How Dark Souls Helped me Achieve my Goals

Now that we’ve had some time to settle into the New Year, I have to ask: who is still pursuing their New Year’s resolutions? I know I’m certainly not. But that’s because I never set any in the first place. This time, I was smart enough to realize something crucial. And it was all thanks to Dark Souls. Well, some of it at least.

How Dark Souls Taught Me a Lesson on Motivation

In 2019, I first attempted a playthrough of Dark Souls. For those not in the know, Dark Souls is an action RPG famous for its high difficulty. Despite not being a hardcore gamer, I really wanted to play through it. I struggled my way through half of the game but eventually gave up before making it to the end. Despite trying so hard, I just didn’t have the attrition needed to see it through to the end.

Standing proud and tall at Level 123: My Dark Souls character ‘Amogus’

When I returned after nearly six years, I started by making a joke save file. Fittingly, I called my character ‘Amogus’ and decided to go on a little bit of an NPC killing spree. I ended up killing a merchant character who, upon his death, dropped a katana weapon, the Uchigatana. Liking the weapon, I decided to keep playing on that save file. Before I knew it, I had completed everything I had on my old save file six years ago. Then, I stood in the game’s final level, the Kiln of the First Flame. And soon after, I had defeated Lord Gwyn, the game’s final boss. As I saw the credit roll, I reflected on what had allowed me to get this far.

There were a few reasons, prior experience being one of them. I had also matured a lot since my first playthrough and my hand-eye coordination had likely gotten a lot better as well. But what also played into it was my shift in attitude since the first attempt. I was playing on what originally was just a joke save file. No pressure to complete anything. I could quit whenever I felt like it. And yet, I never did. I even completed the whole game again on that save file, this time with tougher enemies!

This more relaxed attitude leading to success isn’t isolated to Dark Souls playthroughs. My Discord server was made on a whim six years ago for people to discuss a YouTube tutorial series I was working on at the time. That series was also born out of a spur-of-the-moment decision. I didn’t create it expecting a lot of views. And yet, to this day, part 1 of that series is my most viewed video by a long shot, sitting at just over 100k views at the time of writing! And it’s still getting views to this day.

The analytics for my most viewed video: ‘The Basics - Unitale Crash Course Part 1’

A stark contrast to these success stories has been my journey into game development.

How (Not) to Succeed at Game Dev

Since 2015, I’ve been tinkering with game development in my free time. That’s over 10 years at this point! And yet, the amount of projects I’ve abandoned dwarfs the amount I’ve actually released. Sure, it’s probably normal to abandon some projects. But time and time again, I abandon them, feeling like I’ve failed.

It took me a long time to release why that is. Every time I start a new project, I take on way more than I can reasonably handle. Scope creep is real with my projects. But another, perhaps more insidious reason, is that I hype these projects up in my head. “Oh my God, this will be the greatest game mankind has ever seen”. No wonder all my projects have been abandoned. I just couldn’t handle the pressure and every time I faltered, it felt like failure.

So this time, I’m doing things a little differently. I’ve set an intention for my current project to do the best I can with the resources I’ve got. But sometimes, this means not working on it for a while when I’m busy with other things. Like university, life, or this blog. And sometimes, I just don’t have the energy to work on it, even when I’m not doing anything else to keep myself busy. I’m training myself to not view these moments as failures. And that’s why I have yet to abandon this projects, over six months after starting it. One day, it might even make an appearance on this very blog!

Closing Words and Further Reading

Remember when this post was about New Year’s resolutions? Yeah, me neither. I really just needed a hook to talk about these thoughts that have been with me for a while now. Maybe someone somewhere will find them useful or inspiring. In any case, thank you for reading this far. If you want to read even more about resolutions and intentions, I can recommend this article by Psychology Today on New Year’s resolutions vs. intentions. It inspired me to finally get this article out the door.

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