Posted On: 2017-01-02
Happy new year, and welcome to 2017!
A lot of people start each new year with a resolution to do (or not do) something that year, but I've never really understood why. January 1st (or 2nd, as in this post) seems like a really arbitrary date to decide what you are going to do for the next 365 days. Additionally, planning an entire year in advance is horribly vulnerable to the Cone of Uncertainty (who knows if 200 days from now they will even be living in the same place, with the same job, in relationships with the same people, eating the same foods, etc.)
In light of my feelings about resolutions, I will instead document a few things that I am currently keeping my eye on as good goals. They are certainly open to change, reprioritization, or complete abandonment, however, they are things which, at present, are worth investigating working on in the next few months:
Polishing up one or two prototypes, and cross-posting them to a web portal.
A few of my prototypes ("Table Flip?" in particular) are closer to small games than simple prototypes. I am always intimidated by sharing my work (often because I feel it is not good enough - but that's no way
to get better at it), but I think that this is the right next step for my work as a whole. I currently receive very little feedback about my prototypes and, while that was
previously useful due to my strict deadline, I need to develop my ability to receive and interpret feedback (probably criticism - this is the internet after all).
Start prototyping the core systems to my three major game ideas
I haven't talked much about them, but I have been keeping an eye on a few game ideas that are too big for prototypes, but that I definitely want to make. There are three of them
so far, and I think that spending time prototyping the core mechanics (to validate that they are as satisfying/engaging as I think they are) would go a long way towards
finding the right one to spend time on.
Improvements to this site, specifically the blogs.
The current approach to the url is not very search-engine (or human) friendly, and each blog update currently requires
that I restart the entire site. These are small nuisances that I just need to spend time working on to resolve.
While not exactly resolutions, those are my current ambitions for this... year? I'll probably change/refine them within a month or two, but this should be a good place to start the year. If you have any thoughts about it, please let me know!