Oneaday Year 1 Retrospective

Wow, I actually missed the anniversary of my oneaday initiative. Instead I decided to talk about the Hauppauge PVR. But it was actually on the May 5th last year when I decided to post something every day. Ironically, I missed two posts this weekend. Which also explains why I’m far from 356 posts. This is actually post 303.

So what did I do a year long? Well, for starters, it took about a year to “finish” Monster Hunter Tri. The 3rd post I did last year was a first impression of that game. Little did I know that I would eventually be doing a successful weekly podcast about this game.

I can certainly tell what I did NOT accomplish in a year. I haven’t finished my game TRAUMA. This fact is the source of a great deal of pain, worries and embarrassment to me. Sure, I’m almost finished but then again, I was almost finished last year. It doesn’t feel like I did any progress there. The main problem seems to be the fact that my job is simply not allowing me to concentrate on my work as a game developer any longer. I was doing well in the beginning but recently, the workload has risen to 40h+ weekly. This is simply not something I can continue doing. I will need to change this in the following year.

On a more positive note, there have been some definitive highlights in the past 12 months. Here are some examples of posts that either turned out to be surprisingly successful or that I somehow ended up looking back to fondly.

• Monster Hunter Tri Diary 5 – How I killed the Barroth – I wrote a lot on Monster Hunter. The Barroth post remains to this day the most popular ones. It’s even one of the most popular posts overall. I’m guessing it’s because many people are having the same problem as I did there. On the other hand, the post pretty much nails the Monster Hunter experience for me. I also enjoy the little storytelling arc in there. Overall, perhaps one of my favorite posts.

• I’m Big on Lutetia – I enjoyed a lot of the space geekout posts. I think having secondary interests is important to keep mentally flexible. I liked the two Lutetia posts because they were about a genuinely spectacular encounter and included some really cool factoids, photos and charts.

• Why the Wii Hate? – Perhaps not exactly a masterpiece of blog journalism, but that innocent post still attracts a great deal of visitors. I think most of them are simply console war veterans seeking for skirmishes. As far as writing and content is concerned it is not my favorite. On the other hand, I still stand by the points I made and the list of good Wii games is still valid. I just wish they weren’t still on my backlog.

• Realistic Sci-Fi Genre – I like it when I can continue certain themes on this blog. The Realistic Sci-Fi Genre is certainly one of them as it echoes some popular pre-oneaday posts from this blog. lt’s an interesting little trend I want to continue exploring in the future. Perhaps not only as a consumer but as a producer? Let’s see.

Of course, these are just a few examples of many different things that happened. I started a plan to reduce my Backlog. I almost lost all my data. I went through all sorts of bugs and hardships working on my game. I wrote a lot of things on StarCraft 2. I got into some unnecessarily heated discussions about Apple products and participated in a different, much bigger Internet shitstorm (most popular post btw).

Considering this there are two things I certainly gained after just one year. First, I’m feeling much more confident with my writing. It’s has become much easier for me to judge the scope of a text beforehand and to consciously structure it. I’m also writing much more quickly now. The other thing is that the blog is getting much more traffic. Have a look.

The red line marks when I started posting regularly. The spike is where I posted something on the Penny Arcade controversy.

Before I posted regularly, there were occasional spikes of visitors but hardly anything serious. Right now, the traffic on the blog has risen to around 1500 visitors weekly. This is a solid figure.

The writing has become a natural part of my everyday life and I see a lot of positive things it has brought to me. I curious to see what the next year has in store. Hopefully a game release. I would like to thank you, my dear readers, for being my guests. Overall, it has been a pleasure so far and I pledge to continue posting this way.