December 2020 Year-End Sitrep

2020 has been nothing if not eventful. COVID-19’s knocked absolutely everything for a loop. Working from home, massive shifts in freight logistics and scheduling, big changes to safety operations, and of course the whole mess with social distancing. On one hand it was a tough set of transitions, but I won’t lie: it offered quite a bit of opportunity as well

What happened in 2020

The early months of 2020 were mostly focused on finalizing a lot of the bureaucratic cleanup that had been started in 2019. Getting the last empires set up on reasonably current spreadsheet versions, and rolling turns forward. Initial plans were scheduled to go set up the big 3^rd Battle of Elysium sometime in the late spring. Plans for attending Gencon were also getting finalized at this time.

When the move to working from home hit in March, this forced certain changes in priorities. The original plan of running 3^rd Elysium at home evaporated as social distancing requirements slotted into place. After a lot of waffling, Gencon as well found itself being cancelled, and my summer more or less ceased to exist. As the situation became clear, work got substantially more stressful, and outside of some writing snippets, not too much was done until August when I was scheduled to go to Gencon. Instead of using that weekend as a time to get Starfire stuff done, it was a week where I literally decompressed from all the madness that the early part of summer had dumped like a summer rainstorm.

Fortunately all the stress that had piled up dissipated in September as several large work projects completed themselves successfully, and that drastically reduced the amount of stress. Honestly, it was like night and day! Over summer I had sent out a few commission requests to get some more art done, and with some spare time I worked on following up with those artists. That got a few gears spinning back up to speed. Finally November rolled around and I was able to take advantage of all of that prep work from the first half of the year and actually run 3^rd Elysium! It took a few days, but in the end it was done and complete… mostly!

After that, the rest of the year is perhaps best described as anticlimactic. Some writing, some following up on one thing or another, and squaring away some more notes, really. After what I’ve been through in 2020 however, anticlimactic is about the best thing I could’ve wished for!

2020 Goals

So how did I do? What got done on the 2020 to-do list, and what remains?

1) Push the turn processing up to get everyone lined up and done 140

Completed!

2) Set up and run the 3rd Battle of Elysium to a conclusion

Almost completed! The battle itself is done, but the aftermath still needs to be run. But that’s easily an order of magnitude less complex.

3) Do a full overhaul and update of my map (as seen on Fleet Management Mk2) so it’s all on one well-organized map WITH space to expand

Mapping software is installed and patched up, but work not completed. This is going to be carried on to the 2021 Task List.

4) Finish the writing work for Scenario Book 1 – The First Contact War

No real work done here. This is going to be carried on to the 2021 Task List.

5) Go do a second pass on the artwork for Scenario Book 1, incorporating new details and design concepts over the past year

This has been moving at a reasonable pace, mostly thanks to the talented Devyash AKA D1D2M3, who has been taking some of my 3d models and sketches ad making them look properly impressive. He’s already completed one piece, with the second well on its way. Once these three pieces are done, I’ll have a good idea on how to do a proper detail pass for the actual 3d models. So while the work to actually do a second pass hasn’t been done, a large part of the preparatory work has been.

6) Start fishing in my contacts to find someone who can do proofreading for Scenario Book

I’ve done a few light searches to look for some potential editors, but nothing really serious, as other things need to be done before this gets fully actioned and completed. It’ll be carried on to 2021.

Coming Soon! 2021 Goals

I’ll be putting a new list of tasks together for 2021 soon enough; It’ll be carrying over a bunch of ones from 2020, along with a couple new ones to continue improving things!