Goodbye 2017, and Happy New Year!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 1, 2018

Last night we said goodbye to 2017 by watching the Rifftrax of Sharknado (which was hysterical), and playing the Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords boardgame. We won about 8 minutes before midnight on the second-to-last turn before we would have lost. So… yay!

Online, people are talking about how horrible 2017 was. For me… there was a lot I’d hoped to accomplish but didn’t get to, and I was in crunch way too much of the year, but aside from that, things went pretty well. I’ve had far, far worse years.

At the day job, things are kinda taking off right now. I’m getting paid to play in Virtual Reality, which is kind of a life-long ambition. Yeah, it’s not all I’d hoped and dreamed it would be, but it’s still pretty cool. It’s challenging, interesting, and sometimes even fun. Business is going pretty well at our company. We’re as busy as the proverbial one-legged-man at a butt-kicking contest (thus the crunch), as an artifact of success, but we’re pulling things off.

On the writing front, I had six stories published in 2017 (not including the one that squeaked in via digital in 2016 but didn’t see print until several weeks later). I had a novel, “Blood Creek Witch,” accepted by Immortal Works Press, and finished the last (?) revision. It will be released in March this year (YAY!). I also wrote the next book in the series, which is about to undergo serious revision as soon as I’m done with a couple of short stories. In spite of crunch, I’ve managed to pull off the writing thing. Yay.

Game development was sadly not a great winner in 2017. When programming for the day job goes 12 or more hours, it’s hard to come home and do basically the same thing. On top of that, I’ve pretty much lost my content folks to other projects, so it’s back down to just me. This is making me reevaluate how I make games in the future. I have limited art skills, and tons of art needs in the current project. That’s a problem. I have worked on some smaller experimental projects, particularly with VR, but nothing that I’m ready to talk about or take to the next level *yet*. I intend to explore these further in 2018.

I’ve also been avoiding making some hard choices with Frayed Knights 2. At this point, there are some things that just need to be completely re-written and re-done, but I am terrified that taking that step can throw the game into an endless loop of rewrites. But it may need to be done. FK2 was a learning project for me, and I now know a whole lot of what I did wrong. Continuing in the same direction could actually take more time. But content-wise, we’re still stuck at the halfway point. It’s a rough place to be.

We got to vacation in France this year. We’ve been talking about it and saving up for it for years. CRPG developer Charles Clerc of OlderBytes.com is a friend of ours, and he opened up his home in southern France to us to explore the country beyond Paris. We had an incredible week-and-a-half out in the Toulouse area.

I definitely slacked on the guitar hobby, compared to previous years. So I didn’t make as much progress as I had. This is a carry-over from the end of 2016, and another victim of crunch mode. Mostly. However, compared to pretty much every year before 2013 since I was 17 years old, I still did pretty good. I learned to play a few more songs, and while it’s still rough, I can play Don’t Fear the Reaper, a long-time air guitar favorite. Learning to play it For Reals is a huge .

So… all told, 2017 wasn’t too bad for us. Ups and downs, but I’m calling it a win.

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