2025 status update

Hi here's a bit of an overview of what I did this year and my plans for next year. I think I've made good progress with a bunch of projects, but it's always hard to balance shorter term things with a longer term project (Lo-Fi Room).

What I did this year

Lo-Fi Room

• Steam Demo!
• Updated demo everywhere (also added to Newgrounds + Gamejolt)
• Finished all the basic level art
• Random Beat saving /loading
• Implemented achievements / progress
• Planned the final structure of the game
• Made B-sides for rooms 4 - 10
• Various programming tasks (maintenance, bug fixing)
• Showed at the Alt+G festival in Seoul
• Made and added 4 or 5 new tracks
• Updated Unity version + dev environment

Solo Music

• Did my first live looping performance! (I've done 3 in total now)
• Started learning concertina and playing with some folk groups
• Learned about Live Coding! and made a live coding prototype
• A few more performances using Lo-Fi Room

Varim

• Finished Varim singles artwork
• 3 Varim singles released
• Recorded drums for Varim album
• A bunch of gigs

Website

• Dancheong pixel art page
• Comics page
• Various minor improvements

Art

• 2x art exhibitions
• 5 pages for story book competition
• Over 1000 daily drawings completed!

Other smaller things

• Lots of pixel art when I've been taking the subway
• Making some music on the subway

Plans for next year

Lo-Fi Room

• Finish making and importing the remaining music (~8 tracks)
• Make all the animation frames (Room 12 onwards)
• Make clickable objects (Room 12 onwards)
• Make B-Sides (Room 11 onwards)
• Arrange all tracks into longer songs
• Implement Progress Screen/UI
• Add controller support
• Add beatmaking tutorial
• Various UI problems bug fixing
• (Possibly) Release?

Other Stuff

These things are way less decided, it all depends on what's going on and how much free time I have.

Solo Music

• Get more samples set up for making music on my phone & live looping
• Release compilation of older tracks
• Release a dungeon synth album?
• More concertina learning - organize the tunes I've learned, learn more tunes and learn left hand accompaniment to tunes I've learned already

Website

• Rework page design /layout
• Rework current music page?
• Add music player?
• Blog page?
• Add my webgames to my site - Try setting them up as progressive web apps (so they can be installed and played offline too)

Live coding

• Try working out a setup in gibber or strudel

Art

• Plan out the story book and work on it more

General reflections

I'm pretty pleased with how much I've been able to do this year. The demo update release kept getting delayed, but I've made good overall progress. I tried to keep as focused on Lo-Fi Room as much as possible, but inevitably there were shorter term things that I also wanted to do. I think it's been a pretty good balance this year.

I was able to do a lot of new things that I've wanted to do for quite a long time: live looping, learning concertina, story book art. Also live coding was something I just found out about this year, and I was immediately able to give it a go!

It's been nice using my website as a kind of home base, I would like to add more to it (particularly music) but it's tricky to find the time to make more substantial changes. I've been pretty ok with keeping it up to date, but I can probably make it all a little easier to add to.

I'm not sure if I'll be able to release the full version of Lo-Fi Room next year but I should get pretty close! If I do, it will probably be towards the end of the year. I'm reluctant to make any promises about a release date as I find it very hard to predict and my time can very easily get impacted by other things.

Anyway, those are my thoughts and general plans. I can't promise that Lo-Fi Room will release next year (there is still quite a lot to do), but it should be very close to being finished by the end of next year.

Thanks again for your interest and being patient with development. It's all taken way longer than expected~

Barend