Big News

Dear Recoursers,

First, we’d like to thank you for your interest in our game and the extremely valuable feedback you provide us with. Your ideas helped us improve the game and become better developers ourselves as they often presented us with new challenges to overcome. We’re glad to announce that the next phases of the game will be available soon. Here’s what’s coming your way:

• Online Co-op as a Standalone Game: We’ve been secretly developing an online co-op mode for a long while and we’re about to finalize our quality checks. You’ll be playing as Whisper – a holographic A.I. that can possess and control nearly every puzzle element, including physics objects. You will be able to host or join games and progress together with your friends or other people on Steam. The online mode takes place before the original game and revolves around Whisper’s training as a young A.I. unit. This mode will appear as a second launch option on Steam instead of a new DLC and will be completely free to game owners. We’ll throw in a few levels to the demo, so prospective players will be able to try it too. If you wish to participate in the betas and would like to play with us, please let us know in the comments.
  
  
• New Story Chapter: We haven’t forgotten about Sleet and Floe. They will continue their journey by visiting other parts of the planet and advance the story. Sleet is also getting a new tool that allows him to attach deployables to any surface. The new story levels will involve investigating options to discover more about the planet’s recent history and what happened before their arrival. The development of the story mode takes much longer, so we can’t promise a specific date, but we’re aiming for our one year anniversary.
  
  
• New Level and Puzzle Design Approach: The most recurring requests on the forums and support inquiries were related to the levels being too big and crowded. Laptop owners also reported low framerates due to dynamic lighting. To address these issues, we have adopted a new design approach. The new levels are smaller and they have fewer puzzle elements. These new bite-sized levels will allow you to play the game in short bursts and make it much easier to collect secrets, get achievements or hunt for Easter eggs. We have also switched to a static lighting approach to allow the game run faster on laptops. This means you’ll no longer be able to dynamically change the time of day, but we assess it to be a good tradeoff. In addition, adding new levels will be much easier for us. We’ll be able to update the game much more frequently with new content.
  
  
• Possible Re-optimization of the Original Game: We’re investigating if it’s possible to split the levels in the original game into smaller chunks. It’s taking painfully slow as we don’t want to cause anyone to lose their progress. It requires building lots of betas which is very time consuming. Therefore, we’re giving it a low priority for the moment as we'd rather invest that time into creating new content.
  
  
• Switching to Unreal Engine 4.13 from 4.8: Unreal Engine has evolved a great deal after we released Recourse and there is a plethora of new features we’d like to include in the new levels and modes. Imagine puzzles based on fluid and wave mechanics, growing vegetation, sliceable objects, selectively permeable walls, user interfaces projected on objects and so on. There’s a wealth of opportunities. The 4.13 version also includes a great deal of under the hood improvements that allow us to create much better looking games that also run faster.
  
  
• Vulkan support: Vulkan is a new graphics API used by many next-gen games that allows for faster, smoother frame rates. No need to worry if your card doesn’t support Vulkan, you’ll still be able to run the game with DirectX and OpenGL.
  

That’s all for now. If it all goes per our plans, Recourse will grow to be one of the greatest puzzle games out there, offering an unprecedented level of content in one big package.

Cheers!

Clouds and Blue Team