It is the end of 2025, a tumultuous year by any measure, and I am officially out of quippy intros, so without further ado, let’s get right into it.
The last jam?
As planned, I made a game for So Bad It’s Good Jam 2025, my “one jam of the year”.
My entry was called Boulder’s Gate 4, and despite the title and keyart is actually a bad knockoff of Papers, Please (this year’s modifier for the jam was “genre fakeout”). The postmortem goes through my thoughts in it in detail, but in short it was a real do what I feel like, throw in things as I think of them project. It was not a very competitive entry overall and did poorly in the ratings, though it did get quite a few plays- probably because of the attention-grabbing thumbnail and the fact that it was playable in the browser on launch.
I’ve already written up my feelings on game jams in postmortems for both the 2024 and 2025 SBIG Jam, and I’ll quote the latter here (with emphasis added):
In last year’s SBIG postmortem, I talked about how stressful jamming has become for me. I have adult responsibilities, summer is a busy time, and even putting in far less time than other jammers I’m still absolutely burned out by the end. This is the first jam where I actually said, out loud, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” After it was done, I told some of my friends that this was going to be my last jam. It sucks, it feels like the end of an era, and my feelings overall are complicated, but I felt it was for the best.
I’ll talk more about burnout in general later on (because I’ve definitely been feeling it), but for jams specifically, I think I’m all but done with them. As tempted as I was to call it right after SBIG 2025, next year’s SBIG will mark ten years of that jam, and I’ve participated every year, so I think 2026 will be the right one to end on. As has been the case for the past few years, I’m not even going in trying to be competitive, and to mark a decade of jank I’ll be doing something special (that’s probably barely a game and might not be finished in the jam period).
A few surprises
I had not gone into 2025 intending to do more than one game jam, but when the Trans Joy Jam 2025 was announced, I really wanted to throw my hat in the ring. Starlight Nights was made in a hurry and it shows, but it was nice to do some slightly different gameplay- it’s a side scroller! While it would have been nice to do more with the gameplay, it’s the story I really wish I’d done better on. It’s way too similar to Shattered and See Who I Am, and I’ve done way too many origin stories in general.
Technically, I even did a third jam game this year, though it was a low effort game for a joke jam (the Low Effort Princess Game Jam). This was another ephemeral April Fools release, although it was available for about a month rather than just a few days. I had about a week between the announcement of that jam and its end, so this “new” game basically consisted of hacking some new graphics (including AI slop and unedited memes) onto Starlight Nights. It was called Princess Diana vs The A Game Of Thrones and it probably would have been deeply offensive to British people had any British person actually played it.
I also did a surprise update to SE7ENGOKU in late spring, kinda sorta for Magical Girls FOREVER Continue-It Jam III. I’d been hoping to build out the next planned milestone, codenamed the “Story Mode” update, but I only managed half of it because real life really started getting in the way. What was finished was mostly cutscenes and minor tweaks, and unusually for me I chose to split it up and submit incomplete to focus on quality (or at least not cutting to the bare minimum). For various reasons it’s even less likely now than ever that SE7ENGOKU will ever be completed, but I’ve called the project dead and buried before only to dig it up again, so never say never.
I’m tired
You may have noticed that 2025 was pretty frontloaded. Chronologically, the last game of the ones mentioned was Boulder’s Gate 4 and that was in early August.
I fell into a creative rut some time in the spring, and I’m still not out of that hole. I can’t describe the experience as anything other than flailing about. I experimented with AI- my feelings on it are mostly negative and somewhat complicated, but it was useful to experience firsthand. I wrote passage upon passage of slapdash fanfiction, rarely finishing a chapter let alone a complete fic. For a while I was sketching every day in the self-described “vain hope that it will somehow make me good at drawing.”
I also did a lot of just… not making stuff. I played a lot of War Thunder and Baldur’s Gate 3 and watched a ton of videos (including several days worth of aviation content and half of Strange Aeons back catalogue). I didn’t want to touch Unity or Visual Studio at all.
I think, honestly, I just burned out. I’ve been moving away from game dev in recent years and reducing (or at least shifting around) my creative output, and project after project in early 2025 in combination with getting way busier in my offline life was too much, especially after pushing out Meridiem in 2024.
So Bad It’s Good Jam didn’t really move the needle- I’d hoped the rush of the jam would get me going again, but I was back where I started as soon as the jam ended. If anything it burned me out even more, especially with game dev.
I started working on one more game in the summer, a game about taking revenge on crooked car dealers that I titled Smash Up The Stealership at the last minute. When I came up with the idea I had high hopes for it, and plans to make it a properly polished game, but when I started actually working on it I lost all the enthusiasm I had.
I did manage a demo in time for Full Indie 2025- I did not exhibit, but I handed out cards with links and physical demo discs- and that was pretty much it. I’d been hoping to do similar at Vancouver Game Sewer as well, but I did not make it to that event at all.
I don’t know if Smash Up The Stealership is going to be a thing- I seriously don’t think I’ll make a real go of it, but I might do a bit more work on it- but I’ve wholly deferred any decision on it to 2026. I’ve been bouncing back and forth between imposter-syndrome wishing I was a “real” dev and embracing the art of the janky brainrot shitpost, and I think that game kind of represents both sides of that coin.
I also finally tried Twine (and hated it). I wanted to do a quick and easy gameplay-lite, writing-heavy thing for Christmas, but I procrastinated and only managed the first act. I might pick this one up again and restart with a different stack, or I might just let it lie. I love holiday specials, but by the time I’m in the mood it’s usually too close to the date to make something, so I rarely go through with it. I was hoping to reset mentally a bit with this one too, but it didn’t really work out that way.
Where does that leave…
Shattered 3, and the Shattered series in general, is officially dead. I’m calling it, folks. I’d still like for it to be a thing, and it feels like a shame for the work I did put in to go to waste, but every time I think about Shattered 3 and its scope I’m overwhelmed with dread. As much as I want this game to exist, the last few big projects I did were absolutely brutal, and I’m just not willing to go through that again to make it happen, especially since there are so many other things I know I’d enjoy making a lot more.
Outliers isn’t, though I have no idea if or when I’ll do a full-size mainline game again. I’d like to do something in that verse next year, but it probably won’t be very big and might not be a game. I’ve toyed with the idea of Sakura as the protagonist, but I don’t yet have any good ideas for that.
CommonCore, perhaps surprisingly, is not dead. It’s very much in maintenance mode, with only what I need for each game added as needed, but R6.3 was released just this month, nearly a year after R6.2. In 2026, I’ll finally be moving on from Unity 2022, targeting Unity 6.3 LTS (skipping 6.0) with CommonCore R7.x Goodsprings. It’s very much in maintenance mode- I haven’t looked at the Trello board of planned features in half a decade, there’s a few things I’d still like to do but just can’t be bothered to add, and it only really gets updates when I’m working on a game and find something missing or broken, but it’s still here.
Another “great Unity mess-up”
Speaking of Unity…
I won’t go over the whole situation again- I’ve summarized it briefly along with my response in an initial and an update post. I ended up patching about half my Unity-based games, focusing on recent releases and main series games (Outliers and Shattered). For the newer games I rebuilt the projects with a newer editor, while the older ones were just patched and repackaged. The one oddity was the original Shattered, which was on a version of Unity new enough to be vulnerable but too old to be patched, and it had to be upgraded.
It was a tedious, annoying process that felt like an unpleasant necessity at best and utterly futile at worst. A lot of my friends who had made games in Unity simply didn’t bother updating them at all, and I can’t necessarily blame them.
Greener pastures
Most of this post has focused on game dev, and though that’s historically been my focus, I’ve said again and again that I’d like to move away from it, that I am moving away from it. What about, you know, everything else?
I’m trying to improve my art and learn to draw properly. It’s been a tumultuous journey with a lot of false starts, and I honestly don’t know how good I’ll ever get, but it’s been something I’ve wanted to do for a long time and I finally decided to just try and go for it. In the new year, I’m planning to start posting some pieces that are a little nicer and in a different style than what I’ve posted in the past. I’d hoped to have one or two this year, but it didn’t happen, and I think the only art piece I posted was a fairly minimal Halloween one in my old style.
I’ve committed to launching a webcomic in 2026. That’s something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time, and I will not confirm or deny that some friends cajoled me into committing or that alcohol was involved. I have a premise in mind, but I still have to develop the story and characters, and I’m not sure what it’ll look like style-wise.
I managed to do a bit of blogging this year, cleaning up and posting a few offhand rants that originated on my Bluesky and doing one big post on AI. I’d like to do more in 2026, but it’s really a kind of thing that happens as the inspiration strikes. I’ve poked at posting some of my photography online, I don’t know how much of that I’ll end up doing but I’m more open to it than I’ve been in the past.
I’d like to do more creative writing as well. I poked at fanfiction this year, but my dream is to write a full and proper original novel, and I want to start taking some steps toward that. Though I do have a concept I really want to write, I want to get some practice with short stories and maybe another novella first.
I soft-launched a ko-fi, but never got around to really using it, and I’m on the fence about whether I want to monetize (or at least monetize in that way). For the time being, I won’t say no if you throw a few bucks my way, though.
I think that about covers it. There are a lot of unknowns in 2026, but I’m excited for the possibilities. See you all there!
Addendum: the stuff I forgot
After writing this post, I joked that there was probably at least one thing I forgot. A few days into 2026, I skimmed through my Bluesky again and found a few things that were at least slightly notable, but were missed in the status update.
Shattered 2 got a source release and art pack. I honestly thought these had been released the previous year (2024) and it was only when I actually checked that I realized that wasn’t true. This is probably the closest I’ll get to a CommonCore sample project- it’s built on an older version, and it’s full of jank, but it has examples of most of the things that can be done with the framework.
I made a map for Heretic! It’s been a long, long time since I’ve touched anything Doom related, but I had the sudden urge to try it again so I downloaded a new version of Doom Builder and started throwing stuff together. It’s pretty uninspired, and leans on a ton of GZDoom features without really making good use of them, but it was really nostalgic to play in that sandbox again and I had fun with it.
Ja Wizardman IV is probably not going to be a thing. I had some ideas for it, but I think it’s going to be way too much work for what’s ultimately a pretty dull joke.