I started writing a blog post way back at the beginning the year, taking a look back at 2024. Things kind of got away from me, and I never quite finished that up, and finishing it felt like a bigger and more complicated problem the longer I left it. Here we are, now, more than halfway through the year, and while I have kept up working on my projects on a nearly daily basis, the post has just languished on my hard drive. I’m going to try to just get it cleaned up and trimmed down a bit, and get it posted already. I’ll just go ahead and sum up 2025 so far as well.

Checklist

  • put off blogging for dumb reasons for way too long
  • made a lot of progress on Five Words of Power

2024 in Review

At the beginning of 2014, I was “just about done” Escape From Evil Island, which proved to be more like “two-thirds done”. I finally released it in late April. During those intervening months, pretty much all my free dev time (i.e. time I wasn’t working or trying to relax) was tied up in Evil Island. Even when I wasn’t directly working on it, I was playing it quite a bit, organizing notes from other playtesters, etc. Now, more than a year later, I’m still happy I made it, and I still feel the occasional urge to go back and make some little tweak to it – and so far I’ve managed to resist, which is probably for the best.

OneTurnTactics

After releasing Evil Island, I decided I would finally join a game jam I’ve been meaning to participate in for some time, Week Sauce. I greatly appreciate the idea of game jams, but I don’t tend to participate in them myself anymore. It never feels like my time and energy aligns with the strict schedule of most jams, and if I do have the time and energy, why wouldn’t I spend that on the game I’m already working on? Week Sauce, though, is explicitly designed to fit into a busy schedule, and is very chill and laidback. The community has also been a delight to interact with on Discord.

Sadly, I didn’t finish the game anyway. I worked on it for a few days and put it down to chase some other ideas.

Lathyrus and Wizard Shoot

I dipped my toe into some 3d stuff, learned some more about building tools in Godot, and about a few external libraries and tools that might be useful to me in the future! Lathyrus was a small attempt at the grid-based first purson dungeon crawling type of game, like the old Gold Box D&D games or Etrian Odyssey. I built some interesting tools for building that kind of game, and messed around with a few different aesthetic ideas. Wizard Shoot was the incredibly dumb name for a prototype of a sort of Quake-style game with the (planned) aesthetics of Catacomb 3D), where I tried out FuncGodot) (formerly known as Qodot) and TrenchBroom.

Ultimately nothing releasable came out of these, but hopefully I find a reason to revisit them some day. I think there are some interesting bits in there.

Alice is Dead demo update

After I put there down I decided to focus on updating the steam demo for Alice is Dead for a while. It addressed some of the issues in the first demo, either small technical problems or just things we’ve changed our minds on, and to add in some of the new systems I’d built. The original trilogy was built over the course of a few years, and naturally grew some more complexity as it went. With the remaster we figured it would make sense to “backport” some of those features to the earlier parts of the story, so the whole package feels more cohesive. I think it was a good update, personally, and the feedback we got on the changes seems pretty much universally positive.

OneTurnTactics, Again

After releasing the new Alice demo, I decided I wanted to go back and finish OneTurnTactics. I had nearly finished it before I had shelved it, and it was already kind of interesting, just not much of a finished game yet. It also just rankled that, yet again, I had put almost, but not quite enough effort into something to release it, and then just put it down. There’s a running joke with indie game devs about their hard drives being graveyards littered with abandoned projects, and I’m honestly sick of that being true for me.

So I polished it up and released it, got some good feedback on the idea and at least a few people seemed to genuinely enjoy what was there, so I was happy with that. I’m also glad I got it out there so I could more one more project over into the “actually shipped it” list.

Defend All Humans!!

Riding on that high, I then dusted off another old game I’d started an even longer time ago and, again, had abandoned just short of being releasable: Defend All Humans!!. It was a fairly small amount of work (especially considering I had abandoned it) to finish it up, and upload it to itch.

Five Words of Power

After the jam-sized games, I took a couple of days to think about what I wanted to focus on next for my main personal project. I realized that most of the games I’ve actually released are almost entirely unlike the kind of I really want to make – instead of character- and story-driven games, with a level of actual sincerity, I’ve focused more on arcade and puzzle games. Even SimpleQuest is more of a parody of an RPG than it is any serious attempt at narrative.

To that end, I came up with a new game. It’s not Black Mountain, or related to Geas and that larger world at all. It’s a self-contained story, and I’m building it as a game in the vein of the old 2D Zelda games, particularly Link to the Past and Link’s Awakening, but smaller scale than either of them. I’ve been focusing on the game since then, and a lot of what I’ve built will definitely be making its way into Black Mountain and its follow ups. I’m aiming to come out of this having learned a bunch and with some useful code in hand, but I am also aiming to make something that is actually good, rather than just practice or a prototype for a bigger idea.

So far, both for the predictable internal reasons (I remain myself, after all) and for larger external reasons, progress has been slower than I’d like, but it remains steady, at least. I am moving forward at least a little bit (nearly) every day. It’s not ideal but it would be way worse.

Aside: Sincerity

It would be fair to ask why I think “sincerity” makes a game better. The first answer is easy: I don’t! Looking at SimpleQuest and Evil Island, obviously I appreciate satire and dumb jokes, but that’s not actually my main interest in writing for games. I also enjoy a good “pure gameplay” game, like OneTurnTactics and the games that inspired it, but my real goal with making games is, ultimately, to tell stories.

What do I mean, then? When I say “sincerity”, I mean something between “serious” and “authentic”. It doesn’t mean that the games can’t be light-hearted or be humourous; what I really mean is that I have not taken the stories seriously while writing them. This has actually been on intentional tactical decision on my part – I built these games as a way to practice game development, and I have an unfortunate bent toward perfectionism when I care deeply about a story or a project. Setting out to make a “bad game” is a way for me to tamp that down, at least a bit, and get out of my own way long enough to finish something.

I came to the realization, though, that if what I ultimately want to do is to release some games I care about… then am I actually practicing all the skills I need to practice, if I only make games that I don’t care about? My comfort with game development in general, and Godot in particular, has certainly improved! But I still feel that omnipresent perfectionism hanging over me, stifling forward progress because it might not be good enough." If I want to release games that matter to me, I med to practice making games that matter to me! I felt like it was finally time to face that.

And Onward

Back when I wrote the first draft of this post in January, I wrote that I “didn’t know what the rest of the year was going to look like”. More than half that year has passed and I still feel the same. Some things have solidified and some things feel even more up in the air than they did then. I’m still (again, as I wrote seven months ago, maybe even moreso now) not feeling comfortable making any big proclamations or promises about what I’ll do or what I’ll get done with what’s left of the year.

That goes for this blog, too. If you’re reading this, I clearly managed to get this post out finally. I’m seeing what I can do to make it easier and more natural for me to keep updating the blog – it is useful for me to take stock of what I’ve worked on each week, and later on, having that record gives me something to look back on, either for figuring out what happened when, or just as “tangible” artifacts of what (and how much) I’ve accomplished. On the other hand, I have an awful tendency to get in my own head about whether I have “enough” to write about, or whether I should really write more educational/informative posts rather than just progress updates, and just sabotage myself from getting anything at all posted… but there’s no objective “right answer” here, no matter now much I might look for one.

So, here’s to 2024, very belatedly. It certainly wasn’t the best year, and it certainly won’t be the worst, when it’s all said and done. That said, I accomplished quite a bit personally, and it’s worth looking for any cause to celebrate. Here’s hoping I can find things to celebrate about this year, too, when I finally get around to writing about it.