Getting Started

See our website for details on the game.

Installation

Download the latest release of Airwave from our Itch page: https://arwv.cc/itch.

Once downloaded, simply extract the archive (zip for Windows and .tar.gz for Linux) and enter the airwave-* folder that is extracted.

Running Airwave

In the airwave-* folder, you'll see two binaries: airwave and airwave_server. To run Airwave, you'll need to run both of these.

The client should open and show a connection prompt. It's prefilled with the address of your local server, so you can just click "Connect" to start.

Voice Mode

Voice mode is a feature that allows you to use your voice to command aircraft. It's disabled by default as it requires an OpenAI API key.

To enable voice mode, you'll need to add your OpenAI API key to the .env file.

OPENAI_API_KEY=your_api_key

Once you've added your API key, simply restart the client and voice mode will be enabled.

Getting an OpenAI API key

If you don't have an OpenAI API key, you can get one by creating an account at https://platform.openai.com/login.

Once you've created an account, you can get your API key at https://platform.openai.com/api-keys. If you choose restricted permissions (recommended), make sure to set Model capabilities > Responses to Write and Model capabilities > Chat completions to Request.

Then, add your API key to the .env file as shown above

(check out this other guide if you're confused)

Do I need a credit card?

No, not by default. OpenAI gives new accounts $5 in free credits with no credit card required, though they do expire after 3 months. Once the free credits expire, you will need to link a credit card to top-up your account.

Cost & Usage

If you're worried about cost, don't be! Regular usage equates to pennies (literally). In our experience, playing the game with two people both using the same API key, we collectively used a total of 3 cents in usage for the full two-hours of gameplay, so it's incredibly cheap to use.

Also, as noted by the disclaimer in the .env, Airwave only uses text completions from OpenAI and does not use expensive thinking/reasoning models, audio generation or transcription, or any other more expensive offerings from OpenAI. Just cheap LLM completions with gpt-4o-mini!

Troubleshooting & Help

If you run into any issues with installation or running Airwave, please reach out to me in our Discord server, or email us at [email protected].