This past year, I had completed quite a lot of what I wanted, but not as much as I wanted. I managed to make significant progress on my open source game dev project. I also was able to play some games, read some books, and even started a new job.
This coming year, I want to set some goals for myself. I have a lot I want to do, but I also want to temper expectations. I can easily overwhelm myself. I get anxious about many things and it can become crippling. So I want to set goals that I think I can do.
First up on my list of goals for 2024, I will finish my open source project to make all the games and projects from Beginning Game Programming. I have completed about half the projects in the book and the rest are almost all complete games. So it will be some work, but I should be able to complete them all this year.
In addition to this, I have a goal of moving away from GitHub for my open source project hosting. Github is in the process of what Cory Doctorow has termed “enshittification”. Or in short, making a service worse for their users over time. So I will be working on moving my various repos to a more friendly service called Codeberg. So keep an eye out for those changes.
My next goal is to complete one commercial game this year. I have been trying to get a game out there for sale for a while. I have started work on a number of projects and have one that I am really passionate about that I want to get done. This is being made under Divine Knight Gaming label. The game is called Deadly Labyrinth. It is a Gauntlet inspired game with my own twists on it. The game will have a story mode for each of the 4 characters and an endless mode.
After that, I just want to read more. I have a number of books on my list to read and I want to read a lot more than I have been. I love to read and feel that doing more of it will help me improve my state of mind for the coming year. Some books on my list are Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman, Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, The BFG by Roald Dahl, and many more. It is quite a list.
So that is where I am for this coming year. I am really looking forward to it.