What I did in 2019

From Red Blob Games's Blog

It's time for my annual self review. You can see previous ones from 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018. I didn't have a lot of goals for this year:

1. Write to my blog instead of only to Twitter or other closed platforms.
2. Improve my explanations and write new ones.

The first I can measure by looking at whether I blogged about my projects. I did: 24 blog posts this year. I'm pretty happy with that. The second is harder to evaluate, but I would say I didn't spend nearly as much time on explanations as I had hoped to. I wrote these new explanations, but they were small:

• Axes and Angles
• Grid Edges
• Circle Filling
• Making-of: little details

And I worked on these two, but didn't get them to a point I was happy with:

• Coordinate transforms - abandoned
• A* Heuristics - incomplete

I spent some time improving existing explanations:

• A* Implementation - clarified terminology: "location", "node", "state" can all be graph nodes
• Distance to Any - improved layout
• Making-of: drag handles - updated to work with touch screens
• Differential heuristics - continued to work on it but still nowhere near complete
• Terrain from Noise - island and wraparound map sections
• Hexagon Guide - improved the map storage section, and improved the load time
• 2d Fourier Noise - refactored code, improved the terrain rendering

Instead of explanations, this year I was more inspired to work on art, learning, and other fun projects:

• Goldberg Coxeter
• Orbit Spirograph
• Growth Forms
• Reaction Diffusion
• Delaunator Animation
• Voronoi Percolation
• Sphere HEALPix
• Cube morphed into a sphere
• Square tiling of a sphere
• Dungeon on a sphere
• Weighted cell rendering
• Isometric outline experiments
• Cellular influence maps
• Dyson Hatching
• Triangle texture patterns

I also have 15 other projects that weren't for the general public (for clients, or responses to emails, etc.). I generated new logos for my social media presence using a new logo generator I wrote. And I updated my home page with links to lots of projects I hadn't previously linked. I track these projects on Trello.

What else? I'm hanging out on AIMA chat (students who want to contribute to the AIMA textbook open source project), Roguelike Discord, ProcJam Discord, a few Slacks, Twitter, and a few subreddits. I decided to go to non-GDC conferences this year, and went to BangBangCon, FDG, and Roguelike Celebration. I'm pretty happy with how all of this went this year.

For several years I've hoped that the coordinate systems page would become the next big successful project after the Hexagon page and the A* page. I've attempted to write it several times but just haven't been happy with it. I'm now starting to think that maybe it's not going to be the next big success for me. I've also been trying to come up with a good explanation of differential heuristics but can't seem to make much progress. Maybe I won't have any more big successes with tutorials, and should stop looking for that.

What are my goals for 2020? Unfortunately, I don't have any strong goals. After working on big projects in 2018, I ended up working on small projects in 2019. I would like to work on something bigger, but I think my focus will be on learning new things rather than explaining things I already know. I'd like to work on projects that last a month or two rather than a week or two, to really dig into them and learn a topic deeper than I can do in a week. Other than that, I feel kind of aimless right now. I'm ok with that. I'm in a wander-and-explore phase of my life.

Labels: annual-review