Designing with an Unhinged Brain (and Why I Stopped Fighting it.)

Well—it’s not entirely me.

I design through a kind of chaotic control. Not controlled chaos. They sound similar, but they aren’t. Let me explain. Controlled chaos is when someone builds a structure first and lets the chaos run around inside it.

Imagine you’re making a garden. You buy the seeds, till the soil, build your tidy walls to keep out the weeds and animals. A little overgrowth is fine, but it’s all happening inside the plan. You grow what you intended, and all is well. That’s game design for a lot of people. Build the boxes early. Keep the ideas contained. Honestly? It’s efficient. It works.

Unfortunately, my brain does not respect boxes.

When I make games, it’s like I toss a handful of random seeds across the yard and wander away. Whatever starts growing, I watch. The things I like get water and sunlight. The things I don’t like get pruned. But I don’t care about “form” until I already have a small ecosystem fighting for dominance. If you tried this with a real garden, it would look completely unhinged… but the process would be strangely fun.

And that’s the double-edged sword of designing this way. On the upside, chaos digs deeper wells. It creates as much as it destroys. If you build walls too early, creativity can only grow so far. On the downside, working this way is inefficient, messy, and occasionally impossible to wrangle.

There’s also the spiraling.

Most people research like this:

1) Look up the topic.

2) Stop when they have enough to proceed.

Meanwhile, I research like I’m trying to uncover a conspiracy:

1) Look up the topic.

2) Find several related topics and research those.

3) “Is that REALLY true?”

4) Look for articles that contradict everything I just read.

5) Research the contradictions, then research the contradictions of the contradictions.

Outward and outward. Around and around. Until one of three things happens:

1) I finally scratch the itch and feel satisfied.

2) I gain a sudden flash of self-awareness and declare myself done out of mercy.

3) I just. Keep. Going.

This is, by most reasonable standards, an unhinged way to do anything. So naturally, I leaned into it.

No really—this is how I actually design games. I won’t tell anyone else to work this way. It’s not efficient. It’s not sleek. But if your mind works the way mine does, (my condolences) you don’t get to choose. You just embrace the chaos and let it grow its weird little garden.

The good news is that by the time I’ve spiraled outward enough to call something “finished,” I almost always know the material deeply. That's not me talking from ego. It's just a side effect of this brain style. My brain holds me hostage until I understand things. What can I say? I have a gluttonous mind.

If there’s one takeaway from all this, let it be this:

There are best practices, but the best method is the one that stops you from fighting yourself. Creativity is hard enough without adding self-sabotage on top. Never underestimate the power of a mind that finally decides to work with itself instead of against itself.