Friday Rambles and Game Dev Update 2025-01-03

Wow! It's the first Rambles of the new year.

Happy New Year! Yes, I've been playing 13 Sentinels. How appropriate!

Real Life Stuff:

The holidays are over! I finally got some time to actually do things.

I went to Barnes and Noble a lot this past week due to holiday stuff, and I found a lot of new books to read by seeing popular books displayed around the store.

I read a book called Atomic Habits, which was a good book to start a new year with. I've had mixed results with self-help books before, but I think I can implement a lot of the little nuggets of practical knowledge from this one to help improve myself and my work. It's nice to have a framework that I can build off of, even though in hindsight they might seem pretty obvious or common sense.

Based on my learnings, I defined some habits I want to pick up this year. Call them resolutions if you'd like. I'm keeping them very easy (the so-called "2 minute rule" where a habit should be scaled down to something really easy to start). One example is "write a sentence in my journal every day". I'm keeping the rest of them personal for now, but I'll let you know how things go.

Another takeaway from the book is the importance of setting up your environment to define the context and cues for your habits. For me that means setting clear boundaries between my work and play, and making it easy for me to establish good habits and avoid bad habits. The upshot is that I cleaned my office area and finally unpacked all my boxes. Although that was already on my todo list, but now it feels a little bit more meaningful for some reason.

Anyway, it turns out I still like reading. My iPad Mini has been perfect for reading ebooks, with just the right form factor, and the Paperlike screen protector I have on it for drawing has a nice tactile feeling when turning the digital page. I have two more books that I want to read in my queue from seeing them displayed at Barnes and Noble. Will let you know if I enjoyed them. They're fiction this time around, though.

Moving on: While basking in the spirit of the new year, I sent out a bunch of messages to people I hadn't talked to in a while. Mostly people I used to work with who are in the area, now that I've moved back to my old haunts. I'm meeting a few of them throughout the next week to grab coffee and catch up and stuff. Cool!

As for video games, I'm 15 hours into 13 Sentinels, and thoroughly invested. I can't imagine how challenging doing all the story/narrative design for the game must have been. And yeah, it turns out it's perfectly suited to playing in short bursts.

On a side note, I can't play a game anymore without trying to analyze and learn from it, but dang I think it does make me appreciate the good games way more in a deeper way.

Game Dev Stuff:

I wrote a news event post for the Steam store page for Dreams and Deadlines.

And announced the new Overtime Update! More officially, this time. Still aiming for a February launch. A few people commented that they wanted to pay me somehow for this free update, so I might have to think up some completely optional DLC or something that people can buy if they really wanted to. Aren't people so awesome? I love people. And I love you, dear supporter.

I also did some optimizations that made the game feel a lot more responsive in parts. This is mostly for the Switch version, although it does feel like it improves performance in the PC version a little bit, too. Other than that, not a lot of gamedev work. I'm still setting up my environment and mindset for an improved workflow. Or whatever.

The End

Next week I'll be focused on going through my long todo list of remaining Overtime Update tasks. Boy oh boy I sure hope I didn't underestimate the work! It'll also be the last week before we get family visiting, and I won't be able to do a lot of dev work for about two weeks. So I'm going to plan around it and do prep work so I can try to get some art done on my iPad during any downtimes, which is the bulk of the remaining work, anyway. Okay, thanks for your support, as always! I hope this year is a good one for you and me. See you next week!