Hello everyone! I’m Bread, the developer of Bolt & Whalington, a Metroidvania-style game currently in development.
If you’re interested, feel free to add the game to your Wishlist — your support truly means a lot to us!
As you can see in the image above, our protagonist Bolt has turned into a chicken… and even starts dividing like a cell. This is actually the result of our Setting Machine, a system that changes the rules of the world.
When we set “Bolt” = “Chicken”, Bolt literally becomes a chicken and gains all sorts of chicken-related abilities. These new abilities can be used for exploration and puzzle-solving in the Agricultural District.
The first ability lets you press the left mouse button to explode, blasting yourself in a chosen direction.
Another ability allows you to hold the right mouse button to throw an egg in a direction.
Now things get interesting. If we continue changing the rules and set “Egg” = “Chicken”, the eggs you throw will hatch into chickens instead. And when these newly born chickens lay eggs… they also lay chickens. This leads to exponential growth, eventually resulting in a recursive chain reaction — and finally, a massive explosion.
In programming terms, this is essentially an example of recursion and set growth:
When an event happens → I give birth to a chicken → the same rule is then applied to my children, and my children’s children.
That’s how the scene in the opening image came to be. What started as a happy accident eventually became a feature we decided to keep, and we’ve since designed gameplay mechanics around it.
If you find this idea interesting, feel free to add Bolt & Whalington to your Wishlist. Your support is the greatest motivation for us to keep developing the game. ❤️