2025 was a pretty wild year for me. I started the year in a sort of professional limbo. While I had a fairly successful online business creating book covers, about 80% of that business was based on a certain freelance website. I had been on that site for over 15 years, and it eventually turned into one of the most terrible places to work on the planet. I would honestly rather go back to my chip delivery job than do anything on that site. That said, losing 80% of your income is kind of bad… lol.
The good thing is that I run my own book cover design and publishing website, www.ilovemycover.com, which I have been running for about eight years. The freelance website always took precedence over my own site because that was where my bread was buttered.
After losing the freelance site, I went all in on my own website. I pulled as many clients from the freelance site as I could, and most were more than happy to follow me over. Long story short, 2025 was not nearly as bad as I thought it would be financially. In fact, I did pretty well, especially considering I no longer had to pay site commissions on everything, even tips.
This happening at the end of 2024 also led to some hasty moves for game dev Rob. I wanted to rush out NEXIFY so I could possibly create another source of income. Rushing out a game just to make money is probably one of the worst things you can do as a developer, and I did not want my first game to be that. If you look over my blog from last year, you can see me starting off rambling, and according to that blog, the game should be done by now. In reality, it is barely off the planning floor.
I am getting back to it slowly and planning everything out, which I will start sharing more of here in the coming weeks. I am thinking about doing a short dev vlog series for the game, maybe five to ten minute devlogs where I just talk about the game and what I want to do. This is mostly so I can see and keep track of my progress while creating the game.
Currently, I am creating the stage design for each level using the Kenney 1-bit assets, along with some of my own mixed in.
I am excited for 2026, I don’t know if NEXIFY will be finished before then, but my hope is that it is out sometime in 2027.
