Thursday 22 August 2013

How Long Can You Stay Positive?

Our minimalistic game about the transience of life returns as beije develops it into a native game for the Windows Phone.


A few months ago beije and I made a small browser game called Monorun! It’s a delightful and unforgiving game that will only take ~17 seconds — on average — of your life to try. In fact, if you haven’t already given it a try you should go and do that right now. Just go, try it and then come back to read the rest of this post. Like I said, it only takes ~17 seconds before you’ll meet your inevitable demise.

I stole borrowed this picture from beije.


Don’t worry, I’ll wait.


Pretty delightful, right?

I would love to say that it was an enormous success and we became filthy rich. Filthy rich I tell you! But that didn’t happen. To be fair though, it’s not something we were aiming for. Our only goal was to design and develop a “fun” little with a limited time-scale — about 4 weeks from idea to Release Candidate 1 — and to make its source available on github.com.

If — on the side of these goals — the game would happen to become a moderate success, well, we would consider that a bonus.

I was looking forward to writing the post you’re reading.

I was really looking forward to designing all kinds of informative and pretty infographics but the more I looked at the statistics we had, the more I came to the conclusion that I shouldn’t. The data we had didn’t really warrant infographics in that way and I couldn’t justify designing infographics whose only purpose was to look pretty.

So I’m going to have another look at it before I post anything. In the meantime — if you have a Windows Phone — beije went and developed a version of Monorun! for Windows Phone and you should download it right here. Go! Do it, like it, share it, play it and then tell us what you think by leaving a comment down below or writing a review in the Windows Phone Store.

Feel free to click the image to go to the Windows Phone Store.