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It's okay to not be subtle

Progress on my current game was not as quick as I hoped it would be over the past few weeks and frankly, it was a bit frustrating at times. I thought after having finished GB Rober very quickly last year, I was past the point of doubting and second-guessing myself all the time. And yet here I was, wondering if the stuff I made so far and have planned out, is actually “good” enough, or rather if I am “good” enough to actually make it.

After all, I'm making a game, where I actually had to openly make statements about what I would consider to be a world worth fighting for, and that’s totally different than whatever I did with GB Rober, right?

Sure, I did make GB Rober explicitly anti-capitalist (probably not in every aspect, but I think the ‘shoot your bosses’ part is fairly clear), but it doesn’t count, because it’s small and isn’t serious.

Why though, isn’t it serious?

I honestly don't have an answer for that. Maybe it’s a combination of my low self-esteem and the general notion that unless something I’ve made is actually commercially successful, it’s just a fun little hobby thing. Trying to unwrap this particular package would probably take a while, so let’s just skip ahead and talk about why all of this is wrong:

Yeah sure, GB Rober is a small pixelart platformer that is very simple and on-the-nose about its subject. However, that doesn’t discount the fact that I still had to consciously make decisions about what kind of world it takes place in, what I would consider an enemy to be worth fighting and what kind of world the players would help create in the process.

These are questions every creator (regardless of media) has to confront themselves with, since your art is a direct reflection of those questions.

Me being scared of making statements about what kind of world I would wish to live in, doesn’t go away if I were to pursue a different project. I would maybe postpone these answers, but I would have to answer them sooner or later, because that’s what creating things is about. The only way for me to avoid this is to just completely stop doing things, and I don’t think that this is an option.

Yeah, but what about the possible reception? What if it’s not subtle enough, or not eloquent enough, or whatever? Just looking at GB Rober again, I think it’s okay to not be subtle about things, and maybe its very upfront nature was the reason why it worked so well for me. I’m generally not a subtle person. I’m very loud and don’t really like obfuscating my intentions with people. So maybe that’s what my art should be as well. And something being loud, doesn’t automatically make it less earnest in any way, so it’s absolutely okay to be as much in-the-face as you need. After all, you’re expressing yourself in this, and pretending to be someone you are not, only leads to something that is probably much less interesting.

Anyway, there isn’t really a great takeaway here for other people, this is mostly to remind myself that what I’m doing is okay, and that I am okay.