basking in the shade: a fork in the road
in the basking in the shade subseries i will be posting developer blogs. these are more personal and informal reflections on my journey as a creator.
since my youth, i was taught "only hard things are worth doing." this truism was both spoken and unspoken, reflected in the rough-and-tumble attitudes of those around me. truly it was a harsh mentality, cultivated through the harsh lives of those around me: rural poor, immigrant farmers, reservation survivors, ghetto kids-turned-adults, and white usamerican greatest generation and baby boomer bootstrappers.
now in my adulthood, i've learned so much more since then, often "the hard way." between learning much deeper about how ability, disability, and economics works, it's become evident to me how that truism is so much a falsehood. and worse, has led me to frequent misdirection and self-destruction throughout my life.
when one is always looking for what's "hard" as a confirmation that it's good, worthy work--what one really does is run up against one's limits time and time again. and since we don't live in a world where the rules of battle shonen are ontological, that simply doesn't work that well.
every medicine has the potential to heal you with one dose and be fatal in another--the advice to push against your limits, to question what your "limits" really are, can be a healthy one in the right dose. at times in my life, i've been convinced i couldn't do something when i really could. in those times, the reminder to question what i perceive as my limits has been helpful. but without its counterbalance--of respecting my limits, of evaluating when and how i need to push myself, what areas really matter to push myself in life--i found myself pushing in every direction all the time, well beyond my capabilities, into disaster. before a few years ago this was exacerbated by not yet realizing i was autistic. the dissonance between "what i was capable of" and "what i was made to feel i should be capable of" were immense. i ran myself into burnout constantly, with unrealistic expectations for myself in every area of my life, all driven at its core by the dogma of "hard is right."
i've learned many things on the question of ability, and the foremost is that health and productivity are not opposed, but mutually reinforcing. gradual, consistent effort maintains your health and leads to sustainable results. effort doesn't correlate to value and is instead a cost:benefit analysis, so choosing where to apply your effort thoughtfully will often yield the best results. this means, of course, doing a lot more "easy" things, especially ones that bring value to your life, based on what you deem valuable. and of course, we maintain productivity not dogmatically, but to provide a stable life for ourselves and our loved ones. as you can see, it is a shifting of thought towards balance and harmony as the core principle.
my current project is an autobattler inspired by etrian odyssey. before that, i was briefly working on a survivor-like/bullet heaven game. the first game required reconsideration for two reasons: first is that i found the genre overstimulating (though fun), so it was hard to work on. this led directly to my decision to work on a turn-based, methodical game instead with the autobattler. second though, was that it was hard for me to design. following the first issue, it was hard to both get in the weeds and get inspired for a project like this. since these games overstimulate me, it's hard to engage deeply and consistently with them as a genre. it eventually made sense to reconsider and place my efforts into an easier project in a genre that i find easy to lose myself in. autobattlers and dungeon crawler rpgs both qualify there, so when the concept struck me it was an easy decision to redirect my effort to it.
as i have gotten deeper into my autobattler project, i've now realized another thorny area for me. it was brought to my attention through jamming a short visual rpg (think vn+rpg) for my partner as a christmas gift. it was easy, it almost felt effortless. i enjoyed the process thoroughly. it made me think about my autobattler: while it hasn't been unenjoyable, it has felt hard at times. and it's feeling harder the more i get the systems programming done and move more exclusively on to battle system design, the core of the game. there was a time in my life where what i wanted the most was to make games like this, but now that i'm making one i've realized i find narrative design more natural and joyful to me than action or strategy design. in retrospect this should be no surprise, as my last two rpgs were very narrative-forward in their use of the rpg structure. but that is the ghost of "harder is better."
when i think about making pulpy, cute visual rpgs, it feels easy. it feels like something i could easily just "do" indefinitely. it's probably one of the few times anything in my life has seemed so natural to me.
so my question now: do i continue with my autobattler and all my current future plans to make big systems-driven rpgs, or do i reconsider my efforts once again? i'm wary of entering a pattern where i throw away previous effort repeatedly in a sort of perfectionism. right now my thought is to scope down my autobattler before moving on, but really i'll just have to sit with it and see where things go. part of me is also saying "ah, but wouldn't it be fun to get outside my comfort zone a little?", so clearly there's a balance for me to discover here still.
i'm perennially reminded of derek yu's advice, to find the intersection of "game you want to make", "game you want to have made" and "game you can make." 14 years later i'm still learning this advice it seems! it feels humbling, and a reminder that we are always evolving and changing as individuals. the right answer to that equation was very different 14 years ago, and maybe in 14 years it will be again. the frequent question of my life these days is "how can i make my life less harsh and more relaxed," and it seems i am constantly finding new answers to that question. rather than forcing outcomes, i want to be a student of myself and the world around me.