CRAWL

The Cycle

I have this reoccurring dream.

I'm in a city. The actual city doesn't matter, and it definitely does not exist. It's a lot of 90 degree twists and turns, it forms a big massive grid, and it's very dangerous. For some reason whatever passes as law enforcement wants to kill me and the entire place is foggy as hell.

It's not quite a Silent Hill situation. I don't think the city represents my past sins or whatever. But I do know that I gotta find some way out of the city and the only way to do that is to go as far in to the city as I can. So, I get up and I start walking, I start talking, and I do everything I can to not get beaten up by the boys in blue. Or black. Sometimes they're in yellow, like raincoats. That part doesn't really matter in the end.

Now, I'm aware of the patterns. I know this is because of my hobbies; between video games and tabletop games I love a good dungeon. I've argued for years that a dungeon is like a big ecosystem more than it is a hole in the ground, and there's a lotta political intrigue and negotiation going on in a good dungeon. If you ask me, New York City is the greatest Megadungeon ever made and all it takes is someone to sit down and commit that to paper.

So, once a year I pick up a notebook and start doodling maps and then that notebook joins a pile of notebooks in my desk drawer that just kinda collect dust the next one joins the pile. And every three years or so, I pick one up, and leaf through it and try to find the spark to sit down and do something with these ideas.

But alas, I have a brain sickness: My ability to actually start a project is thwarted by my need to do it perfectly all at once. The idea of something stretching out years, held together only by my own interest and ability to find enough energy to get started always stops me before I get started.

So it languishes. An untouched pile of notebooks waiting for someone to turn the dream into something real. I get really sad with myself. I start to think about how I failed to achieve any of my dreams and just sorta retreat into myself. And then we have the dream again and the cycle starts all over.

Point x

When I was a kid, my dad introduced me to tabletop games.

Our first game was a Delta Green one shot. Now, I'm old enough now to appreciate how wildly inappropriate a game of Delta Green was for a 12 year old, but it gave me the taste of understanding what you could really do with games. As a GM, you took the seat of a designer and crafted new stories, worlds, and experiences for your players. The idea of making a little world just for your friends to have always felt like one of the kindest things you could ever do, so it bears out that a few years later I would want to GM. I don't think I actually even enjoy playing tabletop games as a player so much these days because the idea of crafting things for my wife and friends gives me way more joy than actually sitting across the table. ¹

Around the same time, I played a video game, then another, then discovered you could make video games by writing silly little lines of code like if x then y end and realized I could make little experiences for all kinds of people I had never even met. People kept saying Learn To Code, so I figured why not. What if I did in fact Learn to Code, letting me have a job and a hobby. I went to school, I got my degree, I worked a regular desk job and eventually found myself at a whole ass game studio! Wow! I could make a game for people! I can use all this code to do something that makes people smile!

Point y

When I was an adult, I learned the game industry fucking sucks.

Perhaps it was the fact that I worked on a game that was beloved but bad at making money, but the moment the aforementioned game crumbled and I was left dealing with the aftermaths of a layoff, I became very aware of how much the art of making a game is held up by passionate weirdos and held back by people who use non-words like "KPI" and "Shareholders". I wanted to work things people liked and enjoyed and I was then asked question on how I could make the thing worse so we could make more money. It was frankly soul crushing and put a thought in my head:

Maybe this whole journey was a bad idea?

It's possible that, in the pursuit of learning skills with the single dream of wishing to making what are basically toys for people to play with I may have wasted a good chunk of my life? Maybe, hypothetically, I invested a bunch of time learning how to make Mario move only to watch the industry that would hire and retain me for those skills lurch into a weird preventable death spiral.

Maybe this was all very stupid, Robert. Maybe you should've learned to be an electrician or something instead of helping ideas men make bad products?

When the second wave of layoffs hit, I basically had already lost the creative spark. I shuffled to another start up, where another wave of bad ideas lead to another wave of layoffs, and then sorta flailed around blindly until The Government offered me a paycheck so I could feed my wife and my little blind/deaf dog and I said "thank you for the opportunity" and the drawer of notebooks continued to collect dust.

Line(x, y)

A week ago I sit at my desk, staring at a piece of paper with a half scribbled dungeon layout and waiting for scripts to complete that I receive an email stating that there's a new game out by the company I used to work for. ²

I make a face when I see what the game is, and then proceed to make several faces when I learn how the game was made. I feel the spiral start up again. I start to get very upset with myself about how much time I've wasted. I reflect on the fact my birthday has just passed — I'm 36 now and the 16 year old who decided he'd make things for people would be so disappointed with me — and for the first time in a long time instead of feeling sad I feel...mad?

I bet could do better than what they made here. I know I can do better than what they made here. I can definitely do better, with blackjack! And Hookers!

But I need accountability. Also I have a second brain sickness that prevents me from not playing with new versions of old technology. I spend far too long fiddling with text editors, hemming and hawing over engines. I tell myself I should blog and then delete my blog and my old domain so I can spin up brand new ones. I get lost in a bunch of busy work. And then we wind up here.

I need a dumping ground for ideas, a place to post progress, and overall a creative outlet that isn't just writing tiny little posts on Bluesky. I also kinda wanted to give a polite goodbye to the other blog I mostly abandoned, sorry Bear buddy, no hard feelings.

So. Thats why we’re here. Let's get busy writing.