It’s only right that my first interview that I post coming out of Summer Game Fest 2026 is also the very first game I played there as well. My Arms Are Longer Now is a hilariously unique game that I absolutely enjoyed, and it really set set the tone for a great weekend of games. Please go read my impressions linked above, and check out Toot Games as well. Loving what I played, I just had to ask Toot Games a few questions on how this bizarre idea came to fruition.

Toot Games is co-founded by Matthew Jackson a game designer, programmer, and teacher based in Melbourne. He completed a Computer Science at Swinburne University of Technology in 2021, and then worked at Firemonkeys as a Game Designer, working on Need For Speed: No Limits. The other co-founder is Millie Holt, a screenwriter from Melbourne. Her work has been featured on NPR, ABC, and The Guardian. She has been shortlisted for the 2023 Australian Writers Guild Monte Miller Award and is currently in production on two shorts for Adult Swim. But arguably the most important employee at the studio is their CFO, Ruby, the twelve-year-old greyhound.

We were able to lock down Matthew Jackson; Co-Founder of Toot Games, the Design & Technical Lead of My Arms Are Longer Now to answer some of our questions.

WTMG: Where did the idea for such an unconventional game come from?

Matthew Jackson: Millie and I both have comedy backgrounds in our other work, so whenever we make games we’re aiming for something funny and weird – My Arms Are Longer Now started as one of many game jams we have done together – specifically for Global Game Jam 2021, the theme was “Lost & Found.”

WTMG: The main premise of the game is stealing various objects. Will players be able to do anything else besides stealing?

Matthew: Absolutely, you’ll be able to slap people, terrorize birds, trip people, smash windows – and in general just make the people in our games have a worse day.

WTMG: Can we interpret the game in different ways? Does it have a hidden meaning? What lies behind the overall concept?

Matthew: The core comedic principle in the game is that “Bad things happen to good people” and to further that “you are the bad thing that happens to good people.” The arm in our game is customizable – it’s supposed to be your arm, and give you the experience of being gross and awful.

WTMG: Were there any design challenges in implementing the mechanics?

Matthew: I spent basically a year of my life going crazy trying to get the arm to behave how I wanted it haha, and I went truly insane. Other than that, our game is very content driven – it’s a vessel for jokes and gags that sometimes you’ll only see once. So that’s a big challenge since you just have to make a whole lot more to get to a total playtime and complete experience.

Also, a huge challenge was getting a game that has a unique, very 2D art style (Millie Holten’s art style, to be specific) to work in a game that has very 3D physics. The arm has to be able to go over and under things with realistic collision, so that was a massive challenge – here is a bit of concept art that we used as a north star for a long time, and that little section where the arm goes under and then over the chairs was really hard to achieve.

WTMG: What was the weirdest bug you encountered during development?

Matthew: Skin hydras and arm donut ghosts (pictured) – the arm is formed by a dynamically rendered 3D mesh, with points that make it up jumping around it to deal with collisions. We shrink and extend the arm and in the past sometimes those points would get a bit confused and would render arm where there was not supposed to be arm.

See strange floating ring of blue points; those are arm particles that somehow got loose from the actual arm, and left to its own devices it dances around invisibly in the background like a strange ghost.

Very similar issue but much more visible is what we call the skin hydra, or arm hydra, where due to a retraction glitch the arm has formed a new wrist that longs to be free. We have banished the arm hydra by fixing the bugs that caused it, but in the dead of night I fear it is trying to work itself back into the game.

WTMG: I’ve heard about an official (?) MOD where the arm is replaced by a… leg. Will it actually be possible to play with a leg as well? If so, is it just a cosmetic change, or does it affect gameplay in any way?

Matthew: Haha foot mode will arrive should we hit a wishlist goal we’ve put out to the public! If we can get an additional 10K wishlists (as of writing) – we will introduce a swap for the hand that replaces it with a foot. Slaps will be kicks, pinches will still pinch but with the big and middle toe. While mechanically it doesn’t change anything, it really does create some interesting narrative changes to why a foot would be doing this haha.

WTMG: How long is the game going to be? Longer than the arm?

Matthew: The game will be around 4 hours long, maybe a bit shorter if people are blitzing through each level ignoring the bespoke fully voiced gags from every character in the game, and a bit longer if you’re hunting for every little optional interaction and stealable.

And that will do it for the interview, thank you so much to Matthew Jackson for taking the time answering some questions about the game. Please go check it out, and wishlist it so we can get that foot mode! Take it from me, it’s a hilarious time filled with ridiculous humor and great art. Toot Games is cooking up some wacky with this one and we are definitely looking forward to it!