So what was the abandoned, previous idea for that area, that you felt was not interesting enough?

Same, I’d love to hear about the evolution of the initial idea in a less vague way. This was probably my favorite part of the game.

Your post has a lot of personal relevance. I don’t think I’ve worked at anything close to full capacity for years, and I’m not even sure if I ever have. I want to see how I can better manage the human animal.

Giving yourself the time and opportunity to imagine and explore is sometimes the best thing you can do for your creative mind. My best ideas typically come from exploring loosely-related subject matter, which often forms unintentional connections between that and my own work. This does help me think more creatively than if I were to “force myself into productivity” a set number of hours per day (often a counterproductive practice).

I’ve actually been curious about how your trip to Thailand impacted (or perhaps propelled?) your work on Braid. I recently came back from a 2 month solo trip (a combination of work and pleasure). Even though I was working a fair amount, the trip did wonders for clearing my mind and allowing the space to consider game design in a more focused yet exploratory way (particularly visions for future projects). That trip actually spurred productivity on personal work that I didn’t expect to touch while “on vacation,” but that is typically the best time to do that kind of work. Creative inspiration seems to flow naturally when embracing new environments and giving your mind a break (or a reboot), allowing ideas (and “work”!) to come uninhibited, while removing the dampening effects of scheduling constraints and the distraction of other people. Anyway, thanks for the post. I’m stumbling upon it rather late, but it seems to have resonated with a number of readers.

Botched the link to the Gamasutra article, sorry about that.

For anyone also interested in Jonathan’s insights on promoting your game, I found a great comment from him on a about promoting your indie game. Answers my question very well, hope it can help others!

I have one question for you, regarding your statement “…It had design problems, but also, we didn’t really know how to talk about or promote a game” in your post. Of all aspects involved in game development, the one to me that seems most daunting and elusive is ‘promoting and talking about your game’. Do you have any insights (or references to material online) for approaching this – specifically what kind of activities are most valuable in this aspect of being an indie game developer (being active on forums? starting a blog? starting a twitter account? entering into game contests? all of the above?!).

I’d consider myself a semi-introverted type, so this aspect of things does not come naturally to me and I’d like to focus my initial energies in this area on something small but achievable at first. Any advice would be much appreciated, and thanks for your time.

Thank you for your reply…It helped me a lot!

It might have sounded like rambling to you, but it definitely struck a chord with me (and many other readers).

One quick question (without spoilers) …

Presuming we persist and go deep with The Witness, will we know when we hit the location/scenario you are talking about in this post?

Will it be obvious, like: “Oh right! That’s what Jonathan’s vacation post was about!”

I’d love to re-read the post after discovering this new area.

Many thanks for your posts – have a great 2013.

I think that before you really can go for quality in a serious way, you have to get good at the actual craft of making games, which means building a lot of things.

I did that without much discipline for many years, and it resulted in me never finishing/releasing anything (but I still learned). I might have learned faster given the discipline to finish and release things.

Then again, I might have got stuck releasing not-so-interesting projects. It’s hard to say. I think you have to figure this out for yourself.

I think once you know how to get games done, then you are in the position to make a choice about how much to engage that skill versus how much to let calendar time go by so that you see better ideas (and whatnot). And in fact, on a given budget of time/money/etc, the better your game-finishing skills are, the more room that buys you for mind-in-the-clouds thinking (because if you are bad at finishing, it is going to take a lot of work, so you had better start now! If you are very efficient at programming, it’s okay to start building production-quality things later…)

According to this book: http://www.amazon.com/Flow-The-Psychology-Optimal-Experience/dp/0061339202/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1357048952&sr=8-1&keywords=Flow
You are pretty much spot-on.
(Don’t get the book, it’s pretty repetitive and also obvious to anyone who spent any time knowing himself)

Once the game is released I’ll see if I can find the bit where this week of 100% productivity was put into ;)

sebastion,

About listening to music while performing creative work, I’ve heard similar sentiments from others in artistic fields. I can definitely imagine music assisting the creative process – particularly with divergent thinking.

Podcasts? Maybe that explains this – a co-worker at my former job used to listen to those while working. I found them distracting, especially since they were about marketing and I wanted more experience in it. Sales was his full-time job, though, so maybe they blended in with his work.

From my experience, thoughts compete with one another. Humans can multi-task, but we’re not very good at it. Focusing on two tasks – more on one than the other – often leads to nothing more than doing a poor job on the primary task and getting nothing done on the other.

… So I wonder what stage of game production Jon prefers music during, if at all? Design? Development? Prototyping? … Support and Maintenance? :)

I’m sure both have their own reward :D

Pritchard, I’m a graphic designer, and I find that music with no lyrics helps when I’m trying to do something creative, and I find podcasts help more when I’m trying to do something mechanical and rote.

I think it’s to do with distracting the parts of your brain not used in whatever task is being done, for me anyway.

If you don’t mind, I’d like to share my thoughts on listening to music while working. I’d appreciate anyone here’s feedback. This might just be the right crowd for this kind of thing:

Music has a tendency to pull your thoughts in the direction it is composed in. Deep, critical thinking can be demanding enough that the brain power required to process sound becomes a distraction.

I’ve known people who claim they “can’t live” without music. More specifically, people imply they cannot function without music or that they function better with it.

I can imagine two effects of music assisting with work that is overly stressful or involves rote tasks. Respectively, music can distract thoughts and distort time perception.

However, working hard is not the same as thinking hard. Memorization is not the same as learning. Being a bystander is not the same as observing. Having a feeling is not the same as deducing a proof. When tackling deep, critical tasks, I find the requirements and effects of music to be a distraction. That is why I almost never listen to it.

In fact, I don’t view music much differently than drugs since it affects discernment. I am not saying music is bad, but only that it has its place. Hard work, yes. Hard problems, probably not. Know when to use and don’t abuse.

– Limited time, and therefore a deadline. Deadlines always conduce productivity!
– Freedom. True freedom. Not “work on a project, and do something cool in a week, or else” freedom, but “do anything, sleep if you like” freedom!
– Distraction free block(s) of time
– A well-defined challenge. Ideally, self-imposed, since that also fits with the freedom requirement.
– (Optionally) a change of scenery?

It makes me realise why companies like Google do their 20% time thing, which provides several of those points. Creative and passionate employees will be productive, non-creative employees will at least be well rested!

Another example: My brother was mentioning that his most productive times are on the train commute to and from work. Limited time, freedom (he doesn’t have to work on his commute, but he chooses to), more distraction free than the office, a self-imposed 1-hour challenge, and lots of change of scenery!

Very sophisticated and first online game I played. Most rewarding thing was destroying other team starships once you got your ground base and supply of energy cells (attackers took these along for faster shield regen) running. Also remember vividly, I believe what were called Thumper missiles (upon hitting enemy base turrets or enemies it made them spin uncontrollably), “peeking” enemy base turrets, very neat flares that fooled long range Hunter? missiles and small but friendly community. This game needs to be open-sourced and ported to modern engine that makes use of gpu.

I’m already having fun just trying to read the message behind these puzzles–and I’ve yet to even play it! Thanks again and good luck with the rest of production!

I appreciate the standards you have set for me, whether they be as simple as your complex vocabulary, or as complex as your simple anecdotal blogs. Thank you for your games and the desire you instill in me to achieve things for once in my life.

-Evan

I had a very similar experience! My cousin and I have been working for years on a game called The Journey of Eko. It was becoming huge and resource-draining, and at a point all our effort was in getting around technical limitations. Design-relevant progress was very, very slow. Also, we were having a real hard time in getting the platformer and combat gameplay feel fluid as we wanted in a physics-based environment.

Then there was Ludum Dare 24, in which we participated. We love it, and it’s good to be away from The Journey of Eko for a while. We made a simplistic procedural platformer in 72 hours, which was totally unrelated to Eko and didn’t end up as fun as I planned. After that I took a 3 weeks vacation. I wanted to rest like normal people do, but I kept thinking: “maybe this LD game could actually be real fun if I made some adjustments here and there…”, and then spent the 3 weeks coding a combat system into it. It felt great to be away from Eko for a while, and surprisingly enough, the improved Ludum Dare game actually became very fun! With more than a few butterflies in the stomach, we decided to drop almost everything that had been completed before in terms of programming, and port the entire The Journey of Eko into the former Ludum Dare game! No more real physics and hi-res, but also no more time spent on things that weren’t making the game more fun. Four months later, I’m really glad we had the guts.

All this to say that, indeed, a time off where you can code whatever you want without being seen as ‘unproductive’ by your peers and even yourself, is freaking great! I could code with such speed and confidence as I couldn’t in years, it was fun, and almost as a side-effect, it was the most relevant thing we did for Eko in a long time!

Cheers from Brazil! Look forward for The Witness!

Gabriel – @pixel_cows

ps: if you care to see the progress of a random guy’s game, it’s here! :)
http://www.pixelcows.com/p/the-journey-of-eko.html

I’m glad that you’ve recovered and thank you for writing this!

you are truly an inspiration to me. I am currently an undergraduate mechanical engineering student very interested in design. I am at the point in my undergraduate studies where I am getting much better at the “0th” order term that you have mentioned.
I am very quickly realizing personally the hanging variable at the end of the equation you have developed for your personal success (which you so elegantly described as eroding at our execution efficiency). I am going to be able to shape myself exactly how I want to over the next few years as I graduate and create my future.

I feel like acknowledging and understanding fundamentally what drives us forward in this accelerated state you describe is a trait not only of developers, but of all successful people in a wide variety of fields that take pride in what they do. Thank you so much.

Regards,
-Brad Mello

~And of course, I look forward to the bright future of this game and can’t wait to experience the fruits of your labor during this exciting time.

I’m glad you made this blog post. It gives me hope.

It’s clearly too early to say what is a “jonathan blow style moment”, but it sounds to me The Witness will contain plenty of thought provoking moments as well, which excites me!

The Africa trip was to see an eclipse and otherwise see Africa. The Thailand trip was to see Thailand. I don’t have some brainy scheme about where to go on vacations! (Though the Africa and Thailand trips were both with the same friend of mine from college… who was going to Japan just about now, but I decided I didn’t want to fly a lot right now.)

I totally agree, I think this is probably the best log you have written. Primarily because it is so frank and personal. I could sense your excitement for the work you’re doing. And that is a very rare thing this late into development. So ramble on!

I so want to get back there. I’ve not been burnt as much as you Jon, but the older I get, more I think it is the place I wanted to be when I decided to make games and other creative stuffs.

I happen to, in the last years, have reached this feeling at two occasions:

1. a self-imposed “game jam” (if you can call that this way): there was a simple game idea I had for years that I was talking about with a friend, but I didn’t found the time to try it because I was working on very technical stuffs on my “big game” (which I am working on now, with less code). My friend at the time told me to just stop the fucking big game and allocate a time to do the little idea, at least to prototype it. After some time thinking about it, I said “fuck, I’ll just do it” and did it for a week of spare time (only a few hours really). I started with too basic tools to I didn’t get far but the prototype showed there was some good potential for a bigger game. I almost got the “joyful productive creativity” but it was cut y the transition with my job at the time. After that I tried several times to do this game more seriously but was quickly stuck in always the burnt that is related to considering too much the technical thing and the code flexibility. Now that I read your experience, I think I see what was missing and how it could have been far better if I tried to do the full game in a time that was just for that.

2. this year, I was working late in a game company, making a shitty game that didn’t get much audience anyway. I was asked to do it in a week, it took two, but that’s another long (actually short) story. Anyway the important part was that night I was still at work, most of the team was at home but I felt the game needed something a little awesome when the game end (it’s the kind of game you can’t really win, you just play as long as possible). I tried a simple idea. Then I felt it could easily be enhanced, with some simple code. Then I figured I could make it almost epic, but adding a bit more code. Then I figured it could be very impressive (at the scale of the game’s quality….) so I added some code to make it like that. That was an awesome feeling. Unfortunately it was only a few hours.

I believe that part of the way to get there is dependent on, as you said, experience, technical skills (mostly to make working our raw material as precise as experienced hands working wood or piano or something-you get it), focus time (actually, unfocus time that let you naturally focus on something unplanned) but also tools that don’t get in the way (which is related to experience).

It makes me think that, as often said, isolation IS the best thing that can happen to an artist; but it also makes me think that most of our social constructs are getting in the way; which makes me fear a bit the strong feeling toward wanting to get isolated to get back to that feeling, while knowing it’s also a good way to miss tons of things in life.

Just wanted to share that too; thanks for your text, it’s very encouraging to me and I think other creative people struggling in what they are trying to create.

The holiday has been great, I’ve done lots of work. I never quite hit the 100% you describe like I have at other times but it’s been joyful nonetheless. I also spent a lot of my free time working on games, and people couldn’t understand why doing this work was such a refreshing break from work work. As you describe here, they are worlds apart.

As a sidenote I always find the peak age question really interesting and it plays out for different disciplines. Of course the argument always seems to present it as being when you have the best balance between your ‘sharpness’, knowledge and ability to realise (eg: getting studio backing to film a major film at a young age is incredibly difficult). However I think the most important element to creating great works, and being at your most creative, is taking in enough new influences and ideas, and concetrating on it enough.

The problem isn’t that you become slower with age, but that this is instead caused by your thinking becoming stuck in its ways and unchallenged. Look at Michael Haneke, a veteraned director at the height of his game, to paraphrase a recent S &S interview: creating something great is always very difficult. If you have found it has become easier with practice you’re simply not making something good anymore.

Can’t wait to see the game.

It is easy to over-intellectualize the process … which is just one way the mind finds to procrastinate.

Just go design stuff. Once you are designing sophisticated things, you will be in a good position to judge how to do that better. Up until that time it doesn’t really matter.

I was definitely aware of it. There has been a gradual trend of recovery — I was super-burned-out in 2001, not-so-burned-out in 2011. But this week was the first time I have had that “I am working at 100% capacity and doing the best work of my life” kind of feeling.

I also look forward to a future post about seeing ideas, as you put it. I don’t closely follow the development of any other games—so perhaps there are others talking about similar things—but this dev blog for The Witness has been really interesting. Typically I only get to see the press and external analysis of games, rather than the underlying design decisions.

That is to say, thanks to you and your team for writing!

No, not at all! Please do more like this!