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A long time ago, I discovered a function in PHP called "shove." Being me, I just had to somehow make a joke out of it. What I came up with was something about "shoving forks into a toaster." I found the idea of someone shoving--not dropping, actually
shoving--a fork into a toaster intertaining. So the little joke became a pseudo script in which a person shoves forks into a toaster until they un-alive. Because I could and also because I thought it would be a good practice to write, I decided to write a
full working script in PHP based solely on the idea, thus, version 1 (later reclassed as version 0.5) was born. The script was simple enough and involved spoons and knives now.
You drew a utencil and had the option to redraw or shove it into the toaster. Upon shoving the utensil into the toaster, there was a small chance you would be electrocuted. These concepts have remained a key element to the game through all releases. In
this version, however, electrocution was an instant game over. It was also here that I somewhat introduced the next key concept: scores. It was more of a statistic that anything. Just a sum of all utensils in the toaster. The last key element that was
introduced late in this version was spare lives. Obviously, there was nothing in-game that would logically give spare lives, so I wrote a generator. The idea was extremely
simple. A counter started at 0 and with each successive shove of a utensil into the toaster, the counter increased by one. When the counter hit a certain number, which depended on how many spare lives the player already had, it would reset back to 0 and
give the player a spare life. Upon electrocution, the counter reset to 0, the utensil got destroyed, and the player lost a spare life. If the played had no spare lives, then it was game over.
Soon after releasing version 1, I wasn't satified with the medium in which the game was published. Since it was written in PHP, it required some level of PHP hosting service to be played. I wanted people to be able to more easily access the game, not
requiring constant internet access. Another issue of running the game in PHP was that the player's internet history got filled with multiple entries for two or three web pages. Fortunately, I had already had a little bit of experience with an actual game
development software. This software could publish to Windows (Android too, but I still am struggling to get that to work properly). I recreated the game in this software in its originality, but I started to feel like it needed a little bit of overhauling
done to it. The next core game element was born: puzzles and maths. Upon electrocution, the player is given a chance to save themself by completing a challenge instead of using one of their lives. Each puzzle and math problem was to be randomly generated
by the game as to not be predictable. If the player lost the challenge, it was game over. Very quickly, the next key component took shape, used to encourage the use of the challenge system over the spare life system for saving the player. The players
score now depends very heavily on how many spare lives the player has: the sum of all utensils multiplied by the number of spare lives. Checks were put in place to make sure the player didn't have a score of 0 for their first five or so turns.
Other concepts were also born at this time, but not implemented. In more recent updates, some of these features have been put in, but caused issues beyond my being able to fix, so I had to remove them.