Always starting again
It will be different this time ... right?
Welcome to “The Wilderness and the Wellspring,” a newsletter about riding the endless wave of creativity from self-doubt to creative highs.
Try the podcast version of this post—you might just love it!
Failing stinks, but what else is there to do?
I’ve failed a lot, and my failures tend to be what I focus on. I don’t focus on my failures because it’s fun or because of some deep need to constantly improve. I focus on my failures because I fear that no matter what I achieve, I’ll never be good enough, that whatever good fortune comes my way is entirely up to the whims of the universe, and that I ultimately deserve no credit at all for the good things that have happened to me.
I keep focusing on my failures because I struggle to give myself a break. It’s exhausting. If you can identify with this feeling, perhaps you’ll find a home with me.
I don’t give advice
This isn’t a Substack about “The ten ways to kickstart your creative process” or how I launched myself from zero to a million followers in just six months—partly because I haven’t achieved that goal, but mostly because I’ve given up on giving advice (am I helpful? I’m honestly not sure), or reaching for vanity goals (I don’t feel happy after achieving one). I am pretty vain, though, despite this. Damn that flawed human nature thing.
When I think back on my life, and the moments that changed my perspective, I don’t generally think of the thousand tidbits of snap advice offered by whoever was within earshot. Instead, I think about someone telling me a story about how they understood what I was going through and what helped them without judgment or expectation. Just two people sharing a human experience.
Why I’m writing and what I’m working on
My primary reasons for doing this are to have a creative outlet for times when I’m feeling discouraged and to give myself a little break from the struggle so that I can regain the strength to get up and keep going. My particular creative medium is code and video games. I’ll talk about that stuff occasionally, but this Substack is really about the struggle, the struggle, and, oh yeah, the struggle.
This Substack is probably the 100th creative thing I’ve started. As a kid, I found a love of programming, video games, and a universe of possibilities to explore. I believed I could do anything if I just put my mind to it, worked hard, and never gave up. But I didn’t account for things like scope creep and analysis paralysis.
I’ve tried all the productivity systems, buckled down, and forced myself to work when I didn’t want to, and where did it get me? Well, it got me a career in technology to pay the bills (I can’t complain), it put a roof over my head (that’s always nice), and as a result, I can spend my spare time on the creative hobby that is making video games.
Did any of the productivity stuff make a significant difference? Am I here to tell you how “this one system can change your life?” Nope and nope.
I haven’t found much value in thinking in those ways. I haven’t even found much weight in following my dreams since almost all the good and stable things I have in life have come as the output of hard work. I’m not referring to rise and grind culture when I say hard work. I mean slogging my way through what I need to do so that I have time and money to do the things I want to do with whatever is leftover.
I have found a lot of disillusionment in my creative pursuits (sad surprise) and self-loathing (ouch) for not achieving my goals even though I did all the right things.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’ve given up trying to try, but here I am doing yet another creative thing. The weird thing is that even when I want to give up and stop telling myself I’m not good enough, I keep returning for more pain. The only conclusion I’ve come to is that I’m hardwired to be like this. I don’t mean this as an exaggeration—I don’t think I could stop doing this stuff, I can’t explain where the drive comes from, and honestly, it’s far from fun many times. I’ve walked away from programming twice in my life for over a year each time, and it always pulls me back in.
Where are my fellow creative sufferers? The ones who don’t even want to be famous or successful, and maybe even have a stable and excellent job, and yet put themselves through the emotional ringer year after year?
I don’t do anything special for motivation, and I’m not an exceptionally high achiever; I keep on waking every day, and for whatever reason, I want to create things. So I work, and whatever I get done is excellent, and what I don’t get done is just another item in an infinite list of things I can beat myself up for later.
So that’s about what to expect on this Substack. As for the rest, if you have a particular interest in video games, then read on. Otherwise, stick around for the following email when I return to talking about creativity.
I’m working on three Games
because having multiple projects going on at once always works
DVMO: a beta game concept that’s complete enough that you can play it
Dev time invested: 4 months
Last year I made an asteroid mining game called “Deep Void Mining Operations” (DVMO), and you can play it for free in your browser right now. It even has a helpful YouTube video explaining how to play it, which you’ll need since there are no in-game instructions.
DVMO contains a complete game loop and is a fun and chill game you can play at a languid pace. There is no time pressure; while a score is kept, you only see it at the end. I’ve received great feedback on things I could add to DVMO, but it’s creatively simmering until I get back to it.
I just started working on an as-yet-unnamed retro arcade-style top-down shooter.
Dev time invested: 1 month
I started a new, small game. It contains a complete game loop: take off in a helicopter, shoot stuff, rescue hostages, and return said hostages back to your takeoff point. It features programmer art. It contains four enemy types so far. It’s not yet playable since I haven’t published the binaries, but I post about it occasionally on my Twitter account. The pixel artist I’m working with has given the game a working title of “Steel Sky Ops,” which I dig. Here’s a screenshot:
See all those bullets flying and the simple black & white graphics? It’s like I’m following the typical advice of building a simple but fun game prototype before going crazy with graphics and sound and hyper-ambitious game design (don’t worry, I do all those things on the next game in the list)!
“Soul of Argus”
Dev time invested: 2.5 years? It depends on when you start counting.
So here’s the big one—my video game equivalent of The Great American novel—my albatross of a game that I hope will be great but which scares me.
I’ve been chipping away at it for several years. It’s an insanely ambitious, probably way over-designed game that I hoped to launch into public beta last year … yet here we are. Its working title is “Soul of Argus” (but that’s also the third title it’s had). It’s a techno-mass surveillance game about data, digital identity, and security in the modern world. It builds on my 20+ year career working in technology and weaves what I hope will be compelling gameplay into a massive, believable online simulation of computers and networks.
Don’t understand what the game is about? Yeah, that’s part of the problem—it takes me at least 30 minutes to explain the concept to anyone. Okay, it’s like “Watch Dogs,” but way more realistic in the kind of way where you have to be a professional technologist to appreciate its beauty. I’m sure it’ll be an absolute smash hit when I throw it out the window, and it goes *splat*!
Oh, and did I say that I’ve been working on this game for 2.5 years? Depending on how you measure it, you could probably claim that I’ve been working on it for up to six years since I had the first twinkle of the idea.
Stay tuned for updates on that one because, based on the development timeline, I’ll be writing about not shipping that game for at least another decade.
Yeesh, why do I do this to myself? Probably because I can’t stop.
Seriously, I can’t stop. Sometimes I wish I could.
Thanks for reading!