a power of two
it’s my birthday again!
It’s my birthday again! That means it’s time for my now-yearly tradition of writing a big celebratory blog post about what I’ve been up to over the year! Also, I’m 32 this year - which is, at this point in my life, a lovely and comforting round number. Being a power of two, I’ve become incredibly familiar with it with my years of game development and general computery nonsense. It’s like seeing an old friend! And with that, read on for the year in review!
Spacing Out and Peacing Out
At the start of the year, I was still working at Unity. It’s kind of wild to think about! It was a very busy and chaotic place to work; I’m very grateful to have met and worked with so many interesting and wonderful people, both on the team I was on there and the teams we worked with at various game development studios. Those creative and interesting people were always in such stark contrast to the increasingly bizarre corporate bloodhounds at the top of the company. Finding out what the latest company strategy or reorganization was every other morning was not a fun experience. Doubly so when Unity, as a corporate entity, seemingly tried to shoot itself in the ass as fast as possible as often as possible, with mandates that flowed out to the company and the public with little-to-no internal consultation whatsoever. Like I say, a chaotic place to work. But the actual day-to-day was fantastic, and I’ve never been more proud of my professional work than the work I did with the team and Mobius Digital on Outer Wilds for Switch - one of my all-time favourite games, ever, and I was given the opportunity to work on it and optimize it! Such fun!
As the project began to wind to a close, the juxtaposition of the massive creative energy and love poured into the project versus the constant dread of the corporate overlords, the random layoffs, the runtime fee debacle, “defence” industry contracts, et cetera made me re-evaluate my position in life. I decided I wanted to make things again - on my own terms, without restriction. I wanted to bring new life and ideas into the world. I wanted to tell stories, and make toys, and engage my creativity. And so, after a lot of thought, I quit Unity after we shipped the game and a couple of patches. I’ll sorely miss working on that team - but we were to be broken up and reshuffled after the project’s end anyway. I wish all of them who still work there the very best - and from the outside perspective, it at least seems that the new management at Unity is trying to take some of the concerns raised internally seriously for once.
The Interregnum
I found myself, this Spring, with no… work. No meetings scheduled. No upcoming deadlines. No manager. No stand-ups. I hadn’t been without daily obligations since becoming an adult and it was really, really, really strange. I had been fortunate enough to have saved up a good chunk of money working for Unity, living in my tiny Scottish city and spending as though I still worked my previous jobs - an unimaginably lucky position that I didn’t want to waste. So began the “interregnum” - a time in which I had nothing guiding me from above other than my own ideas and creativity. And the first decision I made was to rest; I didn’t want to burn out so soon after leaving my job by trying to do a million things at once. So I settled down, content to rest for a month or so.
Dear reader, I made it about a week before the burning need to make things took over and instead I created a schedule for myself where I would alternate work and non-work days in a turn-about fashion, with the non-work days being dedicated to learning new things, reading, ideating, etc. I followed the schedule for a good few weeks, and it gave me a bunch of new ideas for projects (Bean to Me being one of them) and resulted in growing my project backlog from about 13 things to 17 things. The system works, I guess?????
It was kind of an amorphous time - even though, rationally, I knew I had enough money to be comfortable doing this for a while, I began to feel really anxious about not earning money. It was pretty strange, because I had already budgeted and planned out my route, but I kept having this nagging feeling I should be doing more with that time. So, I began freelancing; I could continue to do the work I was good at for people who needed the skills, but charge an amount appropriate to my living situation that would be attractive. And then…
Very Evil Demons
A bunch of us kind of ended up in the same situation. And we all believed in better ways of working - we all met regularly at the local union meetups. And we thought, hey - we’ve all wanted to work in a co-operative for years. Why don’t we… make one? And so we did. Boom! Bam! It was that easy!!!
Well, incorporating a company was pretty straightforward and definitely nowhere near as expensive as I had previously imagined it to be - as long as you don’t have ongoing costs, or raw materials to supply, or spoilage of goods to worry about, that is. All of us decided to continue freelancing in the meantime; we could continue to keep our own livelihoods stable, but we could use Very Evil Demons as a vehicle for publishing work, for finding contracts too big for any one of us to tackle alone, and discover routes to creative arts funding that are closed to single-person participants. And so far it’s been great! We successfully built and published Bean to Me as a kind of test vehicle for working with the Steamworks API and Steam Store platform, we’ve been talking to all sorts of wonderful and interesting people in the co-operative space, and pitching various things to various people and institutions. Watch this space!
Switching Off, Snapping, Tooting
Inbetween the computer-and-games-work-stuff I’ve been taking time to disconnect. I believe very strongly, now more than ever, that every person who works with computers for a living and their hobby also needs at least one non-digital hobby to indulge in. Even if it’s just five minutes in a day listening to some music or reading a paper book, it’s so important to disconnect every once in a while. It refreshes an resets the way you feel. It gives you fresh new ideas. It lets you enjoy the richness of life. And for my part, I’ve been getting into film photography (and to a lesser extent, continuing to learn to play the saxophone). Photography, for me, feels its most rewarding and most meditative when I can’t see the result instantly. When blurs, smears, smudges, flares and flashes are no longer glaring, easily-edited-out flaws, but instead simply a part of an image - sealed forever in silver and celluloid, they become an integral part of the work. There is a peace in my mind when I’m outside with the camera, looking at the world with fresh eyes, seeing shapes and colours in places that were always there that I had not appreciated before; when I’m lining up the image, when I raise the camera to my eye, when I pull the lever and - for the briefest moment - bathe the film in the light of the world, freezing in time all action. The magic of film! The latent image, in the chemistry - that instant, pressed by glass lens and black felt into a rounded square. Nothing’s quite like it. And it took this long for me to discover it; the joy, the quiet contemplation, the excitement! There’s an entire planet of fresh experiences in hobbies unexplored out there. Just make sure you switch off once in a while and find it!
Wrapping Up
Well, that’s about my year in review, I think. I’m not sure if the post is longer or shorter than the last couple, but I’m not going to check! I’m going to eat chocolate and tortilla chips instead. Until next time!
