I’ve been a hypercreative person for at least 15 years now. And in that time, I’ve frequently considered why I do what I do. Why am I compelled to create stuff, all day every day? Why does my brain keep coming up with new ideas?
Surely, most of those ideas (for stories, games, music, etcetera) have no practical survival value at all. How would our brains even evolve to cherish such ways of thinking? Why does it feel like dying when I can’t be creative and make stuff for a few days?
Then I read a short piece by a small game developer. This was in response to why many game developers don’t actually play that many games.
The first reason, as expected, was that they just didn’t have the time. After working on your own game for 10 hours each day, you really can’t look at a screen anymore, and you probably have other matters to attend to.
The second reason, though, was more interesting. They said that “making games” is a game in itself.
A game is nothing more than problem solving. The game invents some artificial challenge (“score the most goals”, “kill all the monsters”, etcetera) and you have to overcome that obstacle by being creative, skillful or just working hard. The fun from gaming comes from that sense of accomplishment and growth. The satisfaction of having done something hard, having learned a new skill, and beating the challenge.
Well, they were right. Developing games is the exact same loop.
- You have a problem: “how on earth do I make the character jump?”
- You research ways to solve it. You investigate ways to poll input (“when is the spacebar pressed?”), you investigate physics systems, you investigate vectors and which one you should change to go up.
- Until you finally crack the code. You press spacebar, and your character jumps, and you feel great about yourself.
- You’ve learned a new skill, you’ve grown, and now you can overcome even tougher problems.
Making a sprite jump is, of course, one of the simplest things you can do in a game engine. But that’s why you start there. For a new game developer, this is just the right balance between too easy and too hard. Once you’ve conquered those easy problems, you move to larger ones, and larger ones.
Until you see that developing a game is nothing more than playing the game of development over, and over, and over, as you get better and tackle harder problems.
That’s what makes it fun. That’s what makes it addictive. Many game developers admit they are often burned out or sick of programming, but they keep coming back because they just feel the urgent need to keep making games.
The past few years, I realized this is not just true for games. This is true for all artistic endeavors.
The loop of “making stuff” is pretty much the same as a game loop, the same as the loop that keeps you in “flow” and keeps you having fun.
- You try to make something new.
- This inherently has challenges, new problems to solve, new skills to learn.
- You finish it, having grown and learned new skills.
- Go back to step 1 and make something bigger and better.
This is honestly the addictive loop that keeps me going. I rarely think that my current project is any good. After dealing with the main challenge—the core idea that made it interesting in the first place—I can only see the flaws and the pile of boring work needed to finish that project.
But I still finish everything now. Pretty quickly, in fact.
Why? Because I know that once I finished it, I can start a new idea and it will be better. I know that making this garbage project now will grow my skill and lead to a slightly-less-garbage project next week.
And the cycle continues. It goes on and on, because you can always learn new stuff, make new stuff, chase new ideas.
These days, I write code in an hour that would have taken me a week to figure out 10 years ago. I draw 20 pretty icons in an hour, whereas I’d have made 5 ugly ones in a week 10 years ago. As your skill grows, so does the complexity and quality of all your subsequent projects. The line only goes up and up. Just like how, in most games, you can only gain experience/points/levels and never lose them.
And that is addicting. That is the core of a game loop and the core of what makes games fun.
I write this article in the first place just to share this idea and perhaps give you new insights.
I also write it because I think realizing this is a key to good mental health and habits. If you’re an artist, if you were born with a very creative brain, I think this is almost the only way you can live without feeling like some part inside you is dying. Make stuff, make it faster, make more stuff, better this time. That’s the game loop of the artistic life.
In the past, every time I tried to make my current project a “masterpiece” or “perfect”, I failed miserably. No matter how much extra time and energy I put in those projects, they never really got better. Because I simply lacked the skill at that time. Because my creative focus wasn’t in it anymore.
At the same time, if I told myself “just make some tiny project, don’t worry about it being good”, I often gave up too. Because, well, it’s just a tiny project that can’t really be sold! Where should my motivation come from? Why am I doing this again?
Then I started actively saying to myself: “You are making this now so that your next project will be even better and done more quickly.”
And it made a world of difference. I was fine with setting a deadline and stopping when a project was “good enough”. I was also fine with making smaller things, writing shorter stories, creating a really odd board game, because I knew that even those projects would help me grow towards the next ones. Do anything today, for it will teach you something and make you a better artist tomorrow.
You just have to trust that process. You never know when something will become valuable.
When I started my first One Paper Game, for example, I wrote terrible slow code and made a very bad game. But it was a necessary project to grow towards the professional and high-quality One Paper Games I made afterwards.
When I finished my first Saga of Life stories, as another example, I was only 11 or 12 years old. They were illogical, nigh unreadable, with no cohesion. I still finished them and turned them into a website and larger project. Because those bad rushed stories were a necessary step towards the high-quality professional stories that the Saga of Life has today.
And perhaps most importantly: I was able to go back to the old stories and improve them with my current knowledge. If you visit the Saga today, you will certainly find differences in writing style and quality between stories. But I don’t think any story, even the oldest one, is outright bad or unreadable in any way.
Artistic life is a game. A game of growth and leveling up with each attempted project. Embrace that. Use it to subdue doubts or perfectionism, use it to get more work done and be less critical of yourself, use it to let out the bursts of creativity. For I know what it feels like, to a creative person, to have to bottle it all up or slow yourself down all the time. It feels like dying; a day without new inspiration or new stuff made, is a dreadful day.
Those were my thoughts for today,
Tiamo.