A Cruel World

This was my first ever Ludum Dare. I'll get a post mortem up later today.

A Cruel World is a very short exploration game about an silent, outcast child in a harsh environment (because as far as I can see, the future is getting darker and darker!). It touches on religion, deforestation, corruption, self-image problems, and animal cruelty.

There is some anthropomorphic art, an eerie atmosphere, poetry, and slightly dark imagery. The game would have been longer and darker, but I ran out of time and made do with what I had accomplished. I'm quite happy with the result though!

All the artwork/animation was made myself (hence the large file size - sorry), and for the audio I used the license-free audio provided by SoundEffectsFactory on YouTube (with some editing myself). Oh and it's built ontop of libGDX for anyone who is wondering.

I packaged it as an executable JAR file - so it should work on any platform.

Let me know what you guys think! :)

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CONTROLS:

Walk - Left / right arrow keys
Jump - Up arrow key
Activate - Space bar (when X appears in the top right corner)
Music - M (Pause music if it gets annoying!)
Zoom - Mouse wheel
And the list of items on the bottom left is what you currently have in your inventory.
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EDIT: It may be useful to know the following:

- On the second level: When you pass the boxes for the first time they cannot be climbed. Speak to the lady, and then return to the boxes to collect the key. You can then proceed. (It can be tricky to get up the box stack though - sorry!)

- There are bugs with the interaction with characters in some places. Some will require you to 'Activate' near the character to view their speech, others will simply appear.

Hope this helps!