2016 Goals Part IV:  The Projects

I didn’t finish a number of projects on my list in 2015.  I’m under no illusions that I’ll finish all my projects in 2016, but I’m going to try. 🙂

I avoided quite a few personal projects in 2015 – I needed to be careful adding too much to my overflowing plate of things to get done.  Some of them are still on my mind – and I figure if they’re still around in my head, it’s worth digging deeper on them next year.

2016 Professional Projects

Some of the stuff to get done are professional projects.  A quick overview of some of ’em I still need to finish up:

Tracy Dunn Books series site:  supposed to be a quick project that stretched out a bit longer than planned.  Some of that was my schedule, some of it was waiting on customer deliverables (which, for marketing materials, often runs longer than the customer thinks it’s going to – got marketing text is often hard.  In the case of a book series, it has to be appealing to the target audience, can’t spoil the plotline, and has to be strong,) and that “ah ha!” moment where it all comes together in my head in an appealing fashion took a while.

Beaver Lake Campground:  this is just finishing up a reporting system for a WordPress based reservation plugin I wrote.  Getting close to done.

Speak Easy Specials:  a complete backend, website, and app.  Currently the most active project on my plate, and the release is set for early 2016 (end of January, beginning of February.). With this one, I started out as a consultant for the Kickstarter, and eventually took over development at the customer’s request.

The project is pretty much a complete redesign, removing a lot of visual cruft from its original design, and simplifying it down to fit the customer’s true vision for the project.  It’s on of the highlights of my work from2015, in my opinion, and I’ll be really happy to see it released into the wild 🙂

Note: linked site is actually an old test version.  The development version is “hidden”.

Jumpman Forever:  the 1.2 release has been taking forever.  Some of it is my schedule, some of it is the need to “get it right” before it hits Steam, iOS, and Android platforms.  Complete overhauls on areas like the menus, controls systems, etc. have eaten a lot of time.  But, I’m loving the results so far.  However, Jumpman Forever won’t be “done” in 2016:  there’s still two years worth of updates to go after I release 1.2 (longer, if it should happen to gain enough of a user base.)

Crucible:  a lot of its work is deriving from work on Jumpman Forever.  Stuff like the menus are reusable, multi platform pieces I designed with the idea of reusing them on Crucuble. Handy that way.

One cool thing is that the extra time allowed me to further refine the design.  Now, I’ve got a project that has the potential to refine two genres of video games.  If it has any success, I’ll be interested to see in what ways the game ends up duplicated by others.

Advanced Mobile Healthcare:  Finish up their website – they put it on hold for a bit, while they decided what changes they might potentially be making to the company.  That ended up being a good choice – they offloaded a remote location they had, so no need for a lot of the extra information.  Most of what I do for them is desktop support and networking, rather than my usual web dev.

League Sports Page:  While I haven’t talked about it a lot, I actually own half of another startup, League Sports Page.  I’ll be talking about it more in the future, but the best way to describe it is a simplified Wordpress designed for sports leagues to offer as a service to their teams.

Wichita Developer Lunch:  The site is ready, it’s time to start marketing the hell out of it.  When I have some money (which is a problem, since it’s supposed to be part of my revenue streams to prop up development time on the games and on League Sports Page.

Most of these projects are towards the end of their development, and most of them have already been paid for, or have only their final completion payment left on them (the smaller payment.)  I’ve got quotes out there for more projects, but it’s a wait and see thing.

2016 Personal Projects

Not everything I want to get done in 2016 is professional projects.  Some of these are my little way of changing the world – not that I’ll actually accomplish it, but tilting windmills can be fun.

Sex With Davis:  a web series on the science of sex, misconceptions, etc.  I’m basically ready to do it, I just need a place to shoot at.  All the episodes are broken down into bite-sized bits about sex, usually 5 – 7 minutes long.

First Geek Congregation: somehow, someway, I want to get FGC’s tech base updated to something much better.  Right now, we’re running on a Windows laptop that’s underpowered, using Google Hangouts straight up (no extra encoding) to record it from a Logitech webcam, and using the mic on the Logitech for audio.  I have no way of flipping slides into the video stream, the quality of video is pretty bad, the quality of audio for the audience is horrible (since it’s interactive), etc., etc., etc.  We need some serious upgrades (and those upgrades also roll over into Sex With Davis, though it’s not “live to tape”, so I don’t have to worry about some of it as much: it’s easier if I can insert effects on the fly, but I can do it in post if necessary.)

I think what’s going to happen here is shoot for about $3,000 in crowd sourced funding.  Not sure if I’ve got that much clout built up with FGC yet, but we’ll see what happens when I try.

Writing:  Yes, I’ve got books in development still.  At some point, I’d like to finish up IZ and “Hero” or “Villain”.  IZ is actually the priority one, since it’s the one most likely to get completed. 🙂

The Car:  The car needs a major overhaul in a few areas.  For that, I need some money, and time in a garage. 🙂

The Movie Project:  I’m working out how to pull off doing a movie this summer.  Full length, straight to YouTube movie.  I’ve got part of the cast, and part of a script ready.  This is something that’s been on my list for quite a while now, and I’ve managed to get most of the script set up so it’s primarily guerrilla shooting in various locations, but the extras and licensing for two days worth of shooting for one section of the movie is gonna be an issue.  I could change it, but it ends up being a lot of the cornerstone for the story.

The genre is horror-comedy.

2016 Blogging Projects

Of course, there’s always the blog on here, and I’d really like to speak more often on here.  I start lots of stubs of articles, but never finish them up.  I’d like to go back and finish some of those.

One of them, though, is a memorial article about Jeff.  I’ve got a good chunk of it, but it’s not easy to write.  There’s a lot of territory to cover, and the wound is still raw from his death.

Midnight Ryder Technologies is going to be getting some blogging love, too.  I’m going to finally start doing what I show my customers to do:  use blogging (of useful or interesting information, rather than what I post on here) as a way of driving more traffic to the site.  Mostly, the content is game development and tech.

 

Now, when I write this all down, it seems like a lot.  But a big portion of the professional list goes away in the first couple of weeks of the year, and the rest of the list is longer term, slow burn projects like the blogs – they take up a small amount of time every week, rather than being a big push.

Which, hopefully, leaves me plenty of time to do things like working out, and accomplishing my other goals.  But, according to Ghostbusters II, I’ll need to get it done before Valentines this year. 😉

Only one more goal post to go… 🙂