The Creative Process #42 - My Year of Creativity

2025, the year of the far-flung future, is in the past. I greeted 2026 sprawled exhausted on my bed. The last two weeks I've been physically busy – assembling a new set of desks for my kids for Christmas, all the Christmas preparation, then parties for my mother-in-law's 70th, Christmas itself (with children who do not believe in sleeping in but to counter that, a wife who makes a perfect Christmas roast lunch), then a good number of days post-Christmas with my visiting father battling through some much-needed gardening, including chopping back an invasive vine that had strangled a whole area (as mentioned in #32). When I got to the night of the 31st of December, I was supposed to be making up stories for my kids as I put them to sleep, but kept wandering in my sentences as the dream world started to drag me into the depths. I missed fireworks and my yearly review with my wife. 2025 squeezed me dry.

I don't think anyone would claim 2025 was a light, breezy year. Mine was in no way bad, just very exhausting.

What I did in 2025

Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
-- Kurt Vonnegut

I followed the common playbook of thinking to myself: "I didn't do much this year" but then double-checked my notes and had found that I had actually done a lot. Not all of it was successful. Not all of it was completed.

Here's an abridged version of the creative work I did this year, in no particular order:

Fixed One True Love: I fixed some outstanding bugs in the game – in particular a whole path that was impossible to succeed in. I uploaded it to itch.

Let's Play of One True Love: I experimented with running through my game, narrating the entire thing and adding little comments. The experiment wasn't successful and I didn't publish it, but I learned a lot.

Made a 3d version of the front cover of Best of Text: Brian Rushton drew a cover for his book and I tried to make a similar version, but in Blender. The technical trickery to make the portal was completely wasted time.

Quit Duolingo and Twitter: While not creative endeavours, abandoning these sinks freed up a noticeable amount of time and energy.

Volunteered to be on the IFTF Grants Committee: I offered to help out Hugo Labrande and company with managing the grants process. I didn't do a huge amount, but chipped in where I could and did some video chats. This year's grants process has been great.

Volunteered to help with the IF Archive: Part of the fallout with the UK Online Safety Act was that a number of archived interactive fiction titles needed to be tagged for potentially problematic content, so that UK people might be blocked from seeing it. I helped tag a chunk of the archive and might try to help out more with the IF Archive.

Took up piano again: I mapped out an attempt to learn piano (again). My main approach was via Simply Piano which was pricey and perhaps not quite teaching me the correct things. It was nice making familiar sounds with the plinky-plonk keys, though. As was approaching a new hobby from the ground up and distorting my Youtube feed for a while.

Weight training: I finished my first year of weight training, which I never thought I'd get into. This was also a nice hobby to look at from the ground up, and see progress. I learned lots about motivation, discipline, mind and body, and being social and supportive.

Moved the newsletter to Ghost.io: Substack is quick becoming the Medium of newsletters, and the whole icky politics made me want to move. The move was easy and I don't think anyone complained.

Reverse Conway's Game of Life: Following a creative but technical idea I had, I wanted to get a Game of Life configuration that evolved to a pixel art image. This required a fair bit of technical know-how to approach this tricky problem, but was ultimately a failure. The aesthetics of pixel art and Game of Life don't mix well.

Wrote a guide to commissioning art: This was edition #36 of this newsletter and was well-received.

Wrote and submitted Anne of Green Cables to IF Comp 2025: I finished my major project of the year. It was a lot of work and it did okayish in the Comp. I think it deserved much more polish than I gave it, so I shouldn't have been disappointed with how it went.

Edited and submitted Cart to IF Comp 2025: A while ago I thought it'd be a flex to submit both Cart and Anne to a competition together. Well I did, and it wasn't really. But it was an interesting experience.

Reviewed IF Comp games: I wrote half a dozen reviews for other games in IF Comp, posted in the secret author's forum. I wasn't particularly pleased with what I wrote (I was burnt out) and want to rewrite my reviews for IFDB.

Prototyped a genetic programming demo: To do something completely different, I jumped into real-time games programming with Bevy in Rust. I wanted a demo of evolving artificial life, which has long been an interest of mine. I managed to get things on screen and the organisms would pulsate and rotate randomly based on their genes. I had to shelve the project for time constraints but am keen to do more experiments in this space.

Helped Mike demo Aloft at PAX Aus: I usually do solo hermit creative work, so to do public, social work demoing a friend's game was quite the change. It went spectacularly well. No publisher bites yet, though, which is madness to me.

Deep dived into Solo RPGs and Gamebooks: I explored hobbies adjacent to traditional interactive fiction and spent a lot of time/money/attention on these little corners of the world. This might be instructive for my endeavours in 2026.

That list is not at all a brag. It's more for me than anyone else to remind me that I've not been sitting around idle. And even if I had, that's okay.

What's next

The following are a list of titles of games that I want to work on in 2026. No context or explanation, just the titles:

• Void Space Pirate Radio
• The Submariner
• The Death of Alan Watts
• Emerson Sprylock: Gentleman Rascal (game book)
• Canopic Jar

The Submariner has been percolating in my head for a while now. Canopic Jar and Void Space Pirate Radio have been around for at least six months, Emerson Sprylock only a few months, and The Death of Alan Watts has been a very recent idea. If I finish any of these, I'll be pleased. I'm very focussed on having a long quality test/editing pass for each project. I feel I can successfully start and finish a project, but I really need to learn how to edit and polish for a lot longer than I usually give a project. So maybe even aiming to finish any of these in 2026 is unhelpful. Working on them remains a priority, though.

What's your 2026 look like, creatively? Any projects on the horizon? Any new things you're itching to try?