A quick reflection on 2025 and what to look forward on 2026

Hi all, thanks for taking the time to read this, if you've been reading other things I've written before allow me to extend my heartfelt thanks and wish you a happy new year. If this is the first time you read me allow me to give you a warm welcome and also wish you a happy new year.

I want to use some of this day to reflect back on what I worked on last year, most of it I'd say was behind the scenes as I didn't really release much on 2025. My biggest release includes this blog and a renewal of my website Crimson R Games, which in reality isn't much in the grand scheme of things, specially because after 13 years of working on those 2 it always feels more like I work on them but never really fill them as much as I would like to. Hopefully that starts changing on 2026.

However, another thing did see the light on 2025, and that's my mini demo (it really is that short) of WAVES, which was my entry for the Github Game Jam of 2025. So far I've gotten positive feedback on it and I will definitely complete the game but most likely I'll shift engines back to Godot, I'm no stranger of Godot, I've used it for CRB-5-digital fly which you can check out here, and other games released by companies I worked on which sadly aren't on the app store anymore but if you're curious I believe APK Pure has it, minor disclaimer, no one from our team uploaded that APK so I cannot fully say downloading that is safe, reader's discretion is advised. Anyway, back on topic, WAVES has it's open source repo available and I was meant to do a devlog for it but honestly I've been on crunch time at my job for the longest and all my free time and energy I have left to spare has been going to projects that aren't complete. So for now I'll save the details to when I finally get some time to truly give it a full devlog entry, which I may publish on itch instead of here, just because I feel itch will give me more visibility, and hopefully redirect traffic from there to here and vice versa, do check out my itch if you haven't btw: aldoram5 on itch.

What to look forward to in 2026

I have several projects I've been working on since a long time, so do look forward to them, I kinda want to keep most of them as a surprise for now specially because my time to work on games is very very limited and I kinda would like to find people with a similar mindset as me to work and collaborate together since making everything in a game is very very time consuming and taxing, as fun as it is, balancing out my full time career with my game developer aspirations is becoming very difficult and honestly it kinda impacts both my mental health and physical health. Having said that there's a sneak peek:

The colors will return soon

I will make an announcement soon, very very soon in fact about one of my games that started also as part of a game jam, and will be released very very soon. Please look forward to it.

WAVES will have a full release

I've gotten very good feedback with WAVES and Wavy which you can see at the post's header, this little demo which is heavily inspired by the arcade classics will see it's full release this year, when? it's too early to tell, as I said I plan to migrate to Godot, since I like more the visual aspect of it than with Phaser, specially when editing the levels, so migrating the gameplay loop will take a bit as well as derusting myself on Godot which I plan now to use C# instead of GDscript to future proof my games as the engine progresses.

Catgirl galore

Yep, I'm a big fan of catgirls, yet they haven't appeared in any of my games right? Well that's about to be over as I plan on releasing a game with them and CRB-5, who will finally get a normal name Roxanne, I don't want to disclose much of the game as originally this was meant to be a Puzzle challenge clone until I realized a very talented team released an open source version which also has pvp online, thus rendering my idea completely pointless, as such my kitties will have to be moved to a different game however I do wanna give a sneak peek of the new designs which I will most likely be releasing on my Pixiv as I reveal bios and such.

Also CRB-5, Roxanne, has a new design but will reveal it later as I'm not ready for it yet.

Project A

This is quite a premature announcement/mention, but this story has been in development since almost 6 to 7 years, but since it's a very big story I tend to leave it and then come back from time to time, but yes, this has been in the works as an ink text based game to a RenPy visual novel, and I believe it will definitely stay as a visual novel but yes, this is also in the works and I pray I can finally finish this by the end of the year.

And that's a wrap, 2025 was a year for a lot of learning for me, I practiced a lot my drawing, I need to improve my music skills and finally start using FL studio instead of just Garage band, 1bitdragon and LMMS, I want to create cool songs that fit these characters I'm creating. On 2025, I also had a lot of professional growth and I've been learning a lot about AI tools to use, definitely Claude Code remains my favorite so far and I would love to make a post on it but honestly there's a lot of it out there and I like talking about stuff like how I just did on this post. I look forward to 2026 with optimistic eyes, hopefully things get better and all the problems in the world + life's stress gets reduced and we get a very needed period of peace under all this chaos unfolding.

Aldo out.