I’m starting this review four days into January because while it’s true that I’m so busy with all of my responsibilities in life, I have allowed myself to give into comfort for most of December, and that’s bled into January. Well stocked with all sorts of holiday delectables and the usual bounty of two early-January birthdays for the kids, I figured one last hoorah would be justified before I return to my old Vaely self. So if I spent a bit too much time in Shattered Pixel Dungeon or my body fat is +0.2% higher than it should be, I could be forgiven, and I could forgive myself for not having already written a single word of this annual review until January 4th.

What Went Well

I “say” a few things in life, and one of them is that no matter what happens with Tinydark in the coming years, I’ll have lead worthwhile life just for having started a family of six. My prime directive is always to keep the family afloat, minimally surviving and maximally thriving. This year, which included the birth of my fourth and presumably final child, I was a great dad. It is so rewarding to watch the children grow and to know that I played a part in their happy and successful lives.

Family life. Relative to the difficulty of 3-under-5 and our lack of village ‘round here, we were successful in keeping things stable and ensuring a good life for the children. I took them out each weekend, often each day of the weekend if we weren’t doing anything else. Every holiday was a success. Every night, we cleaned and the kids woke up to a perfectly clean house for them to play in.

I will credit our now-15-year-old son with being the reason we didn’t implode from the chore burden; he handles the mowing, dishes, and tidying up.

I credit my wife for handling holiday, birthday, and event planning even in her diminished state. Many mothers in her position may have given into the temptation of unsafe sleep habits, let the house go to ruin, or other means of easing our burden at the cost to the child, but she has stayed steadfast.

Violet. She’s helpful, loves her family, and loves being a girl. She’s interested in whatever we put in front of her; it’s hard to say what she especially enjoys doing. All kids like the playground, of course, but I’d say physical activity is especially enjoyable for her. Smart enough, which I’d like to improve in 2026. She’s fine socially, especially after the “ice is broken.”

Her personality’s solidifying around a higher neuroticism than I’m comfortable with, but that is my only real concern. She is evidently a mini-me, for better or worse. I tell her we have 'the same brain,’ a tendency to whatever makes a person test positive for ADHD. She can be forgetful like me, hyperactive, hard-working. Dark? Some signs of that here or there. :}

Olivia. She continues to be a little ball of sunshine. Her verbal skills are incredibly strong, but she’s still three – this makes for some hilarious quips or conversations due to how well she can articulate her primal toddler thoughts. She’s generally on track with her other milestones except for the social. There aren’t a lot of opportunities to socialize her, and when I try, she’s often too shy to make any progress.

Everett. Was born perfectly healthy and may very well be our happiest baby yet. My wife breastfed him flawlessly up to 6 months, then we started supplementing with formula. His milestones are good and everything is on track, but I’m disappointed to see he is trending toward my cursed stature (I’m 5'3/161cm). I suppose if he can even get an inch over me, I’ll be happy.

He enjoys his belly being eaten, my beard bristling his cheek, strangers smiling at him, Mom (times one-hundred), and pretty much anything that his sisters do with him. :}

Artificial Intelligence. I can credit a large portion of this year’s productivity to AI. How do I care for three kids while simultaneously working a 9-5? Write the plan, and change diapers and get snacks while the solution is generated. Same goes for Tinydark, knock out a household chore and return for a code review. Developers saw some significant improvements to models this year. I switch between GPT 5.2 and cursor’s built-in “composer 1,” the latter of which is fast enough to not have to wait long for more tasks to finish.

I played around with Suno V5 and made a parody song that had been in my head for a few years. I got better at image and video generation with Sora and Sora 2. I generated transcriptions for most of Black Crown: Exhumed’s miasma items and I’m looking forward to getting them on Distrokid (and thereby on Spotify, YT Music, Alexa etc) when I finish.

Despite the incredible threat to my career that I’ve built a family around, I embrace all that is AI. There is no sense in fighting against it anyway.

Work. It’s hard to look at all I’ve done and say Tinydark wasn’t a success, but I did not release Black Crown: Exhumed and I could have if I just prioritized it. I did get an unexpected, massive Bean Grower update out. And uh, MonBre too…

My 9-5 is going well and our client is very pleased with our work, so I don’t have to worry that the sky will fall any time in 2026. I even got more contract work to the tune of 75 billable hours.

What Didn’t Go So Well

Lifestyle. This year I officially became sick of how we live. Olivia turned three and has never known a life where my wife is consistently present for dinner. Nothing described in the opening of my 2024 annual review got better, only worse. To reiterate, which has only become more evident with her sacrifices in 2025: my wife tries her best. I wouldn’t have married a lazy excuse-maker.

We did not intend to have Everett because we knew we just didn’t have the bandwidth for a fourth child. We were right: the reality of “you’ll make it work” is that you’re stretched thin in every conceivable way. My girls deserve more one-on-one time. They deserve a dedicated parent on weekdays. They deserve better lunches and for their parents to not be spacing out from exhaustion while playing.

Of course, the benefit is that they get to have a fuller family life, and I’ve still been successful in staying active with all four of my children. We could be as little as one year away from being back on the rails and feeling well.

Cognition, as always. I have complained about my cognitive performance in every annual review so far. Looking back, I think I was overly critical of myself. I’ve always been forgetful; I simply had a period of maybe two years where I was consciously learning a lot and trying to commit it all to my “mind palace.” The Roman Room technique. I think I look at those halcyon days as what I could be now, but the parameters back then were very different, having to care for little more than our school-age son.

Well, I’m at a consistent 6 hours of sleep these days, often disturbed once at night. My only exercise is the occasional strength training I do with dumbbells in my office. My focus is constantly torn between life, family, gaming (yes), work and more. I haven’t used the Forest app at all in over a year. The best version of me was when I could sit down and work uninterrupted with Forest running. I honestly can’t imagine forming that habit in 2026.

And so, my short-term memory has never been worse. I need constant reminders from my wife to do household things. Long-term, I find that I forget details from shows we watched only a few days prior, or some info I learned on YouTube, or most troubling: something a friend told me about their personal lives.

Charlie Kirk -> conspiracy theory rabbit hole. I didn’t know too much about Charlie Kirk. You could have lumped me in with the people who just said he should debate stronger opponents than the average college student (which he did, often). But my wife liked him and when I saw the clip of his assassination, I was done for the day. Took the kids out for a walk and processed the reality of his death and what that meant for America and general discourse.

While I’d like to say I tried to make the best of his death, I didn’t. It didn’t galvanize me to work harder, to better secure my kids’ future, or do anything productive. Instead, it was all, pathetically, too much for me to bear: seeing people’s reactions and celebrations, listening to his content, following Candace Owens, talking with my wife. I felt spiritually exhausted. I saw the same three out-of-context clips passed around by willfully ignorant morons, or worse, those who knew they were wrong but spread the message anyway. I must have seen his death from a variety of angles over a hundred times. I finally gave up when I saw this woman’s gleeful expression, captured in this moment for eternity. I tried to distance myself from the investigation and everything surrounding his death.

That was a two-week stretch when most of my free time ended up being tied, in some way, to Charlie Kirk or his assassination, and it was the start of Vael Victus in a funk until late October. I started to notably feel better around my birthday week where I had a staycation with the kids. There was no way I was going to work through the cognitive load that Black Crown demanded, so I found myself building a variety of other things and writing my first Game Design Document since 2018 (for a future project).

Caffeine/body. I haven’t improved my caffeine intake nor have I solved the problem of my forward neck posture, which has gotten worse.

Spanish. Had to stop learning Spanish around the time that Everett was born. It was just too much to keep up with learning a new language and all my responsibilities. I felt empty about it for days after, and I hope I can return to learning Spanish in 2027 because there’s just so much value in it.

What I Learned

I remembered how great babies are! Yes, I’ll lead with that. Watching a third (fourth) little human experience everything for the first time is just incredible.

I was forcibly pulled back into the conservative commentary world and bolstered my arguments (for and against). I ended up with some hype for Jesus because it’s pretty clear to me that most people are in need of a good religion, and Kirk’s death encouraged some people to pick up a bible for the first time. I should note that I’m neither religious nor conservative.

As previously mentioned, AI. Image, video, music generation. I suppose I learned a bit about different art styles and music genres. Pretty slow with web dev this year.

Goals and Expectations: 2026

Stability. We should start to see progress on stabilizing our lifestyle in May, around Everett’s first birthday. Then, I can’t believe Violet is going to school this year…! I have lived with her being around me all day since she was born. With her in school and Olivia approaching four years old, I expect our weekday life to settle a bit. I also expect my wife to start feeling better and the breastfeeding burden will be lifted from her, so I’m looking forward to being able to get more of my weekdays back.

Body. I’m planning three months to improve my overall health, starting some time in March. I want to get back to running at least 4/7 days of the week, and I need to take my forward neck posture more seriously. I’m interested in creatine, but I’ll only take it if I’m sleeping better. When I last set aside time for strength training, the lack of sleep definitely affected how hard I could go and how long it took me to recover. Creatine would be bottlenecked by sleep deprivation.

Release Black Crown: Exhumed. Finally, I’m going to do it. It is the next major thing on the list, no more bullshit getting in the way. I’ll be releasing it as I originally wanted, though without sound/ambience and additional content. If the release is even mildly successful, I’ll aim to get sound in for a Halloween update.

I honestly cannot imagine anything beyond this. Will URPG be ready for beta early next year? I think so. Will the UI project have gone well enough for me to start pitching the engine as a product to strangers? Entirely possible. I could fall in love with how well I feel after focusing on my body and just continue to do that. One thing I’ll say is I want next year’s annual review to be more triumphant: that I did improve my cognition, our lifestyle did stabilize and maybe I finally turned a profit with Tinydark. For now, this humbled Vael will try his best, as always, to prepare for the inevitable doom he believes is coming for us all.

Here’s to 2026.
Vael