2025 was a rough year, lot of development but no game release, too much time creating tools and ways to improve speed and code quality. Since my last game Kung Fu Clairvoyance is still going to take several months of development, decided to take a new challenge and make a game in about a month, well it took me almost two months to finish but it will be released very soon, finalizing now balancing since all development is already finished.
The new game is Slot Forger, a slot machine dungeon crawler game, spin your machine to victory! hope you are able to enjoy it!
Download link at : https://mysticriver.itch.io/slot-forger
I did not notice but I haven't updated this blog for quite some time, but I posted videos in YouTube every week without fail. I made quite a lot of progress this year by creating a new level editor and also started a new dialogue system, I had quite a lot of troubles with these two areas since my previous editor was too customized to a specific game, now it is more generic, and the dialogue system, I wanted to display text and tell a story in my games, but without it, it was quite cumbersome and took a lot of time to implement stories into my games, so I did not add much story to any of my games because of that. My new game Kung Fu Clairvoyance will solve those 2 issues with a new map editor and a dialogue system that I can re-use in any future games, with those two tools I am expecting to develop faster.
This year I made 3 games, but didn't finish any of them due to different reasons, a card game that became quite difficult to make it fun, I still want to complete it, and with the dialogue system I think I can add all the missing part to it, next is a factory type of game, I got it mostly working but I needed to tell the story of the game, so again, the dialogue system will help me solve that, once I finish Kung Fu Clairvoyance in the first part of the year I should be able to move back to my other 2 games and finish them, it took quite a lot of time this year to make any progress, since I was not a full time game developer as I was two years ago I lacked the time and strength to finish all in just the few hours I had every day.
If you are following me in YouTube , Twitter or other social media places, thanks again! hopefully I can post more next year! but no promises yet, at least new games will come up for sure.
Wish you a happy new year and enjoy holidays, 2025 will be a better year with many new releases and new projects in mind.
Finally the last game of the year has been released, Highway Burnout!
You can download it from https://mysticriver.itch.io/highway-burnout
A high speed action 2d car game, race against time to defeat a terrorist organization that is trying to use a nuclear bomb, reach and destroy the last truck carrying the bomb before it detonates, you only have 30 minutes to get there. For that upgrade your car on the way with new weapons, and car enhancements for the ultimate killing machine.
My next game is going to be a card game about surviving in a deserted island, you just got there but do not recall much of your previous life, you just woke up in the beach under a hot sun and you will need to find a way to survive and find a way to return back to civilization by building tools and a ship.
Explore the island, find resources as cards and build your way out, check my video in my Youtube channel and how you play the game.
There will be around 100 cards to play with, and I at around 50% of the game development now, expecting to finish it this month.
This week The Last Mob Witness remastered has been released.
The game had quite many enhancements including a 2.5D view of the background levels and pixel art animation of all characters, some minor game adjustments and you can also kick your enemies.
Here are some of the in-game screenshots! and as usual you will be able to download it for free from my page at itch.io
This week I am working on the final level of the game, after it is finished tomorrow I will play test the whole game.
This is a screenshot of the subway level.
Added also a some new actions like taking cover by using your enemies and stab them when on the floor for maximum damage. Next video will show all the details as well as the link for the download of the game!
What is this game? The Last Mob Witness is a single player gun and beat-em up game, fast action game with guns and if no guns beat them with whatever you can get on hand including knives, swords, pipes, and many other things, ran out of bullets, throw your weapon to knock them out!
You are the last witness against the crime boss, and you need to reach the court room to testity against him, no one will help you now since there is a kill contract established by the organized crime awarding $10 million to who ever kill you.
Run and move fast before others find you, the only safe place is court, trust no one until you reach there.
History I was excited a few years ago when I watched John Wick's movies and I heard about John Wick's game, but I was disappointed when I found it is a tactical strategy game, I wanted to play a fast action game like in the movie, and since I was not able to find one, I started mine now.
Gameplay goals I wanted the following actions to be allowed in game - Take cover behind objects or walls
- Shoot a wide variety of guns and have limited ammo - Reload your guns if you earn or have clips
- If no ammo, or at any time, you can choose to throw your weapon to the enemy to knock them down to the floor giving time to you to decide your next action
- Use knives, swords and other things to hit your enemies
- Throw your weapons, knives, swords, anything you can grab
- Counter their punches and disarm your enemies in close combat - Grab them and throw them to the floor
- Punch enemies if no weapons - Enemies will also have to reload and have limited ammo - Cover with your suit since it is like an armor until you loose the protection
- Free flow punching
Development This is my 3rd game that will be released this year, and it will take me a little bit more than one month to complete it, you will be able to download it for free. I developed all the art / animations in a very limited time and budget.
I'm starting this devlog almost at the end of development which started just 3 weeks ago!. I reached alpha version now, and adding more levels for the release with 5 levels planned for this game, expecting to finish polish of the game this weekend. I am planning a better version of the same game with better character sprites for next month.
Devlog Most of my development is shown in YouTube, please consider following me, I will really appreciate your support!. More to come soon! Feel free to ask questions at any time.
Just a little bit more than a month ago I started this game, and now, you can play it , download it from https://mysticriver.itch.io/ totally free.
You play as a Loot Rat, roll dice and complete requirements from cards to get loot!, then assign loot to the enemies of the hero so once dead the hero will get those loot items, help the hero complete the quest and save the world!.
History -------------- Have you ever complained about the loot you get when playing games? why you get so many duplicates or useless stuff and not incredible stuff every time? blame the loot rat! Loot rat puts items into your enemies without them knowing they have those items with them, so it is up to you to decide what to give to the hero on every battle and help the hero save the world.
Gameplay -------------- It is a dice and inventory management game, where you roll dices to steal items from different places, put them into your backpack and put those items into the enemies loot slots, when the hero defeats the enemies the hero will receive the loot you put there, so you basically help the hero save the world, assign the wrong loot and the hero may even lose the battle.
I started making Monogame (Including XNA) games for more than 10 years but never released any, but today, I released my first game made in Monogame, Space Bugs Wars, and it is free for download from
Also I release YouTube videos every week, I talk about indie game development and I focus on different topics that may be of your interest , if you are demotivated or stressed out while making your games take a look at my videos, some may give you some laughs. You can watch about Space Bugs Wars in YouTube and I made this game in 3 and a half weeks. My plan is to release one game a month and this is the first one.
Last year, I added fires inside ship and a spread model, and recently added no gravity or microgravity into space ships, the challenge now is to figure out how fire will behave, because no one really knows what happen in space yet! I've been thinking for months what should look like in real life but I couldn't find any real study to back up my ideas, well finally NASA is going to do that test, you can read more at NASA Fire test in space, I am really excited so finally I can see more than just a small flame in space and replicate the findings in game.
So stay tunned, once the report and some images are published I will remodel fire in 0g!
So far until now, all the game was modeled around having gravity always, but not anymore, I wanted to add more realism and now lack gravity also affects your ship and when visiting other places, this means a lot of changes in the game, one was the addition of inertia and acceleration inside ships that affects your crew, previously shown for objects, now it also affects crew members, but your ship may also lack gravity controls and that will affect how your crew navigate inside ships, so the next update will show up how your crew move in 0g and other items that may help your crew move inside ships better like magnetic boots.
Something that bothered me for quite long time is the fact that not many forces are factored inside space ships, in games or movies. Let's think about acceleration or rotating your ship, that do not really affect things inside, I haven't seen any single game handling this at all, so your crew should be affected by many different forces.
Well in the next few days I will add momemtum and centripetal forces, so accelerating or turning your ship will cause many things. For example if your crew is floating without gravity inside your ship and you decide to turn around very fast, your crew will hit walls and get hurt, also if you leave unsecured stuff on the floor while you accelerate or turn around your items maybe get destroyed by the impact or fly around, so storing everything properly will be very important. There won't be a magic wand that will let things stick on the floor.
Accelerate your ship very fast and things may get ugly inside, you can add as many thrusters in your ship but the faster you turn or accelerate the more cautious you will have to be with your crew and stuff inside, better keep your crew sit and your stuff stored in secure places. This is a new dynamic being added to the game.
Here is a small sample, some stuff left on the floor while accelerating my ship and rotating at the same time.
Development the in the last few months went pretty well, but haven't updated the blog that much, you can see what happened in the daily log to have an idea what's coming up to the game.
For now, hope you can enjoy a small comic strip about several things I have in my mind around the game, at least once a month you will see one.
Nothing can be better than having a few drinks with your fellow crew members and have fun in space! well excesive consumption of alcohol can be a dangerous too...
After a long afternoon drinking my crew members passed out and are sleeping on the floor, quite bad I would say, but you can see them there with a hangover headache already
and still wake up for more beer a few hours later...
Alcohol consumption will help to improve mood for some crew members, some may not drink depending on their traits but in general a moderate consumption of alcohol is fine. Sometimes you may find alcoholic crew members and that may be a problem, having them drunk during service may be a problem if a pirate just started to attack your ship! not being able to wake up your crew at a proper time may be another problem too.
But for now, let them sleep peacefully and wake up with a headache, traveling through space with not much to do may be boring sometimes and having different things in your ship to pass the time will help. Having a good amount of alcohol stored will help too, besides food of course!
You can brew alcoholic beverages too! more to come soon.
Some crew members may be stronger than others to alcohol... let her finish her beer...
No spaceship should go out in space with proper ways to clean your crew, after long work days and a lot of effort a shower will be needed to refresh your crew , or as needed.
So a new system was added into the game, hygiene. Some activities will decrease it more than others, like jogging around or doing heavy work, while others will do little to lower it.
What's the implication of not being properly clean? well if your crew is injured and have blood loss that may turn into an easy infection. Also it may cause disconfort between crew members, a smelly crew member may affect another one and the other may even refuse to be around because of the bad smell, this will cause stress between your crew members, also crew members that enjoy being clean will be highly stressed if not being able to take baths regularly.
The easy way to keep them clean is to give them enough free time during the day, so your crew will do things like joy activities, baths, eating , sleeping and other things, working is important as well as free time for them.
Farming is a new activity you can do in your ship, since trips may take many months it will be necessary to either buy a lot of packed food or grow yours in your ship, you will be able to select a vegetables to grow so your crew can fill up an empty stomach without much trouble.
Some crew members may hate the standard space ration and even get unhappy while eating that for a long period of time, so growing some vegetables may help them feel refreshed during a long trip.
Recently I got stuck thinking about time, this is a thing that has not been addressed in any other game the way I am looking at it. On earth you have 24 hours day and you can have a similar time scale while traveling in your space ship, so time can be managed easily and assign duties to your crew and create day/night shifts as needed, no issues, but now, what if you go to a planet that has a very long day/night cycle? how will the natives will behave?
I haven't seen any game in which time is a game factor in that sense, most games will just default to a 24 hour cycle and NPCs will just go to their beds and sleep and come back to work the next day, but if a planet has 100 hours per day, how will the NPCs behave? time to sleep every 18 hours for example? so all the planet will be adjusted into a 24 hour cycle with a 100 hour day? if that happens then there will be days in which what is supposed to be early morning will be a complete darkness because it just happened to be in the middle of the planet's night. And what will happen if the planet has a 5 hour day/night cycle? or worst case scenario 200 years of light/night?
After doing more and more research, I figure out that there is no simple answer to this question yet, human will eventually leave earth to other planets but we haven't figure out yet how we, as a human race, will manage time in other planets, and this is becoming an issue with the game, since I can't really seem to find an easy solution to something that looks trivial, how to measure time and divide it properly.
So the first solution that came to my mind seems to be to divide the planet's time as close as a multiple of 24 and adjust the internal people clock to that multiple, so if a planet's day/night cycle is 12 hours, the NPCs will live in one day with day/night cycle plus 4 hours to get a full day in which they are awake because the total is 16 hours, and the rest 8 hours will be time to sleep, that will give us a night of sleep with light and darkness. But now if the planet has a day of 100 years the local time will be divided in 24 hours as usual and let people sleep as usual even in plain light or darkness, most probably same as the people that live in the poles.
Another solution that came to my mind is to make seconds faster or
slower, so it will be still 24 hours but each second will be faster or
slower than we normally perceive, so for a 100 year day/night cycle each
second will be very long, and for planets with a day/night cycle of few
hours each second will be a lot faster, problem will be that trying to stay awake for 8 hours in some planets will be impossible.
The other solution is to let the time run in the planet, so if a 50 hour day happens let native people live and sleep in cycles as needed without any schedule , just live and do what they can in any cycle so no single person in the planet will run under the same clock and just live, this is the easiest way but not very nice. What's the implication about this solution? since shops will run by NPC, if the NPC goes to sleep and the player goes to the shop and it is closed, how will you know when is the shop going to open? and what will happen if you have many shops you want to visit but all of them are open at different times? this doesn't looks good from business point of view, but the easiest to implement, if a NPC close a shop to go to sleep, then it will post the time it will open again and this will solve the issue. So until a more elegant solution is found I will stick with this one for the time being, now it is time to implement this solution.
This week added arcade machines. Arcade machines will help your crew cope with the long travel in space but not everyone enjoys doing the same things, some may enjoy to play games, while other may enjoy running around, eating, gardening etc... many more activities to add so your crew can relax!
You can now see your crew's traits , likes and hates so you can plan accordingly.
You can buy new hardware to improve or add functionality to your ship, but buying is not the only thing that matters, your crew will have to install the hardware and the time until the hardware is ready for use will depend on the technical expertise of your crew members, some items will require weeks until fully active, while others a few minutes.
You will be able to see the progress on the brown boxes containing the new shiny upgrade of your ship and see as well who is working on that equipment, also the crew member working on it will gain some experience over time and the more time your crew spent installing or fixing the more proficient will be on those tasks.
You will be also be able to select what to install first or assign specific crew member to install hardware as desired.
So the next time you purchase something, think first if your crew is capable of installing it at a reasonable time otherwise the wait can be very long.
