[Recursion Dev Log – #01] 

Date: 20/06/25 

Hello, welcome to my first ever dev log for Recursion, an upcoming project set in an eerie corporate environment. Over the next ~9 weeks these will be posted on 3 weekly intervals to reflect what was accomplished each sprint.

For more frequent updates, check out our Discord Community.

Recursion is a game developed using the Unity Game Engine (6000.0.39f1), it is set in a sterile corporate office space.

New Features

Narrative Flags/Triggers

A system for setting flags to true and false to trigger specific world-states has been started on, the back-end data structures have been coded.

Save/Load System

A custom binary format for a .dat save file was created to save a snapshot of the player’s employeeID, their loop count, and a list of all the narrative flags they’ve triggered. This will make testing narrative progression in the future so much faster.

Level Blockouts

The foyer and first floor have been blocked out and designed with temporary materials, geometry - with notes placed throughout to guide development further.

Elevator

An elevator system has been added, enabling players to summon an elevator to their floor by interacting with a button. The elevator can be taken to a floor of their choosing. This is still very buggy – you’re not meant to fall out of the ceiling when the elevator goes down… Right?

Bugs

Elevator Noclip: The player can fall through the ceiling on descent and noticeably glitches when the elevator moves, additional player-positioning logic. Possible fix: Custom TRS multiplication between elevator and player transform. 

Pickup Slot Causes Items to Collide with World: The static pickup point for the player causes held items to clip through the world, making them harder to see or use, this behaviour is undefined - but it would be nice to allow players to move their held item along the vertical axis.

Upcoming Objectives

• Add scan/printer tasks,
• Add break room stasis logic,
• Lock elevator buttons based on progress,
• First pass at puzzle 01

Reflection This sprint was manageable, I didn't get as much done as I would have liked (further into onboarding), triggering the full onboarding sequence. Doing the save/load system took more time than expected (I'm prone to over-engineering things). Other than that, I spent a little too much time away from the computer - life still happens behind the scenes, and balancing other commitments with development can make things difficult at times. Moving forward, I have some tricky decisions to make regarding time management, spending a few more weekends in studying and coding, but also sparing enough time for me to keep me sane to prevent burnout. Until next time!