Before today, there was only one blog post on my site, from 2020, helloable.c. I’m pretty sure nobody has read it. I don’t know, I don’t use analytics, but I never advertised it. My primary motivation for even writing that was to combat imposter syndrome I felt at the time, even though already had 4 years of professional experience at that point. If I could offer a useful blog post, maybe I could be a “real” developer, I thought. Pretty silly reasoning, really! I had a draft for the longest time about using #define in C to implement compile-time templates, which I never finished because the quality didn’t measure up. Honestly, I don’t care to finish it.

Today, I merged my programming and game development related posts from two of my older blogs (and a private journal entry) so that I could start tracking my past. It made me feel kind nostalgic. I’ve been trying to make a successful game for the past decade as a solo developer, and I didn’t, yet. What I did have, was a successful eight years of professional software development, a fun time doing improv comedy, and great personal development. While I am allowing myself to feel nostalgia for the past and wonder what could have been if I sacrificed those things for developing a game, I do not regret it. Instead, I feel excitement for the future.

Juggling personal projects, work, friends, and leisure life is not easy. No matter, I set unrealistic expecations. I expected too much from myself. I started projects with much excitement and gave up on them. I felt guilt and shame for not following through. It affected my social life. If I was playing video games, out socializing, living my life, or even working, I felt guilt that I wasn’t working on my game. Not only was that an unhealthy mindset, the stress I put on myself to accomplish my goals was unproductive in achieving them.

If there is one thing I could say that I regret, it’s not writing more. Nate Silver put out a blog post a few days ago titled Always. Be. Blogging. which while I don’t care to be a successful blogger, inspired me to reflect today. I read my past blogs and merged them here, starting from over a decade ago. I’m excited that maybe one day, this journey, which has been a dream I’ve had since at least the age of 5 or 6 will be inspiring for someone else. I wish I wrote more about it. Documented or not however, I understand my past of starting projects and not finishing them is hardly unique even if it were better documented. Instead, I’ll just quickly take a look at what I’ve done in the past, and just make a promise: I’ll be blogging a lot more.

A quick look at the past decade of my personal projects

Punching Out Cthulhu (project name)

Starting in 2011 while I was in high school, This was my first serious attempt at making a video game. It started out Sure I’ve dabbled, but this time I was serious. When it came to coding, I struggled to make any progress. This game became my hyperfixation up until 2014-2015 when I started City Night. My plan started out as me making a silly mobile game about punching monsters based on punch-out. If I stuck to that, I think I could have been successful. Instead, since it became my hyperfixation, it turned into an epic story in my head about love, betrayal, loss , So… scope creep. Maybe someday I’ll pick this back up.

Peewees

I thought I would mention this because I found a reference to it when going through christianbaum.com on archive.org. I made a barely functional demo for this in 2013, and I lost the source code. This was originally going to be a lemmings / pikmin style management game. I probably won’t pick this up.

City Night

I started this game as a winter game jam game in late 2014. It was supposed to be a cute little NES-style adventure showing how hard it is to survive in a city without a support system. Had I stuck with the original scope of this game, I have no doubt I would be done with this. Like Punching Out Cthulhu, I didn’t, because my perfectionism refused to stick with the original scope. If you start at the beginning and scroll through older posts of this blog, you can see how things quickly got out of control of from what was originally a simple game.

I think I would like to finish the original version of the game in a game jam and also explore ideas I had later on.

Kat’s Dream

This started out as an infinite runner While my mind loved to try and sabotage it with scope creep, I actually did publish this to Google Play, (source code at Kat’s Dream), but it was quite bad, nobody downloaded it and it was delisted last year for failure to target Google’s newer Android API, so I don’t really count that. I might also pick this one back up some day with the thoughts I had.

Stray Kitty

This is probably the most successful thing I’ve done! It has 50k users on the Chrome web store https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/stray-kitty/pdiefgmeejbkamgippdjdchpgkdnelbl?hl=en and the source code can be found here. https://github.com/xianbaum/StrayKitty. Sometimes I think about expanding on this with more cat behaviors and porting it to other platforms, but I’m not sure, really. Funnily enough, I get offer emails about purchasing it all the time. The most recent offer was $5,000. I’m not going to do that.

I want to write more, but after adding all those posts to my blog and writing this, it’s almost 6am.