Regret

2026/01/20


This year, in June, the game that started it all (Alien Invasion) will turn 10 years old. Nothing I made before it had as much impact on my life, and most of the older games aren't available publicly anyways. But the last 10 years were not full of great memories and game-making shenanigans, but instead of misery and nonsense.

I regret all of it. Whereas normal people tend to learn from their mistake, I instead hyperfocus on the same fuckup and double down for eternity. Of the past 10 years, less than 3 were actually spent on games, and only 2 had me making new stuff consisntently.
So what did I actually do?

I obsessed over what name I should publish my games under. Switching from one to another, then back to previous ones, over and over, it was annoying, but manageable, though it also had me losing tons of time, as every game had to be edited, then reuploaded to feature the newly selected name. After 2018 I simply had too many games to go through each time. I decided to stop until I settle on something. It took 6 years. It's complete insanity, but of course, it wasn't the only problem. Other factors played a bigger role in having me not make anything for years.
I obsessed over whether my games needed to be more "normal" or more "bizarre". Colorful or, instead, fully hand-drawn. Very long... or short and quick. I also wanted to connect them to a single shared universe. This took all the fun out of game design and instead made me spend all my time thinking about the details of something I wasn't even doing anymore.

I obsessed over solutions. If I can't settle on a name - let's use ALL of them! Every game will use whatever it featured first. When that only caused more uncertainty - I decided to take my time and invent the perfect name. After that, I thought I'd pick from my previous aliases. Or, maybe, something random? In the meantime, the games needed to be adressed too... At first, I considered updating every single one of them, adding tons of content to make them all "worth keeping". But the exhaustion and need for a quick fix wouldn't allow that. So how about combining them into a bigger games? Again, I was too tired, and did not want to touch my previous games at all. So I chose the nuclear option. When the summer of 2018 ended, I deleted the source files (!!!) to most of my games, ensuring that no solution can ever be found. In what world was this a better choice than just keeping everything as-is and making new games without an "about" section? This led to a stalemate. Can't go back to how things were, can't do anything about it either. FUCK!

Nevertheless, I turned to updating my older games either way, though most of the time I just refined them, rather than added content. I juggled new game ideas in my head, occasionally even trying to work on them (I started working on the second chapter of Mr.Bean VS Scatman in late 2018) though no to avail. Each time I had the same notion in my head, "This isn't gonna last, I need to sort things out, then I can make games again". I didn't want to use Construct anymore, feeling that gamemaker would be more appropriate and trying to learn bits of it here and there. Why? Eventually I just accepted that I will not be making anything new any time soon.

But at the end of 2020, a miracle happened. I sat down and updated two of my games, adding ludicrous amounts of content to them, and finally transforming a very short FPS game into Mr.Bean VS Scatman, something that I've been meaning to do since 2017! With newfound hope, I restored the website and quickly returned to my original plan of updating everything. Pure Black 3D, Rum 3D, KLoP3D and Transfer Administrator all got massive updates. But I wasn't having fun at all, so I moved on to doing nothing again. Back then I didn't realize this, but it wasn't worth it. Mr.Bean VS Scatman became, at least from my point of view, a legendary game. But what good did it do to do any extra work on a prank game like PB3D, or waste effort on the short but sweet KLoP which went from being an enjoyable 4 level game to an unbearable snoozefest with 5 times as many levels? As for Transfer Administrator, I hated working on it even more. The original took a few hours to make, the remake took a month. It's nice to see the original fully fleshed out, but it was a terrible choice of a game to work on right after another slog (KLoP3D) and immediately after returning to game design in general. It's no wonder I was drained and unwilling to work on anything after that.

Time passed. Eventually, other hobbies appeared in my life, and though they didn't last, I was glad to enjoy stuff once again. But this shit was always at the back of my head... waiting.

In June 2024, another miracle happened. A name! I don't know how, but I knew exactly what I wanted to use. And at the of that year, yet another miracle. I sat down with a few beers and played through my 3D games again, then wrote down a plot line for a unified, single game that would combine all the ones I felt were inadequate on their own. And then I made it! And it seemed like a good job, though not as amazing as Mr.Bean VS Scatman. I was then going to remake some of my older games, when suddenly I went "fuck it" and tried to recover old files again. I have no idea how it's possible (since I failed every time before), but I managed to recover almost every single source file from 2017-2018 that I was missing. This changed everything! I planned out what I would combine with what else and went on to spend the next few weeks on my grand masterplan. This time, I took the whole "single universe" thing seriously. Hell, I even considered somehow connecting Mr.Bean VS Scatman, which takes place in the real world, to all my other games. I also took a stance against violence and illicit substances (why?), removing all mentions of alcohol and the more bloodier scenes from my games. Big games won over small, unified or disjointed, yada yada. Thought it was nice to work on games again, some of this effort was really, really not necessary, especially that insane combined 3D game.

When it came to actually making new stuff, I suddenly felt lost. What the fuck do I do? After making 3 new games (I'm surprised I got them done) I burned out for the rest of the year, and it ended up being my most miserable year so far.

2026 started off with more frankensteining of old games. Though I'm glad to have combined all the Alien Invasion games it was a pain to update Rum 4, and once I was finished, I finally realized just how foolish this entire affair had been. My grand masterplan backfired - shared universe and lore, larger games only as well as taking things too seriously in general, all of this stuff is just not compatible with my creative process.

..But, it cannot be! This would mean that all my work has been for nothing!
 And indeed, most of my work (and lack of thereof) was ultimately a major waste of time.

All I did was create and sustain my own misery. It finally hit me - the regret is never going away. But the regret I felt in the Summer of 2018 is not comparable to what I feel now. The wasted years are not coming back. I acted unbecoming, whined and complained, while everyone around me moved on and continued to have fun. Why? Why would I do any of this?
But of course, by 2018 it was too late. 2018 was a reenactment of what happened in 2017, and actually, it happened more than once there, on a smaller scale. But alas, I never learn.


Things are different now. My current real life circumstances sure do keep me useless. I never needed to change my style or learn gamemaker. Construct has always been more than enough - I could have made tons of games, and therefore lots of fun memories. My life after 2018 is a blur. My desire to keep making games is fueled entirely by negative emotions and experiences, and today, the process itself just feels like a pain in the ass. The end.

I will be updating my catalogue. Instead of treating some extreme makeovers as updates, I'll treat them as new games altogether (because they are), e.g. the 2021 versions of Pure Black and Transfer Administrator. I'll try to make as many different iterations of games available as possible. Perhaps I'll improve the design of the website, too. Maybe, who knows, new games will appear, too.


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