What did I do in December?

I ate way too much food and slept a lot. But before Christmas, I had a whole December of somewhat exciting adventures. A lot of things didn't get done due to general end of year business, but here's what I released.

• I reviewed Kynseed, and damn. I could have played this for 100 hours or more before I reviewed it, but for one I don't get paid that much and I also normally wouldn't play this kind of game for that long. I like the game in general and was engrossed by it, but it was shallow and boring at times, and failed at some aspects of the Life Simulator game loop. It could have been exciting at all times rather than just compelling in the long run.

• I wrote a little opinion piece on how Kynseed is kind of a better Fable.

• I reviewed Wavetale, which was nice! Easy, simple, and fun. But the price is a bit much for 5 hours of easy, simple gameplay, which is a shame because it means I can't recommend it until it's on sale. I enjoyed it and I hope this team at Thunderful gets another chance.

• I reviewed Aka, which is a lot worse at all the things Kynseed got wrong about Life Sims. I did not enjoy this game even though it made me cry, which is a sentence. I almost backed this on Kickstarter when it came around, and to play the game and find someone's MS Paint scribbles in place of a properly drawn map... Most of the game is more polished than that. But there aren't good reasons to do anything in this game. If I wasn't reviewing it I might have gotten bored due to the lack of direction. It's important to be able to set goals that sound fun, and Aka didn't help me with that.

Outside of what I released, I took a full weekend off for the first time in a while, went to the doctor and hopefully resolved a minor health issue, and played a lot of Marvel's Midnight Suns, which I really love.

This year overall, I have:

• Reviewed 32 games

• Created 2 games

• Released 7 Youtube videos on my personal channel

• Done some work on my novel (I didn't track the word changes, but not as much as I'd like)

• Written too many guides and articles to bother counting

• And probably more I don't remember.

Next year, the plan is to keep up the reviews and crank up the game development, Youtube videos and novel writing. The novel needs to be finished next year, and now that my filming setups work, I'd like to try producing shorter scripts more frequently, as well as a big video every two months or so.

32 game reviews is a good number at about 0.6 reviews a week despite the downtime in between, but I want to make more than one Youtube video a month, or at least 13 in total. My main goal is to simply better use my downtime. When I'm not working, I sometimes get depressed and unable to do anything, and if I used even half of that time to work on videos, writing, and game dev, I could easily triple what I currently make.

A better balance between work and fun, plus an increased focus on my health, should let me do more while making me more happy as well.

I wish you all a good new year, and I'll see you again at the end of January.