Thoughts on goals for 2025, indie games & gamedev, and toxic productivity

So I finally took the leap and set up a less-heinous web site using Zonelets (this is a great tool!) and I'm happy with the results. I'll tinker around with the CSS and JS since I can't resist tweaking things. Hopefully this will be more pleasing than my previous hand-written HTML-only c.1998 format. And with that, comes the new blog. I think it's one of if not the best way to express my thoughts and ideas outside of the local text docs and onenote notebooks I've been keeping for the last X years. I'm also one of those people that loves to talk endlessly about everything game-related to my wife who is amazing and patient and interested in the weird technical things that I blab about from time to time. So now I am subjecting you, the internet denizens, to my unfiltered ranting. Honeslty, I thought about starting a few different projects for a while- a youtube channel, a second bluesky account, another blog, a mailing list, etc., but it's now January 1st of the year of our Lord Helix 2025, and I just happened to remember that I really should stop procrastinating and update my wonky, cringe neocities site, so this worked out perfectly and here we are.

I'm still going to be using Bluesky for posting, but will be less active daily. I'm trying to train myself back off of daily social media useage since I feel like the time before I started using Twitter (2008-2015) was way more productive for me and my daily game design goals, and also a lot better on my mental health- not that Bluesky is bad for it as much as other sites, but just in general I feel like I just value my daily routine without it being as big of an influence on it. I think I'll try to start these blog posts out as monthly so I'm setting an achieveable goal instead of trying to hold myself to a more active weekly cadence. I've got to pay more attention to my full-time day job after all, and I am trying to recover my weekends for friends/family and other things instead of spending them working on Mangotronics publishing duties, but that's also going to take me reclaiming some time outside of my 9-5 (either early in the weekday mornings or evenings). So with that comes making sure that I'm getting enough rest, which I think I've been doing a good job of so far, and not burning out being up too early and getting to bed too late. I want to make sure I'm keeping up my end of the bargain for my developer partner buddies after all. I feel like I'm almost there, making parts of my daily routine more ingrained and second nature instead of having to glance at my schedule every 15 minutes and setting up meetings throughout the day. With a good effort to stay on task and on target, 2025 should be the year that I finally get some games released on consoles now that I have the dev kit access. Fingers crossed.

Another one of my goals is to eschew Steam and GOG, and mostly stick to itch.io whenever possible. As I discovered, itch has some pretty decent build tools and even though the itch client app is not perfect, it's more than functionali and useable, so I also want to continue using that for updates primarily as opposed to Steam when I can. It's hard to avoid Steam, but I've completed harder challenge modes in the past so I know it's possible. The discoverability problem is still there, but that doesn't bother me as much if I'm working on my own projects. For clients and partners, it's on me to help with Steam since I've built up a knowledge base and muscle memory for that, but I'm hoping that I can afford to hire or partner with someone who has similar Steam release and community management skills once I get some funding. Which speaking of- leads me to another big goal I set up which is building up Mangotronics' non-profit arm. I'm probably going to have to make this into a whole other post since its such a large topic, but tl;dr version is that I expect we'll soon be able to get Mangotronics accepting charitable donations and be able to give tax-deductible recepts for them, along with allowing employers to match contributions. My end goal is to supply fuding to self-published/self-employed indie devs so that they can fund if not 1 project or partially supplement their income to start, a way to fully fund their continued development. Huge goal, I know. Probably too big, but that's what I am aiming for as an ideal scenario.

I realized that half-way through this post I lost track of all the other things I wanted to touch on, so I'll most likely include those thoughts as they come back up in future posts- who knows, maybe I'll be posting again sooner than February after all. There are a lot of game and game mechanic ideas that I've got around a hundred pages and 10+ notebooks filled with so maybe those will become blog posts here too. This is probably a good time to wrap up this innagural entry. Lastly, I'm looking forward to all of the current and future indie game scene projects, blogs, curators, etc. that continue to create amazing pieces of work and art through 2025 and wish everybody the best in their 2025 goals. See you next time! -slime