Since I finished making my last game in November, I have been doing zero game creation, but that’s because I’ve been really busy learning all about software development on the TechUP course. We’re now into the final stages and are starting work on a group project, which is fairly challenging as it’s a bit ‘in at the deep end’, but hopefully we’ll have a good output at the end of it. I’ve got lots of modules to catch up with at the same time, so it’s going to be a bit manic from now until mid-February!
Post-TechUP I have lots and lots of plans though. In addition to getting back to my regularly scheduled game creation, I will be continuing my Python learning in a more hobbyist fashion, as Geth got me lots of Python game coding books for Christmas and I got some great Python manuals from Mum and Dad as well (mostly Dad… I think Mum may have done the wrapping). I also want to learn a bit of HTML, CSS and JavaScript as I have plans to make some fairly complex websites over the summer – one will be a client-facing website for my business (one of the two key ambitions I had for utilising what I’ve learnt on the course*), while the other will be a fun interactive map for my phone box photo collection.
Lots to look forward to, but I need to knuckle down and finish the course first. It can feel a bit overwhelming sometimes but I have learnt a lot.
*The other ambition is to change careers into something more tech-focused. Eventually!
Geth and I did do a New Year’s Day parkrun this morning but I’ll save my regularly scheduled parkrunday post for tomorrow. Lots of 2022 stuff to discuss today!
This year’s non-binding New Year Resolutions:
Sort out the house. It didn’t happen last year and it may not happen this year, but I would at least like to get some more stuff up on the walls (including that spice rack I bought a year ago) and work out a more manageable cleaning schedule.
Don’t book any midweek trips away and assume I can just ‘squeeze any work in’. I’m far too busy to be away during the week. Trips will be weekend-only with very rare exceptions.
Get one or two of my years-in-the-making longer game projects published by focusing on those rather than short things for jams and competitions.
Use the skills from my TechUP course to build at least two fairly complex websites.
Create some games using Python!
Take another big chunk off my marathon PB at the Edinburgh Marathon in May.
Get back to the fitness level I was when everything screeched to a grinding halt in March 2020.
Get my parkrun ‘different events’ total up to at least 30, continue to volunteer once a month, get my Wilson index to 15 (geeky – don’t worry if you don’t know what that is) and take part in parkrun every possible parkrunday!
Listen to more music and keep a closer eye on what’s going on with synthwave, industrial and heritage artists.
Actually leave the UK for the first time in four years (Ireland is the plan… not going far but it’ll be something!).
Catch up with what’s been happening with Doctor Who. It’s my favourite TV series but I’ve drifted away from the fandom over the last few years as I’ve been busy with other things and haven’t been hugely fond of the Whittaker/Chibnall era. I’m about two and a half series behind!
Finish all the books I’m reading. I’ve got into an awful habit over the last year where I start a book, read it for a week or so (last thing at night in bed is my reading time), neglect reading for the following week or so (because I’m anxious about not getting enough sleep if I read… even though I know I sleep better if I do), then abandon it and start a different book. This year, I’m going to concentrate on one at a time and read them right to the end. 20 books in 2022 seems like a good target!
Make a LOT more time for videogaming by keeping my evenings and weekends free. My game backlog is probably 1,000+ now and it’s time to start whittling that down. It’s my favourite way to relax and I most definitely have not been doing enough relaxing in 2021, so this has to be a real priority over the next year.
It’ll be interesting, as ever, to come back to this post in a year’s time! I didn’t make any resolutions last year except the house-sorting one, which was kind of a fail… let’s hope there’ll be more hits than misses in 2022.
Geth’s current videogame (which he has been playing nonstop since Christmas Day) is Shin Megami Tensei V, which I got him for Christmas. I would love to spend as much time videogaming as Geth does, and in order to do so I am planning to reorganise a few things this year.
I always intend to post lots of blogs at the end of the year with lots of big lists of all the things I did and the media I consumed and my highlights… but December is always so insanely busy I never get round to it. Maybe in 2022 I will write them as I go along haha! It’ll just have to be one megapost this year…
This year’s big resolution was to sort the house out. I did not do that and now it is one of 2022’s big resolutions. Other things have just taken more priority.
Business exploded in a good way this year, which means that I’m now working a lot more hours. It’s taking a while to adjust my life to this, and I’m beginning to realise that I can no longer just plan a trip away midweek on the assumption that I won’t have much work to squeeze in. 2022 will be a lot stricter in this regard.
I continued writing and coding text adventures and being involved in the wider interactive fiction community, and managed to release four games for various competitions. My highlights were winning the Scott’s Choice Award from legendary text adventure game creator Scott Adams for Barry Basic and the Quick Escape, and winning PunyJam #2 with Morris, my first ever PunyInform release. I also enjoyed making a short game for ParserComp based on photos of the beautiful area around Causey Arch after visiting it with Mum and Dad, and my first ever attempt at speed IF for EctoComp!
Since October I’ve also been very busy with studying for the TechUP Software Development course. I have learnt a lot of Python and other very interesting things that I will be taking forward as my career gradually transitions more towards tech. (The Python knowledge will also enable me to do some very fun stuff with my game development!)
Running has continued on a more positive trajectory this year, with races and parkruns returning. I am nowhere near as fit as I was in March 2020 when everything shut down, but I have still managed two important PBs in 2021 – I took nearly five minutes off my 10k PB at the Sunderland 10k, and more than 45 minutes off my marathon PB at the London Marathon. I have also completed the second year of my daily run streak today and am hugely proud of that, as it’s been very difficult at times. Finally, parkrun-wise I have visited two new-to-me parkruns (Girvan Prom and Southwark) and earned my V25 t-shirt with my 25th volunteer stint!
As usual, I didn’t listen to much new music, but I absolutely loved the long-awaited new Duran Duran album Future Past, and I was over the moon at finally being able to see them live in Birmingham in September. Geth and I then saw Andy Taylor the very next night back home in Newcastle, and we had a great time seeing Soft Cell in Leeds in November. Lots more COVID-postponed gigs to come in 2022 (and some reviews of the ones I’ve recently attended!).
I watched pretty much zero new TV shows and films this year, though there were a few I added to my ‘buy the BluRay at some point’ list. I did record a lot of stuff on my digibox though! Geth has watched thousands of hours of YouTube channels about gaming and running, and I’ve enjoyed those by virtue of being in the same room. I did enjoy the Strictly series in the autumn, as ever.
I didn’t manage to find nearly as much time for videogaming this year as I would have liked, but there have still been a good few games to enjoy. In addition to playing all the other text adventure games in the jams and competitions I entered (see above – and also finishing off the Adventuron Christmas jam games from last year in January!), I finished Bravely Second in time for the much-anticipated Bravely Default II coming out, played Bravely Default II on and off from February but have still not made much headway ten months later, played the interesting demo of Project Triangle Strategy (set for full release on Switch in 2022 as just Triangle Strategy), finished Final Fantasy I (finally! I will be moving onto FFII for 2022), got very freaked out by Return of the Obra Dinn, got most of the way through The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, played about ten minutes of Pikmin Bloom before deciding it wasn’t for me, enjoyed a couple of old ’90s platformers for Christmas that I’ve loved since childhood, started Braid again (will actually finish it this time!), continued enjoying the lovely meditative filler game Link-A-Pix Colour, and COMPLETED EVERY SINGLE DEMO ON THE NINTENDO 3DS ESHOP (a project I’ve been working on for years). Watch out for next year, when I will be putting some serious effort into finding a lot more time for games!
I have lots of plans and resolutions for 2022, but I’ll talk about those tomorrow…
Snowflake leggings and new silver nails – all ready for New Year.
I’ll do a separate earworm playlist post soon…. maybe (I’m considering starting to log that separately from the blog and doing a yearly chart instead). So far it’s three weeks’ worth of Christmas music and Disney/Pixar soundtracks. I must admit I am looking forward to listening to something else in January in order to clear it all from my brain.
The strange thing I’ve found about this Christmas holiday is that, after a year of nonstop rushing and deadlines, having time to myself is making me slightly anxious because I’m being a perfectionist about enjoying it efficiently! I’m trying to relax a bit more and just go with the flow of what I want to do. Yesterday evening I went back to my Python coding practice, even though that’s technically ‘work’ as it’s part of my TechUp course, because that was what I felt like doing. I’m also planning to make a bit more time for myself in January and February, as I’ll be very busy with finishing the course and I’ll need some relaxing downtime to balance it out.
My Switch Lite, charging in its case (its battery was almost flat yesterday). I might play it later, or I might not… it depends how I feel!
It’s going to be another lovely day spent doing some gaming! I got back into Braid on Steam yesterday (a game I’ve been meaning to finish for a long time) and am also charging my Switch Lite, as it’s seemingly run out of battery since the last time I used it. I may also be doing some coding later, as Geth got me lots of interesting coding books for Christmas.
I’ve run out of Christmas food photos for the time being, so here’s a picture of today’s Christmas leggings instead.
I’m still feeling rough after my booster yesterday morning. I had hoped to be done with the after-effects by now. However, it does make me feel really lucky that I was able to book a slot early so that this won’t interfere with Christmas. Hopefully I’ll feel a lot better tomorrow!
This is the book I got as a prize for winning the most recent jam I entered. It’s signed with a personal message from the author and only took six days to arrive from the US, which is impressive at this time of year!
…when I will finally get all the non-work/studying stuff that I’ve been meaning to do for the last few weekends (and not had time) done! Including the last of my Christmas prep, which I’ve been spending three months doing gradually so that I don’t have to rush around doing it in December. December is extra especially busy this year, because this year has been extra especially busy in general.
Storm Arwen is due to hit tonight, bringing high winds and snow, so Geth and I are not planning to leave the house this weekend. The treadmill is available for running (we won’t be parkrunning tomorrow even if by some miracle our local ones are going ahead) and our supermarket delivery has just arrived, so we’re looking forward to a couple of days of hibernation.
If I’ve got time, I may even do some game planning, seeing as I feel a bit bereft after finishing my two recent short ones! I put up the post-comp release for The River of Blood today (the EctoComp results were announced this morning – my game came 9th out of 23 overall and 7th out of 15 in the Petite Mort category so I’m pretty happy with that), and it looks like a good number of people are playing Morris as well, so I’ll be excited to see how that does in the next couple of weeks.
Another framed image that was up in our Leeds hotel room a couple of weeks ago. I’ve not been anywhere or photographed anything interesting in the interim!
This week’s earworm playlists:
Saturday
Soft Cell – ‘Bedsitter’ Taylor Swift – ‘We Are Never Getting Back Together’
That is probably a slightly misleading headline. It’s never really time to stop tweaking in my world! If I didn’t have deadlines imposed by jam deadlines and the like, I would probably just keep making tweaks forever and never release anything as a result. This is also true for non-code-y writing, which is why I’ve always found it so difficult to bite the bullet and send out my novel pitches to agents. It always feels like things could be a tiny bit better with just one more pass.
However, even when no deadline is involved, I can still sort of tell when it’s time to stop, even if I’m slightly in denial about it. When I do yet another playtest and there’s just one or two tiny things, and I’m dithering on whether I should even change them, and I go back and forth on those tiny things for a few runthroughs without spotting anything else I want to change… at that point, I really do need to stop faffing and get the project out into the world.
This post is a result of prepping my post-comp update for The River of Blood this week. The EctoComp judging period comes to an end on Friday, and after that I’ll be free to update my game (you’re not allowed to do so for Petite Mort games while the competition is still on). Originally I was just going to fix the one bug somebody had pointed out, but then I started messing about with something else due to somebody else’s feedback, and then while testing that I found another bug, and it took me ages to pin it down… I’m done now, though, and I’m sitting on my hands with that for the rest of the week (unless anybody flags up anything else, which is unlikely at this late stage of the competition). I’m looking forward to posting that update.
It’s time to get back to playing other people’s games, which was the main aim of this week!
Late post tonight because I always make full use of the time allotted for game jams (although today that was a case of resisting making any last-minute panicky changes because the game was pretty much as ready as it could be last night!) My new game is out and you can play it here. It’s my first PunyInform/Inform 6 release (all my previous games have been made in Adventuron), and it was a very different system to get to grips with – I’ve still got a lot to learn! As such, my new game is fairly short and simple, but I’m very pleased with it.
After the release of two short games in quick succession, I am looking forward to getting back to working on my long-form stuff! I have games that have been works-in-progress for literally years and I would love to get them finished and released next year. I do love making a short game occasionally though, as it’s quite satisfying to get something made in a very short time period.
For the next week or so, though, I’m just going to be playing games made by other people!
The Itch cover image for my game. One thing I’ve needed to get used to with Inform is the lack of graphics!
No parkrun today for various reasons, and I’ve got a lot of (fun) stuff to do this weekend so I’ll keep it short today.
I have very nearly got everything ready for my game release tomorrow! Just one more tester to run it past and after that I need to resist the urge to tweak it further (I’m really busy with Christmas prep tomorrow so I won’t have time anyway). Very excited for the release… and of course the other games I get to play during the jam voting period.
Further updates tomorrow!
I choose a different colour scheme for every game so that it looks distinctive on Itch. This was especially important for my latest game, as it doesn’t have graphics.
