Monthly Mewsfeed – Dec 2025

Last Month

This month, it wasn’t the Meowerlords who were getting ill – the human family struggled a bit and all the visits had to be postponed. More time to make things, or more time to be lazy? Why not both! At least the constant cat treatments seem to be done for now, which is amazing.

✅️ Finishing touches for Lonely Socks

I was right last month – the last details of Lonely Socks were no biggies 🙂 It is now live and has already gotten some feedback, which I also addressed in a version I just uploaded (review pending). Maybe by the time this post goes up, it’s already available!

✅️ Release!!!

Since this version went out so fast, I had enough time to also release a follow-up version. The biggest thing I addressed there was making the unlock progress for the other game modes more obvious. For now, Lonely Socks is done, unless someone finds a bug or new ideas arise 🙂

✅️ Give my design wizard more access

The design wizard now has some ways of sharing data, but it remains to be seen how well it all works. Many things to be optimised in time!

✅️ Start next game (again)

As I hoped, I have done a number of things for my new game. It has a work-in-progress level UI theme, but no textures for the little merging blocks yet, and I haven’t even looked at sound effects.

The game logic is incomplete, but I think the hardest part is done. There are lots of details like score keeping, some balancing, animations etc. left to do.

✅️➡️ Christmas 🙂

I was so worried about the Meowerlords keeping us home that I didn’t think that multiple separate groups of humans could get ill, too. Our Christmas will have to be dragged into next year, when everyone is healthy!

✅️ Additional stuff

I never had a good hard mode in Lonely Socks, but this month, an idea finally manifested! You can now annoy some old, grumbly socks and see how well things go when they show up 😁️ I personally really enjoy this game mode.

Also, in case you preferred the old socks from V1, they are back! You can switch to them in the options.

The rest is all related to some Over-Engineering side quests. There are some pitfalls I noticed when setting up the new game, and I am still improving the process needed to generate an UI theme. I also hope I now worked around an entire class of scene initialisation and timing issues by changing the way my apps start up.

Next Month

I still have a few days left until I’m back at work, but January is already filling up with appointments. Planning, as always, is a challenge when the future is involved. I will keep it conservative just to be sure, and be happy about anything additional that I can squeeze in.

➡️ Asset generation improvements

I still have some smaller things to try out for my little system that generates assets from .svg files (someone may or may not love inkscape). The dream is to have as little manual exporting and copying files around as possible, since that really slows down iterations on visuals. Which is not good if you already like programming better than art.

➡️ Make mini news screen behave

The tiny newsfeed in the corner of my apps tends to look like a jumbled up mess of overlapping labels when switching to a phone screen in a new project. It should really work better, so I have to look into making it respect the settings.

While I’m at it, I should also finally make little announcements for all my apps, since I now have more than one. Maybe some sock matching experts also like playing darts!

➡️ Number Collapse: energy

One of the main mechanics of Number Collapse is supposed to be spending and refilling energy by moving blocks and making matches. This is also not implemented yet, and without it, there is no challenge! Even with it, I’m still in 2 minds about the game being too easy, or too weird.

➡️ Number Collapse: scores

Basically a continuation of the game logic from last month: without scores, it’s all kinda… pointless… 😁️ No? Ok, I’ll see myself out.

➡️ Animated score info

I had many occasions where I wanted some sort of standard label to pop up, do a standard thing, and disappear again. A label with some new score that is added to the total, or a help message for example. I’m secretly wondering if there is an Over-Engineering task hidden here, but don’t tell anyone.

For this one, I want an added score to move towards the counter, similar to the folded socks moving upwards in Lonely Socks, or the old socks grumbling at you when disturbed. I feel there is some boilerplate code there that can be re-used, but at the same time, I’m unsure how different the requirements across projects actually are. Darty, for example, had some quite specific abilities and requirements. Would they be a possible application? Who knows.

I’ll get back to it and update at the end of January, as always. Have a good start of 2026, and don’t overdo it with the new year’s resolutions 🙂