Buttered Toast

What is Buttered Toast? “You have to be kidding me?”, you ask yourself. I'm not. The name evokes toasted bread with butter on it, no? It's also something silly.

Let's go back. Way back to the late 1990's. My brother and a friend conceived this idea that we would make a movie that would be the best thing since, well, buttered toast. Why that? In the show “Ed, Edd, and Eddy”, one of the characters said they're better than buttered toast. We enjoy the show and borrowed the quote.

Now that's out of the way, we decided to make a film. I spent the better part of what free time I had in college composing this script. When I graduated and didn't have any chance of employment, I turned to writing the game. However, it was imperfect. I wrote it from a bad place and a situation caused by a budding mental illness issue. The script was outright terrible. “Terribad” is a better term. It contained sexism and other horrible hate-filled things, but there were still humorous aspects to it. Consequently, I decided to can it for the time being.

Fast forward to 2016, I was bored one evening feeding my daughter and decided to revisit the movie script. And what parts weren't offensive, I found myself laughing at it. It was at this point, I realized, given where Master Films was in life, which is how we styled ourselves, a movie was out of the question. However, a game was a more, albeit still far-fetched, possibility. So, again, I can the project after writing up the start of a game design document.

Now, for the present day. I recently picked up interactive fictions and writing them with Inform 7 as a means of release from the stress of my day job at the advice of multiple individuals. Then, it occurred to me to revisit Buttered Toast, my old love. It was still funny in parts and outright terrible in others. With a sense of gusto, I took it upon myself to chop out the unsavory bits, yet I aimed to retain as much as possible the more funny parts. Thus, was born Buttered Toast: the Interactive Fiction Starring Billy Davis. You can find it, and the second game as of this writing, here: https://caranmegil.itch.io/, which are early ventures are to serve as the founding of my Masterful Interactions collective.

Shameless plugs aside, I do enjoy the humor found in the games. I wouldn't have put them out there if I didn't think it was worth your time and effort. More will come. There is an ideas document that outlines hundreds of narbs that my brother and I collected together. Also, the movie script has gems, too, that can be used.