My Battle: A game for my son

I'm going to get a little personal, so feel free to skip this :smile:

It took a long time to come up with an idea for the theme. Like I didn't start working for over 36 hours after the theme was announced. I decided to make a standard platformer where your runs through the world was timed and after the set amount of time you fought the boss. If you lost you would start again with your collected powerups and try to go farther and collect more. Pretty standard stuff so far.

Then I needed a reason for this loop. I decided that the character would fall asleep and he was always attacked in the night. When I wrote the line "I hate going to bed" I realized I'd heard that before. From my son.

He was adopted at a young age but he remembers his birth parents. He is only 10 now but has to deal with emotions and difficulties that I can't even imagine. Feelings of anger at being abandoned, feelings of inadequacy, guilt over loving his family but still longing for the one that he lost. He does a great job with all this, but at night when it is just him and his mind these things come back strong. Some days he gets overwhelmed. He is still learning how to deal with these emotions and feelings.

I realized that the stupid game I was making could be changed to be reflect his journey. In the game you start with no abilities. You can't jump. You're slow. You are beaten in one hit. But then during the day you explore the world and you get stronger. Your health increases. Can avoid some of the attacks at night and you eventually get the ability to fight back.

There are no enemies while you are awake. The world is bright and happy, nothing can hurt you, but the music is melancholy (@JamesOliverMusic made the music and he nailed this). An the timer is always dropping, which signals another boss fight. The more times you fight the boss the better prepared you are to deal with his attacks. After a couple days (hopefully) you win.

After you win you have a conversation with the boss. He says he isn't really defeated an he will be back again tomrorow. You will have to fight again.

My son saw the game. And what was awesome is that he really gets it. We got to have a great conversation about how the feelings and anger may never go away. He might not beat them. They might keep coming back every night. But every day he gets stronger and learns how to fight back. I think he understand it better now. Codifying the experience into a game lets him see himself getting stronger and better at fighting the boss every day he plays. I left him to play it for awhile and I cam back and he had amassed over 200 hp. He just kept playing over and over until he could just stand in front of the boss and tank him until he won. I was really proud of him. That night, he said "I'm getting stronger every day too, right dad?" I choked up a little.

Games can be used to explore thoughts and feelings in a way that makes them real. I really love that. And it turns out it is a great medium to make help my son understand some of the things he is going through.

I'm not linking to my game. I've only rated a few others so far so I'll keep at that and am sure I'll get the ratings I need to be ranked. And, if you actually read all this, you don't need to play it anyway

The link to the game is in the comments if you want to play it.