The Creative Process #3 - Balance, Timing and Trajectory

It’s been an interesting month. Half of it has been looking after my family whilst on parental leave. The other half has been my reintroduction into polite, working society. This liminal phase has thrown a lot of entropy and ideas into my creative life. There’s the lack of sleep, sure, but even that’s a bit complex.

The purpose of this newsletter is to explore my creative process for the entertainment or enlightenment for you, the reader. This month is a bit introspective and interwoven, and I hope it’s insightful rather than indulgent.

Creating after you’ve created a person

I’m exceptionally lucky and grateful to have been given six weeks paid carer’s leave after the birth of my son. Ostensibly this was to look after my wife, do the chores, keep my daughter’s routine going, and lift things with my strong muscles. And I did all that, but my wife reminded me that once my daughter was at school, and the baby got his fill of boob and slept, I wasn’t needed a whole lot. So around the chores, she instructed me to take advantage of the time to have a bit of a rest, a reset and do some creative work.

I suspect my wife understands me and my creative work more than I do.

I did all of the driving during those six weeks, and did at least one direction alone. I chose podcasts to help think about my creative work and life in general. One of the podcasts from the Clearer Thinking organization mentioned recognizing blindsides in ourself. This was an interesting idea.

I straight up asked my lovely, honest, insightful wife for some of my blindsides. I did not end up a smoking crater in the ground. She was extremely helpful, although I admit I was driving at the time and didn’t have the opportunity to take good notes. (Is that another blindside?)

My summary of what I think we discussed was my difficulty in separating hobby projects from relaxing, and difficulty matching my ambition and plans to what I could realistically resource.

It’s true that I have a bunch of things I do in my down time that often look a lot like work. I take it casual enough that progress is slow, but seriously in that I’m concerned about the slow progress. Self-inflicted cognitive dissonance! I know a number of people online suffer from interests becoming hobbies becoming hustles becoming life-aches. It needs to stop before the end of that chain. But where?

On my wife’s second point, I know I regularly have problems with every interesting project being Quite A Bit of Work, even if I have the potential to achieve it. My recent RPG campaign Apogee was trimmed at the end because it got too sprawling and was overstaying its welcome. I have, in the dim, dark past fallen to an equivalent of “It’s okay, I’ll make an MMO myself.” And may continue to do so.

Even when I write these newsletters, I want to squeeze in more and more content, like a grandma making sure you don’t leave the dinner table with any room left in your belly.

I have had success in the past when there’s deadlines and hard limits to the content. I have trouble putting limits in when the ideas just keep on coming. And sometimes being strict with the scope just kills my enthusiasm for it.

But I have made some great stuff outside of these problematic modes. I don’t know how, but I did. I need to find the happy but productive medium.

Another problem raised its head this month. I call it “The Summit” problem. I’ve noticed on a few projects in recent years the following pattern:

1. The project has a component that requires intense work to solve. It is one component of many.
2. After dedication, I solve the problem, thus freeing me up to work on the next component. I have made progress!
3. My attention/enthusiasm wanders off to some other project entirely.

It’s like getting to a minor summit on the way to the peak, declaring victory and going home. Not only is it useless, but also wasteful.

I’ve had it happen when I solved portals in my roguelike House of Limen. I’ve had it happen when solved an obscure ECS system ordering bug in my 7 Day Roguelike, turning a jittery, erratic mess into smooth motion.

I’m not entirely sure how to solve this class of problem. On occasions I’ve hit this problem and then focussed on another component and regained my enthusiasm. Sometimes not.

I don’t feel like it’s a problem of me getting an achievement endorphin hit and being satisfied by it. I still want to continue these projects, but I just don’t grok the reality of having to solve lots of problems in a row. Or it’s a form of minor exhaustion, and avoiding burnout. I don’t know.

A real example of these problems this month

My game Hand Me Down has three or four separate chapters, and two of them are puzzle-y parser interactive fiction. Some puzzles are easy to implement and you can do a few a night. Some take a lot more work.

This month I devised and implemented my “model plane” puzzle box, which I was very proud of. It seems to work well and I like the idea. And upon implementing it, I hit a summit. It was like the opposite of the artist’s fear of the empty page — I had loads of solved content and hooks for more work, but couldn’t direct myself to any of it.

My solution was to shackle myself to the project and finish it, no matter what.

But maybe, says the devil on my shoulder, maybe you should abandon it. The idea is weird and sad and too much work and who cares about parser interactive fiction anyway and ...

Like the “blindsides” question, I decided to solve it with my new weird trick way: just straight up ask someone for their honest appraisal. In years past I might just struggle with it on my own, as all good lone creators should, if you are to believe the tropes. Now I just ask people for straight feedback, without trying to second-guess their answer. It’s building a little self-awareness through other people’s perspectives.

I asked a very nice, very prolific interactive fiction guru for his opinion on my project. It required me to pitch it concisely and clearly. It required me to articulate my worries and whatever nonsense my devil had been pouring in my ear. It required me to offer up my bare throat, expecting it to get bitten.

To my delight, he answered it spectacularly and humanely. He understood the brief and my concerns. He managed to highlight significant prior art that had done similar things and done well for itself, and provided sage advice to my other worries. He even had a good time estimate, which I agreed with and this helped to give me a solid timeframe to consider.

The happy downside is that it might just be that Hand Me Down is completable and could turn out well with some effort on my part.

So back to the workshop! Take that, devil on my shoulder! I’m not stuck in here with you, you’re stuck in here with me!

Relaxing with a few sacrifices

In both actively and accidentally rebalancing my creative work versus relaxation, I’ve been playing more games. In a way I feel like I played them too much, to the detriment of my creative projects and sleep. But in another way, when it’s relaxing time, I should just relax. Entertainment is not a sacrifice, it’s an essential activity.

So that brings us to the first game, Immortality. Ooh boy. This is a full-motion video game par excellence. You investigate what happened to young actress Marissa Marcel by examining old behind-the-scenes footage from three different movies. Every axis of this game is fantastic - the acting, the story, the sound design… oh god the sound and music are amazing. Immortality is a rare game of a perfectly-realised concept that makes the most of its design. In my mind, this brilliance is only shared by Spelunky but for very different reasons.

I’d recommend you play it with a controller and/or headphones. With no spoilers. And any little ones far, far away from the screen.

Next I dug deep into Cult of the Lamb, a game by Massive Monster, an Australian indie games company. It’s something akin to a melee-focussed Binding of Isaac, or a Hades, but with an evil cult simulation game to run between games. You’re initially sacrificed to an evil god who instead turns you into his champion. You are charged with cutting down the rival gods, whilst maintaining a little village of cute evil cultist forest animals. You’re going toe-to-toe with an eldritch abomination, and then return home to sort out the toilet situation at camp, with a quick aside for fishing and merciless cultist sacrifice.

There’s a good number of different, interacting systems in this game, and it’s all presented with a lot of juice. You don’t just press a menu button to choose a new dark ritual for your cult, but suck in eldritch energies with appropriate sounds and special effects to enact such an edict. Which, to be fair, is a long button press, but it looks awesome. Everything is full of character and detail.

I’m glad to see such an excellently designed and gorgeously detailed game come out of Australia.

Third on the list is a game I helped on Kickstarter: The Wandering Village by Stray Fawn Studio. It’s a village simulation combined with one of my favourite tropes: city built on top of gargantuan megafauna. You found a city on top of an ‘Onbu’ who wanders through the world at its own whims. There’s a plague that you try to avoid, but overall you’re trying to build a village whilst surviving whatever environment the Onbu walks through.

It’s chill and you don’t have to worry about building armies or any of that guff. The Onbu might walk through a desert, and that means your beet farm has to fast pivot into cactus or corn plots. Or he might trudge through some plague spores and cause an infection in the berry bushes.

Despite being very chill, it is a massive time sink. Progress is slow and simple. The AI isn’t the sharpest, and they might wander past 20 identical jobs to the one they are going to do at the other end of the Onbu. But it’s fun and there’s a seamless transition between the city builder and watching the Onbu stomp through the land.

My last game is a return to an old addiction: Kingdom of Loathing. This is a long-running browser game with black-and-white simple line art, and a tonne of comedy writing. It’s a ever-changing single-player game with multiplayer potential. It has endless replayability. It all started as a little fart-about game by Zack “Jick” Johnson, but grew over the years to include a number of contributors. I admired their work greatly.

I had religiously listened to all the podcasts the Kingdom of Loathing crew put out, especially Video Games Hotdog and Video Games Taco. In 2019, Jick was accused by his ex-wife of physical and emotional abuse, and the entire periphery of Kingdom of Loathing collapsed in the aftermath. Though he had been crass in years past, I had heard him through the podcasts improve as a person. The allegations would be unconscionable, if true, and my admiration for Jick, his crew and his work crumbled.

I’ve never really resolved how I feel about creative heroes being (or potentially being) horrible people. Some people expect that from anyone with a modicum of success. I hope I can be a positive influence in my tiny world and make cool things for cool people.

Kingdom of Loathing still trundles along and I recently got back into it. I was very far from seeing all the content in my first years of obsession, and they’ve evolved it over time.

I really like the design of it, especially the ascension mechanic, and have daydreamed for years of making a similar game. As I thought more about the mini-adventures idea from last newsletter, I realised those adventures are proto-versions of the Kingdom of Loathing game style. I am steadfastly refusing that creative call to action for the foreseeable future (cf. shackling myself to Hand Me Down), but I hear it.

I hear it.

Picking up the pen again

In amongst my self-reflection and tidying, I revitalised my note-taking habit. I’m very keen on personal knowledge management systems. At work I’ve been diligently maintaining a journal, and expanded it to a series of interlinked notes. During baby leave, I configured the same setup differently at home and created my best practice of note-taking yet.

Over the years I’ve tried a lot of things: TiddlyWiki, a diary, a bullet journal, habit metrics, Notion… The one that’s worked best for me has been org-mode, because I am a gigantic Emacs nerd. And more recently I’ve gotten into org-roam, which is the Roam Research-inspired knowledge system based on the Zettelkasten approach of having zillions of uncategorised notes interlinked. My approach is a little different but it works. I was initially inspired by Jethro Kuan’s braindump, and he wrote org-roam.

I had to give it a wanky name, so I call it my “Exocortex”. Many people online call theirs a “Second Brain” after Tiago Forte’s course of building one.

It really does help in throwing things from my brain to SSD storage, and it’s searchable and usable with very little friction. It makes neat graphs and encourages linking but not too much hierarchy.

This current incarnation replaces my old practice of design.org files strewn across my project directories, as well as record boring-but-useful things like the details of our dishwasher, car insurance or records of dentist visits.

My previous version of my Exocortex was slavishly dedicated to being processed into a set of browsable, hierarchical HTML pages, but I found that to be a yak-shaving time sink and also not as useful as just browsing them in Emacs.

I hope to build up this set of notes for at least a decade. I’ve added a new habit to my life:

1. I have a shortcut on my phone to instantly smash down an idea or fact when I think of it.
2. On Wednesday nights I go through the “inbox” of notes and shepherd them into my exocortex.

This works brilliantly, although it is hard to do anything involving pictures or mathematics. I have also adopted a tiny Moleskine notebook — called a commonplace book — to carry around at all times. Transferring from this book to my exocortex is not as effortless, but it’s not an impediment so far. Most notes are via my phone.

The notebook gives me a chance to imagine AI solutions of reading in my handwritten notes. I’ll implement that just after I do all the other amazing technical things I want to make. My version of Wanderer above a Sea of Fog is me standing on a mountain of all my projects, thinking about another project.

Next month, in kilometers

Heavy as the setting sun
Oh, I'm counting all the numbers between zero and one
Happy, but a little lost
Well, I don't know what I don't know
So I'll kick my shoes off and run

&Run by Sir Sly

I’m rather tired from fatherhood, work and trying to do creative work. I’m not burnt out by any stretch, but I need to keep moving in the right direction. Which direction and how fast remain a problem to be solved. I at least have a good vector on my current project, Hand Me Down.

Next month contains my favourite event of the year — Roguelike Celebration. I got to watch the practice run and it left me happy all day. Goodness knows how I’ll fit the workshop into my schedule, but I’ve bought tickets (and spares in case anyone wanted to go but couldn’t afford it). I intend to present at it one day in the future.

The other bit of momentum is that I’m doing my yearly fundraiser. I used to do Movember every… well… November, but I felt increasingly distanced from it, despite my friends, family and colleagues donating tens of thousands of dollars in my name over a decade. Plus my wife and daughter had an aversion to my moustachioed form. Now I do One Foot Forward for The Black Dog Institute, which is more agreeable in every way.

I need to squeeze in 60km of walking around my schedule to raise money for mental health. If you’d like to help out, head on over to my fundraising page. I greatly appreciate any help.

I hope the walks get the creative juices flowing, and the Spring weather is nice enough to allow my son to witness the beauty of nature from a carrier on his Dad’s sweaty chest.

Parenting, creative work, fundraising, actual work. All a struggle. All a balancing act. All totally worth it.

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