The latest title in the bestselling Clutter
franchise is launched today on Steam. UK-based Grey Alien Games is publishing Clutter
17: Flower Power – Collector’s Edition on behalf of Puzzles by Joe, an
Atlanta, GA-based game developer behind the hit casual game series.
Clutter 17: Flower Power – Collector’s
Edition is not only
the 17th installment of this ever-popular
hidden object/puzzle hybrid game series, but it also features over 1,800
puzzles! Expect fresh challenges, addictive gameplay, and high replayability.
Clutter games are a firm favourite in the casual gaming world, and
have generated over $3.5 million in sales to date.
Jake Birkett, owner of Grey Alien Games said:
“Puzzles by Joe continues to innovate, and fans will love this fresh, floral
take on the popular Clutter series.”
Grey Alien Games has several of its own
titles on Steam, including Regency Solitaire, Regency Solitaire II, Shadowhand
and Ancient Enemy.
It’s been a very good year for work goals! But less good for personal goals, though I’m not too worried about that as they weren’t super-important, more like “nice to haves”. Read on to find out more.
2024 Work Goals
Ship Regency Solitaire II in Q1. (SUCCESS! We shipped in Feb, so I even got the Quarter right. The game is currently 97% positive on Steam and sold better than we expected on there but worse than we expected on the casual portals. But I think the long tail will be good.)
Ship Shadowhand Solitaire. (SUCCESS! This didn’t happen until November because a) we did some updates to Regency Solitaire II, and b) it was more complex than we thought to complete. It’s turned out well and people like it. Not a big seller but a solid title in the catalogue that we’ve bundled with our other games.)
Grey Alien Games’ revenue is over $100K. (SUCCESS! This is net revenue from all sources e.g. Steam, casual portals, tax rebates, consultancy/writing, Patreon etc. We only just hit this goal, and it’s definitely due to launching TWO games in the same year.)
Success rate = 3/3 = 100%. Wow! That’s pretty rare for us to hit them all but I’m glad we did as they were important goals for our business and will enable us to “survive 2025” and ship more games.
Stretch Goals:
Start work on something else. (SUCCESS! Very happy to say that we got an offer of collaboration for a new game at the end of 2024, and now contracts are signed and it’s going ahead straight away in 2025!)
Make some kind of platform deal for Regency Solitaire II or III. (FAILED: We had a few people talking to various platform holders on our behalf but alas nothing materialised. However, I did manage to make another bundle deal with Fanatical at the end of December that will generate some bonus revenue.)
2024 Personal Goals
Get my weight below 67kg by Christmas. (FAILED: I remained fairly constant for most of the year but gained a bit in the run up to Christmas and ended up close to 69kg, but still within a normal BMI range. I definitely didn’t do enough walking in 2024 but I will fix that in 2025!)
Have at least 6 weeks of “no work” vacation even if it’s a staycation. (FAILEDish: I did actually have over 30 days off work and we went to Scotland and Crete, plus had a relaxed summer. It’s just that early in the year I was crunching a bit to finish Regency Solitaire II and worked every weekend for a couple of months, which reduced my days off total to 17. I don’t mind though and I feel good about the work I got done so I am not planning to try this goal again in 2025.)
Fix my C64. (SUCCESS! I’m super-proud to have done this. After watching a lot of C64 repair videos and procrastinating I finally got the tools I needed and desoldered a faulty RAM chip (was hard to do), fitted a socket and new chip, and it booted up first time! I’ve been playing on it over Christmas and loving it.)
Keep doing Yoga all year. (SUCCESS! Missed a few lessons here and there due to various reasons but did the final lesson in December and will be going back when it starts up again this year. I’m enjoying it a lot and getting better at it. Recommended!)
Sort out our attic. (FAILED: Though in December, I did get down my big box PC games and put them in my game room and also got rid of a couple of other things. It’s a big job though that we still need to do so that we can add in more attic insulation.)
Success rate = 2/5 = 40%. Though if I was being generous perhaps I could give myself half a point more for taking a lot of days off and going on several trips. Like I said above, these weren’t critical personal goals, so I’m OK with this.
Stretch Goals:
Get solar panels fitted. (FAILED: We just can’t afford them at the moment and when I looked into it the cost was quite a lot higher than I remembered. So alas I’ll have to remove this as a goal for this year unless we suddenly have a hit game.)
Go on a holiday to Scotland! (SUCCESS: We did this in late May/early June and took lots of reference photos for Regency Solitaire III and also just soaked up the vibe of various places. I’m sure we’ll be going back, but to a different part, sometime soon.)
Bonus Points
I had a good year of going to various Aikido courses and learning more internal power stuff from some quite old senseis. I also taught at several courses, which was nice.
I did an updated version of my “No Hit Wonder” talk to various groups of Canadian indie devs and I’ve also been asked to speak at Reboot Develop Blue in Croatia in April. It’s my favourite conference, so I’m looking forward to that!
We finally sold our TSLA stock for a small profit. I had to hang onto it way longer than I wanted to due to it having a dip for a couple of years but I really wanted to get rid of it due to the company owner’s “erratic behaviour”, shall we say. This has extended our runway and we are confident that with existing ongoing game revenues we can “survive 2025” and make some new games.
Our Steam publishing revenue has continued to grow along with our audience and has contributed to our highest grossing year on Steam to date! (since 2015)
I’ve had shoulder/neck problems for years which have sometimes affected my work but this year I’ve had quite a few good patches, which is great news. I hope I’m learning to live with it better and maybe it’s even getting better!
We encouraged our our eldest son to apply for a cybersecurity programming job in Cambridge and he got it and has moved there from his previous job. We went to visit him and he has a nice house and flatmate and seems to be doing well, which is great news to us as parents.
I did some remote work experience for a teenager who is a friend of the family. I got him to make his own small-scoped game in Unity and he really enjoyed it. Recently I’ve been speaking to another local mother about doing the same thing this year for her autistic son. This feels like a good way for me to “give back”.
Mistakes
I mentioned above that we sold our TSLA stock at the first viable opportunity. Unfortunately if we’d waited about 1 month we could have made an insane 50%+ profit. Hindsight is wonderful, plus we needed the cash to pay salaries.
I didn’t do enough walking and feel less fit plus I miss seeing the wonderful countrside around here. This is an easy fix though.
I wanted to make another game with my youngest son (who is in his final year at Falmouth Uni studying Game Programming) but he was pretty busy/distracted last summer with his own things and we only made minor progress on a (cool) thing. I hope we can return to it, or maybe I’ll carry it on my own as a hobby project.
We got distracted with a bit of contract work which generated some money but was a bit spread out and required too much of my time/focus. When I look at my annual revenue breakdown (see our forthcoming Patreon post for details) I can see that most of our income came from simply selling our own games and that is clearly our strength and we need to double down and focus on that in 2025!
2025 Work Goals
Ship new game. (Hopefully we’ll do this in the summer as it’s got a sensible scope, uses existing tech, and we’ve partnered with a team that will handle the art, writing, audio for us, which leaves us to focus on the code and design.)
Ship Spooky Bonus Collector’s Edition (or a sequel) at Halloween. (This is an important goal because we think it’ll be quite easy to do and it’ll make quite a lot of money, which will extend our runway to make more games!)
Grey Alien Games’ net revenue is over $120K (I’ve boosted the number a bit to take into account inflation over recent years and just to give us a bigger target, though in reality we are at the whims of the market and a lot of indies are struggling at the moment.)
Stretch Goals:
Start work on something else. (This may happen alongside the new game I mentioned above as Helen can do a lot of research/design for Regency Solitaire III at the same time, but I’m leaving it non-specific in case we do something else later in the year instead.)
Make any kind of platform deal. (What I ideally mean by this is essentially “free money” by getting our existing IP on a new platform, or part of a special program such as Epic’s free game deals. Though we are also open to deals with say Xbox GamePass, Apple Arcade, Netflix or others, which will require a lot of porting work).
2025 Personal Goals
Go on 20 nice walks. (This can be in the countryside, or in seaside towns, or on holiday, whatever. I don’t want to set myself a goal like walk 3km a day as I found that quite a lot of pressure in previous years especially when the weather was bad!)
Sort out our attic and add more insulation. (This has been on my goals list for years, but I feel like this is the year we finally really need to do it since we had a leak up there in 2025 and I had to remove some insulation in one area.)
Finish the year lighter and fitter than I am now (68.5kg) (This will be a side effect of walking more, and I’m also tweaking my diet a bit this year, and continuing with yoga and Aikido, so we’ll see how that goes. Admittedly I don’t have a measurement for fitness but I’ll go on vibe.)
Go on a holiday for at least a week. (I talked to Helen about this today and we’ve got several places in mind but are keeping it open until we return from Reboot Develop and then we can see how we feel. It might be in UK, which is fine with us.)
Convert my Flash games to Ruffle. (I have a bunch of old gamejam games that simply won’t run in a browser any more and that is sad. So I want to make them run again via Ruffle so that my catalogue is complete and accessible.)
Stretch Goals:
Get a new drive. (Our driveway has never been repaired/replaced in the 20 years since we’ve lived here and it looks the worst in the entire neighborhood. Maybe it’ll just be re-tarmaced for cost-effectiveness though I’d prefer some nice brick thing but that can be very expensive. We don’t want gravel or any resin, which is essentially plastic.)
Ship a hobby gamedev project. (I’ve been feeling the need to do this for a while. Might finish my Cyberjam pico-8 game, or even ship an old Amiga game, or something else. We’ll see how much spare time I really have for doing this…)
