Echoesdev blog

Building Echoes

Echoes is a side-scrolling puzzle platformer made in LÖVE. You play a small amber lantern-spirit in a dark ruin. Press the echo key and a cyan ghost replays your last three seconds. The ghost is solid on top, so you can stand on it, ride it, or leave it on a pressure plate to hold a door open.

These posts follow the game from its first build on, in order, mistakes included. Start with what the game is, play it in your browser, or read from the top.

  1. A ghost of your last three seconds The first build of Echoes records your last three seconds and replays them as a ghost you can stand on.
  2. Gamepad support and swappable art Keyboard and Xbox pad input share one binding table, and art dropped into a folder replaces the procedural drawing.
  3. Mirrors, veils and crumbling stone Three new tiles change what an echo can do, and seven new levels build their puzzles on them.
  4. Menus, saves and a HUD for memory Echoes gets menus and a save file, plus a HUD that shows how much of the last three seconds the next echo will replay.
  5. Benchmarking the pause screen A benchmark showed every scene far under its frame budget, so the one optimization was to stop redrawing the pause screen.
  6. Four bugs behind a quit button The game seemed to race through levels and crash. Four bugs between scenes explained it, and none of them was in the simulation.
  7. Rebuilding Ferry Ferry passed every check but could not be beaten by hand, and a redesign widened its 9 to 10 frame boarding window to 52 frames.
  8. A simulation that never draws The game's code is split by what each part does in the game, and the simulation that replays your echoes never calls LÖVE.
  9. Searching the levels for shortcuts A search that plays every shallow strategy against a level found shortcuts in three shipped levels, and each shortcut became a check that has to fail.
  10. Waystones and act IV A checkpoint tile splits long levels into rooms, and the five levels of act IV are built from rooms that each pass the shortcut search.
  11. Act V and Let Go Five levels finish the game, and Let Go replaced a planned level whose key timing window measured 12 frames.
  12. Rewind, a trail and an ember in every level Echoes played well and wasn't fun. Seeing an echo before casting it, rewinding a mistake and an optional ember per level are the changes that came out of asking why.
  13. Next: playtests and cleanup The new levels, rewind and embers need people to play them, a few weak spots are known, and adding a tile should touch one table, not five places.