Retrogression

(Banner courtesy of David Morgan)
Retrogression has long been my magnum opus and a perennial thorn in my side and is an exceedingly complex game to describe.

The concept of the game was to develop 'form' in videogames. So, in poetry the physical manifestation of a poem (its rhyme, its meter, the no. of line per stanza, and so on) has the capacity to relay information as much as the content (the actual words) and this is something that I wanted to do with mechanics in games; where mechanics reinforced the ideas expressed in the content.
To accomplish this I created four 'realities' across three acts (read: four rulesets consistent with certain premises) for the player to interact with during a single story with relevant mechanics overwriting the old.

The first act established the two polar realities that would merge to varying degrees in the later acts. This was an absolute-reality which contained an absolute-game-reality. In the absolute-reality the player character, Will, acts independent of player input; he's a real person, after all. There are no HUDs, no pausing, no saving, just Will going about his day. The act was to be voice-acted with any sound being diagetic.

This would not be much of a game however, so the sequence is periodically broken by the player playing Will playing a game (concentric circles were a big motif when I first started the project) and interacting with the absolute-game-reality. This was a faux-MMO with a little ABS I built featuring cooldowns and some conventional skilling systems (cooking, fishing, smithing, mining).

 (Its hard to see but the player is here ^ )

The second act is where things got super interesting to design as I took a real world setting and imposed a game-like structure. Examples of this included:
-No levelling; stats are decided largely through choice of equipment, which, in turn, is regulated through money. Will's sprite also changes to reflect his current equipment.
-Weapon durability and inventory capacity; 'cause stuff's heavy and breaks if you don't look after it.
-A first person battle system without any health bars or such; you gauge your own health by the shade of the screen, and your enemies health by its changing graphic. Health recovers over time, you can't just drink a potion.
-Hunger, thirst, and tiredness meters; real life can kill you in more ways than one.
-All the inconveniences of real life :3 ; areas can only be accessed at coherent times, pick an item off the shelf and carry it to the shopworker, learn skills by reading, etc.


The third act is the most recognisable as an actual game as Will has fully immersed himself in his delusion. Narratively, it is perhaps best considered as the real world reasserting itself due to sheer incompatibility with the wildly high fantasy which leads to a somewhat dark exploration of gaming tropes.
At this point Retrogression becomes about being as game-like as possible, so most mechanics exist to enhance the experience although some additions and alterations still serve a narrative purpose. The principle design focus was on providing the player with contrast and choice like in the video below where the player is presented with the option of undergoing a hyper-attrition sequence or a one-hit death platformer sequence:


(I could make this work so much better nao ¬.¬)

Download:
Kek, no. Not for a long time. A huge amount of the game has actually completed made but every time I've worked on this I got way too into it and burned myself out in a couple of months; now I just kind of feel ennui when I consider reopening it. I think this will be my white whale.