Man, 2023 was a wild year. We saw the rise of generative AI, claims that the United States government is hiding aliens, and probably many other crazy things that I forgot about. However, I have also done some fun things with my personal life as well. I learned more about programming and I have created many projects that I am quite proud of. You can check out a review of every game that I made in 2023 here if that sounds interesting.

Here are some of the highlights from my year:

I created a Terraria clone and I had a lot of fun creating it. It was especially fun to share my progress with my friends and the internet and this project actually ended up growing my YouTube channel quite a bit which was an added bonus. There are some things that I don’t like about the project in hindsight and I am considering in the future (probably not anytime soon though) to rewrite the project to be something better and perhaps something even bigger though I make no gaurantees.

I learned the Rust programming language and I can say that while Rust has some issues (long compile times…) it also has many positives that I like and I enjoy the lanugage. Some of the fun projects that I have made using Rust include Krab Kart, Scale The Tower, and Sandpaint.

I also learned Lua and created a game which allowed for enemies to be scripted in Lua (Galaxy Invaders), and created a game using the LÖVE game engine for the GMTK game jam (Sokobash) and also ported my Neovim config to Lua.

Overall, there are still many things that I want to learn (programming and non-programming alike) and I unfortunately didn’t set aside enough time (or I lost motivation or ended up getting distracted by something else) to learn these things. Hopefully in 2024 I can get enough motivation and time to learn the stuff that I want to know more about. I’ll also probably end finding new things that I want to know more about.

Hopefully 2024 will be another year of adventures and new projects (that are hopefully better than the projects that I worked on in 2023!). Also hopefully the world doesn’t end next year as well. 2023 was wild, but I have a feeling that 2024 will be even more crazy.

Anyway, have a happy new year and may 2024 be a successful year for all of us!