I was exposed to a "haha you have to be obsessed with doing X as a teen to become any good at it" post today and I'll rip this idea to shreds with my teeth. I'll burn it all
in the year of 2013, when I was already in my 20s, I thought to myself "I want to publish an original story by the end of the year". it is literally a decade later now and I am hopefully going to finally publish an original story in a few months. I could sit here and bemoan how long I took and how slow I am and how I'll never be successful or I can fucking do the thing and be proud of it
in like early 2016 i was insanely depressed and i wrote this big dramatic diary entry about how i'll never make anything cool like undertale, because ohhhhhhh toby fox was making stuff since he was a teen, ohhhhh woe is me. he's just a guy too but i guess he can do it but i can't because he's been so dedicated since he was so young......... i gave up on music but he didn't, it's so over.........
guess what bitch [2016 me]? it's 2023 now. it's been like as long since then as it was between [toby fox's cringe teen earthbound hack] and [undertale] and you have a lot more 7-8 year periods of your life left too it turns out!!! you can just spend your time now learning and doing the thing instead of comparing yourself to .0005% insanely successful artists who also just happened to start young!!! your learning is not inherently worse just because you started older!!!!
it is not to make great art or to make art that will resonate with millions of people or anything like that. the act of creating and sharing art is intrinsically valuable and that is enough
(obligatory acknowledgement that since we live under capitalism, sometimes the point of art is perforce to make money to survive. but also that sucks)
Me making games at 32 vs. me making games at 17 has a huge difference:
15 years of experience.
Not of making games, just 15 years of figuring all sorts of different shit out. Some of that time was writing, or making games that went nowhere, or playing other games, reading books and broadening my taste other ways.
But some of that was just figuring out how to do things. Better ways of managing life stuff, actually seeing projects through. Knowing how to use my time better. Having a slightly better idea of how my brain works (and doesn't work).
All this stuff helps, the biggest hurdle is just realising you don't need a specific prerequisite to do the thing you want to do. You just let yourself do it and engage as best you can for the stage you're at.
