Ah, I have it now. Meh.

It’s definitely not depression that I’ve been experiencing. It’s more of an emotional vacuum. My mood has not been in a downswing because I have not experienced moods in a couple of months. I’ve felt no anger, no sadness, hell, I’ve even lost the ability to cry, but this has also come with a dearth of elation, joy, passion.

Since November, I’ve been on Abilify in addition to my usual Lexapro. This was intended to help control my bipolar, and I can only conclude that it did its job a little too well. Creating art is all about appealing to the emotions of the viewer, games doubly so. Without the ability to feel, I lost the ability to make games.

A week ago, I decided to stop taking Abilify (after consulting with my doctor, of course). Within days, I felt the desire to work again. So that answers that!

Regroup

And so it’s time to take a step back and look at my projects and projects in potentia.

Since my brain switched back on a few days ago, I’ve had Guys! Stop Pressing Buttons! noodling around in the back of my mind. One thought has continuously asserted itself: Too much. I have the utmost faith in the G!SPB! concept. What I do not have faith in is the project’s potential as a freshman opus.

A brawler by itself isn’t terribly intimidating. I can at least wrap my mind around it without getting seasick. Hone the controls to a razor’s edge. Create a kung fu movie AI system (a handful of enemies press their attack while the rest wait around the periphery). Probably need to introduce one or two new enemy AIs per level. Level design could turn into a slog, but with regular playtesting, I imagine it can be made to be a lot of fun.

Microgames, though, scare the hell out of me, especially when I’m confined to a “jokes about rhythm games” theme. Every new microgame introduces custom gameplay code and mechanics that have to be playtested, tweaked, and perfected. I’d be astonished if I could eke out more than two complete microgames per month of work.

Conservatively, I’d estimate that I can complete G!SPB! in the span of two years. That’s way too long. This game’s time will come, but that time is not now.

What else have I got?

I have two other game concepts that consistently nip at me.

Remember Fortress? I came a long way with that little game before the code got so disgusting I couldn’t look at it anymore and put it aside. That wasn’t very mature of me, was it? I bet I could finish Fortress in six months to a year if I really set myself to the task.

And then there’s Montsa Punch!. I originally worked on it just to learn Unity and Blender and play around a little bit with brawler ideas to prepare for G!SPB!. It was never supposed to turn into a full blown product, and yet I still play it every few days. There’s something delightful about it. How often is one actually pleased with one’s own work? And didn’t I just say I wasn’t too frightened of a pure brawler?

So which one do I want to finish? Fortress is, by a vast margin, an easier project, but the code is a mess, and finishing it starting from its current state could be a nightmare. I’d probably want to either refactor first or just trash it and do it over in Unity. Monsta Punch!, on the other hand, is in a state of pure potential, and that’s both a good thing and a bad thing. Good, because I could probably use the energy that comes with a fresh project right now. Bad because it’s a long road ahead. Fortress at least has the benefit of already being content-complete.

Maybe twiddle with both for a few weeks and see what happens? I’ve got some thinking to do.

• There is a problem that needs to be solved.
• I set my mind to solving the problem. I am the only person in the room. I must solve the problem myself, motivated by myself, with no one to bounce solutions off of but myself.
• I stare at the problem.
• The rest of the day passes by. North America turns to face away from the sun. Another day’s productivity is gone forever.

This is in contrast to what I saw while visiting my friends, Will and Dain, at Cipher Prime:

• There is a problem that needs to be solved.
• Will and Dain discuss the problem.
• The problem gets solved and everyone gets back to work. Five minutes have elapsed.
• I experience awe.

With a brief conversation, two minds defeat a challenge on which I would have wasted an entire calendar day. I tell Dain how envious I am of the relationship he and his work partner have. He simply nods and smiles. “Yeah, man.”

When first I set myself on this path, I looked upon solo indies who had made their careers working by themselves in their home offices, paragons of near total self-sufficiency, and I thought to myself, That is what I want to be. In the (almost) year since I quit my job and began working on games full time, nothing has become clearer than the fact that working alone is not a sustainable strategy for me. It is disappointing, but I cannot escape this conclusion.

It takes a certain kind of… savant, let’s say, to create in isolation. While I have had considerable success at being creative by myself in the past, it is evident that the type of creativity inherent to video game development does not lend me to the same work style.

I crave partnership.

I have set my dire agents to the task of forging working relationships. Though such bonds will root me in Philadelphia longer than my five-year plan would have dictated, I have a career to build. More to come.

Weeeeiiiirrrrrd. But I’ll take it.

I went to my first GDC last week, and thank the gods I swung back to the manic end of my bipolar in time. I had a great time and met a lot of great people (and one or two not-so-greats, but hey, even Macs crash from time to time).

Tuesday night was probably the biggest and most harrowing evening of the trip. I went to a party populated by all of the indie dev greats in one little pub. I just spent five minutes trying to come up with a good metaphor for how out of place I felt. Take that wasted effort to mean that I felt considerably out of place.

Nevertheless, as a personal challenge to my social anxiety, I committed to spending the evening walking up to every random group of people, introducing myself, and starting a conversation. When one conversation reached its logical conclusion, I excused myself and went straight into another cold introduction. No breaks except to pee (concordantly, I found a lot of excuses to pee).

It was nigh magical. With but a single exception, everyone was warm and welcoming and eager to hear about what I was working on. It gave me a great opportunity to perfect my Guys! Stop Pressing Buttons! pitch, and I even got a lot of kind words about Monsta Punch!, including from one of the Sword and Sworcery developers!

I’m feeling emboldened, socially if not otherwise. I don’t feel like my work ethic is back just yet, but I can work on that. The main thing is that I broke out of my shell and found myself feeling perfectly natural in a difficult social situation. I just need to work my way back up to working again.

Oddly, that thought makes me feel a thousand times more anxious than I felt going into GDC.

I didn’t get any work done, is what I’m saying.

I detest weeks like this. They make me feel like I have no hope in ever succeeding at anything that requires self motivation. The good news is, my brain did settle down for short periods of time that were nonetheless lengthy enough to work out a few implementation-level problems in my head. I spent the rest of my time taking care of myself and letting my brain process what it felt such a desperate need to process.

Thankfully, weeks like this are, if not rare, at least uncommon, and I’ve gotten good at using them to unwind and recharge rather than obsess like my brain wants me to do. I may have only written 20 lines of compilable code this week, but another 200 are waiting in the back of my mind to be slammed into the keyboard come Monday.

I’d intended to have a fun prototype to share with you today. It’ll have to wait until next Friday.

It’s been during this time that I’ve discovered just how valuable it is to have a circle of peer support. Within seconds of tweeting about the trouble I was having with the design and how I wanted to give up, I had encouraging rebuttals coming in.

Nothing helps your motivation better than knowing it’s perfectly normal to lose it!

These tweets were just the beginning. The words of support poured in for hours after that, and I even got a phone call from Tim at Final Form, who was in his usual pep-talky mood. I’m extremely lucky to be able to count him and the other Final Formers as friends and mentors, and luckier still to have such a network of friends to cheer me on when I feel like quitting.

You can’t work in a vacuum. You can’t suffer silently. I forget way too often that games are by nature a highly social animal. Working on design documentation is well and good, but it keeps you from getting feedback. It isolates you into this nasty little bubble of pain that you can only escape by letting others into it. As Tim told me, game development is a cycle of designing, implementing, playtesting, and designing again. Hypothesis becomes experiment becomes theory becomes new hypothesis. The last two weeks, I’ve done nothing but hypothesize. No wonder I’ve felt stuck!

So today I open Unity and Blender back up and start building again. Hopefully I’ll have something to show next week!

Okay.

The name of my next game is Guys! Stop Pressing Buttons!

Is it sexist?

Sound off in the comments.

Here! Play it! The character you don’t touch the controls for will get taken over by the AI after a few seconds.

It’s a simple enough game. Two Monstas punch each other until one of them wins. You have three actions: a quick punch combo, a heavy punch, and a block. Quick punches can be blocked, heavy punches can be interrupted by a quick punch, and blocks can be broken through by a heavy punch. Rocks, papers, scissors.

I was the sole developer, with Francis serving as producer during the last few days of the project.

The game was developed for the Unity engine and targeted at PC/Mac, web, and iOS platforms. Scripting was done in MonoDevelop (kill me). Character art was done in Photoshop, and animations were created in Blender.

What Went Right

1 – Art and animation: Oh my HELL did I have fun animating the characters for this game. Everyone I showed the game to loved the art style, which made me verrrry happy. I’m really excited to do more of this in my next project.

2 – Simple mechanics: The rock-paper-scissor fighting system is a lot of fun and adds a big layer of psychology to two-player matches without the AI.

3 – Architecture: Thank the gods I nuked the code base halfway through and started over. After just a couple weeks of intense textbook digestion, I feel like a leaps-and-bounds better software architect. The ease with which I was able to work with my own code at the end of the project (a rarity for me) confirms the progress I’ve made.

4 – First time writing a realtime AI: Writing AI for Fortress was pretty straightforward. When it was the AI’s turn, it could analyze a static snapshot of the game state and decide what to do. Monsta Punch!‘s AI needed to be realtime, making decisions as events unfolded. I’d never written such an AI before, but thanks again to lots of pre-reading, I was able to create a reasonably effective AI that was easy to extend and tweak.

5 – Test driven development: This was my first time using TDD, and while I got lazy with it after a couple weeks, I found it very useful and will continue using it in the future.

What Went Wrong

1 – Bad early architecture: I went into this project remembering the ASCII fustercluck that was Fortress, thinking that this time will be different. It wasn’t, and I ended up nuking everything after it became clear I was repeating old mistakes.

2 – No tuning or tweaking: This was by design, as I was only going for “good enough”, for extremely forgiving interpretations of “good enough”, but still, the game has very poor balance. The AI is dumb dumb dumb, and you can easily win by just mashing the quick punch button. But again, making the game perfect was never the point of this project.

3 – No art other than the characters: Again, no big deal, “GOOD ENOUGH”, but still.

4 – Test driven development fail: I stopped using TDD toward the end. It didn’t bite me in the ass, but the same may not hold true in larger, future projects.

5 – My drumming: That’s me playing the drums in the background music. Sorry guys.

AND SO

I had a ton of fun developing Monsta Punch!. I learned a lot, and that was my only real goal apart from making the game at least a little bit fun. With the knowledge I’ve built, I feel like I’m in good shape to dive into Guys! Stop Pressing Buttons! and really make some good progress right out of the gate.

Developers: 1 (me)
Producers: 1 (Francis)
Budget: $3000 – Had to buy my Unity license at long last
Length of development: About two-and-a-half months
Release date: 24 January 2012
Platforms: PC, Mac, Web, and iOS devices more recent than iPhone 3GS (so iPads and anything with a Retina display)
Development hardware: Late 2008 15″ MacBook Pro, 27″ Cinema Display
Development software: Unity, MonoDevelop, Photoshop, Blender, Xcode (for iOS deployment only)
Final SLOC count: 1821 SLOC, which actually seems a bit high, but I don’t argue with my tools when they behave as well as sloccount does

This kind of plays back to the problem of cowboys in the game industry, but you see it in almost every creative discipline, the idea that it’s noble to suffer in the name of your creation. And let’s be fair, there are certainly subjectively unpleasant processes in every art form, from wrestling with an IDE to cleaning brushes to writing lab reports and so on. But, the fact is that you would not be doing what you are doing if you didn’t love it enough to not mind the struggles and chores of your craft.

Furthermore, in most cases, a creator gets a hypnotic charge out of focussing on every little element of their work. Every task, no matter how menial or painful, is another step towards the realization of your creative vision. Whether you realize it or not, you are likely still in a state of flow during these moments of drudgery.

If you genuinely are suffering when you work, you need to stop doing the work. Life is too short to spend all of it delaying gratification. Step away from what you’re doing and explore the world until you find something you love to do, no matter its warts of tedium. You’ll be happier for it.

It turns out the only good way to get out of a downswing is to choose to do so. That’s both good and bad. On one hand, it means all you have to do is pick yourself up and get back to work. On the other hand, that’s impossible most of the time.

Depression is stupid like that. You know consciously how to make it stop because you’ve done so countless times over the last 31 agonizing years of your life, er, my life, I mean, wait, it hasn’t been agonizing, well, maybe yes, you get my meaning. You know how to pull out of a downswing when you’ve had depression issues long enough. It really only takes a little bit of willpower.

But when you’re depressed, you only have enough willpower to keep yourself fed and maintain the most basic hygienic rituals, and that’s if you’re doing well. Summoning the self control to flip your entire psyche right side up again takes tremendous effort.

In my case, that flip doesn’t usually happen until I hit a stratum of rock-bottomship so hyperbolic and asinine that I can only shake my head in rage and scream, “Fuck it, this is stupid!” We with bipolar call this the start of the manic phase.

Thankfully (again to Lexapro and Abilify), neither my downswings nor my upswings are as dramatic anymore. If you’re finding yourself blasting between bad moods and RADICAL moods every few weeks, look into medication. A small amount of anti-depressant combined with a small amount of mood stabilizer could end up changing your life like they did mine.

In other news, I’d like you all to welcome Mister Francis Fernandez, my new producer. Francis and I know each other as fellow Jonathan Coulton cruisers, and he was the first to answer my call for a producer two weeks ago. While he doesn’t require my services in turn, he has plenty of experience both as a producer and as a Unity developer, and we already know each other anyway, so it made perfect sense to bring him on. Already, he is utilizing such trade phrases as, “Since this is basically a short week now, I won’t need as much from you next time we meet.” My hope is that having someone like Francis to check in with every week will keep me on task and productive, which I’m certain will keep me from slipping into any more significant depressive swings. I hope I hope I hope.

Because Monsta Punch! exists solely for the sake of my own education, it has come along veeerrrrryyyy slowly as it frequently loses priority to reading and research. That priority reached the ultimate low point this week as I nuked the whole thing from orbit and started from scratch.

Psychotic!

It became evident to me while I was working on Fortress that I am an awful coder. More specifically, I’m a perfectly good programmer, but I’m a terrible software engineer. While I can make things happen on the screen, my code always has this kind of beautiful mind thing going on that makes it not only difficult but even disheartening to modify. This is actually the biggest reason why I cancelled Fortress: I couldn’t bear to work with its code any more.

Going into Monsta Punch!, I swore things would be different, and sure enough, things did not be different. Not 500 lines in, my Unity scripts began to spaghettify. Unacceptable. Something had to change.

I decided to spend the next two weeks doing nothing but reading. I started with the Gang of Four book, hoping for some insight into what I was doing wrong with respect to my architectural practices (I also picked up Programming Game AI By Example, mostly so I could take frequent breaks from reading about patterns). Turns out? My architecture actually wasn’t that bad. It had some suck, mind, but something else was wrong.

Changing gears, I grabbed Clean Code, which quickly proved to be my favorite textbook of 2011. So many wonderful insights that felt so obvious once I read them. If you are a coder, you must read this book.

The opening chapter of Clean Code made the briefest mention of test driven development. I dabbled with TDD a little bit in school (because I had to in order to complete the homework assignment), and randomly — thankfully — decided I wanted to know more about it. This led me to Noel Llopis’ series of blog posts on what TDD is all about and how to get started. My eyes were opened. Again, I encourage you to read up on the practice.

And so when I sat down with Unity again with a copy of Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests looking up at me from my Kindle, the first thing I did was move my scripts elsewhere and start over. Now here I stand, the proud owner of a handful of tests that don’t do much yet, but I can already see that my code is more modular and readable. This is me hoping these last few weeks of non-productivity have paid off.