Affection Game Postmortem

Hey there!

Welcome back to another one of my post-mortems! It’s been quite a while, huh?

Making this game… has punctuated a lot of personal growth and room for growth.

Affection Game’s concept sparked from a desire to start asking for what I want, to bring up my needs, and listen to the needs of others.

I think I started off pretty well! Working on this game encouraged me to be more communicative, be more open, and speak up for my needs and to the needs of partners.

But I have to admit, I think that all slowed way down throughout 2018, as I was closing up the testing of this game and starting to work more on the art.

I began to isolate myself, a thing common with my depression journey.

I dropped off the face of the planet from tons of friends and really only communicated with one partner (my now primary partner) and one friend on a regular basis. I stopped being communicative with everyone else online. If I was at a live event, I’d try my best to pour energy into interacting, but the moment I was alone or with my primary partner, I’d basically be in the Josie Robo Bubble.

I learned through this, that not all partners are going to deal with my isolation episodes. And that’s perfectly fine! Especially since this has been an on and off part of my life for years. Years of someone being there, but not really there? I could see how friends and partners would want to opt out from that.

Over the course of making this game, two relationships of mine changed. One partner re-negotiated what our relationship is, and another brought up that they didn’t want to be partners anymore.

I’m publishing this game shortly after a breakup that was well deserved. I was barely communicating with someone I wanted to keep dating casually, and didn’t even update them on what was going on with me or how I was starting to restructure my relationships. For their well being, they needed to break up and eventually realized they can’t be friends with me.

And I respect that so hard. If there’s anything making this game has taught me, it’s that needs are supposed to be heard, and it’s up to all parties to figure out how best they can address them. The whole time we did a relationship post-mortem and I was realizing how badly I hurt this friend, and I was also internally cheering them on. It’s never fun to be told that you were neglectful, but all the things said were spot on, and I didn’t want to deny the truth they were saying.

The timing for all of this was wild. I was planning on publishing near the end of May, and bam! Breakup that perfectly explains what I need to work on happens.

From everything that’s happened during this game’s development has encouraged me to start working on a self reflection game. I think the next step for me is figuring out how to sort out my own feelings and thoughts, and figure out where to grow next.