(01/01/2026)
HELLO! Excuse me while I brush the cobwebs off of this text box. It's been, what, a whole year? Maybe even a few decades? Sorry about that.
In this post, I'm going to explain why I've been away, why so many of my projects for 2025 were scrapped, and finally talk about the next big thing I'm releasing very soon!
Essentially: I started full-time work back in May, which has been fulfilling... and also physically and emotionally draining. Balancing a job, self-care, family, friends, AND creative endevaours is tricky tricky business and I don't think I'm ever going to fully figure it out.
This website will still be updated from time-to-time, but updating it Every Few Months is a luxury I won't able to afford for a very long time.
That's not to say I've spent these past however-many-months exclusively wallowing in my own shame! Oh no-no-no! Many-a-project have been scrapped in the time since my last blog post here, and I'd love to do a brief little look into each of them, and why they didn't survive my hyper-critical, evil gaze.
Similar to Digital Penthouse, this would have been an abandoned website left online with many broken hyperlinks. It was a company website for a fast-food business known as Ronald's Burgers, complete with employees-of-the-month, a news tab, a flash games section, and comments from satisfied customers.
Various words and sentences would stick out as unusual, and were actually SECRET HINTS encouraging the reader to interact with the website in strange ways, such as clicking a broken hyperlink 15 times, or getting an exact score on a game. Each time one of these secret objectives were fulfilled, a new page would open containing online chatlogs between the employees who created the website - and peeled back a mystery of kidnappings, illicitly-sourced "burger" meat, and a CEO who was hiding a lot more than a hair transplant. The chatlogs contained the bulk of the actual story, and reading them would give hints towards more secret objectives, which would in-turn unlock more chatlogs.
I loved the project's "gameplay loop", and writing the chatlogs with basically no plan ended up working in my favour, as I quickly came up with a delightful cast of characters with clear arcs, desires, and resolutions that felt very natural to the universe.
Unfortunately, the scope of the project was too massive (I mean, really, 3 seperate flash games? You don't know flash, dude), which ULTRA sucked because I felt like I had put in so much work already. Not to mention, a problem with the secret-objectives-system was quickly becoming obvious - with no clear relation between the secret-puzzles and the chatlogs they unlocked, tracking your own progress became more of a headache with every new piece of content. It maybe could have worked as a collaborative experience, where many members of a community investigate it together, but I just wasn't interested.
You can listen to one of the songs I made for a "Burger Tower Defence" game here:
I've only shared a very small snapshot of the chatlogs in the images above, but if people are interested I'd be happy to show more. Because there is SO much more.
This project is the most annoying to me. IT ISN'T SCRAPPED. IT'S 95% FINISHED. I JUST LOST INTEREST RIGHT AT THE END!!!!!!
Picky Picky Plants (name subject to change) is a Baba is You Levelpack about trying to fit plants in a grid based on their rules. It has 4 worlds, custom music, and all of the Olie Levelpack stuff that people seem to like. I had a friend playtest it and they really enjoyed it.
Maybe finishing it can be my 2026 New Years Resolution. Because GOD, if this just ends up sitting on my computer for another year, I'm going to lose my mind.
Here's a sneak peak of the music: The track for World 1, Inkspill Isle.
A book about a quartet of people discovering a card game that can predict that future. It reused all of the main cast from the Ronald's Burgers project in a new secondary school setting, and developed each of them into very charming little characters. I wrote four chapters of this and then realised that, out of all the directions I could think to take the story, none of them were particularly interesting to me.
I know I say this about every project, but I'm so gutted I wasn't able to do something more with this one. The prose is so damn cute! And the character arcs are all related to the central theme of confronting uncomfortable truths about yourself (like assuming people are avoiding you because you tend to avoid them, or grappling with the fact you might be queer). It's safe to say I feel very strongly about these topics.
I'd love to share the four chapters I DID write... once I'm certain I don't want to give the story another go. YOU WILL SEE IT ONE WAY OR ANOTHER.
And finally, my newest project, HAZEL'S MIRROR, will be premiering very soon! Chances are, when most people read this, the project will already be released.
It's the biggest thing I've ever worked on. Easily. The final video is just over 1 hour and 30 minutes long, with over 50 original songs and tons of unique art and environments. I'm so so SO proud of the story, the atmosphere, and the presentation. I just hope people won't find it too boring.
I will say a lot more about this project post-release, especially in terms of behind-the-scenes work-in-progress-y stuff that I saved during its production. So stay tuned for that!
Hopefully this won't be the last of Olie you'll see this year. The future is looking bright!