Available on Windows
recruit one
MISSION BRIEFING: Ready to take to the stars, Recruit One? Tackle over 20 trials to prove you’re worthy of joining us aboard Lightway Lines, a pioneering space tourism airline. Don’t wait around – you're against the clock and a whole lot more in this sci-fi puzzler. Have you got what it takes?
Move Quickly, Tread Carefully
Each stage has a number of traps ranging from guards that keep an eye out, to red floor tiles that can end your run in a
heartbeat. Time your moves carefully, as you only start with five lives.
But keep moving, you're also against the clock!
What People Have Said
Gotta Go Fast
A few players found Recruit One to be quite enjoyable to speedrun. I had never designed the game with this in mind, nor did I expect it would be at all interesting for speedrunners.
And yet…
Retrospective
Recruit One was the result of a game jam ran by Vagabond Dog back in October 2020. The theme was 'No Words'. And so, a light puzzle game was born that instead used sound effects and clear UI to instruct the player of the world they now inhabited. It was a fun challenge, and I learnt a lot about communicating to the player with iconography; it also became the first game I had ever finished and published for free on Steam.
Before deploying to digital stores, I cleaned the game up, added six more stages, tweaked the balancing, commissioned a piece of artwork, bought the license for some music and of course… Added some words!
Development wise, there are many inefficiencies in the eventing. Despite this, the game is solid and runs well (probably because it's tiny). I've always been proud of it, and I think the reason people have enjoyed the game is because it's very simple to get into, but it is a real challenge to do quickly. After adding an in-game timer with miliseconds, things got more interesting…
Once a small number of people across various communities got into speedrunning Recruit One, I think that ended up being where the real fun was - and I love that. So, if you're lucky, sometimes your audience can be the ones that determine what makes your game tick.
