On being a hopeful creative when the world feels hopeless

I've already touched on this in the past in a few places scattered across the internet (like both the Kickstarter comms page for Alcyone: The Last City, my upcoming interactive novel, as well as on my own personal social media) but recently reading this interview with Gareth Damian Martin of Citizen Sleeper/Citizen Sleeper 2 (and the excellent In Other Waters, which I was also an OG Kickstarter backer for) has gotten me thinking about this topic again.

"[I’m] thinking a little more about how do we continue to build a future when we know that it’s going to fall apart. We know that there’s an inevitable entropy to everything, not just political systems and structures, but our lives and our physical bodies. We know it’s going to fall apart, and yet each day, we keep getting up and we keep doing things."
- Gareth Damian Martin

The development cycle for Alcyone has been quite long if we're being fully accurate about it. I had a very, very rough prototype some time back in 2015, and development of the game has gone along at varying degrees of intensity in the near-decade since then. Whilst I think it's an extreme exaggeration to say I've been "developing the game for ten years" (especially since it's only been my full-time job for the last ~two), it's still been a project that's existed while my life has gone through some pretty transformative stuff.

When I first started writing Alcyone, I was in the middle of an abusive relationship even if I wouldn't realise it until some time later. But my headspace was quite dark, and what I was writing reflected that. I was not connecting with hopefulness, because I didn't feel hopeful in my day to day existence.

As my life changed (in ways predominantly good and healthy, but there definitely were upheavals) I found that I was having a much harder time connecting with the mentality I had at the start of the game's development; however, I'd now promised something to people, had financial support to deliver it, and had external expectations to meet. I was stressed that I couldn't seem to figure out how to link myself back to that despondency, and I questioned why I even wanted to.

When Alcyone became my full-time job, I found myself dealing with a lot of writer's block at first explicitly because I didn't want to write a dark, helpless, hopeless story like I had in mind when I first began the project. And I was struggling to figure out how to reconcile the game I'd pitched publicly with the sort of stories I want to be telling now.

In the end I think I've managed to find a balance that solves the conundrum, and I'm very excited for players to experience it when the game is released (just a couple of months to go!), but it was a challenge bigger than I expected and held me up creatively for a lot longer than I wanted it to. But, I think the story is better for it, and I think people will enjoy it a lot more — particularly because my heart is in it rather than it would have been before.

There's a lot to be vexed and stressed and despondent about these days; I didn't see a reason to drag all of it into my fictional sci-fi world, as well.

PS: I was a huge fan of In Other Waters and Citizen Sleeper — if the latter had existed earlier in the development cycle for Alcyone I would have been "heavily inspired" by it in a lot of ways. I'm very much looking forward to the sequel even if the likelihood of me having the time to play a video game over the next few months is hovering around absolute zero.