What do studio closures, a changing funding landscape, cancer, A&E, and co-working spaces have in common? I didn't expect them to be a major part of my last year. As Flammable Penguin Games approaches the one-year mark and the announcement of our first VR title—after cancelling one title and shelving another—I thought it apt to reflect on how what was meant to be a studio with staff is currently a largely solo endeavour.
This is a difficult post. I have to acknowledge the troubles I've had, and why the reality is at the moment this is a largely a solo endavour rather than a studio as planned, and my personal struggles.
The Energy Equation
Making time to write blog posts for the website is much like my Twitch or video stuff. It takes time and, more importantly, it takes energy. Though I feel it is important to discuss things that I'm doing and also just to generally market the company ahead of actually marketing a specific game. The difficulty is, people will say there is never enough time. The matter is, there's never enough energy.
There's no focus. Everything that takes brainpower burns calories and takes as much off-cycle processing as on-cycle processing. Especially difficult programming problems and business decisions often take days of not thinking—being in the shower, gardening, walking about—as they do time sitting down with pen and paper and working the problem, as it were. And so it is with overloading your brain with new TV shows, fictional books, video games, strong narratives, or side hobbies like this, which contains a bunch of time and energy to format and structure your thoughts and bring something of value to you, the reader.
The truth of the matter is that the balance of time and energy is increasingly difficult in what is largely a solo endeavour at the moment, for reasons I'll discuss another time. It is challenged by the need to communicate one's thoughts, to bring things into the light and challenge them. I dictate this at the same time as I'm attempting to code, and I find my brain has immediately entered a kind of state-freeze because while I'm able to type out code and talk at the same time, the lines of thought are parallel, and even quite simplistic code can often take more mental energy than you think. Even speaking in one's own native language on a topic that is considered fairly low-drag, the brain will falter or stutter. Focused, diligent work is often more efficient. As my mum says, "Make haste, not waste."
Understanding ADHD and Brain-Switching
Interruptions are a difficult thing. Brain-switching tracks is the hard thing, especially as this year I have pretty much largely accepted I have ADHD. It's a diagnosis I've dodged for most of my life, from childhood when there was an over-prescription of Ritalin, all the way through to the current era where people say there is an over-medication of the issue because of TikTok or some such. I am seeking professional medical aid don't worry; I am not self-diagnosing myself, so to speak.
However, it can be true that a disease or a disorder of the mind has become more prevalent. It can also be true that we have under-diagnosed the issue, especially in Britain, where a strong Protestant work ethic has established a cultural basis, and many of the mildly neurodivergent behaviours are commercially beneficial and have been encouraged. Though, as any medical professional will tell you, the only difference between being sad and being depressed is crossing enough statistical diagnosis points to receive a medical diagnosis. Things like autism and other composite medical issues are all about whether you cross some kind of threshold, because they're symptomatic in definition, not origininating from a virus or dectable single source.
The nature of the issue is one of thresholds, of crossing a line. In my case, I found the manic nature of a video game studio well-suited to my mental tendencies: the constant deadlines, producers breathing down my neck, the structure and the format of studio life. The manic craziness of the video games industry in general is well-suited to me. Running one's own business without permanent staff and a team, however, post-COVID, and with the variety of stresses which include alcohol, old age, and other issues known to be worsening factors for ADHD, meant that by the time I left my previous job, my mind was better described as Swiss cheese. And while it is true that some of my issues with working were due to a growing disinterest in my work and my mental focus returning to video games, it is also true that my condition had worsened, and I'd become more aware of it after a psychiatrist friend alerted me to a lot of my tendencies. So, I'm still in that pipeline and learning to work in, as much as I despise the phrase, my "new normal." It has however had an out of proportion affect on the company.
Missing Studio Culture
I do miss the studio culture and the manicness of getting to work with other people—the structure that it provides. Though I welcome this opportunity to go out on my own and do the thing I want to do. So I'm looking forward to that in the biggest of ways. That is to say, I'm enjoying the process. Though, let's also admit that the first year of operation, which is approaching, has been a rough one. A year that, if you had laid out all the challenges I would face before leaving a stable job, I likely would have put it off or not jumped. I'm glad I did, though, despite the challenges.
Year One Challenges: The Perfect Storm
Funding Disappointments
The challenges began with a lot of business deals that were not certain by any means, but were well on their way, falling through all of a sudden as Meta changed its position on investment. There was a bit of a domino effect about a month after I started the company, and various sources of funding I had previously planned to receive didn't come through. I had an expectation that wasn't hit. So admittedly, these are not huge setbacks, but they happen.
Medical and Personal Struggles
Not long after that, a few other things happened, most notably on the medical side with friends and family. For privacy reasons, I shan't go into it, but to sum it up, over the last six or eight months, my mother's cancer returned for the third time. My wife had her first-ever emergency surgery on a very scary day in December, which also required a follow-up surgery. She's totally fine now, but my mother is still deep in the process of chemo and such. Additionally, one of our friends who was having a rather rough time before this got a tricky, life-threatening diagnosis. She's quite young, and it's been difficult. Not to mentioned the queer community in the UK has faced a lot of challenges. Let us just say our friends and family have had a rough time of late.
The Loss of Tentacle Zone
Additionally, the co-working space which provided the template, structure, and framework for me to launch my company was shut down when, unfortunately, Payload Studios hit a troubled spot, like so many other game studios, and effectively had to shut its offices. Thankfully, they were able to sell their IP and keep a few staff members, but the vast majority were let go, and the Tentacle Zone that provided that safeness from which to build was destroyed by the economic environment.
There was a month or two of no office, trying to move the company office, a friend offering me space in their office, and realising that my ADHD had gotten as bad as it had. Seeking medical treatment, as you can imagine, is a whole other pipeline to go down.
Though I am happy to report we now rent space with some other indies in the Games London office, which is ideal. Also I've ommitted the Game Changer story from this article as it is more my wife's story to tell than mine but that was a huge boost in the first few months of the company before everything took a turn. So we have landed on our feet but it was a rough few months of no office which it turns impacts me more than I thought.
The Godot Gamble
Not so much an unexpected problem, I made the quite bold decision to use Godot for the first title. I won't say I regret that decision; however, even at the time I was making it, I warned people off it, as it is not a commercially proven engine. There are titles out there, but it is definitely a less-tested option, and to say I've hit a lot of the edge cases with Godot is an understatement. It's one that makes me consider my own studio's future with it. But hopefully, a lot of the systems that we're building in our own custom branch are robust enough to make future titles for us commercially more viable, rather than switching to Unreal. Though it is a decision we will think long and hard about.
Why Share This Journey?
Why am I writing this rather long-winding article, one may wonder? Well, partly it's to share the challenge and the journey. I've come to realise that one of the reasons I have been somewhat opaque on this journey is a desire to present a professional front and a stability that is, well, professional, and to avoid that manic, individual quality basically robbing the company of its reputation.
The reality is, that is still my goal. I still want to hire employees as soon as we've secured more lines of funding, and I want to build a studio, not a mostyl solo developer endeavour. So, that is still very much my goal. But the reality on the ground at the moment is one of an individual with many challenges, soldiering on, so to speak. And again, the dark tone should be avoided because the reality is I'm actually having a lot of fun. As I've said to people, 90% of my stress is worrying about the continuity of my company because I am enjoying it so much and I don't want it to end. But that does require a degree of fiscal responsibility and looking towards P&L sheets and thinking about how to keep the studio viable into the future.
Moving Forward with Transparency
In that vein, with everything that I'm faced with, I think the appropriate solution is to share more of my journey, to be more, how should I say, open with the challenges that I face. To that end, I'm not going to be a daily streamer/vlogger or anything like that (I haven't been for a very long time), but I think I am going to be sharing more frequently from a personal angle. A personal angle on my game development journey, and perhaps a few more difficulties faced, and maybe a few more candid moments—the occasional stream or occasional video.
Generally, with my articles on the website, I am likely to keep them more technically focused or, shall we say, lesson-focused, so they provide some takeaway for the reader, so they are more constructive in nature. And, to be frank, they last longer, because a lot of this personal, moment-to-moment content is navel-gazing and less informative in nature. So for those reasons, the blog posts are likely to be for when I have a concise series of thoughts or a learning lesson I'd like to share.
The truth of the matter is that I am often stopped from hitting an upload button, a record button, or sharing my journey in general by the fear of wasting your time, not providing content of value, and being a whiny little bitch on the internet—which, let's face it, all of us are sometimes. That being said, I do understand that it is somewhat harmful to project this image when the reality is that everyone has their challenges. It gives a false impression to others who are struggling, and it frankly blocks me from support and from a community that could otherwise be helping me through the situation. I'm not very good at asking for that support, so being more open about this particular journey may mean that I'm able to find those resources and help others on their journey by my example.
Game Announcement and Develop
I was planning to be on stores and announced for Develop. I'm close, so fucking close. But I've made the last minute call to hold fire. I'm going to be getting all the material locked and loaded and allow myself to talk openly about the project while at Develop with my peers. I'm also going to try share a bit more from Develop and this month the game will go live in a very early state. So exciting times. This game will be updated and mantained for a long while but hopefully we are starting to work on new things as well soon and look for that funding. But most importantly I want our first game to be a long term grower from humble seed.
Where to Find Me
So, if all of that's useful or in any way interesting to you, I will probably be on my YouTube, or it will be posted here to some extent, or on BlueSky, or probably Twitter again. You can also find me on Mastodon. The social media landscape has fractured in so many ways over the past five years or so. I do like the idea of doing more with Twitch because it doesn't require editing; however, I'm not particularly happy with my Twitch setup from a technical point of view.
With all that being said, I hope you enjoy the journey and the soon-to-be announcement as I try to get this thing to the next stage. Farewell for now.
Follow the journey:
- 🌐 Flammable Penguins Website
- 🎥 YouTube
- 📺 Twitch
- 🦋 BlueSky
- 🐦 Twitter
- 🐘 Mastodon