I Like Making Video Games
It's like making art, but with rules.
I completely forgot that a few years ago I made a video game. Or playable media, or whatever it actually is or should be called. I wrote 34 (ish) poems about my first year living in New York City, and then sewed them all together in a choose-your-own-adventure poetry “book” that takes you through a bunch of decisions I made as a newbie in the city. You can live my life and make your own choices about your day or your job or your friends! I’m very curious to see what you would have done, and which poems you end up reading. My game is called “Year”. You can play it here.
It was this experiment that reminded me also, that art and writing and photography and coding can all live happily together on your little glowing pixel screens. The backgrounds of the poems I digitized and pixelated depend on which poems your decisions led you to. The writing is writing, which goes without saying, but to tie all the creativity together in bows of code helps me remember that no matter how free-wheeling my creative process might be, I still need a binary box of numbers to make it into a game.
Creativity and practicality don’t have to be mutually exclusively, but it is kind of nice to know that no matter how much heart I put into my poetry, if my variables aren’t correct in the programming then nothing will happen, or anything will happen, who knows. Bugs in the program do not care about alliteration, they only care about a proper sequence of zeroes and ones.
I recently started coding in Unity, and I’m working on a 2D game. As a cartoonist, I always liked to see my comics come to life. Creating animated sprites of my characters is exciting, reading a comic is one thing, but playing one and seeing the story come to life yourself is something truly special, and also really cool. I love to tell stories, but in games, you tell them to yourself.
I’ll add links to my games as they come out! But for now, if you like games, or poems, or New York, or want to go on your own poetry adventure, check out “Year”, and keep making art, playing games, and being yourself.