Continuing the tradition here's my annual summary post for a year in game dev/font dev/music/pixels 

Let's start with...

DATA

STATS

Overall stats for all projects over the lifetime of my itch.io page, including a column each for 2023 and 2024 for comparison

	LIFETIME	2023 Only	2024 Only
Page Views	92,713	25,500	53,681
Downloads	20,876	6,076	11,180
Browser Plays	11,822	576	8,390
Gross Payments	$1,799.22	$641.00	$1,152.22
Reviews	258	89	133
Followers	1095	Unknown	539

And further broken down into categories (lifetime only):

Category	Views	Downloads	Plays	Gross Revenue	Reviews
Assets	6,379	760	491	$63.00	23
Fonts	51,810	12,101	N/A	$1,658.11	122
Games	21,174	3,992	5,871	$0.00	61
Soundtracks	13,350	4,023	5,460	$78.11	52

There's been a huge increase across the board this year: the font pack went viral on Twitter over the summer, which I suspect is the primary driver of this. I don't expect next year's figures to match this, given how dramatically engagement has fallen on Twitter in recent months, but I'm extremely grateful for this year's performance - thank you to everyone who's checked out and engaged with my work!

INCOME

My income for 2024 was as follows:

• 2024 Gross Income: $1,152.22 itch, unspecified commissions
• 2024 Net Income: £737.15
• $4.19 mean payment excluding unusually large donations (>$25)

Hopefully this can be helpful for other hobbyist devs looking for a point of comparison! 

PROJECTS

This year ended up being another fairly quiet one for releases for me - between work and other commitments (more on that later!) I only managed to put out a handful of new projects, but some of the ones I did manage to release ended up being amongst my favourite of my releases so far.

Here's some brief thoughts on each release, in chronological order:

Hard Rain was another Trijam entry*, and turned out to be punishingly difficult, with a deliberately awkward text-based control scheme, tight timers and a very rudimentary art style - all things I like about it!

This is a concept I could see myself revisiting: it's quick to iterate on, and with a more substantial list of commands and some differentiation between characters I could see this being a fun little retro-styled minigame. I'll add it to the list of concepts I might revisit somewhere down the line.

* As usual, I didn't manage to make the 3 hour deadline

Realistically, Space Generator was more an excuse for me to learn the basics of shaders than an actual project, but it does make very pretty colours! This also made for a nice excuse to finish up a couple of ambient(ish) loops that I'd never found a home for.

Really Long Arms is a speed climbing game, but more importantly it's a game in which you have really long arms. It was my entry to GMTK Jam 2024, heavily inspired by Peaks of Yore, Getting Over It and GIRP, and features four stages of escalating difficulty with a couple of upgrades and online leaderboards.

This is, by quite a comfortable margin, my favourite game I've released to date. There's certainly things I'd change - specifically snappier, less floaty controls and a wider field of view - but I really like the moment-to-moment gameplay here and it feels more complete than most of my projects.

3C was a fun project to work on, and I really enjoyed trying out a different style visually, but ultimately it didn't capture the atmosphere I was aiming for and ended up quite tedious to play.

I adore horror media so I'm going to have to work on this, as I clearly need practice making this kind of slower paced game compelling.

COLLABS

Early this year I was invited to join a couple of other devs on a project - whilst this project was eventually cancelled, I really enjoyed my time working on it and learned a lot about the challenges and practicalities of working within a team. It was also great to meet more like-minded people who inspired me and encouraged me to try new things.

One of these creators, TheAtrxcity, invited me to work on a jam game over the summer which turned into From Beyond, an arcade-style shmup with a roguelike format for which I contributed backgrounds, boss art and a remix of the music for the main theme. We also built a variety of different game prototypes together, trying out different genres, roles and engines, and providing playtesting and feedback on each other's solo projects. It's been great to get to know him over the course of the year, and I'm looking forward to working together in the future!

I also made a new font for bard_pixel's upcoming game Nunya (demo linked) - it was a pleasure to work with him, and I can't wait to play the game once it's out.

FUTURE PLANS

LAST YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS

Last year's commitments included:

• Release a full length game
• Enter more game jams
• Pause Free Font Friday to focus on games

I failed at all three! Even so, I'm mostly happy with what I ended up releasing and I like the direction the larger project has taken, so I'll still consider this a success.

2025

Based on my experience last year, I'm going to keep this year's goals more achievable:

• Private demo for main project
  I want to release a full, feature complete demo for the main project to a handful of people - I'm happy with the direction it's headed in, but it'd be great to get some feedback. This should be complete early in the year.
  (Anyone reading this - if you can spare the time to try it out I'd love to share this with you! More than happy to playtest and provided feedback on other people's projects in return, of course. Feel free to reach out in the comments, or on Twitter or Bluesky via DM)
  

• Main project - finish existing areas, add one new biome
  The first area is almost complete, and the second has gameplay but needs art, music, sfx, shaders... Still, I think completing what I have already and adding at least gameplay for a new section isn't unreasonable as a goal

• More Game Jams
  I did three this year. Even just one per quarter would be an improvement!

Obviously I'll also likely get sidetracked and release more fonts and weird pixels, but that's all part of the fun.

Thanks to everyone who's joined me this year, and of course to those who've shared how they've used the fonts in their work, always a joy to see them out in the wild. All the best to everyone, happy new year!