Here’s a retrospective of all the stuff I made in 2024 (or more accurately stuff I FINISHED, since 90% of what I work on these days never sees the light of day). There’s a surprising amount of stuff in here, even if a lot of it is for super small-scoped things like Pico1k jam. Also there’s a couple of collaborations, which is nice as ‘do more work with/for other people’ was one of the goals I set for 2024.

Here we go then, in chronologial order.

Should Married Men Go Home - 10th Jan

For Public Domain Day 2023 I decided to try making a Playdate version of a public domain film, and ended up getting a watchable version of Buster Keaton’s The Haunted House converted across, complete with the option of using the Playdate crank to control the film.

For 2024 I decided to make another one, this time based on one of the new 2024 public domain movies, and decided on Laurel and Hardy’s Should Married Men Go Home. It’s a longer film and it was more challenging to get the file size down to something the Playdate could sideload, but I got there in the end.

The plan was to continue doing one of these every year as new works enter the public domain, but looking at this year’s public domain movies that might not be feasible. I’ve been converting silent short films due to Playdate size constraints, but from 1929 onwards full-length films with sound became the norm.
 
 

Guess Hue - 31st Jan

This one was a very nice surprise - Nextlevelbanana (check out her Patreon!) asked me to do the music and audio for her Global Game Jam project Guess Hue, a physical event game where you have to press the correct button in response to increasingly confusing and rapid prompts. It’s completely unlike the things I usually do, which made it an interesting and fun challenge.

I was very conscious of it being an event game, i.e to be set up somewhere and left running for hours on end, so the music is basically just a bassline and percussion - any kind of melody would soon become grating under those conditions. Also, events are noisy, so it had to be something that would still work when people couldn’t hear it properly.

When you get a game over, the game plays a demotivating sound which is chosen from a pool of around thirty (again, so it’s not the same sound playing over and over at an event). Most of them are from CC0 samples I found on Freesound but I made some myself, including the sound of me flushing the toilet in my flat which I’m inordinately proud of.

The game is super cool, congratulations to Nextlevelbanana, Ragonia (art) and Dizzyandlost (writing) for doing such a fantastic job with it. It’s been getting positive feedback at events and made it into the showcase at this year’s Super Magfest. To think that in a few days thousands of people in Washington DC will hear the sound of my toilet flushing as they walk around the convention centre. Videogames are great.
 
 

VGFX art - 26th April

In April I had fun making art in VGFX, Sophie Houlden’s excellent vector art package for the Picotron. Not gamedev per se but I’m including these because I (mostly) like how they turned out.

I still haven’t sat down and done much with Picotron. Partly because I’m a big lazybones and partly because it’s still early in development. This year, maybe? And while I’m promoting Sophie’s Picotron stuff, their Picotron port of Lemmings is amazing and one of my favourite things of the year. They have a Patreon which is well worth checking out.
 
 

Arrow Head - May 13th

A little one-button browser game made in PICO-8 for TweetTweetJam 9, and an excellent example of how theme/worldbuilding can make or break an idea.

This was originally a basketball shoot-the-hoop game. You would spawn in a random place on a basketball court and had to press the button at the right time to make the shot. This had two main problems: 1) drawing the basketball on-screen took me past the jam’s character limit, and 2) it was INCREDIBLY BORING.

At some point I realized if the person and the ball were the same graphic I could fit it all in, so I changed the setting to a person launching themselves at a giant-ass outdoor target. This completely changed the game for the better. It’s mechanically identical to the basketball game I had before, but infinitely more fun to play just because launching yourself at a giant-ass target is a much more fun idea.
 
 

Power Cycle - June 27

A game for Pigsquad’s Summer Slow Jams Resource Management jam. I did this one to force myself to do a ‘proper’ project, which I hadn’t done for a couple of years for a bunch of predictable reasons (getting busy in real life, game dev losing its novelty, gestures feverishly at the world, and so on). I had (and kinda still have) this fear that I’m burned out on gamedev and will never have the discipline/interest to finish anything larger than a tweet jam again. So I did this one to see if I could still design and finish something moderately-sized in two weeks - it didn’t have to be great, but I had to submit SOMETHING.

The result was… a big mess to be honest. To go into everything that went right/wrong would take a full post-mortem which I won’t write here, but I did succeed in my goal of designing and finishing something in two weeks. This gave me a big movitation boost at a time I really needed it, so I’m not too bummed about the game turning out lousy - means to an end etc. It was fun to make and it help clear the case of ‘gamedev block’ I had.
 
 

Picotian Blinds - September 30

Probably my favourite thing I made this year, for Liquidream’s annual Pico-1K jam (which is one of my favourite things every year). A simple demake of a simple game… though technically probably not be a ‘demake’, as the original would be written in assembler and smaller than mine. Even so, I still only used about half of the jam’s 1024 character limit - it was nice not having to do all the awful unreadable compression tricks you usually have to do in these ‘character limit’ jams.

I used the PICO-8 ‘secret’ alternate palette for the background gradients, which is a first for me. The code for the blind itself is an awful mess (I just tried random things until it looked right), but the end result looks good and successfully recreates the ‘zen’ relaxation vibe the original has.
 
 

Heads over the Pacific - November 3rd

A submission for the 0hour Game Jam - another PIGSquad jam where you make a game during the ’extra’ hour you get when PST switches from daylight saving back to regular time. My entry is terrible :-D. Even for a 1 hour jam I managed to get my pre-prep and scoping wrong, and the end result is a barely-working bugged mess (again, I could write an entire post-mortem on all the things I got wrong, which is actually kinda impressive for a 0-hour project).

The other entries are worth checking out though - if nothing else you should go and play CHEEKS CHALLENGE.
 
 

Wink Commander - 16th December

Another nice surprise - Cheeseness put out an open call for people to submit music for his 7DFPS game Wink Commander (which has surely one of the best game names of all time). The game puts you in a small spaceship traveling between starports, and you wink (or otherwise gesture) at the people in other spaceships as they pass by. The music is for the in-game radio you can turn on/off, change stations on and so on.

As a brief, this is the complete opposite of Guess Hue. I didn’t really have to think much about the game - in fact I could submit anything I liked and it would work for the in-game purpose.

I submitted a short instrumental played entirely on a lap steel guitar, in the tradition of old-timey-guitar-music-in-sci-fi-soundtracks like ‘Increased Chances’ in Full Throttle, ‘Benson, Arizona’ in Dark Star and the surf-rock soundtrack in Atom Zombie Smasher.

I highly recommend checking out the game, it’s a fun experiment that plays with a bunch of themes and ideas I’ve been into lately, like: diegetic music (which was a thing in my June game Power Cycle), detailed/interactive environments that aren’t explicitly mechanics/goal related, worldbuilding that’s not based on text/dialog exposition). Cheeseness always does great work - Hive Time is my favourite of his games and he has a Patreon which I highly recommend.
 
 
 
 

AND WHAT ABOUT 2025?

This year I’ll probably be less active on the gamedev front, just because of time constraints (this post was supposed to be done for NYE ‘24, and it’s going up at the end of January… that’s probably a good indicator for the rest of the year). Also, I’m going to try to finish a bunch of existing projects, rather than start new things and add to the dreaded idea debt. I made a list of 12 unfinished things and the idea is to work on one a month. Will I finish any of them?

Probably not, but I promise to have fun trying. -H.