Date: 2026-03-02
Tags: Games, Blog

Perfect Tides at Four

Perfect Tides was released 4 years ago last week on February 22nd, 2022. I didn't quite get it together to write this post at the time, but it was nice to just think about it for a while, so here are some thoughts.

I was expecting my first child right from the start of development. In those early pregnancy days, it was a race to make headway on the game before everything was thrown into chaos. On April 21, 2018, I told the technician who administered my epidural that I was making a video game, and she lit up with interest. I think that was the first time I got out and pounded the pavement as a game developer.

My newborn son spent dozens of hours nursing and then napping on my bare chest while I coded and wrote. For a while, it was the only way work was possible. I would meticulously prepare for these work/milk sessions so that I would not have to move. It wasn't ideal: the nursing donut would put my arms in an awkward typing position, I had to look over the baby at my screen, and I could be interrupted at any time by his ever-changing needs. But I became agile, learning to pull inspiration from every free moment, and somehow the work did get done.

I don't go looking for ways to struggle (with the exception, perhaps, of certain fitness goals), but certainly every struggle shapes me and the work I do, and I always come out grateful. Perfect Tides could not have happened if I wasn't already anticipating a brand new kind of life. It was my chance to take a leap into game development and see where it got me. And during that pregnancy and post-birth, my mind and body changed, I stopped taking as guaranteed things like youth and wellness and survival, and I entered a realm that, while universal, is widely unknown to most game developers. This is why I rarely have a good answer for "What games influenced you?". Games so rarely depict what I find most compelling about life; that's why I go to the trouble of making them.

Perfect Tides was not a big hit, it was not covered widely by the press, and yet people have never stopped talking about it and playing it. I'm pretty down on the concept of "too many games" these days. I think the average gamer thinks too much like a publisher. If a game is slow to find its audience in the weeks following release, there is the sense that it's dead and buried, a casualty of the landscape. Why do we allow ourselves to think and focus our discussions in these terms? If and when (and I do think it's "when") a game of any uniqueness finds its audience, it will be loved. Explored voraciously. Obsessed over. It will take its place as connective tissue in the player's mind. There will be a happy ending, even if a fiscal quarter can not contain it.

Starting from playtesting and through release, I was amazed at how many people were willing to give what I'd made a chance. The players saw the intent in my not-very-Designed game and allowed it to do something to them. In the ensuing years I've read a lot about Game Design and I'm glad it had so little influence over me in those early years. Much like my wonderful boy, I think Perfect Tides is exactly what it needed to be. I gave it everything I knew how to give, and it continues to make its mark in the world.

Thank you to all the early supporters, testers and players who have given their time to this game since its earliest days. The year 2000 was only 17 years gone when I started writing it. In 4 more years, it will be 30! I don't know about you, but those numbers make me feel young - eternal. I wrote it all down, after all, and I don't plan to forget.