Thoughts from last Thursday:
Tonight we set up our Indie Bits game, and I'm consumed by nervous anticipation. I imagine this is not unlike when your firstborn child goes to kindergarten. OK, maybe it's not that serious. But the feelings of, please don't bite anyone, and I hope you make friends translates roughly to please don't break while someone is playing you, and also please no one play this game because What if you don't like it? What if people hate it? What if it doesn't work? What if it's uninteresting? What if the puzzles are too hard? There are so many ways this can go wrong.
Tonight we set up our Indie Bits game, and I'm consumed by nervous anticipation. I imagine this is not unlike when your firstborn child goes to kindergarten. OK, maybe it's not that serious. But the feelings of, please don't bite anyone, and I hope you make friends translates roughly to please don't break while someone is playing you, and also please no one play this game because What if you don't like it? What if people hate it? What if it doesn't work? What if it's uninteresting? What if the puzzles are too hard? There are so many ways this can go wrong.
These are not feelings I typically experience with the things that I make, as I usually make things just for myself. I've always been more of an engineer then an artist. At middle school art camp, I was competent at various techniques, but I never had any great ideas. We would be set free to our own creative devices with a new method, and I sat there, feeling inadequate. My ideas come not from freedom, but from constraint. I'm not very good at making things interesting or beautiful, but I'm very good at making things that are functional. I think Wray has helped me use my talents to good effect on this particular project. He labeled my contribution "fabrication." That's not a word I would typically use, but it suits.
I enjoy the challenge of creating something according to a certain set of specifications. He has had ideas about how he wants the game cabinet to look, or how the caches should work, and I've been able to realize them. I have had ideas of my own obviously, but many of my ideas have come during the process of making. There is a particular excitement that comes from laying hands on a given material and then understanding what you can do with it. It's strange now to have that feeling be validated by the participation of others, or alternatively, crushed by their disappointment and feedback. It feels like a very grown-up brave thing to do, to put this thing out there and see what people think about it. I'll try to update on Sunday, when we see if anyone actually plays the thing, or even less likely that they finish it, as it is a beast of a thing.
Back to the parent analogy, we sort of made a game in our own image. Wray has an interest in location-based gaming, and I liked the challenge of making an arcade cabinet. We both love geocaching, and I love paper puzzles. But are there others out there who will be willing to invest the time in a game that uses no less than four modalities? Are people willing to drive around town, and do actual internet research about the festival? Did we go in too many directions at once or did we create an uber game, an homage to everything we love about games? I suppose we'll find out.
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