Say Hello to the Toyeater...

Ho ho ho! It being holiday season, and me not having written a seasonal story this year, I decided to sling out an extra size-warping game. But me being me, it’s escalated to a not-so-little game. The result is Toyeater, my next interactive adventure – another survival horror story using the Renpy engine, but this time with a more dynamic structure.

What is Toyeater?

Toyeater is a visual novel-style survival game where your choices will ensure whether you live or die. Mostly you’re probably going to die.

You find yourself waking in the dark, with a group of strange people in costumes like something out of a Christmas play. Nutcracker soldiers and princess ballerinas… And what’s this? You’re wearing the same getup.

The rub is, you’ve been kidnapped. You’re in a box. And you’re either very small, or the elf out there that took you is very, very big.

And your mad giant captor is coming to eat you, one by one, as she prepares for Christmas Day…

Escape the Room

Once you get out of the box (if you can manage that!) the game is contained to a single room with multiple locations. With a terrible, giant elf coming and going, you have to tread carefully searching for clues that’ll help you get out.

The game itself is marginally shorter in text and images than Dorm Till Dawn, but I’ve aimed to make the playthrough much more dynamic. Rather than a linear story, you can move more freely around this room, and your actions will dictate how things progress. The puzzles, I think, are fairly simple, but the challenge comes in finding them and doing things in the right order – not to mention that you have a limited amount of time, and every extra movement brings the elf closer to returning…

My aim was to make something nice and short as a Christmas treat, about the length of Enclownter, but instead we’ve got something much more elaborate and sprawling. There are a lot more conditional situations than in my previous games, with actions having varying consequences (as a heads-up, the game will track if you belong on the naughty list!), and you can even choose between being male or female.

When’s it out?

I’m determined to get the initial game done by the end of next week, so I’ll be able to get the beta version up for subscribers on Patreon and Subscribestar next week and the full public release out the following week.

That is, in time for Christmas.

It’ll be the same deal as before, $15 members or any active members with $15 spend will get access, and on release I’m thinking to retail this one at £12.99.

As of writing this I’ve written all the code (about 24,000 words) and about half the images (estimated about 350 total). Then I need to get all the sounds in order. There’s more I’d like to do with it but I want to draw a line under it to get it out in time, but so you know once it’s released I will probably do some updates to (a) make sure everything is working smoothly and (b) add a few extra options. More on that to come, though.

For now, back to the workshop for me, and wish me luck in pushing this to the finishing line soon!