Leaving

Last Friday was my last day at the studio. Ten years, give or take a month. I handed in my badge and my laptop at the front desk, and the woman who checked me in on my first morning, who has outlasted three reorganizations and most of the people who ran them, said, "Well, you're not the first." Then she hugged me, which she has never done, and I cried in the parking garage, which I had promised myself I wouldn't.

I don't want to write a post about what's wrong with big studios. I loved a great deal of it. I learned to write there. I wrote hundreds of quests, a few I'm proud of, and one, about a man looking for his brother's grave, that people still write to me about. I worked beside people who are better at this than I'll ever be. Some of them read this. Thank you.

But a game that size is a city, and you write one street of it. For a long time I've wanted to make something small enough to hold the whole of: something where it feels like there's someone on the other side. Not a script that branches. Someone paying attention. I've been saying that out loud for about a year now, mostly to Owen, mostly late, and at some point he stopped telling me why it couldn't be done and started telling me how.

So we're leaving together, to make one thing. Owen kept the studio's servers standing up for most of the years I was there, and we've been arguing in hallways since the week we met. He builds. I write. We have savings that will last about as long as we think the game will take, which we both know means they won't.

We're doing it in Duluth. I grew up here, my mother is still in the house I grew up in, and a room with a door costs less here than a parking space did in Seattle. Owen says he came for the lake. He came because I told him there was a print shop downstairs and he likes the smell. We signed for one room up a flight of stairs on Tuesday. It has two radiators, and no two days are they the same temperature.

I drove out with everything I own in a car I should have sold. Three days, four audiobooks, one bad motel in Montana. I stopped at the lake before I stopped at my mother's, and I'm not sorry.

I'm scared, which seems right. Everything I've made that was worth anything scared me first.

What would you make if no one could tell you it wouldn't fit?