Story of a Failed Indie Dev

I've been posting on this blog for about ten months now. There's a summary of my story in the about section, but I haven't told the whole thing.

The story starts while I was still in college. I majored in Real-Time Interactive Simulation; a fancy way of saying video game development. A friend of mine introduced me to a game called Dwarf Fortress. In Dwarf Fortress, you oversee a colony of dwarfs as they work the land and build a city. The map is divided into a 3D grid, and any space can be mined out or built upon. The game is insanely detailed, to the point where you can examine what kind of nerve damage your dwarfs have suffered. This detail combined with the flexibility of building however you like makes the game incredibly engrossing, but also daunting. Dwarf Fortress is also rendered in ASCII characters, like an old Rogue-like game. This is nostalgic and charming, but one can't help but imagine a full 3D version.

Just as I started to entertain the idea of making such a game myself, Minecraft appeared out of nowhere and quickly rose to fame. I quickly abandoned the game ideas that had taken root in my mind. Minecraft had beaten me to the punch, and spawned countless rip offs hoping to cash in on the trend. I, myself, was a huge fan of the game, despite how it had dashed my hopes. So while I would sometimes daydream about the game I'd like to make, I focused on finishing my education.

One year, I had the opportunity to attend GDC. While there, I had the opportunity to meet the creator of Minecraft (Notch) and talk with him for a while. I conveyed my story to him, including both my appreciation for his game, and how I envied that he had beaten me too it. Notch, being the incredibly cool guy that he is, took it all in good stride and encouraged me to pursue my own ideas. Something along the lines of 'there's room in the world for more games like this'. Don't quote me on that though.

Eventually, I did finish school. I was fortunate and managed to land two job offers right before graduation. One was a fairly typical, entry level, game development position. The other was from a company that makes slot machines. The second job hadn't at all been the sort I'd been looking for. The manager that had come to recruit people was looking for fresh young talent to bring his company's technology into the 21st century. It was also in Reno, Nevada; somewhere I had never imagined living. Especially so because I have a hard time dealing with hot weather. Give yourself a biscuit if you're genre-savvy enough to figure out which job I picked.

I enjoyed my time in Reno. It was my first time living on my own and I relished the freedom. The heat didn't bother me at all, much to my pleasant surprise. One time, I biked into the desert to watch an eclipse. My job afforded me freedom as well, for the most part. Perhaps just enough to be frustrating. I had neigh unlimited freedom with the code I wrote, but practically none when it came to integrating that code with what the company already had. But despite frustrations, I still enjoyed my job.

However, after a little more than a year, I began to feel restless. Reno is a nice town, but the days seem to blend together there. The frustrations I felt in my job were reflected in my life as well. I had more free time than I had ever had, but it wasn't enough. It was almost enough, and somehow that drove me crazier than not having time at all. I began to think about what I wanted to do with my life, how I could get more time without becoming a hermit. I concocted a plan: I would become an indie dev.

The idea was simple. My job was high paying, so I saved up money for several months. I would use that money to leave the working world for a year. In that time, I would make a game. If it succeeded, I would use the profit to fund my next game. If not, I'd simply return to normal working life no worse for wear. I started designing a game that sounded interesting. A game where you'd colonize Mars with self-replicating robots. When the time for my break drew near, I began telling people about my plan. I got a lot of people excited, received lots of encouragement, and a fair share of (justified) doubt.

Part of that break was moving back to Washington. I missed my home, my friends, and my family. While in Reno, I met my current boyfriend. He, too, wanted to get out of Reno, and Washington had been one of the places he was considering. And so it happened. We packed up our things, took a nerve wracking drive across three states in a 20 foot U-Haul with a car in tow, and embarked on our new lives.

Settling in wasn't easy. It took my boyfriend a long time to find a job in the area. Having him at home when I had been looking forward to eight hours of isolation per day... well, it wasn't exactly how I had pictured things going. There was a lot of tension in our relationship at that time, and the only thing really deserving of blame was the economy.

I soon became stressed in my work as well. Progress was slow, which only made me determined to do better the next day. Worrying about it made me less productive, and lacking productivity, I became more stressed. The cycle built upon itself for nearly three months. It was at this point that I finally admitted to myself that I was no longer invested in the game I was working on, and allowed myself to explore other projects.

The transition was hard. I still worried about finishing a game, even if it wasn't the one I had set out to make. I was worried about wasting the opportunity that I had made for myself. I didn't want it to be for nothing. And ironically, it was this fear that had been slowing me down all along. The worst part, I think, was that on some level I understood that the whole time. But it's one thing to understand a fear, and another to conquer it.

It wasn't until only recently that I really managed to do that. In part, I think it was because I had given up on my original plan. My time was up, and I needed a job. Perhaps also because I was starting to fear real problems, like running out of money. But whatever the case, I started moving forward. I realized once and for all that I had known the game I wanted to make all along, and it was time I let myself make it. Who cares if it's dismissed? Played by a handful of people and written off as another Minecraft clone. I'm not making it for the approval of others. I'm making it because I want to. Maybe I won't even finish it, but I won't know if I don't try.

And that brings me to now. I made more progress in a week than I had the last few months. Job prospects are looking good, and I'm hopeful for the future, if somewhat cautious. Tomorrow will bring what it may, and I'll do my best to keep on moving.

Nothing Today

No blog post this week. No particular reason other than that I didn't have anything I wanted to write about today. I've been working on the block game some recently, in addition to the job search. Both are going well.

Mindful Thoughts

Minds are tricky things. We spend our whole lives with complete access to one, and yet their inner workings remain mysterious. I'm going to talk about some of my thoughts on what makes up a human-like mind. Wikipedia lists several mental faculties found in minds. These include:

• Thought: the ability to process and manipulate ideas. Includes reasoning, problem solving, and decision making.
• Memory: the ability to record thoughts and experiences. This includes both long and short-term memory.
• Imagination: the ability to think about things that aren't real and to create such thoughts at will.
• Consciousness: the ability to do these things while simultaneously observing that one's doing them. Being aware of one's own agency and forming an identity.

So how do all these things fit together? Well, that's the million dollar question, isn't it? It's not something well-understood by anyone, let alone someone with only casual knowledge like myself. However, I do have some thoughts. Common coding theory says that perceptions and actions are linked. Supporting this, mirror neurons fire both when we perform an action and when we witness it. I think this is the link between perception, thought, action, and imagination.

When we observe an action, we also observe the effects. If we can figure out how to duplicate the effects ourselves, the observed action becomes an imaginary action. Actually executing the action makes it a real action. The idea is that all of these are essentially the same thing. They all take place in a sort of mental play space.

Observation loads information into this play space in the form of short term memories. Here, we can think about what we've observed and, knowing our own capabilities, simulate doing it ourselves. Note that this step can go awry, as happens no matter how many times I see this trick. However, if you aren't completely mystified, you can then replace the memory in your play space with a simulation of doing it yourself. If and when you decide to actually perform the action, it's simply a matter duplicating the imagined action in the real world. If our understanding of the action is incorrect, this step can also go wrong, as it does when I actually try performing the shirt trick. But if it doesn't go wrong, then our understanding of the action is reinforced.

Here's the kicker though. The mental play space isn't limited to physical actions. We can also observe/imagine abstract actions, like addition and multiplication. Sympathy/Empathy would correspond to imagining/performing emotive actions. Doing these things is essentially just a simulation of things we've previously observed, modified to suit our current thoughts.

You can imagine eating something that you've already eaten. You can also imagine eating something you've never eaten, because you can use the first experience to simulate the second. There are lots of studies that indicate that video games make you smarter. I would argue that video games fuel the process I've described. They let you observe novel actions that you can't normally perform, tell you how to execute them, and let you practice doing so. By observing simulations, we literally improve our own abilities to run simulations in our heads.

All of this makes the human brain sound awfully marvelous. How can it figure out how to simulate nearly any situation, even ones brand new to it? Well, to be honest, I don't think it goes quite that far. I think the mental play space is more of a general purpose simulator. The effects of simulated actions are drawn from approximated observation rather than any real, deep understanding. You might be able to figure out the trajectory of a baseball using physics and calculus, but your brain is probably not actually doing that when you catch it.

So where exactly do emotions and sentience fit into this model? I have some ideas for those too, but this post is already much longer that I intended it to be, so I will leave those for another day!

Potato Salad

So in case you haven't heard, a man recently created a Kickstarter campaign to raise $10 so he could make some potato salad. In the first week, he has already raised $40,000.

People seem to be divided into two major camps: those who think the whole thing's hilarious and awesome, and those that think the whole thing's terrible and unfair. While I can definitely understand the frustrations of the latter group, I think I ultimately have to side with the former. That said, I have no intention of actually backing potato salad.

First, let's talk about why this is so frustrating. It's not fair. It's like somebody won the lottery without even playing. What's worse, this injustice was facilitated by thousands of people who should have known better. He did nothing to deserve this money, and has no obligations to do any good with it. Hell, he's outright forbidden to even donate it to charity.

But ultimately, he did nothing wrong. He put a joke on the internet, a joke he probably never thought would pay off. If you want to get mad at anyone, get mad at the backers. Potato salad might even be a good thing in the long term if it incentivizes Kickstarter to tighten up it's recently loosened standards before more malicious exploitations crop up.

He might be doing something wrong depending on how he ends up spending this money. If he simply took the money and spent it on himself, then yes, that would be pretty terrible. But from the look of the campaign page it seems like he has every intention of giving back to the people who supported him. Between hats, shirts, an internet party, and possibly a full blown recipe book, good things are coming out of this. Sure, they're frivolous things, but still good.

Furthermore, potato salad is probably not actually taking away from other, more serious projects. Perhaps there are a handful of people who literally backed potato salad instead of something else, but my guess is that for most it's had little to no impact on what other projects they back. Kickstarter's public stats show us that there are very few projects that almost succeed. 80% of projects that make at least 20% of the way eventually meet their goal. Bottom line: if a campaign isn't already going down in flames, it'll probably succeed regardless of how much attention people pay to potato salad.

There are a lot of lessons we can learn from this whole thing, but I'm going to mention one in particular. The value of something is not always proportional to the effort put into it. Potato salad highlights this in a blatant way, but it's nothing we haven't seen before. It's why Cow Clicker has probably made more money than your favorite indie game. However frustrated you are doesn't change the fact that lots of people genuinely enjoy Cow Clicker.

The thing that both potato salad and Cow Clicker have in common is that they don't require investment. Once you get the joke, you've already gotten the value. Actually playing the game (or backing the campaign) is simply going along with the joke. Most projects do this in the reverse order. You invest time/money/emotions first, and may or may not get a return on that investment later. There's an inherent risk to those projects that simply isn't present in potato salad.

In the end though, fairness and equality are not the same thing, and we can't enforce one without constraining the other.

Let's Talk About Culture

Hey all! I spent the whole day working on job applications and didn't leave any for blogging, so this will be a short one. Also, wish me luck landing a job with Planetary Resources!

A few days ago on Facebook, I saw a comment along the lines of 'the GOP doesn't have culture'. I'm not gonna go into the politics of that statement, but it did get me thinking about something. I was originally going to do a full article on it, but I think a short PSA is enough to get it across.

All people, and all groups, have culture. And culture is not always a good thing.

Culture can, and does, lead to discrimination, inequality, and even human sacrifice. It also leads to many good things, but the tricky part is that, generally speaking, those immersed in a culture have a hard time separating out the good from the bad. This goes for American culture too and not just the GOP.

This is why Westernization is worrisome. It's not because the West doesn't have culture, or that it's culture is better or worse than any other. Letting any one culture dominate the world leaves us blind to the negative aspects of that culture. Without other views to challenge what's normal, we get mired down in the status quo.

While this is particularly threatening on a global scale, it can be harmful on smaller scales as well. I have more than a few things to say about the Queer community in particular. Someday, I might write an article focusing on just that, but for now I'm winding down.