27
MM83
3y

I once had to make a shitty canvas game as part of a marketing campaign when I worked for an agency, for fuck only knows what. You dragged a shopping trolley back and forth in an aisle, and got points for catching items that fell from the top.

The initial round of feedback had the complaint that sometimes players weren't receiving points for items. I spent a night playing this senseless game over and over, but I never failed to get the points for an item. I was pretty confident that it worked, it wasn't like the logic was complex, so I sent it over.

Second round of feedback had the same complaint. They were getting quite annoyed by it, said that it was a bad user experience. Again, I could not reproduce it at all: the game was an equally tedious waste of life on every device I tried it on.

In exasperation, I asked the sales guy whose pitch it had been to get me a video or a more detailed report. The client was quite arsey, as they saw it, at having to do bug-fixing for us, but they did agree.

Anyway, it transpired that they were angry that players were not receiving the points for the items they *failed* to catch. The way they saw it, the game wouldn't be fun if you were punished for not catching items - so they wanted the player to get ten points for every item on screen, regardless or not of whether they caught it in their trolley. Of course, I thought. Silly me.

I was actually quite impressed at how a marketing department could accidentally undermine the very notion of a game whilst seeking to make one more fun.

Comments
  • 1
    They are totally messed up 🤦‍♂️

    Game with hecking canvas? Like, what's even the point behind such a decision, if same can be done faster with HTML+CSS+JS?
  • 1
    Why. So I could just stand there all day long and gain points?
    Why.
  • 2
    @Ranchonyx is that what idle games are?
  • 1
  • 1
    @vintprox I mean there is a native canvas to HTML/JS.

    It's a pain in the ass to work with the native library but it's worth it if you need something to run smoothly with without it stuttering around like a fish.
  • 2
    @vintprox canvas is what I'd use for anything like a game, it is quicker to write/more intuitive to use HTML/CSS for simple things but for any complexity you're asking a lot of the device with all that mostly-needless DOM invalidation, and if there was one thing Shopping Trolley Supremo could not do, it was run badly.
  • 2
    I....I... can't.

    At least you didn't have to make a spinny wheel RNG game that gives the illusion of physics being responsible for the outcome of randInt().
  • 1
    It's like one of those participation medals. We're all winners!
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