2019 in Review

2019 has been a weird year full of things I didn't expect.  I won't write about everything but here's what we got.

Gaming
There was very little noteworthy video game playing this year which is unusual but my tabletop gaming ramped up.  At the end of this year we officially hit two and a half years for the Saturday bi-weekly fantasy game and started up a couple different campaigns on Sundays online.  That's had its own set of tradeoffs but is going well enough given the circumstances.  Here's hoping that nextthis year will continue going strong.

Articles
I did a lot of writing this year.  It started with Adventures in Mini Painting #2, rolled through some worldbuilding stuff and ended up with Filling Out a City.  I also hit 200 posts here which is an achievement of some kind.  I've wanted to do a bunch of this kind of writing for forever but never carved out the time to do it.  The additional research I did helped me improve my own worldbuilding, game, and designs, and served as a springboard for video making.

Videos
Through the latter half of the year I wrote, filmed, and edited 22 videos.  I learned a lot during that exercise and got to become very familiar with my various verbal ticks.  If all I got out of that effort was turning down the volume on those, I'd feel like it was worthwhile.  If other folks got something out of my ramblings, so much the better.

Other than wishing I'd done a better job with them, my only other regret was that these took sooooo much time.  I'd like to do more nextthis year given everything I've learned but we'll see.  I feel like there's more I want to say about video making and youtube in general but this isn't really the place for it.

Terrain
Shoe's 30 for 30 pretty much kicked off my terrain building hobbyaddiction.  I'd expected my Thing a Week to include more terrain but it didn't work out that way.  I've gotten some pretty good mileage out of the terrain I have in the Saturday game but I'm reminded that there's a bunch of stuff I need still.  During Shoe's 30 for 30 the focus was on speed and building fundamentals.  I don't expect to have many strict time constraints moving forward so I kind of want to push level of detail and quality in nextthis year's efforts.  Watch this space!

Painting
At the end of last year I wanted to bring a single fig to high (for me) quality and had started down that path.  I made some progress in January but never got back to it.  Shoe's 30 for 30 chewed up a lot of creative energy but the time constraint prevented large investments in any one thing which is why the figs painted that month look the way they do.  I was also extremely busy this year but that's usually true--it's about carving out the time and being deliberate in practice which I didn't do.  Worse still, the battle pods and Veritechs over the summer were a goddamn nightmare.  This really killed my motivation to hobby in the middle of this year when I did have time.

Pushing the level of quality is completely missing in my mini painting experience thusfar.  I've experimented a fair bit this year but got caught up in a lot of batch painting to meet an arbitrary number.  I hit the number but feel like I've lost some quality as a result.  While I do like batch painting, I'm not sure it's a good thing for me to do.  I'm really hoping I can carve off time to get better at this stuff in 2020.

Design
When I first wrote this section way back in the spring I had loftier goals for where my design efforts would land. Well, I didn't make those and my penance is that I've had to rewrite this section.  Life is hard sometimes.

I started down a path in late April to streamline my fantasy game or at the very furthest point, build a skirmish game with some of the same ideas.  Through the design process I ended up with a sci-fi game instead.  There's good and bad to that but being a completely different game led to some more creative solutions.  The first version of it ended up in a pretty good place that we're busy refining through play right now.  Some day there might be words here describing that effort if all goes well.

The really cool thing is that I started pulling some of those same ideas, now slightly tested, into the fantasy system.  Here too I made significant efforts to streamline.  Some of this has been rocky but I think it'll work out in the end.  This feels like a significant step in the design space--from very crunchy details to streamlined for playability that I wouldn't have otherwise gotten.  The other note I'll make is that I might think there's nothing really left to streamline but I've thought that twice already over the last three-ish years.

Fin
So that's 2019 in a nutshell, at least, the stuff I'm going to discuss here.  Tune in next year to see how 2020 went!

edit:  apparently I've been doing these for a decade including the two that got back-posted thislast year.  That feels like an accomplishment of some kind.