For the past three years I’ve written a little end-of-year summary/review for myself over on itch-io, and figured it might be nice to share here too! It’ll be a bunch of data on my projects including income (I always figure this is useful information for other creatives to compare), plus my personal thoughts on each of my projects released this year, along with some general thoughts and plans for 2026.
Beginning with…
DATA
Overall stats for all projects over the lifetime of my itch page, and direct comparisons of performance across the last 3 years:
| LIFETIME | 2023 Only | 2024 Only | 2025 Only | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Page Views | 164,372 | 25,500 | 53,681 | 71,659 |
| Downloads | 30,990 | 6,076 | 11,180 | 10,114 |
| Browser Plays | 31,616 | 576 | 8,390 | 19,794 |
| Gross Payments | $2,263.88 | $641.00 | $1,152.22 | $464.66 |
| Ratings | 378 | 89 | 133 | 120 |
| Followers | 1385 | Unknown | 539 | 290 |
And the same stats broken down according to the type of project (game, fonts, music etc.), for the lifetime of my itch page only:
| Page Views | Downloads | Plays | Revenue | Ratings | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Assets | 6,841 | 860 | N/A | $58.00 | 15 |
| Fonts | 74,941 | 16,862 | N/A | $2012.27 | 145 |
| Games | 52,217 | 4,763 | 19,548 | $24.00 | 123 |
| Music | 27,141 | 8,195 | 10,964 | $164.61 | 81 |
| Tools | 3,232 | 310 | 1,104 | $5.00 | 14 |
Without going into too much detail, there’s a few key points to summarise:
- Reduced income in 2025
My gross income for this year is less than half that of last year, but given that fonts have always been my best selling work here and I only released four this year that’s hardly a big surprise. I suspect leaving Twitter has also had an impact on my reach, although no regrets on that front as I can’t justify engaging with that fascist shithole. - Increased Views and Browser Plays
This initially looks impressive, but that’s more or less entirely due to the release of Hangman (Very Illegal), which has to date gained in excess of 20k views and 10k plays. Clearly there’s a huge market for games tagged with Adult/NSFW! Once this is filtered out my stats look remarkably similar to last year. - Fonts remain popular
No surprises here!
PROJECTS
Very much an idea rather than a fully realised game, with just not enough content to make for particularly interesting gameplay. Still, I liked the concept and atmosphere, and would release a refined version later in the year.
A teeny-tiny bullet hell made for TriJam, as I’d had a rough few weeks and just wanted to quickly make and release something. Fun enough, although not much to say as it’s pretty trivial. I really liked the sprite for the lead character so ended up making a much more substantial sequel.
I also really, really hate that the music doesn’t loop perfectly.
A little momentum-based racing game – I never got the physics to feel quite right, and the controls in the original jam version could have used refining, but there’s some enjoyment to be had trying to get a perfect lap.
The standout here was the settings menu, which the player interacts with by bashing into physical buttons in the game world. It’s playful in a way that appealed to a lot of commentors – might be fun to try something like this again!
Note: web version not recommended, as the water shader does not play nicely in the html build for some unknown reason.
Battery Acid Boy 2 was a challenge to myself: I wanted to take a simple concept, explore it properly then make it tight, juicy and feature complete – a Real Game, essentially, even if only a small one.
The final game is a pretty straightforward arcade bullet hell, but I’m really pleased with how it turned out! Gameplay feels pretty good, incentivising the player to put themselves into dangerous positions so they can get the laser active more frequently, and with a nice range of enemies that encourage different approaches. In retrospect the difficulty curve could have used some adjustment, especially the early game which gets tedious on repeated playthroughs, but I still enjoy an occasional run!
Equally important though was learning how to put together all of the little details outside of gameplay that make for a complete experience. This included, amongst other things, full control remapping, an interactive tutorial, online leaderboards, palette swaps, retaining settings across play sessions, animated scene transitions – the list kept expanding, and it was eye opening to see partly just how long each of these takes, but also how much each adds to the final release.
I’m particularly happy with the music on this one: for a long time I’ve felt that I’ve been stagnating musically, reusing the same tricks and progressions across many tracks, so trying something new with this more percussive and abrasive style was a welcome change of pace.
A revised and much improved take on Closer, with some heavy inspiration from Balatro and Buckshot Roulette. There really are a lot of issues with this game: serious balancing issues (voidborn/economy powerups OP, building around actual heads is non-viable), difficulty following the score during rounds, overdone lighting and shaders, some terrible 3d animation and an atmosphere that I’m not sure really lands.
With all that said though, when a run’s going well I actually really enjoy this? With a little lucky RNG getting a good run with some synergistic powerups feels great, and I’m quite fond of the slightly obtuse and very clunky interface, especially when entering commands using the number pad.
Hangman (Very Illegal)
I’m not going to directly link to this one as it’s very much NSFW and not sure where it’d fall on forum rules - if you want to find it it’s easy enough to find via my itch page though!
This is barely a game, frankly, and was created during a weekend of intense frustration at the UK government’s tech illiteracy and performative censorship. It’s quite funny then that it’s ended up being my most popular game by quite a significant margin with over 10,000 plays at the time of writing.
I absolutely stand by the accompanying message, but naturally there’s not all that much to say about the game itself – it’s just hangman. It was a great excuse to practice 1-bit art though, and to draw content that’s way outside of my usual subject matter!
Outside of games I didn’t release much this year, with only 4 fonts, a handful of music tracks (and those primarily taken from jam games) and a few new pieces of pixel art.
Stray Thoughts
On a personal level, 2025 has been rough, but there’s been some highlights here and there!
Firstly, music releases this year have been absolutely incredible! Some highlights: Getting Killed by Geese, It’s a Beautiful Place by Water From Your Eyes, EURO-COUNTRY by CMAT, LUX by ROSALIA, Man’s Best Friend by Sabrina Carpenter, Headlights by Alex G, Now Would Be A Good Time by Folk Bitch Trio, Fancy That by Pink Pantheress, Alex by Daughter of Swords, I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away by Hayden Pedigo, caroline 2 by caroline, Heavy Metal by Cameron Winter (I don’t care in the slightest that it came out in December 24 I’m having it), Trying Not To Have A Thought by Algernon Cadwallader and I’m sure many, many more because this year has been ridiculous for music.
Leaving Twitter was frightening as it was, for a long time, the primary driver of traffic to my projects, but in 2025 I just couldn’t justify remaining there. To my relief it’s seemingly had very little impact on traffic too!
And finally, I discovered this place! I’ve been having an absolutely wonderful time here - everyone has been incredibly welcoming, I love the range and depth of discussions (and the fact that I get to shitpost about spiders as much as I want!), and the slower pace and neatly organised threads is much more comfortable to me than trying to keep up with a busy Discord server. Thank you again Alien Bob for making such a fantastic space for us!
Last Year's Resolutions
This time last year I set out a three resolutions, which I described as “more achievable” than the previous year. Predictably enough for such a confident declaration I only managed one out of the three:
-
Private demo for main project: FAILED
-
Main Project: finish existing areas, add one new biome: FAILED
Honestly, I can’t say I’m too torn up about either of these. This project was a platformer metroidvania, which was fun enough but not especially unique and would have taken a good year or two to get ready for a release. Seems a shame to throw it away altogether so I might polish what I have and upload as a demo, but moving on to something a little more interesting as my main project was the right move.
- More Game Jams: SUCCESS (Kind of)
While only 3 of the games I made were jam games, I released 6 overall this year so I’m just going to go ahead and call this a success.
I really enjoyed this year’s approach with revisiting jam games and releasing expanded versions – might be an approach I continue in future (I have discovered prototyping!)
2026 Resolutions
1. The Bigger Picture
My focus this year was often just to get a bunch of games released, and I highly recommend this for new devs – learning how to make, polish and release a project from start to finish is really important, as is the feedback you receive from just getting something published online.
That being said, almost all of my projects to date have been essentially tiny prototypes made for game jams with little reason to revisit outside of the jam’s voting period. By contrast, Battery Acid Boy 2, whilst still short and simple, felt like something I’d actually enjoy coming back to for a quick run every so often, and I’d love to have a few more games made with a comparable scope.
I’m well on my way to making the first, an as-yet untitled Game Boy-style survival horror game:
All of this isn’t to say I won’t participate in game jams – I really enjoy them! – but the main focus will be a handful of short but polished projects for 2026.
2. Milestones
I’m up to 29 games and 28 fonts released, so at the very least I should get both up to a nice round 30 :)
That about rounds the year off for me - best of luck to everyone in 2026! Looking forward to spending more time with you all here and seeing what everyone else is working on 