Hello! It's been a year since I wrote a blog post about my goals for 2024, along with a recap of what I did in 2023. So I decided to do it again this year! It will be interesting to see how I did, but I'm going to start by talking about my year on its own terms before I compare it to the goals I originally set for myself.

What I did in 2024

My 2024 felt like an extended training arc where I spent just as much time learning and honing my game development skills as I did developing new things. Unfortunately I didn't manage to release any new games; my only game-related releases outside of WIP patron builds (the most recent of which was released last weekend) were a couple of small Chessplosion bugfixes and a Ducky's Delivery Service update that lets you attempt its levels in the order you want. Outside of games, I made the MIDI guitar song A Cake For You for COMPOST #4 and wrote a whole bunch of blog posts and Patreon updates.

It would have been nice to release more games this year, and I certainly don't plan on going any more years without any new releases if I can help it. On the bright side, I feel like my pixel art, music and game design skills are much better than they were at the start of the year, and more importantly I think they're even more in line with my personal tastes now! I learned how to draw humanoid pixel art characters like my next game's bunny girl (who was designed by my friend NomnomNami), and I spent lots of my free time learning to play a wide range of arcade action games and studying their design with plenty help from the arcade-style game developers boghog and chunderfins.

The easiest way to see the difference in my pixel art and game design skills is to take a look at my next game. Here are a couple of clips of how the game looked and played a year ago:

And here's how it looks and plays now:

The basic mechanics and enemy designs were already in place a year ago but I didn't yet have a solid understanding of how to create the same kinds of fast-paced intense action and dynamic enemy design that I saw in my favorite arcade games. I was mostly looking at 16-bit console games for inspiration, resulting in my game having very slow and passive enemies. Despite the player's attacks being much weaker back then, the only real source of difficulty was when you would randomly get sniped by ranged enemies hiding at the edges of the widescreen stages.

The enemies in the current build are much more aggressive and work together to surround and checkmate you, and you have to use your attacks' strong crowd control properties to push them back as they close in on you. Trying to keep track of lots of enemies at once is still a big part of the game's difficulty, but I'm much happier with the current mix of difficulty sources instead of the entire game just being a test of how many penguins you can track at once. Besides, the game's new 4:3 ratio makes it much easier to keep track of long-range enemies now.

Another benefit of looking to 90s arcade games for inspiration instead of 16-bit console games is that most arcade hardware at the time was powerful enough to have huge chunky HUDs and throw a bunch of flashy sprites all over the screen to crank up the excitement levels. My game's old HUD was much more subdued, in line with what you would see in a 16-bit console games, but I'm a much bigger fan of its new arcade-inspired chunky HUD and giant score numbers:

If anything, this UI is still a bit reserved by arcade game standards, despite being more wild than what you would see in a 16-bit console game. I'll see if I can inject even more excitement and personality into my game's UI in 2025!

I made the game's arcade mode this year too, and learned lots about level design, boss design, combat pacing and game balance in the process. Overall I feel much, much better equipped to make the kinds of games that I love and express my strange action game ideas than I did a year ago.

I haven't produced much music for my new game yet, but I think I still made a lot of progress on that front. A year ago I only knew how to make the type of music that was in Chessplosion and Ducky's Delivery Service and very little else, but since then I've learned a lot about how to produce the kinds of 90s arcade game music that I love. I'm a big fan of the music I've made for my new game so far, and hopefully I'll keep improving at making music in 2025!

In short, a year ago I wanted to express myself through my games and I feel like I'm way better at doing that now than I was before, whether it's through their design, their art or their music. It would be nice if I can keep improving at this in the future, but I'm already very happy with where I am now!

Outside of game development, I'm much happier with my gender presentation than I was a year ago. I talked about it a bit in my HRT anniversary post but the short version is that hormones and laser are doing their thing, I've been meeting lots of new people, and I feel much better about myself.

And that's my year. I didn't manage to release any new games but I'm much happier with my game development skills now, and I feel much more comfortable with expressing myself in both game development and the rest of my life. I'm happy with my progress!

Did I hit my 2024 goals?

Let's see how all of that compares to the goals I set for myself a year ago. As I said, I'm happy with the progress I made this year even if I didn't hit all of these goals. Plans change, after all.

Make a fun game that people can play with their friends. I haven't released my new game yet but I'm still planning on adding co-op to it. Multiplayer is still important to me, and I love hearing about people playing my games with their friends!

Try really hard to get my game engine's online multiplayer working on Nintendo Switch. I tried my best at this but I failed. I find it very difficult even with my Steam online multiplayer programming experience and I currently don't know anyone else who has experience with this sort of thing who I could ask for advice. I'll give it another try in 2025, because I would love to release my next game on a Nintendo console!

Learn to make 90s-style arcade game music. I think I did this. There's still room for improvement but I've come a long way this year.

Express myself more with my games' art direction. I feel great about this! I'd like to make my game's UI even better but I love it already.

Make games for people who like arcade games. I'm doing this! This is the main thing I've been improving at this year, so now I feel like I'll be able to continue making these types of games in the future.

Make and release a tiny arcade-style game for fun. Unfortunately I didn't manage to do this. I went all-in on learning to make these kinds of games and I'd still like to do a little bit more work on my games' UI, music and sound effects, but I feel very very close to the point where I just want to go wild and crank out a ton of fun expressive arcade-style games.

I summed up my goals for 2024 as I want to unabashedly express myself through the games I make, and I think I'm much better at doing that now!

My 2025 Game Development Goals

Learn to make arcade-style sound effects. Hopefully this is easier than music and pixel art, but it's the one aspect of my upcoming game that I still have no idea how to do.

Try really hard to get my game engine's online multiplayer working on Nintendo Switch, again. I would like my upcoming game to have online multiplayer and I would like to release it for Nintendo Switch, so I guess this is something I have to do. If anyone who reads this post knows someone who has experience with this kind of thing, please try to convince them to give me advice!

Try really hard to get my game engine running in web browsers and on Android. I would like to be able to make web demos of my games that people can play in their web browser without having to download anything, and I'd like to be able to use my phone to show my games to other people at local gamedev events. Both of these platforms will require similar porting methods (using SDL and rewriting my shadow shaders to work with OpenGL ES2 / WebGL) so hopefully it won't take too much work to get both of them up and running.

Release the game I'm currently working on. I love the game, so now I just have to balance it, get some feedback, make some improvements, possibly add co-op and/or an adventure mode, and release it! I don't think I'm necessarily going to try for a near-simultaneous PC & console release in nine languages this time, because doing that for Ducky's Delivery Service was a lot of work...

(A secret goal that I don't want to promise publicly yet). I think it might be fun! I think it might be a lot of work too. I at least want to give it a try to see whether or not it would be feasible, at least on PC.

Make and release a tiny arcade-style game for fun. I swear I'll do this! This is the third year in a row where I gave myself a goal to make and release a tiny game, but this year I feel like I have a much better understanding of how to make the kinds of games that I like.

Keep making games for people who like arcade games. I've found the exact types of games that I love, I've learned lots about how to make them, and now I want to keep doing it.

Rebrand my game development "studio". This is a big one that I haven't talked about here yet. Up until now I've been releasing my games as C.T. Matthews, which is a name I decided on shortly before I figured out I was trans. I decided to go with my initials because it meant I might not have to change the name if I turned out to be trans, which in retrospect is probably not a thing that most cis people would do.

Today no one ever calls me "C.T. Matthews", and I don't relate to the name that much myself either. I'm CassMakesGames over on my Twitch streams, and everywhere else I just get called Cass or Cassandra. I briefly thought about releasing my games as Cassandra Matthews but I think I'd rather have a name that's a better fit for the types of games that I make.

Lots of my game-making friends release their games under internet monikers, like NomnomNami, chunderfins and boghog, and I'd love to go in that direction too. I'd really like a game-making name that screams "this person makes wild arcade games", so I'll see what I can do. I'd like to get this out of the way before I officially announce my upcoming game so hopefully you'll hear more about this very soon.

Anyway, those are my goals. In summary, I want to finish off my training arc by learning sound effects, making my games' art direction a bit wilder and adding a few more features to my engine, give myself a rebrand to reflect my new game-making direction, and make more games for people who like arcade games. I'll do my best, and I wish you the best of luck with your goals in 2025 too!