Hello, Declination

This is the first entry in the Bardle Studios devlog. It covers what we’re making and why.

Declination is a puzzle-exploration game. You play as a small robot exploring a world left behind by a civilization that split itself apart before the planet’s magnetic field reversed. The pieces it left behind, the sentinels, are dormant. Your job is to wake them.

How it plays

You explore freely and read what’s left on the walls. Some areas glow. Step into one and it locks into a small tactical grid with a limited number of turns. Inside the grid you can move and push or pull. Energy cores bounce off each other, and the goal is to get them into a pylon.

The part we’re most excited about is what happens beyond a single grid. Solving one puzzle can change something elsewhere in the world, and a later puzzle might ask you to kick something out of one grid and into another.

What’s next

Right now the game is a handful of rooms and a set of mechanics we like. Next we’ll build out the first biome and work out how its puzzles connect.

If you’d like to follow along, sign up below.