I haven't done one of these end-of-the-year blog roundups since December 2018. This blog is now 16 years old. Maybe now's a good time to catch up over the past 6 years of my life??
Here's my "greatest hits" / notable blog posts since 2019, along with some commentary with the benefit of substantial hindsight.
⭐ = Gay game release / artist statement.
2019
- Thick skin: complexion, realism, and labor in games is still a good one, comparing the tech art of layering multiple texture maps in modern 3D game materials to Lucian Freud's fleshy painting.
- Radiator European Tour 2019 (London, Berlin, Milan) + Lessons from Europe: field reports from EGX Rezzed, Now Play This, and A MAZE Berlin provide a snapshot of the pre-pandemic games festival circuit in Europe. Flying back-to-back weekends between New York and Europe sounds glamorous but it was actually a mild nightmare and it made me realize I didn't have the energy / desire to try to become a "real artist" and enter the fine art world seriously.
- State of the design blog is when I officially started blogging less. Little did I know that 6 years later, it'd be the year of the blog!!
2020
- The powerful presence of non-presence in "Out For Delivery" is my last VR-centric post, about a remarkable piece of VR filmmaking in Wuhan just as the pandemic was beginning. I think it might even be the last VR thing I ever played?
- My fy_iceworld feature for Rock Paper Shotgun is probably the best thing I've written for RPS. Read the comments in part 2 for a possible tantalizing conclusion to the mystery too -- though without evidence, it's impossible to confirm anything. Thanks to editor Graham Smith for believing in it.
- ⭐ Hard Lads as an important failure. Personally I think this is one of my better gay games / masculinity simulators, and it doesn't even have any adult nudity. It also happens to be one of my better artist statements / essays too. It's my only game to get reviewed in Art in America -- again, I was on the cusp of entering the art world, and I had to decide whether to commit to it or not.
- I got burnt out on streaming and I started making Quake maps. I can't find a blog post for my first Quake map, but #2 is Smell It In The Street and #3 is It Will Be Summer Eventually. I wouldn't say they're good levels, I was still learning TrenchBroom and figuring out my Quake design voice, but they play OK enough.
- The year of changes - kia ora Aotearoa. And the big one: I announced I was leaving New York City and moving to Aotearoa New Zealand, where I still currently reside today. (You can't get much further from the art world than this?)
2021
- ⭐ We Dwell in Possibility as queer gardening simulation was a Manchester International Festival commission and represents the height of my fine art dabbling. I still feel a bit cheated by the pandemic here -- it would've been great to attend MIF in-person and experience it firsthand. At least the game turned out pretty good! One art critic said it was surprisingly subtle and open, compared to my other games -- I forget his exact words, but it was something like -- it's my least American game.
- Three more Quake maps: #4 is Daughter Drink This Water, #5 is Tell Me It's Raining, and #6 is When There Were Wolves. I believe Daughter is regarded as one of my better maps, an adaptation of Hang 'Em High from Halo 1 that gradually unfolds itself. It represents the point when I finally became proficient and fluent enough in TrenchBroom and Quake mapping, culminating in my Quake Renaissance series for Rock Paper Shotgun.
- Open world studies: for some reason this is the year I wrote big design analysis blog posts about big meaty open-ish RPGs -- Deathloop, Enderal, and The Forgotten City (2021).
2022
- Four more (!!!!) Quake maps: #7 is Heart Like a Bird's Nest, #8 is The Close And Holy Darkness, #9 is Breakfast Under The Balloons, #10 is There's A Certain Slant Of Light. This year I was also volunteering as the maintainer of Quaddicted, the main Quake 1 community map archive. In retrospect, 2022 is probably the year I did too much Quake stuff and burned out a bit on it.
- ⭐ Logjam as mourning wood is one of my weaker gay games, but I still like it. I wanted to try making something smaller and simpler after WeDIP took so long, and maybe even embrace arcade aesthetics more. You can draw a throughline from this one to my new gay fishing game I just released last week, where Logjam is my first gay game that really lets the numbers in.
- ⭐ Zugzwang as a pole dance upward into heaven is my most complex and difficult game, and maybe the least playable because of it, confusing even hardcore gamers who should be well-equipped to decipher it. It's also the most explicit, with several sex acts that literally dissolve men into puddles of ejaculate. A German museum recently chose this one for an exhibition, and my first reaction was, "uhh are you sure?"... I still like this game though. It's fitting that my most esoteric game is the one about occult sex magic.
- ⭐ That Lonesome Valley as cowboy coin crusher is my first gay web browser game. Similar to Logjam, it's partly a reaction to making WeDIP, where I tried making a 2D web game with more arcade aesthetics. Here I learned a lot about the technical aspects of making Unity WebGL stuff -- this 2023 Unity WebGL tips blog post still gets a fair bit of desperate search traffic.
2023
- This was the year I made no Quake maps and released no gay games. I was busy starting up a level design contract for the upcoming indie 3D platformer Big Hops (now launching on January 13, 2026 on Steam, PlayStation, and Switch!!)
- Double Fine PsychOdyssey recaps / viewing guide, episodes 01-17 is the first half of a viewing guide that I never finished, oops. PsychOdyssey is still a remarkable and brave thing today, when some game developers documented their awkward pain in meticulous detail and let everyone judge them for it. Just some incredible vulnerability on display here.
- Design review of Redfall is my analysis of the last game ever by Arkane Studios Austin. At the time, there was still some hope they'd get a second chance and Microsoft would be a forgiving owner. Today, we now know that Microsoft has definitely drank some of the vampire juice and pivoted to pure evil. Let's all pray for Arkane Lyon and Double Fine to survive the villainy.
- The joys of the anti-farm sim: "Before the Green Moon" is about one of the most underrated indie games of all time by the greatest indie devs of all time. It's absurd this game didn't become super beloved and popular throughout the entire world. It's very good and it does so much. A massive injustice on a cosmic scale, God is dead and we have killed him, etc.
- new web game: "Where's The Beef?" is another mini web game experiment. It started as a very silly thing but then became surprisingly interesting to make and play as I explored the design space. This type of thing returns again in 2025.
2024
- This was the year when I blogged the least, with a grand total of four (4) blog posts the entire year. I suspect I was very busy with the Big Hops contract.
- One new Quake map: #11 is Taught By Thirst, a decent adaptation of de_aztec for Remix Jam. Usually I don't bother much with designing map secrets, but this one has the best designed map secret I've ever done, harkening back to de_aztec's evolving history over the years. It's one for the real level design sickos.
- On "Sudden Death" is about a queer Southern hemisphere sports-themed visual novel, which perhaps predicts my current interests / main project right now...
2025
- It's the year of the blog, baby!! However my blogging momentum has definitely petered out in the second half of the year. At least V Buckenham and Joe Wintergreen are still going strong!
- This is the year I announced my first big long term commercial project: Tryhard, a sports RPG set in Aotearoa New Zealand. It also comes with A Sportslike Manifesto calling for new types of sports games. I'll have a lot more to say about it in 2026.
- I don't actually have a blog post for this one, but I've started a new level design contract, helping out with the upcoming stealth action game Sleight Of Hand. ("Wishlist on Steam now!")
- Space is not a wall: toward a less architectural level design is my most popular blog post in recent memory. It adapts some of my GDC 2025 talk about the difficulties of teaching level design / writing The Level Design Book. I think it tracks with how much more level design I've been doing since the 2020s -- maybe the more level design you do, the less you're able to confidently define what it is.
- new web game: "Don't Rank Cuomo" is another quick mini web game experiment in the same vein as Where's The Beef, this time with some bonus 2000s era game studies discourse about political game design! This one centered "fun" more than the average NEWSGAME (TM) though, and also cemented the notion of non-architectural level design in my mind.
- I started TikToking this year. At first I thought it was like the opposite of blogging / thinking, but now I realize all the supposed spontaneous immediacy is more often a careful performance. Currently I think I'm doing too much editing, I'm still trying to figure out the equivalent of shitposting / triangulate my "TikTok persona."
- ⭐ Rainbows Are Carnivores is a gay fishing / aquaculture romance game. Personally I think it's one of my better games -- better than any of my 2022 games.
- It's also my first public 3D web browser game, since Apple finally improved its iOS WebGL support. Maybe it's because of their XR push, or maybe it's a side effect of the Epic lawsuit, where Apple sort of argued Epic could've shipped Fortnite on WebGL, and so finally the iOS Safari / WebKit team had to make WebGL support seem just barely plausible.
- I made a Quake map for the upcoming Quake Brutalism Jam 3, but the actual public release will likely be next year since it's such a massive community project that needs a lot of QA and testing.
