Oh hey, it’s another year

Boring intro
Skip to the 2024 section if you’re interested in what I’m working on.
Yes, you read the title right: it is my privilege to inform you that another year has begun, which would also imply that the last one has ended. Where did it go? In fact, where do all years go when they’re done? Scientists may never find the answer to this poignant* question. Luckily, we do have the technology to remember the past year and reflect upon it. Reflecting on 365 days on a global scale is a bit much and I’m hoping to finish this post before lunch, so I, personally, will limit the scope to my own work this past year. That’s not all, it’s also time to look at the newly-born year, freshly squirted out of the Womb of Time.

2023: The Year of New Beginnings and the Old on Hold
Backing up your work is important. One way to do so is using source control, like git. Additionally, creating a physical backup every now and then is a solid idea. Really solid. I used to do this diligently for many years, and when my hard drive gave up about 6 years ago, all was backed up and there was no problem. However, over the years I became lazier and more negligent, to the point that I just didn’t use source control for 1 (one) project (this one). When that project was almost done, my SSD (on which it was stored) gave up. This time it posed a larger problem: I had lost that entire project and some spritework / design documents I had done for Cursed Travels: Sunken City. My SSD was promptly sent to a data retrieval specialist, which would “only take 6 weeks at most”.
This was back in April… They’re supposedly still working on it.
I had decided to put Sunken City on hold, because even though the damage on that project was (luckily) minimal, I would rather continue where I left it if I ever got it back. Instead, I started many new projects, some actually very promising ones, to fill the time. One was Lost in Lampyrid Fog, my “big release” this year, which spawned 3 other, new projects. Also, I’d argue Lampyrid Fog was actually 2 games in 1.
I feel like I’ve done a lot but also very little past year, I don’t want to look at my resolutions from past year’s post though. Anyway, that brings us to (the more positive) next year.

2024: The Year of New Endings and the Old Resumed
After a drought there’s usually rain, right? I intend to actually finish a lot of those projects I started last year and even some from before that. In theory, next year will see a significant number of releases and I’m optimistic that this theory is realistic. Below’s a very vague, small glimpse of some projects that are most likely to see the light of day. Some might be the usual free web games, some I intend to bring to Steam / Itch for a small price and others I’d really like to release on mobile (for free). Note that while it’s realistic that next year will see a good number of releases, the list below is still overly optimistic.

For sure:

• Bullet hell game. First on web, there’s always the very slim possibility for a bigger Steam release. The existence of this project shouldn’t come as a surprise if you followed along during Lampyrid’s release.
• Warper Mobile: The original Warper’s content will be more than doubled, enhanced and released on mobile. I was surprised how fun and potential-rich(?) this title still is.
• Some brand-new, casual, relaxing fun on Halloween. This might also be a mobile release, but we’ll see.
• Ferry Wheel: LET’S DO IT, WHO’S HYPED FOR SOME BASIC PUZZLING YEAAHHH!!! On web and mobile, probably. I need to test the mobile waters with something simple, this one might be perfect for that. In case you’re wondering what I’m referring to: Ferry Wheel is that one small game you get to play when you join my mailing list.
• Cursed Travels: Sunken City: If it’s not this year, I’m going to be very sad. On Steam, obviously. Don’t forget to wishlist it!
• A web-based Cursed Travels: It’s been a while, I need to reignite some hype for Sunken City. Scenario and design are done.

Really want to (I’ll try!):

• A game that is actually casual and relaxing.
• Top down puzzler, web based.
• Cool, epic puzzle game for mobile for awesome people who are clever and stuff. This one’s actually over halfway done, I’m just realising while typing this.
• A fishing game. Maybe not as peaceful as Generic Fishing Game, but still quite relaxing.

Highly unlikely, but I will work on it sporadically:

• Project Amidst.
• This game.
• FlowerFlight, to be released for like a buck or 3. Patrons have access to a prototype already (here).

Distant horizon:

• Cataractae Remake.

Hm. That’s more than I thought. Well, let’s see what this year’ll bring. Let me know if I forgot anything. Don’t forget to join my Discord (do it), and maybe check out the ol’ Patreon page.
Happy New Year! See ya!
…OH! We need an image, otherwise this post is just text and it could do with some visual to use as header. Here’s the annual screenshot of Project Amidst:

* I have no idea what this word means.

Obligatory New Year’s blog post 2023

New year, new blog post. This post is mostly me organizing my own thoughts on my projects: looking back at the past year and thinking about what I’d like to achieve next year. I’m not sure if this is interesting for anyone other than me, but I think the exact same about any project right before its release, so what do I know.

2022

2022 was a year that existed, we can all agree to that. It had four entire seasons and contained a whopping 365 days (in case you didn’t know). Furthermore, I did 3 full releases of web games, which is below average for me. In 2020, I “only” completely finished 3 web games as well, although that year I also spent some significant time on the Amidst the Sky sequel, AKA Project Amidst. Past year was similar, as I spent a lot of time developing Cursed Travels: Sunken City (WISHLIST IT NOW THANK YOU).

On the positive side, I’m satisfied with how my games of past year turned out, and their reception was favourable as well. Two of them were entries in the Cursed Travels series, including the fourth entry, which became my personal favourite. Factories and other places with vaguely designed machinery are fun to play around with.
My third game of 2022 was Generic Fishing Game, which at some point was meant to be a very short, dumb gag for Halloween, but changed into something bigger during development. I actually had to work surprisingly hard near Halloween to make the deadline, but fortunately that work wasn’t in vain. The reception was more positive than I expected, but then again, I had absolutely no idea what to expect from that weird project. As a side note, Generic Fishing Game very recently released on Armor Games.

That’s not all, in 2022 I also released a prototype for a fun (at least IMO) little mouse-based game called FlowerFlight and a prototype for a shmup called Stone Blast. These are both exclusive for Patrons though.

2023

At the very least, 2023 will bring the full release of Cursed Travels: Sunken City on Steam (have you wishlisted it yet?). Furthermore, count on the very minimum of 3 “smaller” games, much like in 2022. Those’ll very likely be web games, but I’ve been considering other platforms as well, such as mobile and more Steam. This is the baseline.

That’s all good and all, but I’d like to achieve more this year, so let’s set some goals that are blatantly unreasonable, but would be really great to get done in 2023. That way, if I fail to do them all, it was as expected, and if I succeed at even one of them, we can say it was some great achievement against all the odds. Okay let’s go, here are all the things that I’d like to do game projects-wise:

• Have a fully fletched demo for Sunken City for upcoming Steam Next Fest, start and maintain a weekly dev log at some point and pretty much finish the entire game in March. The Next Fest is in a month or so IIRC, so I really need to get to that basically right now. The demo will likely be a small part of the forest area, and feature some wacky gameplay mechanics and characters. The weekly dev log should be doable, the biggest challenge will be figuring out what the heck to even write about. As for finishing the game in March, we all know that’s very wishful thinking (speaking of wishes, don’t forget to wishlist the game on Steam!).
  By the way, I’m thinking $13.00 for Sunken City would be a cool price tag, but it depends on how long the game turns out to be and how pricing even works on Steam.
• Get some actual significant progress on all three: Project Amidst, Cataractae Remake, and this game. Finish and release at least one of them. All of them are meant to be released on Steam for a ridiculously reasonable price.
• More “small” (web)games. Let’s say at least 6 total to roughly match my original plan of releasing a game at least every 2 months. I have so many unfinished projects and concepts lying around that it’s genuinely getting depressing. This includes games such as Ferry Wheel as well as some stuff outside of my comfort bubble. This may or may not also include an April Fool’s game (although that’d clash with me working on Sunken City) and a spiritual successor to Generic Fishing Game for Halloween.
  In case I manage to amp up the frequency of games, I’ll also finally expand my Patreon a bit more.
• Port Warper to mobile and finally make something really cool I’ve been planning for mobile. Yes, this is pretty vague, and I’ll leave it as such.

That’s it for this ol’ blog post. Let’s make 2023 our best year so far. Oh, and here’s a screenshot from Project Amidst, because a blog post without an image is annoying:

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..Oh right, happy new year and all that. Bye.

P.S. Has anyone found the Cursed Travels fellas in N Step Steve Part 2 yet? They should be in there somewhere, but I haven’t found them as of writing this haha.

I don’t know what I’m doing: June 2021

Ever since I started making games my philosophy has always been to… well, just make games. This approach is inherently very short-term: focus on the next game, throw it on a site somewhere and start on whatever I feel like making next. This used to work okayish. In 2019 and part of 2020, I’d put my games on Kongregate and people would actually play it too, shockingly. However, the mythical “golden era” of Flash games had already ended years ago. As for more recently, the aforementioned site stopped accepting new games, Flash bit the dust completely, and some other sites (luckily not all) are displaying some red flags as well. Time to focus a bit more on a Steam release.

Heading toward Steam was always the plan, but one thing endlessly worries me: sure, I could make a game for Steam, but who is actually going to buy it? With that question in mind for a while I realized that I should finally take the long term into consideration. To that end I’ve made a mail list, as an effort to retain at least a part of my audience from the web games. Hopefully people who follow me via there or Twitter or Itch, might be interested in buying a Steam game (aside from being notified whenever I finish a new web game).

So this down here might be the plan for now. I’m not very consistent with plans, as some might have noticed, so take this with some amount natriumchloride:

1. Still make web games in between
Web games are just too much fun and easy to publish. However don’t expect anything as big as for example Tower of the Scorched Sea. That extra effort is better spent on Steam games. There will be more Cursed Travels, that is for sure. I need some outlet to make horror-like stuff and cryptic riddles and puzzles. Other smallish, possibly experimental stuff is very likely. Basically, don’t expect less web games per se, just more focused, smaller games.

2. Make a small Steam game
Steam is big and scary and I want to start with something small to see how it all works. I’ve already started on an atmospheric 2D platformer that I think might work very well, but we’ll see how that goes. More on that in the near future.

3. S_E_C_R_E_T P_R_O_J_E_C_T
There’s an interesting idea flying through my head for a while now. It’ll also release on Steam, but only after the waters have been thoroughly tested with the small game. Who knows a publisher might even be interested, but probably nooot~.

4. Project Amidst
Man, this game got big very fast. I still get back to working on this every now and then, but it’s very far from being finished. After the secret project I’m probably confident enough to go back to this full time.
As a little update on how this one’s going: it takes me 1 hour and 10 minutes to play through all the content the game has at the time of writing this. For reference, it takes me 36 minutes to play through all of Amidst the Sky. Project Amidst is already the size of 2 or 3 large web games, but runs smoother (because it’s not a web game…) and looks better (because, again, it’s not limited to wacky browser limitations). This game releasing at some point is the most certain thing in this entire post, it’s only a matter of time.

Other projects
There was this boss fight game, but that’s not going too well. I’m considering removing some of the bad parts and releasing whatever is completed on Patreon for Patrons only or something.
There was also this shmup that has about 1.5/~7 stages done, I think? I ran into the game developer equivalent of a writer’s block on this one, but that issue has recently been resolved. This one might come back at some point.

What was the point of this post?
I don’t know. Gonna work on the small Steam game now. Bye!