ctmatthews

Indie game developer

a trans woman in the UK making 2D action games about ducks:

Ducky's Delivery Service (Steam/itch/Switch)

Chessplosion (Steam/itch)


i mostly post on my Blog / Newsletter / Patreon


i play fighting games! i won Evo in 2021.


pfp/header by NomnomNami


✉️ Contact (email/DM)
ctmatthews.com/contact
🖼️ pfp/header by NomnomNami
nomnomnami.com/

(Crossposted from my blog)

Hello! A year ago I wrote a blog post about my goals for 2023, along with a recap of what I did in 2022. So I thought I'd do it again this year!

What I did this year

Released Ducky's Delivery Service on PC and Nintendo Switch

I finished my game Ducky's Delivery Service and released it on Steam, itch and Nintendo Switch. I'm very happy with how it turned out, but I wrote a postmortem if you want to read all about it in excruciating detail.

Released Gauntlet mode for Chessplosion (with online co-op)

I love arcade games. Pretty much all of my favorite action games are based on arcade game fundamentals: short runs (often 10-35 minutes), intense pacing with no downtime, scoring systems that encourage mastery, and enough RNG to keep you on your toes but not enough that bad luck can ruin a run.

My previous game Chessplosion (Steam/itch) has a lot of single player modes, but once you can clear them there's not much else to do other than speedrun them. So I started thinking about what my ideal single player Chessplosion mode would look like, and came to the conclusion that it's basically just Dungeon mode but with no random dungeon layouts, no upgrades, no downtime or backtracking, and a scoring system that encourages aggressive play.

So I made it! And then I got carried away and put local and online co-op in it.

For a mode that I basically only made so I could play it myself, I'm surprised how much fun I've had watching other people play it too. I'd love to add online co-op to some of my future games, and I feel much more confident giving it a try now that I've had some practice.

Started making my next game

I'm really looking forward to announcing my next game! It's another action game about hopping around on a grid like Chessplosion, but with completely different mechanics instead of the chess piece bombs. It's in the prototype stage and I'm still trying to figure out the details of the core mechanics and enemy designs, but I'm looking forward to seeing how it comes together.

Boar gameplay gif

Released C.T. Anti-Aliasing for Aseprite

I completely forgot I did this until I started writing this post! While I was working on Ducky's Delivery Service, I found myself doing a lot of tedious manual pixel-by-pixel anti-aliasing for my pixel art in a way that would be easy to automate. I was essentially just coloring in all of the inside corner pixels, where the main color meets the outline. Two places where I had to do this over and over again were the cutscene character portraits and the translated game logos on the title screen:

Anti-aliased logo text

I asked a few people if they knew of a way that I could do this kind of "pixel art anti-aliasing" automatically, and was surprised to discover that none of the suggested methods looked anything like what I wanted. So I wrote an Aseprite plugin that would do it automatically and I released it for free on itch.io!

I assumed no one would care about it but it somehow got over 400 downloads and even a few payments/tips! Thank you so much to everyone who gave it a try, and I hope you find it useful. I've been using it all over the place on my new game, so it's certainly paid off for me!

Refactored my entire game engine codebase

My games use my own game engine, but up until this year the "engine" code and the "game" code were all just the same thing. So if I wanted to make a new game, I would just copy all ~70,000 lines of code from the previous game into a new folder and I would painstakingly delete all the individual parts of the code that weren't needed in my new game.

This was fine when I just wanted to make my first couple of games, but I didn't want this to be my workflow forever. So I spent a month completely refactoring everything, and splitting up my engine code and my game code in a way that makes it much easier to share code between games and quickly start new game projects. Not very exciting but it will save me a lot of time in the long run!

Set up my Patreon

I'd been meaning to do this for a while, but I finally got around to setting up my Patreon! As you can probably tell, I like writing way too much about the games that I make, so now I have the perfect excuse to do it every Thursday.

Patreon duckling

Thank you so much to everyone who supports me on Patreon and helps me continue to make games!

Lots of trans stuff

I don't want to write about this in public too much but I've been working on a lot of personal goals too. I came out as trans at the start of 2022, and there are still a lot of personal changes I want to make but I'm slowly making progress.

My 2023 goals

So that's pretty much everything I did this year. Let's see how it compares to my 2023 goals that I came up with last December:

Announce and release my second game (hopefully on a console and also PC). Ducky's Delivery Service is out on PC and Nintendo Switch!

Make the most interesting games that I can, instead of worrying about what’s popular. I did this with Ducky's Delivery Service! But unfortunately I spent a bit too much energy worrying about what's popular, even though it didn't affect the final game.

Make and release a tiny game for fun. I didn't manage to do this, sadly. But at least I made Chessplosion's Gauntlet mode and the Aseprite plugin!

Keep improving at art and music. My art improved a lot! There's still a lot I want to learn when it comes to music though, so I'll keep trying.

Track my vacation days. I did it! I took 20 days of vacation this year in addition to 10 public holidays, which is a huge improvement over last year when I forgot to take time off until December. I was much less exhausted as a result, despite everything that's going on in my life outside of work at the moment.

My 2024 goals

Most of my goals are personal things, but again, I'm too shy to talk about them in a public post like this. My game development goals are basically a continuation of last year:

Make a fun game that people can play with their friends. I love Chessplosion's gauntlet mode co-op, even though it's a borderline-unplayable chaotic mess. I would love to make a game that people can play with their friends in a less messy way! It could be a co-op shmup, a co-op campaign mode in my new game, or even some kind of party game. I've just got the urge to make something that people can play together without it necessarily being competitive. I don't know if that urge will last, but it's something that I want to try.

Try really hard to get my game engine's online multiplayer working on Nintendo Switch. I ported Ducky's Delivery Service to Nintendo Switch, but I haven't ported any of my engine's online multiplayer code yet. It would be nice if I got that working!

Learn to make 90s-style arcade game music. I like the music in Chessplosion and Ducky's Delivery Service, but I don't know how to make other kinds of music. My original overambitious plan for the Ducky's Delivery Service soundtrack was to try and learn to make full-on jazz fusion with realistic instrument sounds, which ended up being way beyond my skill level. But I still love big bombastic arcade game music and I would still love to make games that sound like that, even if it potentially means stepping away from ultra-realistic instrument sounds.

So whether it's FM synth pop, 90s videogame jazz fusion or maybe even full-on jungle, I'd love to be able to make some arcade game bangers. Even if I somehow don't end up using them in my games, I'd just like to be able to make them for fun.

Express myself more with my games' art direction. On Ducky's Delivery Service, I put a lot of effort into improving my technical pixel art skills. I think it's a huge step up from Chessplosion! I pushed myself even further with my new game's prototype and I love how it looks so far. But I would like the art direction of my new game, and every other game that I make, to have more thought put into it instead of just defaulting to "let's draw some standard pixel art videogame characters and environments and make them look a bit like a Nintendo game".

There's nothing stopping me from taking my next game's existing visual themes to the extreme, or ramping up its slapstick humor levels, or doing something else entirely. I can go as wild as I want! If the old DOS game Interpose can put an entire synthpop song on its title screen, I can put a bit more effort into earnestly expressing myself more through my games' presentation.

Make games for people who like arcade games. I like arcade games more than console, PC or mobile games. I was mostly known as a competitive fighting game player before I started making indie games (I won Evo in 2021!) but I love basically every type of arcade action game, such as shmups/STGs, beat em ups, arcade puzzle games, run n guns, lightgun games and arcade-style platformers.

All of my favorite games that I played this year were either arcade games, or games that were intentionally designed to play just like an arcade game. If you're curious, they were Mr. Driller, Gun.Smoke, Ghosts n Goblins Resurrection, Gunvein, Sisters Royale, Hazelnut Hex and Point Blank.

Arcade-style games mostly aren't too popular these days compared to standard console-style or PC-style games, but there's still an audience for them out there. It's not huge but it's big enough for a small solo developer like me.

I make the games that I enjoy, and that was also the case for Chessplosion and Ducky's Delivery Service. But if you came up to me during those games' development and asked me who else would play them other than myself, my answer would have been "uhhhhhhh hopefully a very small subset of modern indie game players?"

Sadly, my taste in videogames is nothing like the average modern indie game player. So it was hard for me to imagine anyone else getting excited about Chessplosion and Ducky's Delivery Service while I was making them, which made it hard to decide which features to prioritize, how to present those features to players, or how to market the games in general.

So instead of taking the large group of gamers who doesn't care about the same things as me and hoping that a small subset of them will buy my game regardless, I want to make games for the much smaller audience who already likes the same things that I like. I still want to include easy modes, lots of alternate fun game modes, and various other ways of making things a bit more appealing to players who might not have much experience with arcade games. But I'd like to make games that primarily appeal to arcade game fans, and I don't want to change my games in any way that will compromise that experience.

In practice, this probably won't change much about how my games end up. But it should stop me from wasting my time worrying about whether or not I can make my game appeal to the fans of the current Steam indie flavor of the month and instead make me focus on making it as good as it can possibly be, and that's always a plus.

Make and release a tiny arcade-style game for fun. I didn't make a tiny game last year (other than Chessplosion's Gauntlet mode), so maybe I'll manage it this time. I want to get more experience making arcade-style games, so let's make one!

And that's about it. In short, I want to unabashedly express myself through the games I make. I already express myself plenty through their gameplay systems and their cute ducks, but let's see how much further I can push things this year. I'm slowly coming into my own in real life, so let's try to reflect that in my games too.


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