So roughly a month ago, I set this project free into the ether. I have watched it dance around and pondered how it moves, what could be improved, where it might go next. But I have not opened the project in Unity, glanced at the code, or opened any of the animations to touch anything up. They all sit in stasis, and perhaps it will be a bit more time before I turn my attention to them again.

Instead I have poured myself into thinking about the project in longevity. I have written multiple budgets, timelines, plans, an extended GDD, and most of all, thought about what I might want to do with it all. This has spurred me to re/start projects I have thought about for a long time, or had put on the back burner while I simply tried to get through the day. I've set meetings up to chat with folks about how to make the project happen if I can scrape up the money to finish a prototype. 

It led me to reaching out to old friends and making new ones. In the unlikely event you read these words; thank you. It's been a joy over the past few weeks to chat about game design and theory and art and poetry and the meaning of making things. Your insights and our discussions have been so illuminating and interesting, and it makes my heart happy to have had them. And our discussions remind me of the joy of making games, and how fantastical it is that anything gets made at all.

Right now I am house sitting- I swear this is relevant- for my aunt. My late uncle was a poet, and the two of them collected art. So much art. I'm talking floor to ceiling art. Right now where I sit I can see... 46? different artworks both painting and sculpture. It's kind of wild. So much of this collection is traded, bartered for with poetry or labour or a good meal, on loan from friends who've passed; collected in a way meant to be reverent to the art itself. A collection never intended to be collected but now rivals many galleries with easily 500+ artworks.

My uncle and I once had a conversation in which he asked me how much I thought he'd made as a poet over his life. A dozen published works or so, invited as a speaker to read his work, well known in the smallest of circles of regional poetry. "$2000," he said, "and without your aunt, I would've struggled more". I like to imagine that I said something meaningful back. 

I doubt I did.

So for years I worked helping support others make the work they wanted to make, scraped money together to help folks pay for their projects, wrote grants and cheques, sent paypal payments and wires. I ran the numbers recently- though I am scared to run them properly to know what my accomplishments might actually be. I've helped roughly 40 studios learn the skills they need to start up, around 30 games I wrote the cheques to fund through artists fees, advocating on behalf of the medium at multiple levels of government, dozens of events spanning years showcasing hundreds of games with 2000+ games curated across them all, somewhere around half a million dollars in grants written to help pay folks making and supporting games...

But in all of that, that conversation sank in the back of my mind and held me. That I was scared of my own work seeing the light of day, of trying to do the very thing I supported from the other side. When I shuffle my own projects to the side to prioritize supporting others, or teeter on the edge of finishing until something comes up to justify not finishing. 

"The ghosts have you," kit tells me while I sit on the floor in the days after finishing the jam. "The art ghosts."

Sometimes it feels like something wants to be made. Suddenly it is real, has a voice, is sitting on your couch playing Switch while it waits for you to get ready to leave. 

At times I want to slap away its open hands like a child, kick at its shins, crying, and baulk at the very idea of making it known. I want to scream incomprehensibly, kick the wall in frustration, and run away.

"It's okay, I will be here until you're ready"

I think I am ready to be here, and making this thing. This has been a ghost long enough. While I'm not sure how much more of this will be public there is work to be done, and a lot of it, to see this through.