I Installed Linux Just to Feel Something
And other ways I procrastinated on my indie game
Last fall I published a microscopic game called Big Larry’s Beach Baseball. It felt great to finish something, polish it, and let strangers on the internet judge it. Is it the best game in the world? No. Is it going to make me rich? Absolutely not.
Since publishing BLBB, I haven’t posted a single update on my main project, For the Birds. I’d like to say it’s because I’m busy with my day job, or because I’m carefully plotting a masterpiece. The reality is that I’ve spent the last six months oscillating between "existential dread" and "unfocused creative mania." For a while now I’ve been feeling the pressure to finish something so that I can publish it and write about it or post it somewhere and capture that feeling of accomplishment when something is finished. And I suppose get some kind of external validation. But I have to be honest, it’s a lot harder to finish creative projects when you have to work for money.
So, instead of finishing one big thing, I have started twelve small things. Have I figured out the perfect work-life balance? Do I have all the answers? Of course I do. I have a PhD, which means I’m professionally trained in overthinking simple tasks until they become complex problems.
Looking back at the last six months, I haven’t shipped the birdgame. But I have done a lot of cool, diverse stuff.
Beep-Boops and Boxes
I decided to learn music production because I hate feeling accomplished and wanted to feel like a beginner again. I didn’t make the music for BLBB, but I want to for the next game. So, I downloaded FLStudio, hooked up my piano, and immediately forgot how music works.
I could talk about the fun of breaking down the MegaMan Cutman theme, but the reality is that I’m sitting in my office making 8-bit beep-boops on FamiStudio and banging on pots and pans while apologizing to my wife. It’s loud, it’s bad, and I’m making it.
Is this music?
I also returned to the fundamentals of art. I started the "Drawabox" lessons because I hate feeling accomplished twice. I’ve finished lesson one and am currently on box #50 of the "250 Box Challenge." As an extension to drawing I’ve been doing some alla prima style oil painting. Of course, I couldn’t help turning it into a more complex project and started making character portraits for a D&D campaign for my friends and myself. I’m about half done with this project.
None of these sketches or loops are going to win awards. There is no pressure to “publish” a practice drawing of a cube or a D&D portrait. It’s a nice respite for my brain to just exist in the unfinished middle of a project without worrying about the end result.
Rage-Quitting My Own Code
While drawing and music felt like a breath of fresh air, I was feeling stuck trying to return to my main project, For the Birds. This past summer was chaotic. The last few months were a blur of pivoting to make BLBB, helping my dad with the fall harvest, and restarting my full-time job. Somewhere in that chaos, I lost the rhythm needed to work on complex bird spawn algorithms.
Here is the truth about game dev: sometimes you code yourself into a corner that isn't fun. I have a spawn and progress algorithm for the bird game. It works. The math is correct. And it’s incredibly boring. Whenever I sat down to work on improving it my creative muse left me. So I did what any developer would do: I completely abandoned the project.
I started making Trash Bandit (working title) that is a little platformer in the style of a puzzle platformer like Donkey Kong ‘94 for the Game Boy. I spent days getting the jumping mechanics to work and I got them to a point where I feel like my next step is actually making the levels and theme. Instead of forcing myself to fix a complex, un-fun algorithm, I let myself just play with a raccoon who jumps good.
But apparently, one unfinished technical project wasn’t enough distraction.
Building Procrastination Within Procrastination
Recently, my day job shifted from backend ML research and data engineering to include the flashy world of frontend. Naturally, I decided to bring this trauma home with me.
I wanted a personal site, but I didn’t want a template, and I didn’t want it to scream “HIRE ME.” I wanted a space for myself. A digital garden. A MySpace, but without Tom. I built the site from scratch, deployed it to Azure, and spent way too much time on CSS animations. But the pièce de résistance of this procrastination effort? I added a command line interface (CLI) to navigate the website. (I also started building not one, but TWO idle games to play inside the site. Neither is finished. You saw that coming.)
I didn’t say this was a playground for things I find useful. Does a personal website need a CLI? No. Is it terrible UX for non-technical and mobile users? Yes. Did I enjoy building it? Immensely. It’s a useless feature, and that is exactly why it’s great. Of course, I haven’t finished the website either, so you can’t use it anyway.
Speaking of wonderfully unnecessary tech projects, I bought a new laptop and immediately removed Windows to install Linux. It was perfect, except for one thing: the laptop kept falling asleep while I was playing piano through the MIDI input. FLStudio on Linux wouldn’t keep the machine awake. To make matters worse, Strawberry on Linux wouldn’t keep the machine awake when playing music either.
I know I could just set the power settings to never sleep, but I’m lazy and if I want to listen to music, I don’t want to remember to toggle the power settings every time. So instead of taking two seconds to change the settings, I spent 15 hours writing a bash script to do it for me. I wrote up the power solution to keep the laptop awake and put it on github as a “smart kde inhibitor”. Zero stars so far.
The Graveyard of Good Intentions
So, here is the current inventory of the last half-year. It isn't a finished game, but it is a magnificent shrine to the unfinished:
A laptop that I hacked to stay awake.
A website with a terminal that nobody asked for.
Two half-baked idle games within the website you can’t use.
Half a platformer about a jumpy raccoon.
Fifty (50) drawings of boxes.
Three painted trading cards.
A birdgame that is currently on life support.
If I showed you a highlight reel of For the Birds from the last year, it would look like I’m a disciplined indie dev making steady progress.
It would also be a lie.
Real life is getting distracted, building weird tools, and abandoning complex math to draw raccoons. I used to think devlogs were supposed to be educational. “Here is how you optimize your pathfinding algorithms! Follow along for productivity hacks!”
But looking at my pile of over-engineered nonsense, I realize the real optimization was just giving myself permission to make useless garbage. And honestly? It’s working. The existential dread is gone, replaced entirely by unfocused creative mania.
If you need me, I’ll be drawing box #51.
Then it’s back to birds.