I released Quarantine on May 16th, 2013. That means I've been making and releasing games as an adult for 10 years! I’ve been making little games and prototypes much longer of course, but I've lost all my Game Maker or RPGMaker 2003 work from elementary and middle school. So this still feels like a pretty big milestone for me!
I want to do a rundown of each year, what games I made, and some thoughts on what each game means to me. This post covers 2013-2017 — I'll do 2018-2022 sometime soon. This is going to be an extremely self-indulgent post. I'm mostly writing this because I think it'll be fun to refer back to ten or twenty years from now, and see how 2023 John felt about his work. I hope you enjoy the commentary nonetheless!
2013
I remember having an “enough is enough” moment this year. I’d been playing freeware games for ages, and I wanted to be a creator myself, to make and share games with my friends. I’d been part of the SMPS forum for 2 or 3 years at that point, and it was the most stable and supportive web community I’d ever been a part of. I knew I could share creative work there and folks would play it and be nice. And yet every single project I'd started for ages seemed to fizzle out before it even got off the ground.
"Enough is enough" turned into “let’s just make something really small”. I tried to make a simple score attack game where you shoot down waves of enemies attacking a castle wall. I used RPGMaker 2003 assets in Game Maker. I got frustrated quickly — I couldn’t make it feel quite right.
I forget the exact impetus for this, but I started Quarantine right after dropping the score attack game. I think I came up with the Lost Woods puzzle that starts the game first. Then I thought of the Ikaruga polarity platforms and quickly implemented them. I spent about a week making the basic game and most of the levels. I got stumped trying to make a climax, though.
I waited a week, then got back to it. I came up with the static for the last level after trying a few more ambitious things and getting frustrated. I added the same static and NIN music sample to the title screen, and very suddenly I had a finished cool thing. I shared it online in a hurry, feeling immensely pleased with myself.
My SMPS buds played it and were naturally sweet and supportive. A couple weeks later I started seeing it mentioned on other sites. One forum post listing new freeware game recommendations put Quarantine right next to thecatamites’s Lake of Roaches; I felt extremely starstruck seeing my work listed next to catamites'.
What really blew my mind was seeing Quarantine featured on the front page of IndieGames.com, a website I’d been frequenting for years. I was very excited — I remember literally running out of my house and dashing around the driveway hooting and hollering. It was a level of immediate recognition I wasn’t expecting, and it knocked me on my ass in a great way. It seems insane in retrospect. I was 19 and had maybe fifty Twitter followers at the time, and I have no idea how my first little game wound up getting that kind of reach.
I started Fugitive shortly after that, still high on all the recognition Quarantine had gotten. I scoped way bigger for Fugitive, which easily could’ve bitten me in the ass. I wanted to make my “reverse metroidvania”, a game where you start off strong and then lose abilities as the game progresses. It was an idea I’d chewed on for years. (It’s an idea a lot of devs chew on for years.)
Mercifully, I decided to make it a linear Mega Man-y platformer instead of an actual metroidvania. I used lightly edited ripped art for the player character and most of the tiles, and Newgrounds Audio Portal music for the soundtrack. After thinking up the basic shape of the story (including the final encounter with the “fugitive”), I was able to get a first level up and running pretty quick.
Fugitive took about five months to make. It’s a full-length retro style platformer with multiple levels and bosses. You can beat it in 15-20 minutes if you know what you’re doing — it’s one of the biggest games I’ve ever made. The final boss is still the most elaborate action setpiece I’ve designed. Even with all the aesthetic shortcuts I took, there’s no way to make that much bespoke hand-designed platformer level and have it not be a lot of work.
Fugitive rules! I still like it a lot. A lot of other people liked it! It got featured once again on IndieGames.com (thanks Paul Hack!), plus several other sites like the late great FreeIndieGam.es. It’s by far my most viral success in ten years of game dev. It's a little demoralizing for your second game to be your most successful when you’ve put out like two dozen. But I’ve come up with other metrics of success since then, and I can’t resent Fugitive for being the breakout game when it’s as good as it is.
I put out Into the Vortex a month after Fugitive. I started making it for Ludum Dare (the theme was “You Only Get One”), but went over time and spent a week working on it. It’s a short one-boss shmup inspired by the GameBoy game SolarStriker. It’s a little euroshmup-y playing it these days — when I realized it was very hard to dodge all the attacks, I gave the player a 25 hit health bar. That’s a lot for a three minute game. I wouldn’t do that these days; I’d rather make the action gentler but give you fewer hits. I can dodge almost all the patterns consistently, so I generally don’t think it’s bullshit. And I love the mood it’s got going on. (I’d go on to reuse that smoke texture in several more games.)
I’d built up a pretty consistent style across Quarantine, Fugitive, and Into the Vortex. All three games relied on wordless storytelling, they're mostly grey-scale, they’re all pretty hard, and they tend towards uneasy ambiguous conclusions. These games neatly represent “John that really loved Don’t Look Back and Seven Minutes and games like them”, plus a number of retro console game influences. A lot of my work still draws on these aesthetics and styles.
Game of the Year: Fugitive
2014
I think I decided things were feeling samey, because my 2014 output was dramatically different from my 2013 output. I'm glad I stretched my muscles instead of settling into a single defined style — I'd shake things up this way a lot over the coming years, and that variety is something I really value about my output.
The next two games are tricky to talk about, since one was a collab with my ex-wife and the other was influenced strongly by our relationship. I do not feel warmly about her these days, so that complicates my relationship with the games. But my general philosophy is that "it's not the games' fault things broke so bad", so I don't feel crummy seeing them on my itch page. They still represent a step on my journey as an artist and as a person, and I value them for that.
Dance Party is a collage game where every key on the keyboard makes something different happen on the screen. It’s a funny premise, and the collage aesthetic is pretty delightful. It’s very stupid, very colorful, and abandons any pretense of having traditional “gameplay” or “goals”. It’s completely different from the subdued hard action games I’d made up to that point. Even though I obviously feel weird about a game celebrating a relationship that ultimately turned toxic, it helped me stretch and expand my creative voice dramatically. I’ve made a lot of happy bouncy games since 2014, and I know I have Dance Party in part to thank for that.
Ants: A Love Story is the only game I’ve actually finished within the three day Ludum Dare jam window. It’s a block pushing game; calling it a “puzzle” game would be a stretch though. Once you figure out the basic goal, executing on it isn’t hard. I mostly still like this one for the very cute intro cutscene and ending and a couple small details throughout that make me laugh.
Next is one I feel unreservedly good about: my first collaboration with long-time friend Polly, Operation K.A.T.B.! I really like this one still. The flow of the world design is great, and the little details like the kiss sound effects, the counter, and the teleport animations all make me laugh. It’s directly combative about not being a “normal” metroidvania. You have a health bar and score meter that never change, because there are no enemies or damaging obstacles. K.A.T.B. (short for Kiss All The Boys) was made for a two week jam themed specifically as a middle finger to gamergate chuds, so we made it as queer and un-videogame as possible to lean into that theming.
My next game Frog Adventure took a few months of on-and-off work. It’s great! The comic timing was inspired by the opening stages of Rhete’s excellent The Adventures of MikeMan 2, and I think it’s one of my funniest games. I love the feel of the platforming and tongue grapple, and popping chains of bubbles is satisfying. While I love the ending cutscene, the actual execution of stage 5 feels weak to me. I don’t know how I’d do it differently though, so I'm not that cut up about it.
Lots of folks liked this one! It got featured on Warp Door. I can’t confirm this because Warp Door zapped their old comments threads, but I think Terry Cavanagh played and wrote a nice comment for it, which I was extremely star-struck over. thecatamites also wrote a lovely blurb about it on FROG WORLD — Quarantine may have been listed next to a catamites game on a freeware recc list, but now catamites was actually playing and writing about a game I made.
Years after release, Babycastles reached out to me about including Frog Adventure as part of an in-person exhibition in NYC. I was happy to say yes. They built a special cabinet for it, and it was part of the swamp-themed exhibition for months. I was very delighted when I saw the photos.
The last big thing about Frog Adventure is that it’s my first solo game with a text storytelling component. There’s only two cutscenes, one at the beginning and one at the end, but it still felt like a big shift from Quarantine, Fugitive, Into the Vortex, and Ants’ storytelling. As a teenager, I idolized the wordless storytelling of games like Super Metroid or Another World. But these days writing is an important tool for me, and my favorite stories I’ve told all involve writing.
I built up some good momentum in 2013 and 2014. I successfully slammed out 3 or 4 games a year for two years after going ages without finishing anything. My work also got a ton of positive reinforcement, both from friends and from larger institutions. This is anecdotal, but it felt like larger sites and the community at large cared more about small freeware games around 2008-2013 than they do now, and I snuck in at the end of that era.
I also did a lot to ingratiate myself in alternative games criticism spaces on Twitter, mostly by bloviating about game development even though I was still a baby with little real experience. I don’t feel warmly about these spaces or my rhetoric in retrospect. I was a pretentious 20yo who’d read too much Insert Credit and thought he knew everything, and a lot of the voices I paid attention to weren't much better. I’m still pretty arrogant, but I like to think I’ve mellowed out a lot since then.
Game of the Year: Frog Adventure
2015
I got married at the end of 2014, which does a lot to explain the coming drought of games, energy, and general happiness in my life in the next few years.
I released exactly one game in 2015, and it’s the only game on my itch that I don’t like. Hummingbird Lovers Psychic Supernova (what an overkill title, just Hummingbird Lovers would’ve been fine) was a tiny jam-scoped collab game with my ex-wife. I wasn't happy with it even at the time — the movement is cute, but it doesn’t have any real arc. You just flutter around the map until the song finishes (which takes way too long), and the game ends unceremoniously. She pressured me to upload it anyway, and I caved in.
Hummingbird Lovers is an incomplete sketch. It has a few cute ideas, but it doesn’t meaningfully come together. Some developers are comfortable sharing games like this, and I don’t actually think there’s anything wrong with that. Some of my favorite devs are hilariously prolific, releasing dozens or hundreds of games, many of which are just light sketches of simple ideas. That kind of fire-hose expression is a valid and radical way of working. It’s the exact opposite of “I mortgaged my house to make a metroidvania” indie dev, and creators have a lot to learn from this model of making art.
But it’s not my style! I like making games that I like! It’s been eight years and this dopey game I helped make in two days is still stuck in my craw. I hid it from my itch page at one point, but that felt wrong. I hate it when devs I like remove work they’re not pleased with anymore from their pages; often those same games are stories I quite enjoyed. I don’t think Hummingbird Lovers has any fans, but it still feels “dishonest” in a weird way to hide it. I might change my mind later, but that’s where I’m at right now.
Game of the Year: No Award
2016
This was the year I graduated college, got a job, and was generally very unhappy. Like in 2015, I only made one game. Luckily, I love this one.
Spider’s Hollow is made in Puzzlescript, a great tool by Increpare for making block-pushing puzzle games. I’d been using Game Maker for nearly everything I’d made since 2002 (outside some RPGMaker experiments), so this was a big shift. It turns out I deeply enjoy the novelty of learning new tools and making things with them! I didn’t know at the time, but I’d move away from Game Maker almost entirely moving forward. I’ve only put out two Game Maker games in the seven years since making Spider’s Hollow.
It’s also my second game to contain a meaningful amount of my writing, and moreso than Frog Adventure this is where I really started to develop my own voice. Spider’s Hollow is ominous, dryly funny, and lightly horny. My 2013 games were silent eerie greyscale action games inspired by freeware I loved as a kid. My 2014 and 2015 games were colorful and “wholesome” games that moved far in the opposite direction. Spider’s Hollow feels like the start of a more mature era of creation for me. It was also the prelude to maybe my best and most productive year of game dev ever.
Game of the Year: Spider’s Hollow
2017
For a variety of personal reasons, 2017 was the darkest and most stressful year of my life. I don’t believe in the suffering artist myth at all, that a painful life leads to more interesting art. But in spite of everything, I put out three hugely ambitious games this year, all of which I absolutely adore.
Her Lullaby is horror visual novel that takes a couple hours to play. It’s a collab project between me and Polly. It’s the darkest (arguably) and the bloodiest (definitely) game either of us have worked on. We both love it a whole lot.
The development cycle was about three months, and completely improvised. Polly sent me a 10 minute demo of a “Ren’Py” project. It started with two women waking up in a mysterious basement, and ended with the two of them stabbing each other to death. It used a placeholder background (which we never replaced) and had no music or character art. She basically went “hey would you wanna do anything with this with me?” The demo lit my imagination on fire and I jumped at the collab.
I quickly figured out the basics of Ren’Py (it’s straightforward as long as you’re not trying to do anything too clever tech-wise) and drafted around 10-15 minutes of follow-up to the scene Polly sent me. I sent it back to her with a knot in my gut. It was by far the most violent written prose I’d ever shared with friends. I felt like I’d done something wrong or evil by writing it. It’s kind of cute how embarrassed I was in retrospect. It feels quaint now that many of my friends are making straight up smut games (I’ll join y’all someday).
The whole process of writing the draft with Polly was pure joy. We passed the project back in forth writing new scenes and trying to surprise and delight each other. About halfway through we talked things through and developed a rough outline. Even then, we still managed to surprise each other a lot with the remaining scenes. At some point we pulled in Taylor to do the music and Carmichael to do the character art. Both of them nailed their contributions, and adding their work into the game made it feel suddenly real in a really cool way.
Her Lullaby felt momentous to me. It was the longest work of prose fiction I’d ever helped write, and the first time a game I’d worked on ended with a big explosive emotional character catharsis. It felt magical, like the floodgates were blown open and now I could make all new kinds of games.
Writing is a really important part of my creative voice now. Last year I made six games — four of them were interactive fiction or kinetic visual novels. The year before last I self-published a short novel. At this point I'm as much a writer as I am a game developer. Her Lullaby is where it all started in earnest.
Kikai is one of my few years-spanning dream-projects. I’d worked on it on and off since making Frog Adventure, so it took about two and a half years to come together. I wrote about making the game at length in 2016, about half a year before finishing it.
It’s a sort of shmup where the camera moves around in different directions irregularly. It’s a riff on Daniel Remar’s Hero Core and the last level of Ecco the Dolphin. It feels like such a simple thing in retrospect, but it took a hilarious amount of work to get together. I’ve found the most labor intensive games to make are the ones where I have to make a lot of handcrafted maps, and Kikai has a lot of maps.
It’s good! It forms a neat trilogy with Fugitive and another game we’re talking about in the next post, hard minimalist 10-15 minute action games with neat little stories. It’s kinda funny how this felt like the dream game to end all the dream games, my mic drop as a designer, and now it’s not even my favorite game I put out in 2017. It’s also never really popped off among friends the way some of my games have. I’ve put out many games that took way less work to put together than Kikai, but found way more of an audience.
How important a game feels to you when you’re making it doesn’t correlate with how important it will be to you later, or how much audiences will like it. This is part of why I value being prolific over pouring hundreds of hours of work into individual “masterpieces”. If how much a finished piece speaks to me and my friends is ultimately kind of random and arbitrary, I’d rather get as many pulls on the slot machine as I can. That way there’s less pressure for any one individual game to blow up. I still love Kikai, I think it's a really cool and fun action game, but I’m glad it helped me internalize that lesson.
Last up we have Atop the Witch’s Tower, our final game of this post and my first five years of adult game dev. It’s one of my favorite games I’ve ever done. It’s a cute nice love story told in around twenty minutes — one of my favorite IF form factors. The idea started as a Twine game, but like all my Twine ideas for years it fizzled out. Then, when I wanted to make a ZZT game after reading all about its history, I pulled the idea back out and repurposed it.
ZZT is wonderful, both the software and its modern community. I wasn’t plugged into that community at all while making ATWT, but they were so celebratory and supportive of my work I’ve been paying attention ever since. There's been a huge pop off of new work in the space in the last five years. In 2017, there were a grand total of three new ZZT games released. In the years since, it’s always hit at least the double digits.
This excerpt from Dr. Dos’s decade write-up makes me swell with pride:
“Atop The Witch's Tower represents what I see as ZZT's healthiest possible future, one in which ZZT isn't a tool for ZZTers to play ZZT games, but as an accepted medium for independent game creators to create their ideas into something playable. ZZT not as a novelty in which a 30 year engine gets a quirky release, but something that can hold its own with other highly approachable tools for game development such as Twine or Bitsy.”
ZZT is delightful to use, and thanks to Asie’s work with the lightweight Zeta web player and the Reconstruction of ZZT, it’s more accessible than ever. I’d love to see friends make games with it, and I want to return to it myself someday.
This one was close, but I still have to give the award to Her Lullaby over ATWT. The payoffs in Her Lullaby still gut me, and the experience of making it with my friends is some of the most fun I’ve had making art.
Game of the Year: Her Lullaby
Thanks for reading this extremely self-aggrandizing post! I love my games, and I love the communities I've become a part of while
making games. This kind of reflection brings me a lot of joy. I hope to draft the 2018-2022 piece in the next month or two. See ya then!
