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.

Waker Fan Art!

 I can't get over this.

My friend, artist and game developer Jon Sandacz, made this awesome 3D model based off of my WIP game Waker, featuring the Waker, Sue the Poggle, Feirn, and Gammon. I've never gotten fan art for a game before - it feels nice. It's especially interesting to see what characters and events other people remember from the game and decide to include in a work like this, and what they decide to leave out.

As always, you can download the October demo of Waker from the "My Games" tab on the website. I'm hopefully going to upload a new demo sometime within the next month.

Recommendation: Attack on Titan Tribute Game

You see the text in the corner that says "Frumper just killed a titan with 520 damage?" That was me. I did that. Boom.

Hey, so you know that hit anime/manga Attack on Titan that all the kids are raving about these days? Have you ever though to yourself that a co-op multiplayer game based on the franchise, in which a small team of terrified soldiers armed with jetpacks, grappling hooks, and swords has to fight through an arena of giant, naked, nearly-invincible giants, would be balls-to-the-wall awesome?

There is such a game. It is free. It's called Attack on Titan Tribute Game, and it's balls-to-the-wall awesome.

And it's also really freakin' hard. The only way to kill the giants is to close in using your 3D Maneuvering Device (meaning that you have to traverse levels Spiderman style), get behind them, and land a well-placed blow to the back of their neck. The game's mechanics are super bare-bones - you have to manually aim the grappling hooks yourself - making the game really, really hard, but also allowing for a number of incredibly complicated and impressive maneuvers.

As rough as the game is, it's one of the most fantastic multiplayer experiences I've had in a while. Check it out.

Frumped.

The Echidna Awards! (GOTYs 2013)

After much careless deliberation with myself, I have chosen the top 8 games of 2013. These are clearly indisputable. Check out my list at Beta Fish mag and be enlightened.

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.)