The Vision for 2026
Let's resolve to make this a year of action and results.
First of all, congratulations to everyone who submitted a game for Cold Case Jam 2025! You can view and play the games here.
2025 Retrospective
It’s honestly quite difficult for me to write a retrospective of 2025. It was, objectively speaking, not a great year for me.
Probably the best thing that happened was the Mystery Game Jam in April, which received so much participation that it reinforced my belief in Mystery Gamedev and encouraged me to keep taking the risk of building tools and educational content for mystery game developers.
Aside from that, I’ve only really worked on two things this year: the Mystery Maker app, and the Mystery Game Masterclass. At the time of writing, neither one is in a usable state, but I’m working as fast as I can to make that happen within the next few weeks.
I wish I could give you an exact date, but my schedule has been hard to predict.
I’d also prefer not to get too deep into a retrospective here, because there is honestly not that much to even say. I spent most of my time building those projects. Whenever I wasn’t, I was just dealing with the plethora of real-life issues that were constantly being thrown my way.
I don’t want to be overly negative, especially on a post that you’re going to be reading on New Year’s Eve. So let’s put all that behind us and look forward to the future.
The Vision for Mystery Gamedev in 2026
Here’s what I’m hoping to accomplish this coming year.
Relaunch the Mystery Game Masterclass
First, is the relaunch of the Mystery Game Masterclass.
I will be launching with two options:
Just the course content (video lessons)
The course, plus direct mentorship with me
Both options will include a payment plan, so that hopefully the content becomes accessible to more people, particularly those with limited budgets.
The course will initially launch with the core 6 modules, but sometime later in the year I will update the course with 6 more modules that go beyond the essentials.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past two months not only building a custom online learning platform, but also revamping the course content to add even more material.
By the way, if you’re subscribed to this newsletter, then you’ll be given free access to the entire first module of the course. Yes, even the free newsletter subscribers. I want to prove to you that this is such good content that you have to try it out. So when the course is ready, you’ll get an email that will let you view the entire first module, absolutely free! Just be sure to subscribe to this newsletter if you aren’t already.
Launch Mystery Maker
Next is the launch of Mystery Maker. It’s a tool I’ve made that is designed in accordance with the framework that is taught in the Mystery Game Masterclass.
The app is a new kind of “mystery outline” that is more than just a text document. It keeps track of everything in your mystery: setting, characters, clues, theories, and even your interactive puzzles. At the click of a button, you’ll be able to assess the fairness of your puzzles and verify the correctness of your overall solution.
Also, once the Pro modules of the Masterclass are finished, Mystery Maker will be updated to accommodate those modules as well.
But this is ultimately a really ambitious app to build, so it’s going to take a while.
Release game engine plugins
The Mystery Game Masterclass also gave me insight into all the different kinds of game mechanics that make up a mystery game. There are 3 main categories and a total of 9 subcategories, and my goal is to create at least one plugin for each subcategory for each major game engine. A good goal is one new plugin per month.
So, this is obviously a lot of work, and will take its own amount of time, but the goal is to improve the efficiency of making mystery games by providing a solid starting point for every mystery game developer.
These plugins will be priced significantly cheaper compared to the Mystery Game Masterclass, and will only be a one-time payment as opposed to the recurring subscription that Mystery Maker will require.
My goal is to have many different products at a variety of prices to ensure that everyone can benefit at least in some way from the tools and resources I am creating.
Mystery Gamedev services
I’m definitely trying to narrow down a specific set of services that I can offer that go beyond a generalized “mentorship session.”
Some examples of services might include:
Fairness and solvability assessment
Story research and fact-checking
Puzzle difficulty balancing
I wanted to offer services as far back as 2024, but I didn’t have the infrastructure to actually do so. The point of creating Mystery Maker is to give everyone a solid “outline template” to work from, and the purpose of the Masterclass is to give everyone (including myself) a solid mental starting point from which we can assess the quality of a given mystery game.
Without having these in place, it would be nearly impossible for me to consistently offer a high quality service that actually does what I claim it will do.
You could do all of these things yourself if you follow the methods I teach in the Masterclass — or you can just ask me to do them for you. Your choice!
Mystery Game Database
The Database will be improved and some premium features will likely be offered to developers. I haven’t settled on the specifics for those premium features, but probably something along the lines of enhanced discoverability.
Some developers have also mentioned interest in turning the database into its own kind of storefront, so that people can buy mystery games directly from it. I do like that idea, and I have some other ideas that would work well with it. But it really just depends on how much progress I can make on everything else first.
Interestingly, my work on the Masterclass has led me to develop several important ways of classifying and organizing mystery games. I’ve come up with a way to break down mystery games into distinct components, both in terms of story and in terms of gameplay. It has become significantly easier for me to define what should be considered a mystery game beyond the surface-level description of “a story designed like a puzzle”, which may be still useful, but remains difficult to actually quantify.
So the Database will be updated with these new search criteria, hopefully soon, as well as many new games that have been released and will be released in the future.
Mystery Gamedev Newsletter
My work on the Masterclass also led to literally hundreds of thousands of words being written. (Technically, being spoken and then transcribed — I’m a lot faster at talking than I am at typing, though I am still fast at both!) I realized that for a video course, I needed to tighten up the pacing of each lesson, and condense the content into just the essentials for optimal learning.
It’s not as easy as you think to actually make a decent online course. It’s not just about the words you write, but how you speak them and what is on the screen while you are talking. So I learned that writing for a course is very different than writing for a newsletter.
As such, I had to “throw away” a lot of details regarding the course content. I personally think it’s a lot of cool info, but since most people have such low attention spans, it just wouldn’t be good for the course.
So, if you want access to all of those unused or “thrown away” words, the good news is that I’m going to be offering all of it to my paid newsletter subscribers.
Each course lesson will get its own dedicated newsletter article. It’s going to be a lot more dense than the course, more along the lines of an academic textbook, with meandering passages about things that I find personally worth talking about.
I’m going to release these on the usual weekly schedule, and so that means if you want to learn everything immediately, then you’re just going to have to buy the course instead. It will take at least one full year, if not more, to disseminate all of this information via the weekly blog posts. That’s just how much content I’ve been writing over these past several months!
And so, there are going to be a lot more paid newsletters going forward. There will still be at least one free article per month, and I might even let free subscribers see the first part of each paid piece. But I am unfortunately at a point where the bills need to be paid somehow, and I can’t keep offering all of this stuff for free.
There approximately 100 free newsletter articles already, and I still have plans to make free videos for YouTube as soon as I get some time for them. But I hope that people truly understand and value what I’ve been working on for the past two and a half years.
My Own Projects
Speaking of that — it sure has been a while since I’ve worked on any of my own mystery games!
Currently I have a list of over 100 game ideas (plus even more ideas for web apps and other software) that I really want to work on. It’s admittedly quite difficult at this point to set any of these ideas aside.
There is also the fact that I still need to finish Detective Butler and the King of Hearts, which was essentially put on hold since June of 2023.
The good news is that with all of the things that I’ve been working on, my own projects are going to go significantly faster. I have a much deeper understanding of the mystery genre than I had 3 years ago, and I’ve even built tools and designed systems that will speed up the actual development process.
Again, these are not just tools for me, but tools for all of you as well.
I really wanted to enter the Cold Case Jam with my own project, but I had to make finishing the Masterclass a higher priority.
However, I did try to brainstorm what I would do differently for the project that I started for the 2024 Mystery Game Jam (and never released). Within 90 minutes, I went from an idea that I struggled to make any progress on during the final two weeks of that jam, to a fully fleshed out concept that I believe would make for a legitimately fun mystery game to play.
I recorded the entire brainstorming session, so maybe I’ll make it available to paid subscribers at some point.
Regardless, I am 100% convinced that my framework is truly helpful, and I hope to only prove that point even more as I get back to working on my own projects next year.
When Vision Meets Reality
Considering all of the above, it’s going to take me a while to actually find the time to work on my own projects. It’s also very hard for me to specify any timelines at this point.
Without getting into the details, I keep having to deal with one catastrophe after another in my personal life, all of which either significantly drain my time, my energy, or my bank account, and I am running very low on all fronts.
Mystery Gamedev, for me, isn’t a hobby or side project. It’s something I’ve been building toward for most of my life. It grew out of real experiences, unresolved questions, and a long relationship with mystery as both a genre and a way of thinking. Games are the medium, but they’re not the whole point.
Perhaps I will share more about those inspirations some other time.
But passion alone isn’t a strategy. If something meaningful can’t support itself, then it eventually collapses under its own weight. I know this from previous experience. And I’m not willing to run on pure internal motivation while ignoring external reality.
So this is a period of recalibration. I have to prioritize work that stabilizes my situation. And so that means I’m being more deliberate about where my effort goes.
In the past, I’ve tried to keep everything moving at once, even when the return didn’t justify the cost. That approach isn’t viable forever. Sustainability isn’t about pushing harder, but about designing systems that don’t require constant effort just to exist.
I still believe in the work I’m doing. I still think it has value beyond myself. And I still intend to see it grow into something that justifies its existence — not through excessive sacrifice, but through real results.
Conclusion
So, I’ve outlined my vision for 2026. Hopefully it sounds like a good plan.
It’s the future that I want to live in.
I want to build these things and share them with all of you.
But if for whatever reason it doesn’t work out, I may have to spend much of my time on other things that can keep myself and my family afloat instead.
I am sure that these are just hard times right now. Despite how bad things seem, I am actually surprisingly calm. Objectively, this has to be one of the worst holiday seasons I’ve ever had, but it doesn’t actually feel that way. It just feels like an annoying bump in the road.
I wish I had more uplifting news to share. But I guess as long as I’m still in the game, that’s good enough for now.
Ultimately, 2025 was a quiet year of learning and building.
Let’s resolve to make 2026 a year of action and results.
Thank you all, and have a Happy New Year!
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