2025 Yearly Recap

Welcome!

Hello hello! Welcome to 2026 and welcome to another yearly recap! If you want to check out previous years, head over here. I’m excited I’m still here doing gamedev and excited to share with you what I did in 2025.

Metrics

First thing’s first. The numbers! I have collected various cool metrics that pertain to my success (or lack thereof) in game development.

• Total net revenue includes all sources such as game sales, merch sales, publisher payments, contest prizes, merch, etc. The various vendor fees like Valve’s 30% and Etsy’s 7% has been subtracted.
• Followers is a combination of all the other platform followers such as bluesky, twitter, youtube, steam, itch, newgrounds, twitch, etc.

Another interesting thing to consider is how my own project management went. In 2025 I planned to do 72 tasks and completed 47 of them. Thats 65% completion. I find myself asking “Is completing 65% of the stuff you set out to do a lot or a little?” I’ll compare it to 2026’s ratio and decide then. Its addressed from both sides, smaller more achievable goals AND becoming better at actually working.

Noteworthy things from 2025

• Migrated to this website. The previous website had a blog section seperately and a landing page seperately.
• Published two new steam pages. Falling Thingies and Trash Force. Pending launch in 2026! 🤞
• Exhibited Falling Thingies at two in-person expo’s. (Musician for Falling Thingies Calvin was there in person)
• Started Twitch Streaming again! Managed to do 108 hours of uptime. Let’s try for double that!
• Pushed big updates to Charles the Bee and Pixel Fixel. Cementing them as things I can move on from and don’t have to think about as much.
• Made a suite of tools for various pre-production and production tasks for myself. These are the tools that are publically available here.
• Competed in 6 game jams, won one. That’s 6 more Blue Pin Studio mini games out there!
• Wrote 21 blog posts (including this one). That’s basically twice as many as last year!
• Created a steam bundle for games similar to Eggnog Incorporated called the Corporate Climb Bundle
• Co-created a minecraft server with a bunch of other game devs. All of our communities can co-exist in this online space that we’ll evolve over time. Check my discord for more info!

Extra Tidbit

Here is how each year compares to the previous year

Musings

Last year I wrote that I had the best year and worst year simultaneously and was hoping 2025 would be better. Was it better financially? Not really. But it was better in all other aspects of life. I made more money from my day job than the previous year and managed to still do game development a lot.

As I’ve mentioned in the December 2025 monthly recap post, I aim for 2026 to be the best year for Blue Pin Studio to-date. And I’m not talking about simply making a few thousand dollars. I’m going to try to break into the 5 digits gosh darn it. In my mind I’ve framed the first 5 years as a valuable education where I spent 5 years part-time learning the ropes, tuning my skills, meeting cool people. The next 5 years is when I cash in all of that education and start doing game development properly.

There are concerns amongst game developers and people at-large that A.I. will make artistic endeavors even less profitable than ever. It has also never been easier to make cool games, so there are lots of humans joining in too. Will these two factors affect my ability to succeed? I doubt it, but who knows! I’ll surely let you know by this time in 2026 how it all went.

Thank you following along, thank you for playing the games, thank you for hanging out and chatting. Thanks to everyone for everything! Let’s have a great 2026! :)

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