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Thing A Week

I like New Years resolutions. Sure they’re kind of cheesy and I always tend to make similar resolutions each year (run more, get better at guitar, write more music, update Mount Saint Awesome more regularly, etc.) but I still enjoy the excuse to take stock and think about things I want to be doing.

A lot of what I want to be doing is making things and in order to stay focused on that I’m going to steal an idea from the brilliant Jonathan Coulton (of Code Monkey fame!) and try to do A Thing A Week. While Jonathan did this entirely with songs I’m going to branch out to include almost anything that I can create within the 1 week time frame. This might involve building a guitar pedal or brewing a beer or making some art or creating a small web app or piece of software or even… writing and recording a song. I have a bit of experience with this schedule from the early days of Mount Saint Awesome. Back when I first started the comic I was VERY dedicated to posting a comic every Monday and I stuck with that schedule for over a year. It really helped me improve as a cartoonist. Here is the first comic I posted and here is one of the later plot based comic I posted (this was less than 1 year of comics, but still a noticeable difference.)

The first thing I’m going to try is building an HTML5/JavaScript game. I’ve been doing web development for a long time now but I’ve never built a game and it seems like a good excuse to play with some new HTML5 stuff, plus I’d really like to get more serious about JavaScript. If all goes to plan I will have a game to show off here next Monday!