2024-2025 Wrap-up

Episode Art by Sayara T.

It's been a while since the last proper wrap-up post! Let's do a little run-down of what I've been up to over the last few years.

• Rhete, Polly, and I restarted the Sockscast after a couple of years off. Between equipment updates and a much tighter episode run-time, I think we're making better radio than ever. The 2025 GOTY episodes are a great place to jump in!
• Launched a new website! Take a look around — I have links to my various web presences, lists of games I really like, and a whole mess of links to other cool sites. It feels good to have a home online that's mine again, instead of being wholly dependent on services like Itch or Blogger.
• Made five little games for Glorious Trainwrecks.
• Contributed to the 2024 Tunnels of Vextro and the 2025 Vextro Unplugged anthologies.
• Wrote a 45k word Twine, my largest prose work to date (published under a different label), plus a big post-release update a year later.
• Started writing games criticism again.
• Judged for the IGF twice, met some cool peers, played a bunch of very cool games. 
• Made a little Puzzlescript and then made a collab level pack with friends.
• Made a little Videotome horror short.
• Contributed a map to the Caves of ZZT Remix collab ZZT. 

There's nothing more reinforcing for an artist than having a community of brilliant, supportive peers. My friends in the Socks, Vextro, and Domino communities (plus friends that don't fit neatly into any of those boxes) have done more for my creative drive than anything else. 

This year's starting strong with the Cookie Cutter jam. We're getting an insane number of submissions! I made a whole one-hour micro-RPG in ten days! That's a very fast turn-around for me! After the jam, I'm hoping to polish off at least one of my two extant mega-projects, then slam out some more short-form works. Look forward to it!

Cookie Cutter RM2k3 Jam and Demon's Keep

pixie forest by peb

I still can't believe this one is happening. After being lightly bullied into it by some gamedev friends, I pulled the trigger on a game jam idea I've had in my back-pocket. I made a handful of maps in RPGMaker 2003, and challenged friends to make a complete game using only the maps I made. You can read the complete jam rules here.

The response has been insane! This is the first game jam I've run on Itch, and we've already gotten seventeen entries and counting. Over fifty people have joined the jam! I've played about half the entries so far, and I'm having a blast. The gamedev channel on the Socks discord has been popping off constantly since the jam started. The vibes have been warm and supportive and exactly what I'd want from an event like this.

Descent to the Underworld by onamint

RPGMaker 2003 is on sale on Steam for $2 until the 23rd. There are still nine days left on the jam — please feel free to jump in! Make a big epic project or a tiny shitpost or anything in-between, all are welcome.

I finished my entry, Demon's Keep, in about ten days. My aim was to make a Completely Normal RPG using the template maps, then balance and present it as tightly as I could with the RPGMaker skillset I've built up over the years. I think it turned out really good — give it a play, along with everyone else's submissions! I thought I'd be an early entry (and give friends a "normal game" baseline to bounce off and twist in wild directions), but instead a bunch of folks beat me to the punch. 

I couldn't be happier or more humbled by the response. I love to see a mix of gamedev vets and complete newcomers joining the jam. There are a lot of entries that are friends' very first uploads to itch! I hope to run (or help run) more events like this in the future. I get a tremendous amount of satisfaction from helping empower folks to make art.

Distant Times and Vextro Unplugged

I participated in my fourth Vextro anthology! The 2025 theme was "Vextro Unplugged," which everyone interpreted in different ways. This was a smaller one with just four entries, but I think they're all bangers. 

My entry was Distant Times. It's a collection of flash fiction I've written with my local writing group. At the time I got this together, I had about twenty pieces. I picked eight of them I particularly liked, polished them up, then figured out how to present them as a website, ePub, and PDF. (I also went back and updated Wayward to have proper web and ePub versions.) 

Formatting fiction for web is non-trivial. It took a while to figure out how to make the web page and ePubs look nice to me. There's a lot of overlap thankfully — behind the curtain, ePubs are just zipped up HTML/CSS files with some extra metadata. I generated the PDF with Pandoc. In the future, I'd like to build a pipeline with Pandoc that easily generates a web page, ePub, and PDF from a markdown file. I plan to release more prose fiction online in the future, so I want to make it as straightforward to maintain as possible.

I really like the eight pieces I picked. Many of them have the violent immediacy that I think characterizes a lot of my storytelling. A few go for something different though, in ways I think strengthen the overall collection. My favorite piece is probably A Wake (which I based the thumbnail image off of), but reader reactions have been pleasantly varied in terms of favorites. The total word count of all eight stories is a little under 10,000 words — give 'em a read if you're interested!

War in the Gut Biome by Sunday

Some quick rundowns of the other entries (plagiarizing my own itch comments since it's been a few weeks):

• it's easy and it gets easier by nilson. nilson is a champion at creating warm wet human texture in whatever medium he works in. This one is a short 3d walk-around game; like all his works it pulled me in and didn't let go, I felt something welling in my chest the whole time I played.
• War in the Gut Biome by vitasunday. PDF zine mixing RPGMaker assets and tropes with local LA food culture. Pure joy from start to finish, had a big grin on my face the whole time I read it.
• SIMROT by wasnotwhynot. Wuzzy writes stories that sit in my spine and spiral inward, tightening and tightening the more I read. This one shares some elements in common with Whole Numbers, another recent fave from their output. This one is meaty at 12k words, and I really enjoyed the journey it took me on.

I love my cool brilliant friends and I love participating in these jams. I can't wait to see what everyone makes next!

Sketch Gamedev and Glorious Trainwrecks

Since late 2024, I've shared five little games on Glorious Trainwrecks, a site I've adored for a long time. The intent was to embrace "sketch gamedev," to slam out tiny games in a few hours a-piece. I've enjoyed many games made in this mode by others. I thought posting on the site, which is all about this spirit of playful experimentation, would help me enter it myself. (Glorious Trainwrecks is also a creative crucible that helped forge many of my all-time favorite freeware devs. In my arrogance, I thought contributing to the site would help my own light shine similarly bright.)

I failed miserably at my goal. I did successfully slam out a couple games in a day or two each. Then the third one took a week. Then the fourth and fifth ones took multiple weeks spread out over several months each. Ah well. 

The first game was Broccoli, a tiny RPGMaker 2003 "horror" game. I made it the same way I've continued approaching flash fiction for our local writer's club. I generated ten random words on this site, picked two ("broccoli" and "horror"), then made a game. I got the bulk of it down in 2-3 hours, then polished it up and posted it the next day. I consider this a Success in terms of "embracing sketch dev," and if I'd continued with this approach I'd be writing a different blog post.

A little before Christmas last year, I released Action Sketches on itch. It collects the remaining four games I released on Glorious Trainwrecks, all action games made in Love2d. (My favorite is probably Danse Macabre, made in about a week, but I like all of them.) 

If I really wanted to make sketch games, I needed to use easy tools I'm comfy with like RPGMaker, Bitsy, or Twine. I'm still very much a newbie when it comes to coding games from scratch, and making even simple games in Love takes me a long time. I did learn a lot about how I like organizing and building games on the back-end, and I feel much better equipped to tackle other projects in the future. So, still a win ultimately, even if I didn't turn out a whole feast of games like I wanted.

There's one more "problem" that got in the way of me making sketch games. Every single one of these I put out, friends immediately jumped in, live-posted them, and said nice things to me. I have an intensely supportive peer group of artist friends; I want to reward their care and attention with competent, enriching art. That's an extra bit of self-imposed (and obviously optional!) pressure that makes it harder to just throw something together, to not worry endlessly about whether it "works" or not.

I want to keep experimenting with quicker modes of creation (in addition to longer form works, of course). I might try approaching it like I have my flash fiction, mostly keeping it to myself and a few close peers, then releasing a collection of works I particularly like all at once. Or maybe I'll get over myself and post a bunch of art on Glorious Trainwrecks (or elsewhere) again. My friend sraëka has been doing that on itch for the last few months and they're having a lovely time.

It was a good experiment. I've been at this in earnest for thirteen years; I think I'm finally figuring out what I want my art practice to look like, one teeny tiny step at a time.