Hello, everyone!

So this will be a big post-mortem about Asterash my latest Flash Game. As some of you may know, I usually work in more than one game at once and while I was working with Witchcraft I was also working on this arcade style game!

I will divide it into parts because I just have a lot to say about it, it was a really amazing experience to make this game and I would be totally open to working on a small web game again.

How it started

We started making this game with KMiles on October and we released on 10th of March. He wanted to make a bullet hell and I wanted to give a challenge to my Framework Mono by trying to make a difficult game from a performance side of view. Also, I never made a bullet hell before so it was a nice starting point for me in order to learn new things!

The first prototypes were already promising since it was fun to destroy ships while avoiding bullets. We decided then to continue it because of that, being a prototype with almost no feedback at all and being that fun gave us the hint that it was worth it!

First reviews

The first reviews of the game were awesome. I mean, we received a lot of great feedback like:

“There were a few “unlucky” and “Why do you hate me game?” situations which truthfully were hilarious, a bit of bad luck and poor planning leading to an epic failure (“Well , damm”). It may seem unfair at first but it gets better as you keep going, learning how to avoid those situations thinking ahead and dealing with each enemy type better. For me, challenge makes it interesting so I am eager to see what else the game will throw at me as I progress further! Slowly but surely!!” – GH859

or

“if you can appreciate a hard game that doesn’t make you rage quit, you just found it.

you guys really ought to expand this, it doesn’t have to be a 2 minute game and its easily going to earn you some AD revenue if its put out for mobile devices. good luck, and thanks for the game” – kakapants

and more!

We even received a lot of cool reviews on youtube like this one:

And it also got a review of Daikon Media that you can read here where Frederick wrote some cool stuff like this one:

“I would say, this 2017 version of “Bats”, “Space Invaders”, & Co is a great mix of old ingredients and with a few tweaks (improving the learning curve, rearranging the UI), it would be a perfect adaptation leaving nothing to be desired. MonoFlauta did a great job here and although I’ll always keep on playing my old favorites, “Asterash” has proven equal to the old classics.”

Of course, we received some negative feedback, especially for the difficult of the game. But it was still really awesome to receive so much feedback!

The “Hacker”

Just when we released the game, one guy thought it would be funny to hack the game and upload fake results. Being that one of the biggest features of the game was the high score table and the “Over the Top” medal, this was a big low hit for the game that was just released.

Why am I calling him “hacker”? Because probably he just used CheatEngine. This thing lets you change vars values that are saved in the memory. Could I have protected the game from this? Yes, I mean, not in a perfect way but encrypting the value would have added an extra difficult to it.

The point is, why would someone hack a free web game? I mean, that’s a really stupid thing. There are big companies, not all of them, that sell you shitty games for 60 dollars and you try to ruin a free game? This kind of people really deserves to be charged for every DLC the companies want to sell them.

The records and stats

The game has been up for, approximately, two months now and we have a lot of cool stats for it. Being featured on the front page of Newgrounds helped us to get a lot of exposure! And not only that, we also won the daily award of that day! Thanks to this exposure, the leaderboards were changing almost every hour because there were people playing it over and over again.

But well, here are some cool stats we got from the game:

• The record, at least for now, is for the user dke981 who did a total of 610.300 points. That’s really big number!
• We have almost a total of 30k of views in Newgrounds and a total of 327.433 runs. That’s more than 10 runs per player!
• Only 19 players got the medal Over the Top. Wich means that only them had been on the top of the leaderboards.
• From all the players that played in Newgrounds, almost 2000 give it another try after dying and more than 500 tried 15 or more times!

I know the stats may not seem significant. But, in my maybe not so humble opinion, they say a lot about the replayability of the game. I mean, it is a really big number of people who played it over and over again in order to see their names on the leaderboard.

A close

The game is published, the first month has finished and for a web game, this means the end of its big moment. But I will say once again it was a great experience and I am looking forward to work in another small game while I work in Witchcraft. It is a really sad thing that people want to see Flash dead being that it is capable of making this kind of things in a really quick way (we worked really slow on it). People want to see it dead mostly because its security flaws, but I think that is like the CheatEngine, it just shitty people who can’t find fun in the little and free things. Anyway, I am glad to contribute to keep contributing to the community of developers who still use Flash, even if it is in a nostalgic way.

Thanks for reading!