The Rediscovery of Excitement. And Hope.
After about a week of 16–24 hour days working on our game, I’m actually tired at 10:30pm. The longer days were not so much a result of being overly driven, but rather: simply difficulty sleeping after a week and a half of the flu where I spent 90% of the time asleep. Now, though, tired enough that I’m writing this from my phone from a little neat on my couch.
And when I’m tired, I just tend to spend a lot of time thinking — there’s plenty to think about after a week that intense — and reflecting on where I am right now. Sure, 32 years old and single, no kids (to my knowledge?), and a very dude apartment. But given the events of the last year and a half, the intensity in which they affected me, and the expansive potential of many of them being capable of crushing my spirit irreparably… I can’t help but appreciate just how amazing the result of persevering through it all.
Earlier today we happened to tease the teaser trailer we are working to have up on 4/21 at around the same time as an interview I have a few weeks ago went live. And mid-week last week, I reached out to one of my favorite bands I’ve ever heard (you probably haven’t heard of them — not in the “so indie” sense so much as the statistical sense). I was following up on a very brief twitter exchange where one of the band members and I exchanged our love of mech games. I direct messaged him, referencing that exchange from seven months ago, told him we are putting our first trailer together and had nothing in the way of music to accompany it. I asked if he happened to have any tracks he thought would fit our tone well that we could use (noting that I had literally no money I could pay). He said he thought so, but wanted to check with his band mates to make sure its free use was cool with them. A few hours later, I had a master of the track sent to me. And now we have music for our trailer, and in one of the coolest ways possible at that. And, today, I read a tweet from one of my teammates referring to me as the team’s “fearless leader.”
That entire paragraph of exceptionally wonderful things stands in such stark contrast to the borderline hopeless, aimless, general bad series of events chained back-to-back-to-back from a year ago that it’s just remarkable to me.
I’ve been “in the games industry”, in the sense of being a person contributing to the industry at large, since I published my first programming book at 17. And of course I wanted to make games as a career. That desire dissipated within my first year at the University of Michigan. I eventually decided to pursue a different career path: high school English teacher. So, I went through the rest of school majoring in English with a minor in secondary education (I didn’t finish the minor, but was close). And that was just my new plan going forward. Then I started needing money towards the end of school, so I, basically, fell back on my primary skill: game development. At the time it was as a graphics, gameplay, and engine programmer. I wasn’t fully happy with the gig, but wanted to give the games industry one last shot before leaving it. I decided to change tracks and focus on becoming a game designer.
I did. It took a lot of time, but I did. And it was a much, much better fit for my personality. But after a few months I just started to wonder with increasing despair: an I doing anything beneficial for the world? Is being happy just challenging my brain and learning and doing fun things anywhere near as important as being a teacher would have been?
I actually struggled with that notion for a few years. Eventually I started forming an adult life, lived with a girlfriend (a few, but, you know, at different times in life), had good friends, and did all those things that distract you from existential dread.
A year ago at this time, I had none of that. I was even working for an education-technology company at the time, but things in life were just so dark, I didn’t feel like I was making the difference I hoped I would be, and I just wasn’t sure how any of that could change.
My side-project at the time (under Joy Machine v1.0) was a game called Sacrilege and intended to resurrect the god-game genre (games like Populous, Black & White, etc). The core design tenets of the game were the same as they are now: creative, open play, highly customizable, dynamic, rewarding players who experiment, etc. But the problem was: it just wasn’t fun. It didn’t have any personality, it wasn’t fun to work on, and the end result didn’t excite me all that much (and I’m a very easily-excitable person). So I killed the project.
A couple of months later, I found some neat mech assets in the Unity Asset Store. They inspired me to play around with a new side-project in Unity. For a day. But the ideas that I had that day for the kind of game that needed to be made, that would be wholly unique, that would be a great entry in an underserved niche… Well, the concept of the side-project and how excited I was about it, by the end of the day, demanded more attention. And a better toolset. So, the next day, I switched over to Unreal Engine 4 and started up what was going to be a neat sandbox for me to practice technical art, learn a new engine, and put the extensive procedural content generation research I had been doing for years into practice.
And that project became my beacon of hope. At the end of the work day, I could go home and work on it. And it never failed to continually excite, promote learning new things, make my mind race with ideas and designs that far exceeded any side-project I’d ever taken on in the past. This was, roughly, early May 2016.
Now I have a team of nine other people that work on the game whenever they can spare the time because they know, like I do, that it’s going to turn into something capable of being a paying full-time job for us “soon.” It’s hard to really convey the game in its entirety publicly right now. It takes a fairly long conversation with me (there are no “short conversations” when talking to me) before the full scope, tone, originality, and fun of the game really is realized in another person’s brain. And I think, even after our first teaser trailer, it’s going to take us time to properly figure out how to position the game for a wide audience to grasp quickly. But it’ll happen.
This project has already impacted my quality of life and my general excitement on a daily basis in ways that I don’t know I can ever fully explain. I am constantly dissecting it and challenging my every idea to ensure that what people end up playing is every bit as fun, engaging, responsive, and unique as I know it can be. And the team I’ve brought on board so far are not only an absolute joy to work with, but are all singular talents who understand the vision and provide insight and talents and skills to help make it better than the best it can be in my mind alone. And while all of this could be taken as overconfidence or over-promising, I don’t think about it that way at all. Just because you think something will be great doesn’t mean you have to disregard it because if your personal bias; sometimes something will be grant because it is great.
We have a long way to go still, but it just astounds me constantly how much having a thing you believe in can completely change your entire worldview. And there are so many people who have helped and encouraged me along the at so far that it makes me even more driven and excited to eventually deliver something that I think is truly important to the world right now: fun.
By the way, this entire post was simply everything that was going through my mind while I was playing with a photo manipulation app on my phone because I was too tired to use my brain. Here it is:
