Pleck's Mart

Category: inspiration

  • game con-spiration

    game con-spiration

    I’ve been a lazy game developer lately. 

    A couple months ago I was proudly telling people how much progress I was making on Pleck’s Mart. Heck I was logging at least—at least—a couple hours every day adding to the code base and debugging the game and making art and then sitting at the cafe writing story for the damn thing.

    I also wrote a couple months back about how I made some silly choices around leaning into a dead-end part time job that was supposed to round the rough edges off my days but instead wrapped me up into grocery store drama and derailed a bunch of personal motivation in my off-hours, plentiful tho they were.

    In short tho, I haven’t been coding for about two months now.

    Sadly. Realistically. Frustratingly. 

    There is a mental wall in the way, if I’m being honest, because (a) I was just coming up on a challenging bit of code, (b) a new version of the engine came out in the intervening months, and (c) it’s kinda sorta summer and (d) I should be spit-polishing my resume and not making video games.

    But then I went to Game Con this weekend.

    A couple things happened, very passively to be honest, but they happened at Game Con nonetheless.

    First, I got to wander around and talk—actually chat with and talk to—other indie game developers. That’s big. There’s a hundred reasons to go to a convention linked to your hobby, but seriously on or close to the top of that list of reasons should be the simple fact that hanging out with likeminded individuals is inspiring for another long list of reasons. There is a community. There are organizations boosting these efforts… locally. People have trod this path before us and are coming up the path behind us, and that means something.

    Second, I got to finally have a chat with Chris. We’ve been friends for over twenty years now, hung out countless times, vacationed together, stood atop a mountain peak in the sun, and rung in the new years nearly every year of that twenty. He is a legit developer. I mean, he professionally codes for a living, has a business, does community building, and that list goes on. And I sheepishly gave him access to my github repo. We finally got to chat, hanging out in the halls of Game Con, playing some board games and poking at the demo booths, and he wants to help with Pleck’s Mart. What’s our next step, he asked.

    So, it’s monday morning after the gamer inspiration weekend and I’m looking down the day at a question of not if I go down into the basement today to write some code… but when.

    What is the next step?

    As ever, it’s one problem, one line, one version at a time. And if nothing else, looking for that lost momentum.

  • little treasures

    I like food.  

    I mean, I like the culture and the feeling of food, the idea of it as a thing that links us and propels us and drives us to become more than eaters harvesting nurtients from organic objects, but instead seekers of taste and flavour and aroma and texture and everything that strikes the senses as we dine and indulge.

    It’s no wonder then that when a local international food market opened up near me, sitting here in my quasi-career change retirement and looking for something interesting to occupy me in the hours of the day when I wasn’t behind a keyboard or writing code or making art or studying for the next phase of my serious career, when that market opened that I found myself with a part time job amongst all that interesting sort of food culture.

    It was a fit. And then it wasn’t.

    I left that place and still had food culture on the brain.  And that analytical, data-processing brain of mine had already long been thinking about how I would automate many of our frustratingly manual processes with a good database and some customer model simulations, y’know, in code of course. It would be an interesting exercise, no? To walk through the aisles of a grocery store and map it into a complex digital economic simulation, figuring out all the maths of supply and demand clashing with the forces of microbiology and human pyschology.  Complex and challenging and—

    Politics. I forgot about politics.

    About the same time I was thinking about starting work on a simulation of that store I found myself weighing my future at the same, and internal politics played my hand for me and I gave notice.  I had been through one career burnout already. I wasn’t queued up quite yet for another—or a retriggering of the last one.

    You may know the next two months of that story if you’ve read this blog. 

    I started coding anyhow and my food market simulator idea became the foundations of a silly little cozy game roguelike pixel party coding project now known as Pleck’s Mart.

    But as politics are wont to do, the politics played out, calmed, resolved somewhat, and the vibe of the store reverted—and me, keeping my finger on the pulse of that place, a sudden found myself being offered a chance to go back and do that thing which I had originally thought would be my job: be a food culture guy working in a trendy local international food market. In other words, I am back at work at the place that lightly inspired me towards a video game idea.

    The coding may slow somewhat, but the fresh opportunity to observe a real food market with the eyes of a guy who has been trying to simulate one in said code—that is a priceless opportunity, no?