Monthly Blog Post: January 2025

Welcome to my first “monthly” blog post of 2025. Here’s what I’ve been up to:

Sea Magic!

I’m making a sequel to Bee Magic! It’s called Sea Magic.

Like before, it uses an unorthodox game structure. Instead of one big level, there are multiple levels. There’s also a score system! By completing levels and getting high scores, you unlock tools that make it easier to complete levels and get higher scores.

I would say that this is an “experimental” structure, but it’s basically a minimalist version of Tactical Nexus. Except it should hopefully be quicker and less demanding to get through than TN.

Also, I hired a composer to make music for this! Hazelstorm made three songs for the game that complement the pixel art visuals nicely. You can find his previous work on his Youtube and Bandcamp.

Secret Project

I’m working on a secret project! I got a surprise offer to adapt [REDACTED] for [REDACTED], and I accepted.

I was planning to release Sea Magic some time this month, but I’ve been spending my time on this project instead. I’m not too disappointed, though, since this has been a nice project to work on.

While it’s a puzzle game, it’s more casual than my usual work. Also, it’s smaller in scope than my usual work, which is to say that it has the scope of an average web game (if not bigger, still.)

Parallel Dungeons

Truthfully, I wasn’t planning on putting this in the blog post. But while I was writing the previous paragraph, I thought to myself: “Huh, I really should make more small stuff.” And then I remembered my current side project I’ve been doing, so now you get two project reveals in the same blog post! The things I do for you.

(Self indulgent aside: This has precedent! I actually revealed the sequel to 5 Step Steve and Tauriel Teaches Typing in the same Twitter thread. My Twitter threads were predecessors to these “monthly” blog posts, in the same way that Twitter itself was a predecessor to the wealthiest man’s personal social media site.)

The idea is that this is a deck building roguelike, but you’re in multiple parallel universes at the same time. So if you use “Knife”, which has a 50% of doing 2 damage, you might do 2 damage in universe #1 but 0 damage in universe #2. I think it’s fairly intuitive in action.

Anyways, here’s what the game looks like:

I started this project a few years ago, but I recently decided to go back to this. Now that I have more experience as a designer (and I’ve played more roguelike games,) I’ve been making a lot of quick progress on this. I think this has become a really fun game!

Also, it’s in Godot, which will be a first for my “mainline” games. Roguelike deck builders have so much UI, and it’s much less tedious to do it in Godot.

So… look forward to playing this when it’s ready!

Other Projects

The Words In Your Mouth is still on the back burner. I’m more than a little self conscious about how long this one has taken, but it hopefully shouldn’t be to much longer in the grand scheme of things. In fact, I’m going to set a soft goal of 2026 or so to get it out (this may bleed into 2027.)

You know, the second person I showed the prototype to (an industry veteran whom I respect) was really enthusiastic about this game’s prospects. She said “This could be the next Undertale,” but that I would need to make sure the writing and overall game is really good. But honestly, I’m not trying to make this the next Undertale. That was what Tauriel Teaches Typing was for! :P

But in all seriousness: I think it’s good to set realistic expectations. Plus, there’s a lot of design decisions that make this a somewhat “weird” game that appeals to a niche audience. I’m not trying to make a game for a million people, I’m making it for the people that will want to play it.

And if it happens to sell a million copies, I won’t complain.

Anyways, speaking of Tauriel Teaches Typing: it’s still in the “I’m going to do another entry one day” pile, but I do have some more ideas about what a future game could look like!

See, I don’t really think that a “direct” sequel would work that well (I have some ideas, but none I’m absolutely sold on,) and I’m not sure a remake of the original TTT would be worth it. Instead, I might do a soft reboot where I make a very similar game, but with a different story and themes. As a bonus, people might finally stop saying it’s literally the same game as Undertale. Maybe.

Finally: I’m going to put out another WebAssembly tutorial post soon. It’ll be about files and will be more streamlined. Look forward to that.

Cool Links

• Recently, I’ve been reading Foreach (CW: language, blood, violence). If you follow my stuff, you have a 90% chance of also enjoying this (source: I made it up.)

Closing thoughts

I don’t know what the future holds, both for my personal life or the world at large. But I’ll still be here, doing my best.

Thanks for reading!