Indie game designer Edmund McMillen (Gish, Super Meat Boy) revealed that Time Fcuk, his time-bending puzzle-platformer co-developed with William Good, has so far been played more than 3.5 million times since launching two months ago, with 1 million of those plays from Newgrounds.com.
To celebrate the game's popularity, Newgrounds.com added a feature to view user-submitted levels (nearly 7,000 created so far) by category and with thumbnails of their layouts. McMillen also published a postmortem on what he felt went right and wrong with Time Fcuk's development.
He begins by naming a recent high school reunion as a major source of inspiration for the game, especially its intro animation.
"I had recently attended my high school reunion, it was a very strange and depressing event. Lots of drinking, crying, and sadness mostly from people who never seemed to progress past that high school mind set, most complaining about how they felt stuck in a situation they weren't happy with. ...
I wanted to write about a man who was at war with himself over his future, one side of him wanted 'enlightenment' the other wanted 'comfort'. And that's is essentially what Time Fcuk is all about. Every bit of text throughout the game has substance and meaning to me, even down to the description."
One of Time Fcuk's features that McMillen didn't feel work out as planned was its use of alternative levels:
"Half-way through development, I came up with this amazing idea of having alt levels, so for each level you play, there's a chance you will play one of 2-3 levels, giving the game a more dynamic feel.
I came up with the idea late one night where I envisioned people playing the game and then trying to look up hints on how to beat a level only to find no one had played the level they are on, in hopes that they would feel 'crazy'.
Ihis of course didn't have the effect I wanted, maybe a few people had a profound 'OMG THE LEVEL ARE DIFFERENT FO EACH PERSON' realization. But really, it was just a lot more work for me that made things two times more confusing for us when trying to fix the difficulty curve of level progression."
You can read the rest of the postmortem, which also describes McMillen's goal for the ending and how he stumbled on the idea of the radio frequency theme at the designer's development blog.
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