So I’d say enough time has elapsed since I released Quality Television for me to look back on it. The concept is simple yet silly: your only weapon is a television, and placing it anywhere will hypnotize any guards caught in its entrancing rays. Developing this thing was a lot of fun, as you might imagine! First up, the development process:

1. First afternoon- Brainstorming! It actually only took about 5 minutes of brainstorming for this idea to pop into my head. My first idea was a JRPG where you use words as a weapon, but I’m terrible at JRPG design. My next idea was BANANARANG!, which is exactly what it sounds like, but that seemed too indistinguishable (mechanically speaking) from a normal boomerang. Then I hit upon the TV idea, loved it, and started prototyping. It was all engine work today, but not much else.
2. Second day- I made a phenomenal amount of progress on the second day; most of the content you see in game is from this stage of development. Level design was top priority, and I finished all but level 8 (which was a story level more than anything else).
3. Final hours- From here was the aforementioned level 8, the beginning and ending sequences, and sound and music. I wasn’t as productive here as I was the previous day, but I’d say I’m pretty happy with how complete the game feels.

I guess I’ll go straight to what went well and what didn’t:

PROS:

• Core Gameplay: The core mechanics of the game worked out really well. I ended up with the game alternating between action and puzzle levels, with the final levels (Levels 6 and 7) being an effective mix of both. I feel like the Level 4 difficulty spike was a bit too much though, maybe I should have had an additional level to better teach the unusual light mechanics.
• Technical Stuff: Aside from a Windows version crash that was fixed within a couple hours after release, there weren’t any major bugs.
• Sound and Music: I had enough free time on the final day to put together a decent (albeit short) soundtrack in Renoise. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that additional instruments come in when the TV is in play. I even made the added instruments low-quality and static-y, as if they were coming from the TV itself.
• Art: Well, it was there. I do think that its simplicity worked well.
• Story: This was a lot of fun. The story is, again, simple, but the opening text really set the tone, featuring the “Sinister Governing Body” (or SGB). I’d rather not spoil the ending here, but suffice it to say that it’s pretty crazy– and a natural extension of the game’s mechanics, too!

CONS:

• Scope: Generally, when you see “scope” in the “cons” section of a LD postmortem, you expect the author to have overstretched themselves. In fact, the opposite ended up happening. There are only 8 levels, the last of which is entirely story-oriented. I feel like I could have done a lot more with the concept with the time allotted.

So here we have the pros vastly outweighing the cons. What a successful success this success has successfully been! Successful.

Download Quality Television here. Successfully.