Gamedev Diary: Talking Yourself Into Tasks
One of the most underrated productivity hacks on my list of things that work is “fool yourself into doing it.” This is a skill I developed because I’m not very brave, and yet most of life requires courage. I survive this by telling myself I’m not actually going to do scary things while planning to do them.
For instance: I dislike travel. Every trip I’ve ever embarked on successfully has involved me telling myself I’m not actually going to follow through on it. “I’m just shopping for ticket prices, I’m not going to buy them.” “I can cancel these at any time, but I’m just looking at hotels in the area.” “I can always sell this hotel room to some con-goer who needs it, there’s no need to panic.” “I’m packing, but I can always back out. I’ll be out the money, but that’s fine!” “I am in the boarding tube, but I can always turn back and run a—okay, now it’s too late, might as well keep going.”
Once something’s fait accompli, I can relax and deal with it.
You can do this with many kinds of projects that look terrifying when you scope them properly. “A novel is how many pages? I have to write how much?” “No, no, just a sentence. Today you’re just opening the document. See? Not bad. You could write a sentence and call it a day. Maybe two. Okay a paragraph maybe, might as well.” And you just keep doing that: “My job is to open the document and write a line or two, every day.” And eventually, you end up with a book.
It’s been a while since I tackled a new project, something I had no way to get my arms around. The idea of writing a game was terrifying, so… naturally… I told myself I wasn’t going to write a game. One person, writing an entire game? I knew Stardew Valley took ConcernedApe like 8 years. I didn’t want to spend 8 dedicated years on something.
But I did want to write a game.
So I deployed the chaff. “I’m not going to write a game,” I said. “I’m going to write a silly toy that generates a baby Jokkad from two parents and tells me their colors.”
This was my thought: “If I make this toy and it’s pretty, when I’m bored and need a pick-me-up, I can just generate a random baby and look at it and be amused, and then I can go back to work.”
So that’s all I concentrated on. “My goal is to make a single web page that lets you select two parents, then generates a baby that looks a little like them. I’ll be able to use it to generate random Jokka for my stories! That would be useful.”
The other step of this “fool yourself into doing it” productivity hack is to tell people about it. I know there are two lines of thoughts about this: “If you tell people, you’ll drain your enthusiasm and raise their expectations, and that will sabotage you before you get going,” and “if you tell people, you’ll create accountability and it’ll keep you honest and drive you on.”
As usual, I find this dichotomous framing less than useful. It’s obvious to me that some projects benefit from total secrecy for various reasons… while others need accountability. And there’s a third path there, which is “other people’s enthusiasm makes me enthusiastic.” When I’m working on something I adore, external stimuli matters less to me. But on things where I’m actively embarking on a project I’m not sure I can swing at all, the “borrow other people’s enthusiasm to remind yourself you can do this” third path is vital to longevity. For me, anyway.
The reason I have any of these screenshots at all (and I have so many of them) is because I shared often, incrementally, and self-deprecatingly as I experimented and iterated. “Lol, look at this hot mess.” Or, “Eee, it’s working!” All of it kept me going when I wasn’t sure I was capable of what I was undertaking.
For a long time, I told myself I was “learning,” or “experimenting,” or “making a toy” while working on JOKKA! Making it any more serious would have hamstrung me when I needed the momentum. Especially because so many of the things I was doing, I didn’t understand and wasn’t sure would be possible to me, with my limited understanding of all the tools that coders use to accomplish things. But I tried to keep a sense of wonder about it, and my most common question was, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?”
“Wouldn’t it be cool if babies inherited colors across generations? So maybe we could remember the grandparents and sometimes surface their traits?”
“Wouldn’t it be cool if it also inherited… I don’t know. Stats? Or predilections toward them?”
“Sometimes, a kid’s born that is nothing like their family. Wouldn’t it be cool if there awas a mutation rate? And you couldn’t always predict exactly what you’d get?”
“Wouldn’t it be cool if there wasn’t a constrained palette, but instead you’d get blends of possible millions of hex colors?”
“I’m just drawing this baby image. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could fill in the colors with the inherited colors?”
“WOULDN’T IT BE COOL IF THIS WORKED?”
And eventually, I realized: “Wait, it can. And it is.
…What next?”
What next, then, is a backtrack, in which we talk about how I decided what to make a game about! Tune in next week for that!
