Refactor Deep

Greetings symbiote. Pilot your whaleship and program your endosymbionts. Scavenge for parts, maintain your energy, and explore the depths. 

1/25/26   We FINALLY fixed the ship save/load and logic save/load. A huge pain.

NOTE:  ships will lyse when they cross the  border of the encounter gridspace. There are some transmissions in the message system that were supposed to be callable after you traveled a certain amount of distance. They are bugged so you probably won't get to read them. There are 3 achievements hidden on the map. There are a bunch of ships and logic presets available from the start so treat this game as a sandbox. 

We probably overscoped for the development time of    9 days. Still, we learned a lot. We may give some devtime after the jam to squash bugs and flesh out the mechanics.  It's fitting that the theme was Repurposed and we'll probably have to refactor the code if we were to expand it.

Credits: 

https://astecarmyman.itch.io/  - lead game design, junior programmer (search engine / Godot documentation), art, writing, general ui See my devlogs: Designing Refactor Deep   Refactor Deep Development Post-Mortem

https://10kbananas.itch.io/mrsplat - lead programmer (used copilot inline suggestions    in VS Code), game design, (node, map, and shipcreation sections)

https://itch.io/profile/mizuenalover - music

HOW TO PLAY:

Programming:

Execution of the programming flow is directional. Drag and drop nodes (left click) onto the gridspace and connect them by right clicking the input node to the output node. The flow direction proceeds from the first node that is right clicked. Bidirectional connections are possible. Parallel nodes and random nodes are the only nodes that can output to more than one node. All nodes can receive an arbitrary amount of inputs.

KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS:

Space - toggle  network flow execution simulation

Enter - saves the file, you will need to hit the refresh button to see it in the scrollbar of ships/logic to load, toggling the gallery button will not reload the ships/logic. 

Escape  -   quit   to   map   if in   encounter 

START NODE: The first node MUST be a green start node. You can only have one green start node in the logic circuit. If you have multiple, the first one placed is used. 

DIRECTION NODE: Directional movement arrows cause the bioship to move one unit in that direction.

SHOOT NODE: The shoot node is represented by a ball with 3 lines coming out of it. It launches a bullet in the direction it is pointing.

WAIT NODE: The wait node has no function other than causing a delay before the execution of the next node it is directionally connected with. It is represented by a clock with a light brown background.

PARALLEL NODE: The parallel node causes a branching split in the flow of the program so that 2 threads are processed. it is represented by a black line splitting into 2 arrows pointed in the same direction. This was originally intended to allow for diagonal movement and shooting. CAUTION, using too many of these with a bunch of recursive logic can cause extreme slowdown. Parallel nodes cannot be directly connected with other parallel nodes. 

RANDOM NODE: The random node randomly picks a branch extending outwards from itself to execute. Useful for adding variance to movement. The random seed is deterministic. It is represented by a white pair of dice. Alternatively it may be blurry and may look instead like a white cube with black smudges on it

Upgrade System:

There are 4 upgrades/abilities to choose from which can be accessed from the shipyard using the wrench icon. 

MAW SIZE:

This increases the maximum amount of bioships that your whaleship can swallow at once. 

This limit does not apply to friendly endosymbionts.

ENERGY CONVERSION:

Converts bricks to energy. Use this when upgrades become too expensive. (part subtraction is not yet implemented)

ENERGY STORAGE:

Increases the maximum amount of energy your whaleship can store and also recharges some energy.

SPEED:

Increases the speed that your whaleship travels. Your maw will fill faster too. 

Battle System:

As you move through the vastness, the whaleship will periodically roll for encounters when you travel a specified distance interval. The roll then goes to a spawntable which will put bioships in your mouth according to the color of the zone you are in when the roll occurs. The maximum number of bioships you can encounter at once is limited by your maw size. 

From the map screen, when you press the jaws icon, you will access a representation of the whaleship's digestion system. You must select which bioships to spawn in as your chosen endosymbionts. 

You can do so by clicking the toggle button. After this, you must assign a program logic node. Once that is done, you can repeat this process to select multiple bioships to spawn on your behalf. 

Should you destroy a swallowed bioship, you will be instantly rewarded with 4 bricks. If you breakdown all the swallowed bioships you will also be rewarded with cores and shooting bricks scaling with the amount encountered.

NOTE FROM DEVELOPER: I do not recommend spawning more than 6 friendly bioships especially if their logic nodes contain multiple recursive branching loops. Doing so may cause severe lag. I.E. the game will slow down, freeze, or crash if the programs loaded are too complex and cause a forkbomb.

Astec's dev commentary: 

The map was inspired by Deepolis. The ship assembly segment was inspired by  Shellcore Command. The programming reminded me a bit of Hexcelle Arena but isn't that complex.    At some point I'd like to share an after-action-report about the process and also iterations of concept art / game design.  

Known bugs:

Moving the game window, will cause the whaleship map indicator to teleport elsewhere on the map sometimes off screen.

Sometimes the whaleship will teleport randomly off screen or on the map when moving around. Running from the game editor, this can be triggered by printscreen (defocusing the window).

If you run out of energy, the whaleship will keep moving in the direction it was traversing until it collides with a waypoint. You can still rotate the ship. 

Sometimes the whaleship clips through walls.

Switching between scenes such as going to messages or the shipyard from the map will reset the ship position when you return to the map. 

Please comment below about which parts are fun/intriguing and also tell us any new bugs you've encountered.

Titlescreen music clipped from: