A belated happy 2025, everyone! I only ended up posting a single blog post over the course of 2024, so I’ll take some time to reflect on the year as a whole.
My Own Work
True to my word, I did in fact finish one of the projects on my backlog: Solitude. The overall concept for the experience has shifted a few times over the years, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out and have added it as the first completed project in the universe of The Unseen City. As for the others, well, I’ve decided to put them all on ice for now. Too many disparate ideas that I don’t have strong conviction behind. Maybe that’ll change someday, but for this year I want to clear my slate and refocus on two primary ideas.
The first idea I’ve had will be another contribution to The Unseen City, specifically The Outskirts. I want to create a very stripped down exploration game inside a giant concrete megastructure. Think the architecture of NaissanceE, with the vibes of The Aether from Vertigo 2. More than anything I want to nail the feeling of having stepped into an unknowable space, something you can tell was built with a purpose but one that you can’t possibly fathom. I believe The Utility Room also does something in this vein (based on the few clips I’ve seen of it), so I might play that as well for further inspiration. This should be a good opportunity to flex my music and sound design chops as well, so I’m definitely looking forward to digging more into this one.
The second idea I’ve had is a bit more ambitious, but one that I really want to try and commit to this year: Creating a native VR game to be released on Steam and other storefronts. It’s honestly something I’ve wanted to do since I first got into VR in 2019, and with the XR tooling available now in Godot I think I’m at a point where I could actually start executing on this. The premise of the game is very much a Half-Like, where the player finds themselves deep in a sci-fi prison facility and has to find their way to freedom while battling strange and varied threats. I’m very much looking towards Half-Life: Alyx and the Vertigo series as my main sources of inspiration, and I’m hoping to create an experience that can strike that balance of both mechanical and narrative satisfaction. Additionally, I want to look into the idea of creating a WebXR demo of this game as a form of promotion. With Godot having support for WebXR baked in, I’m fairly confident this will be doable.
These will be my primary creative focuses for 2025. Keep your eyes out for updates! As for names, it’s obviously very early days and these could change, but for now I will call them BÉTON and HYPERION respectively.
…
Okay, I did have one more idea.
Growing up, I played a lot of escape room games made with Flash. One series I remember was from Afro-Ninja Productions, which had these small, contained escape room scenarios. The one I’m specifically thinking about is AN Escape Series #3, where you have to escape from a phone booth. I think this would be a great fit for VR and want to try my hand at adapting it, so at some point this year I want to see if I can get in touch with the original creator and get their blessing to do a WebXR remake. If not, I won’t stress too much about it, but it would be very fun for me. Fingers crossed!
My Work With Others
I don’t often work with others, but there were a couple things to highlight from last year.
Firstly, I worked with my girlfriend to provide programming and audio assistance for her capstone project, a visual novel titled The Mystery of Beaumont Manor! You can play the Chapter 1 Demo online on itch.io. We’d originally planned to do a full 4 chapters, but had to scope back to finish in time. We’re hoping to work on it more this year though!
Secondly, I was made a maintainer on the Servo project! This is definitely the most notable open source project I’ve been a part of, and I’m looking forward to doing more with it in 2025. After finishing my current work on the SubtleCrypto implementation I’d like to work more on the WebXR side of things again, maybe even attempting to finally get Linux support added. And of course there’s plenty of other interesting problems to tackle, so we’ll just have to see how the year shakes out.
In Summary
To sum it all up, here’s my tentative plans for 2025:
- An aesthetically striking WebXR exploration experience, tentatively named BÉTON.
- A native VR (with WebXR demo), sci-fi Half-Like game, tentatively named HYPERION.
- A (potential) WebXR remaster of an old Flash escape room game where you’re stuck in a phone booth.
- Continuing to work on the visual novel my girlfriend and I started.
- Continuing to contribute to the Servo project.
I’ll try and make sure to post a little more often than once a year! Until then, thanks for reading!