2018 End of Year Wrap-up

Here we are, at the end of a new year. It's crazy how quick these years go by nowadays, but at least I'm still getting plenty done! Let's jump right over to some accomplishments:

Cloudy Climb

DFGame had its first field test this year, with a little platformer called Cloudy Climb. The game was very short and not great, but I was able to get things done without too much trouble. I'm in the mood to make another small game this year, but I haven't decided when. I'm focused on bigger stuff right now, so it'll probably happen much later in the year.

DFGame

On that note, let's look at DFGame. Since last year, DFGame has received dozens of improvements and 2 new modules. Despite the progress, I haven't made a new version since May. At this point, DFGame feels like it has made enough changes to consider a 2.0 version release. For the sake of making it a good one, I want to polish a little longer.

Halberd

This year also marked a return to my longest-running project: The Halberd RPG engine! This attempt is shaping up better than the previous ones, so hopefully things will continue to go smoothly next year. I'm not ready for a source release just yet, but it'll probably happen within the first 6 months of 2019.

...What about Singularity?

I've been awfully quiet about other projects for a while, and Singularity hasn't seen much attention since the release back in January. I've grown quite a bit as a software dev since then, and I want to make a cleaner and more polished release. I've scheduled an v0.4 release for next June, though obviously that date isn't a guarantee. I'll be focusing on bugfixes and polish this time around, since most of the important big features are already working.

A Little More

I didn't just spend all of 2018 programming (though I'll admit that was most of it). I also made some art! Following up on last year's attempts to learn pixel art, I kept practicing and improving. I'm not a great artist, but I'm miles ahead of where I began at this point. I can't wait to see what the future brings in this regard, who knows how my games will look in a few years!

On that note, I drew a few more things to cap off the year:

I'm also planning to look into a few other styles of art, such as digital painting. I think expanding my view of art will help me grow my style in general, so there may be more than pixel art around here a year from now...

Next Year

Besides the obvious, I have a few extra plans for 2019. I'd like to take dflib and fold it into the dfgame ecosystem, probably as its own set of high-level modules. This will not only give me an excuse to update and fix up dflib, but it'll also let any of my existing dflib projects to pick up any dfgame features they want. Most won't be useful, but there are a few interesting possibilities like audio notifications.

I also have another little something that might happen with dfgame later. We'll see about that...