Cyclops (V.O.): Previously on Sexy X-Men Dating Sim. I lost a lot of time struggling to establish a narrative pipeline for The Phenomenals, available for free on the Dorian app on both iPhone and Android.
I don’t remember much about the day before asset lock on The Phenomenals, our all-important deadline from the publisher. Mostly, I remember I was shivering. This wasn’t “I should’ve worn a jacket tonight” shivering. It was that “dear lord, what’s wrong with my body” kind of shivering.
Amanda and I were supposed to get our flu and COVID vaccinations a few days before, on Wednesday evening, but her job buried her in work and we couldn’t make the appointment. We cancelled at the CVS, then took the next available appointments that following weekend. We had out-of-town company coming to visit soon. We didn’t want to risk getting COVID, which was making headlines again. She got her shots on Friday. Unfortunately, she was out of sorts on Saturday when we were finishing some major scenes, but she was a trooper and we finished them together. I got my shots Saturday evening. When I woke up on Sunday, I knew I was in for a bad day. I was feeling awful.
There were last minute notes from Dorian to address. We needed more premium choices and there were still background assets to finish. I remember being wrapped up in my fuzzy green “Muppet” blanket, my hands shaking as I clacked on the keyboard of the laptop. I wished so badly that I was asleep, as I pushed to finish the backgrounds. Amanda isn’t as well-versed in Affinity Photo as I am. It had to be me, and we promised Dorian we’d meet this deadline, so it had to be while I was sick. The timing was horrible. The feeling was horrible.
But as bad as I was feeling physically in that moment, I knew it would feel worse – emotionally – to let people down. I didn’t want to let down our publisher and blow our deadline. That could affect whether they’d support The Phenomenals in the future. I didn’t want to let down our out-of-town friends by telling them, last minute, they needed to find another place to crash. And under no circumstances would I let down Amanda, my creative partner. My partner in all things! This game would be finished, shivering or not. I pushed myself to finish. If I was healthy, these tasks that would’ve taken me two hours tops. They were going to take a lot longer than that, since just looking at the screen was making me nauseous.
You know the conversation meme that goes something like, “What’s one thing people don’t understand about your industry?” Let me answer you, meme. This is what people don’t understand about crunch in games. They imagine a mean boss telling everyone they need to work late or they’re fired, but that’s not usually what happens. The pressure to crunch is more often self-directed. It’s coming from inside the house you! You can’t let down your team. You can’t flake out on that feature, just because what? You’re low on sleep? This is your dream job. You’re going to lose this opportunity because you’re hungry and can’t see straight? C’mon, man! So you chug a Red Bull and you keep coding, keep writing, keep drawing. You have to keep going. And you do. And you hurt yourself doing it.
I started working early in the morning. By the late afternoon, when we met with our editor over Discord chat, the first three episodes of The Phenomenals was finished. There were some odds and ends left to tie up during the week, but it was finished enough. Our editor congratulated us. I mustered a smile, but deep down, I was deeply unhappy. Not just because I was sick. It was more of an existential dread, knowing that a project I was doing strictly for fun and artistic expression was forcing me to crunch.
Well, not exactly. I was forcing me to crunch. My anxiety over letting others down was pushing me to crunch, when I explicitly said I would not crunch. In this moment of weakness, I gave in.
As I said, I don’t remember a lot about that day. But I do remember a thought I had as I lied down on the couch. I remember thinking that to make the kind of projects I want to make, the way I want to make them, I needed to be stronger. It would be one thing to say I want to make games for the sake of making games, and slap a “screw capitalism” bumper sticker on my laptop. But it’s not enough just to say it, or even write an entire newsletter about it. I’d have to fight hard for it. I had underestimated the insidiousness of the system, and I had overestimated by ability to beat it. To live a healthy, creative life, I would have to fight a sickness that’s all around me, and deep inside me.
I fell asleep to a YouTube video. I don’t remember what it was. It wasn’t a refreshing sleep, but it was a much needed one.
🎲 Your Turn: Do you find it easy or difficult to live a creative life? What kind of struggles do you have? You can reply to this email or tell the whole world by hitting the orange button below.
📨 Next Week: A few thoughts on the exciting launch of Clone Drone in the Hyperdome, the VR game I’ve been working on for the past year!
One response to “Shivering to the Finish Line”
Well, I’ve mentioned in several comments on past posts how blindness hampers the process of getting ideas out of my head and into either tangible or digital form and struggles with motivation, so I won’t rehash those points.
Other issues that make it hard to be as creative as I would like to be include:
Space: I live in a sardine can of a 3 bedroom, single wide trailer with two other people and I’m typing this from a reclined position atop a foam camping mattress piled with blankets and pillows that doubles as bed and desk chair, my keyboard resting on my stomach. Within this space, I’m pretty much limited to the digital realm and things that can either be held in the hand or laid in my lap as I work. Plus the room is cluttered with some things I’d realistically have to spend several minutes removing things from the room to get to and a proper reorganization would likely take several days and involve moving half the room’s contents to the kitchen. And speaking of the kitchen, it’s really more of a kitchenette with most of the kitchen’s floor space being the walkway from the living room to the hallway, so no room for a kitchen table. If I need an actual work surface, my best option is to use the stovetop, of which only the middle third is flat, the left and right thirds being taken up by the gas burners and the indentations for the burner grills, and while we don’t use the stove because we can’t afford fuel for it and no one in the house is comfortable cooking with gas, the kitchen is so lacking in usable counter space it also gets used for counter top appliances and letting the dishes air dry after washing them, so often unavailable for use as a crafting work surface, plus nothing remotely suitable to allow me to sit in front of it, so using it as a work surface means staying on my feet as I work… which leads me to…
Physical limitations: I tip the scales at over 350 pounds and that’s down from being in the 390s this time last year and over 400 at some point in 2023. I also have less than stellar ankles, knees, hips, and lumbar, and I’m 6′ 2″ on my shorter leg living in a dwelling that feels built for people a head shorter. I have to bend over awkwardly to use the kitchen sink and the bathroom sink is even lower. On some days, it’s murder on my back and joints just to do the physical activity of daily survival, and even on a good day, 2 hours of walking up and down the hall or leaning over the stove as I work or even just standing around as I shoot the shit with whoever’s in the living room is enough to have my body screaming at me, and if I over do it on the physical activity I often spend the next day where it’s a challenge just to stand. Blindness is why I recieve a disability check, but my lack of physical fitness is why I’m unwilling to take a retail or food service job, which is about all that’s available where I live that doesn’t either require a driver’s license or a different degree from the one I have(local job market says I should have studied nursing instead of computer science). Also doesn’t help that I have basically no heat or humidity tolerance and live in a very hot, humid climate(it hit 80F on Halloween this year, I’m pleasantly surprised it remotely feels like December right now).
Also, a smaller issue, but of the two people I live with, one seems indifferent to my creative pursuits, the other outright hostile, especially to my interest in salvaged materials, and the latter spends most of their time at home in the living room/kitchen, so I don’t feel comfortable working on anything that requires leaving my bedroom on their days off… On the upside, they’re currently dating someone who does show interest in my crafting. Ultimately, I try to do things for myself, but having someone who finds even the throw away experiments interesting is still affirming and the accusations of being a horder aren’t always easy to ignore.