I didn’t put up a devblog last month, and I’m not sure if anyone noticed. I’ve noticed a cyclical trend over the last couple of years: I work on EverEnding, hit a point where it’s difficult or tedious to progress, decide I need to take a break from EverEnding, I start working on another project, something goes wrong with that project or I get anxious about not making progress, and I come back to EverEnding. Throughout it all, progress gets made, and I learn. Slowly.
That’s what’s killing me now. What good is slow progress? How long is the rapidly deteriorating world going to sit and let me ‘perfect my art’? Can I sit down and write another blog post about how “it may take me five more years to finish this but so be it I’m in for the long haul!” when I know so little about what the world will look like in five years? Will there be a world in five years? Even if that weren’t the situation, though, I think I’d be coming to be less comfortable with this idea of finishing art ‘eventually’, ‘someday’. It’s tenable to put art out there which you’re not sure if anyone is going to care about, and it’s tenable to spend many years making art, but combining these, spending years creating something you have no idea if anyone is going to care about…
I’m increasingly tempted to focus more on things that aren’t making games, on trying to make art and music or trying to do more writing. They might not have any more of an audience, but at least they can be done to a reasonable level of quality within a few days – or a few weeks or months, depending on the scope. At the same time, I have a hard time seeing myself ever completely focusing on any one of these pursuits – one of the reasons I’ve always been enamored with the concept of game development is the promise of being able to explore all these different media through a unifying meta-medium. Now, though, I just feel scattered – it would be bad enough to spend my days carrying water to fill a well that might not have a bottom and that I’m unsure if anyone will drink from, but I find myself pouring into several such wells. What can this achieve?
I think I’m improving, but improving at what? I’m improving at working on making a game, but not at actually making games – after all, in all this time, how many games have I actually made? I’m getting better at being comfortable in a cycle of development that never ends, miniscule gains that never pay off. I don’t know that this is the correct skill to learn. I need to learn how to actually make things, not how to be ceaselessly in the process of making them.
So that’s the skill I’m going to try to practice. I’m going to spend some time studying the tools that are available, most notably Unity, and techniques that I’ve neglected. I’m going to set out blocks of time which I can use to make projects, and then complete them as best as I can within those time blocks – small games, primarily, but maybe I’ll also try to make an album or two or spend a month entirely on creating characters or environments. It doesn’t really matter what it is, as long as it’s something with a beginning and an end, instead of being ceaselessly borne on a current.
I’ll write about this more later, but you can expect posts around the beginning of every month detailing these projects and, hopefully, sharing some finished work. How do I know this time is going to be different? That this isn’t just another part of the cycle? I don’t, really – but these questions have begun to weigh on me more and more, and I don’t think they’re going to stop until I do something about it.
It’s time to finish something. Maybe I’ll know what it is once it’s finished.