now I know that my GJ account is as dead as the Gobi desert and out of nowhere to come up with one of these posts is an interesting move, but this is the best place where I can write article-level posts so might aswell do it

(I'm doing it in advance a few days because I will 100% forget about it on New Years Eve sorry guys)

I've done these kinds of "reflecting on" posts for past years, and whereas in those posts I kept mentioning how my years kept getting better and better, this year I feel as if it was more of a reality check than anything. This is all unrelated from IRL stuff, because, as per usual, all that stuff keeps going great. Got thru freshman year of high school amongst the top of my class, so that's all fine and dandy, however my game dev side of things has had a rather interesting turn of events as of recently, and it pretty much taught me the dangers of rushing projects way out the window

most of you by now are fully aware of this little open world project of mine that I like to call Sonic Horizons, and how it was featured at this year's SAGE 2023 event. Now on the surface it appeared to be a pretty sick demo, full open world, like half an hour worth of content, little buggy but functional, tons of recognition (videos, podcasts etc), seemed like the recipe for success ain't it? yeah well the behind the scenes was a whole different disaster

since I've had somewhat of a burnout during the whole summer (and due to a pretty severe Spider-Man hyperfixation that still is present today) I basically slacked off from any work on the project to get it ready for the event, up until roughly the last two weeks into the deadline for the demos (which was September 1st I think). Put two and two together and you'll quickly realize I had to put myself through a severe amount of overwork just to be able to get the game out in a presentable state in time. I could just as easily have delayed it, but knowing how many demos I've promised leading up to SAGE, and with how all of them have got delayed (plus the fact this was many people's most anticipated fan project at the event), it lead me to the mentality of "try to finish it despite knowing it's not ready for atleast another month". Had to ask the staff to grant me another day of work just to be able to get the game to work and, low and behold, the game was playable from start to finish, with a million bugs in plain sight that anyone could stumble upon by accident. So next day I had to deal with ANOTHER bunch of overwork (and now stress from the accumulating backlash following the unstable release of the demo) and you can imagine once all the work was over I felt almost dead (literally). Put me in a power-out state from any work for a whole month, with it still rippling into recent work sessions aswell, but I've mostly recovered from that.

so, the big lesson I learned from this? never release demos if you're unsure if they're actually presentable again. Despite the game itself getting so much praise and positive reception from many fans, I can't bear putting something this buggy out again, atleast not when I'm unsure whether I'll make it on time or not

anyway melodrama over, this year I've also began embracing my animator side-hobby more and more, to the point where I can now see myself as an actually viable cinematic (+ film for that matter) and gameplay animator, and alongside that, I've found another skill I've began pursuing slowly, that being LookDev related work, that being shaders, compositing etc. It's a really fun learning experience so far, also factoring me learning Nuke for the first time, and now using it in almost all of my compositing work (that isn't related to some shitpost)

now that this is all out of the way, where do I see myself in the future? Honestly, no clue. One thing I know clear as day is that I want to continue pursuing animation so that if I ever have ideas of dropping my game developer career for some reason, I can fall back on it instead (maybe I'll get to work at some big studio someday who knows !!)

I won't do some "special thanks" to friends or something as that's mostly redundant, and most of these friends probably know how much they meant to me throughout this online space (and some IRL aswell), but despite all of this, here's hope for a good next year, and hopefully I'll get to build my shiny new PC sooner (oh yeah I'm building a new PC). In the meantime, happy Christmas Eve