Recompile – a 3D Metroidvania-inspired hacking adventure game | Hacker News Reader

Recompile – a 3D Metroidvania-inspired hacking adventure game

recompilegame.com

81 pointslaktak33 comments

No GNU/Linux version, for such a geeky theme ?

The game uses Unity3D, it might only be a matter of ... recompilation :D

And testers running the whole thing on a new platform at the very least. I'd like to see it on Linux as well, but let's not underestimate the time required.

Via Twitter, I've asked them if they plan for this to work with SteamPlay/Proton.

Even the geekiest game programmer acknowledges that all the tooling, support, and money is on Windows, and Linux just isn't worth the extra effort.

I agree: if you only consider extra revenue, it's not worth the extra effort.

And yet, GNU/Linux is supported by many commercial games: Amnesia, SOMA, SpaceChems, Towerfall, Braid, HyperLight Drifter, Shovel Knight, Undertale, VVVVVV, Hollow Knight, Overload, WarGame Red Dragon ...

So there must be something else there than extra revenue.

> The game uses Unity3D, it might only be a matter of ... recompilation :D

It's not. It's a matter of porting, QAing, and then indefinitely supporting a platform that will not bring enough revenue even to cover the developer's time.

For AAA titles I could understand that, but for indies? They won't sell that much Windows copies, so having a Linux option is always good (see other indies, like Factorio, Oxygen not included, Hollow Knight).

It's especially true for indies: if you don't sell as much Windows copies, you won't sell as much Linux copies too, proportionally. I've worked in an indie publisher, and not a single one of our projects would return the investment of releasing a Linux version.

> return the investment of releasing a Linux version

It must be nigh on impossible; beyond developer time, support requests will be a complete nightmare.

So why do many indies do have Linux versions (Steam is a good source for those)?

From what you wrote it should be next to impossible to find them.

I spend my entire day in tmux and vim land in a Linux terminal, but as a gamer wanting to play good games, it’s windows all the way. Gaming on Linux just still isn’t there yet.

It depends on what you look for, Steam has put a lot of work into consolidating ways to run windows-only games to work on Linux.

Aside from that, games like Factorio, Minecraft, Civilization 6, XCOM2, Shadow of Mordor, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided run on Linux just fine.

and csgo :)

If you have a GPU that supports Vulkan these days, and you play games on Steam, it is very likely that you will be able to play games even without native Linux support. I check before I purchase any games, but it has become very unusual when I encounter a Steam game that I cannot play.

https://www.protondb.com/

Gold or better generally just work. The current ratings for the top 1000 games:

Top Thousand Unrated:61 Borked:6% Bronze+:64% Silver+:59% Gold+:49% Platinum:19% Native:25%

that's really cool - my beefy gaming rig dual boots ubuntu so ill check it out!

That's cool, but I don't want to use Windows for games. Games that don't work on Linux (at least through Proton) simply won't get played.

Linux is there, it's just a matter of developer support.

As an aspiring game dev, I can't help but click on these posts haha :) The art in the trailers is beautiful, and I like the programming theme.

One thing I can't figure out is how much of that programming theme is simply used as a muse (portal) and how much of it is intended to teach the player something about computers (redstone in Minecraft). For example, "every single environmental feature, including power grids, locked doors and even huge enemy spawning machines are all powered by intricate, interconnected logic gate circuitry." does that mean the game will implicitly teach the player about basic rules of logic? Demorgan's and so forth?

Another bit that caught my interest was "the game’s entire narrative takes place within 1 second of real time." Is there user / system time as well? Or is this just a plot point?

In this thread, laktak posted an interview that includes a gameplay demo that shows basic interaction with the logic gates. It doesn't look on the redstone side of the spectrum, sadly.

That’s a shame - building logic gates from scratch in red stone was pure joy and absolutely changed the way I think about computers

yup, fond memories from my highschool computer classes. we built logic gates with transistors on handcrafted wooden circuit boards.

i don't think i realized the implications then, but over time as i learned programming and other things about computers, i always felt that it gave me a better understanding of what actually goes on behind the scenes. in particular it drives home the reason for why computers work in binary

Wow, I wish I had been exposed to this stuff in high school - I had already gotten well into my professional career when I found "Code: the hidden language of computer hardware and software" by Charles Petzold and it was just eureka moment after eureka moment reading that and then building the gates, adders, memory, etc from the diagrams in the book via redstone. One of my favorite learning experiences of all time!

I like the ASCII Art of PhiOS in the game, more here:

https://youtu.be/AesJLSI3D-I?t=375

Oh man. I've been fantasizing about an ASCII-based windowed UI like this for years. I want this to be a real thing.

ASCII-based windowed UIs were things, especially Turbo Vision and the like for DOS. The game's UI reminds me of certain old DOS programs that predate even Turbo Vision, notably COMPRESS (actually a disk defragger, not a compression program) which would put up a text-based "graphical" representation of your disk and animate the blocks being shifted around, in a format that was legible even on an IBM MDA monitor for true monochrome cyber goodness.

For the record, I am buying this because the cube enemies remind me so much of Code Lyoko that I want to relive those memories in a video game. Not because it looks awesome in all the other ways :P

Aww... I thought HN post was triggered by it release (or at least date), but sadly this is not a case.

BTW, how not-released game can have so many awards already?!

As the author of a far less ambitious hacking-themed platformer (currently in development), this looks flipping sweet. Thematically it reminds me of Rez, in which you also play a digital construct exploring the metaphorically rendered insides of an incipient AI, and Rez is like my favorite game ever. I can't wait to see this new take on the theme. I bet even Tetsuya Mizuguchi himself is watching this with interest.

While the game looks like a great piece of art, I'm not sure how this game specifically is relevant to HN.

There's a lot of video games out there and this community typically doesn't upvote or discuss game releases.

Was there some previous discussion of this on HN?

Any dev blogs with interesting technical insights?

What's special about this?

Apparently all the puzzle and creature logic is built with in-game logic gates that you can modify.

Also, it's pretty and many of us like the aesthetic.

From the hn guidelines: "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

A strong ai / hacking-themed game fits the bill.

I think misunderstood my post. I wasn't trying to debate whether this is off-topic or on-topic, but rather why this particular game is being upvoted when games on /newest generally get ignored.

In case there was some interesting dev-blog or somesuch being posted here earlier, I just didn't want to miss that.

Looks like this game features some neat procedural animation. Nice

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