2024 has been an awesome year for me, and I hope you also find something to reflect back on fondly as you think of this year in retrospect.
TORSO TENNIS has been a really pleasant project to work on (nearing it’s 1-year in-development birthday!) I’m excited to share more news in 2025.
Showcasing at Oak City Indie Games
I had an incredible time showing off TORSO TENNIS at Oak City Indie Games on December 6th. I’m incredibly honored to have my games featured on the event artwork and helping to organize the event was definitely a highlight of the year for me!
My Favorite 3 Games in 2024
- UFO 50 - A delightful collection of retro-styled games with modern design sensibilities. A true buffet of indie game short stories - strategic puzzlers, brutally hard action games, playful platformers, and so much more. Each game will surprise you with layers of complexity that might not be immediately evident. Playing this “Advent Calendar” style was the gaming highlight of my year. Each day was an exciting new surprise and I hope that you give this game a try.
- Void Stranger - a dizzying dive into a puzzle dungeon. It is brutal, harsh, and it’s design is rough around the edges. But, when you scratch at it, you discover layers and layers of clues, secrets, symbols, and a slowly unravelling narrative that transfixes and encourages you to dig deeper.
- Zwift - A cycling MMO that uses a digital cycling setup to read your power output. I really love it. It’s gotten me hooked on raising my stats in the best way possible. I have really enjoyed racing & training on this platform since September.
The next few weeks:
I'll be on break for new years bug I’ll return on Monday, January 6th with more TORSO TENNIS development. We’ll be heavily playtesting the game to get it balanced and ready for launch!
Here’s a photo from our IRL December playtest - 2 PC players and one Steam Deck player. As always, join the Discord to leave feedback and stay up to date on development. You can also respond directly to this email if you’d like to get in touch with me.
From the Community
We do a lot of progress sharing on the stream and on discord. I love to see people who join the coworking streams hit major milestones, so here are a few of those:
Arpeggiatura has been working on a wiggly 3D platformer “White Knight”, which now has a winter-themed level.
Gnomable finished a game for the Secret Santa Jam, a bumper balls autobattle roguelike: https://gnomable.itch.io/regally-rotund
Thanks so much for reading the Tomato Club newsletter! See you in 2025
<3 Michael
If you made it down here and you haven’t wishlisted TORSO TENNIS yet, please visit the Steam page and do that!