Six weeks, zero pixels

In the last Papniskin post I ended with something like “maybe this is the part where I finally sit down and do the work instead of just talking about it — we’ll find out soon enough.”

Well. We found out.

Six weeks. Zero commits. Zero pixels. Aseprite hasn’t been opened. Godot hasn’t been opened. The neatly named VM is sitting quietly in its folder, untouched, like a polite dog waiting at the door of a room I never walked back into.

So. Devlog update: nothing happened. Welcome to the post.

The day job got loud

I’m not going to dramatise this. The day job got loud, that’s all. The kind of weeks where the calendar fills up by Monday lunchtime, where you finish a meeting only to discover three more crept onto the schedule while you weren’t looking, where by 7pm the laptop closes and the idea of opening another editor — even one for a project you genuinely love — is borderline offensive.

There’s a particular kind of tiredness that comes from work like that. It’s not even physical. It’s that the part of the brain that does creative tinkering has been rented out all day. By the time you get it back, it just wants to lie on the carpet and stare at the ceiling for a bit.

And to be honest, a lot of it has been the good kind of loud. There’s been a stretch of work I’m genuinely proud of — designing and starting to implement test automation for a couple of genuinely big systems, the sort of thing that’s been on the wishlist for ages and finally got proper time and space. On top of that, the annual review cycle landed, which sounds dry until you remember it’s also the part where you get to push the people you’ve been quietly mentoring into bigger roles and fatter pay brackets. Watching someone you’ve been backing for months land the title and the raise is one of the genuinely satisfying parts of being a few years into a career — a small private win that doesn’t show up on any dashboard but matters more than most of the things that do.

Either way, full is full. I’m aware this is the standard pattern of every desk-bound human on Earth in this era of metrics and engagement and slick dashboards measuring whether you smiled enough on the Wednesday standup. Distant thunder, I’m not going to make it the whole post. Just naming it: work has been heavy in both directions, and game dev was always going to be the first thing to go silent when that happens.

And then, the better reason

But honestly, even on the weeks when work eased up, I didn’t go to Papniskin.

I went to my kids.

I’ll keep this vague on purpose — the blog is anonymous and the children are not a topic I want fully written down. But there’s a stage small kids go through where every older parent in your life starts quietly telling you almost the same sentence, almost the same wistful half-smile: this is the bit you’ll miss the most. They don’t say it as advice. They say it as a confession. Something they wish someone had said louder to them when they were where you are now.

I keep hearing it. From colleagues, from neighbours, from family. And I can already feel why. There’s a softness to this stretch of life that I don’t think comes back. The way they want to be carried. The way the day winds down into a small evening that is mostly them. The way the smallest things — a silly invented word, a flopped-over cuddle on the couch, a question about why the moon follows the car — feel oddly enormous later, when you’re brushing your teeth and they’re asleep and the house has gone quiet.

And it’s not all small and quiet either. This is also the season of little adventures. Loads of bike rides with the kids strapped into the seat behind me — small hands pointing at everything that goes by, a constant running commentary blowing back into my face as we go. Weekend wanderings into town for an ice cream that’s melting faster than they can manage it. This is the age where almost everything is still genuinely new to them, and there is nothing on this planet quite like watching that small wide-eyed face light up at something I’ve walked past a thousand times. Pigeons exploding into the air when you charge at the flock. A fountain rediscovered every visit, with the standing summer promise that on the next really hot day, yes, you can absolutely get in. The bell of an old tower coming out of nowhere on a quiet afternoon. City corners I didn’t even know I had, suddenly worth a detour because they made someone small gasp.

And then, once the kids are down, the slow part of the evening with my wife — a film we’d been meaning to watch, a bowl of popcorn between us, real conversation in our own voices again. She still does the same quiet thing to me she always has. We end up sitting closer than we need to, a hand finds a hand somewhere around halfway through a sentence, and the comfortable kind of nothing-much quietly turns out to be the actual point — and never only comfortable.

So the maths of “do I go downstairs and open Aseprite, or do I stay up here for another half hour” stops being maths at all. It just isn’t a choice. The pixels can wait. They will, very patiently, wait.

Family first — always. Even when “first” means a top-down pixel art game sits idle for another six weeks and counting.

I genuinely thought about cutting Papniskin from the blog

I want to be honest about this part because it surprised me.

A few days ago, looking at the blog’s tag list, I had a real, considered thought: maybe I should just retire game dev as a topic. Clean it up. Stop pretending. Let the posts that are here stay as a small archive, and let the tag quietly die. The case for it was almost convincing. I’m not making progress. I’m not making screenshots. I’m not even making half-promises any more. What is this tag for, exactly.

I sat with that for about a day.

Then I decided no, and the reason is mildly important to me, so I’ll write it down.

This blog isn’t a portfolio. It isn’t a product. It isn’t a feed. It’s a slow record of a regular guy doing regular things over a long stretch of time, and a topic going quiet is not the same as the topic being dead. If I cut it now, I’m pretending I’ve made a decision I haven’t made. I haven’t decided to stop. I’ve just stopped, temporarily, because life is doing what life does. There’s a difference, and I want the blog to respect it.

Maybe in a year I’ll come back to it. Maybe in five. Maybe in 10, when the house is quieter and the evenings are emptier and I have the brain for it again. Maybe never, honestly. But the slot can stay. The VM can stay. The tag can stay. None of them cost anything except a few bytes and the occasional honest update like this one.

The peace of a shelved project

The version of me from late April, freshly motivated, fingers itching for Aseprite, would have read this post with a small wince. Six weeks already? Come on.

The version of me writing it today doesn’t feel that wince. I think that’s the genuinely interesting part.

I’ve watched a lot of side projects die over the years — mine and other people’s — and I’ve slowly started to believe that the ones that survive long-term are the ones that are allowed to rest. Not pushed. Not whipped back into motion every time a guilt pang shows up. Just allowed to sit on the shelf, dust-free, with the door closed, until the season turns and the energy comes back. The projects that die are usually the ones you try to force during the wrong season. They rot under the pressure.

Papniskin is on the shelf, and the shelf is fine. The shelf is, in fact, the correct place for it right now.

There’s a small irony I’m aware of: I’m writing a blog post about not making the game. I’m spending the exact half-hour of evening focus I claim not to have, typing this instead of opening Godot. I see it. I’m laughing at it. Sometimes the honest devlog is zero pixels and a paragraph explaining why.

A quiet close

The VM is still there. Still named. Still snapshotted from the day in April when I was briefly convinced the long gap was the last one. Apparently it wasn’t. There will be more gaps. That’s fine.

When I’m ready, it’ll boot.

Until then — the kids are small, the work is loud, and the game is on the shelf. I didn’t give up on the dream today either. I just chose, for the hundredth quiet evening in a row, the people in the room over the project in the other room.

I’d choose it again tomorrow.