2026

In 2025, I set out to:

• Publish Adventure in Hender's Castle on Steam.
• Expand Aventuras Bonitas, my video game studio, with more projects and increase the size of the team.
• Maintain my exercise habit and increase the amount of weight I can bench press (at that time, 50kg).
• Practice piano every week.
• Learn a language.
• Read more than I did last year (this will be easy because I read almost nothing in 2024).
• Make more videos (public and personal).

How did it go?

Adventure in Hender's Castle, the first game from my studio Aventuras Bonitas, already has a Steam page but hasn't been published yet. Furthermore, the studio is now in "survival" mode. The initial answer is that things didn't go very well in this regard, and I will delve into that shortly.

I maintained the exercise habit. 2025 is the year I’ve exercised the most in my life, and I increased my bench press to 70kg. However, all the credit goes to my wife, who made me wake up early and go to the gym 90% of the days. In any case, exercise is now a constant habit that I plan to maintain indefinitely.

I practiced more piano in 2025 than ever before, specifically using the Simply Piano app. My ability to read sheet music and play without having to constantly "look" at the keys improved significantly. I still have a long way to go, but the piano hobby is undoubtedly another success.

I read more than in 2024. By a rough count, I read about 9 books—mostly fiction with a few technical books thrown in—though I can certainly increase the number of books read.

Learning a language and publishing content were the two habits I definitely didn't follow, both due to a lack of real motivation. I have no need to know a language other than Spanish and English, and I don't have a goal for publishing content (previously it was to market my game development, but I've learned that trying to be a YouTuber and a Game Dev at the same time is tremendously difficult). So, I am marking these as a failure.

In conclusion, regarding the 7 initial goals:

• 3 were resounding successes: exercise, piano, and reading more.
• 2 were failures: learning a language and making more content.
• 2 had "mixed" results: publishing the game and expanding the size of the studio.

What do I think about this, and what am I going to do this year?

In February 2025, one of Aventuras Bonitas' main clients paused their contract. This forced us to pause all the contractors working on the game and ask ourselves questions about how development would continue. Very close to these events, I already had a trip scheduled to San Francisco to attend GDC, where we would show the game at two events: Pocket Gamer Connects and "The MIX" showcase.

At both events, the reception to the game demo was "lukewarm." Players understood the vision of the game and there were some fun things in it, but they had a long list of opinions on things that didn't quite convince them—many of them technical rather than game design related. As a result, we made the decision to restart development on the game (I tell the story about that here only in spanish for the moment).

This reboot of the game would not be in the hands of the original team, but rather done by me directly. I put all the time I previously spent talking to studio clients, managing the team, and correcting their work directly into working on the game myself, one or two hours a day.

That was one of the most valuable lessons for me in 2025: if my "dream" is to make commercially successful adventure games, then I must work on the game and publish it myself, not create a company, hire, and train a team to try to serve clients and make a game by proxy. Working those hours on the game every day since April is the closest I've been to the dream of making a living creating video games.

With this new mindset, we have paused the search for new projects for the studio, concentrating all our energy on making the game. I have a pending update regarding the status and plans for Adventure in Hender's Castle.

The goal remains to publish the game "this year," just as it was in 2025 and 2024... which isn't very encouraging strictly speaking, haha. But now development is literally in my hands, so we will do everything possible. Unless a very good opportunity presents itself for the studio, we really won't be looking for new clients.

Learning a language still appeals to me "intellectually," but the inability to apply that knowledge is what I think keeps stopping me from truly committing. Even so, I'll give it another try this year with Portuguese, taking advantage of the fact that there are a good number of Brazilians at Upstart13—or maybe we'll go to Gamescom Brazil, who knows.

Publishing more content is the other thing that appeals to me "intellectually" but for which I don't have a clear objective. At the end of 2025, I published some posts with opinions I liked, mostly for my own reference (like this annual review post), so I think that is the direction I want to take: writing more things for myself.

So... My goals for 2026 will be:

• Publish Adventure in Hender's Castle on Steam.
• Read a minimum of 12 books.
• Be able to converse in Portuguese.
• Be able to lift 90kg (or more) on the Bench Press.
• Post at least 12 times on this blog.
• Learn to perform 8 songs on the piano and have them sound "good."
• [A secret goal]

This list of things is very similar to last year's, just a bit more specific, I'd say. I think what this reveals is more about the type of "life" I want to lead.

Let's see how it goes. Happy New Year!