The 2023 recap!

A quick recap on my activity this 2023 (January 4th, 2023).

As the 2023 ends and we get started with 2024, it’s a nice moment to reconsider what I’ve been doing in the past year. Some of the events have been important and great, some have been sad or hard to overcome, but all of them conform my 2023 after all, and I would like to share them with y’all.

A personal breakdown?

During the first part of 2023, I was fighting for a ticket to a very important national competition of coding. And though I gave it all, in the end I lost in favor of faster, more experienced coders. Honestly, that left me a little unstable, and eventually that was reflected in my activity.

If you take a closer look into my stats (such as my GitHub skyline or directly from my profile), you’ll see my activity decreased drastically between March and Setptember. I’d say that’s not a coincidence, because between those months I was busy treating my complex emotions. Eventually, from September to now, after some professional atention, I felt much better, so I returned to my normal activity.

Diddi and the Bugs 3.1.1 dropped and v4 development started!

One of my best games I’ve ever made is Diddi and the Bugs, a shooter game that has progressed since its creation, back in 2021. Though this year we didn’t drop any major releases, I had the chance to release version 3.1.1, the final bugfix for the 3.x series.

In 2023, we started to develop a new major version: version 4.0 – containing brand new features such as skin packs, a new Special Attack, the introduction of Pyxel v2, and much, much more.

But there’s even another accomplishment that I’m so proud of. This year, two new contributors joined the project on GitHub! As a project owner/manager, I’m so happy to see my project receiving help from other people!

I finally cleaned up my website.

Yup, I finally made a deep refactor on my website. I feel that it now feels much cleaner, accurate, and it’s easier to navigate it. Since that site is a sort of “presentation letter” as a developer, it’s very important to keep it clean.

And I also created the log, this binnacle you’re visiting today. I hope to write a lot of articles this 2024!

I almost made it into the GameOff 2023 event!

My initial goal was to submit a game to this year’s GameOff jam. And I almost made it, and created an ambitious platformer named Diddi and Eli. But due to some personal stuff, my schedule was moved and I didn’t release the game. I even wrote an article explaining the reasons.

But the development of Diddi and Eli won’t be over. I hope to release a polished version of the game around this year, but probably outside of a jam. Also, I would love to join GameOff 2024!

And finally, I started my crusade of learning the fundamentals of AI…

This might be the most recent event. In December, during a vacational period, I started a course about AI fundamentals. I decided to take on that course because AI technologies are a quite relevant area in the world of programming. So i created an ai-fundamentals repo to upload my models as I create them, and to share that progress with the world.