My New Year's Resolution

It’s been quite a few years since I last attempted to keep a New Year’s Resolution. This also happens to be the first year that I’ve had any interest in doing something to better myself since the pandemic started rather than to simply stay safe and sane. I’d like to learn something that I have been meaning to improve my understanding of and to build a habit of learning, so this year I have decided to finally learn how to design and develop video games.

Over the last few weeks I’ve had some thoughts on resolutions that led me to this decision. The key points I drew from these thoughts were:

• This should be something I can do on my own
• It should be something I enjoy
• It should be a mental endevour
• It should be something I can do regularly
• I should be doing this to learn rather than reaching a specific end goal

These details happen to line-up really well with the Seinfeld Strategy. For anyone who doesn’t know it, the simple version is:

• Define a goal
• Get some visual way to represent each day of the year. Habit tracking app, calendar, etc.
• Set a minimum daily requirement
• Mark your progress daily as you complete the requirement
• Don’t break the chain

The thought being that the momentum of doing this thing each day and the visual of that momentum help to enforce consistency and progress over perfectionism and to build better habits. Will it work for me? Who knows? Let’s find out.

And to clarify, game development was not something I chose out of the blue. There were a few reasons I ended up interested in making games again:

• I am already a software developer
• I have tried to develop games before and have failed to complete what I set out to do
• I’ve always wanted to make games, both physical and virtual
• I have learned about the Godot game engine. Specifically:
  • The event pattern Godot uses is similar to how a lot of modern frontend web development libraries I’m familiar with handle things
  • It avoid the licensing mess that other game development engines have by simply giving the developers full-ownership over their work
  • It’s cross-platform and works for mobile development
  • The 2D-engine is truely pixel-perfect 2D, and not 3D minus one plane

So to keep this relatively short, my daily minimum requirement will be to complete something within at least one of the following categories each day:

• A blog post here about my recent work or something relevant I’ve learned
• Work on graphics for the current project I’m working on
• Writing code for my current project
• General planning for next steps. This should probably be at least 15 minutes to be valuable
• Learning/developing from tutorials to better understand the engine

That’s it. I really just want to learn to build things I’m proud of. Things I can enjoy on my own and that will hopefully allow me to share that joy of creation with others. I have poor discipline when managing side-projects and would like to prove to myself that I’m capable of following through for a full 365 days. If I don’t end up with a finished game by year’s end, that’s fine too. My goal is to learn and get a deeper understanding of how games differ from the sort of development I do on a regular basis. We’re just going to see how it goes. Here’s to learning in 2024!