December 31st, 2025

Today is December 31st, 2025, which means that it is once again time for my once-a-year reflection post.

2025 was a very long year. This is both good and bad; so many things happened. I was organizing my photos the other day (a practice I neglected for…pretty much the whole year) and events that seem a lifetime ago were, in fact, things that happened this year??? Also I’m 30 now, which is a surprise in the sense that I’ve felt like I’ve been in my 30s for a while.

My goals from last December were (I feel like they have been similar for a few years??):

  1. Ship my first commercial game
  2. Figure out what to do next

Which I’m pleased to say, for once, I actually did both those things?

I spent a lot of the beginning of the year working on Desert Angels, my weird third-person optional shooter(?) walking sim(?) trash exploding game, and it was released in April! It was a lot of work over 2 years of production (and a ???? of preproduction, made weird by COVID-times) and I am quite proud of it. You can find it on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3048770/Desert_Angels/

Besides Desert Angels, I also continued my streak of working with the team on a game in GMTK game jam. This year, we made Shredmill (https://jamadoo-games.itch.io/shredmill) - a track-collapsing fast-paced skateboarding arcade game. We didn’t win any ranks at the jam this year, but the game did end up on itch.io’s homepage, so it’s also quite possibly the most popular game I’ve helped make. It’s short!

Anyway, after the one-two punch of releasing a big game and also day job getting really busy…I lost approximately 4 months of my life to playing Baldur’s Gate 3. Which I’ve beaten 4 times now, and have several more in-progress (and much slower) playthroughs. It’s a good game. I’m a little annoyed at how much I like it, because now I want to make a game at that scale, which is actually literally impossible.

I finally got myself out of Baldur’s Gate 3 hell in September, which I spent approximately 3 weeks of in Sweden doing more game dev, except in Sweden! I attended Spelkollektivet, a game-dev coworking / coliving space (https://www.spelkollektivet.com/), and had a lot of fun! I’m also now prototyping my next game because I cannot stop.

Oh, and I’m preparing to run a new D&D campaign in the new year, because I needed to do more things with my time.

Anyway, oops all game dev. Strange year for that, because the industry seems to be going up in flames around me. I’ve been so tired of being in tech and having to deal with all the gen AI nonsense everywhere, but I like games and do not want to stop making them. And also a weird feeling actually accomplishing my yearly goals, because I normally don’t??? What am I supposed to do now?????

The answer is make new goals, and probably do not accomplish them. So, some new goals:

  1. Have a demo of and a clear idea of what my next game is going to be by this time next year!
  2. Swim more. Oh yeah, I started swimming this year because exercise is hard and it’s a good way to spend a lot of effort on very little result! I am very bad at swimming and I have no intention of getting better, I just want to do it more.

Here’s to 2026!