Time to blog again.
It’s been more than one year since Mosa Lina launched. The game sold very well (especially for something developed by a tiny team on no budget in half a year). I have been enjoyed that success by spending most last year on going out of my social comfort zone. I moved into a shared flat in the city, got addicted to online dating and was basically never really alone for many, many months.
That brief chapter of my life is over now. I want to get back to work. I have been getting back to work, but slowly.
Where I started making games to escape loneliness and depression, where I kept making games because I felt I could get really good at it, where I clung to making commercial games because I did not want to do anything else, I now struggle to locate a clear internal drive within myself.
In some ways, I am perfectly set up to do interesting work. I have 10 years of game making experience under my belt, I still have money, I have friends in the industry and I have found a great collaboratuer in Rollin’Barrel.
But I struggle to grasp a perspective from which to work. I feel as if much of my work was done in opposition to some imagined enemy and now I see nobody to fight.
I guess it is time to switch my process out of this combative angle and adopt a different approach. Writing this blog (which I intend to update every friday) should help to do that.
One approach I find scary and somewhat compelling, is to get completely sober. For large parts of my adult life i have been moderately abusing one substance or another (most notably food, alcohol and weed), trying to shut up the endlessly spinning brain. This substance abuse has gotten much better over the last years, but I never fully managed to cut it off. Focusing my attention on living a genuinely healthy life, becoming some sort of boring monk, could be a worthwhile struggle.
Maybe it even somehow informs my work. Let’s see.