TesserActive - Coming 12/23/2025

 Hello, World!

I'm bad at making blog posts and social media. I haven't posted an update in 5 years, on March 1st 2020. Wildly enough, I made that post just before... something... happened.


So what have I been up to in the past 5 years? Working on TesserActive, working my day job, and living through multiple once in a lifetime events, as we all have. And I am writing this post since I have some great news to share!

You may have already seen on various other social media platforms, but here's the Bluesky post:

Anyways, after a few weeks of Nothing Ever Happening, it's time to Prepare for Unforeseen Consequences: 🎊TesserActive will be released on 12/23/2025🎊 https://linktr.ee/atticspacegames #tesseractive #gamedev #indiedev #pixelart

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— Attic Space Games (@atticspacegames.bsky.social) December 9, 2025 at 12:00 PM
So let's talk about what that's been like! Think of this as a... pre-postmortem. A premortem? Do games die when they come out or is that when they truly become alive? Are games alive?

The last major update was, as I said, in March 2020. I genuinely thought the game was almost done then. I've genuinely thought the game would be done soon for years, now. If you can see in the above post, I'm obviously referring to another game that is, allegedly, on the horizon(but just probably really far away). 

I've been joking since 2018 that TesserActive will be released before Half Life 3, the long awaited sequel to one of my favorite video game series' ever. I felt confident making that joke because, for various reasons, I wasn't sure at the time that Half Life 3 would ever actually be released, and I also wasn't sure when TesserActive would be coming out, but I knew it would eventually come out.


Boy, did I get a little worried this year, when some pretty significant rumors started circulating that maybe the time had finally come! At the start of that, in November, I'd already known the game was done and ready to go, so I was still confident I could get TesserActive out before whatever new Half Life sequel was, allegedly, about to be announced.

So, I hear you say, what took me so long? Well... I'm just one person. I had a list of features and content I wanted to add to the game, and I was slowly whittling away at that list. From the initial release of Super Kitty Catch back in July 2015 until October of this year, I'd been working on TesserActive. I also took on some contract work for another game, and also had a day job to pay the bills.

I also had to update Super Kitty Catch, twice, during that time, or risk it getting delisted from the storefront. I also took a little break from development and joined the GMTK Game Jam in 2023, making "Haunting For Sport", which you can find on itch.io here.




In terms of actual development on TesserActive, I have a bit of a confession to make; starting in November of 2023 I rebuilt the entire game from the ground up in Godot, as opposed to the engine I'd been using for the previous 8 years, GameMaker Studio.


Now, I have some good(?) reasons for doing this! I received some feedback from playtesters that my base platforming mechanics needed work; moving and jumping felt bad and sluggish. To refactor that code would require working on code I wrote at the beginning of the project in 2015. I've learned a lot since then, and it seemed to me an insurmountable task to sift through all that spaghetti I made 8 years ago.

Another issue; the version of GameMaker Studio I was using was the 1.4.9999 version, I'd stuck with it for so long because I thought I could get the game done quickly. I was wrong! Also, the Mac and Linux exports for that version broke, and the only way I knew to fix that was by upgrading to GMS2. I tried that; it broke everything.

Meanwhile, in what little spare time I'd had, I'd been playing around with Godot. I've used a lot of engines in my time; I started my software/game dev journey in high school writing Java applications and BASIC programs for my TI-84 calculator. I'd also been dabbling in ActionScript 2.0 with Flash(RIP), and when I finally went to college for Game Art and Design I used UDK/UE3. Since graduating, I've made games in Unity, GameSalad, and Stencyl.

Honestly, for reasons I can't quite pin down, Godot just makes sense to me, and GameMaker Studio never did. I'd been struggling against the software I was using for 8 years, and working in Godot seems to come naturally. 

So, I took all the art I'd made and imported it into Godot and rewrote the entire game using a few starter templates to get going quickly, as well as a few tools to make the development of this specific game easier, including writing a couple of my own!

Another thing that I realized, since working on some larger games; I had no idea what I was doing early on when it came to the actual production of the game. 

Game Production, for those unaware, is essentially the project management aspect of game development. It's deciding what features need to be implemented, and when, to make the game on time and on budget. I had a vague list of cool things I'd like to try to make, but no sense of structure or organization. I had a big amorphous blob of a game in my head, and having a better sense of production would have helped in breaking that down into actionable tasks to complete in a set order. This is something I've been working on lately, and I hope the next game will be a much smoother process in this regard.

Wow, that was a long post! I apparently had a lot more to say than I thought I did. I'll try and keep this blog updated more often, but until next time: Check out TesserActive when it comes out on December 23rd, 2025!

Thanks!
-Garrett