2017 look back

2017 recap and 2018 plans

So 2017 has been a pretty interesting year for me, so let's take a bit of a look back.

At the start of last year I was mainly focused on Xenoblade Chronicles, preparing for submitting to RPGLB. I also had a brief return to Zestiria, and Lightning Returns. The marathon run at RPGLB was a lot of fun, and I was really glad to have the opportunity to show the run off. I also routed "hundo" starting in December 2016 and finishing up my work around RPGLB, with a route completed up until doing super-bosses. This has since been picked up by some people along with a route made by someone else and you may actually see runs of it soon!

Also at the start of the year I was in the process of looking for a job, this didn't really go so well for quite a while (as any of you that have been in the same situation will know), but I did eventually manage to get a job as a Software Developer, starting a few days after I returned from RPGLB. I'm still working there and greatly enjoying it. This obviously means that since the beginning of June, I haven't been streaming as much.

In august after ESA I spent some time learning Rabi-Ribi, which I had a lot of fun with, and plan to get back to it soon with also learning some more categories. I think if I plan to submit anything for the next ESA, it will likely be this.

Since October, I've been mainly working on Final Fantasy XIII - All Missions. I've had a lot of fun doing the routing for this, and even doing runs is still enjoyable (outside of the first few chapters lol). I still plan to work on this to improve my time under 11 hours, as well as finish tidying up the notes and possibly planning to make a much more detailed document (á la Luke's FF10 notes/Lewd's FF13 notes) that go into more of the meta behind the decisions and routing choices.

Following on from this, At some point in the next year I want to go back to Lightning Returns FFXIII - NG+DASH, This was a very fun category to work on originally, but I only ever got a chance to do a single run of the category, and the notes could use some tidying up (and again the want is there to make a more detailed document for it). I think both of these longer categories are very fun to run without being unreasonable in length, and I would love to see more people get into them.

I've also spent time across the year on Fighting Games and fangames. I wont go into either of these too much since I tend to do then solely offline, but one thing I want to do is continue to work on fangame development as a creative outlet. However I know how slow I've been with doing this in the past, so no promises on a timeline. As for fighting games I'm still playing them, not as much as I used to with more free time, but it's still very enjoyable for me to spend time on them, I just tend to allocate that time into playing through my casual game backlog.

In other things, this last year has been interesting since we did the FF Relay twice. While they both went pretty well, there's definitely still some things to improve. The timer program we use needs a rewrite (especially since I now do this as a job, looking back at the code is fairly painful lmao), and we still need to work out what direction we want to go with the next one. However I'm definitely still willing to put in the work and continue setting it up.

There's probably loads of other stuff I haven't mentioned or missed (rando at least), but I feel like I've covered the main stuff. This year has definitely been a pretty major turning point for me with getting a job, and obviously I've had to adjust my expectations on what I can do with my time, so speedrun plans aren't completely extensive for the next year. Having said that, I'm definitely pretty happy with everything that I have going on at the moment, so I'm pretty content to continue on as I am.

TL;DR
2017:
 Did Xenoblade
 Got a job
 Learnt Rabi-Ribi
 Routed FF13 All Missions
 Did the FF Relay twice for some reason

2018:
 Work on FF13 All Missions more (sub-11, better notes)
 Get back to LR NG+DASH
 Run Rabi-Ribi more, other categories.
 Play more casual games.
 Improve the FF Relay timer program