In 2022, I set out with one goal:¹ finish six games, with at least half being games in progress before 2022. As I did in the previous year, games will be ordered based on when I started working on them.

To my great surprise, 2022 was an unqualified success. I surpassed my initial goal of six (although still only three were in-progress games), and the games were, for the most part, much chunkier than my 2019 games. Of special note is ProtoBound, which I didn’t think I’d ever finish.

Timeline

Because I’m obsessed with them now (and I’ve been updating it as I’ve been working on projects, making it quite accurate), here’s the timeline. An * indicates a finished project, a + indicates an evergreen project like one of my released packages or my blog, and a - indicates an ongoing project that I did some work on. Anything without an indicator is a new unfinished shame for me to carry on to new years.

I really started struggle to come up with colors after the halfway point here. I should just stick with a palette for next year.

I’ll be discussing these in the order in which I started the projects, mentioning changes to KHPackageCore and Menutee under the games that I made the changes for, and covering blog posts at the end. This means that for some projects, primarily FBD, there will be some jumping around in the timeline, but it seemed more comprehensible than interleaving the games. This will cause me to reference some games that won’t appear until much later, but I don’t think there’s a good way to get around that.

Main Projects

FBD Gaiden (New)

December–January

I started working on a spin-off game for Four Block Drop on the 28th of December, getting an early start on the inevitable Tetris January. However, for the first time in years, the motivation just wasn’t there. I did the mildest amount of work until the 30th of December, then just poked at it a couple times in January. I suspect that much of my time was taken up playing games instead of making them.

On the 13th I abandoned all pretense of working on Four Block Drop, as my attention turned to another project.

July

On the 11th of July, I decided that I should come back to my Four Block Drop spin-off. After all, if I left too many new games unfinished, I thought, I’d end up going backwards for the year.² Only—and this is the really stupid part—I’d rewrite it all in Unity, ignoring all my work I’d done in the Typescript version.

I set myself an audacious goal of the 16th for the core gameplay, and the 31st for the full game. On the 15th, I got Tetris working. One day later, I got the core excavation gameplay implemented. That meant that all I needed to do was art, menus, audio, music, and polish.³

I was fairly motivated until the 23rd, at which point I decided I wanted to push my initial deadline of July 31st, as I thought it had the opportunity to be something that felt really good and I didn’t want to rush against the deadline of the start of 2022 LOWREZJAM. I’d come back to it right after that, right? Of course not.

December

December hit, and I realized that if I wanted to finish this project in 2022, I’d need to get going, so I picked it back up on the second and by the seventh I’d fallen off. Reading would dominate the rest of the year (and the first couple months of 2023.)⁴

CHIP-8 Emulation (Misc.)

When I was reading one of the many articles about how easy to start and hard to perfect a Game Boy emulator was, I came across a post recommending that for people who wanted to dip their toes into emulation, a CHIP-8 emulator⁵ was the place to start. As a programmer, the siren song of writing an emulator often calls to me, and this time I listened.

I wrote an emulator in C# for Unity and documented some of the pitfalls of my CHIP-8 implementation, along with a few additions, here. For the most part, I had a lovely time working on it, and it had the bonus of reigniting my interest to work on HodgePodge, as a CHIP-8 emulator could easily become one of the rooms.

I successfully completed the CHIP-8 and SuperChip components, but stalled out while trying to finish the sound components of the XO-Chip spec additions. It required some sound programming techniques in Unity that I was woefully unqualified to do, and it ended up draining my motivation.

What I Learned

1. Emulators are fun, but a huge pain to troubleshoot bugs for.
2. Did some more shader work, which was interesting.

HodgePodge (In-Progress)

Despite losing motivation on the XO-Chip component, I pivoted my interest into HodgePodge in mid January. I started working on some shaders for the CHIP-8 room as well as some other ideas, but the motivation was quickly extinguished. I suspect that this is a problem I’ll regularly have with HodgePodge—it relies more on level design creativity than anything else I’ve done.

There are a few fits and starts with HodgePodge, often backporting changes or testing out new concepts,⁶ but I came back to it in October 4th for a concept that I was waffling between adding as a room or as its own game. In the end, I decided to split it out to its own game, which will be covered much later in the retrospective.⁷

Why Didn’t I Finish

This was one of the games I identified for my shortlist, and one of the games I had the most passion to work on. So why didn’t I finish? Well, I mentioned it above, but it’s very asset heavy, and that’s something that have trouble with. Additionally, it is the testbed I use for trying out things, so often code ends up being in an intermediate state that I need to clean up.

And since this was a carryover and not something I committed to finishing, I didn’t finish it. I still do want to finish it though.

America is Bleeding. (In-Progress)

America is Bleeding. is the final name for the project I codenamed Connection Terminated in 2021. While I do have it on my shortlist of games that I wanted to finish in 2022, I didn’t expect I’d finish it, as it was heavily art-focused. Additionally, I’d mentioned it as a possible submission to the 2022 HPS1 demo disc, but the deadline for that was the 31st of January, a tight deadline for a game that had essentially zero world design done for it.

However, on January 27th, it was announced that the deadline for the demo disc would be extended to April 30th, three months later. This lit a fire under me, and I resumed work on it on the 28th. I set a goal of March 31st for finishing the game, a month before the deadline. I figured that would help me get the game into a workable state with plenty of time to spare.⁸

The first blocker for my motivation was making all the models I needed for the game—they were required to have a navigatable world, but I didn’t want to lock myself into any particular layout. I overcame this hurdle by gray-boxing my environments, allowing me to set up my gameplay flow while getting a feel for how I wanted the world space to be.

Once I got over that hump, I was able to sustain my motivation well while setting up all the different object interactions. I added a bulletin board that you could pin up your hints to, and established a nice flow for creating assets with similar pixel sizes. My bugbear became the computer with which you’d input all of your solutions. I decided not to use Menutee, but instead custom-coded the layout and interactions.

I had wanted to create an on-screen keyboard so that a controller could be used throughout the whole game, but this, along with the tedious UI work, was combining in a nasty way that was draining my motivation to work on the game. My period of high motivation came to an end on February 15th, exacerbated by family health issues and a non-insignificant amount of work stress.

Despite my flagging motivation, I managed to get a theoretically releasable version of the game ready on the 25th, over a month before my deadline. I wanted to also introduce a secret puzzle and chat logs that you could navigate, but left that for later. It was at that point that I once again became quite enamored with the idea of working on HodgePodge, but that fizzled out quickly after it started.

Wanting to stretch myself out of my comfort zone, I signed myself up for C.H.A.I.N. 2, a sequel to the original C.H.A.I.N., which is essentially the exquisite corpse concept applied to a series of games. While I wasn’t actually committing myself to work on it yet, it was a bold step into something I hadn’t tried yet—working on a collaborative project with a hard deadline.

The aforementioned work and family stress caused me to have no motivation for the vast majority of March. On the 27th, I decided to force myself back into development, hoping to meet that March 31st deadline that I had set months previous.⁹ I quickly cut the secret puzzle idea and managed to finish the 1.0.0 version for the 31st.

I had some people I know online playtest it, and not one of them finished it. In fact, some of them didn’t solve any of the four puzzles. They did provide some feedback which I used to polish up the game. I submitted it as a potential entry to the demo disc on April 4th. This was a big step for me. I’m a hobbyist developer, and I felt guilty about potentially stealing the limelight from developers who wanted to pursue a full-time career more. Additionally, there are many incredibly talented developers, and I tend to have a healthy amount of self-doubt about my more ambitious games.

I’m proud of myself for taking that step. I decided that if it did get accepted into the demo disc, I’d expand it into a full-sized game, making it twelve puzzles instead of four. I even specced out some of the puzzles.

On June 15th, I got my answer as to whether or not the game would be on the demo disc—I was not selected. And you know what? It was fine. The game was niche and the competition was fierce: there were 62 submissions total of which 18 were picked, a roughly 30% acceptance rate. It didn’t hurt that I was deep into another project at the time, and really didn’t have much of a desire to come back America is Bleeding., seeing it as more of a complete project anyway.¹⁰

I ended up releasing the game publicly on June 17th to, well, a not-great reception. I had wanted to make a challenging puzzle game that functioned similar to an ARG’s puzzle in terms of complexity, and I think I succeeded.¹¹ For the most part, the people who played it were not the people that I was targeting—horror fans more than complex puzzle fans.

Still, I’m very proud of the work I’ve done, and I think the puzzles in the game are all quite interesting—especially the one that requires a real radio.¹²

What I Learned

1. Making puzzle games is hard
2. I can make a somewhat good looking game if I put my mind to it
3. Failure is fine (again)

Being a Good Uncle (Reprise)

After finishing submitting America is Bleeding. for consideration, I was somewhat adrift. I tried to go back to HodgePodge to create a network of rooms, but I didn’t gain purchase. At a loss for what to do, I decided I’d go back to Ninja TriWars, the game that I made to my nephew’s design.

The physics system in it had always been a little bit janky, with enemies sometimes bouncing unintentionally when they turned, and some weapons being considerably weaker than they should be. After updating the version of Unity and my libraries, I decided to try to tackle that.

It didn’t work and I fell off of it fairly quickly, in large part due to heavy motivation to work on The Insatiable Tomb of Ratakanen, and it fell off to the side.

In October, my nephew began requesting Ninja TriWars updates again. I took his desires into consideration, and started work on it again in late October, hoping to get an update out for his birthday. However, because I’m me, I still wanted to fix those pernicious physics issues as well as some other little oversights. I once again updated the Unity version and got to work.

His requests were fairly tame: an introduction with his story and a new flying enemy. The intro was fairly easy, and I was able to knock that out fast. Surprisingly, this time not only did I not burn out on fixing the physics, but I was also about to do it easily and without issue. Go figure.

There were a lot of QOL improvements: menus, a hitmarker, better physics, more complete sounds, cleaner level generation. But, unknown to my nephew, I wanted to give him a nice surprise:¹³ a second boss. I started working on the boss on the 30th of October, and it took me through the 5th of November to get it done. His requested flying enemy was considerably faster, and I managed to get it done by the ninth, which meant that I’d beat my deadline for a few days.

I should finally publish this publicly some day, but there’s always a few corners that I cut that I want to fix and always more projects to get to. Maybe next year?

What I Learned

1. Voice acting is a pain
2. How to write the Sutherland-Hodgman algorithm

The Insatiable Tomb of Ratakanen (New)

On April 14th, I started reading The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin, the second book in The Earthsea Cycle. It’s somewhat of a fluke that I read this at all. The Earthsea books had been highly recommended to me, but the first one did not grab me at all, as I found it somewhat plodding and tedious. However, in an effort to try to puzzle out what he saw in these books and because someone else had said The Tombs of Atuan was one of his favorite books, I decided to give the series a second shot.

I had a fantastic time with The Tombs of Atuan. I tore through it in days. It sparked my imagination, and it is one of two times that a book has inspired me to create a game.¹⁴ The idea of having dark caverns that you navigate solely through touch, counting the number of passages you pass before you turn got stuck in my brain. I started to think about what a game based around only the sense of touch would feel like.

This game was intentionally designed with fun as a non-goal. You navigate underground area in pitch darkness, having only the nearest walls and any pitfalls shown to you in the form of a zoomed-in minimap. It’s incredibly easy to get lost, and making a map by hand is all but required. It uses Bloed for level design, which ended up giving it a blocky atmosphere.

Most of my time was spent on level design, and it’s easily my most expansive game. There are twelve distinct underground zones, which you can only tell from a few candles in the darkness and the texture of your created game maps. There are bottomless pits. It is intentionally an unforgiving experience, and the intended difficulty has permadeath.

I worked on this like I was possessed until the 3rd, at which point I lightened development to put out a few blog posts. I resumed work on Ratakanen, giving it my full game-dev free time attention. May was a busy month for me, as I had many relatives visiting, so this went slower than it would’ve otherwise.

Looking back on it, I’m surprised I managed to motivate myself to do so much level design. I suppose that’s the power of a compelling idea. I finished it on the 15th of May, although I released it two days later when I had some free time to monitor comments. Coincidentally, this marked when my work started requiring that we return to the office, further cutting down into my development time.¹⁵

Strangely, despite it not being a game that I personally enjoy and a game designed to not be fun, more than one person has told me that they enjoyed playing it. Go figure. Later progress in the year is bugfixes.

With this and America is Bleeding. finished, I found myself 15 days behind schedule, something far from insurmountable. After all, I planned on doing the low rez game jam, which would only take two weeks, and CHAIN 2, which would take one.

What I Learned

1. The Tombs of Atuan is fantastic.¹⁶
2. How to use Bloed
3. Relearned the power of having a muse
4. I used bolt to script some of the action sequences, which was much more easy to follow the flow of than my previous approach of chaining together MonoBehaviors using my Action framework.

lowercase freecell (In-Progress)

In mid-May, I came up with a stupid theory—you can classify gamers into two groups: those who prefer Klondike Solitaire¹⁷ (those who prefer more chance-based games) and those who prefer FreeCell Solitaire (those who prefer perfect knowledge skill-based games). This, obviously, is nothing, but it did make me want to play FreeCell again.¹⁸ It turns out most versions of FreeCell just simply aren’t very good. They either lack critical features, like undo, have wonky controls, or are chock-full of ads and mechanics intended to addict you.

It occurred to me that I had started working on Solitaire back in February 2020.¹⁹ This was a golden opportunity to make the best version of FreeCell, as I had worked on Solitaire professionally before, and I really like FreeCell.

Because I don’t like making anything easy, I decided that this should be a generic Solitaire that I could extend to support any number of different Solitaire games.²⁰ This one attribute wasn’t all that difficult, but there were some components, like complex card-flipping logic, that I did write myself into a corner around if I wanted to do some weird Solitaire variants.

Because it’s FreeCell, I had a working demo to show my focus group²¹ in the 27th of May. Reactions were positive.²²

That version of FreeCell was playable, but missing may of the bells and whistles, like advanced hinting, menus, stats, settings, and saves. I also wanted to animate in and out the menus, something that Menutee hadn’t supported.²³

FreeCell went through quite a few rounds of polishing and over-complicated design to support multiple types, and on the 7th of June, I set a deadline for the 14th. After all, a month of development for FreeCell just feels like too much time. I met that deadline with two days to spare, putting me about half a month ahead of schedule.²⁴

What I Learned

1. You can work on even the simplest games forever if you don’t give yourself a firm deadline
2. Over-engineering can be a non-insignificant waste of time

Fighter’s Guild (In-Progress)

Fighter’s Guild is my 2021 NaNoWriMo project. I did hit the word goal, but I didn’t end up with a story written from start to finish and, furthermore, it wasn’t in a usable format, instead just a bunch of Google Doc sections. So, on the 12th of June, I picked it back up. By the 17th, I’d written it all in a format that ink could handle, but my motivation was waning.

I’d decided to do it all in Unity, which loses a lot of the infrastructure that twine gives you by default. Also, I’d been running myself pretty ragged. I had been going hard on game development for months, and I’d been trying to reread the entire Cradle series before the eleventh book came out.²⁵ All of this together made it slow going, but I managed to do a bit a day until July 4th,²⁶ when I dropped it to finish a higher priority in-progress game.

I came back to Fighter’s Guild to make the battle system, which I planned to use in another project I was able to start.²⁷ It went well, and I was able to finish it in only a few days.

Why I Didn’t Finish

This was another one of the projects I specifically called out, but I was bearish on the prospect of finishing it there. It’s a large project that had already consumed a month of writing, and I find it much easier to write to a deadline than when self-motivated. Many of the gaps that I had (and still have) I hadn’t figured out how to bridge, and there’s a lot of boring infrastructure work to get it all working in Unity.

I am excited for this project,²⁸ but the periods I’ve tried to work on it have had lacking motivation.

lowercase mine (New)

While fighting off a lack of motivation on Fighter’s Guild, I became more enamored with the idea of making a version of Diamond Mine Solitaire.²⁹ This was partly because I wondered how the game would play with a few tweaks, but also I wanted to see what parts of my over-engineered solution weren’t over-engineered enough. Maybe because I’d worked on a bunch of month-long projects and I wanted a quick win too.

I started work on my version of diamond mine on June 20th. I had a good time designing my variant,³⁰ with this probably the most strictly game design focused work I’ve done. I finished it on the 24th, and released it on itch the day after. Despite my goal being to make a generic Solitaire infrastructure, there were things that I ended up hardcoding (like the background color and card backs) that I never ended up fixing. Oh well, I’ll get to it eventually, maybe.

This put me two months ahead of schedule, and made me fairly confident I would hit my goal. I only needed two more games total, with one of those being an in-progress one.

What I Learned

1. Sometimes over-engineering is good
2. Tweaking game design can be fun

Into the Maze. (In-Progress?)

This is a project for a collab that I started on last year (under the name Shining Hedge Maze). I was doubtful that it was going to release, but on June 27th, some renewed interest on the relevant discord got me to update my libraries, export a new version, and finish up the itch page. It then went radio silent for a while, but then the day after I decided I was just going to release it, it got brought up again. This will release eventually. Probably.³¹

Why I Didn’t Finish

I did. I’m just waiting for other people to finish.

ProtoBound (In-Progress)

Also on the 27th of June, I picked back up ProtoBound (Untitled Bound Project or Bound in previous posts). I’m not quite sure what made me pick this up in particular, but I was looking for something that’d get me jazzed while Fighter’s Guild wasn’t exciting me. Multi-tasking development is generally a bad idea for me,³² but I was getting so little work done on Fighter’s Guild every day.

The first thing I did when I picked ProtoBound back up was to revert all the changes I’d made on a branch. I then worked to simplify some of the existing code and try to understand it comprehensively. In the biggest step, I actually managed to finish refactoring the layout system on July 3rd. This prompted me to drop work on Fighter’s Guild, as I could see that finishing this game was plausible.

I set a deadline for the 11th, hoping to spur myself into action. This was a game I started work on in 2014, so I was eager to get something out. I finished it several days ahead of schedule, on the ninth, and released it a day later. I was so excited that I wrote a blog post about it here.

What I Learned

1. It’s possible to finish long-running projects!
2. Aggressively cutting scope can be good
3. Sometimes refactoring works, if you cut out the hard parts

Thirty-Six (New)

Going into LOWREZJAM, I was planning to make a Super Mario Land-style shmup. That plan ran into a solid wall against my motivation, or lack thereof. I was adrift until I thought of a game that I’d played recently that had abstract gradings of your performance[^ts1] along with my sister’s previous jam entry, which made the player figure out what to do in a game without rules.

Why not take it a bit farther, I thought, and do something a bit player hostile.³³ I ended up making a 6x6 grid with 20 different puzzles which did not tell you the rules, you could fail easily, and only play once.³⁴ It was themed as if it was a real single-player board game (somehow magically enchanged). It would end with a rating of your performance. If you visit the webpage again, you just see that rating.

It felt good to work on a game jam again; it’d been almost exactly two years since my last one (LRJ2020), and I kind of felt like I wasn’t capable of quick development anymore. Despite never being super motivated to work on this, I managed to finish it in a week, which put me one week ahead of the deadline for the jam. I had enough time to make a 3D render of what the game looked like, which was a lot of fun. It was a cute contrast to the ultra low-rez nature of the actual game.

LOWREZJAM is a scored jam, which is normally something I don’t care about. However, I will perpetually be bitter about my authenticity score in every jam, which is ostensibly whether it’s 64x64 pixels or not. This one 100% fit the criteria, as have my two previous entries. What did I get for authenticity? A five? No. A 4.643. Don’t ask me why.

What I Learned

1. This was the first full 3D scene I rendered.

C.H.A.I.N.G.E. (New)

I could have signed up for the original C.H.A.I.N. back in 2020, but I was worried about my ability to deliver an interesting game on a prompt that was out of my control. As part of my efforts to stretch my comfort zone, I signed up for the new branching version way back in February 25th.

I was given the previous games in my branch on August 28th to ponder, although it would take a week or so before I’d play them, before starting development on September 13th for a week. I finished on the 18th, adding an extra feature in response to feedback the day after. Whether the game I delivered is interesting or not is up to the player, but I had fun trying to implement a combat system that was communicated clearly in a dungeon crawler environment.

It gave me good opportunity to make my core package more robust, as I added support for extending the dialogue system with custom tags as well as some other miscellaneous functionality. All in all, it was a nice experience, and it was good to realize that, yes, I can make a game in a week, even if I have to continue someone else’s story, which constrains the gameplay types I can use.

It isn’t out yet, but my part is finished, and theoretically the whole package should be out within a month or two.³⁵

What I Learned

1. This was my first time fully implementing a turn-based combat system.

Pier (New)

In early October, I was replaying the excellent programming game Else Heart.Break(). Initially, it made me want to write a programming game, although I ended up being inspired to make a chill vibing area, as the game has a lot of places that just have a really nice vibe to them. I wanted to make a relaxing experience, where you just sit on a pier, see the waves, and listen to music.

If it looks like I was developing HodgePodge and Pier in tandem, that’s because I was, more or less. I was unsure if I wanted Pier to be its own thing, or for it to be a room in HodgePodge. As such, much of my development incidentally drove development in HodgePodge, like credits or menu improvements. Similarly, I was having a lot of fun making infrastructure and tools, which often got merged into KHPackageCore.

The tandem development ended on October 10th, when I decided I wanted to use URP (the Unity Universal Render Pipeline) instead of the built-in render pipeline. Since I’d invested heavily in the BIRP for HodgePodge and you can’t use multiple render pipelines in the same game, I decided to split this out. Development was paused on the 14th of October, when the A Game By Its Cover jam started. Unfortunately, I have yet to come back to this one, but it’s not too far from being finished.

Why Didn’t I Finish

I got distracted by the AGBIC jam, and a later game was similar enough and drained my motivation enough that I had no desire to return at the time. Hopefully I’ll finish it off in 2023.

THIS MAZE HATES YOU. (New)

The A Game By Its Cover jam is a very chill jam in which you take a fictional cartridge for a Famicom game from the annual My Famicase Exhibition and, with the creator’s permission, make a game inspired by it. I forget how I came across the jam, but I immediately got taken by two covers, Moss and This Maze is Not Fair.

The jam started on October 14th, and I got to work on what would become THIS MAZE HATES YOU. I was enamored by the idea of an infinite perfect maze,³⁶ and wanted to see if I could do it. Long story short, I did, and documented my experience here. A week and some change after the start, on October 23rd, I finished the game and submitted it to the jam.

What I Learned

1. It’s kind of possible to make an infinite perfect maze if you cheat a little.

CALM MOSS (New)

Remember how I said I was inspired by two Famicase covers? Well, I made two games for the jam, the second one being inspired by Moss. It was a long one, extending from October 14th to November 15th (later extended to the 30th). Also notably, it’s unrated and working on pre-existing games is fine.

So, I decided, why not take the concept of Pier and apply it to some mossy and grassy environments? Failing to think of any reasons why not, I started work on what would become CALM MOSS on October 24th. It began by getting Pier into a workable state and then branching the project off into its own thing.

Motivation was not completely there, and I ended up halting work on this on the 24th. This, if you’ll remember, is around when my nephew’s birthday was, and I wanted to give myself plenty of time to update that to my satisfaction.

I also had to take action to prevent my free Heroku app from going kaput, which required that I update a bunch of PHP code,³⁷ which evolved into me refactoring it and adding features. It ended up being a fun jaunt into some of my old code (much of it from over 10 years ago!).

Naturally, I went right back to CALM MOSS. Well, not quite. There was a little interlude before I got back to CALM MOSS on November 21st.³⁸ I still wasn’t inspired to work on it, but I managed to get it out on the 26th.

I wasn’t all that enthusiastic about it, but it was done! In the end, that lack of enthusiasm coupled with just how similar it was to Pier made it so I didn’t go back to that this year.

What I Learned

1. This is the first time I’ve used the terrain tool in a game, and it wasn’t the most encouraging experience.

Space Cards (New)

For a three day period from November 18th to the 20th, I must have been possessed. I should have been working on CALM MOSS. Instead, what was I doing? Working on a roguelike deckbuilder. Now, it’s important to point out two things.

1. I don’t like roguelikes.³⁹
2. I don’t like deckbuilers.⁴⁰

So why was I working on a roguelike deckbuilder? I have no idea. Mercifully, I regained my wits relatively quickly and got back to the jam game, leaving only an unfinished game as a memory.

Why didn’t I Finish

Common sense prevailed.

Sacrifice Game (In-Progress)

Way back in 2021, I had planned to make a short JRPG about a mercenary contracted to kill the archetypal JRPG sacrifice. That ended up getting sidetracked immediately by Fighters' Guild, but I still wanted to make it. Deciding not to actually do it in RPG Maker after all, I started writing it in twine. I poked at it between late November and early December, but didn’t make too much progress.

Why didn’t I Finish

I got sidetracked by games, books, and a couple blog posts. Mainly the reading.

Miscellaneous Projects

This section is for games that I can’t publicly talk about in detail and unreleased but finished carryovers from last year that are here for my own historical interest.

Another Secret Game

The previous year, I’d mentioned a secret group project I’d finished and a second one that I started. The second one continued into mid 2022. We finished working on it August 30th, although unfortunately it will almost assuredly not see the light of day. Still, it was good experience working with people, and good, talented people at that.

Working on games for my own satisfaction is not something that bothered me; in fact, I have several finished games that I made for fun prior to the publishing of BinPuzzlin that I never released at all. I would toss them up, but they’re mostly locked to the iOS platform, and I don’t care to pay money to publish there, nor do I have a macbook to do so.

Blog!

I intentionally had no goals for blog posts in 2022, but I ended up writing fifteen posts in 2022, surpassing the thirteen I wrote the previous year. It was a good year for writing!

A Productive Year

All in all, a very productive year. It had the most releases since 2019, and overall the games were chunkier than the average game I made that year. I hit my goal of six games released total, with three being in-progress games and then some, actually releasing eight. I polished off three in-progress games: lowercase freecell, America is Bleeding., and, most notably, ProtoBound. Additionally, I made more progress on HodgePodge, Fighters Guild, and Sacrifice.

Now, did I end the year with fewer in-progress games than I started with? Well, no. Joining the ranks of the unfinished games are Four Block Drop Gaiden, Pier, and my greatest shame, Space Cards.⁴¹ All in all, I ended up neutral in terms of games finished. That said, the former two are quite close to release and, while they don’t technically fit into my goal for 2023, I could see them slipping in.⁴²

Unfinished Games

This yearly post is probably the best place to keep track, so here it is (ordered by how likely I perceive me finishing it):

1. Pier
2. Four Block Drop Gaiden
3. Sacrifice Game
4. HodgePodge
5. Fighter’s Guild
6. Strange Traveler
7. PushPull
8. Low Rez Explorer
9. Space Cards
10. Escape Room Professor
11. Boar3D
12. DaleZ