It’s January 1st 2023, and here I am writing another retrospective blog post! Overall last year was very good, considering how horrible the prior two years were. Thankfully there were a lot of positive changes in my personal circumstances, but I just want to write a bit about my goals for this year. I had 3 big goals I wanted to accomplish last year, and I managed to get 2/3 of them finished. Not bad! The first big one being…

I Got a Game Development Job!

I’m extremely happy to be writing this – I finally got a full-time game development position at an amazing AAA studio! I accepted the offer back in October but I haven’t actually started working there yet. At the end of January, I’m going to be moving from Ireland to the UK to start my first full-time job in the game industry. Needless to say I’m very excited to start! I won’t be able to write or talk about what I’m working on due to the NDA, but I’ll still be working on some of my own smaller side-projects when I have time.

Wrote a 3D Scene Editor for my Ray Tracer

In 2021 I spent quite a lot of time working through the Ray Tracer Challenge by Jamis Buck. I talked about this before but essentially I used it as an opportunity to learn C++, graphics programming, Google Test and simple CMake. I was very happy with the results, but I mentioned this time last year that I wanted to extend my work and add a 3D editor to the Ray Tracer. I’m very happy to report that I did! You can see my post where I go into more technical detail by clicking here!

I’m very happy with how this turned out. Admittedly it’s a bit janky, but for my first attempt at something like this I think it could have turned out a lot worse! There is unfortunately some functionality not present that is in the Ray Tracer, such as CSG and material patterns. But after a refactor and cleaning up some of the main code, I should be in a position to finish off any missing functionality for a 0.2.0 release. However, that’s all hypothetical. For the moment I’m done with the Ray Tracer project, I learned a ton and got what I wanted out of this project. So yes, it’s not a “1.0” release, but I’m happy to say it’s “finished”.

Began learning 3D Art

Towards the end of this year I tried picking up Blender again, followed some tutorials and now I’m on my way to improving my 3D modelling skills! I’m still a very early beginner, but I thought it would be worth at least mentioning that I started to properly learn 3D around now. I first tried learning 3D at the end of 2020, but I decided to not continue at the time.

After finishing the famous Blender Donut, I’ve mostly been following tutorials from Blender Guru, Ryan King and Sickly Wizard to create some scenes. Here’s some of the work that I’ve done this year, nothing truly original and mostly created from tutorials, but still I’d like to show it off!

I’m particularly happy with the PS1 style desk scene thanks to Sickly Wizard, and I like the Skyrim Sweetroll I made. I don’t quite know how to make the icing texture, so I like to think it just hasn’t been put in the oven yet. The candy is from a Blender Guru tutorial, and the strange untextured ship/turret is from an unreleased game jam project I was working on.

A Year in Preview: 2023

I have a good feeling about this year. It’s going to be busy and very different to what I’m used to. To be honest, writing these goals feels over ambitious and realistically I don’t think I’ll accomplish all of them – but I’ll definitely try!

Move countries and work in the Game Industry!

This is definitely my big goal. It’s going to be strange for me living away from home for the first time, but I’m excited to live in a new city! This is something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time and I really want to make it work. I’ll be busy throughout this month getting ready to move to the UK and setting myself up for the rest of the year. My main priority this year is to do the best job I can in my new role. Everything after this is lower priority but I do hope to accomplish them.

Release a Small Game

So last year one of my 3 big goals was to release a game. I sadly didn’t manage to do so due to a few reasons.

• I decided to move away from using Unity and began learning Unreal Engine.
• I couldn’t decide on an idea, and the ideas I did like were way too over-ambitious. If I’m being honest, feels like I was procrastinating by trying to find the “right idea”. I did make a few prototypes though!
• Got sidetracked with a house move, renovation and some other commitments.

The big difference is this year I’m going to do monthly dev-logs where I write about the work I did month-to-month. I’m not promising that they’ll be super detailed or well-written, but it’ll be there to show off my progress and to stay accountable.

I have a few game prototypes I’d like to make, and I’d like to pick something interesting but small in scope. I’m giving myself a release date of around October to release the game. I hope to have a project outline done by the end of February and then I can work on the game throughout the year. Because of my full-time job and other commitments, the game will be slow to develop so I’ll need to keep the scope tight. If I don’t hit the October release date, then I’ll delay the game release to early next year so I can wind down in November and December.

Catch up with my Reading Backlog

During C̸̭͒Ō̶̮̣͒V̴̲̌̈́I̴̙̣̋͊D̶̠̄ I bought a lot of books that ended up gathering dust on the shelf. This year, I’m going to finally get through one of them!

Game Engine Architecture – 1165 pages

So, this book has just under 1200 pages. If I read 100 pages a month, I’d finish it by the end of the year. Now, I’m not planning on actually reading it cover-to-cover, but I do want to at least skim chapters and then read in-depth for important chapters. But my goal with reading this book is to get a greater understanding of what goes on under the hood of game engines. I like to know what my code is actually doing, and I think really studying this book will make me a better game programmer overall.

Now, if I somehow manage to get through that book quickly enough, I’d like to also get through these two as well!

A Programmer’s Introduction to Mathematics – 360 pages

I’d like to improve my graphics programming skills, and a large part of graphics programming requires a thorough understanding of Mathematics. I know enough for gameplay programming, but once it gets to more advanced topics and reading about algorithms written by mathematicians, I get lost. I’d like to become more comfortable with understanding Maths concepts so that I can understand what is actually happening intuitively, rather than copy-pasting someone else’s algorithm.

Effective C++ (Third Edition) – 272 pages

While I’ve been using Blueprints to learn the Unreal Engine API, I’m very shortly going to be using C++. I already have a good bit of experience after working on my Ray Tracer, although I’d like to “level up” my C++ skills. From reading online, this book seems to have a lot of examples of well formed vs badly formed C++ code.

Create 12 3D Renders

I also want to challenge myself to make 12 polished 3D renders with the purpose of sharing them online. On one hand, I’m considering pacing myself at around 1 render a month, or I could make them during November/December once I release my game. I mainly want to do fan-art stuff this year. They’ll mostly be small, simple props rendered in Unreal Engine, and I might throw in some animations and VFX too! This is purely to pick up a new hobby.

Finish Grade IV Piano

So I’ve been practicing the piano for the past few years, and I’m doing the graded exams through the Royal Irish Academy of Music (RIAM). This year I’d like to push ahead to the next grade, which is Grade IV. Although I’m moving to the UK, I’m thankfully able to do my lessons online. Eventually I’d like to compose my own music, but perhaps that’s a challenge for next year!

Relax, don’t burn out!

So yeah, I have a lot of plans for this year and it looks like I’ll be very busy. The most important thing however is that I don’t burn out. If I manage to just live in the UK and do well at my job and get nothing else done then I’ll consider this year a success!

So that’s it!

That’s my post. Another year came and went. I’m really looking forward to moving to the UK, working with the new team at the end of January and finally “officially” being part of this industry.

I hope everyone who read this had a great New Year and I hope you all stay safe and stick around for next year! Thanks so much for reading ❤