No more holding pattern

The Age of Reason will end in 2023, I promise.

First of all, here are some things I did this year that I'm proud of:

2022 sure has been a land of contrasts. Overall, despite everyone’s insistence that things would be “normal” again (as if whatever was considered normal wasn’t already terrible for most people on this planet), we still managed to drift even further into the Clown Dimension. What personally frustrates me the most isn’t how things are going on a political level (though it’s still very bad), but how powerless I feel when I think about all of it? A few Months ago, I was thinking about why my last two commercial game projects (GB Rober and now Virtue’s Heaven) both have a very strong political undercurrent within them and why I’m so insistent on building them this way. I think it has much less to do with a genuine belief that somehow my games will contribute to changing the tide of history, and much more to do with me flailing around to mask my own feelings of powerlessness. Making my games this way, at least gives me *some* way to express all these ideas that are flying around my head. It’s not like I don’t like what I’m doing, but I feel like it would be deeply irresponsible of me, if my own contributions towards us overcoming this hellscape we live in, would be a handful of videogames that only a few hundred people at best will play.

Anyway, the push towards making things “normal” again will continue and in that process capitalism will do what it always does: Enact vengeance on anyone who does not comply with its vision of normalcy. And with that being said, let’s talk a bit how this year has been going for me personally:

Again, it has been a land of contrasts. I had my final therapy session in late March of this year, and I got off of my antidepressants in late Summer, ending a process of recovering from severe depression, anxiety and just being burned out to no end, that took almost three years. I don’t even know when the last time was where I felt this good about myself. Another big step I took was to start taking ADHD medication in October. I know that the medication won’t magically make me start working earlier, or just get rid of those self-doubts I have (more on that in a minute), but I’m optimistic that with the added stability, things can actually get better, as long as I keep going. So on that front, the year has been great, and as long as I ignore the impending apocalypse, this has been the third year in a row, where I can look into the future with a certain degree of optimism.

However, this optimism takes a bit of work on my end, because there isn’t a lot of what happened in terms of my professional aspirations that would warrant that optimism. Commercially speaking, 2022 was my most successful year as a game developer. Thanks to a weird trading card and low price combination, Splinter Zone had its best year and people kept buying GB Rober when it was on sale. I couldn’t manage to get a console port for it sorted out though, which is a bit unfortunate. That aside however, it’s been good and the extra money was needed, considering that everything got much more expensive and I also had to pay for some stuff that I needed for Virtue’s Heaven.

Which brings me to my goals for this year: I wanted to get Virtue’s Heaven off the ground and maybe even get close to finishing it and I wanted to actually try and apply for some game development jobs. Both of these had mixed results. Virtue’s Heaven remains a struggle. It took me until November to finally find a structure for the game that I’m happy with and I spent Months building things for ideas that I ended up scrapping all together. Not that I made no progress at all throughout the year, it was just that I very often went sideways instead of forward. I keep second-guessing my decisions with this game and end up getting lost in details that I don’t, and frankly shouldn’t be working on at this stage.

In general, I’m just very unsure about the game’s overall quality.

It’s weird, because I like the concept, I like how it feels to play and since I finally landed on a working structure for the game, I can actually see glimpses of something really interesting. However, I have no idea how well this game will work for people that are not me. I had barely any chance to watch other people play the game, and what I did see from a handful of Youtube videos of the game’s EGX demo, didn’t fill me with confidence. It helps a bit that I now know what the game is likely going to look like in the end and that I see a path to get there hopefully towards the end of next year. The project was never easy, and considering that all of my previous attempts to turn this gigantic ball of movement options into a working videogame fizzled out after three Months, I’m glad that now I at least know that it will exist at some point.

The theme of “I’m torn between being convinced that what I have is cool and exciting, but I also think it’s the worst thing ever made” continues in my attempts to find an actual job. I haven’t really applied for a ton of gamedev positions before this year, mostly because I was just too depressed to believe I actually had a chance. I’m also just not very good at job applications, you know? One constant element throughout most of my life is that I’m not very good at leaving good first impressions. Job applications, on the other hand, require you to leave a good first impression, because you likely won’t get another chance. Add to this my general frustrations with the whole process of writing applications and you just get something that is not only very unpleasant for me to do, but also filled with self-doubts.

Did you know that March of 2023, marks the tenth anniversary of the first videogame I ever released? Sure, I didn’t do much else until 2015, but I’m still not a beginner at this. Yet, despite having released two commercial games, having three games get accepted into the Leftfield collection, being on course to release a third commercial game next year, being completely self-taught and having done all of this, while living below what is considered my countries’ poverty line, I couldn’t even get an interview for an internship this year.

I had days, especially after rejections for positions I was actually excited about, where I sat there wondering if what I’m doing is actually worth anything, or if I’m actually any good at it, when I can’t even get into consideration for entry-level positions.

At some point, I felt like I was losing my mind, because on one hand I truly believe that I’m good at what I’m doing, but every time when I try to get/need some kind of meaningful outside confirmation for this belief, I just run into a wall. Obviously, there’s a bit more at play here. There’s a difference between being good at something, and being good at selling yourself as someone who’s good at something and I’m not the best at the latter. However, I’m at a point where I’m seriously wondering how long I should keep doing all of this, because it’s just impossible. I’ve been doing this for a while now, and though it’s not that I haven’t gotten *any* support from folks, it’s just not enough to keep doing this in perpetuity.

So that’s 2022. A year where I felt really good about myself and where I am in life, but also one filled with a ton of doubt and frustration, most of which were completely outside of my control. I’m not ready to give up quite yet, but I feel like my life’s been in a holding pattern for a while now and as much as it needed to be like that for the last three years, I want to try what I can to break out of it next year.