As usual, I’m taking the last post of the year to review my resolutions and see how I did.  Here’s the page pulled out of the sidebar: Link

Prototype and Playtest a Game/Mod – Pass

This was my first resolution, and probably the most ambitious.  I asked myself to do some actual game design this year and get it on the table for playtest.  I took the easy way on this one by doing two game mods rather than a game I developed myself, so I got a pass, but I am proud of the work I put out this year.

First, I playtested Eclipse: Ships of the Line.  This is a mod for Eclipse that I’ve been poking at for a while that adds a bit more to the missile system and added a couple other types of ships for purchase.  Generally, I think it turned out well, but it felt a little lost in the shuffle – there’s a lot possibilities in Eclipse and the few extra tech didn’t dominate so much that it was ubiquitous.  This was a bit by design, but I think stepping it up a little bit would help.  The battleships, on the other hand, did get a bit of use, so I was happy about that.

Though something I’ve talked a lot about already, my second project – to design a character for Warmachine/Hordes went really well.  As I mentioned previously, I had a lot of fun doing the design work on this, and I felt like when I was done it had a lot of polish: I had solid rules that had been playtested and adjusted based on feedback, I had fully painted models that had the look I wanted, and I had a set of cards that looked pretty good.

Play Through a Campaign – Pass

For my campaign play this year, I elected to play Android: Netrunner: Terminal Directive with a friend of mine at the shop.  As you may remember, I was really hesitant about picking this up because it was a campaign game and I’d been delinquent on the ones I have.  Still, I’m glad I picked it up, as it had some nice ideas and got me playing Netrunner for a while (something I want to do more of).

I still have plans to get through Rise of the Runelords, even if I don’t do so for a resolution.  I’m enjoying the game, I just didn’t really make time to play it once I had other things going on.

Assembly Backlog – Fail

In looking at my backlog, I think I just did okay.  Most of this got waylaid by the fact that I was assembling and painting Grymkin for most of the summer and fall, but there were other motivational issues as well.

Starting from the top, I did pretty well with my Kingdom Death: Monster models.  I have all the monsters and nemeses done and quite a few of the characters.  I’ve currently got a campaign going, so it makes keeping up on this a bit easier – it’s always worth having another possible model to play.

My Tau…  …Haven’t moved all year.  This is mostly because nothing really came up that would make me want to play them – the Thanksgiving game was going to be Space Wolves/Imperial Knights and I find it hard to think about just doing a pick-up-game.  There is one league going on at the shop currently, but…  …it’s got a few too many people involved for me to feel like it’s my thing.  Conversely, I did get more walkers on the table for the Thanksgiving game this year – I had 22 dreadnoughts and knights.

Firestorm Armada, like my Tau, also didn’t move at all this year.  I thought from time to time to do some work on these, but I find that the effort to get started is a bit higher than I would like (though this is true for painting in general).  I may need to adopt some patterns to help this next year, but we’ll see.

I did pretty good keeping up with my Warmachine/Hordes models that I bought this year…  …But not so good on my backlog from last year.  Mostly this is due to the fact that I was playing Grymkin weekly, and not playing Khador.  Still, I’m a bit behind on my Khador in general, so I’ll have to work on that.

Of all the things to finish, I actually did get my MERCS goal in.  I got the USCR and Kemvar all assembled.  These guys were pretty easy once I laid them out and started gluing, probably because they are the least complex models I have in my collection.  Still, it’s good to have them all done – maybe I’ll see about getting a game in at some point…

Read some Numerical Analysis Content – Pass

While I technically passed on this one, it was a low pass – I read my thesis and I Kelly’s Nonlinear Systems book, but not anything else.  I attribute this mostly to not making additional time to work with the topic, it was really only passively reading the subject matter.  However, this tells me that if I really want to get into thinking about numerical analysis again, I’m going to have to do so when my mind is more sharp, not when I’m trying to relax at the end of the day.

War game List/Card Game Deck Posting Tool – Fail

This didn’t get done, primarily because I wasn’t spending a lot of my time on my computer this year.  Looking back, I don’t think I did any personal coding this year – something that’s a little shocking as I look back.  This is a bit indicative of how I’m spending my free-time though, so we’ll see what this looks like next year.

Doctor/Dentist – Pass

This one was technically easy, but it still seemed arduous.  I think it’s mostly just that I don’t typically get a lot of value out of it, but the scheduling of it is painfully difficult.  Still, I got it all done and I’m not dying of anything and my teeth aren’t falling out (except the ones that are, which aren’t a problem) , so it’s all good.

Verdict

Four out of six resolutions complete, which doesn’t feel bad (it’s kind of like two out of three).  I’m most surprised by the fact that I didn’t get through my assembly backlog, but, looking back, it was pretty ambitious afterall.  That combined with the fact that I did a ton of assembly for both the Warmahordes league and the Thanksgiving Apocalypse game makes me think that I need to tune my resolutions a bit better for my plans next year (like, you know, plan to assemble the models I plan on using).