In retrospect

Stay In Your Seat

I don't remember where I got the idea for this game. I thought it would be a humorous to make a game that simulated something dull and uncomfortable. It was an idea I hoped would catch on with game streamers because at the time I thought, hey I need a game streamer to play my games. The idea merged with a plane sitting simulator. I don't remember how. I didn't know about the Desert Bus game until after I was already into the development of Stay In Your Seat. My friend Peter, who helped make this game, told me about Desert Bus.

Peter and I were at the same day job and he had an interest in making games -- he had played around with Game Maker Studio but not Unity. We got to talking and I told him about this idea and we set out to make it together, me helping him learn Unity along the way. We started the game in July 2016. We finished in October 2016. Since then almost nobody has played it and nobody has bought it. That shouldn't be surprising considering it is a game about sitting in an airplane for three hours.

Before the game was done, we realized too late that most computer keyboards couldn't even support the number of simultaneously held down keys that the game requires. If anybody ever tells you your game has bad controls, tell them at least they're not as bad as Stay In Your Seat's controls. We discussed changing the controls to require typing the words over and over instead of holding down a crap ton of keys at once, but what would be the fun in that? The whole point was to simulate something excruciating. We wanted fingers to cramp.

It was all a joke. It is not a laughing matter. I'm certainly not laughing now.

To this day, I am not sure if games as jokes is something the world is ready for. I am not sure if the world will ever be ready.