Hello, everyone!

What a year this one has been on both a personal and professional level. It had a lot of downsides and upsides, but I can say I survived. As every year, I am bringing you a list of updates, and you can check the previous one here if you want.

As always, I am going to talk about every project I worked on during the year. This year includes: Community Warriors, Confused Army, Cards & Claws, Summer Snow Day, Airport Security Guard, and Animal Guys. What a crazy ride this year has been!

So let’s begin with this recap!

Community Warriors

In January, I started working on Community Warriors and suddenly decided to release it without any prior notice.

I have always had some sort of fascination with making games that use external SDKs—trying to include them as part of the gameplay and seeing what I can create with them. This is another case where I did that. I created the Twitch Mono Integration, which I made open source, and integrated Twitch into a game where anyone could play just by watching the stream.

Here, players were even able to store their progress, which led them to come back and keep leveling up their characters.

I was pretty happy with the end result, but I couldn’t reach a large enough audience, so it made sense to keep the stream open the whole time while continuing to make updates. Because of that, I decided to stop adding features, create a free demo version so anyone could stream the game with their audience, and wrap up a final version that I was proud of.

Except for game jams, it had been a while since the last time I started and finished a game in my spare time, so I felt like this unlocked something for me. This one also came with an extra achievement for me, since I did it all on my own without any other team members. Don’t get me wrong, I love working with other people, but there was something special about making this game entirely by myself. Finally, it was great to have the support of my loved ones during the streams—it really meant everything to me, and thank you if you were part of that.

Confused Army

I was going through a lot of personal stuff during that month, and I focused on making a game—once again, all on my own.

I didn’t want to drag anyone into this, since I wasn’t sure if I was going to finish it, so I picked the One Game a Month #50 game jam, checked where I could borrow simple assets that fit a minimal aesthetic, and came up with a simple puzzle-game mechanic that allowed me to create as many levels as my life permitted. From this combination, Confused Army was born.

From this idea, I was able to create what I consider a solid, simple puzzle game, and I ended up creating 28 puzzles from it.

I didn’t take the whole month to make it; instead, I worked on it whenever I felt like doing so, and I’m very happy with the end result. Once again, I focused on making something small but solid, proving that I could still take a lot of joy from my craft.

Cards & Claws

That same month, I was eager to work on a game jam with my friends, so we joined the Brackeys Game Jam 2025.2 and created Cards & Claws.

A lot of things I had never done before were the main focus of this jam. It was my first time making a multiplayer game in a game jam, and thanks to my professional work, I felt confident enough to take that risk. It was also my first time making a card game, which led to a lot of crazy balancing—but also a lot of fun. Finally, it was my first time working with Otto, who did an awesome job illustrating all those cat cards.

The game was not only fun to develop, but also fun to test with friends. Usually, during game development—and especially for game jam games—you end up making single-player games, which leads to testing everything by yourself. Here, we were able to provide a multiplayer experience where anyone could jump in at any time and play with random people.

This is a game I am very proud of, given its technical challenges, and I hope I can make another multiplayer game during a game jam in the future.

Summer Snow Day

Summer Snow Day went through a lot of updates, and we finally uploaded the demo, which you can download and play on Steam right now. Thanks to this, we got a boost in wishlists, and I hope this gives us the push we need to make this visual novel a success.

Thanks to the demo, we have also been fixing issues reported by users, and we’ve been able to keep polishing the game. Apart from that, we have also been working on the remaining chapters and minigames.

This isn’t the kind of game I would usually work on, but we have been working on it for so long—at a really slow pace—that I have high expectations to see how the public receives it once it’s out.

Airport Security Guard

This game has been, by far, the most successful one I worked on this year. Airport Security Guard has been among the most played VR games on the Oculus Store almost since its release, and I am very proud of the work I was able to do on this one.

Since the company shared their vision for this game with me, I was so thrilled and optimistic about it that I was able to put a lot of love into it. I truly felt like it was a game I could have worked on in my spare time, and I felt I was able to put a lot of myself into it. Usually, at the company I work for, I make games more for a salary than for artistic motivation—but with this one, it felt different.

It was really nice to see how a game I believed in so deeply and worked on with so much passion reached that position in the store. Of course, this was also thanks to a lot of help from my team members, and I am so happy that we were able to work with total freedom for most of the time. I believe that the freedom we had was what gave the game its unique feeling and helped it reach where it did.

Animal Guys

After the success of Airport Security Guard, I was asked to start a new project with a huge multiplayer challenge, and I’m very happy that I got to lead the code architecture for the next VR game as well. This new project was Animal Guys.

Although it didn’t achieve the same level of success as Airport Security Guard, Animal Guys was a lot more fun to play with our users thanks to its multiplayer. This later led me to work on the multiplayer version of Airport Security Guard, which was also a lot of fun to play, but where I personally felt more engaged with other users.

Other projects

For Riverside Rumble, we didn’t add too much to it, but I can say it will most likely be released in January. Roberto finished everything that was missing on his side, and I am now wrapping it up, so hopefully you will be able to play it during the first month of 2026.

Meanwhile, throughout this year I have been working on small prototypes, most of which were just quick tests that were quickly discarded. It may sound a bit dramatic, but I think it’s important to do quick tests and be open to discarding them if you don’t feel like they are going to work.

Although some of them were quickly discarded, I am still working on two of them, and I may start sharing content related to those if I feel they are promising.

Wrap up

I don’t want to sound like a victim or try to make you feel pity for me. It has been an intense year. I felt a lot of burnout because of my work and my previous relationship. I pushed myself to keep working on what I love, to once again feel what I used to feel when I stayed up late working on my personal projects.

I know I’m still not there, but I feel like over the last two months—especially this last one—everything has improved dramatically. I hope that during 2026 I can get back to where I was in terms of motivation, while adding the experience and knowledge I now carry with me.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you start the year in a great way while occasionally playing any of my games. Thank you again, from the bottom of my heart.