It wasn’t long until I found the famous Sloperama post on ideas. But I didn’t believe it, and I don’t think a lot of new developers do either. But it is true. Sort of…

While Tom has good reason to write something like this intended for game dev tenderfoots, I think this nugget of advice can have a decent negative effect on what more experienced developers decide to work on, or even prototype.

So my post is directed towards developers with a few polished games under their belt. To stay with the Boy Scout ranking system, these developers would be First Class or Star. Not necessarily Eagle Scouts [Miyamoto?], but know how to tie a square-knot no problem. They’re comfortable with the execution of the game idea, working on usability, play-testing and have a general understanding of good and bad design. I’m not saying there’s some sort of ceiling on any of these, but I think there’s a point you reach where you feel like you’re “in your cockpit” [Stolen from Mike] when you’re making whatever it is that you’re making.

I think the reason Tom Sloper wrote that article, and so many other veterans follow with the same advice for designers starting out, is due to the fact that many a first timer looking to promote their game solely based on the idea of it is often touting an idea that doesn’t excite people experienced in game development. That’s not all that surprising, though if you’ve made a few games. Or even one.

I’m not excited by my Big Ideas that started me off on this path in the first place. In fact, a friend asked about “my first love” just last night and he seemed disappointed that I wasn’t excited anymore by the idea, like I had lost something along the way. But I’d argue the opposite, I’ve actually gained something and that’s the ability to understand my limits [temporary] as a developer at this point in time and what that means for the games I want to make.

In the beginning I would let ideas run wild with features, story and content. They were sprawling epics of games that would take decades to create with even a medium sized team, but I didn’t care. I was a teenager in love. Now though, an idea of that scope can’t even get me off the couch because it’s too big to understand really quickly. Not that a large idea can’t be great, but it certainly is much harder to test against and I have less experience with that. That’s just me, though.

As I grow as a developer I temper my taste for the game ideas that we come up with and I think more developers should take notice and give ourselves a little more credit as designers. Our latest game, due out in a week or so, is a product of really hashing out ideas based on an abstract concept and trusting our gut for that Eureka moment. I’m not saying it will be typical but the first time we tried doing the brainstorm-room thing, as more experienced developers, it worked. Though it seemed that throughout the process, the important thing was not to settle on good-enough. We had plenty of decent ideas that could have been decent games, but we weren’t excited about those.

For this session we settled on a word or phrase [parallax scrolling] and used it as a starting point to drive the brainstorm. Just about all of our games are centered around one mechanic that seeds teh rest of the game. If we hold true to that mechanic we feel like the mechanic itself will form into something cool and interesting. Anyway, “parallax” went to “speed”, into a discussion about speed and the feeling of going fast and how awesome that is, into talking about propulsion types and eventually into the final solution which was the Eureka moment. It was incredibly obvious to us both simultaneously that we realized it had to be prototyped immediately. I went into my room and created a mockup while Mike made a control-scheme prototype. And we had it.

A lot of my views on ideas now are driven by the experience, and while it may never happen again and I could be totally wrong, I feel like we need to trust ourselves as developers more often and put a little more faith into our ideas, even if they have burned us in the past with those terribly overblown growing-pain game projects that we all embarked on when wide eyed and green. Find a project that excites you in all areas that need exciting! Scope. Style. Gameplay. Innovation? You can have ‘em all, just hold out for the right one and bounce ideas off each other. It’s not like we have a checklist of things that make for a good or bad game project, it’s just what our tastes have become so we don’t need to check them against some sort of rote list or anything, we just kind of know.

I feel like that’s also one really important facet of settling in on an idea [as opposed to rapid prototyping multiple ideas]. Most often, those early game projects that I spent years translating into worthless design documents were solely from my brain, and that’s a problem! Our brains like to give themselves credit when they come up with something “new” so that colors the idea in a favorable light. If you have another brain around that can’t help but give you “big ups” for an idea it didn’t completely have, then you probably know you’re onto something.

Anyway, just wanted to ramble on that for a bit, something I’ve been thinking about while on some downtime. Also, you should know that there are many ways to generate ideas and prototypes. This is just what worked for us last time and we’ll probably try it again for the next game. I’m all for people coming up with personal ideas as a means of expression [I do that also] or shotgun prototypes or picking random ideas off a dartboard. Whatever works!

Hell: 222 OSRAM OSTAR® LE UW E3B LEDs united in one piece of art. Each of these latest generation LEDs has a brightness of up to 1120 Lumen, which equals the light emitted by a powerful video projector. 222 of these LEDs produce 240.000 Lumen, a brightness usually sufficient to illuminate a football field. In our case, the light is concentrated on a panel none bigger than 240×140 cm. The 222 LEDs are arranged in such a way that they read the word “HELL” , which in German also means “bright”, playing with this ambiguity in many different ways. Extensive electronics such as transformators, cooling and emergency switches are built into the panel that must be fed with 30.000 Watts of power supply. In an active, turned on state, the piece is too bright to be looked at, so that one is oblidged to wear welding shades when contemplating the artwork. At exhibitions, special care and safety measures must be taken in order to avoid damage to the eyes of spectators.

And there we have it, the final answer to the mystery of 222. ;)

Play it right now for free!

I felt a great sense of accomplishment making this game on my own, though I know there is an oceans worth of improvement to be had still, it’s a big milestone for me so I thought I’d share the journey with you all in this post.

My whole career as a game developer has been spent on the visual side of things, which can sometimes be frustrating for me. In my formative years as a developer I often struggled with programmers on any number of levels. Getting something as basic as prototyping the first draft of player movement in the game was an extremely laborious task [we were using a game-maker like tool as well!].

Though, I’m not totally oblivious to coding. I code all my own websites [intuition, Mikengreg, this site...] but that’s more script than anything and when it comes to games I rarely touched more than a config file in plain text or XML scripts.

So a few years ago, during the days of Dinowaurs, I ventured out to try and learn a bit about coding games. At first I started using ActionScript 2.0 with the help of a book or two and I made some solid progress, but I never felt like I “got it”. I think I made some particle systems and a few other toys, but no games.

After awhile I bought a few books on ActionScript 3.0 and dove into the terrifying world of Object Oriented Programming [OOP]. It was a completely new way to set things up compared to 2.0 though it felt more organized. Like there was a more strict set of rules that I’d need to follow that might allow me to uncover the underlying structure of this “magical coding stuff” better.

For the next couple years, and up until just recently, I would find a free night or weekend and try certain things out. Most of the time it was a simple project to learn how input works with the keyboard. Other times it was a grandiose plan to overhaul my portfolio or create a “platforming garden” where I would be able to test and tweak platforming characters. These would always fail miserably because I was in way over my head, but they were wholly necessary to the learning process. After I failed or came up against a brick wall I would often stop studying/coding for months at a time. The frustration was immense and I didn’t really have a community to advise me during. That was fine though. I certainly had plenty to do with my other projects and the break was nice since I would get a little obsessive about figuring out a certain problem.

So this sort of on/off parabola continued until about a month or two ago. I was in a programming phase and I took to going back to the early chapters of the Moock book. I realized I didn’t truly understand the core concepts of many different devices in OOP and I needed to get back to basics. It was here that I learned how powerful functions actually can be and what arrays actually do. I continued to read and re-read these same chapters until I completely understood the building blocks of AS3.0 and it was then that I decided I could pull of an actual game.

Using only circles and frictionless physics I was able to make a full game that I’m pretty happy with. It’s not a game that is supposed to say anything in particular nor is it a game that I think is incredibly gripping or fun for me, but I feel like the concept is sound and the execution decent for my first game. There are many things I would like to alter if I had the powers of an expert coder [motion blur] but those simply won’t be happening for this game.

I hope some of you get a kick out of it and I’m considering posting the awful source here since it might be a good opportunity for some more experienced developers to give me some tips on how to better code something and so on. Though that could get overwhelming as the whole thing is a 100% mess; I’m sure. It’s all in one file! o_O

Oh! And post your highest level in the comments if you want. I don’t have high-scores or anything so this’ll have to do.

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

This is a quote that has often resonated with me, but recently I started ruminating on it a bit more while driving alone in the car. Whats that really mean? To steal and not copy? Certainly a great artist isn’t someone that breaks into someone’s studio and steals their work off the easel calling it their own. I think the answer to that question can reveal a lot about the process of creativity and diffuse misconceptions about originality.

The first notion I had regarding the meaning of this quote had to do with piecing together different “great ideas” into one unified piece of work. I don’t think that’s too far off but I’m not sure it does it justice. It’s too simplistic of an interpretation and doesn’t give enough credit to the “thief.”

How I take the quote has a lot to do with the difference between copying and stealing. Somebody who simply copies someone else usually doesn’t need any surrounding knowledge of how the original was formed or what sort of structure lies underneath. It’s merely aesthetic. To draw from a photograph is a mechanical exercise that does take skill, but it certainly doesn’t take the kind of investigation it would to “steal” it.

Now. To steal; that’s a task for a scholar. To successfully steal an idea or method and co-opt it as your own takes a lot of studying. For instance, to truly steal from Super Mario Bros. you’d have to understand the underlying “whys” of nearly every piece of level design and character control in the game. It’s a huge, complex framework of design that has to be teased out in order to properly examine. Plenty of people make platformers in the exact same style as SMB but they are copies [many of them poor] not stolen.

One deep example of SMB level design is the first level. This was analyzed somewhere on the internet, where specifically I can’t remember, but the first level of Mario is a delicate balance of risk/reward and tutorial masked as gameplay. Remember, SMB was the first platformer of its kind and nobody knew what the hell was going on when they started up 1-1. In the space of a half minute or so players with no platformer reference could understand blocks could be broken by getting a mushroom, goombas were bad, jumping was good and coins were fun to collect. I won’t break it all down but it’s quite a feat and copying that first level as an homage is a neat nod to Miyamoto, but it’s still just copying. To understand and steal the idea that you can teach the player the conventions of the game through level design, well that’s stealing a great idea, putting it into use inside a different system [your own] and looking like an original genius.

Right now I’m in one of my “learning to program” stints so practically speaking, I could take a code snippet from a forum somewhere and pipe it into my project and things would just work. This would be copying. But alternatively, I could study the code snippet, search out a few more and figure out how it’s actually working. It’s sort of the fish and the fisherman lesson here. Stealing is about understanding the target as intimately as the original artist. And there’s that word: “original”. We’re obsessed with it as artists, scientists or internet commenters. We always want to be the first!

VadersMom1337
First!

But really, everything is stolen. As far as I can tell everything in the world is derived from something else.

Carl Sagan
We are made of star stuff.

So when something new comes about creatively, scientifically or otherwise it’s never brand new. It’s stolen from elsewhere. I think it’s really important to accept this fact. It’s not uncommon for an artist to bang their head against the wall searching for the next bit of inspiration from within. When something like that happens it feels special and personal, but really it’s still an outside influence, the difference is they’re not conscious of it. So steal, steal, steal! Go out there and be a student of the world and drill down to understand the whys and the hows of other creative mediums, nature and the universe.

And the view they had when they hit this magical mileage:

Pretty awesome. I’m jealous of this 222 view and mileage, perhaps I’ll need to modify my odometer… I’m patiently awaiting the van’s arrival to our parts if everything goes as planned. Thanks Andy, you guys rock! Make sure to check out their blog to see what they’re up to. They plan to traverse the entire continent of Canada in the name of indie games. Canada, the 8th continent. Buckle up!

With the beautiful days ticking away as I’m stuck inside on my computer and a recent signup at Wakoopa, I’ve been more conscious of how I’m spending my time. It’s not that I’m completely wasting it but it certainly feels that way as I hear kids run around at recess outside or watch the clouds pass in front of bright blue skies. I’m always doing stuff in front of screens. You’d think I worshipped these guys, staring endlessly into their sputtering radiance. But no more!

Every single day, I’m going to do at least one thing that doesn’t involve a screen of any kind. What constitutes a screen? Anything with pixels. No pixels! Not here, not anywhere. What constitutes a “thing”? Whatever it is, it can’t be routine.

crowd

Hey, but what about my iPhone! I can’t live without 3G internet, what if someone emails me and I can’t see the sports score or the twitters news day…

No! Step away. If you can’t leave your cell phone in airplane mode for an hour or keep yourself from checking your email for 5 seconds you should seriously consider why that’s really so important in the first place? What’s the pay out on being constantly connected 24 hours a day? For me i can handle 22 hours a day just fine and the pay out of those 1-2 hours of disconnection is incredible.

crowd

But what about showering? Nobody showers with a screen… Or, or cooking! Yea. Got you there, don’t we?! Your reign of screen-hate is over.

Doesn’t count. If it’s a chore, task, errand or whatever it’s not really adding something new to your life. Because that’s the whole point! On Wednesday I went outside and drew pictures for an hour. Yesterday I went running in my new Vibrams! [I don't usually run]. Today I’m going to shoot some hoops. Work doesn’t count, even if you don’t work in front of a screen all day.

Social things count too. Tonight I’m going out to VEISHA with some friends, and while there may be a guerilla screen or two there [DROID] it will still be an activity that is more spontaneous than it is routine. I’ve tried a bunch of stuff to focus on things outside of work in my life and it always seems to end up being too complicated. This is simple. Once a day, get away from the digital world, however and whenever you can. Even if it’s just for a half hour or ten minutes!

It seems simple and easy, but you’ll have to get pretty creative after just a few days of doing it. Oh yea, that’s the last rule. You can’t do the same thing twice in a row. And if you alternate between two activities you’re missing the whole point again! :)

I’ve posted this little manifesto on the TIGForums, so if you join up post something cool you did with your No Screen time.

So I played an awesome game today, it’s called Specter Spelunker Shrinks. But when I got to the site I thought…
me

“Whoa, this is the same dude [NMcCoy] who did Wavespark?! Awesome!

I continued to believe that NMcCoy made this game and my idea of him as a developer was bolstered. I already loved Wavespark. So while that helped out my opinion of NMcCoy, I completely missed the fact that it was done by a different developer, Ken Grafals of Fall Damage Games. It’s quite easy, but the only difference is in the masthead [image at the top of a page]. See for yourself:

Did you catch the difference? ;)

But seriously, this is becoming more of an issue now that we have plenty of free, well designed solutions for putting out what we make. I actually recommend using a theme of some sort if you’re not of the visual persuasion, and even if you are since it’s a great starting place. All of the typography is pretty much going to be nice, clean and legible so you don’t need to fret over that, and the overall user experience is polished on most popular Wordpress [insert your CMS here] themes.

However, this kind of thing happens a lot [i see this theme everywhere], where we all use the same theme and then the confusion starts in. So if you’re dropping in a theme of your own, I would advise one change. It can take as little as one minute if you want. Change the colors! It’s a very simple fix. Head over to the style.css and search for the hex of whatever colors you’re using [use firebug as well]. Do a Find and Replace on the colors, swap them consistently like that, and there you go. You’re a completely different “company” that’s most likely not going to be confused with anyone else. It’s all you need, and it goes a long way.

Now that doesn’t mean picking colors is easy, in fact it can go horribly wrong. But be modest, stick with a strict palette and ask for some honest opinions and after an hour or so you’ll be on your way. In fact, in just one line, I did it with Fall Damage Games. By taking out the background image, and just leaving the background black, the whole site took on its own identity.

Just tweak the CSS a tad, you’ll be glad you did. It’s important.

“Mom. Am I going to die?!”

It’s this sort of mindset that gets me paralyzed in a creative block. I’m staring at sketches, ideas and everything else I can think of but a feeling of deterministic dread drapes every new thought. It’s not the blank-page problem, or at least not usually with me. I’m creating new stuff, exploring new areas but none of it is working. It all sucks. It’s never going to work! AHHHHH!!! In this most recent case it was my work on the Mikengreg identity. After a long hiatus from the badge, I decided I hated it. This is nothing new, I was never 100% happy with it, but now the pressure is on and I was questioning the entire direction because I was no longer in the groove of working on Mikengreg stuff.

While I know the big idea of Mikengreg is “handmade games crafted with love and high-fives” I lost the scent on how that would actually be applied to the identity a long time ago. What does our website look like? What surface are we making these games on? Where’s the system?

That’s how I work, in systems. If I don’t have a system that I can turn to then I’m 100% lost. More on systems in the future. I’ll post about that when I do my big Mikengreg identity process post. Point being, I was lost.

Don’t let it stagnate

So the first contributing factor was that this was looming over my head during a couple of big projects. In my head I am thinking: “Mikengreg isn’t perfect, in fact every time I look at it, it sucks a little more.” With each day that I didn’t work toward making it work I saw more and more mistakes. This may seem like a good thing on the surface, but in reality it added to my crippling creative paralysis. In the same way putting off talking about a serious problem with a significant other only makes the fight worse, putting off facing up to the issues with the logo made it that much harder to address.

Do your best not to cut off projects midway through their development. If you have to split time between them, do at least a little work everyday on one or the other to avoid it stagnating.

Stick with the spark

Of course, the “don’t let it happen” variants are merely precautionary and aren’t too useful when you’re in the throes of a major creative block. On Monday I basically just planned and sketched all day. It wasn’t a bad thing, and certainly could have been worse [stare at a screen all day] but I was convinced that I had got it all wrong in the first place. The original line of thinking was to make a beer/food label/badge/seal logo for us that would communicate our personality. Last time I left off I was planning on hand-painting everything [website etc.] and toying with the idea of doing it in woodcut. I did some website concepts and all of them felt aimless and trite. So I went back to the drawing board and came up with modern stuff, corporate looking stuff, experimental type and etc. Some of it was ok, but it was all just as aimless as the website concepts. It wasn’t until I realized where I’d left off with the woodcuts that I just needed to iterate on that. I was letting my growing distaste for what I’d done tempt me to scrap it all, including the big idea.

That’s really the nugget of all of this. The Big Idea. Don’t lose sight of it. It’s what Mikengreg was founded on; it gets us excited and we believe in it. By investigating other avenues I wasn’t expanding the process, rather I was abandoning the only shred of a system that we had in the first place. It’s healthy to think outside the box but if you’re letting the block itself frustrate and control your creative decisions you may make some serious mistakes. Always keep an eye on the original idea when moving forward. That is your guide and it will never waiver [unless of course it was a bad idea in the first place].

Don’t move horizontally, drill down vertically

Part of the solution to dredging myself out of the block was to stop thinking in terms of iterating horizontally on a design problem. What I mean was that I was looking for solutions in alternate styles of typography, completely new identity systems [see above] rather than constraining the vision and thinking vertically about what wasn’t working with the original concept. I had this aimless website design, a few aimless pieces of art that I was arranging and various typefaces I was switching in and out. One image was hand-painted, the other a sketch, and then the logo badge you see on mikengreg.com. These disparate elements weren’t working and I wasn’t willing to think about why because I was so frustrated.

The real problem was that I had a website that was more graphical than the content it would be displaying. After immersing myself in a healthy amount of top-quality website designs from around the internet, it was clear that I was more concerned with the identity itself than the games we would make and showcase through the identity. The identity is the pasta [handmade and cooked to perfection] and the games are the sauce. Of course I don’t actually want to have the identity overshadow the games; I love our games, and I think they’re fucking awesome. So, I took a step back and reconsidered all my choices and decided that all this hand-painted stuff had to go. Also, the badge needs a good amount of simplification as well some woodcut treatments.

Now I had my system. Woodcuts and wood. It made total sense the whole time. Wooden surfaces chiseled by hand into works of art. All the elements were now in place with the system. Handmade = 1 color woodcut. Games = showcased in full color. Crafted with Love & High-Fives = Mikengreg [the humans]. Now surely there is a lot more to the system, but we’re good now. I’ve got the badge looking much better. Everything in its right place.

Though, none of this would have happened as quickly if I hand’t stuck with it. Fight through the pain as much as you don’t want to. It’s a much stranger problem when facing creative problems, but hopefully some of these things I went through will help you find your way through it.

I tell people this a lot but my Mom gave me a great piece of sinister logic when I was younger trying to learn simple division. I was on the bed cross-legged pounding my fists into the comforter because I couldn’t understand the problem. My mom, being the award-winning teacher she is, waited until I calmed enough to tell me:
Mom

Now Greg, you want to know something? That frustration you’re feeling… Well that’s how you know you’re just about to learn something new!

About 5 minutes later I figured it out and I’ve been doing long-division ever since!

Edmund’s points are all very sound, but like any list, it’s easy to pick apart. But really what came out was a discussion about how each of us as developers approaches things from what sometimes is a vastly different angle. Stephen Lavelle [increpare] mentions how he takes issue with most of the points, and with good reason. Stephen makes games for very different reasons than Edmund. It got me thinking again about something I’ve been thinking about a lot since I was talked to Ben about creativity. We were chatting about his ongoing sideproject: Aztez and we got talking about collaborations and he mentioned how he sees most developers as one of two different types of creative people: Artists or Entertainers. That stuck with me and forced me to take it on and ask myself…
Me

Am I an Artist or an Entertainer?

Now there are a lot of problems with grouping someone in such a broad category. Certainly there is a vast spectrum there between those two values and the words Artist and Entertainer are insufficient especially in lieu of the “games as art” dead horse. Perhaps a better divide would be Artists who want to Express an Idea v. Artists who want to Express Emotion? I dunno…

Labeling things like that will only upset people but if you can get past it and ask yourself “which am I?” I think it provides an interesting insight into the “why” of creative expression. If nothing else, it’s a good starting point. So let me start…

Raymond Arnold

If you don’t care about quality and you don’t care about money or recognition, by what metric do you measure yourself at all?

Rob Fearon

Whilst I obviously can’t answer for Stephen, I can answer this for myself. Getting the idea out of my head and onto the screen is far more important a factor for me than anything else. If it turns out to be an idea with some merit (however one might choose to define that on a personal level), then ace. If it isn’t, at least it’s out of my head.

But crucially, I don’t measure myself on the body of my work and wouldn’t care to either. It doesn’t define me. There are far more important things in life to worry about, y’know?

Rob’s feelings on the question of “why” are pretty close to what I feel about making games. Or anything for that matter. Right now I have an idea for a visual poem I want to do. A comic strip that I want to start. An iPhone game that refuses to find a home. These are all things that fester inside me and I desperately want to expel them. Not that they’re demons of any shape, but it’s this compulsion to create that drives me. Showing it to other people is a nice side effect, it’s always nice to hear someone got something out of something I did, but it’s not the why. The why is much more selfish.

Raymond Arnold

the people who are most successful (both in terms of quality and recognition for that quality) tend to do most of [Edmund's] things.

Stephen Lavelle

Screw quality, screw recognition, screw success.

I understand what Stephen is saying here and I think his heart is in the right place and I definitely feel the frustration of forcing a “focus on success” type of attitude. Too often do we assume that everyone else in the world wants tons of money and fame. Though I do take issue with the bit about quality. If I have an idea for something and I can’t execute it like I see it in my head then it’s never as satisfying as creating something that I feel is 100% realized how I envisioned. Now, that doesn’t really exist, just like no circle is perfect, but there are things that I’ve done that I’m still proud of today and then there are many that I am not. I am highly critical of myself and if I weren’t I probably would have gotten bored of this a long time ago. It’s that unreachable goal of perfectly capturing and conveying an idea and transferring it from my head to the screen/page/canvas that also drives me [mad].

Exactly why I do what I do

I want to get more specific though, because this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. For me, the real reason I make video games boils down to a very specific, very discernible moment.

It’s “seeing it live”. It’s a feeling I clued in to over a decade ago doing Final Fantasy VII fan sites in PageMaker. I would type in some code, save the file and then load it up in the browser. I’d see the changes and it would work! It felt awesome and I was hooked. I had this thing [webpage] that I could endlessly modify and watch it work and show to others. It had this whole hairy underbelly that only I knew about and I would be pulling the levers and setting it up just right. Games are a lot like that. Animation; 3D modeling; they all have elements of alchemy that let you surprise yourself. There’s something very abstract about the process, much like Pollock probably experienced when he was playing with gravity and paint on a canvas. The work would surprise him and he’d respond and refine and respond and refine…

That’s why I make games, or why I do anything creative. I’m addicted to that. I enjoy drawing, but when I draw I usually find a way to play with my subconscious by laying down a doodle and then responding to it, or venturing into watercolor or inkwash and letting the water do its thing with the paper. In my early college years at Iowa I did a lot of symmetrical abstract work in Photoshop using the Liquify filter and hundreds of blend layers horizontally flipped to create something incredibly unexpected, yet recognizable. The moment just before turning on the blend mode to see what it would look like was that nugget of crack that I craved out of the whole process.

So in the end, it’s completely selfish. There was a time that I thought what I was doing would somehow make a difference in the world, or help people understand each other a bit better so that maybe the world would be a better place, but the last few years of my life have taken that view out of the idyllic and into the realistic. It’s impossible to save something that doesn’t want to be saved even if it needs it. I don’t think what I’m doing is bad, and I still do believe in what I’m doing is for the good, but it’s clear now that it’s much more for myself than it is for others. If others get something out of it, then that’s the icing.