Everyone is doing their recap posts and so I guess I should do one of my own. It’s a little late but I refuse to do any kind of 2024 summary until the year is over dangit.

Overall it was a very weird year. The first half of the year was incredible, with the birth of my son and being able to take 12 weeks off work to spend all my time with him and the rest of my family. The second half of the year was less great, with the election, day job vibes changing for the worse, a small flood in the basement, and my furnace going out and now having to replace it, which is incredibly expensive. It has been a very stressful few months here but things will be ok.

It was a pretty good year for game dev stuff I suppose. I made a tiny game in Downpour (Itch.io) and while I haven’t been too inspired to make more with it, it’s a great little tool. We also shipped the first Locally Sourced Anthology (Steam/Itch.io), which I’m very proud of. I wish I could have made a game for it (and thus made some money too) but it’s still something I’m very proud of and we’re already starting work on the second one, which I have a game planned for. The biggest thing for me this year was organizing three games and creating one of those, a point-and-click adventure, for the Ann Arbor 200 project. I will do a larger post on that soon, summarizing my feelings on it (very positive!) and my process, but it was a great honor to make something for the Ann Arbor District Library and I finally got to learn Adventure Game Studio, make a point-and-click adventure, and got paid for it! I also got to make my oldest a beta tester on that and that made her incredibly happy, so it was worth it for that alone.

I also had a lot of doing my weekly indie game roundups on the blog. Not to pat myself on the back too much, but I think I did a good job. At the very least I mention games that aren’t on Steam, unlike a lot of other websites and Video Game Influencers who talk about how much they love indies. Good job me.

So what’s next for 2025?

I’m going to just stick with the reasonable goals and not stuff like the end of all billionaires and changing the US into a socialist utopia. But in 2025 I’m hoping to:

• Do more point-and-click adventures. I’ve got a half finished one made in clay that I should get back to, but I’ve got a few design quirks to hammer out there. It turns out that making everything in clay is tough. Not as expensive as I thought it would be, but still time consuming and hard work. It should be out sometime this year though. I’ve also started work on another Maniac Mansion/Zak McKracken inspired one and that’s the only I’m more excited about at the moment since I think I have a good flow down for making these and can build on what I learned with my last game. I’m also pairing up with someone to make a point-and-click adventure for the next Locally Sourced anthology, which means there could be 2-3 little adventure games from me this year.
• My kids also now want to make an adventure game with me and use clay. I suspect this may be a really tiny thing that I put on Glorious Trainwrecks, or on itch and turn off the comments and ratings, but it should be fun.
• Keep doing the indie game roundups. They’re fun and it enables me to discover more great art.
• Continuing to be annoying about how people should start their own site and blogs.
• Go to grad school. We’ll see about this one. I’ve wanted to work towards a MLIS for a while and keep putting it off, and I think I’ll really regret it if I don’t at least try. I don’t think it will be a fast process, just one class a semester, but I have to do it.
• Volunteer more with local environmental restoration groups. I did a little bit last year with Friends of the Rouge and aside from it just being a good thing to help make the planet cleaner by building rain gardens and doing other work, it’s also just a good workout and I learn a lot from it too.

I’m not exactly expecting this year to be stress free, with fascism continuing to expand across the world, but I’m still hoping to find joy where I can.