I’m finally done with Synthrally. I might patch the game if some outrageous bug rears its head in the next month or so, and commercially, the game is probably going to die in obscurity like 80% of games that are released on Steam every day, but for now, I’m done. I’m finally free, and I’ve been waiting for this moment for nearly a year now.

    There are plenty of reasons why I got tired of the game. I’ve been in the same Unity project for more than 2 years now (which was a HUUUUUGE MISTAKE). There was no “pre-production” for this game, since it was originally just a side project, so all of the garbage code from the prototype (that I haven’t surgically removed) is probably still in it. My coding practices and standards changed several times throughout the project; this was a product of me “learning on the go”, and while that was illuminating, it wreaked absolute hell on the project’s technical structure. There are a lot of redundant systems and over-developed one-off features; in the beginning of this project I had an up-to-date mental model of the game’s core loop. That stopped after about 6 months. Hell, working on any project, game or otherwise, on your own for over 2 years on-and-off is T A X I N G. And that’s not even mentioning how shitty this last year has been for me, personally.

To sum this up without wasting too much of your time:

• For the last year, I’ve had little/no ownership over the place I live. When you have no income, you can’t buy furniture, so I’ve just been living with all the old crap I had around as a teenager, which isn’t fun. Also, barring one or two occasions, I haven’t cooked anything in a year. I fucking love cooking; it de-stresses me and is something completely unrelated to games. Not having that has been difficult.

• I don’t have the creative environment and support that I had in Redmond. I’m very much on my own; I can’t really talk to anyone else about what I do, and that’s something I’ve realized that I really need.

• There have been a lot of family emergencies in the last year. Every other month, I’d lose 1-2 weeks of development time to something, and then I’d have to re-evaluate my production timeline while stressfully anticipating the next issue.

• I’ve been forced to learn a lot of stuff, and while I’ve learned that I really like animation, VFX, and art in general, I’ve also learned that I CANNOT do marketing. It takes me several hours to work up the will to send even just a few cold call emails.

    For a while, when describing my development history on the game, I’d say: “So I kept applying to jobs and worked on this game on the side, and I never got a job, so the game just got better.” It’s a solid tagline, but there’s an important bit there that people miss: what I meant when I say “the game just got better” is basically “I did this because there was nothing better to do”. It’s the difference between saying “I’m working fulltime as an indie dev!” and “Yea this is a side thing that I’m doing I guess”. Not having the confidence of funding and a dependable full-time work schedule made this project a lot more unfocused and stressful. To be sincerely honest, if it wasn’t for my friends and family supporting me, I’m not sure I would’ve ever finished this game.

    Let me elaborate. Due to the factors mostly listed above, my motivation for completing this project was depleted a looooong time ago. I nearly gave up on it around the end of 2017. Synthrally’s existence is entirely due to the constant support I’ve gotten along the way. I quite literally cannot pinpoint a single game feature, mechanic, art, or otherwise, that was not drastically improved with feedback from playtesters, fellow devs, and friends. If you go to the game’s twitter page right now and look at the accounts listed in the “likes / retweets” section, more than 80% of the people there are friends of mine. I also would not have been able to go to PAX at all, were it not for my family paying for everything and helping out the entire time. PAX in general was only encouraging because of the cool people I met and because of the friends that came to visit the booth and play the game. Earlier in this post, I mentioned that the game is objectively a commercial failure, which is true. But when people ask me “Do people like it?” my answer is a resounding yes, because throughout all the feedback and encouragement, people still tell me the game is fun to play. You all are the reason this game doesn’t feel like a failure.

    So what’s next for me after Synthrally? Well, I’m not taking much of a break; next week I’m gonna be starting “pre-production” on whatever my next project is. I use “pre-production” in airquotes because I’m intentionally doing it without direction; I’m just gonna do a bunch of studies and make test projects for the fun of it, just to assure myself that game dev is still fun for me. I’m gonna start applying for jobs again because I’ll Never Be Free of The Endless Turning Wheel of Fate that Will Rule My Existence Until All I Know Is Dust. And I’ll probably start making a bunch more one-off projects when the need strikes me.

I’ve learned a lot from Synthrally. I think I’m a better developer and person than I was a year ago. But I’ve still got more to learn, more games to make, and I’m not stopping until I make this thing work.