I recommend this book

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/rental-person-who-does-nothing-shoji-morimoto?variant=41046832840738

I listened to the audiobook version since it was included in my Spotify subscription.

I’ve been in do-nothing mode for the past few years, and it’s a frequent struggle to be “okay” with it. Moriomoto hides a powerful and compassionate message behind the nothingness: someone who does “nothing” still has value. And the “nothing” may be a real something that’s not so easy to quantify in our conventional numbers-oriented civilization.

There’s plenty more I could go into regarding philosophical questions on the how friendships evolve and what our expectations become of those close to us. But I’ll save that for when I have more energy to write, and just leave it as a recommendation if you want an easy read or listen.

Second Update of 2022: CFS, The Tracker, Pacing

Stream of consciousness post incoming!

For the last six months, nearly every day I wonder if today’s going to be the day I post an update here. Some of you may be wondering what’s been going on with me. Am I still making games? Am I still making anything? That fatigue thing, is it better, worse, or the same?

It’s not for lack of interesting topics for me to get into. It’s just an energy thing. I have this high standard for myself for communication, and most days I simply don’t feel capable of writing. My friends with whom I correspond me via email know all about my “reply to everyone” festival that happens only a couple times a month.

So, how is chronic fatigue treating me lately?

In short, it’s still there. The physical symptoms are slightly better than they were at the end of last year. For reference, I spent most of last year turning down social engagements, and standing for more than a few minutes would rapidly drain my energy. These days, I am able to make it outside every day, do at least a 20 minute walk, and sit at the computer for about 2 hours, and I’ve actually been able to do a bit of coding (more on that in a sec). If there are big social events, I rest up the day before, and usually have a couple recuperation days afterwards. 80% of my average day is lying on the floor mattress watching Twitch or YouTube (or a few months ago, playing Elden Ring). Preparing simple meals is doable, but I don’t cook anything elaborate anymore.

This video is worth a watch if you want to know the latest research. My symptoms aren’t as severe as some of the patients they show, who can’t even leave bed, or struggle to walk around the house. But the story of the officer who went from field work -> desk work -> work at home -> no work… that’s pretty relatable.

For the last year, I haven’t been able to work on my game project at all. Well, I’ve made some brief attempts to redesign things, hoping to make it feasible for someone in my situation to complete. The problem is, game design is one of the most mentally taxing activities for me. There’s something about spending time in the hypothetical realm of imagination: piecing together how each element of the game impacts other elements, planning the project, predicting problem spots that are going to cost me time I can’t afford to lose… one or two of these workdays, even if they are 3-hour days, leaves me floored for a week.

On a brighter note, I have been able to find a workable pace doing application programming for about two hours a day. I’m making a tracker, which is something I’ve always wanted to make. It’s about 10% of the complexity of my game project, and with the right routine, I’m able to make very slow but steady progress on it:

  1. Open Visual Studio and Notepad
  2. List some of the features or fixes I could work on today
  3. Pick one that seems doable given my energy level and interest level at the time
  4. Work for two hours, or until I feel tired, whichever comes first

No roadmap, no feature list, no milestones. I have a vision for what it’s going to be, and I just use its current state as the plan. Maybe this is how sculptors work in marble…the proverbial “removing everything that’s not the sculpture” strategy.

The (yet unnamed) tracker is strictly a hobby. It would be great to get it to a point where I can share it with others, maybe even publicly, but I’m not trying to build a business around it. The benefit to me having a purpose to each day. It’s a lifeline.

Can you identify the song?

The cost of working on it is that it takes just about everything I have, so the rest of the day is just recuperating. It gets boring, let me tell you. I have Twitch to keep me company, thankfully, since it’s easier to watch someone else play a game than to play one myself. (For the record, Elden Ring was playable with my policy of saving difficult boss fights for later. I don’t want to talk about Malenia though.)

I’ve had lots of time to think, and there are topics I’d like to write about: reflections on game production for the games I finished and didn’t finish, my experience working in game audio as a contractor, maybe even philosophical topics about how we can sabotage our chances of success by being too persistent with our goals. Not that I have figured it all out, but if I get around to writing about them, maybe they’ll provoke some thoughtful discussion.

If you watch the CFS video to the end, you’ll see that even if the illness miraculously gets the funding it needs, we would still be six years away from some sort of treatment. So I’m gonna be this way for a while, maybe forever. My time making games could well be behind me. I cherish the ability to work on the tracker project, however slowly, and hope I can continue to do that for a while. I’m also very thankful for everyone who’s written to me, either in the comments here or via email. And I am very fortunate to have a loving, supportive partner who is taking care of me, and friends who all just want to see me do better, even if they all don’t fully understand what this is like.

This would normally be the part where I declare my intention of writing posts more frequently than twice a year, but really, I don’t know when I’ll do the next post. Maybe it’ll be about the tracker and what makes it special. Or just a quick note to say hi. (See, I’ve got to lower the bar a bit of what qualifies for a post, to relieve some of the “first post in six months” pressure to make a grand slam.) In the meantime, feel free to drop me a line, and if you don’t get a reply for a week or two, you’ll know not to take it personally.

This concludes this stream of consciousness, non-revised brain dump of a post. Thanks for reading and catch you next time.

Out of Nowhere, an Update

I get the occasional email from folks wondering what I’ve been working on lately and where I’ve been, since I haven’t posted here or on Twitter in a long time. And since it’s been 8 years since Escape Goat 2 launched, a lot of you are wondering if I’m still making games at all. This is an update on where I’ve been and a bit of an explanation for why there hasn’t been much news from me lately. Be warned, it is not a particularly positive or uplifting story, but you may find it interesting.

From about 2014 thru 2019, I worked on a half dozen prototypes in order to chase various business opportunities. Escape Goat 2’s poor commercial reception put me into business mode, where not only did I feel I had to analyze the market and pick the ideal genre (or collection of genres), but that whatever I made next had to be a big hit, to make up for last time, and justify this whole career I’d chosen. (If you’re considering going down this road, don’t. Turn around, and focus on making stuff you enjoy, and seeing feasible projects through to completion. This is my advice to my past self, may it be useful to someone out there reading this.)

Though most of my prototypes ended up on the scrap heap, one lead I pursued worked out, and in 2019 I got a publishing deal with a major indie publisher for a prototype I had been developing for around a year: an action RPG dungeon crawler roguelike city builder RTS survival defense game. Basically, a tremendous challenge of a design for anyone, and I made it harder on myself by immediately staffing up an art team and finding myself as manager, producer, lead designer, tools developer…basically everything but art itself, and entered into full production before the prototype was fully fleshed out. We had a very solid 15 minutes of gameplay, but things kind of fell apart in terms of what the mid and late game would look like. While everything was being illustrated, I changed stuff left and right trying to find the fun, and after two years, was just lost in the woods.

We were a year behind schedule in 2020 when the pandemic hit, and that was around the time that I started having increasing problems with energy levels. I was taking full days off because I was simply unable to concentrate. Those days grew to weeks sometimes. Charting my hours worked per month through the year, it was getting continually worse. My team and publisher urged me to take three months off, hoping that would cure the “burnout” and get things back on track.

Unfortunately it didn’t. I turned to modern medicine for help, and after a slew of tests received a diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome. If you know someone who has it, you know that it’s worse than it sounds. To summarize, any physical or mental exertion is met 1-2 days later with an extreme loss of energy. In its mild form, which I had in 2020, a 40 hour work week would result in needing to take the next week off. In moderate cases (where I am now), I am lucky to work for an hour a day without being struck by “post exertion malaise”. You can see what sort of problem this would present if you are an indie game developer.

There is no cure for CFS and if you simply keep trying to brave face it and muster the strength to work, do housework, generally live life, you will gradually lose your stamina to the point where you pretty much can’t do anything anymore (severe CFS). I’ve now been in the care of my health provider’s CFS specialist team, who have helped me hold the line and even regain a bit of capability over the last two months (I take low-dose Naltrexone which helps me get rest from sleep, and a beta blocker to keep my heart rate low). The biggest change though is just learning to do more things lying down or reclining. I try to get one 20-minute walk in per day, which isn’t enough to send me into PEM, and staves off the problems that being completely inactive causes.

There are supportive people in my life, but it takes people a while for them to grasp what this condition is. I mean, it’s just in your head, right? It’s invisible and there is no biomarker (yet), so friends and family are going to start with “you just need to get outside and get moving,” “you’re just unmotivated in your line of work,” etc. They don’t mean any harm by it, and some of them will eventually start to understand. But once they do, there’s not much they can do besides express their sympathies. (To be heard and have your experience taken at face value is worth a lot though…)

Probably the most frustrating part of it is not knowing how bad it’s going to get. Have I held the line at one hour a day on average for work/activity? Or is that going to go to one hour a week, and then to zero? The past 24 months has mainly been a steady decline in energy levels, so it’s not pleasant to think of what things might be like next year or the year after. My doctors have said that in their experience, many of their patients have regained some capability through following their advice, medication, and pacing, but they haven’t ever had a patient who’s fully recovered.

One lifeline I have these days is talking with friends who are working on their own projects, and doing what I can to support and encourage them. Even if my development plans are on hold, I still have enough energy to workshop ideas, and any benefit that has to others brings me a lot of satisfaction. Speaking of which, if anyone reading this wants to get in touch, I’m always down to discuss game design, computer science, game audio… I still have a ton of expertise and passion for these things even if I can’t directly make use of them at the moment.

So, we’ll see what happens from here. I’ll post an update for any changes in my situation. Kindest Regards, and best of luck to you in your life and pursuits.