1 Year Later

Almost 1 year has past since I started consistently doing this, with consistency being a flimsy word here. I suppose what might be expected is a year in review, a what I learned. Some click bait about "I did X for an entire year and here's what I learned." It certainly has been a wild year, full of life that is for certain. Maybe if this was a sit-com then we could do flashbacks to previous episodes or just random events on scripts that didn't quite make it into an episode, but was a good concept.

I haven't posted anything in a while, I will admit. I guess I will do a summary of what happened in the past little bit of my life. I quit being a bartender, I graduated with a B.S. in Physics. I am now an adjunct faculty member at the university that I graduated from. I applied to various graduate schools and waiting for a response. I am now streaming video game development on Twitch.tv, as much as I can and hopefully I will get a community of people following me there in order to get some passive income, and that once I get some progress in the game I can then sell that to make a few dollars. I think I did the math one night and realized if I sell 1000 copies of the game at $10 per copy, then I would earn enough to pay for the cost of living for making the game over a three month time period. Which would be cool. If I build a community over at twitch and or youtube, then that expands considerably but that is a big if. The whole thing is a bit of an if anyways, but oh well. Unfortunately the only way to win big in this world anymore is risk. Well maybe not anymore, just in general.

The funny part is I was thinking about what to write for this yesterday, and the day before, and I had all these ideas about what to talk about. Maybe it's because I am sitting in my office at the university, which is weird to say, I have an office. But I have no real ideas.

Year in Review

I may have joked about it in the beginning but I think it might be important to do a quick year in review and bask in self-pride over all that I have accomplished this year, and though it does seem a bit braggadocios, I think its important to acknowledge the highs and the lows. Though this will kinda focus on the highs.

If I remember correctly last year I had a website that was empty but also, looking terrible, not to say that this website looks like it belongs in a museum for its inherent beauty, but its a far cry from the basic html with styling that basically amounted to changing the color of the text in various places to get an understanding that it could be done. I started a decent habit as I said before of creating these posts and though as not as consistent as I would like, I do have a significant amount of posts listed here.

I learned nvim, which is the text editor that I am writing this in, and I still haven't figured out how to exit it, which might be why I started the habit of creating these posts ;), I have created an environment in here that I will say is starting to be completely my own and I am proud of it. I also got a spell checker in here finally so, posts should receive a moderate increase in production quality just from that alone. Still expect very little editing though, I can easily write things, but reading, well I still cannot do that.

I participated in 2 game jams this year, Ludum Dare 56, and the Pirate Software Game Jam. For Ludum Dare 56 I submitted "Microbe Mashup" receiving 1019th overall out of 1929 total spots. This was while I was going to school and working if I remember correctly, I might not, but still I am proud of what I did. I created that game by myself with raylib, and C, and I think that it is a good game, and it was something that helped me develop the factory strategy pattern in programming using the C programming language. In the Pirate Software Game Jam I *checks notes* didn't submit anything, and received a DNF (Did not finish). Which is true, I didn't submit anything because one of the requirements for that game jam is to create a web build of the game, and I just don't know how to do that. But, I created a game where you move different wand parts in order to cast spells to kill enemies, I don't have a name for the game yet, I came up with one and I was so satisfied with it, I congratulated myself for it, and I completely forgot it by the time I was going to rename the project it. I am currently continuing development of this game over on Twitch on a near daily basis in order to hopefully sell the game for some space credits at some point. I think yesterday is the first day that the game actually had all the parts required for it to be an actual game, which is super cool and I am super proud of. The only things that I really want to add to it before having people play test it would be having the player actually be able to die, and reset the game to a new run (kinda important I know), status effects for enemies, items that modify spells, combination spells (combination of multiple different mana to cast a spell). Once these are in, hopefully I will get this done within the next week (??? A very tentative schedule), I will try and get this out to various people in order to collect feedback, using this feedback, I will change the game, and add more features, like game feel and more enemy types, mana types (which also means spells), items, and possibly changing how the map works and adding more types of rooms to go to. After adding this I plan to do a second play test and then actually fix the art for the game because right now it is my art that I created, and it looks awful.

So that's the year in review...