I haven’t done one of these since the Covid 19 pandemic.
Normally I have a pretty good grasp on how a year went, and I’m content to just reflect from the memories, but these last 3 years have really started bleeding together to the point I’ll remember something from 2023 like it was a week ago, and something from last month that seems like it was years ago.
I think my ability to observe time tends to be linked more with my work than anything. Usually projects are pretty sequential and anything that happens in my life overlaps with some project where I can kind of place it.
But ever since we’ve been forced to pivot our priorities toward preparing for all these age verification laws, the usual flow of work has been really broken up, and the projects have largely been a lot of cleanup, and preparation to get old, outdated pages (typically mod and admin tools) updated to where they can run in our new routing stuff. This lack of really visible productivity has had a major impact on my perception of time, where it often feels like I just did one project all year.
So, I thought it might be good for my own mental health to actually take a few minutes and look at my work and social history for the year and puzzle together what actually happened in 2025. Turns out, once I separated the work stuff a bit more, there was a fair bit!
I know in 2024 I was definitely struggling with burnout, and I made sure to really take the last few weeks of the year off and just recharge. I did have the Secret Santa going on, but we had a great team helping out so the year didn’t start with a lot of major pressures. I DID have a big todo list for the secret santa system, but I put that shit off until November lol.
Very early in the year, I found out that @Galneda had recently moved into the same area I live, and we started hanging out here and there. Since then both he and his wife have become pretty good friends of ours, and we’ve hung out a fair bit over the year. In fact, they are coming over to our place to celebrate New Years Eve tonight (along with @Bitbeak, who I’ve known for a few years now, and @littlbox who is flying in for a visit later today).
I remember having some anxiety at the start of the year with the whole political environment. I think we all can relate there, so no need to go very deep, but I should have known the year overall wouldn't be too terrible because in mid-January, I got the mega ultra super flavor-blasted Dorito! (or the year has been such a shit show that this managed to somehow become a highlight)
Around that time I also backed the Hand-Drawn Megaman Game Guide book from Phil Summers. I'd been a fan of his hand drawn game guides work from back before Nintendo did their usual bullshit and made him take all his hard work down. I was super happy to help fund an actual Capcom-sanctioned guide for one of my all time favorite games.
I got another huge pick me-up early in the year when @BellvonArtsy asked to do a creator spotlight on me. It's always nice to feel recognized, and he did a really cool portrait you can find in the Art Portal:
In February, my wife and I celebrated our 26th wedding anniversary. We wanted to go to a dueling piano bar, because we used to love going to Howl at The Moon in Denver (before it closed during the Pandemic). The place we found was kind of mid. Very bougie/contemporary, and the good seats cost extra money even after paying admissions, so we got stuck at the bar, beside the main doors, on one of the coldest nights of the year. We still had fun, but left way earlier than we probably would have otherwise.
I think it was also around this time that I also backed the Once Upon A Time On the Internet documentary by @littlbox (who will be interviewing me for this very same documentary, probably in April). I know I got a sweet t-shirt not too long after this.
I started doing work on a new Flash Forward game as well sometime in late Jan/early Feb. I hadn't really planned on that at all. In fact, I had very much sworn off doing any more Flash games because I hate all the hacky bullshit you have to do that other platforms just do easy out of the box. Plus it's all dependent on how good Ruffle currently is, and you never know when you'll slam into a limitation.
If you know me at all, you know I like to just drop ideas for cool games in casual conversation. I'm really bad about it to the point where I'll just rant out a whole-ass design document. The people who've known me long enough are smart enough to go "that's a cool idea" and leave it at that, because they know I'll never ACTUALLY make 99% of these ideas. But @RavioliBox (bless her heart), took to my idea about "what if we made a retelling of Pico's school, but it was a pro wrestling school" to heart, and straight up started doing artwork and character designs for this game idea, and after seeing how good they looked, I felt like it had to actually get made.
So we started building what was just going to be a simple wrestling game that would play kind of like the fights in the Paper Mario series. We even got pretty far with it when we realized we really wanted to do more than just the wrestling matches, we wanted to make a real RPG. We kept going for a while, but ultimately I got sick of trying to optimize this Flash version to run good, and decided to cancel it in favor of eventually moving to Godot and building it in a proper game engine. This is still the plan, but I just fell into such a big groove with my day job stuff, I haven't had the mental capacity to program a game during my evenings and weekends. In fact, I haven't had that mental capacity for it since the last Flash game I did in 2022, Sausage Game (although I did find the juice to get an old Mini-Putt game working again in 2023).
For anyone curious about the Pico wrestling game, I did post a WIP video on X at the time that shows some of the mechanics off. I had a whole set of keyboard controls for PC and on-screen inputs for mobile and everything. It got pretty ambitious.
As for my regular NG work, I had largely been working on an ActionScript 2.0 library for the more modern Newgrounds.io API up to this point. We had officially dropped support for the old Flash API, but with the Flash Forward Jam around the corner, we wanted to make sure most people could still add medals and such to their games. Well, I finally finished that in Feb and rolled it out to very little fanfare (which I guess is actually good news, it means less people are insisting on using Flash).
The plan was to build an ActionScript 3.0 version next, but after doing the AS2 version, I found a bunch of issues I needed to fix in one of the old code generation tools I had built. In 2024 we also had started work on cleaning up and modernizing the stuff we use on NG for packaging and building libraries. SOOO, a bunch of tech-debt/creep turned the AS3 port into a larger project.
This is also when the pressure for getting things ready for these oncoming age verification laws started getting heavy.
One of the big steps to get there is having all the site traffic run through a single routing system, where we'd be able to check region information, age status, etc, before even loading any pages. As you may know, Newgrounds has well over 20 years of code. In that time, a lot of stuff had never been updated to run under our current framework, or it had been spliced in to avoid having to do server reboots or anything involving downtime. All of that needed adressing.
@liljim has been doing the REAL heavy lifting all year getting these new systems going, but his work largely depends on getting everything running through our modern framework, so all focus has been on that so nothing is being blocked.
Unfortunately, the AS3 API for Newgrounds.io kind if fell to the wayside because of all that, and hasn't been touched since. But boy oh boy did we find lots of old, deprecated code that was just begging to be removed. We got admin/mod tools that had been broken for years up and running again. We snuck in a bunch of UX improvements in places that worked, but just felt dated. It's hard to really show just how much stuff we did because so much of it isn't really in your face.
When March rolled in, I received my copy of @HappyHarry's Starbarian Tales #1, which was fantastic! Between that and all the Skybound "Energon Universe" books I've been picking up, my graphic novel shelf got pretty full this year.
March was also when my first anti-burnout adventure of the year was booked. I really wanted to get offline, and go somewhere with a warm beach and palm trees, but wasn't really wanting to deal with international travel because of all the political bullshit going on. So, we went about as far south as you can go in America, and spent a few days bumming around South Padre Island in Texas.
The beaches were awesome. I ate tons of fresh seafood. There were plenty of things to do, and our resort had a great poolside bar (that we spent way too much time at). At the same time, people were really boycotting travel to the US, so they had all these Spring Break parties going on with hardly any people at them.
It was kinda sad, but we weren't really there for that sort of partying anyhow, so I thought it was a great little vacation, and I felt fantastic when it was over.
In early April, I got to hang out with my old pal @shok, who was in town managing "Magic Wands" as they and Essenger opened a Birthday Massacre concert. The show was a lot of fun, but the real event was when our group took over a Denny's and spent WAYYYYYYY too long coming up with stupid names for dishes we would sell if we opened a goth-themed diner. The gag went on so long, Shok kept texting me more dumb dish names for like 4 days after. It was one of those things thats so stupid, but in the moment, you couldn't breath from laughing. And yet, I can't even remember most of the things we came up with lol.
For work stuff, I found a bit of time in April to do some small updates on the audio player and art player so they both have more keyboard support for playback/browsing controls now. Probably the first real user-facing update of the year... yeesh.
That must have triggered something, because this is when I decided to take a break from the more mundane stuff that was slogging along and built a library for mapping gamepad inputs to keyboard events in Ruffle, along with a frontend tool for setting up custom control mapping. This was probably the biggest user facing update, and even spawned a whole gang of users who have dedicated their time to making tons of old Flash games playable with a controller. It was definitely cool seeing how this update breathed some new life into the old library, and even seeing some people discovering awesome classics for the first time as a result.
Sometime around here, myself and a bunch of NG peeps I hang out with on Discord started planning a summer meetup somewhere in the midwest. I Remembered @MayaLaCookie had wanted to get one going in the Denver area, so I invited her to the group and to tag along on our road trip.
Every summer my city has a block party, and that was where I met Maya for the first time IRL. We mostly just sat around and listened to an okay Prince cover band, and Maya did some drawings in her sketch book, but it was a cool hang none the less.
Up until that party, the weather had been kind of dogshit. Tons of rain, thunder storms, and always the possibility of hail. I didn't get my garden planted until that same weekend, and as a result a lot of my late season crops sucked ass. It didn't take very long before it also got super hot.
And at the end of June, there was a whole lot of drama surrounding a sorta-popular, but also-despised, member of the community (If you know, you know). I very publically put myself out in support of the people he pulled his shit with. It wasn't something I planned on doing, but I ultimately did for 3 reasons. First, I really believed the people who came out. I'd been hearing the stories for a long time from different people, and there was an obvious pattern. Second, I've seen too many cases where the popular kids in a community will just automatically defend each other, and create a fear of retaliation or ostracization. I'm in a position where publicly saying I believed the allegations can give others in the community permission to do the same, and feel protected in doing so. And finally, if I could take any of the backlash and heat from this guy's inner circle so it's not aimed at any victims or people who are kicking the guy out of their spaces, I would do so gladly.
I don't know that I can take any real credit for how it all played out, but it seems like the boys club didn't really go on full attack mode like you'd expect. The guy was kicked out of a bunch of online spaces. Some apologies were actually made, and more than a few of his friends actually admitted that the guy fucked up.
There was one specific person who very much thought I was some all powerful wizard with a magic orb that created the downfall of their friend, and spent an unhealthy amount of energy trying to get under my skin as if I'm some dumb kid that still takes that sort of bait. I was comedy gold though. The total lack of self awareness or irony. The certainty without actually having any real insight. You could almost see the soyjack rage face as they got ignored and kept ranting impotently into the void. God I hope he sees this and does another one, it really is super funny.
July was a busy month. At first I mostly just kept plugging away on my work tasks, but we had a lot of stuff happening at the end.
On the 19th, my wife and I attended a 3-day punk festival. On paper, it sounded like an amazing weekend. It was called "Punk at the Park" and featured tons of great punk bands, a shit ton of food trucks, lots of vendors and alcohol. In reality it was "Punk in the Parking Lot". The venue was just this paved lot right beside the city dump. It heated up like an oven in the sun, and smelled like hot garbage. To make matters worse, the local organizers apparently had some ties to the Trump administration, which led to several bands dropping out in protest.
Fortunately, we got in kind of late on the first night, so the heat of a parking lot environment was mostly cleared up. The lineup was still quite entertaining, and we had a blast, even though our feet were killing us by the end. The Aquabats stole the show.
The second day, we planned on spending most of the day at the festival and even got a hotel so we could drink a lot and just uber back. When we got there, it immediately started storming and pouring, which pushed a bunch of performances back and led to shorter sets, but it turned out to be a godsend because once the rain quit it was well over 100 degrees until the sun went down.
We definitely drank a shit ton, and ultimately had a lot of fun, but we were physically wrecked to the point we skipped most of the 3rd day and only showed up after sundown to see the last 3 or 4 bands.
At the time, I said I'd never do another festival like that again. But looking back on it now... yeah... I'd probably do it again someday lol.
Not even a full week later, that meetup we were planning was coming up. We ultimately landed on meeting in Kansas City because it was kind of the midway point for everyone who wanted to come. My plan was to rent a big van and bus the local Denver peeps, and meet the rest at a nice AirBnB.
As it turns out, pretty much everyone who wasn't already near the KC area ended up having to bail at the last minute. @Raviolibox discovered it cost less to fly to Denver, so she just came out early and crashed on a shitty air mattress in my office for a few days before we left. We ended up doing a bunch of touristy stuff and hanging out with all the Denver locals (@Bitbeak, @Galneda, @Mayalacookie) a bunch that week too. We probably should have just made it a damn Denver meetup.
But, we made the road trip to KC and got to hang out with @WiggidyWack, @CarterSterling & @jacob. Got to eat some good BBQ, checked out a cool museum, and after years of trying to get me to play, @Bitbeak got a bunch of us to go out and play a local Disc Golf course. (I have since bought my own set of discs and have played fairly regularly. It's a fun ass sport).
So yeah, July was a very fun, but very exhausting month. On the plus side, when we got back from the meeting, I had a ton of giant zucchinis in my garden, and my tomato plants were finally starting to get fruit on them.
In early August, I started feeling that old spark of creativity again for the first time in a long while. Spending a week with a bunch of artists tends to have that effect, and I filled up a few pages in my long-neglected sketchbook.
I posted a few of em over on X
Near the end of the month, my wife and I hit our first show at Red Rocks Amphitheater for the year. It's always fun to go to the venue, but the concert itself ended up being kind of a dud. We were seeing "1964 - The Tribute" which is essentially a Beatles cover band.
The thing is, the SPECIFICALLY cover the songs that the Beatles performed in their '64 US tour, leaving out the majority of their best work. To make it worse, their "Paul" had blown his voice at a previous concert and could barely hit half the notes, let alone any harmonies. It wasn't the worst concert I've ever been to, but I don't think I'd bother seeing them again, even at full health. (The Fab Four is a WAY better Beatles tribute band)
In early September, we got our Red Rocks do-over and went to see Get the Led out (for like the 5th time). Those guys are easily the best Led Zeppelin tribute band I have ever seen, and they always put on a killer show. Seeing them has sort of become our annual 'goodbye to summer' tradition.
As far as work goes, I was still slogging away on updating all those old pages and doing general bug fixes and cleanup, so there still hadn't been anything particularly cool that people would actually notice. That really got me wanting to do SOMETHING that I could ultimately share and leave a sign I was still alive and kicking. That's when I came up with the idea of ASSETober.
I'm not gonna go TOO deep into that here since I actually did a pretty good job documenting it already. Basically, I wanted to draw some game assets every day in October, even though I wasn't actually making a game. Just for the challenge, and to have something worth posting about. I ended up pulling it off and did a full 31 days, and ended up with enough stuff to where I actually DO want to make a game out of it all. Could it happen in 20206?
Also in October, I had another, little, long-weekend getaway to get off-grid and recharge (technically it was for my birthday). This time we stayed closer to home and just rented a private condo out in the mountains. Nothing fancy on this trip, just a lot of relaxing and fresh air. Crazy how good just getting out of the city for a few days can be for the ol' mental health.
In November the NG Fishing Collab, from @CJSPellsFish finally came out. I didn't really do anything on it, but I did provide the PsychoGoldfish sprite from my Fish Canon game, and it was fun to see that in there. It ended up being a fun little collab game, and you should all check it out.
At the end of the month, we got ready to kick of the 2025 Art Secret Santa. @SereneFalconer stepped up, again, to host and organize a bunch of stuff. I always appreciate that since it keeps me free to deal with the more technical issues. We also had an awesome crew of helpers that sorted people into artist groups, handled a lot of moderation and answering of questions. Big shout outs to @WizardoFrank (who also made this year's promo banner), @LegolaSS (who also ran the 'group E' event for unscouted users), @Oddlem, @RavioliBox, @queen-evvvvve, and @skoops for all the help!
In December, I was finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel as I started finishing the last of our old NG pages that needed updating. We ultimately ended up just killing a couple of tools that didn't really work right, or that we'll eventually just need to rebuild from scratch because they are so out of date, but we also ended up with several tools that were previously broken finally being useful again. It was pretty satisfying to be able to close that last ticket right before the holidays.
Also right before the holiday break, the Hand-Drawn Megaman guide I backed at the start of the year finally showed up, and it was such a cool book. The timing of it helped really get me in the Xmas spirit, like it was an early visit from Santa or something.
For the last couple of years, my family has shifted from getting each other some big thoughtful gift, to getting a BUNCH of silly/stupid/funny little gifts ande did that again this year. Shopping around for so many little things really gets you excited thinking about how they'll react to them all. By the time Xmas came around it looked like my tree threw up all over the floor because there were so many little gifts.
I stayed up late on Xmas eve to make sure the Secret Santa reveal went off without a hitch, and it all went quite smoothly. I think by the end there was maybe 3 missing submissions, and one was posted the same day, just late. Easily the highest completion rate in any of these events.
The only sucky part of the holidays was half my family got sick. My middle kid (lol kid... he's 21) was sick weeks ago and was over it, but my oldest son (25) was miserable, my daughter (15) had a sore throat and a cough, and my wife ([redacted]) was kind of in-between. By some miracle, I never caught what they all had, or if I did, I got it REALLY mild.
But, everyone seemed to enjoy all the silly little gifts. I got cool shit like lightsaber chopsticks, and underwear. Oh, and Santa left us a Switch 2 with Mario Kart World. He's pretty keen.
Speaking of video games, I took a look back to see what I played this year, and I got through a surprising number of games. It's funny because I feel like I never really have much time for them anymore, but my play log says otherwise.
This year I played:
- Assassin's Creed Mirage
- God of War: Ragnarok
- WWE 2K25
- Spider-Man 2
- Dragon Age: Veilguard
- Hollow Knight (I slept on that until all the Silksong hype started up)
- Balatro (it's been my go-to mobile game all year)
- Clair Obscur (I think it was legally required to play that this year)
- Split Fiction (perfect couples game!)
- Castle Crashers (Because of the Painter Boss Paradise DLC. I made 2 characters before I got bored)
- Warcraft II Remastered (fun walk down memory lane)
- Peak (This has been my personal GOTY just because it's been such a great hangout game. I got 100% of the achievements and everything)
- Dispatch
- And of course, lots of Jackbox and use Your Words 2 on party game nights.
I played a few others, but they didn't really hold my attention so I didn't count them.
Anyway, as I'm writing all of this, I'm really supposed to be tidying up my house before people come over later to ring in the New year with us, so I guess I'll wrap it up here.
2025 was a surprisingly busy and decent year, despite not having a lot to show for it in my work life.
I do have a few goals for 2026. First is to have a bit more user-facing projects out on NG (and I DO have some very cool stuff in the pipeline). Second is to actually build one, or two, of the games I mentioned (I can't believe it's been so many years since I actually put a game out!). And third is to keep finding the time for little adventures and recharging getaways.
I hope y'all have a great new year, and for anyone struggling, I hope things get better.
ConnorGrail 
Jacob 
FREE99 
