Cog: Introduction

So I thought, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool to do a recursive, sort of fractal exploratory platformer with nested avatars."



The game takes a sort of "Metroidvania" approach to world design: open, seamless, large. The added bonus with this design is that everything exists on various scales, 5 or so by the most recent design. Each "tile" of world can be broken down into a smaller tilemap, with tiles that can be broken down, etc. This won't be procedural or infinite, but instead part of a designed and (hopefully) well thought-out world.

The player gains access to these scales by inhabiting larger avatars. These super-avatars initially appear to the player as sections of the world that can be explored. When the player reaches a central "control node", he can take control of the larger character. The camera zooms out and the smaller capillary tunnels and platforms fade away LOD-style to reveal a bigger picture.

The video above was hammered together in TorqueX, which admirably handled tilemaps hundreds of thousands of game units across. There's no way I'd do a real game like that though. There will ultimately need to be some hierarchy based LOD mojo going on to keep collision and art from showing up at scales irrelevant to the player's current frame of reference.

At first I was pondering how to wrap a context around this inhabitation/scale shifting mechanic. The main character started as an alien ball of light and it magically took control of things. Upon a little further iteration I decided upon the concept of gears within gears and sketched up a corresponding, slightly more endearing character.

Everything's in a prototype/pre-production phase right now, and this could take a rightful seat alongside many other projects waiting in my design folder. Hopefully more to come soon.