New Year's Revolution
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- Details
- Category: Brain Dump
- Published on Friday, 13 January 2012 17:04
- Written by RB
- Hits: 11
Suppose I better do a few New Year's Resolutions, even if it's only to post some content on the site! Of course, I will try to achieve them resolutely. I've split them into two categories: personal goals, and professional targets.
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Personal Goals
1. Bring myself down to a BMI of at least 24.9 (aka the borderline of normal weight)
As I am the atypical gamer, I haven't really taken much care of my body over the years and that's got to stop. No, really. Efforts I've made to change my diet and exercise quickly burn out because I've always lacked the motivation.
This year, I want to be different. I'm looking to get back into snowboarding later in the year, and let me tell you - snowboarding when you're unfit and overweight is ankle breaking. If I want to do it without a full metal burnout then I've got to toughen up my constitution and lose a stone or two.
I'm not expecting miracles from myself - I know what I'm like in this regard - but if I can ignore the pangs of snacking on the most part and find an exercise routine that doesn't bore me to death (HIIT looks pretty good in this sense), I should be on the right track.
2. Crush my gaming backlog by 75%
I like playing shitty games. There's something so inherently disgusting in working around the technical flaws and awful premise that makes them just plain enjoyable to work through - always something to laugh at, so to speak. But there's no joy to be had in forcing yourself through something distinctly middle of the road.
Console games are curious things when it comes to length. The rising of the achievement has given me a perfect excuse to look for additional value in a £40 purchase and all too often that can lead to playing through an average game for far longer than one should. End result? More unplayed games sat in boxes in my house than I've ever had at one time.
I'm driving to empty all of these boxes by the end of the year. I doubt I'll be entirely successful with the raft of new releases on the way, but a target of emptying most of them seems something that's realistic.
There have been problems in the past to avoiding this kind of behaviour, such as the pursuit of gamerscore and continually worsening trade-in value, but quite frankly with the death of MyGamerCard last year which kept the achievement game competitive and statistical, and Amazon's own trade-in deals beating the High Street by unspeakable margins, at this point there seems very little excuse.
I don't think I'd ever want to change my buying habits on this front. I think I'd miss it the ability to explore new content on a whim. However, what I do have to respect is that there is no point in pushing through with titles I'm not enjoying. It is better to take a £10 hit and throw the game at Amazon after a few hours than it is to keep playing until I'm just shuffling through in a zombie like fashion.
3. Update this place at least once a month
Posting in fits and starts does nothing for your Google ranking nor encourages regular visitors. Whether I am Brain Dumping, or discussing Game Design, or starting to make inroads on my Game Collection database, I want to be more actively updating this site. Writing the Corpse Party article last month earned me almost 100 hits overnight when Xseed very nicely retweeted it, despite it not being a review specifically and I did nothing to follow it up.
I don't have the time or inclination to write big sprawling inventive articles every day like I used to. I'm at a point these days where I like to do things rather than talk about them - very different from the bright eyed attentive me of 10 years ago. But that's a good thing for any website; the longer you hold things back, the more ideas you'll have and you can cherry pick the best ones.
Professional Targets
1. Have enough in the bank from trading by the end of the year to at least go part-time
Slowly but surely I'm becoming a pretty decent sports trader. That is, the act of backing an outcome in a sporting event and then offsetting the result when it's going your way to create a small profit no matter what the final result is. It's pretty hard to explain, but Google is your friend on this.
Last year, I had a breakthrough and made 4 figures, before a poor run in the final few months of the year forced my total down. Some of it may have been greed, or inexperience at handling large figures, but I'm not prepared to let that strike me down.
This is the year I want to make a real fist of it - push enough money that would rival or in fact beat my annual salary from my jobs. You can't guarantee anything in trading, of course, but there are pros out there that can read stats and odds well enough, and those who just read markets and take a stab in the dark.
It's nice to dream. I want to make it a reality.
2. Start using this blog for what I intended - a chronicle of my game design attempts
As I detailed in the Welcome to Sixbuttons.co.uk post, this website was supposed to be largely about my attempts to put together a unique game. I'm a student of game design, but not so much coding so whatever I do will likely look and sound cheap and derivative. Nonetheless, I hope what I can catalogue in my design theories and output here will be just as interesting as any final product I come up with.
I've been working on ideas and documents for the past year and more vehemently in the past few months. I'm not expecting to have anything finished, or even developed to a point where I can deploy a demo or beta, but I'd certainly like to start work on my concept this year. Expect detailed articles!
The next two months are quite busy for me, so March is a target for starting. Fingers crossed...
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I think that'll do. To the future!