This is the second and final part of my decade-of-gamedev retrospective! You can read the first part here.
Alright, let's start off with a bang!
2018
After my success with Puzzlescript, Ren’Py, and ZZT, I felt empowered, and was eyeballing other engines besides Game Maker. I’ve been messing with RPGMaker 2003 since I was a kid, and I’ve played and enjoyed a lot of games made with it over the years. So, I booted up my old fan-translated copy, and set out to make some fun RPG bosses. This was in part out of frustration that a lot of popular RPGMaker games have gorgeous art and stories, but easy and uninteresting combat. I wanted to see if I could make fights in RPGMaker that were more exciting to me.
After some work, I successfully made some fights I liked — mostly by making them hit hard and fast. RM2k3 fighting is pretty slow by default, but by ramping up the bosses' Agility stats I could make fights that felt quick and thrilling. Once I had those bosses, I wanted to make a game about them. Minimalism is my natural impulse with these things, out of personal taste and also laziness, so I wanted to make the game with as few moving parts as possible.
RPGs tend to have a lot of moving parts. How do you make a game about fun RPG bosses without an RPG’s worth of moving parts?
RPGs tend to have a lot of moving parts. How do you make a game about fun RPG bosses without an RPG’s worth of moving parts?
Here’s what I arrived at. There’s only one dungeon, of course. It’s not very big, by dungeon crawler standards. There’s three playable characters, each of whom have four skills. You don’t learn any new skills, get any new equipment, or find any other playable characters. There’s no shop. The only resources you find exploring are healing items and a few damage-dealing items. There’s no way to heal outside of the limited healing items you find. There are no random encounters, just ten unique bosses. All the art, music, and sound effects are default assets that came with RPGMaker. The overarching story is communicated across a handful of cutscenes, totaling maybe 3,000 words.
I really like this language! The downside of taking out character progression in RPGs is that it can make random encounters unrewarding. The downside of taking out random encounters is that it can remove the resource stress of exploring a dungeon. But having limited enemy encounters and limited healing and no character progression basically turns the whole game into one big math puzzle.
How do you get through these fights efficiently? How do you save the most resources for whatever is still to come? Because you know exactly how many bosses are left, there’s still a nice feeling of progression after each fight. And because of the limited resources, there’s a wonderful survival horror tension that permeates the whole game, and there’s a lot of weight and stakes to the last fights.
That there are cutscenes and writing at all is why I don’t know if “minimalism” is exactly the right label for this approach. sraëka’s Ocean OI tells a complete story about hard dramatic RPG fights without any map exploring or explicit narrative. It also uses RPGMaker 2000, which is turn-based and dodges a lot of the readability issues and ATB muddiness endemic to RPGMaker 2003’s engine. sraëka’s games are incredible, and I think they function more as true minimalist explorations of RPG language.
That there are cutscenes and writing at all is why I don’t know if “minimalism” is exactly the right label for this approach. sraëka’s Ocean OI tells a complete story about hard dramatic RPG fights without any map exploring or explicit narrative. It also uses RPGMaker 2000, which is turn-based and dodges a lot of the readability issues and ATB muddiness endemic to RPGMaker 2003’s engine. sraëka’s games are incredible, and I think they function more as true minimalist explorations of RPG language.
Ultimately, I’m still not quite a formalist, even though a lot of my work flirts with that paradigm. My favorite RPG bosses are a synthesis of strong formal stakes with big character writing catharsis moments. To me, making fun RPG bosses meant also telling a fun character story.
That desire to imbue the boss fights with characterization is what led to the dream dive premise. I wanted to make every boss and map a different “facet” of one character, to use RPG language as a metaphor for a character study. This isn’t a new idea at all — like a lot of queer nerds I played Persona 4 in high school. This was just my spin on it.
Making the story a tragedy was a natural evolution of this premise. If the player is fighting and killing bosses, and the bosses represent the character you’re supposed to care most about, it follows that the game is probably going to be pretty sad.
Making the story a tragedy was a natural evolution of this premise. If the player is fighting and killing bosses, and the bosses represent the character you’re supposed to care most about, it follows that the game is probably going to be pretty sad.
After figuring out all that... the rest of the game came together pretty easily. It was really fun. I got the maps done early, and I already had about half the bosses from prototyping. Most of the story flowed naturally out of an intro cutscene I whipped up early on. There are three narrative sequences late in the game that still knock the wind out of me on replays. Watching them come together on the screen during development felt like a miracle. I came up with the “Barrier” boss mechanic late in the process (borrowing equal parts from Dragon Quarter and Mega Man Battle Network), and it single-handedly snapped together the final boss sequence. It’s still one of my favorite game rules I’ve ever put together.
I just... I really love Facets, y’all. I felt more insecure about it than I’ve ever felt about a game during development. Because it’s weird and hard, and because it’s a story about conversion therapy and slowly murdering a queer girl, and I was worried that wasn’t a story I had the “right” to tell. I didn’t get a ton of feedback immediately after release either — I’m still not used to the slower response you get releasing a big 2+ hour game versus short 5-20 minute pieces.
But the game found its audience over time. A lot of players have said very kind things about it. It has more views and downloads than any of my other games on itch. Somehow I even got to talk about it in a PCGamer piece, which is still insanely wild and cool.
The thing that makes me feel most warm though is that friends have made more games inspired by Facets than I count on two hands. Multiple times I’ve played a rad game by a friend and afterward they told me they started work on it after playing Facets. I can’t overstate how good that makes me feel. The way Facets tells its story resonated with other creators, and it made them want to tell their own stories. I can’t think of any warmer flattery for an artist.
The thing that makes me feel most warm though is that friends have made more games inspired by Facets than I count on two hands. Multiple times I’ve played a rad game by a friend and afterward they told me they started work on it after playing Facets. I can’t overstate how good that makes me feel. The way Facets tells its story resonated with other creators, and it made them want to tell their own stories. I can’t think of any warmer flattery for an artist.
I also made My Wish For You in 2018! It’s a Flickgame shitpost I made in a single evening. The joke is that for six months, for reasons that are hard to recall, everyone in my social circle kept telling this one friend “Happy Wednesday!” every week. I made the game as a climax to the bit. It was the first time I made a game in less than a day — it’s something I want to do more of! I like the idea of being more loose and improvised as an artist.
This was even harder than last year, but ultimately only one game can win GOTY 🙁
Game of the Year: Facets
This was even harder than last year, but ultimately only one game can win GOTY 🙁
Game of the Year: Facets
2019
Mid-2017, several months after releasing Her Lullaby with Polly, she approached me about doing a follow-up game. Her Lullaby’s story was dark, violent, and loud. Most of the game took place in one room, under harrowing circumstances. We’d both built up a lot of love for these characters, but within the actual game there wasn’t a lot of quiet time to explore them (especially Tocco). Her Lullaby’s ending is also ultimately pretty happy, and Polly saw some room to complicate that clean catharsis. An “epilogue” would give us room to explore these negative spaces in the original game’s story.
I was immediately on board with the vision Polly laid out for Afterward. It felt like a challenge. After making Her Lullaby with everyone, I’d wanted to write something different, something quiet and grounded, to prove to myself that I could. I was excited at the prospect of stretching our creative muscles. After making Facets, another oppressively dark and loud game about Big Feelings, I was even more ready to work on on something all new.
So we got to work! And... it was really hard! It took us over a year just to get a story draft together! The entirety of Her Lullaby came together in just three months, and Afterward was a shorter game! Arghh!!
So we got to work! And... it was really hard! It took us over a year just to get a story draft together! The entirety of Her Lullaby came together in just three months, and Afterward was a shorter game! Arghh!!
It was generous of Polly not to murder me during this game’s development. At one point she passed me the project to write my next chunk, and I took six full months to get anything back to her. And when I did... it was really bad! I’d bungled my part in a couple key ways, and I’d also been way too aggressive about editing Polly’s existing chunks to match what I’d written. It went further than trying to edit Polly’s prose style closer to mine, which I was already obnoxious about. I actually changed the story function of stuff she’d written, and for the worse at that.
We had a big sit down and she laid out her response. It all made sense to me pretty much immediately. We made a handful of changes together, and suddenly we were both happy with the draft again. Crisis averted, but goddam, writing quiet character exploration stories is hard. Her Lullaby’s climax is three armed characters fighting for their lives. Afterward’s climax is two people sitting in a café talking about their feelings. We knew the story we wanted to tell could be good, but getting it on the page was really tricky.
We had a big sit down and she laid out her response. It all made sense to me pretty much immediately. We made a handful of changes together, and suddenly we were both happy with the draft again. Crisis averted, but goddam, writing quiet character exploration stories is hard. Her Lullaby’s climax is three armed characters fighting for their lives. Afterward’s climax is two people sitting in a café talking about their feelings. We knew the story we wanted to tell could be good, but getting it on the page was really tricky.
Ultimately, we made it happen. Afterward kicks ass. I’m grateful to have worked with such cool brilliant people. Carmy and Garden both knocked their contributions out of the park. Polly’s chapters are great, and her direction and vision helped keep me from capsizing when I was lost at sea in my sections. We worked in some VN direction moments we’re really proud of, moments that help Afterward stand alongside Her Lullaby and its big formal twists at the end.
In some ways I like it more than the first game. I think it’s the most “literary” long-form prose project I’ve contributed to. There’s no magic, no action scenes, and no tidy romantic catharsis at the end. It’s just two characters coming to complicated realizations about themselves and their relationship, after going through an awful traumatic experience together. Even without all the genre fiction signifiers I’m used to relying on, it still feels gripping and immediate to me to read. Thanks to Afterward, I feel empowered to tell a wider variety of stories.
Some writing wisdom I subscribe to: the ease with which a writer’s words flow onto the page does not correlate with the merit of the finished story. Sometimes drafting is hard, and sometimes it’s easy. Sometimes stories snap together quickly, and other times they feel completely broken until some change in the edit ties everything together. Work on the story until it’s done. Whether it was easy or hard for you, the reader won’t know the difference.
The summer after releasing Afterward, I loaded up Game Maker and started work on a little arcade shmup. I’ve never had an easier time prototyping an action game than I did with Expanse. Within a couple hours of loading up a blank project, I had something on the screen that I liked. The full game was finished and released a few months later.
“Make something happen on the screen that I like” is my guiding light for prototyping games now. I think Expanse was when I first put the idea into words. When you outline, imagine, dream about the game you want to make, it’s easy to get lost. You over-scope, you lose track of what you actually have the capacity to create. But “something on the screen that you like” can’t lie to you, at least not the way dreams can. Instead of marrying yourself to grand ideas before you’ve even started, build your vision on the foundation of what you already have. This has worked for me with games, music, writing, every art discipline I’ve taken a stab at.
“Make something happen on the screen that I like” is my guiding light for prototyping games now. I think Expanse was when I first put the idea into words. When you outline, imagine, dream about the game you want to make, it’s easy to get lost. You over-scope, you lose track of what you actually have the capacity to create. But “something on the screen that you like” can’t lie to you, at least not the way dreams can. Instead of marrying yourself to grand ideas before you’ve even started, build your vision on the foundation of what you already have. This has worked for me with games, music, writing, every art discipline I’ve taken a stab at.
Expanse is, for me, the most fun game I’ve ever made. I revisit it every few months to make another stab at a No Miss Clear. It’s my only fully arcade-style game, with lives and a score and a hard game over. Like I talked about last time, my older games were inspired by classic freeware like Seven Minutes and Don’t Look Back. The action in these games was often more about helping to set a mood, rather than crafting fun challenges for their own sake. I think that influence is obvious in Fugitive and Kikai — mood and storytelling are important to me. Expanse was my first game where the arcade action was fore-fronted, with awesome high energy videogame-ass Dying Eyes NES tunes to sell it. It still has its own atmosphere and arc, but it was definitely a new approach for me.
It’s hard to put into words what Expanse means to me. It feels special and magical, a success I’m worried I won’t be able to replicate. That’s obviously funny to say considering how humble and lofi the game looks. But it’s just how I feel every time I play it. I want to make more videogame-ass videogames. I want to make stuff that reminds me of 80’s Sega arcade games and 90’s DOS platformers.
I think you can feel those goals in my recent Love2D work. Something I really want to do this or next year is an arcade-style shmup in Love2D with colorful tiled background art and original Bosca Ceoil music. I get a ton of joy from my work in interactive fiction, but there’s something primordial about arcade design that resonates with me. In its own humble way, Expanse feels like the closest I’ve gotten to the romance, the bliss of wind sweeping through your hair as you chase the horizon in OutRun or Space Harrier.
Stuck is my other Flickgame besides My Wish for You. It’s great and I love it. It's very funny that this was my last release for a year and a half. I made it in a hotel room when I was stuck in Toronto after a flight got canceled. It copies the same theming from Spider’s Hollow, just in a new format. That’s something I haven’t done before or since — maybe I should! I like that my work feels really varied and fresh, but there’s no reason not to return to ideas that resonate with me as an easier way to explore a new tool.
This was the other really hard year to choose besides 2017. I think because I picked Her Lullaby over Atop the Witch’s Tower, I need to pick Expanse this time, even though I love Afterward to bits. Collabs and solo projects fill different needs in my soul, and I want to give both their due in these lists.
Game of the Year: Expanse
2020
Weirdly, I didn’t make a single game in 2020! This was the only year in the last decade I didn’t put anything out at all. I must’ve just been feeling lazy or something, no clue what sapped my motivation.
I did get some work done on three big mega-projects — I wrote about my progress with them once in October 2020 and again in April 2021. Two of projects would come out in 2021. I’m still pecking very intermittently at the RPGMaker explore-y game. It’s basically been what Kikai was for me in 2014-2017 — a stupidly grand scope, lots and lots of mapping, a story I’m still trying to pull together.
I’ll get it out sometime, but these days it’s harder for me to get excited about solo mega-projects. Smaller solo work is just more rewarding on a freeware scale. A freeware itch game that takes a year plus to make generally doesn’t get much more feedback than something I whip up in a month. And collab games can scratch that “make an epic game that’s 2+ hours long” itch with way less work on my end.
I’ll get it out sometime, but these days it’s harder for me to get excited about solo mega-projects. Smaller solo work is just more rewarding on a freeware scale. A freeware itch game that takes a year plus to make generally doesn’t get much more feedback than something I whip up in a month. And collab games can scratch that “make an epic game that’s 2+ hours long” itch with way less work on my end.
But it’s almost done, and I like it. I know it’ll get done eventually.
Game of the Year: N/A
2021
I wrote mostly about my game design journey making Facets earlier, but the characters and story are just as important to me. Alyssa is the phylactery I funneled several years’ worth of real life suffering and angst into. While my life drama wasn’t the same as Alyssa’s, it did inform the feelings I explored in the story. The other characters with important to me too, although with how Facets is structured none of them get to be as defined as Alyssa.
Her girlfriend Lacy in particular seemed to call out for her own story. It’s weird that my previous ideas for follow-ups were all about either further exploring Alyssa (who has a pretty complete story in Facets), or about the fucking dream dive team. Ellis, Claire, and Rory don’t need spinoffs or tragic backstories — they’re interchangeable instruments of institutional violence. Lacy was the obvious choice for further fleshing out. Reading about Shion escaping St. Lucia’s Academy in late 2020 lit up some synapses, and suddenly I had an idea for what Lacy’s story could be. I spent about nine months tying that story together.
Totaling around 36k words, Wayward is the biggest prose story I’ve worked on. It’s a cool little book! I cried a lot writing it. This is what I wrote about it in 2021:
I'd come up with several ideas for stories in Facets' world since the game's release, but this was the one that felt right. I think it's because Wayward's story is sweet, cathartic, uplifting — all the other follow-ups I'd considered were even bleaker than Facets, somehow. I think I had to grow a bit as a person to write the successor Facets called for. Facets was about the feeling of being slowly killed inside your heart; Wayward is about what a way out of that feeling might look like. I needed some distance from my own drama to really understand what that way out could be. I think that makes it an interesting and worthy follow-up to my most personal game.
That all still feels right to me.
Wayward made very little splash online even among my friends, which I get. While both of the stories are really important to me, Facets has all the cool game design and the immeasurable aesthetic appeal of default RM2k3 assets to prop it up. Wayward is just an amateur writer’s first stab at a short fantasy YA dystopia. It makes sense to me that folks aren’t as interested in the latter. (All the folks that did read it, you have my endless thanks ❤️)
It’s still really important to me at least. I took a break writing this post to reread a few of the later sections and quickly started crying about my OCs for the hundredth time in five years. I know I’ve still got a lot of room to grow as a writer. But I learned a lot writing this story, and I’m excited to put those lessons into practice. I’m excited to someday tell more stories I love as much as Facets and Wayward.
If you haven’t played any of Toby Alden’s games, go rectify that here! Their work is wonderful (I particularly love Rena Game and Family Mansion), and when they reached out about doing a collab with me, I jumped at the chance.
The initial prototype they sent me for Nymph’s Tower, which used placeholder art and only had the first tower, already felt really good and complete to me on its own. Toby’s platformers have a level of care to the feel and mood I don’t see in hobbyist spaces often. It’s nice to see someone that absolutely adores Knytt draw all the right lessons from Nifflas’s work. They asked me if I wanted to do a second tower with my own level design, and I was immediately excited to make cool Metroid-y maps using the play language Toby built.
Unfortunately, like with Afterward, this is one where I feel guilty about my performance as a collaborator. I dragged my feet for a year straight working on my parts of the tower. I’m aghast it took me so long, and apologized several times over to Toby at the time. I didn’t even finish the whole second tower; at a certain point I realized I was just spent and asked Toby to finish the last few areas.
But! I still think the maps I did do for this game are really dope, and Toby polished off the second tower beautifully. I haven’t done proper Metroid-y level design since Operation K.A.T.B., and it was fun to stretch those muscles again. The finished game is gorgeous too; the art from Reshma, John, and Sam is all amazing, and Muxer’s music rules. This is my only game where I was a firmly secondary collaborator, working with a friend to help realize their vision instead of helping spearhead the vision itself. It’s something I’d enjoy doing more often, assuming I can be a functioning person and actually finish my contributions promptly next time.
Game of the Year: Wayward
Unfortunately, like with Afterward, this is one where I feel guilty about my performance as a collaborator. I dragged my feet for a year straight working on my parts of the tower. I’m aghast it took me so long, and apologized several times over to Toby at the time. I didn’t even finish the whole second tower; at a certain point I realized I was just spent and asked Toby to finish the last few areas.
But! I still think the maps I did do for this game are really dope, and Toby polished off the second tower beautifully. I haven’t done proper Metroid-y level design since Operation K.A.T.B., and it was fun to stretch those muscles again. The finished game is gorgeous too; the art from Reshma, John, and Sam is all amazing, and Muxer’s music rules. This is my only game where I was a firmly secondary collaborator, working with a friend to help realize their vision instead of helping spearhead the vision itself. It’s something I’d enjoy doing more often, assuming I can be a functioning person and actually finish my contributions promptly next time.
Game of the Year: Wayward
2022
We’re just about caught up! I’m going to write a little less about these since they’re all fresh in my brain. You can look through the last year of posts for more detailed thoughts on them.
I’d spent two straight years completely swamped in mega-projects. My big RPGMaker explore-y game was slowly (slowly) coming together, but this was simply too much time spent on big games. I don’t like only working on (relatively) large projects. I like putting out lots of small games, because I love the rush of finishing and releasing a story. Plus I get more players and nice feedback, because again, a big game is no more likely to blow up than a little one. Even the biggest studios with massive marketing budgets can't guarantee something will become popular; ultimately, it’s all pulls on the slot machine.
In February 2023, my friend Drew posted an extremely good drawing of a seal orb on Discord. Less than 24 hours later, I released A Cold Place. It’s a five minute shitpost VN; I laughed a LOT putting it together. It’s inspired by the Ren’Py shitposts my friend Narf has released over the years. It’s a small and silly thing, and it delighted a lot of my friends.
A lot of the creators whose work I love are loose and improvisational — they release tons of tiny games, many of which they put together in a few hours or less. It’s a mode of expression in games I admire, and it’s something I want to get closer to, especially after getting bogged down in huge projects over and over. A Cold Place is short and silly, and it got my creative juices flowing for my most productive year of game development ever.
A lot of the creators whose work I love are loose and improvisational — they release tons of tiny games, many of which they put together in a few hours or less. It’s a mode of expression in games I admire, and it’s something I want to get closer to, especially after getting bogged down in huge projects over and over. A Cold Place is short and silly, and it got my creative juices flowing for my most productive year of game development ever.
Breathless started out as a short story with a very different, much hornier tone. It’s an idea I’ve had in my head for years. I started work on it shortly after Wayward. I finished the short story draft and... it didn’t work at all! I didn’t like it!
I basically rewrote it from scratch for the Twine version. It took months to come together. The final game’s word count is around 3000 words. I probably wrote and threw out 10,000+ words getting there. The big epiphany I had was making the linear beginning/ending bits shorter and expanding the nonlinear middle part. I wanted to try making it less of a short story and more actual interactive fiction.
I really love how it turned out! I’ve been playing Twine games for a decade, and I’d tried several times to whip up my own over the years. It felt really nice to finally finish and release one.
I basically rewrote it from scratch for the Twine version. It took months to come together. The final game’s word count is around 3000 words. I probably wrote and threw out 10,000+ words getting there. The big epiphany I had was making the linear beginning/ending bits shorter and expanding the nonlinear middle part. I wanted to try making it less of a short story and more actual interactive fiction.
I really love how it turned out! I’ve been playing Twine games for a decade, and I’d tried several times to whip up my own over the years. It felt really nice to finally finish and release one.
Gorgons’ Gaze was a prototype I’d had sitting around for over a year. The high of releasing A Cold Place energized me to go back into Twine and finish Breathless — finishing Breathless got me to go back and finish this prototype! Releasing games feels amazing, and when you build up momentum it gets so much easier to make and share stories.
Spider’s Hollow was more about the story than the puzzles — of the ten screens, more than half are devoted to light tutorializing or just setting the mood and telling the story. The epiphany with Gorgons’ Gaze was making it more of an actual puzzle game. Not only are there more puzzles, but they get pretty hard!
I play-tested it with friends diligently to make sure all the levels worked how I wanted. I was pretty astounded that many of them took almost an hour to finish it. That would horrify me with some of my projects, but with puzzle games I think having some teeth can be what makes them memorable and special. I decided to release it without toning down the puzzles at all, especially since the play-testers all seemed to have a good time.
All told the little prototype I made a few years back became a finished story in less than two weeks. It also wound up being my biggest release of the year by a wide margin, hilariously. There’s a bunch of folks online that love puzzle games and sokobans! I’m glad folks liked this game so much, and I want to do more straight-up puzzle games in the future.
All told the little prototype I made a few years back became a finished story in less than two weeks. It also wound up being my biggest release of the year by a wide margin, hilariously. There’s a bunch of folks online that love puzzle games and sokobans! I’m glad folks liked this game so much, and I want to do more straight-up puzzle games in the future.
Licorice Recoil started out as a literal shitpost, then wound up being my most high-effort production of the year outside maybe Breathless. I knew almost immediately after posting that thread I wanted to expand it into a little visual novel. But even that was going to be a ton of work just to get character art and backgrounds together (visual novels are hard!). I was literally in the shower when I thought about doing it as a Web 1.0 MIDI-backed story, like the ones I’d read in the early 2000’s on Geocities. That made it into something both exciting and doable, and I got to work. It took about a month to come together.
I really like this one, because it's cute and sweet, and because I've got a meta-attachment to the theming. I’ve made a lot of pretty dark, edgy stories. Sometimes folks say offhand that my games are all grim and sad. I feel defensive about that, because a lot of my games are cute and nice! I feel the same way about difficulty. I don’t like being pigeon-holed as someone that only makes hard games; many of my games, like this one, are gentle and straightforward.
I like all sorts of different flavors of games — I don’t think there’s one ultimate standard all stories can be judged by, one set of rules and virtues to uphold. All I try to do with each of my games is make them the best versions of themselves. Sometimes that results in bitter black licorice, sometimes sweet red licorice. Both are valid, and both speak for different parts of myself.
God I made so many games last year... Beach Balls was my first experiment with Love2D, a Lua framework for making your own videogame engines. It’s my first game where I coded the engine myself in a text editor. It’s also my first game where I made the music myself (using Bosca Ceoil). I didn’t borrow any assets to make this one. It may be a tiny one screen score attack game, but it’s my first game that's, in a way, entirely mine. That feels really cool, and it’s a direction I've had a lot of fun exploring this year.
Gardens of Vextro is the last game I contributed to in 2022, my 25th release, my final project of the decade. It’s only been seven months since we put it out — it feels hugely momentous still. It’s a chain game anthology by me and seven members of the Vextro community of game developers. I made the first game, then the other games were made sequentially, each responding to the previous games.
I’ve been writing these blurbs for a while and I’m very tired. I’m just going to copy-paste my commentary from Extras folder since it lays out most of what I want to say:
This whole thing started when we were talking about doing an Experiment 12-style chain game in the Vextro chat. I remarked that this was a discussion we seemingly had annually for like seven years, without ever actually making one. I asked the chat, if I made a starter game, would other folks want to participate and make their own game. I got several enthused responses, so I resolved to make one. Then I called my shot, and said that when I got home from work, I'd make the entire starter game that night.
So, Buried Flower was an exercise in me trying to slam out a complete game from start to finish in one sitting. This is not a natural mode of creation for me. Even my Flickgames simmered longer than one night. But I basically got there — I did some polishing the next morning, but it was pretty minimal, and I got it shared with the chat by noon the next day. The whole thing took about five hours of work.
It's basically a 1500 word short story, of course. It bloomed in my head pretty quick after I told the chat I’d make a starter game, and no real branching meant it was linear and quick to write the full story. I wanted to create a lot of narrative weight and hooks for friends to elaborate on in their games, and I think words are the most efficient means to communicate a lot of story very quickly in a gamedev context. The final anthology is fully half kinetic VN-style text games with no story-branching choices, which I think is really neat. It's very different from the original Experiment 12's approach, and it's one of the things that makes Gardens of Vextro feel like something only our crew could have made.
I used the formatting from my Twine game Breathless, so after slamming out the story itself in 2-3 hours, getting it into Twine wasn't hard. I think it still gains something from being in Twine; the added resonance of the everpresent "Leave" option obviously resonated with the other devs, since it recurs several times in the later games. The story itself is pretty well-trodden ground for me thematically, I joked after finishing it "oh great, another John game about doing a murder and feeling bad about it". But I still really dig how it turned out, and I think it's elevated by its inclusion with all my friends' amazing games.
Starting a chain game like this was extremely satisfying for me creatively. I get a ton out of joy out of inspiring friends to make things. All of ‘em had shared work before that I loved, but several hadn't released any games in a couple years, and one hadn't released a finished game at all. It made me really happy to help inspire artists I respect tremendously to make new amazing work. The whole project was a delight for me, and I’d love to participate in something similar again someday.
2022 wound up being my most productive year ever in terms of number of finished releases. It concluded with Gardens of Vextro, one of the coolest and best projects I’ve ever been a part of. It’s very rad that I’m ten years into this and I feel better about making and sharing art than I ever have. I’m writing more blog posts lately because I finally have some confidence that I know what I’m doing. I wouldn't be where I am without my communities and friendships. I plan to keep making art in some form or another for the rest of my life, and I love being surrounded by other creative people who support that goal.
This whole thing started when we were talking about doing an Experiment 12-style chain game in the Vextro chat. I remarked that this was a discussion we seemingly had annually for like seven years, without ever actually making one. I asked the chat, if I made a starter game, would other folks want to participate and make their own game. I got several enthused responses, so I resolved to make one. Then I called my shot, and said that when I got home from work, I'd make the entire starter game that night.
So, Buried Flower was an exercise in me trying to slam out a complete game from start to finish in one sitting. This is not a natural mode of creation for me. Even my Flickgames simmered longer than one night. But I basically got there — I did some polishing the next morning, but it was pretty minimal, and I got it shared with the chat by noon the next day. The whole thing took about five hours of work.
It's basically a 1500 word short story, of course. It bloomed in my head pretty quick after I told the chat I’d make a starter game, and no real branching meant it was linear and quick to write the full story. I wanted to create a lot of narrative weight and hooks for friends to elaborate on in their games, and I think words are the most efficient means to communicate a lot of story very quickly in a gamedev context. The final anthology is fully half kinetic VN-style text games with no story-branching choices, which I think is really neat. It's very different from the original Experiment 12's approach, and it's one of the things that makes Gardens of Vextro feel like something only our crew could have made.
I used the formatting from my Twine game Breathless, so after slamming out the story itself in 2-3 hours, getting it into Twine wasn't hard. I think it still gains something from being in Twine; the added resonance of the everpresent "Leave" option obviously resonated with the other devs, since it recurs several times in the later games. The story itself is pretty well-trodden ground for me thematically, I joked after finishing it "oh great, another John game about doing a murder and feeling bad about it". But I still really dig how it turned out, and I think it's elevated by its inclusion with all my friends' amazing games.
Starting a chain game like this was extremely satisfying for me creatively. I get a ton out of joy out of inspiring friends to make things. All of ‘em had shared work before that I loved, but several hadn't released any games in a couple years, and one hadn't released a finished game at all. It made me really happy to help inspire artists I respect tremendously to make new amazing work. The whole project was a delight for me, and I’d love to participate in something similar again someday.
2022 wound up being my most productive year ever in terms of number of finished releases. It concluded with Gardens of Vextro, one of the coolest and best projects I’ve ever been a part of. It’s very rad that I’m ten years into this and I feel better about making and sharing art than I ever have. I’m writing more blog posts lately because I finally have some confidence that I know what I’m doing. I wouldn't be where I am without my communities and friendships. I plan to keep making art in some form or another for the rest of my life, and I love being surrounded by other creative people who support that goal.
Solo Game of the Year: Licorice Recoil
Game of the Year: Gardens of Vextro
As much as I’d love to have another prolific year, my itch is probably going to be quiet for a bit. I have one short finished game ready to go; that’ll come out later this year as part of a larger collab anthology. I’m finishing up a pretty ambitious RPGMaker MZ thing that’ll hopefully be the start of a big collab with some cool friends. If everything goes smoothly, you probably won’t see that one for a couple years. I have a few Love2D solo things in the works, but they’re still a ways from being done.
I’m also working on an R18 Twine thing, something I’ve wanted to do for years. I’ve been playing and adoring tons of retro PC ero-RPGs and VN’s, and I’d love to channel more of that energy into my own work. If that comes together, I’ll probably open another itch profile just for R18 stuff. Everything here is under my real name, and I’d like smut to be nicely segmented off whenever I’m job-hunting in the future.
And of course, I still want to finish my RM2k3 huge map explore-y game... Gyahahaha, oh no, it sounds like I’m getting bogged down in mega-projects again.
Whatever. I know I’ll bounce back eventually. I’ve been doing this for a while, after all.
Thanks for reading. I’m having a lot of fun on this journey, and I'm happy other people are enjoying the ride too. I’m turning 30 this year — it’s wild just how much exploring I’ve done since I started this blog a decade ago. It makes me excited that I still have so much exploring left to do.
I had fun writing these pieces, patting myself on the back and reminiscing about all the work I’ve put out. I hope all this was useful to you, especially if you’re struggling to make art, to express yourself, to live creatively. Making art doesn’t have to be hard. It can just be putting one foot in front of the other, month after month, year after year. It can just be chasing little feelings of inspiration that delight you and making cool things happen on a screen.
Of course, a lot of my friends don’t need pep talks. So many of you are already galactic brained super-geniuses making amazing work. I’ve gotten untold joy from playing my friends' games this past decade, as much joy as I’ve gotten from my own work. Thank you for making things. Working alone in a vacuum wouldn't be any fun at all; it’s infinitely more satisfying making art in conversation with peers I respect.
Maybe I’ll do this again in 2033. See you then!
I had fun writing these pieces, patting myself on the back and reminiscing about all the work I’ve put out. I hope all this was useful to you, especially if you’re struggling to make art, to express yourself, to live creatively. Making art doesn’t have to be hard. It can just be putting one foot in front of the other, month after month, year after year. It can just be chasing little feelings of inspiration that delight you and making cool things happen on a screen.
Of course, a lot of my friends don’t need pep talks. So many of you are already galactic brained super-geniuses making amazing work. I’ve gotten untold joy from playing my friends' games this past decade, as much joy as I’ve gotten from my own work. Thank you for making things. Working alone in a vacuum wouldn't be any fun at all; it’s infinitely more satisfying making art in conversation with peers I respect.
Maybe I’ll do this again in 2033. See you then!
