On the 1st of August 2016, I posted my first Dev-Diary on this website. Today, it is 10 years later!
Over that time, I’ve shared many of the ups and downs of my journey, and while my posting has been irregular over the years (it’s been a few months since I’ve posted an update haha), I have upheld generally consistent posting when I believed it was necessary.
So, as a special treat for this momentous day, I will be going back through every year, covering the highlights both good and bad, to bring it home to where I am today. ^^
▫ 2016
In 2016, I was originally posting Dev-Diaries to my old Newgrounds and DeviantArt profiles (I still check in on my NG account occasionally, but I haven’t looked at my DA account in a while haha~). It was exactly a year after I had quit my full-time office job to chase game-dev; I was fully self-taught and only had experience with modding and Flash, so I had a *long* way to go.
Sticking with what I knew, I was still working in Flash building my own “game engine” called the Monochrome Engine (ME). It wasn’t a *proper* game engine, it was more of a base to be imported into Flash from which 2D platforming RPG games could be built. I was heavily inspired by Sophie Houldon who built the first Flash engine I used to get my start in Flash. When I first posted here, the ME was relatively far into development with a good handful of mechanics and physics.
As the year went on, progress on ME was actually rather consistent. New mechanics were added including customisable NPC behaviours, parkour movement, projectiles, and much more. I was also talking with a composer about a soundtrack for the first game I wanted to make with ME, a broader set of stories within the Series of Colour. I had a few delays here and there, but I was posting twice a month and usually had something to talk about.
I wasn’t the most professional game dev, having dropped myself into the deep-end while dealing with mental-health issues and undiagnosed neurodivergence, but I was passionate, ambitious, and building big things from the heart.
▫ 2017
This year kept production on ME going, while also doing some extra little tasks as well such as participating in YuGiOhReanimate, planning a graphic novel I was conceptualising with a friend of mine, and building a card game with another friend. Nothing like trying to get involved in as many projects as possible hahaha…
ME made consistent but exhausting progress. Better NPCs and physics, animations, optimisations, inventory, etc etc. I was packing in a *lot* of content. Something I was most proud of was building a dynamic 3D audioscape into the engine, something I had not seen in Flash. In June, I was finally ready for testers! I put a call-out, had several people pick up the engine and play around in it. It seemed like it was finally starting to make a bit of progress?
A year after my first post here, Adobe announced it planned to fully discontinue Flash support. Now, this wasn’t too big a surprise considering they were already moving away from Flash, but the news came just as I was starting to wrap the first milestone of my final push on Flash. Over a year of work down the drain immediately. It sucked, my mental health dropped, I wasn’t in a good place.
I kept going though. I continued experimenting with other projects, started learning Unity, C#, and 3D modelling. I took a breather, and thought up some ideas, and stumbled across something! I decided to begin working on what would become known as t̶h̶e̴ ̴p̶r̵i̴m̷a̸r̷y̵ ̷p̴r̶o̷j̸e̴c̵t̵, but what I would refer to as THE Game. This project became my introduction into my next stage of game-dev; working on a known engine, learning useful tools, and studying a programming language that I would carry with me for many years to come. I kept jumping between working on t̷h̵e̸ ̵p̸r̸i̵m̴a̴r̴y̴ ̵p̶r̴o̴j̷e̵c̶t̴ and practicing my skills with small concepts and tasks, and the rest of the year went by productively! I wrapped up the year by returning to my roots and spent a bit of time modding and mapping, which is something I still love to this day~
▫ 2018
2018 picked up where I left off, working on THE Game and experimenting with 3D modelling. Once again, scope-creep bled into my work and THE Game continued to expand bigger and bigger. What was meant to be a 6-12 month project was still a prototype after 12 months. The aesthetic was good, the concepts were there, the ideas were strong, but I just wasn’t an experienced enough developer to get this done fast enough. So of course I went backpacking around Japan for a few weeks, as one does hahaha. As an aside I will say; whenever I try to give myself a break, even back then, I found that the developer’s mind never really switches off. I’m always writing, sketching, planning, something! Even just walking around; I love looking at how our world looks and moves. Architecture, people, sounds, art, culture. I have an incredible amount of privilege in my life to have been able to go on a few trips and see new sights, and I love how these experiences shape my creative journey. But, I digress!
THE Game continued, side-work continued. I got to speak on a panel at OzComicon about video games and ethics which was fun (and I forgot I did!), and then when October rolled around I finally released something! core_ailtt.exe dropped for Halloween as small part of t̷h̵e̸ ̵p̸r̸i̵m̴a̴r̴y̴ ̵p̶r̴o̴j̷e̵c̶t̴. It was something I put together over a month, in a way to prove to myself that I could make a game and release it! To this day, the game has not been solved.
As the end of the year rolled around, I hit 50 Dev-Diaries, mostly because I was posting twice a month regardless of whether I had anything to talk about or not, but it was still a fantastic milestone! Despite the ups and downs over the past few years, I was still around, still making stuff. The end of the year also saw the first iteration of Management In Space (MIS), just a lil something I built during a small game-jam that I ran with some friends~
▫ 2019
2019! Let’s start this year by stopping work on one project to work on another! Classic! Surely it won’t become all consuming and take over my life.
So I decide to start expanding that “fun little resource management” game I made during the game jam in 2018. Updating UI, adding proper mechanics, and updating NPC systems. While this is happening, I hit the 10-year anniversary of The Series of Colour, a fun milestone to look back upon with a project so close to my heart. I will take this opportunity to say that I actually fully intend to return to this world one day! Even after ME was shelved permanently, I still continued to write stories and expand that world. There is so much to revisit, and I am excited to do so when the time comes. ♡
Anyways, MIS continued to expand, though it looked and played nothing like the game I am building today. By April I realised that both MIS and THE Game are way too big now, and they’ll just be “done when they’re done”. This is a terrible mindset to have for an amateur developer, and it would be a lesson I would learn the hard way, but at this point I kept going. As the year went on, in an attempt to get MIS finished by the end of the year, I start taking it to dev meet-ups for testing and getting fantastic feedback. I keep working, coding, drawing, writing, everything non-stop. Towards the end of the year, I notice my mental health, which has been rather shakey of the past few years already, steadily dropping, and it’s something I start to address more seriously now.
▫ 2020
Yeah it’s *that* year.
MIS is still being worked on and I keep sending new builds to the handful of testers I have. I set up a KoFi to help with a bit of funding, and I also start working on a little side goal of making as many One-Page-One-Shots as possible. The plan was; every month for 12 months, release a small RPG game that can be played with paper, pencils, and dice, where all the rules are on a single page, a common and popular format and one that encouraged me as a developer to try and very rapidly make a lot of small games. Despite skipping a few months, it went quite well, though I have since delisted them all from itch.io so that I can review them and reupload the good ones after they’re more optimised~
While I continued to work on MIS and the OPOSs, I was also able to try my hand at a few other things. I started mapping for VRChat, a weird but fun online place, and even got a few commissions for 3D mapping and modeling. Amidst global lockdowns during the rise of Covid, I also tried my hand at running a Choose Your Own Adventure story game on my socials! It was a fun way to engage with people while practicing my story-writing, though I never actually finished it hahaha. I also got my first paid video editing job in a long while, cutting videos for Lab Muffin Beauty Science which was excellent return to that video! (Fun Fact: I originally studied film and video editing, and graduated with a BA with Honours!)
The year continued, a lot of pretty messed up things happened across the world, and I start posting monthly instead of fortnightly. As the year came to a close, I brought Duncan Latto on board to start working on the soundtrack for MIS, who would go on to be my composer for basically every game moving forwards!
▫ 2021
This was a pretty good year for me. As usual, I start the year exhausted, but I am much more committed to addressing my mental health issues (which have been steadily improving!) and eventually get my ADHD diagnosis! This was the year I started doing video editing for Radioactive Magic working on their series PokeStudy, which would become my main source of income for a few years. I also join Inflorescent Games Co-op as a volunteer developer and co-director!
I also began working on roll, a meditation endless-runner originally for mobile and eventually ported to Steam, but I’m getting ahead of myself~ With all these things going on, whenever I would look at MIS, I would see a messy project without preproduction held together at the seams with duct-tape, so in August of this year I decided to pivot to working on roll and to permanently shelve MIS, never to be seen again… (hahaha… we shall see about that..!)
This was also the year I made NieR:Cogito, an interactive novel where you make philosophical choices about machines set in the NieR universe. I made this game in 3 weeks to be submitted to a competition run by Square Enix to promote their new mobile game, and I *won*!! Unfortunately Square Enix wasn’t super happy about that, but after some back-and-forth about the game’s existence, we decided to just leave it (which honestly, was actually really nice~). You can read more about that journey here, but needless to say it was exciting and scary.
By the end of the year, I had a game released, was doing proper video editing, was working on two games with one as part of a larger group, had won an award, and had been written about in some articles!
▫ 2022
2022 continued strong. Inflorescent Games released UFOTOFU: HEX, a game I worked on and did some marketing for. I continued to edit for PokeStudy, and steadily moved into more of a producer role instead of a just as an editor as I would sit-in on script reads and contribute edits, provide my own direction on visuals and storyboards, and work with an artist to create new assets. Amongst all this video work, I tried my hand putting together some videos of my own and started Silver Ambience, a place where I could host music videos for my games, as well as videos of some of Duncan‘s music.
I continued to do a lot of work on roll, with a lot of focus on world generation, stories, fun little mechanics. I brought Grace Eun Jin Anderson on to help with drawing the collectible cards that accompany the game’s stories. Of course, scope-creep once again became very real, but I was much more experienced this time around. Optimisation also became a big hurdle across this game, as it was primarily meant to be played on mobile which brought with it a plethora of technical limitations. These delayed me, but ultimately served as excellent learning experiences.
▫ 2023
roll continued to dominate this year. I was still working for Radioactive Magic, though Inflorescent Games had to dissolve due to a lack of funds sadly. While all the projects I’ve worked on have been learning experiences, roll was a major turning point. Yes it did get dragged out much more than necessary, but unlike small quick projects like core_ailtt.exe and NieR:Cogito, roll required a lot of forethought and careful building. On the other side, opposed to my longer projects such as THE and MIS, roll had a much smaller scope and, most importantly, was being built with a lot more experience. I feel my Dev-Diaries for roll are the best I’ve written; while they’re indicative of my abilities at the time, they’re incredibly thought out and explain complex updates and concepts in great detail. Writing those posts helped me *feel* like a game developer.
As the year went on, my work on PokeStudy came to a close as the series ended, but I also hit 100 Dev-Diaries which was a very exciting milestone. The end of 2023 saw me showcasing at my first event, having roll presented at SXSW Sydney! It was bonkers stressful, and even though it was questionably successful, it was something I’ve been wanting to do for years and I’m incredibly thankful for the opportunity. Steadily, production on roll was starting to come to an end.
▫ 2024
Despite the fantastic successes of the year prior, 2024 steadily dipped out of it’s strong start, but finished on the highest note of my life thusfar.
At the start of 2024, I knew I wanted roll to be released asap. I was cutting content, fixing what was broken, and polishing everything else. By mid-year I had a “basically complete” version of the game that was essentially ‘Minimum Viable’ public build, and then by July it was released, even though it felt like a loss publishing a game with so much cut content. On top of that, all of this was on the back of several months of no income, and things were getting pretty dicey. I’ve said throughout my Dev-Diaries and even in today’s recap that I am fortunate to have so much privilege in my life that has let me chase this dream, but by now I am in my early 30s and needing to look forward into the future. What do I want out of life? What do I want to create?
The answer is MANAGEMENT IN SPACE of course! That’s right we’re back take that good thing off the shelf!
After what felt like a lifetime of non-stop hard work, I was finally going to get paid to make games. Screen Australia provided me with prototype funding to start working on MIS again, this time with a fresh start. I had been thinking about MIS on and off for a long while, and coming back to it I had new ideas on how to bring out the best for this game.
With the funding and attention, I was able to take MIS to multiple events in 2024 where I could showcase the prototype to industry peers, publishers, and other developers. It was a rollercoaster of a year that ended with me finally achieving a dream goal.
▫ 2025
From the huge step forward of 2024, 2025 started strong. Right out the door, I received another grant from Screen Australia, this time to fund the production of MIS for an entire year!! I was now working as a full-time game developer! I was sent to GDC in San Fransisco, gave a talk at ALT:GAMES, and was able to showcase the prototype around at more events. As a quick step back, I finally played roll for the first time in nearly a year; seeing it again with fresh eyes made me realise how much I had accomplished with it. I was finally properly proud of it~
Back to MIS; I made the decision early on to migrate to Godot, and spent a good deal of time rebuilding mechanics from the prototype in the new engine. This time however, I had more time and understood what I was doing, so I was not only faster but was also building systems more efficiently. While I wasn’t posting Dev-Diaries as frequently, I did manage to do a handful of highly detailed posts about theses systems, reminiscent of my posts about the production of roll.
By the end of the year, I had an alpha build ready to go, and was able to showcase it at numerous events once more. This time around, people recognised me and the game, and loved seeing how far it had come along. I was able to do a live pitch demonstration at GCAP, and was told that I had “the perfect pitch”. People loved the game, and I loved working on it, but I was once again burning myself out hard to hit the constant deadlines.
▫ 2026
We now reach the current year as of writing. 2026 began as per usual, carrying the exhaustion of the prior year, which in this case unfortunately meant incredible burnout. I announced that I would be bringing my artist Grace onboard as a the character designer because she is far more talented than I. This was also when I was able to announce that I had been talking with the National Film & Sound Archive of Australia about Flash preservation, and that I would be advocating for archiving Australian Flash projects by raising awareness, recovering lost media, and helping developers and artists with the application process.
More massive news this year was that I was chosen by Screen Australia to be a Future (Games) Leader! This meant that they would send me to BitSummit in Japan and provide training to help me improve as a developer and an upcoming industry leader. This would result in becoming a tremendous amount of work as I continued developing MIS to have a new booth build ready that was translated to Japanese, while also preparing the game to be released as an alpha demo on Steam! The year flew by in a blur of early mornings and late nights, and finally in the middle of the year I presented the new demo to Japan, and then released the demo on Steam!
▫ Now (Dev-Diary 121)
This brings us to, now! Japan and the demo drop was just shy of 2 months ago, and my last Dev-Diary was back in April. Since returning from Japan, my time has been occupied predominately by 3 things; administration, bug-fixing, and exhaustion. With the end of the financial year and the acquittal of two grants, I had an incredible amount of accounting and paperwork to complete. When that was all wrapped up, I had to address several glaring issues with the demo and prepare it for the NonbinaryCodedGames Fest, which went wonderfully and saw my game played by some streamers which was exciting!
Unfortunately, this update does not have the happiest of endings, as it sees me burdened with the culmination of months, even years, of burnout while quickly running out of funding. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting with dozens of publishers over the years, but MIS consistently gets turned down as a poor fit, a high risk, or just “not developed enough”. Paradoxically, publishers love the game and want to see the game further along but don’t want to fund it to get there. I’ve been hoping to find funding for MIS so it can enter ‘Early-Access’ at the end of this year, but this will likely need to be delayed by another 6 months while I sort out funding and my own exhaustion levels.
The other reason this isn’t a happy ending is that this is obviously not the end! I might be tired and steadily running out of money, but I have no intention of stopping. I truly and genuinely love what I do, and I believe in this project. It has a long way to go, and I have a lot to learn, but I know I will succeed.
Looking back and seeing how far I’ve come has been much needed retrospection and even some self-validation. A lot of my dev journey has been me struggling and learning things the hard way, taking too long on projects that don’t succeed. It has also been steady and quantifiable growth, lots of small and big successes, winning awards, presenting showcases, giving talks, and making so many incredible new friends. I may not have done things the normal way, and I might be seen like a bit of a weird dev even now, but I wouldn’t have done it any other way.
I’m aware that basically no-one reads these anymore, and frankly they’ve always been for myself, to hold myself to a schedule and a standard. Despite that though; to the handful of people who still read these and have supported my work from day one, thank-you for continuing to believe in me. For the new people who might stumble upon this because of my recent work, or work I do in the future, thank-you for seeing and encouraging me. For myself who never gave up, despite everything, thank-you for all your hard work, and I look forward to what you accomplish over next 10 years and beyond.
Till next time, all the best~
^,,^