(Re)Making a Case for Remaking Your Games

I had tried to make games before this one. There are python files on my parents' old PC that contain numerous little text-games. 

Some of them are sort of cool. There is a text-based fighting game, in which you choose from a set of characters and type your moves. There is an absurd little adventure story that seems to forecast what a lot of my writing looks like now (especially in this game and My My Microwave). There is even an attempt at a parser-based game, a genre that even now I've only just barely dipped my toe into.

All of them are unfinished. Some are more complete than others, but not one is even close to being anything that anyone would ever want to play. There is a reason they have sat for years now on that PC. Unloved. Unviewed. Unplayed. Gathering whatever the digital equivalent of dust might be. Some of them are sort of cool, but all of them are barely games at all. They're more like vague concepts for games. They're brainstorm lightning, but no rain. They're tiny; they're boring; they're poorly written, and they just aren't fun.

I had tried to make games before this one, but I always failed. In many ways, I think As Prescribed is not actually as far from these early experiments as I've positioned them in my mind. It's pretty small. It's pretty boring, at least to play for any extended amount of time. The writing is not the best or even my best. It isn't even that fun. Most of the mechanics are hidden behind layer after layer of writing that I thought was clever or meaningful or funny. It's a strategy game where you are trying staying alive that I, for some reason, presented as a sandbox game with no real discernible goal. Instead of trying to do anything, the player just clicks links and sees what happens. It feels random. It is pointless.

So, no, As Prescribed isn't actually all that different from that absurd little adventure game I tried to make all those years ago. But it does have one crucial difference. It's playable! And I don't just mean that it is complete enough and comprehensible enough that one can sit down and click around for a few minutes and things actually make sense (I do mean that). I also mean that it is here, now, on itch, and people can play it if they want. 

And if there is a digital equivalent to dust, this game hasn't been gathering it. A handful of people still play it every month. Even more people view it. In fact, it continues to have both the most views and plays of any of my games, something I've both hated and admired about it depending on how I've felt about whatever I'd been working on recently.

All of this just to get to five days ago (April 15, 2024). FishFest, a jam that encouraged me to make a weird, little experimental game that had been bouncing around in my head for a while, was only a few days away from ending. I was working on a post-jam update for that game, and like all jam games right when I finish them, I was in love. Feed the Fish (my FishFest submission) was my latest obsession, and my fingers were working tirelessly to make it as complete and cool as my brain insisted it could be.

And then I got an itch notification. I expected it to be someone commenting on the jam submission, but I quickly found that it is not. It was a new comment here, in As Prescribed's  comment section. I feel like I'd been caught cheating. Feed the Fish is another fling in a long line of ultimately meaningless little relationships that, at the time I am in them, feel like the most meaningful things in the world. As Prescribed is my first kiss. Its meaning is lasting. I couldn't help but pause my work on Feed the Fish to see what was being said now about As Prescribed.

The new comment was short. "Umm..." the user trails off. Followed by a screenshot of the game with an unwieldy error message. My stomach danced in a rude way. I can't help it; I've come to accept that I will never not feel this little tinge of anger and failure when I see that one of my games (or anything I make) doesn't connect with people in the way it does in my head. I simultaneously feel like I am the worst for having made such a broken piece of garbage and they are the worst for not "getting" it, or forgiving it, or just staying quiet so I don't have to know and can keep my personal idea of what the game is and how it plays.

In this case though, I'd known for a long time. The game has broken on start since the post-jam update, March 2023. At the time, I couldn't bring myself to fix it. It was my first game, its structure in Twine had become as unwieldy as the error message suggested, and I really just wanted to do anything but work on this game anymore. I told myself that somewhere down the line, I'd figure it out.  That it would be a simple fix. 

And then I never looked at it again. Until April 15, 2024. "Umm..."

I was forced to realize that the one thing that made As Prescribed any different from all those earlier attempts was gone. People couldn't play it. It couldn't have been any less playable. It wouldn't have been any less playable sitting somewhere in the tomb of my parents' old PC. Where my art goes to die.

All of this was thrust into my mind by this comment. It was not as formed as I put it here, but it was brewing in me. I know because my stomach did that thing, and I didn't even need to use the bathroom.

My initial response was to open As Prescribed on Twine, take a quick glance, remember that it was made using the story format Harlowe (which I hadn't used since As Prescribed), and to decide that fixing it was hopeless. I posted a response to the person about getting around to fixing it sometime in the future, and I went back to working on Feed the Fish. But I quickly found that I couldn't feed the fish or do anything else to the fish, because I had a tough pill to swallow. I couldn't have this memory of what my first game was and the conflicting reality it that didn't even work past the start button. I couldn't. It felt terrible. It felt worse than that little tinge; it felt like real failure. The game was unplayable. It was not a game.

I went back to As Prescribed, and this time, I started really combing through the Twine passages. I read some of the writing and (despite my criticism of it above), I still think some of it is pretty funny, unsettling, clever. I saw how some of the things worked behind the scenes, and I realized that the mechanics were a bit deeper than I remembered. I looked at the game, and things started to click, and I knew that I might not know what to do with the mess that the game is now, but I knew exactly what to do with the pieces. I remembered what I did already with the pieces.

I made a new Twine project, using the Sugarcube story format that I've used for every Twine game I've made since As Prescribed, and I started copying and pasting some of the text from the old project. I started finding little ways I could organize things that make more sense. I started finding little ways I could do what I was trying to do in the first place. I staredt to feel the same passion I felt when I first put the game together, when I first submitted it to the jam, when I first made the post-jam update.

Spoiler! It only took about four days to remake the whole game. I made myself a promise that it would work as closely to the original as possible. Changes would only be practical (making some text more readable) or because I just couldn't make it the same (I no longer have one of the sound files used in the original game). It only took four days, and I had made the exact same game that I had made one year prior. And it was not that different from all those games that came before it, but I didn't care because I remembered how it had been different, and I loved it for that. I love it so much.

I could tell you that you should remake your games because you will see how your skills have improved (they have) or because you will learn things about yourself as a designer, or writer, or programmer, or artist (you will). But I won't tell you those things because if someone told me that it would not make me want to remake my old games. The last thing I want, the vast majority of the time, is to learn more about myself  because I am terrified of myself.

No, I want to tell you that you should remake your games because it's a blast. Because you will find that all of those meaningless flings were not meaningless, you just can't see what they really mean in the moment, and you blow what they do mean way out of proportion.. Because you will find that you are better and smarter and kick more ass than you knew. Because you will remember why you loved that game before, and why you still should love it now.

Because you will see that you can make games. 

You've done it.

And if you remake a game, you've done it at least twice. 

And maybe even more times that that.

And.. oh golly... here we go, you're about to do it again.