Whoops, turns out my website was broken in a few ways.  Comments didn’t work for blog posts, and category pages didn’t work either.  The culprit was shifty URLs for both of them.  Should be fixed now.  Quick, post comments and stuff!

The Company of Myself continues to collect viewers and spread around the internet like a video of a cat falling off of a table into a vat of molten lead.  Unfortunately, due to agreements with the sponsor, I wasn’t allowed to put in a counter to keep track of the total number of plays across the whole internet–I can only check on individual sites, and only when they publicly list how many plays a game has.  Armor, for instance, has the game played over 300,000 times.  Newgrounds has something like 130,000.  The game has also reached the “best of all time” list on NG, currently sitting on #6.  We’ll have to wait and see how it shifts around there over the next few days and weeks.

I’ve got a pretty good idea of what I want to work on next, but I don’t want to say too much about it just yet, as it’s got a lot of room to evolve.  Once I become more sure of the project and have something to show, I’ll post about it.  For now, enjoy the Zen demo, because that’s not it and it’ll disappear eventually.

I threw a link to Company up on Reddit, and it’s gotten a fair bit of comment feedback–As of right now, almost 250 comments in 12 hours. I’m always intensely critical of my own work, and that makes it very hard for me to say that I really like something I’ve made until I hear opinions from lots of other people. I liked Spewer the whole way through its development, but I wasn’t ready to call it a good game until the people who played it called it a good game.

From the looks of it, Company is a good game.

I decided to handle all of the game design for Company on my own, because I wanted to find out if I could actually do it successfully–My recent projects have all been joint efforts, so I was getting nervous that the game design was only good because of the other person’s contributions.  Hopefully the positive response here is enough to convince me that I can indeed do this stuff and do it well.

A smattering of responses from Reddit users:

• This game is pimp.  (Word.)
• Braidish but cool.  (This is a very expected response, since the game is largely inspired by Braid.  The number of people who note that it’s similar to Braid is about where I expected it to be.  Good eye, gaming community.)
• I would seriously enjoy having this game on a handheld system of some sort. It strikes so many awesome chords with me. I just love the style/storyline/atmosphere of the whole game so much that it would easily be addictive. You did a great job!  (At this point, I don’t really see myself doing more with this game, to be honest.  I did what I wanted with it, and I’m satisfied with leaving it where it is.  Making another version for something other than Flash would just mean reusing puzzles, and that’s no good.  A lot of people don’t realize how important it is not to repeat puzzles in these kinds of games–Making more content becomes really huge challenge by the end, and once you’ve done all you can, there’s nowhere else to go.)
• Best flash game I’ve played in a long time. Gameplay is simple, but challenging and thought-provoking. Music is wistful and nostalgic. Graphics are crisp. Story is subtle but deep.  (This person managed to compliment all three people who worked on the project. Luka Marcetic did the graphics and animation, and David Carney wrote the music.)
• Wow, great game design AND great writing! You rule!  (Bawwww, thank you.)
• Add a mute button. (Whoops.  There’s volume control in the pause menu, but it’s obvious now that this isn’t clear enough for average-gamer-Joe. Next time I’ll make it more apparent.)
• Very rarely am i impressed with an online game, but I thought this was very well done.  (I’m not tearing up.  I’ve got something in my eye.  Give me…give me a second.)
• You’re fucking brilliant, man. Seriously.  (Hey, I love you, too!)
• That was awesome. perfect use of challenge without being impossible. Neat story the game play, perfect music. Just the right amount of emotion to make you connect with your little mass of pixels. This is how it’s done. Thanks!  (This is pretty much EVERYTHING I strived for in development.  Hearing someone else tell me it works is unfathomably satisfying.)
• Thank you for making this game, I really enjoyed it while it lasted, I am truly amazed how a small game like this can create such an atmosphere.  (Atmosphere, hooray!  Another big goal of mine, so it’s great to hear it turned out how I wanted it to.)
• The way the story was presented reminded me of World of Goo, I liked it.  (This one confuses me, actually.  There’s no intentional WoG influence in Company, although WoG is definitely a very good game.  I’m curious what parts they considered similar.)
• SUCKS! Is Crap!  (Hey!  Fuck you, buddy!  …Okay not really, but this is a good moment to share a bit of insight about art, business, and life in general.  I hate it when somebody makes a product and then gets all pissy about customers who don’t like it.  It’s not your job to like it.  It’s my job to make you like it.  If you don’t, that’s my fault.)

And with that, it’s just about time to work on something new.

Finally, after lots and lots of wading through business delays and whatnot, Company is out in the wild. You can play it on a whole bunch of websites, as it looks like it’s started to spread around already. Find it right here.

Up next, randomly generated dungeons and adaptive difficulty.