toffwee's blog

2025 Wrapup

me (3rd from left, elezen) in ffxiv with friends in starlight celebreation outfits

earlier this year our AAA game company suffered mass layoffs, and a lot of my friends at work have been made redundant. AAA is really not looking good... it's unlucky that i've spent my life working towards this career for it to explode right as i get started. FUCK ah well We Continue. here's my silly little projects!

Games

i made trainplanner and won #1st place in every category out of 122 entries! that's insane!!!! this was soooo much fun and i really love the love2d gang, so sweet and supportive and funny

trainplanner #1 for gameplay, mood, audio, graphics and overall

i also made candela with the lovely mothkira. i dont work in teams often but working with moth was a pleasure & a privilage. making 3d things in love2d is hard, and i spent the majority of the time fixing bugs in love-gltf and coding my own lighting system rather than making the game. i wish i did this beforehand, but despite that, our rankings were still pretty great!! this was carried by moth's cool 3d and ui art, it was a huge shame that the game design suffered because of the tech issues

girl on elevator with buy menu candela girl shooting robot candela #1 for everything except audio where we came #2

tetrenga's also on steam now, which has been a fun project. team sylph is official... we added global and daily leaderboards. it could be nice to improve this further..

tetrenga on steam

Writing

i wrote a short story called girls in rock. it's about a girl who lost her arm while mining and is now scared of mining forever and feels bad about not pulling her weight. her desperation for affirmation from her new mining partner sorta makes her go insane

writing is fun, i am like, confoundingly bad at it, in a "how the hell have you made it this far in life" kind of way. i was also sad & lethargic when i wrote this so i don't think it demonstrated the moral i was going for, but it was fun

clean drawing of girl with no arm, next to draft art of girl saying what da hellshit

Other Stuff

i played the factorio dlc with cero, i was so honoured to be arguing on stream with one of my favourite artists and oomfies. this dlc surprised me with how fun it was - a lot of factorio mods introduce complexity, but this dlc transforms the way you play quite a lot. (cero also transformed the way i play too because she hates using bots oauhg lol... though belts ended up being more fun i cant lie...)

me and cero on the factorio DLC completion screen our factorio earth base thumbnail drawing cero did, im shaking her with an inserter

the discord server had a minecraft phase and literally anything productive i was doing came to a halt. the chocolate edition modpack is the most fun i've had playing a modpack with friends, and we even got some pretty anti-minecraft oomfies playing... it's very objective and exploration focused rather than typical tech trees, it feels like minecraft with terraria progression, everyone loved it

my minecraft cottage

this is the first year i've gotten involved with advent of code, competing on a love2d server leaderboard, and it was so fun. in industry, you surprisingly don't really get to do pure & dense algorithmic stuff very often, so this really relit my fire for code-as-puzzle-solving. the first few tasks were quite simple so i used it as an excuse to learn how to use Python+Manim to visualise the solutions (i've also somehow dodged writing any meaningful python code in my 15+ years of coding...)

me rank #1 in AOC leaderboard, all gold stars completed

2025 Goals

my 2 goals this year were to make a fighting game and host a tournament, and make physical oil paintings

my friends got me some oil painting classes for my birthday and they were great fun. i got along with everybody there and flirted with women in their mid 40s so it was a huge success imo. i bought oil paints after this but haven't used them yet, waiting for a safe space to set up a studio... i'd like to join the city's art club next year, but building up the courage for it is hard..

My oil painting of some fruit

i also took another shot at making a fighting game. for a while i've wanted to make a game that plays like a traditional fighter but the win condition is similar to smash bros' sumo-wrestling-y knockout idea. a lot of studios have tried and failed at making this concept many times but im adamant they're just doing it wrong

i got a prototype working; this was a lot of work and the resulting games that were played weren't incredibly interesting as far as our high standards for fighting games go, but there's some sauce there.

but it's going to be much more work to clean this up. i know that even if i lock in for months and get all 5 fighters into the game, with their full moveset, that'll only be 20% of the full game's work. the remaining 80% will be balancing and making the kits more interesting. this was very hard but great fun, i think if i was less critical and my standards for fighting games weren't so high, this could be a full thing

also character design is hard!! i wish i could create n'zig ironmaiden but i can only make jimmies.......

5 character concepts for my fighter this is every guilty gear character vs every tekken character

for the amount of time i have available to me, i think a traditional fighter is far too challenging if you want to make something novel and fun...

so i wanted to fart out a nidhogg. here's smaurai buttshit. (this was a typo but my friends insist on it being officially spelled "smaurai" now)

it's a mega-simple fighter a la divekick, but i think the movement keeps things pretty expressive. playtests for this game have been great fun (thanks shaun, kae, moth, pg and jill 💖). i still haven't hosted any kind of tournament for it yet though, there's a lot of menu-fluff i still need to code, so maybe tournament soon

looking back at this year, i technically hit my goals, but i think i did the minimum for both of them. i could paint more.. i could have made a full fighter.. i'd like to continue working on both of these..

Games of the Year

the goats:

very good honorable mentions:

DISHONORABLE mentions:

Gold rank league Sanabi <3

Songs of the Year

albums of the year:

soft ones:

fun ones:

Other stuff I did that I don't have pics for

Next Year

i've been very indoors this year, and pretty sad about my job, but it's been really good

my goals for next year, hmm.. next year i want to:

thank u x100000 for the amazing year, hope you all have a lovely 2026!

snoffee

0 cools!! 🩷

Go back home