Annual devlog: 2024

I didn't make too much gamedev progress in December between holidays, playing Confounding Calendar games, and the year-end wrapup posts. So I'll do an overall year in review instead.

Three (and a half) releases:

• Boarding Zone, for Thinky Puzzle Jam 4
• Meticulous Microbes, for Ludum Dare 56
• To Curse The Darkness, for Confounding Calendar
• Life of the Zip Bird, a Thinky Collective collaborative project that I contributed a level to.

My baseline I aim for is Thinky Puzzle Jam and Confounding Calendar (or something comparable), and I hit that, so cool! Sometimes I worry myself about pigeonholing myself as "easy little puzzle game with a secret", and branching out more from that, or the puzzle genre in general, is something I was trying to do with some other projects this year and might look into next year.

Three more significant prototypes/incomplete projects:

• Sorcerous Stacks, a game inspired by Ferociter's Lost in Firefly Forest and Lost in Lampyrid Fog but set in a magical library. I got a very basic "engine" together and implemented a puzzle or two, but never made it past that.

• Untitled shmup, which started from the GMTK Jam's "built to scale" theme- the idea was that to fire stronger shots you had to expand your hitbox, making life more dangerous. But this was mostly "how do I even make a shmup," and I got to something technically functional but I wasn't sure what the next steps would be to make it fun.
• Meticulous Microbes expansion, adding some new mechanics/levels and QoL to make the game a little beefier than the jam version. I'm kind of working on this now, jotted down some level thoughts over the break and starting down a list of UI changes.

Art and interface stuff is a common theme in what blocked me with these, since that's something PuzzleScript gives for "free" and I can usually get away with not doing for something jam-sized. Is this the year I actually draw some boxes and try to get my Aseprite skills from "crappy pixel art" to "okay pixel art"?