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Here’s a video of the IndieCade session I participated in — the Iron Game Designer Challenge. 3 teams were asked to rapidly design a physical game given both a theme (Amish people) and a material (bananas). My team took home the winning prize :)

Designing Biba has been a huge challenge, and I was beginning to question my commitment to physical play. But this session cast off any feelings of doubt I was carrying. Physical play is capable of making people smile and laugh in a way that no purely digital game can. I can’t ignore that.

Given this renewed understanding of the world, I’ve put my big side project on hold. This could be seen as another excuse to avoid venturing out on my own, but it’s not. I know that because I’ve made more progress on my new side project than any other one I’ve attempted. Its release is inevitable :)

Just give me another week or two and I’ll have something pretty to show you :)

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I’m down in Southern California to attend IndieCade – a festival and conference celebrating the independent game development community. I’m disappointed that I’m not bringing anything to show; Biba is still in a weird state of preproduction (not that it’s easily demoable anyway) and my other project is currently fighting a war in the name of jitter-free fixed timestep update loops (translation: it looks like ass). Nevertheless, I’m here to meet new people and get inspired.

But will I fit in…? :-\

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It’s 1am. I’m paper prototyping and programming almost simultaneously. I’m not ready to call it a victory just yet, but evidence suggests that I’m steadily overcoming the dirty hump I described a few weeks ago.

It’s hard to get started on a solo side project. It’s even harder to maintain that initial momentum. Fear is one factor, but my friend Ken gave me insight into an equally relevant element – our day jobs.

Intuitively, I believed that having an unsatisfying day job would motivate me to work on side projects in my spare time. But that’s not true at all.

The opposite is true.

Having a satisfying day job creates an abundance of motivational energy that can then be channeled into side projects. I feel energized after a productive day at work. Stress, blockers, political drama, low momentum, and a general lack of productivity during the day sucks that energy up.

Sometimes the negative forces at play in our day jobs are beyond our control. But simply being aware of this relationship was enough to get me going.

Indie superstar Jake Birkett tweeted some other tips you may find helpful:

Dev Motivation Tip: Set your desktop wallpaper to a screenshot from your current game. (link)

Dev Motivation Tip: Print out an optimistic projection of your 1st year sales on all platforms and stick it on your noticeboard. (link)

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A few weeks ago I patted myself on the back for overcoming my fear of making things. I didn’t know it then, but I’ve been lying to myself :) The truth is this: I have overcome my fear of making things with other people. But I’m terrified of making things on my own. Not only that, but I need to make things on my own to feel happy and fulfilled.

I have no excuses. But I am discovering, bit by bit, the nature of this fear. I’ll share with you a couple lessons I’ve learned so far.

It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this:

1. Ideas are not only worthless — they are harmful. The more time I spend fleshing out an idea in my head or on paper, the less likely it is that the idea will ever get implemented. Push for daily iteration, and take as little time to think through an idea as possible. Explore ideas by prototyping and playtesting (code that shit up!), not by running thought experiments or writing documents.
2. Dreading the code is far more draining and time consuming than coding itself. I’m no software engineer. For me, programming is more frustrating than it is rewarding. I give myself every reason I can think of to avoid it. But if I spent as much time coding as I do thinking about not coding, I would be sitting on a mountain of finished games. It takes less time to code up an idea than you think (unless you’ve been thinking for far too long and your idea has grown far too big). Stop worrying about the future, live in the present, and focus on building tangible things.

Muster up the strength and push through! Whoopah!

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I was just commenting to the others that the only person I know that uses emoticons in a completely true-to-life way is you. Most people aren’t really smiling when they post a smiley. But I am quite certain you are doing exactly as your smiley suggests.

– Fouad

Staying true to yourself is hard. But every little moment counts :)

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On September 30th, 2007 I published my first entry on my blog at SpryBry.com. I tried blogging once before, but gave up after I started blogging about how sorry I was for not having the time to blog. My chunky bum needed to take a different approach — something lightweight and sustainable.

I opted for the tumblelog/microblog format; instead of posting lengthy articles that demanded too much time to read and write (like this one), I would post quick thoughts, quotes, conversations, links, and images that could be digested within a few seconds (the average user ended up spending about 30 seconds reading my front page posts). In the end I amassed a collection of 1,407 posts over 1,365 days (a little more than 1 post per day for 3 years, 8 months, and 27 days).

I wrote my final post on June 25th, 2011. It wasn’t planned, but it was inevitable.

Here’s why I quit.

When I started blogging I was 20 years old and about to graduate from university. I was an aspiring game designer with an ego, but I had never actually made a game (it’s much easier to judge the work of others than it is to work on something yourself). I was lazy, but more than that I was fearful. I feared failure.

What if I was full of shit? What if I wasn’t the rock star of a designer that I thought I was? What if my work turned out to be indistinguishable from the mountains of worthless games already out in the market?

University taught me how to learn, but it taught me nothing about how to be creative (and by “creative” I mean being able to make things out of nothing — not fluffy, egotistical talk about how capable you are when you don’t have the portfolio to back it up). I chose to attend graduate school because I wasn’t ready for the “real world.”

I asked my undergraduate research advisor, Dr. Bill Tomlinson, for a letter of recommendation. I told him that I’m a naturally born game designer, and that I needed to attend grad school to cultivate my talent lest the industry corrupt my ideas and ambitions.

He declined.

He said, “Bryant, how can I recommend your abilities as a game designer when I’ve never played any of your games?” I responded, “Well, I’ve designed plenty of brilliant games, they just aren’t in a playable state right now.”

In truth, I had designed nothing. I deluded myself into thinking that the shells of ideas I had in my head were legitimate designs. You’re only a game designer if you’ve made games that others can play.

Bill replied, “Make a good game and I’ll write your letter of recommendation.” I fought hard to avoid the hard work. Every day I would come to him with a new idea for a project, and every day he would say, “That sounds great, Bryant! Go and make it!”

My hope was that he would recognize the brilliance in my ideas and write a recommendation based on that. But Bill was unrelenting. He wanted something playable.

Bill left me with one last bit of advice. He said, “Without fail, your first game will be crap. Your second game will also be crap. Probably the third, too. You’d be wise to get those out of the way quickly so you can start building the good stuff.”

I faced my fears and made a game. I called it SpaceSound (or, as my dear friend Ellen called it, Richard Simmons in Space). It was crap. Objectively crap. Bill’s reaction was, “This game sucks. My freshmen students could make something better than this.” And he was right. That game was a pile of steaming shit.

I went back to the drawing board and made a second attempt. It was equally shitty. But there was a small glimmer of potential, and that was enough to convince Bill to write my recommendation. I was accepted into grad school with a fancy scholarship from EA, and I’ve made many games since then (some shitty, some slightly less shitty, none as shitty as my first two).

What does this have to do with blogging?

I started blogging because I feared failure. I was afraid of being creative. I needed to face my fears, so I committed to posting on my blog every single day of the year. It didn’t matter what I posted so long as I did. Each post was an act of creation; I was putting something into the world that didn’t already exist.

The majority of my posts were failures — completely worthless to anyone and everyone. A handful were good. Only a few were memorable. The ratio doesn’t matter. What matters is that I got used to implementing my ideas and sharing them with the world.

My game design process is pretty simple now. I no longer hold onto shells of ideas. If I have an idea for a game, I’ll quickly prototype it (usually on paper) and playtest it with a few people. If it works I keep iterating and testing. If it fails I throw the idea out and move on. There’s no room in my head for ideas that will never come to fruition. Ideas aren’t valuable; it’s the execution of ideas that’s worth something.

That’s why I stopped blogging. I learned my lesson.

Yet here we are. What’s my reason for blogging now?

The answer is: I’m not sure yet. But I have two ideas.

1. I want my friends and family to understand what I do and why I do it.
2. I want to understand what I do and why I do it.

And hopefully, while all of this understanding is taking place, I will do things and people will enjoy the things that I do. Hopefully.

— Anthony Brandt

— Benjamin Franklin