8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Tag: game development

Chapter List

  • Those Walls

    Let me walk you through the door I found in the wall that had been blocking my path.

    I spent the early part of 2025 building the foundations of a computer game. Code. Art. Story. All the bits strung together into a few megabytes of raw materials that I can compile into a simulation-slash-cozy gamer’s curiosity.

    But yeah. I hit a wall. 

    See, building a game is the work of a hundred different skillsets mingling together into just the right blend. A proper game studio would have specialists who focus on each niche skill. A proper game studio would have project managers who coordinate the timing. A proper game studio would have deadlines nudging their team forward.

    I had me.

    I am not a specialist.

    I am managing my own project.

    My deadlines are ethereal.

    So a wall, even a metaphorical one, spells trouble.

    The details of said wall are not important.  What is important is that walls can be impenetrable and project-ending failure points.  They often are.  And sometimes, often I would argue, creatives run into a wall that they don’t even realize was a wall at all.

    We can then do one of two things. We can give up—and that’s fine. Sometimes it’s the right answer. If the wall is insurmountable, spending the rest of our lives looking for a way over or through it may be a terrible idea.

    On the other hand we can look for a gap, a door, a foothold to climb over, or the place where the wall has crumbled from the efforts of someone who went before and…

    Well. That’s what I did with my game development work.

    Thus I march on, scanning the horizon for the next obstacle for surely there are many more ahead.

  • Professional Games 

    In early 2025 I founded a game studio.

    Sounds impressive, no? In a way it is like any other clever idea: you give an idea a name and send it off in a direction and it becomes important and meaningful. It becomes work.

    Why did I found a game studio?

    Because I write code.  My profession for two decades has involved technology and systems and building things on computers. The gaming industry may seem lighthearted and playful, but at the end of the day games are just more code (and art and music and databases and stories) built inside of a computer.

    I spent the next five months working on the soul and systems of a simulation-meets-cozy style game and pushing it through various iterations of functionality until I was actually able to load it onto one of those handheld gaming PCs and sit on the couch playing my buggy (but functional) game.

    It’s now mid-2026 as I write this and the game development has been stalled for about a year. I’ve poked at it. Prodded it. Added tiny nudges to the system. But stalled, really.

    I bring it up here because it comes to mind when I think of the idea I’m trying to get across in this chapter of the blog: creativity isn’t just a whim. It can be work and a product and an invention that may someday wind up in a store being sold to people who would pay for it.

    And on days that I’m being particularly honest I think I would tell you that the game development didn’t stall for lack of time or motivation or direction. It probably stalled because the profession that morphed in a newfound passion quietly transformed back into a profession when I wasn’t looking. And it took me a few months to get my head around that idea.