2024 Year-In-Review

December 31, 2024

Year is over! I made a good amount of stuff! Heres some stats:
16 games released - 49 prototypes/unreleased projects

Before we get into everything else, here’s a mini roundup for December!

Rougelike Style Experimentation
Some style experiments with nuclear throne-like generation. I particularly like the last one.

Level Editor
An all purpose level editor I can port over to future projects when needed.

Mario World Hacking
I spent a few days making some Mario World levels with a friend. I really like sheer level design and not having to code mechanics.

Baking
Our kitchen is finally back together after a 2 year long renovation which means I can bake again!
Here are some Christmas cookies I made.

Multiplayer Prototype
I spent a day doing a jam with a friend where we both made a framework for multiplayer games. My output was this duck game-ish versus game.

Evil Christmas Evil Elf
Made in 20 minutes. Dont really have anything to say about it.

TIMEZONE 9900
A lightning fast speedrun game I made as a gift for a friend. I say a little more about it later in this post.

Ok thats enough of that. Lets get onto the whole year!

Prototypes

This was my first full year of making public roundups! Which means that most of my prototypes are easy to find on this very website!
Because of that, I’m not going to post every single one again here. Instad I’ll choose some of my favorites to share here.

Terminal Project
I’m really happy with how polished this turned out. It ended up going nowhere because I didn’t have much of an idea of what I wanted to do with it, but I’m happy with it regardless.

Gunibalt
This one is kinda silly, but I like how breaking glass feels in it!

Mooncat
I’m really happy with the mechanics I made for this. A lot of them are returning in a new project in a similar genre because of that!

Mech Jam Game
This was the start of me being confident in my pixel art skills. I’m pretty proud of the mech run cycle and all of the juice.

Katana Zero Prototype
I love making juicy attacks! This is my personal favorite of those attempts this year. The slash animation is also pretty good if I do say so myself.

GB Platformer
This is the project that a bunch of the Mooncat mechanics are returning in. I’ve been working on this off and on for a few months. Its nice to come back to something comforable when I’m feeling burnt out.

Released games

My goal this year was to release a minimum of 12 games (1 every month) and I succeeded! About halfway through the year, I pseudo gave up on this goal because it was putting a lot of pressure on making stuff, but ironically taking the pressure off made the goal easier to achieve.

Dreadwood Hunter
This was made in a day at the very end of January. I’m really proud of the atmosphere I was able to get out of so few pixels. Skooka helped a lot with that through the amazing sound effects.

Door Kicker Deluxe
Made for the Brackeys game jam. I spent half the jam making an idea I ended up not going with. I spent way to long on making the gameplay here so its visually super bad. Looking back, if I had to re-do the artstyle I would’ve leaned into the unfinished feeling more and made an artstyle out of it.

Rapidoodle
Made in an hour for a game jam with some friends. Not much to say about it other than that I think its just okay.

WHAT IS GOING ON!
Sarn got me to do the bullet hell jam when there were only 2 days remaining in the bullet hell jam and I made this. I think its fun, but I made the abilities hurt you way too much. There’s basically no reason to use any of them aside from heal.

│ ■ │
Really proud of this one. Sarn had the idea really late at night and we Decided to do the jam together right then. The gamplay is super clean and sarn did a great job with the music and SFX. We were both on vacation for the last half of the jam so the latter half of the game’s balancing isn’t the best because we didn’t really have time to test it.

Make 10 Plus
Another hour jam game that I expanded into a full release with another hour. I think the only thing I would change is adding an indicator that you can clear boxes. That wasn’t intended, but its really useful when going for high scores.

Maintenance Break
Made with 2 other friends over an extended weekend. I think it turned out okay, but I think it falls short because the development was largely unfocused for the first 2 days. We had a lot of vague ideas of what we wanted, but when it came to actually designing it was hard to figure out what to do.

Renegade Rally
This is by far the game I’m most proud of. It preformed really well in the jam and its super fun on its own. Its also my largest game by a longshot. I’m super proud of how many different enemies I made for it and the variety between all of the levels. I could go on about everything I like about it, but I’ll spare you the paragraphs of text I would type.

Gatotag
Made this with Team Bugulon! It was a really great experience working with such a huge team and I’m really glad I got to do it. Everyone there is so talented! I felt out of my element haha

Drillship TURBO
Made over a weekend in a creative frenzy. I think making you shoot bullets at yourself isn’t clear enough and the game doesn’t really need it. Other than that I LOVE this game. Very happy with the particle effects.

Critter Switcher
Tbh I barely did anything in this! (Sorry torcado) I bit off way more than I could chew, but didn’t want to leave my team hanging by suddenly leaving the jam. I think the game we made was still pretty fun though!

Two-Week Megamix
14 games made in 14 days. I definitely want to do this again in 2025 if I have the time. I learned a lot about how I make things and the points where I need to improve doing this. Very fun! My favorite game is the mountain platformer - I like the art in it!

Mouse Snake
Every halloween I do a personal game jam after handing out candy. This year I made an idea I have had in my head for a while. I think it turned out a little to challenging. Definitely want to steal the idea of metascore for a future project. I think its a fun way to unlock stuff.

Mini GUNN
My big project! I’m very very proud of what we were able to fit into Pico 8. Also this was my first steam release! Woohoo! I have a very long blog post about this in the works releasing sometime in the future so to be honest I have very little left to say here.

Evil Christmas Evil Elf
I joined a voice call and 3 people said “WERE DOING A GAME JAM WANNA JOIN” and I said “YES” and I made this in 20 minutes. I’m still glad that I’m able to make something with any amount of speed. Its not super fun tho :P

Timezone 9900
Made in a few days for my friend BoomBox5. I want to expand on the movement in this someday, but right now I feel pretty done with the project. It was very exciting to see people beat my dev time. The best score I’ve seen is 25.80 seconds which is kinda insane. I wish it had 2 more levels.

Other Stuff

Art
I spent a lot of the year trying to improve my pixel art skills. Here are some of my best pieces. They’re mostly mockups for various games. You can see all of them here.

Music
I got into making music. I’m still bad and it’s taken a bit to be okay with that, but I’m starting to become content in that. Listened to my released stuff here.

Games I Played

I played a few games in 2024! I made a whole list reviewing all of the games I played, but heres a bit more depth into my top 5.

#5 World Of Goo 2
World Of Goo 2 feels like a sequel that would’ve been made for the original right after it came out. It still has all the creativity, charm and fun of the original, but expands on it all amazingly. New gooball types fit right in with the old ones and the atmosphere is better than ever.

It has a great balance of more puzzle-y levels and pure building focused levels just like the first game. When its at its best, the game throws what seems like an impossible gap or hill to climb and gives you an amazing feeling of accomplishment as you figure out how to make your structure reach the other side.

Also the soundtrack is amazing. My favorite track is ‘There’s Something About This Island’

#4 Tactical Breach Wizards
Tom Francis has been making infrequent devlog videos on this game for years so my excitement has been building for a while. I could not be happier with the product I got.

The main draw for me was the gameplay. This is the first expressive feeling tactics game. The character’s moves give you tons of options on how you want to clear the level. Weather that is knocking everyone out of a window, pushing them all next to an explosive barrel or throwing them through a magic portal you created.

What I didn’t expect was the story. There were a few moments in this games story that really wow-ed me. Everyone feels like real people. Each character is more complex than just being an archetype and they all have their own reasons for fighting the main force. Without spoiling anything, the conversations in Dall’s stress dreams were my favorite for so many reasons.

#3 MOLEK-SYNTEZ
The only non-story pick in this list. I fell in love with basically every Zachtronics game this year, but MOLEK-SYNTEZ is an easy pick. It has the same complexity as all of their other puzzlers, but executes everything so much more succinctly. Solving each puzzle felt super rewarding.

The extra campaign took me about 4x the time as the main one, but also felt 4x as good to solve. The game was at its best in the very end when I really had to think how to use the weird shapes it gave me to make the weird shapes it wanted.

#2 Eliza
Another Zachtronics game in another genre. I don’t usually like visual novels, but this one captured me from the first conversation. The Matthew S Burns uses the subject of AI to talk about and show humans in a way I’ve never seen before. The people in this game feels so real. Every character, even the ones you might hate at the start have incredible amount of depth and reason for what they do. This game makes you look at life through eyes you’ve never seen out of before, sometimes eyes you would never want to see out of.

This game might seem like science fiction at first, but don’t let it fool you. Its not a game about the future and how robots will work in it then. Its a game about the present and how people function in it now. Every good part of this game is a spoiler so I cant say anything more than that. Play it. Its Amazing. My favorite part is the ending. I can’t say why, but it ties everything together perfectly.

#1 Crow Country
Everything SFB Games make is amazing. They have such an impressive artistic range. Crow Country is easily my favorite thing they’ve made. I went into it not expecting much more than a simple and cute horror game, but got so much more than that.

Everything about it feels authentic to the time period off of which its based from the anti-aliased UI to the simple animations on the zombies. It doesn’t sacrifice quality for this authenticity. It injects plenty of creative fresh ideas into the formula.

The puzzles are creative and carefully made - Not being too hard or confusing but still managing to feel rewarding and unique. The train car puzzle is my personal favorite. I’m a big fan of the game’s structure, almost being metroidvania-like. Instead of unlocking new moves, you unlock new information that help you solve old puzzles. Some of the best moments in this come from remembering details you saw 10 rooms ago to solve an optional puzzle that unlocks you a powerful weapon or ability.

I couldn’t review this game without mentioning the story, but also I cant mention the story without spoiling the best part so you’ll just have to trust me when I say the reason there are zombies in the park and that the backrooms are full of gold are answered in the most satisfying way. All of the writing of the game really effectively contributes to its theming and almost every letter or note you find lying around serves as amazing foreshadowing for the secrets of the park. One of my favorite details is how the never-to-be-finished attraction that you find under-construction signs for at the start of the game serves as an omen for the rest of the story. IVE SAID TOO MUCH! Just go play this now!!!

The End!

2025 is here now! This is the first year where I’ve released games I enjoy playing and I want to keep doing that. I’ve found much healthier ways to view my work and make stuff this year and I want to stay in it. I’m really starting to feel confident in the quality of my work. I want to grow into that confidence more and make even more of what I want and what I love.

I want to get better at finishing stuff this year. I still struggle with staying motivated when there’s always a brand new shiny project. I also want to keep making friends and meeting new people! I’ve made so many talented and creative friends this year who’s work constantly inspires me. My final goal is to release at least 1 game on steam for money next year!

Heres to a great year with lots of games! Happy New Year!

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