AstroPop was a fun game to work on. All the art was done by Tysen Henderson, and he created some really cool concept sketches which I've included on this page. This was the first game we did that required the use of both mouse buttons: Zuma, while having right-click functionality, didn't require it to play the game. As such, it's been the subject of much internal debate as to whether this killed off its casual approach. We found that a lot of people just couldn't handle the dexterity required to left click to grab, right click to release at a rapid pace. That may be why it's seen better sales on the cell phone and XBox 360. This game also still stuck to the mantra of a never ending product, like Typer Shark. It's my belief that this also contributed to some confusion and less fullfilling gameplay. Every few levels, with each of the 4 characters, you'd get a bit of storyline and an upgrade to your SUPA weapon. After level 32 though for each character, there was nothing more: the game just got algorithmically harder. I would rather that we had cut off gameplay after level 32 per character and instead had some kind of victory screen, but hindsite is 20/20. We didn't believe that at the time. Also, this was the first game we did that involved multiple characters you could play as, rather than one main avatar, each with their own unique special weapon. We dubbed this weapon the SUPA weapon, which stands for Super Ultra Powerfully Awesome. Totally sweet, I know. We tried many different variations on the 2 button mouse interface and none worked out well besides the one we opted for. One variation involved holding down the left button to "suck" in bricks, and letting go to release or "blow" them. This caused us to temporarily adopt a more adult name internally for the game. This was actually pretty mindless and not fun, so we dropped it. AstroPop also at one point had a 3rd mode, dubbed Adventure Mode that was canned.