By Heidi McDonald
Not all games are silly and carefree, and sad or serious games have an important place in our art. Making a sad game, though, especially when it’s based on your own lived experiences, can be really hard. After doing a game jam in which I made my first Sad Game™ about my partner dying of cancer, I realized that I had inadvertently learned some important lessons about self care while making one.
(Note that I am not a mental health professional and I am not attempting to give or replace actual professional mental health advice…this is just a list of lessons I learned, which I’m sharing in case it helps others.)
Preparation
1. Plan your environment.
It’s important that when you create this type of material, you’re in a soothing, calming environment. Color light bulbs, soothing sounds, aromatherapy, whatever that means for you.
Additionally, turn off anything distracting like other devices, or avoid places with lots of outside noise. (This is one lesson I learned by mistake when a neighbor decided to deploy his leaf blower for two hours.) It’s more conducive to creating in this way because it offers safety and familiarity, and allows you to focus your full attention on your work with difficult material. This isn’t the kind of work you should build while sitting in a coffee shop.
2. Plan a strict meal/shower/sleep schedule.
You may or may not be a schedule person (I, a creature of spontaneity, am definitely NOT), but understand that making a schedule like this, while making a work like this, is important even if all it does is remind you to eat, shower, or sleep – restorative activities that will help you.
Having that schedule as a nudge really helped me to remember things like “when is the last time I ate something?” and take better care. It helps you check in with yourself, which I really needed when I was heart-deep in these memories.
3. Work on scenes separately and out of order.
In retrospect, one of the smartest things I did before I began was to break the work into scenes, and rank how difficult I felt each scene would be to create. I fell into a cadence of, hard scene, easy scene. Recognize that the top three hardest scenes WILL affect you, and plan your work accordingly. I had a scene that involved showing his actual moment of death (which had only occurred five weeks prior), and I had to take a 5-hour break after that one and pass its implementation to a team member. I didn’t even touch that scene, because I knew I couldn’t.
Maybe you’re someone who wants to get the hardest one over with first (but it risks exhausting you early), or maybe you’re like me and save it until the end…but, put thought into which moments in the work are hardest for you and make a work plan which allows for that. (For me, the hardest scene to write was “At least you still have me, Butthead.”)
4. Build extra breaks into the schedule.
There may be (and probably WILL BE) times when you feel overwhelmed or Too Sad, and at those times, it was really helpful for me to be able to just walk away and reorient myself. Pet the dog. Feed the birds outside. Make a smoothie. You should prepare a list of activities like this which you can do when you need to step away for a bit.
Anticipating that you will need to take half an hour to regroup a few times (but don’t know what times those are, in advance) will allow you to automatically build time for this into your schedule. The length of break should be commensurate with the difficulty level you’ve assigned each scene.
5. Have access to support.
Before you begin, have supports on standby in case you need them. A friend or relative it’s okay to talk deeply with, your therapist on speed dial and aware of what you’re doing and ready to help if you fall into crisis. You may need hugs, you may need emotional support, especially if you are re-living hard things as you create this work.
I realized this one on the fly, and am lucky that I had my mom in the house, a therapist who answers messages quickly, a dog downstairs who loves scritches, and one of my closest friends working on the project with me. It made me realize how important it would be to make sure in advance that you have support in place before you even begin.
6. Give yourself permission to cry.
Please read that again, because it’s almost certain that you will cry (and cry A LOT) while making a sad game, just as players may cry while playing it. That’s okay. It’s an important release, and it’s part of the process. If you yourself aren’t emotionally affected, how will your players be? Go with it. Have tissues at the ready.
While Doing the Work
7. Hydrate extra.
This is something I wasn’t previously aware of until my partner died, but when the human body experiences deep grief, the body automatically hoards water and makes us thirsty because it anticipates that we will be crying a lot and losing water through tears. I found this fascinating, and made a better effort to hydrate once I understood this phenomenon. So, it’s a good preparation point when working with heavy material.
8. Work with folks you trust, lean on them when you must.
Only work with friends you trust, who you know will handle the material with compassion, and will understand when you cry and need to take breaks. I was incredibly lucky and humbled that my close friend Michelle Clough stepped in to help me finish my game (at the expense of her own). There were parts of this I was simply unable to implement, and having her there to pass it off to was of great comfort and allowed me to worry exclusively about progressing with the writing.
9. Fortify before writing hard scenes.
I spent 10 minutes of meditation, fortifying myself, before each of the hardest scenes. I mentally acknowledged each time that I was about to go through something hard, and reminded myself of the responsibility I have of memorializing this incredible man, because I’m the only one who could. I reminded myself that I’m safe, I have support, and it’s okay if I need to walk away for a bit and seek out that support. I believe that this was singularly helpful, and I encourage it: meditate, acknowledge the difficulty and the importance of the task, remind yourself that it’s okay to walk away (or even stop completely) if you need to.
10. Only write one draft of hard scenes.
One thing I decided at the outset, partially because of schedule and partially because writing this game was going to be hard: I decided to only write one draft of the hardest scenes, and pass each off for editing and implementation. This allows you to write what you need to write, but not have to be mired in the subject matter for longer than necessary, because of endless revisions. That ended up being a smart move which I will highly encourage.
Generally and Overall
11. Ignore the bad brain.
I’m not going to snow you folks. There were about four points at which I nearly stopped making my game because it hurt so much, and because my brain began lying to me about how nobody would care about this, I was being self-indulgent, how dare I use his death this way, he’d be angry, how dare I expect other people to hurt too, etc. I was not prepared for the degree to which my brain tried to sabotage me.
So, I say to others: if you’re someone whose brain does this, be prepared for an ONSLAUGHT of bad brain, and be ready to shut it down HARD. I got past it by having two responses ready to go, that I repeated out loud: 1) Are you okay with this man being uncelebrated and unsung? 2) your own GDC talk told people to dig deep and look into their own hearts…are you going to be a hypocrite just because doing so was hard?
Whatever those responses are for you that will shut the bad brain down, have them ready even before you start (I wish I had) and repeat them out loud to banish the bad brain. Hell, it can be as simple as “I CAST BANISH!”
12. Be brave, dig deep, but also think about post-release.
One of my favorite chefs, Kevin Gillespie, recently wrote in Food and Wine Magazine that “Criticism never stops hurting. Not if you care.” I was acutely aware of this the whole time I was making my game, and there were memories I held back from the game that would have made the game better to include.
I decided I wanted to keep those just for me, that I had no obligation to share ALL of it, and had to remind myself that it’s got to be a balance between laying your soul bare while still shielding a piece of it for yourself. The more personal the game got, the more I worried about trolls coming after me if I release this.
(I had no such worries about the game jam folks, but once you release a game fully into the wild, especially for money, the criticism is always harsher, and I have to be really honest with myself about how well I can handle that, knowing how very close I am to the material.)
I still don’t know where I’ll land with any of this, because it’s not lost on me that my partner had to die for this to exist, and I don’t want to be seen as “cashing in on that.” I’m proceeding slowly and carefully, getting advice from folks I trust, and also working through things with my therapist like “could I handle working with this material for another year or so” and “what is my obligation to comfort the people I made sad, and do I have the spoons for that.”
The oddest thing to wrap my brain around is how people can get emotionally crushed by your game and then thank you for it. It’s causing me to re-examine everything I thought I knew about what resonates with people, and it’s turned me a bit upside-down because I’ve always been very conscious of what I’m multiplying by putting it into the world, and what emotions I want to give to people when they experience my work. Until now, it was whimsy, sexy, silly…but I’m not sure about that anymore. It’s a thing to resolve, for sure.
In the end, it’s going to be a deeply emotional and highly personal process, and you are going to have to listen to your body, and treat yourself like you’d treat your best friend if they were going through what you are. I did think people would see my game as brave. I was not prepared for the outpouring of thanks and support I’m still receiving from folks who played. It’s humbling. Was it worth the difficulty of the process? ABSOLUTELY. You just have to prepare yourself for that difficulty.
Heidi McDonald is a 15-year veteran game writer and narrative designer, who created the game Moments Away the 72 hour Game Writing SIG Arcjam in December 2025. Moments Away won 1st Place, the Community Choice Award, and was a finalist for Excellence in Narrative.
Click below to play the game:
You can learn more about the jam and play the award winning games at the 2025 Game Writing SIG Arcjam Page.