Posted On: 2026-01-05
Roughly a year ago I planned to make significant changes, including several options for which path I could take. One year later, it's time to look back on those changes, what went right, what went wrong, and how best to proceed from here.
I've written a bit before about how I approach programming when I have multiple options: I try one approach until it gets stuck (or takes too long), and then pivot and try a different approach. In general, doing so allows me to find the best solution without over-commiting to any one approach: without this, I have a tendency to lean too hard into my biases, favoring what I think I know by digging too deep into that one approach and thereby missing a simple solution that requires thinking about the problem differently.
Over the past year, I've tried to apply that same approach to changing my line of work. I started the year working on what I intended to be a much smaller project (estimated at one month development-time, though it went way past that.) Once it became clear that was not getting the results I wanted at the speed I wanted, I pivoted into looking for a publisher. As work on that stalled out, I pivoted to looking for full-time work outside of game development. When progress on that also halted, I pivoted into new territory (open source contribution).
At the time, I thought I was successfully applying my parallel development pattern, but looking back on it, the proportion of my time was very unevenly distributed. I spent far longer on making a "small" game than any other approach and I spent so little time on a potential publisher that I don't even have a pitch for it. What's more, progress in general was quite slow, with each try being measured in months rather than hours/days (which is the speed this strategy works in software development.)
Alongside trying to pivot into something new, the past year brought a couple big changes in my personal life - specifically, that I moved twice in one year. As it's entirely personal, I don't want to write too much about it, but I would be remiss if I didn't at least acknowledge the substantial temporal and attention costs.
Trying different approaches has been useful, and I'd like to get closer to doing a proper parallel approach for this year. As such, I've identified a few changes that I think will make that happen:
By combining these strategies, I am optimistic that I will be able to cover a wider variety of possible solutions to my situation, and thereby improve the chance of finding one that will succeed. While it's easy to become discouraged a year of failures, I need to keep in mind the cornerstone of parallel development: no matter how many times you fail, you only need to succeed once.