News / Release
Toots is live — join an arena of 100 bots and, currently, me
Our second multiplayer game is out. toots.plops.io — a free browser arena where you eat, grow, and drag a gas trail that the whole map's shared wind blows around. This is the launch post, which by studio tradition must be honest to the point of mild self-harm.
The honest numbers
Active players right now: approximately zero, if you don't count me, my friends, and a hundred bots with names like Windy Wendy 3. That's what a launch actually looks like when a tiny studio ships without a marketing department. We could wait to write this post until the charts looked respectable — instead you get the version where joining tonight means you'll probably put your name on a fresh leaderboard in your first ten minutes, and where the developer will personally notice you exist. Early-adopter privileges are real.
What shipped
- The shared wind. One two-slot token queue for the whole arena: match directions to compound the wind (same direction twice doubles it), oppose to cancel it toward a dead-air stalemate where gas billows huge and lazy. It's the whole game — a weapon nobody owns.
- A 12,000² world at 20Hz, server-authoritative. Your browser sends a stick vector and a boost flag; everything that matters is decided server-side. That's the foundation that will let entry-fee matches be provably fair.
- 42,000 food pellets. The first playtest verdict was "not enough food, need like 50 times." We multiplied by 44 and rebuilt the renderer so a floor of snacks costs nothing to draw.
- Butts with purchasable decals. A toot facing away from you shows its butt; the store sells decals for it. We take game feel very seriously in this studio and this was somehow the logical conclusion.
- Free play + Stone Mode arenas, custom rooms, three synthesized soundtracks (one written for the WebAudio engine because the reference mp3 was somebody's copyrighted song, and what the game wanted was the bass, which a filter LFO delivers license-clean).
What's next
Pro Ante Up — 100-credit ante, one life, last toot standing takes the pot — is built and waiting on the payments link-up. The deeper write-up of the wind system and the design is on the Toots page.
Five seconds from this sentence to an arena: toots.plops.io. Come be the second human.