The Kevster Games - Beforelife Afterlife (2025)

Guide a soul to rebirth in this second-person puzzle platformer!

First-place winner!

In the Afterlife, wise Old Souls who have Lived and Died can volunteer to escort an infantile, helpless Young Soul to be reborn. Following this dangerous journey, the Young Soul begins Life anew and the Old Soul is blessed with youth — and an opportunity to reborn themselves — for their good deed.

In Beforelife Afterlife, you play as an Old Soul accompanying a Young Soul through four levels where you must make pathways for the Young Soul to reach the end unharmed. Using your mouse, you can possess physics-based blocks within your reach to create pathways for the Young Soul by moving them out of the way, or using them to carry the Young Soul across bottomless pits and up cliffsides.

My third game jam entry, Beforelife Afterlife was developed in 48 hours for the theme "before and after" by myself, supplemented with an original adaptive piece of music composed by Skele and art contributions by the talented Reptacular. After trying to develop something entirely too complex for fall 2024's CROUPIER, I reflected upon what I felt made spring 2024's KerSPLAT! so special: iterability—by developing a few moving parts which function distinctly from one another, I could easily reuse them in new contexts in ways that felt meaningful and new. I used this concept of iterability to create some of Beforelife Afterlife's many ideas based on the same type of object, just altered to behave differently; for example, every block in the game behaves in the same way, but can have different aspects, like their movement along the horizontal or vertical axes, or their gravitational pull, altered to be used in much more situational contexts to create unique challenges. I also opted to write the entire physics system from scratch, as I did not know how to use any languages with built-in physics engines and did not have enough time to learn.

After our team's artist fell unexpectedly ill, I had to take up the responsibility of creating the rest of the art assets. I had a hard time imagining what a "Beforelife" would look like; originally, I wanted it to look abstract and dark, with small, pastel details. In the end, with time running out, I settled on just making things feel familiar by theming them after archetypal locations, like a library or ruins.

As the developer, I like the concept of this game. However, my actual application of many of its ideas are lacking and appeared to be frustrating to many players—I enjoyed watching people play the game and figure out their own solution to some of the game's more open-ended puzzles, but the majority of their reactions were frustrations with the controls or the length of time they had to wait for the automatically-moving "main character" (the Young Soul) to turn around and reposition itself so that they could actually try again. Should I ever return to this concept in a full version of the game, I have some new ideas I would like to try to make the game more clear and engaging, without removing from the original game's difficulty.

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Developed by The Kevster Games Team:

The Kevster: Programming, Art, Concept, Design

Reptacular: Art

Skele: Original Soundtrack

Development:

I had two very simple principles for this game. The first was to create an easily-iterable design (discussed above), and the second was to split up my days for distinct parts of the project. With the jam starting at 6 PM on a Friday, I used the few hours I had that day until I went to sleep writing the entirety of the game's physics engine and the majority of the rest of the code so that I would have a solid foundation to work on for the rest of the weekend. Saturday was reserved for creating all of the game's levels and fine-tuning anything that appeared to be broken. Sunday was spent making the art assets and polishing the game, performing beta testing, and fixing anything that was too hard or unclear. Throughout the entire weekend, Skele composed a song that I had asked to be broken up into multiple instrument channels and exported separately; as you play through the game, an instrument is added for each level to create a fuller and more intense song as you got closer and closer to the goal.

This is the earliest screenshot I have of the engine in progress; the red blocks are immovable solids, and the blue blocks can be possessed by the Old Soul. In the final game, swinging lanterns are used to tell the player that the Old Soul is close enough to possess a block, but I initially planned for the blocks to become outlined when close enough; I don't remember if I just thought lanterns looked cooler, or if the outlines were too hard to do, or if the outlines simply didn't look good enough to convey such an important mechanic. The small blue square on top of the blue platform on the left was a crate object which would have been able to be moved around by active physics blocks like the Young Soul is, but it never seemed to work quite right (and I never found a use for it in the final game anyway.)

Also in early versions of the game was the ability for blocks to impart vertical momentum to the Young Soul standing atop them, therefore launching it when a block abruptly stopped moving upwards. I took it out because the soul was launched entirely too high when doing this.

These are screenshots further in develoment. Because of the short development time, each of these scenes look exactly the same in the final product (sans spritework and other polish.) The concepts came together very quickly: a simple level using blocks confined to moving vertically as doors and elevators, a more complex level using gravity-enabled blocks as rubble, and so forth. There are many more concepts I could still explore with these mechanics, such as throwing a block and having to catch it later, for example.

On the first day of brainstorming, when I settled on the story concept, I sketched the top image of the souls and sent them to Reptacular, who was to be the game's sole artist. Before they had to exit the project, they completed the bottom image as concept art, created the in-game sprites for the souls, and the background for the game's final level.

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