Echoes of Color
Dev log
Sep 25, 2026

Hello from the Recursion Board

releasedesignintroduction

Hi! I'm Jasmine (JazzyPetal), and this is the first dev log for Echoes of Color, the action RPG I've been building on my own. I'll use these posts to share what I'm working on, what's broken, and the occasional detour. This first one is a quick introduction and a look at where things are headed.

What is this game?

Echoes of Color is a top-down ARPG where everything (you, the enemies, the world itself) is made of simple shapes. You pick a Square, a Circle or a Triangle, each with its own kit, and build it up with four colors: red for raw force, green for durability, blue for flow, and yellow for luck. Then you head out into the Recursion Board, a persistent, procedurally generated map of worlds that keeps growing the further you push.

It started as an experiment. I've wanted to make an ARPG since Diablo II, but I'm not an artist, so I started fiddling with a game built entirely out of geometry. It kept growing. If you've played Path of Exile, Last Epoch, Risk of Rain 2 or your share of procedurally generated roguelikes, you'll probably spot some of its DNA.

Geometry is the weapon

This is the part I'm proudest of. The geometry isn't just how things look, it's how you fight. You can smash blocks around the map and beat enemies up with them, and honestly, it never stops being satisfying. The floors get involved too: the different materials can propagate effects in strange ways that spread and react as a fight plays out.

So many glyphs

Actions can be socketed with glyphs that change how they behave, and there are a lot of combinations. I genuinely have no idea what every combination can do yet, which is exactly the kind of thing I love about ARPGs. I can't wait to see what people come up with.

The road to 0.4.0

0.4.0 is about making the basics solid rather than piling on more. Right now I'm:

  • Making sure each Shape gets a fair(-ish) run from the start through the first boss.
  • Checking that every passive actually does what it says it does.
  • Making sure every Shape feels fun to play.
  • Doing slower, more deliberate runs of the game and fixing the loose ends they shake out.

A nerdy detour: spatial indexing

Once world generation, projectile count, and enemy sprites got complex enough, performance fell off a cliff, and figuring out how to fix it took a while. The answer was something I'd never heard of before: spatial indexing.

The short version: when a lot of things keep asking "what's near me?", checking against everything in the world gets expensive fast. A spatial index sorts things by where they are, so that question only has to look at the nearby area instead of the whole map. Learning that from scratch was really cool, and it's a big part of why the game runs the way it does now.

What's next

I'm reworking the first portal experience. I know having your movement blocked by tutorials isn't always fun, so I'm looking at ways to make that first run feel better without sacrificing a bit of exposition to teach new players what is going on.

Thanks for reading!

Jasmine