Another blogpost before 2027! They said it couldn’t be done.
But yes, the main site has finally gotten a facelift after a number of years of being relatively barebones, just listing out projects in text. Now just about everything has some kind of corresponding visual. The work/professional projects have nice big hero cards showing image carousels with screenshots and a short description taken mostly from my own personal notes on my “Master Experience List”. I was also able to add some contracting work I did for Rebuff Reality back in 2020-2021, which I had nearly forgotten about until recently. The personal projects and games pages now have cards in 3-wide grids, again with accompanying visuals and more detailed descriptions of what in the world I’ve actually made. I’m pretty happy with it as it is now, and hopefully any future potential employers perusing my site will be more intrigued.
On the topic of employers, I’m currently still on the hunt for another full-time position. There were a few potential leads I thought might pan out, but sadly none of them have for various different reasons. I’ve made a bit of money from doing DataAnnotation work, but I don’t exactly want it to become my only source of income for the foreseeable future barring going back to retail or similar. I’ve been exploring some potential other paths: going harder on looking for game dev gigs, thinking about freelancing (which even though I’ve done it before makes me a bit nervous, but hopefully I can get past that if I choose to really hunker down and pursue it more). I’ve also started toying with the prospect of composing/arranging saxophone pieces for a bit of side cash, tapping back into my musical training from high school and college.
I’ve also revived my old game jam series! “MetaFest” has been rebranded to “ManiFest” (short for Manifold Festival) and I’m currently just a couple days out from launching the 3rd one! It’s been fun to start seeing some activity in the old Discord again, both fresh and familiar faces alike. I’ve also been entering into some other jams myself again, which most recently has led to a fun little dreamcore-adjacent adventure game called “afterparty”.
Those are all the biggest items I think. Ended up leaving this post partially finished last night so I’m gonna close it out this morning. Maybe you’ll hear from me again before the year is out!