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Goals for 2022!

3 years ago3,041 words

Here's a look at how well I achieved what I set out to in 2021, and what I hope to achieve in 2022!

For a few years now, I've written posts like "Looking Back at 2020", where I went over my general thoughts about how my life's been going, and all the creative stuff I'd done over the past 12 months, but this year the long ∞ look back over the past 2 or so years of Atonal Dreams development ∞ serves the latter purpose, and I'll summarise the life stuff here.

Much of what I said in the ∞ Looking Back at 2020 post ∞ still seems to be the same. I'm still mentally ill and isolated, still living with my parents. Still making stuff, but not much money. I don't feel terrible about it, though. I'd say I'm mostly content... right?

Sometime in the middle of 2019, I made a tool thing for myself which allows me to record my tasks and moods over the course of the day. I've at least mentioned it probably a few times in this blog before, as it's become such an integral part of my daily experience that I feel lost and frustrated when I can't chronically chronicle every feat or feeling.

How it works is that I have a palette of mood-related words, like "Calm" or "Depressed", which are each associated with a valence (positive/negative-ness) on a coloured 7-point scale (-3 to +3). All I have to do is click one of the words, and it records that as my mood at that moment. Takes like a second. (I can add new words easily.) For tasks, I enter a name and category, and press begin, then press another button when I'm done. The result gives something like this (this shows an archive of five days of activity and moods, from a particularly good week in April; usually I just see the current day):



Today [well, yesterday when I wrote this since I'm reviewing it today, but whatever], I quickly coded a thing that produces pie charts of these coloured moods for each month. It looks like this for 2021:




So I'm usually neutral (or ambivalent), but I tend towards negative moods more than positive moods, with the -2 ('Awful') negative moods being much more common than the +2 ('Great') ones. I also had a small but concerning number of -3 ('Abysmal') moods this year, and zero +3 ('Amazing'). But it's not all negative! There's a decent enough amount of +1 ('Good') moods in there, usually when I'm 'Focused' on some creative work, and more than zero glimmers of Great-ness.

So I felt that wasn't too bad, all things considered... But then I checked what the data for 2020 produced:




Hmm. Maybe it's not obvious from comparing those two images separately; here's a gif alternating between them:




Seems I had fewer Good moods and more Awful ones in 2021, and some months were dominated by those nasty purple bruises. So that's concerning. Looking back, I probably have been less productive over the last year, and more frustrated and miserable about my position in life. I get annoyed at how long Atonal Dreams is taking... then the poor moods from that make it take even longer. Annoying, how that works. And I've been regularly frustrated about being a 33-year-old man who spends 99% of his time alone in a small bedroom in his parents' house, and my step-dad's friends come over all the time who I avoid due to social anxiety, sometimes to the point of delaying basic needs like eating or using the toilet. Ugh. I don't enjoy being mentally ill, or living with an extrovert.

Anyway, I should keep this downward trend in mind when thinking about what I hope to get out of this year.



I wrote out some specific goals for 2021 in ∞ this post ∞, so I'll go through those:

Make at least £20k

I calculated (somewhat inaccurately, apparently) that I'd earned £12,862 in 2020, and hoped to earn £20,000 in 2021; less than the yearly wage for a mediocre job, but enough to be satisfying for me considering the autonomy and lack of social-anxiety-agitating obligations that the path I've chosen offers.

I got an app earlier this year which gives me reports for my various bank accounts, making it much easier to see how much is incoming each month (so no having to figure out what the Steam sales stats mean). Here's a simple table showing what I earned each month for the past three years (values in GBP):




I ported MARDEK to Steam around June/July 2020; before that I had pretty much no income (the sub-£100 values were presumably from advert revenue from a Four Temperaments info site I made years ago, and the 0 months are when it hadn't generated enough to pass the payout threshold). MARDEK and ∞ my Patreon ∞ are at least producing a relatively reliable - if fluctuating - amount each month now, and I'm immensely grateful for both, even though I can't help feeling concerned because of how much lower these numbers are than if I were doing pretty much anything else (plus they're on a steady downward trajectory).

So I made just over half of what I hoped for this year... though the £20k figure was largely from assuming I'd have at least a Kickstarter for Atonal Dreams out by now, which obviously hasn't happened yet. I'm hoping that it will in 2022, and that I'll be able to run it successfully enough to build a security net.

Speaking of my Patreon, I seem to get new patrons every so often, but I also seem to lose them at the same rate? Every time I check I see I have either 83 or 84 patrons. Which is a sizeable amount of people for whom I'm incredibly grateful! It's more than probably most solo creators for sure. I feel I should be doing more with it, though, and I'm not sure what.

Something that came up earlier in the year - maybe in a Discord discussion? - was the idea of adding new tiers for higher amounts, so people who have spare income can offer more. I've been thinking about that. On the one hand, I don't like taking anything, especially if I'm not putting out regular content like the daily or weekly videos some youtubers somehow manage. On the other, if the very idea of being a supporter - and it really would help me out a lot - is a reward in itself, then I could definitely add the option. Maybe I'll add tiers increasing by $5 or $10 or something up to maybe $50, and then later remove any that aren't being used? I'm not sure; I feel so weird about anything involving taking other people's money!

I've also been wondering what kind of content I could put out more regularly... but I really don't know. Games are my main thing, but they take forever. I also make music, so I've been thinking about that a lot, like maybe I could put the albums on YouTube where there's at least a chance of finding new people who might then support me on Patreon, but I'm very aware that as much as I love the stuff I compose for its own sake rather than for a game soundtrack, the lack of an experiential connection - and dissimilarity to popular genres - means it's unlikely anyone else will care much about my non-game stuff, and my game soundtracks are mostly for old, unfinished projects that few people have ever even played.

I suppose the only money goal I'll set for 2022 is "earn more than I did in 2021". If I fail to do that, well...

Release Atonal Dreams

Finishing Atonal Dreams seemed so achievable! But I vastly underestimated the time it'd take.

Port at least another old game

I didn't; I'll get come back to this.

Release some old music albums

Gasp! I actually did this! I compiled almost all of my old music into albums, and put them on ∞ a Bandcamp page ∞, which was personally satisfying if not financially lucrative (I think they only got a handful of sales between them). I managed to post one new album a week for a while, but ran out of steam before I could get to my most recently stuff that I've never released anywhere, but which I'm most personally proud of.

Compose a new album

I kind of did this?? I composed 17 pieces of non-game music this year (totalling about 42 minutes), many of which I'm very pleased with. Several - most? - of them are piano pieces that I've been having a lot of fun regularly playing, so I'd like to compile them together into an 'accessible piano compositions' album or something and maybe put it on both Bandcamp and YouTube (with sheet music, of course) in case anyone else is interested in playing some eccentric intermediate-level piano music. I've also got another, similar album of more amateurish, awkward-to-play piano works that I want to put out first though; maybe I'll do that in the coming weeks, for my own satisfaction even if nobody else cares.

Play at least 10 indie games

This doesn't seem like much, but I still failed to achieve it! Checking my blog posts and memories, I think I played the following indie games this year:

- ∞ Timelie ∞
- ∞ OMNO ∞
- ∞ Toodee and Topdee ∞ (I never finished or wrote about that one; I played it because the dev was one I followed when looking for others on the same path as me. Interesting concept, if not my kind of game. Seems to have done okay in terms of sales and reviews, which is good to see!)

Is that it? I thought there were more than THAT! I played these non-indies:

- ∞ Hyrule Warriors - Age of Calamity ∞
- ∞ Bravely Default II ∞
- ∞ Oddworld: Soulstorm ∞
- ∞ Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus ∞
- ∞ Kingdom Hearts FINAL MIX ∞
- Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories (never wrote about that one)
- Pokemon Brilliant Diamond (or that one)

So that's exactly 10, but only 3 are indies. I feel like there were more than that, though... Hmm.

Get into yoga (again)

I didn't do a single yoga even once!!

Get into lucid dreaming (again)

The thought's often been at the back of my mind, but it needs to be at the front of my mind for it to be fruitful. I think I maybe had a lucid dream once during 2021 though? I can't remember! Wait, I occasionally keep a dream journal and I must have written about it... Yes, I did, but I read it back and it doesn't spark any memories at all; just sounded like gibberish. A shame.

Move out for a bit

To quote from the old post I'm getting these from:



Well, that didn't happen, and I am cringing at least a bit remembering how hopeful I was about it! I'm still in contact with that friend - she's the one I'm supposed to be doing weekly video calls with, though she cancelled last week due to illness - but I can't see us living together any time soon, or ever. I've been in this same room all year.

Do some volunteering?

Ehhh... What's my excuse for not doing this? I don't know. Depression? I suppose I've just fallen into a rut, so there are these things that I'd like to do, that I should do, but just... don't, because it's so much easier to slide with the inertia and do what I do every day. Making changes is difficult, especially without a motivating force.

GROW 10 EXTRA ARMS

Annoyingly, I only grew seven, and three of them don't even work properly. Damn wizards and their dodgy potions. I did climb Mt Everest with them, though it was less a skydive off the summit and more a flailing, rolling tumble. This is stupid!

2022 Goals

So that was 2021. I suppose my goals this year will be fairly similar:

Earn at least as much as I did in 2021

That's not exactly a high bar! But I'll be more specific about how I hope I might achieve that:

Run a Kickstarter for Atonal Dreams

I really hope that I'm able to get to that point this year!! If not, that's a huge concern... I'm hoping that if I do do one, I'll succeed with it, but I'm aware of how much I don't know. So it'll be a big challenge that I'll have to figure out. I'm worried about it, but it's not like I can just avoid everything forever.

Also run another alpha test

If I can't even do this, then that's a huge problem. I'm expecting it should be within the next month or two.

Port at least one old game to Steam

MARDEK's earning money more consistently than I expected it would; it didn't just have a week one explosion of interest which dwindled to nothing immediately after, as is the norm. I suppose pretty much everyone who's buying it is doing so due to nostalgia, so I wonder whether similar nostalgia would motivate people to pay for a port of something else I've made.

The only things I can think of though are maybe Clarence's Big Chance as a separate release, and maybe some compilation of a bunch of my other old stuff... but I've written about all this before and it never led to anything. The biggest point of concern is that it'll take time - weeks, or maybe even months - that I'd rather be spending on Atonal Dreams, and I don't know if it'd be worth it because my old stuff's all unfinished. I suppose I should give it some more thought in the coming weeks, though.

Finish putting music albums on Bandcamp

I have several left that are almost ready to put up, so I'd like to finish doing that even if they're new music that few - if any - people will care about.

Put music albums on YouTube?

I don't know if there'd be any interest, but it's worth a try?

Compose 20 pieces of music

This should be very achievable as a personal goal, especially if I count music I'll be composing for Atonal Dreams.

Get used to posting on Reddit regularly(ish)

Hardly a discrete, quantifiable goal, but it'd be valuable for me to get into the habit, maybe? Currently it's less anxiety and more apathy that's preventing me, though. Hmm.

Get a new PC!!

I talked about this a few times recently, and got some useful, thorough suggestions... which I then neglected to come to act on due to indecisiveness. It's something I definitely want/need to do ASAP though.

Move Out

I've been thinking about it a lot, and I do want to try, at least for a bit... though money's a concern. I save almost everything I earn, and I could rent a place for something like £500 a month - I don't need anywhere big or fancy - but with bills and food on top, I'll be eating into my savings each month, most likely. I'll be 34 in February, though, and my lack of independence is one of the biggest reasons my mood's been so poor... But then would isolation make me even worse and lead to suicide?? That's a genuine concern, and I just don't know.

See a therapist

Maybe this would help with that, but I think I mentioned to the nurses at the brain hospital that I should really see one, and they said they'd see what they could do... but I still haven't heard back. I should probably go and ask my GP about it, but from what I've heard, I'll likely just be directed to online worksheets or video call sessions, which doesn't feel useful at all. Ugh.

Do some volunteering!

I have no meaningful way to meet people, and I never get out into the real world as I don't have a traditional job, so this is really the only thing I can think of to even have a chance of helping with those things. Though I can't imagine it actually being much use, since my problem with it in the past has been that local opportunities in this sleepy seaside town are mostly things like giving old people sponge baths, which would only have negative effects for me. Perhaps it'll be different if I move out to somewhere more populated? That's something I've been thinking about.

Play 20 games

That's double the amount I played in 2021, but I feel it'd help me stay motivated - and distract me from stressful focus on work - if I did. I need to make a habit of it. I should also make a proper list of things I play so then I can actually remember them all!




Bleh... Now that I write all this out, I feel so... bleak, I suppose. Hardly hopeful or joyful. My life's not where I want it to be at all. But then again, I could be trapped in a horrible marriage and career, which I'm not. My situation might not be ideal, but I suppose few are.

I don't know what hope there is of finding people to connect with - like a partner, new friends - so I haven't even bothered listing that. But who knows. I should probably be more social online at least, and maybe if I move out I'll be more inclined to be. We'll see.