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be the final edit I'll make to this game - it's four years old, and while it certainly shows on the surface that it no longer represents my absolute best as a game designer, it really shows under the hood.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.

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!

Look, I can do animations that aren't pixelated four frame walk loops!

So, I'm currently in an animation class. Below is my final project for it.

It's not strictly games related, but I figured that you, dear reader, would nevertheless be amused by it. For amateur work, I'm pretty satisfied with it.

Enjoy! If I can make a game version of this for Ludum Dare this weekend, I'll totally do it.