We've all had those projects where things went horribly wrong, and the occasional one were most of it went smoothly. Sometimes the games were received well by their audiences, and sometimes they were disasters.

What are your experiences with this? I'll write a bit about my own work, for starters.

Invasion
Brilliant new idea. Everyone loves it. Upgrade bug means that unit bonuses would be applied again every level, resulting in units killing the castle in one hit, moving at such speeds that they go straight out of the other side of the screen. Murder holes bug kill infinite numbers of infantry at once, resulting in 'all archers' being the only viable strategy. Castle aims arrows very badly. Made mistake of adding greyed-out units to the deployment menu which you couldn't actually unlock. Several saving bugs.

Invasion 2
Upgrade bug still there, but speed increase is removed. Arrow arcs become even wilder, greyed-out units still there, added useless ram unit. Archers still only viable strategy.

Invasion 3
Was received surprisingly well, due to amazing artwork from Kortex, and new units. Deployment keys refreshed browser for people on the Windows version of Internet Explorer (ie, almost everyone who played the game). Far too easy.

Invasion 4: The Last Crusade
Determined to regain the lost score from Invasion 3, changed the function keys to number keys, made much more balanced, artwork improved further, can't get into game due to broken preloader... whoops. Game becomes download-only, and is fixed 2 years later. Due to download-only-ness, the only version of Invasion that no movie portal's stolen yet.

Note: I still receive emails about the greyed-out units from people who're playing Invasions 1 & 2, on sites that stole them but cleverly overlooked the fact that they're not the latest versions.


Revolutionary RTS. Disaster. 6 months of work, 10,000 lines of code, and a full night's coding without sleep is wasted when Newgrounds audience don't read instructions.