So originally I had planned to write out this whole thing about what my plans and changes were going to be in 2016, and I really felt like I had a lot of things to say about what I've been up to and how I've been doing mentally and all that kind of stuff, but then somewhere along the way I just kinda lost all the motivation to do that.

When I was writing the 2015 posts at the end of December I felt like I had some really intense feelings to scribble down, but as time went on those feelings kind of faded and I felt like it would be weird to write about them at that point.

Things felt a little derailed by the holidays, friends visiting, and Awesome Games Done Quick going on, so I never felt like I was in the mindset to write out a big heartfelt post about the new year. So now here is my best attempt at some sort of reflection of the past, and/or look at tomorrow...

By this point of the year my life was really weird! I just got back from a bunch of traveling, moved out of the house I had lived in for a long time, and was staying with some friends and their family of three kids and three cats. Now that December is officially over I can finish my year recap.

October

By the time October started I had been staying with some friends for a week or two, I think, so I managed to get into some sort of routine. It's actually all a big blur in my mind as to where I was staying.

I spent some time finishing the last of the Otter examples I had planned out.

I even did a cool example on shaders which are still unbelievable magic to me.

This was the month I actually dove back into working on Super Sky Sisters as I somehow found some motivation again. I think the motivation came in the form of a double shot of espresso mixed with black coffee every morning.

Against everything I stand for I started adding a progression system to the game in the form of unlocking some various items from achieving certain goals.

A lot of people that have played builds of the game have requested some sort of progression system so I caved to their demands. I understand that a progression system does invoke positive feelings for a lot of people because unlocking stuff is fun, but I feel that a lot of games have these systems that shouldn't. I'm still not sure if Sky Sisters falls into the category of benefiting from a progression system.

I also spent some time adding an online ranking system to the game. It's an incredibly simple system, but I'm hoping it will provide players with some sort of ever lasting to improve their scores (it probably wont.)

I had spent a lot of time working on my game projects at a local coffee shop, and time just flew by. Suddenly my girlfriend's job offer came through, and it looked like our lives were about to change significantly once again. She accepted the job, and by the end of the month we would be making our way from Tempe, Arizona to Denver, Colorado.

November

We're already through most of the year and to the first month I spent in Denver. I spent some time getting myself and my games up and running with itch.io.

Wow look at all those cool games! It is really neat to see a bunch of animated gifs of stuff you've worked on (and released!)

Of course being in a new place now has inspired me to start a brand new prototype, but actually it's not so new! It's actually the same prototype I had back in January of 2015, but I started it a new as I had a lot of new ideas and a much clearer vision for it.

The first step of this new prototype was to make a sweet ui system.

I'm actually pretty happy and proud of this system I put together for dragging and dropping things! I do want to get it to a state where it's shareable, but right now I'm still finding the occasional bug and oddity so I don't want it out there quite yet.

Of course I made some more otter examples for cool things like tweening.

Eventually my prototype started looking more like this:

And my view from my desk went from a suburb street in the desert to a cool overlook of some of downtown Denver!

So overall moving has made my motivation go up quite a bit, but I seem to be channeling it into really weird things like not finishing Super Sky Sisters...

December

Work continues on my weird RPG prototype thing! Just grinding along at my task list at this point.

I really dug into the debug console portion of Otter as well as I started using it more and more for the RPG prototype. I went through and redid a bunch of the api for it as well and made use of C# attributes instead of weird debug command registering methods. The more I learn about C# the more changes I end up making to Otter, since Otter pretty much was my "learn C#" project.

The last thing I did was started working on inventory menus for my RPG prototype.

And that pretty much brings us to right now. I didn't end up traveling this holiday because of the recent move, and because I usually really dislike going back to the east coast in the winter... but of course this year would be the year that the east coast has the most amazing December ever recorded with record high temperatures. Well, I guess it's not that great since that means we're just inching closer to becoming Venus.

I mostly spent the week of Christmas and New Years off of programming. I've been spending a lot of time on art stuff, and hanging out with some old and new friends. Now I think I'm ready to start 2016!