Yo, here’s a summary of my year, in no particular order:

• I ported Epic Battle Fantasy 4 to Android, but the Play Store algorithm did not bless me this time. I didn’t even bother to port it to iOS, which wouldn’t have been much extra work. Mobile development in general is such a chore with the technical and legal requirements changing every year – I just can’t feel any enthusiasm for it. The only reason I stuck with it is because EBF5 did surprisingly well on Google Play, but the numbers are gradually declining.

• Otherwise I spent the year mainly working on Matt’s Hidden Cats at a casual pace. The gameplay content is almost finished, but I’ve gotta wrap it all up nicely with some nice menus, flavour text, and general embellishments. Would be nice to have the game finished in 2025, but the scope keeps increasing.

• I went to Morocco in April with my brother. He found incredibly cheap Ryanair flights, so we had no choice. We spent half of our time in Marrakesh, mostly in the old town center. It’s a really beautiful city with plenty of historical buildings – mosques, religious schools, palaces, ruins, and also a LOT of markets aimed at tourists. It’s also incredibly hot, dense and busy, with lots of motorbikes, stray dogs and donkey carts squeezed into tight, labyrinth-like pedestrian paths. And merchants will harass you constantly! Due to my beard, everyone called me Ali Baba. It’s not an atmosphere that everyone will enjoy, but we’ve been to Cairo in Egypt as kids, so we were ready. And despite all that, accommodation was cool and quiet inside.

• We also spent some time in Agadir, but it’s a much more modern city as it was completely destroyed by an earthquake and rebuilt, so it didn’t have as much culture and history. We went to Crocoparc to see some crocodiles!

• The highlight of our trip was our time in the desert. We visited the Berber fortress at Aït Benhaddou, which is known for having many big films set there. We rode camels and quadbikes in the sand dunes at the edge of the Sahara. And we spent many hours in buses and taxis, making brief stops at restaurants, farms, valleys and viewpoints. I survived the trip without getting any sunburn, mostly by keeping covered or staying in the shade!

• My favourite games this year were Returnal (a lot like new Doom), Super Mario Wonder (great party game), and Astro Bot (a lot like 3D Mario). If you haven’t played ’em, you should consider it.

• Some memorable indie games I played this year are: Tunic, UFO 50, Cocoon, Cat Quest 2 & 3, Crypt Custodian, Islets, Minishoot Adventures, Angel at Dusk, Leap Year, Animal Well, Curse Crackers: For Whom the Belle Toils, Momodora: Moonlit Farewell, BZZZT, and A Little to the Left. In addition to those, I can see in my Steam purchase history that I bought a LOT of indie games this year that I didn’t finish…

• I also continued playing a lot of hidden object and puzzle games for market research, but Hidden Through Time is still my favourite. I’m looking forward to one that’s currently in development, called Lost and Found Co., as it looks like a lot of effort is going into it. But overall I’m pretty confident that Matt’s Hidden Cats is going to be top tier relative to the competition.

• Lego was the major hobby taking up my time this year. My dad is worried about getting dementia, so I gave him some Lego, and he’s had no trouble with it. We quickly built our way through a lot of Technic stuff, up to the massive Rough Terrain Crane set. My other family members are getting interested too, so I’ve amassed quite a collection of new sets this year.

• I’ve also been restoring a lot of old sets from my childhood – ordering missing parts, restoring their colors with chemicals, and cleaning them up – and also buying more vintage stuff. I’ve revisited Technic, Bionicle, Slizers (Throwbots), AquaZone, Pirates, Ninjas, and many more. I’ve figured that as long as the sets are complete and stored properly, they’ll keep their value and will be easy to sell/gift on if I ever tire of them.

• Rebrickable.com is a website where users can share their alternative instructions for existing sets, and I’ve been getting great value from it. For example, I’ve built like 5 different machines from set 42081.

• I read a bunch of manga this year, mostly short horror stories, but the one that stayed with me was Goodnight Punpun. Most depressing thing I’ve ever read – I felt like someone close to me had died.

• I continued to watch a lot of horror films this year, with my favourites being The Substance, The House That Jack Built, When Evil Lurks and Strange Darling. Other noteworthy ones included VHS Beyond, Green Room, Oddities, and Exte: Hair Extensions. Also watched a few NSFL films that showed me what mental illness feels like, such as Human Centipede 3 and Tumbling Doll of Flesh.

• Me and my friends watched all the Fast and Furious films. They were really dumb in an entertaining way, and the whacky stunts were hilarious.

• Had my first psychedelic trip. Flowers danced. My dog thought I was dying. Felt deeply connected to my ancestors and to conspiracy-brained people. Very cool.

• I flew to Dublin on short notice to attend a Newgrounds meetup. People shared sketches and stickers, and we watched some cartoons at a gaming pub. I reckon most people there were 10 years younger than me, but everyone was super friendly and open to chat. Hotels were expensive, so I didn’t bother and just slept in the airport. It all went very smoothly considering how rushed my plans were – I should try to do more little trips like this if I get the opportunity.

• It was time to finally sort out some old video games. I cleaned up some consoles, and sorted through my collection to see what had no sentimental value to me. I sold about half of my games to CeX, but they wouldn’t accept a lot of my consoles due to some minor issues – so maybe I’ll just donate those to charity or something. Either way, I’ve decided that if I’m gonna horde stuff, it better be in good condition and of some importance to me.

• I took up running with my dog as a hobby and quickly built my way up to running a 10k, and then got bored of it immediately after that because I injured my foot. Gone back to getting my exercise from VR games and some simple weight exercises. My Strava friends were sad to see me exit the running cult.

• Me, Ronja and Ethel, and my brother and his partner, rented a gatekeeper’s lodge in the countryside for a few days to chill. Survived 110c in the sauna!

• Some of Ronja’s friends from Finland visited us in Glasgow, but besides going out for food a couple of times, I was mostly bed bound due to some mighty cold.

• I made a BlueSky account and got a decent amount of followers there. This was an attempt to get away from Twitter – but now I have two Twitters! I really need to learn how to just post without browsing. So much time and energy wasted there – it’s my worst habit by far.

• I drove down to Blackburn to pick up the perfect car for my brother – a fully upgraded Skoda Yeti. Very cool. His old VW Polo could barely start. Also found a fantastic Moroccan restaurant nearby, and will try to stop by there every time I’m driving through England.

• Some of my childhood friends from Poland were visiting Scotland, so we rented a house near the Isle of Skye and explored the area. Saw the abandoned ship at Corpach, walked around Portree, climbed up to the Old Man of Storr, trespassed around Eilean Donan Castle, and more. We also played a lot of Smash Bros Remix on the Nintendo 64.

• Me and Ronja celebrated our 10 year anniversary with a log cabin stay near Ludlow. It’s a very cosy part of England with a lot of beautiful medieval buildings and large antique shops. Stokesay Castle was unfortunately closed, but we got a good view from outside. We got lucky with the weather – it was snowing, which is very rare in the UK! The cabin we stayed in was high up on stilts, and had a DVD player and a hot-tub. Very nice.

• My brother got a new rescue dog who is super cool. He’s 30kg and still a dumb puppy – so kinda scary – but he’s quickly learning to behave.

• This year’s outlook for the world has been pretty poor. War continues in Ukraine and in the Middle East. AI is flooding the internet with garbage. Governments are losing elections everywhere – people are pissed off and our leaders don’t seem to have any productive solutions, which could lead to even more disastrous outcomes in the coming years. I’m trying to do my part by donating to causes I care about without getting too emotionally invested. It’s hard to find any optimism when no one seem to agree on anything – but life is good when I keep to myself and forget about it for a while.

Happy New Year, ya’ll.

Here’s a collection of my favourite photos from the year…

(click here for a bigger version)

In an attempt to get more followers, I'm doing a Steam key giveaway scam on BlueSky (it's a Twitter clone).

Follow me there and repost my latest post for a 10% chance to win Epic Battle Fantasy 5.

(the scam is that you have to follow me, which sucks)

I think in a few months I'll do a similar giveaway for Newgrounds, since I also want to drag more people here and away from Facebook and Twitter.

In other news, please wishlist Matt's Hidden Cats on Steam. The game is still far from finished, but already has 60 levels.

I'm gonna be in Dublin on the 18th for the Newgrounds meetup!

In other news...

Epic Battle Fantasy 4 is live on Google Play!

It’s in Early Access, but it’s 99.9% done, I don’t anticipate any major changes.

The performance and Google services (ads, purchases, achievements, cloud saving, etc) should all be very similar to EBF5. It’s running on a newer engine so should be more compatible with Android 13 devices. iOS version coming a bit later.

If you haven’t played the latest versions of EBF4 on Steam, well, it’s got widescreen support, new weapons, skills and summons, cheats and challenges, and a lot of other new content. All of that stuff is in the mobile version, though some of it is paywalled. The entire story is free, but you can pay to disable ads and get the Battle Mountain area and other extras.

Tell yer friends about it!

New thumbnail art by NaT.

Hey guys, I complain a lot about mobile game dev on my social media, since the Google and Apple app stores are very frustrating to work with. Their API features change every year, they bother you with new regulations, their tools are clunky to use (and sometimes don’t work at all), the documentation is bad, it’s very difficult to contact a human for help, and it’s just an unpleasant experience all around.

BUT...

Since the EBF4 port is almost done (Ronja is currently playing it) I figure I’d write a bit about what I do actually like about mobile game dev, and why I’m spending a chunk of my time porting my games to Android and iOS, despite the frustration.

1. App stores only take a 15% cut from smaller developers, instead of Steam’s 30%. So that’s a very cool bonus, and is the main reason I considered mobile dev once this policy was announced by both Google and Apple.

2. Everyone has a phone – I can show my games to anyone if they’re on mobile, even to non-gamers. The potential audience is massive. And people asking for Switch ports will have no right to complain, since they also have phones.

3. My games are designed for mouse controls, so touch controls are an almost perfect fit. I do have to update the interfaces to display tooltips differently, and to make text and icons bigger, but in general mouse controls translate well to mobile, and in many cases using two thumbs is faster and more convenient than using a mouse. And if you really liked the mouse controls (rollover to see tooltips, etc), you can use a device with a stylus, and it’s functionally identical to a mouse!

4. The bar is really low for mobile games – I struggle to find games that aren’t full of bad practices like microtransactions, daily notifications, repetitive grinding, and lowest common denominator design. Being able to make good games feels like it gives me somewhat of a competitive edge. Good, well-known indie games do exist on mobile (Terraria, Stardew Valley, etc), but a lot of them require you to pay up front, or they’re better suited to consoles or PC due to complex controls and detailed graphics. The EBF games have point-and-click controls and cartoony graphics, and were originally free-to-play in web browsers, so they fit well on mobile. I feel like mobile gamers are getting just as good an experience as the PC players – and since it’s free-to-play they also get to try a huge chunk of the content before spending any money!

(I should clarify that while my games are free-to-play, they don’t have microtransactions. They have in-app purchases that disable ads and unlock side content, and the spending limit is only between $12 and $24 per game, more or less the same as buying the games on PC.)

5. The algorithm may bless me – much like on YouTube, success on mobile platforms seems to be a bit of a gamble due to the all powerful and completely opaque store algorithms. But this potentially means that my games can get a huge amount of exposure without any marketing at all, and that’s what seems to have happened with EBF5. The game’s got around 600,000 downloads on the Google Play store, and almost all of that is from the store algorithm showing it to people – my own marketing attempts are a drop in the bucket. It’s impossible to know exactly what metrics are important for the algorithm, but I have to imagine that having the game translated into many languages, good review scores, and long-term happy players helps here somewhat. But most importantly, I find the uncertainty of the algorithm very exciting – watching the daily downloads fluctuate due to forces outside of my control is pretty addictive, where as on Steam, the stats are more predictable and uninteresting, outside of a major sale or feature.

6. Flash works better on mobile than anywhere else! I’m still using Flash for all of my games, and before Adobe abandoned it, they made a final push to optimize it for mobile, especially iOS. For games with vector graphics, like EBF, the performance is comparable on mobile and PC, which is crazy. There are some visual effects that slow things down, but if I avoid using those, I can install PC versions of my games on a phone, and they will run fairly well before I make any changes. It’s very satisfying to see my games running smoothly on a small, portable device, especially since Flash hasn’t historically had the best reputation for performance. And in case anyone reading this doesn’t already know, Flashplayer (in the form of AIR) is now being maintained by HARMAN, a Samsung company, and is getting regular and sustainable updates. It’s not going to keep up with other cutting-edge game engines, but it’s still totally viable for small-ish games on desktop and mobile.

Hey guys, we're hosting an Epic Battle Fantasy Valentine's Day art contest!

To participate in the contest, create some sappy and romantic fanart of your favourite EBF romance (canon or not). Make sure to post it to the ⁠contest channel on the EBF Discord server with the name of the art piece, your name/nickname (how you want to be credited), a link to your art page, and the contest tag. The deadline is on Valentine's Day Wednesday February 14th at 10PM GMT, and the contest tag is “Valentine-Contest-Entry”, don't forget to include it with your entry! You can make as many entries as you’d like, but all art must be new, image format (.png or .jpeg), made by you, and PG-13.

There is a total of £500 (~$620) to be split between the top entries, as well as Steam or mobile keys for any Epic Battle Fantasy games of your choice. Cash prizes will be awarded by PayPal or bank transfer.

Entries will be judged by me and Ronja (more judges likely to be added), and winners will be announced within a couple weeks after the deadline.

Hey guys, every year I write a long blog post summarizing the highlights of that year, so here it is for 2023:

• Finally decided to ditch the old 2002 Honda Civic, and bought an automatic 2018 Skoda Karoq. Ronja recently got her driving license, and this seemed like a good disability-friendly car to share. We got the fully-loaded version because we wanted the seats to automatically adjust for each driver, but this also came with other cool vanity features, like a sun roof, 4 wheel drive, and a more powerful engine. We had to drive all the way down to Llandudno in Wales to get this rarer version! Loving the car so far, and made good use of it already. But most importantly, it feels a lot safer than the previous one!

• Me and Ronja went on two cabin trips this year with Ethel, our dog. The first was in the Lake District in England, where we stayed 3 nights, and saw a nearby castle, birdwatching platforms, and hiking trails. The second was a cabin by the lake in Lochgoilhead, not far from Glasgow. It was located in the back yard of a fancy hotel and wedding venue, but there were no events on, so it was just us there. It looked beautiful during the day, but like a Resident Evil location at night!

• Attended a lot of big life events this year, including 2 weddings, 6 or 7 birthday parties, PhD graduation party and a bachelor party, in addition to the usual May Day, Midsummer, Eurovision, Halloween and New Year’s Eve parties. I’m building up a collection of colorful shirts to wear at these. One of the birthday parties was at a trampoline park, and another was a game of bubble football, both of which were new and fun experiences for me, and exhausting. Also went bowling for the first time in years, and bought an ornamental sword for a friend, which looked very cool.

• A bunch of my friends are starting to have babies, which is making me feel old. I’ve started collecting cute Duplo sets to gift them later.

• Workwise, I spent most of the year working on Hidden Cats. There’s 30 levels that are mostly finished, but I expect I’ll be adding another 50 or so, plus some story elements. It’s turning into a pretty big but still quite experimental project. The demo has been well received by players, but my audience still isn’t particularly interested in the game, so I need to do more to market it next year.

• I’ve started work on porting Epic Battle Fantasy 4 to mobile, which includes adding widescreen support and a bit of new content.

• Epic Battle Fantasy 5 continues to sell well on Steam and on Android, and a Chinese government-approved version launched this year. I’ve also been helping modders with some graphics – the scene is getting more lively as Flash decompiling tools improve.

• Went to see the The HU – a folk metal band from Mongolia. I don’t do live music very often, because of how crowded and painfully loud it is sometimes. The band was fun but the venue was awful!

• My most played game this year was once again Age of Empires 2 – the game is still getting updates, and me and my friends are still not bored of it. Other games I really enjoyed were Resident Evil 8, Resident Evil 4 Remake, Jusant, Humanity (VR), Pistol Whip (VR), Katamari Damacy and We <3 Katamari Remakes, Final Fantasy 7: Remake, and replaying Half Life: Alyx with developer’s commentary. A lot of remakes! I’ve also been getting my dad into some calmer VR games, and occasionally returning to Overcooked, Moving Out and Mario Kart 8 with Ronja.

• I’ve been reading a lot of horror manga this year, particularly most of Junji Ito’s work. I think the whacky scenes from Gyo and Uzumaki stuck in my mind the most. Also digging into small, obscure, indie horror games, including Who’s Lila?, Utility Room (VR), Feed Me Billy, and Squirrel Stapler. The video essays by Jacob Geller and iceberg videos by GriefSpeaking give me tons of horror recommendations.

• On the topic of horror, I’ve been hosting horror movie nights for my friends to show off my vast collection of films. Some recent favourites include Barbarian, Deadstream, Soft and Quiet, Smile, Bodies Bodies Bodies, Talk To Me, Infinity Pool, and Butterfly Kisses.

• I collected a bunch of retro space Lego from my childhood and some from even earlier. M-Tron, Space Police, and UFO themes from the 90s. Loved the whacky colors they had at the time. The modern stuff does nothing for me.

• I went on a theme-park road trip around England by myself, staying in Travelodges and spending 5 days in Alton Towers, Drayton Manor, Fantasy Island and FlamingoLand. The kids were in school and the weather was cloudy, so the parks were totally empty, except for Alton Towers, which still had 15 minute queues. The big new rides in Alton Towers (The Smiler and Wicker Man) are thematically incredibly impressive. FlamingoLand is a hidden gem – it has 3 great rollercoasters, and the zoo is pretty good too. The scariest ride by far was the 70m tall Sky Flier in Fantasy Island – besides being very tall, it also felt unsafe, and I was the only person on it.

• Later in the year I did two more theme park trips, this time with some friends, to Blackpool Pleasure Beach and FlamingoLand again. Blackpool’s Valhalla dark/water-ride is probably the best ride in the UK, their Icon rollercoaster may be the best rollercoaster in the UK, and the crowds are generally smaller than in Alton Towers. So if you only do one theme park in the UK, this maybe should be the one!

• Finally, I visited Thorpe Park on my way to Brighton with Ronja. Even though school should have still been on, the park was very crowded with kids – even the queue skips were sold out, and the best ride, Swarm, broke down while we were queuing for it! Stealth was fun, and Saw could have been an awesome ride if it was smooth instead of painful. Ronja only rode the water rides, which were pretty good too. Good day regardless of all the challenges.

• Me and Ronja went to Brighton for the Develop conference, and bumped into a few British indie game devs, including The Super Flash Brothers, Damp Gnat, and Grey Alien Games. The conference was packed and there was a lot of indie stuff to see, but the best parts were getting food and drinks with people afterwards. We of course did all the tourist stuff too, including seeing the Royal Pavilion, going up the i360 tower, and riding a crappy rollercoaster on the pier. We also saw a bit of Oxford on our drive down. On our drive home however, a combination of bad weather and road closures meant that our trip took 13 hours instead of 9. A new daily driving record for me!

• Ronja went to Finland for 2 weeks, and then again later for 1 week. I thought being home alone would be fun, but I didn’t do anything special in my free time besides babysitting the dog.

• I’ve been continuing some of my good habits from last year – trying to eat out at cute cafes and restaurants regularly, enjoying buying clothes, trying to buy more long-term furniture and home decor instead of cheap stuff.

• Also continuing some of the bad habits, like spending too much time on Twitter. It takes a lot of discipline to do the fun parts of social media and then stop before you get to the bad parts.

• In terms of exercise, I’m not doing great. I stopped playing Beat Saber because it was damaging my shoulders, and I haven’t been getting much regular exercise since. I should get back into weightlifting, as it’s very effective, time-efficient, and safe, but I’m lazy, and dog walking takes up a lot of that exercise time these days.

• In August I went on holiday to the Greek island of Kefalonia. I was there with Ronja, my brother and his partner. Splashed out a bit on fancier accommodation with some nice views of the hilly countryside. Driving a car there was like real life Mario Kart – no lane markings or speed limits, goats and pedestrians all over the road, and always at the edge of a cliff. We visited the ruins of a town destroyed by an earthquake, walked through some castle ruins, drove to the top of the highest mountain, and tried a lot of local food. Loved hiding from the sun in caves by the beaches. Managed not to get sunburnt. Learned about Balkans meme culture on Reddit. Great stuff overall. But then our flight home was cancelled and we had to sleep on the floor of the airport.

• Halloween was a big effort this year. I painted a bunch of cheap skeleton props to make them more interesting, and putting up all the decorations took a couple of days. Every year the collection grows. We hosted a party and got tons of trick-or-treaters.

• Had some fun upgrading Ronja’s PC with new (but used) CPU, GPU and RAM. It’s 6 or 7 years old now, but can play AAA games once again. We also replaced the case with something more beautiful. It’s the biggest PC build project I’ve done, but it went pretty smoothly and it was fun to figure out what the best components were for an old motherboard.

• I voted in Poland for the first time! I didn’t know I could. I’m happy with the election results, but it will apparently take some time for the damage done by the previous party to be undone. Now if only we could kick out the conservative party in the UK sooner…

• I started attending pro-Palestine ceasefire marches. I’ve never been to political rallies of any sort before, so it’s been quite a spectacular experience. It’s nice to be around hopeful and energetic people, rather than the usual political talk at the pub where everyone just complains but feels helpless. The West’s disastrous invasion of Iraq was probably the worst thing the UK government has been involved in in my lifetime, and I would like for that sort of thing not to happen any more.

• December was a tough month for my family – my brother’s dog died of cancer, my aunt died of cancer, and my uncle was diagnosed with cancer. My dad had heart surgery to improve his chances of surviving his 70s, and he’s currently recovering in the hospital. I’ve been visiting him almost every day, and he seems to be gradually getting better.

• Ronja’s mum visited for Christmas again and got me the big Lego rollercoaster set, which was a massive and time consuming build, but looks really cool. It was a Chinese knockoff, so it took a little bit of DIY to get it running smoothly. Ronja put a lot of effort into cooking and decorating, where as I mostly helped with cleaning. Since my dad is in hospital and my brother and his partner are away in Lithuania, Christmas dinner was a smaller affair.

Finally, here’s some of our favourite photos from the year – onwards to 2024!

Happy New Year, ya’ll.

(Here's a higher resolution version of the photos)

I try to keep politics to Twitter, but felt the need to say something on Palestine/Israel, in case there's still any fence sitters reading this.

For anyone out of the loop, there's an ongoing genocide in Gaza being done by Israel, in response to a major terrorist attack on October 7th in which 1,000 Israeli civilians and tourists were killed. So far, nearly 20,000 have been killed in Gaza, the majority of which are women and children, and almost all civilians. Infrastructure in Gaza has been destroyed - hospitals, universities, utilities - so around two million people are displaced without food, water or medical care for over 2 months now.

There's a lot of history and details there that I'm not qualified to talk about (this has been ongoing for 75 years, after the UK apparently promised the land to both sides), but this scale of devastation hasn't been seen in decades. The important thing to note is that Israel holds 90% of the power in this conflict (as you may be able to tell by the death counts) and is fully supported by the USA, with the UK government also being supportive. With that advantage, most of what they've accomplished has been to kill and displace civilians and take land, instead of any "self defense" goals.

I feel the need to speak up since the UK government (and the opposition party too) are complicit in this.

In my opinion, the invasion of Iraq was the worst thing the UK government has done in my lifetime, and this feels like a similarly awful foreign policy blunder. I've been attending ceasefire marches to absolve me of my shitty government's actions, for whatever that's worth. I also chipped in £500 to Medical Aid for Palestinians and £500 to Doctors Without Borders.

Humanitarian organizations are saying that their medical staff are being targeted by Israeli forces, so I respect any work they manage to do in these circumstances.

Anyway, this all sucks, and I would like to see a ceasefire and negotiations for long term solutions.

The first playable demo of my new game Hidden Cats & Dogs is now available for everyone.

Download it here for free and try 6 random levels:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/hidden-cats-dogs-94340545

Here's what I've been working on over spooky season - Autumn levels for Hidden Cats & Dogs.

You can wishlist the game on Steam if you are cool.

The Steam store page for my new game Hidden Cats & Dogs is live!

Please wishlist the game and let your friends know about it.

The game is probably over a year away from release, but I could have a demo ready soon-ish.

Hidden Cats & Dogs features...

•    Thousands of items to find, and 20+ hours of gameplay.
•    3 difficulty modes, with different goals in each, allowing for multiple playthroughs.
•    Spot-the-difference challenges, and other secret game modes.
•    Diverse areas including ancient Egypt, volcanic islands, European forests and castles, arctic tundra, fantasy jungles, and many more.
•    Occasional dark humour. (which can be disabled for a family-friendly experience)
•    100% DRM-free, so you can make a copy for your grandma.