(Crossposted from my blog and my newsletter)
After digging through some year-old posts, it turns out that my goals for 2022 were to release some big Chessplosion updates, improve my art and music skills, start making my second game, and figure out what was going on with all of my weird gender feelings.
I hit most of these goals! Chessplosion now has a dungeon mode (see trailer below) and online team battles, I'm much better at pixel art than I was a year ago, I've done most of the work on my next game (although I haven't announced it yet), and I came out as a trans woman. That last one has taken a lot of work, but I am continually shocked at how many new friends I have met and how nice everyone has been to me during the whole process. The only 2022 goal that I haven't achieved yet is to improve at music, which I'm going to work on in January.
As for 2023, most of my goals are boring personal things: do more voice training, try my hardest to navigate this country's trans healthcare system, lose a bit of weight, get out there and meet more local people (assuming it's safe to do so), and enjoy being myself. It would be fun to start competing in fighting game tournaments again too, but I'm not going to beat myself up over it if I can't find a game that clicks with me.
But I do have some game development goals for the year:
Announce and release my second game (hopefully on a console and also PC). I've done a lot of work on my second game and I'm really happy with it so far! When I started making it last year, my plan was to finish it within a couple of months because it's a bit of a weird game concept and I don't have any idea whether or not there's much of a commercial audience for it. But I ended up liking it so much that I'm making it bigger. I did this because of my next goal:
Make the most interesting games that I can, instead of worrying about what's popular. I could write a whole post about this, but the short version is that there's a lot of very useful indie game marketing advice out there that's paired with advice on what genres of games you should even make in the first place. It's common to see things like "city building games are popular, puzzle games are not, and 2D action games are only worth making if they're based around building up an overpowered character, grinding for RPG stats, or exploring an interconnected world".
I haven't been following any of that genre advice myself, but up until now I've forced myself to make excuses for it on a game-by-game basis: Chessplosion didn't follow popular indie game trends because it was my first game, and my second game isn't following those trends either because I won't spend long making it. But recently I've seen so many incredibly exciting and original games from friends and other developers, and I would rather keep trying to make the most strange and exciting games that I can instead of forcing myself to stick to whichever genres are popular on Steam. If I run out of money I can always just do some contract work then get right back to making the best games that I can, instead of compromising my games for commercial reasons.
Make and release a tiny game for fun. I've been wanting to do this for a while! I was going to do this with the game that I'm working on now but I got carried away and made it bigger. I'm glad I did that, but let's see if I can keep things small next time.
Keep improving at art and music. I'm happy with the progress I've made so far but I don't want to stop yet! Music is currently a big bottleneck in my game development process because I'm so slow at composing, and my drawing skills aren't at the level where I can draw my own promotional art yet. So I'll keep working on it!
Track my vacation days. 2022 was my first full year of working on my own games full-time, and I accidentally only took one day off work in the first eleven months of the year. I noticed this in early December and ended up taking most of the month off as a result, and thankfully I'm almost back to normal now. I love making games, but towards the end of the year I found myself getting exhausted from overworking. Worse still, if I just spend all of my time making games and I never do anything else, it's easy to accidentally become a boring person. I don't want either of those things to happen to me again, so from now on I'll make sure I take a reasonable amount of time off work throughout the year!
A year is a long time, and I'm sure that these goals will have completely changed by the end of 2023. But for now, this is what I'm working towards.
