CROW FUN

I'm responding to this thread (bluesky link, also twitter link) by Jake Eakle / personman:

these ideas got /inside me/, man!! i don't know exactly how to explain it but it really feels like engaging with this game taught me The Truth.

like, you gotta let things be how they are. sometimes that means stepping back and letting things settle into their natural shapes. sometimes it means stepping UP and putting in the hard work to get them where they're going. both are good! both are true! do you see??

and you gotta meet people where they're at. with complete respect and without hiding the truth from them! without sectioning them off into a little fuckin zone! but still you must PROVIDE.

this game has deeply important ethics lessons for you, if you listen.

(Yeah read the whole thread it's good.)

So on one level like it even seems absurd to say the game teaches ethics, on the surface there's not much that looks like that! It's not telling a story with characters and morals and quotes. You could say that the ideas that Jake's talking about aren't in the game at all, and entirely in his head - but I believe him. It's meaningfully something he got out of it, that emerged from the Jake+HACK system as he spent time with it, not just thoughts he would have had on his own without the game as an - inspiration? object of meditation? friend?

Man, this what making art is all about!

I don't know how much of these ideas I "put in there". I definitely didn't make the game as an allegory to communicate a specific message. But I tried thoughtfully to make good art.

It's this alchemy that happens when thoughtful, heartfelt work comes together with an earnest audience (cocreator?) and it unwinds in them and something new comes out. Different people will get different things out, because it's the interaction between.. some people might not get anything - or might not like what they get - but what I mean by a thing being "art" is essentially this quality of revealing new depths through engaging with it. (Does "better" art mean art that can alchemise with more different souls? Is that a thing?)

Ok that's that thought! One of the really nice things about doing this crowdfunding is seeing lots of different people saying stuff about what my work has meant to them! Thank you everyone!

crowfunding: 868-BACK

Hey! It's been a while since I've written here. I have, though, been fairly consistent about doing a monthly post on Patreon with videos (which are also mostly on youtube). It's been a good process for developing my voice, as always just consistently doing a thing you get better at it and now I'm a more confident speaker! I know video isn't the most efficient medium for everyone - I myself would still much prefer to read text than watch a video, and e.g. when I search for the answer to a problem and all the answers are in the form of video tutorials I'm pretty upset. And my videos are definitely often longer than they would need to be to communicate the information because I'm taking time to think, rambling a bit, and then not editing. But the vibe is good!

Anyway, I'll skip ahead to the present (my last video covers the gap pretty well if you want to check that out) and: I am announcing my next game!

It's called 868-BACK and it's.. well you can guess what it is. What? Michael's making a sequel? I really thought for a long time that was something I would never do, like that sequels are kind of crass. Like - beneath me, I guess? I'd look at these monolithic franchises and just be so bored seeing the same thing being made over and over again. But I'm *_*-CreAtive*^-^, I wouldn't do that! Hah.

Creative work has something in common with therapy, maybe it's a kind of therapy. If you want to keep making new things and pushing boundaries, you have to really look inside yourself and witness what's there. It takes personal growth. Or it gives personal growth maybe? It's all mixed in together, it's just part of being a person. You look at the things that you're cringing away from, the triggers you avoid, and at some point you just have to gird up and go after them.

And it feels sometimes ridiculous when I say things like this because I'm very aware that the things I make don't look "deep" and "serious" because they're full of wizards and robots. Which is just another knot to push past.

Last year I announced I was making a sequel to Cinco Paus! I wasn't very far along with it, and I was trying to figure out what I really wanted to do with it and how I could afford that.. anyway the point is, I was able to convince myself to do a (ugh) seeequel because the original game never really reached an audience, the idea was really to make a version that could (and I'd get to add fancy cool new stuff too, which would be fun to make, but that wasn't why I was doing it). Well, that hasn't gone anywhere yet (see that video I linked earlier for a fuller story but, don't worry it's all good, plans change with the winds but we go places).

Anyway, this year I was reorienting, trying to figure out how to bring in some money, asking myself what I really wanted to make yet. And, a mime wrote to me asking, for the Nth time, if I could add a portrait mode to 868-HACK. Now, 868-HACK started as a jam game made in a week, and then just sort of accreted from there with no good software engineering design at all. It's embarrassing, but to rework it for a portrait display I'd have to go through and change lots of hard-coded numbers because the gameplay code constantly refers to specific screen coordinates. (Okay the thing is, what matters is what gets the job done. I had tried several times to make videogames doing everything "properly" and those projects never got off the ground. I've seen so many other people's projects also go nowhere because they try to do it "right" too. I found an approach that was quick and dirty and let me get out the games I was yearning to make, and it worked(ish). Now I've done a few I'm much better at finding the middle ground between getting it done and making it extensible, but the only way I got that was the real experience of doing it wrong - my CS degree taught me lots of "right" ways but never met them with the reality of messy explorative creative expression.) So I always say no! No portrait mode for you! But it got me thinking, I'd been working in Godot engine, and ported Zaga-33 (a smaller simpler game) to it so I could release it on Android.. how much work would it be to port 868-HACK, maybe a portrait mode and a new platform release would be worth something together?

(Yes he's actually a mime, and he's bloody good too, check this out.)

At some point in there I got out my notebook of "things to try if I ever come back to 868-HACK". There was some damn good stuff in there! What had I been sitting on this for? A bunch of new ideas started flowing too. Before I knew it, I had several more notebook pages tentatively titled "868-HACK sequel??? 869hack?".

Well. Turns out sequels are totally fine! I got past that discomfort with the idea of a Cinco Paus sequel (which is still on the cards!) but that's opened up a whole new vista. It had been really important to me to be being original and constantly doing new work, and all my so-called "broughlikes" are determinedly avoiding each other. Seriously, 868-HACK / Imbroglio / Cinco Paus are about as far apart as games can possibly be while being in the same niche subgenre and interested in all the same things. Sometimes I'd see comments about how my games are all kinda the same and I'd really bristle! No! They are definitely different! (Even ignoring Helix etc. in totally different genres, but people do.) And I'm proud of how different they are, I'm not going to turn around and say that's not a good thing. That drive for difference really pushed me to discover some great ideas. Here's where the "therapy" comes in: sometimes we discover that we have a belief that's limiting us from doing what is there for us to do, and we feel like we're blocked because we're not letting ourselves just do the thing that we could do, that we want to do, and would be good for us to do. But - those limitations we put on ourselves aren't intrinsically bad things! To get past them, we have to recognise that they were something that served us at the time, but their time is past and now we can move past them. Step by step, I'm past the idea that I should avoid things that are too close to what I've done before, and I've allowed myself to consider the (to other people bleedingly obvious) idea of making a sequel to my most successful work.

And a vista opens up. I had been treating everything I'd made before as an obstacle, and so the possibilities of what I could make were gradually closing smaller and smaller every step. But I own everything I've made, I can do whatever the heck I want with it, it's all just resources. I watch my daughter painstakingly drawing a perfect picture one day, and the next day she cuts it up with scissors to stick pieces on something else. Yesterday's meal is today's ingredients.

I'll be posting more details about the design direction and where it's at soon! But, mostly being busy just working on it.

Also (importantly) I have run out of money, so I am inviting crowdfunding support so I can finish the game: 868-BACK on backerkit. Please share, support, etc. I hope you're excited about seeing what I do with the freedom to take the original and twist it into wild new shapes, and I hope for some of you that excitement translates into a willingness to donate up-front. Thanks!