A Year Long Journey

30-December-2022

This year has been pretty interesting for me in terms of the time spent trying to do and find some new things or skills or hobbies.
I tried a lot of new things this year and have planned for trying out more next year hopefully,

Initial Quarter of the Year

7th of January - 1st of March

I consider the start of this journey by 7th of January, because on this day I tried Pixel Dailies for the first time and just decided to stick with it for as long as I could. This was going fairly great as I could see my consistency in form of my tweets.

But the mindset of "Sticking With It For as Long as Possible" changed when I saw a tweet of a fellow pixel artist showcasing all of his January's Pixel Dailies attempts, I wanted to do that too but I was missing the initial 6 attempts of the Month. Then I decided to make sure to stick with it till end of the Month of Feburary. I did sticked with it until the end of Feburary but found it difficult to stick for longer.

On 1st of March I made a simple barrel for Pixel Dailies as the theme was Barrel, and after that my consistency in Pixel Dailies just disappeared into the thin air.

I also have a Blog on Making Pixel Art for 54 Days Straight.

4th of Feburary - 7th of Feburary

While keeping up with Pixel Dailies I also tried a Game Jam "Mini Jam 99 : Birds". It was a 3 days long Game Development jam. It's theme was announced before it started but limitation was announced just as the Jam started and limitation was "Can't Stop Moving". So I made a Topdown game with a Seagull as the player, who have to dogde poles on the surface of sea while keep on moving forward.

The Second Quarter of the Year

15th of May - 26th of June

In this period of time I thought to try to learn DSA (Data Structures and Algorithms), so first of all I made a C file, copied code for making and reversing a Linked List and tried to see if it worked (for no reason, even though I knew it would work I still copy pasted some code).

I tried doing DSA by myself for sometime, but it felt pretty boring, so on 3rd of June I created an account on Leetcode. Initially I tried choosing some random problems on Leetcode and try to solve them, but just 2 days later I joined "2 Weeks Study Plan To Tackle DS". In the beginning I was trying to solve any problem that I can and leave the one which I didn't understood, but changed my mind later and started looking on the internet for solutions of problems which I didn't understood and try to understand their solutions. And it worked fairly well, I was starting to understand more about Data Structures and how they can be used.

The Third Quarter

2nd of June - 13th of September

During the start of June I had started journaling my days before going to bed. I just wrote about the things I did which were productive and which were unproductive. I was fairly consistent with it and felt some positive changes in my productivity too.

I did for more than 3 months (104 days to be precise) straight. I eventually stopped journaling my days because of sudden change in my schedule due to admission in Higher Secondary School.

21st of July

I published my first Game made with C#, Round Pong. This game was made solely because I wanted to learn C#, I saw few YouTube Videos on how I can learn C# and tried to setup Raylib_cs on my system which is basically a wrapper for Raylib.

I also recorded a timelapse of the process and upload it on YouTube. Which was just my second YouTube video. I also open-sourced it just as it was released, which reminded me about how I can work on some open-source projects or open-source my previous projects I made for practice.

1st of August - 30th of August

I was working on my open-source project "Radius2D". I had made this project earlier in C++ but didn't open-sourced it. As I was looking for some project to work on GitHub and it's code was complete spaghetti, I decided to make it from scratch using C# while having it on a GitHub repository. I decided to name the repository "Radius2D" and upload the old files of C++ code and worked on C# to replicate it. After that I realized it's performance was bad and needed to be improved.

I have written a Blog on my experience of Working on my own Physics Engine.

19th of August - 21st to August

While working on Radius2D I gave myself a break of two days because, I joined the "Kenney's Jam 2022". Theme of the Jam was "Growth". For the Jam I made a game with Space Battle, where you have to fight Enemy Battle Ships and collect their Material to grow Size of your Battle Ship. I recorded the Time-lapse and uploaded on YouTube, and also open-sourced it on GitHub.

3rd of September - 20th of September

It was the time when I decided to build my own Personal Portfolio Website. I made it with the purpose of showcasing all my projects at one place, including the Games uploaded on Itch open-source projects on GitHub and even some pieces of my Pixel Art. I also had a thought that I might even write some Blog Posts.

I made the website added different sections to it, and though Blogs were not available in the beginning, I added them soon after it was deployed. For Pixel Art, it was not added for a fairly long time.

Last Quarter

24th of September - 25th of December

I have gotten admission in a Higher Secondary School, and am having little to no time for working on my projects. I decided to work on my projects only on Weekends. On those weekends I worked on Radius2D as well as my Website, I wrote the Blogs in that time, added some new features in Radius2D in that time, published Radius2D's Nuget Package and even added Pixel Art Section on my Website.

I have a Blog about Programming on Weekends only.

Working on weekends only

Conclusion

Goals for 2023