Lately I’ve been thinking a lot on the importance of having other creative outlets besides the one that is your job/career. Making games was once just a hobby of mine, albeit one I put essentially all my waking hours into over the course of years as a teenager. It was something I really enjoyed, had friends who also shared the interest and without it I don’t think I would have survived high school as intact as I did.
Even through university where I studied game design, I still spent most of my indoor free time making games aside from what was needed for assignments. Things changed though once I got my first ‘real’ games job in 2022, and I started to find two things:
- When I wasn’t working, I didn’t want to play video games like I used to.
- When working on hobby game projects, the motivation just wasn’t there anymore.
This was something I’ll admit that I struggled with immensely. Gamedev had always been a creative outlet – essentially my only creative outlet – for many years and there was something scary about not having that passion that drove me to make things anymore.
Games At Gunpoint
Until this year, I tried to force the games out of me. I had ideas for stories I wanted to tell or situations I wanted an audience to experience, and I could only envision these through the lens of creating video games. Many of these ideas would excite me with the same passion as when I used to start projects back in 2018 or 2019.
Then, just one day into working on the project the thoughts would start:
“Making games is so tedious.”
“I’ve done all this before.”
“I’m making the same things I was in 2019.”
I would be lucky if I made it past this first day, and if I did things did not get better:
“I hate doing game art.”
“Everything takes too long, I feel like I’m going to die before this is done.”
“I am wasting my time.”
The project would never be opened again after a week.
When All You Have Is C# Everything Looks Like a Game
When I said that I put all my waking hours into gamedev as a teen, that was a bit of a lie.
Every night, I used to spend 2-3 hours before bed writing fiction. It probably wasn’t great, but I did it every single day. I used to get told in school by English teachers constantly that I was a very good writer, which I’m sure was part of the motivation to keep doing it, but it was also a nice change of pace at the end of the day not to think about game systems and mechanics, or which .cs file I needed to open next.
But this writing habit stopped hard after I moved to Melbourne to fully commit myself to the “joy” of the games industry in 2018. Why? I don’t think I really know. Games became an all-consuming obession, and even though I definitely still had the time to write, other things just took priority.
This brings us back to this year. I made (what I think now is) a very obvious realisation: most of my game ideas?
They work far better as short stories.
Yeah, insert hammer and nail analogy here.
Simple Realisations
The solution to my creative frustrations turned out to be laughably simple: at least for me, having only one form of creative outlet was just silly. I’d let myself become so focused on doing this one thing that I neglected that I enjoy other things too.
I love writing. I’m letting myself take those couple of hours before bed again to write something. It’s not every day, but as long as I don’t feel exhausted I gently push myself to do it. The first night I tried I got over 3500 words down.
It also turns out that I’d managed to keep up a loose habit of learning to play bass guitar since moving out of home, and guess what? Music is a fantastic creative outlet too! I’d already got decent at bass over those 5-6 years (and without a band to play with I feel like there isn’t much room to meaningfully improve) so now I’m learning to play guitar and it’s the most mentally stimulating thing I’ve done in at least 5 years. It feels amazing to be at the early stages of learning a skill again, to progress so fast and feel your ways of thinking change in real-time as you go.
I’ve also been getting back into film photography again, which I studied in high school actually. When my grandmother passed away not too long ago I managed to inherit a little point-and-shoot film camera from the 90s that surely hadn’t been used in at least 15 years. It even still had an unused roll of film in it. Now I try and bring it with me anywhere I go and just take photos of anything that seems interesting or unusual.
The best part of all this: I actually enjoy making games more again! It turns out that not forcing myself to filter every creative idea I have through the lens of making video games has improved my relationship with making them again. Who knew?!
Lessons Have Been Learned
So remember kids: don’t limit your creative outlets to one thing because you decided it’s the thing you’re best at and leave room to explore other outlets and activities you enjoy. It might save your love for the thing you were originally coming to hate.
Another important point I realised: I think it’s important to have at least one creative outlet that is fairly immediate in its output (at least for people with ADHD brain like me). A game may take months or years to make – hell, even to get to a point that it’s coherent to anyone but yourself – but a short story can be written in a day or two. Photos can happen in an instant. You can sit down with an instrument for half an hour and make something that at least somewhat closely resembles music people would listen to without much of a plan at all. It’s so rewarding not having to grind for dozens of hours just to have anything worth showing to another person.
I don’t think I’ll be releasing many, if any, games developed on my own time and money (for the time being at least) to be honest. I feel like I’ve explored my interest in gamedev pretty thoroughly at this point, and I’m enjoying everything else so much. I like it enough to happily be paid to do it, but the world of creativity is so much wider than what I can achieve with an IDE and game engine.
I’ve realised that now.