Idea

At some point, we have seriously decided to turn Super Mario Bros upside down and make a game called «Mario’s Nightmare.» Goomba was going to be the main character, with Mario and Luigi as enemies. Trying to develop this idea further, we even started to play our NES (.. instead of making the game).

In the end, we chose one idea that we could implement in time. In the game we play as crazy professor. He had just made the discovery of his life. But because of the fear that someone could steal his discovery, the professor turns into an embittered sociopath. The player should help him to get rid of the pesky scientists who are eager to get the cherished formula.

Development

Initially I spent too much time creating the main background. The size of the characters and animation were corrected during the final hours. And that, as expected, did not make the animation perfect — the main character runs as if he has a broken leg.

As for programming, at this time, we’ve decided to use a new approach. The prototype was written not with squares or rectangles, but with quite a real images taken from public sources. Later, it allowed us to save a lot of time on the sprites connection.

Music was written at night of the second day of development. Initially, the soundtrack was going to be funny and a little crazy. After several unsuccessful attempts, there was written a serious and heavy title theme about which we had some doubts. But as there has been spent too much time on the music, we decided to leave it as it is.

Unfortunately, we forget to add some game tutorial. And at first, many people could not understand how to play the game. They had to read description on the community page. We immediately tried to fix it by adding to the page with the game information about controls, game elements, etc. Also, we’ve added a gameplay video, the ending of which came out very funny.

Interesting Facts

— From the very start of theme voting, we tried not to discuss and not to see all the possible variants.

— Initially, enemies climbed the stairs to their full height, and then began to walk. But after adding animation, we realized that dancing Gangnam Style scientists — it is too much. We’ve cheated and made their appearance on the top as soon as they reached it. As it seems to us, it turned out not bad.

— We did not have time to do the death animation of enemies, so we decided to fill them with white and then make them disappear. Since we did not have time to implement our fill color programmatically, we decided to fill animation manually. And then simply replaced the image.

— The game score is incorrectly counted. You will get nothing for the bomb activation. All because we hung score increase at the wrong event.

— Due to a bug in the game, you can gather up to 4 flasks, although the maximum amount should not exceed 3.

— Despite the fact that falling bricks have its own formula of random correction, in most cases, brick falls on your head.

— Devolonter had to become a reference of the creeping up the stairs enemy, showing this action on the floor. Now he can not look at these characters calmly. Their animation has turned the most plausible.

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Tags: Mad Professor, post-mortem