My team just released an early prototype of our 2D Puzzle Platformer, Endless You. It’s been a long and winding road, but we’re proud of what we have so far.
Endless You has a grim take on the genre: What if your body from your previous life stayed in the level? Then it could be moved around and platformed off of to help finish the level.
The team has just finished making a plan to get a vertical slice ready for pitching, but want to do early tests in the current version to make sure our direction is strong. We’d love any feedback you might have for the game.
Thank you! I look forward to your thoughts if you choose to share them.
And yes! That game is a lot like ours. I’ve heard a lot of good things about it, too. I’ve been aware of it for a while now, but funnily enough, it’s not a direct inspiration.
More direct inspirations for the mechanic are Wario Land, Boarderlands 2 and Super Meat Boy. I’ve had the concept for about 10 years now, hence the age of those games.
In general, I found the puzzles to be a bit repetitive and easy for my taste. For example, you see this kind of pattern a lot without too much variation or additional challenge:
I didn’t expect that you could die from a corpse falling on you. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) I only ran into it once. It could be interesting if you had to use it intentionally to solve puzzles.
I also found myself often wanting to place corpses next to walls, but the game wouldn’t let me because I was too close to the wall. I would then spend some time trying to position my character exactly to place the corpse flush with the wall, but I think it would be nice if the game could automatically move your character away from the wall just enough to place the corpse.
Congrats on the prototype! After 10 years with an idea, must be nice to see it start to take shape!
I do have some feedback:
Firstly, I have to agree with exo, the puzzles do get quite repetitive especially with the ones that require you to die several times. However, those couple of times where you figure out a new way to use the bodies or the dying mechanic are great, like using the body as a hat/shield or making use of the way it falls on death. I think if you were able to expand on the dead body mechanics, or create new mechanics that interact with it, it will offer more unique options to keep each puzzle fresh. This can include platforming mechanics or abilities, like double jumps, wall jumps/climbs etc.
Alternatively/additionally, you can set up your puzzles so that there isn’t a unique or standard solution for each one, sort of how games like Tears of the Kingdom don’t require you to follow the ‘intended’ solution, and instead provide you with enough tools for you to figure it out in any way you see fit.
On a separate note, I like the camera zoom you do on each death, and the fog effect in the background is neat!
But well done on the work you and your team did, and I’m sure you can take this idea far!
I would agree that the puzzles are on the easy side for this set of levels (though as the designer, that’s notoriously hard for me to judge). We erred on having them be easier to ensure players of a wider skill range would be on the same page by the end of it. I’m curious though, if you feel like players more familiar with the genre would be likely to put the game down at the end of the level set due to it feeling like less of a challenge? (Assuming there were more levels)
There really is only one mandatory interaction with being crushed by a body (and even that is technically avoidable if you know its coming). We plan on having more in other worlds once we have introduced other mechanics that would make it possible to enforce.
I’m happy those two puzzles were some of your standouts, they’re ones I really like too.
I’ll have to think on ways to improve how precise you need to be with placing a body next to a wall. Because I think that is a negative about the experience, currently.
The team and I appreciate you trying it out!
Hah, yes! Having the idea finally take shape is super gratifying.
As far as repetition is concerned, I do feel a bit of that is trying to reinforce concepts sufficiently. Though it’s possible it’s overdone, and can be reduced slightly.
There are a lot of plans for unique death types that aren’t in this version. Fire, Poison, Electrocution, and Freezing to name a few. I do think that the first world can be a little dry in terms of mechanics, but I’m hoping that it promises enough that people will want to try the other worlds.
It might be nice to have a few instances where there’s a set up and only a handful of death types around, and just kinda let the player do what they’d like.
I’m glad the camera zoom was noticed! I included it to add a bit of juice without adding screen shake, since some players experience issues with that. We’re also quite happy with the fog too, it really ups the atmosphere.
Honestly, yeah. Personally, I have pretty low patience for things so if I probably would have stopped playing after the first two levels if I had not started playing it in this context. Of course, (and you may very well know this already) how easy a puzzle game is depends on how familiar the players are with the concepts you use and what their taste for challenge is, so whether or not this is bad depends on your target audience. I might not be the target demo for your game.
For some context, I’m the kind of person who usually prefers and enjoys complicated fare. Some examples include High Frontier 4 All, On Mars, and Factorio. People often think that I am really good at puzzle games and enjoy them a lot, but I wouldn’t really call myself a puzzle gamer. I sometimes find puzzle games, especially sokoban puzzles like Baba Is You, to be inscrutably difficult and I don’t normally spend my time looking for puzzle games to play. I just like some puzzles sometimes, depending on what it is.
Very interesting to note! That’s honestly very shocking to me. I suppose we might consider you outside of the target audience - we aren’t aiming to build a systems-heavy experience - but that doesn’t mean no one within our target audience could have a similar reaction to the first part of the game.
Something to discover as we continue testing this build.
Got a chance to play it today and I would generally agree that the puzzles are too easy and too much of the same mechanic sometimes but it was nice to see the variations when they came around like the first time having to navigate low spike or electrified ceilings. Even just the variation of adding electric blocks between several spikes was nice as a small extra challenge.
I also think it is absolutely a great idea to include the extra collectibles that are behind harder parts of the level so you can cater to both the more casual audience and the more hardcore folks who will likely love those parts of the levels even more. I don’t think any of the collectibles were especially difficult but it was nice to go for them. Though there was at least one level where there is a point-of-no-return in the level after the collectible which is always annoying to me personally, but I would hope in the final game if such a thing existed it would be easy to either restart the level or pick it from a level-picker and get back there pretty quick!
Do agree that having to wiggle back and forth a bit to be able to drop near a wall would be a good mechanic to try and smooth over somehow. But besides the wall drop hiccup I gotta say that I had absolutely no trouble with the controls and the feel of the movement and jump! I don’t know how much time you might’ve spent on it but it feels very natural and great honestly.
The death animation was quick but smooth and effective, the first time I saw it I did audibly gasp! I could tell that there was creativity in the level designs and little bits of attention to detail, just need to keep making levels, add more variety, and just keep iterating! Y’all can totally make something super fun with this
Thanks so much for giving it a go, and I’m glad you got something out of playing!
For the collectibles, I agree that motivating the hardcore audience with them is the way to go. I feel you’re right, and that none were particularly difficult. I guess for some reason, I felt the need to introduce them to the player in a “safe” setting (ie force the player to collect them a couple times) but I’m realizing that might not be necessary for such a widespread mechanic. I’ll think about the point of no return one. Forcing a restart is something I put a lot of effort into avoiding, but that is a situation where I know the player would want to do so.
I’m glad you found the controls smooth! I did put a lot of time and effort into getting them just to my liking. I’ve played a bunch of bad platformers before, so I knew what to avoid, lol.
We’re going to be putting a lot of time into animations, so it’s gratifying to hear that the main one we had done got a good reaction from you.
Thanks so much for your feedback! We’ll be sure to show it off once it’s looking more complete.
Thanks for giving us a chance to play your game! I really like the progression of the mechanics and how each stage builds upon the previous. The tutorial is simple to intuit and it doesn’t stop gameplay which is great.
I do agree with the points others have made about the difficulty aspect of the game and the corpse/wall shenanigans. I have a few ideas:
corpse removal
You already have the acid gun and the vats for disintegrating bodies which make for some great fun.
Introducing a bottomless pit the player or a body could fall into could add some challenge as the player won’t be able to rely on the (seemingly) limitless amount of corpses.
Furthermore, implementing some sort of dozer or compactor that sweeps bodies into a pit or crushes them beyond use might give some more challenge and present some more puzzle design opportunities.
Corpse decay
Conversely, some sort of corpse decay timer could work as well.
Cleaning crew
Implementing a trap that erases all bodies from the previous cloning station to the next might be an interesting addition but it also might annoy when factoring in the time it takes to create corpses.
Muscle fatigue
Decreasing player speed or jump height when carrying a corpse could present more challenges
Corpse Wall
For the wall drop thing, I don’t know if you all have a raycasting implementation, but if you do, you can shoot a ray out in front of the player each time the body placement function is called. The ray’s total length would be roughly the length of a corpse.
If it hits a wall, subtract the ray’s current length from the corpse length and tween/teleport the player in the opposite direction by that much and then play the body placement animation.
And thank you for giving it a go, and for giving us a write up of ideas! I’ll be mulling over your points and seeing how best to implement them where I can.
I’m glad you felt that teaching through the tutorial was effective without it being a hindrance to gameplay. One of our big goals for the project is to have as few words on screen as possible, while still conveying all the needed info.
It might be interesting to have a shorter jump height while carrying a body. It could really make the player consider when to hold a body and when to go on without one.
It could be good for performance to have certain situations where the bodies clear themselves, so it was nice to hear a few suggestions on that front.
For wall dropping, we don’t use a Raycast for it, but it would be pretty easy to change the implementation for a solution like that. Would be an effective way to go about it.
Thanks again for playing, and I appreciate the feedback.
Oooh, shorter jump height while holding something absolutely leads to new level possibilities, just played the demo for Stellagate that revolves heavily around that idea.
