




Last year I was also in a similar situation of time constraints but it was also very different. I was in AAA crunch; the kind where all of your time is scheduled by one group of people to create a product for another group of people with little to no real direct creative input. In this pit of mental despair I found myself languishing and I needed something to inspire me. Having just found out when and where the Global Game Jam would be taking place for the first time (after finding out just after the event the year prior) I knew I needed to be a part of it. It would be an exercise really; I needed to see what would happen if I tried to make a game with some random people in such a short time.

Thankfully that experiment was beyond any predictable level of success and it boosted my game designer ego into existence. Otherwise, if I had ducked out of work and abandoned my family for a full weekend that culminated in creating garbage I think I would have been crushed.

Suffice it to say that the circumstances this time were not at all the same. I’m “living the dream” of being broke, sitting in front of my screen for forever hours a day working on something that I don’t know if it will ever actually find an audience and I’m doing it all as my own boss, so it’s actually pretty awesome. Over the next few months I have a scary amount of work to do, with a lot of that work being necessary leading up to certain events coming soon. So rather than spending a precious weekend, one that could allow me to be with my family, sleep a few extra hours and still manage to get some much needed work done, distracting myself with another project completely I decided I needed to just man the fuck up and do what was the right thing for everyone.

So there’s the side revolving around my personal responsibilities, creeds and codes of honor and all that good stuff. But there is another side to my final decision to stay the fuck away from the Global Game Jam 2013, an uglier and more political side to things. That post is still to come in the following days.