Hello everyone! This is Gaian and I have a massive update to share with you today. Genome Studios 3rd quarter in review. As is consistent with me, I am very inconsistent with keeping up with our Months in review but I hope this will bring a large span of clarity over the past few months.
So let’s talk about the broad strokes before we get to the nitty and the gritty.
I burnt out badly.
Awesome, so now that we have the broad image of this past quarter, let’s see what has been going on with Genome Studios over such a great time.
July was a hustle month.
I was still grilling myself day in and day out on application outcomes, gathering team members, spending money I didn’t have, and working intensely to build up a project with clean and functional systemic foundations.
This systemic rework in tandem with everything else was a major effort that was also causing an insanely high level of stress. For all the best intentions it was crushing my morale, as I basically didn’t have a project anymore.
It was incredible to see the support and belief I was getting from ongoing, and prospecting, team members. And the potential we were reaching to meet. But with funding/investment money seeming farther and farther away, the expenses I was accruing, and the magnitude of this project rework I was getting very very tense.
So in comes August.
Hot on the heels of July, Canada Media Funds application outcomes were finally being shipped out. The first was the Conceptualization Stream, a small fund to just get a team/project started up with a fairly low bar for entry. The hot news was that the application results were delayed as there was such an unbelievable onslaught of applications that they were unsure if they would be able to approve projects for the total 15k budget allowed, or if they were going to have to prorate the funds across all the approved projects. Ai ai ai.
Nope! Applications went through and the org was able to filter out enough invalid applications to get the final selection the full budgeted amounts. We were among the approved, and I began the finalization process in the last week of July, bleeding into the first days of August.
Then came the real deal funding results. The CMF Prototyping stream, this is where your real mettle is tested and you’re competing for finite funds against the rest of the country.
Before I share with you how you mobilize around the Prototypings stream I want to share with you the common pattern of expectation I was given from experienced developers that have gone through the CMF many times before.
So you get your review, where a representative evaluates your project against a rubric. It covers the various subcategories that form the complete application including your vision, team and collective achievements, diversity, project substance, market study/plan, budget, and a few small topics included.
From there you get your results in a score from 0-100, though the expectation for the highest scored projects are only a little over 80%, the idea being that there’s no such thing as a perfect application. That 80-ish percent becomes the fine line that all applications are completing, and clamouring over each other, to reach.
Don’t worry if your application doesn’t get approved though, as if you’re close to that bar but not quite, you should have a good idea from the review on where your weak points are or where you can improve to sure up your application for a resubmission.
So here’s how it played out.
We get our review. I wait a few days to pass the weekend before I look at my results.
Rejected.
That’s okay, it’s to be expected that your first try won’t be approved. But you know there’s stuff you can work from to push your project across the line next time.
Let’s look over the review… oh.. Why does this review seem to just describe my application details in a summarized bullet form. For basically the whole application… there’s maybe 3 statements in the entire review that leads me to some better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the application.
This is deeply upsetting. I have no grounding whatsoever over what I should do to improve this application. I speak with some mentors on the matter. They articulate that other programs have gone this direction, of committing very impartial information in their reviews as giving actual advice or feedback can lead teams to follow the advice only to have the next reviewer of the follow up application review them for exactly the opposite of what was originally advised. It’s just better to not lead applicants in any direction.
Well this is awful. One of the few anchors against the grief of being rejected is now not a factor at all.
The stress and pressure of July, and really the entire year of 2024 leading up to these results are now bearing down quite heavily on me.
I then find out more details on the application intake. Just like the Conceptualization stream the Prototyping stream got about double the quantity of applications than they were expecting. This means that in order to meet their budget limits they had to scale applicants on a bell to sort out and limit the best applications from the rest.
This meant however, that my score on the rubric was synthetically altered to meet quotas and so neither my score, nor the feedback on my application was anything I could anchor to in order to improve my application for the next round.
At this point I’m spiralling. I’ve brought along a fairly big group of potential teammates and I have nothing to offer them anymore, at least not for another 3 months… 3 long months…
The team mates that I had been working with pre-emtively for this application are now still costing me, and my line of credit, and the shortest time I’ll have to cover them until I can get some funding would again, be 3 months.
On top of all that, in all this time I have been compromising on actual development work in favour of application writing, legal matters, corporate banking, documentation in anticipation of onboarding developers, budgeting, and otherwise doing everything I can to prove to strangers that I’m worth anything at all.
So now I keep talking with mentors about burnout. I get advice and feedback stretching from re-defining my measure of success, jumping back in to the Prototyping application because I was quite close even considering the scaling of my score, and that it’s okay to stop.
At this point, my career and day to day is purely and only stress and grief. My systemic overhaul project is essentially empty, I have to postpone my team for another 3 months. My conceptualization application that was approved can’t financially sustain a small group from my team to stick around, and I’m sick with stress. Time goes by, time goes by, time goes by…
Nothing changes and I finally give. I’m in burnout and I can’t recover.
The finality of this drives me to have to do all the clean-out and shut down that continues to contribute to my burnout. I have to let my team go, shut down the work I was aiming to build upon, disengage from my company and career goals, and just completely stop.
Into the meat of August. I’d like to talk about burnout.
Burnout is a vicious and extreme experience. I can assume most people have experienced it in some form in their life but to detail it, it’s far more intense and experience than just fatigue or a long work week. It’s a persistent pressure that will not relinquish you until you make fundamental shifts in your life and work.
In my pursuit of videogame development I’ve slowed quite a lot in my consumption of video games, but at this point I’m actively revolted by the thought of videogames.
I was considering ending my career in digital media production, a field and skill set I’ve been immersed in nearly my entire life.
The thing about Burnout is that it scars you deep inside. No matter how short or long it ends up taking, you are never the same person on the other end.
At this point I was still attending the local meetups, including hosting my own which I was grandfathered in to do because I had gotten prior sponsorship to host them until the end of the year. Being burnt out however was everything I shared about myself, and everything I desperately wanted perspective on. Someone has to have a view that can break me out of my grief and return me to the passion I’ve had my entire life… right?
Sort of…
One of the most common lines I had gotten was to change my expectation and definition of success. It doesn’t necessarily need to mean propping up a company, growing in your career, releasing a project, getting funding… it can be other things. Like making a feature, or getting a build of your project out to the public. Digestible things, internally validating things.
I ended up spinning it differently, and have gotten some push back when I’ve explained it to other devs. But rather than redefining my measure of success, my redefinition was in being allowed to be a failure. Not in such a bitter critical way that the word failure can mean… but that in the business dev and game marketing world you need to have a product market fit, a strong pitch that can sway investors and audience alike, a well scoped project that will start and finish exactly to plan and schedule, that you already know the in and out of every detail of your project, and more.
I want to make my out of scope game, that doesn’t have an absolutely clear destination. That investors don’t seem to understand but an audience picks up instantly when I use the phrase: “Survival soft-souls” or “Slow-souls”. It’ll be imperfect, and very prototypical due to the misalignment of scope and my resources to produce it… a failure. I want that to be okay anyways.
So it’s September.
I came to this realization of acceptable failure… but I’m still burnt out. Being burnt out for only a month is very unlike how burnouts are. The scale I always see (and have definitely experienced myself) is 3 months, 6 months, or a year. So I’ve got a long way to go. I still have no idea what I’m going to do, I still have no passion or desire to do game development… it’s just so much grief.
But I’m bored… so so bored.
So I go back to one of my oldest practices when it comes to being a professional creative and media producer: “Just sit with the program open until you want to do something.”
At first this was simply deciding to completely abandon my aspirations to make a clean and well structured systemic foundation. This was due to another scrap of common advice, which was to make a shitty game. That all games are kinda frankensteined together and just barely holding. You can make it cleaner and more improved later.
So I started a project of a rolled back legacy version of Awakened Guardian from 2022. Everything is broken, just how I left it. It has none of the Genome Studios tech that I’ve created for Del Lago Layover, and in the prototypes I made of Some People’s World… And the programming I did when I was first learning 3D game programming was horrible.
But that was literally only the effort of downloading the project from my git repository.
Then I started a Jira project for it. Didn’t add anything or do anything. This was just me sitting with my computer while I continued to be burnt out, bored, and full of grief.
So then, as part of simply going out and living my life outside of the life of “I’m a game developer”, I ended up catching up with an old friend that had known about all my game development passions in the past. They had come over and I wanted to show them the game that I had worked on. I ran into a build of the game on my computer during a massive hard drive clean up and ended up trying it out myself and felt the wonderment I was originally trying to capture back when I was passionately building it forward. Maybe I could still be excited about it.
So I start showing the project to them. Start in the tutorial, showing the little lessons on how to play. But then it breaks. Picking up things have gotten stuck in the guardians arm and the interaction system ended up disabled. Restart, try to get through the tutorial without hitting these edge cases and bugs. Breaks again. Okay skip the tutorial and run around the first area, Mothers Dream. I pick something up, it breaks. This is exactly why I was so interested in rebuilding the project from the ground up. It was a total mess. The friend segued into moving on from the game after the 4th close and re-open, and I ended up incredibly embarrassed over the project I had made.
Boredom and embarrassment. The best motivators.
So after this brutal showcase I get this tickle in my soul… I can’t possibly be content in sharing my big game ambitions and excitement for this “my dream game” project while it’s in such a sorry state… Like abysmal state.
I then set my goal towards fixing up the 4 years present in the game bug of picked up items getting stuck in the guardians arm. A game breaker that also absolutely devastates the “character-centric” pillar to the game. This goal finally sets me in motion. I diagnose and stabilize the feature then start to record the slew of other issues I had left in the project since Feb of 2022.
My Jira then gets the “Initial Prop Up from Legacy” Epic. An epic is a major stride in a project timeline, created by the sum of its tasks, and bugs, listed as child issues. Not too long after I start an additional Epic: “Stability Pass” that I worked on in tandem. The prop up was the “fix the embarrassing issues you’ve left here forever”, while the stability pass was the “lets get things going like they should have been this whole time.”
All this kicked me into high gear and I started really delighting in knocking off issues from the list and seeing the game project start actually presenting itself like I had always intended.
There was another really significant realization I got while standing on wobbly legs and actually trying to develop this project again. I had made an insane amount of work up to the point I left off. Throughout all my work since then I am just utterly staggered with how much foundation I had been pulling together… incredibly shoddy, but an enormous amount of systems and content.
All of a sudden I find myself captured by the fact I don’t need to work as hard as I would have making the project from the ground up, combined with a far more evolved skill in diagnosing, fixing, and building video games. It makes all my clean up, and stabilizing feel really significant as all these hidden behind the scenes features and game play start to become simultaneously available, unlike the many iterations I’d done in the past which would break some things in favour of better realizing other things.
I really start getting into it and before you know it I have Prop up, and Stabilization completed. On the horizon now is “Post Stability Feature Expansion” bringing together the half completed features, and introducing ones I had conceptualized over the 4 years the project had laid dormant. I’m tearing down features and issues with a vengeance and rapidly clearing these feature tasks in anticipation for something I haven’t been able to aspire for in aeons: “Refining the Golden Path”
So now we find ourselves in the present, Q3 behind us, a deep burnout rapidly shifted away, and interesting things on the horizon.
I am currently bringing together the last tasks and needs for Feature Expansion. This is a pretty significant stage because these features will be the things that allow me to paint the project with new experiences and ways to interact and engage with the world.
You can see a ton of Feature Progress Videos on the GS_HUB Discord News Channel
In the wake of these features I’ll be able to spend some time delving into the actual content of the game, something I haven’t done in ages. I will establish a clearer call to action and motivation to act in the world. Build up some stages of progression leading into opening areas to the play experience to slowly introduce the player to the wide world I hope to create. And try to capture the full crawl experience of provisioning up from safe pastures in order to delve deep into the hostile environments of the deep world. I’m really excited for it!
So what’s ahead?
I’ve been happily chipping away at Awakened Guardian, having fun and watching the game evolve rapidly in the direction of where I’ve always wanted to take it. I have some behind the scenes work to still do but I aim to come out with a playable build in the near future. I have been largely motivated all this time to actually get the project into the audiences hands in a stable and playable state, something I haven’t done with Awakened Guardian so far.
Perhaps I can actually work towards a rhythm of expanding the game through iterations of releases, introducing further stability, content, and features that can speak to a string and enjoyable experience.
I am still holding onto the idea that it’s okay if that doesn’t happen, but I think the most fun developing the project will be to have it out in the world while I make it better and better.
Thanks as always to everyone following along this turbulent and uncertain journey. This hasn’t been the first burnout, and I doubt it’ll be the last, but I am still around, still aspiring to do great work that stirs the people who give my work the time of day.
Here’s to another quarter!
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