NickCummings.com

I’m starting to question whether or not I’m going to ever get this game-design thing off the ground. It’s almost paradoxical to me because I was making games — stupid, simple, crappy ones, of course, but still functional and fully-formed — almost fifteen years ago, but somewhere over the last decade I lost track of whatever it is that got me into a state where I was creating stuff and enjoying it. Maybe the technology changed too quickly, or maybe my brain stopped learning so readily. Either way, it’s been almost three months since I began devoting a huge chunk of my time to learning how to design games, and I still don’t have a single functioning thing to show for it.

Although I’m tempted to blame Flash and its byzantine structure, I think it’s ultimately my fault. I’m too easily beaten down by my own impatience and frustration. And even though I’ve poured countless hours into reading about game developers, rubbing elbows with them at conventions and (perhaps impolitely) sending them my awkward questions about their profession, I still don’t feel like I have the right stuff to do it myself.

Maybe I just need to keep looking for the right toolset, or the right idea, or the right state of mind, or the right situation. But at this point, I’m just so frustrated with being frustrated that I’m tempted to just give up for a while and focus on something else.

Flash is so frustrating for me. It’s not that the program is especially difficult to learn or terribly designed, necessarily; I’m just irritated that I’m choosing the slow but steady path in teaching myself how to use it again after years without so much as dabbling in the software.

The last Flash project I made was completed in late 2006, so it’s been nearly four years since I touched the software. Things are fundamentally similar, even after Adobe bought out Macromedia and attempted to Adobe-ize the interface (largely a good thing), so the pace at which my beginner-level Lynda.com tutorials are moving is maddening. I’m trying to remind myself that if I just stick to it and take my time to really nail the fundamentals I’ll be better off in the long run, but that’s not how I’ve taught myself tools in the past. At a certain point, guided instruction is far less helpful than poking around for hours and figuring out things through trial and error. It’s how I got a feel for Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Final Cut Pro and Vegas. Even when I was 10 years old and first poking around in HyperCard on an old Macintosh, the books I read only got me so far — after a while I wanted to simply see how far my knowledge and imagination could take me.

I’m frustrated because my goal from the outset has been to start making games. The consensus from all sides of the games industry is that the only way to become great at making games is to just start making games and keep making them. There’s no introductory path or universal hierarchy of toolsets; all that matters is being able to make something that works and, ideally, can speak for itself why it was worth making.

So I’ll stick with the ten-minute explanations of how to use the shape tools to draw every sort of oval the mind can conjure up. I’ll try not to fall asleep. But fortunately, if I stick with my schedule I’ll be scripting within a week, and that’s when things get interesting.

So here’s the deal: I recently became unemployed after working six months as a legal assistant in the hopes of kindling a passion for legal work and, eventually, maybe even encouraging myself to apply to law school and make something of myself.

It dawned on me that that’s not the life I want for myself. For better or worse, I’m not happy unless I’m working in some creative fashion. I only feel good about myself when I’m staying up all night working on a layout, or writing about whatever comes to mind (hence this blog), or sketching ridiculous cartoons I wouldn’t dare share with anyone, or…you get the point.

I’m currently living in Eugene, Oregon, which doesn’t have a whole lot going on except for:

• An awesome library
• An abundance of affordable, healthy, local, organic food
• Plenty of bike paths
• A totally awesome girlfriend who’s got my back, even if she thinks I’m ridiculous

With that in mind, here’s the deal.

Starting tomorrow, I’m going to dive head-first back into Flash. With the help of Lynda.com (the best learning tool I’ve ever used outside of a classroom), I intend to teach myself everything I can about making games with Flash with the eventual goal of…well, it’s hard to say. I want to be a game designer, and dammit, now’s the time.

I’ve got this nagging worry in the back of my mind that this is just me trying to justify slacking off and being an unemployed layabout, but I’m pretty sure the opposite is true. For the first time ever, I have no obligations aside from feeding, sheltering and clothing myself. This is the time to hunker down and learn everything I can and start creating things to share with people. I have no idea where it’ll lead me, but frankly, I don’t care. For the next few months, my life is my own and this is what I’m choosing to do with it.

There’s one cardinal rule I love breaking as a writer, and that’s editing. Maybe it’s just the way I approach a first draft, but I get so energized just seeing where my prose takes me that to go back and revise it seems almost criminal at times. Clearly it’s a necessary process for producing something polished and presentable, but it’s hard to liberate yourself to write what you want when you’re just thinking ahead to the next step where you’re going to go back and eviscerate everything. It’s hard to focus on step one when all you can think about is step two.

The next few months are going to be all about step one. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes in a general sense, but if you’d like to keep up with all my notes, sketches, observations, and other game-related details, check out nickplaysgames.tumblr.com. And, of course, I’m still actively working on Silicon Sasquatch for the more high-brow gaming stuff — and if such a thing doesn’t exist, we’re doing our damnedest to make it real!