Recursive Repairman by Bipmo Bopmo
You've been extended an offer for a position as a repairman for RecursiCo, the esteemed company behind the brilliant Recursive Robot (a robot powered by smaller robots). The offer is enticing, but to get the robots working, the tasks ahead of you are far from straightforward.
This game is a grid-based puzzle game with inspirations from Baba Is You. It has 8 levels of increasing complexity, and I made it solo in under 30 hours. (Regrettably, because of the limited time I had, I wasn't able to implement any audio.)
NOTE- I ran into some glitches with window resizing during development, so I disabled window resizing as a precaution. But, after double-checking, it seems like the game still works perfectly fine in full-screen. On Windows, you should be able to make the game full-screen using the Alt-Enter keyboard shortcut. If you run into any glitches with the robot zoom, though, I'd suggest switching back to a windowed view.
CONTROLS: arrow keys to move, Z to grab or select, X to go inside robot, R to restart level
Ratings
| Overall | 40th | 4.136⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 74th | 3.976⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 30th | 4.295⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 77th | 4.214⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 329th | 3.619⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 235th | 3.028⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 556th | 3.075⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 22🗳️ | 14🗨️ |
On my 4K monitor it is 1/16th of the screen and was not scalable. Maybe there is a full screen option in Gamemaker?
It seems to be fiddly trying to link up with the boxes to move them. This may be intended due to certain puzzles but I think it gets in the way of the experience. If I am standing next to the box ideally I would be able to turn toward it without stepping away. It also feels like I should be able to push the box rather than walk around to a perpendicular direction, grab and move sideways. Its a small thing but the rest is so good I could only suggest some game feel ideas. Great job making something fun in 48 hours!
I did run into one bug where if I moved around while the "enter robot" transition happened the screen would get covered up and I'd have to restart.
This game is absolutely the best and most thematic game in the short amount of time I've been reviewing games already. Great job, but I am so thankful that it ended where it did because I think any more would have exploded my brain.
This can absolutely be a full game of its own for people smarter than me.
Mechanically, the only thing that seemed unneeded was the restriction on moving the boxes (no moving to the front). It added practically nothing to the challenge and felt more like a hindrance than anything else.
Graphics is simple but clear and everything plays quite well.
I liked the Sokoban concept of pulling the boxes for once instead of pushing them! I'm not sure whether I like the mechanic that the character's facing direction makes a difference, but it did contribute to the depth of the game. But since the direction *is* in the game: did we need a separate robot X button after all?
The recursion theme with the robots is absolutely fantastic, wonderfully done! :heart: I absolutely loved how well executed this idea is, and the deep mechanics that come from the details, like how to "program" the robots. This is just an excellent example of a simple game with real depth, something I admittedly struggle with a lot in my own games (I tend to make complicated games that are very shallow).
One very specific criticism: it bothered me a lot that I couldn't turn to face an object I was adjacent to without "leaving and coming back." I'd definitely recommend changing that!
I also think the difficulty jump for the last level is pretty extreme. I had kind of a similar thing with my game this LD, where the last level is way harder and requires a level of ingrained understanding of new mechanics that the player can't be expected to have. Just a natural consequence of the tight time limit, but worth pointing out! Feel free to check out my game, it's also puzzle-y!
Really great job! Definitely one of my favorites I've played so far!
here's a couple really minor things i noticed (i mentioned a couple in the stream)
-cant push boxes forward (I thought it had to do with those gray walls with particles when I played the first time, but I now that I think about it I dont think thats the case)
-player should be able to rotate in place like the commenter above said
-if you press z immediately after a move, you don't grab the box. I think it would feel more responsive if you could keep holding z and move any number of tiles and grab a box in front of you automatically.
This game really awesome though, we need more levels xD
link me when you release it I will buy guaranteed