2025 Recap, 2026 Preview

The month started exactly as you might expect: with the mantra of focusing on remrem, I immediately started preparing a portion of the game which was meant to be the new "test build", aimed to try out the new "3D framework" I worked on for the past two years. I started testing out the stylistic possibilities for fun, as I often do while searching for new ideas.

February was spent working on another Remrem section, that is the one I blocked out the month before. This was pretty hard to make!

I also did a thing which we can summarize with this screenshot:

March was mainly spent on three things: modeling and animating a certain character, making an inventory system for the game and making the very first pickable (and equippable) items.

At this point, the mission is simple: do your job and deliver a playable build on June.
And so I did, working the aforementioned stuff and also moving on with the map started in January.

I also had to fix some issues regarding the game's HUD: stuff drawn on GameMaker's Draw GUI events would bypass the post-processing shader, leaving me with an unwanted result (and I should've seen that coming, since I had to tackle the same issue with Lala is Bound)! I had to redo a lot of stuff to draw GUI elements in the normal Draw events, ending up with a result I really like.

In the spare time I also worked on a bonus video for the "Canned Project Galore" Patreon series (you can find the previous videos on my Youtube channel as I'm writing this): this bonus video dives into a relic from my pre-gamedev past, one which nobody knew it was secretly a work of mine (at least that's what I thought, turns out everybody already knew).
I had a lot of fun making this one, making video always feels very refreshing to me!

As things went on, I started searching for the cause of my doubts. It felt like... the more I kept twisting the original design to accomodate the demo, the more I kept losing track of what's really important.
The more I insisted on worrying about the "shape of things", the more I ended up losing myself.

The nefarious June deadline was already gone and some days I felt like giving up on everything. Still, I decided to insist and this started a period in which every time I wake up, it's like a coin toss: if it's head then I'll feel kinda energic and pretty sure of what I made & I'm making. If it's tail, I feel like thrashing it all.

Luckily enough, July turned out to be a colder month than June and that alone gave me the energy to keep working on the demo's design. For once, since May, the project felt like it was naturally going in the right direction.

I uploaded some teasers on Twitter and felt pretty confident about the progresses: I tried focusing on what I wanted to make on a whim instead of "the shape of things" and, with the deadline gone, I also thought about enjoying some good ol' Minecraft with friends!

But you know how they say, "when it rains it pours": as soon as the very first session of Minecraft went by, my left arm suddenly decided to get 2018's PTSD and pulled a FIREWORK on me (for those that do not know, at the time I worked so much that I had to develop with my right arm only because of a tendinitis which became chronic and arbitrarily activates).

I tried ignoring it and that, of course, has been a bad idea: the thing still grieves on me as I write this -I feel better now, thanks to the cold season-, but because of it, development slowed down and I also had to partially give up going to gym, something that helped me clear my mind.

Failing the deadline paradoxically gave me some motivation, tho, and ignoring the aching arm I kept working on the "big demo" with a new deadline in mind: the IMSCARED 2012 birthday in October!

Every time I felt like losing my left arm, I shifted focus from Remrem to a new Patreon video I was making, one that would've started a new series of videos called "Released games galore", starring the games that did see the light of the day. More on that in the next section!

As I was saying, I kept working with that newfound energy; the Attraction, which was constantly teased in the IMSCARED updates, needed to be available in the demo even if scaled down.

By then I already did a lot of heavy lifting with the map itself (not talking about the content), but still it wasn't ready and needed a lot of polish. To be sure that everything worked as intended, I had to set up even things that wouldn't be available in the demo.

A lot of work, but its shape is pretty neat!

As August began, I completed and released the Lala is Bound video. With that done, I could now focus entirely on the Attraction; this month was mainly spent doing that polishing work I talked about earlier and adding some story elements to the demo, so I can't show much about it. it's a rabbit hole.

Also, as it happens once per year, Tiz tried to get us back working on Mirror Layers Enigma 6 (which, if you didn't know, is already written down and halfway done since I dunno, two years? Something like that).
It's a rush that only last a week or so every time it happens, and sadly I can't commit to it until I'm fully done with Remrem (or at least its demo).

And then, September came; I got to play Silksong which is probably the best action platformer I've ever played (such a good year to be a player, so many good games! What could go wrong? f, that's what). I also played a YuGiOh DS game which was suggested to me by NoEye (good ol' GX format, I had a lot of fun).

As for development, things got even bigger 'cause it felt like there was no concrete, satisfying payoff to the demo. I also needed to accomodate Worker/VIP players in some way, so I had to rethink some stuff; the original idea was to ignore that aspect for the demo, but since this story is one which moves with every iteration, be it big or small, I need for the demo to account for that without it being just a change of text.

At this point, the demo I have in mind (and in my hands, even if disjointed and fragmented) is probably bigger than what a normal demo should aim for.

Again, I start worrying about the shapes. Again, I lose myself in the rabbit hole.

The month goes on while working on a new area (which I won't be showing) and a new item.

At the same time, I launch my annual Terrorottobre jam (which, for those who're new to these recaps, is a horror-centric game jam I've been hosting on GameMakerItalia since 2020) with the theme "deceit". It's a thing I love to organize and I like to participate in it myself with a small horror game.

I won't lie, I thought about using Remrem testbuild as my entry for the jam! It also felt right given the jam theme, I could've done something like saying "hey my game is called 'ingannus' it's a roguelike" and then BAM the game's not ingannus, the game's Remrem testbuild and that's a cool surprise/deception for everyone to enjoy!

I kept working on Rem, but the brain wasn't cooperating anymore. Gotta be defective, Ignis wouldn't be proud...
I told myself "c'mon give up once again, make something new, you really need it".

And so I Castlevania'd all around!

I really felt the urge to make something active, something simple like an action sidescroller/platformer and that's why I made a really small prototype called TENSE HOLING, which you can play here if you're a Patron but also for free on this website's homepage as I'm writing this (I'll get rid of it as soon as I find something better to put in there). This thing took something like 4, maybe 5 days of work and came out pretty solid! I made the project really optimized codewise, so that I could expand it in the future since I already knew from the start that I couldn't make much in that short amount of time.

By the by, if you anagram TENSEHOLING you get NOTHINGELSE 'cause the original deceit I had in mind was to make it become a short NothingElse game after a few screens. But I was out of time, and so I pulled a Dice in black & white.

Tense Holing is not special in any way, but I must say I really REALLY enjoy how it looks and feels.

At the end of the month we held a GameMakerItalia meetup, which was awesome even with the awful flu I caught a few days before: GMI people is special and always finds a way to make you laugh and be happy!

I really wanted to make a mini-trailer for Remrem for the occasion, but didn't have the strenght to do so...

It's November, that is CHAKANA month! It's a very cool horror game made by Tiz and his girlfriend. I can't remember when exactly, but I also helped testing it one or two months prior. It was fun.

I also had a lot of fun spending some time with the people on the IMSCARED server: they organized a flattering "marathon" in which they tackled through all the games I made thus far. I know you're reading this, and I must say thank you for being so supportive and for liking what I do! It means a lot.

Sadly, for these last two months I don't have much to say: we had to update Mirror Layers because of the nefarious Unity safety breach and thus some days went by, replaying through the thing once again in search of bugs. Tiz did all the heavy lifting, so you might want to thank him!

Remrem-wise, I felt horrible every time I opened up the project but still I made some small tweaks and important progresses on stuff I can't show.

I re-designed on paper the portions mentioned earlier, and I had to find the strength to get rid of things I already made. But I wasn't sure of the new changes, I wasn't sure it would've been a good idea to change all that... I felt really, really confused and stuck.

and I hate getting stuck, I hate it with a passion, that's why I started adding more content elsewhere instead of doing nothing.

By doing so, it felt like something was finally moving again in my brain... But it didn't last long, every time I got back on that damned attraction room I panicked.

And so I ran away once again, giving myself to the Secret Santa jam entry (another annual GMI thingie hosted by Scario every Christmas).

Have you ever gave yourself so much to something

Thus, partially inspired by Void Stranger and Deltarune, I started making my cute bee game: another simple, action-oriented game with a simple gameplay and a simple objective.