There's Always So Much To Write About
Wednesday July 9, 2025
It's been an eventful four months since arriving back in Toronto. Upon returning to my apartment, I'd discovered a pigeon had disposed of the rosemary plant in the planter I'd left outside and replaced it with a small white egg, and multiple piles of pigeon shit all over the balcony. It was too cold to clean everything up, but the next day, a second egg had appeared so I knew I had to do something. Fortunately the temperatures skyrocketed to 16C one wet day in March, so I took the opportunity and binned everything.
The weather didn't really warm up properly until May. But when the city's cherry blossoms, magnolias and tulips burst into bloom, it heralds the start of True Spring and it's such a wonderful time to be out and around the city to visit all the beautiful trees downtown. The University of Toronto, Queen's Park, Christie Pits and High Park have some magnificent flowers, and it's all a matter of finding the less crowded ones so you can avoid the Instagrammers. We had the Victoria Day fireworks and very soon after, the official 1.0 launch of Lynked: Banner of the Spark.
Though it's only been a year and a bit since I joined FuzzyBot, it's felt like I've slid in and made myself useful pretty quickly. Shipping a game is intensely stressful for everyone. Console development is hard. Programming for TRC requirements is hard and often those features will never been seen by the majority of players. But we did it. The team did it. We pulled through for a largely successful launch and quickly patched some major issues. Reception has been very positive, but I think the game has struggled with discoverability, which is a very common problem these days. It's satisfying though, and we're all incredibly proud of what we've accomplished, and we should be! We celebrated in style - the three of us in Toronto, with partners, at Barberian's Steak House.
There was also Doors Open (Got to see the Mayor's Office and a bunch of cool things in the City Hall, as well as a guided tour of the murals out in Islington), a week in Montreal, Eurovision, and the usual street festivals like Taste of Little Italy and Do West Fest. There was the inaugural Toronto Video Games Month; one of the events they had was to project some video games onto the wall of a factory building by Billy Bishop Airport while people played - that was really cool to watch for a bit, but the highlight was getting to meet the Mayor of Toronto, Olivia Chow, who has an incredibly strong Asian Auntie vibe about her. She tried really hard to sound like she knew about video games but ended up talking about Angry Birds. There was also the Rat Race, a scavenger hunt of sorts through Toronto's underground PATH system, which we achieved second place for! There was Pride, a few days in Bruce Peninsula, and a week in Sudbury visiting Manitoulin Island and Killarney Provincial Park, some of my favourite places in Ontario.
Summer is truly a great time to be in Toronto, it's really a shame that it goes by so quickly. This autumn though, my parents will be visiting me, here in Canada, for the first time since I arrived eight years ago, so there's plenty to look forward to in the months ahead.
Posted by Jeremy at 12:35am on Wednesday July 9, 2025 :: 0 comments :: 