September 2016 End of Month Goal Review

The weather is changing, the goals are not.

Goals

  1. Write 3 Blog Posts Per Week and Publish 2 – Again I only got out 5 posts. This is the third month in a row at this rate. The writing goal was 12 and the publishing goals was 8. It is obvious to me I have not been keeping to my schedule. Time to draw it up again and stick to it.
  2. 1 Game Designed, Created, and Released Per Quarter – Drone Tournament (Game #2 of 2016) programming is nearing the glorious day of launch. These last few weeks the server and client sync bugs were worked out and some serious refactoring work has been done. I might even finish it before the end of the year. No work was done on Game #3.
  3. 1 Book Read Every 2 Months on Game Design – Read several more chapters in the book on creating games with PhaserJS. Learned about some new technologies I had not heard about and some resources that will be valuable in making games in any language. Will be adding these to the resource page soon. Also had some good ideas about using a Monkey-X physics engine just from reading this book. Well worth the investment.
  4. 1 Article Read Or 1 Video Watched About Game Design/Creation Per Week – I found a series on game balance that has some long, supremely valuable articles on the basics of designing games. Some really excellent material and would highly recommend the read.
  5. Get 100 People Reading Evolving Developer Per Month – Progress = 100%. Wow. Went from 0 readers last month to just over 100 people getting their eyes on the blog this month. How you ask? Well I did something absolutely crazy. I shared a couple posts. The first one I shared on Hacker News and in a programming Facebook group I am a part of. This alone got just over 100 unique viewers. The second was not quite as popular and I only shared it through Hacker News but still showed a small spike in traffic. So getting 100 viewers was slightly easier than I thought. Now we have to figure out how to get them to come every week.

What Went Right

Finally made progress on the viewership goal. In fact hit it for September. And it was all accomplished from taking a single simple action. Why didn’t I do this before? Also the game is working. Core game mechanics are finished and refactoring has begun. Slow steady progress marching forward. Additionally, getting great ideas from the book I am reading and the articles that I have found.

What Is Not Perfect Yet

Writing volume is still lower than intended. This is partially to do with assigning more of my time pie to getting Drone Tournament finished. Also, did let the amount and number of articles I read / videos watch of game design drop a bit. Main issue is the writing volume though.

Corrective Measures

It all comes down to routine. Must not let the routine get so easily interrupted. The writing must go on, both in code and in articles. Additionally, I am revisiting my article writing schedule and planning out which articles need to be written on which days.

First time to hit 100 viewers in a month, not much but it is progress.

I Want to Be a Better Developer