Another year is over, here's a summary of what happened in 2025.
YouTube
This year I passed 100,000 subscribers and received a Silver Play Button from YouTube. Opening the package and holding this award felt surreal - thank you to everyone who has subscribed and interacted with my videos. I hope you've enjoyed my videos and learned something useful from them.
I only posted one video this year, which was A First Look At Raytraced Audio. I started working on this video in December 2024, and it took many hours to create:
300 hours creating animations and upgrading the engine to render in 4K
30 hours scriptwriting and recording the voiceover. It took many iterations to condense the video down into 8 minutes
10 hours iterating on the thumbnail and title. See below for all the iterations
This video was also a technical milestone. It's the first video I rendered in 4K, and it was rendered completely in my engine. I wrote more about this here.
This video went through many drafts to receive feedback from peers, family and friends. Early feedback is so important, I didn't finalise any animations until the final script was written and the voiceover was recorded.
After that, I began lining up the animations to match my voice. This meant adjusting the durations of each pause and segment to ensure that what's on-screen matches exactly what I'm talking about at the time. This was tedious, but I believe it's one of the factors that makes the video so accessible to everyone, regardless of technical background.
A team of audio researchers at the University of Surrey in England have reached out to me, to help create a video for their project. This is my first professional animation gig and I'm honoured to help them out.
Thumbnails
I always test multiple thumbnails and titles on my YouTube videos to see what works best. After experimenting with my past 6 videos, I've figured out my style: abstract shapes, easy-to-read text, and an arrow pointing to something interesting.
These thumbnails are intentionally vague, but the positive responses to each video tells me it's worth it. I created 6 polished thumbnails for my Raytraced Audio video, but got lucky and the first one performed the best. Usually it takes a week of A/B testing to find the right one!
Here's what this process looks like behind the scenes:
Patreon
This year has been incredible – 2545 people joined my Patreon, with 298 choosing to become paid supporters. Your support means the world to me and I hope you've learned something valuable from my work. I'm grateful and motivated to continue creating, sharing, and collaborating with you all.
A special thank you to zepofan who has been supporting me since 2021 - in more than just Patreon - you've also helped find many bugs in Sector's Edge and spent many hours recording trailer footage. Thank you!
Also thank you to Lavr, Andreu, Matt, Nocturne, Konstantin and Nandor, who have been been Patrons since 2023. Having long-term members means a lot to me.
GitHub
This year the engine received 524 commits, 1481 files changed, 99050 insertions and 51736 deletions.
Engine development has taken a back seat as I'm mainly working on Raytraced Audio now, but it's a priority for 2026. I plan to create more examples and labs projects to help teach both basic and complex rendering concepts.
I also plan to create standalone modules for main engine features - voxels, particles, networking, multithreading - that can be used in any C# project. 2026 will be a busy year!
I've created two public repositories this year, as part of the Raytraced Audio plugin for Godot:
openal_soft_bindings contains C# bindings for OpenAL Soft
godot_openal bypasses Godot's audio system and uses OpenAL Soft instead
Lastly, thank you to all my GitHub Sponsors. I'm so grateful that you are interested in my work, and I hope to continue to motivate you to pursue your curiosity.
Documentation
This is the year I started working on documentation, for both the Vercidium Engine and Raytraced Audio.
Writing documentation has been a much different experience than I expected. As I'm writing docs I'm also removing unused code, renaming functions and making features easier to use. It feels like I'm upgrading the engine rather than just writing about it.
There are many topics that I still need to write about, but I'm already seeing the benefits of the documented parts of the engine.
Raytraced Audio
Raytraced Audio is my main project at the moment, with progress on all fronts:
the C# SDK is undergoing testing by 24 C# developers
the C SDK is nearly complete (6 months ahead of schedule!)
the Godot plugin is functional and nearly ready for testing
Since posting my YouTube video in April, Raytraced Audio has also received some technical upgrades:
energy-based system for sound muffling
reverb constructed from echograms
any sized environment is supported - no more voxels
highly optimised, cached, trail-based raytracing system
You can read more about these features in the Energy and Materials post, and the Voxels vs Trails post.
2793 people have signed up to test Raytraced Audio, and 1400 of them are Unreal Engine developers. The C SDK will be ready for testing early next year - much earlier than expected - and shortly after that I'll start working on the Unreal Engine plugin.
I also created a new website for Raytraced Audio, which has many cool animations that showcase each feature: vercidium.com
That's All
Thank you to everyone who has supported my work, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!