Use Your Head
Use Your Head is a puzzle platformer that lets you play as the Headless Horseman. Beset by ghosts and head-nabbing bats, you must solve puzzles by throwing your head to platforms and switches while your body fends off the attacks. Just use your head!
Contributions
- Lead Gameplay Design
- Puzzle Design
- C# Programming
Dynamic Camera
The core of the entire game is having a detachable head that acts as your camera. It was important to find a healthy balance between interesting but not gimmicky, and the angle we settled on feels like it hits that just right. Just enough space to see, not so much space that it’s irrelevant.
We also made sure the camera snapped back to the player’s body when they are holding the head so that the player doesn’t feel disconnected from their own movements when they are in sync.
Puzzles
One of the best parts about having this unique mechanic is the kinds of puzzles you can make involving it. Having your head activate some buttons while your body activates others already opens up the potential for hundreds of levels, and when you add in crates and the regrettably scrapped crate-climbing mechanic, you have a full game’s worth of content in a single level.
Combat
Adding to the chaos is the combat you have to manage while solving puzzles. With the bats who steal your head, you have to keep up with them for fear of losing sight of your body, while the ghosts attack the body itself. Either one of these enemies are dangerous in their own right, and it only gets more hectic when you have to fight both. Many of the puzzles even force you to split up your head on your body, forcing each to fend for themselves.
Feedback
To keep the eerie feel, sound was used sparingly. However, the one sound that was critical to be put in was the sound of a gate opening and closing. Many of the buttons the player presses are far away from any gate they can actually see, so having a mechanism squeak to indicate movement helps affirm to the player that they have activated the button they were touching.
Controls
In order to sell the idea of using your head and your body separately, it was decided that the body shouldn’t be able to attack while holding the head. We also didn’t want it to be that the player had to lob their head just to put it down, so making sure that the player had plenty of options related to the head was key. They can simply drop it, throw it in a high arc to hit anything on ledges, throw it hard to go down narrow corridors, and call it back. The call back was set to be incredibly slow so that it could not be used as a mechanic for anything other than retrieval.
