holy shit, i moved (Patreon)

"Tell a story," Patreon says, so here goes.

My first memory is of jets. The US Air Force Thunderbirds. I was two, and there I was, at Cessna Park in Wichita, standing under a cottonwood tree with my hands pressed tightly against my ears, elbows out, just watching the jets thunder past and shake my little body to its core.

I was in love.

My parents hated video games, but they knew I loved airplanes, and for some reason—I still don't know why—they bought me Microsoft Flight Simulator 98 in the Christmas of 1997.

I was in love.

One day, in late 1999 I was reading through my Flight Simulator 2000 manual and came across a reference to a website, "flightsim.com," which let you "download more airplanes." I didn't know what 'download' meant, because we didn't have internet, but I knew 'more airplanes.' So I asked Dad, he took me to the library, we downloaded a bunch of planes, including the B-24 "the dragon and his tail," which has a naked lady on the front. After midnight, when we got home—people were afraid the Y2K bug would completely destroy the internet—we installed it and Dad and I both realized it had a naked lady on the front, so we figured out how to uninstall that plane, but there were some others and it was okay to use them.

Dad gave me the floppy.

I started modding flight simulators. A few years later, I won a scholarship to fly a plane. I flew with an instructor, Kirby Ortega, who said he was impressed by how well I flew, and that was awesome, because he was a test pilot. When the scholarship ran out, I flew with a man named Doug at a privately owned airport near the garbage dump until I moved up to K-State Salina to begin my professional pilot's degree.

Then I got sick.

I'd been having health problems for a while, but living at the airport up there, I dunno. Something went really wrong. It took a while to figure out, and in the meantime, I dropped out of school, put my life on hold, and watched my peers pass me by. I made friends on the internet, started downloading video games onto my own computer without my parents knowing, lived out of a church for a while because I had nowhere else to go... it was rough, but the video games got me through. When the doctor said "hey, you can't fly planes anymore," at 22 years old, I felt like everything that was in me had just been ripped away. I had nothing left.

After a lot of treatment, I returned to school and decided to get a degree in video game writing. I worked my ass off. I had to live off of food stamps. I had to take care of my little brother and attend 14 hour days at school, but hey, I wasn't living with my parents anymore, I was moving forward, finally, finally, FINALLY... I had something to look forward to. I graduated in 2016, 6 years after I should have.

Then I lost it all, because there weren't many job opportunities for someone in Kansas. Had to move back in with the parents.

It felt like putting my life on hold.

So I figured, hey, I'd try to make a game, convince someone to fund it, and move out that way. Between September 2017 and March 2018, I got nonstop bad news. My teeth were coming out because I couldn't afford to care for them and I'd need $25,000 in surgery. My heart had a defect and overwork was killing me. I had developed diabetes. It felt like everything that could go wrong had gone wrong.

But.

In September 2017, about two months after I lost my home, the wheels had been turning. I figured that the gameplay-driven game I'd been working on needed art to sell to publishers (this has been confirmed to me multiple times since then, lol). I figured I could develop a little walking sim solo if someone taught me how to do it, so I asked the brains behind Tangiers, a long-time acquaintance, Jess Harvey, to help teach me how to work with level design tools in Unity.

Initially, she was on board for that idea, but eventually said she was hard up for cash and would lose her home if she didn't get it quickly, and she could make the game a lot faster than she would if she had to stop and teach me how to do things.

We'd make the game episodic, and she'd do the heavy lifting first episode, and instead of a weird little free game like I was thinking, built over the course of a few years, while I tried to get my life back on track, we'd build this thing in a single month, release it on itch for a few bucks, maybe make enough for a couple month's rent for both of us (I'd lost my home but the family members I was staying with were demanding rent). If people liked it, then we'd make the rest of the episodes and she'd teach me then.

I agreed.

For a lot of reasons, this didn't happen.

At some point, we realized we'd need sound, and Jess wanted to hire some person who ended up not working out. I'd been insisting we use Chris, because I knew how fucking good the man was, but Jess was reticent because she hadn't worked with him before. Eventually, I won that one, and good thing too, 'cause the IGF award we won was for excellence in game audio or something. Chris deserves every accolade he gets, and if you need a musician or a sound guy, please hire him. He is a phenomenal artist.

For a long while, the game was called Sin Titulo, because it was 'without title,' but there's a great Eisner Award-winning comic by that name, so I went with Sin Voz, 'without voice,' because that seemed.

It's really interesting looking back at the old logs and seeing how I'd changed things over time. The day I had the idea, I had two plots in mind: there was a first-person sequence, designed as sort of a stereotypical "here's a nonviolent game! there is a birdwatcher in a forest! la-de-da-de-la, this is fun!" Then you would die horribly and kick off the rest of the events of the game.

At some point, I'd tweeted about 'possible first person verbs,' because walking sims bothered me a whole heck of a lot by how verbless they were. To me, having grown up with flight simulators, and eventually having clutched onto flight simulators as a way to keep doing the things my body prevented me from doing, games were places you went, and walking sims were often empty shells of places where you walked slow and did very little.

I wanted to make a game where you did a whole lot without traditional shooting bits. Then, at some point, I had this idea that actually you should shoot exactly one person, and it should really stick out to you as this immensely painful experience, like just absolutely horrifying.

Jess absolutely delivered that.

The very first image for the game was this shot from Collateral. I think you can see those colors throughout the end product. In my logs, I listed a ton of vignettes, some that didn't make it in (like a cowboy who never stopped growing and eventually sat in a field until he became a geological structure, or a person under a sheet who kept telling you 'i'm a ghost' and running away when you got close), but Jess and I both really seemed to like two things: the birdwatcher and the guy driving down a road, angry as hell.

Night road trip and birdwatcher. Then we tossed in the my weird tape idea. Okay, we had something.

In a couple lines, I managed to explain the game's ethos. First was this quote from Raymond Chandler, and the other was that line Godard said of Griffith: "'What do filmgoers want?' Griffith asked. 'A girl and a gun.'"

So much of our conversations went like this.

You know, some people compared us to 30 Flights of Loving, and I remember thinking "nah, man. I can't make that, and I don't want to. I want to make something very different." Well, I found this in my logs.

So idk, make of it what you will. I can say in my head, I wanted edits because of a bad experience I'd had shooting a film back in college with a guy who took a bad idea I'd had for a long take and insisted on doing it even after I'd seen the environment and tried to shut it down. It was so bad, so terrible, that we got last place in the student film competition because our director kicked us out of the editing bay and refused to let us remove the shot.

I'd read this 2016 bit by Zach Wilson, formerly of Visceral, currently at Bethesda, who talked about the video game Virginia without actually talking about Virginia, a game I wouldn't play until after we shipped:

"he kept suggesting that we cut between moments — that we shouldn't be spending time walking down stairs where nothing happens"

That really spoke to me because the student project I was on was walking up stairs where nothing happened. I got it, man.

Here's where I created TV head.

A lot of this process was a back and forth between Jess and me. I'd suggest something, she'd suggest something that altered it, sometimes that was good, sometimes that was bad. Like, I suggested a wall of sound like in The Rapture Has Come And You Will Be Forcibly Removed From Your Home, then Jess came back with this after playing the game:

At some point, I suggested to Chris that we use 'Charlie Brown adults' for our voice acting, since we couldn't afford voice actors, and Chris ultimately just tried doing weirdspeak with a friend of his (Barron? I think?) and then distorted it in a way that worked for him. The three of us together are why the game sounds as odd as it does, but mostly Chris.

Some people were very "is this Lynch/Cronenberg?" Sorry, friendo, but not a whole heck of a lot, to be honest. Jess was surprised I mentioned "silencio" without having seen Mulholland Drive, but it was in keeping with the theming for a lot of my game projects. Pistolero, Sin Titulo, Silencio... I have a theme.

The Eternal Miami Night game would have had a similar name, but I couldn't figure out what to call it. The idea was, you'd wake up on a beach at night, and a friendly woman would tell you "welcome to hell," and she would explain that you were here, in hell. Eventually, you'd realize you were actually here to rob the place, and it wasn't really hell, more of a pocket dimension someone had created to house people like you. A prison break.

I still want to make it. It would be my Deus Ex.

Truth is, I have a couple themes in my work.

A lot of people enjoy the subversion of expectations. I once watched a video of parents panicking when their child tried to eat a lit birthday candle, and I remember the kid not understanding what was wrong. He only became afraid when he realized the parents were afraid. That fascinates me.

I'm also a big fan of dread. Here's me setting the game's tone:

(there was a whole thing I'd come up with about a person being afraid of time ending and so he had a room full of clocks that he constantly kept winding up and at some point, the clocks all stop at the exact. same. time.)

(I should return to that one)

What we ended up with was a game that was very clearly something that came from me. This isn't to say it didn't come from the others, because it absolutely did, but someone who plays this is going to see, very clearly, my fingerprints all over that thing.

Then we shipped the game, a lot of people loved it, and I had to get heart surgery because I'd worked so damn hard on staying alive that my heard had torn itself in half and I needed someone to go stick some cables into my body to burn some nodules off to fix it.

Grim stuff.

A lot of stuff happened that I wasn't happy with, but suffice it to say, it was determined that for us to finish the journey I'd worked so hard on, Jess would have to finish her game. I basically wished her the best of luck and told her that I'd need to be seeking a lot more funding than she was looking for to escape the dangerous living situation I found myself in.

I tried, for a bit, to work on their next game, but all of my creative input was rejected. If the last game was very much a Doc-fueled project, the next one was more or less all Jess, and that's fine, but I need a certain amount of room to be creative, and if I don't have that leeway, I can't produce good work.

So, hey, the company's making a new game, I know almost nothing about it. Maybe it will be good, maybe it will be bad. I was big into the game when it was just you and two people on a beach watching the world end (my initial pitch was Waiting for Godot with shotguns and after several conversations, Jess and I had turned it into this other thing), but it got changed and the creative direction just isn't something I have fire for. That's not a good thing or a bad thing, it's just the thing.

Would I like to finish Sin Voz, as the project came to be called? Oh yeah, absolutely.

Is it going to be finished? Probably not.

So, at GDC, I talked to a bunch of people and got a new game funded. Patreon is now no longer my primary source of income. If you want to stick with me, by all means, go for it. I'm going to keep the account up in case this next game bombs and I have to come back here. But like... my life's in a really okay place right now. I've got some lingering issues to take care of, and I have to figure out how in the hell I'm going to get the dental work I need done... but I finally moved out.

I moved back into the exact same unit I'd left all those years ago. My life is back on track.

I'm making a game that isn't like anything you've ever played, even my last game. It's strange, it's sad, it is a game I hope you find as impactful as my last game.

If you want to stick with me, thank you. I'm going to try to write up articles on the games I've been asked to write. If you have games you want me to write about, please, hit me up. But I'm also pretty dang dead from the move.

Truth is, being disabled, in pain all the time... shit's been hard. I should have graduated in 2010. I should be a decade into my adult life. Now, here I am, a month away from turning 31, and I feel like I'm just about to get my life started.

Thank you for being with me on this journey. Each and every one of you means the world to me. Thank you for your patience regarding my games writing, I'm sorry the output isn't as fast as I'd hoped, but the past few months have been a whirlwind of transformation, and tomorrow is the first day 'off' I've had in literal weeks.

Thank you so much.