Here is my 2020 Year in Review and here is my 2021 Year in Review and here is 2022.
In 2023, having mostly recovered from moving to a new country, I did: a bunch of stuff.
January
…but it doesn’t look like I released anything cool in January.
As I finished The Little Match Girl 4, I realized that the game was too good to be a Patreon exclusive for two years. I had to change that policy. I figured LMG4 was a great candidate for IFComp 2023—but I couldn’t release LMG4 before I released LMG3!
February
To promote the release of The Little Match Girl 3, Sarah Willson and I constructed an “ARG” (really just a set of puzzles), the trailhead for which is here. The prize you get for solving the “ARG” is the URL of the game, THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL 3: THE ESCALUS MANIFOLD. It’s a text adventure but it’s also an RPG with spells and critical hits and so on.
March
I participated in EnigMarch 2023 and made 31 puzzles, some of which were pretty good! This one was great. I’m very proud of this one too.
And one of the puzzles was a full text adventure titled “How the Little Match Girl Got Her Colt Paterson Revolver, and Taught a Virtue to a Goblin,” the first of many “side-stories” in the Little Match Girl saga.
The way I see it, the numbered installments of the Little Match Girl series are like movies, or two-part season finales. The little match girl’s life includes all sorts of episodes in between, but we only get to play some of them.
April
In April I visited my family in America, and I got to host another Family & Children’s Council trivia fundraiser! Here’s the “Secrets of the Zodiac” video round.
May
If I find anything cool I put out in May I’ll be sure to come back and add it here.
June
I was working hard on stuff that would be revealed later!
July
I got Sarah Willson to email me the prompts from Enigmarch 2022 one day at a time to recreate the challenge of making a puzzle every day for a month! I made 31 more puzzles. This is a good one. And this one (the metapuzzle for days 23-30) is great.
Plus one of them was another Little Match Girl Game, “How the Little Match Girl Met the Queen of Vampires.” There was some amount of non-spontaneous calculation involved in the creation of this game, because I knew players were going to see the Queen of Vampires again in an upcoming game…
August
Frustrated with the lack of adulation being heaped on my 2021 game Even Some More Tales from Castle Balderstone, I released “Visit Skuga Lake: Masterpiece Edition,” basically the same thing as “Visit Skuga Lake” but with bonus features. If you only have time to play the best part of Even Some More Tales, that’s a shame, but I’ve got your back.
To work out some leftover ideas from EnigMarch 2023 and EnigMarch 2022 I made a short extra puzzle set for “EnigmAugust,” but it’s not exactly top-tier material.
Zach and Sarah and I started another podcast, the Third Strongest Podcast, about the game EarthBound. EarthBound is my favorite game of all time, it’s very important to me, and I was pretty nervous about trying to do it justice in our somewhat slapdash-analytical format. I still don’t think we said everything we could have said about this incredible game. But we said a lot.
September
Against all odds, Jenni Polodna and I released a couple new episodes of that Clash of the Type-Ins podcast!
I made this set of puzzles based on the board game “7 Wonders” to amuse my in-laws (with limited success). It’s only 100% solvable if you have the same outdated edition of the board game that they have. But it’s pretty easy overall.
October
I entered THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL 4: CROWN OF PEARLS in IFComp 2023. It ended up taking third place. My prize was this awesome comic where Aster Fialla depicted a scene from the game.
I was not yet done with puzzle construction, and adapted Mab Graves’s “#Drawlloween” prompts into 31 more puzzles. I got a head start, so I got to exert more than one day of design-effort per puzzle, so there are a lot of good ones. This one is fun, this one is great, this one is fun just to look at, this one is fantastic, and this one might be my favorite even though it’s not very fair or solvable. It just looks amazing.
Plus, yes, one of them was another Little Match Girl game, “The Little Match Girl and Her Friend, the Crow,” a prequel of sorts to LMG4.
November
As soon as IFComp was over, I released “The Little Match Girl against the Universal Sisterhood of Naughty Little Girls,” a sequel of sorts to LMG4. I released it along with this little manifesto that I think a bunch of people did not pick up on the subtext of.
December
It looks like I didn’t release anything in December, but I do have a file here for a podcast called “You Need To Relax,” which I hope I can get around to working on soon.
Taking into account all the puzzle-making enterprises listed in this Year in Review, it looks like I made 135 puzzles in 2023. But Sarah made some of those LMG3 ARG puzzles. So let’s say 130.