Time to talk about 2013 and reflect. Overall I would see this year as a failure to get some of these passion programming projects going due to unexpected things. But overall a successful year going into an even better year with more clear, achievable goals.
Things that went wrong this year was basically setting goals that were un-realistic with the time I had to do them. I wanted to create this multi-platform OpenGL 2D engine for all my games. And while I have the design down, I basically had barely little time to do any programming on it, and very little programming was finished on the project. Only the starts to the Asset manager really got done. While this is disappointing I am not just throwing it away for when I can actually put more time into it. But many positives came out of this year.
One thing that happened, one huge thing that happened was shortly after I started programming the previous mentioned project I started getting involved in music again heavily. It eventually led to getting a home recording studio started up, learning some recording engineering skills, and a begining to work on origonal music which is something I used to do when I was younger and was a huge passion of mine. While we had a lot of fun and wrote some awesome punk songs back then, now we’re older and can write more advanced music and have a much better understanding of it. Things are going good with this project, and eventually I will be opening up another site that focus’s primarily on our music project. (Our referencing me and my cousin).
However, in a way this year was a success in programming as well, just not a success in my side projects. I have learned a lot of new skills and refined my programming skills in several platforms and languages. My software engineering process is more fine tuned now, and much more efficient. I have learned more web technologies and programming skills as well as built upon my existing native skills heavily.
Since I haven’t been doing a lot of game programming this past year one of my goals for 2014 is to actually learn some new game programming skills through various small projects on the side while I am not doing music. I have found that there is definitely time for this. While doing so I want to re-package, and re-write a lot of Dodge and Destroy again, this time from scratch and not just an update to the code base that I did before. I want to actually build some proper graphics for the game, as well as add in multiple resolutions, or a dynamic window as well as getting rid of things I used in that project like GLUT. I want to add in png graphics instead of using raw tga files. I also want to add in a simple particle system to the game to make it look more appealing, similar to the one I made in an Android game awhile ago. My other goals is to work on some 3D programming again, and I got a really nice OpenGL reference book to help me out with it.
The other project I want to get started on early 2014 is an Android app, not a game just an app. I just wanna write something that could be useful and throw it out there to see what happens, if people pick it up. If it works out it could be another source of income while small, that could support other things like the music project.
The final goal is to get the music project done, and to our music out there. We are incredibly excited about the potential of our music and feel that it is headed in a very good direction.
It feels insanely good to actually have realistic goals this year and I am going to work my best to follow through with them. The inspiration coming from the amount of work and energy we have put in to our music project and the feedback we have been getting is driving me to achieve my goals rather then get stuck in the terror barrier.