How would postmortem pill cannon

“As a person taking antidepressants, I don’t find this game funny. Not at all."

Player with newgrounds

I will tell you how we, two men, created the Pill Cannon flash toy, what we learned, and how we feel now, and how to eat everything that we want and at the same time stay slim.





Introduction.

We are two: zLumer is a programmer, an international mystery man, and I, tequibo, are like an artist. We are called while softstable .

')

Story

In general, we did a different game, but there were some difficulties, it was slow, we were tired of it, and decided to switch to a simple and fast project, to make it in a week.

The game is about how one-armed robot saves people from unbearable longing and inner loneliness with magic pills of happiness. If you do not have time - people are thrown out of the window.

July 29 - September 11, the development of the first version of the game, sending it to fgl

then we collected feedback, conducted playtests, corrected something.

September 24 - the game is available for bets sponsors

October 19 - king.com bet is accepted



The first bid was 200 dollars, it seems the last one, the winning one, is 1800. And it’s extremely bad that you cannot get money through paypal in Russia. That is, it is possible, but not officially, through intermediaries-shkuroderov, or having an account in a country in which you can receive money from PayPal. We received through moneybookers, and it seems that is why we chose this sponsor, and not another.

According to the contract, there is no advertising in the game, but we can sell lok-sites - versions with logos of other sponsors that work only on the site of this very other sponsor.



The sponsor is the one whose logo and links are in the game. It seems to be beneficial to him, that from other sites where the game is hosted traffic went to him. And he is ready to pay for it.



Graphics

I tried to visually separate game objects from the background due to saturation.

As a nice little thing there are dreams of the robot, which are shown at the beginning of each level. It seems that not all players notice them, well, okay.

I drew in the illustrator with the mouse.

The obstacles in the game were originally just some kind of cubes and chopsticks, but then the thought came to make them in the form of drainpipes and air conditioners.



Errors

In the plans we had different elements of the game, which we did not have time to do, such as: people riding elevators, destructible and moving obstacles. Perhaps we will release the level pack, and there it certainly will be.



We knew that the game was easy, but we didn’t have the last playtests, and after the release we learned that the game seemed to players not just easy, but boring and monotonous. We, of course, hastily edited the game, shortened it and complicated it somehow, but it didn’t become better until we know.



The graphics should be done closer to the final stage of the game, bring to mind the gameplay on the squares and circles. What I did with the levels a couple of days after the release is an urgent patch, but not a solution.



There is still a problem here - it is extremely difficult to keep track of the complexity and interestingness of the game you're working on - if only because while testing it you become an expert in this game. Therefore, to test the game on living people is very, very important.



As an experiment, we award points for flowers that grow when a tablet falls to the ground. That is, we encourage Mazil. Well, or rather, console. This confuses some players, as it turned out, perhaps it should have been somehow explained in the game.



Still, we can remember that we wanted to make the game in a week, as a result we made it in a month and a half, however, we did not work every day and not eight hours. But I have not been worried about the terms for a long time, and I know that in the beginning they are shorter than at the end. It is absolutely wonderful here that no sad people hurried us, we ourselves decided how much to work on the game.



In general, it turned out - good graphics, animation, sounds, even with the code everything is fine, but weak gameplay.



There is also a certain minus in that the game on different portals was not filled by ourselves, and, for example, on the newgrounds now there is still a broken shortened version, in which obstacles do not work on some of the levels. The sponsor, alas, shows some sluggishness.



About setting

I invented the game a long time ago when I was a much more somber young man. But now she seems funny to me.

I also thought to write something like this at the end of the game:

“Personally, I think that books, films, games, music, any form of art are often nothing more than magic tablets of happiness, which allow us to forget about the endless emptiness inside our souls.”

And I also thought of writing something else, something useful and important. But, failed to articulate this important. And whether it is useful, who knows. I thought it was a little pompous, such things.



In general, practice breathing exercises. And about the pills, I do not know, and do not even ask.



Well, and finally, as if a screenshot from our other game, which, perhaps, will be next.





In general, we are glad that our first game saw the light, and even liked someone.



Thanks for attention.