The Creator's Character Arc - Five Years Later
There's this YouTube comment on the music video of Goodie Bag by Still Woosy that's been stuck in my head: Yeah, they do. Fresh Gen X looking 20 year-olds in colorful 90s throwback fits chill out and groove in a hazy warm California, dancing like they're in an ironic but genuine
There's this YouTube comment on the music video of Goodie Bag by Still Woosy that's been stuck in my head:
Yeah, they do. Fresh Gen X looking 20 year-olds in colorful 90s throwback fits chill out and groove in a hazy warm California, dancing like they're in an ironic but genuine A24 take on the dance party ending you see in animated blockbusters. I'd believe you if you said that they were just some of his friends who just happened to be around that day. But they don't feel like real people. These colorful dancing smiling goofballs feel like characters at the end of a movie about a story of their trauma, joys, breakups, gossiping, compromises, and adventures. What's their story that I'm out of the loop on? I bet it's good.
I haven't been able to rid myself of this framing that I feel obligated to place myself in to narrativize my own character arc. Many of you are dying to know more about the progress of the character arc of the Creator of this game who promised more games eventually. What has their story been for the past five years? I feel obligated to write this story for you despite feeling a little uncomfortable at fully committing to it. Perhaps because my own story that I tell myself in where I am in life has been messy and uncomfortable lately. Or maybe I'm just shy? It's probably both. The need to publicly share yourself when there are many eyes on you who want something from you (game) is scarier than I was expecting.
Anyway, hi. This is Ahmaykmewsik. Or Marc, I go by that too. All communications that have been from Not Fun Games have been from me. I am the developer and creator of the (mostly) solo developed project that was MetaWare High School (Demo). And today is the 5th anniversary of its release.
This retrospective was originally envisioned as a game. For the past few months I had been working on a small visual novel framework that could run in a web browser in which I was planning to release this 5th anniversary retrospective, complete with slow thoughtful music and surreal graphics. Something that might feel like a continuation of the game itself perhaps. But I lost motivation to follow through on finishing it. It began to feel utterly disingenuous and inappropriate to be presenting this part of myself in such a dramatic way. I would have done it without hesitation 5 years ago I think, but it's not the right choice for the current me. So instead of something that resembles a game like I was hoping to give you I'll be repurposing this retrospective into just text instead.
I wish I had something new and concrete to announce for you to look forward to. But I don't have that yet. I don't have anything finished that I'm ready to show you yet for the work I've been doing. I wish I did. I really do.
So in place of something more exciting to share, I've made something small. An experiment of something new. What you're playing is something I made in the last few months. This is coded mostly from scratch using the raylib library. Perhaps all of this work is a little overkill for what essentially is a blog post. But perhaps that's okay. But I can write you a story of where my character arc is at the moment. I'll talk about how I feel about MetaWare five years later, my motivations for why I was making this game with the perspective that I have now, and also a smidgen of what I've been doing since. (Just a smidgen. Don't expect much. I'm still keeping most details on future projects to myself. Sorry! Feel free to skip to the end if that's all you're here for. I won't tell anyone.)
[some explanation for how the controls work and how long this is]
It was perhaps an unwise move to make a game that lies about what is really is. A demo that isn't complete, but somehow also a complete game. Bait and switches are a guilty pleasure of mine. I find it magical to be surprised by something that you weren't expecting - that takes a left turn and goes deep into that unexpected direction. For those of you who are familiar with the trends, it is obvious that I had been a big fan of the infamous Doki Doki Literature Club!. I was especially inspired by how it had so confidently done this same obfuscation trick. It's a similar unassuming visual novel that came out a few years before MetaWare that was also not upfront with what it really was, in its case, a psychological horror game. I was eager to follow in its footsteps and try something similar. But as a result, there are no doubt many out there who only played enough of MetaWare to be fooled by its lie and are now genuinely excited for a finished version of what they played to be complete someday. It's been stressful to know how to communicate anything about my future plans knowing that doing so will likely cause confusion for those who were only somewhat paying attention. (Although maybe I shouldn't worry about it too much. Are those people even paying attention anymore? Are you reading this?)
Even though I shot myself in the foot, I'm happy that I fully committed to the ambiguity. It was a thrilling uncomfortable way to present a game - a game that stumbles between finished and unfinished. That meta-narrative complexity is the kind of thing that I love. And the confusion surrounding the game's true nature adds to the experience a lot. At least for me. I'm proud of the final result. And I'm happy that it's connected with the small audience of people who've stumbled upon it. Hello.
I'm proud of the game now, despite its flaws. But I don't know if I can say that I was proud of the game when it first released. How MetaWare ended up was very different from what I wanted it to be.
I think I'd like to talk about "why" I made MetaWare.
If you do creative work, I hope you relate to the experience of becoming so enamored by an idea that you can't stop thinking about it. That's what MetaWare was for me. This gimmick of taking metafiction to its absolute extreme and using it as a tool for tackling existentialism and philosophy, it was enthralling. If it is a known fact that you do not exist, that your ground truth is not actually true, what purpose then do you have to live? To question something like that is to question everything that you hold dear to you. To question all of your values. How you see the world. Crafting characters that tackled these questions from different angles was satisfyingly fun. It was a fresh new way to think about the human condition from a unique perspective. And it was fun to be a little silly too.
That's the simplest answer for why I made MetaWare. Needing to realize that vision felt inevitable once I was excited by the idea. And I think I did an okay job. The game isn't very long, especially by visual novel standards. It doesn't go that deep and is overall pretty unfocused. It bites off much more than it can chew. Not everyone got their own route (sorry Isadora). But it's fine for what it does. It pulls a trick by getting away with being far from perfect by embracing its imperfection. I'm hoping I can do better next time.
But that wasn't the only reason I made this game. It wasn't the deeper reason for why I needed to make this game. To explain why, I need to explain more about what was important to me and where and who I was at this period in my life.
Making things has been important to me in a way nothing else has been. As a kid, I grew up in a boy choir that engrained into our young minds that music was the most beautiful thing in the world. In high school my time was spent with musical theatre and band kids spending many many many hours rehearsing a musical or sweating outside for the marching band. In college I spent my time with other young lost souls who were investing their personal and financial livelihoods into studying the arts and becoming masters of their craft. And thus starting from a young age and far into my adult life, I formed my identity of being "the person who made music". I made it my online username as I developed a presence online. Ahmaykmewsik. I make music. Who else would I be? That is who I was. The one who makes music.
Having a love for the arts was such a constant for me and the people whom I spent my time with, it never really occurred to me that anyone would not think this way. That NOT loving media with all your soul was even a possibility. Movies aren't just a fun way to spend a few hours, they're an amazing opportunity for a unique dangerously moving experience. Music isn't just something to set the mood, it's something ethereal that binds people together. Comics and manga aren't just something to read to pass the time, they're an inventive accessible achievement of visual storytelling. Video games aren't just something to do when you want to unwind, they're an opportunity to be placed inside of a new world. It became a surprise to me that after art school, as I found myself among people who did not come from this bubble, that not everyone sees art as one of the most important thing in their lives. These core beliefs that I've held for so long simply aren't true for those who do not live in my world. Who weren't band geeks. Or choir boys. Or internet nerds. Or fandom trolls.
So while I was making MetaWare, I wasn't making a video game just because I enjoyed doing it. Working on this game was something that was deeply important to who I was. To something that I believed about myself without question. As an artist.
And as a result, my wishes for MetaWare were monumental. A concept this rich deserved to be something amazing. Groundbreaking. Innovative.
In the year before I started working on MetaWare, I had just finished a frustrating bachelor's music composition degree at a fancy prestigious old music school, the Eastman School of Music. Attempting to assimilate into the secluded historically problematic world of academic contemporary classical music had left me feeling disconnected from myself and the rest of the world. I was searching for an escape. In becoming exhausted with music, I had recently become infatuated with other disciplines of art, especially animation, theatre, and most significantly, video games. So for my master's degree in music I went to the California Institute of the Arts, an experimental arts school that was founded by the Mickey Mouse man (well-known for being the holy grail of animation schools, Pixar comes from there). CalArts appeared to be a place that would let me do whatever I wanted, even if it wasn't explicitly music, so I was excited by the possibilities of doing more cross-disciplinary kinds of work. And I was right, that's exactly what I got to do - anything I wanted. This is where I conceived and completed MetaWare.
CalArts treats its classes as not being all that important. You don't have grades. All classes are strictly pass or fail. Instead of grades, the school encourages you to do whatever it is that is your unique creative passion, whatever that might be, and they do their best to give you the resources you need to pursue that. It's a place where you go to learn how to learn. To learn how to nurture your creativity in whatever form it may take. They will try to teach you some things directly, but the school leaves you mostly to yourself to find your own resources.
And boy did they. My time at CalArts was rather unsatisfactory. Nobody there had experience in game making or its history. Everyone's expertise was rooted in the arts. Not in the games that my generation played and loved as kids. Those who weren't outright against them did understand that they had the potential to be new and exciting, but didn't know what to make of them beyond that. Video game development was certainly something that many students wanted to spend time exploring. A rather large student club formed during my time there that attempted to make games. A few tiny games got made, but most attempts at game development crashed and burned. Everyone knew how to make sound, music, and art, but nobody had experience in any of the other elements you need to make a game, especially programming and game design. So as a masters student, wanting to pursue game making beyond the introductory level in the same vein as I had been studying music, I worked mainly by myself, left much to my own devices, teaching myself just enough programming to get by.
The most useful class I took at CalArts was one that taught the basics of the Unity game engine alongside 3D modeling in Cinema4D. Through this class I made my other officially released game, BUS SIMULATOR, a short 10 minute seated VR experience that was intended for the school's Art Expo, a little experiment with gaze detection in VR where you awkwardly sit and gawk at strange characters on a bus. If you have a VR headset that can connect to a PC you can check it out sometime on Steam or the Oculus store. It's not bad. Out of a class of around six Interactive Media majors (whom I was not) I was the only one who completed a functional finished experience due to devoting most of my time to the project that semester while I was also working on MetaWare. Everyone else burned out, never getting anything to work in Unity's buggy complicated mess of an engine.
So without much guidance or support, I made MetaWare mostly on my own. But not entirely by myself. Games usually never are, even if it might seem that way sometimes. Since the CalArts animators were too busy slaving away on their self-produced short films, I made the smarter choice of hiring some talented artists to draw everything whom I had recently worked with from the online video game music parody based SiIvaGunner community. They were a much better fit for the game and the culture it lived in than anyone at school I could have found. They did a wonderful job bringing MetaWare's limited world to life.
This hired help was the furthest extent that I had any direct help for the game. I had a few teachers with whom I had occasional "lessons", meetings where we talked about my scatterbrained ideas about music, art, games, and philosophy. But after my primary teacher retired, I switched to a teacher who was nearly impossible to contact and during the game's development I eventually secretly stopped having lessons altogether. These teachers were all very kind and loving people. They are listed in the Special Thanks section in MetaWare's credits. But none of them have ever played MetaWare for themselves at any point. They never had time to. Not that they had much reason to. They didn't have any experience with video games outside of what little had been exposed to them from cultural osmosis to know how to really understand the goals or context of such a project beyond the surface level. I was so frustrated that I had no one from whom I could receive direct guidance who would understand why I was so passionate about what I was working on.
Whoops, this has all gotten a bit gloomy. Maybe a bit of a downer for what should be a five year anniversary celebration. I'll leave it in though. This is useful context I think for why MetaWare is the way that it is. At least from my own perspective, perhaps not yours.
A quick aside - I am a lucky exception to most people's circumstances. It would be irresponsible to not acknowledge that I'm expressing my frustrations from a very privileged position. While my education was lacking in many areas, it's unlikely that I would have had made this game if not for the support, space, and resources that my very fancy and expensive (oh god it was so expensive) arts education gave me to teach myself what I needed to make this game. Most never have the resources or time to even consider making a game of this scale.
To me, all of these frustrations are obvious in hindsight in the the moniker I chose under which I have released my games: "Not Fun Games". This name is so stupid. But it had a bluntness that felt just right, parroting a common sentiment of many game makers of the initial indie boom that games deserve as much respect as other more established mediums of art. Because games can be so much more than fun.
This is why I made MetaWare. I was in an environment where I was fighting for a legitimacy that I didn't feel I had earned yet. I felt like an outsider to the world of games because I was physically disconnected from it, and also an outsider within the arts despite living within it. MetaWare then was an attempt to contribute to both of these traditions. A game that would fit into the tradition of the art world that I had been living in while also being approachable enough to be easily picked up and understood by your typical "gamer".
I don't know how successful you could say I was with either of these goals. But with five years perspective away from art school, I've had time to deconstruct my initial motivations. And the more I sit with them, the more I realize how what I perceived as my own passion for wanting to "innovate in games" was perhaps more accurately a desire to simply prove to myself that I was capable of being a legitimate, worthwhile, and valuable artist, as all students are pressured to in art school.
I'm becoming more and more weary of the concept of the "artist" as I grow older. It's an antiquated identity I've clung to for most of my life and have grown to resent. I have early memories of myself as a child learning the piano and dreaming of becoming the next Mozart, creating works of genius that would be worshiped for generations. I've clung to that dream for much longer than I care to admit. Perhaps my mother praised my early music ability a bit too much? Or perhaps it was the boy choir I grew up in that convinced us young impressionable children that we were doing the work of God? Or perhaps it was going to school for music composition and forcing myself to fit into its troubled history of idolizing dead white people. The narrative of the mysterious misunderstood tortured artist is one that was easy to embrace and hold onto growing up as a socially awkward kid with low self-esteem who loved participating in and creating music, theatre, games, and art.
Much of my recovery from art school has been learning to let go of this label, detangling and reconciling these feelings of elitism, pride, and bitterness that I associate with this identity and building a new one, finding a newer healthier source of passion.
Actually, hold on, cut the sound for a second. You are playing this with sound on I hope?. [be funny if the sound is muted] Since this is kind of like a game I want to do something funny. It will be cathartic for me, so please indulge me. Ahem. I HEREBY RESCIND THE TITLE IMPOSED UPON ME OF "ARTIST". I NO LONGER ASSOCIATE MYSELF WITH THIS INCEDIOUS IDENTITY AND CAST IT TO ROT AND DIE INTO THE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ TRASH. THE ARTIST IS NOW DEAD!
Okay great. Now it's official. If any of you feel inclined to worship me as a genius artist from here on out please kindly shut the ♥♥♥♥ up. Or at least keep it to yourself. Because it's illegal now. Treat me as a human being instead. Don't let me catch you. You'll be sorry. Seriously. I'll sue you. Try me.
Anyway - I am still passionate about games. But as I get older (I'm 30 now), my motivations are becoming murkier and harder to articulate. The more I learn about games, the more I realize how little I have actually known about them at all. I've spent so much time thinking on what it really means to "innovate" in games that I'm not sure what it means anymore. I don't think I ever really knew.
I have been bitter about the games industry. I still am. We are all forced to live within systems that prioritize growth and profit over everything else. As a result, the conditions in which games must be created are bleak and scary. More games are made than anyone has time to play. And most of the games that have captured everyone's attention are engineered to extract as much out of you as possible. Your energy. Your time. Your money. And it certainly doesn't help that the world is currently falling apart and accelerating towards fascism.
But nevertheless, even in such a predatory environment, wonderful, respectful, human, meaningful games that enrich people's lives continue to be made. Games are so incredibly hard to make - and yet, people are still creating incredible new experiences and interrogating what they are capable of becoming. That gives me some hope for the future of games.
While school was a frustrating dead end, I'm happy to share that I did eventually find, or create for myself, communities that were more involved directly in game making. Starting at the beginning of 2020, I devoted a lot of time developing an experimental roleplaying game of my own creation around which a small community formed. This game was a spinoff of some elaborate custom online discord mafia games I and others were making and playing. It quickly developed into a mix of improvisational roleplaying, creative writing, and TTRPG-styled gameplay. You won't find any information about this game online - it's a private discord community and we wish to stay that way, so I'll be omitting many details.
This game filled a void of something I had been missing in school: an accessible platform to experiment with game design, especially in how it intercepted with emergent interactive storytelling. For the first year, I ran these small games on discord that lasted a day or a few weeks exclusively on my own. Eventually other people in our small community started running their own games, and over the next five years the community developed and pushed the game into something that more closely resembles a tightly coordinated interactive theatrical production than a game, transforming it far beyond what I could have created just by myself. The community is still active today as of writing, mostly without my involvement.
This game unexpectedly became a learning opportunity for many things for me, one of those being software development far beyond what you would do in a RenPy game (the python-based engine I used to create MetaWare). As I developed and expanded the capabilities of the discord bot that runs the game, it by accident became what I later realized to be a richly capable game engine. A limited game engine nonetheless, but a game engine tailored with many tools to build and manage the complex custom games we wanted to run. I'm unaware of any other discord bot that is as large and feature rich as this one is. It would never be verified by discord for wider use due to how it abuses discord in some key ways. It has been great for our little community and a fantastic opportunity to practice the full development cycle of testing, deploying, debugging, and iterating on a complex tool that other people actively use and enjoy.
Perhaps it might come as no surprise that I also began developing my own video game engine from scratch as well. RenPy was a great fit for a lost artist who needed help with the many details to make a game go while being flexible enough for me to implement more custom features. But a tool is limited to what the tool assumes you will need and want, and I was growing frustrated and disillusioned with the capabilities and reliability of the game engines I had used prior. So I began teaching myself how to make a game in my own custom engine using the inaccessibly verbose but invaluable video series Handmade Hero by Casey Muratori as a resource to learn more advanced software development practices and the incredibly simple but powerful raylib framework as a start to begin learning by example how to build games with C-styled C++. I was so surprised by how quickly I was able to get something working and how much mastery I was able to have on the end result in this new method of working that I became motivated to start developing something more serious. As I went deeper, I became even more excited as I realized that the creative possibilities were only limited by my imagination and quickly growing programming skills. Having so much low-level control allowed me to experiment with ideas that I didn't even think were possible until I discovered that, no, you can just do that. When you make your own rules and have control over every step of the process, so much more is possible than what you assumed was possible.
I worked on this engine on and off for about two years, slowly learning all the minutia of how to make a game from its most basic parts. I eventually found a job in a German software company that was looking for my specific skills in engine work that I had taught myself. So I unexpectedly moved to Germany, planning to continue work on the game in my free time, which they were thankfully okay with.
I did not continue work on the game. This job killed me. As of a few months ago I'm no longer working there.
The particular circumstances of this job, which are outside of the scope here to really talk about in detail, drained my soul. It sucked away all of my time and energy, and I soon found myself with barely any motivation to do anything outside of work. It was good work. I was learning a lot. And sometimes I even had the means to work on my own projects on my late evenings and weekends. But this was the exception rather than the norm. After a year and a half, I said my goodbyes and resigned under difficult messy circumstances. I learned a lot more about programming, but the job left me burnt out, demotivated, and even more disconnected from the people and communities that I actually wanted to be a part of and living in a country where I barely spoke the language.
My character arc is unfortunately in the third act trials and tribulations at the moment. With this time I have been doing a lot of self reflection, healing, and evaluation of what I want to do in the future. It's why this retrospective has the tone that it does I think.
So what is next? I'm taking time to decide. Should I try and find some other place for myself in the game industry and find a "real" job? Or is it time to finally take the plunge and seriously put some money into starting production on a commercial project? Or is there something else that I haven't envisioned yet? Since exiting school, my long term goal has always been to figure out how to make this game making thing work at the scale where I would be comfortable putting a price tag on the end result and to also be something I'm proud of. But even this very core desire of mine has been under reevaluation recently for me. Games are so hard to make, man. And even harder to make well. And even harder to make in the painstakingly slow and precise way that I've fallen in love in making them.
I've promised more in the future. I'm going to do my best to keep that promise. But as I hope is clear now, I have a lot of stuff to figure out still.
The previous game that I had been working on for two years, the "MetaWare successor", as I've introduced it previously elsewhere, I've shelved temporarily, actually. It's something I still want to make. But being forced to spend time away from it made me see the behemoth it was becoming, both technically and conceptually, and it needs some serious work to bring it back down to a reasonable scope in a way I would still be happy with. It was trapped in pre-production hell, or in other words, trapped in me only working on the engine and not on any of the game content proper, as can often happen when building your own engine. Which while not immediately productive, was still important for me to do I think, even if it didn't jumpstart me into something finished. I needed to spend that time learning about game making and software development on my own terms.
Recently I've been exploring something new: a game that attempts to innovate on the rhythm game genre in a similar way the rhythm heaven series did, but in a slightly different direction. This is quite a departure from a visual novel, but I am originally a musician after all! I'm still in the phase of research and experimentation and haven't fit all the pieces together yet, but I'm far enough along to feel comfortable mentioning it here. Everything is from scratch of course, including my own audio engine that is fairly capable now, engineered for as low audio latency as is possible, lower than I've seen in any non-handheld game. It has a more reasonable scope than what I was working on before, and also unlike before, I've been iterating on game design instead of only getting trapped in doing engine work. It's much more viable to be a successful project that I can reasonable finish that doesn't die from my grand ideas and scope creep talents. So it might be what you see next from me.
But don't count on it. I might get another job and trade my soul to a corporation again. Or perhaps you'll see me on a team that makes something I'm proud of in some other context. Or maybe something else entirely. Maybe it won't even be a game. That part of the story is out of my hands to write for you here.
Thank you to everyone who has continued to put their love into MetaWare in my radio silence. And thanks for indulging me in this very long retrospective. I have a feeling that this game means something pretty different to me than what I imagine it might mean to you. I hope it was interesting to hear my perspective.
If you have made fanart or fan content of anything relating to MetaWare and posted it somewhere on the internet, chances are I have seen it and enjoyed it! I look out for it since there's not enough of it to be overwhelming and I enjoy finding it.
I apologize for not giving you anything new in all this time. I know it's frustrating. I share that frustration, believe me. If I were doing what was best for this game, or was was most popularly requested, or what was best for my own immediate financial success, I would have churned out MetaWare High School (Demo) (Complete Version) 2 Deluxe Season 5 Plus! by now. I hope it's clear from all this story making that I've done here that even though I may not be working towards what's best for MetaWare, I am doing a lot of work to find what's best for me. Thanks for your patience. And thanks for playing.
Until next time,
Ahmayk/Marc
- "5 Years" logo thumbnail by Count Cannoli
- Character art & collage by by SparkBag
