2025 New Years Resolution

  • Created 06 January 2025
  • Updated 30 December 2025

Resolution

I want to stop saying “I’m not an artist” and start doing art, start being comfortable with fucking up, and generally be more creative with all tasks I do.

Reasoning

I’ve always felt like “I can’t do that” when approaching creative tasks, but over the last year I touched on many artistic projects and did just fine. AI has become a big deal and through it I learned that even if I’m bad, I’m still a hell of a lot better than whatever image generation models can pump out, because at least I can follow instruction.

Most of the difficulty I’ve faced when doing art has been landing on a consistent art style. I don’t really have one, and I think that’s going to be the toughest challenge to overcome.

Hard goals

I feel it’s important with any resolution to have hard goals, otherwise how do you say that you’ve done it?

  • Find an “art style” that I want to cultivate.
  • Do a self portrait!
  • Add more images to this site, hand drawn, rendered out, whatever.
    • I’ve been a little better with this, mostly for GDDs while I’m working on things.
  • Figure out real-time VFX for game assets!
    • Shaders, my beloved. I’ve figured out the basics to making most realtime VFX, and I’ve been using them pretty often for new game projects!
  • Create a character!
    • I’ve created several for Godscrown!
  • Figure out Blender’s Non-Linear Animation tool.
    • I figured this out! It’s actually not too bad. Someday I should write up a post about it.
  • Figure out Animation blending in Godot/Blender?
    • AnimationTree is slick! I just got to try it, and it’s a lot simpler than I expected. The parameter names are a bit awkward, though.
  • Do some creative writing, an original story.
    • I’ve been trying this on the side, but it’s really slow and without an end-goal, it’s hard to feel like it’s worth it. I laid out some real basic ideas for Spy Phishing, but ultimately someone else wrote out all the details.
  • Learn some audio stuff? How to master properly, maybe learn some foley stuff?
    • I learned a bit about Renoise, but other than that, not too much time to learn it.

Accomplishments

“Fun” and Games Podcast

I recorded an episode for a podcast! In it, I told the story of my RimWorld colony! I think if I want to do more recordings of myself, I should probably get a better microphone, the one I have barely picks me up, or perhaps I’m not using it properly. In any case, it doesn’t have a stand and I had to hold it in a cup for the entirety of the recording, so It’s probably a good idea to get a new one anyway.

Godscrown

I created Godscrown and won the Cosmic Horrors Jam IV! I’m really proud of this one, and I expect to continue working on it.

Rohan

My first born son was born! This has cut into some of my other goals, but he’s here and doing stuff! Eventually maybe he’ll help me with some of this gamedev stuff!

Multiplayer Networking

I learned a bit about Godot networking, it’s not too bad, honestly! But it’s certainly the type of thing you’ll want to plan before working on the entire game

Blender + Pixel Art

I’ve managed to work out a good flow for pixel art. Going forward I’ll be rendering characters and objects in 3D, and using that as a reference for pixel art to better refine angles and such. This has proven especially useful when working with FlatPixel, a tool to create 2D spritesheets from animations in a GLB/GLTF file.

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