So it's a new year, and with that comes the desire to reflect on the time gone by and what's to come in the year ahead. 2017 was such an important year in general and for me personally, both in good ways and in bad, that I wanted to take some time to talk about it.
First off, it has now been just over a year since I started this blog! On Christmas Day 2016 I wrote my first post, though I had been thinking about starting to get into game dev for a couple of months before that. I started very small, with the goal of learning a little of the MonoGame framework by way of making a simple Pong clone. I honestly wasn't sure how far I would get; I had very little self-confidence in myself going into it given my past history with writing code outside of work projects. I was afraid that life would get in the way again and I would lose focus, sweeping this venture under the rug to join all the other hobby projects I had started and stopped over the years, left to be forgotten. To my surprise though, I enjoyed it. It was a challenge from the start, to be sure, but I stuck with it, and in September of last year I declared Pongquetball to be finished. It is definitely not perfect, and I could continue adding new features and changing things if I wanted to, but I achieved my goal. I made a game! It's a free download on itch.io, so feel free to check it out if you want.
Doing that taught me a few things. It helped me begin to learn how to manage my time better and stay focused on the current task. I have a very bad habit of getting distracted while working (including while writing this lol...it's terrible), so this is a big thing for me. It also helped me to start getting in the habit of writing down goals, plans, and notes as I coded. This helped me to continue moving forward and gave me the feeling that there was an end goal in mind, which also helped a lot in keeping me focused and motivated.
Now that I've finished working on Pongquetball I've moved on to playing around with the Unity game engine. It's super slow going (you know, that whole issue with time management, plus dealing with work and other obligations), but I am enjoying it. Currently I'm working on throwing together a quick and dirty breakout game, just to help me learn my way around the engine. But I do have a couple of original game ideas that I want to start working on eventually, and I think Unity will be a great engine to use.
Aside from game dev, 2017 was a big year for me in terms of personal growth. I'm not going to get into all the details because it's a long story, but I grew up in a very fundamentalist Christian environment, and was very religious, especially throughout high school and the first few years of college, until I realized I was an atheist and no longer believed in 2010. In the 7 years since I have basically reinvented myself piece by piece. My views on pretty much everything have changed and continue to change. And my appearance has evolved has well. You see, one of the big things you often learn as a male in fundamentalist religion is the importance of "being a man"...strong, muscular, confident, able to be the head of the household. I have never felt that way about myself. And I've also never been the kind of person who enjoyed just hanging out with a bunch of guys, talking about sports or whatever. The result was that I always thought something was wrong with me and I never really learned how to be myself. I was always just aspiring to be what everyone told me I should be. Since leaving religion behind I've finally been able to start to work through that. It hasn't been easy. However, last year was kind of a breakthrough year for me. I'm coming to terms with the fact that I am not a very manly person, and that's ok. I don't want to be. For years I had a mustache and small goatee. Eventually I grew tired of the mustache and shaved it off. Late last year I realized the goatee didn't feel right either; I just really don't want facial hair anymore. So it's gone, much to my relief.
I've also been letting my hair grow out for...wow, I think it's been about the whole 7 years! I love it. I have no desire for short hair again; this feels like me. So a few months ago I began to think about dyeing it. Would I like it if I did, or would I come to resent doing it? And what color? I had no idea. But I've never done any sort of body modification like that before, and eventually I figured why not? I'm tired of being boring, so I'll just go for it. So now my hair is a nice deep red and I absolutely love it. I'll probably stick with the red for a while, but I plan on going to a brighter and more wild color eventually.
The result of all of this is that I'm beginning to like myself a lot more. I have never felt this comfortable in my own skin before and I want to continue exploring this. For the first few years after I left religion I was solely focused on what I had left behind. Now I'm ready to focus on the future...who I really am as a person, and become a better educated and more well-rounded person. After all, I need to make up for all those years when I was sheltered and didn't realize it. ;)
So, 2017 is over...what about 2018? What do I want to accomplish in the coming year? Well, I'm going to continue learning Unity for one thing. I want to finish this breakout game and then I'm thinking I'll move on to starting to flesh out some original ideas I have! I have two game ideas in mind, one that I've been thinking about for a while. So maybe I'll start toying around with that and see what I can learn how to do, one small bit at a time.
I'm also trying to take what I learned last year about keeping notes, setting goals, and planning, and apply that to more of my life. I'm the kind of person that has to write everything down as soon as I think of it, or I'll forget. And I've seen how much that can help me. So I want to be better about setting daily goals and to-do lists for myself, to help me better manage my time. Hopefully that way I can begin to accomplish small tasks every day or so, rather than going for weeks feeling like I haven't accomplished anything, because let me tell you, that shit sucks lol.
One other small thing...2017 was a terrible year for the United States. There's no denying that. Our country has taken a turn in a direction that honestly scares me (not saying I wasn't bothered by the state of things before, but now it's a whole new level of fucked up). I am not exaggerating when I say that I have been internally screaming every single day pretty much since Donald Trump announced he was running for president, and that screaming has increased every day as well. The result is that I have become a very bitter person. It is easier for me to hate. It is easier for me to lose my temper, something which scares me because my father has a terrible temper, and I never want to emulate that. Frankly, I'm angry. Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing. But I think I need to learn how to better manage this constant anger and annoyance at large parts of the population around me. It's not going to go away, I recognize that. And I don't want it to go away, because that would mean I don't care anymore. But the bitterness is eating me up in a way, and that's not good. So hopefully I can learn how to deal with this.
Well, I guess that's about it! Turns out I had a lot of thoughts I needed to get out. Thanks for reading friends. I know this was a lot more personal than anything I've written before and not strictly focused on game dev, but it's important to take stock of things every once in a while, right? Here's to a new year and working to improve ourselves and the world around us in any way we can. :)
