This game was inspired by when Philippe Petit walked between the Twin Towers. The two key focuses in this project were…

1 ) Designing an environment/world that implicitly taught the player the rules and goals of the game.

To do this, I leveraged the player’s knowledge of how the real world works, designing a world in which that knowledge would be useful in making assumptions about how my virtual world worked.

For example, to teach the player that falling off is bad, I made the towers really tall, and even added lava at the bottom. In real life, taking a fall like that would lead to certain death. Since my virtual world appears like reality—even if it is a little absurdist—it would be natural to assume that in this world, a cat could not survive a fall from a sky-scraper into a pit of lava.

To teach the player about the wind, I added a wider platform at the beginning so they could observe its consequences without being punished.

To give the player motivation and a goal to cross the gap, I put an escape helicopter at the end and added some policemen chasing them to get them moving.

2 ) Capturing the difficulty and precision of the real-world act of walking a tightrope.

Walking a tightrope is a very complex task involving the entire body, so I had to stylize the act of tightrope walking but while still maintaining some sort of difficulty and precision. I leaned into the intense focus demand and reaction time that is required to maintain balance. So I implemented a wind feature that the player must always account for and react to or else they fall off. I chose a simple WASD control scheme so that the movement was as intuitive as possible; that wasn’t supposed to be the difficult part.