I keep trying to convince my six-year old daughter that when my wife and I were kids, the year 2025 was the far-flung future, full of flying cars and robots. She’s more obsessed with the idea that we were alive in the 1800s and had to light a wood stove to eat stewed rabbits, until I explain to her that the 80s and the 1800s are different time periods. Did I mentioned she’s recently been watching Back In Time For… ?

Regardless, it seems absurd to be drifting into 2025. But to ease the transition, I’ve been reflecting on the year past and what’s ahead.

My 2024

After consulting my notes and calendar, I’m reminded that 2024 was a huge, bulging-at-the-seams, two-years-for-the-price-of-one sort of year.

Creatively I managed a few good wins. I completed two pieces, One True Love and Cart (currently unreleased). These two pieces are polar opposites in tone, writing style and gameplay.

One True Love is really about making one choice in a game with some tiny systems at play. You are a princess who has succeeded in all her tasks except one: to release your one true love from a curse that turned them into a frog. When you go to kiss him to release him from the curse… you find two nearly indistinguishable frogs. So you need to make a choice despite the situation. You might choose one frog over another. You might choose to just walk away and take the L. If you dally too long, a hungry turtle might make a choice for you.

Cart is a brutal story about a person who starts in the absolute pit of poverty in pre-industrial England. Refusing to die, they hear the local dung collector has been killed and his cart — and job — is available. It’s really a exploration of authoritarianism and violence. I’ve managed some excellent writing, but it is a hard, hard slog of a read. I haven’t released it because it felt a little too topical at the time, and may only get moreso. Plus it’s hard to get beta-testers with a content warning like this:

I’m glad to have finished it, and I hope to maybe put it in Spring Thing 2025. IF Comp 2025 seems a bit too far away.

In between One True Love and Cart I explored some projects in yet more orthogonal directions.

I deep dived into Pico 8 for a hot month, and worked on a gag arcade sequel to One True Love with 2TRU2LUV, following the Fast and the Furious school of naming ridiculous sequels. You had to chase frogs around a swamp, avoiding a turtle and not getting wet. There was a bit of a learning curve to the project, and I got, like, 70% of the way there.

Around the same time I wrote the start of Adventures of <redacted>, a Bevy game for my daughter. It was designed to be a bunch of minigames, aimed for fun, family and maybe sneaking in some lessons about mathematics, language or life. Really this was just me learning Bevy, physics-based games and little things like implementing particle physics. I want to return to that project, although it’s currently in a broken state as I was trying to refactor to put in different biomes in a sled game.

Anne of Green Cables

In 2023 I finished my big project Hand Me Down, which did okay at IF Comp. One True Love and Cart were tiny projects, aimed at using some of the Twine interactive fiction skills I built up during Hand Me Down. But it was time to move to the next project.

My main creative effort in 2024 was Anne of Green Cables, a cyberpunk reimagining of the classic tale. I spent a lot of time working out the plot and setting, reading the books, prototyping mini-games and attempting to create art for it. I have big plans for it, but this year was a good reminder of how projects scale exponentially.

Anne is a choice-based game, but I wanted it to look great. Art is a good way to break up all the text, and a little design can go a long way. However, creating art is hard, especially when you’re an early journeyman artist like myself. Trying to create whilst also learning turns out to be two jobs at once!

So while I have a lot of pieces of Anne lying about, it’s not enough to assemble into a completed piece yet. 2025 is the year!

(I have daydreamed of finishing Anne, and another small project, and entering both plus Cart into a single competition as some sort of creative flex. Way too ambitious for these creative muscles and creative timelines!)

Attempted and abandoned

While I’m proud of finishing two projects, and doing a lot of legwork on the third, I also recognize that I started some things and intentionally dropped them.

One was an experiment. At our weekly RPG sessions, I seemed to be volunteered to be the loot archivist. This mostly involves the DM quickly rattling off a complicated list of items and me struggling to record them on paper, then laboriously updating a Google Sheet of everything. It’s suboptimal in many ways. I kept hearing about people getting AI to write a complete app for them, so I tried writing an online Pathfinder Item tracker. While the AI could put some elements together, once I started thinking about making it available on the web, plus having each player log in, it got way too complicated and the AI didn’t particularly help forge a path through all that. It did, however, do a good first pass at transcribing the messy notes from a photo.

The other I hope to reinstate in 2025: sketching. For a few months I managed to find time and space to do some pencil sketching and try to improve my skills. I think I understand most of the skills — breaking things down into shapes, getting good silhouettes, negative space etc — but somewhere between brain and hand it goes awry. The obvious solution is to try it ten thousand times, but I didn’t have quite the time, space or dedication for that in 2024. But like I blurted out when my physical trainer asked for a quote for their quote board: discipline beats inspiration. I wasn’t disciplined enough to make it a routine. I’ll keep trying.

The Year Ahead

I know a lot of people are not looking forward to 2025. I’m trying a different tack. While I’m quite aware that next year might be very rough for people, the framing I’m going with is that I’m planning to do good things. The jerks presumably have jerk plans but those aren’t my plans.

My first two months look exhausting already. I’m the logistics guy for a month-long workshop. So January will be preparing for the workshop, and February will be the workshop. I’ve been really keen on some idle, creative time but I won’t get that until March.

Knowing myself in the past, when life is busy, I can sometimes do good creative work alongside it. It’s a matter of balancing momentum and burn-out. I’m taking it carefully as I don’t want to start 2025 on burn-out.

Yearly theme

I mildly like the idea of yearly themes, as proposed by the podcast Cortex. Rather than resolutions or task lists, it’s a good idea to have a theme as a guiding light.

In 2024 I couldn’t find a good theme, I don’t think. Retrospectively it was the Year of Finishing Small Things. Which is a good theme, I think.

After some reflection I will attempt the Year of Resonance. This ties together a number of recent thoughts, feeling and experiences I’ve had. At times, like for One True Love and Cart, or even my new physical training regime, things aligned and with a medium amount of effort, I found good results.

Conversely, in many little aspects of life, I’ve noticed that while something isn’t objectively bad, the vibe is off. My office, for example, I make work. It is messy though, and I catch myself thinking, “Urgh” every time I walk in. I could make excuses about time and energy, but it’s more important to notice the dissonance in what I want for that space, and what it is.

My plan is to regularly tune my life to things that resonate with me. Seek out resonance, and gently recalibrate dissonance.

Every week I have a task to spend Wednesday night processing the inbox of my notes. This should be me evaluating, deleting, reshaping or refiling. I rarely do this. I plan to replace this with a prompt-based “weekly tuning session”. I’ll try to notice resonances and dissonances, and adapt accordingly. For Christmas my wife got me some really cool custom notebooks that I plan to use for the task.

Every day (seemingly every hour) Duolingo nags at me to practice Japanese. Technically it is teaching me Japanese, but really it just feels like it wants me to engage with the app with learning Japanese as an accidental outcome. I’ve long felt this dissonance, so once I hit my 500 day daily streak, I’m going to ditch it.

This year I recognized disliking Twitter and all it stood for, and deleting my account took a huge amount of destructive energy out of my life.

Sketching, reading and learning to play the piano resonate with me, but I need to find a way to tune it into my life.

Creatively I think an occasional tune-in to big projects, and then naturally slide into smaller ones resonates with me. I am still very keen on making cool, small things for my cool, small communities.

I feel resonance works best. It’s not about perfection but calibration. It’s not wayfinding or reaching a destination, but walking a good path. I recognize a good path when I’m on it, but I can’t yet say what the conditions are.

New Year, New You?

Thanks, readers, for another year of following me on my creative journey. As a last little creative thing for 2024, I did my yearly Christmas-themed Blender render.

How was your 2024? What did you learn or try? What’s your creative plans for 2025?

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