The life I want has been taking a back seat to the life I need, and this blog has taken the brunt of my neglect. I just wanted to check in and say, I'm still grinding away. It has been about as humbling as I expected, and I've had to re-adjust my expectations a few times with regard to timeline and the scope of what I can do on my own. Right now the plan is to get some very simple sandbox games under my belt before moving on to Infinite Gymnast and Action Potential.

As the year winds down, I've been reflecting on how short this year felt, and also just how much has happened. I'm not much closer to my goal of stability and stasis, but I'm starting to accept that a lot of what I want just isn't possible, and that acceptance is a wonderful thing. By realizing an option is completely off of the table, I can stop focusing on the things I can't have and start focusing on all of the opportunities that are available, all of the possibilities that I do have in front of me.

My world got a bit smaller in 2013, but it also got a whole lot bigger. My understanding of computers is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was a year ago, just as I had intended, but in that same time my understanding of games has deepened as much or more. I had kind of thought that I'd figured out what made games good, and I just had to make games that fit that model, but over the last year, and even just the last few months, my understanding of the ways in which games can be good has expanded in some profound ways.

My core driving principles are the same. What I've learned this year has only served to confirm my belief that gamers will always be more creative than game designers. Every day I'm more in awe of the plurality of ways of being in the world, and I am as eager as ever to celebrate and affirm the endless variety that makes up our world.

I hope your year was also pretty good or better.



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