when I start getting tired or unmotivated or plum lazy when working on or thinking about my indie games work I try to remember that the sensation of being an island — of being one of very few people doing this kind of thing — isn't a false narrative or arrogance. I'm not a large creator but there are more than a few games I was the first to showcase. I've put a lot of people onto a lot of games that they wouldn't've heard of otherwise. I was one of the first people on Twitch to embrace Steam Next Fest and make "Demo Day" streams a thing*. especially for the micro-indies, any screenshots or videos or writing are so, so important, and with so few other creators in this space, my voice is somehow very loud, my scant body of work made unnaturally large. that outsized sense of service and, to a lesser extent, importance is very motivating sometimes
*I will never be able to prove this definitively but just know that I've been doing Demo Day streams since the second-ever Steam Next Fest (then called Steam Game Festival) in March 2020, and that I used to be explicitly credited by some streamers when they did their own Demo Day streams. which is very weird to think about. a tastemaker since I was 20...