2024 Roadmap

#7DRL #gamedev #travel

Happy New Year!

This post captures some personal goals for 2024 in order to (hopefully) keep myself on track.

Here they are, in no particular order:

Participate in 7DRL

The 7DRL Challenge is my favorite game jam (participants make a roguelike game in 7 days).

This will be my 5th year in a row and I don't want to lose my streak!

My past entries:

A sub-goal for this year is to make something better than Catacombs (my 2020 entry) as I feel that was my strongest game so far.

Travel to Norway

We're planning to take a trip to Norway this fall. While still in the initial stages, we're looking to spend time in Oslo, Bergen, and Tromsø.

In Tromsø, we're hoping to be there at the right time for viewing the northern lights.

I intend to post a summary each day, like we did for our New Zealand trip in 2014.

Post once per month

I would like to post here more often and once a month seems like an easy bar to hit. One post per month is the floor; hopefully I can post more than that.

Expect similar content to my existing posts, e.g. gamedev articles, development logs, travel, and sometimes art.

This post takes care of January, at least!

Snowboard in Colorado

We've lived in Colorado since 2018 and we've yet to hit the local slopes.

This feels embarrassing as someone who really enjoys snowboarding and was very active in my slightly younger years.

I'm not much for crowded resorts these days, so I'll be looking for a smaller place - somewhere a little off the beaten path where I won't spend too much time in line for the lifts.

Release a game for $1

Of all my goals, I'm the most worried about this one!

I have a few prototypes in the workshop, at varying level of completeness. I'll need to pick something, scope it well, and maintain the motivation/discipline to work on it consistently.

Why $1? The exact price doesn't matter so much as the process and implications of charging money. I want the game to be finished, polished, and interesting enough that I feel good about attaching a price tag.

Ideally, this also gives me some grist for the mill in terms of posting each month.

Maintain diet and exercise

Around July 2023 we started a simple diet and exercise routine: counting calories and walking one mile on as many days as we can.

Writing down our calorie intake made us more aware of how much we were eating and quickly led to a reduction in calories consumed. I've lost ~35 pounds so far.

My specific goals for 2024:

This goal dovetails nicely with our Norway travel plans (several outdoor activities/hikes) and snowboarding, too.

Post a 2024 postmortem

When setting goals, it only makes sense to measure how much was accomplished.

I'm reminded of this great quote (which also applies to game development, my health goals, and everything, really):

You can't manage what you don't measure.

Subscribe to follow along and see how this all turns out.