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Week 37 · 7–13 Sep 2026

2026 Week 37: Giving ExitGuy a voice

This week has mostly been focusing on adding speech controls to the Polydex engine so that we can add more context via the main character's reactions.

A voiceless protagonist

Just as with many games before us — mostly to avoid costs, both upfront and on-going — we, of course, will be avoiding spoken audio. But a completely voiceless protagonist is difficult to pull off. At least if you want the player to root for them. Which is why we decided on implementing a text/speech handling system.

We chose to delay the implementation of such a system until we had the camera controls and the engine structure in place. Which we now have, so this week was the time to get started.

And now we have text messaging that can appear — in and around the action — with specific control on how the words appear. These messages reveal based on triggers or game events.

The speech-demo level open in the EXIT level editor
The speech-demo level: a scratch layout built purely for testing the wiring of messages up to triggers.

However, as per usual, something we think is going to be straightforward always reveals some hidden complexity. And this time it came in the shape of how we've designed EXIT's modular levels. Where one level can hand off to another, and then quietly unload itself in the background. Essentially meaning that each modular part has seams that the player can cross.

This meant designing the text positioning system to cater for these seams, and also working out what to do if the character keeps moving whilst the text is on the screen.

Debug overlay showing trigger regions and level seams around the character
The same speech-demo level at runtime with debug regions on: the blue box is a 'say trigger'.

With those issues surpassed we now have v1 ready and it will form part of the engine over the coming weeks. The next step will be trying to add more emotion to the text, controlling the way it animates in.

Other sideline changes

As usual, we're constantly play testing the character's control mechanisms and tweaking bits and pieces. We fixed a rather egregious issue with the underwater transition from flight mode to swim mode. This bug allowed flight mode to get stuck, and the airborne direction controls to kick in. This meant that you could 'swim' faster standing fully upright than when in actual swim mode. And whilst we're all about giving ExitGuy some powerful moves, this one didn't really seem on point. 😂

exitgame.co.uk

And... this website got launched. We'd been building it for some time, behind the scenes. There is still much more to add, but we'll be doing that as we go.