Hey, I feel like I was supposed to write a blog post last week but, well here’s one now! You’re not going to believe this but I got lost in one of the many side projects and a tweet I posted with just a lofi water shader of all things went a little viral (1.5k likes). Then I made another post where you can jump under that low poly water. Then that got into 3k likes. Suffice to say the amount of validation that I got pushed me to indulge in a creative endeavor that makes me feel really guilty. I was going to go into the early development of the machine that BREATHES, but maybe it’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on why I feel mixed about this.
I’m not gonna rehash too much about ADHD/ADD, a thing I’m not properly diagnosed or medicated for, but “the way my brain works” is that I get heavily disinterested in projects after a certain length of time. Things just take slower to do especially if it requires multiple steps. Those steps as a whole might not be too taxing mentally but the quantity and variety of the steps is enough to cost more mental fatigue than usual.
At the beginning of the project however those steps can be blasted through, especially if I’m excited and don’t quite see all the possibilities yet. Game development, especially solo development, involves a lot of steps that require different disciplines. It is very difficult for people new to gamedev to “know where to even start.” because you may follow a tutorial on how to get a character walking around and well, maybe now you want to have an animation for them, or look into moving platforms, or an enemy with pathfinding, that requires a separate tutorial and “something to look into.”
What gets complicated with a project that I’m so deep into is that the steps become complex. By complex I mean they’re no longer about getting started on an AI path or simply getting the AI path working. It becomes, I have a new enemy type and a desired behavior that’s different from the A to B pathing towards the player. The foundation and structure is there, but now I have to remember how things were or if I want to change it because it might not be built for the new feature I have in mind. When you break it down it’s the same amount of steps as adding path finding to a new project, but it’s not as exciting or fresh. At the start of the machine that BREATHES I was still learning gamemaker and by extent how to even code projects. By now I’ve worked in different engines and learned better practices but steps then become choices. Do I deal with the monster of code that I created now or scrap it to make it better later?
Regardless. After returning to my real job from the holiday break I got into a predictable slump. Being sleep deprived and just getting through the day just so my schedule can go back to normal. Then I returned to a familiar side project. When I say side projects I really just mean 1 of 10 potential ideas that could be the seed for the next game. These days when I feel like returning to a project I just try to let it out of my system. Because the feeling of getting through a bunch of steps can give me that feeling of solid progression back. I’m writing all this down because I looked back on the year of 2022 and wondered what I was even doing. Partially it was getting mixed up in life stuff, some game jams, but also probably tooling around with some side projects.
The side projects are hard to pin down because they’re really just prototypes of me exploring things, an artstyle or a specific control scheme. If I decide what the project is going to be or what it even is then I might as well make it my main project. What kind of fucks me up is that I decided to post some water shader (that’s probably a year old at this point and haphazardly made from a tutorial somewhere) that exploded on twitter. I say exploded but relative to my standards the best tweet for Machine was probably in the 300 like range. I think the water gif is mostly riding the low poly aesthetic trend (that I thought people were over with), enough for a lot of people to go “oh looks cool” *click.* There is usually very little correlation between effort and virality especially in the context of shareable gifs.
So I keep going into the validation cycle of blasting through a bunch of steps in a row because this tweet I just posted got a bunch of likes. Well what do they think of this? Oh that gets more likes, then what about… And then I just keep going. I don’t have a negative or positive reaction to this. Usually an ambivalence where I just wish I could transfer the excitement to the main project. If the machine that BREATHES kept popping off on the likes then I’d probably be blazing, I’d probably burn out though, but it’s progress nonetheless. Truth is I don’t know what burnout even really is, there are things I feel like doing and there are things I don’t feel like doing. If there’s no incentive like say a weekly paycheck then I simply lie in bed and abstain from the thing I should do or might as well be “productive” and do the thing I feel like doing.
I don’t have a takeaway or a conclusion here that isn't the usual: “I should probably jump through some red tape to look into medication.” The notification bell is no longer lit up now and I feel more at ease. I will also try to get to sleep early after publishing this. For real though next time I’ll go into the early beginnings of TMTB’s development before I get sidetracked.
Keep on breathing!