2024 Year in Review

Since I began writing more regularly here this year, I thought now would be a good time to reflect on my year in game design and set some intentions/goals for the new year.

My main success was the official publication of Insurgent: Algeria in November. It’s been gratifying to receive messages and pictures of people playing the game and enjoying it. Thanks again to Tim and the whole Cat Games team for bringing it to the public.

I spent most of my design time this past year on Road to March, a college basketball coach simulator game. I had hoped to finish development over the summer while my friend Luca Ponticello worked on the art, but it wasn’t meant to be: I couldn’t settle on whether the game should lean into its possibility for simulation or excitement/accessibility more, and found it difficult to include both. I’ll revisit it with fresh eyes in the new year.

I also released a couple of small “Games of the Month” for free on this newsletter: Word Swirl and Sets. I was pretty happy with how these turned out, but found it too time consuming to put one out each month. I had fun making these, though, and hope to put out a few more this year. Most of my other projects are in the research or early prototyping stages, so I’ll keep those under wraps for now.

My main design goal for this year is just to design consistently and playtest with others at least once a month. Ideally I’d finish a game like Road to March or something else, but I’ve learned not to put timelines on games. They’re done when they’re done.

In terms of this newsletter, I settled into a biweekly posting schedule by the end of the year, so I’ll likely stick with that for the time being. I enjoyed recapping my time at Origins, researching topics in wargames and providing updates on my own designs and playtests. I’d be interested to hear what you’d like to see more of going forward.

I decided to write the newsletter more frequently this year to start critical conversations about games and to inspire myself to design more. In both those areas, I’d say this year was a success. Here’s to an even better 2025.

Happy gaming,

Matt