{"id":1681,"date":"2024-08-04T23:10:26","date_gmt":"2024-08-05T04:10:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/?p=1681"},"modified":"2024-12-13T06:44:08","modified_gmt":"2024-12-13T12:44:08","slug":"2023-year-in-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/2024\/08\/04\/2023-year-in-review\/","title":{"rendered":"2023 Year in Review"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Here is my 2020 Year in Review<\/a> and here is my 2021 Year in Review<\/a> and here is 2022<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2023, having mostly recovered from moving to a new country, I did: a bunch of stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

January<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

…but it doesn’t look like I released anything cool in January.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I finished The Little Match Girl 4, I realized that the game was too good to be a Patreon exclusive for two years. I had to change that policy. I figured LMG4 was a great candidate for IFComp 2023\u2014but I couldn’t release LMG4 before I released LMG3!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

February<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

To promote the release of The Little Match Girl 3, Sarah Willson and I constructed an “ARG” (really just a set of puzzles), the trailhead for which is here<\/a>. The prize you get for solving the “ARG” is the URL of the game, THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL 3: THE ESCALUS MANIFOLD<\/a>. It’s a text adventure but it’s also an RPG with spells and critical hits and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

March<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I participated in EnigMarch<\/a> 2023 and made 31 puzzles<\/a>, some of which were pretty good! This one<\/a> was great. I’m very proud of this one<\/a> too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And one of the puzzles was a full text adventure titled “How the Little Match Girl Got Her Colt Paterson Revolver, and Taught a Virtue to a Goblin<\/a>,” the first of many “side-stories” in the Little Match Girl saga.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The way I see it, the numbered installments of the Little Match Girl series are like movies, or two-part season finales. The little match girl’s life includes all sorts of episodes in between, but we only get to play some of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

April<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In April I visited my family in America, and I got to host another Family & Children’s Council trivia fundraiser! Here’s the “Secrets of the Zodiac” video round.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

May<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

If I find anything cool I put out in May I’ll be sure to come back and add it here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

June<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I was working hard on stuff that would be revealed later!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

July<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I got Sarah Willson to email me the prompts from Enigmarch 2022 one day at a time to recreate the challenge of making a puzzle every day for a month! I made 31 more puzzles<\/a>. This<\/a> is a good one. And this one<\/a> (the metapuzzle for days 23-30) is great.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Plus one of them was another Little Match Girl Game, “How the Little Match Girl Met the Queen of Vampires<\/a>.” There was some amount of non-spontaneous calculation involved in the creation of this game, because I knew players were going to see the Queen of Vampires again in an upcoming game…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

August<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Frustrated with the lack of adulation being heaped on my 2021 game Even Some More Tales from Castle Balderstone<\/em><\/a>, I released “Visit Skuga Lake: Masterpiece Edition<\/a>,” basically the same thing as “Visit Skuga Lake” but with bonus features. If you only have time to play the best part of Even Some More Tales,<\/em> that’s a shame, but I’ve got your back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To work out some leftover ideas from EnigMarch 2023 and EnigMarch 2022 I made a short extra puzzle set for “EnigmAugust<\/a>,” but it’s not exactly top-tier material.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zach and Sarah and I started another podcast, the Third Strongest Podcast<\/a>, about the game EarthBound. EarthBound is my favorite game of all time, it’s very important to me, and I was pretty nervous about trying to do it justice in our somewhat slapdash-analytical format. I still don’t think we said everything we could have said about this incredible game. But we said a lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

September<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Against all odds, Jenni Polodna and I released a couple new episodes of that Clash of the Type-Ins<\/a> podcast!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I made this set of puzzles<\/a> based on the board game “7 Wonders” to amuse my in-laws (with limited success). It’s only 100% solvable if you have the same outdated edition of the board game that they have. But it’s pretty easy overall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

October<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I entered THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL 4: CROWN OF PEARLS<\/a> in IFComp 2023. It ended up taking third place. My prize was this awesome comic<\/a> where Aster Fialla depicted a scene from the game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was not yet done with puzzle construction, and adapted Mab Graves’s “#Drawlloween” prompts into 31 more puzzles.<\/a> I got a head start, so I got to exert more than one day of design-effort per puzzle, so there are a lot of good ones. This one<\/a> is fun, this one<\/a> is great, this one<\/a> is fun just to look at, this one<\/a> is fantastic, and this one<\/a> might be my favorite even though it’s not very fair or solvable. It just looks amazing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Plus, yes, one of them was another Little Match Girl game, “The Little Match Girl and Her Friend, the Crow<\/a>,” a prequel of sorts to LMG4.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

November<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As soon as IFComp was over, I released “The Little Match Girl against the Universal Sisterhood of Naughty Little Girls<\/a>,” a sequel of sorts to LMG4. I released it along with this little manifesto<\/a> that I think a bunch of people did not pick up on the subtext of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

December<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It looks like I didn’t release anything in December, but I do have a file here for a podcast called “You Need To Relax,” which I hope I can get around to working on soon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taking into account all the puzzle-making enterprises listed in this Year in Review, it looks like I made 135 puzzles in 2023. But Sarah made some of those LMG3 ARG puzzles. So let’s say 130.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here is my 2020 Year in Review and here is my 2021 Year in Review and here is 2022. In 2023, having mostly recovered from moving to a new country, I did: a bunch of stuff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,10,16,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose","category-text-adventures","category-trivia","category-year-in-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1681"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1684,"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1681\/revisions\/1684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}