No More Promises

How many years has it been? I’ve lost count to be honest but it’d be easy to check.

Sometimes I sit down and look through parts of the game that has consumed my life, parts that I don’t even remember writing, and try to remember what I was thinking when I started making it. If I’d realized what it meant, would I have started in the first place, or would fear have overcome me? Let’s see if I can manage to repeat myself once more reminiscing about the good old days.

he game is a local multiplayer game at heart, and it came out when everyone and their internet persona was making them. It should have been a happy time, local multiplayer had long taken a back seat and everyone seemed to get the idea that it needed to come back all at once. Playing games with people is the best thing ever so it was really exciting that the hole was being filled. But, at the same time, the surge also acted as proof that nobody really wants to pay for a local multiplayer game that doesn’t have online, with only a few exceptions. Online is exceptionally hard to add, not to mention adding it to fast paced action games, so a lot of people gave up. They’d saved up and quit their jobs to work hard and pour their love into games that nobody ended up playing.

When nobody plays your multiplayer game, that means you’ll never have anyone to play it with and that’s the saddest thing of all. It’s like you threw a party and nobody came. A party that took years to throw.

Tweeted this as a joke in 2015 when I was about halfway done.

I still get the shakes when I think about writing Online code for the game. It took around a year of full time work and a whole lot of learning about completely new things. Every other night I’d be up until 6AM caught up in some system, trying to complete some meaningful bit of progress before I slept and wiped my mind of whatever the immediate problem was. I thought of quitting more than once, even emailed Adult Swim and asked if online was really all that important. Of course it was!

If you want to pretend you’re me feverishly coding in the middle of the night, listen to ‘NYC Bar 2’ from Deus Ex on loop for 100 hours to get yourself into the same mind state. It was my soundtrack for writing a whole lot of code.

I jammed online into the game like an overzealous colony of ants tries to jam an entire hamburger into an anthill. I did it without thinking, persistently, obsessively. Alive in a separate universe from ours, punching keys with complete oblivion in a room full of shitty code and hot flashes. The whole process was the same kind of impressive as watching someone try to drain a lake with a straw and it took pretty much the same skills.

The joy felt finally playing the game online with someone was my reason for being. It justified everything to me, all the work had meant something, I’d climbed a Popsicle stick tower and seen above the cloud layer on a rainy day. Anything can be accomplished with persistence. But like the fool trying to drain the lake, I was left exhausted with a permanent discomfort in.. the presence of straws?

The bad feelings still come back whenever I need to make changes to the old netcode, or sometimes just when I sit down at the computer. I’ve tried to rewrite a lot of it to be less horrendous to deal with but there’s only so much you can do changing code in a live game. It was the bane of the PS4 version, and it fought to be the bane of the Switch version but we fought back. I’m deeply sorry to anyone whose had to work with the code, the thought that some of my anxiety burrowed itself in the code waiting to leap out at unsuspecting victims haunts me. By getting help with porting the game I released that monster on a team of programmers and nobody deserves that.

Code is a lot like a universe. It starts from virtually nothing, has a certain structure and a set of rules laid out by its creators, and as it develops the rules become harder to break. Anyone working within a codebase is subject to those rules, and everything they hope to accomplish has to work with them in some way. A programmer essentially lives in that universe while they’re coding, since everything relevant to a program must be an extension of it in some way. So when you give a programmer a shitty universe to live in… It’s pretty unkind.

Anyway, the lesson I’m trying to record here for myself and anyone else as oblivious to this point as I am is simply not to let yourself burn out. If you love curry don’t eat too much of it. If you love making games, don’t let your computer become a source of anxiety or there’s no telling how long it’ll take to recover. Be ambitious, but take your time and always remember to stop when it hurts.

Well there’s a guaranteed parade of broken promises if you expect some kind of miracle,

You do what you can do, that’s all.

That’s how a Diamond grows, Give yourself the right chance over time.

Don’t believe them if they try to sell you something quicker.

-Diamond, Jimmy Eat World