2025 - A year in review

This year was certainly... unexpected. In a way, it kind of felt like 2020 came back to taunt me and push me to greater limits. While I anticipated a more rocky environment, I didn’t expect the current state of the world to fall into more sorts of chaos, no thanks to our current political climate in the United States. I haven’t felt more frightened, uncomfortable, and uneasy in a while, even if it’s not directly affecting me every day.

When I started this year, I envisioned a goal/theme of “just finish something.” If I had strictly followed what I had written a year ago, I would’ve most certainly failed. What the Taiji?! is in “pre-release hell,” I couldn’t quite build the habit of reading more books pleasurably, and I barely touched Indexing Your Heart and its prototype. 2025 would look like an abject failure on my part. Some of that might have to do with the precarious world I live in, and that drains my motivation to accomplish anything specific to what I had set out.

Just finish something - my goals for 2025

Setting tangible goals in 2024 helped with making them more achievable, compared to a vague theme left to interpretation. Likewise, treating these goals as “nice to achieve” rather than a “requirement of the year” helped ensure I somehow met these goals without the fear of not meeting strict deadlines. With

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That’s not to say I haven’t tried. What the Taiji?! entered its QA testing phase in June/July of this year, and it’s mostly done from a stability/engine perspective. I’m waiting on a batch of music and sound effects to finalize everything. I have thought about Indexing Your Heart for quite some time, too. While I don’t have any serious code commits to show for it, I thought a bit more on world building and the current state of the game. And I’ve undoubtedly had to make some tough calls on it.

With that in mind, this year was also one of beginnings. My explorations for Indexing Your Heart led me to start a new Playdate project, which might end up being the game’s spiritual successor. Right now, all I have to show for it are a couple of UI demos and some 3D content, but I’m already feeling a bit more excited about the prospects of this game, as it feels more solid to me than my previous approaches. Likewise, I published a new app to the App Store for the first time in a long while, Alidade, and pushed out a new feature update for it later in the year. I’m quite pleased with Alidade and plan to keep making improvements to it at my own pace.

I built an app to navigate my Minecraft forever world.

Minecraft has been a staple childhood game for me, and it’s something I play every now and then. I came across a video for starting a “forever world”, and I set up a quick Minecraft server for myself. Since then, I’ve played more frequently… and I made a companion app to go with it.

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This year was also a good opportunity to better connect with my local community. I’ve only lived in Delaware for a couple of years, but this year has made me feel closer than ever. Of course, this raises some questions for me as I venture into 2026, but the sense of community has measurably helped me get through this year.

It’s no secret that 2025 was a dumpster fire in a shitshow, and there are a multitude of ways that it could’ve been better. But I’d be doing myself a disservice if I ignored the smaller wins. I’ll have to see what 2026 brings to the table; I suspect it will be more of the same for quite a while, but I’m a bit more hopeful this time than when 2025 started.