Twelve years of N64 Squid

Here is another year. Let’s go through the recap.

There have been 54 new homebrew games and hack added to the roster. Just over half of them (28) were for the 2025 game jam, the most successful one to date. I did 2 reviews a week for a while to try and get them all before the anniversary, so they were all done in about 4 months rather than 7.

I also managed to move all the old homebrew posts to the new format, so they’re all consistent now. Yipee!

I only managed to get one new book review published this year, the Visual Compendium by Bitmap Books. There is another one that I’ve been reading since that one was published back in October, but it’s really long and I’m reading through 1-3 pages per day. It should be done by the next anniversary, I promise.

On a personal note, I have been a bit preoccupied with a few things. I had a new baby which is always a lot of work. Plus my day job had layoffs and my entire team was eliminated. I did manage to find one job in time to replace it, but it was an awful expereince so I was back looking for work just two months later. I’ve been looking for work for almost 7 months between the two job hunts and it’s exhausting. I just started a new job this week, so I need to focus on getting things right.

Because of that, the only project that I wrote about since the initial layoff was Dscape, since it is a professional one that I could use as a portfolio item. But I did manage to cover Space Battle and Paranormal Deathmatch as well. I should get onto adding more to that section.

Also, that all came at the same time as the Game Jam which I participated in. I was a bit pressed on time and we over-scoped so we released an unfinished game. Before that I was working on my first 3D game, but that’s to be explained more when I publish it.

As for next year, I hope to get that game done, but I probably won’t participate in the game jam. As for the site, I’m not planning anything too big besides some routine maintenance or new libdragon tutorials (and updating the old ones since I’m getting some complaints).

It’s been rough, but we’ll pull through.