Games I Made This Year

a_new_duck · December 30, 2021, 9:08pm

2020 was really hard to get any work done on any of my game projects. I mostly watched TV and played RPGs and was actively depressed that year.

Since I moved back to Utah at the end of 2020, I’ve been working on projects pretty consistently, though I’ve only finished one. I’ve had a much harder time turning things out quickly. I think part of that is that I’ve gotten a lot of tiny games out oever t. Also, idk, I’ve slowed down with age I guess. Oh, and I’m not in school anymore. That has an impact.

Anyway, I was working part time at the Salt Lake City Public Library this summer/fall, and while there I got in a conversation with some librarians about possible exhibits and I asked whether a game could be featured ever and the end result was a plan that I’d make an original game based in part on Salt Lake City historical material from the library’s special collections and periodical archives (I’d already been doing a lot of reading on local history and had been wanting to figure out how to incorporate that into my game-making, so it was a nice fit)

What followed was 3 months of research and 2 months of intense game-making, resulting in a collection of four tiny games called Salt Lake Stories, which was on display on the library’s first floor alongside some of the materials I consulted while working on it (it’ll also be on the library’s fourth floor when it opens later this month, though I don’t work there anymore).

The version here is a little different from the exhibit version in that it has a hard mode (basically versions of two of the games that my testers told me were too hard) and keeps track of progress, since it’s not in an installation setting.

I ended up focusing on the year 1912 and made four games related to people/places, most of which I had some amount of attachment/interest in before I started researching for the game. I wanted to use mostly minor historical figures.

I made two platformers, one kind of a lite eight-stage version of my typical puzzle-platformer bullshit, based on a formerly existing tower on a hill (a monument to which is by a place I used to live)

The other is more of a Donkey Kong riff, ascending the construction site of the also now-gone Hotel Newhouse.

I made a puzzle game based in Salt Lake’s also now-gone Japantown, where you reassemble the front page of an actual paper. This is my most edutainmenty. It was also fun to translate the headlines and ads from the apper.

And finally a falling blocks matching game set at the old location of the city library. This was a motherfucker to program.

Each game is introduced and concluded by a short visual novel-style dialogue, using the tools I built in Game Maker Studio for Melchior Y. Writing this dialogue was weird, because it’s such an artificial thing to do with real people, to have them exposition dump the basically-book-report level of information you did on them, but I think it’s a

I agonized a lot about what stories to include, and felt a little anxious about the fact that of my four, three are white and three are men. At least only one of my featured characters is actually Mormon. I was trying to paint a portrait of all the different things happening in the city, and hopefully that comes through, as well as the obvious incompleteness of its portrait of the era. I felt a weird kind of responsibility to represent things, uh, responsibly. Not sure how successful that was.

Here’s what the display looked like:

It was pretty surreal having it so prominently featured! I do think most of the people who played it were my coworkers, but designing something for a sort-of installation was a pretty neat experience. Even though I’m not working at the library anymore, I may be taking on something of a community-member role in planning some game initiative ideas that kind of came out of this exhibit through the library. We’ll see what happens there.

The game was nominated for the Utah indie game developers’ “game of the year” award at a tiny little ceremony a few weeks back, which was super flattering.

Anyway, neck-deep in a way more polished sequel to Ungrateful Birds now, hopefully out by February. I think I might finally be really back in the habit of making stuff.

jsnlv · November 1, 2022, 3:48am

A post was split to a new topic: Text adventure, interactive fiction, CYOA, choice-based gaming

a_new_duck · October 31, 2022, 4:42pm

I’ve been working on games more consistently and, well, better in a lot of ways over the last year but I continue to not finish many projects. I’ve started two separate things for Kate Barrett’s Open World Jam (the jam just got extended to early next year, so I might still finish one), been working on a handful of other ideas that keep growing in complexity, and

Anyway, for Halloween, I made a small game for my partner, Rachel, inspired by her love of skulls and all things Halloween and our shared love of Dr. Mario. It has a very goofy name, but it’s 2022–what clever name are you going to come up with for a skull-themed Halloween game?

It’s Bones in the Boneyard.

It’s got your standard stuff in a falling-block-matching game, here with both skulls you need to align in threes (horiz, diag, viert), as well as skeletons made from special blocks (which in three of the four modes are the real goal). But my favorite bit is the three stages I came up with for “puzzle mode,” games with special rules where you have to build skeletons from preset fields (the parts for the skeletons you normally get with the falling blocks, but here are already in the level with no bonus parts to come).

The game also has six colors of skulls and the field is only five spaces wide, so to play it well, you need to get creative in your layouts. It’s intentionally a little frustrating, but not as intentionally frustrating as my last Halloween falling-blocks game that I made 5 years ago.

I mostly seem to have lost my ability to make games quickly, but I assembled this game from start to finish in less than a week!

PS

This game is approaching done (and has been in a like 80% finished state since about August), but I need to tie off a few loose ends, run it through some testing, and, uh, get music for it. I had someone lined up but I think they needed to step away. So, uh, if anyone is interested, hmu.

a_new_duck · January 9, 2023, 8:22pm

Holy shit, I finally released the Ungrateful Birds sequels. I started these back in November 2021, after going kind of insane working on Salt Lake Stories.

I always liked Ungrateful Birds and have long wondered if I had more I wanted to do with the basic idea.

And honestly this post stuck with me. I thought it was fun that someone had played it together, and I think it’s a fun game to watch, but I thought it might be even more fun if people could play together. The addition of a second player was the main thing that led me to start on this. I thought it was something I could dash out in about 3 months. But while there was a break in the middle of the year where I worked on an Open World Jam game that’s on hiatus (and then a second smaller Open World Jam game that is also now on hiatus) for a few months, this is the game I’ve probably polished and tested the most, and have probably put the most amount of hours into. It’s weird. Game’s kind of a joke. But I hope it’s a pretty good joke.

Game’s got a world map. Weird how triumphant I felt implementing this. Makes me feel more like I made a Video Game.

At some point, as the scope of the game grew, I decided I wanted to see if I could make a little money from it. But I’m in this as a hobby and mostly just want people to play my games, so I wanted it to be free. So I came up with this weird solution of creating a main game and then an additional game (kind of a level pack, really, but I’m treating it as a sequel or companion game) that’s offered for a small price. I don’t know how successful this will be or how good an idea it was, but I hope enough people enjoy the game that they’re interested in playing more. No Good Deed is 38 stages with 4 bonus stages and Call of the Desert is 16 stages with 1 bonus stage. No Good Deed has 10 types of birds with different behaviors, and Call of the Desert adds five (though two are really just reskins of birds form NGD). I’m really proud of how the levels turned out in CotD. I thought at first the side game was going to be made up of mostly scraps, but it ended up being, I think, a worthwhile game in its own right, even though it’s largely the same game as NGD.

Anyway, I hope some people have some fun with it. I had a lot of fun making it. And I watched a friend play through it yesterday that confirmed a lot of my choices in designing the game and the stages worked out how I wanted them to, so that’s good. And I’m really excited to focus my creative energies elsewhere.

Clyde · January 10, 2023, 4:33am

No Good Deed is adds a lot of joy. Just some initial appreciations:

Freeing my first pigeon (really freeing the second and third was just as exhilarating)
The emergent strategy I developed on Great Falls

a_new_duck · March 29, 2023, 2:34pm

Oh hey, yesterday I released a macOS port of these two Ungrateful Birds games.

I don’t have a Mac, so I borrowed my sister-in-law’s MacBook and installed Game Maker on it. It was a big fuckin’ pain in the ass. For a while I thought it might be impossible to distribute a game from Game Maker on macOS without paying Apple’s developer fee, but I finally figured it out. Now I think I can do it again with other games maybe? May go back and try porting over some of my favorites, like Explobers and Temple of the Wumpus.

Meanwhile, back on my Open World Jam game. I think I’ve got a plan that’ll allow me to finish it by June 30, when the jam finally ends. Fingers fuckin’ crossed.

a_new_duck · October 31, 2023, 6:07pm

I just finished a purposefully confusing and honestly pretty mean platformer to a ZZT-community-associated jam called “Oktrollberfest.” The game is called “Unphased.”

The idea of the jam is to make a “troll game,” which is about setting up and subverting expectations. With this one I started fucking around with ideas in my platformer toolkit in GameMaker until something started to take shape. I think the “trollishness” of the game may have been diluted as I started refining it into a more systematized puzzle, but

This game features voice work by me, a thing I haven’t done in a long time. The ZZT-ness of the jam (the other submissions so far are all ZZT games) helped me feel like I could indulge my lower-fi, DOSesque sensibilities.

I’d talk more about how the game came together and stuff like I normally do, but (a) the opaqueness and lack of guidance as to how the game works is a big part of it and (b) I’m on less than 4 hours of sleep because I stayed up too late finishing this

a_new_duck · November 14, 2023, 5:13pm

Over the weekend (actually between 12am and 5:00pm on Sunday), I made something for a jam put on by a local loose indie game group, the Utah Indie Game Jam 2023. I would’ve gotten started earlier, but I didn’t have an idea and also I wanted to go see a movie and visit my grandmother. Generally, I’m too old for this weekend game jam shit, but I’m trying to participate more in my local community, and I had an idea I thought I could knock out in roughly my old Glorious Trainwrecks time frames.

Which I more or less did. All told, I probably worked on it for about 4 or 5 hours on Sunday. Then I realized the jam ended 3 hours earlier than I thought it did (it was a 45-hour, not a 48-hour, jam) and slapped an ending screen on the game and uploaded it with minutes to spare. I initially gave it the title “Reality’s Off by 52 Pixels,” but that title sucks ass, so when I re-released it after some more polish and a few new levels on Monday (when I spent probably an additional 4 or 5 hours on it), I renamed it and redesigned the little duck player character and gave him a name.

It is, of course, a fucking puzzle platformer. The mechanical hook for this one is that you’re switching between parallel realities, but they’re identical, save for being 52 “inches” (or pixels) offset from one another. This may seem like you’re just phasing from one spot to another, back and forth, across the stage, but when a switch gets introduced in Stage 4, knowing which reality you’re going to appear in becomes very important. (Of course, under the hood, this is all taking place in one GameMaker “room,” so you are shifting from one space to the other—that was a fun mechanical problem to figure out how to fake transitioning between two.)

I thought about giving the player some sort of visual reminder of which reality they were in but then decided it’s more fun (and more frustrating, which I hope is fun, or at least funny) to have the player try to keep this in mind. Even after extensively playing through every level, I was still making basic blunders right before the game’s second release.

After the jam, there was an online “presentation” of the submitted games where each developer presented their game on Discord. My video and audio weren’t working on Discord (I need to figure out what’s wrong with my network configuration), so one of the hosts loaded it up instead, which was nice of him, but he did just fall in a bunch of pits and shifted into walls and was like, “I think we get the idea.” The game was rated like dogshit by the participants for the jam awards, which were determined between 18 games, uh, like two hours after the jam ended. So I guess the ratings were based entirely on that “presentation.” Or maybe the game sucks. I’m pretty happy with it, though.

There’s potential here for more. I thought it would be fun to maybe add multiple types of switches, or enemies, or even introduce a third reality. But I think this is a pretty thorough exploration of the mechanics and I’m satisfied with where I left it.

This is the first year I’ve released more than one game (three, or four if you count Ungrateful Birds as two (you should)) since 2019. It feels good to finish and release stuff! Now to go back to one of my ongoing three forever-long projects.

hellojed · November 14, 2023, 9:59pm

I made it to the 2nd stage, I think the mechanic is neat, especially trying to figure out the jump on the first stage.

a_new_duck · November 29, 2023, 5:34pm

Well, my game Ungrateful Birds: Call of the Desert got nominated for the Game of the Year award at the Utah Game Dev Choice Awards for this year alongside, uh, Hogwarts Legacy lol

So that’s neat

RT-55J · November 29, 2023, 6:29pm

TIL Hogwarts Legacy was developed by the same company responsible for Disney Infinity and, um, the console ports of UMK3

…wait Sculpted Software was based out of SLC? the super star wars guys??

(sorry i just went down a wikipedia rabbit hole)

anyhow, congrats. show 'em who’s boss

Father.Torque · November 30, 2023, 7:34am

Oh hell yeah this rules, put that terf game in the GROUND

contentdeleted · November 30, 2023, 4:50pm

2023 truly is the year of the birds

spinnylights · December 1, 2023, 10:30pm

OMG best of luck tomorrow, I just saw this!! That’s really amazing!! Are you going to the awards ceremony? Sounds like they’ll have “light refreshments”

The whole lineup all together is like…deeply surreal kind of, almost like something from a dream.

a_new_duck · December 1, 2023, 11:24pm

Alas, for some reason they decided to schedule the awards for the same day as the first major Utah game dev event since August—I’m presentin games at a craft market’s “Indie Arcade” both tonight and all day tomorrow. I am… bummed about that, but I and half the local community have a prior commitment lol.

It’s even in the building where I work lol

On the plus side, I won’t have to react to anything where anyone can see

spinnylights · December 1, 2023, 11:33pm

Hah, that’s too bad…somehow it makes sense.

What XD

Very true Always good to stay positive

spinnylights · December 2, 2023, 1:42am

I feel like I failed to sufficiently note this earlier, that sounds quite possibly more fun

a_new_duck · December 6, 2023, 12:35am

Update: I lost to the wizard game, unsurprisingly, but it truly is an honor to be nominated.

spinnylights · December 6, 2023, 5:02am

Yeah totally!!! It is too bad it’s so predictable like that though. I love that a game with the whole premise and attitude of yours was there with a big boozy megamillions game like that, I totally feel like that’s a huge achievment unto itself.

a_new_duck · January 13, 2026, 3:04am

damn. i’ve actually been working on games a ton the last couple years (minus a rough patch between january and july 2025 or so, for country-on-fire reasons), but i haven’t had anything to release. i started 2 different ‘quickie’ projects last year that were supposed to be done ina month, but one fizzled and wasn’t really working, and the other needed such drastic changes that i haven’t gotten back to it yet. and otherwise, i’ve put a ton of work into explobers (2, the sequel, which i’m just calling “explobers,” actually, to be confusing) and elegy of orra, but i’ve been working on those since 2022 and they’re nowhere near finished yet.

anyway, i really wanted to finish something for the end of 2025, because i haven’t released anything since fall 2023. i started a project on december 22, 2025, and i just released it this afternoon. it’s called “zem”

https://jdmgames.itch.io/zem
(i don’t know why this link isn’t being properly processed. that’s annoying.)

if that sounds at all familiar to you, it may because you’re the sort of person who knows about zzt, and a game i made in 1998 called “zem!” used to be mentioned on the zzt wikipedia page (i didn’t do that) and has appeared in an actual print book.

this is what zem looks like now:

this is what zem looked like in 1998

zem is the little teal ampersand. in “zem!,” zem is explicitly a lemming. in “zem,” zem isn’t identified except as a little crature that marches ever forward.

i’ve tried to revisit zem! a few times over the years. i wrote about an aborted version from 2003 a while back. i adapted those assets and tried to make something in gamemaker in the early 2010s, and then i drew the zem walking sprite from this game in 2022. but i couldn’t figure out how to make a game with it.

zem! x (the third zem! zzt game) and the bang! version and one of the other versions i sketched out were about chasing the every-walking zem around stages in order to capture zem.

so in late december, i opened up the gamemaker file that simply had a modified player character from my custom gamemaker toolkit that walked forever, with the zem walking sprite. i again was trying to figure out how to make the lemming-catcher thing work. no idea, but i was committed to fucking around. i decided to try to make a climbing animation. in the zzt games, zem would walk ever forward, and if presented with a wall, zem would attempt to move a block up and see if the next space was clear. this is how you could make stairs or whatever for zem.

so somehow this clicked–i could make a game that goes back more to the style of the first game, which involved moving a cursor around that would place blocks zem would walk on or run into. but that’s kinda boring, so i tried instead that the player could move around specific sorts of blocks within stages to get zem to the exit. i made the cursor system, made it pretty snappy, and then enjoyed playing the first level i made (still the first level of this game), and it all went from there. i then made blocks that give zem commands like jumping and turning around. yeah, that worked.

major breakthroughs for the shape of the game and the kind of puzzles i could make came when it occurred to me i could make a bomb block. another happened while i was in the shower and figured out how i might do a puzzle that would involve a big block of stairs—initially everything was 1x1. varied puzzle pieces really opened up what i could do.

anyway, i came up with 35 stages that were all made by last thursday. as of friday, i had not sequenced them or figured out what progression looked like. i slapped together a sequence and a save file system, and that was all complete by friday night. but something was starting to gnaw at me.

i wanted to make a level editor. i’ve been drafting plans without getting very far on a level editor for explobers. i wasn’t sure if it was feasible. i wasn’t sure how to share levels once they were made. but after attending an anti-ice protest on saturday morning, i came home and dove into working on a level editor. by 3am saturday night, i’d put together a basically functional level editor, though it could only save one level that couldn’t be easily exported to other players.

so sunday, i dove in first thing in the morning and learned about arrays. and how gamemaker handles external files. and buffers. i’d put off learning all this shit for years. now i know what a buffer and an array are, and i’m actually a much more powerful programmer (within gamemaker) for it. i really leveld up over the weekend.

so now players can build and share .lvl files with their custom zem levels. i have no idea if anyone will do this! but there’s still a lot of potential with the puzzle elements i built. i capped the game with the 35 stages it has because i thought going any longer would wear out the game’s welcome and threaten its flow. i think it’s very likely no one will make puzzles for this, but i can imagine a player coming up with their own ideas—puzzle design concepts i never really explored in my stages—and wanting to make them. i hope someone does. but if not, it was one weekend of my life where i learned a whole hell of a lot. it was complete by about 1am on sunday night.

i decided to gate the level editor behind clearing level 8. mainly because i thought it was overwhelming to load the game up for the first time and be immediately presented with two options (“custom stages” and “stage editor”) having to do with the editor, and only one to do with the Game Itself. i hope that wasn’t a dumb idea.

i’d taken today off work to work on some freelance work. i got 3 major things i intended to do done from that, but after that i shifted to finishing up “zem!”

this is my first game i’m releasing simultaneously on macOS and windows. macOS is annoying because i haven’t paid apple their $99 developer tax, and so you have to do crazy workarounds to get it to open, especially if you’re running sequoia or later (it’s pretty easy pre-sequoia).

anyway, i’m pretty happy with zem. i’m pretty happy that i made it in 3 weeks that included christmas and new year’s, and the flu that knocked me out for two days around new year’s. it feels good to be able to say i released another game, too. if i don’t release something, i begin to feel like a poser when i call myself a game developer lol.

because you can’t pause the game and move blocks, you constantly have to keep zem safe while you build out the solution, and virtually no solution allows you to not move the blocks around in real-time while zem’s moving forward. i had someone ask me why my puzzle platformers have such twitchy, fast-paced timing action sometimes, and i get that that’s not everyone’s idea of what a puzzle should do. but i like it, apparently, because i keep going back to it (explobers being the prime one here).

so yeah, this is yet another (this one more surface-level) reworking of lemmings ideas. lemmings remains the single greatest influence on my game design sensibilities, which is evident in games like this, explobers, liz & laz, and a few others i’ve made.

i’m planning to go back to work on either elegy of orra or explobers later this week (not sure which, but i think i’ll keep working on them alternating a few weeks at a time). but i will also say i’m thinking about a “zem” sequel. i have a document with a host of ideas for new puzzle elements and blocks and mechanics that could open up what could be done with this formula in a huge way. but i’m gonna step away from that and wait until inspiration strikes.