Hello, I feel like it has been a while - I have been needing a break from Illic. Despite my best efforts it hasn’t been a break from game dev entirely. I have published a small arcade game called Jelly Pong. I also helped a bit with my sister’s caterpillar game. As I finished the last patch I was feeling incredibly drained and so I couldn’t help but remember a piece of advice I had heard numerous times. It turns out whether it is making a game or drawing or well… anything actually you need a break sometimes. It sounds obvious, and it is obvious. The truth is that it is never so simple when you are working towards your dream.

So is this the end of Illic? While I might be running my fifth Illic Dnd campaign on the subject, that is in a different timeline from Lords of Illic. Last week I was part of a livestream to promote the Academy of Interactive Entertainment where I studied game programming. 

It was nice to get out of my head and talk about how: 

“I'm actually living the dream right now.”

“I actually really like Illic.”

“My job, come to think of it, is actually really cool.”

The hosts of the live stream Matt and Natalie took an interest in both my personal work and my job. Talking about my passion helped to rekindle it and remind myself of why I was working on Illic in the first place. It reminded me of what it was like when I was about to graduate high-school. I had wanted to develop games for as long as I could remember but I didn’t think I could. I found a university games course, but even then I didn’t think it would work out. When I eventually ended up in AIE I found out that I had been completely wrong. There is however another key reason I can’t stop here. As I watched Matt play my game on livestream I could see every other person who found my game (and probably a hundred imaginary people) start my game, be confused and give up. I wanted to jump in and explain the basics to each of them. Which is when I thought to myself…. If Queen Asteria would do me a favour and explain the basic controls, wouldn’t that be great? Like an addict I have been dreaming of how I would make that happen. I plan to warm myself up with a content only patch - to give me more time to feel better about the game and also to get a couple of cool things I have had on my mind into the game.

Other than the boost I got from the livestream there is another good reason I want to continue to work on Illic. Another piece of advice I have heard in numerous places is that a great way to gain a new insight into something is to create something small and different from scratch. Coding Gurus will suggest code dojos or trying out new languages. Artists will suggest trying different mediums or styles. I heard this piece of advice again from a Game Conference Developer talk on youtube (I finally started watching them again). The talk is called Jumpstarting Your Creativity: From Hobbyist to Professional. The speaker had very much the opposite problem I have - instead of being stuck on a single project for an eternity, he kept on starting new things and never being able to finish them. At first I was just interested in his journey as a solo developer, but as he talked more about his strategy I realised that it was a lesson that applied equally well to my problem. If you are stuck in big projects you can’t finish working on smaller games to explore ideas is just as good a way to break out of the rut. Thus I started my remaster of Jelly Pong (every game is getting a remaster these days anyway). It has been interesting to work on something so different but there is a big problem with Jelly Pong. It is a physics based game, which means it is about wrangling the physics engine. What I enjoy about making Lords of Illic has always been making the systems - I would love to hand that pesky level design to someone else. While my brother enjoyed making a couple of levels it is largely up to me - especially since I had to test and refine all his levels anyway… I don’t think it will be my last little project - I’d like to try to make a simple card game sometime - but since Illic is still not finished and I actually feel like working on it, it will be back to Illic for me.

Before I go I have one more thought. When I started my second hand musings series the fourth entry was all about putting your name on your game. From Put Your Name on Your Game, a Talk by Bennett Foddy and Zach Gage. There has been pressure from the game industry for a while to make people who work on video games anonymous. The video espoused how important it was to put your name on your game. Making a game is an incredible thing and it is important to give the creatives in the industry their due recognition. In the past I have wanted to be anonymous and before I went to Avcon I actually removed my name off the itch page. Though that was less about anonymity than I wanted to avoid my old username from combining with the .itch to create a rude word. I put that as a topic for a full blog entry but what more is there to say? It is all in that video. For myself I think I need to work a bit on being less embarrassed by my game and my tastes. After all, aren’t I living the dream?