Screw Turn is a metroidvania with a twist. A couple of twists, actually. It's in the awkward position of having its primary unique selling point also a massive spoiler, but since I don't think this page is going viral any time soon I'm going to talk about it properly. If you fear those spoilers, though, consider yourself warned.
This is a very quick writeup of an early project, just standing to give a vague flavour of the project and show that it doesn't just exist in my imagination. There's much more to do, and much more to talk about, but I hope you find this writeup interesting in the meantime!
So, Screw Turn is mostly a tech and gameplay demo at the moment, but it's early days. It's a 2D metroidvania at first blush, but it has a few interesting visual properties. The game is all pixel art at a fixed 360p, but everything is dynamically illuminated. Also, the player can't see through walls - everywhere you go, walls are opaque. Here are a couple of pictures of our little space guy standing right in front of a light source, and then moved over to the right so he's in the dark and can't see the light source anymore.
Early on, the game will play like a 2D platformer/metroidvania with a bit of an orienteering/mapmaping vibe to it, because the player also won't have a map (yet). So the fact that they can't see through walls will play into that challenge, as well as the fact that some areas will need the player's light source to navigate.
The twist with Screw Turn, though, is that the navigation is challenging because the game world will gradually reveal itself to be non-Euclidean. The game takes place on the two-dimensional surface of a complicated 3D shape - you just can't see it.
Screw Turn was inspired a fair bit by Animal Well, a little bit by Tunic, a little bit Celeste, and a bit by Portal. My goals are basically to make a game that stands on its own as a fun and challenging platformer, then adding metroidvania elements, then adding the non-Euclidean geometry fare. I really like the idea of the game taking place in 3D, and the player's job is to make sense of that - giving them tools such as range finders that beep when they're close to each other, with proximity measured in 3D rather than 2D space.
Screw Turn is in its early days, but it's a game full of fairly thorny tech challenges and they've been overcome. In particular, the non-Euclidean nature of the world is handled with portals as a technique, but that's not part of the game world - the portals need to be invisible to the player. That means that the dynamic lighting needs to work with, and through, portals seamlessly. Getting this working was a pain! But, it's done, and it's running well on very low spec hardware. Likewise, the art pipeline is sorted, which required some custom tooling for 2D normal and height maps. Finally, I've got some work done on exporting the 2D levels as meshes and programmatically bending them to a 3D shape - kind of like the reverse of unwrapping UVs of a mesh, but instead of creating 2D shells from a mesh, we're creating a mesh (the 3D world) from the shells (the levels).
Fond as I am of the little space guy in these graphics, I'm not an artist, and a lot of art needs to be done to give the game a distinct identity, and more importantly, to make it navigable. Coming soon, hopefully, because I think environmental art will really make the lighting sing and make it much easier to notice things (like that you've run through a tunnel and now you're back where you started but you're on the wall instead of the floor).