Well here we are at the brim of a new year!
I’m sure we have all started and finished many projects in 2014. We have learned and grown much as developers.
Personally, I have achieved so much more than I expected when 2014 started!
This year my goal is to top any past achievements by completing a full fledged game that is worthy of a player base.
How much have you grown? What are your 2015 goals?
I’ve grown substantially over the year I think. Mainly in just raw programming skills, I’ve dedicated a lot of time to learning and I’ve probably quadrupled my skills from what they were back in February when I started project “SixtyGig”, then moved on the Retro-Pixel Castles in May. It’s been a crazy ride, I’ve spent (easily) 8-10 hours a day, nearly every day since February advancing my programming knowledge, and it has finally started paying off as of October. 
My one and only goal:
Finish and move Retro-Pixel Castles out of Early Access before 2016. 
As the year ended I realized my full potential (because of tafsj). I wish to show my ability and polish a different kind of game. Every time I started a project and got into it, someone on JGO had already created it and better.
This is exactly how I’ve been this past year as well. The progress shows!
I learned most of the important things about OpenGL, improved my math skills (but quaternions are still hard for me), started learning how to make music, learned (slightly more than) basics of Ruby, Python, Lua, C#, C/C++, and hacked together an interpreter of a little “language” I made. Pretty successful year, as far as I can say. I learned a ton of stuff. I still have a lot more to learn, though!
And, most importantly, I joined the awesome community here!
Next year I plan to make my project be an actual game (rather than only a rendering engine with some input (porting to LWJGL 3 took a little time)), and bring it to what could be considered an alpha.
In 2014 I put 3 apps on Google Play, wrote an AI system and got terrain generation working the way I want it. I figured out what games I want to make, came up with a solid new game concept. I invented a new markup language and the essentials of a 3D modelling language. My goal for this year is to get to 1000 downloads of Verbal and to get to a playable demo of Fog.
Is Verbal a free app? I’m not in the mobile market, but isn’t 1,000 downloads a bit low for an entire year? That’s only around 3~ downloads a day? :o
In 2014, I gained a lot of knowledge but also wasted a lot of time trying to build half-assed frameworks and tools rather than building a game. My main learnings from 2014 are:
So for 2015, I have the following goals:
I think that goal is based on current download counts. From November 29 - now there were 50 - 100 downloads, so multiplying that by 12 is a pretty reasonable goal.
I need to iron out some bugs, add a third game mode, and add some social aspects, then I will actually do some promotion of Verbal.
In 2015 I want to actually fully understand how to use Opengl , it’s fun to get into. I also want to stay motivated on my current project SOLIS , development has really sped up as java begins to come back to me, I have also gained a lot of understanding and thinking about efficiency when programming (but not premature) to make my project achieve 2000fps constantly instead of ugh 100.
I do think one of the things I need to work on this year is with my geometry , I currently struggle when in tutorials they give normals and all these other values that I have absolutely no clue about.
The main blockage for this will be my GCSE’s and transition into 6th form I will have a lot of time during the summer (12 weeks I believe) but during that I am going to learn electronics as im doing AS and A2 courses on it plus general stress from other attributes. I do hope to get my current project to a standard so that I can sell it so I can help with tuition fees.
It’s going to be an Ok year with a lot of ups and downs but yer it will be good for game development.
At the start of 2014 I was just beginning to learn Rust. By now nearly all of my projects are written in it. I’ve a written a library that gets rid of lots of OpenGL boilerplate (through a clever compiler plugin that generates shader/vbo bindings from the fields of a struct) and an entity component system framework, along with 2 games for Ludum Dares.
Additionally, I did a major refactor of Paint.JAVA (now Spade), and the framework is hopefully stable enough to support a 1.0 release as is (editor functions on the other hand, have a bit of work to go).
Next This year I hope to get Guardian (rewritten in Rust) to a nice playable state, release Spade 1.0 (and hopefully a few versions after that).
With my new PC I have a graphics card and drivers that properly support OpenGL 3.1+ (Before I was stuck on 3.0), I should be able to learn a few more modern OpenGL features.
Non-gamedev related I want to focus a bit on my fitness. I’ve started jogging 3-6km on some mornings over the last month or two but I think I can do better.
What I did in 2014:
What I am going to do in 2015:
Have a nice day and a happy new year!
Nice progress everybody!
What I did in 2014:
What I hope to do in 2015:
I can’t believe how quickly 2014 has gone by. I hope you all have an excellent new year.
I hope everybody on JGO will make the best out of this year. It’s a shame seeing so many projects start and then fail after the first couple weeks of their development. To everybody here, please use your time wisely. Dedicate this year to something big, something you know you will be proud of by the time 2016 rolls around.
Cya all in 2015!
Over 2014 I was happy to learn novice-level html, javascript, SQL, linux and tomcat java enterprise edition and java server pages. Game-wise I made little progress but that’s fine, I think these broad web development related skills will come in handy for games eventually.
For 2015 I plan to learn about openCL and openGL. I recently discovered that this will require me to learn C which I’m quite excited and scared about.
It’s nice to see so many new folk at JGO, and the older people still contributing interesting insights. Happy new year everyone
What I did in 2014:
Hopes for 2015:
Happy New Year!
You don’t necessarily have to know C/C++ to learn OpenGL, though some guides may require you to understand the basic syntax.
There’s nothing really scary about it.
Well I suppose if you use LWJGL you don’t, but if you do it all in C/C++ you do 
You could’ve mentioned that in your post.
If you need a guide, I highly recommend reading the OpenGL SuperBible. Excellent learning resource.
Have fun!
It’s really nice to able to read everyone’s accomplishments and what they hope to achieve this upcoming year. It’s about to be midnight here, so I guess I’ll do one as well.
Also, I wish you luck on this!
What I did in 2014
What I want to do in 2015
I want to really attempt to focus on game design and focus on learning that in great detail. Especially LibGDX and Box2D. I want to get to the point where I can come up with an idea and roll with it, instead of having to look up every little thing as I go. I will attempt to learn all these topics by creating Ghostr and learning along the way.
Can’t wait to read more of everyone else’s accomplishments and wishes. 29 minutes till’ new years here!