2018 has been quite a year. It began with me moving out of the neighborhood I shared with my abusive parents and quitting a job that was bad for me. Then I traveled through Europe for almost two months and popped by Feral Vector, which means I had fun and met wonderful people.
Around July I gave a talk at BIG Festival, which means I now know Brazil and got to see some pretty birds while drinking tons of coconut water. By September I was anxious and tired, mostly because my laptop and kindle died on me, but my journey through the world wasn’t over. I still had to go to QGCon with my friend Nadia to show La Maupin there. I had fun and the people I met there were great, but Canadian food tried to kill me several times. I survived.
A while after I came back from Canada I endured the death of one of my cats and simultaneously landed a job abroad. This means that if all goes well, I’ll be moving to Berlin by March.
2018 has been the year of bitsy, which means I started using the tool and made four games and a Spanish tutorial. I’m also trying to build a Latin American spin off of bitsy boutique. I’m still working on the launcher because is it just me or javascript is hell?
In other maker news. I’m trying to make a cat feeder so my cat stops demanding food from me at 4am and can demand this from a tiny robot instead. I also got a Barbie branded toy laptop to make an interactive thing. I wanted the thing to be a parser game, but the display is really bad at showing text and really great at showing dancing pixel monkeys.
I made five Twines this year. Penélope espera sola is the only one in Spanish and also one of my favorite ones. I want games was a really simple entry for Manifesto Jam, You wake up in a new town was made for procjam and made everyone feel something different. I believe this is cool. My other two Twines are horror themed. They’re Redacted and Let us in.
I also made some things that were self indulgent and hard to describe to other people, but I love them just the same. Like, Should you pick up the phone?, Sky Station, and Doom Fetito.
Doom Fetito got featured in Kotaku several months after its release. At first this was okay, then it got weird. So weird a website claims I’m a lawyer, so weird that I now know way too much about Christian memes and people who believe in reptilians, so weird that I had to make a tool to mass block people on Twitter. The tool is serviceble, but I have to add OAuth support to make it accessible and it feels too much like real work, so I’ve been putting it off. Please help me do this.
I did a lot this year, but it’s not as much as I would have liked. For instance, Matajuegos went on hiatus, which was sad, but necessary. Rest assured that we will be back.
I managed to take a sort of sabbatical this year, thanks to lucking in on some money and some small freelance gigs every now and then. If I’ve managed to travel so much throughout the year, it was because most of the events I’ve been to as a presenter have covered the costs, either partially or fully. It has also been possible, because some really kind people have lent me their couch. I’m super thankful for that.
I’ve spent no small amount of energy in trying to find alternatives to GDC for people in underdevloped countries and marginalized communities to go to, because going under a huge financial strain for a place that doesn’t care about you, sucks. This means I’ve been taking notes of every event I’ve been to this year and you should get my thoughts on QGCon, BIG, and LevelUy someday. My thoughts on Feral Vector are already out there.
I’ve been also telling people from other countries that they won’t be seeing me at GDC and that saying “see you at GDC” to most people who live in underdevelopment countries might be insenitve. Another thing I’ve been telling them is that things in Argentina and Latin America in general are bad and scary right now. People get really down, but they also seem to really listen to me, so I’m surprised.
2018 has been a bittersweet year for me. My wishes for 2019 are safe, legal, and free abortion in Argentina, and the end of fascism and neoliberalism. No matter what happens I will still be making small games.