The Circle of Life

Select a character with 1, 2, or 3, then move them with the arrow keys. When you switch to a different character, the first one replays your exact moves so you solve each puzzle by cooperating with your past selves. To win a level and advance, you need to get every character into the fire.

I built this game for a game jam with the theme "rebirth." I wanted to make a 2D platformer, but so many of them do the same things, so I set out to make something different and landed on this idea. My favourite parts of building it were coding and refining the core mechanic and designing levels that push it.

After finishing, I realized that because the characters record inputs rather than positions, the frame rate can occasionally desync them from where they should be. If I kept working on this, I'd fix it, probably by stabilizing the frame rate, to keep the gameplay smooth. For now, the workaround is to walk into a corner every so often to re-sync your position, though as a player you really shouldn't have to.

Art assets are from the Kenney Game Assets All-in-1 bundle by Kenney, released under the CC0 1.0 license.