Endless Pickpocketing

This is Endless Pickpocketing, by Eri Godahl Drury. Click the image above to make a daring robbery attempt on your target. Watch his eyes to make sure he doesn’t see you do it!

This page is pretty inaccessible to screenreader users, I’m sorry to say.

Months ago, I saw this article shared on Critical Distance's best of the year list or whatever, and it left a curious impact. It’s a call to action to make small games, tiny games, even, and not to be intimidated by the size and scale of AAA games, popular indie games, or even games that inspired you when you were young. It recommends making something small that communicates a simple idea, perhaps in an engine like Bitsy or Twine, and suggests that these sorts of small games are legitimately better than the big hyper polished ones, because they have an easier time making good on their promises. The article also suggests some strategies for making these types of games, and for not feeling ashamed of not being able to make something on the scale of, say, Hollow Knight as a solo hobbyist developer.

I *do* make small games, often VERY small games, and it's looking like I might not graduate beyond that in my lifetime.

The writer claims there's no shame in that, that you need to learn to love tiny games, and that even if there's some hyper-ambitious big AAA-adjacent game you want to make, it's best to just bite off a small piece of that and make a tiny version of it (which is what I've done here).
And that all sounds nice, but I've been making these sorts of nanogames for a while now, and I don't know if I believe that anymore?

Let me explain. Like most indie game devs, I'm stuck in a purgatorial loop of endlessly remaking the same game from my childhood over and over. Lizzie Smithson, my life's work, is based very closely on the Sly Cooper series, particularly Sly 3. I've tried innumerable angles in my attempts to recreate those games’ magic, but there's always been a sort of je ne sais quoi to the Sly games that's eluded me over the years. Something in the series is like lightning in a bottle, and I can't seem to recreate it.

So to speak of something like Endless Pickpocketing, this game here: Let's just say I had fun making it, and I guess I'm proud of it the same way I'm proud of all my games, but it's not good enough. At my point in life, I think I do want to make something a little bigger in scale, something where you at least get to use a control stick to move a character through a level. That's the stuff that inspires me, and that's the stuff I like to imagine myself making. But then I think of the work that would need to go into that, animation, code, maybe music, and it's beyond me, it's just so far beyond me.

The thing is, I'm already putting more of myself into my work than I need to, I usually finish two pages of my webcomic a week alongside my grocery store day job, and when I mentioned that to an online acquaintance, they seemed to imply it was an awful lot of work. I dunno, it's just normal to me! But it doesn't leave a lot of room for any ambitious side projects--typically, whenever I make one of these games, I have to first get ahead of my backlog a bit so I can keep the webcomic running and updating the whole time, cause that's important to me. Am I crazy for Doing that? I wonder.

And I really don't know if I even can do anything more ambitious than what I'm doing--it’s like this follow up article the same writer wrote says, the “big” games, like Owlboy or Iconoclasts, are made over the course of up to a decade, or have teams of dozens of people behind them (This article gets into it too)--I don't want to spend ten years making a game! I can't afford to hire several dozen people to bring my *vanity* projects to life (and I don't know anything about managing a team)! And I'm not interested in finding investors or a publisher either, cause if I had those I'd have to answer to obvious sharks who I know don't understand what I'm going for, and the only thing I want to have to answer to is my own foolishness. If that means keeping my Kroger job and staying a hobbyist, then so be it

I feel like Martin Scorcese at the end of his life--I can see miles of oceans of possibilities for the stuff I want to do, and it looks like all I can accomplish of it in my life is wet my feet a bit. Did I waste my youth? Maybe I did. But then, who doesn't? I wish I hadn't.

So it looks like I'm stuck for now--maybe someday, a game engine will come out that lets me make my dream open world platformer easily and not too exploitatively. Until then, this game here is the best I can do.