What is Toyeater – A Recap

Toyeater is a visual novel adventure, like my other current games, with a seasonal theme and a giant murderous elf. It was my first experiment in making a non-linear narrative game, testing features I’ve now put to wider practice in Dorm Till Dawn 2 and Micro Daze. This made it more of a puzzle game, with a time-based structure and different things to unravel to make it through to the end.

It’s also the first game where I experimented with animations, though only in making little snippets for its original cinematic trailers. Since making those trailers, I always hoped to work a few of the animations back into the main game, and the time has come.

Admittedly, Toyeater has never been the most popular game, possibly because of its more fantastical nature –people seem to prefer the contemporary stuff? – so expanding on it has been for my own satisfaction as much as anything. Personally, I love the creepy Christmas atmosphere, and wanted to animate as much of it as possible.

The First Anniversary Edition

The result is an updated edition with an added 30 mini animations, bringing various sequences to life. This includes views of a lot of little people getting grabbed and/or eaten, or stomped, and a few bits of movement.

I’ve also included the option to activate or deactivate the animations in case anyone prefers the earlier, static image format.

The gameplay is the same as I’ve not had time to add some more puzzles, much as I would’ve liked to, but as a bonus tweak obtaining the telescope now unlocks a couple of additional animation angles too, the same way it provided close-up shots before.

This anniversary edition will be released December 12^th to Patreon/Subscriberstar, and on my own store, itch and Steam (pending approval – the original version is already Steam-approved so it should hopefully go through smoothly).

And as it’s Christmas, this is a free update for anyone who’s previously bought the game. It will be available from the same product listing and past order confirmations should link to the new version (though I’m going to update the actual download links, as I doubt the original one is still secure).

For subscribers, the game will be available on Tier 3+ as my regular game, and I’ll otherwise send the link to all active subscribers with over $30 spend.

There will also be an updated demo version with some of the animations added.

Will there be more?

I would’ve added some extra story content/puzzles if I had time, and there are a few more animations I could’ve done, so who knows, I might still expand the game.

However, I’m not sure I’ll be able to return to Toyeater without totally overhauling the files. It’s been challenging to go back to this game because the way I set up the file was incredibly complex and ungainly – I’ve clearly learnt a lot since making this! (One example is that every different camera angle used a different camera – and whatever I did to organise all the character and clothes rigs was even worse.)

But at the least, I’ll have one or two more trailers showing off some of the animations…

Merry Christmas one and all!