GBGames

Despite making a note to myself to do so, I didn’t spend as much time in December reviewing the past year and planning the next year, which is why my new year post is so late into the new year.

Last year, I set the following actionable goals for 2025:

• Publish at least 1 free game by June 30th
• Publish major Toytles:Leaf Raking quality improvement update (including demo) by December 31st

I also had the following aspirations (that is, goals I didn’t have control over so I don’t call them goals):

• Earn 2 sales per month (+24 sales) by December 31st
• Increase newsletter subscribers by 1 per month (+12) by December 31st

How did it go?

My Goals

Published Freshly Squeezed Entertainment Game – DONE

I did it! You can play my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project Clown Alley Creator, a family-friendly creativity tool for creating your own fun and zany clowns!

Well, technically it wasn’t done by June 30th. It was published on July 5th.

But I will count it as a win because the game was ready to be published, and I had to wait for reviewers at a couple of app stores. Next time, I should anticipate that kind of lead time.

What was intended to be a six month project took about nine months, from initial design to publication.

Why the difference? Well, I will create a post-mortem for the project soon, and I’ll share what lessons I’ve learned then.

But for now, I will say that I was fairly happy with how the project progressed, and it seemed well-received by players.

Published Toytles: Leaf Raking update and demo – NOT DONE

Toytles: Leaf Raking is my current flagship title, originally published in 2016.

Which means that 2026 is going to be its 10 year anniversary!

As I said multiple times last year, I wanted to celebrate by updating it with better visuals, audio, and game play. I started to call it a Major Update(tm).

After I finished Clown Alley Creator, I spent time trying to promote it, and I didn’t get started on Toytles: Leaf Raking right away.

In fact, I felt a bit unfocused, and it took me many weeks to get back into my game development routine.

When I finally had a new plan, it coincided with getting into the end of the year holidays, a notoriously unproductive time. I decided to set my sights a bit lower to at least have a significant internal update.

So before the end of the year, I wanted to release a new version of Toytles: Leaf Raking that should otherwise look and feel the same, but it will have an upgrade of libSDL from v2 to v3. I use libSDL as a cross-platform library that lets me make my games and have them play on many platforms. It is how all of my games currently support desktop and mobile across five operating systems without requiring a lot of effort to support it.

Most of the porting work was relatively easy thanks to the fairly well-written libSDL migration guide, and I had the game running with libSDL3 fairly quickly.

Well, without audio.

I used the audio management library libSDL_mixer for my audio, and the change to libSDL3 meant that libSDL_mixer was completely overhauled, which meant that my own code needed to be overhauled when it came to audio.

Between not putting in many hours of work into it and not having a clean design for the new audio code, I floundered, and the end of the year came and went without a new Toytles: Leaf Raking release.

My Aspirational Outcomes

Earn at least 2 sales per month by December 31st (Target: 24) – 9

I definitely fell short here, and it was mainly because I didn’t have much of a promotion strategy. I didn’t want to do a bunch of random social media posts or pay for ads without those tactics being grounded in something bigger.

In fact, early in the year I had planned to create a free booklet about games and online safety, but I switched focus and spent time trying to figure out what that bigger promotion strategy would be. I didn’t expect to find a universal perfect solution (or else everyone would already be doing it), but I did want to have something to inform the tactics I might employ.

For instance, if I wanted to establish GBGames as an expert for parents who care about privacy and ensuring that their kids are not bombarded with invasive advertising, perhaps that means I focus a lot on writing for that audience. Maybe I still create that free booklet, but now I have much better idea of what I am trying to accomplish with that booklet.

But as usual, I found myself focusing most of my available time on game development. Even when I did finish Clown Alley Creator, I spent most of my promotion time creating social media posts and sending out press releases for the next couple of months.

What’s kind of annoying is that most of those 9 sales of Toytles: Leaf Raking most likely can’t be attributed directly to my own efforts. It turned out a somewhat viral incremental game about raking leaves was released, and coinciding with its release was a spike in traffic and a few purchases of my game.

That’s right. I probably can’t even feel good about the low sales numbers I did get.

I mean, I’ll take the sales, and to be fair, I kept the game alive and working all these years to be available for those customers, but I don’t want to hope I get lucky that something like this will happen again and frequently enough to earn any significant amount of money.

GBGames Curiosities Newsletter subscribers net increase (Target: 12) — net 2

I gained 3 subscribers and lost one of them for a net gain of 2 new newsletter subscribers. Positive numbers are good, but it is still a very low number compared to where I wanted to be.

Once again, my lack of promotion is primarily the problem. However, there was a technical problem that I didn’t know about for months that could have also impacted things.

See, my Freshly Squeezed Entertainment line of games is part of my product development strategy.

The general idea is to quickly create relatively polished prototypes as complete playable experiences, release them for free to make it easier for them to find an audience, and hope that if enough people love them that they’ll be willing to sign up for the newsletter and give me feedback, and if enough people really love a particular game, I can then decide to make a “deluxe” version for sale with the expectation that I’ll have an audience already willing to pay for it.

And you know what? After Clown Alley Creator was released, I could see that people were visiting the newsletter sign-up form on my website from the game.

Now to be clear, I do NOT track anyone’s data in my games. I don’t want to do anything creepy like that, no matter how normalized it is in the industry as a whole.

But my website does track visitors the way almost any website does, and so the links in my games append a little information to the URL to let me know what game is sending the traffic, for instance.

And I can see that I got hundreds of visitors from Clown Alley Creator whereas I got way, way fewer visitors from my first Freshly Squeezed Entertainment, Toy Factory Fixer.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t translating into people actually signing up. I chalked it up to perhaps not offering a strong enough incentive to do so. Ah, well. Maybe the next game might do even better.

But then near the end of the year, I was checking some very, very old messages somewhere, most of which were spam (which is why I never check them), when I saw one person in August said that my newsletter signup form was broken.

And sure enough, it was!

I fixed it (it turned out that I had the same MailChimp signup form for many years and for some reason it stopped working relatively recently, but creating a new signup form seemed to do the trick), but it does mean I had months in which potential visitors interested in signing up for my newsletter couldn’t!

So I’m hoping that people continue to play the game and visit the site over the next few months, and with the working signup forms, I’m hoping that I get way more than 2 signups.

Speaking of, do YOU want to signup for the free GBGames Curiosities newsletter? You get free Player’s Guides to my existing and future games for free!

Analysis

I successfully worked my plan and got a third game published. I feel confident that I can do it again in a similar amount of time, and I think I learned some things about managing the project and prioritization that should help me deliver games faster.

I did not, however, get a major update for Toytles: Leaf Raking out. I didn’t even get a minor update out, unless you count the update I did to comply with ever-changing app store requirements, which I don’t. The libSDL3 update started out well, but it feels bad that I somehow spent a couple of months of calendar time and still didn’t get the audio part finished.

Despite tracking time for promotion, I am not sure how much good it did. Most of my early effort wasn’t actually DOING promotion so much as figuring out a strategy, and later when I was actively trying to promote Clown Alley Creator, I started to wonder just how impactful it was to spend time on my daily social media posting and sending out press releases.

But Clown Alley Creator seemed to be one of my more popular games, and it seems like people are playing it. Too bad I was oblivious to my mailing list signup form being broken for months to take advantage of the people potentially interested in signing up for it.

In the time between working on Clown Alley Creator and working on Toytles: Leaf Raking, I found myself updating all of my games for compliance with app stores before a deadline, which took some time away that I didn’t anticipate. I somehow need to find a way to be more productive AND allow for slack in my schedule to allow me to attend to things like this.

Also during that time, I found myself a bit knocked off course. I was steadily working on Clown Alley Creator, with a daily habit that often added up to 5-15 hour weeks, and then when I was done working on it, I felt like I didn’t know what to do without my regular development work there to keep me focused. Even when I had a list, and I knew what I could be working on, whether related to promotion or planning the next project, I just didn’t seem to be able to do so.

It was somewhat of an unplanned hiatus, one in which I felt like I should be doing something but wasn’t. I think the lesson is that I need to plan some deliberate downtime for the end of a project. I once had a very intense month-long project that took me months to recover enough to work on the next project, so maybe this isn’t a new insight. But I need the break, I need to recharge, and I need to make sure I am purposeful about it.

I have found that I can do the work indefinitely after I set myself on a particular trajectory. That is, after doing the hard work of planning, I can work the plan. I can even adapt the plan, sometimes significantly, and still continue on.

But momentum changes seem to be challenging for me, even if ostensibly the day to day should be the same. Switching from one project to another, I went from being slow and steady and consistent to just being slow and inconsistent.

It would be one thing if I can claim that the reason I was struggling was that I was bored of the older project or didn’t find it compelling, but I don’t think either of those statements are true. I’m pretty excited about the new Toytles: Leaf Raking updates, in fact.

What might impact things is that the country I live in has had a very, very rapid slide towards authoritarianism in the last year, so maybe my struggle comes more from struggling to justify my time working on games when I could be doing something to connect with my neighbors and friends more often.

Some numbers

I spent 252 hours on game development, at least 100 fewer hours than each of the last couple of years.

For comparison, a full-time developer working 40-hour weeks would have accomplished the same thing in 1.5 months.

I’ll try not to think about those numbers too hard.

I did 34.75 hours of writing and published 51 blog posts and 11 newsletters.

I did 1.75 hours of video development and published 0 videos, unless you count the trailers I created for Clown Alley Creator. I just didn’t focus on video creation at all.

I spent 67.50 hours on promotion efforts. I sent out a press release to 95 outlets and content creators over the course of four months. Most of them never replied or reported anything that I am aware of. I didn’t track how many published social media posts I created.

I earned less than $25, most of which I won’t see until this year due to how the app stores don’t pay out until a month or two after the sale.

I spent almost $4,000, about twice as much as last year, but most of the cost is due to getting myself a new computer to replace my main machine that I’ve had for over 10 years, plus getting a new LED printer to replace the one that used to complain about the ink not being legitimate even if it was.

These numbers are obviously not very sustainable.

As for personal goals, I think I am doing a good job maintaining a healthy-ish body.

I kept up my walking routine from the previous year, and I walked a total of 62 hours. Aside from a couple of instances when my lower back was bothering me slightly, I found my morning stretching routine seemed to keep me in fit enough shape to handle day to day life.

In fact, a few times I found that I was able to shovel snow or even carry heavy logs to help my wife’s family when they were cutting down trees, and I felt great afterwards.

While the last half of 2024 ended with me not doing any push-ups due to my wrist hurting, I started the year at 5 push-ups a day and then a couple of weeks later I was doing 10 push-ups a day. I think I intended to eventually go to 20 or more push-ups per day, but I decided not to push it, and I ended up doing them almost every day. I ended the year with 3,500 push-ups total.

Similarly, I had started doing squats again after not doing them for a long time, and I ended the year with 3,500 squats as well.

I had a goal to lose some significant weight, and while I lost a couple of pounds, my weight was fairly stable throughout the year. I suppose that’s better than losing a bunch and gaining everything back?

I read a total of 62 books, of which 31 were audiobooks. Some favorites include:

• Feeding the Machine by James Muldoon, Mark Graham, and Callum Cant
• Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba
• Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America by Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazen
• The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson
• Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger
• The Field Guide to Citizen Science by Catherine Hoffman and Caren Cooper
• The Last Archer by S. D. Smith
• Don’t Talk About Politics by Sarah Stein Lubrano
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
• The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul
• Subtract by Leidy Klotz
• How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner
• Recursion by Blake Crouch
• Tears in Rain by Rosa Montero

As for games, please realize that I almost never find myself playing new games. I don’t tend to let myself play games that often, especially when I am barely making the games I want to make, so if I do play games, it is usually a game in my existing collection.

I played quite a bit of eFootball early on. I enjoyed it, especially if I ignore all of the weird card collecting things and just focused on playing games against the CPU to get my soccer fix. Unfortunately, at some point I found the somewhat consistent crash bug on the main menu to be too annoying for me to bother fighting past, and I uninstalled it from my Steam Deck. I am still looking for a good soccer game, and I’m a bit turned off from free-to-play monetization. I have my eye on getting Pixel Cup Soccer one day, but I am going to miss the high fidelity of eFootball.

I also played games on the PlayDate, such as Pick Pack Pup, Shadowgate PD, Tiny Turnip, and Battleship Godios. I really enjoyed both Saturday Edition and The Whiteout. Blippo+ was an obsession for a hot minute.

Since I built a new, more powerful desktop computer, I played Kerbal Space Program and found myself periodically checking on the status of Kitten Space Agency, the spiritual successor that is currently in pre-alpha.

I finally got around to playing Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine, and I love the atmosphere and heist tropes.

After reading Recursion by Blake Crouch, I read another one of his books, Run. It is gruesome and harrowing…and it made me want to play Overland. I remember not doing so great the last time I played it years ago, but this time I managed to get pretty far before accidentally losing my dog and another member of my party to a weird teleporting thingie and suddenly finding my party surrounded by monsters.

I was listening to the audiobook The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei at the end of the year (it was the 2nd book I finished in 2026, and it will be a highlight then), and someone had just gifted me the game Outer Wilds, and I couldn’t have asked for a better pairing. My very first attempt as space travel in Outer Wilds didn’t go so well. I was so used to Kerbal Space Program’s relatively realistic rocketry that the more arcade-y space travel in Outer Wilds meant that I didn’t realize how close everything was. While I was trying to get my bearings and figure out how to fly towards one of the other planets, I noticed some reentry burn around the edges of the screen, and I turned around just in time to discover and flown directly into the sun. Whoops.

But the game I have been telling everyone about since I got it? Dice the Demiurge, the single-player incremental dice game. I love this game. It’s compelling, it does neat things with a wide variety of dice, it’s funny, and it has a lot of variety. It even has some demands on the real world that I really like.

I found myself playing one session of Dice the Demiurge each day, which allowed me to take just a few minutes to get some game play in with a game that was rich and engaging. I fell behind during the holidays, so I’ve been playing multiple sessions each day to try to catch up.

Goals for 2026

My goals for 2026 are very similar to the goals I had for 2025:

• Publish major Toytles:Leaf Raking quality improvement update (including demo) by December June 30th
• Publish at least 1 free game by December 31st

Both of these goals boil down to development/production goals with a definite output.

What I want to do is figure out at least one more goal that is focused on promotion that would similarly have an output I can control.

Unfortunately, I’m now weeks into the new year, and while I feel like I’ve got a better handle on what a promotion strategy might involve, I’m frustrated that I don’t something more solid in place despite spending a lot of time last year on trying to figure this out.

Most of the advice out there is probably fine if you are trying to make a big splash upon launch of a new game on Steam or if you are monetizing people’s attention on mobile with ads or in-app purchases. Based on the sheer amount of discussion related to this kind of hit-driven business, you’d think that it was the only way people know how to run a game development business.

I’m fine with slowly growing an audience who appreciates entertainment that doesn’t come with strings attached, that likes their privacy and doesn’t like feeling worried about whether they can trust their games. I want to make games for families who can feel peace of mind that my games are not spying on them, selling their data, or trying to convince their kids that maybe fascism and white supremacy is fine actually. I want to make games that encourage the player to be curious and to support their creativity.

So it sounds easy: I just need to talk more about the kinds of things that this kind of audience would care for.

I look forward to figuring out the how.

Happy New Year!

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

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