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.
A weekend of socialising left me with no time to ruminate about the creative process. Oh no.
Last week, we’ve finished the first version of the steam page for NEXT GAME and decided on a release date, which is a little bit further down the line than originally planned. Together with a remote-house-restoration-project that fell through for now, this should free up all of REDACTED for me to keep working on NEXT GAME.
REDACTED months. That should be enough time to get everything to a coherent level of quality. Maybe there is even some room for some playfulness.
Two weeks ago, work was all about connective tissue between larger chunks and last week was all about heaving some more large chunks into the game, allowing for even more connective tissue to grow up.
It’s not easy to talk about all of this without giving away the game, but the world now, finally, contains almost all of the areas it needs. There is one subterranean space that I feel like not building after all, but otherwise everything is where it needs to be.
I think this week’s work will mainly about cutting new intentional paths & sequences into existing blocks of unrefined content. This should increases the „gameplay resolution“, allowing us to maybe even actually test the real, longterm arc of the game, something that we’ve been unable to do for all these months. We just didn’t have the amount of geography necessary for that.
Being responsible for most of the map, I’ve been the bottleneck in this project since day one. Following my style of constantly throwing everything we’d built away and starting from scratch has left us with a map that should really work, but that also mostly exists as a sketch, a well practiced gesture, describing something I can now finally realise with ink.
I’ve been dealing with the feelings of inadequacy that would usually make me relapse by getting addicted to online dating and eating lots of shitty food again. Meditation and awareness practice is allowing me to reign that behaviour in a bit more, keeping it from spiraling into outright self-harm, but in the end I am incapable of letting go completely right now.
Millenial Cringe by Merrit K. really hit me, maybe because of my commercial game output. Qomp, Producer, Mosa Lina and especially NEXT GAME are all standing in direct reference to older games, they are comments, distortions, persiflages. This is not explicitly what is dragged through the mud in the piece, but it’s close enough for me.
Maybe I am not an experimental, but a referential game designer.
I am aware that a lot of people really do not agree with the Merrit’s position and I should really get into the various responses, but for now all I can say is that the piece left me energised. Here is a fight.
I’ve been accidentally shying away from uphill battles since Mosa Lina. After getting pretty far in my campaign against extrinsic motivation but eventually not really breaking through the sound barrier of finity, I gave up by viewing the world of game design through a pretty rigid analytical framework, neatly sorting everything into known categories that are too sterile to spark anything in me anymore.
Time for another round. Ding ding.
Spent the weekend in Prague with friends, hanging out, not doing a lot and enjoying it immensely. The bus rides there & back again were spent in silence, with no reading or anything really. I’ve been lacking this kind of empty time.
Instead of making room for it in my days, I mainly work, socialise and then rewatch shows while binge eating late into the night, waking up to feel like shit.
Work-wise, we decided to pivot all work towards making a trailer for the pretty imminent steampage reveal. It’s the right thing to do right now, and it pushed us to get a bunch of areas up to snuff in terms of gameplay and visuals, but the constant context switching and organisational work is getting to me.
I can feel myself fraying at the edges, loosing my ability to stay with myself. I’ve been dissappearing into these sudden emotions again, these bursts of nerveous and unproductive energy. I get rude and dismissive and agitated.
There is a yearning for solitude, isolated work, for not being accountable to anyone, for not having to manage anyone but myself, but yesterday, marveling at my mood swings, I maybe finally came up with a worthwhile experiment to run on myself during the remaining development:
Can I help ship this game without feeling all of these negative emotions?
I used to run experiments on myself with my work in other, less personal, ways. Can I make a game (in a month) that makes more money I earned in my hostel job (in a month)? Can I convey an concrete message only through gameplay? Can I make a game that’s mostly text? Can I make something that a lot of people would buy?
These experiments detached myself from the work somewhat. It turned everything into a game. If I could not do what I set out to do, at least I would get some new data, a clear answer and a good starting point for some reflection: Why could I not do…
So this is the way forward. Can I help ship this game without going bananas?
The first step towards that is probably to get my late night eating under control. Waking up feeling like shit has got to go. See you next week.
MARBLE SOULS has been announced to an incredible reception. The game seems to have hit some small, but very specific nerve and our announcement was carried pretty far and pretty wide by enthusiastic third parties.
We got a couple of write ups from cool websites, trailer reposts on the short-form-video platforms and 15k likes on the ketamine app without having to open it. Wishlists are 4-5 times higher than they were for Mosa Lina during the same period. The announcement trailer is the best performing video on my youtube channel and MARBLE SOULS is #1496 in wishlist activity according to SteamDB, which (whatever that means) seems pretty good.
Some of the reporting on authorship on the project has been a bit confused, so I want to clarify that Fynn, Rollin’Barrel and me have been working on this game as partners. We are simply using the Stuffed Wombat socials & steam account because those have the biggest reach and we don’t want to build up a specific team presence at this point (and maybe never will, who knows).
I’ve managed to stay kind of calm during all of this excitement. It seems that we have a very good shot at reaching a lot of people with this game, which would allow us to self-finance our next title too. Yay. At the same time, I keep thinking of Truck-Kun by Strange Scaffold, which had breached 100k wishlists and is now sitting at less than 200 reviews. I am not sure what happened, but my suspicion that word of mouth beats steam internal metrics is deepening. So while all of this attention is nice, the real moment of truth will be when the game actually releases.
Reading all the various responses has helped to clarify a lot of fears and concerns and convictions we’d had over the last months and in the last days we’ve been able to tackle a lot of things with fresh energy and clarity. We finally have an actual production spreadsheet now. Things are getting serious.
I am very much looking forward to returning to more direct work. All of this has kept me from building new spaces for quite a while now, but with a whole bunch of new approaches on handling the coordination part of collaboration, things are looking pretty nice and free for a little bit.
Now, with all this attention, I am unsure how much I should dive into the development processes here. When it was just me in my room tinkering around with Mosa Lina systems or PRODUCER dialogue, writing very open process diaries was easy. Now, there are other people involved and they might not appreciate constantly having to read drafts to determine wether or not they are okay with making this or that public.
The general plan in regards to marketing is to step off of the gas now and focus on finishing the game. Once that is done, I’ll start making tik-tok-reels, or whatever it is that us zillenials are supposed to watch all day.
See you next week!
P.S.: Canon Of Balls, a different marble-darksouls-like-game that we were extremely excited by when it was announced, is actually coming out very soon! Had we pushed through our original (slightly insane) production schedule, we would be competing for eyeballs right now, but thankfully we needed a bit more time.