2023 Wrap Up
written on Tuesday, January 9, 2024
Introduction
It's the start of 2024, so I want to reflect on how 2023 went, regarding my FLOSS activities.
Releases
In 2023 I made 17 releases:
| Date | Project | Version |
|---|---|---|
| 2023-02-05 | Pixel Wheels | 0.24.2 |
| 2023-02-14 | Cat Avatar Generator | 0.2.1 |
| 2023-03-12 | Nanonote | 1.3.91 |
| 2023-03-20 | Clyde | 0.5.0 |
| 2023-04-02 | Nanonote | 1.3.92 |
| 2023-04-03 | Nanonote | 1.3.93 |
| 2023-04-11 | Nanonote | 1.4.0 |
| 2023-05-08 | Burger Party | 1.4.0 |
| 2023-05-20 | Burger Party | 1.4.1 |
| 2023-06-14 | Burger Party | 1.4.2 |
| 2023-07-03 | Poglyph | 0.0.1 |
| 2023-07-05 | Poglyph | 0.0.2 |
| 2023-08-30 | Pixel Wheels | 0.25.0 |
| 2023-09-21 | Pixel Wheels | 0.25.1 |
| 2023-11-02 | Burger Party | 1.4.3 |
| 2023-12-01 | Nanonote | 1.4.1 |
| 2023-12-28 | Clyde | 0.6.0 |
or, grouped by project:
| Project | Versions |
|---|---|
| Burger Party | 1.4.0, 1.4.1, 1.4.2, 1.4.3 |
| Cat Avatar Generator | 0.2.1 |
| Clyde | 0.5.0, 0.6.0 |
| Nanonote | 1.3.91, 1.3.92, 1.3.93, 1.4.0, 1.4.1 |
| Pixel Wheels | 0.24.2, 0.25.0, 0.25.1 |
| Poglyph | 0.0.1, 0.0.2 |
(I haven't written about Poglyph yet. It's a set of two small CLI tools to find missing glyphs in fonts. I extracted it from an internal Pixel Wheels tool and now use it in Burger Party)
I was happily surprised by the number of releases I managed to push. It's a bit more than I expected.
Pixel Wheels
I had the secret goal of getting Pixel Wheels 1.0.0 out for the end of the year, but that did not happen. Moving houses ended up taking way more time than I expected :)
Still the game is in a good shape for a 1.0.0 release. The missing track is mostly done, I may add multiple difficulty levels (some equivalent to the 50cc, 100cc, 150cc and 200cc in Mario Kart) and that will be it.
Burger Party
Burger Party made a surprising come-back this year! Google requesting the game to be updated otherwise it would no longer be available on Google Play finally got me working on it after leaving it untouched for 5 years.
I am happy that I finally got to add the end sequence I had in mind and that I pushed the game on F-Droid. This had the unexpected side-effect of gathering interest from several translators: the game received an update to the Spanish translation from a native speaker and got translated in Basque, Dutch and Polish! And it's not over yet: I recently merged an Hungarian translation too.
Clyde
I had high hopes on Clyde, but it has failed to gain traction for now. Marketing is definitely not my forte, but I keep trying :). At least it's useful for me, and creating it was a nice way to gain more knowledge in Rust.
Support
I have a support page, with links to various ways to give me money.
The thing is, even critical infrastructure projects struggle to get funded (mandatory XKCD link). Me, I just make tools and games. I am also not starving, there are more important projects or causes than supporting me. Still I would love to be able to reduce my time at $JOB to a 4 day week, keeping one day for my own projects, as I once did several years ago.
Support in 2023 breaks down to this:
| Source | Number | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Patreon supporters | 2 | 100.25€ |
| Liberapay supporters | 1 | 5.43€ |
| One-time Ko-fi donations | 4 | 25.42€ |
| Itch.io sales | 1 | 4.32€ |
| GitHub sponsors | 0 | 0€ |
| Total | 135.42€ |
The tricky part of being on platforms like Patreon or Ko-fi is they encourage you to give some rewards to supporters. It makes sense, but it does not match well with open-source work: I don't have any secret agenda I could share with insiders, all my work is in the open. As such I feel the least I can do is write monthly status updates, but it takes quite some time to do so, and I have no idea if they are useful. When I look back at them I often find them boring to read.
I actually like writing, and I'd like to write more interesting pieces than status updates. I am considering focusing on one interesting topic for each month, and write on it instead. What do you think?
What to expect for 2024?
My primary goal for 2024 is to get Pixel Wheels 1.0.0 out. I don't want to write down any other goal for now, we'll see when it's out! Once this one is achieved I am sure I am going to feel a huge relief :)