REGRESO A LA LOCURA — Return to Madness

Cosmic-horror action platformer · pixel art · Godot 4 · 7 stages · 5 languages
by DanimanX

▶ Watch the 1080p promo — English · Español

Regreso a la Locura is free. If it earns a place in your library and you feel like saying thanks, you can buy me a coffee — completely optional.

_{paypal.me/DanimanX}

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"It was not death that claimed me, but the certainty that I had been here before."

You are the Witness, last acolyte of the Order of the Open Eye, descending through the seven layers of Cthulhu's dream to seal again the seals that someone is opening from the inside. Every layer you cross tears away a piece of your sanity, and the madness you accumulate never heals: it makes you hit harder, makes you see horrors that are not there, and in the end it returns you to the beginning.

Playtime: ~20–40 minutes per run · Saving: at the altars.

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Play it

Grab a build from Releases: Linux, Windows, macOS and Web.

Web build: it must be served over HTTP. Browsers forbid a file:// page from reading the game files (index.wasm, index.pck), so double-clicking index.html fails with a network error. The page now detects this and tells you what to do. Easiest path: unzip and run the bundled launcher.

cd regreso-a-la-locura-web
python3 serve.py        # opens http://localhost:8000 for you

# Open the project in Godot 4.7+
godot --path . --editor

# Or play it directly
godot --path .

Linux, from the downloaded build:

unzip regreso-a-la-locura-linux.zip
chmod +x regreso-a-la-locura.x86_64
./regreso-a-la-locura.x86_64

Key	Action
A / D or arrows	Move
Space	Jump (hold for a higher jump)
J or left click	Strike — 3-hit combo
K	Dodge (invulnerable, passes through projectiles)
L	The Voice: a scream that stuns and pushes, costs sanity
E	Interact
Esc	Pause / controls
Enter	Confirm
← →	Change language (title screen or pause)

Gamepads work too (left stick or D-pad, A jump, X strike, B dodge, Y The Voice, Start confirm / pause — including 8BitDo Wukong / Ultimate 2C controllers).

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Languages

The game ships in five languages: Spanish, English, French, Portuguese and Italian.

Switch with ← → on the title screen or in the pause menu. The choice is stored in user://settings.cfg and survives between runs; on first launch it tries to match your system language.

Everything is translated: stage names, intros, lore fragments, revelations, boss names, the whispers of madness, HUD, menus and the ending.

Texts live in assets/lang/{es,en,fr,pt,it}.json, generated by tools/gen_lang.py, which refuses to write if any language is missing a string. tools/check_lang.py verifies the same thing in CI.

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Web build troubleshooting

The web export ships with its own HTML shell (web/shell.html) that replaces Godot's generic failure screen:

• Opened with file:// → explains the browser restriction and shows the command to serve the folder, in Spanish, English, French, Portuguese or Italian (whichever the browser asks for).
• A file is missing or the server answered an error → names the file and the HTTP status (index.pck — HTTP 404) instead of "network error".
• Browser lacks WebGL 2 / required features → lists exactly what is missing.

tools/gen_web_bundle.sh exports the project and packs index.html, serve.py, START-HERE.txt and a 404.html into the release zip.

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Promo videos

The videos are generated from the game itself — nothing is edited by hand:

bash tools/gen_promo.sh                  # Spanish
LANG_CODE=en bash tools/gen_promo.sh     # English (also fr, pt, it)

1. Godot records the run at native resolution (480×270, lossless) with --write-movie.
2. tools/gen_promo_audio.py aligns the soundtrack to the real cut points.
3. ffmpeg scales ×4 with nearest-neighbour and encodes H.264 at 1080p.

Output: promo/return-to-madness-promo.mp4 (English) and promo/regreso-a-la-locura-promo.mp4 (Spanish).

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The two bars

Sanity (0–100, per stage) drops when you take damage, when you stand near horrors and in the dark. At zero the Witness screams, loses a candle and madness rises. It recovers at the altars (which are also save points) and by killing.

Madness (0–7, permanent) rises as you advance, as you kill and as you die. It never goes down:

• damage you deal: ×(1 + 0.13 · madness)
• damage you take: ×(1 + 0.09 · madness)
• enemies notice you sooner, and spectres that are not there begin to appear

Tide	Name	What changes
0	Witness	nothing
1	First whisper	vignette, whispers
2	Crack	chromatic aberration, hallucinations
3	Voice	screen warp, trembling HUD
4	Vortex	control drift, eyes in the background
5	Choir	duplicated silhouettes, constant whispers
6	Sleeper	everything breathes, the eye follows you
7	Return	the game restarts with a deformed world

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The seven stages

1. The Drowned Coast — Innsmouth in the rain · The Drowned Priest
2. The Crypts of Dagon — flooded catacombs · The Gilled Mother
3. The Forbidden Wing — Miskatonic Library · The Librarian
4. The Plateau of Leng — ice and the moon of Kadath · The Moon Hunter
5. The Abyss of Yuggoth — fungal machine-city · The Mi-Go Engineer
6. The Dream of R'lyeh — impossible geometry · The Self I Never Was
7. The Throne of the Sleeper — the dreaming chamber · Cthulhu

Each stage has an altar (save point), optional lore fragments and a three-phase guardian at the end. Behind the door, a revelation.

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Project layout

project.godot              autoloads: GameState, I18n, AudioDirector
scenes/main.tscn           single root scene; everything else is built in code
data/stages.gd             the 7 stages as ASCII maps (generated, editable)
scripts/
  main.gd                  flow: title, stages, death, revelation, loop
  game_state.gd            madness, sanity, candles, save file
  i18n.gd                  5-language lookup with Spanish fallback
  level.gd                 parses the map, autotiles, collision, props, entities
  player.gd                movement, combo, dodge, The Voice
  enemy.gd                 five creatures with their own behaviour
  boss.gd                  seven guardians, three phases, patterns
  tentacle.gd              tentacle that bursts out and retracts
  hud.gd                   candles, sanity, madness, boss bar, whispers
  madness_fx.gd            post-processing and hallucinations
  pixel_font.gd            5x7 bitmap font drawn from an atlas
  smoke.gd / bot.gd        verification harness (see below)
shaders/madness.gdshader   aberration, warp, vignette, grain, scanlines, tint
assets/                    sprites, tiles, backgrounds, ui, audio (all generated)
assets/lang/               five languages as JSON
tools/                     generators for art, audio, levels, text and video
promo/                     promo videos generated from the game
.github/workflows/build.yml  CI: Linux, Windows, macOS, Web + release

Levels are text

A stage is a 17-row ASCII map in data/stages.gd:

"...................",   .  empty          P  start          A  altar (save)
"..###.......###....",   #  solid          X  gate           b  lore fragment
"..###..^....###....",   =  platform       B  boss           t  torch
"#########..########",   ^  spikes         s  statue         :  chain
                         ~  water          1 drowned  2 cultist  3 polyp
                                          4 beast    5 Mi-Go    T tentacle

Rules the generator enforces: no jump exceeds 4 tiles horizontally or 3 tiles vertically.

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Regenerating the content

All content is procedural and reproducible:

python3 tools/gen_player.py     # the Witness: 28 frames
python3 tools/gen_enemies.py    # 5 creatures + 7 bosses + spectre
python3 tools/gen_world.py      # 6 tile atlases + props
python3 tools/gen_bg.py         # 7 stages × 2 parallax layers
python3 tools/gen_ui.py         # font, candles, eye, logo
python3 tools/gen_audio.py      # 7 ambiences, boss music, 12 effects
python3 tools/gen_lang.py       # the 5 language files
python3 tools/gen_stages.py     # the 7 ASCII maps + validation

bash tools/gen_web_bundle.sh    # web export + launcher, as shipped in the release
bash tools/gen_promo.sh          # promo videos (LANG_CODE=en for English)

gen_stages.py validates every stage: if a jump is impossible or a marker floats, it fails and writes nothing.

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Verification

The project ships with a harness that plays itself. It is not a demo: it is the regression test.

# guided screenshots in /tmp/shots (title, stage 1, madness 6, library, Cthulhu)
godot --path . -- --smoke

# can stage N be traversed end to end? (bot that jumps, hits and dodges)
godot --headless --path . -- --smoke --traverse --invuln --stage=1

# does the boss die and the gate close the stage? (duel + full loop)
godot --headless --path . -- --smoke --bosstest --stage=1

Measured on this machine (Godot 4.7.2, Linux, no dedicated GPU):

• Geometry: all 7 stages are traversable end to end without getting stuck. Bot times: 22 s, 27 s, 33 s, 32 s, 66 s, 38 s, 36 s (at ×2.5 speed).
• Combat: all 7 guardians die and the gate completes the stage, raising madness from 0.8 to 7.0 across a full run.
• Structure: gen_stages.py validates jumps and footholds before writing data/stages.gd; check_lang.py validates all five languages in CI.

The --invuln mode exists because the bot is not a combat AI: it isolates geometry from fights.

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Credits

A game by DanimanX.

Code, art and audio generated for this project. The Cthulhu mythos belongs to H. P. Lovecraft and is in the public domain; proper names are used as homage. Inspired by the feel of Blasphemous (The Game Kitchen).

No license declared: all rights reserved by the author. If you want it to be free software, add a LICENSE (MIT, GPL-3.0, or CC-BY for the art) — that is the only publishing decision still open.