Over the last two years, I’ve shared year-end wrap-ups showcasing game development projects that I’ve been involved in. Wrapping up 2024, I wanted to continue that trend but add more context and insight, so here’s a glimpse behind the scenes of my work and the progress I’ve made. This is my 2024 in game development!
Something in the Water
First up, I kicked off the year with my first devlog for my solo project, Something in the Water. This was a fairly long and heavy editing project, and it’s probably my most serious step into producing videos to support my work.
With the devlog, I covered the background behind the project and my motivations going forward. The response kinda blew me away. I must have been blessed by the algorithm or something, because at the time of posting I had around 1000 subscribers, a number that doubled after the video.
At the time, I wanted to quickly follow up the devlog with another, but because my work on Something in the Water was so “stop and start” throughout the year, none of the aspects of development were especially video-worthy; mostly because they couldn’t quite tell a complete story – so rightly or wrongly I held off. Something I’d like to redeem going into 2025. The project is going really well and I’d like weave video production into my process, but in a way that protects project momentum rather than slowing things down.
SENTRY Early Access Release / Launch Trailer
Next up, my work with Fireblade Software on SENTRY. After what is now the longest single production of my career, SENTRY released into early access at the end of March. The response was positive and it was just a huge relief to finally get the game into player’s hands. Working on such a small team, you’re limited to the amount and types of feedback you recieve, but early access allows that channel of communication between end user and developer. We take advantage of this wherever possible, be it through the forums, Discord or indeed YouTube comments.
Regarding YouTube, I produced another trailer to coincide with the launch. The launch trailer was a bit of a scramble. It’s hard stepping away from work on a project to produce media for it, but it’s necessary to help reach more players and sell the game. It’s a trailer that I’m quite happy with due to the rather challenging brief. This required a showcase of the strategy layer and the upgrade systems – areas that are visually dry, but also wholly absent from the SENTRY demo. Therefore we needed some ceremony around that. And with some fun editing techniques, I think I just about pulled it off.
Now it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, we had some criticisms over the difficulty and the game length; areas we instantly got to work on in our first major release in June, in form of the Starfarer Update.
SENTRY Major Update 1 / Devlog 3
With the first major update we offered a tiered campaign whereby players would play through a shorter, and lower challenge “Initiate” run before moving to the tougher, and longer “Starfarer” run. And this split across multiple ships all offering a slightly different bonus to flavour their run.
In addition to this there was a huge list of content and features that were added to the game, most I covered in SENTRY devlog 3.
Now again, putting together a video (in this case, a devlog) so close to a release means stepping away from the project for a while, and honestly I think sometimes the payoff isn’t worth the effort. So going forward, I need to tighten scope of these videos, something you’ll likely see for major update 2 coming in the new year where we’ll be delivering the co-op update.
The Enclave of Dis
Towards the end of the year I took part in a mapping jam for DOOM. The challenge was to create a mutliplayer deathmatch map for DOOM in just one month. I decided to take an old level I created for a cancelled Xbox 360 iteration of Ryse and adapt it for DOOM.
As you can see, it went super well and opened my eyes to the possibility of future work in the DOOM engine. I have a couple of ideas…
New Project and Closing Thoughts
In September I started working as a level designer on REDACTED with REDACTED. I’ve worked on this project for a couple of months now, and I’ve been having a blast. My skillset compliments the team and the style of game is essentially in the same ballpark as something I’d make myself. I can’t wait to talk about this more in the coming year!
And thanks to you all for sticking around and your continued support. It really means a lot whenever anyone stops by the blog or shares any of my wee projects/bits of progress! Here’s to an awesome 2025!