The idea behind Soft & Wet: Go Beyond (SWGB) was pretty simple. There’s a pretty common discussion in the fangame community about how top needle is not very interesting and also hasn’t been pushed very far, and while the conversation usually trends towards ideas to how to “fix” this (if you even view it as a problem, many people are probably apathetic to it entirely) very little has actually happened to work towards these solutions, whether it be in more grandiose grinds or just making new stuff. Having seen a lot of these discussions and how little had been done gave me two goals going into this project. I wanted to make a needle save that would take me 30 or more hours to beat, and I wanted to make a needle save that people who aren’t complete needle nerds would find cool. There’s a part of me that thinks this is a pretty shallow motivation to make a game, but at the same time it’s not like you need a “reason” to make a game, you can just make something.
Despite having an intended difficulty in mind when making this game, I didn’t actually force the game to be that hard. I’ve thought for years now even before getting back into fangames that forcing something to be a certain difficulty often just doesn’t work out, so I kinda just made hard needle that was fun. The save being 8 screens long was decided upon very early, as well as screens 1, 3, and 6 being screens 1-3 in the maker map this save is a buff of. I essentially just built the save around that structure and didn’t think too much about how hard it was overall. I think this worked out really well, the save feels really “naturally” difficult and not like anything sticks out like crazy for the sake of making it harder.
Another thing planned early on is where the difficulty would come from. I love setup needle, and you can see that in a few jumps in the save like these ones:
However I wanted there to be other sources of difficulty. Very little top needle tests your basic kid control and directional movement, so I knew I wanted to really emphasize this in the save. There are so many difficult water grabs throughout the save which force you to escape the comfort of simple setups and just, do the jump. Even if you can do that there’s still a ton of frame perfect inputs and precise jump heights and stuff like that. You can’t really get away with being lacking in any area, you need to be good at it all.
Beyond the gameplay the aesthetic was pretty important to me. The original Soft & Wet was the first time I really considered block design super seriously and tried to make a “location” in a needle save, even if it’s fantastical and unrealistic. I think this adds a lot to what you make since it gives you an idea of how you wanna build jumps and also just looks nice. I think the themes I’ve built stuff around are pretty basic and I’m not sure how my design process would translate to more nebulous atmospheres that don’t really lend themselves to obvious structuring and visual design. It’s definitely something I wanna try out when I make more needle.
On the topic of the original save there were a few things I got to do differently from it since I wasn’t making this in I Wanna Maker. The biggest ones were catharsis water and vines. Catharsis water technically exists in maker but it looks awful and completely breaks the aesthetic of the original level, so I couldn’t use it. Maker vines are just not something I was at all interested in using, I prefer normal vines a lot more, so that also was on the table. Catharsis water ended up being really useful and fit into the save super well, so many extra options for jumps exist because of it. As a bonus grey is my favorite color so it makes me like the save more visually as well. Vines I ended up not allowing myself to use until Screen 4, I think it helps give a sense of progression since something is being added to the save as you progress. I changed existing jumps to a varying degree, I’m really happy with some things in the original save still but a couple things I didn’t really like and messed with a lot before settling on something new for SWGB. Screen 6 is one of my favorites for this reason, I feel like I made some awesome changes.
I had a pretty vivid idea of what the save would look like before starting, but obviously a lot of stuff just didn’t pan out how I expected. I think for the first half of the save I designed a lot of stuff with the idea of “the player needs to go here, and then this section is indoors, and this one is an outdoors section, and the movement should look like this” and that made me run dry of ideas by screen 4. I realized the stuff I wanted to make never worked out and I just couldn’t come up with fresh ideas. Screen 4 took the longest to make because of this and it’s probably my least favorite part of the save. I think compared to the rest it feels a bit empty and aimless. I don’t dislike it per se, if I did I would have changed it more before release, but it was kind of a teaching tool for me. My favorite part of S4 was the final jump, this drop through catharsis water grabs which just looked cool and stood out as a “setpiece”.
It was something that stood out as a memorable visual and I realized that once I thought of that structure, it was easy to make the jump work around it. For the rest of the save I used this as my design philosophy. Think of a cool structure, spike formation, something like that, and shape a jump around it. This ended up having the effect of making the 2nd half of the save a lot more visually interesting than the first half in my opinion. Especially comparing like Screen 1 which is probably my least favorite visually to the later screens, I just think I got a lot better as I went on.
I definitely realized this as I was finishing up the save, but in the end I think it was kind of inevitable. The more I made, the more creative I had to be, even after introducing vines as an additional gimmick to spice things up. I think the save has a good sense of progression as is, with the later jumps feeling more intense than the earlier ones. I could have probably worked on the game further to make it more perfect but at some point you are just satisfied with what you’ve made.
Despite making such a hard save it was really important the save was fun to play for me. While testing a few jumps ended up being pretty inconsistent and annoying, since they would end up as chokepoints you just got stuck on even just doing runs in practice. It’s probably weird to nerf spikes by 2 pixels the way I do and I tried to do it sparingly but it ends up being a pretty effective way to nerf things. This spike in Screen 5 was nerfed by 2 pixels for instance and it made the jump go from annoyingly precise to basically exactly what I wanted.
I released the game nearly a month before beating it but there was never really a point where I wished I had nerfed anything else, my intuition about what would get consistent and what really needed to be easier was pretty accurate, which I’m pretty happy about.
I mentioned earlier that I wanted the save to look cool to outsiders, so the visuals were a pretty important part of that. I honestly really like making visuals, although I lack the programming skill to do anything too crazy without help. KiyoshiWJ was definitely the biggest help in this project, the rain and bubble effects were mostly her. The people who helped me with this game really helped bring my ideas to life, and I’m really happy I was able to execute the theme I had in mind. The tiles turned out surprisingly nice I think. The background also took a surprising amount of playing around with to look how I wanted it to. As a final little note, the clear screen turned out really nice I think. The song in it is from Planetarian and it’s a really good song, it’s just a little too upbeat to have been the song for the actual save.
The name of SWGB is a Jojo’s reference, which is pretty obvious if you are familiar with the series. Maybe it’s weird that the game doesn’t include the Prince song it’s named after but I definitely don’t think it would have fit in with the vibe. In general it’s maybe a bit strange to make a game I feel so passionate about and have the name just be a direct reference to something I like. It might come across as more shitpost-y than it’s supposed to. I’ll learn how to come up with an original title one day.
The last thing to really mention about the game is Whole Lotta Love which wasn’t made by me. Still it’s pretty cool even if I’ve played an embarrassingly small amount of it. It was meant to be a bonus thing to play as a break from the save and I definitely think it serves that purpose. It has very “arcadey” vibes to it. It rounds out the game as a whole imo even if it’s just a side thing.
The following is commentary from the person who made Whole Lotta Love:
[Hey, I've never done any sort of dev commentary before, but I felt motivated enough from Pluto's writings (and her mentioning WLL). When Pluto was making the visuals for SWGB, I felt compelled to make something with them. I like the atmosphere they captured, and I thought I could put my own spin on it. Originally, my plan was to make a long save of fairly easy vanilla needle, but I quickly changed ideas after working on the first screen. I just didn’t think it was that interesting. So, I looked to music for motivation. After some searching, the song Hawk by Broadcast gave me an idea to make a speedrun save. The song’s intensity seemed like the perfect fit, I just needed to retool Pluto’s visuals a bit.
I think I also wanted to make a speedrun save because of maker. I adore speedrunning needle saves in maker, honestly. There’s so many little ways to optimize the kids movement or stupidly precise skips you can do. I like this level in particular, where you can just skip the entire screen from the second jump.
I tried my best to capture the essence of that, but a bit less stupid than what you usually have to do for a maker WR. I designed the save around the player having numerous ways to save time at the cost of added difficulty.
Another motivator for working on this save was to just put out something that reflects my current needle making style, as I haven't publicly released anything in 3 years. To that end, I'm pretty proud of what I made here and I think it's a good reflection of other stuff I'm working on. Recently, I've put much more emphasis on "idea" based screens/saves. I used to be fixated on trying to get individual jumps to feel exactly right, and I often lost sight of what I was trying to achieve with the save. Here this save is split up into many self contained segments that focus on one idea each.
Ultimately, I’m glad I decided to go for something other than just a generic long save. I think this save is quite unique, as I don’t think I’ve seen another fangame do something like this. It’s a bit unfortunate because I don’t think anyone actually played the save, but oh well. Nonetheless, I’m still happy with the final result!
-DM]
I’m not sure if I’ll make more needle that’s this difficult, and if I do it definitely won’t be for a while. Making this was a lot of fun and I love how it turned out, but there’s this kind of sad feeling releasing such a hard game since very few people will give it a serious try or have anything to say about it. I want to make games normal people can play and I’ll probably try to focus on that for the rest of the year. Still SWGB is a game that accomplished everything I wanted it to, and it’s by far the creative endeavour I’m the most proud of. A lot of care went into it, even down to some really small things I don’t think anyone else would really notice. I’m really happy with how people have responded to the game as well, it seems like my passion for it has rubbed off on others which I love to see. I don’t think I could be happier with this release honestly.