I use these things – when I actually end up publishing them – a bit like a time capsule, a bit like diary of how I saw game making during that year and a bit because I feel like they could be marginally interesting for other people.
So here’s some thoughts about stuff I did and stuff I enjoyed – and some I enjoyed a bit less – this past year.
My professional 2025
Possibly the year I worked the most in my entire life. Professionally speaking it has been a joyful, brutal, intense year. It was also full of accomplishments:
- First of all, I founded Palomar Games as a proper limited company, through which I do my consulting job and develop games. Let me know if you need a contractor or co-development 😉
- Palomar Games made and published a game! The little experiment that might or might not end up being a thing I mentioned in 2023 definitely became a thing. We launched There’s Nothing Underground in December and I couldn’t be happier how it turned out. This past month I talked about it way too much, and maybe I will talk about it more in the future. But for now the most important thing I want to remember is that I managed to get together a bunch of wonderfully talented, friendly, pleasant people who made and shipped a game that may be a bit weird, but it’s also original, fresh and unique. And we did all of that in two years and with no external financing.
- I started working as a contractor game designer for Toca Boca. With them, I worked on two huge packs for Toca Boca World: Megastar Mansion and Midtown Apartments. Designing for kids and for a project that has been going on for a long, long time has been a fantastic challenge. Working on something like this also means millions of players will play stuff you made, which is a great feeling, and a big responsibility. In general, anyone working on games in Stockholm knows that the people at Toca Boca are a lovely bunch. But I cannot stress enough how many talented and kind people work there.
- I also started consulting for Puzzlr, a startup making puzzle games for news sites. I absolutely loved the challenge of doing that, and that team is going places.
Looking back at all I did in one year solidifies my resolve that maybe I should slow down a bit in 2026. Or maybe not. I know myself.
2025 in indie games
Looking at how things have been in the world of indie development… I won’t go into the whole “what is indie”, Expedition 33 and that whole thing. There are instead a couple of topics I haven’t heard many talk about:
The Robloxification of Steam
Yes, 2025 was the year of friendslop (can we please find better names for genres?). But I think the genre itself is part of a larger trend.
Maybe it partly comes from the change of life habits from the Covid years. Maybe a general decrease of attention spans. Maybe a consequence of the commodification of games – you cannot have an avalanche of games published every single day without the general value of ANY game going down somewhat. Possibly all these things at the same time have created this system of incentives where the commercial potential of a game started to function with the same logic of TikTok, or the Roblox ecosystem.
A successful game on Steam, right now, can be described as something that grabs your attention within the first 3 seconds of its trailer (if not from its title alone), cheap, immediately fun, with an extremely low longevity, almost exclusively multiplayer, developed with low stakes and low budget in a handful of months. I am not giving any judgement of quality, but right now this seems like the typical “indie Steam success story”. Of course you still have your Silksong and your Blue Prince: games made with care, a depth and an attention for quality over several years.
But more and more, the general vibe of the indie sphere seems to be “take the money and run”. Goofy trailer that can go viral on TikTok cause it’s wacky, buggy game released as soon as possible and try to win the viral lottery.
Indie Slot Machines
More on the game design specifics, one thing that makes me also think of Roblox is the “numbers go up” design pattern that seems to have become more common. Now, some of the best roguelikes, from Balatro to Slay the Spire, have that mechanic of finding the best synergies and absolutely break the game with some overpowered build. I am not saying it’s a bad thing in itself. On the contrary, it is a powerful ingredient for player agency.
But more and more it seems like it is the only thing that some games have to offer. It is addictive but it also feels like empty calories. From slot machines, to pinball, to shooters, word games and snooker and idle games and whatnot, we have seen lots of games of that “known core gameplay but your baseline attack is 10 though in some runs you end up dealing 10 million”. It’s that tickling of the player’s inner gambler (or maybe even deeper, the inner hunter-gatherer) that I find a bit depressing.
Fortunately, the games industry keeps being so incredibly varied that we also saw success in every single genre, no matter how much it was considered a living dead (JRPGs? Telltale-like adventures?). So, unless you’re trying to make THE ONE GAME that will make you rich, there’s hope.
2025 in the wider tech world
Well, any reflection of how the world has been in 2025 gives me a vertigo feeling of looking down the drain. But aside from the general *gestures around* of the state of reality, some interesting things happened in 2025
AI and related drama
I have been in contact with generative AI earlier than most, and I have been a skeptic pretty much from the beginning. At a philosophical level, I think that a probabilistic machine takes away the fundamental advantage of computing – its reliability and determinism. Even more so in games.
Games are more theater than simulations, really, and, sure, you can do theater with improvisation, but you can never be sure every experience will be worthy. Even the most parroted-back use case of “you could have characters acting as agents in the world and be able to speak naturally with the player” seems like a terrible idea to me. Only someone who fundamentally misunderstands what is dialogue in fiction would think it’s interesting to have NPCs imitating real life conversations. Dialogue is a way to express and develop conflict and storytelling. It’s (supposed to be) poetry: saying the most with the least.
And so we get with the biggest issue of this, and so many other problems of our time: we live in a world where decisions are taken by money hungry philistines. Blame the decline of humanities education. Blame Silicon Valley and its capitalist hippie origins. Whatever it is, we are in the hands of decision makers and CEOs who fundamentally misunderstand art, culture and technology. So, I am not optimistic about any creative direct use of generative AI in games, especially on the visual front: I still haven’t seen one single AI generated picture that I found interesting.
But also, I am too old to be a fundamentalist. So, where AI has been somewhat useful for me and somewhat interesting has been on the coding side. With all the caveats in the world, I feel that if 1) you are prototyping or generally working on a very small project 2) you are trying to implement a solved problem, i.e. a feature that is not doing anything too esoteric, 3) you can read and understand code and 4) you give it well detailed tasks… If you do all that, LLMs can be pretty powerful and useful tools for improving efficiency of coding. I feel that, as a person who can program but is not a programmer (i.e. someone without a formal education in Computer Science) I am sort of the ideal user of this technology. And still, I find it partially useful and I couldn’t really tell you if it saved me time and, if so, how much time.
If I extrapolate, I really cannot justify the bullish attitude of those who say it’s the biggest thing since the industrial revolution. So I feel 2026 will be interesting on that front. Hope to be wrong, but tighten your seat belts.
Stuff I liked in 2025
Favorite Game: DK Bananza and UFO 50 (I know it came out in 2024 but the Switch version released in 2025 so it counts)
Favorite Album: choke enough by Oklou
Favorite Movie: One Battle After Another by P.T. Anderson
Favorite Book: Life After Cars by S. Goodyear, D. Gordon and A. Naparstek