Doing Something Every Day of 2018: COMPLETE

Jan 1, 2019

In keeping with my pace of writing a single blog post per year, this is my 2018 in review.

In 2016 I started a project to learn something every day for the entire year, and in 2017 that pivoted into a focus on working on my side project, indie game From Orbit.

2018 was more of The Boring Middle Part of a project. It was already underway, and I didn’t complete it, but I did get a lot done! It was a year of steady progress, which is an achievement in itself.

From Orbit

Here’s what From Orbit looked like at the beginning of the year:

And here’s how it looks at the end:

In addition to visual polish, content production and systems work, the project also reached some important milestones… in particular all of the environments, and all of the creatures that I have planned are in game, at least in rough form.

If all goes well, I hope to release From Orbit mid 2019!

Check out the From Orbit dev log if you’re interested in more detail.

Doing Things

This year was all about consistency and making steady progress on ongoing projects. For whatever reason, June and September were particularly productive months, I’m guessing due to lots of daylight and warm weather, but not hot enough to make me feel like a lazy blob.

By the numbers:

• From Orbit (Days): 223 days
• From Orbit (Hours): 280 hours
  • 269 hours development (nice!)
  • 11 hours administrative tasks (meetings, paperwork, websites, …)

I did some modeling and drawing in May and June but otherwise didn’t do much or remember to track what I was doing when I did it. A bit disappointing, but such is the life of secondary goals. I mostly concentrated on From Orbit as my side-project and didn’t sweat any side-side-projects. Maybe I’ll level up to that some year!

What modeling and animation work I did get done was mostly in service of From Orbit

Weekly Goals

Continuing from last year, I keep some weekly goals as well.

• Gym: Get some exercise, offsetting my otherwise sedentary lifestyle.
• Play: Play a new game, hopefully broadening my design horizons
• Chore: Check something off the household/life To-Do list, because I’m an adult

How’d that go?

• Gym: 42 workouts, an improvement of 10 over last year! Audio books really help make exercising tolerable.
• Play: 25 new games played, down from 44 last year. About 8 of which I’d say I really enjoyed and either completed, or would like to.
• Chore: I did my taxes and voted, what more do you want!?

Reading

I also finished reading 10 books, and 3 audio books, slightly more than last year. All of them were in the first half of the year, I apparently ran out of reading steam in August.

Onward, 2019

Where 2018 was a stay-the-course kind of year, 2019 is going to be about endings and beginnings.

Not least of which is the launch of From Orbit. After a couple of years of dedicated effort, I’m ready to get this puppy out the door and on to The Next Big Thing, whatever that turns out to be. My focus on the project from this point on will be driving as much as possible towards release, which means tying up loose ends and resisting scope creep even more ruthlessly.

Hopefully this all means that a year from now I’ll have a more interesting post to write for my 2019 recap!

Bonus