The Glass Bubble

The Glass Bubble I find that few things are as satisfying as feeling our own progress. Feeling something difficult become easy. Feeling something that used to be out of reach become accessible. That is what I felt a few months ago when I learned Unreal Engine. This tool has been in my life for so long. Creating video games is my central professional activity, and everything I create, I create with this tool. And yet I had never learned to use it myself. Or rather, I had never gone beyond the basic functions of the level editor, like placing and positioning objects. Those features were easy for me to learn because I had training as a technical draftsman in mechanical engineering, but I had never learned to script. So I could place objects, create layouts, plan levels, but I couldn't create what sits at the center of the player's experience: interactivity. Learning to script is not the most complicated thing on the planet. Lots of people know how to do it. But it is still fairly complicated. You certainly cannot learn scripting by accident. You have to devote yourself to it and absorb concepts, logics and ways of thinking, building and assembling that are counterintuitive when you don't know them. It takes time, effort and patience. Several weeks, even months, are necessary before you have real ease with it. And I had never found that time and patience. Because I had always been surrounded by people who knew these tools: programmers, technical experts, level designers and other virtuosos of logic and digital creation. The people around me manipulated these tools with such ease and had such an understanding of them, of mathematics and of logic, that I felt their level was unreachable and that trying to move in that direction would not be a good way to maximize the value of my time. Because my value, I imagined, was creation, communication, the big picture, alignment. So I told myself: if I spend weeks learning Unreal - time I don't have - then I am neglecting my work in order to learn how to do something people around me already know how to do, and I will no longer be able to focus my attention on the things I can do that they cannot. That logic, combined with my lack of time, always kept me from finding the courage. Actually, there is more to it than that... because it took me five years after leaving my studio to finally find the courage. During those five years I tried twice and then gave up because I didn't understand enough and wasn't progressing enough. I stayed stuck... my ideas didn't work. I couldn't even get simple ideas from YouTube tutorials to work, and even when I did, I didn't understand them and had the feeling I never would. And then there was Kenya. There are things to say about that country, where I spent six months, but for now the most important thing is that it gave me a form of healing I needed at that moment. I received love, humanity, support, help and recognition. All things I had been missing for years. That healing made me want to reconnect with myself. It gave me the little something I was missing to start again. And then, after Kenya, instead of going directly home, I made the strange decision to rent a small cabin near the ocean in Cape Town and focus on Unreal. Day and night. Continuously. Fifteen hours a day, seven days a week. For months. And the miracle happened. At first I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but with ChatGPT you can describe what you want and ChatGPT will describe the script you need to build. So that is how I worked. And even that was difficult at first because there were so many things I didn't understand well enough even to follow ChatGPT's instructions, like what a variable, an event, a custom event or a component actually is in Unreal. Even when it tried to explain things simply, it assumed I knew what those words meant. And these logics are sometimes strange and sometimes they don't quite work. Even the way the logic is described is strange to someone who has never done it. For many things, it is a reversed way of thinking. For example, if you want an object to follow a vector, you don't say: I want you to follow a vector, and then tell it which vector. Instead, you construct the vector, then start from the vector and say: follow this. And there were dozens of other little details like that that completely lost me. I struggled like hell at first - and for a long time - to make anything work. And it was difficult because when something doesn't work, you don't know what the problem is... so you don't even know what to search for or how to search for it. That emotion of being lost and not knowing how to search is one of the most complicated to manage. Actually, it is omnipresent in development, because even now that I understand things much better, I still encounter it almost every day in one form or another - for example because of a combination of two systems you never imagined and could not have predicted, or because of assumptions you had made your entire life without realizing it, but that the reality of creating something forces you to notice. But when I started, it was all the time. Continuously. For hours. Every day. Sometimes I eventually gave up. Sometimes I had wins. And I think that state of affairs lasted two or three months. It lasted long enough that I started telling myself I would never really understand and would simply keep working blindly like this forever. I resigned myself to it. Then something began to change. Something like muscle memory, a click that happened in my head, I don't know. But almost overnight, I was suddenly able to make scripts that worked without asking ChatGPT. From the moment that click happened, everything started evolving incredibly fast and I began progressing at an accelerating speed, faster and faster. Suddenly, I no longer needed ChatGPT to do everything. Suddenly, I could genuinely understand how the logic worked and extrapolate it into many other contexts. Suddenly, I could optimize, rework and improve all the logic I had already built. Suddenly, it became incredibly easy to imagine many other features by building on the things I had understood and accomplished. Almost overnight I became a technical reference, a point of contact, someone who explains systems and answers questions. And suddenly, my life changed completely. Because I had been carrying a complex. A frustration I could neither name nor even admit. Because working through other people is not the same experience as doing it yourself. There is part of the satisfaction, yes, of course. And being a good collaborative agent has invaluable worth, absolutely. But you are not creating. You can talk to a painter for as long as you want, and if you know painting, trends, techniques, colors, materials, references, models and everything connected to painting that could help them make better decisions and do better work, you can have a real impact on their work. Potentially an enormous impact. But they are the one creating the work. And that is how I felt my whole life about the games I created. As though I were inside a glass bubble, watching what was happening through the walls and able to talk to the people doing the work, but unable to do it myself. The frustration I lived with is difficult to understand and describe, especially if you have never experienced doing the thing yourself. But the truth is that when you work on a game through somebody else's mind and hands, you can never truly make what you want to make. Not really. No matter how clear your vision is - unless you have a precise reference, something that already exists in the world and that you can lean on. But if it is a new idea meant to create an experience that does not exist yet, you have to be ready to accept that the other person will not understand what you explain in exactly the way you imagine and understand it yourself. I suppose that is why I saw in Heraclitus's phrase, "you never step into the same river twice," a parallel with words. I have tried dozens of times to explain things that do not exist yet to someone, and I have had the chance to see their interpretation through the results they produced. So I know that it is not possible to explain something that does not yet exist to somebody else in a perfectly transferable way - they will imagine that they understood, but they will create something different. That is what created my complex: having important ideas living inside me, but always making something different, never truly making what I was trying to make. And learning to use Unreal is what finally reconciled me with the universe, and I want to cry because I am so happy and grateful. Because... even if I am not as good as the programmers and experts around me, it allows me to do something I could not do before: create, explore and build my own ideas. Assemble the intuitions that live inside me, experiment with them and construct something deep, satisfying and unique that is truly aligned with those intuitions. And that emotion... that emotion is pure magic. Something I had never truly experienced, and that is more powerful than anything. And I think this book can give an idea of what I mean because I think it is clear to you that I could not have asked somebody else to write this book for me - because the act of writing it is what gave me the possibility of exploring and assembling ideas that did not exist in this form inside me before I wrote them. So if I had asked a ghostwriter to write this book based on what I had in mind, they would not have followed the same paths or reached the same results I did. And anyway, before writing the book I did not concretely know what I wanted it to be and could not have described it precisely. I could have said: I think we create and become conscious of our ideas by writing them, so pay attention to your ideas while you are having them and talk about that. What would that mean to somebody other than me, and where would it lead them? There is a good chance those words would resonate with others, but they would not understand them the way I mean them - certainly not without having read the book. All of this is true for video games too. The ideas on which Jump In Jack is founded have lived in me my entire life, and I tried to realize them in one way or another in almost every project I participated in. I never succeeded, and I was sad about that my entire life. And today... all the barriers have fallen. I can create what I imagined. AND IT WORKS!! And people are gathering around it, and we now have players playing it. And... life is beautiful. That is genuinely how I feel. The path between my intuition and the product I am building has been complex and winding, probably as much as this book if not more. Maybe I will tell that story someday, but what I am creating is, I know, the fulfillment of a dream I carried with me my whole life and had even resigned myself to never accomplishing. And that is why it is difficult for me to be entirely bitter about the events that tore me away from my old life. Because things were missing from me. Taking care of myself was one of them. Acquiring what I was missing in order to create is another - a majestic one. So if I take stock, the balance is positive, because what I lost was hurting me and what I gained is priceless.