It’s been a while since I’ve talked about my current slate of side projects. That’s because it’s a mess!
I have three ongoing projects in various stages of completion, which is not great. Ever since I went full-time at Doborog, my current studio, I’ve been hoping to keep my slate to: (1) job and (1) side project, for a total of (2) things I’m currently working on. I consider Equip Story less of a project in-and-of-itself and more of an accountability tool for my projects, so I don’t count that towards the total. Though the newsletter has expanded into multi-part interviews and first draft chapters of my fantasy memoir, so maybe I shouldn’t discount the time and effort I’m putting in here?
I’m going to figure out why I have three open projects. Starting… now.
Brain, this is your time to shine. Remember Mode: Activate!
At the end of last year, I was working on a new card game. (I’m going to speak vaguely about these three projects, because I plan to write about them all in more detail soon.) In January, the public domain game jam started, so I shifted away from the card game temporarily to spend the month working on the Marx Brothers game with Gwen. The week after we finished Cocoanut Hotel, there was a game jam at work, but that was only a week long. I picked the card game back up in February, playtested it a bunch, and got deep into laying out the manual. Close to the finish line, I started freaking out about shifting back and forth between video game and tabletop game development. Worried I wasn’t focused enough, I put the card game aside. Temporarily, I told myself. (But I was so close to finishing the beta, lol.)
Soon after, I began working on a new puzzle game in Unity. Then came GDC, where something unexpected happened. On a lark and the encouragement of friends, I showed the head of a publisher I really like a super simple adventure game demo I had thrown together as a fun learning exercise… and the head of the studio dug it. I was gobsmacked. This was a Unity baby steps kind of thing. Actually, baby steps might be overselling it. It was a Unity learning-to-roll-over-from-back-to-stomach-without-crying kind of thing. But the studio head was intrigued by the core mechanic and my writing and asked me to develop it further with them in mind.
The high of that meeting prompted me to write these two page idea sheets for myself on how to evolve the adventure demo into a “real” game. I write them, think about them a lot, then shelve them for simpler versions of the idea. You see, my thinking on the project is that I’m going to make it, one way or the other. So the project needs to be scalable from solo dev to game-with-an-actual-budget. If the idea is intrinsically too big and unwieldy, then I won’t be able to complete it without the studio, which would be a shame. I want the execution to have satisfying Plan A and Plan B versions, which is a production challenge on top of just designing a good game.
And I’m doing this pre-development alongside coding the puzzle game.
To sum up, my slate has three items:
The Card Game – I need to finish the layout, then release it.
The Puzzle Game – I need to fix the current bugs, make a final decision on scope, then wrap it up and release It.
The Adventure Game – I need to decide on a direction, then finish the game design document.
In the middle of writing this very newsletter, I decided to re-assess the card game. I forgot how absurdly close I came to a finished layout. The cover looks surprisingly good for something I hacked together myself! The interior is all-text with no illustrations, but I think that’s fine for a beta version. I took an hour to fix some spelling mistakes, make a few tweaks, then exported them to an eBook file and a print version. I’m going to send it off to the printer this week, which is plenty of time to hand them out at Gen Con later this month. Soon I can fully scratch that off the list.
I decided to ask Gwen for help with my puzzle game’s bugs. It’s the programming equivalent to offering to help a friend move. I offered to buy her pizza, which made the move metaphor fully complete. She was delighted, to my surprise, because other developers helped fix bugs in her games, so she was happy to pay it forward. I’m not sure I’ll ever reach the point of programming mastery where I will be able to pay it forward. My apologies to Haley Joel Osment. My plan is to wrap up this game jammy project in a month or so. The target audience is a few people I know personally. Once I show them the game, and release it via Equip Story, that will complete the project in my mind. After that, I’ll decide if it’s worth pursuing further.
Then I want to focus on the adventure game. This is a type of game I’ve always wanted to make, in one form or another. With the encouragement of a publisher I respect, I’m excited to pursue it. This is going to be a big project for me, even at its smallest scale, so I plan to give it the time and attention it needs.
Unless I decide to do the annual gamebook game jam! I have an idea for it!!!
🎲 Your Turn: Are you working on any creative projects right now? What are they? Are you able to pursue your projects one at a time or do you have a slate of multiple things in progress? I want to hear from you! Reply to this email or tell the whole world about your projects by hitting the orange button to leave a comment.
13 responses to “Project Mismanagement”
My current open tab project is a choose your adventure game with a working title of “Folk Rock Horror,” which is basically “Fleetwood Mac vs Cthulhu” set in a music festival traveling down Route 66 in 1974. I have a full outline of all the choices and outcomes for 5 characters and 15 possible endings, and I’m drafting it in Inklewriter just to get the bones down.
I’ve got a couple of novels sitting in various states of progress in other tabs, though.
I’ve been listening to Becca Syme’s Quitcast for Writers podcast, and lately she’s been talking about “author success engines” and I have been really struck by her idea of “respawn” vs “laboratory” writers. A respawn is a person who is willing to try over and over and over to make *this one specific thing work.* Laboratory writers are creators who like to have a bunch of different experiments bubbling at all times.
So much of the advice for creatives insists we have to focus on ONE thing, but that doesn’t work for everyone. Trying to limit myself to only one project makes me resent the heck out of that project inevitably.
I genuinely make more progress when I allow myself to have a few different kettles of soup on the stove, so I can taste and sample whichever one I’m craving at any given time.
Good luck with the slate of projects! They all sound very promising.
I like that premise for a CYOA! Ink is a great system for that. I’ve been using Ink for years.
Ooh, that’s very good advice. I’m definitely a laboratory writer at heart, though I admire the focus of respawn writers. You’re right, there is no one true path in creativity. You’ve got to follow your instincts!
Hi Geoffrey
I’m impressed by how clearly you have expressed your desires to complete these projects!!
So, I am sure that you will!!!
As Patty , my yoga teacher friend and mentor used to say…
“It’s all a process of unfolding””….
So remember to breathe and be kind to yourself… and have fun doing the work that you clearly love!!
You go guy!!
“ It’s not do what you like, but like what you do”… Bernadette Peters singing to Mandy Patenkin…from Stephen Sondheim’s wonderful musical – Sunday in the Park with George… my all time favorite ❣️
Thank you for the advice and kind words!💖
I enjoy working on all these projects individually. Part of liking what I do is having a sense of organization across my slate, and writing about how I feel is helping me reorganize my projects.
Great choice for favorite musical! It makes sense that your favorite musical is inspired by a classic work of art.
I’m currently trying to construct a three-puzzle crossword suite for my blog. I only have a workable idea for one of them and am hoping something leaps out at me for the other two soon.
I’ve also been trying for a while to figure out how to create a virtual escape room based on an idea my daughter had last summer. The only free online tool I could find was too constrained for the concept. I could probably create it myself in HTML5 if I had the time to burnish my rusty web design skills, but I don’t. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know!
I hear great things about a tool called Decker (https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker), which is based on a platform from the 90s called HyperCard that I loved growing up. I used to create maze games in Hypercard. I bet Decker would be great for a virtual escape room / point and click adventure type experience, as long as you were cool with it being 2D as opposed to 3D.
I hit a wall with side projects and realised they are doing my headspace more harm than good. I haven’t published a completed concept since 2018 now. It took the escalation of my day job ( a project that isn’t delivering either) and turning 50 for me to find the “what the f*ck am I doing here?” moment. I used my chatting-to-AI-on-the-commute time to index every half arsed concept that had a residency in my catalog of ideas to start/pursue/complete. Hit the bottom of the barrel at 79 projects.
Of which 27 are game related, 6 I was actively progressing (2 others I should have crowdfunded already but got distracted).
Suffice to say there is obviously something else going on here, potentially involving novelty and dopamine. The backlog of 30 years of creative and entrepreneurial distraction. So I’m shelving it all. No more side projects.
I’m aiming for a year detox. Or at least until I’ve delivered the project I’m getting paid for. Wish me luck.
I think it’s wise for you to step away. No one should feel pressure to pursue creative side projects, from others or from oneself. If it were me taking a break, I would focus on discovering things that made me happy. There’s a big wide world outside of game development. (Or so I’m told.)
Oh I felt this. Despite how excited I can get about an idea, I try to stay disciplined and limit myself to 3 side projects max. Currently have a scripted comic book issue, a major arcana Tarot deck, and a possible toy/animation IP to get pitch-ready. I also have a silly short film I’ve shot and need to edit.
Well dang, that’s too many, already broke my own rule….it helps to have a community of pals accountable 🙂
Sounds like you have a great slate! When it comes to management, maybe we’re cut from similar cloth. It’s hard when an opportunity comes up or an idea sparks your imagination to be like, “Oh, I can’t. I’m already working on something.” It feels like telling a friend you can’t bike ride today because you have chores, lol. But another part of this is being willing to just abandon a project midway. Being like, “I was into this, and now I’m not!”
I dread to even try to quantify the number of creative things I’ve started, left incomplete, but would love to finish given infinite time, willpower, and know how.
Though, on a more positive note, in recent months, I’ve gotten back into making beaded crafts, and after a few smaller pieces(a pouch that might’ve worked as a grip cover for an umbrella that I cannablized for beads, a little basket that could maybe hold a jumbo easter egg, a tote about the right size for a tablet) to test some of my ideas, I made a decent sized rainbow mat for pride month… I calculate it’s dimentions at 822*414mm and that is used a total of 6233 beads and took about 40 hours over about 2.5 weeks to make. A photo of the final product can be seen at:
https://sightless-sanctuary.net/Crafts/rainbow_mat.jpg
Each stripe made of a different tri-tone mix of pony beads with the stripes being red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and pink… from the leftover beads, I started making a scarf that mixes the beads into a red, oragnge, yellow mix, blue green mix, and purple and pink mix with patches of 12*9 beads in a ROY, GB, PP, ROY, PP, GB, ROY pattern, but I came up a row short on the second Green and Blue patch, and 7 patches ends up a pretty short scarf, so I plan to buy more beads to extend the scarf to 13 or maybe 19 patches… ended up with exactly 42 purple and pink beads leftover after making the second purple and pink patch of the scarf, which I made into a tiny 7*6 patch, stitched the first and last rows together, and inserted a column made of leftover black beads to make a little bead cylinder, and in the process of using fishing line to secure the central column to the outer tube, the outer tube ended up turning into 6 very nice helices.
Most productive I’ve been in a while… and unlike with writing or coding, I think it helps that beading keeps my hands off the keyboard so there isn’t that itch to obsessively refresh my e-mail or get lost in conversation with AI chatbots and that I can listen to YouTube videos, television shows, movies, podcasts, audiobooks, etc while my hands are busy on the beading and the beading helps keep me alert enough I don’t risk dozing off or zoning out or feel a compulsion to constantly check remaining duration/word count like I would if I was just listening with idle hands, but the beading is repetitive enough to not distract me from what I’m listening to, so it helps stay away from compulsive time wasters, produces something worth showing off, and helps me chip away at media mountain faster than I would otherwise. Plus, the beads I’ve been using only cost about $4 per thousand, which ain’t bad for crafting materials I need to buy… been toying around with the idea of making a bead mail shirt, but I’m not sure I want to commit to a project of that size quite yet.
The mat is gorgeous! I love the color pattern. I’m happy you found a project where the act of doing it is enjoyable in-and-of-itself. Process > Product. The one thing I like about doing chores around the house is the excuse to listen to my podcast queue.
Yeah, I hate doing the dishes, but it’s a good excuse to knock out youTube videos in the 20-30 minute range that I’ve downloaded since they’re a bit too long to cover the time it takes to prepare a meal, but I don’t want to risk needing to load a new file while I have wet, soapy hands from chipping away at the shorter videos.
And I enjoy writing and coding, but as long as I’m in a text editor, the web browser and all the distractions it offers are just a few keystrokes away, and it doesn’t help that blindness means I can’t see the red squigglies of spellcheck, the non-red squigglies of other types of error detection, the color coding of syntax highlighting, or any of the other visual productivity aids that have been more or less ubiquitous since at least the 90s. Doesn’t help that I have slow ears and my screen reader is set to a normal conversational rate or that I have to describe my ideas entirely in words in situations where a sighted person could sketch a diagram on paper or in a drawing app. “Work twice as hard to get half as much done” is a statement that comes up quite a bit in the blind techie spaces I’m in on the Internet, and that’s just the penalty from the ears not having as much bandwidth as the eyes.
Oh, and another thing I want to experiment with the beading is using two layers of beads to create embossed images.