With this year ending soon I figured I'd look back at what I did in 2022—games I released, web apps and other digital stuff I coded, and fonts I made—and talk a little about what I wanna do next year.

Games

This year

Really short section cause I released almost no games! I did do a bunch of unreleased stuff, though. I also switched from PDF-first game publishing to HTML/EPUB-first game publishing, with PDF (and maybe print?) coming later.

Here're the games I released in one way or another:

• Like Skyscrapers Blotting Out The Sun v2—one of my favourite games I've published so far: a writing game about excessive footnotes, killing the author, and woes in translation. I just think it's neat

  

• Stone Words Walk (playtest version), a post-(post-?)-apocalyptic monument-exploring game, a thing-maker; I'm gonna use it in Archipelago23 next year (more info near the end) and maybe organise some kinda jam if I can get it working in a satisfying way.

  

Next year

I've got so much WIP stuff I need to lay out, and the framework I built for Like Skyscrapers is gonna hopefully make that a lot easier. Some names:

• Fleet
• Fallforever
• The Rapparee is Dead
• Stone Words Walk and 3 other games that form a map-game set with it
• this person should not exist expansion
• Imitations of Life
• the Dark Tidings Anthology
• Parallax/The Parallax Tapes

I might also revamp/refurbish some of my older games like From Sea to Shining Sea, Over the Moon, and the Death of Numismus

Web/programming projects

This year

I started seriously learning (a bit of) HTML, CSS, and javascript. Here's what I did while I was learning:

• Like Skyscrapers Blotting Out The Sun v2, where one of the big changes was making an HTML version! I first released it in 2019 as a PDF I made in Word. This new version was the first thing I properly wrote from the ground up in all 3 main web languages.

• Write Skyscrapers, a free template of the Like Skyscrapers file. It got a little interest, but I dunno if anyone actually used it.

  

• my original site/blog, StS Pages, which started out as a refactored Zonelets blog. I got up to 27 posts, plus a solo RPG play journal with 25 more posts! Most of these posts were imported to this site's blog.

• Zonelots, a generic version of this blog.

  

• Weird Waves, my audio horror/weird fiction/sci-fi fake radio web app! I got a lot outta going from struggling with the basics to adding more more features to fixing the last few issues and focusing on adding shows. It's probably the single thing I learnt the most from doing. I've written a few posts here, which you can find on the Weird Waves page.

  

• itch.io's HTML basement v2, a major update to my directory of HTML elements you can use in itch blurbs (and some other neat tricks).

• Last, but not least, Like Skyscrapers v2.2 upgrade, a major code rewrite using everything I learnt since releasing v2.0.

Next year

I wanna make this year's projects more accessible: adding a GUI to Write Skyscrapers so people can use it without coding knowledge; maybe making a template version of Weird Waves; and making an app that lets people make custom Dicier-style icon fonts (more info in this explanation).

Fonts

This year

A little slow for fonts, but not as slow as games was.

• Zenimini, a tiny chunky pixel-ish floppypunk typeface adapted from some headings in the British superhero/cosmic horror comic, Zenith.

  

• The Analog Digits volumes 1 and 2: fonts for making retro electronic numerical displays. I started with reNix (Nixie tubes) and nimoType (Nimo tubes) back in 2020 for a game project I put on hold, and this year added a third and published them all—then released a second set. Are there enough unique, characterful analog electronic displays for a volume 3?

  

• I did the final Dicier upgrade, adding a German translation (v1.5.4). I'm planning on making a web app next year that lets people make their own Dicier-style fonts, so honestly there's not much more reason to keep working on this typeface.

• I did a bunch of work expanding LilMrkr to add in East-European Latin-script characters and other stuff, and trimming down the filesize, but didn't release the upgrade (still needs a little more work).

• I did a bunch of work on Minitic Italic, a tiny italic script font for use at small sizes where anti-aliasing blends the pixels into a smoother shape. It's the first time I've done non-rectilinear stuff in pixels! A lotta the characters are still WIPs though.

  

• I did a little more work on Buried Future, my chunky compressed geometric font WIP.

  

Next year

Really I just wanna finish and release the WIP stuff I've got going on, plus the Dicery (see above) and maybe another pseudo-random font like LilMrkr (but based on old monospaced scientific documents).

I've also been thinking about getting back to the timeToPlay expansion that I kinda never got round to adding to. There's still the Bullet and Flower styles to make!

Other?

Next year

I've got a few repeat things planned for next year:

• Archipelago23, a little project in the vein of Dungeon23 and so on where I'm gonna use Stone Words Walk to make an island every day, and tweak the rules each week or so. The goal isn't just to get 1 island per day, but to rework SWW into something easier to use. If I actually get to a point where I'm satisfied with it, I might switch to one of the other 3 games in the same game set (they're all different kinds of map games).

• a daily sound recording thread, inspired by Emily Meo's daily home recording twitter thread.

• daily sketches split between some different styles/media (e.g. still life, poses from references, pixel, isometric…). I might split them by month or try to do one day of each per week at the start (in any order) and see how things shake out.

And so?

Overall: next year I'm planning on switching gears a bit: doing way more game stuff, probably about the same amount of web app stuff, and less font stuff (mainly wrapping up WIPs), plus doing some daily/weekly/monthly stuff in other areas (visual and audio art). Might be the first year I do a proper crowdfunder. Will things happen like I'm planning? Who knows.