PJ's 2018 reflections

Hey everybody!  I've made a pastebin at the end of each of the previous years just to reflect on how things went for me, my speedruns, and my stream.  Even though I've talked at length about my year previously, here we go.  I'll try to be brief, but I will fail.

2018 was a really rough year for me from basically all aspects.  I lost both of my remaining grandparents in the first 3 months of the year, struggled with a few bouts of depression throughout the year, and the Twitch market shifted in such a way that really killed my channel's growth.  To supplement my stream, I was pursuing some other exciting options for the last 4 months and none of them panned out.  Just not good all-around.



On the other hand, my speedrun progress this year has probably been the best I've ever had.  I focused heavily on run quality over quantity this year, and accomplished some things I never thought would even be possible:

1. Dragon View "grand memory clobber" any%.  Thought to be so statistically rare that a full run would be unlikely to ever happen by anybody in any time frame.

2. Batman Forever 100%.  I literally did not even think this was even possible until I started with attempts, due to the nature of the percentage counter.

3. Bionic Commando NES 100%.  Perhaps the strongest speedrun I've ever done.  This is only like 6 seconds off of what I would call a perfect run with current knowledge.

4. Bionic Commando NES any%.  On the same day that I got the 100% run, I smashed the any% category; this run is 4-5 seconds off of perfect (with current knowledge).

5. ActRaiser 2 difficulty 202.  My current time is a 1:00:12 with only a single death.  My dream goal for this was to get a deathless run using safe strats, with a time of like 1:10:00 or so.  I never thought a deathless run would ever be realistic, but I assumed I'd have to make major concessions for speed in order to even try.  Instead, I made the run insanely risky and just brought my consistency up to match it.  I could elaborate for hours, but this run is ridiculously good.

6. While I haven't resumed runs of Robotrek yet, I accomplished my major goal with this: to reverse-engineer the entire battle system.  I've never done any serious work with assembly, so this was entirely new.  With no previous work, I was able to figure out the entire combat system, dump all the enemy/equipment stats, and build a battle simulator/calculator in Excel.  This let me run more accurate tests and completely revamp the speedrun route.  This was a long-time goal of mine and I'm amazed that I was actually able to do it.

7. Mega Man 3 and 7.  Certainly not the same level of quality of the previous accomplishments, but still worth mentioning.  Before my NES controller(s) broke, I was making really good progress on MM3 and I'm looking forward to getting back to it in 2019!  My progress in MM7 has also been great; I expect to keep pushing that until I'm in 2nd place RTA and first place by converted time.

I also was finally able to launch my website, after like 2 years of planning and tech issues!  I've been putting this to a LOT of use, and have a lot of plans for this in the upcoming year.  I'm really glad I was finally able to make this work, and that it has been a valuable resource.



Looking back, I have a lot to be proud of from 2018, but I still just feel terrible about it.  All I can do is focus on what is ahead; in 2019, I am going to be focusing substantially more on making supplemental resources for my games and speedrunning in general.  I want to make more tutorials and instructional videos for youtube, and expand my website to be a more comprehensive center for information on the games I've run.  This will still be in addition to the stream content, so progress will likely be slow.  I think I'll be making a Patreon in the near future to gauge interest in the alternative content and to supplement my Twitch income.

From a speedrun perspective, I'm going to return to some NES runs in 2019: Mega Man 3, JP Bionic Commando, and Solstice.  The Mega Man community is amazing and I've had a blast being involved with them, so I expect to spend a lot more time learning those runs and contributing to the community in the future.

I'm really upset at the direction that Twitch streaming in general is heading (focusing more on guilting/pressuring viewers into gifting subs, self-deprecating gimmicks, etc) and I have no interest in developing my stream in that direction.  My growth is really suffering as a result, but I'm going to continue trying to develop my channel in a way that is consistent with the quality that I and my community expect.  I'm grateful for all of you that have continued to support me and my channel over the years, and I hope 2019 is great for all of us!