First Gear

This right here. These words. This is what you could fairly call "procrastination."

But I do know myself. I know that it often takes me 45 minutes to really get going – to grind through my ‘first gear’ – and once I hit flow-state… well, then its flow-state. But it often takes a bit of puttering around on something irrelevant – or in this case, adjacent – to my intended work before I can really capitalize on a functional creative space.

I went looking for a good procrastination image and got owned by the internet.

Before fatherhood I could make real hay this way. Come home from work, cook up some anti-hangry medication, and fill a glass with something cold. Then do just about anything but what I wanted to work on for a half hour or an hour and then switch gears into the real work… often the next thing I’d know I’d have only a half dozen hours until I had to be back at work, but I’d have a heap-load of work done. But these days, no. The dinners I cook need a little more attention. The time between eating and her bedtime rarely includes time for me to get into that irrelevant ‘first gear’ stage – and even if it did, the distractions would set me back to zero over and over again. So now, I don’t get to flow state until well after 9, sometimes 10 – easily 4 hours later than a decade ago. And there are morning responsibilities too, so being up until 2 or 4 or 5 am – it’s not a viable option. That’s okay though – the Dad gig is a pretty cool one, and it’s not here forever.

What is awaiting me when I get through this – tonight’s ‘first gear’? Implementation.

I finally had my first meeting with my mentor today. It was a touch rocky getting to that first meeting. It took most of a week for our first complete email exchange, and then this afternoon there were complications leading to a half-hour delay. It was inauspicious. But we withheld judgement and jumped in all business-like and took turns telling our origin stories, and by the time we’d finished that we were both smiling freely and hopping with energy to move forward. So instead of the prescribed 30 minutes we took an hour… and then we took two.

We covered a lot of ground.

After we got the sense of who each other was we discussed goals. Since I applied for the TMP I had actually changed my goals – which I knew might be an issue depending on how much tailoring had been done to connect mentor to mentee based on intended goals. I had kind of felt like The Queen Must Die was done… or rather, as done as I was really capable of getting it on my own – I was thinking when I applied for the program that I was ready to strategize a plan for taking the game to publishers. But then I implemented a few changes that ended up having much greater effect on the game than I had anticipated. Positive changes. But even a single playtest made it clear that some serious regression testing was in order – and it clearly wasn’t going to get done before the program started… ‘cause that test was 2 days after orientation.

So we talked about the game. In depth. First an elevator pitch – I probably went 45 seconds when he requested 30. But the premise and the unique aspect were all intact as well as hint of the primary mechanics. Then we dug in – exploring how each aspect interacted and deeper still on a case by case basis – the underlying math, the cardboard record-keeping, what emergent player-patterns have arisen from all the rest. Where was complexity, where was simplicity, where was the unique hook?

It was a good discussion. Scratch that – it was a really good discussion. I felt like we’d had a really good conversation about games. I felt like we’d uncovered ideas that I didn’t know I’d had yet about my own game. I felt like I wanted to play a game with him – 22 hour commute and pandemic notwithstanding. I felt like he saw something that he could get behind in The Queen Must Die. We set short term goals for next week... goals that are beckoning me.

I felt when the discussion was done like the mentorship had got past first gear. And now, I have to go get to work…