We’ve all heard the advice, given gently and in friendship, that the best way to improve in this business is to publish work that we may feel is unfinished.

That advice did not work for me, because it did not point a finger in my face and tell me unflinchingly that if I DIDN’T publish, I WOULDN’T improve. I wish it had.

This manifesto is the advice I wish I had been given, in the way I wish it had been given to me.

First, understand these things to be true:

DONE is a MYTH.
COMPLETE is a JOKE.
PERFECT is IMPOSSIBLE.

STEP ONE: WRITE
Writing a game means: WRITE SOMETHING PEOPLE CAN PLAY.
Writing a game does NOT mean: write something everybody loves every second of and has no problems.
When you have something PEOPLE CAN PLAY, you have written a GAME.
MOVE ON TO STEP TWO.

STEP TWO: PLAYTEST
Playtesting a game means: PLAY THAT GAME WITH PEOPLE AND GET THEIR FEEDBACK.
Playtesting a game does NOT mean: spending an entire year on the process because it’s “not right yet.”
When you have received feedback, MOVE ON TO STEP THREE.

STEP THREE: ITERATE
Iterating a game means: INTEGRATE USEFUL FEEDBACK.
Iterating a game does NOT mean: overhauling the game because one player didn’t like the premise, or taking feedback you think misses the point.
When you have integrated useful feedback and made changes that cover the big pain points, MOVE ON TO STEP FOUR.

STEP FOUR: ART AND LAYOUT
Laying out a game means: DECIDE HOW YOU WANT TO PRESENT IT, AND MAKE AN EFFORT.
Laying out a game does NOT mean: spend months acquiring a new skillset and iterating on the layout so it rivals the best of the best.
When your game LOOKS LIKE SOMETHING BESIDES A DEFAULT GOOGLE DOC, MOVE ON TO STEP FIVE.

STEP FIVE: PUBLISH
Publishing a game means: PUT IT WHERE PEOPLE CAN SEE IT.
Publishing a game does NOT mean: run a successful crowdfund that everyone loves.
When your game is SOMEWHERE PEOPLE CAN SEE IT, you have PUBLISHED a game.

CONGRATULATIONS! YOU’VE PUBLISHED A GAME YOU ARE PROFOUNDLY DISSATISFIED WITH,

AND THAT IS THE POINT.

DONE is a MYTH,
COMPLETE is a JOKE,
PERFECT is IMPOSSIBLE,
AND SATISFACTION IS A LIE.

You have published a FIRST EDITION.

You may have heard of Osamu Tezuka. Best-known in the western world for creating Astro Boy, he was a prolific creator of dozens upon dozens of stories, both one-shot and serial.

Tezukainenglish.com, an incredibly thorough fan-maintained repository of information on his works, says the following:

“In 1977 Kodansha approached Osamu Tezuka with a proposal to publish a complete library of nearly all his manga works.”

“However, with many of the early post-war masters long gone, several of the volumes needed to be painstakingly restored, by hand, from old printed sources. Always with his audience in mind, Tezuka also took the opportunity to redraw some parts, or update certain bits of dialogue that he felt hadn’t aged well. For him these were still living works, and he saw no problem touching up, adding to and deleting from them as he saw fit.”

For him, they were still alive. Stories he had told up to three decades ago were still alive. Every word, every panel, every page was vital, in flux, in motion. He did not look at his work and see it as something inherently precious, inherently in need of preservation in its “original state.” He saw it as a work in progress that he had an opportunity to improve.

It’s an oft-repeated piece of artistic advice to “know when to call something done.” You’ve got to know this simple thing, the pros say.

This advice is accidentally dogshit, because newcomers do not yet know that nothing ever feels done. It creates an expectation that they will somehow “just know” when it’s time to stop working on something, and so they should keep working until they feel like stopping. In being so often repeated, the advice has lost its original tongue-in-cheek workaday meaning. You don’t have to know when something is done unless you’re on a deadline. If you’re a hobbyist, you can work on something forever. But when you’re on a deadline, you can’t spend years tweaking the details - it’s got to come out on schedule, and so does your next job, so it’s chop chop, fix the big problems and move on. This is how a person improves at the craft:

You improve by PUBLISHING WORK YOU HATE.

“Calling something done” literally means to call it done - it’s not done, but you’re just SAYING it is because you HAVE to.

From the moment TRAVEL NOT ADVISED hit Itch, I hated it. There’s so much I’m proud of - the layout and art specifically, I did it myself (with help from Clayton Notestine) - but the game? It’s a hacked-up, shallow one-shot version of the full game rules, because I simply did not have the energy to refine and lay out anything more than that. And even the layout and art is riddled with choices I would never make again.

ANY%? I hate it. I mean, Jam did an unbelievable job with the layout and artwork, but from a game design perspective I can't help but feel it's incomplete, despite being tons of fun to play. Every time I flip through it, every time I play it, every time I think about it, my heart sings with mechanics I only thought of after it had already left the printer. It's already fun, and I can make it even more fun as time goes on.

Publishing TNA in its current state hurt to do. But pushing through the layout process and pushing through the basic process of an itch page did so much for my skills. Crowdfunding ANY% was painful and frustrating, and the length of time it took me to finally physically fulfill it was demoralizing to the extreme - but I did it, and now I feel so much more capable and confident in my ability to run my next campaign and run fulfillment properly.

Embrace the FIRST EDITION.

This website? FIRST EDITION.

Everything I’ve published? FIRST EDITION.

This blog post? FIRST EDITION.

Once you put FIRST EDITION on something, it implies a SECOND EDITION will someday arrive.

So don’t worry that it’s not done. It never is. It never will be.

Publish it. It’s not bad the way it is.

It’s just the first edition.