That kind of emotional swing was not uncommon for Aquaria’s development. In the weeks leading up to our IGF submission, the direction of the game took a sharp turn. Towns full of characters, cutscenes, and dialogue were cut in favor of focusing on Naija herself. During that period, actress Jenna Sharpe brought Naija’s previously text-only voice to life—I remember being woken from a nap to hear Alec’s triumphant “Fuck yeah!” after he listened to her reading for the first time. But we were also forced to kick out a friend of Alec’s whom we had hired to manage the production, due to creative differences. Those two years felt like a continuous expansion and contraction, both with our collaborators and with the game itself.
At the center of it all, the one true constant was Alec and me. My wife Frances and I still joke about how I spent more time with Alec in those two years than with anyone else. How could you not become close? At the same time, we mostly communicated through Google Talk because I lived in San Francisco and he lived in Vancouver. That physical separation, I think, made it harder to really get to know each other. When we started working on Aquaria full time, we had only recently met online, Alec having found me through a small game project I was working on. And while we shared plenty of happy, silly, and triumphant moments in those two years, we also clashed over our differences in personality and work style. I’ve always preferred to chip away on my own part of a project in relative solitude and meet with teammates for discussion when our parts overlap, but that often made Alec, who preferred more steady communication, feel like we weren’t acting as a team at all. And although I consider myself to be a hard worker, Alec’s capacity for game-making seemed limitless. It’s a trait that I still respect, but at the time it was stressful trying to keep up.
I’m proud of how Aquaria reflects the ups and downs of our partnership. But for the same reasons that I’m proud of Aquaria, I also couldn’t make another Aquaria. When the time came to start on our second game, we agreed to make something small, but each of our ideas quickly ballooned into something bigger. For me, it was too soon to start another intense, two-year project—although Alec was eager to begin working again, I realized that I needed to slow down permanently. So as difficult as it was to walk away from a successful team and a talented friend, I felt like we would both suffer if I didn’t.