GAME: Dilation Ball

Game where you play a day that lasts 1 second. Need to find elements that stretch time by 1 second. You win when you live a 24 hour day.

This one is an iPhone balancing game in which the player must guide (by tilting the phone) a sphere that moves at its own, constant speed along a precarious system of narrow rails, and if the sphere falls off the rail on either side, then you restart from the last checkpoint. Think Labyrinth, but no stopping and there are more holes than paths. The sphere's pace is set such that reaching the first checkpoint, which is just a straight beam requiring that the player only hold the phone level, takes pretty much exactly one second. Between the first and second checkpoint, however, the sphere slows down and the length of the beam extends, such that that stretch takes exactly two seconds. Each stretch takes 1 additional second to complete; so the player has to maintain balance for increasing durations between checkpoints. In addition, the slower sphere becomes less responsive to the player's inputs as the levels roll on, requiring the player to become a better judge of how much force they need to apply to the sphere, and for how long they must apply it, in order to keep the ball steady in the face of increasingly frequent, randomized complications like curves, obstacles, and balance-disrupting events like sudden gusts of wind.

The game can be paused at any time (otherwise it never stops), and from the pause menu the player can purchase Rescues: any time you are about to fall and lose, the game auto-pauses and asks if you want to use one of your Rescues, in which case you are placed back in the centre of the rail and you lose any lateral momentum you may have had, resetting your balance but saving your progress. You also earn one free Rescue any time that you reach a new checkpoint. Furthermore, the game tracks all of your total real-time spent playing (paused time doesn't count), and for every few hours that you play you earn another free Rescue. Rescues make it so that your last-second fall at the end of a 30-minute-long stretch won't force you to start all over.

The game ends when you pass a single 24-hour-long run, which means the whole game should take 118 years and change to finish… except that everyone playing, everywhere, contributes their total "earned time" (the duration of the stretch they are currently playing) to a global tally, which unlocks benefits for all players as the player base passes certain milestones. Some possibilities:

• Total global earned time ≥ 24 hours = All checkpoints passed now add 2 seconds to the duration of the next stretch instead of one.
• Global clock ≥ 1 year = All checkpoints are now worth 1 minute. This should help the players reach the 24-hour stretch much faster.
• Whenever an individual player actually achieves the 24-hour goal, all players everywhere get a free Rescue, everyone's levels are worth an additional 1 second, and that player gets to start a new profile to add even more time to the clock.