Review of 2025 (Dec 31 2025)

At the end of every year, it’s time for a quick review of every game I made this year. If you don’t count updates to Randomly Generated RPG and All Shapes and Sizes, I made 5 games over the year. That’s less than 2024, which had a lot, but 2024 had a bunch of smaller games, while all 5 games in 2025 were fairly large ones.

Relentless Waves - tier 1. This is pretty obviously my favorite game this year, as I’ve updated it several times over the year. I think it’s a very fun twist on the genre, and I like the variety of enemies I made. I think my only issue with it is that it doesn’t really have an official level to beat and replay, and possibly the existing ones are just too hard. But maybe I only think that because I’m testing everything at the highest difficulty. 

Fortress Siege - low tier 3. I think this is the card game that aged the worst this year. It’s consecutive turns, which I don’t really want to make anymore, and I did parts of it better later on. The AI opponent was better programmed in Territorial March, and the concept of a card fighting game was done better in Swords vs Shields. The aura mechanic is sort of cool but not really a standout, especially since it’s pretty directly copied from PvZ Heroes. I did learn things from making it though.

Territorial March - high tier 3. This game was better, but there were several design flaws that I would’ve really liked to have fixed in a better way. Specifically with how you could go negative in actions and coins, which isn’t very intuitive, and I did it better in Swords vs Shields. That’s one thing, my opinion on games can decrease if a future game does a better job on parts of it. I think Camp and Road also make the game feel too similar to Temporum. This was also my last try at trying to make a spreadsheet-programmed game work, and I think I’m mostly done with it. I do think the scouts worked well though. 

Memory Tiles - low tier 3. Probably the worst game made this year. It came after a summer of not succeeding with a different game, and while the concept of a minigame collection in a memory game is kind of cool, it isn’t really the kind of game that I want to play or make again. Pretty much the only useful thing I learned is how to load scenes on top of other scenes. 

Swords vs Shields - tier 2. The 2nd best game of the year. I’m glad I was able to make a game in this genre work simultaneously, and I think the turn structure is unique as well. I think this game did the concept of spending actions to play cards for free better, since there’s less need in making effects that make you lose actions/swords/shields (because I could instead make effects about damaging the other player and their cards). I also learned a lot about multiplayer features, and improving how the log works. I once said this game had my best code in it, but less than a month later and no, there are definitely flaws in it. This only drops to tier 2 because I’ve come down a bit on making online multiplayer games.

Overall, I did learn a lot from making these games, and learned a lot about systems that will make future games easier and better (like translations). Despite all the code I wrote, I don’t really feel like I have a game where I can say all the code is as close to perfect as possible. Some are better than others, but even for games like Randomly Generated RPG, I would be implementing them much differently nowadays. Anyways now that I spent this month updating previous good games, I need to actually start a new game.