Now that I've pretty much recovered from the flu I'm feeling well enough to review the year, as is tradition. Let's take a look back at what I've done this year, compare it to the goals I set myself at the start of 2025 and think about what I want to do in the future.

What I did in 2025

I spent the vast majority of the year working on Hyper Bun Buster. Back at the start of January, this is how it looked:

At the time, this was by far the best-looking thing that I had ever created. I was convinced that I had hit the peak of my ability when it came to pixel art, and that I would never be able to make anything that looked better than this.

Here's how the game looks now:

Everything is squashing, stretching and bouncing. Coins, stars and other particles are flying all over the place. Tess is enthusiastically swinging her hammer instead of just kinda holding it out and rotating on the spot, enemies and bosses flash to indicate their attacks, and the environments have paths, cracks and other sprites instead of just being big plain rectangles. I never thought I would make anything that looked even remotely this good.

Hyper Bun Buster didn't have any sound effects whatsoever at the start of 2025. Not only that, I didn't really know how to make the kinds of sound effects that I wanted the game to have either. Thankfully I made a lot of progress on that front this year, making most of the main combat and UI sound effects. It's so much more satisfying to hit enemies around now!

On the gameplay side of things, the combat encounters now have much more variety than before. There are now all sorts of unique and memorable arcade-style combat encounters, whereas almost every fight in earlier versions of the game took place against two waves of randomly spread-out enemies in a relatively rectangular arena. The arcade mode stages are all pretty much finished at this point too (barring playtester feedback), including a couple of new stages that I sneaked into the game in the last couple of months.

I announced the game to the public this year, along with a playable demo at SAGE 2025! I was completely overwhelmed by the response. I received more enthusiastic feedback from this demo than I have from anything else I have ever done in my life, with the possible exception of coming out as trans. Thank you so much to everyone who played the demo, streamed it, or gave any feedback or comments!

Despite all the improvements to Hyper Bun Buster, I didn't finish making any games this year. Mina the Hollower was the last game I worked on before I went full-time indie in 2021 and I thought people would at least get to play that game this year for their fix of a new game that I technically worked on, but that game got delayed until 2026 too. But just because I didn't release any games doesn't mean I didn't release anything at all. The extremely silly Arcade Game Name Generator is one of my favorite things I have ever made, participating in the Indie Game Cheats zine with my friends was a fun time, and releasing my game engine's random number generation code as an open source single-header C library (mel_rng.h) taught me a lot about how to clean up my code for public use.

This year I decided to start releasing my games as DUCK_BERET instead of C.T. Matthews, although I haven't finished renaming all my websites (such as my Patreon) yet. I'm much happier with this new name, and it better suits the atmosphere I want my games to have. Speaking of rebranding, I switched the avatar that I use for my Twitch streams to this character that my friend NomnomNami designed for me in January:

I love how she looks! I've had a great time streaming this year, and frankly I think a large part of it is because of I get to see this cute character every time I do it.

To round off the year, I drew some pixel art fanart of my friend Zoey:

I had a great time drawing this! I'd really like to start drawing more outside of work, especially when I've finished animating Hyper Bun Buster's bosses and presumably learned more about drawing humanoid characters in the process.

I think that's everything I've done in 2025 that's remotely related to making games. But the most important thing that happened to me this year is that I've gained a lot of self-confidence, met lots of new people and made lots of friends. My social life today is completely unrecognisable compared to a year ago and I am so much happier and more fulfilled than I thought I ever would be.

Did I hit the goals I set at the start of the year?

Here are my goals for 2025 that I set at the start of the year, along with whether or not I achieved them:

Learn to make arcade-style sound effects. Yes! I love my game's sound effects.

Rebrand my game development "studio". Yes! I'm DUCK_BERET now.

Keep making games for people who like arcade games. Yes! All of my effort this year has gone into my game's arcade mode and into learning skills that willl help me make more arcade-style games in the future.

Release Hyper Bun Buster. Nope.

Try really hard to get my game engine's online multiplayer working on Nintendo Switch. again. Nope.

Try really hard to get my game engine running in web browsers and on Android. Uh oh.

Consider adding two player co-op to Ducky's Delivery Service. Oh dear.

Make and release a tiny arcade-style game for fun. Oh no.

And here are the extra goals I set for myself in the middle of 2025:

Don't put non-arcade modes in my future games. This isn't really something I can check off but it's a good idea! Such a good idea, in fact, that it might stick around as one of my 2026 goals.

Make it easier to prototype new games in my engine. I haven't done this yet either. It's still a good idea though.

Make smaller games and release them faster. That isn't really something I can check off yet; it's just a goal for the future.

So no, I didn't come close to hitting any of the game development milestones that I had set for myself at the start of the year. Why is that? I can think of a few possible reasons.

Back at the very start of 2025, my plan was to take Hyper Bun Buster as it existed back then and finish it up as soon as I could. I might have been able to manage this on a good year, if everything went smoothly. However, I instead decided to spend a few months learning to make my games look and sound even better, and even more time improving the level design. I'm not sure whether or not that was technically a good decision from a financial point of view, but it made the game better and that's what matters the most to me.

As for the other tasks (Nintendo Switch multiplayer, web/Android builds, Ducky co-op and cleaning up my engine code so I can use it for small games), I felt like it was more important to work on Hyper Bun Buster. Those are all good ideas, but in retrospect I think they're things I should work on when I've finished Hyper Bun Buster or when I'm desperate for a break, not things I should force myself to do in the middle of game's production cycle.

Another possible reason for getting less work done is that I have much more of a social life now. Up until early this year, it was embarrassingly common for me to find myself with nothing to do during a weekend so I would just default to working on my game to fill the time. There's nothing wrong with working on your game a lot, of course, but it can become a problem if it's literally the only thing that you're ever doing. I don't have that problem anymore, so I'm much less likely to work tons of overtime than I used to.

And finally, I've been ill a lot this year. I've had countless doctor visits about chronic headaches this year, and I've been on and off some medicine that helped to an extent but came with some severe side effects of its own. I'm fighting a tension headache while I write this post right now. It sucks, and it has made it much harder to get any work done. Hopefully things improve soon.

So that's why I'm sitting here at the end of 2025 with no finished Hyper Bun Buster, no other small finished games and no web/Android ports for my engine. I'm genuinely sorry to anyone who wanted the game to be done this year, and I hope this post helps explain why it didn't happen. I hope you enjoy the finished game!

My 2026 goals

Release Hyper Bun Buster. For real this time. I love the game as it is, and unless it runs into any serious issues while being playtested I just want to finish it up and release it at its current quality level.

Don't put non-arcade modes in my future games. I sincerely hope that Hyper Bun Buster's adventure mode helps lots of non-arcade players enjoy the game, and I'm glad I'm making it. But making it has taken up a lot of my time, and in my future games I don't want to put in this much time into modes that I'm not a personal fan of. Instead of just trying to give non-arcade players something that plays close to the games they already play, I would arguably be better off spending that time making my arcade-style games look so cool that people can't resist trying them out anyway. If I want to help ease those players in, I would rather do that by adding helpful tutorials and practice modes. We've recently seen the developers of several arcade-style games try to expand their audiences by making extremely beginner-focused beat 'em ups and shmups with drastically simplified mechanics, extended campaigns and/or roguelike elements to ease in new players. In my opinion the best any of these games can hope to achieve is to sell lots of copies to new players who all then turn around and say "well I liked this one game, but all other arcade games still suck". I'm not interested in striving to become another example of this, and I would rather that my future games instead do their best to create new actual fans of their respective arcade genres. That way I would be growing the audience for all my arcade-style gamedev friends instead of just for myself!

Come up with a decent way of prototyping small games. Ideally I'd like to simplify my engine codebase enough that it's easy for me to spin up a new prototype game from scratch, but as a last resort I could always learn how to use an off-the-shelf engine just for prototypes. I just want to be able to make small game jam games for fun.

Get a better haircut and some better clothes. I'm pretty happy with how I look and I'm doing great socially these days, but I still have the classic "I'm afraid to get a haircut so I just let my hair grow out" haircut and I usually dress almost the same as I did before I transitioned. I think I would be happier if I changed those things.

Anyway, those are my goals for 2026. Wow, I sure did write a lot about wanting to make the games that I want to make, instead of compromising what makes them cool in the first place in an attempt to appeal to the masses. I suppose it's not that surprising that a trans person is adamant about wanting to authentically express herself instead of just doing what society expects of her, now that I think about it.

I wish you the best of luck with your goals for this year!