2024 was a fun year full of big events and travel plans - both with friends and family. Traveling to new places has definitely changed my perspective in many unexpected ways; That, and perhaps getting older, has subtly shifted my approach to living life and spending my time. To contain it in a single word, I’d like to start living my life in a more intentional way… but I’ll start off with some reflection first!
Overview
Travel was a big theme this year, starting with a small Toronto trip at the start and immediately following it with another Toronto/Montreal trip with my family. For the summer, there were both small local trips like Seattle, as well as completely new places like going to San Francisco for the marathon.
The autumn season lead me to Hawaii, and with less than a week break right back to Taiwan for three weeks. I was working PST hours on that trip, so the entire thing was pretty brutal and I definitely missed a few meetings… To close the year out, I’m writing this post from Japan where I’m traveling with my family again, and then heading to Taiwan together after.
Between all the events and traveling, I’m also happy with the amount of time I was able to spend enjoying my hobbies and building out my projects. Between gardening, running, bouldering, cooking, drawing, music, and making games - I’m grateful for being able to spend so much time pursuing things that I enjoy!
Projects
This year, I mostly focused on one big game project that (surprise, surprise) has not really gone anywhere. Such is the cost of building with my own game engine… However, I did set up a lot of the engine structure and towards the end of the year I decided to pivot to a much smaller scoped game, which I’ve been progressing a lot better with.
I didn’t end up getting very far with any non-game related projects either, I gave up on my programming language fairly quickly and also couldn’t spend enough time drawing to work through the art book with project ideas. I even started sketching less towards the middle of the year as well, not sure where the rest of my time went if every project started slowing down…
As such, I’m trying to live with intentionality as the core theme of my next year - being more intentional and deliberate with how I spend my time. That’s not to say I’ll plan out every minute of my day, but rather that I should really focus and decide to do things rather than just floating around and doing whatever.
Work
Work has really slowed down over this past year - It’s been quite a while since I’ve joined my new team now and it’s getting to the stage where I’m comfortable enough to let myself stagnate a bit. There’s not a lot of learning anymore now that I’ve become somewhat proficient in Unreal - most of my day to day is just tinkering around with our legacy code base to satisfy whatever new needs the designers have come up with.
I did end up contributing a lot to some “extra-curriculars” at work; Along with a few friends, we put together a lot of different workshops, events, and talks within the studio! We were able to generate a lot of interesting ideas and discussions and connect a lot of different people together, which I was extremely proud of! That is definitely something I hope to be able to continue doing.
Similar to above, my main takeaway is to be more intentional with my work as well. I’d like to make sure I’m either learning something new or doing something meaningful with my time, rather than just loittering around and mindlessly churning through whatever work is thrown at me. This might require me to step out of my comfort zone a bit in terms of communicating to senior team members and leadership, but I’ll try my best to take that step forward!
Misc
I achieved a few big accomplishments with my running this year, starting with setting my 10k PR during the sun run in may. Although the San Francisco marathon wasn’t my best time, it was still a huge accomplishment for me. Finally, I finished off the year by running (walking) 10k every day of November for the #Movember campaign, which was WAY tougher than I realized. I’m really proud of everything I was able to achieve with my running this year!
Another really big step up for me this year was simply just hanging out with my friends more - from bouldering and going to cafes together, to big parties and clubbing; I had a blast spending my time with everyone this year, and I’ve definitely learned to balance friend time with my own personal time a lot better this year.
Art wise, I started off the year pretty strong with my drawing and sketching, but it started to fall apart pretty quickly once I started traveling more. I didn’t get very far with my digital art either, just a few random paintings here and there - I wasn’t able to stick with any persistent long term projects… I’d like to blame my small space at home and the amount of friction in my digital art setup, but all of that really comes down to making excuses. This, again, comes down to intentionality - I’d like to throw away the excuses and just commit to sitting down and drawing whenever I decide to.
Finally, I also get really into gardening starting in the spring and throughout the summer. I’m especially happy with the peppers that I was able to grow, I had a really big korean chilli pepper plant and a few small thai chillies - these all produced nicely and I cooked them all throughout the season! Other than that, I planted some other random veggies as well as some flowers, and was especially with 3 heads of super delicious lettuce that I shared with some friends. Accidentally let some kale and cilantro bolt, but that just meant a have a ton of seeds to grow for next season now! Very happy with how things turned out, and I’m excited to grow more things next season!
Goals
A common theme I have with my yearly goals now is that I NEVER hit them towards the end of the year. Looking at last years, I think the only ones I can sort of justify hitting is basic korean conversational skills, and hosting more cafes/dinner parties. However, these goals were never meant to be strict and acted as a good guideline for me to live the year.
In the same spirit, I’d like to list a few goals that I want to achieve this next year - again with no expectation of any of them being completely met! The overarching theme of the year is to do things more intentionally, and with that foundation I hope to stay a bit more focused on my aspirations:
- Make a game demo
- Make an animated short film
- Korean conversational skills
- Finish 5 books
- Start consistently clearing 4 hexes (bouldering)
- Run a sub 4 hour marathon
- Work on a technical project (probably a renderer)
I’ll keep it a bit more shorter this year to allow myself to focus more on the things that are here, although each of them can be broken down to quite a few things already… I’m already getting excited thinking about all the wonderful things to come in the new year, I’ll work hard to make 2025 the best year ever!