Stepping Stones

Why don’t I make more games?

Of course, I’ve been working on EverEnding, but that’s a long term project and hardly precludes the idea of pursuing side projects. I’ve even tried to take a break of a week or a month to work on such side projects, and they haven’t gone anywhere, as I get bogged down in minutiae and lose momentum before heading back to work on the main project. This is supposed to be my medium, though: Games are supposed to be one of the ways I’m most comfortable in expressing myself, and this idea is core to my identity. Most of the independent solo developers I admire make at least a couple of projects a year, and I feel that this is within my capabilities and would probably make me feel more fulfilled than whittling incessantly away at the same project – and wouldn’t even necessarily take that much time and effort away from that project, depending on how I approached them.

So why don’t I?

I’ve heard it said that finishing games is a distinct skill in and of itself, and if that’s the case then it’s one that I clearly and sorely lack. The last time I remember perceiving this kind of lack in myself was before I learned to draw, but desperately wanted to – when I was hugely intimidated by the gap between what I could imagine and what I could achieve on the page. What it came down to was that the only way I could get past this was by letting go of the idea of creating something great and grabbing hold of the idea of creating the best thing I could – a nobler ambition at any rate, I’ve come to believe. Eventually I got comfortable with just making marks on the paper that looked very approximately like what I wanted – as time has passed, they’ve gotten closer to what I imagine. More importantly, as time has passed, I’ve refined that imagined ideal of what I want those marks to be, what they can represent and how. At this point I’d say I’m a pretty good artist: Could be better, could be worse. I guess that’s the same for everyone: It’s a place we tend to stay at for most of our artistic lives, so it’s a place we have to learn to feel okay with being in.

However, as a game developer I think I’m still Nowhere. Undefined. Maybe I’m great! Who knows? Maybe it’s the fear of finding out that I’m not that’s holding me back – that’s certainly one of the things that used to hold me back from the visual arts. Better to be silent and thought a fool than to speak up and remove all doubt, as they say.

It’s really not, though. Better to just be okay with being thought to be a fool. It has many advantages. It’s very freeing.

I’ve gotten mostly okay at sometimes being bad at art and music and writing. I just kind of assume that some ratio of the work I produce will suck big stinky butt, and hope that as I practice and develop as a creator that ratio will get smaller. It’s hard for me to get there with games, though. Even a small game takes a lot of work to make, so it’s hard to feel okay about that work going into something that’s not great. I’ve made a few games, here and there – for game jams, mostly, 3 or 4 spread across the last decade or so. These games were mostly pretty abrupt and incomplete, but, still – they were games.

I think another big obstacle has been that I tend to start game projects from a place of intellectual interest. I usually start with a theme and/or a game mechanic, and try to build out from there. This isn’t actually a bad way to design, but it’s a bad way to make a project I give a shit about. This sort of intellectual interest has a shelf-life. Eventually, if I keep thinking about the project I will end up exploring the design fairly completely in my mind, and obviate any pressing need to create the project itself. Games take long enough to make, at least for me, that this usually happens before the project is complete. Thus the reason why I’ve maintained interest in EverEnding for five years but I have trouble maintaining interest in most game jam projects for more than five days: Some games are just more fun to design than they are to create. These are not the sort I should be making. I need to start from a tone, a feeling, something unnameable to seek rather than something unnamed to build. And, since these are games, the mechanics and theme will follow, as they must, a series of intellectual challenges, puzzles to solve to figure out what this mysterious place I’ve found for myself will be.

Once I can teach myself to start and to finish smaller games, maybe I’ll be ready to start to finish EverEnding.