Back in December 2017, I submitted my first ever FPS game to GitHub's Game Off game jam. It was inspired by DOOM, Wolfenstein 3D, Hexen, and others from the early era of sprite-based shooters. I filled it with weird music and trippy visuals and called it BAD VIBES. 

It felt like a major accomplishment at the time, and was the first time I ever felt genuinely proud of a game I created. I thought that would be the extent of the experience, and I'd move on to my next project. I never could've guessed how long people would keep playing the game. Not only was it featured in GitHub's post-jam roundup, people also started streaming it and posting Let's Plays on YouTube, writing me with requests for new levels, and dropping higher and higher scores in the leaderboard. My mind is still blown from that first response.

Almost four months later, I'm still getting new high scores all the time. Unlike many other games, you can only get a high score on BAD VIBES if you beat the game. And anyone who has played BAD VIBES will probably tell you that it's not exactly easy to beat. Harder even still to break into the TOP 20, which I feature on the game page. Suffice it to say that I was thrilled to see that today we hit 100 HIGH SCORES on the BAD VIBES leaderboard! I seriously can't say thank you enough to everyone who has taken the time to check out my little passion project, and especially to the fine people at itch.io for providing such an incredible platform for independent game makers.

I'm currently hard at work on my next game, which is something else entirely and will be my first ever premium game (fingers crossed I can bring that one to GDC next year), so I won't be able to update BAD VIBES for a while. But I feel like it's doing fine enough as it is. Maybe I'll just leave it alone for good, and let it remain the weird, fun, little thing that first made me proud of my work making games.