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[portponky]

Greenlight: http://goo.gl/kZF1dN
Steam store: http://store.steampowered.com/app/497780/

Recursed is a platform puzzle game. Each level has a set of rooms with various items and a crystal at the end. Rooms are accessed by jumping into chests. Chests are items, and are found in rooms. Chests can be carried, so rooms can be carried. Rooms can be moved into each other, into themselves, duplicated, destroyed, and so on. The interconnected nature of the levels can be manipulated and twisted in bizarre ways.


In this situation you can get through two doors with one key

The game is written in C++ using OpenGL and liberal amounts of Lua for scripting the levels, loading assets and so on. The bulk of the game, including almost all puzzles, are already planned out and implemented, but now I have to do the long hard task of polishing it from a prototype to a finished game.

I make regular dev videos, so I thought I should post some sweet animated gifs here when I figure that out. But for now here are some videos.

Last week: 2 month summary




This week: Redesign and implementation of a shader effect

[Pixel Noise]

The idea of being able to rearrange how rooms are connected seems fascinating - but is there a practical application for that? Will that be part of the design/puzzle solving aspect?

[portponky]

Yes, absolutely. Some of the puzzle content comes from movement and positioning. E.g. you can't jump as high when carrying an object, you can only throw horizontally, can only carry one object, that sort of thing. The majority of the puzzles are based on traversing and rearranging the rooms.

The basic rule is that the contents of a chest reset when you exit the chest.

You can't take two keys into a chest but you can take infinite keys out of a chest containing one key. It sounds messy but it's logical when you play it.

[portponky]

I've updated the backgrounds to something I'm more happy with.

Old background:



Previously I had a few silhouettes drawn in greyscale and colored in a shader. My art isn't so great, and my arthritis prevents me from spending a long time on pieces like this.

I wanted the backgrounds to be more plain, less busy and less expansive. The player is jumping from room to room so it doesn't really make sense to have a landscape in the background, even if landscapes are pretty. I wanted something with some simple colors to make the game brighter and happier. I tried a few 3D effects and moving backgrounds, but they were distracting or made the art look generally inconsistent.

After much deliberation, I decided to use a simple pattern with a vignette overlay. That way I can swap patterns based on room depth (a vaguely important concept in the game) and keep things simple. I arranged them in a texture with the vignette first and patterns afterwards.



The pattern is repeated in the background with the vignette and a color gradient. The colors are set in the level lua file so they can vary a little from level to level, even if the patterns don't.



And as I mentioned, the pattern changes on room depth.


dang it took me ages to export a gif on linux and it still isn't quite right

[portponky]

There are seven environments in my game, the previous screenshots show the starting 'cave' area. I've been working on the other graphics, so here's a few screenshots.

This is the sewer area:


This is the temple area:


Here is the wood area:


I'm not happy with the wood area, it's a bit too stark and simplistic. The water in all areas doesn't really look awesome, which is something else I need to think about.

[portponky]

Idea for the title screen:





The fonts and icons aren't final though.

[portponky]

After some slight problems here is the overgrown villa tiles. Originally this was a completely overgrown jungle-level, but it looked kind of terrible because I couldn't match the simplistic non-realist style of the other tiles. So after much thought, I redrew it as a kind of european villa. It's supposed to be a little reminiscent of the sort of things Escher drew.

[portponky]

More graphics updates, which is starting to feel like a never-ending slog.

First up, the redesigned 'wood' area:





I am quite happy with how this turned out. It's hard to get good looking wood pixel art whilst being consistent with the simplistic patterns style that I'm concentrating on.

I draw tiles for another area that was previously undesigned. I had it marked as 'basement' or 'pipes' but ended up drawing a castle tileset.





I'm not totally happy with this set, it feels quite bland and plain. I think it maybe needs a few additional tiles to liven it up a little.

Lastly, I washed out the colours on the temple area because it was a bit too retina-burning. I originally changed the palette to sandstone colours, but then it looked a little too drab so I settled on a halfway palette.

[nikolaus]

I think your tiles are cool, but maybe go a bit more easy on the contrast with the 'overgrown' tiles? The plant stuff has a lot of emphasis and looks as if it had some sort of gameplay function. I'd push the colors more towards the wall  color. And why not pick up the plant theme for the background there?

[portponky]

Here's a test with the ivy colours tweaked towards the wall colours: http://i.imgur.com/TPong3e.png

Ivy and plant life on that kind of whitewash brickwork really does stand out abruptly. I tried to capture the feeling of spanish or mediterranean villages.

About the background: The background colours for that zone are brown to olive colours. The reason is that it's later in the game and there are a lot of gameplay elements that need to stand out using different colours. The wood levels have a rich green background, but they are earlier in the game when enchanted (green) objects have not been introduced. The cave has a blue background, but it's placed before water levels. So I'm restricted as to what colours will give a clean, undistracting view for the player. I think dusty, pale browns fit this theme quite well.

I might change the triangle pattern out for something else, though. It was in place before I designed the tileset and I'm not sure if it really fits here better than in other places. Perhaps some windows and twisted vines might fit better?

[portponky]

I tidied up the castle tiles. I was annoyed at the randomized brick placement I used, because the castle wasn't a ruin so there was no reason for the brickwork to be all higgledy-piggledy. I added a few more tile types and tidied up the backgrounds.





I've added tiles for the bizarre dark end zone.





I tinkered with the graphics for a late-game mechanic where instances of levels are stored in containers for later usage. The graphics used to be awkwardly shaped and an indiscernible dark purple. I've changed it up so the fissures that cause storage are a star-checked green, and it creates a small cauldron pot with a gentle blue colour. This colour difference helps differentiate between entering a stored state and collapsing a stored state, which used to be visually kinda similar.

This extremely confusing flow chart should explain... probably not a lot. It makes a lot more sense when you try it than when you try to explain it.



I also added some easter eggs but those are too secret to share.

[MegaTiny]

Well this looks incredibly confusing (in an interesting way). Do the puzzles slowly ramp up to allow idiots like me to understand? Or is it more like the Witness?

[portponky]

I've not played The Witness because there's no linux version. Recursed starts off simple, and the first 30 or so levels are approachable. Towards the end it gets very lateral so it's pretty difficult. There are 64 levels, as well as some bonus areas for when you break reality.

[portponky]

I think the water in my game looks a bit flat and dull. Example:



I need to make it feel a bit more alive and interesting, because it's a major gameplay element. Here is a mockup I did in a few minutes in mspaint, which is roughly what I'm planning to implement in the upcoming week.



Let's see how it turns out...

[portponky]

I shoved the game on Greenlight because I have nothing to eat but moths. I made a trailer, too, and learned a bunch about capturing and making videos using obs and KDenLive.





The Greenlight is at http://goo.gl/kZF1dN

Putting something on Greenlight is surprisingly stressful. I commend the bravery of all those who have thrown their dreams out to the masses to be judged.

Next I have to fix up those water effects. I kinda implemented that mockup (as you can see in the trailer). I ditched the reflection idea because it made no sense and killed visual clarity. I also need to complete the game's script and get it translated into a bunch of languages.

[portponky]

I've been working hard on this game for the last couple of months, though I didn't update this page due to laziness. I'm gearing up for a steam release soon.



Here's the level select menu.



And here's a level with the restart bird.

At the moment I am working on translation and internationalisation. I planned from the start for the game's language to be changeable, so it's going quite well. The community of volunteers willing to translate is really amazing. I've been offered French, German, Russian, Czech and Polish. I'm still interested in Spanish, Italian and Portuguese (br) so hopefully I can find some help with that.

To implement translation, I stored all my strings in lua files. There's the basic one, language.lua which sets all the gui text. Then there are others, for example the audio files each have a lua file containing meta-data for the audio, including subtitles. When the game tries to load any lua file, it searches first for one specific to the language. So for example, if it's trying to load voice.wav, it'll look for metadata in voice-en.lua then voice.lua (assuming language is en). That way the meta-data can be superceded for specific languages.

Then I wrote a very short python script to target all the meta-data and pull out all the strings. I put them into a google spreadsheet, with translation notes etc. Then I copied the sheet for each language. The same python script will take the translated results from the spreadsheet and match them up with the English strings and generate the necessary language scripts. This is done as a build step for building the release version.

[Dustin van Wyk]

Hi all ,

I'm the sole composer for the 'Recursed' project which will be available 30th September, 2016 on Steam.
Just wanted to share the lead single off the OST [Out 4 October 2016]

Recursed - Woodlands

Link: https://soundcloud.com/dustinvanwyk/recursed-woodlands



Thanks ,

Dustin

[Dustin van Wyk]

Hi again TIGsource crowd! ,

The day has finally come for the release of Recursed!
In the spirit of this joyous celebration , I've decided to release a mix of rough drafts and songs that inspired the overall sound of Recursed to give everyone a better feel of the game.


Recursed OST Mixtape: Sketches & Influences



Mix : https://www.mixcloud.com/DustinvanWyk/


Hope you enjoy!

Recursed is available now for Windows, Mac and Linux on Steam

Steam Link: http://store.steampowered.com/app/497780


Thanks again ,

Dustin

[quantumpotato]

Looks rad. Buying.

[portponky]

Thanks!

It's been a busy day. Releasing on Steam is quite a nerve-wracking experience. Hopefully all goes well.

I've had a couple reports that the in-game overlay can mess up the game on Windows 10. It's easy to workaround, but a little frustrating.

At some point I intend to make a video going back through my git commit history for the last eight months and showing how the game changed from inception to final product.