Good grief I did so much stuff this year.
January
As the year began, Zach and Sarah and I were still recording Third Strongest Podcast, our deep dive into EarthBound. We haven’t pursued any other deep-dive-into-important-video-game podcast projects since Third Strongest Podcast wrapped up in March, because no other video game is important enough.
February
Speaking of third, the Third Quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction should have taken place on February 29, but it was delayed for a few months.
March
Speaking of months, I participated in #EnigMarch 2024 and made 31 neat puzzles. I’m especially proud of this one and this one and this one, which all share the quality of not really looking like puzzles. They seem like shallow, trivial objects, but they all contain secret meaning that you can unlock with your human cleverness. And for this one I wrote an epic poem!
April
Speaking of epic feats, in April I swam all the way out to this rock.
Aster Fialla finished up my IFComp prize, an incredibly rad comic of a scene from my game The Little Match Girl 4: Crown of Pearls.
Speaking of little match girls, I released “The Little Match Girl at the Battle of the Gray Peaks,” a quick little episode between bigger, fancier text adventures.
May
Speaking of text adventures: Thanks to a grant from the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation, I put together an audiobook edition of the first three chapters of Writing with Inform, which is the documentation for the programming language I’ve been using to write text adventures for the past thirteen years. The authorial voice of Writing with Inform was a lot of fun to interpret.
The Third Quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction finally came out with MOONDROP ISLE, wherein an epic collaboration between nine interactive fiction authors produced an epic textual simulation of exploring an abandoned resort and meeting guinea pigs. One of the coolest things I have ever made in my entire life.
June
Speaking of my entire life: In June I visited my hometown and my family in America! Everything’s free there—for a small fee there, of course.
July
Speaking of small things, Sarah and I put together a very small ARG to reveal a new game, The Little Match Girl 5: The Hunter’s Vow. The Little Match Girl games don’t really need to be played in order (I didn’t even write them in order), but before you play this one you should at least play The Little Match Girl 4 to introduce yourself to certain key details.
August
Speaking of introductions, my next game was called “Welcome.” It was programmed in Inform 7 without the use of quotation marks, which is kind of like playing a guitar without using the strings. For example, you have to use quotation marks to give your game a title, or else you get stuck with the default title, “Welcome.”
Then I released another new game, “The Little Match Girl and His Holiness Pope Pius IX.” (Can you guess which Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale this one is based on? I’ll give you a hint: It’s a story that nobody has ever heard of.)
Zach and Sarah and I hit upon this idea where we design Zelda dungeons for each other in the form of audio escape rooms. We call it the “Zelda Puzzle Podquest” and we put it in the feed for The Hero’s Path (way down at the bottom of the episode list) even though it’s not really the same thing.
September
Speaking of being way down at the bottom, I had a bad, bad cold for a while in September! Oh, I was in a terrible mood. In between feeling sorry for myself I worked on the stuff I would reveal in October.
October
Speaking of October: Halloween is barely a thing in Australia, so I have to observe my favorite holiday in a very personal and lonely manner. This year I made a spooky diorama that let me try out lots of fun miniature/dollhouse techniques.
I entered three games in EctoComp 2024: “The Little Match Girl in the Court of Maal Dweb,” “Last-Minute Magic,” and “Like a Sky Full of Locusts.” None of them placed very well, even though “Maal Dweb” had an average rating of 4.6/5 and the others didn’t do much worse. It has been suggested that my mistake was entering too many games. Why on earth would I do such a thing? Do I love Halloween too much?
November
Speaking of being in a bad mood, I spent most of this month in a bad mood! No cool stuff! Sorry!
December
Speaking of cool stuff, I’ve been working on more cool stuff! Remember last year when I said I was working on a podcast called “You Need to Relax”? That didn’t end up going anywhere. Sometimes things don’t end up going anywhere! But my prediction for 2025 is that you can look forward to games called “The Little Match Girl Approaches the Golden Firmament” and The Little Match Girl 6: Fulcrum of the Telkon Vortex.
For more hot deets you should check my Patreon and my Mastodon, or to get me directly you can shoot me an email! What else can I link to? I can’t think of anything!
Thank you for your interest!