Date: Saturday December 30th, 2023
Time: 01:43:01 PM
By: chris tomodashi
i've been pulling my hair out with different art tests over the past two weeks, trying to come up with the visual style for tomodashi's first game. each art test gets me one step forward, and two steps back. i just can't seem to choose one.
the word "choose" really struck a chord. in the bath i had a long think about what got me here, after over 15 years of "thinking about" starting a game company and making my own games.
back in the mid-2000's, my best friend and i at the time were in graduate school, and miserable. we both hated being teaching assistants, we hated a lot of the research, and we hated the subject areas we worked in. what got us excited was *games*. whenever we talked about games, our faces lit up, and we'd spend hours arguing over what made Metroid or Tetris or Fallout the best. we'd spend an equal number of hours tearing apart games like Baldur's Gate, and why we thought it was an inferior role-playing game (compared to pencil'n'paper experiences). those chats soon transformed into a couples role-playing group (Deadlands, Planescape) that lasted for years.
that semester we took a game design course together, and cemented a plan: we were going to keep working as grad students, but moonlight as game developers. we had no idea what we were doing, but we were sure that whatever game we made, it was going to be better than Baldur's Gate. we wrote design documents, we went on long walks arguing over mechanics, we learned python; eventually we began building a game in pygame.
but we needed money, we figured, if we were going to do this "right". we thought up and registered a business name, and then we opened a business banking account. but with no prospects for game development contracts, we rebranded ourselves as software engineers. we scored a couple of (to us) lucrative database and web contracts that added up to several thousands of dollars by the end of the year.
but after a year, we still had no game. our pygame-based engine was barely in its infancy, and all of the excitement around making an amazing RPG had long since faded away. programming a game after programming databases and web front ends all week felt like a chore, even if it was a happy chore.
after two years, we called it quits. we were both close to graduating from our Master's programs, and had no idea what was next. we liquidated the bank accounts and went our separate ways.
i was despondent. without him, i felt like i didn't have the skills or the motivation to make a game by myself. instead of plugging on, i gave up on games. i soon graduated, and my academic supervisor offered me a position as a Ph.D student.
thinking i had no other choice, i became a Ph.D student. i continued on in my graduate program in misery for years, and considered quitting many times. i moaned to my friends about how much i hated graduate school, but all of them assured me to keep mushing on, because coming out with a degree was better than coming out with nothing. i listened to them.
in the evenings, i'd pass my time by writing about games and talking about them non-stop. i wrote several designs on paper, but never quite committed to making one on my own. years passed.
in the late 2000's, i graduated and started teaching in my discipline as a travelling "adjunct" or sessional lecturer. this type of work consists of short-term (one-semester) contracts that pay little, and are incredibly demanding. after a year of it, i was absolutely burned out.
out of nowhere, i was invited to apply for a faculty position at a respectable university in another town. faculty positions are rare, highly sought after, and guarantee a degree of permanence never found as a sessional. the staff in the department were kind and generous, and a lot of fun to be around. everyone i knew told me it was an incredible opportunity. being asked to apply for a position was practically the same thing as being offered one outright.
so i applied. and four months later, i was offered the job. but instead of feeling excited, i felt a knot of dread in my stomach. the job would mean a lifetime of marking and teaching and research in a discipline i didn't care about anymore. when i approached the hiring committee about changing my research focus to gaming and media, they all shrugged and said that it wasn't a very interesting subject to them. couldn't I pick something sexier?
i felt torn. how could i turn down a job that any other recent grad would saw off their left arm for? i went to a buddy of mine who was a department chair at a local university, and asked him what i should do. how did i know this was the right job for me? he smiled kindly and said, "chris, the right job is the one that someone will pay you to do for them."
i was stunned. i sat there in silence and processed his words for hours. a part of me knew that he was right: these jobs are one in a million, and the department *wanted me* there. and yet, a part of me knew that this was terrible advice for someone like me. i hated my discipline, and ultimately just wanted to be making computer games instead of teaching.
a few days later, i called the chair of the hiring committee and announced my decision: i was not going to take the job, and i was leaving academia for good. it was one of the hardest, and most important phone calls i've ever made in my life.
i realized today that i've struggled with making choices for myself most of my life. when my game development partner quit, i gave up on my dream. when my grad supervisor offered me a Ph.D slot, i took it without asking myself if it was what i wanted. i allowed other people to make the choices for me. i took the easy way out, which meant accepting whatever career opportunity came up because "anyone else would say it was a good choice". they were never *my* choices, because the choices were made by values external to who i am as a person. i failed to choose.
that makes starting a game development company of my own, using ideas out of my own head, a terrifying prospect. so even something as seemingly-benign as picking a visual style or colour palette for a game can be anxiety-inducing.
and yet - being in the position to choose, really choose, feels wholesome. picking how the world and characters should look feels just as good as the day i chose to quit academia. even if my choices turn out to be the wrong ones, i can at least say a few years down the road: they were my choices.