Notes from the Workshop

I am a tired man. I am a stubborn man, I think. I suspect something is wrong with the build again, though I understand nothing about why, and I am not even certain what exactly is broken. I wait for it anyway. I have become very good at waiting. It may be the only professional skill I can honestly claim.

Most of making a game is waiting. You wait for the build. You wait for the shaders to compile, a process that seems to take longest precisely when you are most impatient. You wait for the world to finish generating, because the land in Crown & Ashes is not drawn by hand but grown, piece by piece, from rules I wrote and only half remember writing. So every morning I sit and wait to see whether the cliffs I imagined last night look like cliffs or like wet clay somebody dropped on the floor. Often they look like clay. Then I change a number, and I wait again.

In those hours something strange happens to the mind. With nothing to do but watch a bar crawl across the screen, I begin to argue with myself, and I argue badly. Who is going to play this? Is it not a kind of vanity to spend years on a world that nobody asked for? I have learned not to answer. I stand up, I make tea, and I come back. The build has failed. Very well. One line, one wrong character, buried in a file I have not opened since spring. I fix it. The build succeeds, and the doubts withdraw into the corner of the room, where they sit and watch me, patient as cats.

There are always two games. One lives in my head, and it is vast and dark and alive. Every villager in it has a history, a grudge and a reason to stay. Every ruin has a story about who built it and what drove them out. The forest breathes, and the six lands scheme against one another in letters nobody will ever read. The other game lives on the screen, and it is smaller, and it stutters, and every so often a soldier walks straight into a wall and keeps on walking, with the dull determination of a man who has received an order and intends to obey it whatever the cost.

The work is the distance between those two games. Every day I take something out of the first and try to carry it into the second without dropping it, and most days I drop it. Some days that distance feels like the whole of my life. Then, without any warning, something crosses over intact. A road winds through the generated hills exactly as it should. The villagers hurry home at dusk, and one of them glances back at the trees. Small things, all of them. I have learned to treasure them the way a prisoner treasures a letter.

I spent an absurd number of evenings on torchlight. Nobody asked me to. I did it because a torch is the whole promise of this game held in one small flame. Here is a circle where you are safe, it says, and past it you are not. If the torch is too bright, the night loses its teeth and the circle means nothing. If it is too dim, the player cannot see the thing that kills them, and that produces only irritation, which from the developer's chair is dreadfully easy to mistake for fear. I adjusted the colour, the radius, the way the flame leans and breathes in the wind. When at last it flickered the way I wanted, warm at the centre and hesitant at the edge, as though the light itself were unsure how far it dared to go, I sat for a long while in the dark room and felt, for a moment, that all of it had been worth it.

Some people make games in large rooms full of colleagues. I make mine mostly alone, and it is lonely work. You argue with yourself at three in the morning, and you lose. You make a decision on Tuesday, reverse it on Thursday, and by Saturday you cannot remember why you made it at all. There is nobody to blame and nobody to thank.

And still, every morning, I open the project again. It is not discipline. I have never been a disciplined person, and I distrust people who say they are. It is something closer to love, or perhaps to illness. I have not decided which, and I am beginning to suspect that for work of this kind there is no real difference.