Designing world-spanning & momentum-based platforming in Sylvie Lime

gamedeveloper.com:

This interview is part of our Road to the IGF series. The IGF (Independent Games Festival) aims to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize independent game developers advancing the medium. Every year, Game Developer sits down with the finalists for the IGF ahead of GDC to explore the themes, design decisions, and tools behind each entry.

Sylvie Limeis a platformer that asks you to play around with momentum, movement, and some wild abilities to get across its deadly hazards. And sometimes you're a lime.

Sylvie Davies, the game's creator, took some time to speak with Game Developer about the Nuovo Award-nominated title and how the creative platformer was inspired by an oddball Famicom game and a box of citrus, the multi-game spanning ideas that would inform its varied cast, and how some unexpected chaos came out of adding some really mundane tools into the platforming title.

Who are you, and what was your role in developing Sylvie Lime ?

I'm Sylvie Davies and I developed Sylvie Lime together with my friend Aria. For the most part, it was my project, but Aria helped with some things related to the characters and story. The non-player characters were sort of co-designed and belong to both of us, and the setting of the story comes from one of Aria's works. I programmed and designed the game, created the graphics and audio, and wrote the dialogue.

What's your background in making games?

I have been making video games for around 20 years. I started out using a tool called Project FUN created by the DigiPen Institute of Technology. It's extremely difficult to find any information about this tool nowadays, since DigiPen reused the "Project FUN" name for something else, but there is an