It’s three months and a week before 2018, but it’s not too early to think about goals. Once upon a time, I used to strongly poo poo New Years resolutions, seeing them as a wonderful way to hex your own self growth. Looking back, my ability to manage my own self growth didn’t really put me in any position to dismiss how anybody else does things, but I still think the word “resolution” encourages lofty dreams with no plans to encourage real follow through. (There’s probably a clever line to be had here about Thoreau’s castles in the air crashing helplessly to the ground.)
So, “resolutions” are still bad. Let’s call them goals.
In 2016, my goals were pretty straight forward: To get the hell out of Los Angeles and reestablish my independence in a place that wasn’t Los Angeles. That turned out to be coming back home to Portland, which suited me fine. From there, it was kind of startling how quickly everything came together and how effectively I hit every single milestone. 2016 was an objectively horrible and truly awful year, but, for me personally, it was kind of amazing.
In 2017, having pretty much cleared out my road map from the last year, I ended up feeling very rudderless for the first part of the year and had some pretty scary financial moments during the summer. but in the last few months I made some decisive moves, developed a vision of where I want to be in five years, identified what I needed to do to get there, stopped being the guy with the car, and got serious about working on Behemoth. I feel more powerful and ambitious than I have…possibly ever. I’ve lost a lot of time over the years and I really believe I’m on track to make up for it. 2017 is up and down, but I’m still unambiguously moving forward.
Barring some kind of cataclysm (which, who even knows at this point), I think I’m starting to see my way forward for 2018: It’s time to find community.
I’ve never been good at this and it’s always been a pretty low priority for me, but working on Behemoth by myself in my apartment everyday after work is only going to take me so far. My standards for what constitutes a social life are anemic; Los Angeles was a very lonely town for me and I may have adapted too well to that loneliness, but, even before that, I was always satisfied with having one or two extremely close friends and mostly ignoring the rest of the world. This has to change.
I want to start streaming on Twitch, not because I think I’ll find any kind of major success there (exactly how many people am I competing with?), but for its own sake, because it looks fun as hell. I want to develop stream games and gimmicks. I want to learn how audio and video processing work. And I want a way to ensure that I actually am playing video games, because I honestly do forget sometimes. Once Behemoth is more presentable, I can do the occasional game dev stream. If I can build some social connections while doing any of this, all the better. I’m already laying some groundwork for this, but I’ve got a ways to go before I have a product worth selling.
I need to connect with indie game development communities. I need to learn better practices than what I can come up with on my own. I’ve traditionally disliked this kind of thing because it feels mercenary, like I’d be playing other people’s boring games as a bargain to get them to play my boring game. I don’t think that actually reflects reality. There are people who are making things that will be interesting to me, and I need to find them.
I need to seek out other fans of old MegaTen and stop feeling so lonely about loving my favorite games and not caring much for modern Atlus. If I want to find people who share my creative values, there’s probably no better place to start.
I need to finally find a way to make Twitter work for me. I originally used it as a place to vent my frustrations and anger, but that isn’t healthy and I also just have less frustration and anger to begin with. I always burn out on it because I let myself get too close to the news cycle and it exhausts me. I care passionately about social issues and end up immersing myself in them on Twitter, but I have no energy left to do anything else and in the long term it wears me out terribly. And I’ve always been such a wallflower, scared to interact with the extremely good people there, even though they may very well enjoy what I have to say. Twitter complements every single one of my other goals. I need to get real about it.
I need to keep in better touch with people on Facebook. Haha, I’m just kidding, Facebook can rot in hell forever.
2016 was an amazing year for me. 2017 has been pretty good. 2018 has the potential to blow them both out of the water. It’s still early, but it’s time to get to work.