How a groin glitch led to the commercial release of Mount Your Friends

When Daniel Steger of Stegersaurus created the first prototype for hilarious multiplayer climb-em-up Mount Your Friends, he never planned for the concept to go any further. "The first version of Mount Your Friends was created during a weekend jam that's run in Toronto called the TOJam," he says. "It's one of my favorite events to attend." "I also have a history at TOJams for making games with unnecessary nudity in them. The version of the game made at TOJam was no exception." Even though Mount Your Friends wasn't at first intended to be a commercial release, around a year and a half later, it has seen releases on Xbox Live Indie Games and now PC via Steam. And it was a silly glitch in the game that convinced him to go beyond the prototype phase. "While working at the jam I knew it was coming along well, but what pushed me over the edge to make it a published title was actually a bug," Steger explains. "A day into development, when I added the 'dong physics,' a peculiar bug happened with my physics engine. The joint between the new appendage and the rest of the body was not behaving properly, and started wildly spinning out of control, pulling the rest of the player with it." That's right -- Steger decided to turn his prototype into a full commercial game based simply on the accidental swinging physics of a cartoon penis. "At that moment I was stuck in a laughing fit at my desk for the next five minutes as a crowd formed around me," he laughs. "The decision was finalized -- I had to make a retail version of the game."

And so the Xbox Live Indie Games version of the game was born in the summer of 2013, eventually becoming an XBLIG local multiplayer favorite. But Steger had his sights set on bigger platforms. "I wanted to make a PC version of the game the entire time to expand my market past Xbox Live Indie Games, especially since the Xbox One was coming so the 360 had a limited lifespan," he reasons. "I needed a Steam deal though, so at the same time I released the Xbox version of the game, I started my Steam Greenlight campaign. From there it was just a matter of waiting to get Greenlit before I felt confident enough to start on the PC version." "Honestly, the worst part of going from XBLIG to PC was my focus and feature expansion," he adds. "A lot of things had to be done for the PC edition, but the drive to work on it wasn't there anymore. The XBLIG version was made in a mad one month dash of motivation. By the time I got Greenlit, I hadn't worked on the game for a while, and didn't feel the same drive I had originally to jump back into its code." And once Steger did finally get into a rhythm, he found that there was another problem -- many of the new features and ideas he had envisioned for the PC version weren't actually that great in motion. "I wanted to make the game much larger, but had to learn the hard way that a lot of my new ideas were actually making the game worse," he notes. "A lot of time was used on PC features that were cut from the game." This is Steger's first PC game, and as such he's preparing to support the game for a good while, ironing out any bugs that pop up. After that, the dev has a few ideas up his sleeve that have been planned for a while. He did not confirm whether swinging body parts will be involved.