Get a Start

Sometimes my brain and how it processes information is quite exhausting and demoralizing. Instead of focusing on a beginning and an end to a project, it wants to do everything at once. I have a lot of trouble doing simple tasks because I get bored super fast. Two piece puzzle. No. A twenty million piece puzzle. Yes. With such big projects it is really difficult to find a beginning. Sometimes even too difficult.

For years I want to develop a survival computer game and have already created some demos. First in commercial 3D game engines, then in open source engines and then again after some months to 2D engines. I have learned a lot, but have I implemented my idea? No, because I tried to put the cart before the horse. That doesn’t work. So I started at the end. So the end doesn’t lend itself to a good starting point.

But as it is in life, some people need longer to start a project. My brain felt that everything I was about to do should be looked at from an artistic point of view first. In my previous demos, I had primarily focused only on programming and neglected game design. You can do that if you want to learn something but not if your plan is to publish something someday.

So workarounds are only good until the problem reappears somewhere else. So on my second try I had a lot of pixel art designs but still nothing published. No completed demo, but always aborted mini projects. I have a long term plan of where I want my journey to go, so why does my brain refuse so much to find a good start? The clue lies in a single term of the last sentence. Good.

The computer game should be good. Even better. Perfect. I see all the great computer games and wanted to keep up with those really high standards. My programming should be good, so I did everything right. My game design was going to be really perfect, so I designed everything 100% down to the smallest detail. I came up with such a complex system that the developers of Eve Online would have had a blast with it. Since it was only a survival game, I had designed a very small lore. I had not found a beginning until this date.

At some point a burnout set in that was triggered by my own project. I threw all the drawings in the corner and formatted the entire SSD with all my project files. After that I cried for a whole weekend and asked myself how I can be so intelligent and persistent, but at the same time so stupid that I don’t manage to find a beginning. I stand in front of a building and can explain the architectural style, the era it was built in and the color scheme, but can’t manage to find the entrance at the front. The open door. I don’t see it. The problem with some people is that they think too much about something and sometimes they think so long that they just go around in circles.

After a year’s break, I went back to the project because I don’t want to give up. I developed the simplest demo I can imagine. With an online tool. Humans. There is a tutorial cat that interactively explains to the player what the game goal is. Collect loot and read the texts about it. Nothing more. When you go through an exit the game ends. This is what I have been trying to create all along. There are no survival aspects yet, because the player is immortal. Despite this, the avatar has two frames and shows that the character is moving. Loot disappears when picked up by the player and in my imagination items appear in an inventory. The color palette is clear. The exit can abstractly stand for the death of the character, because after that everything starts all over again. Just like in a real computer game. A digital rebirth.

After five years, I had finally found my beginning and can finally embark on the journey. I don’t care if I fail, because already I have learned and accomplished more than I ever dared to dream. And have finally finished a first Humans demo.