Well, this wasn’t quite the relaunch post that I was planning to kick off the blog with.
It was going to be great – I swear! I had this whole post drafted up, with a ‘plucky underdog gritting my teeth against the limitless but uncaring world’ kind of feel to it. Talking about how, even though motivation can be hard to pin down sometimes, you should treat your future self with respect and get working on what you want to achieve today.
So, yeah – a little bit fatalistic (or maybe realistic), but I hope generally motivating – not so much ‘no one cares about what you are doing’ and more ‘no one cares… yet!’.
Of course the universe can’t be relied on to cooperate with the tidy narrative you’ve got set up for yourself. Just as fate is liable to kick your legs out from under you when you think you’ve got things under control – it can also lift you up unexpectedly.
At the end of last year, we (me and a couple of creative compadres – working as TEK Collective) put in an entry for the Epistle 3 Jam – adapting (however loosely) Mark Laidlaw’s synopsis of the Half-life 2: Episode 3 that was never destined to be.
I’d really like to do a proper post-mortem piece on this at some point in the future, so to cut several weeks of story very short – the jam looked like it could be quite high profile (on the game jam scale at least). As ever I tried to set an ‘aim’ for this jam so we went in with the ultimate goal of picking up some press. And in the end, we did! We got a few links from blogs, a couple of youtube videos, very happy.
A few weeks after the jam we were also contacted by GamesTM (a UK game coverage outlet that still runs a print edition) to see if we’d take part in an email interview – tough choice there! Had to think about it for about the length of time it took me to write out ‘thanksforaskingwewouldloveto’.
After sending in our answers I pretty much forgot about the interview, imagining there’s probably a lot of hurly-burly trying to get articles ready for a print magazine and our small contribution could quite easily be cut, so it’s best not to get too invested in the idea of making it in.
However, a week-and-a-bit ago I got an excited Whatsapp from Eddie saying that an issue of GamesTM, featuring a retrospective on the Epistle 3 jam, was out. He was able to run out of work to a Sainsburys near him which has a decent sized magazine section and grab a copy slinging me over a couple of pictures of, well, us!
So yep, we made it in – a few quotes in the main article and a little break out mentioning our game.
Mostly i’m just chuffed and have enjoyed the novelty (without reading too much into this lucky break). This could be the absolute pinnacle of my game dev career – so I intend to enjoy it. Print coverage of games is already on the endangered list, so I intend to make the most of an experience that many more deserving devs might not get!
I’m sure there must be a lesson here, but i’m not quite able to pull the threads together into something profound (answers on a postcard* if you can do better than me). Instead of taking ages to think about it and then abandoning the draft of this post because it’s out of date – i’ll get it up and follow up with any reflection.
On the whole though. It’s validating – whether deserved or not – and it’s encouraging. I can’t wait to get back to work.
JK
*now there’s a turn of phrase which is aging rapidly.
