Recently, my life has been a never-ending series of events causing me to say “This has been the busiest week of my life.” And here’s me saying this again: this has been the busiest week of my life. It’s been so busy, in fact, that it’s forced me to do a full update on all of my activities as a dev, thanks to one big career move.

You’ve already heard this news if you’re in circles anywhere even close to mine, but I’m starting a fulltime PhD! It was a rollercoaster and a half going between a rejection for a different PhD, waiting months for everything to progress, getting falsely rejected for this one, getting the actual offer letter, and then a whole kerfuffle with the stipend and realising the offer letter’s date was incorrect and I actually started in October. But it’s starting! Good grief!

This means I finally have the means to live on my own again, and I’m fully settled into my own flat after getting at least seven papercuts from tearing apart IKEA cardboard. You can never be truly happy while living at your parents’ house, and that’s something I believe more every passing day.

With one of my biggest setbacks “fixed”, at least for three years, that prompts the question of what now. This all comes with the caveat that a PhD is very much a fulltime job, but considering my output wasn’t slowed much when I had a studio role, I don’t see that being a major issue. So:

What’s Going on?

I’m taking this moment to do a refresh of what I’m doing, how I’m doing it, and where I’m going from here. It feels like something I need to do for myself as much as everyone who follows my stuff, because it turns out moving your entire life out of your parent’s spare bedroom does things to your brain.

As you might have seen from my site refresh, I’m splitting my work into “major” and “minor” releases. They’re pretty self-explanatory: minor releases are stuff I’ll be making in a month or so with little extraneous planning or collaboration; major releases will be more involved.

I’m going to divide major releases a little more with Big releases. Big releases, capital B, are ones I’m designing from the start to be “commercial” games. From day one I’m intending to charge money for it, while the others I’ll just fling on the internet for free. As you might expect, Big releases will be significantly longer to play than the others.

A Big project will almost always be cooking in the background. Other major and minor projects will pop up as and when, most definitely around LITHOBREAKERS jams. Because of the nature of jams and random inspiration, I can’t really pin what those will be as far in advance as Big projects.

So, the next Big project is CHILDREN OF HELL. After I’ve figured out my new working routine, it’s full speed ahead for the demo, which will be running until the end of Act 1. We’re hoping for it to be released before the end of the year.

After that, we’re shooting for a second demo for an appropriate Next Fest, which will run up to the end of Act 2. For which Next Fest, that depends on how fast we are. And depending on how early that is, will depend how long the gap between the Next Fest and full release is. This part is running on a lot of unknowns! Either way, the full game should be done and out by mid-2026. Maybe a bit later if we spend too long fucking about with shaders.

Once COH wraps, I’ve got two projects I want to focus on as my next Big releases. As is the trend for literally every indie dev on the planet, I’m going to rip off Disco Elysium, except the thought cabinet is a bunch of prog metal albums embedded in the head of a maladjusted freak of a trans man. It will be by far the most self-indulgent game I’ve ever made,¹ and take my usual writing practice of “just put song lyrics in there at random” to heights never seen before.

The other is looking to be, gasp, my first foray into something fully 3D. A hotel management sim that’s a direct ripoff of the Sims 2 DS game. It’s going to be a satirical anti-management sim. What that means, you’ll have to wait and see.

I would also like to say that a major release for IFComp 2026 is rattling around my head. However, with the current policy allowing fully genAI games into the competition, and apparently doubling down on that, I will not be submitting anything until this policy is fully revoked.

If it doesn’t, I will probably be working on this regardless and releasing it whenever I feel it’s ready. My hope is to get COH to a point where I’m mostly hands-off and can just direct the gang in making assets, leaving me free to hack away at other stuff. I’m not making solid promises, but, there’s something here. It’s an idea I definitely want to do at some point, so this might roll over into the year after.

What’s Around the Corner?

In much shorter news, I’m showcasing Diet of Worms at EGX Leftfield! It feels like the king of weirdo game showcases. I wish I had more thoughts to put here, but I spent them all yesterday on trying to figure out the most efficient way to get 12 boxes up a narrow elevator.

There’s also a massive announcement that I am itching to tell everyone about, but I am fully NDA’d until the end of November. It’s games-related to myself specifically, and that’s all I can say.

And, finally, the release of COH’s first demo will coincide with a big announcement, that I’m going to be opening a Patreon. I’ll be retiring my ko-fi updates and putting devlogs on there instead, and you’ll also get some goodies such as your name in game credits, suggestions for the NSGtH universe, or my entire backcatalogue if you give me enough money.

The main reason for retiring ko-fi is that basically no-one understands that you can subscribe on there. It’s the place people go to tip artists they like and buy things from their shop. Say you have a Patreon, however, suddenly everyone gets it. I’m not particularly fussed about moving over, and the ko-fi will still be open accepting one-off tips. Or subs, if you would like to support me with absolutely nothing in return.

What Else?

And here’s a collection of updates that have next to no bearing on my actual dev activities. If you just care about that, you can safely close the tab.

As I’ve mentioned before, and you can probably see, I’ve done a complete refresh of my site. It’s far simpler now, and that mostly comes from me presenting myself as a researcher and artist first, rather than someone who needs to package his work for a random HR department to decide he’s worth hiring. I like it far more now, and there’s more bits on there that are actually useful.

One bit, for instance, is that you can now immediately see what conventions and showcases I’m attending next on the main page. There’s also a handy little table that tells you my availability for contracts, workshops, and articles. Wink wink.

Coinciding with that, I’ve also moved webhosts to NearlyFreeSpeech.net. This move was initially prompted by neocities apparently culling NSFW content, and given how banning drawings of naked women is always the canary in the coalmine,² I wanted to look for ways out before such perversions as “being transgender” were on the chopping block. However, that later got clarified as a restriction only affecting IRL porn—a restriction that’s been in place since the service started—and 18+ websites will eventually need a click-through confirmation screen to stay online. That’s a reasonable line to draw while navigating the hellscape of puritanical laws we find ourselves under, and neocities is still a service I’d recommend to others.

But, I’m still moving to NFS. The main point of that is cost. Neocities, with all its bells and whistles of features is 5 dollars a month. NFS starts at 1 pence a day, and for my purposes comes out at less than 2 dollars a month. The downside of that is needing to understand SSH or FTP and learning the basics of how web hosting works. I was already using FTP on the old IONOS hosting I was paying far too much for, which also came with needing to teach myself the likes of htaccess. There was no reason for me not to be here in the first place, really.

It’s now also much easier for me to set up new designated sites rather than fucking around with subdomains and folders. I have done that, in fact! I now have a “space-between” site, for things that don’t really fit the vibe of my “professional” front-facing stuff, but I still want to share or talk about online. It’s not something I’ll be actively promoting, but I’m not considering it some secret that will ruin me if someone finds it. An open secret, perhaps.

That site is built on Strawberry Starter. It’s a very nice blog building tool, and I highly recommend checking it out yourself. I am also distinctly not using it for any of its blogging capabilities. I’m using it for futureproofing, because I am fairly certain I want to make a sideblog for even more off-topic thoughts. That might be months off. That might never happen.

My main site is still coded by hand.³ I did question myself on why I wanted to do that, when I found a static site builder more than useful enough for my second site. The ultimate answer was that I didn’t have an answer. I kept telling myself it was a matter of doing things a static site generator couldn’t, but the final result is something I could have easily gotten out of a few rounds with 11ty.

It’s a weird point of pride, I guess. I’ve been hand-coding my presence on this site since my first foray in 2017. I’m closing in on 8 years of fucking about with HTML because I saw a screenshot of someone with a custom homepage and ugly Firefox CSS and thought it was the coolest thing ever.

And it’s weird, because that simple desire to fuck about and customise my internet experience to the nth degree is the reason I got my first job. My undergrad doing game design got me nothing. Having any amount of HTML experience got me some shit job as a marketing assistant, that then got me a slightly less shit job coding emails. Having a degree was less than useless; it was me goofing off in my spare time that got me where I was.

And now I’m doing a PhD with no masters degree, because I kept making games in conversation with a bunch of off-kilter transexuals.

Life’s a weird fucker, sometimes.