Okay so I ended up writing obscene amounts of personal ramblings in response to this, I am NOT gonna post them but I just want to let you know these words have been great reminders.
I feel this. I went through the same thing with music at the end of the 2010s. I stopped enjoying the process and more-or-less quit composing. I’ve been battling this with games for the past few years, but I think I do deeply love this process on a different level… I just have to commit to not crossing that cardinal sin line for my own sanity.
i feel similarly about cooking or even doing the dishes sometimes--i had not thought about applying it to my practice. thanks for putting it into words!
Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes the "if it sucks, hit da bricks! YOU CAN LEAVE (clothe shoppi, cops if ur quick)" meme is one of my favorite FAVORITE piece of media ever made by human hands. (I don't think it's normal 1. to have a favorite meme and 2. for that meme to be about a skeleton saying "YOU CAN LEAVE!! REAL WINNERS QUIT" but here we are)
But like I think it's genuinely lifechanging advice. Words to live by.
Taking the pain slowly out of the process of making until it's effort that you can enjoy (and not the corporate/commercial type of work, but some sort of idea of labor), and once you can't enjoy it, you find a way to enjoy something else, and maybe time can make that specific project new and enjoyable again.
I've been letting my ADHD demon take me by the hand lately - paying extra attention to whenever I stop having fun on a project and start like really really struggling - and lead me to where it wants to go and making whatever game I find over there.
And fuck if it isn't a finished commercial product, fuck if i don't finish it and just move on, fuck if it's half-baked but I call it done earlier than I would have because I'm not enjoying making it anymore...
However, sometimes you don't want to have made a game, you want to have made that one specific fucking game that doesn't exist yet and that you're the only one that knows how you want it to be and... I feel like there's some form of weird pleasure in pushing yourself through to finish a project like that, pushing against your own limits for a while (without hurting yourself) and getting a result that the process to reach felt some degree of gruesome. I think it kind of has a specific quaity to it sometimes, some works just show a bit of gruesomeness to how they've been made, they feel sweaty in a good way.
And I feel like you should first learn to enjoy that specific aspect of making a game before you attempt to make "that one game." Otherwise you should just try making "a game", a game being a work that has fluidity, and just has to exist to be a success to yourself, without being measured against some sort of ethereal vision of a specific thing you want to make. Making specific games feels like a trap, almost always, I think, but especially when you're a beginner and you have no idea what you're doing, but you want to make that game, and you're chasing that.
Anyways I love your manifesto and I love chopping vegetables and I love videotome (and I do the point at the screen and smile thing whenever I play a videotome).
this is a problem about myself that i feel like i'll always be conscious of, but never really know how to solve. comparison comes so consistently and naturally to me that i feel like i've been missing the point, but i don't know how to will myself to change. ty for making this,,, i feel like i needed to hear it <3
Dunno your situation or goals or whatever, but I had the same feeling with a lot of my creative projects. I wanted to have written a novel or made a game or whatever the case may was. Currently I've found enjoyment in writing scripts and shorter form things, and doodling modest sized things rather than trying to make some grand work of art.
Just took a while of trying out different types of creativity to find the ones that I enjoy doing as much as I enjoy reaching the "have done" step. Best of luck to you.
Thank you for making this! For so long, projects have filled up a space of my mind that is hard to decouple when doing literally anything else. A part of it is a deep passion, excited about new ideas constantly and finding everything an inspiration. But it's so exhausting. Impossible to live in the present often. But this is a good reminder to just enjoy the process without big expectations.
this is something I need to learn. i need to find the fun in making stuff again. because doing it is so stressful, but not doing it makes me feel like shit, so I just end up miserable either way. glad you've gotten to a better place with that.
I needed to read this, lovely project and reminds me once again that productivity doesn't have to be all in life, enjoying the trip, the song while is playing, they're also important.
very relatable set of experiences. it's hard to tell how much you actually enjoy doing something when there's all these other pressures on you while you do it, so i'm still figuring out exactly how i feel about the process. but i had an experience recently where i bought a new instrument and started playing it for fun and found that my enjoyment of playing scales and doing exercises was, for once, greater than my frustration at not being good yet... too early to say but i suspect having a more balanced life makes it easier to separate my feelings about doing the thing from my fears about what it means if i don't
love this, ive been thinking a lot about my unfinished projects lately and why i dropped them, and it's absolutely that feeling of do i HAVE to vs. do i WANT to
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Thank you for making this.
Okay so I ended up writing obscene amounts of personal ramblings in response to this, I am NOT gonna post them but I just want to let you know these words have been great reminders.
Thanks!
love this so much.. monetisation & identity really do poison the well and its a long process to filter out pure water again..
I feel this. I went through the same thing with music at the end of the 2010s. I stopped enjoying the process and more-or-less quit composing. I’ve been battling this with games for the past few years, but I think I do deeply love this process on a different level… I just have to commit to not crossing that cardinal sin line for my own sanity.
Genuinely, thank you for writing this.
<3333
i feel similarly about cooking or even doing the dishes sometimes--i had not thought about applying it to my practice. thanks for putting it into words!
This was a conclusion I arrived a while ago. I was always an anti-work kinda person, but I realize I was treating my own gamemaking as work too.
I’ve become content with just being chill about what I’m doing. The process is more important.
love this!
Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes the "if it sucks, hit da bricks! YOU CAN LEAVE (clothe shoppi, cops if ur quick)" meme is one of my favorite FAVORITE piece of media ever made by human hands. (I don't think it's normal 1. to have a favorite meme and 2. for that meme to be about a skeleton saying "YOU CAN LEAVE!! REAL WINNERS QUIT" but here we are)
But like I think it's genuinely lifechanging advice. Words to live by.
Taking the pain slowly out of the process of making until it's effort that you can enjoy (and not the corporate/commercial type of work, but some sort of idea of labor), and once you can't enjoy it, you find a way to enjoy something else, and maybe time can make that specific project new and enjoyable again.
I've been letting my ADHD demon take me by the hand lately - paying extra attention to whenever I stop having fun on a project and start like really really struggling - and lead me to where it wants to go and making whatever game I find over there.
And fuck if it isn't a finished commercial product, fuck if i don't finish it and just move on, fuck if it's half-baked but I call it done earlier than I would have because I'm not enjoying making it anymore...
However, sometimes you don't want to have made a game, you want to have made that one specific fucking game that doesn't exist yet and that you're the only one that knows how you want it to be and... I feel like there's some form of weird pleasure in pushing yourself through to finish a project like that, pushing against your own limits for a while (without hurting yourself) and getting a result that the process to reach felt some degree of gruesome. I think it kind of has a specific quaity to it sometimes, some works just show a bit of gruesomeness to how they've been made, they feel sweaty in a good way.
And I feel like you should first learn to enjoy that specific aspect of making a game before you attempt to make "that one game." Otherwise you should just try making "a game", a game being a work that has fluidity, and just has to exist to be a success to yourself, without being measured against some sort of ethereal vision of a specific thing you want to make. Making specific games feels like a trap, almost always, I think, but especially when you're a beginner and you have no idea what you're doing, but you want to make that game, and you're chasing that.
Anyways I love your manifesto and I love chopping vegetables and I love videotome (and I do the point at the screen and smile thing whenever I play a videotome).
Happy game-making <3
this is a problem about myself that i feel like i'll always be conscious of, but never really know how to solve. comparison comes so consistently and naturally to me that i feel like i've been missing the point, but i don't know how to will myself to change. ty for making this,,, i feel like i needed to hear it <3
Dunno your situation or goals or whatever, but I had the same feeling with a lot of my creative projects. I wanted to have written a novel or made a game or whatever the case may was. Currently I've found enjoyment in writing scripts and shorter form things, and doodling modest sized things rather than trying to make some grand work of art.
Just took a while of trying out different types of creativity to find the ones that I enjoy doing as much as I enjoy reaching the "have done" step. Best of luck to you.
if it sucks.... hit da bricks!! truer words have never been spoken. thanks for sharing this!
Thank you for making this! For so long, projects have filled up a space of my mind that is hard to decouple when doing literally anything else. A part of it is a deep passion, excited about new ideas constantly and finding everything an inspiration. But it's so exhausting. Impossible to live in the present often. But this is a good reminder to just enjoy the process without big expectations.
this is something I need to learn. i need to find the fun in making stuff again. because doing it is so stressful, but not doing it makes me feel like shit, so I just end up miserable either way. glad you've gotten to a better place with that.
<3
I needed to read this, lovely project and reminds me once again that productivity doesn't have to be all in life, enjoying the trip, the song while is playing, they're also important.
Love this manifesto! Technical question: how did you loop the game text? :o
very relatable set of experiences. it's hard to tell how much you actually enjoy doing something when there's all these other pressures on you while you do it, so i'm still figuring out exactly how i feel about the process. but i had an experience recently where i bought a new instrument and started playing it for fun and found that my enjoyment of playing scales and doing exercises was, for once, greater than my frustration at not being good yet... too early to say but i suspect having a more balanced life makes it easier to separate my feelings about doing the thing from my fears about what it means if i don't
I hate to look into a mirror and this was as clean as they come. Enjoying the process again is a year long project in itself (for me)
"do i want to make a game or do i want to have made a game?" called me out. love this. will definitely have to revisit this, it really spoke to me.
I was thinking about that Kurt Vonnegut quote and then you preempted my comment, love walking, love cooking, love farting about, simple as
oh yeah that's who it was... simple as
love this, ive been thinking a lot about my unfinished projects lately and why i dropped them, and it's absolutely that feeling of do i HAVE to vs. do i WANT to