2019 Reflections.

At the end of 2018, I said that I wanted to keep in touch with people and exercise. Well, the good news is that, unlike last year, I actually did accomplish some of these goals! …at the very end of the year. In that I started practicing taijiquan, and I am still very bad at it, but I want to keep it up. I sort of kept in touch with people? But it’s still something I can improve on.

2019 marks my second year living in Seattle and working at Oculus. As per usual, I worked on entirely too many projects at once, but unlike last year, I did actually finish a few.

So…what happened this year?

  1. I released two games: Recording the predestined time – a sci-fi(?) slice-of-life(?) visual novel, and a short walk in the spring – a procedural ghost memorial. They’re both narrative games, but they’re very different, and I’m quite proud of how they turned out. I’ve become a lot more comfortable with writing the last year than I was during college.

(if you want to play them, you can find these games at https://amorphous.itch.io/)

  1. I visited NJ in March to watch a Sailor Moon musical live, which was amazing. (also wait, that was this year???) It turns out, I still really like Sailor Moon.

  2. Speaking of theater things, I joined a theater troupe and went onstage for the first time this summer! Specifically, I was a part of Hello Earth’s production of Star Wars Episode V, despite having little to no knowledge of Star Wars. (I watched Episode I and Episode V, in that order, as a kid – and have been told that that is possibly the worst Star Wars watch order)

  3. I spent practically the whole year writing an interactive fiction engine so that I can convert some of my looooong stories into narrative games. There’s still quite a bit of work before I can call it done, but it’s already at the point where I can make games in it! (It’ll be open-sourced when I think it’s ready to be open-sourced.)

  4. I drew a lot, mostly in the last few months of the year. I put a few pieces on Instagram (though I forgot about it more often than not), and sort of did inktober by drawing anime fanart. Which I also made a website for! https://revuetober.netlify.com/

  5. I continue to work on too many projects. Too many to list here - though I’ve been working on getting better at telling people I do things.

I still have a (sort of regularly updated) email list at https://buttondown.email/amorphous, and I’ve started figuring out the games community on twitter and discord, but it’s all stuff I am continuously working on.

It’s been an eventful year, and I have big ambitions for 2020 too. Specifically:

  • make and sell a game
  • do more things on stage
  • keep up with taijiquan
  • finish one of my multi-year stories
  • be more present in communities, whatever that means
  • celebrate more

‘Celebrate more’ feels really daunting to me, actually. I typically don’t share my accomplishments or my joy, and I’m always self conscious of appearing like a braggart.

But I’m proud of what I do, and no one else is going to celebrate for me.