"urghh"

I'm a bit late to this recap, I've been putting it off because I have admittedly had a rough year. This year's probably won't be as long or as in-depth as last years.

PROJECTS

The first few months of the year were taken up by finishing waxweaver. I had been working on it since January of 2024. It became the longest and largest scoped project I had ever worked on. The last portion of the work was admittedly a bit rushed, and I was starting to lose the energy for it and wanted it to be done. I had also learned a lot more about Godot and programming during its development, so it became more and more rough trying to work with the systems I had laid out the year prior. Regardless, I managed to pull through and make something that I was pretty dang proud of. The game did well here on newgrounds, and mister brandy buizel even gave me 100 bucks to put the game on steam. The game ended up doing fairly well, and it was nice seeing all the positive feedback and people's builds and such. I occasionally came back to it for minor updates ( even adding a makeshift multiplayer mode ), but my interest waned until I had no desire to work on it anymore.

After waxweaver's steam release, I hit a pretty big burnout wall that I am still not completely recovered from. 2024 I had projects up the wazoo, no matter the day I had something going on to work towards. The completion of waxweaver gave me an empty plate, and a feeling of needed to top myself with a newer and better project. This led to a period of being a bit of an idea guy and not being able to commit to new projects.

I managed to squeeze out a jam game CARD STOCK in June, but I'll admit I don't really like this game and I'm not very proud of it. Something I did do this year was participate more in my local game dev community. I submitted waxweaver to a local game dev award show, and won the prize for Best Free Game. The event was pretty lowkey, but it was still a nice surprise. I participated to 2 local jams, making Drag Drone and Plinko's Bomb Defusal. Drag Drone I think is a fun buggy little timewaster. I am pretty dang proud of Plinko's Bomb Defusal however, I think for what it is it turned out great, and is probably the most put together game I think I've ever made. So despite not having the energy to work on the bigger projects, I still managed to pull through and make some neat stuff and meet new people.

I also drew some, not too much, but enough to see that I have improved. I have also just been sketching more, a lot of it never made it on here.

my faves:

FUTURE

This year I want to focus on just chilling a little more. There's been a lot going on, a lot of it very stressful, a lot I'm not comfortable sharing publicly. I tie a lot of my self worth into my art and my projects, and when I can't manage to work on anything, I feel like a useless person. I get into one of two states: not being able to work and feeling depressed and worthless, or being absolutely addicted to working and ignoring other aspects of my life. It isn't healthy at all, and I want to focus on other valuable stuff. I want to take care of my body better, I want to interact with my friends more, I want to try and hone my other skills and passions, like drawing or finally picking music up. I will still come back to game dev, I have so many ideas and I truly love making games. But I don't wanna come back until I have learned to love myself without it.

2025 sucked ass, but I am hopeful for 2026. Half life 3 is coming out soon ya know.