In 2016, I was faced with one of the most difficult decisions of my life. In order to pursue my dream job as a developer on my favorite game (PlanetSide 2), I would need to leave a wife and four-year-old child on the opposite side of the country. I wasn't originally going to take the position... which made it all the more difficult when I did.

Hey there folks, Wrel here. I’m the sole author of Distal, and since we're building a game that celebrates the hardships endured by your characters, I figured I'd share some hardship of my own.

Work has a profound importance to me. The perseverance, the act of doing. It's the slow, forward progress, step by step at the cost of one's own mind and body… Sacrifice, in other words. You can blame my father for that. He hammered a work ethic into me that, some 20-30 years later, I now view as a both a great gift and dire character flaw.

My time in the games industry was good, because of this, however. I could learn faster, do more, and devoted myself wholly to whatever needed done. Weekends were often spent shepherding community events or playing the game; planning for the future or putting out fires in the present; and I was no stranger to weekend office visits at obscure hours of the morning just to work on random ideas with no one else around.

I did well. What’s more is that I enjoyed the work for a long, long time.

By the end of a 7-year run, I went from Game Designer, to Lead Designer, to Creative Director (and de facto Executive Producer) managing a team of ~20, and running a multi-million dollar live service video game. If it's not clear, that is an astronomical rise both in breadth of duties performed, and the weight of the ones I already had. So when burnout finally hit me… it hit me like a truck.

Every new hat I wore distanced me further and further from the thing I most wanted to do, which was to design, build, and create. At the same time, the things that needed to get better at the corporate level showed no signs of improving. A lot of this had to do with how tumultuous it was at the organization over the years, and the (sadly standard) corporate politicking, and all the behind-the-scenes on-goings that ultimately affected those of us just trying to do good work. It wasn’t until late 2022 that I realized that I was no longer doing what I loved.

That brings us to now.

I’ve moved back across the country to be with my kid again, to start over from scratch, and to just do what fuels me creatively. I don't mind the slow, forward progress, step by step, sacrificing my mind and body to make amazing things… but with any luck, this time it will be with a bit more balance.

Thank you all for being here, and for helping support this project.

I realize this doesn’t answer the why of building Distal specifically, but... we can talk about that next time.