picking up

Wow! A domain name all to myself! I should have just done this in the first place.

1. Recent history

I am, you see, a failed video game developer. I don’t wear the name with particular shame (although I did for a few months), it’s just a fact. Between February 2022 and May 2023, I was working on a video game called pan-gaia. Then I stopped. And now, after a year, I’m starting again. ¹

The reasons I have for making pan-gaia are long and deserve a separate post. They only strengthened the longer I worked on it. But I didn’t end up shipping anything, and then - to be blunt - I ran out of budget and strength at the same time.

Now, I will lay out what I think I did wrong and right the first time around.

2. What did I get wrong?

Shrinking from the mic

I have not generally, out of upbringing or acculturation or temperament, been a risk-taker. Before starting work on pan-gaia, I had a 9-to-5 job, which I had taken immediately after graduating. I quit it to work on the game full-time.

You must understand that this act was, even to me, astonishing and out of character. (But I had another reason: at the time, I thought it irresponsible to split my attention between a paid job and something I was doing for myself.) The people around me seemed bewildered, too, and their responses generally fell into two camps:

1. Great brilliant good luck
2. Why are you quitting a stable job for this, most doubtful among doubtful ventures

It was for the latter side’s sake, and what they thought of me, that I restrained my commitment, not in money and career, or even in effort, but in how much I was willing publicly to commit myself to the project:

• I didn’t announce what I was doing on any channel for the first five or six months.
• I didn’t reach out to anyone who might be interested. (OK, I e-mailed like 2 people and got no response from either, but that doesn’t really say anything)
• I didn’t create concept art, or push promotional materials to build hype, or set up a dev blog under my own domain name (eh? eh? regular old rhetorical Cicero so I am)
• I didn’t seek out feedback or playtesting from my friends and family (!), because I didn’t want them to see an unfinished product (!!!)

But the obvious lesson here is that, whether the Don’t Quit Your Day Job side was right or not, it was stupid of me to embark on a venture and then conduct myself like I was ashamed of doing it.

I was essentially hoping to make sales by springing onto the scene with something fully-formed, saying, in a stage whisper, “Sorry for being so reckless, and you have no idea who I am; but I’ve made something, and if it’s not too much trouble, you might or might not like it; though I don’t want to bother you, so I only have a couple small photos, and a paragraph or two which can tuck away unobtrusively near the blind spot of your retina”. And then scurrying away before they could give me feedback.

And yes, I was ashamed of doing it. If it’s not clear by now, I’ve gone through some personal changes since then.

Perfection on a fixed schedule

At first, I only wanted to make pan-gaia small, as practice for another, larger game I had in mind. I scheduled and budgeted towards this in January 2022. The budget I allocated was very, very conservative (for reasons mentioned above).

Then, as development went on, the scope of what I wanted to do got larger and larger. Two reasons:

1. The growth was mostly in the direction of “capture more of the Earth’s behaviour”: first the sea, then rivers, ice, etc., as I came to understand that you can’t really model part of the planet without the other parts: everything is connected. I kind of just picked a tough subject.
2. I started to see a kind of beauty in what I was doing. A lot of climate science is simple physics, at large scale, put together in interesting ways. ² Physically, this is nothing more than an unevenly-heated gas with some dust and water vapour in it, and yet Nature somehow manages to pull this out of its butt: It pained me to start applying approximations and shortcuts to the things I was learning.

I was somewhat aware of scope creep as a phenomenon in software development (painfully aware now), but the situation seemed special to me. It became my passion, my obsession, to “get it right”. In a way, I was also proving to myself that I understood the material I had just learned.

None of this went back into adjusting my schedule or budget, because I felt I had no choice. The possibility didn’t even enter my mind. The budget was fixed, the schedule was fixed, and that was that. So I just worked harder and longer hours, until I was exhausted week after week. The last two months (March and April 2023) were hard.

Product-ing as I went

One’s personal obsession is not guaranteed to yield a fun game for others. Before development started, I accepted this. My small-game concept was:

This will be a software toy. SimEarth was (in its own words) a software toy. And a software toy doesn’t need explicit gameplay.

But, after a couple months (viz. the scope creep and zeal for getting it right), it became:

This is too complex to be a software toy. I have to engage people so they focus and learn one thing at a time. How? People love pandas. Deploy the fuzzy creatures and make people manage the climate to keep them safe.

And by about November 2022, I had a realization, and came back around to:

Humanoids and their ancestors have lived through all these changes. The history of Earth and the history of life (and in particular us) are the same. SimEarth was not just a software toy, it told that history. Guiding a species through it can be the gameplay.

I like this latest idea! Now I think I have a workable game concept, or at least a starting point which I can show to the audience. ³ But, incredibly, for 11 months, I was toiling away without it. I was just working off of “model the Earth and figure it out later”. This also ties back into the hesitation I had to show partial work.

When I did end up making the Earth model more-or-less acceptable to myself, I then started to show it off, to… crickets. Someone asked me point-blank: “where’s the game?” I realised I now had this model, great, but I had to hammer it into something people could interact with. And because the model was so big and complex, working as hard as I could, I couldn’t just peel off part of it to make something in four months.

3. What did I learn?

May and June of 2023 were spent in a kind of muted blur for me. The Steam Next Fest I had been aiming for came and went. I had failed. They had been right about that stable job. How could I have been so foolish?

That July, I moved towns and jobs. It was the end to a decade on Vancouver Island. With time, the shock faded, and I began to look soberly at the partly-finished work that did exist. I also came to realise that I had grown a lot over the past 18 months. Here are some things I think I got right, or maybe learned to do right halfway through.

Firmly grasp the mic

My appetite for risk is higher now. I failed, and yet my head did not explode. I also now have a desperation (or something? but not negative? mostly?) to make artefacts I can show to others. Whatever the feeling is, it works to overcome my natural fear of public opinion. Last December I gave a talk at my local developer meetup, in front of 40-ish people. I never would have done that.

For people who are like me: I’m not sure what to say, except just go out there and show up and try and fail and feel foolish about it. It’s that simple. It does wonders.

Make something people kind of want

All the product managers reading this will laugh. But who’s laughing now? I just taught myself what you already knew, for… #!%&, probably a lot more than a year of business school costs. OH WELL.

Anyway, yes, products sell if people find them good and pleasing. ⁴ All the Earth model code I wrote was very pleasing to me, up until it wasn’t. And then, unshipped, it could be found pleasing to precisely 0 people.

I don’t think I can guess exactly what the audience wants, but I now want to lead with that thought and then think about the technical details.

However, as devil’s advocate: it could also be that now, having learned various climate simulation techniques, I can reason about composing them into a system that supports a fun gameplay loop. Whereas I couldn’t before.

Last week, for no reason at all, I went to the Steam page for pan-gaia. There is one solitary community discussion, from July 2023, which I had not seen:

Finally a simearth-like! I have been waiting for a decade or even more! Kudos

Whoever made that discussion! I don’t know who you are, or if you’re still waiting, but I hope you understand how much those words mean to me. Somebody wants some part of what I’m making. Had I read that when it was first posted, I probably would have cried. I won’t let you down, three random Steam users.

4. Let’s go

The TL;DR

I think the TL;DR of what I learned over the past two years is:

1. There must be some inkling of what people want inside of what you’re building.
2. To know if you have the inkling or not, you must show it early and often.
3. To show it early and often, you must be willing to leave out what they won’t see. Even if you think it’s beautiful.
4. To show it at all (for people like me), your desire to ship must also overpower your fear of the spotlight.
5. It is very, very, very stupid to base your first video game around a numerically tetchy physics problem. Do not do this. Make a poker roguelike or something.

What next

Setting this website up is the most fun I’ve had in months! I next want to make something I can post online, like a 1-dimensional climate model. I think on itch.io.

After that, I’m going to lay out the great grand vision I have for pan-gaia in this blog, up to any particularly strong signals I get from the itch game. There is a lot of unorganised material from the past 2 years. I’d also like to reach out to People with Big Brains who might be interested in what I have. Or hate it. I’m all ears.

Finally! I hope you appreciate how embarrassed I feel writing this post! One must hope it gets better from here, if not in business, then in my ability to try and fail in public places.