Eevee grew to level 31!

A year strongly defined by mixed success! Also, a lot of video games.

I ran three game jams, resulting in a total of 157 games existing that may not have otherwise, which is totally mindblowing?!

For GAMES MADE QUICK???, glip and I made NEON PHASE, a short little exploratory platformer. Honestly, I should give myself more credit for this and the rest of the LÖVE games I’ve based on the same codebase — I wove a physics engine (and everything else!) from scratch and it has held up remarkably well for a variety of different uses.

I successfully finished an HD version of Isaac’s Descent using my LÖVE engine, though it doesn’t have anything new over the original and I’ve only released it as a tech demo on Patreon.

For Strawberry Jam (NSFW!) we made fox flux (slightly NSFW!), which felt like a huge milestone: the first game where I made all the art! I mean, not counting Isaac’s Descent, which was for a very limited platform. It’s a pretty arbitrary milestone, yes, but it feels significant. I’ve been working on expanding the game into a longer and slightly less buggy experience, but the art is taking the longest by far. I must’ve spent weeks on player sprites alone.

We then set about working on Bolthaven, a sequel of sorts to NEON PHASE, and got decently far, and then abandond it. Oops.

We then started a cute little PICO-8 game, and forgot about it. Oops.

I was recruited to help with Chaos Composer, a more ambitious game glip started with someone else in Unity. I had to get used to Unity, and we squabbled a bit, but the game is finally about at the point where it’s “playable” and “maps” can be designed? It’s slightly on hold at the moment while we all finish up some other stuff, though.

We made a birthday game for two of our friends whose birthdays were very close together! Only they got to see it.

For Ludum Dare 38, we made Lunar Depot 38, a little “wave shooter” or whatever you call those? The AI is pretty rough, seeing as this was the first time I’d really made enemies and I had 72 hours to figure out how to do it, but I still think it’s pretty fun to play and I love the circular world.

I made Roguelike Simulator as an experiment with making something small and quick with a simple tool, and I had a lot of fun! I definitely want to do more stuff like this in the future.

And now we’re working on a game about Star Anise, my cat’s self-insert, which is looking to have more polish and depth than anything we’ve done so far! We’ve definitely come a long way in a year.

Somewhere along the line, I put out a call for a “potluck” project, where everyone would give me sprites of a given size without knowing what anyone else had contributed, and I would then make a game using only those sprites. Unfortunately, that stalled a few times: I tried using the Phaser JS library, but we didn’t get along; I tried LÖVE, but didn’t know where to go with the game; and then I decided to use this as an experiment with procedural generation, and didn’t get around to it. I still feel bad that everyone did work for me and I didn’t follow through, but I don’t know whether this will ever become a game.

veekun, alas, consumed months of my life. I finally got Sun and Moon loaded, but it took weeks of work since I was basically reinventing all the tooling we’d ever had from scratch, without even having most of that tooling available as a reference. It was worth it in the end, at least: Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon only took a few days to get loaded. But veekun itself is still missing some obvious Sun/Moon features, and the whole site needs an overhaul, and I just don’t know if I want to dedicate that much time to it when I have so much other stuff going on that’s much more interesting to me right now.

I finally turned my blog into more of a website, giving it a neat front page that lists a bunch of stuff I’ve done. I made a release category at last, though I’m still not quite in the habit of using it.

I wrote some blog posts, of course! I think the most interesting were JavaScript got better while I wasn’t looking and Object models. I was also asked to write a couple pieces for money for a column that then promptly shut down.

On a whim, I made a set of Eevee mugshots for Doom, which I think is a decent indication of my (pixel) art progress over the year?

I started idchoppers, a Doom parsing and manipulation library written in Rust, though it didn’t get very far and I’ve spent most of the time fighting with Rust because it won’t let me implement all my extremely bad ideas. It can do a couple things, at least, like flip maps very quickly and render maps to SVG.

I did toy around with music a little, but not a lot.

I wrote two short twines for Flora. They’re okay. I’m working on another; I think it’ll be better.

I didn’t do a lot of art overall, at least compared to the two previous years; most of my art effort over the year has gone into fox flux, which requires me to learn a whole lot of things. I did dip my toes into 3D modelling, most notably producing my current Twitter banner as well as this cool Star Anise animation. I wouldn’t mind doing more of that; maybe I’ll even try to make a low-poly pixel-textured 3D game sometime.

I restarted my book with a much better concept, though so far I’ve only written about half a chapter. Argh. I see that the vast majority of the work was done within the span of a single week, which is bad since that means I only worked on it for a week, but good since that means I can actually do a pretty good amount of work in only a week. I also did a lot of squabbling with tooling, which is hopefully mostly out of the way now.

My computer broke? That was an exciting week.

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A lot of stuff, but the year as a whole still feels hit or miss. All the time I spent on veekun feels like a black void in the middle of the year, which seems like a good sign that I maybe don’t want to pour even more weeks into it in the near future.

Mostly, I want to do: more games, more art, more writing, more music.

I want to try out some tiny game making tools and make some tiny games with them — partly to get exposure to different things, partly to get more little ideas out into the world regularly, and partly to get more practice at letting myself have ideas. I have a couple tools in mind and I guess I’ll aim at a microgame every two months or so? I’d also like to finish the expanded fox flux by the end of the year, of course, though at the moment I can’t even gauge how long it might take.

I seriously lapsed on drawing last year, largely because fox flux pixel art took me so much time. So I want to draw more, and I want to get much faster at pixel art. It would probably help if I had a more concrete goal for drawing, so I might try to draw some short comics and write a little visual novel or something, which would also force me to aim for consistency.

I want to work on my book more, of course, but I also want to try my hand at a bit more fiction. I’ve had a blast writing dialogue for our games! I just shy away from longer-form writing for some reason — which seems ridiculous when a large part of my audience found me through my blog. I do think I’ve had some sort of breakthrough in the last month or two; I suddenly feel a good bit more confident about writing in general and figuring out what I want to say? One recent post I know I wrote in a single afternoon, which virtually never happens because I keep rewriting and rearranging stuff. Again, a visual novel would be a good excuse to practice writing fiction without getting too bogged down in details.

And, ah, music. I shy heavily away from music, since I have no idea what I’m doing, and also I seem to spend a lot of time fighting with tools. (Surprise.) I tried out SunVox for the first time just a few days ago and have been enjoying it quite a bit for making sound effects, so I might try it for music as well. And once again, visual novel background music is a pretty low-pressure thing to compose for. Hell, visual novels are small games, too, so that checks all the boxes. I guess I’ll go make a visual novel.

Here’s to twenty gayteen!