Wake up inside your conscience's internal representation and hunt down 100 memory fragments across procedurally generated levels that grow in size and complexity. Switch between first- and third-person views in this action puzzler platformer, firing colorful photons from your gun to illuminate paths, battle enemies, and reveal the environment. Unlock upgrades like a flashlight and scan grenade after gathering fragments-the grenade outlines surroundings, spots interests, spawns hidden foes, and eliminates active ones-leading to a final room upon full collection.
Levels draw from a seed-based pseudo-random generator for endless replayability, letting you tackle four difficulties from relaxed illuminated runs on easy to pitch-black navigation on impossible. Tiles ramp up from rating 1 to 10, spawning trickier platforms, barricades, traps, and pickups as you progress. Casual indie players seeking mystique-filled challenges with adjustable intensity will find hours of engagement here.
Photonic Distress (or PD for short) is a blend of First/Third Person puzzler/platformer with a unique twist.
You wake up in an internal representation of your conscience where your goal is to collect 100 memory fragments throughout increasingly complicated and increasing in size procedurally generated levels, or dreams. These levels are illuminated on easy and medium difficulties but dark on hard and impossible ones! You have a Photon gun that you can use to light your way up and fight enemies as you go through these levels. Initially this is only in form of colorful balls, or photons, that your shoot from your gun but ass you collect fragments, the upgrades will become available for you, such as a flashlight attachment, a scan grenade - that shows an outline of the world around you and highlights points of interest, as well as spawning/revealing unspawned/hidden enemies and killing the ones that are spawned. Once you collect 100 fragments the final room will open where you can go to end the game.
To provide maximum replayability, level generation is based of a Pseudo Random Number Generator. The seed you choose or randomly generate when starting a new game will dictate how your levels look, what they are made of, how many fragments you will find in each level and etc. This means that you can complete the game on various difficulties for the same seed, or various seeds for the same difficulty and every time it will look different.
PD features 4 difficulties: Easy, Medium, Hard and Impossible. Based on your chosen difficulty your gameplay may be quite relaxing as you quickly go through levels or very challenging - if you feel so inclined. On easy and medium difficulties the levels are illuminated! On hard and impossible you'll have to navigate your way in the dark, relying on your Photon Gun, Scan granade (Unlocked at 30 fragments) and of course your skill! The tiles that make up your level have a difficulty rating from 1 to 10. On easy, the difficulty rating increases slower, on impossible - every fast. As the difficulty keeps increasing you will find that the levels will be made up with tiles that are increasingly trickier. We have to admit higher level tiles give even the calmest of us an urge to smash something. Levels also gradually increase in size - more so with harder difficulties.
There is also an assortment of various barricades, traps and pickups that will also spawn for you.
Most of the music in-game was composed specifically for PD, by a very talented friend of ours, Toteki. However you are welcome to turn it off through settings and put some of your own chillout (or adrenaline pumped) music in the background. Overall we aim to provide a mystique filled ambiance with just the right challenge level for you to spend your time.
PD was made by a very small team. We are as indie as it gets. it's our first game and we sincerely hope it is worth your time and money.
