Mystery Gamedev 2024 Year in Review

Looking back on 2024 and our plans heading into 2025

Happy Mystery Monday!

As 2024 comes to a close, today’s post will be a lengthy retrospective on our accomplishments this past year, and a short preview of what 2025 will look like.

But before we get started, I just wanted to ask you to please fill out this feedback survey.

It will only take a few minutes, and it will seriously help out Mystery Gamedev as we move forward next year.

The survey will ONLY be available THIS WEEK, so please fill it out ASAP! Thank you!

Now with that out of the way, let’s dive in!

Visual;Conference 2024

We started off the year strong with a talk on mystery visual novels at VNConf 2024, an online conference for visual novel developers. We received dozens of new members from this event, and our talk was so popular that we repurposed it into our most popular blog post by far.

The 20-minute time limit unfortunately meant that I had to cut out a lot of things I wanted to talk about from the video — but if you’re subscribed to this newsletter, you’ll be able to read about all of those topics eventually.

Mystery Game Database

February and March were spent creating a new and improved Mystery Gamedev website, including a database of mystery games. We kept working on this database throughout the year, including lists of developers and publishers, an account creation system, and ways for users to submit mystery games to the database.

We’ll continue improving the website in 2025, along with adding hundreds of more mystery games to the database. Currently, almost 900 games are already there for you to discover. I have also begun setting up ways to handle games on stores other than Steam, as well as games that are on more than one store, and games that are no longer available to buy anywhere. There are a lot of different edge-cases to handle, which has made this more complicated than first glance, but I’m committed to doing my best to making a useful, accurate, and nice-looking database of mystery games.

Long-term, we have many more plans for the website, for both users and developers — it is just a matter of time — so please look forward to 2025!

Mystery Game Jam 2024

Our very first Mystery Game Jam event began in April, with over 150 registered participants! This was a number far exceeding our expectations, so it really was incredible to see so many people excited to make mystery games.

We held several group Q&A sessions in our Discord server, where I set aside some time each week to help participants with their games.

Ultimately, 25 mystery games (or demos) were submitted by the deadline. You can read about some of my personal favorites in this post.

It was my first time running an event was big as this one, and I learned many lessons along the way. Perhaps most importantly, I learned just how many people struggled to make a mystery game in under a time limit, and I realized what needs to be done to make the process easier in the future.

We will absolutely be doing another one in 2025, where I’ll be incorporating the feedback from last year, so please look forward to it! More information on it will be coming soon!

Mystery Gamedev Podcast

In August, I began hosting the Mystery Gamedev Podcast! To be honest, I’d wanted to start my own podcast years ago, but I just didn’t have anyone to talk to… Well, now I do!

Despite being an introvert, I love getting to know people and asking them questions — especially if they are mystery game developers. I also think it is important for the general public to get to know these game developers as real people.

It turned out that we had about one interview per month, with the exception of December, in which we had none. This worked out fine for me, because it takes a lot of time to prepare for these — I had plenty of time to play each developer’s games and brainstorm interesting questions to ask (and plenty of time to work on the other things mentioned in this article). I will likely keep the same schedule going forward, with one interview posted per month, as long as I can get the volunteers for it.

If you are a mystery game developer and would like to be on the podcast in 2025, feel free to submit this form for consideration! Or, if you are a fan who really wants to see your favorite developer appear on the show, you can point them in our direction!

Community Events Calendar

In October, we held our first real community event, where we played a short murder mystery roleplay in our Discord server. Building a community involves more than just small-talk — it involves getting people involved in group activities. So one of my goals in 2025 is to run more community events like that one.

I know mystery gamedevs are ambitious workaholics (or at least, I am!), but it is nice to set aside some time every so often just to play games together and make fun memories that will last a lifetime.

You can see previous and upcoming events on the MGD website events calendar. The calendar also shows game releases and other events like Steam sales and festivals. Anyone with an account on our website can register for our events on the calendar page, and those registered will get first priority when we run community events in the future.

Newsletter & Discord Server

It’s easy for me to forget that writing this newsletter also counts toward what we’ve accomplished this year (it’s pretty much just become a habit at this point). We’ve consistently released one newsletter every Monday since August 2023, resulting in more than 75 total posts and over 100 total subscribers!

I’ve gotten into a good rhythm with these posts, getting my workflow down to a science so I can find and share the most important mystery game news as it happens: new games, new demos, festivals, and huge discounts. And in the future, hopefully more!

We’ve also consistently managed our 300+ member Discord server, with almost no conflict, especially during such a tumultuous year. I am truly thankful for everyone who has joined and who has stayed with us so far. I know I can’t please everyone, but I am hyper-focused on our mission, and I am glad that so many of you believe so strongly in what we are building together.

Although our organic growth rate has seemed to plateau, the good news is that it hasn’t fallen off a cliff, either. We have a strong base invested in the long-term. And that’s exactly what I was hoping to achieve.

What’s Next For 2025?

I’ve touched on this in the paragraphs above, so I’ll keep it brief here:

• Finish the core features of the website / database

• More frequent community events and games

• More content designed to reach new people

• Tools and resources to help devs make games better, easier, and faster

Before I wrote this post, I was a little disappointed that I hadn’t accomplished some of those things a lot sooner. I had to spend a lot of time this year dealing with real-life problems outside of MGD, so I know we could have gotten a lot more accomplished.

But looking at what I just wrote, it is actually not that bad! We started a lot of cool projects and traditions this year, and ultimately it is something to be proud of. We went into 2024 with an ambitious vision, and now we are heading into 2025 with a solid foundation and a crystal-clear roadmap. Let’s make it happen!

Again, please take a moment to fill out this feedback survey.

It will only take a few minutes, and it will seriously help out Mystery Gamedev as we move forward next year.

The survey will ONLY be available THIS WEEK, so please fill it out ASAP!

Thank you again, and have a Happy New Year!

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