Quick Personal Note
This started as a passion project during a break after my studies - something I always thought would be cool to try. Over time, it's grown into something much bigger than I expected, and honestly, I'm grateful for everyone who's been part of this journey. The support means everything, especially from those of you who've stuck around through all the delays and growing pains.
This year is also when I fully realized that game design is definitely something I want to pursue as a career. I'm studying computer science, which I love and find genuinely interesting, but I don't want to be just a programmer. I want to learn to think like a proper game designer - validating ideas properly, testing them in the right ways, getting a more structured approach to design instead of just building whatever seems cool at the moment.
Looking Back at 2025
Last year took way longer than expected - both the rebuild itself and then the rollout process to really make it stable. I kept learning new things during development and realizing my previous approaches were wrong, which meant constantly improving but also constantly extending timelines.
Plus we had that economy blunder early on that I made - some balancing changes that threw off the whole player economy. Then I spent time trying to fix it fairly without just wiping everyone's gold or making arbitrary adjustments that would hurt people who'd earned their wealth legitimately. It was a mess, but we will get through it, and I already learned a lot about how interconnected everything is in a player-driven economy.
These things happen when you're learning as you build, but I want to acknowledge that the timeline wasn't what I promised. That's on me.
The Technical Side
Yes, I spend a lot of time on code that players never see, and I know some people think that's inefficient. But when you're building solo for the long term, keeping the codebase maintainable and genuinely enjoyable to work with matters for motivation. If I dread opening the code because it's a mess, progress dies.
Plus, your idea of what "maintainable" means changes dramatically as you learn new patterns and tools. What seemed clean six months ago now looks like amateur hour, so you refactor. It's part of growing as a developer, and at this scale, I think that investment in code quality pays off in faster feature development later.
This Year's Focus
Immediate Priority
Just finishing up the end of semester, so I'll be starting back up in a week with stability and reliability as priority one. No more mysterious bugs that happen randomly and take forever to track down. Better error handling, better monitoring, better testing.
New Features Coming
- Tribes: The guild system people have been asking for
- World Bosses: A feature i've announced for v2 but had to be delayed
- Tasks System: Daily, weekly, and lifetime tasks with more complex and interesting lifetime tasks than version 1
Behind the Scenes
Finally building proper game analytics and user behavior tracking, which I've honestly neglected too much. Better testing processes, automated monitoring, dashboards to understand how people actually play the game. All the infrastructure stuff that makes everything else possible and helps me make better design decisions.
The Approach
Moving toward more constant intervals of updates, even if they're smaller individual changes. Making sure each one is solid and actually improves the game step by step, rather than these massive releases that take months and inevitably have issues.
I've got a lot of cool feature ideas I'm already prototyping and testing in small ways. But I'm staying flexible on exact timelines because things always change as you build them. Working on better planning and preparation so I can maintain steady progress even when life gets busy with studies and other responsibilities - which happens regularly.
Thanks for sticking with this journey. Here's to making 2026 the year Pixel Odyssey really hits its stride.
Back to building,
Lino