It Did Not Turn Out Okay
Tuesday June 9, 2026
In my last post, I expressed some optimism for how the year was going to turn out. Well, We Gotta Go! didn't meet performance expectations and as a result, we're all back on the job market. It was pretty crushing for us; we'd put our heart and soul into making the game quirky and full of character. Everyone contributed a bit of their personality; for me, the inclusion of the Explosive Durian and the King Durian items were a real treat, but Art Director Noah also made us graffiti tags in the gas station bathroom, so I used it as an opportunity to sneak in a Kiwi reference.
I think this one was particularly sad because the small group of us were so talented as a team. I will miss working with each and everyone of them dearly. In the meantime, the weather has improved and it's no longer consistently below zero, and the sun sets after 8pm now, so there's plenty of things to look forward to in the coming months. Over the past month or so, Toronto's trees have burst into life with the cherry blossoms hitting peak bloom, along with the magnolias and tulips. It's truly a lovely time to be out and about in the city.
I was in Ottawa for Victoria Day weekend to catch the annual Tulip Festival, which I had last seen in 2018. Saturday was spent driving most of the time. We wanted to get up early to head down to Dow’s Lake before the big crowds, and had originally planned to be there at 8am, but instead my brain decided to wake me up at 4am and I couldn’t get back to sleep. So, we headed down at 6.30am and it was so peaceful and serene, barely any people at all. We met up with some friends later and went kayaking on the lake, then headed up to Parliament Hill and later to Gatineau Park for a short hike. Traffic heading back to Toronto was really bad on Monday, though we still managed to catch the usual fireworks down by Woodbine Beach.
We also went to Vancouver for a week. The weather was phenomenal - it only rained for 2 hours the entire time we were there. And of course the scenery was absolutely stunning. We did three hikes in the time we were there; the first was Joffre Lakes, an hour north of Whistler - three glacial lakes that flow into each other with that beautiful green colour and the stillness providing an amazing reflection of the mountains and the forests behind. We were there early before the crowds, and it was well worth it. The second was St Mark's Summit in Cypress Mountain, which took us up past the ski fields and over to the west side overlooking Howe Sound. The final one, the most brutal, was the Stawamus Chief in Squamish, a trio of mountain peaks overlooking the town next to the Sea to Sky Gondola. The initial climb was a 600m elevation of literally just stairs, worse than the Grouse Grind, but the view at the top was incredible. We covered many parts of town as well - biking around Stanley Park, exploring Steveston and Fisherman's Wharf, absorbing the ocean breeze from Spanish Banks and watching the sunset from Queen Elizabeth Park. I got to meet up with a few ex-colleagues as well, and as always, the food was excellent throughout the week.
Today I'm off to Europe. It’s a nice time to travel and it feels like a while since I’ve been overseas - New Zealand doesn’t really count as a foreign adventure. I’ll be heading to Barcelona for a few nights, running to my favourite cafe in the Gothic Quarter for a Suizo and Xuxo, then consuming as much tapas and alioli as I can, then I’m over to Rome for a week. The last time I was there, I had food poisoning, so I’m keen to rewrite those memories and properly visit the city and all its history. Then to Frankfurt where I’m meeting up with a Kiwi friend who’s living in the Netherlands, and we’ll road trip to Luxembourg, Brussels and The Hague and end up in Amsterdam where I’ll fly back to Toronto.
Posted by Jeremy at 5:11pm on Tuesday June 9, 2026 :: 0 comments :: 
Definitely the Shittiest Game I've Ever Worked On
Friday March 6, 2026
After being laid off last October, I knew I was unlikely to land a job that side of the new year, so I decided to just relax for a few months. I played a lot of Pokemon Legends: Z-A, and purchased the Mega Dimension DLC to go with it. While it wasn't a particularly standout game - in fact, a lot of the gameplay in the DLC felt like chores - the active battle system was a fresh take on a very old formula. Still, it was a good way to pass the time, especially with the days growing darker and darker. We had a nice gathering at Asian Dragon Buffet with my friends from the badminton group for our end of year do, and then another buffet at Spring Garden for Izzy's birthday, but otherwise most of my days were spent playing on my Switch and cleaning up 20 year old PHP code for Psypoke.
In the weeks before Christmas, I had some interviews with a Vancouver company that looked really promising. The recruiter was a Kiwi - immediately putting me at ease. Real nice guy to chat to, and just wonderful hearing someone else that sounded like me. The technical test wasn't too difficult, apparently I had one of the quickest solves, and the cultural fit interview was also smooth. After finishing the two rounds of interviews with them, I was waiting to see if they would offer me a position, when surprisingly I received an offer from the last place I expected to - FuzzyBot. Someone was leaving and they needed extra hands to help ship the game. It was a no brainer. I loved working with the people there and I loved the work I did, so I had to turn the Vancouver company down. On January 5th, I started working for FuzzyBot again, on the shittiest game I have ever worked on.
We Gotta Go is a "friendslop" game - games designed to be played with friends, where the intent is to pull people in and go viral. In our game, you are the embodiment of poop, trying to find a toilet in a haunted mansion where everything scares the shit out of you, literally. There's so much room for humour and though it's not the kind of game I love playing, I have been having an incredibly fun time working on it. Turns out toilet humour is extremely popular.
The period between Christmas and New Years was nice. I cooked a big Christmas brunch with bacon, eggs, avocado and sourdough, and then an even bigger Christmas dinner with wasabi mayo prawns, and herb-crusted lamb cutlets, roast vegetables and purple yam mash. We finished the dinner with Costco tiramisu and hot chocolate! On Boxing Day, we had planned to go to Niagara Falls to see if they were frozen over, but the weather was so bad that we decided to stay in Toronto and have hotpot for dinner. For New Years Eve, we had another hotpot and then we went down to Billy Bishop Airport and braved the -10C weather to watch the fireworks over the waterfront in front of the CN Tower. New Years Day had nicer weather, so we drove to Missisauga to have IHOP and then to Tiffany Falls and Niagara Falls to see all the ice. It wasn't cold enough for everything to properly freeze over, but there's still beauty in the ice formations that we did see.
January and February have gone by reasonably quick, although there was a period of 11 days where I absolutely did not leave my building at all. The snowstorm during that time was so severe that both badminton and church on Sunday were cancelled. 60cm of snow was recorded at Toronto Pearson Airport. The piles of snow from that storm are still visible almost 6 weeks later, though we are getting False Spring 1 this weekend and that should melt away a bunch of the ice. Probably the highlight of January was seeing Rob Paulsen (voice of Yakko and Pinky), Maurice LaMarche (voice of The Brain) and Randy Rogel (songwriter) perform at the Flato Theatre in Markham. It was a night of 90s nostalgia, with plenty of laughs and humour. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience to sing along to Yakko's Nations of the World song with Rob. United States, Canada, Mexico, Panama, Haiti, Jamaica, Peru... 🎶 After the show, I got to chat with them a little bit and take a photograph with them, and mentioned that they had worked for Steven Spielberg, and I work for Max Spielberg, so at some point in time we've all had a Spielberg for a boss.
For Chinese New Year, I cooked up another massive dinner. I don't know what I was thinking - my place can only hold five people but for some reason I ended up cooking for like, eight people. I guess that fear of not having enough food was real. The yee sang turned out super well, and in addition to being immaculately presented, it tasted excellent as well, perfectly balanced in sweetness, saltiness, freshness and sourness. So many ingredients went in - the base of cucumber, carrots and radish, and then mango, pomelo, red capsicum, smoked salmon, salted egg fish skin and abalone - the premium ingredients inspired by the yee sang I had in Malaysia two years ago.
In addition to this, there were prawns, duck and lettuce wrap, roast pork, barbeque pork, stuffed tofu and fried rice. Phoebe had brought some famous Chinese New Year snacks as well as some of the selection of treats I had bought for dessert.
And now that it's March, and the Nondescript March Event has passed, I've felt a lot more reflective and introspective than usual. What I've achieved with my life, where I am now, what I want to happen in the future. Things have largely gone very well for me in my life, despite one very marked tragedy early on, and more recently, two layoffs in two years. I still feel uncertain about this year and how it will unfold, but hopefully things will turn out okay.
Posted by Jeremy at 3:54am on Friday March 6, 2026 :: 0 comments ::