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Season 2, 2025

2025-07-03

Here we are halfway through 2025, and it’s already time for another seasonal recap! Season 2 was a big shift for me, with my schedule being turned pretty much on it’s head. I’ve definitely been busy this season, pushing projects further than I thought they could go. I also got more of a handle on what a well spent day looks like for me, and what it takes to keep spending them well consistently. This recap is absolutely gargantuan. It took writing almost 4000 words over 3 days and I barely scratched the surface of most of the topics. Feel free to skim the headings to find stuff that is interesting to you.

Let’s kick off with a look at the plans I made at the end of last season:

A routine for workdays

A foundation for my online presence

At least 1 more asset pack released!

Progress on big projects like Verbal Void.

Start prototyping my NPC Guard project (and maybe getting some others involved)

Bonuses (I don't have direct control over these, but i'll try my darndest to get them to happen):

That’s a lot of stuff! I definitely had some high hopes for slamming lots of stuff out given the new full time resi schedule. Unfortunately, I fell into a bit of a slump in April, which made things tough (more on how I managed this later).

Routine for Workdays: upon typing this up, I put it on the wall and immediately hated it. I don’t think I stuck to the schedule a single time this whole season. But that’s ok, because I don’t feel like I’m really wasting any time day-to-day now.

A foundation for my online presence: yeah nah. too busy with fun work to bother with this. maybe i'll revisit this in the future!

1 more asset pack released: nah didn’t do that either. It’s been busy!!

Progress on big projects: another no lol. more on this later on.

Start prototyping NPC Guard project: at some point this season, I put this to bed. I think because it’s not something I want to make commercial. I’m happy to keep it as a hobby project for now, and don’t feel the need to express myself through it for now.

1 more game project released: I did this!! took part in a game jam just last week.

Sound Processing Unit Launch: We’ve got a date for the gig locked in, and we’re grinding to make sure we have enough time to practise it all. Hard work, but looking like it’s going to be a huge gig.

So things didn’t go quite to plan this season, but I’m feeling good about how it went, so lets take a look back and scope it out.

Season 2 Recap:

Dungeon Pizza

This project has been making serious moves this season. We’ve been working to get the game into more people’s hands, and also into events! It’s exciting working on a project with this much momentum, and I hope we can bring it all together in time for a swift release before the end of the calendar year (I’d like it to be just about ready by the end of next season, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves).

This season I learned about mixing with FMOD busses, & assigning them to elements in game, as well as implementing snapshots for some cool effects, polished up some sound effects for some minigames to basically final quality, and wrote TWO more tracks for the game! Yahoo!

On top of all this, we also took the game to some local events and got it into people’s hands. It was great to see players who were unfamiliar with the project resonate with it, and pick it up pretty quickly. Definitely makes working on it going forward easier too.

Keen to keep powering on with DP. It’s got a lot of people doing sick work, and I’m excited to get it OUT and into the world!!

Queensland Games Festival

Speaking of events, QGF was the big one! Dungeon Pizza had a great showing, and we dressed in aprons and chef hats heheheh. It was a lot of fun and very invigorating for the team to get so many new people introduced to the game! I was lucky enough that Dungeon Pizza wasn’t the only game I had worked on showing at QGF. The Family and the Fearless, a one page TTRPG I worked on for a jam had a table, as well as Hyper Router, which I got to work on as a part of Camp Squiggly (AND I WANT TO MAKE MORE MUSIC FOR IT HOT DOG). Not only that, but Moonbrella, which I’m ramping up for now was showing (And won an award! congrats Jett!!) AND Bumper Bout (which i’m lined up to compose for) had a table and also placed 2nd in the people’s choice award (Congrats Rocco!!). All in all that’s 5 games I’m “attached to” showing at one festival! That’s very exciting and validating, but the next step is following through with these and making sure I can take them all the way to release!

Moonbrella

Moonbrella development is ramping up and I’m super excited to work with Jett again on another game. In this season, we talked through a bunch of references and laid out the framework for the music in the game. I also put together a track for a set piece moment in the game. It was an interesting blend of genres to try and mash together, and I think I got most of the way there, but I might revisit and spruce it up once the other tracks have taken form in order to give it all a bit more coherence. I’m keen to dive in more, and it’s one of the big tasks up front in Season 3!

Sound Processing Unit

This is the project that I’m most excited to reflect on for this season. At the end of March, we had only just had our first rehearsal, with maybe 3 of the tracks transcribed. Now we’ve got ~13 tracks transcribed, and we’ve even done 2 playtests with the game running! Everyone is still excited to get this show rocking, and I think if we are able to keep the pace up, we’ll be in the perfect position to have a high energy show. The transcription process has sometimes been a slog, but it does feel good to get the music in front of everyone and hear it all together for the first time. We’ve got ~6 weeks until the gig itself, so that will be a fun milestone to hit! There are a few tracks still to transcribe and practise (and not much time to practise them) but with some elbow grease I reckon this will be a highlight of the year.

Scream Forever Jam

This one just squeaked in before the season’s end. I went looking for jams as a result of last season’s recap, and horror seemed like a good fit between people’s interests and as something fresh people may not have worked on previously. Luckily the Scream Forever jam was at just the right timing where things were lulling just enough for people to have room to give a week to the project. We ended up making Dead Ears! A 1st person exploration with “microphone input” (we have to cut mic input as a mechanic right at the finish line, but it seems most players are convinced it’s working anyway heheheh) It was a blast getting this made with such a fantastic group of people! I feel like we did a good job of keeping the work healthy while pushing ourselves to make something novel! It all came together well and I am proud of the work I was able to contribute. Making horror sounds was something new to me, and it’s something I’d like to do again! I was also in engine a fair bit for this jam. I appreciate having someone drive the main functionality, and then allowing me to get in there and add polish and extras once the foundations have been laid. Definitely want to increase my engine skills, so I think another jam is on the docket next season!

Timefinding & Notion (my notebook is sad)

This season I finally found a task and time tracking solution that seems to be working! After fiddling with basically every other alternative, I made my way back to notion to set up a comprehensive project, task and time tracker to keep things on check. I won’t go into intense detail here, but I’m really liking being able to automatically sort tasks by custom parameters, and keep notes inside the tasks quickly and easily.

One of the downsides of this is that I’m not using my notebook as much as I would like to! I don’t want to set any hard and fast goals here, but it is something that I feel sad about when I look back on my notebook and it’s blank. I think going forward, if I’m unsure where to write something down, it goes in the notebook.

That’s all the business-y project-y self development stuff, but there are some other things in Season 2 that I want to cover as well!!

Birthday Comedy Night

I turned 30 this season! Cool! To celebrate I invited my closest friends to partake in a private open mic comedy night. I was lucky enough that many of them took me up on the offer and we had a wonderful night with ~2 hours of delightful acts. I’m very grateful that my friends were willing to step up to the plate for this, and I had many reports that they also had a great time! (phew). This was the third “high concept” birthday celebration I have put on, and I’m glad they have all been received well. Looking forward to making my friends do more stupid crap for my amusement in the future.

FIST Campaign Wrap

We finished an entirely homebrew rpg campaign this season, a first for me! We really enjoyed using FIST as a ruleset, it gelled with our play style super well. The campaign itself was run with a different member of the group running a session (mission) each time we got together. The meant that there was never the same group of players at each session and every mission was seperate from the last.

We ran the finale in over the course of 3 sessions, with me running the 1st and last missions, and another player, Will running the second. One of my favourite aspects of this was kicking it off with a campaign recap (on brand for me lol). It was very fun walking ourselves back through our characters’ exploits, and putting together threads that cropped up throughout our play time. In doing this we made a great map of things to touch on in the final sessions. If I ever find myself towards the end of a campaign, you can bet the butcher’s paper will be coming out before that final arc kicks off. It enhanced our enjoyment greatly.

Throughout the campaign we had amassed in-jokes, grudges against certain enemies and our own head-cannons for player characters who were no longer in the game. It was fun to bring these all back around for one final hurrah, but it also meant that there was a massive narrative knot to untangle to make things feel satisfying. Unfortunately for everyone, I had a whole long weekend with absolutely nothing booked, and I untangled that knot into a much bigger, scarier knot.

After sorting through the absolute mess of character duplication, dopplegangers, quantum shifts, and cybernetic implants, I landed on a solution that seemed to wrap all the character’s abilities and experiences into a cohesive (but not all consuming) whole. It seemed to be satisfying for the players characters to have an undiscovered link revealed towards the end of the story, without it reducing all their experiences to a single factor. Experiencing this reveal also included the players travelling to a surreal extradimensional plane (something that didn’t really have a precedent in this universe, but wasn’t out of the realm of possibility). All rules kind of went out the window here, and I just wanted the players to really concoct some hidden meaning from whatever random stuff I was throwing at them. The ending was sudden, unexpected and achieved a secret goal I had set for myself (a player saying “that can’t be the end”). I knew it would be impossible to give every player satisfying individual payoff, so leaving them all scrambling for meaning and closure seemed to be the best alternative.

In the end I think it’s one of the more memorable TTRPG experiences I’ve had, and I’m glad I was able to share it with this set of players. If you’re curious about this whole thing, please ask me to tell you more cause I could go into MUCH greater detail AT LENGTH. Looking forward to more TTRPG experiments in the future! (West Marches campaign anyone?)

Dumbphone mode

This season I finally pulled the trigger and got myself a dumbphone!! Something I have been wanting to do for quite some time now. Part of the reason for this was moving a computer out to the shared living space (see below). It meant that any internet based communication could be accessed somewhere other than my smartphone where I lived. This meant the smartphone could be turned off, and the dumbphone could be used for emergency communication if needed. The system isn’t perfect, I’ll still frequently forget to turn off my smartphone, or need it for verification or something, but overall I think it strikes a good compromise between convenience away from home and the ability to log off when desired. It has been quite a long time since I have felt like I could truly “log off” but that feeling is back and better than ever. If you have a similar relationship with modern smart devices, I highly recommend getting the cheapest dumbphone you can find and working it into your lifestyle.

In terms of improving this in Season 3, I have one big project in store that I’m very excited about: restoring my old iPod >:)

Broken Computer, New Computer

My handheld PC broke :( It seems like the motherboard is toast, which means it keeps overheating instantly. I struggled with this for a good few weekends, but to no avail. Installed new OSes, reformatted M.2 drives, but to no avail. I did enjoy using it, but I just don’t have the funds or the bandwitch to deal with a refund unfortunately. Luckily, I was able to get my greasy mitts on some ex-business stock, and fit it with the 3080 GPU I had in an external enclosure. It runs great! I’m enjoying having a little dedicated space to play games, and even watch videos & surf the web, it makes the office a lot easier to work in and I’m able to focus on what I’m doing since the activities have dedicated areas. I’ve been frivolously eyeing off new accessories like headsets and high refresh OLED monitors, but I can’t justify purchases like that at all right now lol.

Mental balance

I was struggling at the beginning of this season. Things felt harder than they should have been, and I was overthinking everything to the point of paralysis. This could probably have been attributed to the huge life change I had recently undergone and then expecting myself to operate at the same (if not higher) capacity. I was able to cut myself some slack, but made a couple of minor changes that I think help me overall day to day, and I hate to say it … but they were vitamins and regular exercise o_0

I had been taking an occasional Vitamin D pill in the morning from sometime earlier this year, and it seemed to help keep me in balance mood wise. I was struggling to get out of bed less (especially before the sun was up) and felt more ready to tackle stuff overall, but I was still struggling with energy levels. I would get to lunch, then crash had and not be able to keep focus for basically the rest of the day. From reading about other people’s experiences, I decided to try adding a B12 tablet into the mix and it’s had good results! I’ve felt more capable of diving into tasks past the morning, and haven’t been frustrated with a lack of drive or foggy brain. There have been off days where I’m not feeling on top of things and most of the time I can tie it back to missing my vitamins D:

In the middle of the season I also started “running”. I use the quotes here because in no way to I identify as a runner or look to improve my performance or whatever. I’ve found that it’s the easiest way to get outside, and engaging my body quickly. Basically all it took was that the risk of not doing it (feeling depressed and out of sorts) outweighed the cost of just getting the hell out there and seeing what happened. I started with the intention of running “every day” knowing that I wouldn’t end up doing that. I’ve landed somewhere around 3 mornings per week that I’ll get outside first thing. It’s nice to have some time to just listen to music too!

Overall I’m feeling more capable and more comfortable. I’m not going to say I wish I had done it sooner because running still sucks lol. But I am better than running, and so I will show running who’s boss a few times a week.

Media Log

(Bolded Titles are my recommendations)

Movies & TV

Grand Theft Hamlet (2024)

The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)

Open Your Eyes (1997)

Mulholland Drive (2001)

Funny Girl (1968)

Sinners (2025)

The Nut Job (2014)

Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)

The Man in the Iron Mask (1998)

Johnny Guitar (1954)

Mission Impossible: Fallout (2008)

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning (2023)

Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (2025)

Dark City (1998)

The Phantom (1996)

Mommie Dearest (1978)

Bones S1 (2004) (yep the bones rewatch is on lol)

Games:

Haste (2025)

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (2008)

Blood on the clock tower (Social Deduction Boardgame, 2022)

Killer Frequency (2023)

Puzzle Agent (2010)

Blue Prince (2025)

Oblivion Remastered (2025)

Mothership (TTRPG, 2018)

Mario Kart World (2025)

Pokémon Violet (2022)

Aliens Fireteam Elite (2021)

Sable (2021)

Nioh (2017)

Witcher 3 (2015)

Mausritter (TTRG, 2020)

Ghost Recon: Wildlands (2015)

Rush Rally 3 (2022)

Tactical Breach Wizards (2024)

Books:

Directing Actors, Judith Weston (~30%)

Art & Fear, David Bayles & Ted Orland (More than once)

Hunter X Hunter Vol. 13 - Yoshihiro Togashi

Albums:

Album No. 2 - Valeriy Stepanov Fusion Project

Sega Rally Championship - 30th Anniv. Album - - SEGA Sound Team

… okay so after ~3000 words, that’s the recap done. I’m glad this one was big because it felt like a freaking huge season, and it’s nice to have that reflected here! But we’re not done yet, there’s some planning to do for season 3 >

Season 3 Forecast

Season 3 of 2025 is going to run from July 1 - September 30, ending right before Games Week! I’d love to have things ready to show to people when I’m down there, so there’s a lot more work to be done -- (Across the 3 days I’ve been writing this, so many things have come up and shifted it’s bananas. I’m going to try and factor them all into this forecast but there’s really no knowing what could happen) Let’s look at some scheduled events that are upcoming:

Great, nothing planned past the middle of the season, so room for pivots if need be.

Let’s look at some of the key objectives for Season 3:

Portfolio updates

It is in my best interest to go ham on improving my portfolio both in the near and long term future. The main part that needs filling out is my sound design representation. This will require some tailored (and probably voiced) videos detailing process on a couple of projects (lookin’ at you Dungeon Pizza and Dead Ears). Also potentially diving into upskilling in some other programs but we’ll see about that one.

As a part of this I might look at website updates, this requires a fair bit of research on my end, so I don’t want to dump time into this too much, since my website works fine as it is now.

Contributions to projects

As I mentioned before, there are a bunch of projects I’m contributing to, and I’ve love to contribute more! Keeping on track with projects that are rolling and keeping in touch with others that are on the periphery will be a priority for me. Hopefully I can get stuff out sooner rather than later!

Preparations for Games Week

I’m yet to book anything for games week, so I’ll have to get on that this season. I also want to figure out how to introduce myself and keep in contact with people I meet down there (bluesky seems to be more ubiquitous than last year, hopefully I can skate by on that). I’ve also gotta sus out tickets to events and grant applications to keep the sting down.

Another Game Jam?

You know I'm a sucker for jams and I'm enjoying the pace of jams with the past two seasons this year, so I'm going to pencil in another. I don't know when, I don't know where, I don't know how, but if everything lines up, I will happily jump in the jam jar again.

Conclusion

So there it all is. An absolute unit of a recap, and I’m feeling like season 3 is going to be no different. Lots of things bubbling away, and developments are definitely happening at breakneck speed. I’m going to continue holding on for dear life and making sure I’m equiped and ready to tackle whatever comes through.

Thanks for reading, live your dream.

Oscar.

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