Patching of Games and the Implications

A friend brought it to my attention that Monster Truck Power Fantasy, among other Game Maker: Studio games I've made, would display a black screen on his computer running Windows 10. This appears to be a rare bug, but it's one I've since fixed. Monster Truck Power Fantasy, Gewgawlicious, Bloodjak, and Digital Toilet World should now run on Windows 10 with no problem.

The Morphine Western Revenge already had the fix applied, most people shouldn't download and play Darcy's Yurt Adventure, and Empty Chambers and How to Fly were made in Game Maker 8, so I ain't touching those anymore. Everything else was made in Unity or Twine. 

I know I'm late to the conversation about the permanence of software as a medium, but I'm becoming increasingly aware of just how fragile it is. Text can always be transcribed and preserved in a dozen different ways. Music and film can always be digitized to a playable format indefinitely. I'm starting to come to the realization that my games may no longer be playable on Windows, maybe not even ten or twenty years from now, and there isn't much I can do about it.

This particular black screen bug, from what I've read, was caused by the Windows 10 Creators Update, and it affects fullscreen Game Maker: Studio games indiscriminately. There's a simple fix that can be performed from within the program. So far, so good. It took an evening for me to go through nearly every game to perform the fix and re-upload it, but it's worth it to make sure that my games can run, let alone run well.

The scary thing, though, is that Game Maker: Studio is no longer supported by the developer, as it has been replaced by Game Maker: Studio 2. GM:S, in its final version, was capable of circumventing the bug. I certainly can't count on that being the case in the future, or on Game Maker: Studio properly running in the future.

So, it's possible to port all of my games into the new program. From what I hear, this requires the games to be reprogrammed, to an extent. I've made six Game Maker: Studio games so far, and it would take some serious time and effort to port them in Game Maker Studio 2 to make sure everything continues to work on current software and hardware. Not to mention, every time I have to make a change to fix a bug across all of my games caused by, for example, a Windows update, I have to fix and re-upload all of my games.

I make about two or three games every year. Let's say Game Maker Studio 3 comes out in five years. By the, I would hopefully have at least 16 games that I would need to port into that program... the workload required to keep my work current will snowball over the decades.

Of course, who knows how long Game Maker will exist as a program in any iteration? Nothing lasts forever. Maybe the last version is released, say, fifteen, twenty years from now, the company goes bankrupt, and I lose the ability to make any changes to my games' source code?

Of course, you can run any outdated Windows program in compatibility mode, and it should run correctly. But whether it does or not depends entirely upon the competence of Microsoft engineers. The ability for anyone to play my games over the course of my lifetime is largely in their hands. Not to mention, it won't occur to the typical player to run a game in compatibility mode, or to run it through an emulator.

This is probably going to be a widespread problem as operating systems undergo countless iterations over the coming decades (get hyped for Windows 40), and I may be pleasantly surprised by the solutions the IT community develops, but in the meantime, it is unnerving.

Underground Arcade at Artscape!

This is old news to those of you who follow me on other social media, but I am pleased to announce that the Baltimore Game Collective (consisting of Let-Off Studios and myself) will be showcasing our games at Artscape in Baltimore this July! Together, we are presenting Underground Arcade, which consists of eight games, half by me, half by Let-Off. Check out the trailer above!

Artscape advertises itself as the largest free arts festival in America, so I am grateful to be able to showcase my work in this setting. If you're in the area, do stop by and say hi!

Digital Toilet World v1.3

The last game I needed to revise in preparation for festival showcasing was Digital Toilet World, which has now been updated to v1.3. Most of the changes are minor - they make the game a bit more user friendly - but the experience is mostly the same, with one exception.

I have rewritten the game so that the dialogue more closely resembles that of the original version. I had grown considerably as a writer over the course of college (which I was in the midst of when I first made the game, and at the end of when I last revised it), and felt justified in making substantial changes.  My first update to the game, v1.1, simply corrected typos, but in v1.2, I rewrote much of the dialogue from scratch.

However, I've since realized that many of those changes went beyond improving the original script, changing the tone and subtext of the game. With this version of the game, I decided to compromise between the original text and my revisions, in an attempt to preserve the game's original spirit.

The decision to make any changes to a finished work always makes me nervous. While I want my games to be the best they can be, especially when I'm about to showcase them at a festival and have more exposure than I've ever had, I also don't want to be George Lucas. I don't want to take a perfectly fine piece of art and blemish it. I felt like I've managed to avoid that until the 1.2 revision of Toilet World. Hopefully, v1.3 adequately reversed those unsavory changes.

I think this will be the final edit I'll make to this game - it's four years old, and while it certainly shows on the surface that it no longer represents my absolute best as a game designer, it really shows under the hood. Making revisions to Bloodjak was easy - the code for Digital Toilet World is an illegible mess by comparison. I still love the game, it still holds up, and I think it represents my narrative and design style better than anything else I've made, but I've come to realize how much I've grown since then.

v1.3 has pause support, by the way

As always, you can play the game on Gamejolt and itch.io.

Here's the complete change list:
v1.3
Changes:
-Pause support added.
-Dialogue rewritten to more closely resemble that of v1.1.
-The player can now move using WASD in case your down arrow key is broken.
Bug Fixes 
-Androids no longer spawn while the player is in conversation.
-Sprites no longer blur.

 I have a big announcement to make soon.

April Update: Gewgawlicious v1.1, Monsterpunk Devlog #14, Music

In a Nutshell

If I've gone dark from the dev blog for a few months, it's because (surprise) I've been busy. Part of that busyness can be attributed to game development, primarily to two large projects. The first of these has been my application to Artscape, Baltimore's big ol' arts festival. I've been collaborating with another local game developer (Let-Off Studios!) under the moniker "Baltimore Game Collective" to exhibit a collection of eight short games during the festival, and while our acceptance status is pending, I am feeling confident this year! I've made a short demo reel for our showcase that will function as a promotional video if our acceptance is confirmed. 

The games I am contributing to the collection are Gewgawlicious, The Morphine Western Revenge, Bloodjak, and Digital Toilet World. While I am feeling good about Revenge in it's current state, the remaining work demands some additional polish before being publicly exhibited. 

Changes to Digital Toilet World will be minimal (in fact, I'll be reversing some unnecessary changes I made in the last update), while changes to Bloodjak will be a bit more extensive to make it more accessible to casual members of a festival audience. As for Gewgawlicious...

Gewgawlicious v1.1 is out! Now with audible music!

As is the case with most jam games, Gewgawlicious was rushed, and benefited from some minor revisions. Namely, there were three issues: 1) The music was too soft. 2) The bomb beeping was too loud and 3) People were confused by the user interface and basic rules of the sandbox. The first two issues required straightforward solutions, the third required a bit more care. I made a number of subtle changes to the game's user interface that will hopefully provide sufficient guidance to the player and keep them playing up through the game's punchline.

As always, you can play Gewgawlicious at itch.io and Game Jolt.

As for the other project that's been occupying my time...

Monsterpunk Devlog Update #14! Now with character portraits!

After spending nearly a year on The Morphine Western Revenge, I've been able to return my focus to Monsterpunk. For those of you who are newcomers, it's a survival action-RPG inspired in equal parts by virtual pets, punk games, and queer games. I've been working on it on and off since... 2014? Gosh.

I started off by finishing off drawing portrait art for all of the game's characters - a task I had left unfinished about a year ago - and since then have mostly been making fundamental changes to the game's mechanics. I'm always growing as a designer, and that has been especially true over the course of Revenge's development. One of the most frustrating aspects of working on a large, long-term project is that there's a mismatch between the initial quality of the work and your current ability, and taking a lengthy hiatus from a project only makes that difference more obvious. So, I'm making changes to some of the game's most fundamental aspects. I've slowed character movement speed in order to better control the overall pacing of the game, while lowering adversary health in order to make combat faster and snappier, among countless other changes.

For those of you who just got here, this is also a game about flirting and pooping.

At this point, I'm aiming to release the game by this summer. While there is much about it that I find endearing, I've been working on it long enough that it is, admittedly, beginning to feel like a burden! It is already playable from start to finish, and has always been even after the first week of development. The question has never been whether it can be released at a given moment, but whether it should. I don't know if the game will be the best it can be by the summer, but as time goes on, that question becomes less important.

I want this game to be great, but I'm also looking forward to being able to chill out, make jam games, and hack Pokémon roms again.

Here's Some Music, Too.

Finally I threw some tracks up on the Soundcloud - the music from Gewgawlicious and Darcy's Yurt Adventure, as well as two unused tracks - one from a collaboration that fell through, and another that was written for Revenge, but ultimately didn't fit the mood of the game, although I think it is rather good. Enjoy!

Digital Toilet World v1.2

I am pleased to announce that Digital Toilet World, after 2 years, has been updated to version 1.2!

Being one of my earliest efforts at a 48-hour jam game, it is crudely drawn, scored, and programmed. There were only so many improvements I could make with the time available to me that respected the original flavor of the game. That being said, it looks, feels, and plays much better now than it ever has. My goal was to transform the game into something I'd be comfortable presenting at a showcase, and I succeeded.

Here's the complete change log:
-Web version added
-Dialogue can be skipped by holding enter
-Opening scrawl can be skipped by pressing enter
-Holding escape now quits to the menu instead of quitting the game.
-HUD updated
-Tileset updated
-Dialogue rewritten, most drastically in the case of the survivor
-Enemies and NPCs are now animated
-Ghost now has attack animations
-Level geometry changes, especially in the final areas
-Changes to enemy spawn locations
-Damage taken reduced on normal and hard difficulty settings
-Boss attack frequency increased across all difficulty settings
-Boss attack patterns changed
-Androids and boss now fall from the sky instead of emerging from your poop
-Android HP lowered across all difficulty settings
-Android fire rate decreased on poop hell mode
-Android spawn time from poop now randomized
-Final encounter length increased
-Stranger now dies
-Music and speech are now louder
-Music now plays in the survivor's area
-Bathroom signs added
-Keys now bob
-Difficulty setting names changed
-Text box opacity increased
-Some bug fixes

Unexpectedly, most of my time was spent making technical changes to port the game to HTML5. The bugs I initially encountered when attempting to do so where ghastly.

I may update the game again before summer to make further changes - the Artscape submission deadline is the end of March, and I simply wanted to make this game extra-presentable before then.

As usual, you can find the game at either itch.io or Gamejolt. Thank you for playing!

February Devlog Update

On Playtesting Monsterpunk

Monsterpunk is the first game I've made where I've put serious effort into playtesting. Most of my jam games are never tested before release due to time constraints. Sufficient playtesting for my student projects was, unfortunately, a low priority due to development conditions. At the time, simply finishing a game was a challenge; let alone making anything playable by a lay person.

While most of my jam games err on the side of being too difficult (but fair), they have generally been playable and enjoyable by most people even without playtesting. Because of the incredibly short development cycle on such games (2-7 days), the mechanics of my jam games are relatively simple. By the end of each game's development, I have plenty of practice playing it, but not so much that my abilities fully eclipse those of a first-time player. Basically, it's still possible for me to imagine what it's like for a first-time player to try the game, and I design accordingly. Even though, as the Bloodjak high score table below demonstrates, I have a very different relationship with my own work than anyone else does (6821 points), many other players were still able to form some sort of relationship with it. I consider the game to be more successful than not.

While Bloodjak's high score table provides an objective measurement of just how better I am at my own games than average players, geoffryb, Raeleus, and DifferentName still scored high enough to experience all of the game's content, and lower scoring players still gave me very positive feedback.
In other news, my niece and nephew ("StRuby" and Huck) are totally destroying the Guest Leaderboard.

Monsterpunk is fundamentally different from anything else I've worked on. I've been developing (and playing) the game for nearly a year and a half. Not only am I exceptionally skilled at the game, I'm also starting to become bored by it. More so than usual, I have an insufficient ability to predict what an average player will be able to understand, what they'll be able to accomplish, and what they'll enjoy in the game. While every video game should be sufficiently playtested, Monsterpunk is both the first recent game of mine for which sufficient playtesting is possible and the game of mine which requires playtesting the most.

Playtesting for the game is far from over - I'm only halfway through the list of people who offered to help - but it has been a thoroughly useful process. The first two playtesters barely lasted 10 minutes in the game. With necessary changes, Playtester #3 was able to play the game for a couple of hours. Further changes allowed Playtester #4 to be the first to beat the game. Playtester #5 not only beat the game, but voluntarily played through the opening 30 minutes of the game twice. The game has transitioned from something unplayable to something genuinely enjoyable over the past few months, and it's been both a pleasure and a relief.

Altering the HUD's color scheme was one of many necessary tweaks made evident through playtesting.

What's left for Monsterpunk? I'm recently begun drawing and adding character portraits to the game, but once that's done, I'll add a character selection quiz, illustrate the game's endings, exaggerate the impact of the player's violence (or lack thereof) on the world, complete the soundtrack, and make various other small mechanical and audio-visual tweaks.

Character portraits

Considering how consistently wrong I've been in predicting the release date for the game (originally December 2014?), I probably should stop making promises regarding it. That being said, I'm currently aiming to finish this game by spring, and I can't imagine that I'll still be working on it through the summer. I don't want to spend more than two years on this project, and I really don't want it to stay in perpetual development hell. I don't want this to be another Waker.

This time, though, I actually have a good reason for extending the game's release date!

On Preparing Games for Festival

I'm intending to showcase my shorter games at Artscape this Summer! Artscape is a massive, free arts festival held in Baltimore each year. Local game developers have been showcasing games at Artscape (through Gamescape) for a few years now, and I want to participate. Monsterpunk is too long, complicated, and R-rated to be showcased at such an event, but Bloodjak and Digital Toilet World are short and simple enough that they'd be perfect for it.

In preparation for Artscape, I'll be making changes to both games to make them more accessible to a festival audience. Bloodjak will mostly receive minor difficulty tweaks, but changes to Digital Toilet World will be more extensive, including some basic animation for the enemies, edited dialogue, and significant changes to the game's difficulty. If possible, both of these games will soon be playable in your internet browser!

I originally wanted to present Empty Chambers at Artscape, but I've begun revising it and realized that the game needs to undergo some very heavy changes to reach the same level of quality as my more recent work. It's the only jam game I've made that hasn't yet had a post-jam revision, and it shows.

In any case, those new versions of Bloodjak and DTW will be out within the next few weeks! I'm pretty stoked about it.

But wait! It gets better!

New Project!

I've been asked by a friend in Athens, Ohio to make a short game for an art showcase he's curating at the beginning of April. The game's inspired by a piece of writing of his - a western story about a Native American woman addicted to morphine who's allegedly trying to rescue her sister from Union soldiers.

Since I'm adapting the story into a video game, I went ahead and added a ton of shooting to it. As much as I'd like to break away from traditional (violent) design sensibilities, imagining the story as a top-down shooter was simply the fastest and easiest way to add a compelling interactive element to the story given the limited development time. Making compelling narrative games requires engineering the entire experience from start to finish; making compelling action games only requires engineering specific elements of the game (enemies, weapons) and then mixing and matching those elements.

Here's an early peek of it, two weeks into development. I'm pretty happy with it so far!

The enemies don't shoot yet, obviously.

The new game will premiere on April 1st at Athensworks, and then will be made available online shortly thereafter. If all goes well, it will also showcased alongside Bloodjak and DTW at Artscape.

IndiE3 as an alternative mode of cultural politics

IndiE3, if you didn't know, was a free cyber indie game dev expo that ran parallel to E3 last week. Throughout the week, a group of volunteers in Seattle live streamed indie game trailers and panel discussions. As I previously wrote, I had lost my initial pep for the event a couple of days in, and I missed the end of the event due to wedding attendance, so I didn't find the event fulfilling in terms of raw content. Of course, there were some high points: I caught the end of a fantastic interview with Christine Love on representations of sex in games, was introduced to some cool games through Warpdoor's panel, and saw some intriguing trailers. Sadly, I missed most of the panels, and wasn't very interested in most of the games shown. That being said, IndiE3 is still damn worth celebrating.

Never before have I heard of an international cultural expo being so inclusive. Do you want to attend IndiE3? All you have to do is sit in front of your computer in time for the live stream and chat as it happens. Do you want your game featured? It doesn't matter who you are or what your game is - send an email, and it will be shown, for goddamn free. Want to talk in front of an audience of hundreds? Again, it doesn't matter who you are - send an email, and you can host your own fuckin' panel. About just about anything. Yes, you.

Do you know how cool that is? THAT'S FUCKING ICE COLD.

Just about every other game expo, such as E3,  is rife with barriers to entry. It costs ahellovalota money to book a flight, crash in a hotel, and attend the event. E3 itself is open only to industry professionals, and being able to host a talk requires an even greater level of pre-existing legitimacy. So, through these sort of conventions, a relatively small group of people (technically skilled college-educated white men who like videogames just fine the way they are) gain reinforced status as the elite creators of games. Dominant discourse about games is limited to this group, and remains relatively stagnant.

At this year's E3, the games we see are the same old violent games with white male macho protagonists*. I mean that literally: it seems as though at least half of the new releases I encountered are sequels, spinoffs, or reboots. Mainstream games simply haven't responded to much of the social, narrative, or even ludological criticism that those of us on the fringe have been slinging at them. Games are capable of exploring as wide a variety of human experience as any other entertainment medium, yet so far have only explored a small fraction of it. Mainstream games have so much growing they can do, yet grow so little.

Compare this to IndiE3. While most people involved with the event were men, I noticed a greater diversity of individuals than typically is associated with gaming. Not only that, but panelists seemed to be greatly concerned with social and economic criticisms of games and their production. Panel topics included: "Games have a Racism Problem," "Creating Games Under Capital," and "What Not to do with Native Americans in Videogames." Other panels were more critical of dominant design philosophy and storytelling in games, but even these panels had a socially conscious edge: one panel I overheard on "Designing RPGs without Combat" was critical of how relationships and sex were portrayed in most RPGs.

Now, of course, with such low barriers to participation in IndiE3, you're bound to get some pretty awful games showcased. Some of the games honestly looked a little like the stuff I made in middle school. That being said, there were tons of really cool games too, such as Unrest, There Shall be Lancing, Charlotte Seeker, and Witchmarsh. What's more, the ability for anyone, regardless of their background, to have their creative work broadcasted to over a thousand people around the world, with no strings attached, it amazing. It's an opportunity that, under capitalism, is incredibly rare.

That's essentially what makes IndiE3 so special. The mainstream games industry, and all of the expos associated with it, are capitalist institutions to their foundation. IndiE3, by removing all economic and social barriers to participation to it, is fundamentally critical and egalitarian. It's what a game convention looks like if designed by anarcho-socialists.

Considering the results, that's fine by me.

 ----------------------------------------------------------

I'd also like to briefly share some more personal notes on my IndiE3 experience. Digital Toilet World, unfortunately, was not shown during the Warpdoor showcase as promised - the live streamer progressed through the list of games rather slowly and only played about half of it. 

Toward the end of the event, a volunteer finally confirmed that they had received promotional materials for Waker, but, because of the aforementioned wedding, I missed the trailer showing. I'm currently having trouble finding and viewing its recorded video segment. 

Overall, I think that, since the event was planned over a weekend by volunteers with no budget, it was stronger as a proof of concept than as an actual event. Poor communication and lack of manpower posed problems throughout. However, most of the issues were resolved over the course of the week, meaning that, if IndiE3 happens next year, it'll be as as strong as a magical flying ox. Bad ass.

------------------------------------------------------------

Please feel free to talk to me about IndiE3, the intersection between gaming and social justice, or anything else. I covered a lot of subject matter in this and didn't go into much detail about any of it. Hit me up. 

*Seriously scroll back up and watch the video in the link before the asterisk. This is what gaming mostly is. We all know it, there's no excuse for it, and it's gotten boring.

IndiE3 is Today!

IndiE3 is starting as I write this! It's a cyber game convention created 4 days ago, open for anyone to participate in, free of charge, which is really cool. It's fantastic that developers like me have spaces to promote their work without economic/professional barriers to entry. The fact that the community managed to pull this out of there asses over an extended weekend is incredible.

Waker should be on shown through IndiE3 sometime later this week. There's new screenshots and updated info about the game on its page. I'm working on a new demo and a trailer, you'll see them in a few days. In the meantime, Warpdoor is showcasing a whole bunch of games over the next four hours, and I'm thrilled to say that Digital Toilet World is among them. 

The channel for IndiE3 is over here.

EDIT:
Here's the other channel. I think Warpdoor's doing their thing over here.

Void Hero Blues, Site Updates, RIP Freeindiegam.es

Here's some more screenshots from The Void Hero Blues. If I can get away with making this whole damn thing with cubes, I swear I will. Can I say how much I love bump maps?

Also, I've been tidying up the site a bit. The "games" page is a lot more user friendly, and you may have noticed there's a whole bunch of new entries with the text, "coming soon". I've decided, for posterity's sake, to upload a bunch of old and unfinished (playable) work. Unfortunately, some of my best stuff from my teen years has been forever deleted, but what I've presented what I've been able to salvage. I'll be uploading old games as I have time. Stay tuned!

I also want to pay homage to freeindiegam.es, which recently was shut down. Most of the recommended games on this blog I originally found on that site, and one of the happiest mornings of my life was when Terry Cavanagh shared Digital Toilet World. It was a real special website, and if nothing takes it's place, I'm half tempted to spearhead an effort to help replace it. Terry, Porp, Stephen, Tim, Aquin, and Noyb, thanks again for two years of fantastic work. You're some of the coolest sons-of-guns there are.

Breakthrough, Response, and Transition

That up there? That's a video of a guy that I don't know playing "Digital Toilet World".

That kills me.

Here's the thing about me. I've been making games with Game Maker ever since I was 12. The first few years, I only shared the (terrible) games I made with my friends. By the time I was 13 or 14, I had discovered  this amateur entry-level first person shooter software called Silent Walk, and so I had made some (pretty bad) shooter games and shared them with the Silent Walk community, most of the members of which were boys my age. During my high school years, Silent Walk ceased to satisfy my creative needs, and I resumed work with Game Maker. I had published (mediocre) games on Game Maker's website and received maybe a dozen or so plays for each of my games (one of which was How to Fly). Having those dozen plays from strangers made my day. The possibility that people who didn't know me could choose to play my games, and that some of them could even like them, was inconceivable to me. I didn't care how few people played my games - the fact that there were people mattered.

It was during my high school years and early college years that I had really discovered the indie game scene. I had discovered the games of developers like Terry Cavanagh, Stephen Lavelle, Bento Smile, Christine Love, Amon26, Jonas Kyratzes, Anna Anthropy, Daniel Remar, Jason Rohrer, Cactus, thecatamites, and countless others. Most of the people above were my heroes. I played and idolized their games. I wanted to be one of them.

Before I reached adulthood, started this blog, and shared Waker on the Tigsource forums, I was just a kid who, in his spare time, made little games that his friends and family would occasionally play. Now, that's all changing. Over the past year, people I've never met have been blogging about Waker's development, following it, and are offering to write music for it. "Digital Toilet World" has been downloaded over a hundred times, ranked well enough in Ludum Dare, has a "Let's Play" video, and was posted to freeindiegam.es by Terry Cavanagh, one of my goddamn teenage heroes.

It's not much press, but holy shit, it's press. This is a transitional period for me as a game developer. It might be a little obnoxious, but I am probably going to freak out with every piece of publicity I receive for a while. It's just a phase I'm going through, please bear with me.

And thanks for playing and reading! For those of you keeping score at home, this is my 100th blog post here. I've undergone a lot of change as a developer and as a person since I started writing; I can't wait to see what the next 100 will bring.

TERRY CAVANAGH PLAYED MY GAME OMIGOD

You know that guy who made VVVVV and Super Hexagon? Well, he played "Digital Toilet World" and posted it to freeindiegam.es. What the hell.

It's not like I'm a big fan of his work or visit the blog every day or anything. *cough cough*

Digital Toilet World: Developer's Cut!

New features added to "Digital Toilet World":
-Mac build! May display white screen depending on your OS and graphics card, let me know.
-Music!
-Variable difficulty, including poop hell mode!
-Bug and typo fixes! (I missed one typo though...)
-Juciness!

Check out the My Games page up top to download it! Thanks for playing!

Now I can move on.

Bonus! Here's a map of the original game world! Cheers!

Digital Toilet World and LD28 Updates

Hey all,

So, out of 1284 entries, "Digital Toilet World," placed #111 for humor and #282 overall in Ludum Dare 28! Originally, I was a little bummed that I didn't make the top 100 for any category, but considering how rough the game is, I'm still happy that I ranked so high regardless. It deserved the placement it got.

Next time around, I definitely need to hold myself to higher standards, and appropriate myself more time to work. Most of the highest ranking entries had quality graphics, sound, and UI - I purposefully skimped on these attributes in DTW, thinking that it would be forgivable for a jam game. I also didn't have Friday evening/Saturday morning to work on the game like many developers did - that was a lot of valuable time I could've spent fixing bugs and improving the presentation!

That being said, I still managed to cram a lot of content into the game with the time I had, and managed to tell a decent little story to boot. Oh, and having completed a game, period, is still a great achievement. At the beginning of 2013, I hadn't finished making a game in years. By the end of it, I had made two. It's a great feeling.

Someone asked me to port this to Mac, and I started just to fix some bugs and a typo for it, but I'm now also implementing difficulty levels and plan to add music - the most prominent criticisms about the game were its lack of difficulty and music. So, "Digital Toilet World Plus" will be coming to you soon! I don't plan on replacing the craptastic graphics and audio, or an expanding the game in any other way - I really don't want to dedicate too much more time to this project - but I do want to fully realize the original vision I had for the game.

Thanks for playing, and for the meaningful criticism!

Oh, and I had said earlier that I was going to list a bunch of my favorite picks from the competition. Sadly, the record of games I rated during the competition has been lost - but here's a bunch that I remember:

From the 48-hour compo:

The Day the Laughter Stopped - Interactive fiction game about sexual violence. Trigger warning. Really powerful - and it couldn't be any more powerful if told through any other medium. If you play one game from Ludum Dare, play this one.

You Only Get 1! - In which you are in a Japanese gameshow and must accomplish three tasks with one object. Very amusing!

The Foodcourt - I won't spoil it. Apparently it's funnier to Swedish people - there's supposedly a pun that I can't detect. Still, really funny.

From the 72-hour jam (with teams)

Titan Souls - Is fucking unreal. It's Dark Souls meets Shadow of the Colossus. It plays great, feels great, looks great, and sounds great. You wouldn't be able to guess that this was made in 72 hours otherwise.

Mama is Sick - Simulation game in which you are a schoolgirl in a third world country, struggling to care for her family with only one dollar a day.

Impressive Dog - Is cute as hell.

Wilhelm's Escape - Brilliant, short, and good-looking point-and-click adventure in which you die in amusing ways.

You Only Get One Pig - Great series of pig-related minigames.

Going Down - Your plane's going down, and there's only one parachute. Have you ever wanted to play a game in which you beat people up with a suitcase? Now you can.

Ludum Dare 28 Compilation Video

Here's a neat little compilation video of a few games from Ludum Dare 28. "Digital Toilet World" makes an appearance about 1 minute in. I really wish I captured higher quality footage of the game. It was my first time recording my own game; I'll definitely have to figure out how to get better footage when it becomes necessary for me to actually make trailers and the like.

Some great work is featured here. Over 2,000 entries were submitted for the competition, this barely represents the variety of work created for it. After judging officially ends, I'll share my favorites.

Digital Toilet World is now on Game Jolt!

You can now check out my latest game, "Digital Toilet World," on Game Jolt right here!

I just realized recently that I forgot to change a typo in the game - the player character states that something's a "mute point" instead of a "moot point". Even though I am filled with much shame, I still claim that the game's otherwise rad.

Digital Toilet World Released

Welcome to Digital Toilet World.

One of humankind's server worlds is under attack, and its up to you, the cleaner, to purify it. You are accompanied on your holy mission by a brave little monster, the only one capable of fighting the viruses.

Unfortunately, this monster needs to go to the bathroom, often. And there's only one goddamn toilet on the whole server.

That's such shit.

"Digital Toilet World" was made for the 28th Ludum Dare, the 48 hour game making competition. The theme for this particular competition was "you only get one". I have always wanted to make a monster-raising game, and thankfully the theme was open-ended enough to allow me to do this.Obviously, I didn't have time to make a full fledged monster sim, so I restricted myself to the clearly most entertaining mechanic of the genre - pooping. I then added some combat and exploration on top to give the pooping context.

I've always wanted to make a "punk" game in the style of thecatamites or Porpentine for a change, and LD was the perfect opportunity for that. The game's crude as hell, but it's the most fun (complete) game I've made to date.

YOU WANT TO DOWNLOAD THIS I CAN TELL 
HOLD ON HERE'S THE LINKS
You can check out the game's compo page on LD here. If you could rate it up, I'd love you. Judging for the competition ends around January 6th, I think.

You can also directly download it from my dropbox here.

Right now I only have a Windows build. If you want a Mac build, I'm going to need actual physical access to Mac (if you're one of my Baltimore friends with a Mac and you want to play this, let's get together and make it happen.)

Digital Toilet World Released

Hey,

I just submitted a game for Ludum Dare 28. It's called Digital Toilet World. You can check it out here.

I'll write a more substantial blog post when I have more time and am not being pressured by my friends to leave the McDonalds from which we are obtaining internet access. I have to leave now.

For what it is, I'm quite proud of it. It's a fun little thing. Enjoy!