Lost Recall – may status

Lost Recall has a storyline that is conveyed mainly through short texts that can randomly appear at the beginning of levels. Once a text appears, it will never repeat again. There are not many texts, about 50 at the moment, but enough to convey something. I came up with the idea that the tone of the texts will intensify with the progress of the game – the more levels you complete, the more the texts will reveal about the presented world. Thanks to this, I avoided placing them permanently under specific levels, which would take a lot of time. Randomness often simplifies many things 🙂

The game, besides logical elements, also has skill-based elements. These include avoiding spikes coming out of blocks. As you know, if spikes come out on a particular field, you can’t stand on it or enter that field either. However, there’s one trick – if we time it right, we can pass through fields that are currently changing. This is well presented in the gif below:

The whole difficulty lies in having a good sense of timing, aided by the sound of the spikes retracting and extending, or so it seemed to me… I had trouble playing the game despite trying to time it with the “beat”. I wondered if the sound was maybe too late. It turned out that the sound was emitted at the right moment, but had about 100ms of silence at the beginning. It took me a while to figure it out, but once I located the cause, a quick fix in Audacity solved the whole problem:

Interesting fact, it was not my idea to allow the player to pass through the changing spikes. It works like this because I implemented a slightly different system for detecting whether the player is standing on spikes rather just checking if the spikes are overlapping with the robot. Each tile has a flag indicating whether entering that tile is lethal for the robot. However, this flag doesn’t perfectly match how the tile looks. I will try to explain exactly how it looks with the following professional diagram:

It’s nothing groundbreaking. Many games use such systems. In this case, it makes the player feel like they narrowly avoided death.

Stay safe and keep playing games!