I really enjoyed the checkpoints from Ori and the blind forest, for those unfamiliar with the game, your character has the ability to create his own checkpoints. However, this uses up some of a resource that you use for many things in the game.

This requires you to try to estimate how dangerous the upcoming area will be. I thought about how I could introduce an interesting system for checkpoints in my game. My game has no sort of resource that I could use for that nor do I want to have the exact same system. I thought about what sort of emotion I wanted to instill within my player with the checkpoint system. I want it to feel like you are taking risks, I thought about shovel knights system where you can destroy checkpoints for money.

This makes it feel like you’ve given up your safety net and now you can’t mess up. I want the same emotion but I don’t have anything you could gain from destroying a checkpoint (except coins but I don’t want to utilize them that way). Then I thought about it again, you could have a resource if the checkpoint itself was a resource. Imagine that throughout the game you have locked checkpoints that behave exactly like checkpoints from any other game. But you also have a “mobile” checkpoint, which you can place then pick up and put down.

if you die while the mobile checkpoint is out you respawn at it. If you are holding it then you respawn at the last locked checkpoint that you activated. If you reach the next locked checkpoint while your mobile one is still out then the mobile one comes back to you.

I think this definitely creates a risk vs reward mechanic because the only way to move your checkpoint through the levels is to pick up your checkpoint and have to go through areas without having a nearby checkpoint. This also means that even though you will die a lot (so far this game is very difficult) you don’t get set back far and the respawn times are instant (i.e. super meatboy).

However, that might be confusing for the first bit of the game and if I wanted to really make the players feel risky for picking up checkpoints I would need to put quite a bit of space between locked checkpoints (about 3 minutes of gameplay maybe) but that’s a lot to lose for one mistake, so maybe I should stick to the normal checkpoint formula. Comment whether you think that this checkpoint system is worth anything or if I should use normal checkpoints.