I’ve been playing a lot of Satisfactory. If you’re not familiar, Satisfactory is a base-building game. An active Idle Game, you are effectively one of the grunt workers in an RTS. You build, you acquire resources, you build more. Repeat. It starts out small, with Miners feeding Smelters feeding Constructors. Then you make Assemblers, to combine the outputs of two Constructors. Screws and Plates make Reinforced Plates. Then you build Manufacturers, to combine four items. Then Refineries, to combine solids and liquids and gasses, and eventually you manipulate quantum mechanics to change the structure of things at an atomic level.

It can be broken down to “you build something to build a bigger thing to build a bigger thing”, but that doesn’t really explain what makes the game work. At its heart it’s a puzzle game, an exercise in optimisation, and in cooperative play, an opportunity for organic storytelling. Why craft a straightforward solution to a problem when you can experiment with something bizarre instead? Sure you could make conveyor belts from A to B, but what if you made an automated Train to carry those goods instead? What if the Trainline went through the sky like a serpent not bound by gravity?

And as your production lines grow, and your bizarre choices lead to more bizarre choices, Satisfactory begs the player to contemplate who they really are within. At some point you need to be honest with yourself about what victory is. What success looks like. Because it doesn’t look the same to every player, and the sooner you understand your own definition of it, the sooner you can forge a path to that victory.

For me, success is building anything. The least you can do is anything at all. I don’t need a perfectly balanced, hyper-efficient factory to be happy. If my current in-game goal is “make Computers”, then making any Computers is enough for me.

If you listen to The GAP, you’ll quickly realise that my co-host Luke doesn’t feel the same way. If we’re not making Computers efficiently, he would rather not make Computers at all. We are playing Satisfactory together on a Dedicated Server that I’m hosting out of my office, and we are polar opposites when it comes to this element of factory design. Drew also plays on the server, and his position is the same as Luke’s.

And something I realised as I was setting up a factory that would build Supercomputers at 16% efficiency was that bizarrely, Satisfactory reminds me a lot of the writing process.

Not just because I need to justify having spent the better part of the last fortnight playing this game instead of writing, either.

When I write, I actually tend more towards the Luke/Drew philosophy. Hell, I’m past them. If this factory building philosophy is a spectrum, Drew and Luke (or Druke) aren’t even at the far end of it. There are people who play Satisfactory by building complex but neat centralised resource hubs. Who acquire resources in one place and ship them across the planet to another to use them. To them, the neat factories Druke make might as well be the hideous spaghetti I create.

And when I’m writing, I am absolutely more inclined to write like the people who build ultra factories. Everything is planned out. The outcome is clear from the outset, and no words hit the page until I know exactly how we’re going to arrive at an outcome. How we’re going to hit the important beats, how a reader will remain engaged.

Well, when I write fiction, that’s how I write. When I write a review, it’s a bit more like Druke. I have written the sheet music, I know what song I plan on playing, but I’m happy to jazz it up a little here and there. And when I’m writing these blog posts it’s the full Joabyjojo. You’re reading spaghetti, dear reader. I am getting words on the page right now. (I am also making spaghetti for dinner. That is not a process I spaghetti up, actually).

And not just in the months when I spent the entire time playing Satisfactory instead of writing blog posts nobody reads. There’s something liberating about just writing for the joy of it. I guess it’s why I continue to do the blog posts.

Well that and the crippling feeling I have that I might deep down be a quitter.

Anyway I didn’t know this post was gonna end there, but it does. A short one I guess.

Onto a writing update! The edit is complete. The book, Till The Heavens Burst, is coming in November. That’s one or maybe two more blog posts! I am incredibly excited to share this book with people, and also unbelievably nervous. But mostly excited.

My mate Stephen Farrelly launched a new website called 3rd Phase Boss, and I’m incredibly proud of him for getting it out there to the world. It looks awesome, and I think it’ll be a great place for pop culture news with an Aussie spin.

I watched a film called The Substance that I thought was absolute genius. I would recommend you go and see it at the cinemas while you can, but I would warn you that it has some fairly shocking horror scenes. And naked humans, but the scenes of outright gore are more offensive to our 21st Century sensibilities.

I’m reading The Blade Itself, by Joe Abercrombie. I haven’t read any stuff by Abercrombie before but I’m digging it so far.