Over the course of 2025 on GameJolt and in my personal life, I've experienced a good bit of positives, negatives, and lessons learned throughout the halfway point of this decade, and today I'd like to reflect on the whole year. There's a lot that I'm gonna talk about, so if rant posts are not your kind of thing then this might not be worth your time.

For those who don't enjoy reading rant posts here's the TL;DR, pretty good year in terms of max modes and game development but REALLY shitty year in terms of personal life and other things, learned some valuable lessons, and most of the people I've met are great people. Again, shitty year, 2025 can go to hell.

Anyway, I'm gonna start off with the positives first, then move onto the negatives, then get onto the lessons learned, and then what to expect for 2026 along with some mentions of goats and that'll pretty much be this entire rant.

The Positives: I've got a bit of things to say here. First off, I hit 500 followers on Game Jolt and 500 subscribers on my YouTube channel so that's pretty awesome. I kicked off this year with a pretty bad max mode but still a good achievement, mainly Lonely Menace from TRTF 2 CN. This was already a pretty good start for the max moding part of the year. There were a couple filler modes here and there, I won't go too deep into allat, but the most significant ones I would like to point out are: Puppet Master All Challenges OG Laser Pointer, Hardest Ringing Nightmare, BFP All Challenges v3.12, Melancholia, Hyper Golden Freddy All Challenges, Silent Sleep Paralysis v1.3.2, Eternal Sleep Paralysis v1.5.2, Silent Suicide Mouse v1.2.0 AND Silent Sleep Paralysis v1.2.0, along with Suicide Mouse v1.0.0, BFP v1.1, Silent Suicide Mouse v1.2.2, and FNaC 3 The Challenge Nerfed Laser Pointer. If you wanna know the extra filler modes then check my channel by clicking on this text. I also discovered the All Modes List, which I've been interacting with and have found many modes that may help me get further into my max moding journey and eventually reach the higher ranks and have a really good hardest (this is my profile btw). There have also been games that genuinely look really good and are absolute aura (those being Sister Location Super Custom Night with Perfect Mode, The Return To Freddy's 2: Anniversary Edition, FNaF 2 Super Custom Night, etc.). Game development has also gone very well, near the start of 2025 I got both FNaF 4 UCN v1.0 and Bootleg Plush's 1 Custom Night released. Around the end of January of 2025 I got The Return To Freddy's 2: Classic Recoded released and over the course of this year the TRTF CR games now have a full series dedicated to them and I also announced ProPG's UCN and a 2.0 version of FNaF 4 UCN. I also got FNaBP 2 CN and FNaBP 3 CN released along with 2 CN's VHM update and all of those games in general have performed very well in my eyes. (I may also start Halloween Edition CN development soon, idk.) Then, near the end of 2025, in November, I had gotten The Return To Freddy's 4: Classic Recoded out. This was probably one of the hardest games I've had to make, simply because The Return To Freddy's 4 is a bit more of a complex game in the TRTF series and I planned in a lot of content for the game (LockJawed From The Dead, Golden Freddy and Golden Lockjaw, the new mechanics, the new easter eggs, etc.). However, this game was a blast to test and I'm really happy that this game has turned out as well as it did. Some of my IRL things were also neat, though I won't get into those due to personal reasons. If you're a friend of mine and would like to know, given that I trust you not to share this information you can ask me on Discord (I don't chat with friends on Game Jolt usually). If you would like to add me, then my username is the same as it is on YT and here.

The Negatives: Now as for this part, this is going to be a bit of a long one, some stuff may not be mentioned here due to personal reasons or simply because I forgot that, but I'm going to start off with the fact that this has easily been the worst year of my entire life. With a lot of things changing and the real world becoming much scarier around me, it was not in for a good start. On top of that my grandpa had passed away back in November and it's still super sad to know that he's gone. He was from experience one of the best people you could ever meet and the kind of person we need more of in this world. Game development was also getting a bit frustrating at times, ESPECIALLY during development of TRTF 4 CR due to bugs that would just randomly pop up out of nowhere and it was really annoying trying to fix them as sometimes bugs would just pop up here and there without me even realizing (the subtitles were so fucking annoying to fix you don't want to know). IRL issues were also popping up extremely often and there's so much that I can't say here as I'm not comfortable with all that. The ones that I really need to get out of the way though is that back in late August my dog passed away. He was an old dog and lived most of his life on the streets and my parents adopted him in late October 2021. He was a really good dog, sure it was rough getting used to living with him at first but in the end of the day I got over my issues with him and he was honestly a really chill dog; it didn't hit me that hard at first but after talking with my father I just broke down into tears. Mid September was when things took a massive turn for the worst, as at one point I was struggling with a class that I really hated (and still do) and the grade wasn't that bad but I kept overstressing about it and I said that I wanted to end my life in my last class (not going to go further abt it besides that). However, I managed to get through it thanks to my parents, @Emperor_Berzerk , @MarcosE , and my school counselor + my therapist who I see every other week. If it weren't for them, I don't even know if I'd still be here. There was also my major fumble on the 30th with TRTF 2 CR, if you saw what I posted that day you'll know what happened, I'm not keeping that post up so the situation doesn't get worse than it already was.

Lessons Learned: This year has taught me a lot, both personally and in terms of game development. Likely won't mention personal stuff, but game development wise I learned that you REALLY need to test your games and make sure they are functional and bug-free along with being balanced (The releases of both BFP AC and Frankburt's Night were extremely rough to say the least, Prophecy Mode will not be having that same treatment). It also came to my senses real quick after the backlash for using AI for Dug's v1.3 mechanic is that people would prefer a dogshit and unbalanced mechanic that is made by HUMAN over a really good mechanic that is made by a MACHINE.

What to Expect For 2026: Moving forward, AI assistants will no longer be involved with any of my games. I cannot stress this further enough. The TRTF CR games SHOULD hopefully all be finished, but if TRTF 1 can't be finished then definitely TRTF 3 CR (BTW since there's already a "The Return To Freddy's 1: Classic Recoded" I came up with a cool name for the CR equivalent called "The Return To Freddy's 1: Reconstructed". It's still part of the CR games but the naming is different to avoid confusion). FNaF 4 UCN v2.0 will probably come out this year as well, the game's basically in the final testing stages and more balancing issues need to be patched so it doesn't end up an RNG mess like 1.0 is.

And before I end this off I want to thank a couple people that are really cool and overall nice to talk to. Even if I don't talk to you anymore if you are mentioned here then it's simply because you're a goat. (theres a good chance i forget someone with this )

@1kmz , @AlexTheWolf5 , @Andsy , @Astromic , @OmerMohammed , @Bisctard , @Ravingbloodlust7 , @bongocat11 , @Dark_Reun14 , @Delternal , @dixiethegal , @Emperor_Berzerk , @la_yeet , @GreenJerry , @Il_Tizio_666 , @ItsMeNoOne , @abm213 , @Frogboi17 , @karsan4900 , @KingPinWeeks , @LoomaKinz , @MarcosE , @epic_gamer89 , @MrMalos , @Mirlie , @PM_SerK , @RainbowHype , @skymustdiee , @fdfdjfk3 , @TyVanBuskirk , and @vincedoesstuff

Alright, we're finally done. If you read up to this point, then thank you. I'll see y'all whenever the time comes for me to post again.