Developing SKAR: Build & Battle — A Deep Dive Into Our Cooperative Voxel Shooter

The spiritual successor to Space Knights (2013) is coming to Roblox — and it's the most ambitious thing we've ever built.

The Origin Story

Back in 2013, a game called Space Knights launched on Roblox. It was scrappy, it was fun, and it built a community that still remembers it over a decade later. SKAR: Build & Battle is the spiritual successor to that original game — rebuilt from the ground up with over a decade of lessons, modern technology, and a singular vision: the definitive cooperative base-defense shooter on Roblox.

SKAR is a 4-player cooperative shooter where you and your squad defend against massive waves of intelligent enemies across fully destructible voxel worlds. Build fortifications, craft and upgrade your weapons with hundreds of modifier combinations, master active combat skills, and take on screen-filling boss fights that will test every strategy you've got.

It's not a sequel. It's an evolution.

A World Made of Voxels

At the heart of SKAR is a fully custom voxel engine — not Roblox's default terrain, but a purpose-built system written from the ground up in typed Luau.

Every block in the world is interactive. Every block can be destroyed. Every block can be built upon.

The engine uses a chunked binary buffer architecture — the entire world is divided into chunks, each stored as a compressed binary buffer for maximum performance. This lets us run massive, detailed maps with thousands of active voxels being modified in real-time without dropping frames.

Key features of the voxel system:

• Block health — individual voxels have hit points. Chip away at walls. Watch fortifications crumble under sustained fire.
• Schematic placement — pre-built structures can be placed, rotated, and removed at runtime. We have over 80 hand-crafted schematics powering our maps.
• Native spatial queries — raycasts, AABB sweeps, radius queries, and cube-region queries all run natively in our voxel space for fast collision and line-of-sight checks.
• Server-authoritative replication — the server owns the world state and batches voxel changes to all clients via our typed networking layer, keeping everything in sync.
• Pathfinding integration — every voxel change feeds directly into our hierarchical pathfinding system, meaning enemies dynamically adapt their routes when terrain is destroyed or built.

The result: a world that feels alive. Bosses tear through your walls. Explosions carve craters. Your hastily-built fortifications actually matter — until a Boomer detonates and takes out half your front line.

Smart Enemies That Hunt You Down

SKAR doesn't do dumb AI. Our enemies use a custom hierarchical voxel pathfinding system with a token-based targeting architecture that makes every encounter feel dangerous and unpredictable.

The AI Token System

Every monster in SKAR is assigned a behavioral token that defines its current objective. The game dynamically distributes these tokens across the horde:

• Player Attack — hunt down and engage a specific player
• Structure Attack — target player-built fortifications and the base itself
• Swarm Targeting — coordinated group rushes on a single position

The ratios shift based on the game mode. In Wave Defense, enemies split between attacking your base and hunting players directly. In Extraction, they're all coming for you. Tokens automatically reassign when monsters get stuck or their target is destroyed, so the pressure never lets up.

The Monster Roster

We've built a diverse enemy roster where every type demands a different response:

Every enemy type also has a Flux variant with elevated stats for harder encounters. The difficulty scales with a formula that accounts for wave number, player count, and objective multipliers — and the wave budget system ensures every round feels like a step up from the last.

Boss Fights That Reshape the Battlefield

This is where SKAR really sets itself apart. Our boss fights aren't just bullet sponges with big health bars. They're multi-phase encounters with unique mechanics that force your squad to communicate, adapt, and sometimes just survive.

The Summoner

A two-phase nightmare. The Summoner teleports to high ground, throws up an invulnerability shield, and floods the arena with minions while draining their life force. Your only option: kill every last minion to drop the shield, then pour damage into the Summoner before it teleports again. Six health brackets, six teleports. It's a marathon.

The Reflector

Reflects your bullets back at you. Every shot you fire can come back as a terrain-destroying projectile aimed at your squad. It teleports above players and stomps down with massive AoE explosions. As its health drops through three enrage thresholds (80%, 60%, 30%), the reflection windows get longer, the stomps get faster, and it starts spawning copies of itself.

The Dragon

A full flight-and-ground locomotion boss with sweeping attack patterns across the entire arena. The Frost Dragon mutation variant changes the fight entirely with ice-based mechanics. This is the Wave 21 boss in our flagship Wave Defense mode — the culmination of everything you've built and upgraded.

The Bulldozer

A multi-voxel behemoth with two distinct phases. Phase 1 is chase-and-dash — it hunts players with diagonal dash attacks that destroy everything in its path. Phase 2 triggers the Cross Attack — the Bulldozer leaves the arena entirely, then makes multiple high-speed passes targeting players, swapping targets between each pass. Every block in its path — terrain and player-built — gets obliterated.

Gun Crafting & The Addon System

Forget static loadouts. In SKAR, your weapon evolves during every match through our addon upgrade system — a deep, layered crafting loop with hundreds of possible combinations.

How It Works

After defeating waves, addon drops spawn on the battlefield. Walk over them to collect. Each addon modifies your weapon's behavior in meaningful, stackable ways. By the end of a long run, your starter pistol can become an entirely different beast.

Weapon Addons

The raw firepower modifiers:

• Bounce Accessories — bullets ricochet to nearby enemies after impact
• Split Muzzle — fire multiple bullets per shot
• Split Bullet — bullets fragment after hitting a target
• Fireball Conversion — replace bullets with fireballs that trigger fire explosions
• Ice Blast — convert to iceballs with AoE slow effects
• Meteor Drop — kills cause meteors to rain from the sky
• Silver Bullet — damage scales with remaining ammo in your clip
• Last Shot Power — the final bullet in your magazine deals massive damage
• Explosion Muzzle — 10% chance of an area explosion on every hit
• Plus standard damage, crit chance, crit damage, and magazine size upgrades across five rarity tiers

Elemental Systems

Three full elemental trees, each with four specialization paths:

Fire — Burning DoT that scales from 2 to 12 damage per second. Specialize into Deflagration (explosion chance), Ignition (extended burns), Overheat (spreading fire), or Overload (kill-triggered buffs).

Ice — 30% slow that builds toward a full freeze with an ice damage burst. Specialize into Deep Freeze (longer freeze), Crush (explosion on freeze-kill), Frosty (bonus damage to chilled targets), or Blizzard (kill-triggered AoE blizzard).

Electric — Electrified enemies take more crits. Specialize into Thunder (lightning strikes), Chain Lightning (arcing damage across groups), High Voltage (every 3rd hit is a guaranteed crit), or Charging Voltage (speed boost for sustained fire on one target).

Character Addons

Survivability and support upgrades with their own specialization trees:

• Shield Device — absorb shields with Thornmail, Emergency Overclock, Energy, or Optimizer specs
• Activator — max health scaling with Alchemist, Overgrowth, Imperial Engine, or Guardian Angel specs
• Weapon Specialist — raw damage amplification with Hunter, Melee Master, Gunslinger, or Ranged Master specs
• Psionic — apply vulnerability debuffs that benefit your entire squad, with specs for Shared Weakness, Transcendent Psionic, Psionic Singularity, or Psionic Execution

Intrinsic Addons

Epic-tier meta-modifiers that amplify your other addons:

• Power Coupler — boosts all damage addons
• Critical Core — amplifies all crit damage addons
• Combustion Matrix — increases all DoT effects
• Predator Circuit — stacking damage per kill
• Ascension Drive — damage scales with total addons collected
• Momentum Loop — kills reduce skill cooldowns
• Paradox Engine — flat cooldown reduction across all skills

By late game, the combinations are staggering. A Fireball gun with Deflagration, Combustion Matrix, and Predator Circuit plays completely differently from an Ice Blast build with Chain Lightning, Deep Freeze, and Ascension Drive.

10 Active Combat Skills

Every weapon in SKAR carries two active skills — and each skill has its own upgrade tree of 4-5 addons that transform how it plays.

Game Modes for Every Squad

SKAR isn't a one-mode game. We've built a suite of cooperative experiences:

• Wave Defense — The flagship. 21+ waves of escalating enemies, culminating in the Dragon boss fight at Wave 21. Survive past the boss and waves continue scaling infinitely with mini-bosses every 5 waves. Map edges progressively erode, shrinking your arena.
• Defend The Base — 4-wave structured defense. Protect the core or it's game over.
• Tug of War — Zone-by-zone conquest across three territories. Terraformer enemies actively reshape the battlefield against you.
• Extraction — Fight Flux enemies, defend timed objectives, and extract before it all collapses.
• Swarm Survival — 4 phases of pure chaos. Corridor swarms of 350-700 monsters. Platform spawns of 100 enemies per player. Blockades. And after 3 minutes, an escape shuttle spawns — get everyone aboard to win.
• Rift Seal — Seal dimensional rifts while Beamers and Stompers try to stop you.
• Destroy Spawners — Take the fight to the enemy. Push forward and destroy their spawn points.
• Dedicated Boss Fights — Standalone encounters against the Summoner, Reflector, Dragon, and Bulldozer for squads that want to skip straight to the hardest content.

Missions chain these modes together into multi-encounter campaigns, with relaxation areas between fights to regroup and prepare.

The Tech Under the Hood

For the technically curious, here's what powers SKAR behind the scenes:

• Typed Luau throughout — strict typing across the entire codebase for reliability at scale
• Zap networking — a typed event/function generator that compiles a single schema into fully-typed client/server remotes, replacing Roblox's default RemoteEvents with something far more robust
• Hierarchical A* pathfinding — custom implementation with region/cluster abstraction, supporting both ground and climbing navigation graphs. Incrementally rebuilt when voxels change mid-combat.
• Priority queue and throttling systems — pathfinding requests are queued and throttled to maintain frame budget even with hundreds of active monsters
• Native compilation — performance-critical systems like pathfinding are tagged with !native !optimize 2 for Luau's native code generation
• Adaptive performance — a client-side performance tracker maintains a 200-sample rolling frame time average and dynamically adjusts visual fidelity. Under load, monsters render as "boneless" simplified meshes. The server queries client performance data before heavy encounters to pre-scale appropriately.
• Deterministic difficulty scaling — BASE_DIFFICULTY * (1 + (round - 1) * ROUND_FACTOR) * (1 + max((players - 1), 0) * PLAYER_FACTOR) ensures every session feels balanced whether you're solo or running a full squad
• Schematic-driven map generation — maps are assembled from a library of 80+ compressed binary schematics, enabling rapid iteration and consistent quality
• Cached pathfinding hierarchies — pre-computed pathfinding data is serialized per map and loaded at match start, eliminating cold-start delays

Building & Fortification

Between waves, players can place voxel blocks to build fortifications, walls, chokepoints, and elevated firing positions. The building system features:

• 12-voxel placement range from the player
• Real-time valid/invalid placement indicators
• Directional connector suggestions for fast construction
• Full integration with the AI system — enemies will specifically target player-built structures when assigned Structure Attack tokens

Your builds aren't just aesthetic. They funnel enemies into killzones, protect your base, and buy precious seconds when the Boomers start charging. But they're also temporary — a Stomper's landing shockwave or a Bulldozer's dash will carve right through them.

Progression & Economy

SKAR uses a currency called Sora to power its progression:

• Earn Sora by completing encounters and defeating enemies
• Spend it on weapons ranging from Common (200 Sora) to Specialization tier (50,000 Sora)
• Weapons come with procedurally assembled mesh parts, assigned skills, and rarity-based stats
• The in-game store refreshes every 6 hours with new weapon offerings

The Energy system provides a parallel progression track — accumulate Energy from kills during a match, hit level thresholds, and unlock powerful Intrinsic addons that amplify your entire build.

Current Status & How to Play

SKAR: Build & Battle is currently in active development with a target release of Summer 2026.

The game is not yet publicly available — it's in closed development and we're iterating fast. But if you want to get your hands on it early, there's one way in:

Join the NeurealRoblox Discord and ask for closed beta access.

We're looking for playtesters who want to push the game to its limits, find the broken combos, stress-test the boss fights, and help us shape SKAR into the best cooperative shooter on Roblox. If that sounds like you, come say hi.

SKAR: Build & Battle is developed by Neureal.