In 2023, I wanted to focus on making games that focused on writing, with the goal of making six writing-focused games.¹ No matter how you spin it, this goal was an unqualified failure. Blog posts were down from 15 to 2. That’s a lot less writing! There are a few reasons I can guess for this, which I’ll touch upon as I go through.

Timeline

Here’s this year’s timeline.

Same meanings as last time:
* indicates a finished project.
+ indicates an evergreen project like one of my released packages or my blog.
- 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.

A Inauspicious Start

During the final month of 2022, I was doing a lot of reading. That focus got my creative juices flowing, and it’s what made me decide to go with my goal of writing. That continued for far, far longer than I thought it would. Until about halfway through March, that’s the primary thing that I did with my free time. You’ll see the influences with the games that I started during this period, as they’re exclusively influenced by what I was reading at the time. The lion’s share of the reading that I did was The Wandering Inn, which I caught up with (at the time) during that time period.

The Wandering Inn is long, like “probably the longest work of fiction” long.² Reading it was an undertaking, and it was one that actually demotivated me from writing after I finished it. The author writes an incredible amount every week and the writing is all higher quality than what I’d put out. I know it’s foolish to compare, but it is what it is and I am who I am.

Ruler (New, Writing)

This arose from reading the web serial, He Who Fights With Monsters. I’d felt like it raised the potential for some compelling questions being asked of the player in prioritization as some sort of demigod. I had a lot of ideas, but writing was sparse. A common trend here and later is that I get hung up on game mechanics and branching pathways and don’t actually end up writing much of anything. That happened here.

Only really notable for being the first thing I tried to finish, as I worked on it for only a few days.

Time Loop (New, Writing)

This arose from reading Mother of Learning. I wanted to do a sort of free form time loop game. I did do a moderate amount of work on it, but I stalled out when I realized that 1. I really should have a world map and 2. twine might not be the right tool for it. Bizarrely, most of the work I did was writing content for newspapers the player could look at as well as, once again, hypothesizing the gameplay mechanics. The player customization screen was going to be a newspaper, but still, weird priorities.

That said, this really does feel like a more natural fit for ink + Unity than Twine, and it really does need a world map. I think this project would be very cool, but it would be a colossal undertaking. This one got a bit more effort, but ultimately not anywhere close to moving the needle.

Sacrifice (In Progress, Writing)

Sacrifice was, of course, a natural fit for wanting to get something done. Its scope is small (probably under 10,000 words), so when I finished reading, this is what I gravitated towards. However, as I’d fallen out of a desire for writing, it quickly fell by the wayside.³

I’ll touch on this more in a later section, but part of what was holding me back was wanting to include a battle system. I’d have to do some sort of Twine integration, which didn’t hold that much appeal for me. I would come back to it a couple more times, but it still remains under halfway finished, writing included. I did end up porting it from twine to ink,⁴ which lets me continue forward with it as a Unity game, leveraging the actual code of the battle system from Sanctuary’s Grasp, although I’d want a different UI.

The Labyrinth of Myclasia (New, Writing)

I forget⁵ what it was that drew me towards business card RPGs,⁶ but whatever it was, it bodied Sacrifice out of the way. In a span of a day or two, I’d settled on the game mechanics and the card design. It probably could be better, but hey, it was my freshman effort in the space.

While the hundred words that made up the game didn’t feel like it qualified as a writing-based game to me, I had the thought to justify it as counting by playing the game myself and including it as a sample. That didn’t go quite as fast. It was another month before I finished the sample, and yet another before I finally released it.

I’m glad that I stuck it out and finished this, although ultimately I just don’t think journaling games are my thing.

HodgePodge (In Progress, Non-Writing)

My new perennial project. Despite it being unambiguously non-writing-based, I figured it I was going to procrastinate, it might as well be on another game development project. I made a good amount of progress on this, modernizing it, fleshing out some of the rooms, and adding two new ones.⁷ Since I was making good progress, it would have been foolish to sabotage my motivation by switching projects, so on the March 31st, I decided that I definitely wasn’t going to participate in Dungeon Crawler Jam 2023, which started on the April 1st.

Sanctuary’s Grasp (New, Non-Writing)

On April 1st, I started on a project for Dungeon Crawler Jam 2023.⁸ I settled on a battle system based on the one from Helen’s Mysterious Castle, although with no grind, no randomness, and you could skip fights that you’d already done before. I’d love to play more games like it. While I had some of the infrastructure from my C.H.A.I.N.G.E. née Dungeon Crawler project, I ended up rewriting the battle system and movement entirely for the jam.

This was a large undertaking, and I’m impressed that it managed to come out as well as it did. I sometimes get into a funk near the end of the development of one of my games, which manifests in having no desire to touch it nor any confidence in its quality as a product.

It hit particularly hard here, where having to do 10+ web builds⁹ to tweak some parameters really sapped my desire to do any more development. I also felt like my implementation of the battle system was overly simplistic and that battles could often be won just by brute-forcing attacks.

The jam had a two week rating period, during which I rated something like 50 of the entries. There were quite a few neat games games in there, and I was honored to see that my game earned 6th place in the overall ratings, 2nd place in the judges pick, and that people enjoyed playing it.¹⁰ Some people even found ways to defeat an enemy that I’d thought was undefeatable, which was a cool feeling.

I won’t list it here, but working on the game made me want to have better tooling. I wanted to make a system for managing different data types for monsters, items, etc. I spent a few days brainstorming it, but it didn’t actually go anywhere. I soon moved on to slowly worked on making some improvements and fixing some bugs from the jam version, which I finished a few weeks later. Motivation was generally low.

Robot Sim (New, Writing)

After spending most of May doing nothing game development related, I tried to force myself back towards reaching my goal. After all, it was getting close to halfway through the year and I’d only finished on writing-based game. I’d realized that I was falling off when I tried to introduce gameplay into my writing-based games, so I resolved that I’d strip all of the gameplay out and just write it all in Twine. I wrote maybe a hundred words before I fell off of this as well.

Champions of Shond: Shattered Vessel (New, Writing, Not a Game)

Early in 2022, I’d played Ys IX. The game came with a prequel novella, and it, combined with my newfound interest in dungeon crawlers, made me want to write a prequel novella for the dungeon crawler game I was already thinking about making for LOWREZJAM. I wanted to make an Adol type—a wandering hero where you see small snippets of their life, out of order.

After falling off Robot Sim, I started writing. My soft deadline was when LOWREZJAM began (August 1st), to have a basis for the character, but the hard deadline was the end of the jam (August 14th), where I wanted to include it as a sort of supplemental material.

Writing it didn’t come easy, but it was an interesting exercise in plotting out a full story instead of just a series of events (like Side Stories or the unreleased Fighters' Guild). I poked away at it in the background of working on other games, and was able to finish the first draft by the start of the jam. It ended up having an impact on how I told the story in that game, as my Adol-like character, Zel, felt like he needed a permanent second character, Mas, to balance him out.

I’m happy with the work and presentation of this. It ended up being around 100 pages, sitting at almost 22,000 words. It’s available on the Champions of Shond: Echoes of Faith page, linked below.

The Path Past The Mountain (New, Non-Writing)

The A Game By Its Cover jam started in early July. I wasn’t sure if I was going to participate, but the case for Far Beyond The Mountain spoke to me. It spoke to me of procedural generation and strange sights. It spoke to me of charting your way through strange lands.

Before I started seriously doing game development, I had wanted to do a road trip game. Just driving down endlessly procedurally generated terrain. The two seemed like a good marriage of ideas.

Now, it’s famously hard to procedurally generate interesting terrain. I did not meet that challenge, and the environments ended up feeling quite samey. I had a few interesting things that could drop in, but with only five or so, you see the same thing fairly quickly. I ended up losing motivation to work on it and, as I had something releasable, pivoted to the next game on the list.

I did do something somewhat interesting, perhaps, in having a mapping game along with it,¹¹ but while I like the aesthetics,¹² I don’t think this is one of my stronger works.

Sports Shooter: The Eight Galleries (New, Non-Writing)

In mid-July, there was talk in the HPSX community about a collaboration of horror takes on various sports you’d see at a big event that might happen every four years or so. I’d long wanted to explore the concept of having a gun in a game but it not protecting you, so I picked shooting as a category. Despite its being a completely oversaturated genre and a sign of an amateur game, I wanted to make a spin on an “Eight Pages” game.

What better way than to make people hunt for eight shooting galleries while a monster was chasing them? In this type of game, it can be frustrating to not be able to find the last few items that you need to collect, so I tried to telegraph it a bit better. In the end, I’m happy with what I accomplished. It’s a weird, cheesy thing, and I like it.

I worked on it until near the end of July, when I pivoted to my LOWREZJAM game. I picked it back up in late August, finishing it for the initial deadline of August 31st, then polished it a bit after that. I came back to it in mid December to add high scores and a few different game modes.

The collaboration hasn’t released yet,¹³ but I’m excited for when it does.

Champions of Shond: Echoes of Faith (New, Writing)

It was nearing August, and I was sitting at one game towards my goal.¹⁴ I’d finished the prequel novella, which I had talked myself into counting as the writing portion of this game. I wanted to do a loose spin on Wizardry combat but with the limited setting of the first Diablo.

I also wanted to invest more in tooling this time around. For Sanctuary’s Grasp, I’d used procedural generation grid alongside my scriptable object management of dialogue lines, both of which didn’t really scale to using external tooling. The former required a scene for each level, which felt cumbersome, and the latter meant that dialogues would get lost in scenes, didn’t have flexible scripting, and were hard to link together.

To that end, I used Tiled, a tool for authoring tile-based scenes, and ink, a narrative scripting language. I’d used ink for a few things before, although nothing released. I used ink to power notes, all the game state, and the quest log, and TiledCS to help me generate the level at runtime. It went very well, and the tools allowed for much faster iteration and a better overview of the game levels.

With ink having its own runtime built in, I was able to test scenarios without having to actually play the game, which was helpful for testing out writing choices and investigating scripting bugs. I still ran through the game regularly, but it streamlined the whole process.

I wanted to make nine levels, each with its own quest, but ended up cutting that down to eight. The battle system was my own home-grown one, and I didn’t think I did a particularly good job of it. My goal was to have each excursion down feel like a battle of attrition, but it ended up incentivizing grinding and using basic attacks to save mana for the bosses.

That said, I’m very proud of this game. It’s my longest, most complete work, and combined with the novella I wrote before and the manual I made during it, it feels like a full, albeit short, game. I’d like to revisit these characters and the world at some point.¹⁵

20 WORDS // 20 SECONDS (New, Non-Writing)

I saw an announcement for the 20 second game jam, and was immediately inspired. While it wasn’t a writing game, it should be something I could do fast, and it’d felt like a while since I’d gotten an easy win. I’d seen this MetaFilter post about a well-polished web game and thought about how something that felt that polished enough to be on MetaFilter was out of my skill to accomplish.

I like making small Phaser games, and this one fit perfectly. The premise is simple—think fast and type fast. In a couple days in September, I made the meat of the game. This was before the jam started, but it explicitly permits that in the FAQ.¹⁶ I released it a few days into the jam, was very happy with what I made, it was moderately popular, and that was it.

Until it wasn’t. 20W//20S became my most popular game by an order of magnitude. It’s hard to track down the exact source of its popularity, but it was talked about in the b3ta newsletter on December 8th. Not a site I’d heard of, but apparently fairly popular in Britain. Being written about that in there got me about 700 views and 200 plays, which in and of itself was enough to put it in the top 10% of plays for my games.¹⁷

Tom Scott, the famous, now retired YouTuber, wrote about it in his newsletter on December 11th. It got me about 9000 views and 3800 plays, which made it my most popular game by far. This one was interesting to track down, as at the time he didn’t have a newsletter archive, and I had no clue that he had a newsletter. I resorted to putting a comment on my page asking where people found it, and someone was kind enough to answer. When asked about where he’d found it, he responded that he’d seen it in the b3ta newsletter. Seeing someone whose stuff I watch like something that I made enough to broadcast it was very cool.

On December 15th, it got posted to MetaFilter. Since that earlier post on MetaFilter was part of the inspiration for the game and I was fairly confident the level of polish required was outside of my skill range, seeing it on MetaFilter (with people liking it) was immensely rewarding. I didn’t post in the comments because I’m far too self-conscious for that, but seeing it was amazing. It drove about 3500 views and 1400 plays.

The biggest bump, after which traffic slowly started tapering off, was being in a Morning Brew newsletter and microsiervos post on December 18th. Between the two, it got me around 31,000 views and 12,000 plays. It made the internet feel broader to see all these newsletters that I had no idea existed.

The year rounded out with getting my first inclusion on a list of top video games of the year on popmatters, alongside a bunch more qualified games.¹⁸

All that attention was fairly incredible. It’s the most that games I’ve made outside of work have been played,¹⁹ and seeing it blow up was a pleasant surprise. I’ve since followed it up by making primarily weird or experimental games, so I feel sorry for anyone who followed me on itch to get fun stuff.

You might expect that I’d feel strange or bitter for having a game that I made in less than ten hours feel monumentally more successful than my bigger games that I put much more time into, like Sanctuary’s Grasp or Champions of Shond, but I don’t really mind. Something smaller and bite-sized is going to be more likely to go viral, and while it felt good to see the numbers go up, it’s not really why I make games.

Isekai X (New, Writing)

The idea for Isekai X, strangely, was borne out of someone complaining that there were pronoun choices in Lunacid. “What,” they said, “would you think if you chose if you were Christian or not in the game?” I don’t think it got them the reception they were hoping for, since, I, at least, wouldn’t care, but it got me wondering how someone would take it if they were transported into a fantasy world that clearly had not been exposed to Christianity. Would it test their faith, or would they move past it?

I ended up falling off of this as I couldn’t find a voice for it. I toyed with having the player play as the isekai’d person, but that felt dismissive of the character’s beliefs. I tried having it be a person interacting with the transported person, but I spent too much time thinking of how I’d go about it and not enough time writing it. I poked around at it on November 1st and 11th, but didn’t stick with it.

This is probably one I can go back to for some quick writing, but it’s also something where I want to be careful with the details, as I’m not a Christian myself. I wouldn’t want it to turn into a dunkfest on a strawman.

Ninja TriWars

It was November, so I worked on some more requested content for the game that my nephew designed. This year he requested a third boss, which I dutifully provided. I also cleared out a few of the issues I had with the game, making explosions more standardized and having a maximum number of enemies on the screen. He requested that I make it public in December, which got me motivated to fixing the biggest bugs and polish issues in the game. Now you, too, can play NinjaTriWars.

A Demon, Summoned (New, Writing)

I was reading some of A Practical Guide to Evil, a book in which demon summoning occasionally plays a role, and it reminded me of an idea that I had long ago. Often when demonic summoning is brought up in fantasy, the perception is that demons are inherently evil. I liked the idea have them appear evil only because they solely interface with humans when we’re attempting to coerce them into doing things. I’m sure this is a well-tapped well in fiction, but I thought it’d be fun to explore from a player’s point of view.

I wanted to make puzzles that you had to solve to try to escape from the summoning rituals, but ended up getting too bogged down in the mechanics²⁰ and fell off it soon after.

A Jar of Cranberry Sauce (New, Writing)

Imagine you’re me. It’s the end of November and you’ve only written two of your planned six writing-based games. All of your other ideas had scopes that spiraled out of control, whether it was from wanting to add battle systems or recreating a text adventure format in Unity. What should I do? Well, in my case I told myself I had to make a writing-based game by the end of November.

The original plan was for that creation to be one of my in progress works: either the game where you play as a demon regularly summoned by humans, or the game about conversing with a person who has been isekai’d from Earth to your home planet. However, the end of November was approaching, and I had no motivation.

Enter the The Flop House podcast, a podcast about bad movies, which had a Thanksgiving themed episode in which each Thanksgiving staples were paired with appropriate movies. For cranberry sauce it was, naturally, A Jar of Cranberry Sauce. The description caught my interest, so I looked into watching it, only to find that it wasn’t available online.

However, the plot summary was, and it immediately motivated me. I thought it could be fun to play with the two perspectives and give life to a work that is no longer accessible.

Thanks to this motivation, I was able to knock it out in a couple of days, meeting my deadline of November.

Fighter’s Guild (In Progress, Writing)

By the time December had rolled around and I’d only finished three writing games, I accepted defeat. I figured that it would be better for me to finish my biggest (by far) writing project than try to poke around at three smaller ones. I modernized the project to account for my new ink integration, and made some more tweaks to how I was going to present the project in Unity. Once I got far enough in, it made sense to me to try to finish Sacrifice in that engine, which is a much smaller scoped game.

I did that, while still working on the engine, and just ended up falling off of the game because a lack of interest in messing with the details of Unity rendering. A stronger focus on writing over the integration likely would have helped me here, as it would have served as a motivator to push ahead. As it was, I dropped it fairly quickly due to a lack of motivation.

Pier (In Progress, Non-Writing)

I was, however, motivated to work on Pier (for just a few days around Christmas). I polished up some aspects, cleaned up some graphics, and inched closer to the finish line.

Missing My Goals

This year was an unqualified miss for goals. I hit only half of my target, publishing only three out of six writing-based games. It was a combination of myself getting too bogged down in the mechanics and being too slow to actually start writing.

Despite that, I’m proud with everything I accomplished. Sanctuary’s Grasp and Champions of Shond were huge swings at genres I wasn’t all that familiar with. I had my most popular game yet, and I am very happy with how polished the project ended up being. I did some weird stuff in A Jar of Cranberry Sauce, and one of the collaborations that I participated in, C.H.A.I.N.G.E., released this year.

If all my misses end up like this, I’ll be happy.

This Year’s Inspirations

Games and other creative works that were responsible for the games I worked on this year:

• He Who Fights With Monsters (the series) by Travis Deverell inspired Ruler.
• Mother of Learning (the series) by Domagoj Kurmaic inspired Time Loop.
• I am Setsuna (2016) by Tokyo RPG Factory inspired Sacrifice.
• Helen's Mysterious Castle (2016) by Satsu inspired Sanctuary’s Grasp
• Diablo (1997) by Blizzard North inspired Champions of Shond: Echoes of Faith.
• Wizardry (1981) by Sir-Tech inspired Champions of Shond: Echoes of Faith.
• Ys (the series) by Nihon Falcom inspired Champions of Shond: Echoes of Faith.
• WordWard Draw (2023) by Daniel Linssen inspired 20 WORDS // 20 SECONDS.
• Lunacid (2023) by Akuma Kira (weirdly) inspired Isekai X.
• A Practical Guide to Evil by ErraticErrata inspired A Demon, Summoned.
• FH Mini 93 - Happy Thanksgiving (2023) by The Flop House inspired A Jar of Cranberry Sauce.

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. Isekai X
7. Demon Summon
8. Ruler
9. Robot Life
10. Strange Traveler
11. PushPull
12. Low Rez Explorer
13. Time Loop
14. Space Cards
15. Escape Room Professor
16. Boar3D
17. DaleZ