Absence

A few months ago, after about half a year of weekly posts, I stopped posting without warning.

Since then, I’ve been working on a game in Unity and it is functional in the sense that pressing buttons results in things happening on screen. It’s just the things that happen on screen aren’t yet the same as what I have in my mind.

I’ve also gone round the houses a few times in Blender trying to get a character model setup in a way that shouldn’t be a pain in the arse for me later on.

But working on the game isn’t why I vanished.

The quit-my-job-to-spend-my-time-making-games thing started because I spent the last 6 months of last year depressed. And it was successful. Between February and August, there was only one period in April where work on the games was going badly enough that my brain decided to block all access to any kind of positive thinking. But soon things got better.

Then the Month of Games happened.

Sure, I’d managed to get 7 games done. And I wasn’t expecting them to set the world on fire. But I was expecting a little more given the investment I’d put in.

Crappy Bird and There’s Always a Bigger Fish have had a few downloads across both Itch and Google Play. The Android versions reached double digits in terms of ad requests, so it’s good to see that I coded the implementation of that properly, but it’s nowhere near enough to generate any revenue. Not that I was expecting them to given the amount of numbers you have to hit before any kind of payout is possibile – it would have been a small bonus if they did.

Heart of the Cards was basically dead on arrival. If I had managed to finish the version I was going to release on Itch, it might have got a few downloads, but based on the numbers the previous two games did, I’m glad I decided against putting in any more effort than I already had.

The puzzle games had the most amount of effort put into them by far. Coming up with the data for the solutions and all their hints took at least 4 times longer than it took to develop There’s Always a Bigger Fish in its entirety. Making these puzzle games felt like an actual job.

“But it’s the most accessible,” I kept telling myself. “So it’ll probably do better than any of the others.”

A couple of days before they went live, I attempted to do Itch versions to draw in the Itch audience. Testing revealed that the Share button didn’t work on Itch because of permissions issues when accessing the clipboard, so I stripped that out and made all the links point to the Github versions to push players over to where there was more functionality. Everything else worked in draft mode, but as soon as I hit publish, some more permissions issues presented themselves which meant that saving and loading was not possible, so the Itch versions had to be ditched. Should have called it Ditch.io.

Itch, the Play Store and Steam all have analytics readily available so I can see views and downloads. Github doesn’t have that, so I had to add a third party solution. While testing, I confirmed that it accurately counted views even though the country was way off. So, after posting links and publishing the post, I gave it a few days and checked the numbers to see how it was doing.

0.

Not even a bot had followed any of the links to any of the 4 games.

I’d already spotted that Twitter’s algorithm had gone to shit a few weeks beforehand, and was worried that it was going to get worse. Instead of showing content from people that I follow, which is the whole point of Twitter, it shovels shit from people I’ve never even heard of talking about subjects I couldn’t give a fuck about. Given that all the best people have since left, it's unlikely that Twitter is ever going to get better, although I had ended up deleting my account shortly before the takeover happened.

But even if Twitter fucked up, there were still links from this blog. I can see the views each post gets. And people had seen the posts, but not played the games.

It doesn’t matter that someone in Italy has attempted to make a crappy bird have a shit, or that someone in South Korea has been eaten by a bigger fish, because nobody anywhere has tried to guess the name of a film, and negatives always win.

I’d built it up in my mind that 4 games would be a big surprise for the handful of people that read these posts, but the biggest surprise was on me when it meant 4 times the failure that nobody played them. I’d double Dooku’d myself. Quadruple the fall.

The motivation for the next project evaporated immediately.

It didn’t matter that I’d overcome my hatred of Blender to successfully model, UV map, rig and animate (very badly) some models.

It didn’t matter that I have Unity sending and receiving data from an API (that I have to run locally with some mad hacks because Amazon keep refusing to take $1 when I try to get in to AWS and actually host it somewhere).

What would be the point in wasting the next few months trying to finish something that nobody was going to play?

I still went ahead and tried continue on with it, and approached each week with a list of general things I wanted to achieve. I bought a PC adapter for Kinect to attempt to make animating easier by motion capturing myself, but the easiest solution is no longer supported and the long-winded one means pretty much starting the model from scratch. I was able to grab the source code from the easy solution but was not able to get it to build since apparently there's some obscure thing from 7 years that needs to be installed with no links available.

Working on games was frustrating, and even playing them was. Saints Row had a bug where it gave up tracking the current mission and just showed objectives for a previous one. Every week Fall Guys removed maps because they were broken, or had missions which weren't possible to complete with complete silence from Mediatonic.

One of the problems of working on game alone is I don't have the skills to do art that doesn't look shit. And collaborating with people with different skills is usually quite fun. I miss writing stupidly intricate systems so that other departments can trigger one thing that will spiral a whole chain of events that most players will never even notice. Those skeleton and spider goons in Ninjago? If you run away without killing them, they will bury themselves back in the ground ready to pop out again whenever you come back.

I do not miss art sticking trees in the exact spot where I've placed characters and then being told I'm the one that has to fix it. Just because I actually play the level doesn't mean I should be the one to fix it. My character was there first. Why can't art move the tree for once?

So I decided to start looking for jobs.

Very quickly after applying, I had an incredibly positive chat with a talent scout, which very much seemed like an actual interview was on the cards. This then followed with radio silence. Feeling my brain in the process of closing off the positive thoughts again, I tried to reason with it. Maybe someone is on holiday. Maybe they are ill. My brain decided this was acceptable enough to delay it's actions, but it then shut down.

When it started working again, I looked for more jobs. After a couple of rejections or some outright radio silence (despite a few "We'll be in touch soon" messages), I then bit the bullet and signed up to LinkedIn again.

I'd originally deleted it because the feed was just recruiters jerking themselves off about how great they all were, and the messages I received from them in my inbox had resulted in them asking if I wanted to get involved in some NFT scams. When creating my new profile, I specificially told it that I was only interested in game development. 10 hours later a recruiter got in touch asking if I wanted to work with WinForms.

A lot of the jobs on the trash site are just recruitment firms wanting to grab hold of your data and then never follow up on the job you applied for.

"Hey Tony, this guy's just applied for the Gameplay Programmer role!"

"OK, I'll message him with the generic 'I'm very impressed with your skillset' crap, pretend I'm interested in talking to him and ask to provide some more information on his background and what he's looking for, even though it's all there on his profile and CV, and then ignore him for the rest of eternity."

"Sounds great, Tony!"

One job fit my background perfectly, but then I looked the company up on Glassdoor and those reviews screamed to avoid - especially for those wanting the role I was looking at.

So now I am wondering am I trapped? Are employers not taking interest because of the 10 months I've just spent at home, or is the lack of professional experience with Unity the sticking point? Is the only way out to actually finish a project and have it be successful, even though there is no way it will match up to what I have pictured in my head?

I don't know. But right now I have to go and trawl through a bunch of listings that are actually just the same job posted by 5 different accounts every day, and attempt to use a sort feature which doesn't actually sort by most recent because it has to shove all the promoted ones at you first, no matter how old they are.