Magicland Year in Review 2025
In many ways, 2025 did not go as planned, but I still hit the majority of my goals for this year and made great progress. Rather than spending all my time building content like I had hoped, I took a lot of time to refine the systems and design of the game in ways I cannot even BEGIN to fully express the importance of. But I guess I should start somewhere, so here goes.
January-March: New Worlds and Budding Ideas
I had a pretty blank canvas going into the new year, so I decided to use the opportunity to pepper in smaller ideas I had been sitting on. In some ways, it was kind of an extension of what I was doing in 2024 - not very focused and kind of just working on it for fun. I also still had a job at this time, so progress was slow and steady. Though, things were about to change in my life that would change the trajectory of the project...
April-June: The Great Refactoring
At the end of March, I was laid off from my job. It was a tough time for me, but with all the newfound free time I had just gained I decided to launch straight into a solid development schedule and tackle more ambitious tasks that I had been putting off. The dialogue system I had developed in 2021 was totally unscalable and needed to be thrown out. By sheer coincidence, I had just met the developers of Yarnspinner at GDC, so I decided to give their package a try. It took me an entire month to make the change in conjunction with the new "item delivery" system. And oh my... it has been SO much better since. I honestly can't imagine how I developed the game before doing this.
The next month and a half was spent refining even more systems, such as cutscenes. While they were a total nightmare to add before, the changes I made during this time have allowed me to envision the game as more cutscene-oriented.
July-September: A New Demo
After the great refactoring, I was left with another large problem: Everything I had built for the original demo was now broke. While this wouldn't cause me issues immediately, I figured I should probably pilot-test developing with all of the new systems I had just made. I needed to know if they really worked, and not just for the same dialogue boxes I tested over and over while debugging them. So while it took another 3 months to get polished enough for release on September 13th, I'm so glad I did this because I was able to catch a whole host of little design flaws and bugs.
Around this time, I also realized a noticeable improvement in my art skills. So I started going through and updating a lot of old sprites I had made when the game was first conceived in 2021, including the player character!
A lot of other things like building textures, 2D assets, and various other characters got similar touch-ups. Overall I tried to make the colors more vibrant and trying to shade with intention instead of randomly.
October-December: Reflections, Creations, Vacations
After taking a small break post-demo patch, I started to shift my working style to be focused on one area at a time. I stared with the Farm Town, since I had a pretty good idea of a kind of harvest moon-type parody quest where you have to give gifts to 4 "love interests". I ended up getting it nearly done in about a month. This felt really good! I thought since I had 2 months left I could get 2 more areas done, but it didn't really work out that way due to holiday vacations and general burnout. I also did a lot of reflecting during this time. Like, what is this game? Why am I making it? What should my end goal be? I feel like I should know the answers to some of these questions, but the fact is that I'm still having so much fun working on the game that I don't care that much. Now, I'm back in it and working at a more modest pace, this time focusing on the Swamp level. The quest of this area will involve reconstruction, teamwork, and conspiracy...
Progress Report
Before I get into the numbers, I realized I should clarify what "done" actually means. For the purposes of these reports, done doesn't actually mean "completely 100% release-ready finished", but instead just having the base-level content implemented for the main quest. For my earlier updates, I was going more off of "done = ready to implement quest content" scale, so I'm adjusting some of those numbers here.
Farm Town: 90% done
Swamp: 40% done
Magic City: 20% done
Enchanted Forest: 10% done (unchanged from Mid-Year Update
Desert: 1% done (also unchanged)
Some numbers went up and some went down as I further realized my scope. But I think the progress can be appreciated through the layout changes of the main areas :)
Goals for 2026
I think I fell into a pretty good rhythm for completing game content at the end of this year. There might be a couple small systems I'll need to add, like a currency/shop system, but probably nothing like the major dialogue refactor in April. So if I can mark every area as "100% done" by the end of the year, I'll be happy. Then, in 2027 I can focus on bug fixing, bonus content, and polish. Still hoping for a late 2027 release date, but we'll see. Game devs are famously very bad at predicting where their game will be done! And do I think I'm special? Am I "that guy" who can actually be right for once? Maybe....... we'll see.
Final Thoughts
A lot of things happened this year, both in the game and in my own personal life. While it feels like a lot of things right now are out of my control, the one solid thing I can put love and effort into is this project. It gave me an outlet to be productive and creative during a year where at times I felt lost and unsure of where my career in games was going. I've learned a lot of things working on Magicland, but if it's taught me anything actually important to my life, it's that nothing will stop me from making games.
Anyways, with all that being said, stay magical. Happy 2026, and thank you for reading!