So its a New Year, and as its been a few months of writing this blog I thought I'd do a pulse check.
In general I am happy with the progress. I have managed to keep a reasonable cadence with posting, completely finish one simple project, make significant progress on a couple of others and along the way I have significantly improved/refreshed my web development skills.
Of course, I haven't made any actual money yet - but then Rome wasn't built in a day. I feel that I have started building some momentum though, If I can keep it up then eventually I might get somewhere.
However, I also want to change the mix a little and have a little more fun with this blog. Up until now it has been focused purely on side-hustle web development, but I also have a few other interests that I would like to occasionally cover. Moving forwards, I am going to broaden the scope a little. The main focus will still be to somehow build a side hustle SAAS business, but I am going to be less rigidly focused on that one topic
My other interests include a whole bunch of areas. These include robotics, game development, science fiction, retro computing and even cabinet making. From now on, I'm going to reserve the right to post about anything that motivates me enough to write an article.
With that out of the way, what else do I want to achieve in 2025? There are a few things:
- Keep a reasonable posting cadence with this blog
- Finish more projects.
- Get fit.
- Have more fun
Points 3 and 4 are actually the most important. 2024 wasn't really a great year for me, and I'm not too upset to see the back of it. One of the motivations for starting this blog was as one way to start pulling myself out of a mental hole. I think this (and other things) might be working, but I want to go further.
Physical and mental fitness are linked, and my physical fitness has become terrible. Part of this is generic middle-age, but mostly it is just self-neglect. I need to change that.
Another thing I need to do is to give myself permission to spend time on things that I enjoy. The hustle/grind approach is just going to lead to more burn out. That is one of the reasons I am going to be less hustle focused with this blog.
So with all that being said, I have been working on another project for the last couple of weeks, but one that is more for my own amusement than for building a business. I've been developing a text adventure engine in Typescript, as a precursor to writing one (or more) web based text adventure games.
Why? For a few of reasons. One, I have a nostalgic love for these sorts of games and I think the world could use more of them. Two, it gives me a way to continue to improve my Typescript/webdev skills but have some fun in the process. Three, it will hopefully enable me to also improve my writing skills.
I don't think I have the chops to write anything long form at the moment, but I think that I should be able to manage a text adventure.
Anyway, this thing is now officially another Project, which means that not only do I have to finish it, I will also be posting about it in this blog.
One of the key requirements I am trying to meet is that the engine should enable an entire text adventure to be implemented as a JSON payload (e.g. with no additional coding). The engine should also be good enough to develop games as good as the classic games of the genre, such as The Hobbit, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy etc.
So far it is coming along nicely, and I'll probably dive into more depth in future posts, but for now here are a couple of teaser screen shots to end with
