December 15th is the 10th year anniversary of Digital Toilet World! Wow!
It is a special game to me. While I’d made games for years beforehand, Digital Toilet World feels like the start of my personal “canon” of work as an adult (technically, I released Empty Chambers earlier that year, but my relationship with that game is complicated). By 2013, it had been 4 years since I’d last finished a game, with my late teens and early 20’s being defined by unfinished, overscoped projects. Digital Toilet World, however, was the start of a long period of creative output for me, as I’d go on to release multiple games every subsequent year until 2021.
Shortly after the original release, Terry Cavanagh (creator of VVVVV and Super Hexagon) shared it on the freeindiegam.es blog, which felt like an honor. When I started showcasing games at events with Underground Arcade Collective from 2017-2019, DTW was the oldest of my games that I included in the lineup. More friends and family have probably talked about Digital Toilet World to me than nearly any other game I’ve made – it’s left an impression on folks.
I originally created Digital Toilet World for the 28th Ludum Dare game jam within 48 hours. One of my friends in college had a vacation house in Wisconsin, so a bunch of us stayed up there during winter break. I spent the first day or two working on the game while my friends engaged in other activities, but I had them playtest it towards the end of development (thanks again!), and then we all went to McDonald’s to upload it since the vacation house didn’t have WiFi. I don’t think I’ve ever had such distinct or fond memories working on any other game.
I don't have any pictures of me making the game, but here's a close-up of the frozen lake outside the vacation house.
I had always wanted to make a tribute to the virtual pet/RPG mechanics of Digimon World, so I specifically made a game based around its toilet mechanics. In Digimon World, your monster partner would periodically give warning that it needed to go to the bathroom. If you took it to a toilet in time, great! If you didn’t, it would poop on the ground, become unhappy, and, if it happened enough times, evolve into a poop monster itself. The poop would remain there forever, a permanent reminder of that embarrassing time your pet monster shit on the ground. It was a weird game.
Pictured: running past a restroom in Digimon World.
Digital Toilet World revolved around a similar system – you would go on an adventure with a monster companion, but he would periodically need to to poo. If you took him to the bathroom, great! If you didn’t, he would poop on the ground, and the poop would permanently remain there. I needed to come up with an alternative punishment for pooping on the ground, so in DTW, poops that don’t land in the toilet would endlessly attract powerful enemies that would relentlessly pursue you. I was really drawn to the permanence of Digimon World’s poop, so I wanted the consequences of pooping on the ground in DTW to be similarly permanent. Once an area in DTW is pooped in, it is forever compromised for that playthrough.
The theme for the game jam was “you only get one,” and in order to satisfy the theme, I only included one toilet in the game. This meant that I had to design the game’s world so that every location was within walking distance of the toilet at a moment’s notice, blocking player progress to late-game areas with doors that had to be unlocked with keys. Requiring the player to revisit the toilet and surrounding areas was what made pooping on the ground dangerous – compromising an area and making it forever hazardous mattered because you had to pass through there again. When I showcased the game, I had a lot of fun watching players not make it to the toilet in time, poop in a narrow but crucial hallway, and yell in exasperation as they realized the severity of their mistake as enemies began to descend up them.
To further solidify the permanence of player mistakes, I also made it so that, until the final boss fight, the player had no way to recover health. Every time an attack from an enemy hit, that health was forever lost. This, again, makes the consequences of pooping on the ground meaningful – getting attacked by infinitely spawning enemies in that narrow hallway had a lasting cost. I could only make the game unforgiving in this way because it is so short. It may be possible to ruin your playthrough in Digital Toilet World, but if you do, dying is inevitable and starting over isn’t so terrible. After losing, players usually jump right back into the game and are able to beat the game on their second attempt.
I really wanted to make the player’s excreting monster companion feel like their own independent entity, which is why they follow the player and attack enemies at their own discretion. Movement and positioning have always been the more interesting part of action games for me, so I made it so that the player only had to focus on dodging enemy projectiles while the monster dealt damage. Replaying the game, I’m pretty proud of how I use level layouts and enemy placement to create interesting scenarios with such simple shoot and dodge mechanics. It’s fun! I finally just now understand why friends and festival goers enjoyed it so much.
I purposefully left the lore in the game vague and under-explained, but it shouldn’t be a surprise to players that the game is set in some sort of virtual, Matrix-esque, post-apocalyptic world. I always imagined the human protagonist – the Cleaner – to be a humorless religious zealot of some sort, hence her fixation on being “incorruptible.” I still find the contrast between her and her silent, goofy, constantly shitting monster companion to be cute.
After I completed the jam version of the game, I released an updated version a month later with music, difficulty settings, and some (very mildly) improved graphics. The graphics are still unrefined, but charming. I like how grotesque and expressive I made the enemies. This was also my first time making a midi soundtrack for a game (excluding an early effort I made when I was 13). I’ve improved a lot as a music producer and composer over the past decade, but I think this early effort is endearing and effective.
As mentioned before, Terry Cavanagh blogged about the game on freeindiegam.es, and, in a way, this was as close as any of my games had ever gotten to being part of the “original” late 2000’s indie games scene, back when freeware was the norm and prominent indie game developers were more often hobbyists rather than commercial teams. The cultural relevance of short free indie games was already waning by the early 2010’s as commercial games supplanted the freeware scene, but it was through Digital Toilet World that I felt like I finally got to participate in the indie scene right as that magical freeware indie era was ending. My thoughts about that era and how indie games have changed since then are too complicated to fully detail here, but I will always miss the old days.
Being able to give Digital Toilet World new life as I brought it to to festivals and conventions during the late 2010’s was wonderful. It was also the first game of mine that strangers online had recorded videos of. I've become used to the practice, but it was surreal and really affirming at the time! I've come a long way as a game designer since making DTW, but I’m really glad that my little game about poop could bring smiles, laughter, and cries of anguish to many people.
Thank you for playing my old poop game. If you want to (re)play it, you can do so here.
