The idea behind this one is about how everyone tells you to grow up and be an adult but there’s so little specific instruction there is on actually being an adult– I was taught four different times in school about the american revolution, but how to “balance a checkbook” (did I pronounce that right?) was only gone over once during high school, almost in passing. Another part of it is that personally, I find that I’m often told to do more, take initiative, be proactive, but when I actually do something entirely of my own volition, it’s usually met with a chorus of “What are you DOING you idiot?!?”, in spirit if not in action. Thus, when you start, you’re given an objective–“Go Forward”– but not really told how to do so. Is “forward” up? Right? Left? It’s not down, is it? You sit and try various directions, but you can’t tell if any of them are right, and eventually you’re told that you messed up too much and now your life is ruined because of it.
Moving forward, the next steps in refining this piece would be having unmarked areas of the space you’re moving around in that would trigger popups of text that would say things like “No, not that way!” or “Go the other way, then do the thing when you get there! It’s simple” or “Why can’t you just do it right??” that would fade away after a few seconds–there’s plenty of instructions given, but not much actual guidance.
Once that is accomplished, the only other improvement would be for the You Messed Up screen/message to come up after a random number of instances of the ‘instruction’ popups rather than after a set amount of time, and adding a manual “restart” button to it instead of it just automatically looping back to the beginning.
Note from the future: the space below is supposed to have an embed of the interactive flash file I created for the project. Unfortunately, it was hosting from a university database that has since deleted my files and user after graduating two years ago. I will be looking for backups and somewhere to host them presently.
<html>http://www.personal.psu.edu/wlb5068/keyflashB.swf</html>
For the movement controls, I actually followed a guide on the Newgrounds.com forums, found here: http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/700462
ProjectHub 