Postmortem - If a tree falls.

In this post I’ll talk about why I made this game and how much it means to me. As a quick warning: I’ll talk about suicide, depression and genocide.

For about six years now I’ve made around 30 games. More than half a decade later my followers consist of the same people: A couple of family members and friends that click my links out of pity. If a tree falls and nobody hears it, it didn’t make a sound.

“So what’s the fucking point?” I ask this question to myself regarding making games, but also regarding waking up the next day. What’s the point of getting up from a depressive episode if we are certain we are going to fall down again? What’s the point of living if we’re going to die eventually? Why does Sysiphus keep pushing that boulder up the hill if he knows for certain It’s going to fall down again?

Is it because things will get better eventually? No it won’t.

Things, in fact, are only getting worse. The climate crisis that will kill billions is inevitable at this point. The trans genocide on the US is picking up pace every minute, and nothing seems to be able to stop it. The rest of the world will follow suit in the descent into fascism. Participating in leftist reform feels like piling up pebbles trying to stop a train. We can only hope to slow it down slightly.

The indomitable human spirit is not conditional in whether there is success or not at the end. The universe does not care and never will. I think we need a philosophy that makes us wake up in the morning even if we know for certain our efforts will NOT bear any fruit.

Leonidas, Constantinopla, Tenochtitlan, John Brown, The Paris Commune, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and countless revolutions. All of them ended in defeat, serving as a form of last stand. I want to feel whatever primal energy fueled these legends to fight despite the certain defeat. I want to package it and deliver it in the form of a videogame.

In the story of Do Not Fucking Die, the protagonist fucking dies. No matter how well the protagonist performs, she will die at the end. The fascists are closing in from all angles of The Commune and there’s no escape. It’s up to the player to decide how much they want to slow down the ever-waiting finale.

I wanted to express that in the game that I made. I wanted to express that life is worth fighting for, no matter what the future holds. At the start I was going to make some kind of endless runner or infinite roguelike but the time constraint transformed it into an arcade type. I want to revisit this game and make it transmit the message of humanity’s stubbornness against an indifferent universe.