Plans(?) for 2022

2021 was an interesting year. While I successfully defended my thesis in December, major revisions were requested so I will be spending the next few months getting that done so will not have spare time for a while yet. While I normally like to use January as a fun way of looking at my plans for the year, this year I don’t have any concrete plans for the year so am just going to outline some of the possible things I am considering. If anybody wants me to go in a particular direction just email me and I will take that into account when I finally have free time to work on things.

Because I will be looking for work soon, I am considering doing some code challenge such as Advent of Code. If I do so, in addition to the game port for that month, I will have my code for the challenge and some walkthrough videos. I kind of want to start doing videos showing how I go about making some of my games so this would be good practice, with the port of Spiky Bird being my first real making of video. If this manages to get a few people to watch the video I may do more.

There are many game engines for JavaScript, so I am trying to decide if I should build my own or just find one that will work well with the type of games I want to design. I am considering creating an adventure game engine to make porting One of those Weeks easy. I would either make videos of the work on the engine or write a series of articles on the subject.

There have been several projects that I have had to put to the side due to the lack of time. I would still like to finish my 2600 emulator and create a NES RPG. My 2600 emulator is very far along. Right now, the project is a Kotlin project, but may switch to a different language so I am not shuffling so many languages. Once I have the emulator working, I want to develop a few 2600 games before going to the NES.

My research was using deep learning techniques for generating levels, but during research I found many different methods of procedural content generation and would love to spend time looking into these. To this end, I am thinking of doing an infinite platformer or two. If I am finished by March, I may do an infinite easter run as a prototype then start a series of Infinite LiteTux using different generators allowing players to provide feedback on the better generators.

My thoughts on where to spend my free time is not at all focused and if I am going to accomplish anything will need to focus on one or two of these ideas. Just trying to decide which ones so while I will continue to try to port a game a month, if there is any of the other plans I have that you think would be good to focus on let me know.