Screenshots
Watch trailer on Steam ↗CarveLight
Bitrot · Published by Bitrot
Last updated 30 Sept 2026
CarveLight is a turn-based multiplayer artillery game fought on fully destructible terrain. Take turns piloting physics-driven cars, carve the battlefield apart with lasers, grenades, and force fields, and be the last one driving. Play solo, on the couch, or online.
Action, Indie, Strategy, Casual · 2027 · More free games
Discover the thrill of turn-based combat where every move matters as you pilot cars and carve apart the battlefield with lasers, grenades, and force fields. Join solo or play with friends online for the ultimate strategy challenge.
About this game
A turn-based artillery game for up to four players, fought over ground you're all actively destroying. Nobody has a health bar, so the only way to win is to drop your enemies into the void.
Destroy EVERYTHING
Blow up the world. Make a precision cut with the laser, or throw a Hail Mary with the laser grenade and see what's still standing once the dust settles. There is no cover here, because nothing survives being shot at.
Armored cars don't have health bars. No repairs. If you want someone gone, you take the ground out from under them.
Bring Friends To Throw Around
Up to four players, online or passing a single controller around the couch. Make a car fly across the map. Yours or the enemy's. Some turns you launch a rival into the void. Some turns you launch yourself, and everyone gets to watch it happen.
Share Your Maps
Sculpt levels in the in-game editor and drop straight into a match on them without ever leaving the game. Publish the ones worth keeping to the Steam Workshop, where new arenas are one click away.
Hone Your Skills
Speeders wanted! Solo challenges are the hardest driving test in the game — knock every enemy car off the map as fast as you can. Finding a solution is only half the job. The other half is perfecting the execution.
Every run is scored on the global leaderboard, so there's always a name sitting one row above yours.
Or skip the scoring entirely: sandbox mode hands you unlimited weapons and an empty arena to take apart however you like.
What's In The Box
✔ Turn-based artillery for up to 4 players
✔ Fully destructible, physics-driven terrain
✔ Online and local couch multiplayer
✔ In-game map editor with Steam Workshop support
✔ A dozen-plus terrain-warping weapons and tools
✔ Deterministic simulation, full match replays
✔ Solo challenge puzzles
✔ Sandbox mode
Carve. Detonate. Last one driving wins.
System Requirements
Will my PC run this? →Minimum
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: 2.0 GHz or better
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: DirectX 12 Shader Model 6.0 or Vulkan 1.3 supporting GPU
- DirectX: Version 12
- Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 2 GB available space
Recommended
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
Supported Languages
Latest news
AnnouncementsOfficial
CarveLight Demo is now live!
CarveLight free demo is now live! The demo includes: Tutorial 4 Challenges - can you beat developer leaderboard times? 2 multiplayer Levels, online and local Join our discord server to chat about the game and find matchups. https://store.steampowered.com/app/5137960/Read full article on Community Announcements (J-manByte)AnnouncementsOfficial
How the lighting works
Hi.The game is called CarveLight because carving the terrain and lighting it are the same system. This post is about the lighting half. Everything is dynamicEvery light in the game is fully dynamic. Nothing is baked, there are no shadow maps, and no part of the lighting survives from one frame to the next. Every shadow in every frame is computed from scratch.This was a hard requirement for the lighting system as there are no static bodies in the game. Cars, terrain, weapons... everything can move freely. 2D games tend to use shadow volumes for lights, but since CarveLight uses precise vector graphics I though a more precise solution is needed. Ray castingFor each pixel, for each light, the shader traces a ray to the light. If it gets through, the pixel gets light with a distance falloff and a cone term. If it's blocked, it gets nothing. The occluders are all edges and circles in the scene. Carve a hole in a wall and light comes through the hole on the same frame the hole exists (see screenshots below). There's no special case for it — a ray either fits through the gap or it doesn't. The same goes for anything that moves. Headlights swing with the car, thruster cones sweep across the ground as you fly, and a grenade lights up the whole room it's sitting in while it ticks. Fire and sparks are left out of the occluder list on purpose. They glow, they shouldn't cast shadows.Wall intactSame camera, wall carved out Making it fastTo keep the rays cheap, the game rebuilds a BVH every frame — a tree of boxes over all that geometry, so a ray can discard most of the world in a few tests. Perimeter-based SAH build, 16 bytes per node, traversed on the GPU with no stack: each node stores where to jump when the ray misses it. Shadow edges are a hard yes/no, so they alias. The fix is 8 samples per pixel per light, which is wasted everywhere except on pixels actually sitting on a light/shadow boundary. So the shader takes one sample, checks what the neighbouring threads got, and ski...Read full article on Community Announcements (J-manByte)
