20-01-2025
Another year has passed where I've kept the tradition of only writing a end of the year post!
Last time I wrote a series of objectives for the year. I mostly failed, but it's not the end of the world.
I didn't release a game in 2024... not mine or TragicoMedia's. Though a game I've been working on as a contractor did get released in early access.
I explored making web games, alongside JuanMa Díaz an amazing artist.
We worked on a couple of prototypes. The first one was a physics based platformer. We had some cool ideas but after a month of work we realised
we'd need a lot of time to make a bunch of levels which didn't make sense with our time budget. The second prototype was a really simple city builder. I really liked this idea but sadly I had to drop off the project because by that time I started doing
contract work and had a really hard time finding time to work on this.
While we didn't manage to release anything it was a good experience overall. I really enjoyed working with JuanMa and loved his approach to design.
Since I wanted to get away from Unity both of these prototypes were done using Defold which was a first for me.
Once again I went to Gamescom Latam, previously BIG, in Brazil. This was unexpected as money was (is) short but Tourist Trap got nominated for Best Latam Game. Spoilers: it didn't win but it was great nonetheless. Being nominated meant the game was actually playable at a booth which was a fun and weird experience. Narrative games just don't seem to "work" at expos in my opinion... but it was still fun to see people play from the shadows. I don't think anyone got past the first couple of puzzles of act 2 during the whole show.
We also pitched a new project to potential partners during the event, had some follow ups and that was it so far.
We have other prototypes in the works at TragicoMedia as well as ideas we throw around and maybe some day they'll materialize into a prototype or who knows... With two different ideas we have applied for government grants, one which results have recently been announced and we didn't get. The other one we should find out soon.
This year I helped organize our local gamedev event LevelUY. It was a great learning and fulfilling experience and as with any event, no matter how small, so much work is done behind the scenes.
At the award show in LevelUY Tourist Trap won Game of the Year!
I got tired of having to figure out Hugo each time I wrote one of these posts (even if it's only once a year) so I did what anyone would do and wrote my own static site generator. It's just a small python script which goes through a directory with a bunch of .txt files. Each of these files corresponds to a post written using markdown which gets exported to a new html file. The script then parses the date and title of the post to generate the index page. The site is generated in an output dir and I drop everything into Cloudflare Pages. Voila!
I'm using Simple.css for styling. I might do some changes to the style later but for now this is it.
TODO: generate an rss. Do people still use this?