Things I did in 2025
Game Writing
Honor Bound came out right at the end of 2024, so it sort of feels part of this year. At the same time it kind of doesn't: by the time my CoG games are released, I'm usually looking ahead to the next thing. But I'm really pleased with how Honor Bound has done! If you've enjoyed it, please do rate or review - in this small niche of game releases, every little helps and any sales go straight into helping me pay the bills.
I started The Earth Has Teeth, my new dark fantasy game in which you play the last surviving priest of a dying god surviving in the wilderness and healing the land. I love this setting so much and it's been an absolute blast exploring something totally new.
I've also been working on a project under NDA with my wife. That's also been very different tonally and setting-wise to the Creme de la Creme series, and I'll be so excited in the future to reveal more about it!
Non Game Writing
For Bonus Supplement subscribers on Patreon I wrote 23 bonus supplement stories about characters from my games. This was a fun experiment for this year and I enjoyed the writing I did! I think my favourites to do were the ones from the NPCs' perspectives: it was fun getting into their heads.
I resurrected my IF-writing advice blog, IF Seal, and answered a whole bunch of questions on it.
I wrote an article for the Game Writing Kaleidoscope which should be coming out sometime in 2026.
Offline, I wrote a little fanfic about one of my roleplaying game characters, and a short story about a setting that's been rattling around my head for some time. At the end of December, I decided that I would expand this and actually make a move on writing something longer in the setting - last year I tentatively thought about it but didn't end up doing so. So while I've been off work during the holidays, I've been writing what might turn into a novelette/novella. It's about a warlock pursuing a monster across the fens, and here's a quote:
Maybe the man's heartsblood is mud, or maybe it's that black stuff he threw up. Time enough to discover that later. In a gloved hand Emre grips the man's long straggly hair, dragging upward to examine his face. Knelt at Emre's feet the man's body is slack and abject, but his eyes dart wildly like those of a frightened horse. He's dark-eyed, hungry-looking, thorn-scratched all over, face streaked with marsh filth.
It's not a romance at this stage of things - if I expand it further, it might go somewhere in that direction - but various characters have very intense feelings about each other! Most or all of them are pretty unwell! I'm having a great deal of fun with it.
Things I liked: reading
Here's my 2025 book rundown! The ones that stuck with me the most were Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou, Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman, and The Time of the Ghost by Diana Wynne Jones. I feel like I'm going to reread The Time of the Ghost every couple of months or so - at least until I write something that makes me feel something like how that book makes me feel.
Things I watched
You have to understand that I get a lot of inertia when I watch TV or films, even when I really enjoy what I'm watching. I watched the first couple of the new Interview with the Vampire show and enjoyed them but didn't get any further. Apparently this year I've been in a 90s mood - I watched Ghost World and The Faculty, and I've been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. All of these held up well (surprisingly well?) and in the case of the films, I liked them more this time around. And I watched some of Twin Peaks for the first time (more 90s!) which was for the most part astonishingly good.
I've been absolutely loving the Shoot from the Hip improv videos and the Roll from the Hip actual play. They've really cheered me up during some tricky points and were brilliant during recovery because they were so chill to watch. During recovery once I had more brain energy to focus I also watched The Fall of the House of Usher which was rather great.
My favourite films that I saw this year were Sinners, Frankenstein, The Zone of Interest, and Aftersun. I rewatched Ravenous which is always a splendid time.
I also saw a filmed version of The Importance of Being Earnest with Ncuti Gatwa as Algernon, which was a ton of fun!
Things I played
In my household when decisions are made about who plays what on which device, I'm low on the pecking order and I tend not to prioritise my own play time all that much: if I've got free time I'd often rather do something physical. I greatly enjoy playing CoG games, but I don't always find it easy to switch off my writer-brain because they're also my job, so I often buy and hoard them for the right moment.
An Imp and an Imposter by Athar Fikry was my favourite this year: I loved the setting and characters, and my nonsense character's shenanigans. I am a very, very easy sell for a con artist PC and the romanceable characters could have been written entirely themed around my personal tastes.
It feels a bit silly to say it but the non-text games that stuck with me most this year were old ones. I played a lot of Animal Crossing New Horizons, and over the last couple of weeks I've been playing Dishonored for the first time (when I first played it twelve years ago, I ragequit because I had no patience for stealth. Now apparently I've mellowed, and am thoroughly loving it).
At the start of the year I played the end of my TTRPG group's Last Fleet campaign in which we are in a Battlestar-Galactica-ish situation fleeing and fighting aliens. I played Cassidy Palamar, a boyband frontman before the apocalypse who was trying to be taken seriously in the new world.
For the rest of the year we played Beam Saber, a mech war game. In that one I play Aquarius "Echo" Flint, an ace pilot who's calcified all his emotions into repression and violence; he's slowly thawing, we'll see how that pans out this year.
I'm also playing in a Hunter: the Vigil LARP in which I play a cute, slightly laddish, paramedic who's developing dodgy psychic powers. Uh oh!
Other Life Stuff
I spent a lot of time moving my body around this year, which is really healthy for me mentally as well as physically. I got some weightlifting PBs that I never would have thought possible and made some lovely friends at the gym. I went hiking and cycling a lot, explored the countryside, got lost in the countryside a number of times, saw some utterly beautiful places, and went on holiday to a rural part of Scotland with my dad. I swam in both the river and the sea.
Late in the year I had surgery that's resolved a chronic health problem that had been causing a ton of physical/mental pain and sleeplessness. The discomfort and disruption from recovery has been massively less hassle than the health issue was giving me and even though I'm not 100% yet, I'm so relieved that it happened and went smoothly.
For 2026
Even though Honor Bound was so late in 2024, it's been strange not releasing a game this year. I'm hoping to get the secret NDA project out in 2026, and to return fully to The Earth Has Teeth as well.
I've been thinking about the bonus stories on Patreon; I'm planning to keep going with them in 2026, but I'm wondering how to make them more attractive to new subscribers. I know that trying to get on a treadmill to churn a ton of writing out at speed will give me burnout, and I need to make sure not to delay things with my "main" job of making the projects I'm going to release. So... that's a bit of a question mark which I'll feel out over the course of the next few months. Either way, it seems to work best when I write a fair chunk of them in advance so I'll be trying to do that at the top of the year.
I'm going to spend some more time on this novelette/novella/thing. It's giving me a lot of joy writing something in a different medium! I might put some or all of it up on here - I'll see how it goes. I'm not sure where it sits in the queer fantasy space; it's neither cosy nor spicy, and romance is currently (??) or maybe (??!!). (I don't think I actually know very much about the current queer fantasy space either, heh.)
I have some ideas for future games, but I'm firmly keeping them on the backburner until these two projects are finished. These ideas include something high-spice/low-stakes that I keep noodling about, a royal/knight something-or-other that's adjacent to the novelette/novella thing I'm doing, and also two or three things from the Creme de la Creme universe. These have been prodding the back of my mind for some time now, so I think in 2026 I'll write up some basic outlines for them so I can leave them be and then return to them if they still feel good when I get to a point when I'm making something new again.
I'm also hoping to write more book and game reviews here and/or on my blog. As I mentioned above, our niche is so small that every review makes a difference and I'd like to give a bit more of a fanfare to some of the brilliant work that's being made here.
I'd also like to keep the IF Seal archive better updated because I have...not been doing that reliably. I want to keep sharing thoughts about design and craft in general, whether or not that's framed in the structure of the advice blog. I have a long post about writing...sigh...spicy scenes in games (Patreon will throw a fit and not let me make the post if I write in more frank terms so - well, you know what I mean by that euphemism) and I'd like to edit that and put it up. There's a lot more I'd like to talk about design-wise as well.
In short, whew! It's been a year! Thank you so much for your support. Whatever your year has been like, I hope you have good things on the horizon for 2026.