New Year, New Goals (2026 Edition)

Ah yes, my regularly yearly goals post.

So last year I made a bunch of goals for 2025 – things I wanted to do in the year to try and grow me, my business and my health. I also introduced the bingo card feature, where I’d chalk of lines, corners or a full house should I achieve them.

That really helped as I achieved quite a lot in 2025. Here’s where I am:-

Get back into public speaking – Success 🎉: I spoke twice in 2025 – once as WPLDN, once at an evening MWUG meetup. It was good to finally get out there and share my knowledge on running a business, and I really enjoyed it.

The talk I gave was a realisation after Loopconf where I shared breakfast with a few folks, and I talked somebody’s ear off on how I run a business. I’m pretty much an open book (even talking about money, folks – you should talk about money1), and this was my talk.

Overall, it was pretty well received. I really enjoyed it and it was good to get good insights from folks on how they run their businesses. I’ve taken at least one point on board for my business.

Speaking at WordPress LDN (photo credit Nathan Wrigley)

Finally rebuild Winwar Media to my liking – Success 🎉: The bingo card helped here as I was pushed to achieve this towards the end of 2025. In the end, the new site went live on 29th December 2025. Is it finished? No. Is it better than it was? Yes. Can I build and iterate things on top of it? Indeed I can.

Similarly, I did the same with this here site, being inspired by Loopconf to start blogging again. Now I can work on things and have a clear roadmap for this site, using a a Trello board to map things out, add features and making the site a bit of joy to navigate. That’s the hope, anyway.

Sing about my Work More – Success 🎉: Yes! I now think I can tick this off as a success as I’ve built up a case studies section on Dwi’n Rhys. I also turn the testimonials into Instagram content, which helps engagement and churning out social posts. Yay! Not quite AI slop!

Run a sub 30 minute 5k – Failure: I didn’t achieve this. I’m about 2 and a half minutes off this at the moment. I’ve had a couple of 1km’s under the 6 minute mark. I’m not going to focus on times, though, instead focusing on quantity this year (more in the personal goals for 2026).

It’s odd, I think my mind gets bored with some runs, and ones I can focus on, which are a bit hilly for example, I do better than ones that are quite boring. I thought I’d get a few fast times over the Christmas break, but turns out straight in and out runs are harder than more undulating park runs. As a beach child, I hate to say it but the sea gets boring.

Hit a weight loss goal – Failure: I haven’t weighed myself for an age, but I know I’m off this. A lot of bad habits have creeped back, as although I feel healthier than this time last year, I am still a little heavier than I like. I’ll look to improve this this year.

Update: I weighed myself this morning, and it confirmed my suspicion. I put on a bit of weight! I’m still way down, but yeah, up a bit.

Attend a Game Dev Meetup – Success 🎉: This was an achievement as I attended the Manchester Indie Game Dev Meetup in July. I’ve since not been back (not that there is anything wrong! Just the dates haven’t aligned). I look forward to attending next year.

Oddly, I also achieved a goal from 2024 – with me scoring 23 in a game of cricket. Funnily enough it was the first game in 2025 I achieved this, with a score of 24. My highest is now 31 (retired).

After talking about the bingo card last year, I’ve filled it in and with additional of two of my 50 before I’m 50 list (I ate in a Michelin Starred Restaurant and I went to The Cave), this was the state of play.

I hit two lines! As such, I treated myself to two of my “line” prizes, which was a pair of brand new pair of cricket trainers and a Strava subscription.

Onto this year, here are my goals for 2026.

Professional Goals

Weirdly, my goals for 2026, I struggled with thinking of professional goals for me this year. I even turned to everybody’s favourite ocean burning hallucinogenic tool – ChatGPT – to try and come up with ideas and it came up a bit short. Nevertheless, here’s what I’ve settled on.

Release another Paid Plugin or SAAS

It’s been a fair few years since I’ve released a paid WordPress plugin or SAAS, and now that I write this with a relatively long term runway, I can maybe focus on some more non web development projects. I was fortunate enough late last year to work on a paid plugin which gave me great insight into how I can build and market one.

So the hope is for 2026 I’ll release a paid plugin or a SAAS. I’ve got two ideas I can maybe look to explore, one paid plugin is pretty much half way there for a first draft, so I can’t imagine it being too much work to push it out. I’ve got a cheeky idea for a blog post to prepare for it, too.

Grow my WordPress newsletter to 50 subscribers

I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to do this, but one thing I’ve seen on a number of my sites has been traffic has dropped from search engines over all my sites. I’m not seeing a drop in rankings, so I suspect it’s due to AI. Joy.

Nevertheless, I’m looking to grow communities around my sites. One such thing is my monthly WordPress newsletter. It gets a decent number of subscribers and open rates, but it is still stubbornly quite small, with only 22 (at the time of writing) I pushed it out a little bit and I’m now up to 28.

I will say, the quality of subscribers is quite something. Names I trust and enjoy listening to in the WordPress space. I must be doing something right. It’d be good to get it up to 50 subscribers by the end of the year. I’m not entirely sure how, so if you want a monthly dose of WordPress, the web and some other fun things, please, do subscribe. Thanks!

Finally get WP Email Capture updated to my liking

I’m fucking sick of Peadig and it breaking, so now that Winwar Media’s site is done, I want to get WP Email Capture off Peadig and onto my standard Kadence setup. I’m imaging as I don’t particularly want to change the design too much or it’s functionality it’ll be a lot quicker. We will see.

Be weird to actually thinking of three different professional tasks to do for the first time!

Personal Goals

First off, I want to go ahead and do something I swore this time last year I’d never do, and run a 10k. I ran a couple of properly timed 5k runs with medals and stuff, and I think most runners are secretly magpies and like collecting shiny things. I’ve ran a 7k once (around the lake near where my partner lived in Romania), so I’d be keen to try and get to double figures.

Similarly for double figures, I’d be keen to get to 50 parkruns this year. I’m currently on 282. I’m 50/50 on whether I achieve this, but it’s one parkrun every 2 weeks. As long as I maintain that, I think I’ll achieve it.

Finally I really want to release a video game on non-Pico 8 hardware. What that will be I’m not sure, but I really want to either focus on retro technology, or something like Godot for maybe pushing onto Steam? We’ll see. I have looked at potentially game jams like DOSEmber as there are DOS based languages on Lua. I have one game on the go that could tick this off, but it may be technically cheating myself. But it’ll tick off the square.

So, on to this year, here’s my bingo card for this year, adding on 3 potential “50 before I’m 50” items.

Overall, I’ve gotten very lucky. The middle square is quite a nice one as I’ve already got a 50 before I’m 50 booked in, and a second one I’m relatively sure of hitting, however I hope that doesn’t make me lazy, especially as two of them require me to be fit.

Nevertheless, those are my goals for 2026. What about yours? Leave them in the comments, and are you doing a bingo card this year? Let me know if so!

  1. My rationale to this is that it’s like politics – the people who shut down talk about it have the most to lose. By being an open book I feel I can help people grow, but that’s by the by… ↩︎
  2. It’s kind of funny that both the amount of subscribers and parkruns are both on 28 ↩︎

Ross on personal apps

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Ross Wintle snuck out a great post late on Sunday – “Trust me: You don’t want to make little personal apps… especially not like that!“, and I had a quiet weekend with a couple of code projects that made Ross’ post resonate with me!

Problem solving in code

LLM’s I find are terrible at problem solving. They’re good at interpreting what people want to do, but it doesn’t really think about the box. I have an example I’ll probably talk on next week’s Now page, but will share it here.

I had a problem with some code in my game, in that I couldn’t get a hitbox (the yellow circle) to sit within the sprite. The problem was the rotation script I use pivots the sprite around the bottom right hand corner of the sprite, so whilst the hitbox remains in the correct place, the hitbox does not.

The LLM was rewriting my code, and getting nowhere fast. It was trying to change the pivot point but going nowhere. Confidently wrong as it hit the brick wall.

The solution? Don’t have a hitbox. Determine that a bullet is outside of the white circle, and if the colour of the pixel at the bullet’s x & y co-ordinate is not black, then determine a hit. This was applied and fixed.

Programming requires a different approach that is often found by taking a walk and thinking about the problem in a different way. There was a famous case with Wing Commander where a bug in some versions was a memory error that existed on the game exiting that caused a crash. The solution? Change the error message to “Thank you for playing Wing Commander!”. Problem solved.

I feel these sort of bugs at the moment can only really be fixed with experience.

Ongoing Support

The second thing Ross mentioned was ongoing support. This is true – I’ve noticed this with Revive to Sky. I pushed an update that ticked the plugin over to 10+ Active installations in WordPress this week. That has meant I get a few more support requests over the weekend. When these occur, it can take a bit of debugging. I curiously asked an LLM for a solution for one of these, surprise surprise they were wrong.

Of course, this can lead to a period of of debugging and a back and forth. That does take skill. You can use LLMs for this – asking what an error means. But often a search on the internet throws up a solution quicker and easier. That’s a skill.

Anyway, I just wanted to highlight Ross’ post and add my 2 cents. Make a brew (it’s Brew Monday!) and go and read it.

MOPy – A screensaver that was bad for the environment

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I saw a post by Ben Daubney that brought back suppressed memories – a screensaver called MOPy, that was controversial due to it’s way you would feed and nurture your virtual pet.

As Ben stated on his post:-

To make your MOPy goldfish happy, you had to buy accessories and food using points generated by making Multiple Original Prints on your (ideally HP) printer. For a while, every kid was spending every lunchtime printing out a single character on a sheet of A4 over and over again just to get enough points to give their virtual fish some virtual bubbles, and hundreds if not thousands of pages were tossed into the bin.

13 year old me didn’t have a printer, so I seemed to remember if the fish went without food, water or their environment enriched by printing out waste of paper, the fish would die. It was incredibly distressing seeing a fish on the surface of the screensaver.

Anyway, there’s a gallows humour joke to be made how a virtual fish ate resources, so ChatGPT could boil the oceans. I’ve not had enough coffee to make it, however.

RIP MOPy Fish, we hardly knew ye.

The Video Games I Fell in Love With in 2025

I lamented in 2024 that video games were beginning a downturn. The games that grabbed me post COVID weren’t going to be a thing going into 2025. I can confirm I was right in my speculations. 2025 was not a good year for video games.

There were good games, no doubt, but again AAA games were all largely disappointing, and indie games – whilst good – weren’t really quite grabbing me. It seems like although art forms require less and less attention spans, video games seem to be sticking with the larger, 40 to 50 hour attention cycle that I just don’t have. Nevertheless, there have been highlights.

The first main one has been being able to explore the Evercade. I’ve a blog post about it within my draft about the systems and why it’s the right mix of curated games and nostalgia (and you physically own the game) mean it’s perfect for those wanting to explore a library but are overwhelmed. It’ll get published soon. But if you end up with one under your Christmas Tree in a few weeks, consider yourself very lucky, as it’s an excellent system.

The second area of joy has been actually making games. I probably should turn the “Games” section of the About Us into it’s own little area highlighting my games, but I get genuine joy when people play or comment on my games. I’ve got a few in the pipeline, but it’s fair to say at the moment I’m preferring making games, rather than playing.

That’s not to say I didn’t have fun playing video games in 2025, oh no. Here’s a list of games I picked up for the first time and enjoyed in 2025.

Games I Enjoyed Playing in 2025

As always, I begin with video games I sunk some serious time into in 2025. These ones weren’t released this year, but short of a couple of quick blasts, these ones I discovered and I loved playing in 2025.

  • Zeta Wing (C64) by Sarah Jane Avory is a fantastic kind of spiritual successor to one of my favourite little Commodore 64 games and also my favourite arcade shooter – Gemini Wing. This Commodore 64 game has everything that made the first game great, with power ups, great controls and a fantastic soundtrack.
  • A few years back I listed Yoku Island Express as my favourite game of 2018. In a similar vein is Pinball Spire (PC), a Metroidvania style game where you play a large pinball table that goes up a spire. You get powerups for your ball that allows you to do some fun little tricks, but it keeps to the pinball element a lot better than Yoku. Maybe better? Not sure. It’s a bit short but it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome, which is nice. I recommend it highly if you like pinball games or Metroidvanias.
  • I’m sorry to Snow Bros (Arcade, available on the Toaplan 1 Evercade cartridge) that I always thought of as a weak Bubble Bobble clone. Turns out it is a ridiculously fun high score chase. Slightly random at points, which takes somewhat of the fun out of it, but overall a great high score focussed game.
  • Probably the weakest game here, Alcon (Arcade, available on the Toaplan 1 Evercade cartridge) – is a Toaplan vertical shooter with an odd quirk. Not kill anything for your first life and dependending on how far you get your next life will begin with a full load out and a shed load of points. There’s a philosophical argument to be made in the less you retaliate, the further you get in life. But I’m not Socrates.
  • A scrolling beat em up like Yie Ar Kung Fu, Guardian (Arcade, available on the Toaplan 1 Evercade cartridge) is a bit of a guilty pleasure. Probably not a great game by any metric, I really enjoyed it. I was so close to completing the came on a single credit. Not great, of course, but I really enjoyed it.
  • Although I’ve had it in my collection for a while, and I love the arcade version, the Game Gear port of Wonder Boy is sufficiently different I find to list as it’s own game. You have to play it so much different to the arcade version (which is one of my favourite games ever made), but it’s still great fun. A fun high score game. Probably could complete it if I gave it some more time.
  • Finally, my latest discovery is Xeno Crisis (Megadrive, available on the Xeno Crisis/Tanglewood cartridge). A modern game in the vein of Smash TV. A beautiful game, that has a cracking soundtrack. Tough, but just a great fun game, with some fantastic action. Recommended.

My favourite game I played the first time in 2025: Life is Strange

Probably my game of 2025. Life is Strange is a fantastic story. The tale of Max Caulfield and her relationship with Chloe Price, and the students and characters in Arcadia Bay is a story that grabbed me. The characters are well rounded. Three dimensional characters and a compelling storyline that develops over the course of the game. When shocking moments occur in the storyline they grab you, including moments that you are stressful, moments that shock you, and moments that make you cry. It’s a great story, with a particularlyevil bad guy, that you genuinely want to see get their comeuppance. The last episode is arguably one of the tensest moments I’ve ever been when playing a video game. So much you could eliminate one of the story arcs from the game, and it’ll still be incredible.

It’s not too difficult, but it’s a majestic storyline (which I’m avoiding here to share anything here to keep it spoiler free). It also has some of the best sound design I’ve experienced in a video game, something I’ve written about before here.

It’s well worth your time, and the last chapter has some of the most tense moments in video games I’ve ever experienced.

Life is Strange is available on Steam, Windows, Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo Switch

Honorable Mentions for 2025 Games

Those are the games I played for the first time in 2025, but what of games released this year? Here are those games, including my top 3 games of 2025. I’ll be honest, I’ve missed a lot of the top games and some big hitters (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Blue Prince, Ball x Pit) are on my “to play” list, or I need a better system to play it. Nevertheless here are some of the games released this year that I recommend you check out.

A cosy logic game, Is This Seat Taken? (Steam) is a game with a fairly simple game where you have to arrange people to sit in locations based on their preferences. Every puzzle is possible. There’s a simple story but has some moments that makes you chuckle. Not too taxing but will keep your brain occupied for a decent length of time.

I wasn’t sure if I liked or hated Keep Driving (Steam) when I started it. I abandoned my first run because I wasn’t sure what I was doing. Nevertheless, I started again and I enjoyed it. A driving simulator involving everything but driving. For anybody who has ever completed a road trip, a lot of the game would resonate. Being able to pick up hitchhikers, a great soundtrack (that you have to buy in game), and some interesting side missions, there are multiple ways to complete this game. Best played after an enjoyable road trip.

A fun little Amiga romp, Roguecraft DX (Evercade) is a great little Roguelike where you descend into a procedurally generated dungeon to take on monsters such as scorpions, snakes, and errr… chickens. Has a Rogue like dungeon crawler been done better? Absolutely. Fatal Labyrinth for one for the Sega Megadrive. However it’s a great game, and well worth picking up.

For the longest time this was in my top 3 games for the year, but it dropped off. ReMATCH (Steam) is a third person football game that’s online. Combining the likes of Libero Grande from the arcade and Rocket League, this game sees you play short – 5 minute football matches – with various people online. You can communicate effectively without voice chat, and the game runs and plays well. The shooting system is a bit like Three Lions for the PS1 (remember that?), but plays pretty well. It ultimately dropped off as although I had some really tense moments (including a “golden goal” draw that lasted for a good 15 minutes), I did drop off, as folks got better, and I didn’t, and it took too long to level up and unlock things. Good fun mind!

3. Dispatch (PC)

Honestly, this will once it’s complete, may be the Game of the Year.

Dispatch is – at it’s core – a real time strategy team where you play a Dispatcher for a bunch of misfit superheroes. You have to send out your super heroes to respond to various incidents in the town you are in, and play to their strengths – send out a charismatic member of the team for community outreach work, send out a tall one or one that can fly to rescue a cat from a tree, that kind of thing.

However, at times, the superheroes can act on their own accord, and this is what is engaging. There’s an in depth story here, with a framing of a new employee navigating a brand new workplace. You have choices and there’s a un-nerving “XYZ will remember this” that flashes up whenever you have something that can affect you. I’m at the end of Episode 4 (episodes are framed based on a single day, and take about an hour to complete), and had a choice at the end of it that brought flashbacks to the choices in Life is Strange – where it feels so consequential. I went “Oh no!” at the end, as you do build bonds with these characters, and right now there’s a sense of foreboding….

With a great graphics, a fantastic presentation that sees your choices highlighted wonderfully at the end of each episode, and a compelling list of characters, Dispatch may – when it’s all said and done – by my GOTY 2025.

19th December 2025: I’m now at the end of Episode 5. The song that plays at the end of Episode 5 is up there with the theme from Snake Eater, “Still Alive” from Portal and “Gigi’s Song” from There Is No Game as my favourite song from a video game ever.

Dispatch is only available on Steam.

2. Öoo (PC)

This was joyful.

Öoo I picked up on a whim, and you play a character with 2 bombs that follow them around (in effect, what the typography of Öoo) is. It’s a fun Metroidvania, whose twist is you get the items all very early on, but you are sent on a loop of a cavern learning tricks with said items. Usually, the last trick will get you into the next cavern. It’s hard to explain but it’s very cleverly done. It offers the “aha” moment that means so much to me in games.

It’s ultimately a speedrun game. Even on a casual playthrough you’re likely to complete it within 3-4 hours, and it’s incredibly charming. The music has that Bubble Bobble-esque loop that is memorable, repeatable but doesn’t get repetitive, and the music evolves as you go through the game. The game is unpolished in a charming way, and well worth picking up for cheap.

Öoo is only available on Steam.

1. The Roottrees are Dead (PC)

One of my favourite games from the last 10 years has been The Return of the Obra Dinn, and any game that scratches that itch will always do well with me.

Add some beige box early internet, well, that scores huge.

The Roottrees are Dead is a fun, 10 hour or so mystery where you examine who inherits the vast Roottrees fortune. Only blood relatives can lay claim to it, so your job is to build the family tree to discover who are actual biological Roottrees. Find their name, their job and what they look like. Dig through library archives and 1998 internet to find out information about individuals. The satisfying elements are when printers whir into action, meaning you’ve uncovered a clue.

I don’t know why it resonated with me so much, probably because it was a simple interface and vely little hand holding meant you had to write notes, interpret documents and – eventually – uncover a secret that ties everything up nicely, works well and is a genuine twist. I’ve talked about the game before on this site as it’s slightly controversial start, but this cosy adventure is well worth 10 hours of your time.

The Roottrees are Dead is only available on Steam

What was your game of the year? Leave some games you enjoyed in the comments!

Previous Years: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023, 2024