ToiletDefense: an augmented-reality game played in your actual bathroom

A phone game that uses the room you are standing in. Scan the bathroom, and critters crawl down the actual walls and rush you across the actual floor. Tap to squish them, survive the waves, and five hits ends the run. It ships with no art assets at all.

The situation

Most augmented-reality games ignore the room and put a virtual board on the coffee table. Actually using the space means the game has to understand where the walls and floor are, and has to stay convincing while somebody spins around holding a phone. And a game that needs an art budget before it can be played once is a game that does not get made.

What we built

The game reads the actual geometry of the room and uses it: critters spawn on the real walls, descend them, and cross the real floor towards the player. The design constraint that made it possible in the first place was to ship with zero art. Every critter is an emoji rendered into the scene, which sounds like a joke and turns out to look right, cost nothing, and remove the entire asset pipeline from a project meant to test whether the idea was fun.

• Reads the real room and uses its walls and floor
• Enemies that descend real surfaces and cross real ground
• Wave-based survival with a five-hit limit
• Zero art assets — nothing to draw, nothing to load

Interface illustrations. Abstracted representations with placeholder content — never client data.

What changed

A playable game that uses the room instead of ignoring it, built without an artist and without an asset pipeline.