I’ve noticed in myself that recently whenever I see gameplay footage of a new game I tend to have a kneejerk negative reaction. In part this is simply because I’ve gotten sick of a lot of game design and writing tropes, because I am very opinionated about what makes a game work and am easily frustrated when I see a new one repeat these same seemingly obvious mistakes – or what I see as mistakes, anyway. Increasingly, though, I have to recognize that part of what I’m feeling is simply envy: As amazing as I feel my project can be [no, will be], every game in existence simply has one huge advantage over mine: It exists, and mine does not.
It’s an uncomfortable thought. Moreover there is the discomfort I find in the idea that many of the things that stand between my game and its manifestation are the same things which make it special – every little care I care to take, every little detail, every improvement, just by having occurred to me they make my game exist slightly less, decline slightly further into the future. It’s unsurprising that these anxieties accompany my decision to set a soft deadline for the project – or at least a demo version of the project. Now that I’m coming face to face with a simulacrum of a simulacrum of completion, I’m having to ask myself some hard questions about what parts of the project really matter, where the heart of what I’m trying to achieve really lies.
Is it envy I feel? Or is it the fear that, when all’s said and done, when all compromises have been made, when all is reduced to the merely real instead of the fantastically speculative, all I’ll have left is something merely adequate? Something I will find as tiresome and unremarkable as I find so many other games?
After a certain point these sensations meld, and fear and desire take on the same aspect – an interesting theme for a psychological horror project like mine to explore, perhaps, but an inconvenient one to experience. There is a place, though, in the process of art, where you can no longer maintain your sense of distance, of safety, of emotional anonymity. There’s a place where you have to take a leap of faith. Right now, for this game I’m making, I have no way of guaranteeing myself that anything is going to work out. I don’t know if my writing will hold or if I’ll hit every eye-rolling maudlin cliche. I don’t know if the gameplay will click or if it will just feel like another generic platformer. I don’t know if these pieces I’m carefully cutting will fit back together again or just remain a jumble of parts, of ideas. I don’t know which parts are taking me forward and which parts are holding me back. All I can do is to keep doing what I’m doing as best as I can, allow these anxieties to act as guiding lights, with only my intuition to tell me whether they’re stars to guide me forward or lighthouses to hold me back, to keep me from breaking apart on unseen shores.