Revving Up: Exploring Life Beyond Game Development
Revving Up: Exploring Life Beyond Game Development
Sharing thoughts and lessons learned from pursuing my passions in life
Above is the video version of this post. The video is not that good of a camera angle so it’s not that interesting to watch and the audio is a bit distracting but I will try to increase the production quality for future posts. Unfortunately I got a flat recording this video so I couldn’t do a second take. Hope you enjoy!
My first indie game was released about 10 months ago. You would imagine that I’d be halfway on a new project or cooking up something big by now but that is unfortunately not the case. Instead of producing I have been working a lot on myself, part of it was burnout that made me want to step away from the computerscreen for a while and another part was just real life stuff that was overdue and had to be dealt with.
The two years~ I spent working on Brainroll was very special and very fruitful, but also very damaging, something I didn’t know at the time. I worked 8 hours per day as a programming consultant only to work on the game for about 2 hours~ in the evenings. However my dreams were very big, in those two hours I tried to fit not only gamedev but also stuff like creating my own build systems, keeping up with emails and different gamedev and programming discords, post stuff to youtube and twitter. If someone has followed my content between platforms over the year it is basically no continuity just for the reason that I tried to do everything at once.
This is is already an easy recipe for burnout but the more damaging part which is easy to forget is that during this period I thought about gamedev ALL THE TIME. I could be working with my consulting stuff while suddenly some important gamedev thought appeared which made me have to take a break and note some stuff down or I could be doing some random chore at home on autopilot only to plan what I will do with my 2 hours later that day. It went so far that I was on autopilot even talking to my parents on the phone or when I was hanging out with my girlfriend. This is the truuly damaging behaviour not only for myself because I basically couldn’t enjoy any single moment in my life but more importantly for the people who are close to me. I don’t think I have been fair to my closest people living as this gamedev robot for this time.
The post release
Before the game was released I already had soft plans of taking a break from programming in my spare time post release which is exactly what I did. Somewhere between the the development and release of the game I switched jobs from working in consulting to working on an older salary system. The former workplace being a very relaxed startup type environment while the latter being very formal and corporate. This change was partly motivated by me wanting to experiencing working on a very big product everyday rather than working on very small products everyday, for some reason I thought there was a bunch of things to learn managing a very large codebase like this.
The transition between jobs was not painless for me, I had to go from a very free environment to a more restricted environment which no matter how hard I try I cannot really fully get used to. Biggest systems turns out to involve a lot of fear due to the larger amount of complexity, this makes it harder to push through changes that are not directly connected to revenue. Due to the pushback when making bigger refactors it is easy to fall into the maintenance mode developer situation where you are just performing the smallest possible code patch to make the program function as specification, over and over again. After listening to a video where Jonathan Blow explains the importance of having a serious and challenging job I got into a bit of a slump comparing it to the maintenance mode situation I have fallen into.
How can I ever expect to be achieve greatness by just performing maintenance patches in an old system? How will I ever be recognized and valued?
Asking myself these questions woke something up in me, I thought why would I care about being recognized? But then I started to piece things together, everything I have done in my life up til now has been to prove something, not to myself but to others. In retrospect I’ve caught myself in injecting my own achievements into everything things which are made for fun like playing video games were not for fun but only to try to be the best. For some reason I’ve thinking it matters to anyone that I’m good. All of this while when actually getting genuine praise it has not really had any effect on me, it doesn’t make me happy to be recognized.
Bringing this back to Brainroll, building a game in my own engine sounded like a very good idea to get recognized for my skill, for sure people would respect me by doing this and I would become great. When releasing the game I did actually get people impressed by the achievement but I didn’t really impress myself. For sure I was happy to finish it and I was very happy when I saw players finish it but I didn’t really feel fulfilled. The game was not good enough to allow me to feel fulfilled but would I have been fulfilled if it was a big hit? I don’t think it would.
Wrapping all of this up I think I have been in gamedev for the wrong reasons. I have not been doing anything for myself but for everyone else which is a poor way to live. A better way to live and actually bring value to people is by sharing something that only I can share, that is when a true connection can be formed and recognition can be achieved for the right reasons and not for an artificial one which I have previously pursued. With this said moving forward I want to embrace being me, I want to personalize everything and do everything in my way and not do this for success but do this because I genuinely enjoy it.
Revving up, living in the moment
One of my newly found interests are motorcycles, they are amazing for many reasons. Not only is the experience riding them one of the most enjoyable there is but there is also a beauty in how they work and how they’re built. Motorcycles just like bicycles works because of physics, I won’t pretend to understand it all but when you feel the physics working with you it’s a good feeling.
I try to draw many parallels between my bike and programming because I think that if my bike was a piece of software it would be close to perfect. Out of the box a new motorcycle is designed to just be able to run, bugs like engine failure can happen but its pretty rare. However it is most likely not the optimal bike for you hence you want to make some modifications, the manafacturer knows about this so they made it easy for you to swap out the things you’d like to change in your garage. A programmer with their software have can do the exact same by allowing modding support in their game for example. I personally found this very inspiring and I want to take my development in this direction, making my software close to perfect out of the box but possible to personalize for the ones who want.
In addition to finding inspiration in motorcycles in my work I also want to integrate it more with my work, not only to make things more fun for me by combining two of my hobbies but also to possibly give ideas or inspire others to try their own thing. I will hence try to make my content not purely about programming but rather an invitation to my life by sharing who I am and who I want to be.
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