Greetings all,

Justin here with Dev Diary #1 for The Everyone Shares One Butt Game! We want to have this series showcase some of the design philosophy of the game, chronicle some history, as well as dive deeper into the mechanics of the game case by case.

Our first topic, doot do do dooo…

POOPS.

Originally this was going to be about both poops and toxins, which do share a mechanical root, but I realized there is so much to dig into in this one diary alone already. Toxins will be discussed in Part 2!

Some of you might be thinking, “Justin, of course there would be poops in the game. That’s obvious! It’s a game about BUTTS!”, however poops were actually added squarely in the middle of the game’s development. It really was all about butts starting out. Just a game about connecting to the butt with our earliest stomach cards (many of which have been completely revised or even axed). The game was straightforward and no nonsense, but it still didn’t feel fully a “game” yet. Our concept was solid, our theming was absurd, but we could go further.

The Binding of Isaac Afterbirth+ on the Nintendo Switch by Edmund McMillen (go play it!)

I was thinking about a way that could make the game incorporate more strategy balanced with powerful randomness. I played (and still play!) Edmund McMillen’s RNG dungeon crawler Binding of Isaac. I thought about the joy of collecting items that would evolve into ridiculously overpowered synergies. This was of course if you found them in the randomly generated levels of each game. And sometimes you would get items you didn’t want, and would just have to make do. I really resonated with the idea of resourceful gameplay because it activated players into battling against the game in spite of their circumstances. How could I find the equivalent for our game?

I looked at the base of what the game was: a path-building board game. Your goal is to get from point A to point B quickly and before your competitors. So it meant that the path you built was very important. But what if your path could change without your complete control? It was an exciting idea as a designer because I imagined decisions that players would make to add randomness within their own stomachs as well as ways they could unintentionally affect other players’ plans. It would promote a risk and reward system that was perfect.

Stomachs… digestive tract… it was easy… too easy… YEAH OKAY LET’S PUT POOPS IN THIS BUTT GAME. How could silly little poops be finessed to key into that risk/reward system? This is where the theming made the design process so much easier.

A dramatized conversation in my head circa 2017--

Me: Yeah okay, poops.

Me: Poops go through the stomach.

Me: Poops have to leave the stomach.

Me: … !!!

Me: Poops will leave the stomach and turn into…!

Me: They will turn into cards!

Me: I did it.

Me: Yeah okay sure you did. (-_-;)

From that 100% accurate retelling, poops would be added to the game. And yes for sure I thought that poops going through a body and graduating into a stomach was a hard sell, even for The Everyone Shares One Butt Game. Still I thought it was at least worth trying out. Soon, the first poop card was introduced into the game. There weren’t that many and so it was tough to assess if they were making much of an impact, but there was something heartwarming about having a lil poop fella independently traveling through a stomach.

We started to run into some good questions:

How and when do poops move through the stomach?
If I have multiple openings, where does the poop go out of?
Also what card does it turn into?

This is the part where I just made stuff up.

Poops would move at the beginning of each respective players’ turns; I kept referring to a turn as a “bowel movement” hehe. Initially, poops would move one space each turn, but then they would never be able to exit if the stomach just kept building. This was later changed to poops moving two spaces.
The poop will just go out of the nearest opening, that makes sense right?
Also, the poop will turn into the top card of the deck, and you HAVE to play it, no matter what effect it has on it!

I truly was just making stuff up for these questions, but most of these mechanics ended up staying that way forever! It worked out because it meant that the poop would depend entirely on the random shuffling of the deck, and there was no guarantee that a player would get the card they wanted, however it did essentially give them a bonus a card to play, which was usually good!

As we tested this out, poops would inevitably become entrenched into the game’s DNA. More poop related cards were added. We would clarify more scenarios including: only one poop or toxin could occupy a stomach at a time, the player would choose where a poop or toxin exited at equidistant openings, poops and toxins move on connected players’ turns in the body they share, and poops and toxins don’t move if you are stunned.

Heck, there’s still outcomes that we haven’t completely accounted for. We got to a comfortable place where we thought that 99% of time, poops were fun and engaging. And the few difficult situations would invoke house rules as necessary.

I bet you didn’t expect so much essay-length introspection on this stuff, but this is really how it is! We continue to work and tinker on the game because we want to share the joy we’ve had playing it with you! Closer and closer each day, the Almighty Butt inches forward!

This is a close on Dev Diary #1. For Part 2, I’ll be discussing Toxins and the chaos they bring to the battlefield!

Stay easy out there in the world!

Justin

Dev Diary #1: A Story About Poop