2023 Goals

What’s happened so far

Last month I talked about how things looked over 2022 in a retrospective, and where I had been planning on going. January hasn’t brought much change from that position (the day job having been hard wat work sucking up most of my time), but that was kind of expected given what was set up to be happening. But with everything coming and going, it also means that 2023 is looking to be a more productive year.

What’s happening next?

2023 is going to be the year that Books Get Done. Well, one book at least. It feels like everything is coming together, and now I’m in a place to be pushing things forward and over the finish line. I’ve gotten a lot of the smaller bits and bobs all done; it’s a matter of taking all the little bits and start actually building the final product. I’ve got the

In somewhat related news, the whole WotC OGL license thing has more or less come to a complete halt. WotC has (for now at least) pulled back from the whole idea of rolling out a new OGL and demanding it take the place of the original 1.0a version AND they’re pushing more of their content out onto a Creative Commons license. Now, this doesn’t really affect my plans for the short to medium term yet, it does restore a lot of stability to the overall situation. It remains to be seen exactly where Paizo takes their ‘competitor’ ORC license, and that’s the one that I’m going to care about since I’m looking at potential Starfinder™ compatibility. Though that’s easily a project or two farther down the line.

2023 Goals

These goals are approximately in order of priority and in order of precedence (IE have to do #1 before you can do #2). There’s some goals from 2022 that are coming back, but a some of them are going to be brand new ones as well. As before, some of them are one-and-done, while others are big projects. There’s a couple more tasks on it this year compared to last, but a bunch of them are more housekeeping tasks; easier one-and done things that can be pounded out sometime in the year.

So enough banter. On to the list!

1) Complete turn processing for all empires up to turn 175

So the goal in 2022 was to get to 175, and that was a bump up from 160. I’m going to try not to be TOO greedy this year, and stick with the 175 goal. That’s about 25 turns, at about two short stories a turn, so 50 snippets. That’s gonna be tough, but with how 2023 has been smoothing out already compared to 2022, it’s doable.

2) Update/Archive all the Sketch Sunday Worldbuilding

A carry-over from 2022, though one that got some progress done already. So the goal in 2023 is to finish backing up all those discussions into a Microsoft OneNote just to make sure that nothing is lost.

3) Finish playtesting and balancing for Scenario Book 1 – The First Contact War

I’ve launched another appeal on the discord server for some playtesters, as the last batch of people just disappeared into the ether, never to be heard from again. I’m hoping to get a few bites from people on discord, and I’ll be looking at running some playtesting at the local game club as well this year to help get some more testing done.

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

This year. This year. That’s the plan and the pressure. I’ve dusted off my task sheet and it’s been printed and put up next to my monitor as a visual tracking reminder. I’ve got most of it done, but it could stand for another edit pass before handing it off to someone for final edit.

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

This task is admittedly higher than it ought to be, as it’s more looking at the commissioned art and then pulling the drawing from it back into the universe’s design documentation and identification.

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

This task is sitting low on the to-do list for fairly obvious reasons. Need to be done writing and my own edit pass before the work can get handed off to an editor. Need to reach out to some of my friends/contacts, see if they know anyone. I’ve also gotten put in contact with some potential sources for this as well thanks to some of my family; not sure if they’re familiar with the industry, but it’s worth a check!

7) Rename systems/planets that do not fit the universe setting

I’ve done a pass through the whole space database checking planet and location names and gotten most of them cleaned up. I’ve gotten the most obvious and blatant ones at least. I’ve also gone through my stellar mapping/fleet board and updated that as well. The individual empire sheets have not been updated, but that represents more of a bureaucratic task that can be done as turns are processed. I’m going to keep this on here, mostly as a task reminder to go through the remainder of the outstanding work and make sure that nothing else has leaked through.

8) Look at the Solar Starfire Freight Handling Rules

Not started yet.

9) Set up a redundant deWulf data backup

The NAS (I keep typoing this as NAIS) continues to quietly chug along. I’m going to have to schedule some time into my day to actually look into it and see how I can migrate data over to it. Ideally how I can automate the process. Otherwise what’s the point of doing backups if they’re only done when you remember to do them?

10) Update the deWulf Story Document

The currently available deWulf story document on the website is, to be honest, really old. It was originally done as just a backup log, but with it out and on the website it does have some amount of actual attention. So the plan is to split it into three parts and then give it some short synopses on the website to explain (and more importantly warn) readers what’s going on in each of them. Mind you that’s not warn them of anything really questionable…. it’s more like my early writing is kinda… rough.

Which is another reason why this is so far down the to-do list.

11) Come up with a replacement for Sketch Sunday

Continuing on this vein, I was VERY happy with Sketch Sunday, and I’d like to continue on with this sort of project in some new vein. I’m out of sketches (at the moment) so I can’t just continue on with the same idea. But the regularity of posting was a very enjoyable if challenging task, and one that I think would be beneficial to continue. I just have to think up what to replace it with.