2025… hot damn!

I kinda enjoyed writing my annual recap from last year… that whole process of writing as it happened was pretty fun! I don’t know if anyone actually reads these things in full, but it’s fun to make them, so I’ll probably keep doing this until I get bored.

I read a handful of other people’s annual recaps last year, and those tended to focus on people’s personal lives… honestly I don’t think my personal life is all that interesting or worth reading about so I’ll be focusing mostly on my work, with a little IRL stuff sprinkled in here and there.

This year was meant to be a real “hit the pavement” moment for Tunaware. We set up a website, brought in @Nicommunism, and started ironing out plans for the second Tunaware Steam game. More on that later.

GAMES

For the first half of 2025, the plan was just to hammer away at Croak Crusader and release that as our one and only game this year, but we began to feel a lot of creative burnout.

I think taking some time away from Croak Crusader will be the right move in the end: I don’t wanna push it beyond late 2026, and it's unlikely that’ll happen for now.

The good thing is, pushing Croak Crusader to the side allowed us to experiment with a lot of cool and interesting new game concepts like Compact Colonies, Karrion X, and My Dead Father. I think Tunaware thrives on these smaller projects, but small games of this nature tend not to do well enough on Steam for me to want to put them up on there.

Speaking of My Dead Father, its release marks a special occasion: the 25th game I’ve made (excluding collabs and demos, which I wouldn’t really count)! For those keeping track, in release order that’s:

1. Indie Pogo (July 2018) (contractor)
2. Where the Moon Goes At Night (Nov 2019)
3. Gate to Hades (January 2020)
4. Jardin De Squelette (April 2020)
5. Beetle Ninja (Nov 2020, rereleased June 2024)
6. Karrion Killer (October 2020)
7. Rat Game (April 2021)
8. Swimming Leningrad (July 2021)
9. Bat-Terry Assault (August 2021)
10. I Wanna B The Clock (August 2021)
11. Monster Crown (October 2021) (contractor)
12. T.O.F.U (December 2021)
13. Adventure of Leek (January 2022)
14. Ruby Heart Matchmakers (March 2022)
15. Porb Dressup (June 2022)
16. Clock Baby Paint Adventure (August 2022)
17. Bird Tapper & The Great Krampusnacht Cleansing (January 2023)
18. Bird Tapper: Purple Platoon Panic (November 2023)
19. Bird Tapper Easy Mode (November 2023)
20. Bird Tapper’s Retro Challenge (December 2023)
21. Gates of Hades (January 2024)
22. Bird Tapper vs The Krampus Fellowship Clan (April 2024)
23. Consealed (October 2024)
24. Cucumber Drag Show (October 2024)
25. My Dead Father (August 2025)

My Dead Father is the 6th Tunaware game, and was sort of designed as a parody of various personal annoyances with the more activistic side of indie game development. The rating getting up to a 4.1 was unexpected: the entire thing was conceived and created in about 2 weeks total and it was mostly designed as a parody of a very specific game @Paytonio and I felt was unintentionally hilarious.

It’s really cool looking back at all of these games in retrospect: some hold up better than others, some I would call just objectively bad products, but as with any medium you learn as you go. I’ve said this before (probably?), but I think that my own creative voice only really started emerging in my work in 2023: Karrion Killer and the RPGs being pretty much the only exceptions from those early years of things that actually speak to my aesthetic and design sensibilities.

Speaking of looking back, it seems like Beetle Ninja is picking up steam a mere 5 years after I first released it. Many thanks to the many YouTubers who’ve discussed it!

I’ve seen a fair few asks about a sequel in reviews, and maybe something will happen with that in the future, we’ll see (I was thinking that Croak Crusader would end up being a Beetle Ninja spinoff of some sort for a while, but it’s more fun to give it its own identity). Now that I’m working with @Paytonio in GameMaker, my ideas are less constrained to the limitations of RPGMaker, and I think there’s definitely a possibility of doing something that, while not directly called “Beetle Ninja 2”, expands on that gameplay loop in some novel and interesting ways.

There’s two web game projects that will hopefully be out next year: a long-awaited Karrion Killer sequel and the ARG puzzle game Penis Cool. We’ve had both of those in production for at least a year now, but we just got too preoccupied with other things to finish them.

Outside of Tunaware, I’m still chipping away at a few little experimental projects whilst I work on GiggleForce. A little over a third of GiggleForce is done, and I anticipate it might take a bit longer than I had expected initially, but it's got a fun story, and I’m pretty proud of what’s been made so far. The story sort of morphs around as I write it, but in a way that I think builds upon the core themes more, and in a way that I think adds to the feel I want it to have.

ANIMATIONS

I didn’t think I’d end up making any cartoons this year, and a lot of that is because it isn’t really something I make a habit of making: they can be fun whenever the ideas spring to mind, but I’m more of a game developer than an animator, at least in my own mind.

With every cartoon, the intention is to try at least one new thing. ‘Military Showers’ isn’t long, but I’m happy with the fact that, even if it’s a tad confusing, it’s my first real full-length sketch with a beginning, middle, and end. ‘Asking Quentin Tarantino literally any question’ was an experiment with greenscreen effects, and ‘Printer Talk’ was an experiment with doing a Clutch Cargo-styled low-budget live-action mouth movement effect.

3 sketches a year sounds reasonable to me, and hopefully it's a rate at which I can reasonably continue to pump out these little experiments.

THE FUTURE

I showed off two games on my Twitter a while ago that haven't been released, but admittedly I’ve been a bit radio silent about them for some time, so I’d like to talk about those as well.

Karrion X has been on the shelf for a while now (I believe it was one of the first projects Paytonio and I collaborated on actually). I don’t feel it’s leaned into too much in the original Karrion Killer, but that whole series in my mind has always been a big tribute to the horror genre. I think Karrion X will be a little more on the nose with that: the influence from Alien is pretty apparent, but there was also a lot of Ao Oni and 2001 A Space Odyssey influence too. I’m happy with what we made, we’re just adding in a few more levels and mechanics to mix up the gameplay some more. I’m saving it for a rainy day moreorless haha!

Penis Cool I teased a little bit last year, but rest assured, I haven’t abandoned it! It’s basically a three-tiered puzzle game: I’m sure some people will be happy to just enjoy it as a mindless town simulator, but digging deeper will lead you to find some cool puzzles that use this website unexpectedly. If it sounds like I’m being vague, that’s because I don’t really want to spoil it too much: I know this is a clichee expression, but it really is doing new and exciting things and I couldn’t be happier with what the game is shaping up to be.

The way Penis Cool is shaping up, I think in terms of depth, it’ll most likely be close to if not on par with a full retail game. I’ve been burned before with thinking things will end up popular only to be disappointed when they aren’t, so my expectations are tempered this time. That said, it probably takes at least 2 people to solve all of the game’s puzzles in this one though.

Tunaware has 4 games in the pipeline now, and it's looking unlikely that we’ll be making a pixel day game this year, but once Croak Crusader is released, the hope is that it’ll make enough money that we can comfortably piss around and make a few more short little “for fun” web game projects.

MISC/IRL STUFF

Life was busy this year. I finished my studies, and now I’m moving over to the professional world.

I met up with @HenryEyes during a brief stay in London: I’ve mostly refrained from IRL stuff in relation to this site, but it's an opportunity I felt it best to make the most of. It was cool finally putting a face to a guy I’ve talked to on and off for the past half a decade or so!

Game development continues on: Tunaware’s agreement with 2 Left Thumbs I think is a fairly good way of keeping those dreams afloat, and with @Nicommunism on board as the promotional artist, I’m super eager to cook up loads of new projects. At the same time, now more than ever I’m being approached by several different people who want me to help with their projects- many of which actually look good! It's a little unfortunate to have to say no to people, but I think I’ve come to find that 3 or 4 games in active development is probably the most I can handle at one time lest I go insane. I’m working with @Stannco on Pengu: Lost And Wanted, the Tunaware crew are working with 2 Left Thumbs on Croak Crusader and Compact Colonies, and GiggleForce will probably eventually release.

I ended up accomplishing most of my goals for 2025, the only one that never happened was finishing Croak Crusader within the year. In commemoration, some goals for 2026:

• Finally finish Croak Crusader
• Get GiggleForce over the halfway point, or at least to a runtime of about 5 and a half hours (currently it's about 3 and a half hours long, and I expect the finished game will be 9-10 hours or so)