One of the goals I've set for myself in 2020 is to spend time learning game development. I don't have any aspirations of making a career change from web product work into the game development world but I thought it would be a good creative outlet for my skill set and my past as a graphic designer. With that in mind, I picked up a Unity course on Udemy and set myself a goal: build games around a specific theme every month for the 12 months of 2020*
The problem with goals, though, is that they only seem to last as long as the excitement you get from setting them. In an effort to combat the cycle of setting a goal, doing it for two weeks, and then giving up, I've decided to set more concrete milestones and ideas to work on in 2020 in hopes of two things - staying accountable and maintaining the excitement I had when I actually set the goal.
In order to stay accountable, I'm going to take a page from Shawn Wang and learn in public. My plan to do this is to post on Twitter with updates periodically but to also keep a monthly post here with a recap of the month, the theme for next month, and a link to the playable versions of whatever I create. No matter how absolutely terrible they are (and trust me, 10 days in, there's going to be some terrible ones).
Maintaining the excitement is going to be the hard part and sometimes life is going to get in the way! Setting the expectation of the letter now should help this summer when I spend more time AFK and may not be able to devote the time I can in the winter months. The part of this that I think will contribute the most to maintaining excitement is the theme. This should provide enough challenge to stay engaged and let me explore implementations that can be literal or more abstract.
The theme idea comes from the world of game jams where you can enter to create a game in a set time frame (anywhere from 24 hours to a week or even more) and the games revolve around a specific theme. A stretch goal for 2020 is to enter and have a submission to at least one game jam by the end of the year. Hopefully my monthly themes will give me a chance to build the skills of creating within the creative constraints of the jams.
With all that being said, the theme for January is stoplights. I have a few ideas that I've been working on that I'll show off at the end of the month. Stay tuned!