What Next For May

The other day I released my fourth game on android under the banner of voyaging mind. I am actually pretty happy with this. At the beginning of the year I decided my main goal of the year was to push my game dev skills a little bit. Since then 3 little games have been produced.

Ok, none have been met with any success from the metric of people actually playing them but they have push my knowledge of LibGdx and let me explore Entity/Component orientated programming. All good fun if you are a programmer type like me.

So what next, well I could continue to pump out small games for the rest of the year. I have plenty of ideas.  I want to push my game dev skills this year and pumping out small games usually means I focus on the code. To become a better game developer I need to push my other skills as well. The major one I am lacking in is my art skills, it is not easy to make progress in the practice of art while at the same time producing a game, so for the next few weeks I am going to attempt to draw as much as possible. If possible everyday but I know some days this will just not happen.

Whenever I have taken the effort to practice drawing I improve, it is just I am starting at such a low skill level it will take many hours of practice to get anywhere descent. While the initial plan is to just use pencil and paper I have a slight urge to do some 3D modelling probably using blender. I am realistic about this and don't expect to get good with just a few weeks practice but any improvement helps - right!

This argument to improve my art skills is also motivated by a quote from Einstein (I think) "Insanity is doing the same things again and again and expecting different results". If I keep on churning out small games at the current polished level then I should not expect things to change. So onto drawing as my primary purpose for a while.

There are some distractions. I have a book on natural language processing book that I want to devour and the voyaging mind website certainly needs a bit of an update.