Making of a flash game for MTV website

You are standing in the entrance hall of MTV Studio with a pillow in your hand. Your goal is to wander the building and beat up everyone—security men and pop singers. From time to time, there arrive “stars” on white limousines with bodyguards—they, too, are to be fought with pillows. You walk the hallways, go to different floors and keep battering each and every person you meet. Security men and bodyguards follow you trying to baton you back. Your character is awarded points for each scoring hit—security men and bodyguards are worth little, artists are more expensive and the stars have yet higher value. Once you reach the certain stage, your points turn into hearts which you are supposed to collect to gain a bonus life. But if you get hit on the head, you lose one.

You can hit 50 times with one pillow, and then you need another one. Beating people without a pillow is harder, so you should open the door closest to you and look for a pillow there. You might find it, and get another 50 hits. Or the room may be empty. Or it may be not, and there may be many security men who would hurry to baton you and take away your life.

The game helps to develop pillow-fighting skills.

Imagine this: your character gets to some floor, gains some number of points and all kinds of other events take place, then something else has to happen—for example, a new character may appear.

So you see, I had to write the script and then play (test) the game; I would see that the script was wrong, look for mistakes (play another ten times), make corrections (and test the thing until it made me sick), and on and on like that, until the script seemed okay and it worked close to the way I intended.

And only after that I could gradually make it look right (testing again and again each time any more or less significant change was introduced). In the end, I performed a series of final tests and found new irrelevant little bugs, corrected these one by one and tested some more, and more, and more…

The worst thing is that I lost interest in the game (or rather, I could no longer enjoy the things all of us like so much about games) after I’ve tested it two-three times. And I lost it for good. That is because I already knew when and where the “unexpected” occured and what had to be done to make it happen. This would deprive anyone of the fun one usually gets playing games. The game began to seem stupid, boring, pointless and all that. I actually stopped believing in what I was doing until I showed it to someone else (asking to test it). My friend looked at the characters I was sick of with amusement, he enjoyed playing the game and banged on the keyboard in excitement. He was surprised and shocked when after _root.floors.stage = stage, p = false, iobj.dir = - 1 and random (400) > 398, where _root.p = false his character suddenly got attacked by a bunch of security men. And when I saw that, I understood that this game was worth making…