2021 Recap

2021 is at its end, and what a year it's been! It was my first full year living in my apartment and that really improved my mental health a lot, so I'm very grateful for that decision. As for my art and some other areas, there were some rocky parts and I'm still figuring things out, but I'll get to that later in this post.

As my tradition goes, I'll start off by showing my 2021 art summary:

So what happened in 2021? Well in January, my brother and I participated in the Global Game Jam as usual (play the game here!), but this time we had to interact virtually instead of being there together in person, so it was different. We were a bit more ambitious with a more detailed art style as well because they extended it to be a few days longer, so it was definitely a new experience.

Then in February, I made a Discord bot for me and my brother to talk with The Nays, to try and emulate mIRC. I still have to log into the bot each time I want to use it, but I switched the hosting over to repl.it at least so that either of us could load it up whenever we plan to use it.

In March I started to watch some Sketchbook tours on YouTube, so I made a few of my own. I recorded myself going through all of my old sketchbooks and edited together the first few throughout the year. I also recorded my Art Journey around that time as well while I was doing more video recordings.

I did a #SurpriseOCDrawing challenge for fun to draw other people's characters, and that was a fun little activity in the spring.

In April I spent a lot of time updating my social media platforms. I made a carrd and Art Station, and uploaded playthroughs of all of my GGJ projects to YouTube (and revamped my channel a bit).

At the end of April I teamed up with three of my closest friends to participate in CCAD's 24-Hour Animation challenge, where we collaborated on Discord to create a 30-second short film. Our team ended up winning and they showed our short film at their end of the year show that we got to all attend in May. So that was a really fun experience!

And after the 24-Hour Animation challenge, we were inspired to work on projects and talk about them together so we started the CUPdates (Creative Update Project), where we meet bi-weekly to talk about projects we're working on and present to the group. It's been really beneficial and keeping us all a lot more motivated to work on our projects. And it's a way for me to make use of this blog more too!

I worked on various projects about The Nays for short periods of time, including the Nays 2084 animation, where I made progress on a few more scenes, then overall I drew more storyboards and story sketches of a few of our Eventures. My brother and I wrote our first remote Eventure in awhile as well around that time.

Then starting in June, I got very deep into game development on Compass Nays (and came up with the actual name and logo for it!). I was super productive on this project until August, which was very different, since summer is usually my time where I don't get any projects done. This year those were my most productive months though, so I think the CUPdates definitely helped. I ended up making a lot of progress overall on the game, since previously it was just a rough battle system. But I went in and made some sprite and style tests, wrote dialogue for most of the prologue, drew the layouts of all of the maps in the prologue, did sprite sketches of all of the prologue characters, made some menu tests, and a lot more. You can check out all of my Compass Nays posts for more details, but I'm happy with how far I got in it this year!

In September I took a break from Compass Nays and completed my very first Unity game outside of work. I made Frank Hawk for my brother's birthday, so I got it done in about a month. During this time I also started to update my online presence in terms of game dev. I made a Game Jolt account, uploaded projects to RPGmaker.net, and revamped some of my itch.io pages.

Because I used up a lot of my creative energy in the summer this year, the fall was a huge lull for me. It was like ever since I came back from my vacation, I had trouble getting back into art. So I really just did inktober and Christmas presents for the rest of the year.

In November I brought back my OC trading card game and started to figure out some of the mechanics more. I printed out my prototypes and tested it. I also uploaded my Art Journey video after finishing it up. This month was mostly Christmas presents and a lot of Notion. I learned a lot about databases from work, so I revamped my entire checklist and task system to be a lot more efficient, and also ended up making a wiki for The Nays there, based on all of my Google docs and Weebly pages.

So overall this year was very different than previous years. I think overall I'm realizing that I definitely experienced burnout this year. Part of it could've been because I was using so much creative energy during summer (when I usually take a break), and then a mixture of other things. I did two weekend challenges of staying up all night with little sleep, and work has been super hectic the past year or so. So a lot has been contributing to this and I'm trying to figure out how to overcome it. Luckily in December I did start to feel better because I was creating again, and that's what really gives me a lot of energy.

Another challenge this year has been that I haven't really had time to write The Nays. So because of that, I ended up trying to focus on Compass Nays instead, which would be a much shorter version of that story, and something I could do on my own. With my brother and I living apart, it's harder to line up our schedules to dedicate a weekend or even one night to writing an Eventure, so progress on The Nays has been pretty much halted. We only wrote 1 new Eventure this entire year. I think this is part of why I've felt disconnected in a weird way. Since I haven't really been thinking in-character as much because I'm not constantly working on the project, I have to do a lot of re-reading to figure out where I left off each time, which is a little weird. I know my goal was to work on side projects more than actually write Eventures this year, and that's what I did. But it's still weird!

Something else I realized this year was that I stopped doing daily drawings. I didn't do them last year, but I still did them more than this year. This year I drew less and less as the year went on, and I think that really hurt my abilities and motivation a lot. I made a lot less drawings overall and it's been hard to get back into it. I'll talk more about this in the next post on how I plan to bring some of that back, but I realize I'm definitely the kind of person who can't take long breaks from drawing, or it really messes with me.

Because I didn't draw much this year, I realize I didn't really improve drawing-wise as much as I would've liked to. But I did improve in a lot of other aspects of my life. Especially in game dev. I've been learning a lot of Unity at work, and some more JavaScript, so that's really been helping me understand and utilize programming a lot more, which in turn really improves my RPG Maker games and workflow a lot, which I'm thankful for. I improved a lot professionally and at work as well, and even got promoted to Senior Curriculum Developer in February this year. So I've been taking on even more responsibilities than I had been previously. We also got a lot of additional partnership courses so I've worked on courses for Google, MIT, and NYU so far. So I'm learning a lot for sure.

And then I also realized over the past year that my social life has improved a lot. Now that I'm living with my best friend, we hang out all the time. One of my friends visits and hangs out with us pretty much every weekend. There are at least 1-2 people that I meet with virtually every month to talk about art and other things. I meet bi-weekly with my friends to talk about our projects in CUPdates. And I've met up with some other friends in Columbus a few times, and one of our friends visited for a few months in the spring. So this year has had A LOT of social interaction in comparison to last year. I'm an extrovert so that energizes me and I love it, but I think that's part of where my time and energy has been dedicated to, so it really does make sense that I have less time for art and personal projects with that on top of work. And I'm not saying this is a bad thing by any means, this is a huge improvement. The fact that I accomplished as much as I did this year on top of all of this means that my mental health is just way better, because I probably couldn't have done that much in previous years. So it's just a different use of time, and it's starting to make a lot more sense.

So now that I've gone over a lot of what happened this year, I'd like to end by answering this question: Did I accomplish my 2021 goals?

I wanted this blog to be less about daily tasks and more about processes and longer posts like this one. And the CUPdates have been working really well for that. I use Notion a lot as well for personal tasks, so this blog works great as my bi-weekly showcase.

A huge goal for this year was to focus on game design and I definitely did that! I learned a lot about Unity, making Frank Hawk, and made a lot of progress on Compass Nays. I even made progress on the gameplay mechanics of the OC trading card game.

I wanted to create more storyboards and finished beat boards, which I suppose I kind of did if you count The Gek Eventure Twine that I just posted. There were a few throughout the year as well, and the last few days of the year, but I still think I could've done more overall. I did say I wanted to share The Nays story with the world through Twine, and I started that, which is fun!

And then finally I achieved a goal of wanting to meet with artists more to talk about my personal projects and simulate college art classes. This was achieved through our CUPdates project! It really helps with motivation and I'm very thankful that my friends are willing to meet so often to make this dream a reality.

So overall even though this year felt crazy and ended kind of weirdly, I still did actually accomplish most of my goals. So I'm glad about that! These posts are really helpful to reflect back and really feel that sense of accomplishment. I have some plans for what to do next to address some of the issues that came up this year, so stay tuned for my next post.

See you in 2022!