2024 Recap, 2025 Preview
Hey folks, it's that time of the year again! Follow me as I'll try to get over everything I've done this year and what you should expect for 2025 (or at least what I expect, since I always end up not fulfilling those promises... But wait! Don't go! This year I'll be as good as I can!)
Go grab some snacks and such, just like last year it will be a long read... This year I had to rush it so it's not well organized and full of nonsense, but here we go I suppose?
Last year I left you with the promise of something "special" coming up in June and to get "more news" about Millennium, a game I was making in team with @desecratedlight ... But i fumbled, oh have I fumbled. I felt like like Lala.
Luckily, every month I take screenshots of what I'm working on ('cause I have to pester Leira somehow) and so we can go through everything to see exactly why I fumbled!
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January was actively spent trying to figure out what kind of game Millennium should've been.
It was an ambitious project, one in which you would have explored a massive "facility", an open map with asynchronous multiplayer and a lot of secret rooms and places to visit and discover.
The level design screenshot you can see on the right was just the game's introduction, the first of many floors that we were planning to make.
Sadly, desecratedlight (you may know them as fran43) had to step out of the project because of personal issues, and since it was their idea to begin with we just had to halt the work.
Meanwhile I started working on Patreon's "Canned Project Galore", a series of video exploring old games I discarded on my road to become the guy that is writing all of this nonsense...
Some Millennium level design
We used Pupa from Keychain for the main character's placeholder.
Here you can also see the player HUD with some neat details!
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The start of something that took a big chunk of this year's hours of work.
Building levels with the new framework is hell, but at least we got verticality..? Was it really necessary?
...and that's why February began with "Bury Her - A dive into 2016's precursor", a video that uncovered the long lost project which then gave birth to the 2016's IMSCARED you all know of. Initially made for Patreon, the video is now available for everyone on YouTube!
After that, I spent the rest of the month working on the infamous new "3D framework" with jumping, falling, ramps traversal, lighting, shooting and a LOT of time wasted on 3d pathfinding (which still needs to be done as I'm writing this).
We'll see this mf as the recap goes on, don't worry...
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March have been a busy month: as mentioned last year, "GameBoy project" has seen some progress!
The """battle""" system has been developed thoroughly, it's far more complicated than you might have guessed until now and me and Tiz can't wait to let you all play some testbuild of sorts.
Since we're talking about GB project, I'll take the chance to tell you that the rest of the year has sadly not been spent on this thing...
Aside from GB Project, the rest of march has been spent working on another Canned Project Galore video (with NothingElse 2 as its protagonist) and the secret thing I teased at the end of last year's recap.
A Stump monster doing his best at being
a stump in the game's overworld.
I can't deny I thought about developing a new NothingElse game, while making the Canned Project video...
...but there was something far more important to do!
Serena, where are you?
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Lo, a lighted up Labyrinth area!
Ah Bridge scene my beloved
April was almost entirely spent making progresses with the new 3D environment. It's embrassing how much time this thing takes me to set up, so much that back then I already started asking myself if it was worth the hussle or not.
I suppose I still don't have a definitive answer to that.
Again, I had to dedicate some time to one of (if not THE) favourite discarded projects: Bridge Scene!
This one has been an awesome trip down memories, and another one you can go watch now on youtube :^)
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So yeah, May started with the aforementioned Bridge Scene video uploaded on Patreon, but what about the rest of the month?
Well, that's when I gathered all the strength I had left to try making IMSCARED mobile one last time. This project has been a demon, satan, evil incarnated, a boulder as heavy as moon itself which I couldn't figure out. I already talked a lot about it, there's no use in repeating myself once again.
Oh and then there's the annual GameMakerItalia contest! This time I decided to avoid making a game for it because I wanted to focus on IMSCARED mobile, nonetheless I wanted to help the community by being the head jury and managing all the livestreams and such. It was fan and the game were great, check them out here!
I hate you but I love you
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Lo, a lighted up Labyrinth area!
Blender wip
Some mobile IMSCARED wips straight from June
This leads us to June, the darned June I teased about in last year's recap.
As we've seen in this recap up to this point, things haven't gone as smoothly as I expected back then! There were some distractions along the way, and the new 3D environment hiccuped a lot. I also spent some time trying to adapt it in a way that would let me use also a third person camera like in LiB, who knows why I did that. But hey, thanks to this we have this screenshot of Lala walking through R's archive!
In the end I abandoned the idea of having the cool update ready for this month, so I focused some more on IMSCARED's mobile port instead. This is when I started understanding what my limits were with that project, and what I should've been aiming for from the start.
By the way, I spent a good amount of June beta-testing [ECHOSTASIS], a game made by Enigma Studio which you should REALLY check out. It's one of the best experiences I ever had, so yeah, maybe start out with his other games, 'cause Echostasis is the final chapter of a trilogy (The Enigma Machine, Mothered, [Echostasis]). Please show the man some love, he deserves it and it looks like he's having the very same experience I had with Mirror Layers... And it's not right, Echostasis really is one hell of a gem.
Way to go Lala, but your new boss could prepare contracts worse than the ones you're accustomed to
Oh, let's not forget that the end of June was spent working on a new Canned Project video, of which I'll talk about after a short break!
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Yearly funny Bulbasaur to check on you, I simply can't get rid of this goober sorry
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So, July has been a month full of things to do: first of all, I made the Canned project video "PLE - A dive into Chaotic memories" (this is still exclusive to Patreon people). Let's not forget that with every Patreon video I also have to prepare a playable build of it for higher tier patrons, one which comes with a room select screen (so that people can play the old broken project in its entirety). It doesn't look like it, but that's one more bit of work! Still, it's great to have those old memories preserved this way. I love it.
We also did some more work on Gameboy Project, but this got halted again because of "Super Xiggo Jam - Sfida Incredibile", an incredible challenge hosted by the famous XIGGO: participants had to make a game with "Sogliole" (Soles, I mean the fish) as its theme. Also, participants could take some more additional challenges like not using the B letter in the game's entirety or hiding a certain XIGGO drawing somewhere. Sounds tempting, right?
Well it was and so I made METAL EEL SOLED, a Metal Gear Solid parody which -as I write this- is still Patreon exclusive. The game's a bit broken, but I had a lot of fun making it! You can see some wip pics on the right.
This was fun to make
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You can do it, Randall!
This one was pretty hard to make, but it came out nice!
August was spent making a lot of miscellaneous stuff: I polished Metal Eel, I tried making Memorial Pillage to work on browser (to no avail), I made a mobile port of NothingElse (which still needs to be uploaded because of reasons), A DAY finally got a mobile release and, of course, I kept working on IMSCARED mobile.
Oh and I made another Canned Project video, this time analyzing an old project called A Case of Stress!
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Then there's September. What the hell have I done in September? The only thing I see is a screenshot ofAh wait that's right, I worked like hell on IMSCARED mobile port to have it ready in October!
I just had to take a photo of Loneliness, the very first time I reached it on mobile!
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October has been another fun month (where fun means "please help I need some rest"): first of all, I hosted my annual "Terrorottobre Jam" with the theme "Torna all'inizio" (which we could translate to "Back to begin" or "Back to square one"); I really wanted to start working on the jam game, but first I had to finish IMSCARED mobile, which finally came out on October 15th. I'll take the chance to thank everyone that helped me with the game's testing, you've all been so helpful and I'm sure that without your help the game would not have been in a stable condition that soon.
Needless to say, I wanted to drag the nefarious IMSCARED June update in the mix, but ended up making a weird small hotfix instead, one that aimed to clean up 2022's postgame. As you may already know, I then decided to retrace my steps and code in everything once again 'cause I'm an imbecile.
And so, precious time drifts away once again...
Squashing all the bugs and working on the "hotfix" took time and left me energy drained.
I tried using the very last ounce of energy to make my Terrorottobre Jam game, in the hope I'd still at least come up with a playable build for the jam (and for Patrons to play). I couldn't make it in time, and so Scary Board Game got postponed to who knows when... But I think it's a good game! Or at least a good idea, I'd say. And that's why, after failing to deliver in October,
Scary Board Game in one of its first iterations! That board is a mess...
...so I decided to make it smaller!
And when you end up placing your pawn on a new cell...
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this is a mockup of the Compendium: you can see it as a Pokédex of sorts; in GBProject you don't go around catching creatures, but you collect data on them.
I decided to work on SBG in November!
Every cell in the board corresponds to a walkable, first person area which could contain monsters, key items, weapons and such. Your main goal is to retrieve the Red key on the board, and only then get back to the very first cell you started on (and so "Torna all'inizio", you get it?).
There's a catch, tho! Except for the first cell, the others you walk on will crumble as soon as you leave them, incapacitating you from retracing your exact steps.
It's a fun concept, also there's a really important thing to note: the thing runs on the new 3D environment, and working on it helped me making a lot of fixes and such to what I had up to this point. So yeah, great news for Remrem!
SBG aside, November was spent working on two other things: the first was my last Canned Project video, this one felt really personal and was a great way to end the series.
The second was, again, GameBoy Project with Tiz: we started working on the compendium and on a day/night cycle.
Poor Gameboy Project, always postponed to make something else... I think No-Eye Soft hates me for this, as much as you all hate me for delaying remrem.
And speaking of that! Judging by a certain someone's TikTok account, something IMSCARED related was meant to come out on December.
...you end up INSIDE the cell, and the game becomes an eerie first person shooter!
To everyone that came to enjoy my Canned project galore series, thank you so much! I love making videos and this has been the perfect excuse to do some.
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Do I really need to tell you? December hasn't seen nothing IMSCARED related. But I tried, oh I tried!
It's just that Secret Santa Jam was camping around the corner, waiting for me with its big festive grin. How could I say no to that?!
And so I didn't, no; I made almost three games this month! It was hell! I talked a lot about it on Patreon, but to sum it up, I made two games for the Jam (one of which was made with Scario, a GMI member) and as stated in the 2024 preview from last year (crazy if you think about how many teased thing I wasn't able to accomplish), I got to update and upload MillMess on Itch for everyone to play.
The two jam games were AIRHEADED and Ah! My life as a normal girl changed when Santa Claus gave me work so I had to save Christmas all alone (or "Gambatte! Rescue-tan" if you feel like it): the first one is something like "Sonic meets Unirally" I think, I find it to be really fun but it's a classic MyMadnessWorks game (as in "the dev is not able to explain the player how the game is meant to be played so the game feels bad"). It's a Patreon exclusive game!
As for Rescue-tan, it's a silly puzzle platformer which everyone subscribed to Patreon (no need to pay for it, you just have to follow) can play. Go get it, it's silly!
Of course I tried making the IMSCARED related thing, but I wasn't able to do so in time... And maybe it's for the best. This year I tried to make everything and ended up making weird things here and there (with the only exception being IMSCARED mobile, that one was a big step forward believe it or not).
If I ever got to make that IMSCARED update I talked a lot about, it would've ended up being rushed, both technically and conceptually... And I don't like that, almost as much as I don't like delaying it so many times.
Whew, I talked a lot, huh? This has been one hell of a recap. Again, it looks like I made a lot of stuff this year, and even if it was unimportant stuff, I can't deny I worked as much as I could.
This is the thought that will keep me company tonight, when the clock strikes and the new year begins.
Yeeeeah, MillMess!
Yeeeeah, AIRHEADED!
Yeeeeah, Ah! My life as a normal girl changed when Santa Claus gave me work so I had to save Christmas all alone!
So hey, let's go and see what you should expect from 2025...
sorry I had to
Let's carve a new face to make a new place
FOCUS.
This is my new year's resolution.
I'll be focusing on IMSCARED (both new content and console port), Scary Board Game and a sprinkle of Gameboy Project. I won't be working on anything else.
The only distraction I'll give myself every now and then will be some Patreon exclusive content, such as new videos analyzing and exploring the games I made up to this point (not counting the Gameboy Project and SBG builds that Patrons will put their hands on!).
Oh and let's not forget No-Eye Soft's NO-SKIN, which I can't wait to see available on Steam! Playtesting that marvel is another distraction I'll let myself enjoy, sorry :P
Next time you'll see something new, it will be in game.
So bye, everyone, and thanks a lot for all the love! Wish me good luck, 'cause I'll need it!
-Ivan