2021 Plans

It's 2021, which means 2020 is finally over!

Before I start talking about what my plans are for the year, here's my improvement throughout the years:

Looking back on last year's 2020 Plans post, I actually accomplished most of what I decided I would do: stop worrying about posting art every day and making it more for my own enjoyment instead. And while that was a better approach, and actually ended up helping me a lot mentally for that rough year, it still felt like something was missing. I think because life got so crazy, I wasn't able to fully complete the goal of wanting to do more with my story. I did a fair amount, but I do wish I had time to do more.

Because I'm not sure what 2021 will be like in terms of life and the world, I don't want to make unrealistic goals, but I still am going to make goals going forward, to keep myself motivated to work towards something.

So this was a theme last year, and it seems to be a reoccurring one for this year as well: In December, I usually get a burst of motivation during the holidays when I have more time off, and it inspires me to set goals of the year to come, based on how the year ended.

This year, I want to focus on game design. This could go a few different ways, and I'm not actually sure which one to strive for most. I'm not saying I plan to finish a game by the end of this year, because I know that could be unrealistic, but I do plan on making more progress on the various games that I've started, or potentially even start a smaller-scaled project that could be closer to finished.

Here are some options for games that I could work on:

• Nay Recruiters: an RPG with an alternate retelling of The Nays' story. I've planned out the playable characters and some gameplay mechanics, and have been working on programming a custom battle system. This is one of my more recent projects that I'd be interested in fully fleshing out.
• Detective Ragger: my college senior thesis project that I made back in 2015. I've been thinking about remaking this game into more of a point-and-click adventure in RPG Maker MZ, since there was some weirdness in how it was originally set up in VX Ace. The overall main story and concept art are complete as well. It would be different than the demo that I originally made, but this might be an opportunity to revisit a project that already had a lot of the basics figured out.
• Zandra and Yaguzi Project: a visual novel that I was creating concepts and story for a few years back that involves a lot of player choices, alternate endings, and gameplay mechanics relating to time travel. It was based on one of the Eventures in The Nays, and I never actually made a project file for it, but I did a lot of research and concepts, so it might be fun to revisit this project at some point.
• 2D Fighting Game: I've been wanting to make a 2D fighting game for a while, and my roommate and I recently were learning Unity and talking about maybe finally making this game. It would require a lot of research into gameplay mechanics, and learning more Unity (or maybe Game Maker?), but it would be something completely different from what I've done before.
• 3D Platformer: also a recent idea, where my roommate and I would be working on our own projects, but designing games at the same time. Mine was going to be about Uather and the orphans, and I made a test with some basic mechanics down. This is planned to be a very short, side project, mostly just to learn new things. This would require me to learn more about Unity and 3D art in general, but might be a fun challenge!
• OC Card Game: my friends and I started making our own trading card game last year. We've already made up most of the rules and what goes on the cards, it's just a matter of finishing all of the art and actually printing the cards. This would be a much smaller-scaled project and possibly able to do by the end of the year, so it might be fun to finish this project to have something more complete.
• Something else: I have various other RPG Maker games that I've started already that might be interesting to revisit, or maybe I'll come up with something entirely new. This is up in the air!

I might work a little bit on all of them, or start focusing on one of them to make more progress. I'm not sure which one that will be, but it'll really be whatever I'm most in the mood for. I want to keep this fairly open, but the main goal will be to work on games, make progress, learn new things, and continue to practice game design.

In addition to games, I also want to create more storyboards and finished beat boards for the Eventures that I've finished writing, so that I can turn them into Twine stories and start to actually share The Nays' story with the world. I feel like it's at a pretty good spot where there aren't a whole lot of Eventures that haven't been written, in the earlier times.

So overall, I think I'm going to focus a lot more on side projects, rather than writing and creating new content for the main story of The Nays. If I want to work on the main story, the plan is to work off of mostly what I've already written by creating storyboard or Twines, while the other side stories will be in the form of games. Obviously, I might write a few Eventures here and there, but that isn't the focus of this year for me.

I realize I'm most productive and creative when I'm working on a project at the same time as other people, so I'm hoping to get some other artists on board for working on personal projects and talking about them, so we can motivate each other! I want to simulate a college setting of being in the same class as other artists, but bring that to our own personal projects. I've mentioned this to a few people so far, but if you're interested and reading this, please reach out! I'd love to figure out how to do this.

So anyways, thanks for reading this! I know this year has had fairly long posts, but that's because I've had a lot on my mind and haven't made blog posts in a while. I can't wait to see what comes next!