My 2025
31 December 2025
Another year, another round up! The end of 2025 marks two years of blogging on Jackalope Mail, and while my output was smaller this year than last, I’m still very happy with everything I’ve done. Is it wise for me to be posting on New Year’s Eve? Definitely not. But I’d be a hypocrite if I released a yearly round up any earlier, so here we are. Very excited for next year but we’ll get to that at the end of the post!
My Games
This year I released two full tabletop games. Borrowers Dungeon Crawl was my submission to the one-page RPG jam and a game I’d been noodling on for a while. It’s a free one-pager about tiny people sneaking into houses and stealing unimportant items from the humans who live there. It’s built on the Tunnel Goons system by Nate Treme, but adds a simple crafting system for combining items and some random tables for generating houses to heist from.
Visitations is a solo game about a horrible sinner being visited by three ghosts. Massively inspired by A Christmas Carol, Visitations uses a deck of cards to generate three ghosts, then lets you journal about your interactions with each of them. This game also led to the creation of the Ghostly Encounters Art Pack because I sourced more art than I ended up using, so I thought I’d upload it for others to use too!
Both of these games will get Design Diary entries eventually, but I’ve been super busy this year so haven’t gotten around to writing them up yet.
I also rewrote and layed out the RPTree Creator Kit, the system behind ABODE! I was never happy with the first version of this, just being a plain word document and a crappy logo I put together myself, so I did a second draft of the intro and design notes, layed it out properly, and commissioned my partner Jamie (on Bluesky and Tumblr) to make a new logo. It looks way better now!
I’m so glad I did this, both for my own sake and because in the months since, Dorian Blackwood has made two games based on the system! Welcome Home Darling is a game of Australian gothic horror incredibly in the vein of ABODE and For the Crown is a fantasy game about investigating the lineage of a noble family. Both games feel like they do something really unique with the RPTree structure that I wouldn’t have necessarily done myself, which is exactly what I wanted to come out of making the Creator Kit.
Outside of full games, I made a 1-page NPC called Witch of the Mountains. This was just a little fun thing to get me out of some creative burnout from my uni projects, because I was craving something to layout.
I also a released a video game as part of my university course. Temporal Breach is a sci-fi top-down shooter where the player can harness different time-travel abilities by collecting dog tags dropped by the enemies. I discussed this game more in the respective Design Diary.
The final thing I did in the realm of games was host a small game jam! I discussed briefly in my blog post I’m So Events-Pilled, but I hosted a game jam for a couple of my friends in a Discord server and it was a really lovely project to get some of them to finally start working on the game ideas they’ve mentioned to me before. Check out the entries for the Squid Realm Game Jam here!
Jackalope Mail
Like my games output, the blog took a small hit as I dedicated more time to university work and personal non-games stuff this year. But I’m incredibly happy with the posts I did manage to get out.
The major change was that the Things I Liked series became quarterly (with three posts out now, and the final for the year out tomorrow!). I’m definitely glad I cut these down from monthly to quarterly, it reduced my workload while also making each post more jam-packed than before. The links section in the Q4 issue is absolutely fill to bursting, I can’t wait to get it out to you!
Early this year I posted my university year 2 essay: An Exploration of Player Elimination in Multiplayer Games. I’m really happy with this piece, especially with the prediction it made that came true just weeks after I submitted it.
Later that month, I bore my soul writing about An Inspector Calls, Social Murder, and Blame. This is simultaneously a highlight of the blog for me (because of it’s seriousness) and an outlier (because it’s got nothing to do with games). Ultimately it was a piece for me to vent about all the big emotions I’d been feeling this year, and it was immensely gratifying to have video essayist SolidArf describe it as “Powerful, poignant, and deeply affirming.”
The final highlight from the blog for me was when I got to take part in Mint’s Blog Buddies series. It was such lovely feeling to read someone analyse my work so deeply. It made me feel seen in a way I have genuinely never felt before, which was super affirming as an artist. It was also lovely to do a collaboration with another blog, which I hadn’t done since my very first blog post in 2024.
Media Appearances
This year was my first time having media appearances outside of my own stuff! As previously mentioned, I took part in Mint’s Blog Buddies series, which was an absolute blast, and I also did an interview for Backwards Tabletop’s Monthly Mecha newsletter.
This has felt like such a step up for me professionally. It’s suddenly dawned on me just how many people actually know me in the scene now. It’s a lovely feeling, but also quite daunting since I don’t have a very high rate-of-release, with uni and everything going on at the moment.
Also on this topic, when I went to UK Games Expo last summer, I was recognised after mentioning my work to the lovely folks at the Biscuit Fund Games table. This was super surreal because they’re way ahead of me in terms of physical inventory and convention presence and stuff, but it was really cool to be recognised like that.
Idk! Still very much processing these feelings, but it feels good to be known in the industry. Next UK Games Expo I’m looking to wear a pin of my logo, and I’m very curious to see if anyone recognises it!
Also, I got followed by Meguey Baker on Bsky earlier this month?? WILD fangirl moment for me there. Anyway, I’m getting way off topic for this section, let’s talk about the future:
Moving Forward
This section is kind of two different things. It’s partly a set of announcements of what to expect from me in 2026, but it’s also maybe a set of new year’s resolutions? I’m not gonna hold myself too harshly to anything, but it’s a combination of things I know I’m going to be doing and things I want to try and do in the new year.
First up, I’m going to be spending the rest of my time in uni making a TTRPG. It’s looking to be bigger than anything I’ve made before, and it’ll be a test for the tactical combat system I’ve been noodling on for a while, which I want to use for a couple big games down the line. Doing this will be another big step for me professionally, setting the foundations for something that I’d need to get crowdfunded. Very exciting!
I also want to try and return to the RPTree system next year. I’ve had an idea for ages, and Dorian’s two RPTree games have re-energized me to get that done. I want to make a game about a divine family tree (like the Norse and Greek mythological pantheons), I feel like there’s loads of potential for petty drama there, which is exactly what I was trying to capture with ABODE. I’ve already spoken to a friend about doing this, and maybe we’ll make it together!
As previously mentioned, I’m going to write up design diary posts for the two games I released this year (Borrowers Dungeon Crawl and Visitations). Sorry they’ve been so late, but I’ve got interesting things to say about both so I’m definitely still going to write them!
In terms of more abstract goals, I definitely want to blog more than I did this year. I’ve already got something in the works, just hoping I can keep that momentum up! On that topic, I want to do more blog collabs too. Whether that’s a specific exchange with one person like Blog Buddies was, or just hopping on the blogwagon and taking part in a bigger collaboration like Prismatic Wasteland’s Merry Hexmas that ran this month. Either way, I want to start connecting more with the blogging community, and this is a great way to do that!
Finally, I’ve started making crosswords! This has just been a fun little hobby so far, but I’m starting to get to the point where I’m quite happy with them, so I’d like to try and post some in the new year! The current one I’m working on is slightly TTRPG related, so it might be good to start with! I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to host them yet, but I’ll work something out when the time comes.
So yeah! That’s been my year. It’s definitely been a hard one for me, but I’m in a good place going into 2026. Very excited for what the new year will bring, I’ll see you there!