Hey friends, happy holidays! I wanted to catch y’all up one final time before signing off this year. The end of the year seems to be a natural time for reflection, so let’s take a look at what I was up to for the past 12 months. It’ll be a long one, so strap in.

How Am I Doing?

Last year around this time, I wrote a newsletter to review the things I set out to do at the start of the year and compare it to what I managed to achieve. In the wording of said newsletter, I made sure to keep the plan flexible, because I had the prescience to know some of the goals would change.

2025 Manifestation Bingo Card

• 🎮 Launch a commercial videogame on Steam.
• 📔 Finish 1 of my short stories. I’ve got a bunch of them but I really need to wrap them up at some point. 😭
• 📚Publish either a children’s book or a board game. Either are near completion, but I’ll probably only have enough time for one of them.
• 💰 Make some money, preferably off of one of the things above.
• ✒️ Publish at least 2 New to Narrative articles.
• 📮 Keep this weekly newsletter going for another year!

What I didn’t expect, is that I’d hit none of the goals! Now, I don’t perceive this as a bad thing neccesarily, but it’s hard not get bummed out by it a little. In truth, my priorities over the year just shifted.

I didn’t end up launching a videogame. I ended up cancelling Rumorweaver and the subsequent tiny prologue game I wanted to make for it. Other than that, the game with a short development cycle I set out to make with Jonas, ended becoming a little longer than first anticipated. More on that later!

As for my writing goals of the year, I did start a bunch of new short stories but ended up never finishing one. One of them is so very very close to completing the first draft, but I already said that way back in 2024. For publishing the children’s book or board game, I kind of just forgot about both of them this entire year. Even if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to find the time to do anything with it. Publishing that kind of stuff takes a lot of effort and definitely not my priority.

Since I didn’t launch a videogame, nor published anything financially viable, I also didn’t make any money this year. Luckily, after some calculations, I’m still very much OK for most of next year, albeit on a student’s budget. Apart from that, anything New to Narrative related has essentially ground to a halt. I didn’t finish nor publish any more blog posts. I dialed back the weekly newsletters to biweekly, and then to just whenever it seemed relevant.

Despite all that, I’ve not been sitting on my hands! So what did I end up doing this year instead?

What Am I Doing?

In spring, Jonas and I got together and made up a bunch of game ideas. We did a couple of pen and paper prototypes and chose 2 to explore further. One was Loopy Folk, a wholesome idle game about taking care of little guys picking up trash. We had fun making it, and I do still believe there’s something to the concept, but the design was a bit too confused to continue with it. It was supposed to be wholesome, but felt a bit stressful. It was supposed to be an idle game, but had none of the pacing.

After that we did a prototype for Bibidi Bibidi! For people who have been reading for a while now, it comes as no suprise that this is the game we went with. It’s a roguelike deckbuilder with a focus on cool wizard stuff!

The initial idea was to build something in like 6 months with the scope of something like Slice & Dice or 9 Kings. We quickly realized however that the game deserved a lot more attention to detail, story, art and enough content to make it worth the player’s time and money.

Because of the longer estimated development time, we decided to launch a public playtest (back in July) that we’d keep updating. And we did! We averaged about 1 update per month since then and a big one is soon to follow. We’ve come a LONG way since the prototype and I’m super proud of what we’ve got so far. If you made it this far, please consider wishlisting Bibidi on Steam!

Honorable Mentions

Aside from our main project, I’ve made some cool Godot frameworks that I plan to use next year for some smaller games. This time around I also wanted to see if I could track all the new game ideas I had. By my count, I’ve had about 22 new concepts in some stage of development, be it design doc or prototype. I’d love to shout some of my favourites from the list:

• PESTEN: A roguelike horror variant of the classic playing card game Crazy Eights where you play against the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

• Summon Factory: An tactical autobattler where you put monsters with various abilities on a conveyer belt that automatically makes the first rows fight eachother.
• Infernalis: A whodunnit detective game in hell in which somebody killed Satan, and you have to figure out who.
• Quilt Quest: A crafting game to kingdom management simulator that takes place entirely on a quilt.

That’s in addition to the ideas me and Jonas came up with, and apart from all the games I’ve actually announced or worked on with friends, such as Landjepik (a grand strategy epistolary roleplaying game with weekly deadlines. I plan to run a playtest campaign of this next year!), Memorygotchi (a very annoying memory and focus training tool for your desktop I got halfway in) or Appliance Assault (the BattleBots-inspired Playdate pitch I never sent.)

Looking back at all of that, it sounds like a pretty full year. It’s funny that this year specifically, I tried to keep down the number of new ideas I usually have to a minimum, to keep me focused on completing projects and revisiting projects I’m still passionate about.

Why Am I Doing? (this)

All in all, it was a pretty fulfilling year, especially on the creative front. I do feel like I want to get back to weekly newsletters. When I think back on the back half of the year, I don’t remember much about it. That’s largely because I don’t take the time anymore to reflect on each week. So even if it’s a bit time consuming, I reckon I’ll try to get back in the flow of sending something out every week again, for my own sake.

Thanks for sticking around, and I’m looking forward to what next year has in store!