💭 I've needed to do something for her for a while.
This was almost entirely on a whim, but I've had this in the back of my head for a very long time. About 4 hours work from start to completion, I think.
I'm actually thinking, if I get off my ass and give it a go, to do some kind of charity stream donating to an arthritis charity. 24 hour Dynasty Warriors stream, I think.

💭 This is a moment and a half for me.
If you haven't heard me shouting from the rooftops already, I got a job with Supermassive Games. Junior designer; I start in January. A week's round of interviews and checks and I'm moving down south to join the gang around London.
It also decimated any plans I had for December.
Getting this, combined with a busy month at my (former!) job, juggling a possible freelance bit that got shelved by a fulltime contract, and other such bullshit, led to this being the only game I made this month.
I had... three projects I wanted to give a crack at? Decker jam is one I'm still genuinely sad I couldn't do. Absolutely need to give that engine a go. The Quinn and Flynn sequel's been shoved into the backlog twice now. All for next year. Let's hope.
ENGLAND ON FIRE was something that sprung up as an idea from reading the book of the same name. I say read, but the thing is more like a picture book featuring some meditations on each curated art collection. Of which, they all hit me in a very specific way. It's the kind of way that you can't just tell people to go read the book to feel. It's filtered through your own experiences with that esoteric nth dimension. To actually explain it, you need to put your own spin on it.
So, this game is the result of that.
I've got a lot of thoughts on the narrative design and what I did there. Got an essay in the works and hopefully I can verbalise my thought process beyond "yeah this seemed cool". I'm definitely saying that for the visuals, though.
I REALLY wanted to release this on the 21st, winter solstice, but just didn't make it in time. Christmas is a good compromise, right? It's released on the 21st in spirit, to me.
So, there it is. The final game of the year and the final game before I start a game design job. It's the perfect round-off to my work and making the industry break, I feel.
Which begs the question... now what?
The goal is complete. I did what I set out to do. Making these little games was, at its core, a means to an end to get me into the games industry.
Well, making these things is just too fun. Not to mention the amount of ideas I have for other ones. I'm now not driven by a need to constantly push for a better portfolio in case that perfect opportunity falls into my lap, taking most all of my free time, and I can just make things for fun as they come to me.
I have so many hobbies I can get back into. Dear god. Dear fucking christ.
EOF really is the perfect round-off, because I'm now looking to things that are a bit bigger in scope. I'll probably still jam on occasion, should the right one cross my radar (or, let's be honest, another html engine comes out). We're talking things that would take me a few months or so to pull together, so we'll see what comes of that.
I'm also hoping to use what I learn during my new day job. 3D stuff, especially. Going to pick up blender at some point in the future and see what I can do.
I have ideas I want to make! I'm in a job I actually care about! I'm going to work with people my neurodiversities let me connect with! I'm moving to a queer space! I'm going to live somewhere I can listen to my vinyl collection! I have rhythm games and used bookstores on my doorstep!
Life, actually, can be pretty good sometimes.

💭 Oopy spooky kooky spoopy. Really like how this one came out.
This was entirely based on a tumblr post. If you're on there, you probably know the one. The idea of human society driving bugs to madness was too tantalising to pass up. So, you know, I had to make it funny.
But I didn't want it to be humourous out the gate. That led to me building the whole game around the twist which meant I was, again, giggling like an idiot whenever I referenced something no one would know about until the end. The really fun part about it, since the frame story is so departed from how you perceive what's happening, it makes it next to impossible to see what the twist will be. Really like how that solved itself.
First run with binksi. I just... love ink to an unreasonable level. I don't know what about it makes my brain go wild. I feel like I'm writing everything for ink and then "porting" it over to whatever restrictions the engine it's supposed to be in provides. That might be something to work on.
I did wonder while making this, does the humourous spin at the end ruin the experience? It was played entirely deadpan and serious so does the final reveal make it retroactively unsatisfying?
I then said fuck it and the only way to find out was to make it.
But the more I chipped at it, the more I liked it as a meta narrative. You go in with one perception about the narrative, and by the end, have that entirely flipped on its head. You can't play it through again with that same perception. By knowing the frame, you're effectively ruined in ever looking at it the same way again.
I'd say that's pretty onbrand for cosmic horror.
Really like this one, anyway. Definitely going to be doing more stuff in binksi. It might become my new default for bitsy-likes.
Shout out King Gizzard for being 90% of what I listened to while making this. I'm very certain the setting was entirely because of Crumbling Castle.

💭 Gay!
I hadn't made anything explicitly queer yet, which is an obvious problem. This one seeked to rectify that.
And, this is actually one thing I'm genuinely proud of. I had a really weird feeling pulling this one together, in that I actually fully liked what I made? I didn't have a voice in the back of my head telling me it was actually shit and that everyone was just being nice to me?
No, even if no-one else liked it, I liked it. I can't speak to how happy I am that I finally feel this way about a piece I've made.
This whole thing got sparked from a post that talked about a thief who did what he did for the homoerotic thrill of being hunted by a man. Throw in a couple lines about police states and here we are.
Structuring the whole game around the twist was a tonne of fun as well. I felt like I could squeeze foreshadowing into every open gap of dialogue, down to what specific words Quinn used and not realising the irony of what he was saying. I felt like a right little shit forcing the player to say or do things that all came together thematically at the end.
Fantastic time all around on this one, and a still alien feeling of actually being proud of it.

💭 My baby,, my little scrunkly,,,,
So, this project is something I made back in 2020. It fucking sucked. It was a terrible terrible touhou ripoff made in unity and the art was horrible and the gameplay was horrible and dear god I really put it on the internet. Why. I still have the old source files tucked into a dark corner of my harddrive and the temptation to nuke the whole thing grows stronger every day.
I, for some reason, however, went absolutely apeshit on the worldbuilding. It still holds up decently, if not a bit awkwardly in places. There's bits I want to redo but a lot I want to keep and play around with, and now I'm back in full creative flow it was rotating in the back of my head. And really, I just love the thing too much. It's like an old blanket.
So, here she is. This is really a test to see if I could get people to care about this in a short amount of time. The mechanics came about from me messing around with narrat and seeing what I could do. Story was the complete focus, if the rushed sketches don't make that obvious. In the end, I like it; I had fun with it. When I wasn't trying to battle narrat and the goddamn indentation. I hate python-likes with a passion.
In terms of making this a full thing, it's going to need more than me. There's more little spinoff pieces I can do solo but turning this into a full game is on standby for now. I've got ideas of boss battle bullet hells timed to music, and there are people who can make that far better than I can, even if I spend years learning how. The problem is actually knowing them. I guess that will come with time.
The title is one of my favourite parts of relaunching this. It means a lot of things, and you'll have to wait for me to make more to know what they are. I will make more. I promise. I've got at least one more parallel thing to run alongside this and then seeing if I can sell someone else into working on it.
Now excuse me, I'm off on holiday to go see Leprous live and never ever shut up again.

💭 God fucking damn do I love TSP.
My name makes it funnier. I mention this literally every time someone talks about TSP.
So my love for TSP, the bitsy game jam theme this month being loops, and realising that I should give a crack at imitating another writing style birthed this project. Immensely fun. Really picking apart the Narrator and how he spoke to make entirely original dialogue for him was even more fun than I thought it would be. He's a wonderful character to write; I highly recommend giving him a spin yourself.
I didn't just want to get the Narrator's language and beats across though, and wanted to make sure the entire game felt like TSP down to the themes and reason for each gameplay decision. Even though it is definitely, certainly, not TSP.
I realised something far too late, however. Going through the right door requires you to go through a large chunk of text multiple times to see three of the endings, which did end up being annoying as hell. By the time I realised this, I was already too deep into the game and the deadline too close to redo those branches. Lesson learnt for the next project.

💭 Is this a vent piece? I guess it counts as that, but it's a lot more positive than the horrendous stuff I put in my journal. No-one alive ever is going to read those, I should note.
This was made with residue energy left over from Red Dwarf, which is why a chunk of this is about writing bugs, and since the bug struck me on the commute the other chunk is about thoughts on my current job. Then I went apeshit with the pixel art and had to stop midway through looking up pentagrams on Unsplash before realising the questions this would bring up with my coworkers were not ones I was equipped to answer.
The title is a bit of a lie, because I completed the rest of it at home on a day off. I still had to respond to teams messages so I believe the spirit stays, besides.

💭 Existentialism!
Space brings me such joy. Which is really funny considering the tone of this game. I think it's practically impossible to do anything on the heat death without going there.
The big theme of this was 'nothing matters, except it does'. Barnad's character progression is based on it, with him going from an aloof and blunt star who knows that everything will die, to slowly coming around to the idea that spending a few minutes with others actually does have merit.
I wanted Barnad's dialogue stilted and choppy, given that he picked up English while being 6 light years away. Bitsy's dialogue box limits really let me lean into it and a few awkward, commas sealed it.
I had 17776 spinning in the back of my mind when I was making this. Not even as a conscious influence, but 'space' and 'I don't have words for what I'm feeling right now' immediately put my mind to it. Given that many reviews noted variations of the latter, I think whatever effect it was having made it in.