It's 2025! Time to talk about my goals for this year and where I'm planning to take my projects.
Before I get into that, here's the updated image that shows my art over the years:
This post builds upon my previous post where I recapped 2024 and what my previous goals were. I'd recommend reading that post before this one to understand some of the context.
Recap
I talked a lot about travel and burnout last time and how that's affected my projects. I truly enjoy traveling and I'm thankful that I have the opportunity to do it, so I'm not saying I'll travel less or anything, but I do want to be more mindful of my time and schedule those travel breaks in more. I plan on keeping those travel times on my schedule and keeping a week before and after travel as "break" weeks where I don't expect myself to work on projects. I naturally do this, so I should definitely plan for that.
I also want to work on my schedule of when they're happening. The excessive amount of travel in November/December was really draining, so I'm already planning to work with my managers on limiting work trips during that time to try and help manage my sanity a little better.
Brainstorming
I also talked about how last year I overscoped a lot. In my Global Game Jam project and in my Nay Saga board game (especially the digital version). This caused me to overwork in some areas and then when I realized there wasn't enough time, I was then disappointed in myself. That led to the burnout feeling and just not wanting to work on projects at some points.
I'm hoping to mitigate that this year by truly scoping things out early and organizing my Notion page and monthly goals earlier on. I did have monthly goals, but didn't usually meet them due to travel. Or I would actually meet them, so I'd start to pile more tasks onto myself because I thought I had extra time or really wanted to polish something up. I'm going to try and let go this year. I need to scope down and really just finish early rather than continuing to add on even if I'm done early. If I finish early, I can work on other projects instead like The Nays.
I really want to find ways to speed up some of my processes more as well to help with this. For example, I've found shortcuts to organize my RPG Maker notes more efficiently so I don't have to search through bookmarks or documentation as much while I'm developing. I've also slowly been trying to find ways to speed up my drawings (especially the coloring phase) so I can produce more Eventure Twines than 2 a year. I still haven't found a solution there, but I do think I'm getting a bit faster over the years, the more I do.
Another area that may have led to my burnout last year was doing one type of task exclusively for long periods of time. For example, I drew a lot at the beginning of the year, then worked on the card design for awhile, and programmed mostly at the end of the year. Game dev is great because you can switch between these when you're burnt out on one of them. I didn't take advantage of that enough. Part of it might be because there weren't as many areas to switch between on a card game when most areas were visual. But I'm hoping to hop around more when I'm feeling burnt out in one area.
I also realized this year, I didn't write much at all. I only wrote 2 new Eventures and barely read any. This really put me out of touch with The Nays and was probably a huge reason why I was so unmotivated and never really felt like I was in the mood for The Nays. My inspiration mostly comes from reading what I've written or writing new parts of the story. This was probably a huge reason that this year was rough in terms of burnout, because I wasn't paying attention to that. This was in the top 4 lowest writing years I've had since 2008, where I only wrote 2 Eventures this year vs. 9 last year and 15 the year before. I really need to get back into writing.
2025 Goals
I put together this list of goals that I'm hoping to accomplish this year:
My main goal here is that I want to work on The Nays more and really focus there. The past few years, my yearly game project became the focus, and it really pushed a lot of my progress on The Nays to the side, which just didn't feel right. I really want to dive back into The Nays as my main focus for this year and then a game or side project can be secondary.
Because of this, I kind of combined some of the game dev stuff together for that last goal. I don't expect myself to finish my game dev portfolio and resume, but I do want to make some progress on it. Whether that's just creating a game dev vlog or two and uploading them on there, or just adding a new game that I made since then. Just minor progress to keep it up-to-date. I also removed the goal of publishing to Steam for this year. I do want to do that still, but maybe not this year when I'm focusing on The Nays more. It may come back as a goal for next year though.
I had a lot of goals last year, so this year I'm trying to tone it back a little. I want to get back on my feet again and make a lot of progress and feel motivated and inspired to work on The Nays a lot more. By trimming down my list of goals, I'm hoping this will leave more free time to work on that project more and I won't feel as guilty taking time away from other projects for it if that's what I truly want to do and what makes me the most happy.
So yeah, I'm looking forward to 2025 and hoping it'll be a productive year for The Nays!
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