Post-creation blues

Finishing Hero's Last Hurrah was a revelatory experience for me. I'm always proud of what I make (the stuff that I put out for the public, anyway) but it's always with qualifications. This is a good puzzle game—if you like this kind of puzzle game. This is a fun short story—if you're okay with intentionally light tropey fantasy fiction. This is a cool little experience—if you accept the limitations of the medium. HLH is the first thing I've made that I think is genuinely good, full stop. It's the first thing I've made that I wouldn't feel uncomfortable calling "art". It's the most creatively fulfilling thing I've ever done.

This is the first time I've fully experienced "the muse": that ineffable creative drive, that magic spark that makes creating feel effortless and joyful, as if it was being written by some supernatural force and I'm merely the conduit. I've had glimpses of it before, most strongly with my Tessa Tomble story, but that was a much different kind of project. I wrote it in a whirlwind of activity during a few days of one of the only extended periods of unemployment in my life.

I also felt it in bits and pieces while making my unfinished VVVVVV level, which I largely worked on while I had a job that provided a significant amount of downtime. Whatever this force is, I didn't think it was possible for me to achieve within the constraints of a regular job.

With HLH, I learned that's not true. I mentioned bringing my laptop to work and working on it an hour a day during my lunch break, but I did have the benefit of two full workdays in February where I was in the office by myself and could work on it all day. President's day, and a day I came in on a Saturday to make up time before taking a day off (for household maintenance stuff.) That helped me finish before the deadline, no question. But if I didn't have a deadline to worry about, I think I could've finished it in just the little bits of free time I was able to scavenge (if I let myself—more on the benefits of a hard deadline later)

My brain doesn't like working on something for only an hour at a time, but there was an important difference: I didn't have much time to actively work on it, but I was working on it in my head continuously. I finally gave myself space to be bored and daydream. I know on a factual level this is vital for creativity, but this is the first time I've internalized it.

One change I've made to my work habits that's hopefully permanent is that I've reduced the amount of podcast and youtube-listening time at work to almost nothing. I used to have the idea that if I wasn't filling every second of my work day with some kind of stimulus, the tedium would drive me crazy.

That was probably true at one time: before my ADHD symptoms were properly treated, before I started therapy and got my depression and anxiety more under control. For the anxious, boredom is a curse, because if your mind isn't being stimulated, the anxiety will happily step in to fill the void. Your daydreams will become a highlight reel of your past embarrassments and a slideshow of all the ongoing horrors you're powerless to stop. It's not a mental environment conducive to creativity.

I've had sort of a lifelong identity crisis, because I've thought of myself as a creative person for as long as I can remember. When I was very young, teachers (and to a certain extent, my parents) saw in me a creative spark and tried to nurture it.

That flame was snuffed out by the trauma of adolescence. Poverty, parental abuse, unaddressed neurodivergence and mental health issues all contributed to a mental state that made real creativity impossible. It gave me a self-image of someone who had nothing worth expressing. It led to a decades-long anhedonia, a fundamental depersonalization. I was a person without an identity, who didn't feel like I deserved an identity.

I've finally reached a point of my life where I don't hate myself, but a lot of the habits of that time still linger. Seeking out constant stimulation was one of them. It's unfortunate that this part of my life coincided with the rise of smartphones, because as we all know it's harder than ever to not be constantly stimulated. In the early 00s, I had to actively seek out podcasts and audiobooks and transfer them to my mp3 player. Now, it takes active conscious effort not to have a drip feed of constant stimuli. So that's a whole mess of new habits I had to unlearn.

The upshot is that for most of February and March so far, I've listened to barely any podcasts, and I've barely consumed any youtube either here or at home. There's still a handful of channels I'll immediately watch a new video from—Techmoan, Cathode Ray Dude, Angela Collier—and I'll listen to every new episode of No More Whoppers, but I've greatly raised the bar for what I consider essential, and I'm much better off for it.

Instead, I listen to music. Finding the perfect version of Auld Lang Syne for my compilation led me to rediscover my love of Phish, and I've acquired hours of their live material I've never heard before (I listened to them throughout development of HLH—see if you can spot all the references!)

And sometimes I don't listen to anything. If it's quiet in the office, sometimes I'll just sit with my thoughts. Not only is this no longer scary to me, it was essential to the development of Hero's Last Hurrah. Some of my best ideas came while I was just sitting here thinking. If I thought of something really specific I wanted to make sure to remember, I'd write it down or make a note on my phone. Usually it'd just stay in my head. The next time I had a chance to work on the game, I'd put it in.

This was surprisingly sustainable. I didn't think it was possible to make something big this way, but I proved to myself I can do it. So the question is... Now what?

Well, that's where the "blues" come in. If I define myself as a creative person, what am I when I'm not creating? It's kind of up in the air at the moment.

Response to the game has been positive, if somewhat limited. I know that I need to find intrinsic motivation for my work, I should neither expect nor desire a tidal wave of positive responses. Even the best work I'm capable of will only ever appeal to a fraction of a percent of a niche, and that's okay, that's natural. Monoculture is a myth and the gatekeepers are dying off. The idea that millions or even hundreds of people might see and enjoy my work is a fantasy, an artifact of the hustle culture that's been foist upon us by the business-brained.

But still, on some lizard level it's hard not to equate a low response with failure. Since March 1, I've gotten four very nice comments from people who enjoyed the game, and I'm grateful for them. If it got no response whatsoever, this post would probably be "post-creation existential crisis".

But there's some selfish part of me that can't help but think... That's it? It feels like something I put this much of myself into should be a bigger deal. But that's superego shit. It's "protagonist of reality" shit. It belongs in the brain toilet.

But knowing that sure isn't stopping my lizard brain from checking my itch dashboard constantly, getting excited by every new view, and hoping that it leads to another burst of validation and happy brain chemicals. It's really repulsive stuff. I'm sort of ashamed to even talk about it, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who experiences this, and maybe getting it out there and letting people know they're not alone could help people. Besides, shame is more superego shit. It can be useful, sometimes, but shame is value neutral. Feeling ashamed of myself because I did something insensitive that hurt someone helps me be a better person; that's different than feeling ashamed of my desire for attention and validation. Everyone wants attention and validation. Some of the ways people seek attention and validation can be hurtful, but the emotion itself isn't hurting anyone and feeling ashamed of it can only hurt me. Maybe talking about the demon can help me exorcise it.

Anyway, my instinct is to immediately jump into making another game to chase that high, but I know that in my vulnerable state, that would be a mistake. Trying to force it will only lead to frustration. Instead, I'm going to spend as much time as I can reading, listening to music and daydreaming. I've got a couple ideas bouncing around in my head, and I want to maintain the conditions for them to take root in case they decide to blossom into anything. It's like Winnie the Pooh said: "Poetry and hums aren't things which you get, they're things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you."

What I will start doing, I think, is bringing my laptop to work again for my lunch breaks and messing around. Sketching out ideas. After all, this all started when I looked at the Cookie Cutter maps and started thinking about what I would do with them. Abstract daydreaming is important, but I need to spend some time each day doing something concrete if I want the right kinds of ideas to come.

With ADHD the idea of losing momentum is terrifying, because there's always the fear that we'll never get it back. That's why it's so hard to actually finish anything: finishing means stopping, and stopping means the momentum is gone and I might never make anything again. If I work on a project forever, continually adding new features and scoping up and revising what I've already done, the momentum will never stop! That's what our brains tell us, anyway. In practice it never works out that way, because it can't. Nothing can last forever. We burn out, lose momentum anyway, and feel more like failures than ever. Finishing means relinquishing momentum on my own terms. It means I have the power to let go. It took a game jam with a hard deadline to teach me that, and I'm incredibly grateful 🦝