Let's make it happen, 2021!

So long, 2020, and good riddance. I hope 2021 will be better than the dumpster fire that was the previous year, and I hope to accomplish some more things this year. Earlier in December, I posted a short list on Ko-fi with some goals I had in mind. Since then, I’ve thought of a couple extra goals.

More indie game development

Creating Unscripted with Ren'Py was an amazing experience! I loved being able to create a unique story and collaborate with artists, musicians, and play testers to create a solid indie game for Steam, Itch.io, and GameJolt. Although The Costumemaster was a failure in terms of a game, I had lots of fun creating it. I’d love to make another major game in 2021. I’ve started working on a prototype shortly after Unscripted released, and I want to keep developing it further. I doubt that I’d fully release the gam by the end of the year, but I have some interesting and fun ideas that I want to flesh out into a great game.

Creating custom music for the game

I’ve been rusty with my music composition skills, but I had a good time creating the soundtrack for The Costumemaster, recreating styles of music I enjoyed with games like Portal in Logic Pro. I’m hoping that, while developing this game, I will also brush up on my music composition skills to develop a good soundtrack for this game.

Making devlogs

When I wanted to report progress on Unscripted, I wrote a blgo post and published it to both Itch.io and the official website. However, I feel that doing it this way isn’t as fun as making a proper video devlog, and it can be pretty difficult to visualize what I’m trying to express in words. After binge-watching a bunch of indie game devlogs on YouTube, I want to try making more YouTube videos about this project, maybe even some livestreams of development on Twitch.

Continuing with Starlight

I still love developing great apps for the Mac, and I want to continue the journey with the small SwiftUI team I have to work on it. We’re currently working on refactoring some parts of the codebase and have some exciting features planned, and I’d love to keep Starlight going as a project. I’d also like to keep maintaining the cross-platform desktop client, though it’ll take a bit more work.

Have a nice Kotlin

Earlier this year, I worked on a language parser as part of the new minigame experience for Unscripted (though it was abandoned). When writing the parser, I decided to step out of my comfort zone and learn the Kotlin language; I really enjoyed learning Kotlin and some of its tricks while trying to implement skills I was learning from one of my computer science courses:

• Then when statement is absolutely amazing and feels like a combination between switch/case statements and pattern matching in Haskell.
• Creating structs/data classes with Kotlin is just as simple as creating a one-line class with the modifier data on top of it.

Like my goals with Python in 2020, I want to continue learning more about Kotlin and create some fun projects with it. The new Compose for Desktop that JetBrains introduced looks enciting, and that’d be fun to play around with as an alternative to Swing.

Except there’s no server

Serverless seems to be becoming pretty huge, and I’d love to learn more about it. I’m hoping that, while I continue to learn Kotlin, I will also get a chance to play around with serverless using the Kotless framework and understand what the hype is around serverless.

This is just a short list for now, and there may be more coming in the future, but I think I have plenty to work with here. Let’s make it happen, 2021!