Category: Uncategorized

1. Brainstorming Phase:

Notes are being scribbled onto a surprisingly diverse set of surfaces, some of them are for a new game, some of them for your DICE Awards thank-you speech. You create a new folder with a work-in-progress name for your project and you are like

Mood: You are beyond yourself because you realize that your game will be the next Minecraft.

2. Hatching Things Out Phase:

You make some serious formatting decisions for the documents you started in phase 1. Notes are herded together to try and crush them into an actual game. After the first rush of OCD passes you realize that some of those awesome snippets were actually rather vague and abstract and, God, there are just so many holes to fill! Sensibly (and because you feel really dried out for ideas) you decide to postpone filling them until you have some actual game play to judge.

Mood: Still optimistic at times. Your project starts to resemble work, which makes you feel mature but also, you know, less enthusiastic. Doubts start to creep in about some of the holes that you patched: Maybe, just maybe, your game may not turn out to be the next Minecraft after all.

3. Realizing Phase – Prototype:

Setting up a prototype makes you remember how much work it is to just get game essentials like menus, asset loading and path finding up and running. You copy&paste from other projects, hushing that voice of shame in your head with a “we’ll automate and clean that up later”.

Mood: Everything is still chill because you know that shitty UI you just made is temporary anyway.

4. Realizing Phase Demo:

You make a TODO list where you constantly shuffle things from “Essentials” to “Nice to have”. You finally remember to “automate and clean up” – because now there are more important tasks to do.

Mood: You’re overwhelmed by the still impressive length of your “Essentials” TODO list, so you decide not to open it anymore. You start to resent your game for being so large and complex. With sadistic relish you cut out every feature that made you excited about your game in the first place.

5. Depression Phase:

Just shortly before or maybe the moment you finish the demo you realize: Nothing looks or works or feels as it should. You wonder how and where you could have gone so wrong. You look at your initial brainstorming ideas and wonder how the hell you could ever think this would be fun. Minecraft my ass.

Mood: Self-explanatory.

6. The Pivoting Phase:

You start to think about how you can save shit. You realize that you’ll have to basically throw everything out. Half-heartedly you start to implement the new changes, just to make perfectly sure that you give up the moment that everything is broken and there is no running, showable version of all your hard work.

Mood: Desperately you try to fight the inevitably dawning realization that you have wasted six month of your life. At night you have nightmares of people laughing at you for being a pathetic failure. You hate your game and think longingly of the time you worked for someone else’s (not-so-)grand vision.

7. The New Shiny or Let’s Forget About This Failure Phase:

A new shiny game idea comes along.

Mood: Excited. Just not about this game anymore.

8. Overhauling Phase aka Brainstorming Phase Round II:

For some reason it finally struck you last night how you can make that game you started three years ago into another Minecraft after all. Probably because you were in phase 7 for another game.

Mood: see 1.

Have you ever noticed how hard it is to come up with an answer to the request: Please tell me about yourself.? OK, maybe that is just me, but this question has me go all blank. I have never sat down to summarize myself or my life’s achievements. I don’t usually have more at hand than my present conundrums. So when I try to answer, out comes a jumbled mess of facts that randomly pop into my head, even though they don’t have much significance, while three hours later on my ride home, I’m thinking: Why didn’t I tell them about X? The same happens to me when someone wants a short pitch of my games or stories. You’d think I’d at least have prepared for that, but then you don’t know me well.

This is the reason why I hate world-building. That vast emptiness of a freshly hatched story scares me. Sure, there are a few pillars of the world and characters sketched out, usually the things I need to support and tell the story. But then what? Where do I go from here?

Now, I’m anything if not methodical. In the past I would create a new document called “World” or “Characters”, spend some hours on formatting headers and text body, getting font and colors just right (how can anyone work in Times New Roman?), and outline in headers what I thought was important to have filled in: History, Geography, Culture. Looks, Past and Quirks of characters. Then I would stare at my table of contents blissfully as if I’d already conquered the hole. Very rarely would I sit down and ask my headers: Tell me about yourself.

You can imagine the kind of answers they gave.

So a short while ago, I decided to try a different approach. Here is how today’s session with Lotte went:

“What did you do before you came to Vienna?” She just blankly stared at me as if saying: What’s it to you? Not having to work much with, I tried to narrow it down to – was she working or not. Being the same kind of pompous ass as other writers, I make my characters superior and cynical and then try to paste some tragic past onto them that however must never question or threaten said superiority. So in my mind I was like: ‘course she was working – what, she wasn’t a freaking housewife! And I began to rattle of professions I deemed acceptable yet not completely unrealistic: Had she been working in a school? No response. I was feeling like she was trying to tell me: dude, this intelligent/ambitious-type-thing? That’s just an act you’re trying to pin on me. – So I took it down a notch: Was she a secretary? She didn’t say no, and I could feel an image of her as a housewife emerging, maybe managing her husbands finances. Would she though? That was not the Lotte I knew. Far too lazy and too much of a oh-look-a-butterfly.

Something else occurred to me then however: Lotte had been married? And of course she said: “I still am!” I could see my brain flooding with questions: Then where is he? How is your relationship with him? Why are you here? And so on.

We had a nice chat after that. In the end I even thought: You’re not such a bitch after all, Lotte Honig!

keep all this nonsense in my head to myself.

I usually don’t anyway, but this is on a potentially much larger scale (#grandiosityMoment), and so I thought I would apologize up front for any lasting damage I might cause should some innocent person happen to stumble onto this. And also, you know, cover myself legally. So, making sure you are not one of the following:

Low on time. (This is not the place you want to be if you need to spend your time wisely.)

Compulsive on the arguing. (Again, more because of the time issue.)

Easily distracted. (See how I’m looking out for you.)

Desperate for distraction. (Seriously, don’t do it. Or if you have to – do it now, while there is little content and you can easily go back to your life.)

And for safeties sake – don’t distribute any of the posts you find here! It is bad enough that you got sucked into it. No need for others to come to harm too.