This is it. The peak.

Submachine: Legacy was released. Thank You everyone for reading! See you next year!

Jokes aside, let’s take a closer look at what happened in 2023.

Submachine Legacy. Finishing and releasing the game on Steam. Please remember that finishing all in-game puzzles is not the end of development. After that comes entire late-development phase, which includes adding all notes (yeah, I still haven’t decided how to display those, that’s why it’s pushed back to the later stage of development), creating intro, outro, cinematics between chapters, also let’s not forget entire sound design that I have to do with ThumpMonks on board. So there is still a lot of work to do. Be patient. I know you are. Be more patient. It will be worth it. I can’t wait either.

The thing that wasn’t listed above is the Shattered Quadrant, an entire new chapter in the Submachine saga derived from already existing Subnet locations, few room designs I created randomly live while streaming and few completely new locations. I wanted to use literally EVERY SINGLE room design I ever created for Submachine in this remaster. This information was kept from the players before game release because I wanted it to be a surprise for returning players. I wanted to make sure that even if you played all Submachines ten times before the remaster, you’d still find something new and never seen before in this game. The game was released in October, on Friday the 13th nonetheless.

Submachine Card Game. Plan minimum here is creating Kickstarter campaign and seeing what comes of it. Then plan and execute accordingly. I know, all I’m saying here is  sweet nothings, but hey. I’m neck deep in the Legacy and don’t think about this project that much. Some progress will be made here. Maybe.

Yeah, nah. The word “maybe” turned out to be the operative here. Let me explain. I forgot about something. I forgot that after releasing a brand new game on Steam you spend approximately an entire month still working on the game, fixing all bugs found by players, correcting typos in notes, adding stuff you forgot, creating new builds of the game daily. I have to change my approach to this in the future. No matter the amount of testing I do myself, there’s no way to catch it all. So I spent entire next month fixing things. There was just no time left in 2023 to do this. This caused the Kickstarter campaign to remain in dormant form, because, not sure why, but I feel making a campaign right before holiday season in December is not that good of an idea. Maybe I’m wrong here, but hey.

Blaki 5. Yes, a comic book. Would you believe it. I want to at least try to come back to the idea of drawing a comic book. Try to remember how to do it, at least begin painting that new album. At least try. You know, this entire album is already written and sketched out. All I have to do is draw and paint it. That’s all. So little, yet so much. Just try to begin. You can do this. One page. Maybe just one, single page for the new album. Is that too much? Let’s wait and see.

Sure, a comic book that I’ll create in 2024. I did try to begin, I looked through all those scripts, ideas and story beats I already have, I kind of prepared mentally to sort it into proper  sequence to fit a comic book album, but I haven’t drawn a single page yet. I can’t rush this process. But I drew TWO unrelated comic book pages! One is the end of year Santa comic (this counts, right?), and the other one is a project that’s still top secret and I can’t really talk about it. More info coming soon probably.

 >> Speaking of things that were done but weren’t on the to-do list >>

Daymare Stray. In march I took a short break from submachining and dusted off old flash engine skills and remastered Where is 2010? into lore-friendly Daymare Stray. To be remastered again in the main Daymare remaster.

Daymare Cat 10-year Anniversary edition. These decades are flying by quicker and quicker. This is scary. Anyway, this game needed a bit of love, I changed some animations, especially main character running. I added a bitmap background testing waters for the future Daymare Town remaster. You guys seemed to like it, so now entirety of DMT will look like this and it’s all your fault. Read more.

Slice of Sea major update and overhaul to version 2.0. After releasing Submachine: Legacy I immediately wanted to update the older game with new UI stuff I created for the remaster. And this is how Slice of Sea got full controller support, new cursor showing hotspot regions where an inventory item can be used and update to entire code, rework and refactor of all mechanics in the game, making them more robust and unbreakable, just like in Submachine: Legacy. Read more.

Daymare Town remaster. Well, this one needs a bit more explanation. You see, I work alone, you know that. Of course, ThumpMonks are making music and sounds, but the rest is me. When you release a game (Submachine remaster in this case), your brain is working on 150% of it’s capacity. Before the release you have to oversee literally EVERYTHING (and more) concerning the release process, and after that there’s this forementioned month of fixing the game on the spot daily. During this process you’re fully enlightened and completely in the zone, you know everything there is to know about your code, how you wrote it, the architecture, design and so on. This knowledge fades in time once you step away from the game. Once you turn the oven off, it’ll take some time to reheat. So, the best thing to do is just to NOT step away, but pivot into new project and keep running, never stopping.

This is how Daymare Town remaster enters the fray. I wanted to transfer everything I still remembered about creating a good point and click mechanics into this new game while I still had all that knowledge in my head. This process also leads to even further improvement of the point and click code engine, previously thought to be bulletproof, but now reaching new heights of coding prowess. I’m pretty sure I’m on the tippity top of my abilities and I’m only half way up. Been that way since 2005 really. That’s so fascinating about writing code actually. You can only draw or paint as good as you trained yourself to, but coding? Sky’s the limit. There’s always something new to discover to make all your previous work obsolete. I love it.

So December was spent creating a Daymare Town prototype, available over at Patreon. It has all major mechanics lifted from Submachine, it even has entirety of Daymare Town 1 backgrounds added to it. I never even intended this project to start this year, I remember saying something about taking time off, like a vacation or something (funny, I know), but here we are, already ankle deep in the next remaster.

Since I already started talking about future projects,  let’s take a closer look at 2024 – the year of the return of multi-project multi-tasking. There’s this saying about too many cooks in one kitchen – how about one cook in two or more kitchens?

Plan A

Daymare Town remaster. Also known as THE LAST remaster. I don’t want to remaster anything else after this game, I want to get back to creating completely new games. So this remaster requires expanding all remaining backgrounds and adding shop and stash mechanics. That’s the minimum for 2024. We’ll see how far I’ll be able to go with puzzle design this year. Looking back at the Submachine remaster, recreating all puzzles was the most misjudged milestone time-wise of the entire process. It’s entirely possible that I’ll switch to remastering small platform Daymare games to add them into this project as well, mainly Daymare Cat, Stray, Invaders and kite. Having said that,  I don’t think I’ll be able to finish and publish this remaster in 2024, but we’ll see. There is a Steam Store Page already live, go wishlist it today if you haven’t already.

Blaki 5. Yes, I’m coming back to comic books. This year for real. Starting with this book, because this series has a nice round anniversary coming up this year, as it’ll be a full round decade since the previous entry in the series, which, yes, I can’t believe it either, was published back in 2014. Which is insane. Luckily I have lots of story bits for this book already written. Now it’s a matter of putting them all in the right order and painting it all.

Plan B

Submachine: the Engine. This one will take few years to finish, so don’t get your hopes up just yet. This is also why I’m making the last remaster now, I’ll just combine the repetitive work of remastering with creative work of designing a completely new game. In 2024 I want to at least write a part of the story of this game, the how, the why, the where, maybe create sketches of some locations, maybe do some puzzle design. I already have few ideas on my mind, however this is not something I can hurry up. This process will take a long time to finish. Luckily we’re not in a hurry.

Submachine Card Game. I’m in the middle of preparing Kickstarter campaign. All other plans for this project are depending on the outcome of this campaign, so there’s nothing much more to say at this point. The minimum plan would be to have a successfully funded campaign, print as many decks as to satisfy all backers and that’s it.

Plan C

Streaming on Youtube. Two things that can and will be streamed: DMT remaster process – at least the first phase of resizing and redrawing all backgrounds to 1920×1080 format. (Original games are in square ratio). The second one is painting the Blaki comic book album.

Daymare Morphs eBook. This is a collection of 46 short stories on over 250 pages written by Nikodem Skrodzki and put to paper by me. Just to clarify here, Daymare Morphs were a Patreon milestone back in 2016. Now I’m just putting them all together into one eBook for easy access to my free patrons, since that’s a thing on Patreon now and I want to give those people an incentive to maybe become paid patrons of mine. This eBook will be free of any charge.

Revolutions eBooks. At some point I want to have my entire Revolutions series in eBook format in English available online. I feel you guys are missing a large chunk of the expanded Skutnikverse without these books. They will be sold in my shop and also offered as free perks for my patrons.

~~

There’s so much to do this year. Or maybe I’m just getting old, because 10 years ago this entire list would probably be done in half a year. There were years with brand new Submachine, new Daymare Town and a full size comic book in one year. You know, the good old times. Oh well.

Let’s get to it.

See you next year.

Well, this is a first.

My first year without anything published. First such year since… 2004 or so. Not a game, not a comic book, nothing. But there’s a good reason for this.

Nothing was published, yet so very much was created.

Let me elaborate.

The era of free, small games is long over, a sentiment cemented last year by the ending of “10 Gnomes” and “Where is?…” series of games that were born in the online web browser flash era of days gone.

Would you believe there were people caught by surprise, that the 12-year project of 10 Gnomes ended after 12 years. Shocking, I know.

So this year it came as a no surprise to me that there were people asking where is “Where is 2023?” game, after the series clearly ended last year. Clearly. This series ended so much, that I even wrote about it in last year’s wrap-up.

Now. Let’s take a look:

Plan A

Submachine: Legacy. The remaster of all Submachine games smashed together into one, giant Steam release. I need to write completely new engine for this. I also need to retouch some graphics that clearly need some love after a decade of remaining small-sized web games. I also need to export all of those graphics from flash, animate all moving things in Spine 4.0 or newer and finally create all logic from scratch in Game Maker Studio 2.37 or newer. Is this all doable in one year?… Let’s see.

2022 was the first year of working on just one project. That project being the remaster of all Submachine games.

This was my workflow goal since a long time ago, being able to focus on just one project at a time. Now, some people say this may lead to a burnout, and they might be right, though I never experienced that during development of any Submachine game. The solution to this conundrum is simple – long time ago I was also a comic book author, some of you might remember. Switching between two drastically different projects lets you avoid burnout if you feel tired doing one thing for months on end. This hasn’t happened to me yet, but I still have around 5 comic books on the back burner in case I get tired of creating games. Which I assume will happen after the release of Submachine: Legacy. This will be the year of the shift.

But first, let me walk you through the development process of 2022. After taking a brief sabbatical after finishing Slice of Sea, which realistically ended some time after game release (fixing bugs, adding features, monitoring comments and reviews for possible gameplay improvement opportunities etc) I started writing Submachine game template from scratch in Game Maker Studio 2 in March of 2022.

Why from scratch, you might ask, since I already had the template of Slice of Sea to use?

Writing templates from scratch is probably the best part of game development. Everything is fresh, new, the code is not bloated, you find all your own new paths, you get a boost of confidence in your skill, everything is fine and dandy. Even if you wrote particular chunks of code before you write them anew, looking for improvements that you can make on the way.

the only thing I took from Slice of Sea was the inventory, which to this day I consider as my pinnacle of development achievement and the best thing to happen to my point and click games since… Well, since I got the idea to create the first Submachine back in 2005. It’s that good. In my opinion. Which will surely change in few years.

But Submachine navigation is something completely different from what was implemented in Slice of Sea. You had your Seaweed to move around there, remember? In Submachine you just point and click, no walking of any kind is involved. More over, from time to time I still get those things called “ideas” on how to code things in a better and more efficient way. You see, I had one of those “ideas” in early 2022, so all Submachine template preparation I did before that went straight to trash. Well, proverbially, because I maniacally archive everything I create and keep it on external drives as well as on my PC and my server. At least four copies of all projects. Don’t get me started about archiving things, it’s a long story for another time. So all preparation went to a folder in my archive to never be seen or used again.

But that new template, man, that was something to behold. It went so smoothly, that in one month I already had all mechanics implemented. The movement mechanics are so slick that I even had all locations (rooms) from all Submachines added to that new template by the end of April. All traversable and ready for navigation. I was so very focused in by then, design milestones were flying by, in May I had all necessary logic for creating a playable point and click game (finding items, using items, saving object states, inventory, movement and so on).

And then, in May, I entered another development milestone. The one I’m still in right now… Recreating all active elements and animations using Spine Animation and adding all puzzles to the game. The real meat of the game. Recreating complete Submachine Ancient Adventure took me about a week. Submachine 1 – two weeks. Submachine 2 – a month. You see the pattern? Remember that each consecutive game is bigger and more complex than the previous one? Yeah, and here we are in January of 2023 and I’m still recreating puzzles and active elements, by now in Submachine 8. I barely managed to finish recreating Submachine 7 in December of 2022. Mind you – two biggest chapters are still ahead of me, and one of them is Submachine 10, which in itself is like 5 other games put together size-wise. So yeah, the task of compressing 10 years of game development into one big game for Steam is taking it’s time. I know that’s not a problem for you, you will wait as long as it takes to get final build of the game that is up to my standards. I’m not burned out, I am working on the game every day and I can’t wait to finish it and show you guys the result. I can’t wait to see your reactions to the Legacy. But for that – we all have to wait a bit longer.

Plan B

Submachine Card Game. Preparing a Kickstarter (or Indiegogo) campaign. Once funded – print them decks, send to backers and release the game worldwide. There are countless more steps to this entire thing, but these are biggest milestones. I also want to create loads of youtube videos going over rules and unclear situations that might occur during gameplay.

I decided to release this game after the release of Submachine: Legacy. I count on the fact that Steam release might help a bit with popularity of this here card game. So we wait. It is still done and ready, still waiting for Kickstarter campaign, still being played from time to time, being tweaked and improved, some cards are in, some are out, you know the drill. It’s not dead, dammit!

So let’s look ahead to 2023. Even though we know exactly what is in the oven.

Plan A

Submachine Legacy. Finishing and releasing the game on Steam. Please remember that finishing all in-game puzzles is not the end of development. After that comes entire late-development phase, which includes adding all notes (yeah, I still haven’t decided how to display those, that’s why it’s pushed back to the later stage of development), creating intro, outro, cinematics between chapters, also let’s not forget entire sound design that I have to do with ThumpMonks on board. So there is still a lot of work to do. Be patient. I know you are. Be more patient. It will be worth it. I can’t wait either.

Plan B

Submachine Card Game. Plan minimum here is creating Kickstarter campaign and seeing what comes of it. Then plan and execute accordingly. I know, all I’m saying here is  sweet nothings, but hey. I’m neck deep in the Legacy and don’t think about this project that much. Some progress will be made here. Maybe.

Plan C

Blaki 5. Yes, a comic book. Would you believe it. I want to at least try to come back to the idea of drawing a comic book. Try to remember how to do it, at least begin painting that new album. At least try. You know, this entire album is already written and sketched out. All I have to do is draw and paint it. That’s all. So little, yet so much. Just try to begin. You can do this. One page. Maybe just one, single page for the new album. Is that too much? Let’s wait and see.

~~

Ok guys, enough of this pep talk. I just found out Heilung released new album, so I’m off to buy it and plaster it all over my eardrums while I figure out that insane Submachine 8 layering mechanic. Figuring new Submachine mechanics is tight!

See you in a year.

I hope.

The year of ending things. Here we go.

Plan A 

Can you guess? Finishing and releasing Slice of Sea.

I feel I can write a very long article about the whole development process, but it’s too early for that. So, for now: yes, it was finished, yes, it was released, yes, I made my debut on Steam. I managed to finally push through Apple macOS trenches and create notarized app for this game, which in turn let me publish macOS version. All of this was kind of new to me, even after almost 20 years in the business. I mean – releasing the game on Steam. Creating proper game trailers, optimizing Steam store page, hitting that button that says “release the game”… Now I know so much more about the process and releasing more games on Steam won’t be as painful and draining as that first one. On a side note – I don’t intend to get swamped in a 4-year-long project ever again. Done it once, that’s enough for me, thank you very much. I played the game few days ago, about two months after publishing – and I still like the design. This is a good sign. I played it, because I finally caved in and added more door tutorials throughout the game in places where people got stuck and missed crucial locations because background passage indication wasn’t clear enough. There have always been hints that symbolized those passages in the game, but clearly not enough. Now they’re in your face, you can’t miss it. If you want to see where I added them, update the game on Steam to the latest version (v1.0.14). If you feel it’s too much hand holding – please don’t blame me. This latest, 14th update kind of rounds up the post-release bug-fixing phase. Game is done. Hallelujah.

Plan B

The last entry in the 10 Gnomes series. The project of 12 years is finishing this year. And it’s going out with a bang, since the final gnomes take place in New York. I could write a long and sappy story about gnomes starting back in 2008 in my home town and finishing in New York of all places, but I think I’ll save that for a proper post-mortem article about gnomes once it’s done and shipped. Also – Where is 2022? Yeah, sure, at this point, why not? I’m sure Santa is up for that as well.

What was surprising to me, was that it was a surprise to so many 10 Gnomes players. The fixed ending to this series was known to the public for at least 10 years. This was a project 12 games spanning over 12 years. Still, people were caught off-guard when the series finished with it’s last installment set in New York. Just as I perfected the gnomes formula, the series ended. I got lots of comments that this flow of the game, so different from all previous in the series – was the best. So, nothing left but to close the series and go out on top.

Now, the last “Where is… ?” game is a bit different story. Let me explain. After finishing the gnomes series – “Where is…?” was the last remnant of the flash era. By that I mean – a series of recurring small games that were meant to be published periodically. But now we’re in a different era. Flash is dead and flash-like thinking about what a game series is – should die too. Also this was the last project with a set deadline for each game. I hate deadlines and got rid of them years ago. This was the last one. It felt right, to retire Santa. I also managed to tie this ending to the gnomes series, in this last Santa game you visit all 24 locations of all gnomes games. And the flow is the same as in that last gnomes game. They were going strong hand in hand throughout all those years, now they both went out in style also hand in hand. Like Bonnie and Clyde. Like Thelma and Louise.

Plan C

Submachine Card Game Kickstarter campaign and whatever happens after that. This plan is so undefined and unstable yet that I do not dare to say more.

Well, this got pushed to 2022, only because the further I went into details of this project, the more indication I got that it’ll be a full-time job for a hot minute as well, and development of Slice of Sea just really didn’t want to end for almost entirety of 2021. Once I had enough free time for the card game – the year has ended. And here we are. However, the game itself got polished in 2021, it’s in even better playability state right now than ever before, it got a bit easier – but at the same time – more enjoyable and quicker to play. It’s looking good.

Plan D

Comic books? No.

Yeah, this was kind of a joke I made at the end of last year’s wrap-up, but this is morbidly true. 2021 was my third year without drawing a comic book. I don’t remember having even one-year break from drawing comics, let alone three. This is the longest I ever went without drawing comics since the 1980s. Yes, those 80s. The sad part is – I kind of don’t miss it and I don’t see myself drawing comics in the near future.

Let’s now happily look ahead to what’s coming in 2022!

Plan A

Submachine: Legacy. The remaster of all Submachine games smashed together into one, giant Steam release. I need to write completely new engine for this. I also need to retouch some graphics that clearly need some love after a decade of remaining small-sized web games. I also need to export all of those graphics from flash, animate all moving things in Spine 4.0 or newer and finally create all logic from scratch in Game Maker Studio 2.37 or newer. Is this all doable in one year?… Let’s see.

Plan B

Submachine Card Game. Preparing a Kickstarter (or Indiegogo) campaign. Once funded – print them decks, send to backers and release the game worldwide. There are countless more steps to this entire thing, but these are biggest milestones. I also want to create loads of youtube videos going over rules and unclear situations that might occur during gameplay.

As you can see – I’m still in the process of getting to my preferable work cycle: having at most two projects at once. If possible – one.

In longer run – I want to settle on releasing one game and one comic book per year. If that proves too much – I’d switch to releasing games and comics bi-yearly (one year – a game, the other – a book).

But this is far in the future.

And this is now.

See you next year.

Ok, let’s do this. 2020 is gone, let’s wrap it up and put it away. This year was dramatically different then any previous year, I don’t have to tell you that. Some things didn’t happen as they were supposed to, other things popped up spontaneously out of nowhere. Let’s confront the to-do list from back when the world was still relatively normal.

Plan A

The big game. Drawing all remaining inks. Painting all watercolors. Finishing puzzles, adding intro, outro, finishing the game. Testing. Creating three trailers: reveal, release and gameplay. Besides all that – the future is foggy.

The big game… Yeah, this working title is no more relevant, since the biggest thing that happened last year was it’s title reveal. Working on Slice of Sea took 90% of my work time last year, and deservingly so. This is the biggest project I’ve ever worked on, spanning more than three years by now. All remaining inks? Yes. That means all backgrounds for the game. Right now the count of locations stopped at 165, however since then I wrote few more locations into the game, will be drawing them shortly. Each location consists of at least three drawings, so to put this to perspective – this amount of drawings would translate to around 5 or 6 comic book albums that I used to draw one of yearly. Painting all watercolors? Well, kind of. That plan changed since 2019, there are no actual watecolor paintings in this, instead everything is colored in photoshop using watercolor textures created by me. So yes, all watercolor is done. This change was implemented to keep the game cohesive and somewhat unified in it’s look. Also – this way I have more control over the color and how it looks. I was able to tweak colors or move around particular parts of backgrounds instead of having a full watercolor drawing just sitting there looking pretty. Finishing puzzles? Hell no. This is the part I’m doing right now and I’m giving myself few more months to do this right. Intro, outro, finishing the game – all of this is still in the future. Testing? Happens daily since 2018. Three trailers? Only one by now – the biggest one, title reveal. This was a big milestone for me, as I said before – biggest of the year, as I was able to share something with you guys. It also proves to you that the game is actually happening.

Plan B

But not so foggy for me to not see that there are 10 Gnomes in Malmo and Where is 2021? on the horizon. Because they are. Gnomes being penultimate in the series, Santa not.

Yes! There were some game releases this year. 10 Gnomes in Malmo, not only released during Covid-19 quarantine, but also shaped by it. The same thing can be said about Where is 2021?, since this game observed return of point and click to the series and Santa being, let’s just say somewhat passive. I want to underline that these two games are, and will remain the only pieces of my work that discuss Covid-19, as I don’t plan or intend to bring it up in any of my future games. Nor comic books, once/if I get back to creating those again.

Plan C

Things that are uncertain and/or unlikely. Trying to publish Submachine Card Game. Still not sure what to do with this one. I’m torn between getting a publisher and releasing it myself. Maybe getting back to comics? But that’s a big question mark right here. We’ll see.

Oh boy, here we go. Submachine Card Game.  There were some developments last year, for example I’m no longer wondering how to publish this thing. We’re going with the self-publishing option and most likely will make a Kickstarter campaign for it. Hopefully this year. The game was being tested, changes were made, the only thing that’s still somewhat up in the air is game instructions – I’ve been rewriting and perfecting those immensely. As of today I’m trying to prepare cards for professional printing to create a deck that can be used in promotional photos and videos for said Kickstarter campaign. However, Slice of Sea overshadows this process, that’s why it’s taking so long. Besides that, there was something else that happened in 2020.

Covid-19 quarantine drawing challenge. I know, the word “challenge” is cringe, but I just like to throw my way some kind of challenge from time to time to keep my synapses going, just like when I painted entire 46-page long comic book album in 46 days few years back. Anyway, starting on March 12th, through entire April, and finishing on May 30th, 79 days of daily drawings. Large part of that was drawing Slice of Sea, but I also managed to draw unrelated, random ink pictures, just like during Inktober a year before. I still plan to sell them at some point, once I gather enough will to actually do it, which can happen tomorrow or in 2022. Again, Slice of Sea overshadows everything else.

Comic books. No. This is the second year without any of that noise. Do I miss it? No, not yet. Funny side note: on the picture below you can see that I mark number of comic book pages created that year in red. I’ve been doing this for the last 10 years, you can see it in all previous yearly wrap-ups. This year I completely forgot about it. I remembered only after looking through catalogue of those yearly summaries that I keep on file, as you do. Kind of scary how much human mind is able to adjust to the current situation it finds itself in.

I think that’s all from 2020. Let’s look ahead.

Plan A 

Can you guess? Finishing and releasing Slice of Sea.

Plan B

The last entry in the 10 Gnomes series. The project of 12 years is finishing this year. And it’s going out with a bang, since the final gnomes take place in New York. I could write a long and sappy story about gnomes starting back in 2008 in my home town and finishing in New York of all places, but I think I’ll save that for a proper post-mortem article about gnomes once it’s done and shipped. Also – Where is 2022? Yeah, sure, at this point, why not? I’m sure Santa is up for that as well.

Plan C

Submachine Card Game Kickstarter campaign and whatever happens after that. This plan is so undefined and unstable yet that I do not dare to say more.

Plan D

Comic books? No.

~~

This is it. That’s all there is.

[Trying to come up with a witty quip to end this post, but drawing a blank.]

See you next year!

Come on boys and girls, let’s take a look at last year, but be haste, for I have little time to spare. Details on why below.

Plan A

the-Big-Game. I think there’s nothing more to say here. I don’t want to dwelve on the specifics and milestones, but the plan is to actually finish and release the game this year. Oh, and I also plan to reveal the actual name of the game this year as we go along. Not sure how to do it yet, I’ll probbaly create a video with the reveal. But not sure when to do it. I think I’ll keep it secret until I have a feature-complete build on my hands. I’m also falling into the feature creep a bit, which is scary. I’ll just have to say “enough!” at some point, and I’m bad at it. The same thing happened with ‘Where is 2019?’. If not for the December deadline I’d just be adding more and more to this game. But here it is, THE plan for 2019. There’s almost nothing else on my mind right now. The focus is set, engines are being revved and the countdown to liftoff already begun.

Aaaaaaand the countdown is still running. Ok, hold on, don’t laugh, don’t leave the stream just yet. Look here, listen. It’s nothing new when I say that I have a HUGE PROBLEM with estimating exactly how long my work will take. Especially if the project at hand is not one hundred percent written and sketched at that time. Having said that – when I look at the big game right now – it’ll be about 50 percent larger than expected. As in actual rooms / views count. Besides that, it will be much more complicated graphics-wise. Ok, in lamen terms – it’ll be bigger and prettier, and it just takes more time. But I assure you, right now I’m working around the clock daily, including weekends, I guess that’s the way these things work. Once I heat the furnace, the production goes into insane mode, so to speak. Title reveal was postponed intentionally by me after learning closer about how Steam actually works and it’s policy on being able to reserve a game name (spoilers: it’s non-existent, therefore you STILL don’t know what the game name is). Me being totally in tune with the big game development is also the reason why this article comes so late. I had to literally force myself to exit photoshop and game maker to write this.

Plan B

10 Gnomes in Oristano. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: Hold on now, you cheeky bastard, is the game already done and you’re just witholding it from us? Like the one in Paris? Well, not entirely. It’s like 85% ready. The locations are done, the gnomes are not. I’m shooting for June or July release. Probably July.

Aaaand, as expected, May it was. This game marks the first time of gnomes being actually nicely animated in Spine, I know, about time, right when the series is almost done. What can I say, I learn along the way. Not sure what I’ll learn in the future, because, you know, the path is winding and it’s all foggy down here on the treacherous road to game development immortality. Wait, when did I become a prosaist? I guess I’m reading too much Wegner nowadays. But the gnomes being released earlier was also a sign of deepened focus on the big game – I was just cleaning the house before the big push. Go and download the gnomes here.

Where is 2020? We’ll continue the adventure of Santa, we’ll find out what happens after he met Seaweed and move forward the narrative. Some of you are asking for a point and click gameplay to return in this series. We’ll see.

What do you think happened. He moved away from the Seaweed and went in different direction. Is that symbolic? Well, no. Santa just has his own boombastic adventures this year and met another prominent figure at the end of this game. Go find out who it was here.

Plan C

So here’s the thing. There is no plan C. And this is kind of big news. It’s also the testament of how much I want to focus on the big game. This year, for the first time since… Let me think… 2003?… So for the first time since 16 years I’m not doing a new comic book. The streak ends here. I’m diving straight into the big game right now in January and don’t expect to surface until the release.

Aaand there was no comics this year. Not even a single page was drawn. All drawing powers went straight into the big game. Well, there, and I also took part in this year’s Inktober challenge. I like a good drawing challenge from time to time. Honestly – this was not a good challenge. Not challenging enough, if you will. Read more about it here. Oh, almost forgot, I also helped in graphical translation of Crumb comic book. Graphical translation? What is this? Find out here (once I write about it in the future :D As you can see there’s no time spare for side projects here).

Unexpected Plan D

Seems I can’t just focus on one thing at any given time, even if I try. This is how the Submachine Card Game came to be. Me resting my  mind from gamedev for a bit. This game was developed in August and right now I’m looking into ways of publishing it. Read more about this game here.

So, that’s 2019. Let’s take a look at what’s coming up…

Take a look at the above picture. What do you see? Lot’s of red? True. But I see a man who THOUGHT he’ll release the big game to the point of writing down actual spoilery development milestones on the yearly projects page. Includin the actual game name at the top. That’s how much I thought I’d be able to release the game in 2019. And here we are.

Plan A

The big game. Drawing all remaining inks. Painting all watercolors. Finishing puzzles, adding intro, outro, finishing the game. Testing. Creating three trailers: reveal, release and gameplay. Besides all that – the future is foggy.

Plan B

But not so foggy for me to not see that there are 10 Gnomes in Malmo and Where is 2021? on the horizon. Because they are. Gnomes being penultimate in the series, Santa not.

Plan C

Things that are uncertain and/or unlikely. Trying to publish Submachine Card Game. Still not sure what to do with this one. I’m torn between getting a publisher and releasing it myself. Maybe getting back to comics? But that’s a big question mark right here. We’ll see.

That’s all I’ve got for you this sunny morning of non-winter in Poland.

I’m going straight back to drawing board, got some more locations to draw for the big game.

Go away now.

Ok, let’s do this, by now you know the drill.

Plan A

The Game. Further development of the game. Let’s pinpoint: merging two engines into one, thus creating final base of development. Evaluating the main character of the game. Creating side characters, and lots of them. Sketching out locations. Creating environmental puzzles, as well as classic point and click ones. Trying to find final “look and feel” of the game. And so on. Do you feel it coming? I do.

Yes, I still feel it coming, even more so than a year ago. Merging two engines – done, you’ll walk around and interact as in ordinary point and click. Evaluating the main character – yes, we have the Seaweed, his story, his character arc, everything. Even though you might have seen him in action already – his graphics and animations will be completely redone to match the style of the game. Creating characters – yes, you’ll encounter different creatures from Daymare Town and my comic book – Morphs, of which there are tons of them, as well as Revolutions. Sketching out locations – well, kind of. They’re sketched inside my head. Does it count? Creating puzzles – those are also inside my head. But it’s a good place, don’t worry.  Trying to find final look and feel – well, still working on it. This one is tricky, because with this game I’m going not only with something I’ve never done before, I also want to change the workflow a bit. Creating locations and then adding more to them, more layers of interactivity and animation. Previously I was drawing games the same way I drew my comics – once the drawing is done, it’s done. This time – not so much. Things will be perfected over time.

Revolutions 11: Apocrypha. The series marches on, strong as ever, into it’s second phase. This time it’ll be a round up of older stories released in different magazines and anthologies, put together for closure reasons as well as new stories written by Polish best comic book writers that I managed to deceive into thinking writing for me was worth their time. All those new stories will be painted and streamed on twitch.tv this year as Ink Companion season 2.

This one was more time consuming then I expected. You see, the ‘older stories’ part of it had around 40 pages. I thought I’d add few new stories from my fellow authors and be done with it. However, I kind went overboard a little bit with gathering those additional stories. There were just too many good authors I wanted to invite. All in all, I ended up creating additional 100 pages for the book. Which is good and bad. Good – because you got a bigger, better book, bad – because it took too long to finish. But that created another piece of big news for you, more on that below. The book is here.

Plan B

10 Gnomes in Paris. Yes, Paris. It’s already shot and partly done. I want to release it before summer break, so expect it late June. Let’s say… June 20th. This time I can make that prediction with a certainty. Let’s see what will happen now that I’ve said this. Stupid, stupid me…

And June 20th it was! I wasn’t so stupid afterall… Ok, I’ll share a little secret with you. The game was ready long before that. Just sitting there on my drive waiting to be released. I know, I know, I’m a cheeky bastard. That’s a first, by the way. The fact that one of my games were finished long before the release. That actually never happened before. You can find this game here.

Where is 2019? Well, what a surprise, right? As I still want to make it a bigger game than before, let’s shoot for… let me think… 12 screens of content, ok? Let’s not overthink it for now. Santa returns, as he’s the character where it all started 10 years ago.

Sure, of course, you just played it like a week ago, right? And, uhm… 12 screens of content? It’s actually bigger than that! Pwned, me from a year ago. Take that! How big is this game? Well, you can count all the screens here.

VormkfasA #60, the final issue. [This is the festival xerox zine that I give away to people who meet me during comic festivals]. Yes, all things must end. I seem to be killing more and more of my old projects each year. Last time it was the Morphs, now this. I’m ending it here because I wanted this run to last for as long as the first run lasted, seven issues. And as it rounds up nicely to overall 60 issues, this is the good point to let it go.

Yes, that’s done now. After finishing all side game development projects, I moved to wrapping up my comic book side projects. Between this and that Rewolucje anthology I was talking about just now things are pretty wrapped up by now. More on this below. You can take a look at the final isue of VormkfasA here.

Plan C

streaming on twitch.tv. As I mentioned before, I found a new home on twitch. A new little corner where I can sit and share my things with you. I’m not expecting it to bring any money or fame as I am realistic about how many people might be interested in watching some old-fart draw live, but I genuinely just like doing it. And that’s a good sign. I’ll create my new comic book here and also parts of the game, those not-spoilery ones. Let’s shoot for, I dunno, 200 followers in 2018. And I promise to talk more.

Yes, stream I did. Even somewhat regularly. But by now I feel that I’ve shown everything that I could show you on my streams, different styles of drawing, painting and what not. The career of a streamer didn’t take off and therefore it’s on a hold for now. Mostly because of me focusing on the development of the big game, which can’t be streamed, because spoilers. You can check my entire 2018 twitch adventure here.

Linux versions of my games. Last year I tackled OS X, Linux MUST be simpler, right? Right?… Guys?…

Sure, simple enough. It however was a completely new beehive to kick and stir up. You see, at least OS X is complicated but a single endeavour. With Linux? There are so many versions, and Game Maker covers only one of them. But yes, Linux versions of my games are somewhat available, arguably, not sure, but you can find them here. And here’s the troubleshoot.

I think this is it. This to-do list seems shorter than before, but hey, we’re focusing here on the game. Joking around is over. Now is the time to shut up and just DO IT.

Oh lol. You thought this to-do list was short, me from a year ago? Wait until you see this year’s list. Speaking of…

Plan A

the – Big – Game

I think there’s nothing more to say here. I don’t want to dwelve on the specifics and milestones, but the plan is to actually finish and release the game this year. Oh, and I also plan to reveal the actual name of the game this year as we go along. Not sure how to do it yet, I’ll probably create a video with the reveal. But not sure when to do it. I think I’ll keep it secret until I have a feature-complete build on my hands. I’m also falling into the feature creep a bit, which is scary. I’ll just have to say “enough!” at some point, and I’m bad at it. The same thing happened with ‘Where is 2019?’. If not for the December deadline I’d just be adding more and more to this game. But here it is, THE plan for 2019. There’s almost nothing else on my mind right now. The focus is set, engines are being revved and the countdown to liftoff already begun.

Plan B

Please note that I’m doing these two projects only because they’re the only recurring series left. Me, being kind of obsessively addicted to completing unfinished projects, I just can’t let them go. At least 10 Gnomes have a proper finish line on the horizon, so there’s a light at the end of this tunnel.

• 10 Gnomes in Oristano. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: Hold on now, you cheeky bastard, is the game already done and you’re just witholding it from us? Like the one in Paris? Well, not entirely. It’s like 85% ready. The locations are done, the gnomes are not. I’m shooting for June or July release. Probably July.
• Where is 2020? We’ll continue the adventure of Santa, we’ll find out what happens after he met Seaweed and move forward the narrative. Some of you are asking for a point and click gameplay to return in this series. We’ll see.

Plan C

So here’s the thing. There is no plan C. And this is kind of big news. It’s also the testament of how much I want to focus on the big game. This year, for the first time since… Let me think… 2003?… So for the first time since 16 years I’m not doing a new comic book. The streak ends here. I’m diving straight into the big game right now in January and don’t expect to surface until the release. There’s just no time to be spared for a comic book. Here we loop back to the issue of Rewolucje 11 being too big and taking too long to finish in 2018. It took away some of that precious development time. Too much of it to be honest. At this point, I don’t care much about keeping the streak of publishing one book per year alive anymore. All that matters is the big game. Nothing else. Maybe I’m just hyper-focusing on the game, or maybe I’m just getting old and a bit tired of comic books. Who knows. Let’s get back to this subject next January.

And with that I leave you.

See you next year for another wrap-up, which will be completely different if everything goes according to plan. Fingers crossed.

We’ll finally have answers to some big questions that I dare not to ask at this point.

Anyway, back to work.

Well, here we are again.

I feel we’ve been doing this for so long, you already know what I’m going to say here. First wrap-up was, uhm, 5 years ago, a simpler time before we were all basically connected by the hip by social media. Nevertheless, let’s dig into this list for the sake of preserving the process. Let me open last year’s wrap-up in another tab, and see…

(more…)

Ok people, let’s do this. I know it’s a bit late this year but there’s an explanation. Hear me out. For no particular reason I decided to fight Apple tooth and nail in order to create legal and legit Mac OS X builds of my games from 2016 by becoming a certified Apple developer and I also decided to do it right after New Years. Why not. After banging my head against the wall for next few days I finally managed to do it, with help from much more skilled friend (thanks, Mike). Skilled, as in: more apt in deciphering what exactly it is that Apple wants you to do now: pay up, jump the hoop or roll over. Now that it’s done, and it’s a REAL milestone in my book, the only regret I have is that I can’t put it on my to-do list for 2017. Because… it’s already done. Oh well.

Let’s look back at 2016.

(more…)

Now, for the first time, this feels right. Wrapping things up, telling you what happened in 2015, because now I use Patreon and your kind donations to create. It is only fitting for me to tell you what you got for your money’s worth. Actually a lot happened and you can see most of it in the above collage. Then we’ll talk about what’s coming up next, and that’s a handful as well.

(more…)

Now this is kind of interesting. Even though I don’t have any kickstarter projects, nor patreon or indiegogo (no one is giving me any money before I deliver) – I feel kind of obliged to keep you in the loop on what I’ve been doing last year and what my plans for future projects are. It’s kind of obligatory for those “fund my project” situations, yet here we developed this kind of relationship without dragging money into the equation. After all, it’s not one project and it’s not just one year.

So… Let me confront my to-do list from 12 months ago.

(more…)