2024 was a strange year for me creatively. It was productive, but fragmented, with my attention split between active game development, video production, and a handful of smaller side projects. This recap isn’t intended as a list of achievements, but rather as a reflection on what worked, what didn’t, and what I learned from spreading my attention too thin.
This post is about focus, trade-offs, and learning where my time actually goes.
Three threads defined my year: Something in the Water, the SENTRY Early Access launch, and a short but surprisingly valuable DOOM mapping challenge. Each taught different lessons about scope, momentum, and how I want to approach my work going forward.
Over the last two years I’ve shared year-end wrap-up vidoes covering the projects I’ve worked on. For 2024, I wanted to continue that tradition whilst adding more context and insight. The video below is a high-level snapshot for the year; the sections that follow unpack what happened during this time and what I took away from it.
How Devlogs Hurt Momentum on Something in the Water
A significant portion of 2024 was spent working on Something in the Water, my retro-leaning solo survival horror project. Progress was steady, but slower than I would have liked. A major reason for this was my decision to document development through devlogs and video content alongside the work itself.
On paper, this made sense. Video devlogs offer visibility (at least initially), accountability, and provide a long-term record of a project’s evolution. In practice, they came at a significant cost. Planning, recording, editing, and publishing video is a substantial commitment, and the expectation of consistent uploads made the impact worse. Tasks that should have taken an afternoon often stretched into multiple days once video production was factored in.
I initially assumed this would be a one-off cost. The first devlog required defining a format, pitching the project, and finding an editing style, and I expected things to settle down after that. What I didn’t account for was how heavy the editing process would remain, the time required to find usable capture footage, or how disruptive frequent context switching would be for solo development.
When I started planning a follow up devlog, I quickly realised there was a problem. The story I wanted to tell didn’t match the state of the game or the footage available. I couldn’t get things to line up. Continuing would have meant shifting focus away from code tasks like refactoring the interaction system in favour of showing more varied environments or encounters. Even coming up with supplemental material or b-roll was enough to fracture what little momentum I had.
That was the point where I had to confront an uncomfortable truth: video production is its own discipline. Doing it well competes directly with focused development time, a cost that’s multiplied on a solo project.
Here’s the devlog in question, covering work on Something in the Water over the year.
The lesson here wasn’t “don’t make videos”, but rather that I need to be far more deliberate about when and why I do. It’s always worth remembering:
Documentation should serve the work, not fragment it.
That being said, the response kinda blew me away. At the time of posting, I had around 1000 subscribers – a number that doubled shortly afterwards. I must have been blessed by the algorithm! However, this success created its own pressure, by tempting me to follow up quickly, despite the fact development wasn’t in a good state to be meaningfully captured. There simply weren’t clean narrative milestones to make for a good video. But as with every social media-driven dopamine hit, it was very tempting, and I think it skewed my personal perception a little. It’s hard to not want more.
So I held off. I chose not to push out another devlog when the project couldn’t tell a complete story, entertain or educate. Going into 2025, that’s something I’d like to approach differently. I’m not going to force anything, but I will aim to integrate video production in a way that supports momentum rather than undermining it. Basically, I’ll continue to drop feed progress on social media, but I’m not going to spend time on a fully edited devlog video until there’s a clear story in place.
This experience had a direct impact on how I would approach work when when switching back to a team environment – which brings me to SENTRY…
SENTRY – Early Access Launch and Design Evolution
After what is now the longest single production of my career, SENTRY released into early access at the end of March. The response to the game’s early access release 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.
The Launch Trailer
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. This process taught me a lot about communicating complex mechanics in video but in a short time frame; trying to show a single action at a time, leading the eye with movement, etc.
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
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. These are steps I’ve been intentionally taking to steer the game design towards something resembling a roguelike or roguelite; essentially taking that approach to player motivation and progression.
SENTRY Devlog 3
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.
DOOM Map Jam – What I learned
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. Below is a video documenting the creation of “The Enclave of Dis”.
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 for something new, but I think it’s also worth noting a couple of areas where I feel I could improve in future efforts. For example, my lack of familiarity with Doom II’s texture set and how it is used resulted in some confusion around the elevators. In the video I mention some creative solutions (i.e. using Sigil’s teleporter language), however the quickest and easiest starting point would be to switch out the textures for something more typical. Sometimes you don’t need to reinvent the wheel!
Key Takeaways from 2024
- Video production can seriously eat into your development schedule
- Early access provides an excellent method to gather feedback
- Short creative side work strengthens design thinking and keeps you sharp
- …and I’ll be more experimental in 2025
Closing Thoughts
So looking back through the year has taught me a lot about where I invest my creative energy. I’m still trying to find the sweet spot between my main project, SENTRY, my free time project, Something in the Water, and where I get to flex my creative musicles (i.e. the Doom map). And while the Doom map offered a lot of fun and satisfaction, it had quite a limited reach and isn’t working in the direction I feel I am headed. Like I say, I do have ideas for where I could take a Doom map in the future, however shortly after the jam I made the decision to broaden my options and choose what to focus on next!
So What’s Next?
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 year of game development in 2025!
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