2026 is here! For the first time in a minute, I have updated my whole site. I made some critical edits so updates should be quicker than annually now. Not that last year was not eventful, life hit hard and fast. Rough times tend to be creatively rich for me and I'm excited to share what I've been up to!
I made two albums this year. One being my own project, the other for a game jam with a friend. I had a great time making music this year, opening up FL Studio and exploring my soundfont library again. So much fun putting together a Cave Story style album depicting the tale of retrieving your soul from some underworld types in a well, to a funky album with a more general-midi type library to accompany an adventure across a shattered history of games.
Speaking of game jams, I ended up not doing many this past year. Two jams with the GameMaker community, the other was a Ludum Dare entry. I'm not going to sugar coat it, that was for the better. I felt way less exhausted by the games I did work on and much happier with the end results. I didn't output much, though what I did, I was confident had much more quality time put into it. I once output 12 games in one year, and I've learned that should be the exception and not the rule, because it's really easy to burn out with these kinds of things. While I do enjoy the speed challenge of making a game in a few days, I think some tender love and care does a world of good and its important to have a grounded outlook at what TLC I can do in that sort of time-frame multiple times a year.
Then there's NO2NA, a game that I've been giving a lot of TLC. This is my game project I started for Slow Jam for the GameMaker community. I thought I could make the whole game in 5 months, and I was very, very wrong. Notuna is my very favorite game I've ever made and I've thought of a sequel ever since the first game wrapped. I gave the original game an update, made a design document for the game and got to what would be a very slow burn (well it was Slow Jam after all). I built the platforming engine from scratch, better accounting for things like slopes, momentum and special moves. It has been fun to put this together, but very time consuming. I had big ambitions with the game, so much so that I had to take a week long break to scale back my ideas and build up again in a different direction. It's been a very fun creative challenge and I'm excited to share more about the game in 2026.
Another creative challenge this pat year has been updating the site. Let me be honest, this is the first website I have ever written from scratch and I was somewhat hell-bent on one aesthetic choice. In particular, those clouds on the main pages were something of a nightmare to make happen until I decided to relent and meet my CSS halfway. I wanted to fix the clouds because I had learned multiple resolutions break the effect and some pages on certain devices are broken in general! This was mainly large images making the page behave in odd ways I had not intended. Generally the way the website was constructed needed that all important TLC, I mean the CSS styling was in every individual HTML file. I gave it the TLC it needed these past couple of weeks and I am much happier with the look of the site itself and even the code holding it together. Last year it was fun to make bring this scrappy idea to life, but refinement will do it a lot of good moving forward. I know there's still a lot I could improve and I'm looking very forward to seeing what that looks like.
Phew! That's my year in review. I thought it wasn't going to be nearly as long as it turned out to be. Next update should be much sooner than one year later!
Happy New Year and go make cool stuff!