by Steven Harmon
Recently had the fortune of stumbling upon Cí Malone's work on Twitter @CrayonMelon and knew I had to interview this dev on their game OCCUPIED, a point & click adventure game that takes place inside a bathroom.
Follow Cí Malone's work here: crayondev.ie and on their Twitter @CrayonMelon
Steven: Today for Toilet Game Studies, we have Crayon Mellon Cí malone, an independent game developer based out of Ireland. I want to discuss Occupied, a bathroom game that you've made for the GDKO, Game Dev Knockout Game Jam in 2023.
And in my opinion, it stood out to me as one of the most interesting toilet games out of the other 56 bathroom related games featured on Itch.Io. The description reads "This is my actual bathroom. I have to go through this every day." Why set the game entirely inside the bathroom, and the players spawns on top of the toilet? What was the inspiration there?
Ci: There's, there's six other bathroom games on itch?
Steven: Fifty six.
Ci: Fifty, oh my god.
Yeah, that is my actual bathroom. I was learning photo scan using mesh room, you just take a load of photos and you get a mesh, but it didn't end up really well because the bathroom is really shiny, so it couldn't actually find any points. So the mesh was this weird almost horror looking thing. It was only a two week game jam. Was kind of like fuck it. I'll just go with it.
And why you start in the toilet is cause I was thinking about the game while on the toilet and it was just so surreal trying to put it at the same point if that makes sense.
Steven: So, on the art style you arrived at that sort of quantized, dithered, low poly art style. Was that basically just out of sort of limitation? You had a really messy photogrammetry scan with a lot of holes and imperfections, and it would have taken too long to re topologize, bake, clone stamp, and texture, so you're just like, screw it, I'm gonna
Ci: Just, just run with it, yeah.
Yeah. And I also made a, a really simple shader that vibrates the mesh based on sound. So just to add to the kind of weird kind of brokenness, mesh room gave me a really high res PNG. I want this to run in browser, so I reduced it down from, I think it was about 8K to about 512 by 512 and then reduced its color as well. I always like trying to make my stuff run in browser.
So that limitation is always going to kind of force me to finding some way of doing stuff that is unique, yeah.
Steven: Fantastic. I was curious, , were there any challenges in setting the game inside the bathroom that influenced the design outside of the art?
Ci: The size, especially, because I wanted to do a puzzle game, a point and click adventure game and I kind of noticed really quickly there's not much I can do in such a small area. But that kind of helped out in the end.
I just remembered because of the reflection of the mirror of the window itself, when I did the 3d scan, it actually put a second room behind the the bathroom and so that's why I just put it there and put a Moe statue in there that you could talk to that's voiced by my brother.
He has the worst mic possible.
I think this is the weirdest game I've made because it was gathering assets for a week, not showing how they're going to work together.
Steven: So, you featured a Greek statue reminiscent of the Vaporwave genre of music sort of aesthetic. Now, was that an inspiration or was that just literally you found a Greek statue model and you decided you were going to use it in this game, you just didn't know how?
Ci: Yeah, that's exactly it. I do love Vaporwave. So, it kind of worked with the aesthetic. A happy accident, I suppose. Yeah.
Steven: Do you see any connection between toilets and vaporwave?
Ci: Oh, that's an insult to vaporwave accidentally, it's toilet music.
Steven: Okay so, making this game how has it changed the way you feel about toilets?
Ci: You can see in the game itself, that toilet is a 3d model I found, that's not the original 3d scan toilet.
I remember trying to 3d scan my toilet, four to five times. One time I tried to put sticky notes and stuff on it so the software could find points to actually generate a 3d model. When making this game, I kind of hated toilets, I was stuck looking at one for so long.
I suppose now I could look back and and respect the toilet, I guess. It's definitely the center point of the game. I think I kind of poorly utilized it in the end, actually. To be honest, I could use it more.
Steven: Speaking of using more, do you plan on including toilets within your future work?
Ci: Yeah, actually, I am. Weirdly enough that you say that. I am putting a toilet in my most recent game. I'm just posting it on Twitter. It's I wasn't really planning anything past just, visual. It's a bathroom kind of thing, but maybe I should implement a little bit more gameplay and maybe reference this game a little bit, have the David statue coming out of the toilet.
I like to reference my other games in, in my games. Yeah
Steven: I'm curious. Why did you credit your bathroom in the credits on the itch (page)? You just include a credit to the bathroom to quote unquote my bathroom now. It's an inanimate object so others would say you own it. Do you believe all things should be credited or are bathrooms special somehow?
Ci: I think in this case it was kind of was a character in itself. So it kind of felt like, yeah, it's an animate object, but it had a character of its own.
Especially sleepless nights, you walk into the bathroom and there's voices in the game. And especially when I'm really tired, I start hearing the voices in the actual bathroom. So I dunno, it just kind of seemed important to actually credit the bathroom because he is a character in himself.
Steven: The bathroom is a he. Can you, can you elaborate on that?
Ci: Oh, no, I, I've gendered my bathroom. I didn't ask . I don't know. Is that a thing? Do people, do people gender their bathroom?
Steven: Maybe French people or people who speak in romance languages?
Ci: Yeah,
Steven: A lot of words there are, are, are gendered.
Ci: Yeah. I don't know why I said he that's...
Steven: Your bathroom can be a he. It's cool. People say boats are female "oh, there she blows!" But yeah, maybe bathrooms are male. We don't know.
Ci: We talk about cars and "aint she a beauty", but we don't talk about bathrooms enough.
Maybe that's what you're trying to fix, I suppose.
Steven: I suppose so. I think that's one of the main, main things that I try to touch on. Exploring all facets of bathrooms.
Ci: Facets and faucets.
Steven: Not particularly toilet related, but I see you're part of Ribcage, a game dev collective.
What's the group's fascination with the Australian Emu War of 1932?
Ci: Oh, you've discovered that? That's crazy. We just have our accountant Tim, from Australia. And he explained the Emu War. We're just, we're just fascinated by it. I think it's, It's just really funny.
They lost. The emus won. well I, I think they won.
Steven: Yeah, they won.
Ci: Yeah. Are you from Australia or?
Steven: Oh, no, no, no. I just saw it. Yeah, I was curious. That's all.
Ci: So. You did your research. Wow.
Steven: I tried to.
Ci: That's a, that's a. That's a deep cut, yeah.
Steven: So what is your personal relationship to toilets?
Ci: It's kind of this object in your life that's always been there, maybe, maybe I shouldn't find such emotional attachment to the bathroom, but you can definitely. I can look at my toilet and go, ah, that's, that's the family toilet.
And when we changed it to a new one, it's, Yeah, you kind of, you kind of weirdly miss the old toilet I have no idea. I'm kind of just tearing up a little.
Steven: That's okay. What aspects of toilets in games do you think appeal to you personally?
Ci: Personally I really like it when games actually have them interactive. , I wonder how much extra work that a developer has to put in, how much time they have to put in to actually make a toilet flush or close and open the lid. And I just, especially for a massive AAA studio, I just really liked the idea of programmed toilet on the Jira board. I really like it when you can just interact with it. Give it the respect that it deserves.
Steven: And what values, culturally, politically, do you think toilets present in games?
Ci: It's a lot of Western representation of the toilet, and in Japan they would have bidets, in India they have the squatter design toilets that you don't see as often.
So maybe the, the burnt zeitgeist of the the Western toilet is kind of important. We don't have a lot of representation of other designs of toilets in all the games we play, I suppose I've never seen a game that has a non Western style toilet .
Steven: I couldn't agree more.
Ci: Yeah, thank you. Now I'm kind of curious because I think about attention to details in games a lot, and I would love to see the correlation between implementing actual flushable toilets to the quality of the, the overarching game itself.
Steven: If you could spend detail on something such minute as a toilet then it really kind of goes to show that the rest of the game will be designed with that thoughtful consideration as well, which is why you see immersive sims usually always include a toilet that's functional. Most people really enjoy immersive sims because they are so systematic, having all these different dynamics coming out of play.
Ci: A counter argument to that would be that a game such as Duke Nukem Forever has an interactive toilet, has you can pee into the toilet and it's kind of notoriously bad, but it does have that attention to detail. So I don't know, it's not a one to one I suppose would be the only it's, it's not a catch all.
There seems to be a point in games when, when you start paying attention to the minute things and almost Ignore the actual game design itself.
Steven: Yeah. One of my old jobs, we call it doorknob design, where you would get fixated on , tunnel vision on one thing and design that one thing, overdesign it and ignore everything else or better yet, it would influence your decision to sort of hold on to that concept or idea when you should have given up on it earlier. And so, yeah, I would say toilets do have that tendency to be over designed, but not at a loss of, I guess interests in terms of people usually find it a redeeming quality.
I would say Duke Nukem isn't all that bad because it has a very interactive toilet that you can pee in, poop in, and of course grab your own poop and draw with it or throw it.
Ci: Important stuff. Yeah. That, yeah, it's, it's almost a saving grace kind of thing if design a game and it's , oh, you do have an interactive toilet. So at the very least it gets a mark there. A well designed toilet that's not overly interactive. I suppose that's kind of the sweet spot. The toilet over designed sweet spot.
Steven: What would overly interactive in toilets mean to you if you, if you were to imagine an overly interactive toilet?
Ci: An overly interactive toilet. I mean, so if you were to have a game that was completely just dedicated to the toilet, I don't think that's a problem. If the game is focused around that, I think that's fine.
But if you had a game that was already in development hell, and it's really lacking in certain areas, like core controls of combat and stuff but it has an insanely in depth toilet where you can choose which lid is down. You can open the back, you can see the water fill up. If they, if they had the time to animate and estimate how quick the tank would fill up to that into a realistic amount, I would guess that will probably be overly designed toilet then.
Steven: I do have trouble with myself with that. Yeah, I once developed a game that was a dating sim sort of visual novel type game but it had a fully interactive toilet totally separate from, from the entire game, that took probably half of the development cycle to make.
Ci: Oh my god, yeah, I say, I say this as if I haven't. I do this all the time. I love putting detail, we have, I have a game on Steam, Employee of the Month, which, which I made with that Rib cage team, and it has insane amounts of detail in really obscure places.
There's a car in the game, if you get back into it, it then brings you into a driving sim that has a controllable radio and you can steer the car, but then it kind of forces you to crash.
And then it has a death ending where the player dies in a car crash and has a whole written newspaper about the accident and then it rolls the credits. And that wasn't necessary to do all of those steps. Most players won't see that. And there's a lot of stuff like that, but I kind of, I'm kind of constantly fighting that.
I really love insane details in games and at the same time I understand that they are a massive problem as well , especially if you're a small team.
Steven: Yeah, scope creep is a, is definitely a problem for, for all designers. It's hard to call yourself a designer if you don't get excited about scope creep.
Ci: Yeah. I think if you have an over designed toilet, I don't deem that a bad game.
Steven: Well thanks again for your time today. I hope you have a great rest of your evening.
Ci: Absolutely.