Three months after releasing SNKRX I had a vision. An alien vision was downloaded into me, fully formed, out of nowhere. It was very specific and immediately it made me cry. For an entire month, whenever I thought of it, I'd cry. If I thought of it while listening to Tomorrow by Kevin Penkin I'd cry even harder.

Something like this had never happened to me before. I've read stories of artists talking about having such strong visions, but I always thought they were exaggerating. And then it happened to me. When something like this happens, you have to respect it. I believe I'm a vessel for ideas that come to me from above. So, in religious terms, this is literally God speaking to me. I can't ignore it.

For the next three years I built an elaborate story around that vision. My goal was to construct a narrative that would maximize it, so that when others reached it, they'd feel it with the same intensity I did. I built a story backwards from that moment, and it ended up having seven parts. The vision became the climax of part six, with part seven being the final showdown that concludes the whole thing.

But I never felt like I had enough to actually start making it real. That changed at the end of 2024. I had a dream, and from it came a simple idea that eventually became the beginning of the series. Suddenly, I could see a path forward.

The idea from the dream made it clear that the seven stories also needed to be games, merged with the books in specific ways. The main structure is that the books and games are separate. You can read the books without playing the games, or play the games without reading the books. You can listen to the books while playing the games, as most of them will be low-cognitive demand kinds of games you can play while listening to or watching something else. But importantly, you can also read an interactive version of the book which contains the merged game elements in it. All these options are available, the last one being the most interesting.

So the plan is releasing a series of seven games + books. I can already make games, but I couldn't write, so I had to learn. That's what I set out to do for 2025.

I immediately had two good story ideas. One became It Follows, and another became the story I'll write after it. They're mirrors of each other, in a way. But they were good enough ideas that I felt strongly compelled to bring them into reality, to not do so would be to be a bad vessel.

It Follows started from the ending, that's the first piece I had. But really quickly after that, I had the first chapter. It was actually the very first thing I wrote, and it came out in like 1-2 hours, extremely similar to the final version. That's when I realized something about how I work.

I need to have the beginning and the end. I cannot start working on a story without those two components. Later, it became clear that I also needed a third: a constraint. This wasn't obvious immediately because, by chance, It Follows' first chapter has a strong built-in constraint, the curse's rules. This wasn't the case with the next story, where I have the end and the beginning, but not the constraint.

The constraint is important because when you have the beginning and the end, you want to logically fill the middle so that one thing leads to another. It's easier to do that with a constraint than without one. More importantly, the constraint should be thematically sound with whatever the story implies. In It Follows' case, the curse's frules, combined with how the character goes from follower to followed and how that flips again at the end, turned out to be both thematically coherent and generative. In my next story, there's no obvious constraint yet that follows thematically from the beginning and informs the end in the same way, which is why I haven't started writing it yet.

But this explains why I suddenly saw a path forward with the whole series after I had the dream. It wasn't clear why at the time, because I didn't know I needed these elements, but once the beginning was in place, suddenly the whole series was locked in.

The same was true for It Follows. Once I had those three elements, filling the middle was easy. Well, perhaps not easy, but logical. I tried a bunch of different middle ideas and eventually, unfortunately, landed on the concept of what I internally called the "grindr descent." Unfortunate because I didn't really set out to write porn. But I had this ending I thought was really good, I had this beginning I thought was really good, and I'm practicing so I can bring this seven-part vision that was sent to me by God to life. To shy away from writing this story because it's icky would be wrong.

I knew I wanted the story to have a downwards arc from the beginning, because this story is also practice for story one of the seven-part series. That story will have similar downwards motion (without the sex), so using It Follows as practice for that general structure made sense.

In any case, once the grindr descent idea came to me, it became clear that it would fit into the story well, it was super generative, a lot of things came out of it naturally. I convinced myself that a way to look at it positively is that if I could write porn scenes well, I can probably write any kind of scene well. Sex is naturally kind of non-confrontational, so compared to battle scenes that sort of unfold themselves naturally, it's probably harder to write them. I don't know if this reasoning is valid, but it's what makes sense to me.

I did get feedback that multiple people skipped the sex scenes. But this is kind of mixed... It could be because they're poorly written, or because the story only becomes "about porn" at around chapter 3. This baits people into thinking the story is about this curse mystery, and suddenly it becomes this huge porn-fest with no warning beforehand. So I don't know how much of that skipping is bad writing on my end or failing at managing expectations. Either way, it's still a mistake on my part.

On top of the grindr descent, another idea that was generative was using myself as the character. Initially, I did this to decrease variables. It's my first story, I'm learning, so I decided on a single POV with me as the character. When I had to ask "what would this character do in this situation?" I already had the answer. Of course, because of how the story ends, it also kind of had to be me all along.

But this turned out to be the right choice. A lot of the story's themes emerged naturally out of the clashing between myself and the plot. If I were creating a character from scratch, I don't think the thematic cohesiveness the story has would have happened as easily. I kind of got lucky. I'm a real person with real contradictions and drives, and the curse idea just happened to hit on my personality in a particularly right way.

One could say that I had this specific idea in the first place because of this, that it wasn't luck but my high levels of intuition working through me without my conscious knowledge. That's a reasonable explanation, but it still wasn't a conscious choice. I don't remember exactly how I had the idea for the ending and beginning... In any case, I think this kind of cohesiveness can only happen consciously if you're an experienced writer, which I'm definitely not yet.

I'm not going to give specific examples of this cohesiveness here, because I don't like when authors are like "the story was about this" or "the story was about that." If you have to say afterwards what the story is about, you failed when writing it. A good test is: if two people are discussing the story, can one say "but the author said this" to kill the other person's theory? If they can, it means I said too much.

And this is because... it ruins the story. If the author can definitely say it's about X and not Y, it ruins it for people who think it's more about Y than X. And who am I to say which is more important? The story is. It has the truth in it. But the truth is a complicated, alien thing. You look at it from one angle and it's X, you look at it from another and it's Y. But they're both true at the same time. So it would be unwise of me, as an author, to reject certain perspectives because "that's not what I wrote about."

Now, from the perspective of the activity itself, I'd say I found writing to be about as fun as making a game. However, finishing a story is certainly 100x more annoying and boring than finishing a game.

When you're finishing a story you're mostly going over sentences autistically, making sure everything is correct, sounds good for the voice you want, is punctuated properly, has no grammatical mistakes, etc. It's really boring work, I didn't like it at all. And you can't even really automate it to the AI entirely because it's hard to get it to care about the exact things you do. I have some ideas on how to make this process less painful in the future, but I think some of it simply must be inherent to the craft.

When you're finishing a game, though, you're mostly testing it as it comes online, watching all the builds finally work. It's much more engaging and fun, at least for the kinds of games I make.

This difference in the finishing process made me think more about how games and stories differ fundamentally. Stories are linear, they follow a clear flow and don't change once they're done. It Follows will be the way it is now forever. Well, I guess there's a small difference if you had it on the same day I released it versus in the future, but that's a small thing. Games are different, they're more like looping.

And if games are looping, the concepts of beginning and end work differently. For games, the beginning is the moment-to-moment action, what you do every few seconds that constitutes a unit of gameplay. Getting this down, having it running and playable, or at least having a solid idea of what it'll be like when it is, constitutes the beginning.

The end depends on the game. For the build-heavy games I like to make, the end likely means "what does an end-run build play like?" When the game is almost being broken by the player, what does that look like? What does it feel like?

And the constraint... in a story, it constrains the possibility space for the middle while being thematically generative. What does this in a game? If you have a game like SNKRX where the beginning is snake + each unit auto-attacks, and the ending is a crazy build that one-shots the screen (ideally in a fun way), what's the constraint? I think it would be how you get from start to end in an interesting way, so the shop between battles. Then, maybe the general form of the constraint is the "meta loop."

Like a good constraint should be thematically generative, a good meta loop should be ludically generative. Taking SNKRX as the example, is the shop reroll system generative? Kind of, it takes you from A to B. But are there better alternatives? Are there different meta loops that specifically make use of what SNKRX's beginning and end imply?

I think something like a pre-run draft does this. The details of this draft do not matter, but the act of choosing units among many possible at the start, fits the game better than doing this spread out throughout the run. You could also imagine that, once you have this pre-run draft going, you could have "shedding" moments mid-game where you alter your powers in important ways. A meta loop focused on frontloaded power choice with moments of change available mid-run, feels much more generative to me for this specific game.

So it seems that for future games, it probably makes more sense for me to tackle the ending first, or second. Get the beginning working and immediately have a few key end-game builds going to see how they actually play. Once those are fun, decide on a constraint that feels generative and takes you from the beginning to the end in a good way. This approach seems like it'll be more fruitful, and lead to better designed endings with properly thought out end-game builds, but also things like well-designed endless modes and so on.

Another difference between stories and games is that once a story has enough to it, it has a logic of its own. It's like it becomes a living artifact with a clear purpose, and like there's a correct solution to any problem that arises.

There's a good example of this regarding #1's presence in It Follows, but I can't speak too much of it. I'll just say that #1's presence was initially much lower, and then when I finished the first draft, the story was basically screaming at me: "If you make this more prominent, it will be super generative." And it was.

The way this works is kind of simple. If you want to be consistent with the story and with yourself as a good vessel looking for the truth, once the story is established, its truth becomes self-generating. You often come to points where you have choices A, B, or C, and it's obvious that B is more correct because it aligns with every element of the story better and potentially generates more aligned elements.

If you make this correct choice B here, you can also change the past of the story to make B even more correct, while also making it lead to even more correct choices later. This is essentially the story speaking to you. It's saying, "if you choose B here, you can make the past and the future better", and "correct" or "better" here means more coherent and cohesive along the themes it's clearly about.

And so this property where the story talks to you in this way about what it wants to become is super clear with writing, but so far nothing like it has happened to me with games. Some developers mention that it happens to them, but I haven't experienced it. Maybe because the kinds of games I make are less strict and more moldable to what I want them to be, so they don't assert themselves as much? I don't know.

All in all, I'm happy with It Follows, otherwise I wouldn't have released it. In the end, I brought a good idea to life as best as I could, I practiced for my big project, and I also actually lived my life a little more because of it.

This last part was an unexpected benefit of becoming a "writer" in my head. Before, I used to really dislike talking to most people. If they weren't intelligent enough, if they didn't have interesting things to say, I unironically thought they were beneath me and somewhat worthless. Now, this actually isn't the case anymore. Simply because every person is potential material for a future story. I love listening to people talk now, and it's really easy to get people to talk about their lives, everyone wants to. It helps that I have a friendly face to a percentage of the population, so they open up even more easily.

This may seem kind of twisted and sociopathic, but 2025 was easily the year where I talked to most people and where I actually enjoyed it. However twisted it may seem, it objectively made my interactions with other human beings better. I definitely can't say making games ever had that sort of effect.

Other than going back to making games, the next thing I want to do this year is learning how to make music. This big project needs to have a specific musical vibe to it, and I think I can learn to do it well enough.

I think the feeling of making music will be closer to stories than to games. They're both linear, both consumable with a clear end, their constraints are more clear than a game's. But music is harder to learn than writing.

With writing, the act of writing itself is "easy," for the kinds of books I want to write anyway. I'm under no delusions that I'm a particularly clever wordsmith, capable of wowing people with my spectacular prose. Most books I end up finishing tend to be written in a simple way, and I want to write the same way. The hard part is coming up with an idea, structuring the story, making sure the constraint is good, etc.

With music, there's a similar distinction. There's the act of making the sounds on the computer, and then the theory behind it. The theory is not easy to learn, but it's not hard either, it's fairly logical and self-contained. But the hard part for me is making the sounds themselves. There's so much to learn, so many different ways of doing it, so many programs and techniques. It's an endless hole of possible obsession.

Compared to writing, where I just open Notepad (It Follows was entirely written in Notepad) and start writing, the "act" part of making music is 100x more complex. I don't know how it'll go yet, but it seems like it's an overall harder and longer journey.

I think... yea, I like writing, and I'll keep doing it. It's also good to switch between activities like this. I'm so productive as a game developer right now because finishing It Follows was so tedious that it made me beg for doing anything else. It was actual torture. So adding music to this and rotating between gamedev, musicdev, and writing will probably be good for my productivity and creativity.