The Cows Are Finally Comin' Home

It has been a while since my last post and my thirtieth birthday, and I have been meaning to contribute an update here for a long, long time. A lot of life was lived, though very little of it seemed relevant as posting material, abetted by the fact I have deliberately set myself upon a much slower pace when it comes to the busy projects that ordinarily occupy my creative and productive energies. But Spring has arrived and with it some energy to deposit into updates, projects, plans and schemes and all that. What a little sun in the state of Washington will do to a motherfucker cannot be underestimated. There are other factors to this, as well. But I feel like I can say something within me is finally turning over and is once again starting to roll forward!

I thought I'd begin my third decade of life proceeding a bit slower than I ran for most of my twenties. I didn't want to slow down and settle per se, but I did want to run at a less manic pace now that I have some (just a little) clarity on what I value and what I don't need to concern myself with. Some material stability helped form this perspective, I'll admit. I have a good job, good relationship, a place to live, and my immediate family members are in decent health as well. But the true animus of my thinking here is that I don't need to run in order to discover what it is I am curious and passionate about. I am sure there is more to discover in both regards, but for now, I know that I would like to focus more deeply on a few select things and entertain a threshold at the limit of my activity beyond which I really encounter only distraction and distractions. I am trying to obtain focus, slow grown and confident focus in at least this first year of my thirties.

It's been a somewhat uncomfortable adjustment for me, a person who worked multiple jobs in undergrad, who always had several writing projects going at once (and I don't mean waiting in a drawer either), publishing multiple pieces in an annual quarter, and completing games and watching movies, just endlessly and, perhaps interminably, active. I have been deliberate about taking on longer-term "projects" and beginning fewer things, which has chafed against long-held habits to just go go go. Not only have I had to battle the commonplace productivity anxiety that many workers and worker-creatives contend with, but also the fear of falling out of practice or rhythm with a certain activity or specific craft. And it's definitely the latter of these things that has been the hardest to deal with. I can assure myself in anxious, listless moments that a busier time will inevitably come. But the fear of falling out of practice and losing something very difficult to get back stings existentially. And there were other things, of course, that introduced delays or detours and demanded my attention like a series of illnesses experienced by my cat and some tumultuous periods at work and seasonal depression. Lots of fun was had as well, but for a time and in some way, I tell you, it was life in the doldrums!

But what exactly have I been getting into?

Last year I conducted a small study into political anarchism. I read a couple historical texts and lined up a few works of fiction that were either inspired by or dealt directly with political anarchism. This year, a major goal of mine is to get through the massive Against the Day, a 2006 novel by one of my long-time favorite authors Thomas Pynchon. I started reading it in February and only just now reached the halfway mark. It's what you might expect from Pynchon when he is allowed to publish 1,100 pages in a single volume: sprawling, meandering, funny, needling, clever, stylish. I don't always love it. I've had moments where I've thought to drop it. But after a while there's always a section or a chapter that restores my faith. I'll keep at it, for now.

Something completely new to me that I've started pursuing is the study of a new language. I'm learning Spanish, and it's going really well. Throughout all my time in College I have always felt very penned in being monolingual, and curious about the way people have spoken about the cognitive experience of being bilingual. It changes the way you think, the way you see, speak. It sounded like something basically psychedelic, which is what I am always always in search. So I have been learning the language, vocab and grammar, for about five months now. I can't speak anything yet, but I can read at a very basic level. I've come up with some really fun ways to integrate the practice into my usual interests. For example, my partner and I have been getting into the movies of El Santo, which are great objects of study for their kitsch, pulp, and cultural significance to Mexico and for the fact that the Spanish used in them is pretty basic.

I've also started playing Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind with a Spanish translation mod. I'll share here what I wrote on Select Button about how singularly unique that is as an experience:

...there’s this happy accident occurring as I play the game like this where the framing device that I am an outsider in a land that is strange to me allows me to simulate, to some extent, a western-like experience where I am a gringo in Mexico. Like, my time so far has been spent painfully trying to understand and talk to people in town for about 40 minutes at a time, before I exhausted bail on society and flee to the wilderness where I can slap fauna and collect bug parts to then an hour or two later sell, wordlessly, at some vendor in town before making another retreat to the speechless wilds. A bug is also causing my journal to update with text that is sometimes written English and sometimes written Spanish, which is a wildly enjoyable enhancement to the experience I am talking about. El Gringo en Vvardenfell.[It's a] very weird fantasy I am participating in here. Like I am CIA agent sent to Vvardenfell, and my decisions may yet spur or prevent a civil war in the region all because I got my words mixed up.

Related to some studies into JRPGs and Survival Horror games (more on this later), I have attempted to get my friends together to play some sort of fantasy RPG. I learned about the Old School Renaissance and got interested in B/X Dungeons & Dragons, playing a few sessions of that with original manuals before switching to Old School Essentials books. But I soon felt the fantasy of playing in that way just wasn't available to myself and the group. And I also learned the OSR is full of some real shit heads, and was pretty much completely turned off. Still, I learned a decent amount about styles of play, dungeon design and dungeon crawls which are things I am still chewing on. Sadly, I think the effort to play RPGs is wavering and may die again. Group dynamics, schedules, expectations... If I could pick out one thing that I think complicated things the worst for the group of people I have been trying to play with is adapting the challenge or scaling the group size so large to match B/X adventure modules and the dangerous vibe of OSR. My next attempt at playing RPGs with people I expect will include fewer players.

Lastly, I have started a new level design project that is requiring me to learn a very different SDK and workflow than Trenchbroom, which I have spent the last three years working in basically everyday. After completing my last Quake map project, You Are the Inch Valley Captive, I thought to myself that I could go on and make another Quake map and get better at geo or intense combat design, but concluded that probably wouldn't satisfy me and I would end up bored. Instead, I decided that I will create a custom story (i.e. short campaign) for Amnesia: The Bunker, using the tools SDK provided by Frictional Games.

Given that I am still working full-time within an unrelated software development discipline, I am at this point experiencing feelings similar to those I had when I was really young and aspiring grandly toward what seemed to be a much too too unlikely future where I would be Working For Videogames. I don't only need to learn the software, no. Also on my plate is a bunch of research and analysis. I've felt compelled to study and test my own aesthetics, as well as others, our assumptions, the established conventions and the values therein behind the design of classic and recent survival horror titles. I've formally turned this into a year-long research project, in fact. But lucky for me, my longtime familiarity with survival horror games is expediting some of this aesthetic/historical research and study. Learning the tools, on the other hand, is harder fought, since they are tailor made for use in developing Amnesia games and include some quirks that set them apart from other level or 3d editors I've used in the past like Unity or Trenchbroom. I am grateful for the Frictional Games Discord and for a tutorial series created by Tech0Freak on how to design a custom story for Amnesia: Rebirth, which is serving me well. These are supplementing my first stabs at working in the editor quite nicely.

At the same time that I decided to start working on a survival horror project, I began learning about the old school renaissance for roleplaying games. Corralling my friends into trying to play games of Old School Essentials and D&D modules from the 80s, I started to think more academically about dungeons and the dungeon crawl playstyle. Accompanying my research into survival horror games, I started to identify ways that survival horror videogames and JRPGs have abstracted the RPG dungeon crawl experience to suit their differing genre conventions. As a practice in design, while I was still not familiar enough yet with the HPL3 SDK to really build anything testable, I briefly, for the span of a month or two, designed on paper one dungeon a week for fantasy adventurers to get lost and overwhelmed and find rewards in exploring.

This was fun for a while and probably worth my time. Designing a decent dungeon for an RPG dungeon crawl doesn't necessarily result in a great survival horror dungeon, but the process was educational and useful for running my own RPG sessions anyway. I ended up with four or five dungeons, each increasing in complexity and interactivity. I'm glad to have them in my pocket for whenever I might need them in the future. And as it turns out, the most simple and very first of the dungeons I drew may yet lend itself as the basic structure of the first part of my Amnesia: The Bunker custom story, which for now I'm giving the title of Spite.

Everything I learned about production from my time working on and completing Quake mapping projects is proving very useful for me here. But a new challenge I face is learning how to work with a library of modular assets, the 3D objects provided by Frictional Games for use in creating rooms or interactive moments and clutter. Getting started on building something with an asset library like this, you first off have to learn just what is available to help conceive what is not available. You could learn how to use Blender to create your own custom assets to supplement things, but I have committed to working with the library as is since I am here primarily to create a playable and fun level. The problem of scale I thought so much about while making my previous levels is basically a solved problem, this way. The greatest hurtle, at least at my current perspective, is learning how to use these assets to create coherent environments. I am interested to what extent, and how, I can achieve a coherent appearance and sense of place by mixing assets from different settings, like placing cavern assets in a bunker setting, or Bedouin architecture in the caves. I think I'm figuring it out.

While I am not altogether pleased with the pace I am currently working at, I can still happily say that the past few weeks have been quite productive. With still not much to show, it's hard to not feel discouraged, to avoid feeling like it is possible to forget how to ride a bike, so to speak. In my experience, however, once you've found your way "to creativity", the habits that kept you returning to the process, back to your True Work, may indeed weaken but the compulsion or sensitivity to the feeling that drew you there in the first place is unforgettable. So, at this point, without too much to show, I cannot fret. I have not become disinterested, and thus we may conclude that I have all the confidence I might ever need.

And that's it for the update. Besides all that, I have been playing plenty of videogames and board games. Metaphor: ReFantazio is a really exciting modern JRPG that I'm quite into at this point, and my partner and I are having lots of fun with recent board game releases like Carcassonne: The Castle and playing through a number of our less frequently played games in our collection thanks to suggestions made by the useful Board Game Stats app. We're enjoying lots of movies, and working our way through Star Trek: The Next Generation but the discovery I am perhaps most energized by lately is the 1979 anime The Rose of Versailles. And when I'm not reading my big Pynchon book, I'm working my way through some original E.C. Comics and Kazuo Umezu's The Drifting Classroom Well, hopefully less time will pass between this one and the next.

—Braden 05.12.2025