New Update + Steam Wishlist is Live!


Dear Patients

Thank you for participating in our ongoing trial of Side Effects. Your comments, feedback and videos have been invaluable to our research. We're grateful for your time, your curiosity, and your tolerance for discomfort.

New Update


As part of our continued efforts to improve the experience, we've released a new update featuring:

  • Improved AI – our subjects now exhibit more complex behaviors and decisions 

  • Bug fixes

  • Two new instruments:
    • Mouth Clamps
    • Pliers

PliersItem


Steam Store Page and Wishlists

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3799100/Side_Effects/

We are preparing for a wider release of the full experience on Steam. If you’ve found value (or something stranger) in Side Effects, please consider wishlisting it. This small gesture helps us reach more test subjects.

Multiplayer Trials Ahead

The next phase of development includes plans for multiplayer.

Thank you again for your participation. We couldn’t run this experiment without you.

– The Side Effects Team

Files

SideEffects_WindowsBuildV0.2.zip 226 MB
2 days ago

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Comments

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(1 edit)

only feedback I have...is this font is atrocious...the game is great lol ok...i take it back...although the computer screen is cool, I personally liked the pill bottles, maybe an option for either for the full game would be cool!

(+1)

haha yeah the font is really bad! We didn’t change it from the unity default font but we will. 

We also liked the pill bottles but felt they lacked some rules communication but we want to bring them back maybe as an item or maybe a special round 

(1 edit)

Great game, I really liked it. Just some feedback from an early player: mouth clamp is item that is very on-theme for the game, but it changes it into something more malicious and restrictive than its first version. Its an auto-harm whenever players isolate a death pill, can be a reversal with the last two pills, and it passively prevents opponents from eating green pills because of the risk of losing 4 resistance before recovery. It also purposefully injures the opponent rather than protect you which madecthis game conceptually unique from Shotgun Roulette and made it more appealing to me. Here is a fix idea that keeps the aesthetic but tempers the malice and restrictive play of the item: make the player use it on themselves, immediately taking a pill randomly or by opponents choice, in exchange for a benefit such as: taking the right to go second in future rounds, or skip current turn and next turn, or make future pills of the color fed to them or the next 3 pills not deplete any resistance, or prevent resistance from going below 1 for 3 turns. This gives players control over when to suffer the danger of mouth clamp. 

Also a new hammer effect: destroy 1 item. This is stronger than its current effect andcplaces value on going first, instead of only being a disadvantage, which is going to become an issue later with multiplayer. 

One more while Im here: giving 5 health instead of 4 would allow further stages played and decrease the cost of pliers, making it more appealing to use. 

Thanks for reading, love this game. 

(4 edits)

thank you for this in-depth feedback! We have felt that the mouth clamp stood out from the other items and you have highlighted it as a change of intent compared to other items (damaging oneself vs damaging the other patient). We might play on this idea that the “company/testers” give the test subjects more malicious items the more you play or it could be a different trial (which has a pool of different items). But some of this might push it more to Buckshot Roulette. We have a lot to think about 

I agree with the health change. Will change it to 5 and test it out 

Thank you again for great feedback! And for playing 

(7 edits)

Thank you for your reply. I respect all those ideas. I personally like this game more than Buckshot Roulette under the premise that you are trapped with one other pitiful person and forced to do a sinister medical trial. You want to stay alive rather than hurt anyone, but by protecting yourself you're allowing the other guy to die. But I do see where you’re going with those other ideas and they are interesting.

(In the first version I built on this premise and used 4 hammers on death pills to purposely keep us both alive into round 5 as an easter egg. I would need to remove 7 death pills to have the smallest chance get to round 6.)

That is such a cool way of playing!!! Will keep this in mind. We will add some benefits to making it to later rounds (maybe some secrets) and you have to try work together to get there