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E-mails

I was speaking with one Kirill Losev via e-mail, and in our 22 e-mail long chain spanning 6 days the conversation turned to the topic of finishing games and creativity. I’ll provide some commentary on the e-mails, but they will also be posted in full.

Kirill 1

Hey man, sorry to disturb you again. I was just reading through this post over the past few days (I haven’t finished yet though). And in a dream this morning I hallucinated a question about comparing architects’ ability to withstand uncertainty and static vs dynamic languages.

I thought about how architects can’t allow themselves the same kind of behaviour like leaving bugs in a dynamic language after refactoring. Their buildings have to be properly designed and made. Of course with games we have the luxury of being able to leave bugs. So the comparison to architects is basically pointless. But what I wanted to compare here is the fact that creative architects can still be creative despite the fact they can’t have bugs.

And I was wondering whether the fact that some people have an easier time living with bugs in production helps more with finishing games rather than creativity. 

While the desire, or personality trait, to make something properly (like to leave no bugs) actually can actually help creativity in a sense that you would dig deeper for a proper design solution that feels good in your whole body. And thus you need the ability to live with the uncertainty until you find such a solution.

Any thoughts on that?

adn 1

I think there are two things being conflated here. One is the ability to finish games, and the other is the ability to have creative ideas. In my very specific case, I can only finish games if my body truly believes in the idea and thinks it’s good. But there are many people, in fact perhaps even the majority, who are not like this. There are many people who can convince themselves forcibly to finish any game they set their minds to finish, regardless of if their body agrees or not.

As for “While the desire, or personality trait, to make something properly (like to leave no bugs) actually can actually help creativity in a sense that you would dig deeper for a proper design solution that feels good in your whole body.”, I thought this too at some point in the past. Perfectionism is like a mix of high neuroticism and high conscientiousness, personality-wise, and people who are high in both will get stuck in a loop of perfectionism working on their game until it reaches a state they think is really good. However, I don’t think these traits alone lead to actually good results. You need something else, something I’ve called a compass, or a sense, or an intuition, for what is good, and if you have the perfectionist trait but you don’t have that sense you’ll just work really hard at making something “perfect” but in actuality you won’t actually know if what you’re perfecting is actually better or not. More on this in this post.

In general I think there are three important things here that are not entirely related:

  1. You need a well-tuned compass for what is “good”. I got into a discussion about AI with a few other indie devs the other day, and the discussion started because someone said that they had listened to some music they liked, but then they found out it was AI-made, and now they didn’t like anymore. The argument I made was that by doing this, by retroactively disliking something you liked because you now found out it was made by AI, you’re making your compass worse. You’re confusing it and giving it mixed signals, and thus it will be able to correctly aid you less in the future. When you’re making a game, you’re making 1000s of intuitive decisions (like the one in that exercise with the images we talked about) based on nothing but your instinct. This is your compass. If it’s good all those decisions will lead to a good, creative game, if it’s bad they’ll lead you to bad design spaces. So honing this compass and paying attention to it is important. There’s a lot more to discuss here, but one problem I see with LOTS of artists is that their compass is extremely influenced, both in visible and invisible ways, by what others think. This is bad, because when you’re making your 1000s of decisions while making your game, other people aren’t there to help you, so you need something that is solid by yourself without consideration for other people’s opinions. I could talk about this a lot, but that’s 1.

  2. There are many ways to be creative, but one of the points brought up by John Cleese with the architect example is that creative people are better at not feeling anxious when there’s an unsolved problem. I’ve been driving a lot lately, I don’t know if you drive, but there’s this thing that happens when someone needs to make a turn soon to enter a side road: they’ll get really really close to the car in front of them before they need to make the turn. This is generally a rude thing to do, right, because if the car in front stops the car behind won’t have enough time to react without a collision. But this is extremely consistent behavior, someone needs to make a turn and there’s a car in front of them, they’ll get really really close. I was thinking about why this happens and it seems clear to me that this is what John Cleese meant by the fact that most people want to solve problems right away and feel anxious if they don’t do it. In this situation there’s a clear problem you need to solve, you need to make a turn soon. Most people, upon noticing this problem, will feel like they need to solve it right away, so they’ll get really close to any car in front of them if they need to, because if puts them much closer to solving the problem. And so if you’re creative, you need to have an opposite attitude that needs to be relaxed, because most good ideas take time to appear, and they often don’t appear when you’re stressed (although this depends on your personality, for me, personally, I tend to perform a lot better in general when I’m under pressure).

  3. The ability to finish games is not related to either 1 or 2, except in my specific case, where I can only finish games when the idea is “right” and it feels creative. So, for me, finishing games is directly related to those points, but if you’re not like me (and you need some honesty here with yourself on if you’re actually like this, or if you’re just reading this and agreeing with it but you’re not actually like this) then it wouldn’t necessarily be. It doesn’t mean those points won’t help with finishing games in some cases, but I believe that for a lot of people they aren’t that important. I see lots of people with subpar ideas finishing their games, lots of people making games “just to finish them”, lots of people who don’t seem to have a good compass also finishing them. I think the ability to finish can just come from so many different places that it’s not correct to generalize it to say it absolutely needs those points.

Kirill + adn 1 commentary

Kirill’s question is interesting but it’s mixing a bunch of things that I don’t think are always related. It’s my fault in a way, because for me all those things are related, but I didn’t make this clear enough when writing the initial post. So here I’m making sure that its understood that for me, those things are connected, but for the majority of other people they are probably not.

I would say that on point 2 I say “And so if you’re creative, you need to have an opposite attitude…”. I would replace “need” with “should”, or even rephrase the sentence as, “For some creatives, it helps them be more creative if they have an opposite attitude…”, as that more correctly addresses Kirill’s question, and is also more aligned with what I now believe to be true as per the content of the rest of this post.

Kirill 2

Thank you for such a thoughtful answer! I do appreciate that.

This topic is incredibly relatable to me because last year one of the most important insights I had was along the same lines: I realised my inability to live with that uncertainty. And I referred to the compass you described as taste. I don’t know if you came to these conclusions through your own experience or through just analyzing. But in my case, it has been a transformative experience from this anxious person with a diluted compass/taste. And since this realisation came to my consciousness (thanks for describing that process in one of your posts, by the way), I can’t stop thinking about it and seeing it everywhere in my life and trying to fix this issue. And the more I practice it - the more I value this compass/taste/gut feeling.

For example, I’ve noticed how when making decisions I wasn’t able to live with that discomfort of uncertainty. And even with the diluted taste, most of the time I wasn’t able to reach even that and I would stop much earlier than what I knew I had in my mind for a game. The taste for what I want to create was there, and it was always better in my head than what I’ve created at some point. But I kind of was afraid to look straight into those facts, covered my eyes and called it done. So the games came out very weak, as you can imagine.

I would go even further and say that your 1st point could be an extension of the 2nd one. Looking back, I definitely can see how I diluted my taste by chasing wrong things, looking outside at what other successful people do instead of looking inside and listening to the body’s response more. (In the same way, right now, on your 3rd point I really have to think for myself to not agree just because I like what you say. Thanks for pointing that out!) I definitely finished more than one game against that gut feeling. And at the core of that process was the same fear of uncertainty, that I had to have answers yesterday instead of exploring in the uncertainty. Taking the example of someone disliking a song because it’s AI - I’d assume that this person changed their opinion out of social fear that some peers would reject them for liking the AI-song. Yet the 1st point of compass and intuition is very important on its own, I totally agree.

Perfectionism is a tricky case and I like that you brought up the concept of compass in this context. And the ability to live with uncertainty is very helpful here too, I think, because this perfection process on something with no substance is a great way to overcome anxiety that you have to work on something. So it becomes a project procrastination (https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html): One reason per-project procrastination is so dangerous is that it usually camouflages itself as work. You’re not just sitting around doing nothing; you’re working industriously on something else. So per-project procrastination doesn’t set off the alarms that per-day procrastination does. You’re too busy to notice it.

But I see value in perfecting and exploring the substance itself. If a game has any. So this is what I was referring to when talking about “making something properly”. And the intuition, that body feeling, is a great compass for that. I agree. It’s a big deal even when prototyping a game actually, right?

In the previous message I did really mix the two things. And it’s a great case in point of this anxiety thing you described with the people driving cars. I had the goal of sending a message and with that anxiety I didn’t really put time and thought into it. Even though I clearly remember the body/taste/compass telling me that it’s not as clear as I can make it. So I was anxiously trying to write the message and send it. With this message I’ve actually tried to take my time to think while I was washing dishes and make a better response. I would appreciate some feedback on whether this message is more clear than the previous one :D

Sorry for talking too much about myself. It’s just something very close to me and I think I communicate better from personal experience. I didn’t really ask any questions here. So please answer to any part that speaks to you, if any. I’d be happy to discuss anything :)

adn 2

>With this message I’ve actually tried to take my time to think while I was washing dishes and make a better response. I would appreciate some feedback on whether this message is more clear than the previous one :D

The individual points are clear but the whole is scattered and the thoughts aren’t properly connected. I feel like when you wanna think about a subject properly it helps to think about it as though you were writing an essay on it. There’s a broad point you’re making, it’s supported by a few different arguments, each of those arguments is composed of multiple paragraphs, each paragraph either builds the necessary conditions for the argument to be shown to be true, or shows the argument to be true. Each sentence serves the same goal. Essentially, you really wanna look at it like an essay. I believe Paul Graham has an essay on writing essays where he outlines much of this more clearly, although I can’t be bothered to search for it.

>But in my case, it has been a transformative experience from this anxious person with a diluted compass/taste. And since this realisation came to my consciousness (thanks for describing that process in one of your posts, by the way), I can’t stop thinking about it and seeing it everywhere in my life and trying to fix this issue. And the more I practice it - the more I value this compass/taste/gut feeling.

I feel like depending on who you are this isn’t something that needs to be fixed. There are people who are more rational, and who have absolutely terrible intuition. Those people can still succeed by just autistically analyzing things logically instead of relying on their compass (which they don’t have, or that can’t be trusted).

>For example, I’ve noticed how when making decisions I wasn’t able to live with that discomfort of uncertainty.

This sentence is not saying anything because you’re not actually giving an example of how you aren’t able to live with the discomfort, so I can’t really understand what you mean.

>And even with the diluted taste, most of the time I wasn’t able to reach even that and I would stop much earlier than what I knew I had in my mind for a game.

This sentence is also incomplete, I can understand that you would stop working on a game much earlier than what you had in mind for it, but I don’t understand what the diluted taste has to do with it.

>The taste for what I want to create was there, and it was always better in my head than what I’ve created at some point. But I kind of was afraid to look straight into those facts, covered my eyes and called it done. So the games came out very weak, as you can imagine.

Perhaps there’s a misconception here. It’s usually the case that the game in your head is going to be better than what you can create because you’re not super skilled. It took me like 10 years to get good enough at juicing things up to the point where I would be generally happy with them no matter what, but before those 10 years I still managed to release 1 game (BYTEPATH) that was flawed in this juice aspect and I knew it was flawed. The most important thing, I feel like, is doing your best with your current abilities. If I feel like I did my best on any game at my current level, I feel good about it regardless of how the game is received, because I know that I did my best, so I have nothing to regret.

>So the games came out very weak, as you can imagine.

Is this your opinion of the game or the universe’s opinion of it? It’s an important distinction because you can feel like a game you made was made properly and to the best of your abilities, and the game will still sell like 10 copies. Similarly, you can feel like the game you made was lacking in various dimensions (despite you doing your best), but the game sells a lot. How the game sells is something you can’t control, so it shouldn’t factor into your thoughts when it comes to how you think about making your game. This is why I ask, is this weakness something you feel, or something based on how the game did with players?

>Looking back, I definitely can see how I diluted my taste by chasing wrong things, looking outside at what other successful people do instead of looking inside and listening to the body’s response more. (In the same way, right now, on your 3rd point I really have to think for myself to not agree just because I like what you say. Thanks for pointing that out!)

This is again something that I don’t necessarily needs fixing depending on the kind of person you are. If you do have a poor compass, or poor intuition, it will likely be hard to improve it, so in some sense there are ways in which you’d be better off focusing on a path that doesn’t require something you don’t have. There are several devs who mainly copy new ideas and execute them better, and it works out for them. They aren’t as creative, but they have the ability to sit down and just work, which often times truly creative people don’t have, and so they can polish ideas in ways that other people can’t. What I’m saying is that there’s a place in the market for every type of person, you just need to figure out exactly what type of person you are, and come up with strategies that will maximally use your personality to your benefit. The feeling I’m getting from what you’re writing, without knowing much more about you, or any of your games, is that you’re not like me at all, and you’re trying to apply these ideas that work for me, when instead what you should be doing is trying to think up of analogous ideas but that work for your specific personality instead.

>I definitely finished more than one game against that gut feeling.

I feel like this is pretty strong evidence that you’re different when it comes to this aspect at least. I’m currently working on a prototype that I started on Christmas, and this entire month I’ve also been in the process of moving to a new apartment. This apartment had all sorts of issues that needed fixing so it’s been a very hectic month with me having to go there sometimes multiple times a day. Yet, despite all that distraction, and that deep sense of “the problem of moving needs to be solved”, when I come home I’m often thinking about this prototype. When I’m showering I’m thinking about it, when I’m driving I’m thinking about it, it’s really taken over. And even though I may not work on it for 3-5 days at once, I always come back to working on it. I’ve worked on hundreds of prototypes now, most of them, whenever I stop working on it for 5+ days, I know it’s over already and I’ll never feel like working on it again, which I now know is my body telling me the idea is “wrong”. But this prototype, it doesn’t quite matter how long I don’t work on it, I’ve always come back to it so far. This doesn’t happen often, and in fact it’s the kind of distinct thing that happens that helped me realize what I realized in the post I wrote, because this only happened before with very few prototypes (which unfortunately were not finished to the end) and with both games I released, BYTEPATH and SNKRX. I don’t know if this prototype will make it to the end, but it’s definitely a distinct feeling of my body telling me “this idea is good” and thus I always feel like working on it.

The difference here is that there’s no overriding the gut feeling for me. If my body doesn’t want to work on the game anymore, that’s it, I can’t force myself to go against it like you said you can. This difference is important, because what I said in the post applies to my particular situation where I can only finish a game if my body lets me and thus I gravitated towards solutions that take that fact as a given and either work around it or use it to my advantage. If you can override the gut feeling, that’s not necessarily a bad thing that needs to be fixed! But it’s definitely a different thing. Because you are you, it’s your job to figure out what it is and how you can best use it.

>Sorry for talking too much about myself. It’s just something very close to me and I think I communicate better from personal experience.

It’s fine, I like talking to people like this.

Kirill + adn 2 commentary

Here the discussion continues and we get to the core of the issue. I’m trying to understand what Kirill is saying and how it relates to my post, but I’m getting the feeling that he doesn’t quite understand what he’s trying to say yet, which is fine, but ultimately I see as my goal in such a conversation to guide him towards what I feel would be the right direction.

It happens often with my posts that people are convinced of what I’m saying, even if it doesn’t really apply to their situation. It’s sometimes my fault, because I have to do a better job at adding more ifs and buts to my statements instead of making them appear so black and white (which they never are in my head, but in a blog post you only have so many words (this is actually not true now that I think about it, “you only have so many words” is only true assuming that the author wants more people to read his blog posts, and so he needs to make the posts more concise and clear, but that’s not really what I want, so take this post and its length as a corrective measure (even this triple parenthesis can be taken as an example of what my thoughts are more like if I don’t filter or organize them at all))). And so in Kirill’s case, it became apparent to me as I read what he’s saying that he’s somewhat different from me in this aspect, and the sentence that really sold it was “I definitely finished more than one game against that gut feeling”.

This is a revealing sentence because, to me, there’s no finishing anything against my gut feelings. I’m what I’ll later call a pure intuition build, and for that kind of build you can’t really override your feelings. If my body doesn’t want to work on something, I can’t force myself, period. And so the conclusions I reach on my blog post about creativity and finishing games, they may not necessarily apply to most other people, and this is what I’m trying to get across to Kirill here.

There’s a danger to writing blog posts about “mental tech” like this. People often say that therapy has done more damage than good to the world, and I think one the reasons is that a lot of people, perhaps even the majority of people, are probably better off not consciously thinking about these kinds of things, as it confuses them more and it does them more damage. I can’t say that about Kirill here as I don’t know him at all, but the kind of slight confusion he displays, and being overly convinced by my extremely good and gorgeous and humble writing skills, is the kind of thing that gives me the impression that I’m engaging in said bad therapy, and I feel guilty about that.

Kirill 3

Thank you for the feedback! There’s a lot of room for improvement. Which I like. I’ll find that Paul Graham’s essay you referred to.

>The most important thing, I feel like, is doing your best with your current abilities. If I feel like I did my best on any game at my current level, I feel good about it regardless of how the game is received, because I know that I did my best, so I have nothing to regret.

That’s a great perspective in general. The thing I was trying to refer to there was about anxiety and inability to live with that uncertainty until I reached the best I could do. Let’s say you have a certain skill set at this point to develop a game and each part of that development requires development time, iteration and such to be implemented properly. But then as you start implementing a feature - this anxiety to exit the road ASAP turns in and you call it done too soon while still having skills and this voice/gut feeling/taste/compass that you know it could be better and you can do it better.

I watched a movie about traveler Fyodor Konyukhov last year who made several world records risking his life. I’m not a religious person at all, but his phrase at the end of the movie stuck with me. It’s translated to english, but you can get the idea I think: “Everything that is given to us is from God, and there is nothing more than what is given that we can accomplish. But to fail to accomplish what we have been blessed with from above is already a sin.” So when I get a cool idea for a prototype that I’m deeply in my body excited about (the same beautiful way you described your work on the current prototype) and then would quit short on it knowing that I haven’t explored it fully due to this anxiety basically - I make this sin.

So yeah, about my previous games I do regret either not following some prototypes deeply enough, or I regret not listening to the intuition about a game being weak and still working on it. But I attribute it to the anxiety of being in a state of not working on anything and procrastinating on a weak project as a coping behavior.

>This is why I ask, is this weakness something you feel, or something based on how the game did with players?

So hopefully the things I described above make it more clear that I felt about the games being weak intrinsically. That they were not done properly despite me knowing I could do more with the game’s core without diving into perfectionism. And this feeling is based on the internal compass/taste understanding that I didn’t do my best. I wouldn’t call my game poorly made while knowing it’s lacking in something if I knew I did my best. As someone said, “A work is never finished… only abandoned.” so it’s a great place to abandon a game at a state where you internally are happy with it.

Which brings me to the rational/intuitive separation topic.

>I feel like depending on who you are this isn’t something that needs to be fixed. There are people who are more rational, and who have absolutely terrible intuition. Those people can still succeed by just autistically analyzing things logically instead of relying on their compass (which they don’t have, or that can’t be trusted). … The feeling I’m getting from what you’re writing, without knowing much more about you, or any of your games, is that you’re not like me at all, and you’re trying to apply these ideas that work for me, when instead what you should be doing is trying to think up of analogous ideas but that work for your specific personality instead.

I totally agree with the over-arching idea that everyone should think for themselves and do the best things that apply to their lives. And to be honest I haven’t really tried to apply anything new here, rather I’ve found a lot of similarities in your posts to my own insights and it got me excited. Because it’s quite rare in my experience.

But after reading this idea that I might be different I gave this idea a shot and questioned myself “What if I’m indeed not like this? What if there’s a whole different perspective on life that I wasn’t aware of that could work better for me?”. So I tried to apply it to myself. But I realised that the binary concept of separating rational vs intuition doesn’t really click with me. My view on this is that there are two halves of the brain for everyone. And you can lean into both of them and develop both of them. I can’t imagine myself sticking to either one. Personally, I need a balance here, which comes from the idea that there are just different tasks for different parts of the brain. And they work in a feedback loop teaching each-other.

For example, I think the intuitive part of the brain is great for selecting a game to build, but then the rational half of the brain could be used to analyze the market and decide if it’s a good time to make such a game. I like the idea of making a game like this that feels great either way and just put it on a shelf until the timing is right. You’d need a financial security to be able to do that, but it feels like a clever approach, especially for small games.

So for me the transformative experience I wrote about before was not about choosing one thing over another or transforming from one person to another and fixing something like this, but rather unlocking a new perspective on life through intuition.

The other aspect is that naturally over the course of the life a person would develop one of them more than the other and thus we get people like from that [REDACTED] video. But you still can train to use both. I think. The question then becomes whether someone would want to spend extra energy learning this or just find opportunities that work best for them, which there are plenty of, I agree.

So indeed, I think this is a very important perspective to keep in mind:

>there’s a place in the market for every type of person, you just need to figure out exactly what type of person you are, and come up with strategies that will maximally use your personality to your benefit.

Thanks for pointing that out explicitly.

>But this prototype, it doesn’t quite matter how long I don’t work on it, I’ve always come back to it so far.

That’s really exciting to read and I am happy you found something to work in such a way! Thank you for sharing that! This is the kind of games I adore working on. In the past I’ve actually tried to work on projects that I feel neutral about but had potential to be successful and well-received and it always was a miserable time for me. And at the same time the best projects I had were the ones for which I had this same deep intuitive feeling. Sadly I haven’t finished them properly, mostly due to the issues I wrote about in the beginning.

>The difference here is that there’s no overriding the gut feeling for me. If my body doesn’t want to work on the game anymore, that’s it, I can’t force myself to go against it like you said you can.

Yeah that’s an important thing to keep in mind. I don’t see it as inherently bad and something that needs to be fixed. I can even see the benefits of being able to do it. For example, if I work on a game that is really exciting with its core for me, a game that has substance, but then after researching market I realise that I need to implemented something that I don’t care about - I could rationalize and reframe it in such a way so that I’d get it done. Would you do it?

>Because you are you, it’s your job to figure out what it is and how you can best use it.

Yeah 100%

adn 3

>The thing I was trying to refer to there was about anxiety and inability to live with that uncertainty until I reached the best I could do. Let’s say you have a certain skill set at this point to develop a game and each part of that development requires development time, iteration and such to be implemented properly. But then as you start implementing a feature - this anxiety to exit the road ASAP turns in and you call it done too soon while still having skills and this voice/gut feeling/taste/compass that you know it could be better and you can do it better.

I see. I understand now why I was having a hard time getting your meaning, because I’m not sure I can relate to this, as in, I don’t think I have experienced this. There are times where I’m working on something and I feel like it’s not done, and I quit working on it before it’s done. But it’s never in a “this is done now, even though I know it isn’t done”, I always know it isn’t done and that I have to finish it properly before releasing it. I personally always try to make things “final” the first time too - which is easier when your game’s visuals are just shapes - so that I don’t have to go back to it again later and finish it more thoroughly. I think a good example is SNKRX. It was released with many features missing, but the game was there enough that the missing features weren’t necessary for a complete experience. As the game was released, it was final enough that I was happy with its state to not regret it. Similarly, after the game got popular I updated it for about 3 months, and at the end of those updates, even though the game could be better in many ways, I was happy enough with it that if I didn’t update it at all anymore (which is unfortunately what happened) I’d have no regrets. I don’t really ever get the urge to quit before I feel like the thing is done, if it’s something I care about. If it’s one of those prototypes that my body is telling me isn’t a good idea, then I’ll just drop it but also not release it.

>But I realised that the binary concept of separating rational vs intuition doesn’t really click with me. My view on this is that there are two halves of the brain for everyone. And you can lean into both of them and develop both of them. I can’t imagine myself sticking to either one. Personally, I need a balance here, which comes from the idea that there are just different tasks for different parts of the brain. And they work in a feedback loop teaching each-other.

Yea, that’s fine. I’m personally very much an intuition build, some people are a mix, others are a more rational one. I feel like when you wanna think about this it’s just important to know where you stand and what the strengths and weaknesses of where you stand look like. For instance:

>For example, I think the intuitive part of the brain is great for selecting a game to build, but then the rational half of the brain could be used to analyze the market and decide if it’s a good time to make such a game.

As a pure intuition build, this line of thinking for me feels incorrect. You have no control over the market and things such as “it’s a good time to make a game in genre X, Y or Z”. Unless you’re a really good reader of groups of people - which you probably aren’t, because I’m one such person and I can’t confidently convince myself that so and so genres are good right now vs. good later - what the market will accept is completely out of your hands. In my view, it’s best to just make the game you wanna make and that you feel is a good idea, do your best, and just release it no matter what happens. But, as you said, you’re a mix of both, so your solution will look different to mine, I just think it’s important to understand what you can actually affect and what you have control over and you don’t.

>Yeah that’s an important thing to keep in mind. I don’t see it as inherently bad and something that needs to be fixed. I can even see the benefits of being able to do it. For example, if I work on a game that is really exciting with its core for me, a game that has substance, but then after researching market I realise that I need to implemented something that I don’t care about - I could rationalize and reframe it in such a way so that I’d get it done. Would you do it?

I would not do it. I’m a very big skeptic of market research and of good practices and “genres”. I’m much more interested in just doing what I feel is right. The mindset I have is more like, instead of researching what the right genres to make are and what the tropes of said genres are, I should be thinking about making entirely new genres instead. Of course, I don’t actually think in terms of “I want to make a new genre”, because that’s not something you can control, but in terms of framing, when people say things like “this genre is so good to make games for right now” or “after researching the market I realized I needed to change the game in this way to fit the genre”, I retort back with what I just said. I feel strongly about this because I think that indie developers are largely not being creative enough with the games they’re making, which is fine, there are lots of people trying to “make it” in the market and so they’re going to do things that feel safe… but it’s a creative market. Creative markets are inherently high variance, or high luck + high skill environments, and so like in some roguelikes/lites, the better strategies often revolve around taking more rather than less risks. It’s better to try something more daring and truly creative that plays with genre boundaries than to submit to things that already exist. When you’re looking at the market you’re looking at the past and trying to echo it in the present. As an artist I feel like it’s much more true to the archetype to be looking into the future and bringing back things that don’t yet exist.

Kirill 4

Oh I’m glad I managed to make the ideas understood.

>But it’s never in a “this is done now, even though I know it isn’t done”, I always know it isn’t done and that I have to finish it properly before releasing it.

I really respect this skill and it is something I still lack. Thankfully, it’s fixable, I think. Given this, are comfortable sharing unfinished games with people to test in a limited space scope? To get feedback early on. It might just not matter for you given your inclination towards intuition so you would probably rely more on your own view of how a game’s progressing, right?

>I feel like when you wanna think about this it’s just important to know where you stand and what the strengths and weaknesses of where you stand look like.

SNKRX seems like a great example of a game that’s designed from your strengths. I should evaluate my games more like this. Derek Yu’s post about risk in picking games to develop you shared in some post would fit under the same thinking probably. I love the 1st Spelunky, by the way, one of my most favorite games :D

>I feel strongly about this because I think that indie developers are largely not being creative enough with the games they’re making, which is fine, there are lots of people trying to “make it” in the market and so they’re going to do things that feel safe… but it’s a creative market.

Yeah, I can relate to that and the rest of the paragraph. I believe we both read the book Theory Of Fun by Raph Koster. The verbalised idea from this book that fun games provide new challenges, ideas for the pattern recognizing brain has stuck with me. Well, at least it’s how I interpreted this idea. Or how I view creativity in games in general. So the most interesting and exciting part of making new games is when there’s a feeling that a game idea explores some uncharted territory. And the smaller the game is - the more exciting that feeling would get. Because it’s easier to come up with a huge game that would explore something new, but when it’s something small - it’s exciting. Maybe because it requires less resources to create too. Is this perspective something you can relate to with prototypes that get you excited?

adn 4

>Given this, are comfortable sharing unfinished games with people to test in a limited space scope? To get feedback early on. It might just not matter for you given your inclination towards intuition so you would probably rely more on your own view of how a game’s progressing, right?

Yes. I generally prefer to just finish the game and test it with a few people after it’s done to fix obvious bugs that I missed. I don’t like sharing unfinished things, also because sharing with people in general also has a negative effect on my motivation. If I share something and it gets 1000 likes on Twitter or something, that’s like a death sentence to the project for various reasons. Very consistent behavior that I wish weren’t like this, but it is, so I really have to avoid oversharing things that I’m still working on if I want to actually finish them.

>I believe we both read the book Theory Of Fun by Raph Koster

I have not read that.

>The verbalised idea from this book that fun games provide new challenges, ideas for the pattern recognizing brain has stuck with me.

The problem with general game design theories is that they’re never going to be fully right, and thus to me they’re often more confusing and obfuscating than illuminating. I have no idea what this book says, but this one sentence summary you had of a single idea from it is a great example. Yes, there are games that do that, but there are also games that do the opposite. i.e. a grinding game, which can be very fun, is all about doing the same thing over and over without any new challenges or new patterns for the brain to recognize, it’s literally just doing the same thing over and over. I find the concept of general game design theories faulty, and in general anyone trying to create a “theory of fun” or similar things has what are, in my opinion, poorly thought out and incomplete arguments.

>So the most interesting and exciting part of making new games is when there’s a feeling that a game idea explores some uncharted territory. And the smaller the game is - the more exciting that feeling would get. Because it’s easier to come up with a huge game that would explore something new, but when it’s something small - it’s exciting. Maybe because it requires less resources to create too. Is this perspective something you can relate to with prototypes that get you excited?

No, I don’t think this logic follows. The games I’m excited to make are games that I think are good ideas. Good ideas can be exploring new ground, but they don’t necessarily have to. SNKRX took mechanics from two games directly https://store.steampowered.com/app/259780/Nimble_Quest/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1046930/Dota_Underlords/, so nothing about it is “new”, except how those mechanics were mixed. You could say that that in itself is new, which is true, but I’m not sure if that newness is specifically what excited me about it. It’s more like, this is a cool thing that is fun to play with. It’s kind of irrelevant if it’s new or not. The prototype I mentioned that I started working on during Christmas is a mix of Balatro and Deadlock/Downwell, again, it’s nothing necessarily new, except the way some of the ideas from those games are mixed. But fundamentally what excites me about the project is that it’s good and fun, not that it’s new or not.

I understand that this may seem contradictory to the idea that I think people aren’t being creative and that they should be more creative, but I also believe that if you try too hard to get at something, you won’t get it. It’s often good to not focus on the things that you want directly, so focusing too much on “is this new enough” is unlikely to get you actually new things. For me, I find that just focusing on what my intuition tells me is good and fun is more fruitful, because my intuition is already taking into consideration “new”. I don’t have to really think about it. Ideas that my body tells me are good are naturally ideas that will have some newness and freshness to them because that’s just how I’m wired. I feel like this is again where we sort of differ, if you don’t intuitively feel like this, and you need to rationalize it, then that’s neither good nor bad, but it’s definitely different and you need to figure out how to make best use of it.

Kirill + adn 3, 4 commentary

The discussion continues from here but most of it will be covered in the rest of this post. In these 4 e-mails I manage to understand what Kirill meant exactly, and so I focus on the intuition vs. rational divide. It seems clear that there’s something different about how Kirill behaves compared to me, and I think that this explanation makes the most sense. This is what this post will focus on now, because this e-mail chain is not the only time I’ve seen this difference play out.

jreg’s video

I was @ed on Discord with a video and asked a question:

It’s a good video that is true, but incomplete. jreg misses something that the rational vs. intuition divide illuminates. It’s true that you should finish more projects than you are finishing and finish them faster, so overall the advice he gives is correct. However, it’s important to understand what kind of artist you are so you don’t end up damaging your creativity on the way by being too careless.

I’ve been learning how to write stories recently (short stories first), so I’ve been watching a lot of Brandon Sanderson videos on YouTube. Sanderson sold his 6th novel after writing his 13th one, so he is the primary example that jreg is probably alluding to in the video. Sanderson also has a writing regimen of 2500 words a day, and he writes those 2500 words no matter what. It doesn’t matter how poorly written they are, he needs something written down so he can improve it later, according to him.

But he mentions that there are people who are not like this. There are people who plan a story for 10 months, and then write the entirety of it in 2 months. There are people who start writing a story, but if it’s not feeling right they shelve it to go back to it later, some people have dozens of stories that they will go back to later. Sanderson mentions that he never shelves anything, he always continues no matter what.

The ability to do this, and the lack of ability to do this, is the divide that I call rational vs. intuition builds. Rational builds have a lower amount of intuition or instinct about their art, and so they have to be able to force themselves through projects to learn how to do things with a more conscious perspective, until eventually it becomes second nature and they’re able to not think about what they’re doing while doing it right. Sanderson is very likely a rational build. He is able to force himself to write, and that’s how he got good at it. But it took him 13 novels to get good enough to “make it”.

Intuition builds have high levels of instinct about their art. They immediately know if something feels right or wrong, and if something feels wrong they will not be able to continue working until they find a way to make it feel right. Sometimes they don’t find a way to do it, and often they’ll end up dropping the project. Sometimes they’ll get a project that always feels right, and those kinds of projects are the ones that they always come back to no matter what, and eventually release them once it feels like it should be released. Sanderson mentions that there are many writers who make it from their first novels, but he erroneously attributes those examples to luck. What’s more likely to be happening is that those authors are intuition builds, they have a very aligned compass and well-defined taste, and they found a project that felt right and saw it through to completion.

Rational and intuition builds both have advantages and disadvantages. Rational builds can force themselves through projects, which means they can be more consistent with their output and with their trajectory as artists. However, rational builds often don’t have a good sense for what works and what doesn’t, and so it takes them longer to learn. Intuition builds can’t force themselves through projects, which means that their output feels more scattered as they will drop projects that don’t feel right (most projects) more often. However, when an intuition builds releases something and they have a well-aligned compass, you can generally be sure that it will be good.

Intuition builds have to be careful to not damage their compass. I gave an example of this in the e-mails, of an artist seeing some art they like, but then finding out it was AI made and trying to convince themselves to not like it anymore. This is damaging that artist’s compass. It’s damaging the sense that all intuition builds have that can immediately tell if something is good or not. This sense is needed for the 1000s of decisions needed when making any piece of art, and so if it is damaged, intuition builds will become worse artists.

There are many more ways to damage this sense, and they’re generally about not listening to it, or letting it be warped in an undue manner. If a project feels right, and the artist knows that they need to keep working on it so that they can see the vision through to completion, releasing it before it’s seen through would be damaging their compass, in my opinion. This is what Kirill mentioned that he did a few times that I found to be telling that he was likely not a full intuition build like me.

If someone is mostly an intuition build, and with their current abilities they can’t finish a project in a timely manner, it’s more correct to shelve to go back to it later than to release it. Releasing something that they know could be significantly better just because they want to force themselves to release it, is the kind of thing that mostly rational builds are more comfortable with doing and that intuition builds will be actively damaged by.

So I would say that jreg’s video is half right, as it depends on what kind of artist you are. What he is saying may apply to mostly rational builds, but he is not taking into account the existence of mostly intuition builds. The challenge for all artists is to release projects in a timely manner, but the additional challenge for intuition builds is being able to think up ideas that can be finished in a timely manner while also feeling right to them.

Ziz

I mentioned I’m learning how to write stories and it’s true. I had a really good idea for a game, the same one that I started on Christmas that I mentioned in the e-mails, and that game mixes a traditional story told as a novel with a game in a specific way that is just wonderful and that I’ve never seen done before, and I’m sure I’ll never see it done if I don’t make it, so I’m making it. To do that idea justice, I need to learn how to write stories. Anything you see tagged as “story” in this blog is me practicing my writing skills.

Also, if you’re reading this and you’re a writer, editor, or anyone who works on the technical side of writing stories, or you know someone who works at this, please e-mail me! I’m very willing to learn and I could use feedback from someone who has knowledge. (at the time this post will be live I only have two very small stories posted, but I’m working on a larger one that should be out a few days (or weeks, time is relative) from when this post is public)

Anyway, I was outlining this story for this good game idea. I know how it begins and I know how it ends, and I’m trying to imagine and fill up the events in the middle so that the two points are connected. At the time I was doing this, it was late January 2025, so 2 months ago, because of how the story ends I believed that the main character needed to be a rationalist type of person, so I started reading things that rationalists wrote. This belief ended up being false, but at the time I didn’t know that. So I read a little of HPMOR, Pokémon: The Origin of Species, some famous LessWrong series of posts, and tried to generally immerse myself in rationalist thought. These are clearly not my people, I don’t find that I have much in common with the way they think, but they are definitely a kind of people and I’m interested in people.

Luckily for me, by pure coincidence, some huge rationalist internet drama happened! I love internet drama, so reading about all this consumed a very good week out of me. kenthecowboy_ did a bunch of interviews with Ziz related people, and I think the best one is this one, if you’re more the listening type:

But Ziz’s blog is the shining jewel in the middle of it all. I read it so fast, I was so enthralled by it. I identified more with Ziz than any of the rationalists I had read so far. I think it’s because of one thing that Brandon Sanderson mentions, about how we like reading about proactive characters. Ziz is very proactive, and has a strong set of beliefs that she truly lives by. She says things like “I frequently thought it was sad that so many people who didn’t believe in college were there anyway. That they had adulthood and freedom, brains and internet, and were dully giving up and being herded anyway, instead of trying their beliefs against the world”. When she says “trying their beliefs against the world” she really means it. Just look at this:

Oh, if I can become a good enough writer to write a scene like this, and to think that this happened in real life! Ziz feels like a real human being, she feels alive. Or as she would put it, she has a very large mana pool. It is so refreshing to find out someone like this exists, and to be able to read their thoughts this thoroughly. You know a blog is going to be good when it has a glossary and you actually need to refer to it often.

And so I was reading all I could about Ziz, who, by the way, was also an amateur indie game developer. I only found out about this at the end of my zizjourney, which makes me think that I have some kind of intuitive soft spot for people who have brains that are shaped like they could become indie developers.

Anyway, I was reading all about Ziz and something about it all struck me. Ziz has this really strong focus on agency. All rationalist and rationalist adjacent types I see on twitter also do. I find this focus weird. I never thought much about agency. I guess I have a naturally strong internal locus of control, i.e. my strong belief that luck isn’t real, and because this is natural to me I don’t have to think about it. But something about how these people talk about it feels off to me.

There was this tweet that I also read at the time that kinda confused me:

i hate how well asking myself “if i had 10x the agency i have what would i do” works

Like, how does asking yourself that at all work? That doesn’t make any sense. And I read the replies and quotes, and everyone is saying, oh my god, this is such a wonderful tweet, this is such a good mental hack, it’s crazy how this works. And I’m like, is this like the breakfast question and I just don’t have a high enough IQ to play along with the hypothetical? Am I retard?

The way I instinctively answered the question is that I would do exactly what I’m doing now except more effectively. I don’t understand how people would answer any differently, but apparently lots of people do. So I thought long and hard about why that is, and the answer only came upon reading Ziz’s blog. Consider Paul Graham’s words on the tweet:

This may be the most inspiring sentence I’ve ever read. Which is interesting because it’s not phrased in the way things meant to be inspiring usually are.

Incidentally, the reason I posted it as image instead of quoting his tweet is because I have it saved as a screenshot, on my desktop, in case the tweet ever goes away. It’s the perfect way of expressing a very, very important idea.

I think reddit’s story is something like, the original guys who worked on reddit joined YC with some idea they had for a product, PG and his crew thought that idea was bad, but they had the idea of reddit and told those guys that if they worked on that instead they’d fund them. So they did it. When I think of this story I think about what I would have done, and 18 year old me would probably also have accepted to work on reddit. But knowing myself, if I actually liked the original idea I went there with (which I would have, otherwise I wouldn’t have applied), I’d do a half-assed and poor job at working on reddit, because I wasn’t as into it as I was into my original idea.

The ability to actually work on a new idea just like that, and do a good job, is the kind of thing that tracks more with rational builds. So it doesn’t surprise me that PG thinks this tweet is important, because he’s always surrounded by rational build types, as the ability to work on startup naturally selects more for rational builds. It selects for people who can start on an idea, and pivot it into something else quickly if required, and do whatever it takes to make the business survive. This is the opposite of an intuitive build, which has a more romantic and inflexible approach to their ideas. I’m sure there are also many startup founders who are intuition builds, who are single idea guys who, if you told them to work on something else, they would absolutely not do it, but I’d guess that the startup environment selects more for its opposite.

And so the reason the tweet doesn’t work for me is that because for an intuition build, agency is generated from the project being right, from things being aligned. The correct translation of this tweet for me would be “if you had the perfect project idea what would you do”, and the answer is that I would work on it. So the tweet actually achieves absolutely nothing, and doesn’t do anything, as it can’t help me get the perfect project idea.

Something else is true for rational builds. The reason why rational builds focus so much on agency is because they can convince themselves of anything using their brain. Because they can convince themselves of anything, they necessarily focus more on agency because it’s always the resource they’re lacking, and therefore it’s what they focus on, and it’s why the question works at generating them more agency.

You see this with Ziz as well. There’s the constant question of, “what should I do with my life to generate the most good”, and Ziz is willing to do anything as long as it achieves that. The ability to do anything, and to convince yourself of anything, is core to rational builds. One of the reasons why rationalist types are so bad at more open-ended questions, especially ones involving morality, is because they have no intuition, and they have the ability to truly convince themselves of anything, which is why you get such a high focus on mental tech and the accompanying cult-like behaviors and everything that follows from that.

The reason they believe the AI can convince them of anything is because they themselves can convince themselves of anything as long as it is logical. If the AI said, do X, Y, Z because of reasons, I’d either feel compelled to do those things or not, regardless of the reasons. For the rational build, they can force actions, and so the AI is actually a more dangerous entity, as they have no defense against it.

They also have a good focus on multiple beings inside them. They seem to naturally gravitate towards concepts around multiple people, or multiple parts, or multiple subagents, tulpas, etc, basically a focus on multiple beings inside you.

My personal theory on this is that is that people with lower intuition are likely less advanced souls, and thus they’re more susceptible to things like demonic possession, as it’s easier for external beings to affect you if you’ve willingly built a place for them inside you. But this starts getting off-topic. I believe I would be classified as a lich, though, under Ziz’s undead archetypes. A level 99 lich at that.

Bias and personality

There’s another interesting general aspect to rational builds is that I feel like most people who have it don’t have a good sense for the completeness of an argument. Previously I would describe this as, rational builds have an autistic/male bent, intuition builds have a schizo/female bent. But I don’t like using neither the autistic/schizo divide, nor the male/female one for these things anymore as they are too loaded now. But it tracks.

Rational builds are usually too focused on the specifics without being able to zoom out to see the whole. For instance, localthunk at the end of last year posted this:

Me whenever people say “hey since Balatro did so well maybe more people should go into indie dev”

I’m identifying that I have survivorship bias, there are parts of my success that I am ignorant to and it would be disingenuous for me to say anyone can do it if they do what I did when I don’t even have the full picture of my own story. I’m not saying it’s a matter of luck.

I wrote another post https://a327ex.com/posts/1_in_4 aimed at localthunk where I essentially described how his focus on negativity bias was incomplete/misguided. Here you can see him reaching for bias thinking again, now invoking survivorship bias. Like with the negativity bias example, his claims are not objectively wrong. But I believe they are unwise. For instance, one angle from which they are unwise takes the following facts into account:

  1. localthunk is the most popular indie developer of 2024
  2. localthunk posted this one day before New Year’s Eve
  3. The new year is the period where most people have the most agency to start doing new things with their lives
  4. People interested in making games skew younger, and therefore are more susceptible to claims about the state of the market and about the odds of “making it” from people they look up to

1, 2, 3 are simply true. 4 is not easily seen to be true, but I believe it is. From my blog and from SNKRX’s success, I know at least 5 developers who were directly (as in mentioned it to me directly, so it’s a higher number including the indirects) inspired by something or another I’ve written here, and went on to release games due to it. My blog has largely always been focused on talking to other indie devs, but more importantly on providing “bloompills”, on making them see that the market is actually not that hard, that things are not based on luck, and so on. I find that over my 10+ years of talking to other indie devs, they’re extremely susceptible to these kinds of messages.

However, they’re susceptible both ways. Just as they listen to bloompills, they will listen to doompills too, which is why you saw so much doom and gloom in the past about the indiepocalypse and the various forms that message has taken as the years passed.

So is it wise for the most popular developer of 2024 to drop a doompill on New Year’s Eve? No, it isn’t. It is in fact very unwise. The amount of negative damage (in terms of games that weren’t made in the future) that single post did probably outweighs everything positive I did with my blog over the years.

And why was the post made? localthunk clearly seems to be someone with a more rational build, at least when it comes to arguing/speaking. Because his game was his first and it was so successful, I’d say he also has a lot of intuition build going for him. Most people are a mix, some people may be mostly rational builds in one aspect of their lives, while being mostly an intuition build in other aspects. Without having ever talked to localthunk, it’s hard to say for sure so I’m just guessing.

Either way, he consistently reaches for bias/fallacy thinking, seemingly because it’s what seems most correct to him, as do the rationalist types and rational builds in general, but this kind of thinking is usually missing a zoomed out view of things that is important. Another example:

Best HN comment I’ve seen in a while, explaining the Rust People Phenomenon.

Here the argument is essentially, Rust people are so fanatic about Rust because of a cognitive bias and a logical fallacy: “loyalty to the brand” and “irrecoverable costs”. This may well be true, however the argument presented doesn’t say anything about why Rust people specifically fall victim to these errors. The argument, as presented, could be applied to anything that people invest time in, like any other programming language. Therefore, the argument isn’t actually saying anything.

Why does Adam Rezich, who I follow, and is thus a very smart guy, describe it as “Best HN comment I’ve seen in a while”? Because one of the things bias/fallacy thinking does is fool the rational build into thinking they’ve understood something, that they’ve gained new knowledge that explains a phenomenon or behavior. But as I just mentioned, this argument doesn’t explain specifically why it applies more strongly to Rust users when compared to users of other programming languages.

There’s a similar error that intuition builds fall prey to, and that I’ve fallen to in the past as well. Intuition builds will more easily fall to things like astrology, or in my case to personality traits, for the exact same reason that rational builds fall to bias/fallacy thinking. It promises explanatory power over behavior and it makes you feel like you understood something.

For instance, if I say, “Rust people are more fanatical about their programming language because their personality traits are likely higher in orderliness than people attracted to other languages. They care more about safety and about things being properly boxed, and one of the ways this manifests itself socially is that they will more easily purity spiral, in the same way a person with OCD does, about all aspects of their lives, including their chosen programming language.”

This feels like an explanation that is saying something, but if you really think about it, it’s not saying anything in the same way that the loyalty to the brand and irrecoverable costs argument isn’t saying anything. Because you could easily just say, well, what’s another language that focuses a lot on safety and that would attract the same kind of person who likes safety and static typing and borders generally?

I don’t know, I genuinely don’t know the answer to this question, but let’s say Haskell. Does Haskell have a tendency to have this kind of overbearingly zealous community that Rust does? I’m not sure it does. You could also think the other way. Godot has/had a similarly fanatic fanbase for years, yet its always been an engine with a dynamically typed language, and only recently has seen a push for C# to be used, and as far as I understand that push has been slow and not really making much movement forward since the last Unity debacle.

So the personality explanation, like the bias/fallacy explanation, may be, in some sense, true, but it doesn’t offer a good and complete explanation of the phenomenon. And worse, it offers the person who wields it the feeling that they have a complete explanation, which will then sap them of the will to think about the problem further and leave them with a poorer understanding of reality.

Another example, now from the personality trait side of things:

Everything minordissent is saying is true, but everything ataraxic is saying is also true. There are more specific reasons that explain the phenomenon better, and the high resolution, less specific reasoning that minordissent uses is not false, but it is incomplete. Notice how for the intuition build, the problem is the opposite as for the rational build. The rational build focuses on the specific and misses the general zoomed out view, while the intuition build focuses on the general zoomed out view but misses the specific.

END

I’m sure I’ll find more examples of this divide, and I’ll add them here as I do, but that’s what I have for now. I think it’s a valid distinction in the end. It’s interesting to me that the distinction between architects and discovery writers in writing seems to be way more established than any such distinction in the process of making indie games. Similarly, with writers it just seems like they’ve talked way more about their processes, such that Brandon Sanderson can summarize the differences between styles of writers pretty thoroughly in his lectures.

There’s little of this discussion happening for indie games. There’s this article by Derek Yu I remember, but I had to actually open up the article to remember the distinctions he made, which isn’t a good sign for something that should feel inherently true. Under Derek’s terms, I’m probably a mix of daydreamer and inventor. I think intuition builds map to those two better, while rational builds map to burrower and finisher better.

Under writing terms, am I more of an architect gamedev or a discovery gamedev? When writing, for all stories I’ve tried to write so far, it seems like I need to know how the story starts and how it ends before I consider writing a single word. So I’m not fully a discovery writer. At the same time, there’s one story where I knew the start and end and I’m mostly discovery writing the middle, but there’s another where I knew the start and the end but I’m very meticulously outlining the middle before writing anything. I think it’s going to end up depending on the story.

For games, thinking about the end usually doesn’t make much sense for me. What’s the end of a roguelite? The build is broken and the game is almost crashing. It’s useful to start from there usually, you know, you have the prototype down, then you implement just enough things such that you get a broken build to see what the game is like. But I actually didn’t do this for both games I released, but I know of developers who make roguelites and who approach it exactly like this, broken build first, and then they build the game backwards from there.

I don’t know, these distinctions are all just interesting to me and it’s striking to me how writing as a discipline seems ways more advanced on this aspect. Trading as a discipline also seems more advanced than indie dev when talking about their processes like this, but that’s because there’s a centralizing factor, which is the chart, price, which makes telling who’s right and wrong easier. Perhaps writing is more advanced because writing is easier to parse than games. With writing you can just read it and it’s pretty clear what’s going on, with games you have to play it, and usually play it for tens of hours to really get to the core of some issues.

Tags
indiedev psychology
Date
2025-03-23 15:37
Previously
The follower A biker drives on the highway. He goes fast, as he should, but whenever he finds a large vehicle, he matches its speed and drives close behind it.