the most recent entry is added at the bottom
Hello again! It’s been a while.
A little more than a year ago I stopped maintaining my blog to gleefully slide into weed-induced psychosis. Reading back through the old posts, I can now see how I wrestle for control, eventually give up and pivot to obsessing about my creative process, desperately avoiding the plastic-bottle-bong in the room.
Getting out of that psychosis was a painful process. I feel like I lost months to paralysis, to all the emotions that the drug had been supressing and to coming to grips with how far from myself I’d gotten.
Somehow I managed to meaningfully contribute to the Mosa Lina 2nd Layer Update and FALLSTRUKTUR before relapsing.
Now, almost one year and a couple of relapses later, I’ve been clean & sober for longer than I’ve ever been since turning 15. I’m very proud of that and feel pretty good.
Work on NEXT GAME has been ramping up steadily for the last few months. We should be able to announce it soon. The Mosa Lina money is defenitely running out now & there’s flashes of anxiety about money again.
If NEXT GAME fails financially it would be a pity, but I reckon I’d have enough ressources left to do one last commercially viable project before being completely broke.
Besides that, I’ve also been working hard on trusting the process, on looking into the future without fear. Something will work out. It always has in the past. Survivorship-bias-mentality, basically :)
But yes. Blogposts.
Last time I wrote these things I had a clear agenda, I wanted to write myself into productivity again. That did not work, so now I guess I’ll just push myself a little bit to write about whatever comes to mind, to see if one of the big essays I’ve been wanting to tackle for years now rears its head.
Let’s see what happens :)
When the intense heatwave that had been burning braincells across Vienna finally ended, my body took that as a signal collapse inward. Climate change driven exhaustion, aided by intense overeating and too many dates, left me hollow and depleted in a deep way.
Before this period of hull-ness, most days contained extremely intense emotions rising out of nothing, taking over my whole being. One time there was deep joy and fulfilment, but mostly it was all rage and sadness and inadequacy.
My 20s were all about this bouncing between elation and depression, flirting with various mood disorder diagnosis and then escaping all of this by immersing myself in the act of making games, leading to a somewhat prolific output that neatly tracks the strenght of my desire to not be alone with myself, a product of trying to gain distance from inner turmoil by redirecting these bursts of energy and these waves of fear into a craft and a practice.
I’ve been griefing these intense emotions, associating them with a highly productive time, but now that they are back I am reminded why I wanted to stabilise my whole life.
It is not easy to find access to the modes of creative work I slipped in and out of as a younger person. I have been trying to make peace with the fact that things might never be the same, that the intense feeling of belonging and cohesion that came with extended period of intentional work (especially on PRODUCER and Mosa Lina), might never come back, that the price to pay for it is, literally, too high.
And so I have been trying to stick with the work on the next game, to be patient with it, to accept that things are just not clicking into place right now and that, at some point, everything will come together, as it usually does. It did not work this week, perhaps because I was anticipating the moment of coherence too much, because I was expecting it as a reward for slog-like suffering through a bunch of designs that never lived up to what I was expecting of them.
I have been running around Europe these last few years, telling every student I was allowed to talk in front of that if they don’t enjoy the work, there is no point in doing it. The rewards are too uncertain and meagre to justify a process defined by pain only. I should listen to that advice myself and actively try to find the joy in the process, rather than expecting it to be delivered to me as a reward for suffering enough.
Just a few hours ago I snapped out of the depression, watching the sunset while riding my bike along the canal.
I feel like I should read a bunch of contemporary design thoughts before conributing my own and I am really excited by Warp Point and how just a little bit of following links has led me to some very interesting stuff. Perhaps this webring is what finally pushes me over the edge of learning what RSS actually is.
That would make at least one person happy, I think ;)
See you next weekend. Take care.
Josh
Besides a lot of very nice social events, I was also working this weekend, leading to this delay in weekend blog.
The deep sense of belonging I was writing about last week has been kind of rearing it’s head a little bit and I am very happy about that. It’s probably because the next game is slowly taking it’s final shape. The last (Nine? More!) months have been a very slow forward crawl. Now things are not yet clicking into place, but steadily aligning in that way which usually preceedes the click.
I was talking with a friend about „hard art“, about following your inner urges in your work and then trying to make a living off of that, and she said that this could be seen as two discrete steps:
I feel like for next game, I was never really able to do the first part of the hard art. Writing this out feels kind of shitty, but I think it is true.
Completely neglecting another piece of advice I’ve been dishing out in my talks (that one should avoid working at the edge of their technical ability, that the freedom of experimentation that is necessary to iterate quickly is only to be found in the space where one is really confident and knowledgeable) I’ve been deeply overwhelmed with all the new possibilities and challenges of next games techstack for most of development. This is one way to learn, I guess, but it’s not a state I’d like to be in for the rest of my time with game dev.
Luckily it feels like I’m finally moving out of it for this project.
Maybe things are relaxing in my mind now because I feel like I have finally reached that space. Maybe it’s also just all the awareness practice and trying to be nice to myself that has put me onto a chill path. Maybe it’s just because we got REDACTED and REDACTED in the game now and it just looks really cool.
In any case, it’s been going well, even if the strain of doing some weekend shifts has left me meandering, doing measly admin work and only poking at progress these last two days.
I was very happy about randomly finding Joni’s blogpost about taking breaks, but have still not found the energy to go through that big blogpost about embracing meaningful decisions. In fact, I can’t find it right now.
Oh well. Usually things like that show up again somehow.
It’s strange, how all week I felt like I was not really doing anything, but found myself confronted with a suddenly much more cohesive game on friday. Seems like I did not do the big, sweeping kind of work work, where you can see so many new things in the game, but the more connective kind of work, fleshing out the little strands of tissue between the bigger chunks, allowing everything to come together.
Still, there is lots to do, in both kinds of work.
I doubt that I’ll ever get to full playfulness with this project, but seeing how much more everything fits together now is very relaxing. We keep talking about an (as of yet undefined) next-next game, an opportunity to approach 3D with more routine and more intentionality. It feels nice. We (or at least, I) are no longer feeling like we are shattering on the rocks, more like we might just get this ship to shore, where the real adventure begins.
I’ve been extremely vague about the nature of this game we are working on, but now, with the announcement date approaching, it’s time to think about how to describe it, how to make people excited about it. Everything hinges on the base premise, which is pretty insane and intriguing, now I just have to figure out how to convey it effectively.
Without twitter, marketing is a strange, unknown thing for me. I am planning to hop onto the less overtly technofascist short form video platforms to do a little documentary dance for your amusement and monetiseable attention down the line, but this will only happen after my actual work on the game itself has concluded. I need to pace myself with the cognitohazards. One at a time.
Yesterday I spent the whole day running relaxed errands through the city, reading Hesse’s Siddartha (thanks for the reminder Jesse Welles), thinking about ex-dating-people without the usual pain and visiting family. Today there is a little peace inside of me.
I did my irregular check-up on my financial situation and, once more, find myself with enough funds to last a whole year. It’s been like this the last 3 times I checked. Thanks for still buying Mosa Lina. I feel like the next game will make at least a little bit of money, but even if it flops completely, I’d be able to continue.
Continue doing what, though? Working on next game, hanging with friends and colleagues, dating, chores, family-life and working on staying clean and sober is leaving me with no time and mindspace at all to do small experiments, to get back into the process of playing at game design that is so crucial in finding nuggets of obsession that I can then excitedly polish up and show to the world. I’m not shitting out enough small experiments. I am standing on unfertilised ground.
When I turned 30 last year I was looking for a kind of balance, for a life that does not consist only of one thing in the extreme and now that I have it, I find myself yearning for that good old self-destructive hyperfocus. Well.
It’s a sunny day, but a rare one that doesn’t also come with pressure-cooker temperatures. Time for some frolicking.