Hot Pig Jump! and How to Run a Successful Games Website Business (or How to Don’t)

Hot Pig Jump is a special type of game.

I’ve watched two people play this game. Two streamers on the Radio TV Solutions crew. Trog and Holly Hollowtones.

It’s a beautiful existential collage. All animal life has been annihilated, aside from the one pig, who “in his solitude, vows to rebel against god.” This is you. The pig who climbs a tower in the mode of Only Up and other Uppie games.

The pig is beautiful and runs just enough to feel alive. You leap onto obstacles, made of stock assets, where model and colliders have tenuous relationships with the expected resulting walking surface.

A spiral staircase has been made, of the carcasses of annihilated animals, made giant. And then of a school class room. And then of other assorted asset pack items with an architectural bent.

The top of a house may be transparent, the untextured backfaces of a walkable covering plane that lets you see inside. The fur of a mammoth may not be walkable, but there is still purchase, and contact is all you need to keep making clean jumps.

You jump and dodge rotating fire streams, and try not to burn the pig. The amount of burn on the pig is measured by the Pig Burn Gauge bar at the bottom of the screen.

In its ending, in English, it hides secret words. The words of God, as it tells you the future of this world, fall outside of the dialogue box. You are to be reincarnated as a human in the next universe.

This is the only game available from its developer, DekkaRuby Games, and in the UK is currently on sale on Steam for £3.39. I tried to find out more about DekkaRuby Games, with some amateur browsering, and instead got captivated by the lack of information.

All that is really available is what’s on the Steam page, which has then been eaten by various websites, all carrying the sentences: “A 3D action game in which you control the main character, a pig, and aim to reach the top while avoiding flamethrowers, which will result in game over if you get completely burned.”

Kotaku tells me that the developers other games are not out until 2030 and include such titles as Doge Simulator and PilotXross, both developed by other developers. Kotaku also tells me that in Doge Simulator news is the story ‘The Best (and Worst) April Fools’ Day Jokes for 2018′ by Cameron Kunzelman, which contains no reference to the game, but does feature the word Dog.

The site Niklas Notes tells me that this is a Walking Simulator, Spectacle Fighter and Runner. It is not, but perhaps these tags have been applied somewhere down the line. Perhaps I can pay $9 a month to learn from the Pro version of Niklas Notes and find out how such expert information is compiled.

I’m not surprised, having run a website and engaged with the Content Management Systems of tagging etc, the templates and algorithms that get applied to website structures to pull from these vast fields of data and autofill ‘Information’ simply don’t have being accurate as their end case, especially not out here on the fringes of a junk game like Hot Pig Jump!

I say that with love, I love junk and I love its particular way of showing you the holes in the system where the unusual slips through and what exactly the role of a site like Kotaku or Niklas Notes becomes, it’s there to make money. Not from me even in Kotaku’s case. It just kind of sits there on some servers somewhere melting itself to turn the crank of ad revenue. I was surprised to see it even had a game database, but its easy to apply to your site I suppose.

Hot Pig Jump! I encountered myself through YouTube, which does the same thing, but is more like the ‘Twitch’ the uploaded streams came from, is more of a ‘Steam’ for people who want to make videos. A first or second stop for the artist as they look to make money themselves, or just have fun.

All highly successful libraries of human achievement and profit seeking cornered by a computing venture on the West Coast of America. All being fed by the people who use them, feeding each other and being fed off of. By me even, here, right now.

And yet, like the pig, in its journey upwards, we have some heart. Since we all know there are other options to the information economy, and our joy is in the collage of life. I could find a Hot Pig Jump! type experience by simply rolling around on the ground and oinking, that I would say is a thing of comparable joy.