Well, 2021 is finally coming to a close, for me it was a year with a lot of change, and most of it was positive thankfully. On the game dev side of things, I had a very productive year. I released 3 projects on itch and added several updates to each. I got into making music for my games for the first time with Sub Mortis. And I started to get back into video editing for the first time in a couple years. To help gather my thoughts on the past year, I decided to write up some thoughts on my released, cancelled and work in progress projects. I also discuss the future of each project briefly, and then my overarching goals for the new year. Hopefully its somewhat interesting!

Oh, and here's the stats for my released projects so far:

January – May: Sub Mortis

I was lucky enough to be able to spend the better part of 4 months working on Sub Mortis as the final project for my university degree. I regularly work on game dev in my free time to begin with, so being able to work on it for school effectively tripled the amount of dev time available. Though even with that extra development time and multiple rounds of playtesting feedback, I still ended up crunching the last few days before the end of the term. Since I was taking an electronic music composition course at the same time, I was also able to use the music created for that class in Sub Mortis. While my music may not even be all that great, I loved being able to create it myself instead of relying on royalty free stuff. Sub Mortis ended up being a huge leap in my game dev abilities, as I now had a good baseline inventory system, a somewhat modular behaviour tree system for AI, and I had figured out how to implement various quality of life features.

Long term plan is to come back to this game after ironing out some feature ideas in other projects and incorporate the more polished systems to turn it into a 3–5-hour commercial release.

June Part 1: Stalewater

The lessons learned on Sub Mortis helped massively when working on Stalewater, the goal of a more constrained game made development generally smooth and the experience a bit more accessible and enjoyable than my previous projects. 2021 had another big first with Stalewater in that I got to see people I didn’t know playing one of my games. A few people streamed it and it was amazing to watch the laughter and confusion live. Someone actually posted a speedrun of Stalewater on the itch.io page, which gave me an appreciation for how plodding certain sequences of the game can be. There was even one YouTuber who played the game with no context; and hearing the utter confusion and delight in his voice was great. With my “so bad its good” games, I always like to provoke the reaction of “What the hell is this and why would someone do this?”. Stalewater excelled at provoking this reaction, and I’m happy with how it turned out. Though I admit I am disappointed I had to cut some things, and the combat is still fairly bland. But I’m planning to rectify these grievances in the sequel.

June Part 2: Mons Badonicus

A few weeks after finishing Stalewater, I released Mons Badonicus, which is the first RTS game I’ve ever made, and the only non-FPS game I’ve ever released. I’m still shocked it turned out as well as it did, a Total War clone made in a week doesn’t have any right to function even somewhat properly in my opinion. But it did, and people who played it said they would love to see it developed further, which I would love to do at some point but frankly that’s years away. I have plans to do quite a bit more work with AI and melee combat in future projects, which I think would improve Mons Badonicus quite a lot when I come back to it. For now, I think of Mons Badonicus as my Fallout 5 or Elder Scrolls 6, I hope to continue it, other people hope I continue it, but it ain’t happening anytime soon.

July – October: Postmortems, Post-jam Updates, Devplay

Over the summer I released a postmortem for Stalewater and Mons Badonicus, which made me realize that I should make my postmortems shorter. I’ve also made significant updates to both, mostly Stalewater what with it having dismemberment, alcoholism and a full save system added. In the fall, I dipped my toes into video editing again with my devplay/postmortem video for Out Of Order, my first game ever publicly released. Also a kinda funny detail: the last time I did any significant amount of video editing was when I made the cutscenes for Out Of Order in 2019, in Windows Movie Maker.

November – December: Little Dark Age

After that there was what seemed to be a bit of a dormant period, but I was working on a couple things during the end of the year.

Stalewater Sequel

The first was the sequel to Stalewater, which would take place after the cliffhanger ending. Its development has taken a while partially because I got distracted by other projects, and partially because I wanted to take the time to improve the weaker aspects of Stalewater and other previous games. I haven’t posted too much about it because I don’t wanna over hype it by posting lots of videos or pictures showing work in progress features and then have it scaled way down in the final product. I simply wanted to focus on the making the mechanics themselves.

But I should note I started a more fleshed out design doc for this game, mainly so I can avoid too much scope creep. I've also found having to write my ideas down like I'm explaining them to someone else helps to clarify the ideas and makes implementation easier. Typically my game ideas end up becoming several text files with a checklist for features implemented, a list of items with bullet-points of their properties, and a list of characters/NPCs describing their personality, appearance and in-game function. This process works great for game jams, but for a longer project I've found my documentation needs a bit more sophistication. The design doc is still very much in the early stages, and that's mostly because I'm lazy and find it more stimulating to code and test new ideas.

Cancelled Vampire: The Masquerade Project

The other major break was during the month of November when I attempted to make a game for the Vampire: The Masquerade game jam. Frankly of the cancelled projects I’ve made, this one was the most complete. My plan was to make a very scaled down version of the 2004 Bloodlines game’s mechanics, set on the Eastern coast of Canada. I had implemented most of the mechanics I wanted for the game, including some I thought would be more difficult. The dialogue system was frankly a massive improvement over the system seen in Stalewater. I could adjust the strength of various facial expressions in the dialogue XML files, as well as how long it took for the NPC’s face to transition between the expressions. The guns felt better to shoot than they do in Stalewater, and I even managed to get a small level of melee combat working. Much like my last attempt at making a vampire game however, it didn’t become anything more than an empty map with some neat mechanics, and since its tied in with the Vampire: The Masquerade IP I can’t really release it without gutting out and changing most of the features and planned content.

Even though it will never be finished, I’m happy I focused on the mechanics and decided to stop development where I did. Even though there were a few days left in the jam when I decided to halt development, I knew I would have to really slog to get it where I wanted. I think it would have been a cool game, but I really don’t wanna burn myself out working late into the night for a jam.

Plans For 2022

My big goal for 2022 is to focus on finishing the sequel to Stalewater, which I arguably began work on as soon as I started releasing post-jam updates. The save system especially was a major feature that I needed, since I knew I wanted to make a longer game, and I didn’t want to cause the player to lose lots of progress when dying. I’ve been steadily working on the game (or at least features I want in it) since this summer and I’m happy with how its progressing. Some features I thought would be out of scope were easier to implement than I thought, and so far for every new feature or polished/refactored mechanic added I’ve been able to balance it out with more wackiness.

I’ve largely been focusing on implementing new features and refactoring existing systems. My thinking is even if this sequel project never comes to fruition, I’ll at least have some neat stuff that I could use in many different types of projects. Either way, I think there’s reason to be optimistic that people will enjoy what I have planned.

Aside from the sequel, I have plans for a different and hopefully shorter game. It will be a remake of a game I worked on in high school with some friends, updated with features I’ve been working on this past year. I don’t plan for it to really have a narrative or many scripted sequences, so the focus will be on gameplay and the mechanics. I couldn’t tell you for certain how long the Stalewater sequel will take, but this remake project I don’t intend to take any longer than 3 months. Most likely I will release it after 2 months, and then try to update it with feedback from players.

To account for the greater focus on larger projects, I’m aiming to do fewer game jams in 2022. As fun as it is to be able to release multiple projects and rapidly iterate on ideas, it is a bit of a drain on both my free time and focus. In jams I always try to play as many games as I can, and give as much feedback as I can, which takes a lot of time and can feel like a slog. And if other people in the jam don’t vote or comment much, it can be pretty demoralizing.

I definitely plan to participate in the next "So Bad Its Good" game jam, and maybe one or two "Improve My Game" jams after that as an excuse to update my (hopefully) newly released games. I've been debating participating in the upcoming "Historically Accurate" jam, but I definitely won't make a game of similar scale to Mons Badonicus.

2022 is gonna be a push towards quality over quantity, or at least that’s the plan. If 2021 is anything to go by though, my plans usually end up changing for better or for worse.

Thanks for reading my ramblings, and I hope you have a nice 2022!