Retrospective: Everything I've Made

I think I've just finished making about seven games now!
For fun, I thought I'd write some short retrospectives on my past work: what I like, what I hate, and if they're worth playing still:

2017
Monochrome Memories:

It's sort of weird even talking about this one, because it's barely even a game. I see it more as a set of public experiments with the RPGMaker engine that I put out when I was a dumb 16 year old kid, and it's very clear that it was trying to ride the coattails of Yume Nikki.
That said, I think I learned a lot with this one: a lot of it was coding, for sure, but it was an important stepping stone with my creative process:
With a lot of games after this one (especially Beetle Ninja), I would draw a lot of the aesthetics and character designs from dreams. After this game, I got a blank book to start writing down dreams, which would eventually help out on subsequent games.
Fun fact: this is actually where I got the design for the seeds of rebirth in Beetle Ninja from.

2020
Gate to Hades:

Gate to Hades was sort of designed to be similar to Hotel Mario. I thought its gameplay loop had potential to be fun if designed a bit more appropriately. Unfortunately, I didn't actually do this, and it turned out to be a frustrating game with lots of collision issues.
I think it could be done loads better today if I decided to redo it with another programmer, but I think the character designs were fun.

Where the Moon Goes At Night:

Where the Moon Goes At Night is by far the most popular game I've ever made. It's also consequently one of the least deserving of that title in my opinion, but it is what it is. I made most of it in high school, and then finished it up during a little of my time in university.
The primary influences for the game were probably Giftpia and I Wanna Be The Guy, but I wanted to design something that felt like a very "old" indie game, like something you'd find on tigsource back in '09, especially from the RPGMaker scene. I thought at the time, and still sort of do, that a lot of games made in RPGMaker are very circlejerk-ish, mimicking OFF and Yume Nikki endlessly without much deviation from these games.
It's wild, and very weird, and showcases my aesthetic in a fairly nice way I'd say. I'm still proud of a few small moments, but I don't consider it as noteworthy as I think most others tend to claim it to be.

Château des Lapins (Castle of the Rabbits):

One of the two quick demos for games I made in French following Where the Moon Goes At Night, and this one is probably the better of the two.
There's some roughness of course, and I do think the coding tends to be a little fuck-y, but conceptually, I think it could easily be done well in a different engine.

Jardin De Squelette (Garden of skeleton):

I still really like most of the puzzles here, all of them are a bit outside of the box, and the use of older compositions in an 8 bit style is a nice creative choice I think.
The atmosphere is the eeriest of any game I've made so far, I think when coupled with all the other elements.
The only part I don't like is that it's way too short, and it's a bit too cryptic with some of the elements, but it comes together well in my opinion.

Karrion Killer:

The first Newgrounds project I worked on that I'd consider a good game. There is for sure room to improve on it: some of the enemies feel a tad cheap, and you sort of struggle to find things out at first. The conclusion is also a bit underwhelming to some, I think which definitely ends up disappointing some.
I think an endless version of Karrion would definitely be cool, and I'd like to see how a "Super Karrion Killer" would be...

Beetle Ninja:

Without a shadow of a doubt, Beetle Ninja is easily the best game I've ever made. The world is really fun, and my character design was on point here.
There are a handful of small issues I had though, most of which were corroborated by a few friends:
The plot elements involving Beetle Ninja's backstory are unnecessary and intrusive, the first hallucination is needless and over-explains things that don't need explaining, and there's a few bits where it gets to be a bit tiresome: I don't want to hear the backstories of all these characters really, that's not the type of game I think a lot of people wanted with this.

2021:

Rat Game:

It's still unfinished, but I did a lot of the character design for the next big update of Rat Game by Levi Ramirez. We'll see how it turns out.