A Rough Year

Hey folks! We started drafting this post back in January and now it's the middle of March, which, uh, should definitely give you an idea as to how the start of 2026 has been going. Better late than never, though? At least we're still alive and kicking.

SQUINKY

I'm not going to sugar coat it: 2025 was rough. Both the game industry and nonprofit sector have been struggling, meaning we haven't been able to find much in the way of client work. I'm not even going to get into the political and economic mess we're in, because all it's going to do is make me feel sad and hopeless.

That said, on a personal level, I'd like to think I've been doing okay in spite of all that. The thing about healing from burnout is, it forces you to change your relationship to work, because if you don't, you'll just keep burning out again and again. I used to care a lot about having a successful career as a game designer, but now, I'd much rather just enjoy making art in various forms, regardless of whether any of it sells or finds an audience.

Some cool things I did in 2025 that I'm proud of include the following:

• learned needle felting and sold a bunch of tiny felt creatures at our local Christmas market
• learned how to roller skate
• took a musical improv class (as in, improv theatre but with show tunes)
• finished two solo games
• co-wrote a larp
• did some interactive theatre
• took a writing class focused on solo performance and started writing a play about my adolescence as a young proto-trans tuba player, which then morphed into a game I'm currently working on called Tuba Trouble: A Point-And-Honk Adventure
• arranged a cover of Careless Whisper for my brass band, which is now a regular part of our repertoire (I also recently finished another arrangement, this time for Total Eclipse of the Heart)
• started volunteering at a local non-profit grocery store
• started an anticapitalist game dev club (if you're in Montreal, join our discord for more info!)

I could be feeling a lot more bad than I actually am that none of these things amounted to a living wage (and don't get me wrong, sometimes I do feel quite horrible about it, thank you very much) but I think it says more about how broken everything is in this moment in time than it does about me, personally. Also, I have to remind myself that contrary to what my heavy use of social media in the 2010s taught me, sitting around feeling bad is not activism. It's way more fun to engage in joyful resistance, so I'd much rather do that instead. Here's hoping I can keep it up in 2026?

JESS

Echoing what Squinky said, 2025 was a very challenging year for lots of reasons. 

In 2025, US budget cuts to the UN led to me losing the contract that I was doing with WHO Academy. Many of Soft Chaos's connections in the US also have lost their funding or had it drastically cut because of that list of research terms released by the government. The game industry as a whole is also such a mess.

My life has really changed in the last year, healthwise, first in scary ways, then in ways that are ultimately good for me but that have forced me to shift priorities and made me less capable of pushing myself in my work. I'm doing four workouts a week plus 10 000 steps five or six days a week, and that takes up time where I would normally be working. I am also dealing with some painful interpersonal shifts that began in 2025 and are on-going. I'm also, frankly, dealing with burnout.

Reading Squinky's words has also reminded me that I still did, in fact, accomplish some things to be proud of last year.

• I spoke on a panel about art games (no publicly available recording, to my knowledge) at ISEA 2025 in Seoul, South Korea, and met a bunch of incredible artists, many of them from Quebec, and got to spend the week getting to know them.
• I created a deeply personal gift (illustrations of song lyrics and a cover of that song) for a close friend that pushed me outside of my creative comfort zone.
• I also co-designed Thunder Only Happens When It's Raining, which Squinky mentioned.
• I helped with co-design for Intrapology and for the Trans Game Zine.
• I designed a game about my relationship to play and transness for that same zine -- yes, I'm outing myself as the author, and yes, I, an adult, design games that include sex and NSFW content! But, I expect that it wouldn't take much sleuthing to pull back the fig leaf of anonymization anyway, and a casual search of my name won't bring it up, so, y'know, whatever.
• I helped run QGCon 2025, a gigantic conference about queerness and games. We'll have videos of most of the talks up on the internet, eventually. I'm proud that we were a masked conference and that we managed to feed everyone. The talks and workshops were incredible. I also got to prototype a game with Avery Alder -- a bucket list item I didn't know I had!
• I mentored three gamemakers across three different programs (Pixelles Make Games, GAMERella Level Up, and in the MFA Visual Narrative in the School for Visual Arts), some of whom I will continue to mentor in the new year.
• I painted some very cute cats for a currently unreleased co-design project.
• I started to practice singing again for the first time since my vocal cords started to change on HRT.
• Because I've started doing 10 000 steps a day, mostly on a walking pad, I've caught up on so much great TV, haha!
• Honestly, I got pretty swole!! I am now able to lift and carry (for a short while) an 180-pound human! 

I'm hopeful that things will change for the better, eventually. The interconnected systems of oppression and how they shore each other up have never been more exposed, and people seem to be paying attention. There's a lot of suffering out there, but I'm convinced that it doesn't have to be this way. 

I'm trying to keep creating in ways that nourish me. I'm trying to keep resisting. My spouse also gave me a ukulele for my birthday and I've just started to learn how to play it (like, really just, just started). I'm also very lucky to have a support network that allows me (if with feelings of guilt and shame) to try and rest. I'm trying to get better at resting. 

ALLISON

In fear of sounding like a broken record, the last year has been rough. My wife and I made the choice to no longer travel to the US, which has meant that for the last year at any given moment there is an aching in my heart for people and places I no longer have access to. This also involved giving up a teaching contract that I had come to love, and losing a bit of the purpose I felt that came with it. 

Because of what we do and who we work with, Soft Chaos has also struggled immensely in terms of finding work. I don’t rely on income from Soft Chaos to survive, but it does bring on waves of helplessness. 

Years ago, we started working on a concept for an Album of short games tentatively called ‘Joy & Despair’, which was about us all struggling with moments of joy while it felt like the world was burning down around us (and this was in the time of the forest fires, so it was a quite literal feeling).  I think these updates about 2025 are very much aligned with that concept, because 2025 was also full of cool things I’m proud of.

• I removed myself from social media. It’s actually been a struggle in a lot of ways, but my mental health is much better for it.
• I found my love of collage. No visual art has ever felt as good as collage does for me.
• I had a short game accepted to be published in a magazine (It will be in the next issue. Yes it is about lesbians playing hockey and dating each other.)
• I started a local parlour Larp group and am running bimonthly games
• I founded a not-for-profit that supports marginalized game non-digital game designers (and our scholarship program applications are currently open if you want to apply!)
• I started logging the escape rooms I’ve done and working towards my goal of having completed 200
• I made dedicated time to spend with friends I care about– often dragging them into the woods and making them design games with me. (one of those games is crowdfunding right now!)
  I signed up to table at Breakout Con (I’ll be there with some Soft Chaos games for sale so if you’re in Toronto come by and say hi!)

I’m going into 2026 with the real intention of focusing on community. There are people I want to see, places I want to be, and causes I want to dedicate my time and energy to. More than ever, it feels important to keep this intention in mind and I’m glad to do it with Soft Chaos at my side.