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:
Write more than 2 Eventures (2 together, more than 2 solo).
Create at least 2 Twines.
Write most of the Eventure Trailer scripts.
Create a solo game (either progress on an existing one or a new game).
Make progress on game dev portfolio, updated resume, and/or game dev vlogs.
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!
It's the end of the year so that means it's time to recap what all happened this year! This has been one of my busiest years in my personal life and I did a lot of traveling, so that did mean a bit less time for personal projects. But I'll get into that in a bit.
To start, here's my summary of art:
I spent a lot of time at the beginning of the year drawing, but then slowed down and didn't draw a lot in the second half of the year. And that's okay! As I mentioned last year, my goals are more game dev-focused and less drawing-focused. So if I draw more some months than others, I'm okay with that.
But in all honesty, I do think I kind of burnt myself out to some degree and that does show a bit. I was really passionate about working on my projects, but trying to fit it in on top of travel and everything this year was a lot and led to some burnout. I was a bit overambitious on some of my projects, which led me to overwork myself. I'm planning to try and mitigate some of this in the future, but before I get into that, I'm going to break down what projects I worked on this year.
As I mentioned in my 2023 Recap post, I ended 2023 very strong. I was very inspired and working on my projects earlier. This included starting on my 2024 project as early as November 2023. I came up with the idea to make a physical board game rather than a video game for the year. This led to my biggest project of the year: Nay Saga.
My main goal was to make a game around the Nay-A-Day drawings I had done and a big goal for me was to draw more of those this year. So I started by drawing a few, but they did take awhile to draw. Some of them were ones I was redrawing so I could have more finished drawings of some of the more main characters.
I spent a lot of time brainstorming ideas for card layouts. I was also updating character spreadsheets and tracking down the 1,000+ characters and which ones had drawings that I could use. I was planning to eventually draw all of them to use, but decided to scope it down a little to only 750+ characters, and cut about 300 of them so I had less drawings to do.
During this time, I also wrote the Sram Eventure because I came up for some new ideas for characters who may be important to include. That meant creating new characters and redesigning old ones for this.
I actually started by designing a digital version of Nay Saga so I could playtest against a CPU and wouldn't need to find real people to try out some of my early concepts. And then I used some playing cards to test ideas. And by the end of January, I had some basic prototype layouts for ~40 cards printed that I was testing out 2-3 different game modes with.
On top of working on Nay Saga and writing an Eventure, I also did my yearly Global Game Jam project. This year, like last, we were very ambitious with the project. We included ~24 characters with different abilities and stats for this game. It meant that I spent about a week or so after the GGJ polishing it and expanding upon it, but I really enjoyed working on it.
And lastly for January, I also started working on my first Twine for the year: The Night Kids Eventure. I mostly did the sketches and some of the lineart.
Though I was extremely productive in January, that quickly changed in February. I was out of town for about 2 weeks and catching up on some games, so I really didn't accomplish much in my personal projects outside of a few drawings here and there.
Then in March, I also didn't make much progress. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth was released, so that was really my life for most of the month. I mainly got back into the project towards the end of the month, where I tried the game out in Tabletop Simulator and added ~64 new characters and printed them out to try and test the balance of the game more.
April started out with more travel for work, and then I took more of a break from Nay Saga. I came back to The Night Kids Twine and finished all of the lineart and basic coloring.
I decided to make another game dev vlog since it had been awhile and got back into looking at my portfolio and old projects. I recorded a few more playthrough videos of my more recent games around this time as well.
In May, I ended up traveling as I usually do to visit family, and was also just playing games and hanging out with my friends more. Outside of that, I got back into drawing more. I dedicated time to finding the best drawings I had of every character and drawing or cleaning up drawings of each character that I wanted in the game. This turned into a project that lasted until August and was really the main part I was working on for Nay Saga.
By the end of May, I finished all of the drawings for The Night Kids Eventure Twine and compiled the Twine together in June.
I drew all of the drawings for The Gek's Rival Eventure Twine in June and finished the shading and compiling by the end of July. I also made a new Twine Template Generator in p5 that helped me automate my process a bit more, so that was helpful.
June was another month where I ended up traveling for a week or so for work, so it was a little disruptive to my personal projects. I did end up finding a Saturday that my brother and I were both free though so we wrote the Complex.Net Eventure during that time.
In July, I was starting to feel the burnout on my projects. Likely because there was so much travel happening in between it, so I decided to take a week off from everything and participate in the O2A2 Visual Novel Game Jam. I started listening to game devs on Twitch in the background while working on projects during this time. It was a nice break to work on this project and have a game finished because I wasn't feeling a lot of progress on my other game with all of the drawing and massive scope I set up.
When I started working on Nay Saga again, I was coming up with more new game modes, printed out more characters, and was doing a lot of playtesting with a set of about 100 prototype cards. A big part of my progression was playtesting, making small tweaks, and finding drawings of characters. So while it was all important, it did feel like slow progress at the time.
During these months, I was constantly updating the card designs and wasn't really happy with the layout. So in August, my friend Jinny sat down with me and helped me finalize my design to where it is today.
I started to concept the different game pieces outside of the cards from here. This included the logo and box art. And then I finally playtested the game with real people using the prototype cards. I was finally feeling confident about the project and pieces were finally coming together. So I finished the game and sent the initial test pieces (1 of each) off to be printed through The Game Crafter.
In the meantime, while waiting for the first draft to arrive, I continued to work on character drawings for the game and finalizing assets. Outside of Nay Saga, I finished up my 2 Twines by creating recap trailers that I imported into the Twines and finished them.
I also started to upload The Gek Eventure drawings online because I realized I had never uploaded those individually to Deviant Art yet. Then August ended with more travel and breaks from my projects.
When I came back from my trips, my first initial print of Nay Saga arrived so I was able to test everything out and make final decisions about the assets. I created the rulebook for most of September.
I also created a 3D model of The Gek, which I used as a player pawn for the game. I 3D printed it along with many other 3D card holders that I found on Thingiverse.
In October, I printed the final version of Nay Saga. So I started to revisit the digital version of the game. The physical version was done so I wanted to make all of the game modes playable. This ended up not being realistic because it was a lot of intense gameplay mechanics and just not enough time. So I ended up mostly focusing on the second gameplay mode.
October was also a busy month for game releases, so I was playing a lot of games outside of working on my project. I was also invited to do an artist talk at CCAD, so I spent some time putting together a presentation and talking to students as well. I also went to GDEX.
So in November, I finished up the digital game as much as I could. This is when I really started to realize the burnout and just that I had really overscoped when I thought I would finish the entire digital game with 6 modes and a story. So I scoped down a bit and settled on just having 2 gameplay modes and basic menus. I did also add a card encyclopedia database to the game as well though which was a fun addition.
Outside of the digital game, I finalized a few areas for the physical game in November. The final game arrived and I was able to finally playtest with all 750+ cards! I took a lot of photos and videos, and created a "How To Play" video that I edited together.
Then I worked on the presentation aspects. I imported all of the final assets into Tabletop Simulator and created a Steam Workshop page for it.
I also updated some of its presentation on TheGameCrafter and made the final itchio page. None of these were published publicly yet.
Then my last physical aspect that I finished in November was painting the 3D printed Gek player pawn! I made 2 because I ordered a second version of the game so I'd have my own copy after I gave away the main print of the game to my brother for Christmas.
So from there, the game was mostly done and I just had some time to polish and wrap up loose ends in December. At the end of November, while I was creating the encyclopedia database of all of the characters, I was reading Eventures and starting to get in the mood for working on The Nays again.
I also was working in RPG Maker a lot for the digital aspects of the game, so I created a new Google Doc that compiles all of my RPG Maker notes in an organized way so I can keep it open and reference it during development. I also created a side document to organize plugins I commonly use and link to their documentation so I can more easily find those while I'm working. It's helped speed up my workflow.
As usual, November and December had a lot of travel, but even more than usual this year. I had additional travel for work in December for a week, which gave me even less time to work on projects. I'm hoping to work this out so we can do this trip sooner next year since it was pretty hectic. I also ended up getting sick from going on the work trip, which lost me a lot of time just trying to survive and canceled one of my original travel plans. I ended up being sick and traveling most of December, so I didn't end up really making progress on my projects for that month to end the year.
2024 Goal Breakdown
So that was the crazy year of 2024! Now that I went over specifics of what I did each month, I'll compare my goals from last year and talk about my progress:
✅ Write at least 2 Eventures.
✅ Create at least 2 Twines.
❌ Write (all of?) the Eventure Trailer scripts.
✅ Draw a few Nay-A-Day drawings.
✅ Make a game (either progress on Compass Nays or a new game finished).
❌ Finish game dev portfolio and updated resume.
✅ Create a few game dev vlogs.
✅ Attend GDEX (or another local game convention).
✅ Publish a game on Steam.
I made some pretty good progress on my goals. I literally only wrote 2 Eventures this year which was a bit less than I was hoping, but I did technically fulfill that goal. And I made 2 Twines! I'm hoping to do more on both of those in the future.
I didn't end up writing the Eventure Trailer scripts like I was hoping to, so I am hoping to continue that for next year, because it's something I do want to do.
I did a few Nay-A-Day drawings, but this one actually ended up leading more into creating more portrait drawings of new characters and cleaning up old drawings, which overall worked really well towards my game.
While I didn't work on Compass Nays at all, I did make a finished game: Nay Saga! And I made the O2A2 game, so technically 2 games outside of my usual GGJ project.
I didn't end up having time to finish my game dev portfolio or finish updating my resume, but I made some progress on it. I'm hoping to continue to poke away at that one. I did make at least 1 game dev vlog though. I was hoping to make more, but that's an on-going project I'll continue to work on until I've finished all of them! I did make a how to play video for Nay Saga though, which goes into talking about my games more.
And then I did attend GDEX, which was fun! It was more to play games than promote myself as a game developer, but it was a great first step to doing that. I'll probably end up going again next year too.
And finally, while I didn't publish a game on Steam in the degree that I was thinking... I technically did publish a game on Steam. I published Nay Saga to the Steam Workshop as a free DLC for Tabletop Simulator, so I technically have a game on Steam now! I do still want to publish one of my finished games on there and go through the whole process of submitting a game, but this was my first steps towards this goal.
Final Thoughts
So overall I did a lot of travel. I traveled to locations where I stayed long enough to spend the night at least 7/12 months this year. A few of those months had 2-3 different trips of doing that as well. So it equaled out to almost every month. That caused a lot of disruptions to my personal projects and I had a lot of instances where I had to come back to my projects after not working on them for long periods of time, which made it harder and did burn me out more.
I also overscoped a lot. Because I was focused and knew what I wanted to do, it encouraged me to push myself further on a lot of my projects. But this year I just didn't have the time to do that, so it just burnt me out. I've been brainstorming ideas on how to fix this going forward, but I'll talk more about that in my next post.
So anyway, this was my year! I'm really happy with how Nay Saga turned out and it was a huge part of this year. I'm looking forward to what's to come next, but that'll be in my upcoming post. Thanks for reading this long post and sticking with me through this journey!
This post expands upon what I went over in my 2023 Recap blog post here. You can read that first to learn about the context around some of these goals.
Before I get into goals, here's my updated art improvement image (open the image in new tab to zoom in and view it fully):
So as I mentioned in my previous post, my goals will be less drawing-focused than they may have used to be. A lot of my goals still involve drawing, but I won't have any goals like drawing daily or posting drawings monthly.
My goals this year will focus a lot more on projects overall. I want to keep working on The Nays as usual, so I want to again try to make at least 2 Twines this year. If I get farther, great, if not, at least 2!
I also really want to write more Eventures again. Now that I'm on track and have proofread all of the existing ones, I'm hoping I can dive in and start to rewrite more and finish more of those beginning ones. At minimum, I want to write Complex.net and potentially the Frank Lady Eventure. Obviously I'll want to do more.
During our bi-weekly Nay Days, we usually don't actually work on The Nays, but instead play games or talk. I'd like to organize those a little better and maybe get back into talking about The Nays and maybe writing or at least planning Eventures during those if we can. If we can do more full day chats where we write, that'd be great, but life will likely get busy again like last year so I'm not promising anything.
And then now that I've read all of the Eventures, I'd like to really dive in and connect more moments and check on overall consistency as much as I can. I would also like to go back and write the scripts for every Eventure Trailer. This will help me recap myself on where the story was at so I can rewrite parts more quickly without having to reread everything every time that I want to write. I might even record some of the voice overs for them after I've written them.
While I know I said I wasn't making drawing-based goals, I do want to revisit my Nay-A-Day project where I draw full body drawings of characters that I don't have a detailed drawing of yet. I'm not committing to how often I'll do them or anything (certainly not every day), but I do want to do at least a few more of these throughout the year. So my goal can just be to try and do a few of these when I feel like drawing something! And then I do also want to just sketch for fun without it being a project. So I'll try to draw when I'm feeling motivated to!
And then I really want to work on games more, so the rest of my goals will be game dev-related. First, I want to just work on a game this year. That could be a whole game on its own, which I've been brainstorming ideas for, or it can just be to revisit Compass Nays and make progress on that. I'll have more information about this after I make a decision.
Going along with games, I've been working on a game dev portfolio and resume, so I'd like to finish those. I've been making game dev vlogs that I'm putting on there, so I'll continue to make these when I'm motivated as well. This goes into my goal of wanting to talk about my projects more. I'm not really going to make it a goal of a certain number I want to finish or anything, but I'll want to make a few throughout the year.
And going along with talking about my projects, I'd like to attend more game dev meet-ups and talk to people about games. There's a local game conference called GDEX that I'm thinking I might try to attend this year. I basically just want to talk about games. Usually I'd be pressured into attending these for job hunting, but because I'm in a position with a stable job that I enjoy, I'd like to get back into this more with a different perspective and how I wished networking was. I'd like to genuinely make friends and connect with people who make games for fun, rather than the stress of asking for a job. This might force me to talk about my projects more with people too. So my hope is that I'll be able to attend one at least this year!
I also have been wanting to publish a game on Steam. So my thought is that I can go through the process and learn how it works by taking one of my Global Game Jam projects and put it on there for free. I basically just want to have a game on Steam and know how it all works. That way, if I ever sell a game in the future, I'll have this part under my belt.
So overall, here are the goals I'm working towards:
Write at least 2 Eventures.
Create at least 2 Twines.
Write (all of?) the Eventure Trailer scripts.
Draw a few Nay-A-Day drawings.
Make a game (either progress on Compass Nays or a new game finished).
Finish game dev portfolio and updated resume.
Create a few game dev vlogs.
Attend GDEX (or another local game convention).
Publish a game on Steam.
I know this looks like more than last year and I said I'd try to do less, but most of these are fairly straight-forward and not super intensive. This will just help guide me to creating projects and continuing to work towards my life goals now that I'm in my 30s.
So anyway, I'm looking forward to 2024! I feel a lot more focused and I know what I want to do, so I'm excited to make progress on my projects with this plan.
It's that time of year: the year is ending so I'll recap how my year went and what I accomplished. I plan to make a post tomorrow that goes over more of my goals for 2024, while this one focuses on reflecting how it went and if I accomplished the goals I set up at the start of the year.
First, this might be an indicator on how my drawing goals went, but here's my 2023 art summary:
I'll be honest, I didn't draw a whole lot this year. I'll get into that more during this post, but basically I've been doing a lot of thinking and after a lot of thought, I've decided to change my focus, professionally and in my personal life. I spent the last decade or so focusing on character design, digital illustration, and animation. And while I do love those things and am very passionate about them, I discovered that there was something I was more passionate about all along, and it's something that started my entire art journey in the first place. Game design.
I was always in this weird limbo of not wanting to let drawing and 2D art go, but wanting to work on games. This year (and the past few) has been a rollercoaster of learning more about game development and making games. And finally I listened to my inner voice and realized it's what I've actually wanted this entire time.
I'm working on some projects relating to this focus so I'll talk more about it at that time, but I figured this would be a good time to first surface it. I've put a lot of thought into it and it's been in my head for pretty much this whole year, I just never really knew how to bring it up until I fully made up my mind.
This doesn't mean I'm going to stop drawing or working on my personal projects by any means though. It just means that instead of spending hours practicing figure drawing or creating daily goals of drawing, I'll be analyzing games, making games, and everything else that goes into it.
But anyway, before I get too deep into this topic, I do want to go through how this year went and what I did accomplish.
Here were my plans from the start of 2023. I'm going to refer back to these as I go through how the year went. One of my goals for last year was to create 2 Twines, and I accomplished that! Something that really helped with this was that I got a head start and got a lot of this done early in the year.
I started out the year by finishing the lineart for the Stinky Girl Eventure, so I was about halfway done by January.
I also was very inspired to draw early on. I was doing a Colors Live drawing almost every day. I had a goal to draw every day, so this was about the closest I got to it. I also did some drawing events during the first bi-weekly Nay Days that I had with my brother.
So drawing was happening, but amongst that, my health was still in a pretty bad spot. I decided to make a big decision to get surgery on my spine in January. It turned out really well and I'm so happy I did it. While it took a couple of months to recover, I've since then pretty much completely recovered and am no longer in pain every day anymore. Because I decided to prioritize my health, that did mean that I was bedridden during the Global Game Jam. We still made a game and I actually focused mostly on the programming side, with just sketches and concepts that I made for the art. I actually really enjoyed it and this may have been what got me thinking more about my game design focus.
Then I started on my next big game project and the biggest one of 2023. I started to learn GB Studio and create a Game Design Document for my project The Nays Origins. I didn't work on it much because I wanted to still focus on The Nays a bit more before diving deep in, so I was mostly just thinking of ideas, brainstorming, and learning GB Studio when I wasn't working on The Nays.
I started reading Eventures again because I was recovering from surgery and bedridden, so I couldn't really draw. I even ended up rewriting an Eventure because I was inspired at this time. When I was at my computer, I was mostly sketching story moments.
Once I was able to sit up more, in March, I continued to work on my Twine storyboards. So I sketched the rough layouts for The Nays Eventure and finished the base colors for the Stinky Girl Eventure.
I did more rewriting, making music playlists, and overall just getting through a lot of proofreading for The Nays. I also started to get some of the base abilities set up in my GB Studio project and did a lot of sketches on paper in my sketchbook for UI and levels.
By the end of April, I was done with the Stinky Girl Eventure drawings and the Twine itself. So at this point I did a lot more reading and writing for The Nays. I also went on a weeklong trip where I got COVID again, but I had a lot of time on the flights to think and brainstorm, so that's when I came up with most of the story for The Nays Origins.
From there, I really started to dive into The Nays Origins. In May, I mostly stopped drawing and focused all of my energy into game development. This was honestly a really rough month for me though. A lot of stressful things happened at work that led to overtime and just a lot of negative interactions. So most nights at the beginning, I was reading Eventures and didn't have a lot of motivation to do much outside of that. It was keeping me inspired despite all that was going on.
I did make a lot of progress on my game though. I wrote the whole script, finished planning the puzzles, and made the entire game prototype using default and rough art. I connected the whole game from start to finish and even made some music and tested the first iteration of my game on my GBA.
June and July ended up being my most productive months for my game. I made all of the art and finalized the game other than some final aspects. During this time, I even went to Seattle for a week and was playing a lot of new games that came out, so I'm surprised I was able to get all of that done.
In August, I wrapped up my game and did some of the finishing touches. This included the logo and title screen, importing dialogue, and making final art for the menus. I also added collisions, which meant a lot of playtesting. And during this time, I also went on a trip to Canada.
And because I was gone for a week at the end of August, that forced me to take a break from my Game Boy game and I switched gears when I came back. I finished the lineart, color, and Twine for The Nays Eventure, and finished up both of my Twines for the year.
I also started to make game dev vlogs for the game projects I've finished. This is when I really started to pivot and realize my focus for game design. I started a portfolio that's still in the works, but was rebranding my online presence. I also played around with GitHub pages in my free time and was learning how to use Unreal Engine 5 at work.
In October, I was in the mood for earlier Eventures after just finishing those earlier Twines, so I wrote an Eventure and read a few. This was when I was inspired to work on The Nays more again. I also decided to do Inktober where I was drawing The Nays more and coming up with their attacks.
And then every year for the past few years I've participated in the CCAD mentorship program; this year I was paired with a game dev student and have really enjoyed it! So I started this around that time as well.
Then I got back into my GB Studio project after a couple of months hiatus. I mostly worked on the physical aspects like the box art and instruction manual. I did a lot of print tests and playtesting, but finished it all by November.
And once the game was complete, I really dove back into The Nays. I was reading a lot of Eventures and coming up with plans for later parts. The Nays Origins really helped me see how I could end the story and I started to find areas I could connect plot points earlier on with it all as well. I did some spontaneous writing and started to sketch again.
So December started off pretty strong, but then it unfortunately turned out to be a really weird month with some unexpected change of plans pretty early on. Unfortunately I got sick with COVID again, which knocked me out for at least a week. I ended up having to cancel some plans to visit family which was unfortunate, but it was at least while my symptoms were mostly going away (other than a persistent cough) so I was able to at least work on some projects during the isolation. I was mostly reading Eventures and wrapping up the year, but it wasn't terrible to get my mind off of things. I also rewrote the PS Chat Eventure.
So overall, I accomplished a lot and made some big decisions this year. Based on last year's goals, here's where I ended up:
❌ Draw every day/post monthly digital sketchbooks
✅ Bi-weekly Nay Days
✅ 2 Eventure Twines
✅ Proofread all of The Nays
❌ Record Eventure A Week video
✅ Improve my health
✅ Create a Game Boy game
I'd say I did pretty good with my goals! I really enjoyed focusing a lot on The Nays and the reading/proofreading aspect of it. Because now all of the Eventures are in a good spot and I'm happy with most of them (or otherwise have noted that I'll rewrite some). This will really set me up to continue to create at least 2 Eventure Twines a year, which is the goal. I calculated it out, and I'm hoping to do more or else I'll be creating those until I'm at least 87-years-old (because that's how long the story is).
The bi-weekly voice chats with my brother were really helpful too. It was fun to connect and talk more, and we also got to do some activities. Though I will say that I wish we had more full days, but our schedules just don't really line up great which is unfortunate and doesn't give us much time to actually have a full day to write or work on a project together.
As I mentioned a lot throughout this, I ended up falling off from drawing a lot but that's because I started to focus on game dev more. The summer was pretty much working on my game non-stop for 3-4 months, so I didn't really have much time to draw outside of the assets for that anyways.
The beginning and end of this year were my times where I was most in the mood for The Nays and writing. While I was working on The Nays Origins, I felt a little out of touch with the story and character aspects because it's about a different group of characters that aren't the main characters in the full story, but I learned a lot about the story and came up with a lot of ideas while working on it, so it really informed me a lot.
I secretly had the idea of making a Game Boy game and I'm really glad I accomplished that goal. It was a tough challenge, but it really reawakened something in me to remember my love for game dev. For example, drawing those level thumbnails in my sketchbook was very nostalgic of when I used to draw levels for my fan spin-off Pokemon games in my notebook as a kid. It's really like I've come full circle with this.
While I've been making a game a year for Game Jams, this was really fun to finally work on something from start to finish for a longer period of time. I realize I've been slowly making an additional game over the years, but this was the most planning and full development that I've had. In 2019 I made a quick JavaScript game, in 2021 it was a Unity game, and last year was a month-long Game Jam in RPG Maker.
So this is something I really want to continue doing. I'll talk more about this in my next post, but I really like the idea of making two games a year: a game with a group for the Global Game Jam, and a solo one on my own throughout the year.
I was also fairly ahead on my projects, which was really helpful. I was done with most of my projects by September, and everything after that was fairly supplemental. Usually I'm scrambling at the end of the year to finish everything on top of all of the traveling for the holidays and everything, so it was nice this year to be done early and have a relaxed finish (other than getting sick). It helped me pick up my motivation earlier than usual. Usually it doesn't happen until after Christmas, but this year it started in October or November.
While I only wrote 6 or so Eventures this year (which is about 10 less than last year), I did do a lot of proofreading and small rewrites in documents along the way. So I'm happy with the progress I made there because it sets me up for more success in the years to come.
I also wanted to talk more about my art with the Eventure a Week series. I recorded ~70 of the 143 that I would've needed, so about half, so I did make some progress. I just didn't finish it. Maybe I'll finish it next year, but it also was just kind of a side project that I'm not sure if I want to continue. I feel like I replaced this in a way with my game dev vlogs, which are a lot more fun to create and kind of fulfill the goal for what I was trying to get at with that one. I did present my Twines at the CUPdates though, so I'm at least talking more about my story. I still need to work on that a bit more though, but won't make it a huge focus.
This year I created 2 games and 2 Twines. Plus all of the progress on The Nays in general. So a really productive year!
I'll talk more about how I'm planning to incorporate all of this into goals in the next post. Thanks for reading this! I know I always have a lot on my mind towards the end of the year, so these are getting lengthier each year. But I really like reflecting on everything and finding ways to improve, as well as thinking about areas that worked really well more me. See you in the next post!
