Okay, it's been a good while since
I last wrote for my public blog.
In short, I had an alright
departure from my previous company. My senior highlighted that it was a change
of management direction that created budget changes for the department, causing
me to not get my expected contract extension, so none of the blame is on me.
They must know it felt like shit.
In the month since, I've mostly
been chilling out and working on my project while applying to jobs. I've had
interviews with about 6-8 companies (lost track a while back), so that's good.
But nothing has really been converted into an offer yet. I'll keep working on
it, I guess.
Ironically the games are doing the
poorest - everything just feels boring and eh. Even though the summer sale just
ended and I went on a shopping spree, I found most of the games I bought
lackluster, and I have limited motivation to play my old/existing games. Am I
outgrowing video games? I don't really think so. I just have this vision of a
game I want to play and I'm trying to look for games that are similar to my
vision, but I've played through just about every possibility I can find, and
nothing gets close enough to what I want. There are good games out there but
they aren't relevant to my goals, and I suspect I feel bad for playing them out
of enjoyment, knowing I have a project to work on.
I've also been kind of
feeling…directionless? Let me put it this way. I started my game project with
the full acceptance that my "failure rate" is above 95%. My goal, you
see, is to make something fun that people will want to play - and why would
anyone play my game? It's not like music or visual art; games comprise an
oversaturated market of half-decade-long projects built by teams of highly
experienced professionals with a variety of different specialized skillsets. A
single talented person can hope to make quality music or art, but they cannot
hope to best the might of a full organization. At least that's what I think.
I also thought, perhaps overly idealistically, that video games might be used as a medium for change. Literature and art have been used as catalysts for positive societal change for millennia; why not, then, a digital medium consumed by millions of youth that serves as a platform for literature, art, and music? But at least in the current day, I question if there is really a place for video games with social statements. The nature of video game development lends itself to corporate production, and the core audience of many video games, I think, lacks interest in such things.
