Welcome to my update article for Spring 2024. It is an overview of the work I’ve done, projects I finished, and any other interesting developments during the months of April, May and June 2024. Let’s see how it went!
Writing work
Saga of Life
The Saga of Life is currently at cycle 3, and I write one cycle (10 stories) per year. I want to leave enough time to write a story, then leave it alone, then revise it later, which means I need to write ahead of schedule.
That’s why last season I wrote up to and including story 8. A few of them needed heavy revisions, but at least the first draft was there.
This season I …
- Wrote stories 9 and 10.
- Revised and translated until story 8. (Wanted to do until 10, but that just left way too little time between writing first draft and doing second draft.)
- Finally got around to translating stories from cycle 2. (Currently there’s this weird gap where stories from cycle 1 and 3 are available in English, but not the cycle in-between :p)
- Made a few minor improvements to the website.
I don’t want to get stuck writing the same types of stories over and over. I would like there to be a clear improvement or change in some area between cycles. (Like how, going from cycle 1 to cycle 2, I’d learned to be less reliant on loads of dialogue.) That’s why I delayed already planning stories for cycle 4. Let some new thoughts and fresh inspiration come in, and allow myself to be a slightly better writer before the next cycle starts.
Wildebyte Arcades
Last season, I wrote up to and including book 6 for Wildebyte Arcades. Everything after book 3, however, still needed revisions and a final version.
As these books are already planned to release throughout the year, I have clear deadlines for doing those revisions about once per month. I usually dread it, just because that final bit of editing and revising is so boring, but it’s usually done within a day or two.
This season I aimed for book 10, but was fine with landing anywhere before that. These books aren’t planned to release for a looong time.
Where did we end up? Book 9 finished, mostly. I had some slight trouble with book 7, because I approached the story in a completely different way, and this also made the book too long. But it wasn’t too bad, just a few days of delay.
I also revised until book 5 and made those available for pre-order, which means all Wildebyte books for this year are completely done and ready to launch.
I guess the biggest victory here was planning ahead. With each book I write, I get a better sense of how to approach Wildebyte stories, and where the series could be headed next. I regularly spend an hour on a Sunday just adding notes, moving around notes, shuffling the order of future reveals and ideas.
When 2024 started, I had written book 1 and 2, a vague outline until book 5, and after that it was just “let’s hope we figure this out”.
Now we have books 1–9 and a strong progression for every single book that comes after it (in the Handheld Disk). Some have a detailed plot idea already, while others only have a few lines that say “the story is based on game X and themed around Y”. But all of that is nicely structured and has overarching threads that give me more direction when writing.
For example, I’ve divided the Handheld Disk into four “chunks”. Each chunk has 5+ books that are all about different games and completely different stories, as usual. But the chunk has one overarching theme or story, one ending it’s working towards. This means that whenever I’m in doubt, or the current chapter of the current book feels a bit boring to me, I always have this overarching idea to progress.
Games work
I’m gearing up to finally buy a new, functional computer. I know what I need know (in terms of components/specifications) to optimize my current and future work, I’ve decided to build the thing myself (cheaper and teaches a skill I find useful), and my current laptop has slowly surpassed that threshold of “this is too broken even for Tiamo to work with”.
For example, it can randomly restart. It takes about 15+ minutes before it’s booted. My graphics design software simply decides not to boot half the time. Etcetera.
Once I have a new computer, I can finally resume video game development. I have a few older, big games that are 90% done that I really want to officially release in 2025. I look to create/finish those games to go with the Wildebyte books too.
But until then … it’s still only board games!
Because I had so much writing (and translating) work to do, I had expected the progress here to be quite light. But looking back, I still made a lot of new board games this season.
- I finished that 4th game prototype I mentioned in the previous update.
- Then I started on the next batch of my “smallest, simplest games” … and finished 5 of those too! (At this point, it might be more than a year before these officially release.)
- I moved those 5 Easter games of mine to their final, finished state!
- I continued the Naivigation project by adding the next few vehicles.
I am growing kind of annoyed at making my “smallest” game every time, because it means potentially better or more interesting ideas keep being pushed to the back of the line. On the other hand, each of those “tiny board game ideas” has turned out to be bigger and more interesting after all, every single time.
So I suppressed the urge to deviate from that list of ideas and just made sure it was ordered correctly. Some new ideas came in, some others revealed themselves to be more problematic, and so the ideas shuffle around a bit.
As it stands, I have about 7 board game ideas in the “easiest” category, before all of those have been made and we move to the “slightly bigger” category. (Which has 20+ ideas.)
Surprise Video Games!
I don’t have a new computer yet, but I’ve researched what I need and what I could pay, so it will probably happen soon.
My screen also died some weeks ago, so I do have an external monitor now.
BUT I have found a temporary workaround that allows me to create really tiny web games on a tablet (plugged into my monitor and a separate keyboard, it doesn’t matter that it’s a small tablet).
My schedule, however, is already full until at least halfway 2025. I don’t have the time to make any big games or set any deadlines on that, as it feels ludicrous to plan some tiny game for June of 2026 or something.
Instead, I’m just making these really small web games whenever I am done with my “main work” for the day. Sometimes I make multiple a week, sometimes I lack the time to do any of it, and that’s all fine.
I’m trying out some new game engines, some new approaches to coding, some ideas I would normally have disregarded as being “too simplistic” or “won’t sell”. There is a lot of freedom to realizing you don’t have to be creative on a schedule or commercially.
Because they don’t represent my income or my entire career, I can allow these web games to suck or never be finished. So I can just play around and have fun trying some new algorithm.
Of course, my brain has been trained since I was born—like everyone else—that everything should lead to career, or money, or success. But I consciously shut that down, any time my thoughts move towards “oh this game idea actually works very well, maybe I can build it into a full release and then sell it blablabla”
I think I’ve realized that making big video games, on your own, is just not for me.
I am a very simple person. I like tiny games that you can play with a friend on the same device, and that’s basically all I ever played. I like coding crazy ideas and working on game mechanics, but I’m not that interested in graphics or polish or whatever. I am just not interested in having a big game under my name, or one with amazing graphics, and I rarely play any of that myself.
That’s why this current habit works so well, I think.
- I have a simple idea for a tiny web game.
- One evening, I just try to make it. (Because it’s a web game, I merely have to open a text editor and then a browser, and we’re off to the races. Even my terrible hardware can somewhat keep up with that, as long as the games themselves stay simple too.)
- If it’s fun, I can spend another evening to finish it (add graphics, music, main menu, etcetera) and call it done.
- If not, forget about it—try the next idea on the list.
Whereas with my books (and board games, to a lesser extent), I have deadlines, and I have to finish anything I start, and they have to be somewhat good. That adds some healthy pressure and productivity, but it also makes you risk averse and feel more like a factory worker.
With these web games, I’m surprised by how some “very simplistic ideas” created really fun gameplay within 30 minutes, and some ideas I thought were “really really good” just didn’t work at all.
In any case, I’ll probably drop the best 20 of them or something on the Pandaqi website at some point. Once I have a new computer, and my schedule is clear of books+board games, I’ll have to reevaluate. Should I even continue? Should I continue making digital games for money or as a job?
I am a game developer, yes. I can and want to make video games, and I have some great ideas that I hope to give a “major release” some time in my future. But I guess my original approach and habits were just detrimental. I worked too hard, worked on the wrong things, had the wrong mindset, and tried to bite off more than I could chew.
Thinking back to how I coded some of those huge games (that are 90% done), I shiver at the thought of opening them and fixing all their bugs :p What was I thinking!? Well, I probably wasn’t thinking, as my hyperactive brain was just “go go go!”
When I come back to full-on game dev, it will probably be in an entirely different shape or form than before. I will probably make tiny web games with no expectation and no goal, even allowing them to be unfinished or very niche, and one “larger main game” (not-web) that actually has a deadline and clear purpose to it. But we’ll see.
Big Fat Website Update
As stated, this is also the time when I do a “Big Fat Website Update”. Although, honestly, I also do many minor updates throughout the year, so it ends up not being as spectacular as that.
In this case,
All Websites
- I discovered I forgot to minify my CSS. At some point, I turned that off or just glossed over it, I don’t know. Now I turned it on again, creating smaller webpages literally everywhere.
- I removed the final external dependency: Google Fonts. Over the years, I already started switching by simply downloading the fonts and hosting them myself on the website. Now I also switched the core fonts of all websites and any older projects that still required this.
- Why? I don’t want to depend on Google Fonts staying exactly the same, and online, forever. This makes my pages faster and smaller, and the only reason they’d ever go down is if I make a mistake.
- I also need the font files anyway to implement in the actual games or the graphics. So I’m downloading and/or hosting them anyway, so why even connect with Google Fonts at that point?
Pandaqi Studio
This is by far my biggest, most complex website. As such, it saw the most updates.
- I finally moved all code to TypeScript. (A superset of the usual code language, JavaScript, which gives more safety and more tools for ensuring your code is correct and runs.)
- Similarly, I moved all older games to my newer, cleaner, faster, generalized system for generating and displaying board games.
- I finally finished my PQ Words project: a set of word lists differentiated by type, complexity and category. I already use this myself in all my word (party) games.
- I finally created a fixed list of categories and tags, then neatly used those for all projects. (Until now, I haphazardly chose whatever came to mind when I made the game page, which resulted in categorization that made no sense and didn’t help find games at all.)
- Just a huge, huge cleanup and reorganization behind the scenes. Made the website build much faster and reduced the number of folders/files/magic-urls-lets-hope-this-doesnt-break needed by a ton.
Pandaqi Tutorials
I wrote a few new tutorials, some of which were already halfway done as I had an old draft that was present on the old version of Pandaqi Tutorials.
I already fixed some bugs and added some (better) interactive tools. Those are the things that actually make the tutorials worthwhile, as playing and interactivity are actually how people learn, so I try my best on those.
HOWEVER, this is the one that got away :p In all the work, planning, circumstances that came up, this always clearly had the lowest priority. Until the season was over, the Big Fat Website Update coming, and I had barely looked at Pandaqi Tutorials.
I already write so much now. Writing even more tutorials, especially when AI exists that can just scrape it and produce better summaries tailored to what people specifically want, it feels meh.
Next year, I guess.
The other websites
All of them required fixes and slight improvements, but they’re all so minor that it’s not interesting enough to mention here. It’s just that I know such minor fixes pile up over years and years and will make my websites much better and modern in 5 years time than they are now. (Or would be otherwise, if I hadn’t performed yearly maintenance.)
Anything else?
I also mentioned my goal to do something different than writing and board games (and light website coding). In fact, I mention this desire regularly in these updates.
But as I explained at the Games section, I’m severely limited in the digital work I can do.
I thought I might try and record music again. But my parents currently renovate the house, which means I have no space, no silence, and no sleep—so that’s not going to work.
I thought I might take up a different sport or non-digital hobby/skill/challenge. I couldn’t find anything. I already physically exercise in a lot of different ways, and have done so my entire life. When I was really young, it wasn’t rare to see me play soccer in the back garden, then get bored and grab a hockey stick and continue that way :p
Alas, the only “different” thing I did was start a secret writing project (which I already planned to start at some point anyway) and research how quickly I could get space, silence, sleep, and a working computer.
Conclusion
Another season, another boatload of work.
We were already far ahead of schedule in terms of board game releases. Now we’re also ahead of schedule when it comes to writing, which is nice. (They’re roughly in sync now, everything done until halfway 2025, so let’s keep it that way.)
Honestly, the “translation” part is toughest for me. I know all those Saga of Life stories from cycle 2 need to be translated at some point. Rather sooner than later. But translating 150,000 words from Dutch to English is still a gigantic task, and not one that really interests me. So I’m glad I got most of that out of the way this season.
So, next season,
- Hopefully wraps up all translations left to do.
- I have some more freedom to do a bigger, more experimental game or story. You know, one of those things that seems like it would be amazing, but deadlines and other work usually makes it a terrible idea to pursue.
- I might have a new computer.
- I take a fucking break for the first time in 15 years :p
Until the next update,
Tiamo
