Like a post mortem Pill Cannon

“As a person taking antidepressants, I don’t find this game funny. Not a bit. ”
A player with newgrounds

I’ll tell you how we two people created the Pill Cannon flash toy , what we learned and what we now feel, and how we have everything we want and still stay slim. Introduction. There are two of us: zLumer is a programmer, an international mystery man, and I, tequibo, are like an artist. We are called softstable for now . History In general, we made another game, but there were some difficulties, it was going slowly, we were tired of it, and decided to switch to a simple and quick project, to make it in a week. The game is about how a one-armed robot saves people from unbearable melancholy 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 development of the first version of the game, sending to fgl
then we collected feedback, held playtests, fixed something.
September 24 - the game is available for betting to sponsors
on October 19 - the king.com

bet has been accepted. The first bet was $ 200, it seems the last winning one was 1800. And it’s also extremely nasty that you cannot receive money in Russia through paypal. That is, it is possible but not officially - through intermediaries-skaters, or having an account in a country in which you can receive money from a paper bag. We got through moneybookers, and it seems that is why we chose this sponsor, and not the other.
According to the contract, there is no advertising in the game, but we can sell locks - versions with logos of other sponsors that work only on the site of this very different sponsor.

A sponsor is one whose logo and links are in the game. It’s kind of profitable for him that from other sites where the game is hosted traffic was going to him. And he is ready to pay for it.

Graphics
I tried to visually separate the game objects from the background due to saturation.
As a pleasant trifle, there are robot dreams that appear at the beginning of each level. It seems that not all players notice them, okay.
Drew in the illustrator with the mouse.
The obstacles in the game were originally just some cubes and sticks, then the idea came to make them in the form of drainpipes and air conditioners.

Mistakes
We had various elements of the game in the plans that we did not have time to do, such as: people riding elevators, destructible and moving obstacles. Perhaps we will release a level pack, and there it will certainly be.

We knew that the game turned out to be easy, but we didn’t have the last playtests, and after the release we learned that the game seems to the players not just easy, but boring and monotonous. Of course, we hastily edited the game, shortened and complicated it somehow, but we don’t know if it became better.

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

There’s still something else to do - it’s extremely difficult to track the complexity and interestingness of the game you are working on, if only because while you are testing it, you become an expert in this game. Therefore, testing the game on living people is very, very important.

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

You can also recall that we wanted to make the game in a week, as a result we made a month and a half, however, we did not work every day and not for eight hours. But I don’t worry for a long time about the deadlines, and I know that in the beginning they are shorter than in the end. It’s absolutely wonderful that no sad people rushed us, we decided how much to work on the game.

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

There is still a certain minus in that we didn’t fill the game on different portals ourselves, and, for example, on newgrounds now there is still a broken shortened version, in which obstacles do not work on some levels. The sponsor, alas, shows some sluggishness.

About setting
I came up with the game a long time ago when I was a much more gloomy young man. But even now it seems funny to me.
I also thought about writing the following text 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 that allow us to forget about the endless void inside our souls.”
And I was thinking of writing something else, something useful and important. But, failed to formulate this important. And whether it is useful, who knows. I thought it was a little pathetic, such things.

In general, practice breathing exercises. But I don’t know anything about pills, and don’t even ask.

Well, finally, like a screenshot from our other game, which, possibly, will be next.


In general, we are glad that our first game was released, and even someone liked it.

Thanks for attention.