First, let's look at what happened last year. I took a trip to Cairns with a few friends - two old ones and a new one. I was supposed to start on Sword Fantasy's basic game framework, but ended up coming short. Despite this, I've gotten a lot further with learning the programming required, although my game research has slowed down - owing to books being so costly in Australia. I did somewhat rewrite the first chapter of the story into a more cohesive more readable form. What do I plan to do this year then?
1. Finish a game engine. - Yep, the most ambitious goal yet. Complete a game engine. How ambitious is this project? I intend to build an engine, complete with graphics and sound - with fully scriptable maps. (I intend to implement fully scriptable AI at some point, but we'll see - highly dependent on how far my virtual machine coding has come.) Broken down, this makes it into several tasks: Get a virtual machine running (the most daunting, in my opinion). Get graphics running and reading data from scripts. Get sounds running and reading data from scripts. Learn how to execute scripts the multithreaded way.
2. Get a job. - Yes, I know goals 1 and 2 conflict. I'm not sure if my goal is to get a job for next year, or a part-time job, or just setting up myself a job. What I mean is actually getting into a tighter routine. I think getting into a routine where time is slightly tighter than it is now will make me more hardworking.
3. Cook more. - Time to save myself some money and learn a few more culinary skills. In addition, cooking actually gives me more time for programming. So go figure.
4. Program something for PSP. - Yep, thought I should give it a try. Chances are it'll be a Luaplayer program since I don't want to spend too much time working on the PSP when I should be working on getting stuff working in Windows. It might not even do anything.
This year, I think I won't expand the story any further, owing to spending more time on everything else. I think to me, the most important thing to do this year is expand my software portfolio while studying. I believe that it's time I go back to fullforce computer programming instead of lazing around researching games and RPG systems. It's time to finally build the engine the game is going to run on for real.