Reflecting on 2025

2025 was the sixth year of my game development journey. Although it was a bit slower than previous years, I continued to improve my craft and advocate for better accessibility in games. It included a major expansion release for my biggest project yet, participating in my favorite annual game jam, and some unexpected conference appearances. Continue reading for my annual status update and what’s next for me.

Evaluating my goals for 2025

When setting my goals for 2025, I aimed to start a new chapter in my game development journey. Here’s how that went:

Participate in Games for Blind Gamers 4

Status: Complete!

My first goal for 2025 was to participate in Games for Blind Gamers 4, the fourth annual jam for making blind-friendly games. After taking a year off, I entered the jam with renewed enthusiasm and a solid concept to test what I learned from officially releasing Periphery Synthetic. The result was Lacus Opportunitas, a trading simulator set in the far future on some tropical lake on Earth’s terraformed moon.

While I’m very proud of the project, I’m prouder of the community and how we continue to strengthen it. With 34 entries, it was its largest iteration yet! Just like past years, I played, rated, and provided thoughtful feedback on every single entry. And every year, I’m surprised by the level of quality and passion poured into the submissions, by who returns from previous years with fresh concepts and practiced techniques, and by who sticks around and chats with us throughout the rest of the year.

There will be a fifth jam this year. For Games for Blind Gamers 5, I will be continuing my tradition of building something weird and helping grow the community. I’m excited to share that with you soon.

Release the Side D expansion

Status: Complete!

My biggest goal for 2025 was to release the Side D expansion for Periphery Synthetic. The new content was ready, with a cryptic teaser airing at the GAconf Awards in January, but something was missing. In fact, a lot turned out to be missing.

What I had assumed would be an early April release was gradually pushed back to August as the scope began to creep. It was a good and necessary scope creep, because I viewed the expansion as my only meaningful opportunity to overhaul pretty much the entire project, from its movement systems and crafting options, to a new narrative structure and cover screen. And under the hood, its changes were to lay the foundation for a series of smaller updates that would logically lead into its final expansion.

Overall, I’m quite pleased with how I cultivated the EP throughout the year. There was something disparate about the original release, as if it was all exposition but none of the pieces fit. This expansion finally glued them all together, and the upcoming one will place a cherry on top for everyone who has supported the project over the years.

Announce the next big project

Status: In progress.

When I started the year, I was looking forward to Periphery Synthetic finally becoming a side project with the announcement of something new. However, given the scope of Side D, and the promise of Side E, my journey has taken a brief detour in pursuit of the true ending for the EP. Through finally finishing the EP, I hope to truly move on and focus on the future.

That said, there has been some progress on the next project! For example, my game design notebook received a few notable entries, such as a roguelike mech shooter, or a tactical creature collector. By fully mapping them out on paper, I gained many insights into their scope and complexity—not necessarily eliminating their possibilities, but making sense of what I’m willing to invest multiple years of my life into making.

I’ve also just wrapped up a two-week side project using RPG Maker MZ. It was fun revisiting this game engine from my childhood, with all of the cool new features introduced over the years. The adventure follows a warrior waking in a dungeon and regrouping with her three friends, culminating with a big boss battle, an epilogue at a tavern, and even a cat! It’s silly and totally inaccessible, but it was empowering to write and fully implement a self-contained story with actual characters and a beginning, middle, and end.

Honestly, it’s too early to even imagine the next project. I need more daydreaming, prototypes, and certainly mistakes. But I do know one thing: the shiftBacktick brand is chill and weird—and I intend to keep it that way.

Surprises of 2025

Like 2024, this year surprised me in a few ways!

Panel appearances

For last year’s GAconf USA, my voice and face made an extremely rare appearance to share how I built Periphery Synthetic. This led to two exciting invitations to connect further with others about accessibility.

In April, I was invited to join a live panel hosted by Unsightly Opinions. It was a convergence of developers, gamers, and accessibility consultants to chat about the future of blind-accessible games. Many of the folks on the call had just participated alongside me during Games for Blind Gamers 4, so it was an absolute pleasure for us to reconvene:

Then in October, I was delighted to be invited back to GAconf USA—this time for a prerecorded panel. The conference called us micro-indies—a term to differentiate solo developers and small teams from the multi-million AA studios who are still-technically-independent-I-guess—and asked us to discuss our approaches to accessibility at smaller scales:

Both were very generous invitations which opened me to new ideas and possibilities—including vanquishing the myth that panels are not for me. My hope, moving forward, is to feel more comfortable with saying yes often to these sorts of things. They reminded me that there is still a sliver of good on Earth, when most days it feels completely forsaken. And I’m deeply grateful for being asked to be a part of these communities.

Bundle contributions

So in 2025, I was proud to offer Periphery Synthetic as part of two bundles hosted by jesthehuman:

• RPGs for Accessible Gaming. This bundle raised $28,000 USD to help fund the production of braille dice for DOTS RPG Project. While I don’t create tabletop games, the bundle’s overall goals intersect neatly with my projects and interests, so Periphery Synthetic was a perfect addition.
• No ICE in California. This bundle raised $105,000 for Immigrant Defenders Law Center and RAÍCES in response to escalating tensions in my country. It should go without saying that DJT and all the haters and losers who enable him are irredeemably terrible, yet here we are in 2026 still debating the supposed respectability of their abject fascism.

I view bundles as a way to express and further my personal politics without injecting them into my otherwise-apolitical projects. Yes, art is inherently political—especially when it celebrates inclusivity and consciously choosing who can access it—but a common thread of my art is empowerment through escapism, so I don’t believe that I have to needlessly confront politics inside it. The very act of you existing, and actively choosing to engage with my art, is enough politics for me in and of itself. And if my support of these specific causes makes you uncomfortable, then please stop reading my blog—no thanks, have the day you voted for, et cetera…

Still here? Hello! Anyway…

On that note, I’ve been narrowing down the best charities to distribute my revenue from Periphery Synthetic. It may be meager, but I hope to support at least one local, national, and international cause. If you feel strongly about any, then please let me know. Otherwise, I will focus on assisting people who are blind. I’ll try to quietly share the results of that here soon.

MDEV conference

Finally, I closed the year with showcasing Periphery Synthetic for a second time at MDEV, the largest game development conference in the Midwest. Previously, I had showcased it in 2023 while it was in a beta state, with an exclusive preview of its water world. This year, I returned with an exclusive preview of its final expansion.

As a solo developer with no team, you’re pretty much glued to your seat at events like these beyond lunch and restroom breaks. But this organically generates a sort of comradery when you have neighbors in similar predicaments. And the creators of Hello Again and Drift Shell were excellently-captive neighbors!

By the end of the conference, only a handful of players had reached the fiery depths of the new lava world, yet their thoughts inspired dozens of changes. These started to materialize in the v4.2.5 and v4.2.6 updates, but most pertaining to the new world will be unstated in the final release. I deeply appreciate everyone who dropped by and connected with me—especially those who helped shape the final expansion for the EP.

My goals for 2026

Like previous years, I always close this annual reflection with my goals for the new year. Here’s what I’d like for shiftBacktick to accomplish in 2026:

• Participate in Games for Blind Gamers 5.
• Release the final expansion for Periphery Synthetic.
• Finally announce the next big project.

These are strikingly similar to my goals for last year! Despite my excitement for crossing all of these finish lines, I’m even more compelled by what they mean for 2027. Where will these projects take me? what more can I learn? and how will I apply those lessons to my future projects? Those are the constant questions of my game development journey—and their winding overlapping answers always surprise me in these yearly reflections.

Thanks for reading, and have a happy new year! 🎉