Super happy for both of you! It was a lazy night and this whole thread got me pondering, so I ended up writing a lot more than I expected about a previous experience that Joe alluded to. It’s about a time when game development didn’t work, but hopefully folks can find some value in it.
Team shit is tough. My biggest (and last real) collaborative project was a Half-Life 2 mod that started as a little thing between some close friends. We thought it would be a fun opportunity to pull in some other cool people we knew, so we spun it off into a “team” — which I’m proud remained unnamed, rather than succumbing to the classic Half-Life 2 modder urge to live under titles like Uncertainty Division or Quantum Bleed or fucking Pulley Software — and did our best to make something.
… And it didn’t go well! I still find myself turning over what happened, because it wasn’t really that we failed to make what we wanted, which is the normal thing to occur. Rather, we failed to make most of anything, which feels odd for a mod project. We had a whole base in Half-Life 2, and a bunch of people who knew how to make Half-Life stuff; we had new enemies with new AI and a solid concept which everyone felt was exciting but which was also really flexible and — my point is that it felt like we had more than enough for people to start jumping in the editor and doing whatever. There was a ton more to do beyond that, of course, but you can’t really iterate on that stuff until there’s some fragment of a game to iterate on.
In spite of a fairly auspicious beginning, especially for a mod project, it felt like the “work” never began. I was prepared to organize people and document things and run meetings and the like, which I did (it was basically all I ever did for a year and a half). But I think what I was expecting was that if we had a level designer, I would give them all the relevant material and say “what do you want to make?” and somewhere in that a level would get made. Not everyone is self-directed, and it’s super normal to require some creative or logistical prompting to feel comfortable with a task, but even people who lean on instructions generally like… do their thing, right? Otherwise you’d be buying LEGO sets, rather than poking the bucket of bricks while muttering come on, do something.
What it kept coming back to was planning: we had a gameplay base and a good runway for new stuff and so on, but it seemed like a lot of folks always wanted to know exactly what they were making before they made it. They wanted things written down and drawn and outlined and underlined, but even when they were, it was seemingly never enough. There were level ideas, proposed locations bundled with moodboards and reference imagery, a grab bag of loose narrative goals to frame a space around, tons of paintovers, straight-up concept art, beautiful styleguide maps, entire articles about the art and gameplay direction… People would smile and nod at these things, add to them, interrogate them, occasionally rebuke them, and then it would never go anywhere. A month later, they’d ask for more. It was maddening.
At the time, I rationalized all of this by assuming that what was really happening was just what you’d call professional or serious or whatever buzzword equated to The Way That Real Teams Make Stuff. I know better now; at the end of the day, you make stuff by making stuff. Especially as somebody who’s since moved into level design, I understand that planning docs and diagrams and verbal questioning are absolutely important and necessary to a point, and are certainly essential to a lot of good and focused work that sits comfortably in a sequence. They exist, however, to facilitate the part where you make stuff, rather than to cogitate on the act of creation as if it were a separate impulse preparing to make itself known at the right place and time. If you obsess over the tools that are supposed to help you begin, then you’ve just built a little cage for yourself — in your brain, mind, and not in an actual level editor.
In the end, I was in a position where I was constantly trying to galvanize other people to make things, even just a really specific twenty minute demo we could theoretically release and declare as the final result of the project. Obviously it didn’t work out, which is a bummer — the people who made cool shit ended up having very little to do with anything they’d created. It was also a good thing, of course, because it was ultimately time to stop working on Half-Life 2 mods and start creating original work. I stuck around with Rachel, one of the people I’d started it with, and we made a game and are currently making another. Life is good!
Still, I think about it often. The whole thing was honestly pretty bizarre and dispiriting, especially since I blamed myself but couldn’t actually articulate what I had failed to do. It can be tough when you have a bunch of engine parts that seem right and fit together but which somehow never end up taking people anywhere. It’s the type of situation that makes you feel like you’re at fault — that if I had produced some unknown but necessary thing on my end, the whole system would’ve finally started and a game would start getting made. But even now, with some solid experience in getting these things done, I look back and find it difficult to figure out what I could’ve done to really move the needle any differently. Certainly the experience could be improved, but it feels like the difference between no game and 5% of one, rather than anything material or meaningful
I’ve had a handful of other experiences like this — I’m happy that most of them are a lot less befuddling — and for the most part they came so close to working as to leave me thirsting for the opportunity to really partake in the process of creating art with people other than my immediate life partner. I have virtually zero experience with professional gamedev, since I’m young and have a stable job and am thus far unwilling to sacrifice either of those things to turn one of my favourite hobbies into a terrible time. I suspect my only opportunity will come from somebody I know referring me to something that they’ve personally verified is worth taking a risk on. It’ll probably happen one day! I’ve come so close to what feels like the dream. I know it’s out there.
As for the mod project, I think the kicker happened later. Last year, having just finished our previous game, Rachel and I were between projects and started tinkering with the Half-Life 2 thing again for fun. It was a nice break in an old comfort zone, but despite not taking any of it too seriously, I feel like we got more work done between ourselves in a few weeks than that entire team was able to produce in the final year of real development. The secret? We just started making stuff. Rachel would have an idea for a little combat area and she’d make that; I would contribute as best I could with atmospheric beats and suggestions and bits of writing, where they were appropriate. We both kept each other moving by continuing to work, and by seizing uncertainty in order to regroup and keep going.
The irony is that we had planned a lot of what ended up being made then nearly five years ago, before the “team” part of the project was even a thing. A great deal of the similar work had always predated our attempts to scale up. All of it had fallen to the wayside because, as it turns out, a general atmosphere of endlessly thinking about work before it starts will eventually turn even theoretically talented and productive people into the exact opposite of what they are.
To see all of this unfold was genuinely nuts, but it was also a bit tragic. I could see clearly that what I had previously written off as a Sisyphean, impossible task was extremely possible, but the time when either of us were ever seriously going to see it far enough (as a Half-Life 2 Fan Project) had come and gone. Still, for a moment, I saw it clearly; in the right hands, with the right people in the right environment, what had previously been a non-starter could not only exist but absolutely flourish.
I had come away from all of these events feeling decidedly anti-team, at least on a personal level. The whole idea of working with a dozen people on the same game seemed like more of a hassle than anything else. This can be true, and frequently is, but it took that realization to cast things in a different light: a team, rather than dooming what we’d set out to do, could’ve just as easily turned it into something more than I’d ever imagined.
This was a terribly long way of saying that my dream is to work with a medium-sized group of great and interesting people who are just making stuff, with everything that culturally implies. I think it would be a wonderful experience. Who knows? Someday...