wanna hear something about the creative process I find frustrating? It has to do with a thing I call crawling in the log. I'll explain why I call it that in a bit, but basically I mean the kinda long dry spells where none of your ideas seem to reach a satisfying conclusion, and

then you just toss everything you're working to the side and start a new one and it's immediately better and closer to what you've been trying to make.

the first time this happened to me wrt game design was when i was participating in the 2018 global game jam and trying to make

a board game using that year's theme "transmission". My friends that I was working with and I spent over 24 hours trying to make a 2 player game about space alien communication work, but every time we tried to play it there was something completely broken about it

It was frustrating, so I grabbed a piece of paper and crawled into this hollow-log-shaped-bench and just wrote a whole game about racing cars.

It was a good game! That was very annoying! We spent so long trying to make this idea happen, but then a new one sprung up from a log

https://globalgamejam.org/2018/games/four-floor here's the game by the way. One day I want to return to it and make it a whole game because it was genuinely a lot of fun.

Nearly 3 years later and I've switched to mainly designing tabletop rpgs, but a good portion of the work i've published came from

moments of crawling in the log. The first version of No Stone Unturned fell out of my hands at a coffee shop in like 2 hours. The game I wrote that day was of course much rougher than the one that you can get now, but if you read the draft the core loop of the game is there

The most recent example is, of course, Grasping Nettles. I think I have 3 currently-paused wips that I started desigining because I wanted to do zinequest again. I had to abandon them for a variety of reasons, but mostly because the scope of those games kept exploding beyond what

I thought I was capable of pitching to backers by Feb. So I sat down, opened a new doc, and Grasping Nettles was written that evening.

All of this is to try to say to people who want to create - don't get discouraged if it's not working! You'll find a log to crawl in soon

bonus content: here's the original draft of that game