hi! i'm raising money for the palestinian children's relief fund with jacob gellar right now! come join! twitch.tv/jacobgeller
SwordStream 2024
You should make a club 👀
Regarde-nous, nostalgiques à même pas 30 piges 🥲
Hope's not lost though. Creative scenes die and grow all the time. I'm starting to do even weirder shit that my teenage self could dream of. UFO 50 just happens to be a reminder of where i want to go, what i want to grow. And for that, I'm thankful 🙏🏽
Those dynamics used to be nourishing for me. They helped me focus my creative energy, set achievable goals, find peers to help or motivate me, etc. Today, I think a lot of devs agree that the field is way less pleasant to create in.
What I mourn is the social fabric around them. Players that are ready to engage with games without the expectations that come with being a luxury product consumer. A blurring of the lines between playing, modding and creating. Lower scopes, lower stakes. Tools that are not industry secrets.
Today, I realise that my own creative prospects were collateral damage. Those were the games I looked up to, but when I finally grew the necessary skills to make them, they just... died. I could have made them anyway, and I did to some extent. It's not their existence that I'm mourning.
I found these games in places like Nitrome, Absoluflash, Eyezmaze and Motion Twin (yes). Violent changes in the ecosystem made it so these places had to either die or totally change their approach to game making. They had to align to what the industry was becoming.
I wasn't alive in the 80s, and I never played video games before 2004. Even so, this *is* how I used to enjoy games on the web. As a collection of tight and wildly diverse experiences, full of care and not afraid to be its own weird thing.
There's a part of my game designer heart I didn't know had died, but playing UFO 50 rekindled it.