⚠️ Trigger Warning for discussion of familial death, and death of a pet, and weight/body image. |
Hey Foragers,
It’s me, Pri, the creative director of Forage Friends and the owner of Pie Trap Studios.
I find myself often getting sad during this time of year. Many people do. No doubt work, familial obligations or a strained relationship with your family, and seasonal depression are contributing factors. Each take their shift to occupy what little headspace I have left. The only time my mind is ever quiet is when I’m asleep. Perhaps it’s the bricks of OCD, ADHD, PTSD, PCOS, and whatever grab-bag of acronyms I’ve been branded, that are stacking themselves into walls and barricading me in with just the company of those intrusive thoughts.
I glance to the bottom right of my monitor’s task bar to see the date and realize it’s been 10 years since it happened. In 9 years I haven’t forgotten, until now. Why do I feel guilty about forgetting one of the hardest times of my life? My mind may have forgotten to mourn, but my body hasn’t. Tingling. Numbing. Tightness. Straining. Cold. A panic attack without trigger. Not painful, but blanketed in complete discomfort.
What does this have to do with Forage Friends, a cozy wholesome game about friendship and gardening?
Well, first, let me tell you about Grandma.
Roberta was a single mom, raising a daughter and son during a time where divorced women were shamed and called spoiled goods. She saved up all her money to send her son to medical school. He later met my mother working at a Seattle hospital, got married, and yay ... I was born.
My grandmother was there my whole life. She was our literal neighbor. I saw her daily and she raised me alongside my parents. She was my biggest advocate for honing my artistic skills and regularly nurtured my creativity and imagination through crafts and games. She introduced me to the first ever PC, back when they were not common in the household. She got me DOS games, where I sat on her lap coloring dinosaurs with the click of the mouse.
She got a subscription to PCGamer Magazine for me when I was in the 4th grade.
Every Christmas was art supplies and video games. Every weekend was teaching me how to bake breads, cookies, cakes and more. She took me to my first Star Wars movie in theaters. She introduced me to The X-Files with her massive collection of manually recorded VHS tapes. In the 5th grade, she helped me outvote my parents in naming my new puppy. An Australian Cattle Dog, blue heeler, ultimately named Candy. My grandmother was at every graduation, including my last one for my BFA at art school.
She was an important person to me, but someone I took for granted. I didn’t call as much as I should’ve after college. Weekly dinners became bi-weekly. Bi-weekly became monthly. I thought I could make up for lost time once I was more stable in my career.
It felt like the ground crumbled from under my feet when I learned of her cancer. My parents, Grandma’s brother, and I all took shifts taking care of her. Giving her medications and injections, taking her to doctors appointments, helping her to the bathroom, making her meals, and sleeping by her side to make sure her oxygen tank ran smoothly. She spent a good year fighting her own body. Until one day, I took her to a medical appointment, and she told the doctor and I that she no longer wanted treatment. She just wanted to be comfortable until the end. If you have witnessed cancer up close and personal, you will know that as much as the doctors tried, it was not comfortable.
I continued to help care for her. I would take shifts with my dad as I prepared her breakfast, then head out to work at a game studio 45 minutes away. At the end of the day I would drive back while eating a McDonald’s cheeseburger to save time. I’d give Grandma her medication and injections, then go to sleep on the couch.
One day at work, some colleagues talked about VR. It was the “new” thing back then. The Oculus would be the first of it’s kind and wasn’t available to the public yet. I’m not sure what compelled me, but I reached out to the developers of the Oculus Rift, pleading for a devkit so I could show my grandmother. They were touched, and the head of customer relations sent one to me right away. (We still keep in touch now and then via LinkedIn, ten years later.)
I’ll shorten the details, but it got reported on by several news outlets for several months. They all added a little bit of flare (fibs) to each rehashed telling of the story, but the main points are there. My grandmother had a wonderful time with VR and I was shocked how much her mood had improved because of it. It was the first time I truly witnessed a sense of healing from games.
Unfortunately, shortly after the video was taken, my 18 year old puppy, Candy, passed away. We buried Candy under a cherry blossom tree that is in my grandmother’s backyard. A couple weeks after Candy’s passing, my grandmother was in immense pain and was hallucinating Candy being at her side. On Dec 4th, 2013, Roberta passed away with family at her side.
Mortality is a harsh reality. It was a pain I never felt before and I tried to hide it. Told my friends I was fine and plastered an empty smile on my face so my new coworkers at my new job wouldn’t think I was a weirdo. After months of driving back and forth from work to my grandmother’s, eating McDonald’s in the car… I had gained over 40lbs. It was hard to breathe. I noticed tying my shoes became more difficult. I even stopped sleeping on my back because I found myself choking and gasping for air in the middle of the night. I gave up taking care of myself.
A year passed, and within that year I went to four more funerals. How awkward was it that I was the one always buying these damn caskets! Who else has purchased as many caskets has I have in such a short time? Well, if you’re ever looking, Costco has a decent selection.
It was the 4th funeral that was the wake up call for myself. An aunt of mine passed away from cancer, tragically young. After the burial, I thought of how selfish and shortsighted I was. I had given up already in just my late 20s while there were people with so little time left with still so much more to see and do. I changed everything that month.
I dedicated my free time to research and strategizing. Through diet, exercise and seeing a mental health professional, my bloodwork had significantly improved along with my PCOS symptoms and feeling of self worth. Continuing that year, I made a great friend at my job, Chris, who is my now husband and partner at Pie Trap Studios.
And while doing all that did help me lose weight, the pandemic and the stress of owning a business had me gaining it all back in a short amount of time. The older I got, the more challenging it was to make choices that kept me feeling my best. My favorite foods upset my stomach, and work frequently took priority over self-care. On top of that, some severe injuries made it difficult to do my favorite exercises. Faced with the reality that all the old ways I enjoyed life needed to be replaced, I found myself in a brain paralysis.
Seeing numbers on the scale that I hadn’t seen in years brought me back into deep depression. To add insult to injury, my partner and I had saved up for over a year so we could quit our studio jobs and make our own game, only to come to the conclusion we didn’t have the resources to accomplish it. We had spent years working and planning on it. It was a VR game we had named “Bootender.” I had wanted to work in VR because of the experience I had with my grandmother using it. Before creating our own studio to make Bootender, I had dedicated nearly 3 years working at other studios and specializing in VR development.
The harsh truth was the scope was much too large for just the two of us and our production pace too slow to catch up with the market. I was driven to make a VR game because of the impact it made on my grandmother. Canceling the project was very personal and painful for us.
So what was next? After canceling the game we had worked on in our spare time for years, I wondered if games even mattered with all that was going on in the world. I wanted to feel important and that I was contributing to the world in a meaningful way, but is that too much to ask from a game developer?
My partner, Chris, and I decided to change our company mission. We wanted to make games that could potentially make real world positive change. After what happened with my grandmother, I saw what games could do. They could do more than just entertain. They could heal. We wanted to be part of a movement where games were seen as more than just child’s play. With this direction I was able to focus my energy into what project would be next. That game became Forage Friends.
Though Forage Friends is still in the middle of production, working on something that might really help people has sparked a passion I have never felt before in my 20 years of working in the game industry. We’ve been able to bring on wonderful people to the team and this project has brought them meaning as well. We truly think about the player first in a more personal way than ever. We want the player to feel good about themselves. We want the player to find better health through happiness. If there is a chance that someone who plays our game says, “This really helped me,” then it would all be worth it.
I’d like to think there was true purpose for my grandmother’s support of my artistic interests and nourishment of my creativity. Forage Friends is the product of love and encouragement that started with her and will continue through our amazing team.
Though I get sad this time of year, the memories of pill slinging, injections, and outbursts of pain get fuzzier. The happy memories of her shaping me to the person I am become more clear. The feeling of loss never leaves, but relearning to live again gets easier.
My grandmother loved decorating for the holidays. She had a huge ceramic Christmas village she and I hand painted together.
I had stopped decorating after she passed away. The memories were too hard on me. Our first Christmas living together, Chris surprised me one morning with a small decorated Christmas Tree. He lit a pine scented candle because the tree was fake, but it was the thought that counted. He told me it wasn’t about holding onto bad memories but creating new, good ones together. After crying my eyes out, I thanked him.
For those who have a hard time this year for whatever reason it may be, I sympathize and wish you the strength and encouragement to make your own happy memories to hold on to for the next year.
Merry Christmas, from Priscilla and Chris.