You know the drill: Look back briefly at the past with disdain and/or longing, and then look forward with hope and anticipation.
Last Year's Plans
- A good amount of games-related stuff, including my small involvement with Colossal Cave, created a universal binary for AGS games, played through the Japanese version of Quest for Glory I, and created another plug-in for Acorn in preparation of creating a game for the Playdate.
- Shared some favorite recipes of mine.
- Integrated AppleScript with a Mac application, which resulted in me rebooting the Permanent Eraser 3 project once again, except this time with older machines and tech in mind.
- Left Twitter, now on Mastodon .
Plans for 2024
- The last few months of 2023 were spent writing a short story and starting the third draft of my novel, but once I wrapped that up, I began my work on my first Playdate game in earnest. The 1-bit dither plug-in is handy for some of the art. I also got the book Pixels Forever which has some interesting insights on pixel art. For a number of solo game devs, they tend to have their strengths and weaknesses — I'm strong with programming experience, but far weaker when it comes to art. Last year I declared 2023 to be the year of the Playdate, and while I started a number of projects to work towards my first Playdate game, it won't be until at least this year before something tangible will be available. Even for a relatively small game, there are many, many details to tackle to craft a decent game. The effort I've seen other game devs put into their own Playdate games has been astounding.
- Continuing with AGS Mac ports for older and newer games.
- Perhaps get back to working on Permanent Eraser 3 if the interest strikes me. So much of my time and energy for the past few years have been focusing on game-related projects, and Permanent Eraser is one of my oldest Mac projects which is still around. There are still a lot of great ideas I'd like to implement for this application which never made it into version 2.
- I have a couple of other programming posts in mind, and hopefully I will put together the energy to write them. But if I don't manage that, here's the source code for these little projects: