The Ebonheim Chronicle

I made a little manifesto for manifesto jam. Fair warning that it's a little needlessly aggressive. I was egged on I think by some of the other entries being a little needlessly aggressive. Just, like, in a silly way.

A wide range of feelings have befallen me since contributing to the jam, both reading other entries and reading the various reactions which vary between critiquing other entries or critiquing the entire endeavor. There are a lot of opinions! So it goes.

Something that stood out to me out of all the comments was someone suggesting that all these manifestos sure seem to point at a lack of places to communicate such thoughts. This mini-manifesto-meta-manifesto has wormed its way into my head and refuses to dislodge.

The following views expressed are my own and do not represent the views of the Chronicles IV: Ebonheim development team despite being its one and only member.

I got into all of this gamedev blogging stuff out of a desire to share my tools and process and designs and ideas. I've always wanted a place to do that, write about the nitty gritty decision making of a big coding project, and cohost was a really nice place to dump that.

That place felt, at least at the start, that it had this shared dissatisfaction with platforms and websites. There was this community punk vibe that made you feel that you were safely surrounded and read by people that loosely agree on at least one metric. I quickly found a great group of folks chasing the same tech writing sharing as I and enjoyed a period of great friendmaking and connection.

Back in those days (Not Actually That Long Ago) the idea of ever actually finishing my game, let alone selling it for money, was pretty far away from my focus. It started as a bit of a toy, something I would fiddle with in the evenings and make a little progress on. Working on the game in some ways became a means to posting. I really did just enjoy not only getting feedback and reactions and conversations from people but then taking that energy on into other peoples projects. It was honestly so fun.

With the transition to Mastodon there has been a real shift. I love all my elephant website mutuals!🐘💕 For what its worth it is still my favorite place to talk to developers about development, but the vibes are very different. The shorter-form responses and twitter-style threads move the needle closer to the microblogging problems and certainly make it harder to have conversation. There is still, in my experience, a great energy there for boosting, sharing, commenting, respecting other peoples feeds, etc.

The fediverse userbase is split into two main camps: people trying it out, investigating what all the fuss is about, trying to stick within their existing friend circle, swept along in some recent migration, and then there are the lifers who have set up their hermit huts on the rocks of decentralization to peer out suspiciously over the shifting sands.

Recently, it has felt quieter on Mastodon than before, which some attribute to some of the population moving on to the butterfly website or back to twitter. I imagine this comes as no surprise to the lifer group who have no doubt seen many such peaks and valleys pass them by.

So it was and so it shall be.

The other websites are really rough! The energy certainly exists in places like Bluesky to form deeper professional connections between developers and share and support one another, but the platform and format directly contradict it. Bluesky is primarily about trying to come up with a pithy 300-character joke about the current discourse or else trying to have the flashiest development gif for other game developers to see. While I've made great connections with some lovely people, I feel I can't interact with them in any meaningful way. We like each others gifs and we leave little jokes.

I've engaged in this! I'm part of that problem. I hate it. But who can blame us?

Everyone is trying to sell something because the stakes are so, SO high for so many people. The fuse has never been shorter and the screws never tighter and if we don't spend at least half of the post character limit hedging and acknowledging that, the Discover Feed is going to Come For Us.

We all log in and try to share the most important thing or console the sad reactions or crack a joke about the thing about the thing about the thing. Every game developer needs to get eyeballs on their work, they have to, it is that or it is ruin. I'm not being facetious, I really do believe that for many it is that dire, that important, that essential.

And it reinforces, every day seems worse, every day a new bit of news, a new revelation, lives are being destroyed in front of our eyes and if its not our lives its easy to feel like it may be us next or we feel survivors guilt. The overwhelming spiral pulls us in and then at the center some random asshole or, hell, a close mutual, posts a goof or tells you you're overreacting or not considering all viewpoints or thinking about it the wrong way.

Posters madness is desperately wanting to help or correct or chide or boost or contribute or console or commiserate and finding no 300 characters will fit into the polygonal spheroid matrix of opposing perspectives.

A chaotic soup of well-meaning people fighting over the best way to help.

I sat back this morning, exhausted, and said “I'm not coming here anymore, I need a break.” and it made me wonder what I even wanted there in the first place. Game Marketing™? Community™? Wishlists™?

I thought about how much I like this blog and tried to interrogate why that is.

This is a place safe from Opinions, and Takes, and Posters Madness. This blog is where I go to write wholly inarguable (until today) things made inarguable by being outputs from my own work and experience. Here is where I can write about a neat thing I did or made that I thought was neat that I want to share because how I made it might be interesting to others.

It's absolutely my escape.

It's a place I can shut the blinds to the outside horrors and just share my hobby with others who enjoy said hobby.

All of the entries in the manifesto jam are saying something their submitters felt like they couldn't sufficiently communicate with their existing platforms. I don't hardly agree with all of them, but there is a sort of cohosty energy there of people feeling safe around like-minded posters. “We're all mad as hell so let it out.” is a powerful feeling and it binds people together.

Maybe there's room, somewhere, for long-form discussions of weird tech stacks or unique development strategies. Maybe there can be a place where the vibe is sharing instead of marketing, maybe such a place exists and I'm not on it, maybe someone will make one and it will come and go, subsumed by capitalism and the horrors.

I don't have a meaningful way to conclude this ramble. But I will continue sharing my silly work and trying to show it to you.

My toxic anxiety is that there's probably an infinite number of uncharitable reading of this post and I guess that's inevitable. I can't construct a post that is immune to that.

I can't do it in 300 characters, 300 posts, or 300 manifestos, and I'll just have to deal with that.

Wishlist Chronicles IV: Ebonheim! 🌐   🙋‍