The end of the year is approaching and I have made a summary of what happened during 2025 and write of what I expect for 2026, as I did the last year.

What happened in 2025

Personal

This was a difficult year since my dad passed away. He caught a respiratory infection around July and even thought he was a healthy person, he couldn’t recover from it. We didn’t expect this to happen and it was hard to process for all the family and friends. He was really loved by everyone and we are going to miss him a lot. From time to time, I cry thinking about him and life and death, and also about the future and about my children and everything (writing about this makes me cry too ).

That wasn’t all, a month ago my grandma also passed away. Even though her case was more expected, since she was old and suffering Alzheimer’s disease for a long time, it was really sad for the family as well.

Those two events changed the everyday dynamics including my work. However, I am lucky enough to have flexibility with both projects so I adjusted the hours to be there for my mom and family. Now that things are slowly returning to “normal” I can adjust back and/or compensate.

Cleared Hot

This was a super interesting year for Cleared Hot. We released the Demo around June, just in time for Steam Next Fest, and it was really well received by players and wishlists increased a lot. Even though it was a great effort to get it in time and we were a bit tired, its success was a great motivational push to work forward for the next milestone.

A month ago, we released an Early Access of the game with the first story arc. We worked even harder but it was received even better than the Demo. We couldn’t be happier with the results. Releasing a game is hard and takes time which makes having a great reception relieving. The main difference with the Demo is that players are paying now for the game.

When I started working in Cleared Hot, my job was more like a consultant for the general solution of the game and/or specific code stuff. However, over time it changed to be more and more of a general developer, from discussing high level game stuff to deciding the technical solutions and coding too. The team grew up over time and now we have a solid core of super talented people, each one with a super power (my superpower is to cleanup the project including code, prefabs, scenes, plugins ).

We integrated my GameObject Triggers’ Logic into the project and we are using it to create the logic for the levels and I am really happy with that since it proves the core idea makes sense to create games. I am also using it for my game Ship Miner, and when I was working at Ironhide we used a similar solution for Iron Marines 1 and Iron Marines 2.

Even though we work together in most of the technical solutions, I was responsible of the destruction system of the game where models are destroyed by physics interactions (I could write in detail about this system in another blog post). All the destructible models are created by Mane and we worked together in tools so he can also integrate and test them in the game too.

I am enjoying the process, from the moment I started to right now, from the technical challenge to the human interactions. I was very lucky that Ignacio from Sarnayer put me and Colin in contact two years ago . By the way, he is in the credits with a special role as the one who connected us .

Here is the link of Cleared Hot for more info:

Ship Miner

In terms of my game Ship Miner, I started by publishing a private Playtest around mid July with the idea of start getting feedback more gradually to prepare for a better Demo. I was surprised with how many people subscribed to it. I started by giving access to a small number of playtesters and as I continued working on the game I gave access to more and more. Some of them even joined Ship Miner’s Discord server for a more direct interaction. I can’t be more grateful for the time they spent on my game and for the feedback they gave me .

I loved this dm from one of the playtesters :

To be honest, I usually just lurk but I have to say the ost mellowed me out (and some tracks gave me Fifth Element vibes) in the best way possible when I played the demo. I was also completely enraptured by the aesthetic that I was really sucked into the gameplay.

In September, after some playtest iterations, I published the first Demo of Ship Miner. Even though some important elements of the game are still being defined I decided to continue since I felt the core game experience was ready to be shared with the world. The Demo went ok, the reaction was similar to the playtest but now with more people. This isn’t bad, some of them even converted to playtesters but I kinda expected a greater reaction but I failed in applying to any event to announce the Demo. My thinking there was, I don’t want to burn all the announcement opportunities with an incomplete Demo but I want to have a Demo as soon as possible so I kinda failed there, I should’ve applied to all the events as possible announcing it, complete or not since now I will have less chances to re-announce the more completed Demo.

Btw, I continue using the Playtest with game updates before publishing to Demo.

I am currently working on the mid loop of the game where the player decides where to go next after completing each asteroid, hope to get an update soon.

In marketing terms, I did a low effort of showing some Gifs and Videos on Twitter, Bluesky, Threads and Tumblr. From time to time I try again Reddit with different luck (I recently had a good post there but still not sure how to do it). I started also to put videos in Youtube Shorts, TikTok and Instagram and even though they didn’t do bad, I still don’t have a good call to action there so the conversion to wishlists was really low. I believe a key element here is to be consistent in posting content and I failed a bit on that this year.

Here is wishlist activity along the year.

A year ago the game had around 1.3k wishlists and now it has 3k. Some key moments were when I had the first Threads “hit” post, starting the private Playtest and then publishing the Demo. I didn’t participate in any Steam Next Fest yet, I am saving that for when the Demo is the best possible, closer to the release.

For the next year the idea is to start participating in more steam events now that I have a public Demo, and also start contacting content creators to try to catch some interest with time. I also plan to improve my social network posting consistency.

Here is the link for Ship Miner in case you want to play the Demo or just wishlist it:

Even though I didn’t start Ship Miner to make my dad proud or something like that, I really wanted to share with him my gamedev journey and also the release of my own game to the world. He was one of the main reasons I decided to make games when I was a kid and I really hope he is somewhere out there watching over me.

Other projects & game jams

In terms of other projects and jams, this year I took that easy and only decided to participate in the GBJAM. The theme for this year was Unlucky and we made a game named Faster than Luck with my friend Unf0ld, clearly inspired by FTL (a game we both love).

I also did a couple of updates to the demo we have with @penusbmic for his assets but I didn’t have the time I wanted to keep it up to date with the latest additions to the asset pack.

When I started the year I also had the objective of find ideas for a possible next game but in the end I decided to keep my focus and energy on Ship Miner to make it as best as possible.

What’s up for 2026

For the next year the idea is to work hard and consistent on both projects, Cleared Hot needs to be ready for a full release and Ship Miner should at least get an Early Access one.

Another thing I want is too try to get more time to work on prototypes and jams again just for fun, improvement and learning. And maybe, just maybe, get an idea for a next project while doing so. Doing procedural generation for Ship Miner asteroids was super interesting and I would love to learn more about that next year (maybe I should join a procjam).

I would love to go to a gamedev conference outside my country this year to personally connect with more people. It’s been a while since I go to something else than the local events.

That’s it for now, no big plans for 2026 more than just continue with what I am doing, 2025 was a rough year with lows and highs.

Thanks for reading!

I wish you all a great new year.