Foreword – Pacing (and Unpacing) Yourself
“Running a little gaming blog with frequent updates will be easy!” he said, “Three 5+ page articles a month, plus a foreward, no problem!” he had been so confident. Lol. Lmao, even.
I’m not often super fair on myself when it comes to work. As a self-employed/unemployed individual, I realized long ago that some self-imposed guardrails would be necessary to actually facilitate some happiness in my life. No working on weekends was a big one.
When you have a 9 to 5, it’s easy to understand that you need to find that time, but once I started identifying as self-employed, I started feeling guilty for not pulling eight hour days anymore. I’d get a few hours in every day at best, and regularly find free time to finish probably 3-5 regular size or bigger games per month. I started to feel a certain guilt about this. My old Twitch/YouTube channel, 『RISINGSUPERSTREAM』, had been a moderate success. Enough to pay the bills, maybe a little more here, a little less there. My game development ambitions, on the other hand, were a wreck. A few years of failed projects and thousands of dollars spent had me feeling like any spare time I had should really be owed to work. After all, self-employment is the dream, right? Why wouldn’t I want to do at least that much? Was I ungrateful or something? A frustrating mix of feelings, for sure.
This turned into a pretty unproductive and vicious cycle, where I’d shame myself for not working enough, nor hard enough, day in and day out. Not taking weekends off exacerbated this, as even if I was only working a couple of hours every day, I was never taking time off of shaming myself. After my girlfriend (now wife) assured me that it was fine for me to take weekends totally off, I did, and boy it’s made a difference.
Over the next five years or so, I quit streaming as a job, I re-entered and finally graduated cegep (in a cool program called Independent Video Game Design that didn’t exist on my first failed go at it), I worked on a bunch of cool student projects, met a ton of people, and fully developed and shipped Garden Guardian, my first commercial game (go buy it!) That was like, a lot of work, and I’m incredibly proud of it all!
Nontheless… I find myself in a lurch! I’m back in that regular cycle of minor self-harm, deriding myself for not working hard enough. It’s been about a year since the final Garden Guardian update and Switch release, and though I’ve worked on various prototypes for things (that I’d like to share here at some point), nothing has really stuck around, and certainly nothing is anywhere close to actually making money. I’m finding myself regularly thinking about work and my lack of it on the weekends again, and I’m trying to figure out how to escape this cycle once more.
There’s this expression I’ve heard recently- “The purpose of a system is what it does”. A simple version of the idea is that if you have a machine that says “HAMBURGER MAKER” on it, but the only sandwiches that come out are hot dogs, you actually have a hot dog maker. It scales marvelously well to government agencies as well! Have a think about it!
Anyways, if I’m going around Japan telling people that I’m a game developer, but then I know I’m not getting many hours in and my prototypes aren’t getting anywhere… am I? Lately I feel more like I’m an unpaid hobby programmer, and even I can see how harmful and needlessly critical self-analysis this is. Something to work on, then.
I’m beyond lucky that my wife has an absolutely banger job that she loves and she’s comfortably able to take care of both of us while I’m working through this, but with Garden Guardian’s sales mostly dried up, it’s hard not to feel a certain shame for not working myself to the bone. I don’t think it’s out of a masculine sense of inferiority- she’s always been more well and consistently paid than me- I think I just feel like I owe her more effort in my work, and towards our own future. We talk about it a lot, and she’s routinely the best and friendliest person in my life, so it’s never a problem. Life’s good! Mostly!
This has been a weird, meandering post, I’ll admit. Maybe a little too personal, even? There’s no nice, comfortable bow to tie everything up in at the end, either.
Well, I should at least try to tie it up nicely. Be nice to yourself! I’m telling myself right now that by putting this out in the world for everyone to see, I’ve got to lead by example and try being a bit nicer to myself as well! I’ll try, at least!
-Liam
PS: This month, Matt and I did a banger little playthrough of the new Silent Hill 2 remake! Give it a look if let’s plays are your thing!
October 2024 Articles
Nintendo Sound Clock Alarmo
tl;dr: A surprisingly playful, almost “not-smart” device, that is both the best and most expensive alarm clock I’ve ever bought.
Tokyo Game Show 2024
A quick look over six games from this year’s event! Double Dragon Revive, GUILTY GEAR -STRIVE- Nintendo Switch Edition, Reanimal, Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero, Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road, and Dome-King Cabbage.
Other October 2024 Things
Matt & Liam Play Silent Hill 2 Remake
A fresh playthrough of Bloober Team’s impressive Silent Hill 2 remake!
7 responses to “OCTOBER 2024”
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A pretty personal post leads me to waffling on if I should try sincere advice or if you’ve probably heard it all, not least from a rando commenter.
But like, yeah you’re a game developer. I think it’s different to streaming (where it’s something you now “used to” do) because like, you released a game! On consoles, even.
You made a game, you’re working on prototypes (which is iterative, and not therefor not wasted), that’s all the qualifications that matter.
And, sorry if you’ve heard that one before. Best of luck, man!
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A lot of your thoughts here definitely resonated with me (although there are certainly differences with my personal situation). I often find that my lack of progress with my game designs and prototypes strengthens my depression, which in turn weakens my drive to get things done with those projects. Even with video games being the only thing on my mind for most of each day, I constantly find myself questioning my ability and legitimacy in development because of the lack of output, and a lot of my self-worth is tied to those (diminishing) prospects. I think the current state of the industry isn’t helping, but yeah, there are a lot of contributing factors to my personal rut.
I’m really glad, though, that your wife’s so supportive of you, and that things are otherwise good. I hope you’re able to get past the wall and get some traction with your games. I don’t know how easy it’d be, but it’d probably be cool to chat with devs in the indie and 同人 scenes while you’re over there (if you haven’t already). I definitely miss having peers around to make games alongside, which was one of the highlights of my time at uni, and that probably helped a lot with my drive to work on things. It took a while for me to feel comfortable talking with anyone, mind you.
Anyway, yeah, I hope you’re having a good one, and sorry for the rambling comment.
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Hey Liam,
I came across your blog just a few days ago and just finished reading your foreword. Normally, I’m not one to comment on things, but I felt like I should finally let you know how much entertainment you’ve given me over the past 6 to 7 years.
I don’t know your YouTube channel stats, of course, but believe me, I’m probably in the top 10% of people when it comes to watching your videos. I (honestly!) can’t even count how many times I’ve rewatched videos like the Labo streams, your coverage of all the Directs and events, Mario Odyssey, World of Light, or even those niche videos like Don’t Knock Twice, Yu-Gi-Oh!/Duel Masters/MTGA, Fear of Bugs, Summer Lesson, Roller Coaster Dreams. Altogether, probably hundreds of times! I could list even more, but I’ll stop here…
What I really want to say is: even if you’ve given up streaming or YouTube and might never create video content again (though I’d obviously be thrilled if you did!), you’ve brought so much joy and entertainment to so many people who couldn’t get that anywhere else. I’m sure many of those people still follow you today from your streaming days.
What made you stand out? Your optimism! Your ability to avoid negativity and always try to see the good in things. That’s what I thought of when reading your post. If you can apply even a little of that mindset to yourself, I think it would do you a lot of good. I don’t want to overstep, so I’ll leave it at that.
This comment might be a bit all over the place, but I just wanted to write to you (been meaning to for a long time) to thank you for your content and your refreshing, entertaining personality. I hope you read this with at least a small smile, and please don’t ever take your channel offline! What else am I supposed to watch while eating, assembling furniture, or falling asleep?! Oh, and I’ll be picking up your game in the next few days—supporting you is the least you deserve!
I’m excited to see what you do next in the future. Rest assured, I’ll keep following along!
Best regards from Doitsu
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Hey Lars, sorry for the late reply. Genuinely, this is such a sweet thing for you to say. That list of videos you posted is so, so specific that yeah, I think you probably must be in that top 10%, haha. Probably even higher! Seeing you mention enjoying those videos- the weird off-the-beaten-path kind of vibe ones- it really makes me happy. I hope this isn’t weird, but I’ve written some of it down on a post-it note and stuck it up near my desk. The bit about my optimism, and maybe applying that in my life… I mean, I’ve just not been doing that lately, and I can’t help but think you have the right idea (you’re definitely not overstepping in that regard, either).
Thank you so much for taking the time to write to me- it’s really moved me. I don’t know what else to say but thank you.
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