2023 has been my most successful year to date, although not necessarily in the ways I'd expected. I've only released three games over the course of this year, not all of which have worked as I'd intended, but the runaway success of Free Font Friday took me by surprise and has led to a huge increase in page views, downloads and community interaction.

Continuing last year's tradition, we'll look at some stats for this year, before moving into a discussion of what worked and what didn't, then a brief look at some future plans.

A YEAR IN STATS

At the time of writing, my games and other projects have received:

And further broken down into categories (lifetime only):

Some key points:

• Fonts (individual and pack) make up 90% of my gross income from itch.io to date.
• The Cleaner remains my most downloaded project, with 2538 downloads.
• My Music Pack continues to perform well with the second highest downloads at 1270
• TYPE:CAST is my most played browser game, with 1329 plays.

I should add a little disclaimer here for anyone looking to compare download figures: my music tracks and my fonts are all available for download both as a pack and as individual downloads, so my download figures look a lot higher than they might otherwise.

MY INCOME

I believe full transparency regarding income can be really useful, both for established creators looking for a point of comparison, and to help set realistic expectations for new creators. Please bear in mind that at the time of writing all of my projects are free/donation only rather than paid, and that my online presence is very small (<>550 followers here, <> 1700 on Twitter) - I have no frame of reference for how a similarly sized indie creator would perform with paid assets.

• 2023 Gross Income: $641 (itch.io), unspecified commissions payments*
• 2023 Net Income: £432.39
• $5.59 mean payment across all projects
• $4.77 mean payment excluding unusually large donations (>$25)

* Exact values reserved for privacy of patrons

WHAT WORKED

Switch With Me

Switch With Me was my entry to GMTK Jam 2023, and is my favourite of my entries to date. It's a top-down shooter in which the player is given the opportunity to exchange bodies with any enemy on entering a new room, with a variety of enemies to choose from each with a different form of attack. While admittedly slight, with a very limited range of mechanics and some clunky design choices, it had a fun joke ending in the form of the 'final boss'. More importantly, I found the central mechanic to be genuinely interesting, and potentially worth expanding upon...

Possessor

So I did!

By the time we reached December I realised I'd only released two games this year, so I thought 7dfps might be a great incentive to put something together. The mechanic from Switch With Me seemed like it could be a lot of fun to adapt to a 3d environment, and it ended up fitting really well with an ultra-fast boomer shooter style. Rather than separate rooms, I instead opted for a single large arena with procedurally spawned waves of enemies, with "possession crystals" scattered through the environment for the player to collect to force them to keep moving.

Possessor has a lot of issues that I need to address, from simple bugs to more fundamental flaws, most notably a lack of enemy variety and a lackluster difficulty curve. Even so, I'm really happy with the final result as a prototype, and I'm planning to iterate upon it and see what I can come up with.

WHAT DIDN'T

Recursion

There's aspects of Recursion that I think could be interesting, in a different context - the slow, awkward movement scheme; the setting; some elements of the sound design - but the game as a whole really doesn't work. This was just the wrong concept for LowResJam, with too many elements of the game working directly in conflict with each other: the empty environments to ensure the game was legible at this resolution are extremely dull to explore with the slow pace of movement; the ridiculously drawn-out intro and tutorial are entirely out of place in a game jam context; the UI is difficult to parse.

As always I've been deeply grateful for the community here, as despite the game's failures people have been wonderfully helpful, providing great practical feedback via the jam comments and being patient enough to take the time to find and highlight the aspects that did work. To anyone who played - I can't thank you enough, you are wonderful :)

As an aside: I've released a lot of games at this point, and while I value all of them as steps along my journey I recognise that many of them are janky, broken messes that don't particularly hold up. For me, that's ok - I love having my itch.io page as a record of how I've progressed as a dev - but I also don't want to inflict some of them on unsuspecting people! To this end, I've taken some time this year to look back over my catalogue, making sure that stronger games are listed at the top of my creator page, with the weaker ones buried in collections much further down and delisted. All delisted games will always remain available via my creator page for those interested, but will not be visible via the itch.io search function or in the browse pages.

MARKETING AND SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media has proven invaluable in promotion, with Twitter being the most successful (in terms of engagement and driving page views) by a considerable margin, followed by Reddit on the rare occasions I've been willing to post there. Bluesky has given me relatively high levels of engagement per subscriber, although as my audience over there is tiny (<100 followers) this has made minimal impact - we'll see if this improves as the site expands.

I love the concept of Mastodon, but I've found my posts receive little if any engagement when I post there. If anyone's got any tips for how to use it more effectively, please let me know!

FUTURE PLANS

Back in 2022 I stated I was going to work on a single, larger project for 2023 - I ended up bouncing between a few larger projects, finishing none of them, but learning a lot on the way.

That being said, I did manage to get a few a good way through development!

So first up for 2024: stop fucking about, and finish one. I've made a start already, and I'm really happy with how it's turning out! This won't be a huge game, likely around 30 minutes to an hour in duration, but considerably longer than anything I've released to date. Hoping to reach out to a few people in the first or second quarter of 2024 with some demos :)

I've also learned that focussing on a single project for an extended period of time is productive initially, but eventually leads to burnout and procrastination. With that in mind, I'm planning on doing a few more game jams this year - I've found the limited duration and smaller scope has worked as a perfect "reset button" on the few occasions I've entered them this year, and that after they've finished I can get back to a main project with a renewed sense of purpose.

Some bad news for anyone who follows me exclusively for fonts: Free Font Friday is finished, at least for the forseeable future. It's been an absolute joy, and seeing my work appear in other people's games has been a dream (please keep sending me links!), but I want to focus on game dev for the time being. I'll reassess when appropriate though!

STRAY THOUGHTS

A special shoutout to a few people:

• VEXED: a sensational creator of games, assets and tools,a continual inspiration for font design. I've really valued their encouragement over the year :)
• 8BitSkull and McKathlin Game Dev, both of whom were wonderful to work with, and I'm really looking forward to seeing their projects once they're released. Go check them out!
• Amirthaz and Tito, who were kind enough to playtest and provide incredibly detailed and useful feedback on a long-term project
• dustdfg for reminding me to correctly tag assets and provide the correct licence information

Special thanks to everyone who's sent me links to their projects using my fonts, music or other assets - I really do love to see how people end up using them :) please keep sending them to me!

Have a wonderful new year!