Yes, this was inspired by Viewfinder. I always had that game in my mind and wanted to recreate it. I'm nowhere good enough to recreate it in 3D. So the next best thing I had in mind was creating it for 2D. Initially I wanted to create a top-down adventurer game with this mechanic with pressure plate acting as keys and stuff. But the whole thing seemed like way too out of the scope for me. The whole taking the snapshot and pasting it and building colliders to it mechanic took me more than 2 days for me to make. I had really low time to design levels to actually make use of this whole mechanic as you pointed out.
I had way too many ideas on my mind while creating the mechanic. Some of them were what you listed down below (But you did bring more extra ideas than what I had in mind). Since this is a game jam, the tight schedule made me drop some of those ideas to make a bit more consistent gameplay. I didn't want to add more mechanics into the game and make it a bug-ridden mess, when I can focus on single mechanic and make a more stable game with much less noticeable bugs.
I do have a plan on updating this after the game jam since people seems to like this mechanic and I haven't seen any other game that have used this mechanic in a 2D game. I'll keep your ideas in mind when I build it after the jam. I've mostly used Unity to build 3D games and its my first time building a 2D game in unity in a loooooong time. So I needed some time to adjust to.
Thanks for this whole constructive feedback. I really appreciate it ! ^_^|
PS: The story I made for this game only took 2 hours and it was done at the end of the jam. I had some time to spare after the whole level building and bringing it together.
Edit: I did think about creating a mechanic on using the copy of a Key to unlock a door. But since the scaling mechanic is in place, I think it would have been a mess bringing it together.