my 2024 in review
NOTE: this is a mirror of my post on itch.io.
Hello folks. It's time for my yearly Big Blog Post...! I actually had this in my drafts for ages but it's now a year in review post. My personal year, wrapped! For all interested parties to see! We all love those, right...? Anyway. 2024 was a weird one for me, so I'm glad to see it go away to hopefully make space for something nicer.
Brief summary of what's in this post:
- The new games I've released this year through Domino Club:
- SUDDEN DEATH, which is a sports/romance visual novel (gay, 18+) written with Nat (nat_pussy),
- Neurokino Retrograde, which is a sci-fi visual novel (lesbian, SFW) written BY Freya (spdrcstl/communistsister).
- A list of things I liked this year: games, films, books, etc.
- General life update! How my 2024 felt overall, and what I'm hoping for 2025.
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SUDDEN DEATH
Winner of Domino Club's Danny Dyer Award — 'for geezers plain and simple. legends in their own way'
SUDDEN DEATH is a game about an underdog sports team that will do anything to win the championship... no, that doesn't sound right. Let me quote Robert Yang from his (very nice, shout outs) blog post about the game:
"there's these two players Mitch and Jordan. Mitch is the honorable captain of the team, while Jordan is a trickster hotshot star. They want to win, but they also want to fuck. Can they have it all??".
SUDDEN DEATH is a story about love, sports, luck, death. It follows a team of ratbags who are also, somehow, honourable. It's the most fun I've had making a video game so far.
✦ PLAY NOW ✦
Stray observations about making the game:
- This is probably the most niche game I've made by far, and I'm very happy how much it hits for its presumed target audience (Australians). I've had a number of people tell me that they couldn't care less about sports, yet they found themselves invested in the story--more than one person told me that the game being explicitly queer helps with this, which I'm quite happy about. I think that's pretty high praise.
- I heard quite a lot of good things about the presentation, which is nice. I think inkrunner is simply the best for making an interactive fiction game look like virtually anything you want, and I feel like I've been training my CSS muscles for exactly this type of thing.
- Among the people who don't realise that the sport depicted in the climax of the game is real and is called Australian Rules Football (albeit the version of it in the game also includes elements from Rugby League because I'm soooo crazy lol), you have either people who assume it's:
- about American Football (...why? anyway this prompted me putting that 'set in Australia' sticker on the itch page because I don't like people thinking of the USA as the default location for any story), OR,
- a made up sport entirely which I actually find quite flattering. You think I could come up with that stuff? Thank you, but that is having way too much faith in my capacity to imagine things, which is a skill I do not have.
- I know the game has my fingerprints all over it, but I do want to point out that a lot of the very fun bits in it were written by Nat! This is not a Just Cecile game!!! Without Nat there wouldn't be the Flo/Phoebe parallel plot, the articles AND incredible comment sections, and most importantly, the exquisite sex scene... and so many of the story beats and small details that I wrote were based on things we'd think up together. Thankfully, most people have been fairly good with crediting both of us. It is funny when people think Nat is Australian, though.
Anyway if you want to read a rollercoaster ride gay horny story and are curious to see if you too can be tricked into being invested in a fictional sports game, you could give it a go :)
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Neurokino Retrograde
Winner of Domino Club's Protomolecule Award — 'for a life collapsed into a timeless hologram of memory'
Neurokino Retrograde is an esoteric sci-fi visual novel. You play as Proxy, who's asked by a mysterious organisation to see if she can identify the... thing? person? that may or may not be her ex, Chia. Chia, who broke her heart years ago. Chia, who encountered an alien anomaly while on a routine job in space and came back wrong.
Just like SUDDEN DEATH, it's a story about love. Proxy sequences abstract glyphs together, the entity on the other side of the glass--hidden by a curtain in a sterile medical room--answers with images, videos. Are they fragments of Chia's memories, or something made up by the aliens? The mysterious organisation wants to know if the aliens are hostile or not. Proxy just wants to make peace with a relationship she thought she had moved on from.
✦ PLAY NOW ✦
I made Neurokino Retrograde with Freya! It was really exciting for me to finally collab with her because a lot of my favourite Domino games are the ones she worked on. It was also nice for me to take a backseat on the writing front and focus solely on visuals and SFX.
I had total trust in Freya to write a very cool story and it turned out so well... I'd discover each new edit/addition to the script when I'd be testing visuals and go "ohhh she's cooking with this one". When I did my first playthrough and got to [REDACTED SPECIFIC MOMENT] I literally gasped. Absolute cinema.
Neurokino Retrograde was made in Videotome Heartbreak, which is the fourth engine in the Freya's Videotome family of visual novel engines, although it ended up being VERY modified/refactored, among other things to suit the needs of yours truly. Freya wrote a little bit about that in her retrospective about Videotome.
Some interesting bits about making this game:
- Our inspirations for the story/general vibes were Solaris (both novel and film adaptation(s) I think?), Annihilation, Arrival, Contact, as well as the game Observation.
- I haven't played Observation, but I did play the Alien: Isolation which shares a connection with the former game through its lead UI designer Jon McKellan. Neurokino borrows a whole lot from Isolation, its UI and also its SFX. Don't tell anyone important (?) about this but I ripped apart a bunch of the interaction sounds from that game, fucked them up into chimeras with other freesound.org material, and voilà. Nice chunky sounds immediately making the interface feel a lot more tactile.
- There are "canon" readings/meanings for all the glyphs in the game. but they're based on ancient Chinese bronze/oracle bone script and each glyph is based on a kanji. They are literally sci-fi kanji. (I may actually post a post-mortem about all the visual work in this game in the future)
- It should be pretty obvious but the sprites are very much inspired by PC-98 games. I'd been itching to draw in anime-style for the first time (? i think?) so this was the perfect opportunity for it. Check out the fake game boxart I made:
I may be so bold as to say that this is kind of a thematic sister game to Under A Star Called Sun, although this is a post-release observation, makes sense considering both games are borne out of shared interests and influences. I think it's neat. We love longing and memories and love... in space!
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A quick list of things I enjoyed this year
Games
Gaming... I don't feel like I do a lot of it and yet here we are.
- 🎮 Alan Wake II: Yeah alright I'm pilled. I'm OBSESSED. Only a game that's part of a long line of games worked on by mostly the same people could be in constant conversation not only with its original predecessor (as a sequel), but also the studio's entire body of work before it. Yes it's meta, it's fun, but it's also genuinely smart and boy have I been rotating it since completing the first playthrough. They figured out how to make a game for intellectuals...
- As an aside, The Lake House DLC is incredible and is GOTY material on its own, not despite its short length but because it does so much in such a tight format. Finally, some good fucking food.
- 🎮 Helldivers 2: I like shooting bugs with my friends.
- 🎮 Pentiment: I finally played Pentiment earlier this year and as expected, I loved it! No one told me it'd be such an emotionally charged game. What the hell. I should do a second playthrough...
- 🎮 PROXIMATE: I'll just paste a bit of what I wrote in my Steam review: 'A ridiculously inventive take on the horror genre; if like me you're into the type of horror that cranks up the dread and anticipation of seeing the aftermath of something horrible that may very definitely happen to you, this is the game for you!'
- 🎮 DOMINO CLUB highlights: As always Domino Club has delivered some of my favourite games this year. My highlights/must-plays (three games from each jam this year) are:
- Giving yourself away: Short, sweet, great sense of place and a certain type of adult ennui. And friendship found in unlikely places.
- Spectator: Darkly funny, a smart and scathing observation of sports culture, masculinity, gender roles, performance, performance, performance. Heed content warnings.
- Your Shadow: I still can't stop thinking about this game. God.
- Divine Hunger: Domino folk horror... you love to see it.
- OOZE LESS: Visceral and haunting, the presentation is so simple... which is why it works so well.
- [EXTERNAL COMMUNICATION]: I love a Jupiter engine game... god this one is so fun. Classic Domino, always surprising.
- 🎮 Latex, Leather, Lipstick, Love, Lust: I stayed up quite late reading this. Such a good encapsulation of being in your twenties and having this unending desire for life and love and latching onto people for the wrong reasons and making mistakes. So good. AND made in inkrunner, too.
- 🎮 notes on the disappearance of a sister: I like conspiracy board games and this one just works so well, with a tool that isn't really made for making games... Great stuff.
- 🎮 TO:NORTH: This game made me cry lol. It was so good I'm considering asking the dev if I can help them translate it to English, even though I'm not a translator. Highly recommend if you have a good grasp on Japanese! One of my favourites that I played this year.
- 🎮 Screen Savour: Simple, sensual, beautiful. Looks and feels like a Domino game (compliment).
Books
I decided to take up the Goodreads challenge to read ten books this year so I can say that I have read ten books this year, and indeed: I have read ten books this year! I tend to slack off when I'm in-between books, losing precious book-reading time. Next year I'll do even better. Anyway here are my three favourites.
- 📖 Revenge by Yōko Ogawa: An anthology of intertwined stories, sometimes absurd and funny, sometimes genuinely emotionally poignant, often dark and macabre. So fun to read. I was literally like 'hmm that was good' after every chapter.
- 📖 Coup de Grâce by Sofia Ajram: A short horror story about a man trapped in an impossible, monstrous Montreal metro station. Imagine if a novel taking the modern aesthetic of 'liminal spaces' and creepypasta/urban legends was Actually Good. This is it. Takes a very fun, very wild turn in its final pages. This one's for the interactive fiction enjoyers.
- 📖 The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier: I always end up reading at least one novel in French per year and this one was so good. So many surprising and interesting turns of phrases, delightful to read. Le Tellier was cooking with this one. He was having fun with the ingredients and it turned out great.
Movies
Reflecting on my favourites this year, it was kind of the year for esoteric romance movies. I love that. Missed out on the Melbourne International Film Festival this year :( maybe next year. I'm sure there's stuff I forgot to mention... I'm bad at keeping track of what I watch but I don't like using Letterboxd. Oops.
- 🎞️ La Chimera (2023) dir. Alice Rohrwacher: What a treat. There's a scene in this film I just can't stop thinking about. I read a comment from someone somewhere saying they kept thinking about my very own Devil's Imago while watching this, which is what convinced me I needed to watch it. They're completely different types of media, but I can totally see why they thought that.
- 🎞️ Fallen Leaves (2023) dir. Aki Kaurismäki: Interesting that both Finnish-made pieces of media I've watched/played this year feature karaoke. I guess they just like it? This was really good, one of my friend randomly asked me if I wanted to go see it, so I looked at the trailer and was immediately charmed. I love how it is set in the modern day yet every single situation, interaction and aesthetic sensibility feels tethered to the previous century in a way that makes you question: when is this even set? Oooohh I love the whimsy of movies.
- 🎞️ La Jetée (1962) dir. Chris Marker: I felt the need to rewatch this after releasing Neurokino Retrograde. I forgot how good and timeless it is... To think this was made over sixty years ago! This time around the writing style really got me. So poetic and evocative. I should make a photomontage as a video game...
- 🎞️ Birdeater (2023) dir. Jack Clark & Jim Weir: My favourite from MIFF 2023 finally got a theatre release this year. Went to see a session with a Q&A at the end. Not for everyone, still great.
- 🎞️ The Beast (2023) dir. Bertrand Botello: A weird one! I love walking out of a movie being like 'Do I like this one...?' and then coming around to liking it. I love the ending so much. I should rewatch Twin Peaks.
Well, that's enough media for me. If I'm good next year I'll make some more regular posts about what I've read/played/watched but I definitely wouldn't hold my breath for it.
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2024, how are we doing?
I don't think I've done an actual retrospective/introspective blog post in... a while? ever? So here's for trying something and see where it goes.
To be perfectly honest, 2024 was a bit of a mixed bag for me. I thought I'd be working more on DAWN CHORUS but that took a backseat while I was busy with contract work, family emergencies, general life and other distractions.
If I put on my big ol' Harshest Critic hat and turn it inwards for a bit, I'd pretty boldly say that the first half of the year was a complete wash on a number of levels (aside from the release of SUDDEN DEATH, probably, thank fuck for Domino Club). For a while I lost track of what exactly it is I'm working towards, my mental health became noticeably worse: I felt frustrated and trapped in situations I thought I could 'work hard' to make better, but ended up in me operating at a loss--luckily 'only' in nebulous mental health terms and less in concrete, financial ways. Creatively for most of the year I felt drained, exhausted. I don't necessarily believe in art/writer's block, just normal fatigue and the natural ebbs and flows of creative inspiration/impulse/motivation... Ultimately I think I just put a lot of pressure on myself, which becomes a spiral that feeds itself.
Maybe that's just what reaching your thirties is like, though. And the industries you operate in the process of being reduced to shambles, and the state of the world in general as you see it through the dim light of your phone screen, and rent's going up next month, and as a precarious freelancer can I afford to quit a job that underpays me, and and and...
It's not all bad news though. In the latter half of the year, things slowly and then steadily improved. I walked away from a bunch of those situations that made me unhappy (as they say, the hardest part is realising they're bad for you). My partner and I went on a month-long holiday, our first overseas holiday since pre-Covid times (finally, unrestrained summer fun!). I made more of an effort to reach out and hang out with my friends (although this needs to improve even more next year). I worked on Neurokino Retrograde, I finally released my remake of Barry Bonds enters the World of Myst, and I'm working with other people on new projects that are exciting to me (can't say too much about those right now). I'm writing again, thinking about things I want to make again. Nature is healing, etc.
I'm not sure how deep I want to go with introspection in a public post, but I learned some valuable lessons from the more negative experiences I had this year, things I can improve about myself. Maybe that's me grasping for a consolation prize for my troubles... but hey, I think it's better than sulking forever. I'd say it's objectively good to still be discovering ways to live better in the world at age thirty. Yay.
2025 thoughts and expectations:
- I'm looking forward to next year! It's gonna be a busy one... but it should be fun.
- I'll probably carve out a full month earlier in the year for a DAWN CHORUS development sprint. I really want to get in the depths of this project lol, my game releases this year have basically been technical research for this... It's gonna be so fun sharing dev process stuff.
- Thinking I could write more regular and smaller blog posts about what I'm doing. I feel like I lose patience with these often because it's very 'who is this even for/who even reads these' but I've been so opaque about how I'm doing for the past few years, a little bit of Life Update stuff outside of usual social media might actually be a nice use of my time. We'll see.
That's it! If you made it this far, thanks for reading.
Cecile