2024 - A year in review

This year has been an incredibly awkward one. I had to answer some hard questions on my existence as a developer for Apple’s platforms. Some new friendships formed while others buckled and frayed away. On top of this, I ended up moving to a new place, which had its own set of challenges and upsides. Given all this, I can’t say that I’m particularly fond of this year, but there’s much to be learned from.

Learning the Playdate SDK and making some games for the Playdate.

If I could pinpoint a single goal that helped me grow the most, I think this one would be it.  I fit right in the moment I started throwing together a build of Package Resolved. Working with the Playdate gave me the same enjoyment and passion that drew me to Apple’s platforms a long time ago. And, in a way, it had reignited that flame. While I haven’t fully released a publicly available, stable build of my work, it’s been a blast working on both Package Resolved and What the Taiji?!, my two current Playdate projects. I’m also honored to be an active participant in the Playdate Squad community.

Setting healthier boundaries.

My relationship with the fediverse had been waning for a while, and I think this contributed to some of the issues I ran into this year. A while ago, I had announced that I would be stepping away for now, putting my attention elsewhere. Suffice to say, establishing this boundary and walking away helped me. It was challenging at first, as I naturally gained the tendency to check, and I still occasionally get emails about trending tags on my single-user instance. However, I have noticed improvements to my mental health from not using it at all. I suspect this will continue throughout the next few years until the fediverse gets its act together.

This goal of setting healthier boundaries extended beyond the fediverse, too. I realized that I needed to establish boundaries for other parts of my life, and that has helped with my own improvement and growth overall.

Keep making Indexing Your Heart.

Indexing Your Heart was put on ice for a moment while I was trying to work out my feelings about Apple. But I managed to get some major work on it done. I rewrote the prototype to use C# and .NET instead of Swift, making builds for Windows and Linux more accessible than before. Likewise, I updated the dialogue format to something much more readable than before. The Itch.io page launched with new Windows and Linux builds, and I’ve been improving parts of the codebase here and there. Perhaps next year will bring more improvements to come.

Overall, I’d say that I still managed to accomplish my goals this year, despite all the other hurdles thrown my way. 2025 might be a little rough at first, but I’m hoping that next year can become better than this one. Though what I want to accomplish will have to wait until next year 😉.