Hey, I'm the guy that made Epic Battle Fantasy, and I'm currently working on Matt's Hidden Cats.

(go wishlist it on Steam)

Ask me anything and I will try to answer honestly!

About game dev, life, politics, whatever.

(try to skim through the comments so you don't all end up asking the same questions though)

Hey guys, it’s been a long time since I was in the habit of writing longer blog posts.

Social media has made me very lazy, and now with AI generated slop taking over many platforms, I think it’s more important than ever to start making sincere and long-form content again. Maybe I can even turn some of my writing into YouTube videos later…

Also, I've given out the keys for that giveaway in my last post. In the end I gave out 310 Steam keys for Epic Battle Fantasy 5, and got 3,000 new followers. Very cool!

Anyway, it’s often said that “limitations breed creativity”, in the sense that various constraints on a project will force you to find creative solutions to problems with whatever resources you have available. You can see this quite well in a lot of indie games that can’t afford to do everything that AAA games do, so they focus on doing a few things very well, and if you’ve played retro games, you can see how hardware limitations of something like the NES console dictate the design of the games that run on it.

In my case, the games I work on are also designed around my personal limitations, rather than me trying to chase the coolest thing that’s trendy at the moment.

My earliest browser games – such as The Kitten Game, Mecha Dress Up Game, and Brawl Royale – were basically glorified PowerPoint presentations: You click a button, and an animation plays somewhere. There were a few variables keeping track of score and stuff like that, but for the most part, the state of the game was just tracked by whatever animations were currently playing. That’s all I knew how to make at the time, since I had some animation experience, but very little programming experience. All of these games were focused on having cool, catchy or even violently shocking animations, while the gameplay was very primitive. They were also all quick to make – about one month of work each. But it worked. That was enough to make fun web games at the time (around 2008). And even today you can still make games that are basically PowerPoints – such as visual novels – if you have an interesting premise and some good design skills.

The next step from there was to learn programming! While I was studying computer science at university, I was still making browser games in my free time. They taught as Java, which wasn’t too different from the ActionScript 2 and 3 languages that Flash uses, so it was just a case of me skimming through some textbooks to see how object oriented programming concepts were implemented in Flash’s languages. You can track my progress quite clearly in the first 3 Epic Battle Fantasy games – each game really pushed the limits of what I could program at the time. Making a Final Fantasy 6 style RPG was totally impossible for me – I could design one, but I still didn’t have the programming skills to pull it off. So each Epic Battle Fantasy game added a few more basic mechanics as I got better at programming: Starting with in-battle turn-order and move selection, then adding level-up perks and more character customization, to finally adding an explorable overworld and more detailed menus for item management.

Gradually ActionScript 2 fell out of favour for the newer, faster and stricter ActionScript 3. It was like going from JavaScript to cleaner Java code. I had to suddenly get serious about organising my code, since ActionScript 2 let you get away with some very sloppy coding practices. Anyway, my next few projects started to get more technical. Bullet Heaven and Adventure Story were action games now – not turn-based – so performance mattered. Animation quality was scaled down as I focused more energy into optimizing performance and testing the limits of what a little browser game could handle. I got to know Flash lot better – what the performance bottlenecks were, how to organise object classes neatly, and just generally getting comfortable with programming anything I wanted in ActionScript 3.

Epic Battle Fantasy 3 was at the very limit of what could be done with very sloppy, unprofessional code. So now that I had a bit more experience with good coding practices, I could make Epic Battle Fantasy 4 an even larger and more ambitious game. In fact, it was perhaps a bit too ambitious for the browser game market, which declined massively while I was working on the game, and mobile gaming took its place. Problems such as browsers deleting your save files and it being quite a large download also plagued the game. But eventually, and luckily, it was allowed to be published on Steam, and I saw more success there than I ever had before. So I was getting to the stage now where I really had to be aware of and consider what worked for each gaming platform.

Bullet Heaven 2 is a bullet-hell shoot-em-up, and it was an experiment in using Flash’s hardware-accelerated engine, called Stage3D. Flash graphics were generally rendered by the CPU, which is why they’re so slow, but it also makes working with them much easier. Using Stage3D meant you could do some very ambitious graphics using the GPU if you put in the effort to code them right. So I started this project by testing out how many bullets and other particles Flash could reasonably display on screen, and it turns out, a few thousand is no problem at all if I make correct use of spritesheets and a low number of GPU calls. So I built the game around that concept. I also learned a bunch about object-pooling, and other memory management practices, but unfortunately was too lazy to implement all of those correctly, so the game stutters occasionally when the garbage is collected. Overall, the game could have used more time in the oven, and it wasn’t my most successful one, but I learned a lot!

Something worth mentioning about all the EBF games is how Flash’s performance limitations influence their design. This is why there’s no dynamic camera moving around in battle, and why you’re permanently limited to 3 characters on your team. This is why the world map is broken up into small, dense sections like a GameBoy Zelda game. Regular Flash graphics works best if there’s only animation happening in a few parts of the screen at a time, and background stuff can just be cached in place. Most of the places where the games slow down are because I broke the rules and did some very inefficient effects. There are advantages of course – I don’t have to worry about memory management or asset resolutions, since Flash uses vector graphics. (more on that later)

Epic Battle Fantasy 5 was my first EBF game made specifically for Steam, and I was also a financially stable and experienced programmer now, so a lot of limits were off the table, and new opportunities arose. It was a question of how polished can I make the gameplay from previous games, in a reasonable amount of dev time? I figured I could put up with about 3 years of work before I went insane, so that’s what happened. Some new design goals were:

• Make the game polished enough so that people will be happy to pay up-front for it without needing to play a free version first. So this meant: polished, consistent graphics, a catchy trailer, and 98% positive Steam reviews.

• Fill it to the brim with content so that people can keep coming back to it for years, and no one can say that it was priced too expensive.

• Reboot the story in a way that new and existing fans will understand it.

• Take advantage of new social media platforms like Discord to really leverage community involvement: feature more fanart, get feedback on balance, support mod development, etc.

• Translate it to an ambitious 12 languages with the help of the fans!

(Chinese in particular turned out to be a really big deal)

All of that went very well, and the game was a huge success. The main issue is that I don’t know if I ever want to work on any project of that size ever again, because on top of those 3 years, I also spent another year making an update and then a mobile port. So in future, a new limitation will be to keep the work interesting for myself by doing as many things differently as I can.

Finally, the game I’m working on now – Matt’s Hidden Cats – is built mainly with two goals in mind: to take advantage of Ruffle’s strengths, and to be a casual game that anyone can play – including my parents and the children of my friends.

Ruffle (a Flash emulator) has been in the works for a few years, but only in the last couple of years has it become viable for running ActionScript 3 games. What Ruffle is exceptionally good at is rendering Flash’s vector art using the GPU, which is something that the original Flashplayer only did on mobile devices. Flashplayer on PC used the CPU, which you’ll know isn’t ideal for drawing graphics – it works okay in a small window for browser games, but really starts to slow down in HD resolutions. With Ruffle, I finally had access to a game engine that renders vector art very fast, even at high resolutions – I don’t think there’s anything else like it. And since I’ve been using Flash the whole time, I didn’t have to change my work flow very much.

What this allows me to do is to have tons of animations on screen with unlimited resolution, and a hidden object game can really take advantage of this, as the genre is known for having very detailed levels, and the ability to zoom in and out. Some of the hidden object games I’ve played have issues with graphics becoming a bit blurry or pixelated when fully zoomed-in, and this leads to a bad experience when trying to find very small items. You can overcome this by making all of your assets very high resolution, but that of course increases the hardware requirements for the game. Vector art doesn’t have this problem – it’s always sharp!

If you’re not familiar with vector art, you should know that it doesn’t use pixels – it’s not a bitmap. It’s a mathematical representation of how the computer should draw lines and shapes, and outside of Flash games, it’s pretty rare to see in 2D games. (it’s conceptually similar to how 3D shapes are drawn)

You’ve probably seen it used in map apps.

Anyway, the development of Ruffle opens up a lot of new possibilities and makes Flash games with vector art viable in the current year on modern hardware, which is pretty cool. And the tech is only going to keep getting better, since it’s a work-in-progress.

The second goal of Matt’s Hidden Cats is to be a good game that even non-gamers can easily pick up. I haven’t seen many good examples of this since the earlier PopCap stuff like Bejeweled, Peggle, and Zuma. Now that mobile gaming has taken over, most casual games are free-to-play and ruined by predatory micro-transactions, and are artificially designed to keep you coming back every day indefinitely. Matt’s Hidden Cats won’t insult your intelligence – you get a complete game with hand-made levels that you can play at your own pace.

I’m aiming to address a lot of the gameplay problems that other hidden object games have. Here’s some examples:

• A lot of them have very limited hint systems: sometimes you have to wait a frustratingly long time to receive a hint, or sometimes the hint just isn’t very helpful. In Matt’s Hidden Cats you’ll have options to change how often you can use hints, and the degree of helpfulness they offer, so you can make progress at whatever pace suits you.

• Often the games become more frustrating as you try to find the last one or two items in a level. To address this, items you’ve found remain circled, so you can clearly see in which parts of the level you haven’t found anything in, which really helps narrow down where the remaining items might be. It’s a subtle hint that players will probably feel smart about exploiting.

• There’s usually no difficulty options in these games! Most puzzle games go for a one-size-fits-all approach, which will exclude some players, and it also means that once you complete a level, there’s not much point in ever replaying it once you know the solution. In Matt’s Hidden Cats there are 3 difficulty options, with a different set of goals to find in each. Easy mode is for younger kids, Normal mode is not trivial but also not challenging, and Hard mode is for anyone who really wants to dig in deep and spend some time getting to know every nook and cranny in the game.

This aspect of game design applies to all of my other games too – I look at games in the genre, take mechanics that I like, and change things that I think should be done differently. Maybe this won’t lead to a completely groundbreaking and innovative game, but it means that my games will be familiar to fans of whichever genre, and the mechanics have already been proven to work in other titles, so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel and spend a lot of time trying out completely new concepts.

You’ll probably have seen by now that a lot of indie game projects out there fail because the team doesn’t have the experience or resources to pull off what they had envisioned. It seems kind of obvious, but I think you should strive to design a game based around what experience and resources you currently have, rather than trying to make your dream idea work at any cost. And even if a project doesn’t turn out how you wanted, there should still be a meaningful place for it in your portfolio of work. For me, even if a game doesn’t turn out to be financially successful, at least it was a good learning experience.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got to share for now.

Hey guys, since Twitter and Facebook suck, I'm trying to scam people into following me on Newgrounds.

I will be giving away Steam keys for Epic Battle Fantasy 5, one of the best RPGs of all time, to a random 10% of people who start following me on Newgrounds. So if 1,000 people follow me, I'll give out 100 keys, and so on.

Please share this news with your friends!

If you already own the game, you'll have a spare key to give to a cool person!

Keys will be given out in a few days, and I'll keep this going for as long as new people keep coming.

(The scam is that you have to follow me, which could be a waste of your time.)

(If you already follow me, you might have to unfollow me and follow me again to enter.)

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.