gelisam/ludum-dare-34

The themes for LD34 were: "two button controls" and "growing"

Growing Up

This is our contribution for Ludum Dare edition #34. We participated in the Jam, in which teams have 72 hours to make a game based on a theme. For this edition there was a choice between two themes, "two button controls" and "growing". So we picked both :)

Play it here!

Spoilers!

Please go play the game first.

I'll be waiting.

Still waiting.

Have you beaten the game yet?

Good.

So, how did the game make you feel? Yeah, I know!

Some of it was intended from the start, but most of it is a reinterpretation of decisions we made for other reasons.

Here are all the bits of the Growing Up methaphor I know of in this game. If you see another, please add it as a comment here.

• At first you don't even know that you're going to grow up, you just live your life on a day to day basis. When you first play the game, you don't know that (you're sure you've played the game yet? there's no turning back from spoilers now) you character will grow up. You don't expect it, because in most games, your character keeps the same look throughout.
• Young people are more willing to take risks; older people are more conservative, they stick to tried and true techniques. In the game, it's much easier to slip in between two birds to grab a balloon when your character is still young and nimble. Once you get high enough, you're more likely to let the harder balloons slip by, because they're not worth the risk.
• Older people are more fragile. When you fall as a young girl, just grab another few balloons and try again. When you fall as an older lady, just grabbing one balloon is hard enough, and even if you do, it will take you forever to recover from the fall.
• You need to prepare for your retirement when you are young. If you end up floating up too fast, if you don't remember where you've left your backup balloons, or if you haven't accumulated enough balloons to keep you going into your old age, the end game is going to be a lot harder, and it's too late to fix most of those obstacles.
• Knowledge is experience, not intelligence. If you don't immediately discover that you can wrap around, or that it's safer along the edges, you're bound to discover it when your character gets old and is being forced towards the sides.
• This one is a bit of a stretch: technology pushes the world forward, but the stereotypical elderly sticks with the old technologies they are familiar with. In the game, the wind pushes you towards the center lane which contains all the latest balloons, but the center lane is too fast and dangerous for you, so you actively fight against the current and stick to the safety of the sides.
• Everybody dies, but nobody expects to die. As your character got visibly older by the minute, the process had to stop sooner or later, but you were probaly surprised anyway.

Oh, and when people die, they stay dead forever. Maybe the implementers of life were also planning to add a restart button but ran out of time before they could implement it? :)

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