Morning,

I say this because this morning I woke up at 5:30 and went to the bathroom, but before I could get back into bed my thought factory started to spin up. The reason? I had this blog entry on my mind or rather what I wanted to write about at least. Recently I have started to watch videos from Stephen Zapata’s channel. He has some meditative drawing videos and if there is one thing I have realised recently is that I need that in my life. The reason is simple, I have to admit that I have an obsessive personality. I will get the idea in my head that something needs to be finished and this compulsive urge will come over me causing me to push myself as hard as I can to reach that goal. You could try to frame that as being motivated but pushing yourself like that is not a good way to live. Furthermore since I am getting older I can no longer use my youth in place of good sense. (For instance when I was doing an internship, working on my major production and also made a prototype of Lords of Illic in my last year of studying in AIE). In particular this year around when I did the Slam Jam I was stressing over work, working on Illic and trying to do a good job in the game jam. Somehow I managed to get through it, but soon after as Easter came around I collapsed. Which in turn meant that I almost missed the entry deadline to AVCON (I had planned to create a trailer over that weekend) due to messed up priorities. Which brings me back to my original point: Stephen Zapata’s video. His message was quite simple: stop torturing yourself by making goals. 

The word goal can mean a lot of different things and a saying I recently came up with was “never forget your goals”. Now there is no contradiction between my thoughts and his because my could be rephrased to be “never forget your aims” or “never forget what you are trying to do”. Then again maybe it is just “know thyself”. I have come across this particular conundrum when working on Lords of Illic. Which is that - I want to make the game for myself, but I cannot deny that I would also love it if I could make a career out of it. Being paid to create exactly what you want is wonderful. Yet as soon as you try to change your footing you have to start to consider the business side of things. Products have to be finished, bundled and advertised. No one can buy a random broken indie game they will never see. Yet if your goal is to make your game at any cost, exactly as you like in as much time as it takes well… That is bad business sense. If you want to sell your game then your first priority is to take stock of the market and get a feel for what people will buy and for how much. With early access, kickstarters and steam pages you need to start getting people to know about your game as soon as possible. For that you need to play the social media game to create the foundation for your work. Of course if you could just churn out the next Minecraft or something and be instantly popular but… Let’s agree that isn’t happening, especially not with a turn-based strategy fire-emblem-like. Since I am very much an introvert and I hate the very superficial world of social media. Yet the allure of this goal was standing over me before I realised. No matter how much it felt as though it went against my personal way of life, the goal was there.

It is this type of goal that Stephen Zapata was talking about. The reason why I work on Lords of Illic is not because I want to make a successful game. If I just wanted to just sell something on steam well… I should start a project which revolves around tantalising men with exciting illustrations of women. That path though is not something I would consider. The reason why I want to make Illic is very simple. In one of Stephen Zapata’s videos he called drawing something like a way to “release a borderline cosmic pressure”. When I heard that I felt a shiver down the spine - it so accurately described what it felt like. Tying that in with my own saying it becomes very simple: it is all well and good to try to make money from your game, but you can’t forget why you are making it in the first place. One of my favourite authors Haruki Murakami said something along the lines of you can’t keep doing something you hate. He was talking about running, but it runs deeper than that. Besides to him running is more than just exercise - it is a big part of his life. Not as much as writing but even but still important. The other important topic he touched upon was how you need balance in your life. He starts his day with a run, and will only write for a fixed amount of time. When writing he followed a series of loops of writing / editing the book from start to finish. It is a way of creating that he tailored to himself and his needs. Another of my favourite authors - Terry Pratchett had a very different style of writing and he also had a very different process. He would decide the end and perhaps some key points in his stories and use them as guideposts as he wrote his stories. He knew where he was going without trying to plan every detail out. More than that it worked, he churned out over forty Discworld novels and at an incredible rate. Later in his life, especially as his Alzheimer's progressed, having his assistant write out as he dictated became a big part of the process. Neither one of my favourite authors was weighed down by large goals. Instead they focused on the best way to do what they wanted to do. They were both lucky to become famous and make money for their works but it was never about that. In fact Terry Pratchett didn’t even have a decent idea of how much money he had and even managed to lose a sizable cheque from his publishers by accident.

Would they have wasted their time if no one had ever bought their books? I don’t think they would have. More than that their lives would still have been enriched by their art whatever had happened. So like Stephen Zapata said in his video, I think we need to shake off these goals. We should not be aimless, but instead we should create our own guide posts to aim towards. We don’t even ever have to reach them. We can change our mind as much as we want. We just need to pick a positive direction and start heading there. If we make a mistake we just adjust our heading.

In software engineering we have a term for this - it’s called agile.

We cannot see the future. Neither you nor I can know how we feel next week, let alone next year. We have to accept that no matter how much we want to, we can't decide everything right now. Software Engineering also has a name for that too - Waterfall Development. All we can do is our best and be honest about our mistakes. If we only expect ourselves to take small steps we no longer have to hate ourselves for not reaching unrealistic goals. Instead we can just be pleased that today we managed to write a couple lines of good code, or that we managed to improve that drawing we started last week or that we wrote an entry in our blog. I have a lot more thoughts on the topic, but let’s stop here before I start to draft this into a self-help book.

Until next time