Merry Newyear! (2024)

Hello everyone! I hope the holiday season is treating you all well. I figured I’d put out a post as a bit of a year’s retrospective. It’s been quite an interesting one, that’s for sure.

Starting off the year on a high note (sarcasm), I lost my “dream job” and had to figure out what to do next after being laid off from the games industry. My job loss was part of the mass gaming layoffs that are still affecting companies today. The game I spent years working on? Shelved indefinitely, with most of the work never to see the light of day.

Years of wading through bureaucracy, slowly having the fight in me drained by upper management... all for nothing. But hey, let’s not get too bitter about it. Thanks to some severance pay, I decided to be brave (read: stupid) and return to something I’d tried pursuing years ago: indie development.

This started off strong, with a solid idea and plenty of know-how. I wanted to create a horror game (SFW) using the story of Little Red Riding Hood as a general template... but it never happened. Like many projects I’ve worked on, scope creep and indecisiveness got the better of me. What seemed like a manageable bite turned out to be more than I could chew. After a few months, I abandoned the project and fell into a development slump.

That’s when I had an idea for a different kind of game for a different kind of audience. Years ago, I had dabbled in adult projects – something I was particularly interested in. I enjoy making sandboxes and had created a few fun experiments in the past, though the content wasn’t very “marketable.” I tried to reformulate some old ideas and began work on a project called Velero. However, after a month or so, I realized the scope was, again, too large. I needed some security and assurance that I wasn’t working on something no one would play. So, I took a break and shifted focus to a quicker project.

Halls of the Pale Widow (Originally called SexyGhostOneshot) was a game I made earlier this year to gauge interest in my gameplay style and to test how quickly I could make something. The low-poly aesthetic, initially planned for Velero, was repurposed as a soft tribute to older horror games. After about three weeks (not including breaks), I released the game and was genuinely surprised by the positive response.

Initially, I planned to return to Velero, but I decided to stick with horror-themed games for the time being. I wanted to follow up HotPW with something that expanded its mechanics, especially the procedural dungeons. Enter Sin Spire – a dungeon crawler with action gameplay in a horror setting. Originally, Sin Spire was meant to be a quick, storyless project that I could finish in a slightly longer timeframe than HotPW. However, the scope grew to include both a story and multiple characters.

Much of my original design document for Sin Spire has been scrapped, with features being added and removed regularly. I’ll likely dive deeper into that in a future retrospective once the game is finished. Despite trimming many elements to avoid spending years on it, the game has still become much larger than I initially planned.

What started as a 3-month project turned into 6 months... and now I’ve decided not to impose a deadline. All I know is that when it’s done, I want to work on something much smaller and simpler.

Throughout this challenging development cycle, one thing has kept me going: you guys. I know it sounds sappy, but without an audience, I might’ve given up by now. I tend to be very secretive, and in the past, my projects often fell apart because I felt isolated and got tunnel vision. Having your support – whether financial or simply cheering me on – has made a huge difference.

This year has been full of tough decisions, but surprisingly, things seem to be working out. This might date the post in either direction, but I recently reached $1,000 a month in Patreon revenue – a massive milestone that has me wanting to pop open the champagne and celebrate immediately. I know life happens, and pledges come and go, but having an audience at all is something I’m deeply grateful for. Whether you’re contributing financially or cheering from the sidelines, thank you. Truly, thank you.

Here’s to 2025 – may it bring a smooth release for Sin Spire and even more games to follow. Until then, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

See you in 2025.