The Game

The Waking Knot is a psychedelic, improvisational tactics game about keeping pace with an ever-flowing absurd world.

This surreal foaming cosmos of bubbles invites the player to act on instinct and exploit shifting opportunities for creative manoeuvres.

It’s a game that is full of life, with striking, vivid hand-drawn characters and action that syncs to the beat of an intricate electronic soundtrack by Torom.

In our first game, me and my friend Bill Owers (as Bongle Systems) endeavour to synthesise the thoughtful, emergent micro-puzzles of Into The Breach with the immediacy of Super Hexagon and give rise to something that feels truly novel.

The Tech

The game is written from-scratch in c-style c++
Custom audio engine that implements granular synthesis (we use this to timestretch sfx to music of different tempos, as well as for some cool effects)
Actions sync to the beat of the music
Asset streaming, hot-reloading, arena allocation, all that good stuff
D3D11 renderer (although I've also played with OpenGL, Metal and even Vulkan along the way)

Recent Activity

Stan Irvin-Wilmot

5 months, 2 weeks ago

been working on a fun little intro for &the-waking-knot with lots of particles - trying to create a sense of fluidity as we move between screens. this is what the game looks like on first start-up at the moment 🙂 (all from scratch, no engine business)

The Waking Knot

Stan Irvin-Wilmot

1 year, 5 months ago

Hi all. Very excited to be able to share the game project I’ve been working on for the last couple of years. It’s a psychedelic, improvisational, tactical roguelike. I’ve been leading the tech side and it’s a handmade-style custom engine.

&the-waking-knot

Game things:

Small-scale turn-based tactics, not unlike Into The Breach
No enemies, instead we have lots of bubbles that move at the same time (evaluated as a graph) - some cause bomberman-style explosions
Emphasis on player expression and going with the flow, you control 3 characters at once, and can spread your 2-actions-per-turn between them however you like. All abilities are very spatial, like swapping, pushing etc
Turn-timer to keep things moving and keep analysis paralysis at bay
in game action syncs to music

Tech things:

c-style c++ custom engine
no external libraries (except d3d11)
custom audio engine with a granular synthesis implementation
Asset streaming, hot-reloading, arena allocation, all that good stuff

I pre-ordered Handmade Hero in 2014 and feel I’ve been on the road here since. Big thanks to this community for being a big part of that. This discord has been an endlessly useful resource. Let me know what you think and fire away any tech questions too of course.

Info: https://thewakingknot.com/

https://youtu.be/XYT6q1Xqjhs

The Waking Knot