2025 was a year of open water. No single port, no single bearing — just a lot of sailing to see what was out there. Some of it made landfall. Some is still on the horizon.

Station Mars

We got one ship into harbor this year. Station Mars is a roguelike space station builder, now live at orbitalblues.catphonics.com. The premise is simple and merciless: you're a robot, you have a grid, and somewhere out in the dark a storm is coming. Build your station — power, life support, shields — before it arrives or the whole thing gets swallowed up and you start again with a new robot and whatever scraps the last one left behind.

78 modules, four storm types, every run different. Version 0.2 is in the water. Play it.

Radios On

Radios On has been a voyage eight years in the making — started as a book, now becoming a game. This year we tested the hull in two different waters, Phaser.js and Godot, neither quite right. The conclusion was uncomfortable but honest: the map isn't drawn yet. The full script has to come first. No engine decision means anything without it. So that's the true work, and 2026 is where it gets done.

Lighthouse Trading

The third big expedition was Lighthouse — stock trading tooling. The chart of repos tells the story: journal, bots, dashboards, signal trackers, MCP servers. We tried a lot of approaches, changed course more than once, and kept running into the same reef. No system was smart enough on its own.

The pivot that stuck: agents. AI agents talking to the brokerage through an MCP layer, reading positions, reasoning about signals, placing orders. That's the course we've set. We're still in early waters but the bearing finally feels right.

What's ahead

The fleet for 2026 is already rigging.

Dragon Shepherd is an isometric resource management game set in a medieval town — tile maps, pixel art, camera controls all running. The gameplay layer is next. It has the feel of something that wants to exist.

Goal Tracker takes a different tack on habits: don't set goals, just log what you do. The system finds your patterns and starts celebrating them. Two days of pushups in a row and it marks the streak. Miss a week and it doesn't guilt you — it just waits. AI reads your journal notes and suggests what to track next.

Ice Lake is a 3D expedition into the unknown. Three.js, browser-based, vintage aesthetic. The real question we're trying to answer is how much 3D game design we can actually do in the browser. It may become its own game. It may just be the place where we learn enough to finally come back to Radios On with real answers. Either way, the water needs charting.

Lighthouse sails on. Radios On waits for its script.

Like many years before — more charts drawn than voyages completed. But the compass is pointing somewhere worth going.

in 2024 I worked on two games. The first was Unicon Rescue, currently available to play at catphonics.com. This game was made with react and purely clientside to make it fast. I got quite a bit of feedback from friends and family for future iterations. I abstracted the game rules from the code so I might make a new version in godot or unity as I keep learning.

The second game is titled "Radios On" and started out as a book idea 8 years ago and now I am slowly working on it as a game. I have much of the pre-production work completed, except for the biggest thing which is the full script.

I made game ui, style, character mockups, and have been working on flushing out the maps and backgrounds.

Like many other years, lots of ideas sat on the back burner while paying work came first. Despite the slow going, I'm optimistic about making significant progress in 2025.