2022 Reflecting on a year in life & game development

2022 ends in an hour, and new opportunities open. I am filled with optimism, pessimism, fear, and excitement. A walking, talking contradiction of life at your service.

Gratitude

I am greatful for so much in life-I have health, a great job, family, two new nephews, kittos of my own, friends, and an incredible community of people passionate about some of the same things as me.

Over this last year, almost 300 people joined the Mach engine Discord sharing in the vision of Zig game development with me. I cannot express how thankful I am for everyone who has participated, whether as an observer or an avatar image I recognize on a daily basis.

I want to give a special thanks (in no particular order) to:

Ali, Lue, TUSF, Ayush, konsuko, Apple, Sander, Bitron, kchambers, squirl, mitchellh, unevenprankster, Snowminx, LittleRat, rasmusgo, Citrus^BrCr, C-BJ, desttinghim, geemili, jackji, kamidev, mattnite, michal, rbino, renerocksai, Spex_guy, and Zargio

There are probably others I’ve missed, but many of these folks have either believed in me, personally been an inspiration to me, or have contributed seriously to making my dreams one day coming true. Seriously, thanks for being here.

The waves in life

Although I am incredibly thankful and count my blessings, I also want to emphasize how incredibly challenging this year has been.

In personal life, I lost one most dear to me-seeing first hand what aggressive cancer looks like. They say time heals all wounds, but time is also infinite-and our intersection of it small, fragile, and temporary.

In social life, I’ve failed spectacularly in both embarrasing and regretful ways while trying to help friends. I’ve also had people I thought were friends let me down. I’ve made new friends visiting places I never thought I’d visit in life.

In professional life, the economic shift & other factors created one of the most challenging years in my career, personal opportunities destroyed and new ones created. It’s been a wild ride.

Climbing a mountain, half way up

In my personal, professional, and open-source work.. I expect next year to be at least twice as hard as this year was. Along every axis, there is evidence to suggest this will be the case. I am fearful of whether I am prepared to manage it.

The challenging work year has led to Mach development going far slower than I would’ve liked. In my life there are few things that I view as more important than this long-term dream I have with developing games-so this has been weighing heavily on my mind.

Mach development won’t be the only challenge I’ll face next year, but I expect it to be a large factor. I’m both excited and terrified for what will happen next year.

Resolution

When I was a child, my parents said for a really long time I couldn’t speak, then one day just suddenly I began to speak full-form sentences with great fidelity.

Looking back, I think this past year has been a catch-up term. It’s brought me more in sync with my reality on multiple dimensions. It’s made my optimism into a clear picture of what must be done to execute.

This year I will continue that trend of synchronization with reality, which is why I won’t make any promises or guesses about what comes next. The only promise I’ll make is to tell you what has happened once it does-my mission is to make things happen so that I have a reason to speak.

I hope you’ll wait to hear my voice.

I’ll be here until I’m ready to share my voice next. Thanks for staying tuned.