Eevee grew to level 30!

Wow! What an incredible fucking year. I’ve never done so much in my life.

I made a video game! Twice! Thrice, even, if you count the one I just finished, which was done on the week surrounding my birthday. Mel and I made Under Construction on the PICO-8 in a few weeks, then I used its engine to make Isaac’s Descent on my own for Ludum Dare, and we just published the more substantial LÖVE-based NEON PHASE for my own week-long game jam. I’ve also got a couple other things in progress, and Mel is at this very second working on NEON PHASE 2.

And we made these from scratch. I wrote a little collision engine! It even mostly works! That’s amazing and I’m so happy about it. It’s also great that Mel and I have something we can actually work on together; before, the most collaborating we really did was on web design.

My interest in Doom waxes and wanes, but I did find time to finally make a real map and later make some speedmaps (which I realize I never fully published, oops!). I even put some effort into embedding Lua in ZDoom, which is an interesting side project but probably not something I’m going to actively champion.

I wrote a few Twitter bots! @perlin_noise puts my post on Perlin noise to use by tweeting images, GIFs, and emoji grids generated from various kinds of Perlin noise. @unicodeveryword tweets every word in the English language that’s also in my wordlist, slightly scrambled by Unicode shenanigans. @calloutbot is mostly an injoke.

I wrote 45 posts comprising 195k words, which is about four novels, and that’s not counting the couple of articles I was paid to write a few months ago. I have Patreon to thank for getting me to write more often, though I recently dropped the writing obligation so I can spend more time on games and a book and other stuff.

Oh, yes, I actually started writing a book, in the sense that I have (quite a bit) more than a few pages written and a concept that I like and am sticking to.

I dipped a toe into music, however briefly, and managed to produce a simple song that’s not too bad. Promising!

I feel like I’ve been slacking a lot on art lately, but looking back, this year saw my first animation (and several more after that), a mountain of ink-on-paper work for Inktober, and of course a lot of exploration of pixel art for games. I haven’t done as much digital illustrating as I’d like in the last few months, perhaps, but I’m definitely creating stuff I’d never have imagined I could do two years ago.

Veekun? Ah, hm. I did write some gen 1 dumping stuff, much of which can be reused for gen 2, so that’s good. Some of the code got modernized a bit, and I made some good progress on gen 6/7. I also wrote that model viewer, which is pretty dang cool. So, still making progress, just slowly. It’s obviously not something that holds my attention as strongly nowadays, but I’d still like to get the site redone — hopefully that’ll make it easier to understand and work on, both for me and other people.

Even after all this, I’m surely forgetting a few more minor things! I’m really happy about how far I’ve come in a year, and I can’t wait to see what this coming year has in store.