So, I’m way overdue for an update, and although I’ve been working away at them I’ve fallen way behind on the personal projects mentioned and hinted at in previous entries on this blog.
I’m still not really great with people, but I do feel like I’m a little better than a used to be. Certain friends insist that I’m really better than I think I am, but personally I tend to think I do a pretty reasonable job with friends but still manage to be near useless with strangers, which obviously is fairly useless for making new acquaintances. I am still trying to work on this, but I’m really not good at letting go of the safety net that established friends provide and trying to talk to people who I don’t already know.
My arthritis (in combination with some old running injuries) is playing up lately, which is pretty painful and sort of puts a cramp on trying to go out and be social, although I’m trying not to allow it to effect me too badly.
Ok, so it would seem I’m way off target. I do have some posts waiting to be published, but I don’t currently feel ready to do so and in the meantime I’ve missed the weekly or fortnightly update goal by a long shot. I’m also way behind with getting WGA up and running, to which I have the new slight complication that the group I was planning to buy my art from are probably closing down and going their seperate ways. I am fortunately in a position where this isn’t a significant setback, but it is still an irritation.
I’ve been getting back into my music properly again recently, which has been good, though due to on-and-off mild sickness my vocals have been even worse than normal lately.
For now that is all. In spite of the futility of such attempts in the past I’m attempting to establish something closer to a normal sleeping pattern (although in my case the established times are really just when I go to and get out of bed) than my current mess.
Updates soon - for real this time.
Oh, lastly, I recommend the band Red, especially to those of you who appreciate Linkin Park.
This seems like an appropriate time to post some goals and thoughts about what I want to achieve during the next year.
A good place to start would probably be with Weapons Grade Awesome, which I mentioned in the previous post and is responsible for my choice of name for this blog. Weapons Grade Awesome will be the name of my new indie games website, where I intend to release games for online play and/or download. My current goal is to have at least 3 small games online by June this year and more (perhaps some slightly larger ones) available by the end of the year. The first will be a simple gridlock game, to be followed by a minigolf game. Both of these initial games will be playable online as Flash games and aim to gain revenue through MochiAds advertising at the beginning of the game, and each will be in the format of a single play per day game where a new challenge is generated daily in order to draw regular traffic to the site. The minigolf game will produce 3 different difficulty levels daily for players to attempt to progress through and will also unlike the gridlock game feature a deluxe version players can download for a small fee which will include additional gameplay modes and a map editor.
I also intend to improve my music related skills this year. I’ve been letting my abilities with the guitar slide a bit and I’d really like to start pushing myself again. I also intend to put a real effort into improving my singing as much as possible, and will be focussing on getting a bit more “grunt” into my voice. My other music-related goal is to finally form a band that actually gets beyond the planning stage, and to hopefully write/play/record some cool music.
Apart from the above the big area in which I’d like to improve is with my social skills. As some have pointed out to me recently I do tend to be pretty withdrawn, and this is an area in which I feel I can improve and hopefully let people a bit closer.
Thanks for reading.
There’s a few things left to do but a few small changes not withstanding (mostly layout tweaks) this is my new blog. I’m now powered by WordPress and am using Nearly Free Speech hosting, and shall be attempting to post either weekly or fortnightly depending on how I go at keeping up weekly updates containing actual content. Content will vary and will include personal thoughts and musings, attempts at arranging social gatherings and such much like my older blog for those who have read it, but will also from now on include progress updates on my game development projects and thoughts on programming libraries and tools. Excerpts of programming/game related posts will be mirrored at my GDNet journal for the convenience of folks who frequent that site.
I also intend to publish small articles to this site from time to time, the first of which is almost complete at the moment.
For any who may be wondering, the title (”unrefined awesome”) is a reference to the fact that I also own www.weaponsgradeawesome.com, although as of my time of writing there’s not yet anything there. I shall explain in further detail what I intend to do with that url at a later stage.
Oh, you may register to post comments if you wish, but for now it isn’t required - you can post as an unregistered user and shall continue to be able to do so unless I encounter any issues that force me to require registration.
Farewell for now.