It’s August already. Where has this year gone? Lets take a look at how I did in on my goals in July.
Goals
- Write 3 Blog Posts Per Week and Publish 2 – I wrote and published exactly 5 posts in July. The writing goal was 12 and the publishing goals was 8. This is why it is important to check the numbers every so often. I am clearly not hitting my writing goals.
- 1 Game Designed, Created, and Released Per Quarter – The rough draft of a card game was made (Design) but no further work has been done on it. I have been steadily working to finish multiplayer for Drone Tournament (Game #2 of 2016) instead, and I have been making good progress. Some of the server side code could be cleaner but it is almost an MVP for play testing.
- 1 Book Read Every 2 Months on Game Design – Still making my way through Clean Code, in fact I just read a few pages before writing this. On page 340 out of about 460 pages so 75% done. Making good progress actually and the principles in it have been invaluable in improving my code for my games and also for my day job.
- 1 Article Read Or 1 Video Watched About Game Design/Creation Per Week – I don’t actually remember July that well as far as this subject goes. I do remember listening to some podcast episodes on a new podcast I found, but other than that not much.
- Get 100 People Reading Evolving Developer Per Month – I have noticed a couple people have followed links from a forum post I did linking to a tutorial on how to handle a certain camera interaction. Maybe more of these kinds of tutorial posts that teach something useful and actionable and that deal with specific problems are what I need to be doing.
What Went Right
Drone Tournament multiplayer is coming along steadily and is almost done. My code is getting cleaner and I am on track to finish reading book #2 of 2016 on the schedule I set for myself. I am getting a tiny, tiny bit of traffic to a certain article that solves a specific problem. Bonus thing that went right is that Monkey-X full version dropped its price to about $40 instead of $100. I was already thinking about getting it and this makes it an even easier decision.
What Is Not Perfect Yet
My writing volume was at less than half of my stated goal per week for July and my publishing of that writing was only slightly better than half. Game #2 was not released on time and is not yet finished. I did not keep track of the articles and videos I watched on games and game design so I don’t remember if I hit my goal or not. And still don’t have even 1 daily visitor to my blog.
Corrective Measures
In order to keep writing volume up, instead of starting every day with coding on the current game for the quarter, I will start everyday with at least 15 minutes of writing. In order to get Game #2 finished, the writing will be followed by at least an hour of designing and coding the finishing touches on the game. I start keeping a list of every article that I read and video that I watch on game design in Evernote to refer back to later to see how I am doing. And finally, I will begin writing more tutorial type posts and sharing them in the Monkey-X forums for people to use.