BYTE

About

A merge-and-consolidate arena, built from the physics up

BYTE is a multiplayer arcade game about growing a body by eating, and watching that growth carry into fewer, bigger numbers instead of an ever-lengthening tail.

The idea

BYTE keeps the loop that games in the .io merge-and-consolidate lineage got right — grow by eating small, merge with equal, get eaten by big — and rebuilds the skin around it. Instead of a static cube in an empty arena under a numeric ceiling nobody respects past the first few minutes, BYTE gives you a body that grows like a snake, in worlds with real terrain and creatures, where growth periodically carries: your blocks consolidate into fewer, bigger numbers the same way binary digits carry when a column overflows. There is no fixed cap — the ladder just keeps going.

There is no attack button. Rank decides everything: bigger eats smaller, equal bounces, and the arena and its terrain are the only things standing between you and whoever is hunting you.

How it is built

BYTE's rules live in a single Rust simulation crate with no external dependencies, which runs identically on your phone, in your browser, and on the server. Not approximately identically — bit-for-bit identically. There is no floating-point arithmetic anywhere in the simulation; positions are fixed-point integers, angles are integers, and the same replay is checked against a committed recording on every build.

This is what lets the game feel instant on your screen while remaining authoritative on the server: your client predicts your own next move, and the server's word is still final, because both sides are running the exact same arithmetic and never quietly disagree about where a body actually is.

The rule the codebase is organised around: the presentation layer never computes anything that affects an outcome. It draws what the simulation returns and plays effects for the events the simulation emits. If a line of drawing code ever needs to decide something, it belongs in the simulation instead.

Where it actually is

BYTE is playable, free, in your browser, right now, and is being brought to iOS. It is early — this section stays because a project that has shipped something is not the same as a project that has shipped everything, and it is worth being able to tell which parts are which.

Done The simulation core: fixed-point maths, seeded deterministic randomness, growth and the carry mechanic, boost, collisions, and multiple worlds with distinct terrain. Verified across x86, ARM and WebAssembly.
Done The networked arena: server, wire protocol, and a shared simulation both ends run and both ends check — a client on a stale build is refused rather than silently let in to disagree about the rules.
Now A native build for iOS, and rounding out the arena's own creatures and worlds.
Next A store release, and travel between worlds within a single run.

Who makes it

BYTE is developed and published by Beacon Light Investments — the same studio behind GORGED, a different game sharing server infrastructure and a publisher, not a fiction. It is a small operation, which is most of why this page says what the game is instead of what it will be.

Questions, bugs, and anything about your data go to the contact page.

The name

A byte is a unit of binary data — the rank ladder and the carry rule are both literally that — and a homophone of bite, which is the entire verb of the game. Both halves land at once with nothing to explain.