How’d I do? Full Review of 2016

Its 2017. A new year and a new set of goals.

But one of the things I learned in 2016 is the importance of occasional reflection and evaluation. So before setting some new goals for myself with this blog and with making games, I am going to reflect a little on this past year’s goals and how I did.

Writing

Goal: Write 3 posts per week and publish 2 to build a small buffer of unwritten posts. This would have been 156 posts written and 104 published.

Actual: 70 posts written and published.

What’s great about this? Even though I did not hit my goal, in fact I came in just under half of the writing goal, I almost tripled my volume from 2015 (only wrote 26 posts that year). This is fantastic!

Games

Goal: Make one game per quarter (every 3 months) and release each of those games on the Play Store for Android. So 4 games and all released.

Actual: 2 Games finished, 1 about 50% of the way, and 1 idea kind of left to die. Only 1 of the 2 finished games was published to the Play store.

What’s great about this? This is the first time I have released a game on Android. I can now point people to my game or show it to them from my own phone. I learned a ton turning it into a multiplayer game and releasing for Android that can help me out in the future. In fact I am probably going to go back and release at least one of my games from 2015 to Android.

Reading

Goal: Original goal was 1 book on game design every 6 months, which I modified to 1 per quarter. So 4 books on game creation or game design for the year. Also read 1 article on game design or watch 1 video on it every week.

Actual: I read 3 books specifically related to making games and game design and several that were helpful, such as Clean Code. Not only that but I read over 25 books total last year. For the articles and videos, I did not keep track of them like I should have, but I read way more than 52 articles and watched quite a few videos and interviews on the subject. One of the goals I exceeded greatly.

What’s great about this? I learned a ton this year about making games, game patterns, game types, and different parts of the game making team. And I found so many more books to read for 2017.

Audience

Goal: Roughly 100 unique visitors a month by the end of 2016.

Actual: More like 30 or 40 although I had a couple months where it was more than 100. I switched analytics trackers in December so I lost some history, but this is to give me better information in the future.

What’s great about this? I actually started telling people about my blog and sharing some of my posts. This is way better than last year where I am not sure that more than 5 people visited my blog the whole year. Also, I actually hit my goal a couple of months.

Important Lessons

Written goals are super valuable. And they are even more valuable if you review them periodically.

Simply having the goal of getting 100 people to view my blog every month would not have been enough if I had not taken a measure every so often to see how I was doing and to remind myself to do something about it.

It also helps you see when your focus is on one of the goals and the others are suffering because of it.

Bigger goals are better because you are going to fail anyway.

One of the important things I learned this year from reading the 10X Rule by Grant Cardone is that most people fail at their goals. Only meaning that they don’t hit 100% completion on them.

So do you want to fail at a small goal or a big goal. If you are only going to get 50% of the way to your goal, you want a bigger goal. Because 50% of 100 is 50, but 50% of 1000 is 500.

I really felt this with writing especially. Upping my writing goal, even though I did not hit it, significantly increased my writing volume.

Overall 2016 was a huge improvement and I am looking forward to making more progress in 2017.

I Want to Be a Better Developer