Dear Red - The lifespan of a feeling

 After being gut punched by my real life limitations after developing discount run, and being stressed out by the tangled mess that was falling islands, I took a yearlong break from making games. The decision was not conscious, as a kid, playing games was my safe space, and as I grew up, making them took overtook playing them as a safe space. It was somewhere where I could zone out from the mess of sounds that was my house, insecurities didn't exist and limits were set by me. But the walls I had bumped into while making my first games left a crack on that safe space, a space where insecurities could seep through and anxiety snuck in.    

The safest unsafe place  

By this time in my life, I had taken a break from college and traveled to the south coast of Mexico with my dad and brother in search of job opportunities. Six months if ups and downs later we hit rock bottom, everybody was jobless and it felt like there was nothing we could do. Two weeks later, I was able to land a job at a kind of shady, jack of all trades IT company. They did everything from isp services to installing security cameras. There was little staff, and it was my job to take care of the website, help out with router configurations, backup computers and work on whatever impossibly big and complicated software idea the owner had at the time.  

A lot of days went by doing nothing, the owner would come in every day and tell me the day's tasks, but sometimes tasks would run out or the owner would just come in late, so I had a lot of time to think. I remembered an activity I wrote in middle school, where I wrote a card to myself and the teacher held on to it until the year's end. I thought about writing to myself with hopes for the future, and suddenly I had the urge to make another game.    

The time traveling consciousness  

As I was drafting my first self-email on the notepad app, a thought hit me; will I even make it to next year? From what I had been living the past couple of years the thought felt like a real concern, if the little luck that had helped us get by most days ever ended, what would become of me? So I decided I would write to a friend.  

As I was developing the idea, overthinking got the better of me and I suddenly had the story in my head of a friend who reads his buddy's delayed emails. What if at the end you discover the sender is dead, and by the time his emails get to the recipient they are but a painful remnant of a consciousness that used to exist? It sounded great, an engaging setting for a short game, but no mistakes would be made this time. Scope would be small, graphics would be simple and I was even writing daily to a friend to get in the mood.  

The mood... I thought, what was I trying to communicate with this game?  

Despair  

After hoping for several years the situation would get better, and only see it getting worse, hope was an afterthought. I felt so hopeless and stressed where I was at in life, that without noticing it, I decided the player would feel the same. Stress, desperation and eventually despair. I erased my self-email from the draft notepad and wrote a good enough story on it, divided by several emails that would represent the level number.  

This time, the game would have limitations just like me, that way it would be realistic to expect myself to finish it. A 25 level, single screen platformer where you can only jump and move, the goal is to get a mail envelope at the end of each level while dodging obstacles. Not on purpose, but the game's difficulty was tedious and frustrating, which in retrospect feels like it fits the game.  

Taking the risk  

Enemies were directly taken from the floating islands code, but movement was a different story. I started running into the exact same bugs that plagued the floating island's movement, so I decided I would take the risk and try something I had never tried before, let's go into the asset store. I had a general idea of how ray casting worked now, and felt confident enough using a script for it in my game, so I downloaded that and suddenly moving was SO smooth.  

I already knew how to work with canvases and decided to try and learn how to make a typing effect for the emails you receive. Working on the game in my off times and days off, I started to get motivated to try risking it in other areas of my life as well. I ditched the bus and started walking home, I tried to become a bit more open about my feelings and I even revived my relationship with my sister, who stayed behind when we moved.  

Twenty four levels too many  

And so, with the basic mechanics and systems in place, the only thing that was left was to fill in the gaps with levels. "It's a small game, so designing levels shouldn't be very complicated" I thought. Little did I know that the few mechanics and strict limitations I had set for myself would be my worst enemy when designing levels.  

The first levels were super easy, but once I got to designing level 8 or 9 I started having troubles thinking about how it's supposed to go. I spent days just thinking about how I could make the next levels without having them look and feel the same as the others. I made a habit of free handing levels in my sketchbook to see if they looked okay, I'll put these at the bottom of the document. And then, I got to level 16.  

Even feelings die  

The sequence of events that follows has yet to leave my mind, as it's the first time I made a big decision based solely on my criteria and looking out for myself. It was morning and the owner still had not come in, so I was working on setting up level 16 of the game. I got a whatsapp from my sister, saying they were hiring at her job and she was pretty sure she could put in a good word for me. I felt a rush if anxiety hit me HARD, "what if I wasn't good enough?" "Am I really going to leave my parents and my brothers?" "The owner is going to be mad at me for quitting". These lasted less than a second before almost impulsively, saying yes.  

Hope was back, I could go back to where I lived before, work and continue college. And as time progressed I worked less and less on the game and focused on getting everything set up, less than a month later I was on my way to start working. I still thought about the game, but I even came to view it in a negative light at one point, "it's too edgy and depressive" I said.  

The feeling that pushed me to get the game done was gone, and with a different perspective I could barely get motivated to work in it. One night, I just said screw it and finished all the levels that were missing. To this day I consider the Dear Red as a "finished" game, but I feel a lot could’ve tweaked and polished before I stopped working on it. It's missing a piece, a coherent feeling.  

Old mail - Closing thoughts  

As I'm writing this I'm judging myself for barely talking about the development of the game at all, Same thing happened with my last post mortem now that I think about it. But I think the story is relevant, it shows games are influenced just as much by whatever is happening outside the screen as they are by what's happening inside. A game born of hopelessness stops looking like a good project the moment the person working on it becomes hopeful.  

Poetically, the game has become its own time capsule of a feeling I no longer remember that well. Whenever I replay it I'm brought back to sitting on that reception desk, with a chair that was way too high and a back rest that was way too small, walking home while contemplating life, getting home and watching my phone for a few hours, lying to myself that the reason I didn't eat that day was because I forgot, and finally falling asleep and doing it all over again. I was entirely convinced that was going to be how the rest of my life played out from that moment, and whenever I play this game I realize how wrong I was.  

Games should transcend emotions and communicate something more.