06022025

I’ll be honest: I didn’t get anything done today as I had planned. I did manage to write a bit, but nothing in-engine. The problem is that I get too distracted in conceptual work, and absorbed in the “why” of everything. I can’t seem to design a single mechanic or think of an image without immediately trying to resolve the question of why it’s present in game, and what its implications are relative to the greater fiction. I spent four hours this afternoon researching prisons in the greater Cincinnati area and trying to plan out viable routes for prisoner transport before realising that this was a largely pointless and wasteful endeavour: the player will neither notice nor care about these kinds of details and they occupy a space in my mind that goes beyond pointless although innocuous frivolity to active, harmful distraction bordering, I suspect, on inadvertent procrastination.

I just need to not think so much about this kind of thing, both right now, and in general. I don’t really have the luxury of wasting entire afternoons trying to devise logistically viable portrayals of prison assassinations based on accounts of guard schedules and local prison cultures and architecture much longer; and even if I did, it would be a colossal waste of time. If every single thing in the development of this game went like this then it would be no different in level of struggle from Work, which is precisely why I wanted to take a break from that project to begin with, and try to pursue something less cognitively taxing.

Lacking sufficient will of my own, what I really need is someone to regularly and actively counteract me on these kinds of things and encourage me instead to just focus on more imminent, tangible things. I wander too easily on my own…