The Most Productive Year

Every year I fall more in love with this game, and I like to think that it shows. We've got so much to cover, let's get straight to it!

Sea Cave City is Completed!

This first hub town has been in development for nearly 2 years at this point. It's about time that it got wrapped up. I've put in a total of 3 unique dungeons, a boss fight, and somewhere around 10 unique NPCs that you can interact with. There's a handful of interesting quests to work through. It also has a second version of itself as seen in this GIF below once you complete a particular task.

Secret content

There is a large amount of secret content that I don't want to show here. Hidden dungeons, bosses, and puzzles. It's the kind of stuff that I don't want to even give a glimpse of before release.

New splash screen

Having a title screen is nice touch for any video game but it's especially nice if you intend to do console releases at any point.

New opening cutscenes

I decided to pour some of that Fern juice into the opening sequence for the game. It all feels more cohesive and intriguing than before. Sorry I don't want to say more to avoid spoilers!

Sand City (Act 2)

I started to build out the new area for Act 2 and so far, it looks really good! It's a big shift for me as an artist because the entire city is outdoors so I have a lot more to consider when I build levels.

Silly YouTube Short showing some of Sand City

Fake 3D Signs (needs work still)

It's such a minor feature but I really like when you can rotate items that you pick up in games. Specifically the really non-important ones.

Fishing (new feature)

Every RPG has fishing and I didn't NOT want to do fishing so, here it is! You can catch different fish in different places and they repopulate every 15 minutes. There's super rare fish and more common ones as you would expect but I have some really fun twists planned for this system down the road.

Each fish you catch is worth some number of fishing points that can be spent with certain NPCs to acquire items, sometimes items that can ONLY be acquired this way.

Each fish you catch will accumulate on the fishing points redemption screen until eventually you have a fishnado of your own making.

I would really like to break down how I wrote the fishing line physics and everything else that has got into this over the last month or two but I'm saving that for a future YouTube video.

YouTube (My Not So Secret Side Project)

Twitch only has so much reach and I think I've sort of maxed out on how big I can get in that category without committing 40 hours a week to it. This game isn't going to market itself and eventually I'll need to pull in more than a few hundred wishlists so I started to make proper YouTube Content about game design.

I have no idea if it'll workout and end up being worth my time but I'm kind of out of ideas.

Self-promotion is impossibly difficult

The internet is anti-ads and anti-promotion, and rightfully so. You're constantly being bombarded with products and people. Routines to begin and apps to keep up to date. You can try and escape this but YouTube/TikTok/Instagram/Reddit/Steam/Facebook all pull you in and get you to spend time with them.

I know so many people who open instagram and just scroll reels for hours at a time. Wishing that they could put their phone down but with every swipe they get pulled in even more. The worst part about this over-saturation of media is that nobody really remembers anything that they see.

Someone will say "Oh did you see that game with the climbing lil bobbly guys?" but few people will know that the game is called Peak without intentionally looking to google for more information. Even fewer people will even care what game it is, they just know that there are funny YouTube Shorts about this silly game.

How are you supposed to market yourself?

It's about building a following of people who consume your content regularly. Whether that is once a month, bi-weekly, or daily. The creators with the most consistent audience always have the most emotionally invested audiences. There's this concept of pulling a lever when you need to, and your audience rushing to support you if it aligns with their general interests or emotional investments.

You have to sell people intimacy and sometimes that's just talking about things that they care about on a regular basis. Some people just talk about Nintendo or old computer hardware. Others will make 2 hours long video essays about video games that you've never heard of.

Twitch Stats for 2025

It's been a less than stellar 7 months for me. While my subscription and revenue numbers are decent, my follower/average viewer numbers have been pretty low. Twitch requires a LOT more time than any other social media platform and I've been considering slowing down on it for a long-time now.