Spring 2026 Update!

Welcome to my update article for Spring 2026. It is an overview of the work I’ve done, projects I’ve finished, and any other interesting developments during the months of April, May, and June 2026. Let’s see how it went!

Where We Left Off

The Negative Money Cycle

The previous update explained (again) how I feel increasingly unable to handle my busy brain on my own. Or, rather, how what’s best for my health (and what my brain wants to do) does not align with how to earn an income and advance in current society.

For example, society and jobs heavily reward specialization. My brain is bored with anything after a few days, which is how I was able to learn the hundreds of different things I can do, but also makes me the anti-specializer :p Even after all these years, I can’t really say I am specialized in anything I do, or have tons of experience that should land me a well-paying job.

On the flip side, I also know that I would be bored with any job within a few days. I know that my degree on Mathematics and my massive body of work could certainly land me a job somewhere. But the mere idea of being stuck in a job I hate, day in day out, is enough to ruin my mental health already. It doesn’t matter what the job is. It doesn’t matter if it’s part time or not. The only constant in my life has been my ability to be completely, utterly disinterested in the same thing that interested me two days ago.

I need money to be able to do (more) stuff and take care of my health. But I have to work so hard to earn scraps that my health suffers and I lose the will to live at all.

Some days I am able to shut off the impatience at still living with my parents, still having no serious income, still not being able to live. I get a lot of work done! I can make entire professional (video) games in short periods of time, I can write books, my online store is testament of that. And I don’t even have to hurry or stress about it—it just happens naturally. It’s just my brain doing what it was designed to do.

But it’s creative work, so of course nobody is willing to pay for it or support it!

And so, after a good productive stretch of a few days or weeks, my mind goes back to putting income above all and trying to find a way out. Looking for jobs. Looking for funding, grants, subsidies, part-time sources of income, anything. Putting all my energy behind selling/marketing one idea of mine.

This inevitably leads to burn-out, depression, and complete loss of motivation for anything. Because it’s putting my brain in a cage and spending all my time doing something I hate or at least don’t believe in. I can make an entire game in a week, and then I’m completely done with it, and then the idea of having to “market” it or “keep working on it” is enough to make me physically sick.

And so, after a terrible stupid stretch of income-searching, my mind goes back to doing what it does best and producing good work.

And so I am left in the never-ending cycle of “I want to move out / start a family / etc!” -> “I need income for that!” -> “I need to work hard for that!” -> “I’m working so hard that I don’t have any life left, am not meeting new people, am incredibly unhappy!” -> “I want to move out …”

Made for Hunting & Gathering

It’s just a shame that the major systems and regulations in our society are so broken and useless. I can either get a lot of meaningful good work done each day, or get a meaningless bullshit job so I have a bit of money, but not both.

I truly believe that my busy creative brain—which most artists have, of course—is not some defect or illness or whatever. If I am allowed to do what’s best for my brain/body, I function very well. I produce lots of good work, meeting deadlines, and can find the space to also relax and do something besides work (socialize, hobbies, etc).

It should be no surprise that if I am not allowed to do what’s best for me, that my brain and body shut down!

I can’t explain it any other way. It’s not “eh I don’t feel a lot of motivation for this, but I’ll do it anyway”. It’s not “meh I don’t love my job, but it pays the bills so it’s fine”. It is complete, utter, soulcrushing disinterest or even hate for certain jobs or tasks. Even tasks that might have actually interested me and made me happy only a week ago.

I often tell people that my body/brain is still stuck in the period of hunters and gatherers. It was made for that time period, not modern society.

• I am always physically on the move. I become incredibly restless just by not being physically active for an hour or two. It was excruciatingly painful to have to sit in some lecture hall for hours at university. (When I tell people that I run 5 miles every day and stand behind my desk all day, they look at me like I’m not human. I give them the same incredulous look when they tell me that they can go a full day just sitting in a chair or, you know, not running.)
• My mind is always active, always alert, always knows what’s happening around me and if there are any threats. I can smell it when someone three blocks from here has burned something in their oven. I am ready to catch things just before someone next to me accidentally drops them to the floor. I absolutely can’t be productive if there is something going on around me, because I care more about helping if there’s danger or resolving urgent problems than typing words on a screen.
• I only care about the physical world around me. If something isn’t in my line of sight, or nearby, then it just does not exist for me. It’s why you can’t really reach me by calling or texting—I want to talk to people in real life, because any other talking just doesn’t feel real to me! Similarly, any work that doesn’t produce tangible results by the end of the day is meaningless to me. Which is why anything resembling office work won’t cut it for me.
• Similarly, I only care about the actual physical priorities. Food, water, shelter. Health and freedom. Anything else is just not important. You will never get me to care even the slightest bit about some secondary or tertiary problem or goal. And money, no matter how important it is in today’s society, is just an intangible human construct that does not have top priority. So my brain will never be able to say “do this for the money”. Because to my brain that’s like saying “hey, spend 8 hours every day, for the rest of your life, to get a piece of paper with some ink on it! Weehoo! Be motivated!”

If I were born thousands of years ago, I would have probably thrived :p I can perform physical work all day every day. I am alert to any problems and react before anyone else. (And that’s just how it has always been. I haven’t trained for it, nor do I have some trauma in my past that made me constantly alert. At least, not that I know of …) My brain prioritizes making sure we have food, making sure everyone’s healthy, making sure we get tangible results from work such as a roof over your head. And I do not care the slightest bit about getting some “reward” for doing all that like money.

But that’s not how today’s society works.

So, yeah, those are my thoughts at the moment.

Is the money worth enough to completely turn myself off and spend my days doing something I find meaningless or even hate? With some income I might be able to move out, might be able to buy an actual functioning computer. But that’s no guarantee at all. (Thanks, in part, to years of policies from our government that only enrich the already rich.) And even then, say I was able to get a little apartment somewhere with a nice fast computer to do my work … I would probably be so unhappy and unhealthy that I wouldn’t get anything done at all anymore.

At the end of the day, I decided that the money is not worth it. I looked for jobs again, I spoke about it with my parents and my general practitioner (and everyone really), and that’s the conclusion. The negative effects of any job would be far too great and not worth it for the income.

The money has to come from my online store, from my work. It was designed for it. I purposely made something that allows me to work on something else every few days.

And it works! I get so much stuff done, even when I’m sick and completely demotivated and whatever. Past month was a pretty slow month (I became ill twice), and I still finished 6 video games, 8 board games, and much more.

Why I’m Telling You This

Now we finally get to the crux of the story. The reason I’ve written this whole preamble in this update article: I spent a week reorganizing my notes and plans for the online store, so I can put my full focus on it.

• I cut out all the “worst” ideas. (Too big, too risky, too uncertain, not educational enough, not sure if I can make it, I have another idea right now that feels more potent, etcetera.) In fact, I launched a website/database with all the thousands of ideas I decided to discard, to maybe help others looking for ideas. I shall link that website when I make it public.
• I reorganized so that I have an ordered list of things to make in a single file. This means that every day I can just wake up, look at the top few items of that list, then pick one to work on. I don’t “allow” myself to jump ahead or anything.
• So I can just continue making all these things in order of the curriculum. As much as possible, I try not to jump between wildly different topics, and certainly try not to jump to projects that won’t be sold/end up on the store.

My planned products / to-dos used to be in separate files, one per topic. But it’s very impractical when spread out like that. It also makes it “too easy” for my brain to jump to another to-do list when I’m bored with the current one. Putting everything in order, in a single list, is much clearer. It also forced me to be more ruthless with cutting ideas, because that single list can only get so long.

It also allows me to move things when my brain really cannot motivate itself for the current thing we planned. I can just say “Okay, today I don’t feel like making that teaching resource, so I will move it to the next batch further down the file”. It means I don’t completely discard very good ideas I should make someday. It means I don’t “miss” or “skip” any parts of the curriculum. I don’t accidentally leave anything unfinished or some scheduled release unresolved.

But it also means I can be flexible in what work I take on. I just say “Not today, because today I’m full of energy for THAT OTHER IDEA”, and eventually everything will be done.

One of the biggest dangers of a busy brain, and one so easily bored, is that you can’t decide. You have 15 ideas and don’t know which one to work on today. With a single priority list like this, I mostly circumvent that problem. I know that the online store is what I do, and I know which items are at the top of that list, so that’s what I will choose to do today.

For example, I spent a few weeks learning how to make online multiplayer games last season. Very instructive, very helpful, very productive. It’s easy for my brain to latch onto that, because it’s new and I’m learning so many new tricks. But at the end of that week, I knew 90% of what it takes to make an online multiplayer game … and I was bored already AND had nothing to sell. The online store will likely never have online multiplayer games. They’re hard to make educational, hard to sell to schools, and hard to run at a profit (or run at all, to be honest, online multiplayer is hard).

At the same time, now I knew how to make them. So my brain opened the flood gates and gave me 20 ideas for online multiplayer games. Even more ideas! Help! Stop it! By allowing myself to even consider the possibility of making these games, I made every problem worse. I gave myself even more options, even more ideas, even more new stuff to learn.

By telling myself “no, this will never be part of the online store, so don’t explore it further” I could finally make decisions again and focus on working on the store.

I’m putting everything into the online store, that’s just the decision that has been made. It’s the most likely route towards income and being able to maintain physical and mental health. The most likely way to stay productive and healthy while finding a way to break out of the no-real-income-cycle.

Finally, this will allow me to improve the “marketing” problem (or “actually being found by teachers / parents”). Because I will actually finish parts of the curriculum, so it can be used in schools and I can share it. That’s a bit hard to do when there are holes everywhere and a topic like “shapes” or “numbers” has only one or two tiny products inside. A teacher looking to use some of my resources is unlikely to find my work or use it in that state. But now that the curriculum has some more meat on its bones, it’s actually able to be marketed and used.

A Bit More Detail

Maybe you read the previous section and think “well duh, of course you need to pick one thing, focus on it, and make products in a sensible order!” Or maybe you read it and thought “That’s stupid, you’re just going to be bored of your online shop in a month and write that you picked SOMETHING ELSE, and the cycle never ends! Now you’re maybe missing out on much better ideas just because they’re not educational!”

And you’re both right! That’s why it’s so hard. That’s the danger here.

There is tremendous value in being so easily bored and attracted to trying new things. I learned a lot, in a very short time, from that stint with online multiplayer games. It showed me a few new tools and tricks that I could immediately use in the games for my online store. (More on that in a few paragraphs.)

So it’s hard to discard that. It’s hard to stop it and tell yourself “no! focus!” every time, when you know you could get a lot more done (and grow in skill) if you do let yourself get distracted by new skills to learn. At the same time, as this article explains, I have enough experience to know you don’t achieve much if you never finish anything or specialize at least a little bit.

I’m trying to find a balance here. I probably will be for all my life. The best balance is to focus 100% on the store, with things to make in a specific order, but be slightly flexible with the details of how/why/when.

Making the online multiplayer games showed me that I could make puzzle games for the educational store. It’s a long story, but I’ll try to summarize.

• Digital puzzle games are ideal educational tools. Puzzles are hyperfocused on testing/practicing a specific skill. Digital ones don’t even need printing or explaining from the teacher/parent.
• Years ago, way before the store was ever a thing, I made a few large puzzle games like that. I learned cool ways to randomly generate puzzles that were solvable and interesting, so I could basically play my own puzzle game as if I were a new player :p
• But my PC was getting slower and slower, and generating puzzles is a lot of number-crunching, and at some point it just was too slow and made my laptop too sluggish to be practical. Young me basically said “I can’t make games that generate random puzzles anymore until I get a faster PC!”
• That’s why I forgot about the possibility entirely when setting up the store.
• But making those multiplayer games made me write a general framework of tools … which made me realize that I can still make puzzle games if I’m just smarter about it.

You see, those old puzzle games are “brute force”. I simply tell the program to create a random puzzle (literally drop random stuff in a map), then try all possible moves. If it finds a solution, great, the puzzle is solvable and we can give it to the player. If not, throw away and try again.

Even on tiny puzzles with few rules, trying all possible moves can easily mean millions of moves. Which means billions of calculations. And then it might not even FIND a solution, so it has to try several times.

Old me had not learned about working smarter instead of harder yet ;) It had not made a few other games with random generation yet and learned some more tricks.

If you design your puzzle right, you can generate random puzzles in a fraction of a second by using a “forward” or “backward” approach.

• FORWARD: Start with nothing and take random turns. After creating this random “solution”, place stuff in the puzzle to match what you did.
  • Example: Your puzzle is about moving a character to collect all the GEMS on the map. So, a “turn” just means the character moves in a random direction. Once you know the character’s path, you randomly place a GEM on some of the spaces where he’s been. (Pretending it was there all along and the player collected it!)
• BACKWARD: Start with a solved puzzle. Take random steps to “make it messy”. Give the player the messed-up state as the puzzle. The steps you took while generating, when reversed, are the solution!
  • Example: Your goal is to put all balls of the same color in the same box. You start with all boxes filled with one color. Then, you randomly take balls out, move them around, make it messy. The player just sees a puzzle with balls in wrong places; you already know the solution.

After having this realization, I made 5 pretty good educational puzzle games for the store, in one week. Not because I worked so hard, but because I could allow my brain to do what it does best (rapidly generate and execute on new ideas for the store) and because I worked smarter instead of harder.

I could look at my old puzzle ideas and change one or two things about the design so it was possible to generate puzzles in this “easy” way. My old laptop (nearing 15 years!) can do this just fine as it’s barely a few hundred calculations now.

At the same time, I could “throw away” any ideas that could not be changed. Some of those ideas might be great … but they’d require a lot of work, because there is no way to “work smarter”. I now realize, as I’m nearing the age of 30, that those ideas should just be discarded. (Or, as stated, they all moved to that database of ideas I’ll launch/make public at some point.)

I have 20 ideas a day. But, realistically, only 10 are good. And only 5 of those are clearly educational or linked to the store. And only 2 of those can be done in a smart and effecient way, instead of just brute force working on it for days.

I think I cut my overall pile of ideas in half the past few weeks. Still a lot of ideas left, but now they all have a clear section with how to do it in a smart way that makes it fast and mostly risk-free.

There’s just … more clarity now. Not the burden of a thousand promising ideas I still “have to make”. Not the idea of “I need a better PC to make all these other things”, but just being smart about my restrictions and doing the things I can do with terrible hardware.

It seems busy brains like mine probably default to the opposite of this saying—“work harder, not smarter”—and I have to remind myself to stop this more often ;) I see the same thing with my family members. We all tend to think “this has to be done, so I’m going to work really hard and hyperfocus until it is done”. Instead of thinking “DOES it have to be done? And if so, can we do it in a SMARTER way?”

A Rant

I did visit the municipality building with a request for financial aid. Because I have my own company, they told me that they can give me a year of aid to “make my company profitable”, but only if I can prove that the company will start making (more) money in the future. At first, this seems like a great opportunity.

But the entire process is very hostile, as if to dissuade as many people as possible, which means it takes a lot of work and I have to put myself into a bit of a cage again. At the start of the application they have a full page of statements like “you WILL do what we say” and “you WILL try to find a job if you can” and “LYING in ANY WAY on this form is a criminal offence and can land you in JAIL!”.

Like, what the fuck? I’ve been doing everything government wants from me all my life, paying my bills and taxes, sending in the proper paperwork for my company, never even getting close to a criminal act and they know it. And now, after years of trying to earn my own income, I put a lot of effort into applying for minimal aid … and you treat me like I’m one bad click away from becoming a criminal? Like a fucking toddler that has to do what you say? Great job, government, making people in need feel even more like a burden.

And all that for … 500 euros a month. Not enough to move out or anything. Just enough to pay for food, medical bills, and server costs.

As I write this, my application is in limbo. Have not submitted it yet. I’m working so hard that I literally don’t have the time to find aaaaalll the different forms and statements and receipts they want from me, nor prepare my “defense” for why my company will be profitable in the future.

I keep saying it: the Dutch government could easily give everyone who requests it a basic income with no strings attached. It’s less expensive than many of their other ideas. It would solve most problems and even save them a lot of money in the long run. All the data and research shows it.

Poor people put a huge strain on the medical system, for example, BECAUSE THEY ARE POOR. So we have this really stupid system where poor people can’t even get a few hundred euros a month for proper food, housing, and health … so instead we’ll ask everyone to pay through the nose for their health insurance so we can support these poor people going to the hospital all the time.

Or think about all the people who can’t work anymore due to burn-out or depression, due to being stressed out about not having money. So because the government did not want to ensure they had enough money to survive, they now ensured they are not working at all anymore and cost the state a lot more money! Yay!

But they won’t, because they are SO SO SCARED that even a single person would get free money, or use a penny of it in a way of which they don’t approve. And, of course, because politicians do not care about logic or arguments or solving problems. They’d rather let problems persist and tell people to be eternally grateful they get some financial aid from the government (… for problems they created).

Great. Just great.

The decision here is basically,

• I either apply for financial aid for my company, but then I have to prove it will be profitable in 6–12 months. (And any extra profit obviously has to be paid back to the government.)
• Or I apply for “regular” financial aid, but then I’m required to stop working for my company. (Because they reason “if you can work on your own company, then you could work a job and earn your own money”)

You can probably see why I ended up discarding the second option. I cannot stop being creative and stop making things, I cannot throw away the store I worked so hard on, just to get barely enough money to survive each month. And yes, it’s that bad. They told me they can’t force me to close my company (so I can keep it around, in case things get better in the future I guess), but I am absolutely obliged to stop any work for it.

You can probably also see why that first option isn’t likely to succeed. Creative work is risky. There’s not a lot of certainty, not a lot of money there. I can show them all the work I’ve done, but can’t “prove” some consistent growth that is sure to lead to profits in a year.

That’s why, after weeks of meetings and talks and trying stuff, I circled back to just having to earn that money myself with the best plan I have so far: the online store.

Conclusion

I’ve written all this at the start of Spring 2026. That might seem a bit weird for an Update article about Spring, but I just had a lot of thoughts to get out, and as you can see I had quite a productive end of March/early April.

In case I forget to update this at the end of June: the plan is obviously to keep working on the products for the online store, in order. That means some ~15 board games in Level 1 (mostly in Mathematics), also some ~15 digital games (most puzzle games like I mentioned), a few educational story bundles, and a few teaching resources.

I made a lot of quizzes last year, so I’m not too thrilled about making them now. I probably need some more time before I feel any desire to make quizzes again, so perhaps next season.

The one thing that keeps getting left behind are the escape rooms. I don’t know exactly why that is. The first ones I made went well and really add something unique. Escape experiences are great for classrooms or kids’ parties, but nobody really makes educational ones. I suppose … escape rooms are just a lot harder to make and more time-consuming than, say, a quiz. At the same time, it’s a “single-time experience” whereas games can be played over and over, so they seem more valuable to me. Again, perhaps next season I’ll catch up with the final escape rooms I had planned for level 1.

Okay, so, what’s the conclusion?

After many weeks of doubt, discussions, visiting people for help, and more … I basically circled back to my old plan and decided it was the best plan. My online store is the best way forward for me. Let’s hope it generates enough income in the near future to solve my endless impatience and fear about lacking money. I also decided, again, that my brain is not broken but just does not mesh with a lot of systems in our society. It’s about finding a way to still earn money (“participate in that society”) while keeping up the good habits and practical workflows that work for me.

Until the next update,

Tiamo

UPDATE (June 30)!

I stuck to this plan quite well and stand by everything I wrote.

I did however deviate at one point—as I always tend to do—precisely because I am in desperate need of more income.

I decided to finally release my first paid game (on Steam, by far the biggest paid video game platform). I knew it would not be an outright success, so I set myself a hard deadline that only allowed ~4 weeks of work on it, and treated it as a big learning/practice game.

And learn I did :p I stumbled through all the different rules, requirements, steps, and more that come into play when you try to run an actual business and get a spot on the biggest video game platform. I learned a lot. It made the final game more professional and polished than it would have been otherwise. I also have a much clearer view of how next games should look and how to sell them better on Steam.

The game I released is Super Sub: World Cup, a silly football game just in time for the football world cup. I’m of course a bit sad that it’s not some amazing game and outright success—you keep secretly hoping for miracles I suppose!—but I’m proud of finishing and releasing that game and know next ones will be much better.

Please note that when I say “4 weeks of work”, I really mean “1.5 week of frantic full-time work” and then “working on the online store again as I try to find some motivation to 100% finish the game and prepare for release”. That part never changes. I can only stay “somewhat interested” in a project for a week, maybe two, and then it’s just complete disinterest forever. So I’ve learned to basically make entire projects in 2 weeks and then give myself some space to slowly, over time, at some point, do the final 20% and release it.

Anyway, this had to be added to the update because it’s obviously a big deal and a big step. At the same time, it doesn’t change much going forward.

As I expected, being present on Steam lends credibility to my games and makes me show up in a lot more places. I just hope it brings more eyes to my work and my online store, even if the Steam games themselves don’t earn a lot. For example, even before releasing that first game, I’d already had way more visits and interaction on my work than ever before.

I’m not going to “full-time develop for Steam”, though, because the online store comes first and working on this single game full-time for 2 weeks was so hard that it nearly burned me out. I’ll make more Steam games, for sure, but I’ll do them in much smaller chunks and with a more reasonable deadline :p