Thread by @gravislizard

tangential to my long-winded complaining about other hobbies I don't actually want to spend time on: i don't want to program videogames. i've complained about this countless times but as i said earlier, I lose interest "involuntarily" but also because it's 300 hours of work

yeah the tools suck shit. yeah they should be better. i'm also unwilling to spend weeks not talking to my girlfriend or watching youtube videos or cooking dinner because i'm busy writing routines to make a door animation play

it's too much time and I don't want to do it. The tools I realize I want are not better programming tools. Those would help many people, but not me. What I want is RPG Maker But Other Genres.

I can see myself having made something by now, expressed *some* kind of idea through a video jame, if I could get into Unity and drop in "Bipedal Monster" and it would already have a basic AI and scripting system

Instead I'm fucking, in the Mono editor writing vector math. fuck off! no i don't want to go to the asset store! i am unwilling to spend even a dollar on an INCREDIBLY specific thing JUST TO DOODLE

i don't even know how to find shit in the asset store! and i don't want to learn! by the time I'm browsing the asset store and trying to decide what's worth money, I'm already forgetting the idea I had. sketching is IMPOSSIBLE

but as disappointing as all the tools are, I'm probably still not willing to put in the necessary time to make a videogame. I also don't have any good ideas, but most postmortems say no game design counted for shit and it was all made up 50% through development anyway.

it just comes down to like... I'm not willing to spend an hour starting the game, waiting 45 seconds for it to load, hitting a door, then exiting and tweaking the particle generator, lather, rinse, repeat, times literally thousands of tiny details

Making things is hard and I think videogame development has been sold to people like me as simply not being as complex as it is. "Just do it" does not acknowledge that the "it" is "200 hours of labor minimum"

Better tools wouldn't help. It's not the tools, it's the raw amount of content and functionality you have to create. Beating myself up for not wanting to design a world simulation is not healthy. Why am I doing it?

I realized that I don't want to make videogames. That's not a satisfying activity for me. I want to make experiences, I want people to feel things I feel, and videogames could do that, and it's too much work. I take no joy from the creation of a work that does not say anything.

I remember from my earliest experiences modding games - making maps for doom etc - as soon as I figured out how the editor worked I pretty much stopped, and I know now it's because I had no ideas. I don't know how to design levels. I don't mean technically, I mean conceptually

And it's... okay, to not have any ideas about a medium. Maybe that's not your medium. I was surrounded by things that told me "you should mod games" growing up. I accepted it uncritically. Perhaps this is not my artform, and that's okay.

I liked Doom; I had the big HOW TO MOD DOOM book; I read the book and did the things in it; at no point did I ever realize "I don't actually have anything I want to make in Doom"

I'm not very good at a lot of physical creativity. I'm not harshing on myself, don't reassure me! I don't need reassurance, please, thank you! This is not self-deprecation - not everyone is good with legos. I'm not, and I shouldn't beat myself up for it.

I tried some drawing and I enjoy it! the act feels good! the in-between work feels good! i can start doing it without knowing what I'm making, and then end up with something. even moreso with painting

i wish to GOD someone had asked me at age 13 "do you really want to do this? would you like to try painting instead?" Maybe I'd have learned to paint, and I'd be a lot happier for it.

i thought of the word 'taproom' a couple weeks ago and felt compelled to draw "a room with absolutely nothing but a tap." in my head it looked like the cover to oneohtrix point never's R Plus Seven, see

i didn't make The Same Thing but, I see how I would. i have some watercolors and ink at home, I could redraw this and finish it. the sketch was satisfying! it's not what i imagined but it felt good to make and it helped me think about the idea and it's nice just having it be real

well, i look at threads and articles and stuff from people who make games and I realize, this is what they feel. i can see it in their work, I can see the chunks of ideas that are becoming realized even though the whole orchestration is nowhere near finished.

And I realize I don't need to force myself to be them. I'm not them. that's okay. I don't have to do this thing that other people are doing. I can find my own medium, the thing I'm actually drawn to.

Don't beat yourself up for not participating in the hot new artform until you ask yourself if you actually want something from it, if you see anything in your head that is appropriate. still photographers didn't become cinematographers just because the movie camera was invented.

more generally, and as i've said before, i am finding that I don't like making things on computers. They are unforgivingly precise. There is no slop, nothing analog about it. It's why I fucking hate editing video in Premiere.

There's no room for error, it never assumes what you meant. You're constantly policing the god damn thing, then finding out later that accidentally, without exerting very much force at all, you fucked up a bunch of shit

I have to carefully, carefully, carefully drag video clips and look VERY VERY CLOSELY to make sure I'm snapping them together correctly. 30 minutes later i'm playing back a clip to see how it feels and there's a transition I didn't plan.

whoops turns out I sneezed, literally sneezed and clicked and dragged by accident and, 15min away on the timeline wherre I couldn't possibly see it, the current clip overlapped another and deleted some footage.

i've tried to pick up digital art. maybe it'll be easier once i'm better at pencil and paper? but every time I've tried, even with a decent tablet and all, i just immediately see two tings

1) everything I do is going to have a massive, immediate effect and I'm going to be hitting ctrl+z constantly; "light sketching" to build up a line is not real
2) default settings are useless; i need 450 hours of experience to customize this to something i can use

i don't know if this is an ADHD thing, but *I can't do endless hours of meta-effort that accomplishes nothing towards the goal I actually intended.* because I don't see in lines, in brushstrokes; I see in images *only.*

sketching, with a pencil, on paper, I am making shapes. they are components of a larger image and each one is satisfying. there are no pencil settings to adjust; the pencil is a physical part of my world that I must work around, not try to alter to perfection

I want computer software that acts more like pencil and paper, where I can sketch and experiment and clean it up later and not have to minutely position and configure everything with tons of foresight

you can't begin anything on a computer without knowing where it ends and being willing to get there, because everything is interlinked, interwoven. you cannot simply paint over the things you did earlier that weren't a great idea.

it takes as much effort or more to remove the things you decide aren't a great idea. and it's jarring, it leaves ragged edges that you must then clean up or *nothing* will work

i realize i conflated two points i was making earlier. what i meant was:
- i am not willing to burn weeks of my life making a complete game
- i am not willing to make an incomplete game at all

it's not an imposter syndrome thing. it's not a perfectionist thing. it's not that i'm unwilling to release something imperfect. it requires dozens of hours of work to create something you can hand to someone, rather than just some disjointed files. i am unwilling to do them.

there's so much shouting about "don't feel bad about releasing something imperfect!!" but no. that's meaningless. i cannot hand you a working EXE in less than ten hours of labor. i'm not willing to! that's too much work for art to me! i kinda wish someone had said that long ago

(sorry, meaningless to me)

i wish someone had told me "hey making a videogame of the sort you imagine requires you to work on it every single night for two weeks and to come up with ideas the entire time." I can't do any of that, and I don't want to.

sorry for still going on about this i just

i feel a little lied to, you know? like, why didn't anyone ever tell me what the reality of this was, the scale of it, the number of things I'd have to learn to do *simultaneously* so I wouldn't *try*?

I didn't pick up juggling, or astrophsyics, because I know I can't do those things. So why'd I beat my head against game development for 18 years? Why'd nobody say "you need to be a capable writer, programmer, artist and architect to do literally anything"?

I guess the reason is most people don't realize they're those things. The people who keep saying "everyone should make a doom map, it's simple and fun" do not understand that when I look at a blank map I do not imagine tiers and doorways and arches. I see nothing, no vision.

I don't picture player routes or think about where it would be fun to put a door key. I see nothing. nothing comes to mind. I see *nothing.* I can't "just start" because my brain will not give me "maybe try a line there...?" I see nothing.

I see no rooms, no textures, no hallways. I am incapable of this kind of creativity, my brain doesn't do it. I don't think there's any shame in that but I feel like my whole life people have told me "your brain is exactly like mine so you can do this if you just chose to"

I would like to stop being a prisoner to this nagging feeling that I am wasting talents that do not exist, that I am wasting my time on this earth by not expressing ideas that *I don't have*

same energy

perhaps ultimately I will do these things, and the value of addressing this is not "I will give up forever" but "I will stop being anxious about it." You can't come up with any ideas, or create them, or refine them when the tools and the entire environment makes you feel trapped.

Maybe I can make Doom levels just to doodle. Maybe someday I'll make a whole videogane. But a lifetime of never realizing *why* these things frustrated me made them impossible to think about critically and understand what i need to change.