Nick Cummings

I had a weird realization while sitting down earlier this weekend, determined to make a playable game even if it killed me: It’s really hard to make anything creative as an adult. It’s a challenge for me, at least.

Thinking back on my younger years when creativity seemed to come in a steady stream of sketches, words and designs, I spent some time wondering: what the hell happened? Shouldn’t my years of experience empower my creative process instead of hindering it? And more importantly, how can I train myself to stop shooting every fledgling idea down before it’s barely had a chance to fly?

Another year older, another year less confident

Remember how I used to make games a long time ago? I’ve been thinking a lot about the process I used back then. I was just ten years old with minimal outside training, and yet I was able to chart a course through the entire game-creation progress: design, programming, writing, everything. Those are skills that take a lifetime to master and, as an adult, I’ve spent a lot of time working hard to refine them.

But here’s what I keep trying to wrap my head around: a ten-year-old with a crappy, second-hand Mac in his bedroom — me, in this case — managed to crank out functional, personal, debugged, fully realized games. And now that kid’s an adult who’s trying to figure out how he can someday be as self-sufficient as he was fifteen years ago. Go figure.

So, what’s changed?

Anatomy of a ten-year-old game developer

There are several pillars of making a game. I’m paraphrasing, but let’s call them:

- Design (what does everything do?)

- Code (how does everything do what it’s supposed to?)

- Writing (how does the game communicate with the player?)

- Art (how is the experience enriched through music, sound, visuals, etc.?)

I managed to keep developing as an artist, writer and designer through high school, college and beyond, but somewhere around adolescence my interest in coding largely fell by the wayside. I took a year’s worth of Visual Basic classes as a teenager and wrote a few simple games that ran on my graphing calculator, but that was about the extent of it.

Or, to put things in perspective: I lived in a house full of CS majors, but I graduated from college with just a single term of Javascript under my belt. At the same time, I wrote thousands of pages of stuff, my Wacom tablet saw hundreds of hours of use and I sketched out countless game ideas on notebooks that are wedged somewhere between clothes in the closet at my mom’s house.

Clearly I’m still pretty well interested making cool, interactive stuff[1]. But I haven’t been able to find the means to take all these ideas and commit them to something real, tangible and functional — something that’s programmed to do things. So what changed?

Inspiration

Most of my early coding education came from my family’s first-ever Amazon purchase: HyperCard in a Hurry. I spent hours scouring its pages, learning the tools and rebuilding the examples with more of my own improvised tweaks layered on top each time. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was knee-deep in the creative iteration process. It was pretty cool.

But one kid in a vacuum isn’t a formula for great ideas. Fortunately, inspiration was surprisingly easy to come by for the time, thanks to AOL’s file-browsing service. Hundreds of other aspiring HyperCard aesthetes would share their stacks with the broader public, eager to see them distributed and critiqued. For a kid on his own at the cusp of the Internet age, discovering a seemingly-infinite network of content to devour was mind-altering. It fundamentally changed my core values and thought processes. Pretty heavy stuff — and it was all thanks to some clunky, amateur HyperCard games.

Similar game portals have come and gone[2], but none of them ever managed to hook me like before. I tinkered with Flash games and toyed around with ActionScript, but nothing recaptured the thrill I got from playing through an undiscovered HyperCard stack and trying to figure out how I could reproduce the cool effects and clever functions other people had produced.

Content creation is everywhere in games these days. The simple fact that games like LittleBigPlanet and WarioWare DIY came from major game publishers demonstrates consumer demand for tools that enable the average person to create interactive experiences to play and share with their friends.

People like making games. I like thinking about how games work. So why is it so hard to find the right frame of mind to start creating?

In short: we rely too much on our own experiences. Doubt is a natural, healthy reflex we develop based on the times our expectations were betrayed, and it helps us steer clear of unnecessary risks. But being creative means taking all kind of risks, necessary or otherwise, and the burden isn’t on the creator to filter them out until they’ve been granted a fair chance to see the light of day. You’ll have all the time in the world to edit, but you need to start somewhere.

The challenge I’m posing to myself this week is to spend a lot more time letting ideas gestate and spring forth and a lot less time pruning out the ones that seem risky, unwise or nonsensical. Being right all the time isn’t very attractive, after all, and I sure as hell don’t know where else I’m going to get the inspiration to make something fun and worthwhile.

So that’s this week’s thought experiment. What works for you? How do you give yourself room to come up with awesome stuff without stymieing your creativity?

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[1]: Seriously.

[2]: Some great ones that come to mind include Newgrounds, Kongregate and Steam, but I never liked working with ActionScript so I ruled out Flash development a long time ago. Probably short-sighted on my part.

It’s easy to get down on yourself when you’re trying to grow in a lot of disparate directions all at the same time and the results of your work aren’t clear. It’s a constant struggle for me, especially considering my tendency to focus exclusively on what I could be doing better under the guise of pushing myself to work harder and more efficiently.

In reality, I’m just being hard on myself for no good reason — probably because it’s easier than acknowledging that life is hard and making even a modicum of progress on anything substantial is no mean feat. So I wanted to take some time to look at the progress I’ve made in the past few weeks.

I’ve started working with a couple of new languages: Python and PHP. I’d always heard Python recommended as a great first programming language, and I can see why: it’s strict, but that forces you to keep your code orderly and easy-to-read. I’ve actually shipped a few snippets of Python code at work, which I’m pretty proud of considering

1. I’m not an engineer, and

2. I hadn’t even touched the language two months ago.

For someone who’s pretty comfortable with HTML, CSS and Javascript, PHP was the missing link necessary to put this whole Internet thing together. Now that I’ve confronted my fear of dollar signs (turns out they’re called sigils — who knew?) I’m excited to see how PHP incorporates within a greater web-design framework. It’s particularly useful to me from both a professional and a hobbyist standoint, since both Facebook and WordPress run on it. I’m most excited to see how I can start building out the knowledge necessary to help build Silicon Sasquatch into the site I’d always wanted. I’ve been carrying a mental laundry list of tweaks, fixes and improvements my site has been in desperate need of for years now, so the thought of being able to finally do something about it is relieving.

So that’s the code side of things. In terms of design, I’m starting to get my feet wet with Knytt Stories and Twine. I’m really excited about what Twine can do from a choose-your-own-adventure perspective, especially given its excellent visual UI and clever implementation of variables. The last “interactive fiction” game I wrote was a short, crude adventure game for my TI–83 where the player was an unfaithful Bill Clinton who had to escape from the White House and the terrible wrath of the First Lady[1].

Knytt Stories is the best do-it-yourself Metroidvania generator ever created. In case you’re wondering what the hell that hyperlinked word means: Metroidvania is a portmanteau of Metroid and Castlevania, two game series that share a legacy of two-dimensional, exploration-driven action gameplay in an open world where the player progresses by obtaining new abilities that enable new areas to be discovered. It’s a very engaging subgenre, and I’ve been dreaming of making games in that style ever since I first played Metroid II: Return of Samus as a young kid.

Considering I’ve been working full-time, editing articles for Silicon Sasquatch and traveling a bit in and around Austin over the past month or so, I’m actually pretty satisfied with how far I’ve come since I recommitted to making games. It’s even more impressive when I consider how hard it’s been to pry myself away from the final chapters of Persona 4 Golden.

It’s been hard work, but the best part is being able to look back on what I’ve done and recognize that it’s been a fun and fascinating journey so far. Learning new skills, refining old ones and taking the time to let my mind wander are some of the most rewarding ways I can think of to spend my time.

Speaking of which, I should probably finish sketching out this Knytt game and start actually building something.

Welcome back! After a couple weeks of wandering through the various stages of doubt and frustration that always go hand-in-hand with progress, I’m finally ready to share a few minor updates on my journey toward actually making games that people can play.

First: I’ve sketched out a couple more lightweight game treatments in my handy, gigantic Moleskine notebook. There’s nothing too ambitious here since I’m trying to settle on a handful of games that I could actually hope to complete in the next few weeks, but right now I’m toying with a few specific ideas:

• A short, mostly linear platforming game that’s about 10-12 minutes long built in Knytt Stories (see above image). In addition to making a series of wonderful, atmospheric games like NightSky and Knytt Underground, Nicklas “Nifflas” Nygren built a sort of a DIY-Metroidvania engine that just happens to be super-accessible. I’ve dabbled in the Knytt Stories environment before, but now that I feel like I’ve teased out a makeable concept I’m eager to get into action.
• A menu-driven “lifestyle sim” as a means to dip my toe into iOS development. That’s a scary environment for somebody with no experience in C, so this is probably going to first take shape as a web application in Javascript. I don’t really want to say more about it until I’ve settled on a specific topic, though.

Second: I’ve been reading Anna Anthropy‘s book, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form. It’s impressive both for its lengthy title and its thesis that we’re on the cusp of unlocking games as a creative medium for the masses. So far, it’s been a great read.

I’m hoping to have more consistent updates in the near future as I double down on the work I’ve been doing.

Let me tell you a story.

Once there was a kid, and this kid loved video games. Ever since he was old enough to grasp an NES controller, he was endlessly captivated by the experiences they made possible. And so he decided at a very young age that he wanted to make some games of his own.

So he did. He spent his youngest years sketching out scenarios and ideas that borrowed liberally from the 8- and 16-bit games of his youth. At the age of 11, he had begun making rudimentary point-and-click adventures using HyperCard, a hyperlink-driven tool that was a lot like the web before the web existed. These were traditional adventure games in the style of classics like Full Throttle and The Secret of Monkey Island on an old Macintosh Performa in his elementary school’s computer lab during recess.

His finest work — “Hex versus the Dastardly Decagon,” named after two characters hastily drawn with the polygon tool — was composed of nearly 100 different slides and featured a half dozen or so branching paths to the end. His teacher was impressed and had him demo the full game to his sixth-grade class. Copies were distributed on floppy disks.

The kid was pretty proud of himself.

Junior high brought algebra and geometry classes, which in turn brought out the graphing calculators. The kid would tap away at his TI-83 while distracted in math class and during between-class lulls in the hallway. He wrote a text-based adventure game using BASIC and tinkered with assembly a bit. He didn’t care for the programming, really — that’s not why he did it. But when he saw what he could accomplish by brute-forcing some basic understanding through trial-and-error, he was hooked. The power to create experiences — to establish rule sets and to watch people interact with them — was the most gratifying work he’d ever done.

Then high school came, and college shortly after. He dabbled a bit here and there, brute-forcing some basic Flash and ActionScript understanding and toying with the idea of a really simple Javascript web toy, but most ideas fell by the wayside. This was the time for building relationships, he thought; for learning as much as possible; for thinking more than doing.

But he never forgot what it was like to make things. And so, one day, shortly before his 27th birthday, he sat down at his computer and decided today was gonna be the day where he allowed himself to admit that he still wants to make games and, yeah, that’s exactly what he’s gonna do.

So that’s where we are. That ugly screenshot you see above is what I hammered out after a couple hours of messing around in GameMaker: Studio — a simple platformer with basic physics. It’s not fun, but whatever — it was worth it. I’m learning again, which is a life-affirming thing and I’ll be damned if anyone argues otherwise. And more importantly, every basic problem I overcome through sheer tenacity and frustration reveals an exponentially greater set of possibilities for the future.

For example: After two hours of tedious trial-and-error, I learned how to make a cake jump and fall with gravity. But in that process I learned a lot of intricacies about how GameMaker’s interface works and became familiar with its (fortunately very Javascript-like) scripting syntax. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.

Anyway. So why now? And why put all this down on my blog when I’ve probably written similar diatribes about how I love games and want to marry them but haven’t put any of those words into action?

Because I need to get it out there. I’m gonna make games, dammit, and I’m gonna make them now, and they’re gonna suck, and I’m gonna love it. And I’ll keep making them until they stop sucking or I realize my raison d’être is actually, I dunno, macrame or billiards or LARPing. One way or another, it’s gonna happen.

I went to see Gabe Newell speak today at the University of Texas. The lecture was called “On Productivity, Economics, Political Institutions and the Future of Corporations: Reflections of a Video Game Maker.” You can check out a video of Newell giving the same talk from an earlier session here. My head’s swimming with excitement and ideas after hearing him talk so I figured this’d be a good place for me to put that all down.

Gabe’s discussion focused on a few major themes like disruption and a post-corporate organization structure that he envisions for producing goods and services (which Valve is modeled on). His thesis is that corporations served an important purpose in setting market value and controlling supply and demand before the internet really became an inseparable part of life, but because information is so easily exchanged now these institutions are far more restrictive and less effective. It’s the same model for why he thinks open source will always eventually win out over closed.[1]

His thinking is that in this world, people are most effective when they:

• Organize voluntarily and organically
• Develop as generalists and not by leaning too hard into a specialty
• Are free to apply themselves wherever they’re most interested and most driven to success (hence the totally flat company organization at Valve)

He cites examples of how Valve dabbling in new ways for players to contribute more to their games’ experiences (like TF2 hats) has created cottage industries where people are making decent money. There are some TF2 item sellers who bring in more than $500,000 per year, and he cited more than a few game devs who moonlight as Steamworks content-makers who make more from selling their virtual goods on Steam than they do at their industry jobs.

Maybe the most interesting part of the talk was Valve’s new definition of a game. I’m paraphrasing, but he described it as something like “an environment or experience that empowers players to be as productive as possible.” He pointed out that the word “fun” was nowhere in his definition; instead, Valve sees the future of successful game design as hinging entirely on how well it gives game-players a solid foundation for creating their own contributions within a shared space. Modeling new TF2 weapons and creating custom Left 4 Dead campaigns is barely even scratching the surface.

tl;dr: I realized today I want to spend a good part of my life helping to make these things happen. And there’s no time like the present, right?

I’m riding a particular surge of energy that came from getting in to work and heading out early. That never happens. It took a strange combination of factors to get me to this point:

• Daylight Saving Time came to an end, and
• Fun Fun Fun Fest nearly sent me to an early grave in the most awesome way possible, so
• I passed out at like 10pm last night

Waking up before your alarm goes off is no small victory. Opening your eyes, feeling rested and realizing you’ve still got time to spare just isn’t something that happens if you have a grown-up job (I’m using that term loosely in referring to myself).

Now I’ve got some time to kill and energy to burn, so I’m turning my attention to finally diving back into game design.

I hustled over to Halcyon to set up with some coffee and GameMaker on my Mac, but the OS X version really isn’t up-to-date with the Windows version of GameMaker Studio. That’s a bummer, because GameMaker is pretty much where my sights are set as I start cutting my teeth on designing, building and iterating.

So now I’m back home and making a game where you click on a clown. Progress.

Fall has arrived all around the country, but Austin’s leaving its scorching summer behind kicking and screaming. I was optimistic that we’d be leaving these triple-digit temperatures behind sooner rather than later, but these things can’t last forever. I know how our solar system works, after all!

I’ve been incredibly busy with all manner of work and diversion, which is unsurprising for a dude in his mid-twenties. Last week was f8, the big Facebook developer conference, and watching it left me feeling humbled in a really profound way. A huge part of why I love working at Facebook is that I believe in the product we’re making – its value, its significance, its ability to affect our lives for the better – and I’d never seen those ideals demonstrated so wholeheartedly as they were during Zuck’s presentation.

I try to avoid talking about work on my personal blog for a lot of reasons, many of which are probably obvious, but I do want to make clear just how proud I am of the work we’re doing and how glad I am that I get to be a part of it. Above all else in life, I want to know that the work I’m doing is having a real, measurable and profound positive impact on people. I’m grateful to work for a company where people care about those things.

Last weekend was also the Austin City Limits music festival, which was an intense and draining way to spend 72 hours. It was also an absolute blast. I mentioned this to a few friends, but seeing live music performed always reminds me just how much I miss playing music with friends. Band was an instrumental (sorry) part of my childhood and teenage years, and I really miss the thrill of being on stage and collaborating with people to make music. It’s something you have to feel to understand, maybe.

This weekend is Fantastic Fest at the Alamo Drafthouse and Highball Lounge on South Lamar in Austin. I didn’t get tickets to any of the showings at the Drafthouse theater, but I did wander over to the Highball Lounge for the indie games festival taking place there. I’m hoping to go back today and put together some more thoughts on the games I played, but I saw some really inspiring creativity on display.

I always toy with the idea of making games for a career. It’s probably silly, given that I haven’t been into programming in about a decade and only know a little bit about game design from the books I’ve read, but I think I’m interested in making games for the same reason that working for Facebook is so important to me. Games give people an interactive and shared experience with an interactive narrative that everyone can experience differently. By putting people in control of the experience, playing a game is also an intensely personal experience. Whether the reward is just mental stimulation (like rotating blocks in Tetris) or serious considerations about personal choice (BioShock’s “a man chooses; a slave obeys” scene), there’s just nothing else like it.

Anyway. My point is that games are a budding and brilliant new medium (new as compared to any other major medium, that is) and I’m thrilled by the prospect of being involved in shaping the course of that medium. That, and the opportunity to express myself creatively and work through countless problem-solving exercises and trial-and-error routines in designing and polishing a game experience sounds like some seriously gratifying work — the sort of tasks where I can really get into a flow state.

So yeah. Someday.

Austin has a pretty active gaming community, it seems. I know a number of great developers are here, including Twisted Pixel, makers of some of the most hysterically funny games in years. I’d love to get involved with that scene and meet some of them, but I’m not sure how to go about it. Maybe I can just mention my game-blogging past? That might help.

Speaking of game blogging, and especially of it being in the past:

I’m not sure what’s going on with Silicon Sasquatch, but I’m pretty sure the answer is “nothing.” I haven’t been able to track everyone down to talk about next steps, but I’m gonna have to consider the site on indefinite hiatus at this point. I think the blame can be placed on each of us having significantly busier personal and professional lives and a site with stagnating design and, honestly, WordPress is starting to feel a little too bulky and antiquated to enjoy working with.

I wonder if Tumblr might be worth revisiting?

Long story short, I love writing about games because I love writing and I love games. I don’t think I’m done writing about them forever and ever, but when I’m working as much as I am and I barely have any time to even play the games I love, it becomes a challenge to fit in the time to publish, too.

But it’s something to think about.

I don’t know what to say about Steve Jobs that hasn’t already been said. As usual, John Gruber’s got a good perspective on Jobs’ resignation, so I’ll just redirect you there.

I never met Steve Jobs. I’m pretty sure nobody I know has ever met him, either. And yet it’s hard to think of many people who have had a greater impact on my life, indirectly or otherwise, than Jobs.

Quadra

I’ve recently picked up Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken after a month or so away from it. If you had to sum it up in one word, I guess it’s about gamification, but that’s such an ugly and misleading name. It’s more about what game systems can teach us about human needs and gratification and it’s full of great ideas about how to apply those lessons to real-world issues. It’s not the first or most original book on the subject, and it’s certainly not the best-written (McGonigal’s voice seems stifled out of some misinterpreted need to write with authority), but the ideas she puts forth are just so tantalizing to a lifelong believer in the value of games.

As with any new technology, I’m not sure how I feel about layering artificial game systems on top of real-world events. I’m fairly confident I don’t need a game that pits me against my roommate in a never-ending competition to see who can take the garbage out and do the dishes more often (although visitors to our apartment might disagree). But I am fascinated in social systems we create and what drives people to love or hate them. To look at World of Warcraft and to only see a fantasy role-playing game is missing the point; the effect it’s had on millions of people’s lives, both good and bad, is the real story there.

I’m currently in the midst of what might politely be called a quarter-life crisis. I say “politely” because I’m actually in a really great spot in my life right now, all things considered, and I don’t want to sound like I’m totally out of touch with the support and luck that brought me to where I am today. But on the other hand, I’m at a bit of a crossroads, and I can’t deny that there are a few big, ugly Truths — picture indistinct, feral creatures with matted hair, wicked claws and dripping fangs — that have cornered me and forced a confrontation. For instance:

• I’m closer to age 50 than to being a fetus

Not the best example? Fine. How about:

• I’m closer to age 30 — the age of real adulthood, I presume, because I sure as hell don’t feel like an adult yet — than I am to 20
• I still don’t really know what I want to do with my life (I’m beginning to think this is a trick question and we’re all doomed to struggle for meaning in a largely empty and unforgiving universe and the sooner I realize that and start settling for “good enough,” the better)
• I’m concerned I’m not making the best use of my time

These issues are nothing new to anybody who has ever had one of those moments where reality, armed with a battering ram of stop fucking around, bashes against the splintering defenses of your self-identity until you’re forced to admit that — oh wait — it might be time to reassess how things are going.

Returning to the previous list for a moment: That last point is a complex one, but if we break it up into its constituent pieces, it’s actually surprisingly easy to fix.

Right now, the component of my life most in need of improvement is how I manage my personal time. I want to start working out again in earnest (i.e., more than once every week or so) and to make sure I’m taking time to read and write often — things I enjoy doing but rarely make the time for. Why do some of my favorite activities feel like chores? Why would I dread taking the time to sit down and bang out a blog post?

I think it’s because I have no way to gauge success in either area. Working out feels great once I’m actually doing it, but it’s also unpleasant in a few not-insignificant ways. I mean, sweating is kinda gross. But more importantly, I don’t have any hard-and-fast way to track my progress. I might notice that I ran farther or faster than the week before, but I’m always wondering what external factors might be affecting my results. Maybe I just ate better this week, or maybe I was sleeping more soundly? Spontaneous gamma radiation stimulated my muscles and now I’m a marginally better athlete? Those variables just end up filling me with doubt.

I see some value in building game systems that ignore those nagging questions rather than solve them. Who cares why I ran faster today? What matters is that I have a comprehensive record of all my time spent working out and the statistics to measure success. Nike+ is a huge step in the right direction, but its biggest drawback for me is that I have to actively engage with the program to track my progress. It’d be so much better if the system could give me a nudge every now and then to remind me about how close I was to achieving one of my goals or to remind me how close I was to hitting, for example, a cumulative 100 miles run with the app.

Writing’s the same way. Word counts are obvious, as are blog posts, but that’s only scratching the surface. What about outlining, or personal journal entries, or editing projects for friends, or planning the next big feature for my website? Even if there’s no tangible reward, having those statistics feels almost like a necessity at this point. That’s not to say that writing isn’t its own reward, but adding some layer of game-like elements to these personal challenges starts to make a lot of sense when I think about the value it can provide.

I’m sketching out a few possible designs for what I have in mind. With any luck I’ll remember to upload them — it’s probably worth at least 5 points.

(Note: Not actually a trademarked statement)

I’ve spent the last hour grazing greedily in the greener pastures of Derek Yu’s source files for Spelunky, which is widely regarded as one of the best indie game successes in recent years. With an Xbox Live Arcade adaptation coming this year, I thought I’d see if I could parse how Yu managed to create such a robust, clever and good-looking experience out of Game Maker’s unfortunately Windows 95-esque aesthetic.

But it’s the poor craftsman who blames his tools, and I don’t mean to talk trash about a great, affordable program like Game Maker. It deserves recognition for its clever visual interface that enables game devs to build some pretty sophisticated stuff without actually having to, you know, learn something about scripting. That appeals to me. Although Spelunky has its fair share of code (seems like most of it’s reserved for the AI) it’s all fairly comprehensible. I think.

I always feel like I’m grasping at straws with this whole making games thing. I can see the finished product in my head, I can envision how to create the art and music and the algorithms for how things should function, but I’ve never been able to wrap my head around the actual building process. Maybe one of these days I’ll make some sense of it.