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The Art of Gaming next to a paint palette with puzzle pieces

Mid Year Reset


What Is This

So calling it a reset is a little strange as it seems searching on Youtube doesn’t quite get me what I want. I want to do a techo kaigi, reflect on goals, make new ones, and not try to sell you anything lol.

A Scuffed Techo Kaigi

A techo is like notebook or journal and a kaigi is a meeting. So a techo kaigi is basically the big end of year sales report where you talk about what’s working and what’s not. So please imagine I am presenting this section at the front of a conference room with and overly decorated slideshow that tells you absolutely nothing behind me that I wildly gesture at for seemingly random intervals.

Now that we’ve set the scene, I’ve used a few notebooks this year: a Hobonichi Cousin (yes that is what the book is called) for planning and memory keeping, a B6 weekly from amazon for game dev planning and tracking, a generic yellow pad for notes and task tracking, and a Hobonichi notebook for game dev planning and development. Although it’s not a physical notebook, I’ll also be taking about my use of Obsidian, a free notetaking app, which I’ve been using for keeping ideas, media tracking, notes, and planning.

The Cousin

I’m not gonna write out Hobonichi Cousin everytime so when I say “the cousin” or “my cousin” know I am not talking about an actual person. This was my first real year trying out anything Hobonichi, especially as I hadn’t been particularly good at keeping up with journaling before. But a few months before preorders started last year, I had started writing things by hand again and journaling my thoughts. Then, after hearing so many good things about the paper and loving the features it had, I bought a 2025 cousin for a relatively low price in September. I enjoyed using that thoroughly so I went through the preorder craziness to get my 2026 cousin. While this was fun and managing to snag the A5 Tomie cover version on my first time ordering anything from the brand was both thrilling and something I will always feel lucky for, I will not be buying another cousin for 2027. But I’ll talk about that more in a bit.

The way I use my cousin is a little unique so I’m going to list out what each notable spread is used for real quick. Yearly - daily spend and marking the last time I did something Monthly - mostly unused unless I did something notable that day or something was coming up. In that case I would put a little doodle relating to what I did/had coming up Weekly - this is the weird one. I HATE timeblocking things in advance because if I miss the starting time for a block then I get distressed. This will happen even if the reason for starting late was due to someone else interfering. And God forbid I just make a bad estimate on how long something takes to get done, then it becomes this whole thing of, well I can’t do the other thing because I haven’t finished the first thing but I can’t do the first thing because it’s not time for the first thing, it’s time for the other thing which I can’t do because… and on and on. So I just stopped trying to time block. It doesn’t help that I was often interrupted and also kinda bad at estimating how long things would take. So I just ignored the time markings entirely and instead use it to track a few things each day of the week: a thing I did for self care, any social time, what books I read, what show/movie I watched (if I tracked youtube there wouldn’t be enough space), what games I played, any cool sites I had visited, any cool blog posts I had read, and for a while I tracked what I had created that day. Occassionally I also tracked food in this section but that never really stuck Daily - quick journaling or todo lists. To the left of the “magic line” I track what I did per hour as I remember throughout the day. For any pages left blank, they were what I’d use for scratch paper if I needed to plan bigger things like a monthly curriculum or goals brainstorming My 100 - in 2025 this was 100 ways to make progress on a game and in 2026 it’s 100 creative things to do. If I can find the 2025 one I’ll make a little blog post with that list of ideas

While I haven’t been using the cousin every day, I get a lot of value from it. I do really like it’s paper and all the little pages in the back. I was so excited for the comfortable night’s sleep page that got added this year since I’m an insomniac! When I first got a cousin, I read the quotes everytime I used a new daily page but recently I haven’t been paying any attention to them at all. I don’t even remember the last time I looked at one. Also the fact I can’t have a horizontal weekly for planning at a glance kinda trips me up since even if I used the current weekly pages like I’d use a horizontal weekly and just ignored the time markers, it’d be too much space. Due to that and the fact that you currently have to buy a cover and notebook bundle if you’re buying from the US and the sticker shock I got last year, I won’t be rebuying a cousin for 2027. I’ll talk more about it once I’m actually in it but I’ll be using the 2027 Chronicle Planner for those curious.

B6

This is a small planner I use mainly for game dev progress. I haven’t really fallen into a rhythm with this one yet so there’s not much to write.

Yellow Pad

I don’t know where I got this thing from, but it’s been great for random lists. I have one for a schedule I was trying to follow earlier in the year still on my PC case. I also have a couple sheets that I have kept because they have OC information or work milestones outlined on them. I’m debating whether I want to eventually upgrade to a cuter notepad or if I should just enjoy that I can pick one up literally anywhere.

Hobonichi Notebook

This is in the same cover as my cousin which is super convenient. It’s sectioned off by project, although most of them are on ice currently so the tabs need to be adjusted. I unfortunately was affected by the bad paper which this year only seems to affect notebooks this year. So I had some weird smearing that hasn’t happened in my cousin sadly. This was much more in use during the beginning of the year and I’ve begun using Obisidian more for dev stuff, although I like alternating between digital and analog as analog can be great for brainstorming. Also making mind maps is a great process on paper, although my digital mindmaps are probably much more readable to others haha.

Obsidian

I’ve been using Obsidian for years, trying different ways of organizing things through time. I wish I could give an indepth vault tour or description but I haven’t quite perfected project management in here just yet, but rest assured I will be gabbing about it as I figure stuff out. I want to use this section to give some tips and talk about the things in my vault that do work or at least work well enough for now. After the end of project management plugin I was using, I’d like to find another good solution. The bases that are being rolled out currently are a start but not able to handle all I want to do and currently (to my knowledge) isn’t able to be extended to do what I want.

Tips:

Plugins

Goal Review

2026 Goals Blog Post

Let’s start with the blog post I made last year. I did not end up doing the MVNA game jam but still want to bring that idea to life eventually. I did however already do a successful game jam! Otome Jam ended with my team submitting a game, although I’ll still be making some touchups to it. Website-wise, I have kept updating the website as every month I’ve made either a blog post or some website change! I’m super proud of myself for that.

Art Bingo Update

I did give an OC a design finally (just haven’t posted it yet) so I’m on my way to getting that one done. I’ve made some progress on the game dev tool. I got my free space done April 2nd when I made my first shader. I made a short musical sketch on March 11th. It was a little pirate shanty that I actually think was pretty catchy and very singable (although the words were never finalized). March 7th I updated the site and made a character page template for the Worlds and Characters page. The last tile with progress is the Artfight tile. I submitted my first attack on the 3rd so I’ll mark off the tile with that date. In all there are still 20/25 tiles with no progress so I have some work to do on my art goals.

General Unshared 2026 Goals

For 2026, I decided to give myself a big goal each quarter and make that goal a little harder/ more specific each month. For Q1 I really wanted to cut down on my doordashing as it was eating up a lot of my funds and was also definitely not good for my health. Also it kinda pissed me off that I was still paying for groceries and then… just not eating them?? So even more waste. Not to mention the food wasn’t even tasting good anymore. I started out by letting myself order 9 times in January. I only ordered Doordash 7 times. In February the goal was 5, the actual was 9. In March, the original goal was 2 but I changed it to be 5 times or less which I hit exactly. Q2 was about working out which I didn’t really hit any of my goals for. I did however start exercising more in June even if I didn’t get to doing 4 times a week. July starts Q3 which is about eating better and so far I’m on track for eating fruit 4 days this week.

The Good, Bad, and Needs Improvement of 2026 So Far

Aka Good, Bad and Ugly but I don’t really wanna talk about the ugly tbh.

Good

Bad

Needs Improvement

New Goals/ The Plan

So personally I just want to make sure I keep on being social while spending more time creating (for both myself and others) and more of my time consuming on stuff that’s not just random Youtube vids. I’ve found some really great creators on there but recently it feels like having it on for background noise is often just making me irritated. It’s the kinda irritation where my brain just straight up goes “No!” to like everything and I have to figure out how to calm it down lol. I think I’m also going to stop shying away from commercial dev. I’ve wanted to make commercial games for a while now and am seeing some luck offering my programming services to others. It’s really scary as I worry about all the usual stuff like what if I release awful stuff or what if no one plays it, but I spent a lot of the first half of this year being shown that those are excuses. People have come back from bad releases before and playerbase already might have to be regathered for each release since I’m probably going to be changing genre and presentation between games. Frankly in this job market, I’m going to have to learn the days of zero risk are long gone and if this fails I’m only going to be back at square one with knowledge and more experience under my belt.

Dedicated Games Time

All that to say I want to work on games for at least an 4 hours a week, with at least 1 of those being on my projects. I may make this more specific eventually and say that planning work doesn’t count or have specific tasks be part of that 4 hours but this should be easy since work will definitely take up more than 3 hours every week. To support this I’ve been playing around with a new project management tool in Obsidian, obviously I’m not committed to it yet (or else I’d’ve talked about it above) but it’s looking promising. I’m also using physical timers to help with knowing how much time is spent. One aspect of game dev I will definitely be counting is interactions with my audience, so devlogs here or time spent on marketing posts and any market research (that isn’t playing games) will count. After all, it’s hard to sell a game if no one knkows about it!

Squeezing In Self Care

The next big goal is that I want to get on top of personal care. So for me that’s cleaning/maintenence and self care. I have a little book that has cleaning tasks for each day I’ll be using for cleaning. Then I think I’ll make a little menu of self care tasks to do on my breaks between tasks. I’ve tried in the past to allocate a big chunk of time to stuff but I’ve found that approach only really works when it comes to getting work done. I also might curate my entertainment so that I’m engaging with media more, not just using it as filler.

Wrap-up

So that’s been my year so far. There’s been stressful periods but overall I’m grateful for the year I’ve had and am quite lucky. I hope you’ve been having a good year so far too and if not, I hope it turns around during this half.