My goals for 2023

I was talking to a friend about new year’s resolutions recently and got a little caught up explaining why I wanted my goals to be input-based rather than output-based. By focusing on the time or effort I put into things, I failed to say clearly, I hope to allow habits and preferences to emerge organically, rather than trying to aim at a specific outcome that for all I know isn’t realistic or even rooted in something I enjoy doing. Essentially, it comes down to measuring success on the act of practice instead of some imagined external validation. After wasting several fumbling sentences on a mangled version of this idea, my friend said the smartest-dumbest thing I’ve heard in a long time: “If you want to do it, you have to do it.”

God, what a perfect platitude. On the surface, it’s a tautological space-filler, the sort of thing you might hear when listening to a baseball game on the radio. But when it sits with you, it almost becomes embarrassing in its simplicity: oh, if that’s all it takes, then what excuse could I possibly have for not doing it? If you want to do it, you have to do it. This will be my mantra for the next 10 months.

Well anyways, here’s how I want to spend some time this year.

24 loaves

I don’t really know yet how much I like making bread. I told my wife last year that I wanted to try it, and now I find myself in possession of about 15 pounds of flour and three textbook-sized books on the subject. I made a couple loaves at the end of 2022, and felt a spark: could it really be this easy to make something that tastes better than what I can buy at the grocery? But I know that breadmaking can be deep and complex (there are full-time bakers, after all), so my hope is to start with getting comfortable with the basics.

To find out just how much I actually like this hobby, and maybe to improve at it, I want to bake 24 loaves of bread this year. This’ll put me nowhere near the mythical 10,000 hours, but I figure baking twice a month or so will at least put me in a better position to decide if it’s something I want to invest more time into in 2024.

I’ve made two or three loaves so far this year, and I’ve got a sourdough starter in the works. As I make more, I’ll share notes on the process and results here so we can all bask in the glow of my incredible crumb structure.

12 games

Unlike bread, I know exactly how much I like making games: quite a bit. It’s been a pipe dream of mine since I was a teenager to do it for a living. And I’ve done it, off and on, with extremely mixed results, ever since then. The problem is, in the decade since I realized how much I love games, I’ve built up the idea of making them in my head to the point where it’s hard to separate the hobby from the hypothetical idealized version of myself (handsomer, better organized, good hair, cool glasses) that makes and sells them as his full time job.

A walk-and-talk with my wife helped me realize that this line of thinking has just about ruined my relationship with the game-making practice itself. So this year, I want to reclaim it as a hobby and give myself a real practical foundation on which I can maybe build future goals on top of.

Games are, in my opinion, a little more complicated than bread. So I’ve set my sights on half as many games as loaves: about one per month. Factoring in the demands of a 50+ hour-per-week job plus caring for my dog and having a little bit of a real life, I think this is actually a pretty ambitious goal. But I’m hoping that the ambitiousness will force me to approach this creatively and to focus on doing the damn thing rather than creating the next Celeste.

So I’ll be embracing tools like PICO-8, coming up with Euchre variants, making up silly party games, and throwing together lame homebrew RPGs. And at the end of the year, if I can actually pull this off, I’ll know a lot more about what it actually means to make games.