HeavenX Devlog 0018

I read something recently that I have been thinking about a lot lately, and it's the reason I'm writing this. The phrase "luck surface area" was coined by Jason Roberts in a 2010 "Codus Operandi"blog post, and the idea is simple: your exposure to luck is roughly the product of how much you do and how much you tell people about it. Do a lot but tell no one, and the work goes unseen. Tell everyone but do nothing, and there's nothing worth finding. You need both.

The surface has two dimensions, doing and telling, and the bigger you make it the more chances luck has to land on you. This devlog is my personal reflection on both halves, and about the fact that I'm good at one of them and bad at the other.

On Doing:

We've been working on HeavenX for over two years now. Possibly three. I genuinely lost track somewhere. I think we started around August of 2023, but I stopped counting a while ago because the number started to feel less like progress and more like a weight.

There are still many years of work ahead of us. We're making good progress, but all of it is in pursuit of something great, and greatness is slow as fuck. The "doing" part is the part I don't think people appreciate enough. You have to struggle. You have to work hard, extremely hard, on the thing you want to make, especially if it's grand and ambitious. And I wouldn't have it any other way. That's not to say it'll work out. It could all be for nothing. But I choose to believe that the more I do, the greater the chance we succeed, so I do. This puts me in direct opposition to basically every game dev influencer out there. Ninety percent of them say the same three things: make something small, make a horror game because those always sell, catch a trend on the way up. There's real merit in that advice, and a lot of it is true. But it's also worth pursuing things that take more from you than they give back for a long time. Pour your life into the design, the process, the mechanics, the feel, the story. Make a grand video game. Not just a great one, not just a good one. Make something that will outlive you. The team jokes that even if HeavenX flops, it's at minimum bait for some YouTuber to make a four-hour video essay about. It's a joke, but it's also the point. We're building so much depth into this thing that these devlogs don't come close to scratching the surface.

On Telling:

This is where I often feel I fall short, especially with HeavenX. Right now we still carry a lot of anxiety about showing how far HeavenX has come, out of a fear that it's "not ready" or not "baked" enough yet. Part of me agrees with that instinct. My whole personality is wired for spectacle. When the team was eight people, I hid HeavenX from every single one of them so I could reveal it in a grand gesture over a fancy dinner on a trip to Florida, and I got it running on a Nintendo Switch first just for the double-whammy.

We designed / printed a fake switch case to put that demo in. This was so early that we didn't have a set or setting for the story.

That's who I am. I want the reveal to be perfect. But perfect is the enemy here. I think we need to be more open, and that's something I want to change. The scary part of telling is the unknown baked into it. There's a lot to weigh. Both halves of this are genuinely hard. But I'm hoping that soon we can graduate from plaintext devlogs to something more substantial to actually show you. The plan, for now, is still a story-side playtest of HeavenX early next year. I hope we hit it. I hope you're still around to enjoy it. It's my life's greatest work.

A Tangent About Luck:

People on the team, Matt especially, tell me I'm lucky all the time. Charismatic, convincing, whatever word they reach for. I think what they mean is that over the years I've managed to connect with and pull in some medium-known people to work with us, and once got the studio a foot in the door with Crunchyroll to build a small game for them. It feels like a lifetime ago now. A good roll on the wheel of fortune. But there is a part of that luck that eats at me. In my actual career, I've never had trouble moving up. Every peer review, positive. Everyone I work with says I'm one of the hardest working people they've ever met. Promotion after promotion after promotion. And none of it means anything to me. I almost resent it. What I want, more than anything I've ever wanted for myself, is for that same trajectory to happen for my team and this studio instead. I made up my mind a long time ago: I would do anything to see my team, and ultimately HeavenX, succeed. It doesn't matter how long it takes or how hard it gets. Nothing is going to stop me from trying. I will try. I have to try. I want this for us. Every time I sit with that, it leaves me somewhere between somber and lost, like there's a part of me that's disconnected from reality.

It makes me think of the song "Wishes on a Wheel" by Beach House: "In a daze, it will change Wishes on a wheel Is it even real? How's it supposed to feel? Once in your life It happens once and rarely twice" The spinning wheel at the center of that song is fate, the uncontrollable ups and downs of life. Our deepest wishes get granted or denied at random by forces we don't get a say in. Its really about letting go of the desperate need to control the outcome, and in accepting the vulnerability that comes with wanting something this intensely. I'm just not there yet.

• Hunter