Hello! It’s the new year, I’ve just recovered from the worst flu I’ve ever had and I'm feeling well enough to review the year, as is tradition. Let's take a look back at what I've done this year, compare it to the goals I set myself at the start of 2025 and think about what I want to do in the future.

What I did in 2025

I spent the vast majority of the year working on Hyper Bun Buster. Back at the start of January, this is how it looked:

At the time, this was by far the best-looking thing that I had ever created. I was convinced that I had hit the peak of my ability when it came to pixel art, and that I would never be able to make anything that looked better than this.

Here's how the game looks now:

Everything is squashing, stretching and bouncing. Coins, stars and other particles are flying all over the place. Tess is enthusiastically swinging her hammer instead of just kinda holding it out and rotating on the spot, enemies and bosses flash to indicate their attacks, and the environments have paths, cracks and other sprites instead of just being big plain rectangles. I never thought I would make anything that looked even remotely this good.

Hyper Bun Buster didn't have any sound effects whatsoever at the start of 2025. Not only that, I didn't really know how to make the kinds of sound effects that I wanted the game to have either. Thankfully I made a lot of progress on that front this year, making most of the main combat and UI sound effects. It's so much more satisfying to hit enemies around now!

On the gameplay side of things, the combat encounters now have much more variety than before. There are now all sorts of unique and memorable arcade-style combat encounters, whereas almost every fight in earlier versions of the game took place against two waves of randomly spread-out enemies in a relatively rectangular arena. The arcade mode stages are all pretty much finished at this point too (barring playtester feedback), including a couple of new stages that I sneaked into the game in the last couple of months.

I announced the game to the public this year, along with a playable demo at SAGE 2025! I was completely overwhelmed by the response. I received more enthusiastic feedback from this demo than I have from anything else I have ever done in my life, with the possible exception of coming out as trans. Thank you so much to everyone who played the demo, streamed it, or gave any feedback or comments!

Despite all the improvements to Hyper Bun Buster, I didn't finish making any games this year. Mina the Hollower was the last game I worked on before I went full-time indie in 2021 and I thought people would at least get to play that game this year for their fix of a new game that I technically worked on, but that game got delayed until 2026 too.

But just because I didn't release any games doesn't mean I didn't release anything at all. The extremely silly Arcade Game Name Generator is one of my favorite things I have ever made, participating in the Indie Game Cheats zine with my friends was a fun time, and releasing my game engine's random number generation code as an open source single-header C library (mel_rng.h) taught me a lot about how to clean up my code for public use.

This year I decided to start releasing my games as DUCK_BERET instead of C.T. Matthews, although I haven't finished renaming all my websites (such as my Patreon or this newsletter) yet. I'm much happier with this new name, and it better suits the atmosphere I want my games to have. Speaking of rebranding, I switched the avatar that I use for my Twitch streams to this character that my friend NomnomNami designed for me in January:

I love how she looks! I've had a great time streaming this year, and frankly I think a large part of it is because of I get to see this cute character every time I do it.

To round off the year, I drew some pixel art fanart of my friend SkylordZoey:

I had a great time drawing this! I'd really like to start drawing more outside of work, especially when I've finished animating Hyper Bun Buster's bosses and presumably learned more about drawing humanoid characters in the process.

I think that's everything I've done in 2025 that's remotely related to making games. But the most important thing that happened to me this year is that I've gained a lot of self-confidence, met lots of new people and made lots of friends. My social life today is completely unrecognisable compared to a year ago and I am so much happier and more fulfilled than I thought I ever would be.

Did I hit the goals I set at the start of the year?

Here are my goals for 2025 that I set at the start of the year, along with whether or not I achieved them:

Learn to make arcade-style sound effects. Yes! I love my game's sound effects.

Rebrand my game development "studio". Yes! I'm DUCK_BERET now.

Keep making games for people who like arcade games. Yes! All of my effort this year has gone into my game's arcade mode and into learning skills that willl help me make more arcade-style games in the future.

Release Hyper Bun Buster. Nope.

Try really hard to get my game engine's online multiplayer working on Nintendo Switch, again. Nope.

Try really hard to get my game engine running in web browsers and on Android. Uh oh.

Consider adding two player co-op to Ducky's Delivery Service. Oh dear.

Make and release a tiny arcade-style game for fun. Oh no.

And here are the extra goals I set for myself in the middle of 2025:

Don't put non-arcade modes in my future games. This isn't really something I can check off but it's a good idea! Such a good idea, in fact, that it might stick around as one of my 2026 goals.

Make it easier to prototype new games in my engine. I haven't done this yet either. It's still a good idea though.

Make smaller games and release them faster. That isn't really something I can check off yet; it's just a goal for the future.

So no, I didn't come close to hitting any of the game development milestones that I had set for myself at the start of the year. Why is that? I can think of a few possible reasons.

Back at the very start of 2025, my plan was to take Hyper Bun Buster as it existed back then and finish it up as soon as I could. I might have been able to manage this on a good year, if everything went smoothly. However, I instead decided to spend a few months learning to make my games look and sound even better, and even more time improving the level design. I'm not sure whether or not that was technically a good decision from a financial point of view, but it made the game better and that's what matters the most to me.

As for the other tasks (Nintendo Switch multiplayer, web/Android builds, Ducky co-op and cleaning up my engine code so I can use it for small games), I felt like it was more important to work on Hyper Bun Buster. Those are all good ideas, but in retrospect I think they're things I should work on when I've finished Hyper Bun Buster or when I'm desperate for a break, not things I should force myself to do in the middle of game's production cycle.

Another possible reason for getting less work done is that I have much more of a social life now. Up until early this year, it was embarrassingly common for me to find myself with nothing to do during a weekend so I would just default to working on my game to fill the time. There's nothing wrong with working on your game a lot, of course, but it can become a problem if it's literally the only thing that you're ever doing. I don't have that problem anymore, so I'm much less likely to work tons of overtime than I used to.

And finally, I've been ill a lot this year. I've had countless doctor visits about chronic headaches this year, and I've been on and off some medicine that helped to an extent but came with some severe side effects of its own. I'm fighting a tension headache while I write this post right now. It sucks, and it has made it much harder to get any work done. Hopefully things improve soon.

So that's why I'm sitting here at the end of 2025 with no finished Hyper Bun Buster, no other small finished games and no web/Android ports for my engine. I'm genuinely sorry to anyone who wanted the game to be done this year, and I hope this post helps explain why it didn't happen. I hope you enjoy the finished game!

My 2026 goals

Release Hyper Bun Buster. For real this time. I love the game as it is, and unless it runs into any serious issues while being playtested I just want to finish it up and release it at its current quality level.

Don't put non-arcade modes in my future games. I sincerely hope that Hyper Bun Buster's adventure mode helps lots of non-arcade players enjoy the game, and I'm glad I'm making it. But making it has taken up a lot of my time, and in my future games I don't want to put in this much time into modes that I'm not a personal fan of. Instead of just trying to give non-arcade players something that plays close to the games they already play, I would arguably be better off spending that time making my arcade-style games look so cool that people can't resist trying them out anyway. If I want to help ease those players in, I would rather do that by adding helpful tutorials and practice modes. We've recently seen the developers of several arcade-style games try to expand their audiences by making extremely beginner-focused beat 'em ups and shmups with drastically simplified mechanics, extended campaigns and/or roguelike elements to ease in new players. In my opinion the best any of these games can hope to achieve is to sell lots copies to new players who go "well I like this one game, but all other arcade games still suck". I'm not interested in striving to be another example of this, and I would rather that my future games instead do their best to create new actual fans of their respective genres. That way I would be growing the audience for all my arcade-style gamedev friends instead of just for myself!

Come up with a decent way of prototyping small games. Ideally I'd like to simplify my engine codebase enough that it's easy for me to spin up a new prototype game from scratch, but as a last resort I could always learn how to use an off-the-shelf engine just for prototypes. I just want to be able to make small game jam games for fun.

Get a better haircut and some better clothes. I'm pretty happy with how I look and I'm doing great socially these days, but I still have the classic "I'm afraid to get a haircut so I just let my hair grow out" haircut and I usually dress almost the same as I did before I transitioned. I think I would be happier if I changed those things.

Anyway, those are my goals for 2026. Wow, I sure did write a lot about wanting to make the games that I want to make, instead of compromising what makes them cool in the first place in an attempt to appeal to the masses. I suppose it's not that surprising that a trans person is adamant about wanting to authentically express herself instead of just doing what society expects of her, now that I think about it. I hope my direction for 2026 is something that you're interested in, I hope you don't mind that I didn't hit the goals I set for myself at the start of 2025, and I wish you the best of luck with your goals for this year!

My top 17 games of 2025

It’s the end of the year so let’s think about videogames! I played a bunch of games this year and I really liked 17 of them. Here they are, in rough order. You can click on some of the games’ names to see my playthrough videos, and some of them even have commentary.

17. Öoo (NamaTakahashi, PC, 2025)

A short puzzle platformer by the creator of Elec Head. It's a little on the easy side even if you do all of the optional/hidden content, but it's very charming! (steam link)

16. Ninja Princess (SEGA, Arcade, 1985)

A cute top-down run 'n gun with aggressive enemies who orbit the player. You have a very strong dodge roll, but they balance it by having some aggressive enemies who just run straight at you and hit you right out of your roll's recovery frames. It's a funny way of balancing dodge rolls and more games should do this.

15. Bomber Man World (Irem, Arcade, 1992)

I prefer Irem's other Bomberman arcade game but this one is still a lot of fun! Filling the screen with tons of enemies, powering up the player really quickly and removing all your powerups after each room is a really fun formula for a single player (and co-op) Bomberman game.

14. Tank Force (Namco, Arcade, 1991)

An arcade sequel to Battle City (NES) and Tank Battalion (Arcade), featuring co-op for up to 4 players. It's a top-down 2D tank game that floods the screen with enemies and challenges you to take them all out before they reach your base. I love the mechanic of being able to shoot enemy bullets out of the air if you line yourself up with them perfectly! The only reason I didn't go for a one credit clear of this game is that it's very long and unforgiving; if you make one mistake and they blow up your base, it's an instant game over. It recently got a PS4/Switch release as part of Arcade Archives if that's your kind of thing!

13. Singou Breaka (NEOタケトンボ, PC, 2025)

Possibly the most stressful and claustrophobic arcade-style puzzle game I have ever played. Slide traffic lights back and forth, match their colors and make them explode! It's so easy to accidentally let everything to spiral out of control, lock up your board and slowly suffocate your way to a game over. I love it. (steam link)

12. Bomber Man (Irem, Arcade, 1991)

The first of Irem's two Bomberman games. This one has the more aggressive enemies of the two so I prefer it, but they're both well worth playing. I want more games like this!

11. Ninja Warriors Once Again / Ninja Saviors: Return of the Warriors (NatsumeAtari, PC/Consoles, 2019 remake of a 1994 SNES game)

A remake of the The Ninja Warriors (SNES) by the original developers, with beautiful pixel art and some extremely interesting new characters. I prefer the original game's 4:3 playfield and higher level of difficulty, but this one is still a lot of fun. (steam link)

10. Splatterhouse (Namco, Arcade, 1988)

An interesting Castlevania-style action platformer for the arcades. The game lets you use infinite continues but it sends you back to the start of the stage every time, so you can still have a good time when using infinite credits and treating it like a console game. The difficulty level is fairly low by arcade game standards and there's not much to do after you've cleared it unless you get into speedrunning, but I loved my time with the game nonetheless. Especially the bubble corridor stage, where you have to proactively punch and kick randomly swaying bubbles out of the air before they overwhelm you and take you out. I would play an entire game of that bubble corridor.

9. Kozure Ōkami / Lone Wolf and Cub (Nichibutsu, Arcade, 1987)

A simplified footsies 'em up with a sword. Enemies outrange you if they approach you from above or below but your sword has a long horizontal reach, so you run through the stage while lining yourself up horizontally with enemies and poking them as they run at you. That's pretty much the entire game, other than a few enemies with guns that mix things up and some awkward bosses who you have to repeatedly poke while standing diagonally below them. Very simple to get into but very fun to learn!

8. Mamorukun ReCurse! (G.Rev / City Connection, PC/Consoles, 2025 update to a 2008 Arcade/Dreamcast game)

An updated release of the cute top-down bullet hell run 'n gun Mamorukun Curse with new characters, a widescreen aspect ratio and various new gameplay modes. I always struggled to get into the original game because it had a vertical aspect ratio and lots of horizontal screen scrolling, so I felt like a horse wearing blinders. This widescreen release helped me fall in love with the game! I wonder if I'll be able to go back to the original, now that this release has eased me into things and helped me learn the stage layouts. (steam link)

7. Deltarune Chapters 3 & 4 (Toby Fox and lots of other people, PC/Consoles, 2025)

It's an RPG. The gameplay isn't my kind of thing but I love the writing and everything else about it. It feels like this development team just keeps getting better and better at doing what they do. (steam link)

6. Midnight Wanderers (Capcom, Arcade, 1991)

An unbelievably beautiful looking run 'n gun that is one of the three games in Capcom's "Three Wonders" arcade release. This is one of those games where you spray a billion shots in multiple angles at once and I tend to prefer games where you have to work hard to aim your attacks, but this game won me over with its lightning-fast pacing and fun boss fights. It's a bit on the easy side but I loved every moment of it. (steam link)

5. Bonanza Bros. (SEGA, Arcade, 1990)

A fascinatingly original sidescrolling 2.5D stealth-action hybrid game from all the way back in 1990, with a great blend of sneaking around, hiding behind enemies, and fighting them head-on in the right situations. It also makes the genius decision of your weapon only stunning enemies for a handful of seconds, forcing you to keep moving instead of being able to methodically clear out every single enemy. I wish some of the enemy types were a bit harder to fight head-on and that the game had a bit more random variance instead of being fully predictable, but I still had a great time clearing it and figuring out how to route my world record speedrun (note: the game barely has any competition, I am not a genius speedrunner or anything). There's nothing else quite like this game, and I personally think the particular way that it mixed stealth and action would still feel fresh and ahead of its time if it released as an indie game today.

4. Hollow Knight: Silksong (Team Cherry, PC/Consoles, 2025)

Unfortunately I had to drop this game after a few hours because of motion sickness. It had some of the best arena fights and boss battles of any sidescrolling game I have ever played, along with lots of dialogue and exploration that personally didn't appeal to me. If they ever give the game an arcade mode with nothing but locked room fights and bosses, along with an optional camera change that makes it so I don't get motion sickness when I play, it could become one of my favourite games of all time. (steam link)

3. Rolling Bird (Hijong Park, PC, 2018)

A brutally tense run 'n gun inspired by Namco's Rolling Thunder (1986), with random level layouts and fast and hectic gameplay. It is shocking just how perfectly this combination works; even with only a few enemy types (melee, grenade, gun, gun again but with the ability to proactively crouch) it doesn't just feel like samey sludge in the way that most randomly generated action game stages do, thanks to the game forcing you to heavily rely on terrain to survive. This might just be the perfect run 'n gun for me, and it is easily the most fun I have had playing a procedurally-generated action game since I first downloaded a Spelunky alpha build from TIGSource back in 2008. I cannot overstate how much I love this game.

My only incredibly minor nitpick is that I wish it mixed in some hardcoded setpieces, to make its overall pacing feel a bit less like Tetris / Mr. Driller and a bit more like a regular arcade run 'n gun that happens to have some unpredictable procedurally generated sections mixed in. But when the absolute worst thing I can say about a game is that it makes me imagine an even better game that doesn't exist yet, that's an incredible place to be. This is an all-time classic in my eyes. (steam link)

2. Violent Storm (Konami, Arcade, 1993)

I learned how to play arcade beat 'em ups by playing The Punisher last year, but playing Violent Storm is what made me truly fall in love with the genre. I love its cramped tight arenas, its fast pacing and low health enemies, its incredibly strong throws and pummels, and its brutally strong enemies who can sometimes be completely impossible to fight head-on if you don't have a way to get the jump on them. Its second loop throws in all sorts of extremely silly Mario Maker-esque level design, with huge enemies chasing you through an entire section of a stage, a big group of fish dancing on a pier, barrels and enemies raining down from the sky, and giant groups of elite enemies arranged like bowling pins.

The only things I don't love about are its boss fights, its easier parts (stages 1, 2, 5 and the first half of stage 3) and how incredibly strong the player's dash attack is against most enemies. But the dull parts are pretty quick to breeze through, and the game still finds plenty of ways to challenge you even when you're using your dash attack as much as possible. I feel like if the original team got to make a sequel to this game, it would have cleaned up those issues and been one of the best games ever made.

1. Final Fight (Capcom, Arcade, 1989)

This might be my new favourite game of all time, especially when playing as Haggar. It doesn't quite have the lightning-fast pacing of Violent Storm but it is perfectly designed in every other way (except for a couple of the bosses). Coming up with a plan in this game and executing it feels immensely satisfying in the same way as driving a manual car, or pulling off a difficult technique mid-match in an old fighting game. There are so many satisfying little tricks like backward jump splashing enemies to pull them towards you, using regular backward jumps when you need the extra speed (such as dropkicking an Andore onto the ground then instantly backturn jumping towards him so you can get into meaty grab range by the time he stands up), knowing when to buffer a superjoy input by holding a button and when to go for the raw two-buttons-on-the-exact-same-frame input, being ready to superjoy after (or ideally before) getting hit in general, and keeping track of whether or not your autocombo suplex hit any other enemies so you know whether or not you'll be able to chain another quick suplex.

Thankfully none of these tricks trivialize the game in any way. Even if you can perfectly execute all of them every time under pressure, you still have to participate in the main game of footsies and crowd control, and I have never played another beat em up that does this as well as Final Fight does.

Violent Storm's enemies are split into three camps: ones who you can easily approach with a dash attack, ones who will run into your jab if you stand still and mash it, and ones who you basically can't safely approach at all unless you throw another enemy at them or hit them as soon as they spawn. Final Fight, on the other hand, has enemies who demand a wider variety of approaches (when playing as Haggar). Basic enemies can often be jabbed or thrown, Bill Bulls outrange you on the ground while charging at you but can still be hit with any jumping attack, Andores can charge at you with no startup and can only be consistently outranged by dropkicks (unless you have inhumanly good jab timing), and Hollywoods are plain evil. There's something really fun about your only way to start your offense on certain enemies being a committal uncomboable low-reward attack like your dropkick, which only lets you convert it into a more damaging followup loop if you can clear enough space to meaty grab the enemy the moment they finish getting up. In short, the risks and rewards of the different attacks and strategies feel perfectly balanced.

Most importantly, this game simply feels great to play on a visceral level. There's nothing else quite like suplexing a guy into ten other guys, or punching an entire crowd at once with your three hit combo. The game really does have it all, and I can't wait to learn how to clear the final stage and eventually go for a 1 credit clear.

I have no idea how the prevailing modern opinion of this game ended up being a combination of "it's an unfair quarter muncher" and "it was good for its time but you only have a few attacks so it's outdated". This is so far away from my opinion of it that I feel like I'm living in a different universe. If you are at all interested in beat 'em ups and you don't mind a very high level of challenge, I highly recommend giving Final Fight a try as Haggar. Just make sure you play the arcade original (or the modern ports on Capcom Arcade Stadium), not the 90s retro console ports that removed half of the enemies and completely changed how the game played as a result. (steam link)

This was a great year for videogames for me! I have three new all-time favourites, a potential future all-time favourite in Silksong, and plenty of other inspirational arcade games and fantastic modern games.

I also loved Panic Park (Namco, Arcade, 1998), Boghog's beat 'em up prototype (Boghog, PC, 2025), Boghog's top-down single screen run 'n gun (Boghog, PC, 2025), various other prototypes and unfinished games (my friends, PC, 2026?), the Fox Flare Night demo (Outside, PC, 2026) and Hyper Bun Buster: Rocket Hammer Action (me, PC, 2026) but filling the list with unfinished demos and my friends’ games felt like cheating, and Panic Park is more of a short term gimmick (albeit an incredible one) than a full-on new favourite game.

There are even lots of other 2025 releases I haven’t played yet that I there’s a good chance I’ll love, such as ASURA THE STRIKER, Daemon Bride: ADDITIONAL GAIN, Gradius Origins, Hundred Line, Lilac 0, MASH VP! Re:VISION, NIGHT STRIKER GEAR, Stray Children and TETRIS® THE GRAND MASTER 4 -ABSOLUTE EYE-.

I don’t remember the last time I’ve had this much fun playing games. There’s something to be said for playing what you love instead of forcing yourself to play whatever’s popular, I suppose.

That’s all I’ve been up to recently. Because the flu destroyed me for almost the entire Christmas break, my friends are forcing me to take this week off work so I actually get some time to rest. So I might have a bit less to talk about than usual in the next newsletter, but hopefully I’ll make something interesting between now and then anyway. In the meantime, I hope you have a healthy couple of weeks and I’ll see you next time!