(by request) I made the game QWOP. AMA.

You go to hell and you die

...in the form of a question, please

Will you go to hell and die? Please?

well, since you asked nicely...

Question One: Perhaps, When One Was Programming QWOP, Were Precious Qualities Willfully, Quietly Opted-in? Qualities Which Would Permit One, Of Player Qualification, Quick Progress While Playing QWOP?

QWOP QWOP QWOPQWOP

tl;dr: Are there cheat codes, yo?

no cheat codes. But if you're going to cheat at a game, why not just close the window and tell everyone you beat it?

Your game gives me nightmares but I admire your ability to troll the entire internet-using world. No questions, just wanna say that.

I have been surprised and thrilled by the amount of rage it seems to elicit in people.

Maybe if you gave the game a QWOPerative mode, you know so two players could play as one of his legs.

I keep offering to make a 2-player tournament version for the PAX omegathon, free of charge, but I can't get them to answer my emails! Damn your eyes Jerry Holkins or whatever!

Are you supposed to just do the splits and drag yourself along on one knee?

You are free to do that, just as you are free to cheat at solitaire, or to eat your own faeces. I recommend you try to have some dignity, though.

What is the proper technique then?

At the starting line do you need to lift your front leg to get your center of gravity to shift forward?

What is the proper steady-state order of keystrokes?

Tell me this or I will be sad.

Just free your mind. Stop looking for a set of directions you can follow. Jeepers, you remind me of an old man with a post-it on his computer that says C:
CD MSWORD WORD

You've revealed your oldness.

Back in my day games were actually hard.

Has anyone ever qwop'ed into Mordor?

This joke is everywhere at the moment. But I must say I prefer the 'LEGS AREN'T QWOPERATING' one.

Fuck the haters. I've never laughed so hard at a game.

Best shit ever.

Boo, I love the haters.

I hate you.

then I love you!

Are you aware that Too Many Ninjas is the greatest game ever?

Thanks! It was my first, which is why it's so sketchy.

To give due credit: it's based off the bouncing-ball minigame in Archer Maclean's excellent IK+.

Have you seen Critical's "Let's Play" of QWOP?

I think he sums it up for all of us.

:D

That video was (as far as I can tell) the source of the big spike in popularity the game had in December 2010. So I'm grateful to Critical for that. But if I'm honest, I don't think that's the funniest LP of QWOP by a long margin.

Can you post a couple you find funniest?

This one is the best by far.

HEY FUCK YOU ASSHOLE

THANKS FOR PLAYING MANG

How much money/ pussy have you gotten from making this game?

I haven't monetized it as well as I could have. In December it was briefly the #3 search on Google worldwide, and that should be enough to make you a millionaire if you're prepared, but I was using $10/month shared hosting and the server fell over. Plus I'm only using Google ads.

No groupies, just hatemail (which I love getting).

So what would you have done differently?

Nothing, really. I think it has an ephemeral quality, which could easily disappear if you changed anything. Like if it played up the laughs more, or if it had more stuff in it.

I did a different kind of game for the iphone version, though, since the platform and market are so different.

For bonus difficulty points, try playing QWOP on anything other than a QWERTY keyboard. ಠ_ಠ

One guy wrote to me and asked me to make a special version for him, cos he only had one arm. I had to oblige, but seriously... I doubt he got very far.

Please don't tell me that your "version for him" was the exact same game with the same keys except the guy only has one arm...

Edit: i've never received so much comment karma before. Thanks, everyone.

hahaha, that would have been awesome.

That is awesome, do you have that version online? I also have a one armed buddy, and id like to see his attempt at it.

no I think I lost it in my big server relocation in December, sadly

Where the hell did you get the idea for this torturous experience?

I made the cricket game and then one day in the shower I wondered if the guy needed to be tethered to the ground.

What was your motivation for creating this game? I mean, why a pseudo paraplegic runner?

He's fine, you're just controlling him poorly.

I love Too Many Ninjas

Thanks, that was my first game (and the only one that isn't an original gameplay idea)

Do you have a favorite piece of hate mail? Has anyone written a crazy/hilarious diatribe? Or is it all "I HATE YOU AND YOU'RE STUPID GAME!!!!111!!11"

I got a 2-page email that was basically just non-stop nerd-rage invective. I wrote back "Problem?"

why did you make this game so easy? I was expecting a challenge... more buttons next time :)

Have you seen this?

Verification please.

I sent a message to the mods. Is there a faster way to do that?

Place a message on your blog or twitter or website if you have one?

Ok, I tweeted it. It's @bfod, in case you were wondering.

What's your game development background? Did you go to school, or did it start as a hobby?

It's still just a hobby, although I have a physics degree which taught a tiny bit of programming formally. My code is among the worst anyone has ever had the displeasure of reading, it is seriously on the 'How is babby formed' level. But it is gradually getting better.

What is your personal high score?

About 50m, damn hurdle screws up my stride and I choke.

Sup, Bennet. Hideous from TIGSource here. :D

Y u no fix memory leaks?

1. I'm too scared to change the code, in case I make it somehow less likeable.
2. You are the only person to have ever mentioned the memory leaks, just now. Now that you mentioned it though, that would explain the slowdown.
3. Memory management is way beyond my level of understanding in actionscript.

Yeah, the memory usage starts increasing the longer you play (this was especially apparent back when you let us alpha test in the minus world though. you must've done something to make it better? or maybe it's just that my computer's better)

I didn't even know that there was any memory management to be done in AS3, except... not keeping things you don't use anymore around. If something isn't referenced from anything else, the garbage collector gobbles it up.

the... garbage... collector?

Do you feel you have validated your existence by making everyone feel inferior I've got 11m ^{^} Pretty interesting to find out a developer can't beat his own game, or is that commonplace/ please correct me if im wrong

It is commonplace in score-attack games. Most of the classic arcade games (Tetris, for example) don't have a finish line, and so it would take a superhuman to play all the way through until the score maxed out. I did test to make sure it wouldn't crash when you got to 100m, at least.

I'm not all that great at playing games, so if I can finish it it's probably too easy for 10% of the players. I wanted it to have a lasting challenge, and if you look on youtube there are plenty of people who can run all the way to the end like a boss.

You realise how hilarious it would have been if you made it so it DID crash if someone reached 99.9 meters?

My upcoming game is even more evil than that :)

Do you think that your game violates the Geneva Convention?

most games do, since the Geneva Convention forbids coerced sleep deprivation

Can't make it past -3...

you must be left-handed

(Hi Bennett! It's Terry.)

What are some of your favourite sport video games, and why? Could you maybe talk a bit about why you make sport themed games?

Thanks for the question Terry :) I make sports games, not because I like sport or because I'm sporty (I'm not) but because it allows you to massively simplify games. I hate sitting through tutorials in games, reading manuals, looking at HUD screens. With a sport game, the players know instantly what their basic goals are - to run to the right, to kick a goal, etc. So you get a lot of communication for free if you use sports as the basis of a game. What I don't like is the slavish adherence to verisimilitude that you see in commercial sports games. Yes, rain interrupts cricket in real life, but it adds nothing to a cricket game to simulate that.

There are a number of sports games I love. 720 degrees is one of my favourite arcade games of all time, just for visual and sonic style if nothing else. Virtua Tennis is really interesting because it takes a technical drawback of early skeletal animation techniques (bad input latency) and turns it into a strength. The player always swings the racquet at the exact instant he intends to, and this is made possible by the fact that the game can accurately predict when you will form the intention to hit the ball. It gives you a great sense of embodiment in the player avatar.

Oh, and Sente's Off the Wall. One of the best, most hilarious 2-player games of all time.

how do you win.

ask Charlie Sheen

Is english your first language? I've spent a fair amount of time playing winner vs. loser with friends, and the winning and losing statements are... odd.

No, I'm from Australia.

The other reason why those statements are odd is that they're randomly generated using a Markov chain.

You sly devil.

Where's the most unlikely place you've seen the game pop up? Like, unexpected mentions in media of any sort.

And seriously, you're the devil. (Yet I admire you and thank you for the AMA. [But you're still the devil.])

It hasn't really broken outside of the internet yet, apart from a couple of mentions in newspapers.

I'm still waiting for it to be mentioned on Conan or Jon Stewart or the Radiohead blog. Come on guys, I know you play games, and I know you read reddit. Let's make this happen!

My 11 year old sister finished the race. I have no idea how she did it. I can barely reach 10 meters. Question: Do you consider yourself to be a sadist/masochist irl?

not a sadist, but there may be a troll somewhere in my extended family tree.

Did you actively promote the distribution/spread of the game to online game sites? Or did you just release it to one source and didn't plan on pushing it out to the world? Have you heard random people talking about the game outside of the internet?

It's not authorized to be on any other sites, and I'm locked in a constant battle to keep the QWOP-thieves from ranking better than me on Google. I did try to license it to people, and I very nearly made good deals with Disney and HudsonSoft, but both fell through at the last second (after we'd already agreed to proceed). In retrospect, it was probably for the best that it stayed exclusive, since it has driven a lot of traffic to my site.

Do you have any neuro/muscular or other medical background? If not, how much research did you have to do for this game?

I had the prototype up and running in about 4 hours after I thought of the idea. So, no research. That's why he's got such a small number of joints!

How old are you? How did you get into making games? How would you change QWOP if you made it again? How could you monetise QWOP better?

I'm 32. I tried to learn to make games about 10 times, starting when I was about 8, before I finally got past the initial barrier to entry... once you have something that runs, it gets a lot easier and more compelling. I think it's about 100x easier to make games today than it was 24 years ago, and about 1000x easier to distribute them, so I encourage you to try if you have any interest at all. I could change QWOP right now if I wanted to - that's the benefit of self-hosting. But I think a lot of people would complain.