it’s 5pm on a friday, i’ve closed my work laptop and shuffled over to the couch to call in the weekend. music is playing in the background, my cat odin is sleeping across from me, and i open my personal laptop to check what’s been happening while i’ve been working. i go through my messages, read up on some news, and for reasons i don’t entirely remember i ended up on youtube looking up my game dstnce.

now to be clear, this isn’t a regular occurrence for me. in the first year or so of dstnce releasing i kept a pretty tight pulse on what people were saying about it. after all, how exciting that real people were really playing a game made by me. silly old me! but as time has gone on i’ve forgotten about the game, moved onto new things, stopped programming in my spare time.

i got busier.

reliving former glory

while scrolling through the search results on youtube i noticed that someone had actually recorded and uploaded a video of themselves playing dstnce about a year ago. with nothing else in particular going on at that moment, i decided to watch this video and see what this person thought of the game. this is actually something i love doing since i very intentionally made dstnce vague so that others could project their own thoughts, feelings, story, etc onto the experience and truly make it their own. i’m often hard on myself and my work, but i do really think i struck gold with dstnce in this regard, and this video was a great example of it. if you’d like to have a look at the video yourself to get an idea of what i’m about to talk about, then you can check it out here.

when i watch people play dstnce i often pay close attention to how their feelings progress throughout their playthrough. usually they start off not really knowing what they’re actually doing, maybe they crack some jokes and have a little laugh at some of the cuter aspects of the game. but without fail i will always see folks hit a point where their guard is down, the pieces start falling in place, and they begin to realise that there’s a dark force at play. then they’ll finish the game, and they’ll have really felt something. some will start theorising about what’s happened, some will just sit in silence as they process what they’ve just seen. no matter what though, they will all have felt something.

watching this video, i could see this person go through each of those beats. i could see their slow realisation that something wasn’t right in this game. i could see that what they thought was a lighthearted game is much darker than they initially thought. i could see that i had made them think.

and as they finished the game, i couldn’t help but cry. at the time i didn’t really know why, but as i’m sitting here now writing this up i’ve had some time to mull over what i was feeling and i think i at least have some grasp on why i got so emotional over seeing someone play my game.

let’s rewind a bit here

back in 2020, when i developed and released dstnce, i was uni student working a full time placement. it was a pretty strange time for me, as it was for all of us, and i had a lot of things on my mind both good and bad. i’ve always been an artistic person in some capacity, and the medium that really had me at the time was games. i needed some outlet for the things i was thinking and feeling, so i scoped out a game that should take me about a month to complete (and then it ended up taking two) and started working on it whenever i could. lunch breaks, after work, weekends, whenever i got a chance to work on dstnce i took it.

it was a pretty rough two months i won’t lie. i was in a really bad spot mentally and kept the game a secret from almost everyone i knew. it felt too vulnerable to share, at least before it was done. even when i managed to pull in a few people for early play testing, i was scared to expose myself like this to people. but it was that desire to make art that really spoke to me and expressed how i was feeling that pulled me through, and i’m glad that i did since i’m still to this day incredibly happy with what i achieved.

fast forward to now, and i haven’t really released anything since. this isn’t because i haven’t had anything to say through art or because i’ve been doing fine the past 5 years. in fact, the opposite has been the case.

the past 5 years

a lot has happened. my mum passed away, as did my friend cinder who helped me make this website. i’ve struggled big time with my eating disorder, had many an internal struggle within my family, been brought close to my breaking point more times than i care to count.

with each of these things and more, i’ve found myself in the same position as i did back in 2020: i needed to say something, and i needed to make art to say it. for a while i settled for what i’m choosing to call a “fake blog” up on gemini, where i would occasionally write posts from the perspective of a fictional character to explore my thoughts and emotions around what i was going through at the time. this was okay, but i always wanted something more. i wanted to make a game again.

and so i wrote design docs on my phone. i made prototypes in godot and raylib. i had so many grand ideas, and yet… nothing. hell, even on this site i can see that i have a ton of unfinished blog posts on things that i really wanted to explore but then lost steam on. looking at all these dead projects honestly fills me with a sense of dread and inadequacy. it feels awful that the drive i once had is now seemingly just… gone. and it’s not like there’s some kind of artist’s block or whatever, i was just too tired and apathetic to get anything done.

why i cried

maybe you can piece together why by now, but just in case it’s not clear what i’m getting at here: i cried because i felt like i had lost my ability to create art for myself. seeing someone else play and enjoy dstnce reminded me of how rewarding and experience it was to make and then release that game. but at the same time, it felt like clinging onto my former glory.

right now as i’m sitting here, writing all of this out, it feels like i can never achieve what i did with dstnce again. it feels almost like lightning in a bottle, and nothing i ever do will live up to that standard again. is that true? it’s hard to say. i definitely have the skills to make something better, but skills don’t mean anything if you can’t even use them. that’s where i feel like i’m at now with game development–i’m more capable than ever, but i can’t bring myself to actually do it. that feeling really, really sucks, and honestly i don’t even really know what to do about it. i’ve a hunch that this is in no small part due to full time work really taking its toll on me, but if that’s the case then i don’t think there’s any chance of escaping this rut for me.

usually i try to end these posts on a positive note or at least share some learnings that i’ve made, but i’ve got nothing. even writing this blog post has been difficult for me, not because it’s emotionally taxing but because i’m really, really tired and the last thing i want to be doing is writing any kind of code.

maybe one day i’ll finish another game. but right now, i’m gonna order take out and play some guitar.