It turns out that the skill of making games is more than just the skills of making the components of a game. This is something I feel like I’ve had to confront more and more: Despite spending a lot of the last decade building up my game development skills, I have almost nothing in terms of actual finished games to show for it. For a few years, at least, I could reassure myself that I was just starting out, that eventually all my work will build to something – but, now, I can’t help but wonder if there’s a gap between the skills I have and the skills actually needed to do the thing. I have to think that maybe, rather than practicing making art and music and programming and so forth, I should have just been practicing making finished games, even if they were tiny, since that was the real skill I wanted.
This is not a new insight. I’ve heard similar things from lots of solo developers, people who get stuck in one project and only manage to shake free by creating lots of small projects. It’s easy to rationalize reasons to stay in your comfort zone, though – or, at least, a comfortable distance away from your comfort zone.
It’s a common fallacy to believe that every problem can be broken down into smaller components. We believe this because it’s necessary to believe this: Large and complex problems cannot be wholly comprehended in their entirety, so we develop methods of breaking them down to make them manageable, to allow them to be solved piece by piece instead of all at once. However, the map is not the territory: When you create a task list, when you write down every anticipated facet of the problem, it still isn’t the real problem you were trying to solve. You can solve every component of the problem as you understand it without solving the actual problem. You can know how long the boards should be and still cut them short, you can know how to perfectly cut a board and fail to hammer the nails in straight, you can know how to hammer the nails but not how to fit the pieces – in the end, you actually need to know how to make a chair if you want to make a chair. Making a chair is the skill you should be training – so why do I worry so much about practicing my measuring, my cutting, my nailing?
When you lose sight of the forest, it seems like the same trees keep showing up, over and over. I focus on architecting and crafting bits and pieces of my imagined game and yet very little of the game seems to get made. I plan what I need, build it, and then when I get there I realize it wasn’t quite what I needed and I go back and I rebuild it, and then when I get back there I realize it wasn’t quite what I needed and I go back and I rebuild it, and then when I get back there I realize it wasn’t quite what I needed and at some point, if you find you keep going back to the drawing board, maybe it’s time to invest in a portable drawing board. Maybe it’s time to buy an eraser if you keep redrawing. Maybe it’s time to buy a straight-edge, if the lines keep turning out crooked. What I mean to say is, I need to be working on the game, not the engine, not the animations, not the design, not the story.
It’s hard to know which one you’re doing sometimes. I was able to spend this much time working on these things because I convinced myself that this was the game and that this was how you work on a game. Indeed, I will probably be able to use much of this work at some point, I will be able to integrate these constructs at some point – but they’re not part of the game, not yet. It’s easy to rationalize an awful lot by saying “this will probably come in handy, eventually”. Even if it’s true, why not just do it when eventually happens, instead of now? How much time will you save by having it ready ahead of time, as compared to the time you will have wasted if the time you were ahead of never arrives?
This is why I put EverEnding on hiatus. I needed to get my hands on a project, to actually work on the game itself and expand it out from its core, to build something relatively simple and straightforward and develop it and see what it could be by slowly turning it into that. And yet, already, I see myself doing the same thing as before: Figuring out scripting systems, building editors, planning tilesets, prepping ingredients instead of cooking. To a certain degree these things are necessary, but certainly to far less of a degree than the one I’m cooking at. Maybe it’s worth it, too, because I’m building these tools with the intent of making the process of developing and expanding the game as rapid and iterative and intuitive as possible, so it’s really just one step removed from doing things the way I want to be doing them. That’s what I hope, anyway.
I think it’s mostly fear that pushes me away from the game itself, the core skill of making a game. Never asking means never being rejected, never creating means never failing, except in small ways, learning failures, failures you wanted all along because they were really successes. The technical problems I keep finding myself solving are imposing, but quantifiable. I don’t need to have anything to say, because I have a problem to solve – I don’t need to access beauty or meaning, because right now I just need to make the tools that I can use later to express that beauty and meaning. So I can kick the can down the road a bit longer, and not worry for a bit more whether I can actually make a game that people will care about. And, as long as I keep doing that, I never will.