When the game ghost won't let you sleep

On diligent creativity vs. inspired creativity

Being a full-time game designer for the past three years, I can confidently say that most of the times, it is a very non-romantic endeavor. There's no flash or flare, no fanfare—just the rhythmic typing of keys for hours, sometimes culminating in a single paragraph or a tiny table of six entries.

You don’t feel particularly inspired, motivated or confident on what you are doing. More than anything, what counts for most days is the ability to show up. To grab your laptop or notebook, and scribble away. To stare at a line for two hours, until it doesn’t even make sense. To keep at it, to follow through, even when you don’t feel like it. Especially when you don’t feel like it.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. They are like, 5% of your job. If you can’t push them through the development process, they will end up in the light bulb graveyard (or purgatory, I think it is a more appropriate metaphor) along with all those app ideas you had that could have made you millions (you have those too, right?).

Look at all those brilliant insights hanging forever in an empty warehouse. Photo by Juan Carlos Becerra on Unsplash

It is particularly hard to push through what I like to call the ‘Suck Valley’—that magical moment when you start to think, ‘this game sucks, I suck, everything sucks!’ Delightful. But if you don’t do it, you’ll be forever haunted by the ghost of ideas past. Yes, sometimes finishing a game is an exorcism.

Granted, I can see a lot of value in unfinished ideas as well. I have my share of games that were developed up to 65-70% just for me to realize, ‘you know what, I think I got what I needed from this. I don’t need to publish it’. And later on, I’ll cannibalize the best bits into a new game. So yeah, every now and then, it is useful to keep those ghosts around for a bit. Brew them a cup of coffee, and wait.

But my point is, in any case, this is all about persistence. That’s what I call diligent creativity. There’s no muse, no ‘a-has’. It is the 'keep-on-keeping-on' spirit that forms the backbone of many creations.

But not always.

‘Ok, I have to write that down right now’

From time to time, however, it can be like in the movies. You stare into the distance, and a spark of brilliance ignites in your mind and illuminates a path that was previously unknown. Ideas flow like a river after a storm, fast and furious, and they demand to be captured before they're lost in the flow of everyday life.

I remember when I came up with the idea for Kismet. I was laying in bed at midnight, unable to sleep for some reason, and out of the blue, the spark came to me. ‘What if we had a game with a single, fluctuating stat?’

Now, I live in a 320 sqft (30m²) studio apartment. There’s no way I can get up and go to my computer without waking up my wife in the process. So I spent the following two hours developing the game in my head. At 2AM, I passed out. Woke up at 8 the next morning, opened up my laptop and typed frantically for 4 hours straight. The whole game was written by lunchtime.

In the afternoon, I spent another 4 hours with layout, illustrations, revision, and the game was published (including a print-on-demand version) by 6 PM. A 32-page game fully developed in 10 hours. Admittedly, it is a quite simple game/experiment that I just felt like it should exist.

It turned out to be one of my most popular creations to date.

It is not often that things like that happen. But when they do, you’ve got to ride that high. I’ve learned that the key aspect in these moments is: creativity loves speed.

When inspiration (or whatever you wanna call it) hits like that, you stand in front of a rare window of opportunity, a magic portal, a shortcut. And it is not about the idea itself, it is the chance to produce without second-guessing yourself. This is when decisions feel instinctual rather than analytical, and the usual roadblocks can seem like mere pebbles underfoot.

When you act upon those moments and embrace the electrifying frenzy of unquestioned creation, you can outpace your self-doubt, your habits of overthinking and over-analyzing. It's a sprint that requires stamina of the mind and the readiness to leap into action. And just like any sprint, it's over before you know it, leaving you breathless, exhilarated, and, if you've harnessed it well, with something truly special at your fingertips.

A jazz pianist recruited by the Grim Reaper

Last week, it happened again.

There I was, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep, when something clicked. I honestly can’t remember how the idea came to me, but in my head, it went something like this:

What if the Grim Reaper came to kill you, but it doesn’t work? Do they leave you alone? Or! Perhaps it recruits you. To be an assistant? Nah. Or an investigator! Of what? Oh! Deaths that happened without their consent. You’ll work for the Department of Unauthorized Deaths. Ha. That’s silly. Yeah, I like that. But why you? What’s so special about you? Maybe you can identify who’s responsible somehow. They are a sort of supernatural being. Do they leave a scent? Or a tone? Oooh! A tone! You’re a musician. You can hear the tones they leave behind and track those entities. And then you catch them? Or report them to the Grim Reaper? Oh. OH! You capture the tones, and form like a song that you play on a special piano, like those phones in Matrix, that the Reaper listens to, and then…

It went like that for a solid three and half hours. Then I collapsed, and picked up the next morning where I left off. I remember sipping my coffee and telling my wife, ‘I don’t know if I hallucinated, but I think I made an entire game last night’. And I had, in my head. Mechanics, dice roll, gameplay loop. All there.

This time, it took a little longer to polish everything. Three days in a frenzy-like state, writing, creating some pieces of art, playing, refining, and then it was done.

44 pages that, as I look through them now, I don’t have a clear recollection of writing them. I had planned a relaxing weekend, but instead, typed away like there was no tomorrow. And it was over before I had the time to question myself if it was worth publishing it. I just… did it.

Midnight Melodies is out now, and it has been very well received, much better than I could expect for such a… peculiar premise. But there it is.

Again, those things don’t happen often. But when they do, you gotta be ready. In a way, I believe diligent creativity nurtures inspired creativity. When a strike of inspiration happens, your creative muscles are prepared for what’s about to happen. You’ve been through this. You know the steps, you know what you need to get done, you can create an outline in minutes, you know where the pieces should fall. And when you need a solution, your repertoire of previous experiments help you concoct a mechanic or two real quick (this is when keeping those ghosts of unfinished games around come in handy).

I am not advocating for insomnia as a creative process. Although it has happened to me more than once, it is not something that I can do on purpose. Most of my days, I just crack open a document and rewrite the same sentence seventeen times. But every time I do that, I am setting the stage for when the Muse comes to visit.

I’ll be ready.