January 1, 2024

Hello. At the end of every year, I make a single Facebook post (often my only post of the year) reflecting upon the year, and how it went. Here was 2023’s:

Hello. It is December 31st, 2023, and so it is time for my traditional, once-a-year long Facebook post that I apparently forgot to do last year. Or Facebook lost it somehow, because I do remember writing it?? Hrm. Which also means I don’t remember any of my goals from the beginning of the year, which I guess isn’t anything new!

2023 held a lot of change for me. 2020 and 2021 were kind of lost to the black hole of the pandemic, and 2022 I made up for it by traveling entirely too many places, and frankly not taking enough time to do my own thing. 2023 also had a lot of travel; I took a month off of work in March to go up and down the US East Coast and see friends, I went to Washington DC in July for Otakon, I went to NJ many times to visit my family, I visited San Francisco and NYC too many times for work, etc.

Oh, and I also quit my job and got a new one in the summer. Which was new. And exciting. I’m now a graphics engineer at Figma! So far I’ve been there for a few months, and I’ve been enjoying myself. The work is a lot more intense than it was at Oculus; I think on my first or second week I was already reading research papers about anti-aliasing! But it’s been fun, and more importantly I don’t think I’ve been working more hours. Which has left plenty of time for me to do game development, of course.

Unlike my normally-50-projects-syndrome self, I didn’t actually finish many game projects this year. The only new finished work I have to show is BeSwitched, which I made with a team for GMTK Jam and we got top 100 in audience polling (out of ~7000 entries), which was cool! And it’s playable online here: https://jamadoo-games.itch.io/beswitched

I also got more active in Seattle Indies, helping organize more indie games meetups for underrepresented minorities, and Seattle JS, where I gave a talk on writing fanfiction in Javascript (surprisingly well received??). The talk was not recorded, but you can find slides here if you want them??? https://amorphic.space/interactive-fanfic/

And then besides that, I pretty much spent the whole year working on a single bigger game project. I think I’ve gotten pretty good at making small games in a week or two for a jam, but I’ve always liked playing longer games, and I keep writing stories that are more novel-length than the kind that is buildable in a week. So…I’ve been learning how to make longer games. The one I’m working on has been in progress for six months, and I anticipate it taking at least six more. I’ve been terrible at giving updates on it, and I don’t think that will change, because I want to finish it, and finishing long games is such a different skill from finishing short games. And I’m not quite at the point yet where I have something I want to show off from the rooftops, either.

So. That’s a lot of words to say ‘I have a big game in progress and I don’t know how to talk about it’ and maybe I’ll figure it out, but either way it’ll be made! I guess you could call that a 2024 goal, though I feel like I’ve had that as a goal for many years. It’s different maybe in that I’m in the thick of it, and have many more of the skills and understanding needed to actually do it. Hopefully.

What other goals do I have for 2024? Probably sleep more. I got more sleep these two weeks than I have in like the whole year (per night) and man have I been missing out.