For those who haven’t played this freeware Vlambeer classic, there’s never been a better time to wake up in jail on Venus!

Steam | Itch.io

Big thanks to Juju Adams and Fred Wood for their tech work, Grayson Evans for the beautiful art for the update, and shoutout to the O.G.’s Paul Veer, Jukio Kallio, and Doseone for helping bring Gun Godz to life!

Peace out,
JW

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Can you believe it’s February March already? I suggest we look upon this as some sort of second third January, perfectly on time for my annual GOTY OF THE YOTY.
You can find 2022, 2023, and 2024 here.

For 2025, in no particular order:

🐐 GOTY OF THE YOTY 🐐

1. Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo (Pocket Trap)
   An original top-down action adventure filled with cool movement mechanics set in what I can only imagine is some sort of Rat São Paulo. Big GBA energy, and I have no idea if this is true here, but you can kinda tell when a game was programmed by one of the designers. Feels good.

2. Jupiter Hell Classic (ChaosForge)
   Accessible traditional roguelike. Accessible 👏 Traditional 👏 Roguelike 👏!!!
   It’s a demake of the fancier Jupiter Hell, which is a remake of the simpler DoomRL, which is a roguelike interpretation of the classic shooter everybody loves. Can’t wait for what the next step in this recursion will be. I’ll definitely be enjoying more of it in 2026.

3. Baby Steps (Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, Bennett Foddy)
   Baby Steps has the best videogame tutorial I’ve ever played, probably the funniest control scheme I’ve ever seen, and a one of a kind grown-up take on masculinity that goes places most games won’t dare to tread. And it’s a hoot to play as a pass-the-controller game with friends.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Despelote, Gnomes, Many Nights a Whisper, Consume Me, Öoo, Shotgun Cop Man, Evil Egg, Ruin

🎥FOTY🎥

1. Common Side Effects (Joe Bennett, Steve Hely)
   Beautifully paced thriller/animated series. A lone nerd takes on the pharmaceutical industry, featuring the best FBI agents you’ve seen since Twin Peaks and plenty of room for psychedelic animation flexing.

2. The Clock (Christian Marclay)
   The Clock is a 24-hour art piece cut together from movie shots of clocks, synched to whatever time it is while you’re watching. I had the pleasure of seeing 14:55 until 15:30 and then like 15:59 until 16:18. Really fun to think about what making this must’ve been like.

3. Robot Dreams (Pablo Berger)
   This dares to ask the big emotional questions, such as: will Dog ever meet Robot again? Beautiful, no dialogue, just feelings.

📚 BOTY 📚

1. Between Two Fires (Christopher Buehlman)
   I used to joke I didn’t like fantasy because horses are scary, but in this medieval horror journey all the horses are long dead and rotting with plague so it’s all good. Beautiful to-the-point prose, as if someone taught Cormac McCarthy about punctuation.

2. The Ministry for the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson)
   This is a climate apocalypse story (cli-fi?) about how with a bit of hands-on bureaucracy and a lot of terrorism we can turn the world into a post-fossil-fuels utopia. Nobody does hopeful politics like KSR.

3. The Third Policeman (Flann O'Brien)
   An absurdist little novel about how having to deal with cops is a sort of tiny hell. It was written in 1940 but only posthumously published in 1967, probably because it was too weird for the English. Very funny, very imaginative, and definitely worth a read.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Native Tongue, Travels with Charley: In Search of America, The Shadow of the Torturer, The Sparrow, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, Manhattan Beach

🎵 MOTY 🎵

Good music that accompanied my year:

1. Mensonges invites Mona San

2. RA.1000 Mark Ernestus

3. ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U | Boiler Room: Tokyo

4. DJ Skia - Best of Senegal (Mbalax) 2025

5. BAALTI 190225

6. oddeen - od

Looking back

My 2025 was great, I got to see manta rays! Please imagine this is me writing this newsletter:

Then some work stuff I helped make happen:

• Nuclear Throne Update 100 released, exactly 10 years after launch! Featuring a new character, custom difficulty mode, localization into 15 languages (I did the Dutch version, je weet toch), 4-player co-op, and much more.

• Ridiculous Fishing EX: Area Fishy-One, in which you can put on a tinfoil hat, catch cryptids, and FINALLY shoot the Moon.

• Collaborated with Button Shy on the Dustbiters: Pocket Edition. Perfect for on the road!

• Released and sold out a physical edition of Nuclear Throne for the Switch, as well as a beautiful Y.V. plushie.

• Helped launch the Iconic Roguelites and Disc Room x Astro Prospector bundles on Steam.

• Gave a workshop with Kitty Calis about making 1000 games per hour at Guadalindie.

• Minit and Nuclear Throne were part of AGDQ and helped raise money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation!

• Went on the TSLOG podcast with Jukio and Joonas to talk about Nuclear Throne update 100 and impatient game design.

• Work continues on the unannounced project, the one I promise we will announce soon each year!

• And we’re once again one year closer to the ULTRABUGS release (wishlist please).

Thanks for reading, in the meantime you’re very welcome in the ever-growing but still-nice jwaaaap discord!

Wishing you all a lovely 2026,
JW

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Nuclear Throne update 100

Here’s the big one, Nuclear Throne update 100 is launching for free on Steam on December 5th, bringing you:

• C-skins for all 13 characters, all with their own looks and unlock challenges.

• Custom difficulty mode, allowing players to greatly customize their play experience.

• Localization, 60+ fps support, and many more quality of life features.

This launch date also happens to be Nuclear Throne’s 10th birthday, what a coincidence!

The update will be releasing on Steam at first, and then once the most horrible bugs are out of the way we’ll do our best to bring it to all other platforms as well.

I really want to thank the team for this one, it’s been an absolute joy working (and brainstorming) with Paul, Justin, Jukio and Joonas again, as well as YellowAfterLife, who started out in the Nuclear Throne mod community but has been doing the majority of development work and upkeep on the game since launch.

Nuclear Throne Dev Stream

On December 6th (19:00 CET) we'll be doing a good old dev stream on twitch.tv/vlambeer with some of the team! Tune in for nostalgic vibes and/or to ask any burning questions you might have.

Yung Venuz Plushie

There’s more: a Makeship Petition to summon a certain triangular gun god and his mony! And by summon, I mean the plushie kind. We're gonna need at least 200 pledges to bring Y.V. into existence, so please tell your friends and head over to the campaign!

Beyond that

• It’s been a busy year so far, with steady progress on the main project.

• You can play the Nuclear Throne 60+fps beta already.

• You can still Wishlist Ultrabugs.

• The Iconic Roguelites Bundle released, which lets you complete your collection of Isaac, Spelunky, FTL, NecroDancer & Nuclear Throne at a permanent 15% discount.

• The Dustbiters: Pocket Edition is coming on black friday, in collaboration with Button Shy. An even smaller version of the game using only 18 cards, in a neat and extremely portable wallet package!

• A physical Nuclear Throne for the Nintendo Switch dropped! There’s still 12% stock left, so get it while you can!

• Ridiculous Fishing EX received two major updates: Billy’s Big Hat Hunt, and Area Fishy-One! Loads more content, including all kinds of hats, cryptids, alien fish, and even the rays of the week!

If you’re as excited as I am and want to help spread the Vlambeer cheer, here’s the bluesky post.

Take care y’all! See you on December 5th.

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🐐 GOTY OF THE YOTY 🐐

1. Slice & Dice (Tann)

   I’ve got a soft spot for turn-based, run-based games, for Dream Quest-likes and Into The Breaches… Whatever you want to call them: Slice & Dice is up there with the best. Super generous with ideas, every turn is a puzzle that lets you plan out your thoughts in extreme comfort.

2. Balatro (LocalThunk)

   This one is a no-brainer, Balatro cleaned out the table in 2024. It takes “against the house” games to a beautiful simple conclusion where your opponent is nothing but an ever-growing number. Is this some sort of metaphor for capitalism?

3. UFO 50 (Mossmouth)

   Releasing 50 games at once is the ultimate flex… You’re almost guaranteed to find something to love, and here’s my personal top 3:

   1. Quibble Race. Illegal sports betting with cute creatures AND leg-breaking sabotage? Yes please.

   2. Night Manor. A spooky point and click adventure that does smart things with the controller-operated cursor. Your only way to interact with the world is also a flashlight and even shakes when your character is scared? Very cool, goosebumps.

   3. Avianos. Religious Dinosaur 4X board-game… with tiny little dino-soldiers that wiggle around in automated combat, incredible! For the sake of putting a top 3 in my top 3 in my top 3:

      1. Brontor

      2. Rexadon

      3. Trilock

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Path of Achra, Chants of Sennaar, RunMan: Race Around the World, Flock, Judero, Dubio, Minishoot’ Adventures, Downpour, Grunn

🎥 FOTY 🎥

1. Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron (Kaku Arakawa)

   This film is not a making of Boy and the Heron, it is more an insight into the mind of an incredibly powerful struggling artist.

2. Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve)

   You need a stillsuit to watch this without a pee break, but it deserves a mention just for the shot of Harkonnen soldiers floating up a gorgeous desert rock. Full of incredible sci-fi “show don’t tell”.

3. Perfect days (Wim Wenders)

   There’s so much beauty in everyday life if you can just slow down to take it in, and Perfect Days manages to capture that for 2 whole hours.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Robot Dreams, Aftersun, Le Cercle Rouge

📚 BOTY 📚

1. A Visit from the Goon Squad (Jennifer Egan)

   This won a Pulitzer prize in 2017, and now a BOTY of the YOTY award in 2025!

2. A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise (Sandy Allen)

   CW: mental health. This is a really compassionate story told around the autobiography of the author’s “crazy” uncle Bob, and his diagnosis with schizophrenia. Really heavy and really beautiful.

3. The Creasy Series (A.J. Quinnell)

   Some people watch reality tv (ok I also do that), other people read an extremely bad and dated series of thrillers about a hard man without feelings who loves only breakfast, revenge and his submachine gun…

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

The Husbands, Ammonite, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Godhusk - Rebirth

🎵 MOTY 🎵

Some mixtapes I enjoyed this year:

1. Contagion Session Guest Mix by Mona San

2. Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso Tiny Desk Concert

3. Himawari Chapter IV by Zoë Janice

4. Benzi Get Right Radio 2024

Looking back

I had a good 2024 where I got to spend lots of quality time with (far) friends and family and barely had a bad meal. Best new things I tried: Via ferrata, haggis, tufting.

Work-wise I struggled a bit with wanting to do more than I could, but looking back there’s a lot to be proud of:

• I became 100% of Vlambeer

• Major progress was made on my main project, hopefully we can show something soon

• The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision decided to archive Minit, Minit Fun Racer, Disc Room, Dustbiters, and all the Vlambeer games

• I wrote about Minit Fun Racer and Disc Room

• Ridiculous Fishing EX got 3 major updates: The Garbage Patch, Back to School, and Billy’s Big Hat Hunt, with another one in development right now 🛸

• A physical version of Nuclear Throne for the Nintendo Switch is launching on the 23rd of January

• We’re one year closer to the ULTRABUGS release (wishlist please)

In the meantime you’re very welcome in the jwaaaap discord!

Wishing you all a lovely 2025,
JW

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I’m still very proud of this game, it’s a unique combination of (highly accessible) bullet hell gameplay, cryptic puzzles, and sci-fi exploration… but also a score chasing arcade game!

Here’s a trailer explaining what the game is all about.

Back in 2020 I wrote a “Disc Room Game Feel Details” thread on twitter, and today felt like a good day to clean up and re-digitalize that thread on a website that is not yet heading towards the bottom of the sea…

To get you in the zone listen to the Disc Room OST while you read.

Disc Room Game Feel Thread

Content Warning: cartoon blood (in-game you can swap this for confetti)

Proximity Wobble:

The character shakes when close to a disc to make things feel more urgent. We also slow down time (and the music) by up to 10% when close to/on top of a disc.

Dodging in both space and time:

In most cases a close getaway is more fun than a death, so collision masks in Disc Room are incredibly generous. Faster discs have smaller masks than slow ones. We also stretch collisions in time, you're allowed to be inside a disc for up to 3 frames.

Directional Shake:

Heavy impacts can offset the camera in a direction to make them feel bigger, and so that the player clearly knows what hit them.

(Also, we save right on death, after the sounds play. This can cause a little bonus freeze frame "game feel" effect depending on your specs.)

Big Impacts:

The first time you die from a new disc type, the blood splat is bigger and we play what we called a fancy "cinema sound", which is basically a super bassy WOOMPPP.

This is one of those things that players won’t deliberately notice, but it just lets us hit their lizard brain a tiny bit harder.

Bonus GIF:

Seamless Intro:

The game's intro comic fades right into the first gameplay, a great detail Kitty really had to sell me on before we tried it out.

Small side story: Kitty also really had to convince me to put this submarine in Minit, which became my favorite part of the game. Lesson learnt.

Unnecessary Parallax:

Each room has a top layer with black silhouettes that move slightly slower than the rest of the camera. Gives it a nice spacious feel. A camera moving slightly to follow the player even though the whole room fits on the screen can make a game feel much more dynamic!

Clear Deaths:

Another thing that we liked about Disc Room right from the start is that the death screen is super clear. No matter how busy it gets, you can see the disc that caused your death, and exactly how difficult the room was at that point.

Game feel is all about communicating information to the player, and sometimes the inherent nature of the game sorts that out for you! Not gonna say no to that.

Little notes:

For the audio Dose did a lot of amazing big sound, but maybe the more tiny subtle things were even more important… In this video you can hear how the Mirror ability changes pitch based on distance.

Dash Tricks:

You can tap for short dashes, or hold to dash further. However: If you release within a disc, it pretends you're still holding the button until you're in the clear.

We make some exceptions to this (and the 3 frame collision window) with discs we know people want to die from (yes, that’s a key feature). Here for example it prioritizes the gold disc collision over all the others you're on top of.

Bullet Time:

The slow ability actually makes you move slightly faster and shrinks your hitbox. Great for tight escapes!

Menu Questions:

The pause menu always shows a random question in the top left corner. It's a fun way to present more lore, and we wanted to give the player something to think about after they quit the game.

Dev scores:

Great idea by Kitty to add the dev team to the leaderboards. It gives everyone at least one friend on there, and also provides an extra non-mandatory challenge for those who seek it. We had it off by default at first, but quickly realized it should be the opposite.

For those wondering: Kitty, Terri, Dose & myself casually played the game throughout development, and whoever had the highest score on a room became the dev team there. It's baked into the game, so you can beat us once and for all!

At this point some people might think "uhh, not all of that is game feel", but it's all user experience. Games are a fully entangled mess of audio and visuals and code and performance. All of it is important and looking at it separately will make you miss Some Shit!

Little fun fact intermezzo:

Disc Room can be classified as a Big Dumb Object game.

Doppler Effect:

there's a super soft ambient wooshing sound that saws make when they fly by, it's pitched up slightly when moving towards you and down when moving away.

Bus Stops:

Disc Room gives players multiple moments where they can "hop off the bus" aka stop playing and be happy. There's the normal ending, hard ending, getting all rooms & discs, going after gold or dev scores, and then the challenges. This is a really important design principle to us.

And finally:

We’ve made sure that Disc Room will always be Set In The Future. It used to be set in 2089, but just so that our ancestors don't have to deal with the whole "this is the year disc room was set in" drama we add an extra year whenever necessary. This is what it looks like now:

Thanks for reading! Disc Room is out on PC, Switch and Xbox. You don’t have to play it but I would appreciate it if you bought it.

-JW

You might know Vlambeer from indie games such as Nuclear Throne, Ridiculous Fishing, LUFTRAUSERS, Super Crate Box, GUN GODZ, and uhhh, Serious Sam: the Random Encounter. Or this logo of an extremely chill bear who’s also on fire.

Here’s what this acquisition means:

1. After my current unannounced project is done, Vlambeer’s arcade shooter ULTRABUGS will see its long-anticipated release!

   (Really good on Steam Deck btw.)

   

2. An update for Ridiculous Fishing EX is in the works and coming out soon. Expect a lot of cool new content and some… unconventional fish.🐊

   

3. I want to preserve the classic Vlambeer games, and make sure they stay playable far into the future. It’s too easy for games to get lost in time and that’s a damn shame.

4. …and last but not least: I’m going to keep making indie games with cool small teams like I always have!

A big thanks to all of Vlambeer’s amazing collaborators, and everyone who made our games possible throughout the years! 💛

For anything Vlambeer related in the future, please don’t hesitate to hit me up.

Cheers,
JW

Back in November 2020, almost a year into the pandemic, Kitty Calis mentioned wanting to do a little something for charity and the idea came up of making a fundraising (fun racing, get it?) Minit spinoff. Dom & Jukio were also game, so the next couple of weeks were spent jamming out Minit Fun Racer.

If you haven’t played the game yet, it’s available on Steam, itch.io and Nintendo Switch.

THE FLASH GAME LOOP

You race through the city, short on money and time. The shopkeeper gets richer as you spend your fortune trying to get ahead in the rat race, rinse and repeat. What’s at the end? Some well deserved peace.

Minit Fun Racer’s core loop has strong Flash Game roots, fitting right into the genre of short arcade games with permanent upgrades that was popular back in the day. (R.I.P. to that amazing era of freeware experimentation and creativity, it is a crime that most of these games are no longer playable.)

Radical Fishing and Ridiculous Fishing are similar games, and this whole structure was later partly co-opted when roguelikes transformed into roguelites which then transformed into any game with some sort of starting over being considered a roguelike again.

DIFFICULTY RAMPS

What we liked a lot about this structure is that it lets players manage their own progression and difficulty. To get further in Minit Fun Racer, you want to go faster, but this also makes things more challenging.

As players buy more upgrades they take their own training wheels off, suddenly moving at breakneck speeds. What was first to be dodged, is now to be hit, and with this upgrade those trash cans suddenly give a massive turbo boost! Every bit of progress not only makes the game more exciting, it also makes the game DIFFERENT. A simple trip to the shop changes the very nature of bits of content, subverting the mental “how to play” framework players built up.

A lot of mechanics like that were iterative things we discovered while testing. It felt really good to try and hit the trash cans instead of dodging them, so we added an upgrade that speeds you up when you hit a trash can. Then it became fun to try and hit a couple in a row, so why not make that a mechanic too, give you a mega boost when you hit three in a row? 

Playtesting is so important! It showed us many ideas that made the game instantly better, deeper and more fun.

Here’s the other thing: because players buy these upgrades themselves, they are literally invested in learning how to deal with them. This is great news, because it means their learning is not forced by the game (which can be discouraging), but self-motivated. Those Flash games sure were onto something!

STRUCTURAL RAMPS

Every few screens in Minit Fun Racer there’s a ramp you can jump from, collecting 3 coins in the air. One of my favorite little tricks is that we put one ramp in the game that has 8 coins instead, and every time you jump that ramp it moves further on the next run. 

By reaching this ramp again (and probably getting further than you have before), you are rewarded with more coins, but next time you’ll no longer have this early coin boost to help you along. Since money literally increases your timer it gives a really nice varied rhythm to the repeated runs, which would have otherwise felt more linear and less progressive.

DEEPER GOALS

On top of dodging traffic and trying to get to the end, Minit Fun Racer has 30 little bonus goals hidden in plain sight. (Not actually hidden, it’s just a menu.)

We tried to make sure these weren’t just boring achievements that checkmarked certain milestones, but more things that guide the player towards little secrets and storylines hidden within the game.

In a way, the goals also foreshadow what the rest of the game might bring. “Crush 5 skulls” or “Deliver a pizza” are just 3 words each, but they really hint that there might be more to this game than appears at the surface.

While some of these goals can be discovered naturally, the rest are really just waiting to guide curious players in the right direction. Once players start paying attention to the pizza, they might become more mindful of other little details too, even the ones not signposted by goals, like that weird ICE COLD HOTDOGS billboard. If anything that’s the hidden message of the Minit games: slow down and smell the flowers, enjoy the little things.

Fun stat break: 57% of players completed the game, 53% delivered the pizza and 10% completed all the goals!

Even though it’s a small game, Minit Fun Racer was designed with different play styles in mind. It has a couple of different spots to get off the bus depending on whether you just want to see the sun set, set some high scores, discover all the goals, or just casually experience this cute little world. There are quite expansive difficulty settings to make things more accessible or even let you play as a horse.

JUST IN TIME FOR THE SUNSET

We had a lot of fun making this game, with a clear scope and framework to start from, and a lot of room for iteration both mechanically and in adding secrets and surprises. Minit Fun Racer is filled with little things most players might not notice, but when they do, it’s there waiting for them.

A big thanks to everyone who made this game possible and a shoutout to all the players who’ve helped raise money for charity by bumping their little bike into 1-bit limousines!

See you on the next newsletter,
JW

If you want entertainment and good company, you’re very welcome in the jwaaaap discord.

While our planet barreled through the cosmic void there were a bunch of things that I really liked:

🐐 GOTY OF THE YOTY🐐

1. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood (Deconstructeam)

   One of my favorite games this year was this exceptionally written and exceptionally witchy narrative adventure. The choices you get to make are A) heavy hitting and full of consequences, and B) constrained by a clever tarot-crafting mechanic that adds a great new spin to “choose your own adventure”.

2. Subpar Pool (grapefrukt games)

   Taking pool and minigolf and turning them into a highly replayable run-based roguelite is simply genius! The whole run structure alone is worth checking out, besides the simple fact that bouncing your little guy around feels incredible.

3. Puzzmo (Zach Gage & Orta Therox)

   So much respect for launching a whole daily puzzle platform filled with classics like Spelltower, Really Bad Chess and the 1910 GOTY “Crosswords”. But where it really hits me is how this combines “simple” daily games with complex scoring: global, friend and even group leaderboards, and every game is scored across a variety of very different metrics. Do you want to play fast, play accurately, or even just try and form the longest possible word? To each their own, and Puzzmo presents it all in a beautiful way.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Venba, Mosa Lina, Storyteller, Music League

STILL WANT TO PLAY:

Buckshot Roulette, Anthology of the Killer, Knuckle Sandwich

🎥FOTY🎥

Although seeing TENET again three seats in front of me on a long flight was definitely a highlight, it did not make the cut.

1. The Boy and the Heron (Studio Ghibli)

   Miyazaki finally follows in the footsteps of cinema titans like Hitchcock, Spielberg and Miller in making a movie about fucked up birds. Besides the beautiful animation (they are FLEXING!) the story and metaphors hit me on a personal level.

2. Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (Guillermo del Toro, Mark Gustafson)

   Classic puppet story as stop-motion puppetry and antifascist roguelike? Sign me up!

3. Scavengers (Joseph Bennett, Charles Huettner)

   You can take 8 minutes out of your day and watch this short sci-fi animation right now, and then be pleased to know that they just released a whole animated series called Scavengers Reign!

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

How to Blow up a Pipeline, Geographies of Solitude, Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary

📚 BOTY 📚

1. Vermis I & II (Plastiboo)

   Vermis is an art book, fictional game manual, and extremely atmospheric little story all in a beautiful one-of-a-kind package. Highly recommended.

2. When I Sing, Mountains Dance (Irene Solà)

   Do you like magical realism and little Catalonian towns and generations of tragedy and grief and forgiveness? Each chapter in this moving little book is told from a different perspective, from hunting teenagers to snobby hikers to the ghosts of witches of the past, and even a brief chapter told by the mushrooms in the forest. A wild thing to attempt but it lands it perfectly.

3. Afterlives (Abdulrazak Gurnah)

   This one actually won a Nobel Prize so liking this book is one thing the inventor of dynamite and myself have in common. It’s a haunting story set in what is now Tanzania during World War I and the end of German colonial reign.

4. Lijmen/Het Been (Willem Elsschot)

   Lijmen/Het Been (or Soft Soap/The Leg in English) is about a scam artists’ coincidental apprentice, and while this book is almost a century old it’s still an incredibly on point satire of commerce, marketing, and the world of business. It reminds me a lot of B. Traven’s writing, people had some sharp thoughts back in that day.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

The Dispossessed, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief, A Short Stay in Hell, Norstrilia

🎵 MOTY🎵

1. Jasmine (Arlo Parks)

   You’re gonna sing like this and it’s a Jai Paul cover? Let’s gooo!

2. Unavailable (Davido ft. Musa Keys)

   If you’re not scared of pop music, 2023 was undeniably the year of Amapiano. This song perfectly captures the vibe of “please do not send me any more e-mails” and “I am not picking up the phone” that we can all use in our daily lives.

3. leavemealone (Fred again.. & Baby Keem)

   If Davido’s Unavailable was not enough, you can add leavemealone to the introvert bangers playlist! Last year was all about setting boundaries, that’s right.

HONORABLE MIXTAPES:

Chase & Status Boiler Room: London, glittertape #7, 10

Wrapping up

Looking back, 2023 was an uphill year for me, in that it was difficult but also ended in a better place than it started, with good perspective. I got to go on some inspiring trips, learnt how to replace flat tires, tried out scuba diving and finally took a first aid course!

In between all that we also released Ridiculous Fishing EX which happened to be TouchArcade’s iPhone game of the year (thanks Zach, Greg & KO_OP), dropped all-for-charity Minit Fun Racer on Switch (thanks for the port Thalamus Digital), and Kitty Calis and I’ve been steadily working on our new project with a lovely team.

She recently compared it to a jigsaw puzzle, where the edges are all in place, and it’s now time to fill in the middle. (I couldn’t agree more, super stoked for the game we’re making!)

So yeah, expect some big announcements soon!

If you want entertainment and good company in the meantime, you’re very welcome in the jwaaaap discord.

Wishing you a lovely year,
JW

There’s only one thing better than getting 4 e-mails, and that’s getting less than 4 e-mails. That’s why here’s ONE e-mail that does the JOB of FOUR!

Number 4 will shock you… If this made it through your spam filter, let’s go:

Sludge Life 2 is out NOW

Disc Room co-creators Terri Vellmann and doseone just Magnummed another Opus with Sludge Life 2. It’s an incredible vandalism sim where you climb and tag all over Ciggy City Suites, a hypercorporate hellscape oozing with all the stuff they don’t normally allow in videogames.

Just like for the original Sludge Life there’ll be a Dutch localization by Kitty Calis and myself very soon. If you speak Dutch and enjoy sentences like “ik kan niet tegelijkertijd ROKEN en levens redden, dus ik heb een KEUZE gemaakt.” you’re in for a treat!

Dustbiters Is Back in Stock

If you’re still on a Terri high after you’ve just one-hundred-percented Sludge Life 2, why not get the card game Dustbiters we’ve made together with Robbie Fraser and iam8bit? This is the 3rd print run already, super happy people are enjoying it so much!

Minit Fun Racer hits the Switch

Every video game franchise needs a racing spinoff, and Minit is no different. All proceeds of Minit Fun Racer (fund raiser, get it?) go to charity, so the more platforms the merrier. When Thalamos Digital offered to port Minit Fun Racer to the Nintendo Switch, Kitty, Dom, Jukio & I had to say yes in under 60 seconds!

This is honestly one of my favorite games I’ve ever worked on, one day I’ll write a post about the little tricks we did with the game design…

And last but not least…

Ridiculous Fishing EX 

I am super excited to announce Ridiculous Fishing EX! An expanded 3D remaster of the 2013 classic is coming to Apple Arcade on July 14th, created by the original team and the extremely rad KO_OP.

Just look at it, Billy has come such a long way since Radical Fishing!

Besides the story of Billy’s Redemption, RFEX will feature a brand new Pro Fishing Tour with daily, weekly, and monthly challenges (inspired by Zach’s Card of Darkness daily dungeons), new new new New Game Plus content, and a little something that can only be described as “BikBok”.

It’s been a decade since Ridiculous Fishing launched, so I’m very grateful that KO_OP and the original team are rescuing it from the Maelstrom of Updating Operating Systems. Really can’t wait to get it in people’s hands again!

Speaking of KO_OP, check out their stunning upcoming “teenage dinosaurs are so doomed” simulator: Goodbye Volcano High!

Thanks so much for reading, it always feels GREAT to send 500 words of pure marketing into the void, but I’m super proud of all these games and the wonderful people that made them possible!

Got some stuff to say? Feel free to comment, reply to this email, or join the jwaaaap discord.

It took a while to write, but without further ado, here’s my favorite media of 2022:

🐐 GOTY OF THE YOTY 🐐

1. Tunic, to be super specific, its secret language (TUNIC team)

   Tunic is an action adventure that beautifully captures the childhood memories of playing games in a language you can’t understand. About half of my playtime was spent exploring the world, fighting cute enemies and collecting pages of the mysterious manual. The other half of my playtime was spent even better, scribbling in a notebook next to me on the couch, solving puzzles and deciphering the in-game language. Translating Tunic is completely optional, but I had an absolute blast with it, and I’d recommend anyone to dive in as spoiler-free as they can. For me such furious note-taking has not happened since FEZ, and the language has a few really fun obfuscations up its sleeve. So that bit specifically is my game of the year.

2. Into The Breach: Advanced Edition (Subset Games)

   I’ve praised turn-based kaiju buster Into The Breach before (“amazing design innovations on every zoom level of gameplay - not many games nail structure this well”), and the Advanced Edition gave me a great reason to just play the whole thing all over again (now on mobile and with more content).

3. Producer 2021 (Stuffed Wombat, ThorHighHeels)

   Producer 2021 released in 2022 I SWEAR. A delightfully weird “graphic adventure novella” with a banger vaporwave soundtrack. The art looks like it came from Grim Fandango’s land of the living, and the game pulls off some of the coolest fourth (and fifth? sixth?) wall breaking I’ve seen in games. Bonus points: you could probably finish this on your lunch break. Your boss also takes 2 hour lunch breaks, it’s fine.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Shotgun King, Chess (literally chess, you know, the ancient board game), Stacklands, Springblades, Vampire Survivors, Poinpy, We Are OFK, Infernax, Wordle

BONUS GAMES THAT I WANTED TO PLAY BUT LIFE ALWAYS GETS IN THE WAY:

McPixel 3, ElecHead, Patrick’s Parabox, Sylvie Lime, Slice & Dice, Super Lone Survivor, Hyper Demon, The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe

Congratulations, now please gather on stage for the group photo.

🎥 FOTY 🎥

Food of the year? No, I ate too many good things. Here are my favorite FILMS I watched in 2022.

1. Fire of Love (Sara Dosa)

   What is more powerful than love? VOLCANOES! Just kidding, I learnt a lot about volcanoes from this and also that more documentaries need to be love stories. 

2. Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (Joe Berlinger, Bruce Sinofsky)

   What is more powerful than hate? I’ll tell you: Metallica hating each other, going to therapy, and then having to kick out their therapist who tries to set himself up with a nice cushy lifetime job. What an INCREDIBLE documentary, it’s a blessing and a miracle that this exists.

3. RRR (S. S. Rajamouli)

   What is more powerful than Asterix and Obelix? Obviously, Asterix and Obelix from 1920s India. My favorite shot is when they show the British war-room and it has a giant world map with the UK flag splashed all over their disgusting empire.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Nomadland, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight, Who Killed Captain Alex, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, 300 Days Alone on an Island, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

📚 BOTY 📚

I’ve never been a big fan of fantasy but 2022 was the year I decided to finally overcome my fear of horses and bards (because what are bards if not clown progenitors) and give the genre a shot. So about a third of the books I read had complicated magic systems and sad princes and war. My conclusion is that there are some decent mostly horseless fantasy novels like Seth Dickinson’s Masquerade series (especially the first book) and Ursula Le Guinn’s incredible Wizard of Earthsea. None of them got into the top 3 though! Yep, it’s still the horses.

1. The Book of Strange New Things (Michel Faber)

   This book hit me hard. It’s about a missionary who goes to space to turn freaky little aliens into Good Christians, but it’s also about mental health and a reminder of the fact that everybody is only a thin line away from insanity.

2. Tenth of December & Pastoralia (George Saunders)

   George Saunders’ short stories did a lot for me this year. They’re beautifully honest, horrible slices of life about broken people and the broken systems they come from.

3. Lena (qntm)

   Lena is a short story about Miguel, the earliest executable image of a human brain. You can read it right here.

Honorable mentions:

Piranesi (Susanna Clarke), The Traitor Baru Cormorant (Seth Dickinson), A Wizard of Earthsea (Ursula Le Guinn), My Year Abroad (Chang-Rae Lee), The Things You Can Only See When You Slow Down (Haemin Sunim), A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Becky Chambers), A Memory Called Empire (Arkady Martine), War is a Racket (Smedley Darlington Butler, who has won the AUTHOR NAME OF THE YEAR award!)

🎵 MOTY 🎵

Music taste is highly subjective, the medium where it’s hardest to find common ground. Conversations about music always go like: “I listen to all kinds of music, everything really, and by everything I mean only SlowTrance and Gospel, do you know DJ Tungsten?” So here’s my spin on that:

1. Wesley Joseph - Monsoon

   Found out about this because A.K. Paul co-produced it, it’s been a while since I’ve heard a bass like that!

2. Flume ft. Oklou - Highest Building

   I really love Flume’s new album Palaces. It has some really original sound design, every sample handcrafted and fresh-sounding, and the music is both energetic and emotional. Another great track on there is Say Nothing.

3. A7PHA - No Goodbyes

   I’ve got a lot of love for my buddy Doseone who as half of A7pha released their album II, including this beautiful song about grief that hit me on a personal level.

4. Camoufly - Told U So

   Camoufly’s Glittertape mixtapes have been on regular rotation this year too, bonus shoutout to this remix:

Honorable mixtapes:

Amapiano Lockdown Mix, Monochrome V, Disk Doctors

What about 2023?

In 2023 I’ve got a lot of cool stuff coming up work-wise:

1. I’m helping out with design on an unannounced game that should be coming out early-ish this year!

2. A new main project with Kitty Calis and a lovely team is in the works!

3. Also, Kitty and I have like 4 or 5 good prototypes we want to look into… Too many ideas, help! (don’t actually send help, we’ve got this)

I can’t wait to share some more soon! Stay tuned.

If you want entertainment and good company in the meantime, you’re very welcome in the jwaaaap discord.

Wishing you a lovely year,
JW

This is jwaaaap’s newsletter about the creative projects I get to work on!

Who’s jwaaaap? I’m Jan Willem Nijman, a game designer by day and professional relaxer by night. In 2010 I co-founded Vlambeer (RIP), where we worked with some amazing folks to make games like Nuclear Throne and Ridiculous Fishing.

Since then I’ve been making indie games with small teams:
Minit (2018, with Kitty Calis, Jukio Kallio, and Dominik Johann)
Disc Room (2020, with Kitty Calis, Terri Vellmann and doseone)
Dustbiters (card game, 2021, with Terri Vellmann and Robbie Fraser)

To see everything I’ve worked on in the last decades: jwaaaap.com

The plan is to keep making games until I retire, and to keep you up to date with an occasional e-mail!

I’ll try to keep things interesting, non-repetitive, and pinky promise to never write a “5 steps to making a successful indie game” type article. Buddy, it takes way more steps than that. Welcome along to the ride.

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