The Bridge

There's a period at the beginning of every new project when you can see the beauty in your creation, but nobody else can. It's like beer goggles, but without beer. Art goggles. It's just a matter of fact: you have the beautiful idea, but it's locked inside your head. You start to build a replica of that idea in the real world, and for some period of time, nobody else will be able to see what you see.

Your closest friends will be politely encouraging, but you can tell the difference between genuine enthusiasm and socially-mandated support. People who aren't shackled by a need to maintain your friendship will be more blunt. During this phase, you will need to be an endothermic entity - you can't rely on a patch of sunshine to warm yourself, you've gotta generate the heat yourself.

It's exhausting, and you will be plagued by self-doubt. You'll be lonely. If the thing you're making is also meant to pay your bills, all these feelings will be intensified by money worries. If anybody is dependent on the project's success to pay their bills, expect something between panic and abandonment.

For what it's worth, this phase doesn't always have to last a very long time. Sometimes it does. In the case of my last project, it lasted seven years and was never completely resolved. But the need to close the gap between the vision and the current product can also be motivating. As long as you've got your art goggles on, when you start up your computer every morning, you'll see your baby's shining parts. The process of revealing that shine to other people can be a slow one, but as long as you can see it - and as long as at the end of the day, your work has become a fraction of a percent closer to what you have in your head - then you're not only on the right path, you may even be living your best life.

What I've learned over the last couple of months is that the tools of game creation have advanced so far that it's possible to cross that bridge to beauty a heck of a lot faster than it used to be. In just a few weeks, I've built a level in Unreal, filled it with hand-built structures and props created in Blender (which I'd never used before), modeled, rigged, and animated my first characters (again, for the first time ever), and even made significant progress on adding basic game logic via Blueprints. With the help of engineer Dan Goes (granted, he's an amazing engineer), we've gotten to a demo that I think is very close to being able to speak for itself. After having been in Unity jail for a decade, it's bananas to me that we have multiplayer co-op working already.

Here's a tiny taste:

But it's not there yet! And here's the truth: I don't think it ever gets there. It's that whole Platonic thing. All you can do is keep chipping away at your own limitations, keep learning, and keep enjoying the process. The tactile pleasure of running your fingers over a smooth surface that you've just sanded. The "aha" that you feel when you learn about bridging faces in Blender. The joy that comes from having a hilariously stupid idea with a collaborator over fried chicken and then rushing back to the office to get it working. This is it. This is as good as it gets.

There's never a moment where everybody suddenly agrees "whoa! you made something cool!" But every once in a while, you'll see an eyebrow go up, or a person will linger a little longer to learn more about it. Best of all will be when your idea sparks the "yes-and" impulse, and somebody will suddenly see their own version of your idea in their head. 

I'll post some game footage here soon - if anything, I think it'll be good to commemorate how far we've gotten in so short a time. I believe in this idea, and maybe you will too, someday. You don't all have to love it, but perhaps enough of you will see the shine that maybe we can keep this nice little situation going for a while.

Okay, I'm gonna go learn how to make a monster vomit particle slime when you kill it.