I was at a dinner last weekend, the normal kind, people I like, and someone did the normal thing and asked what I've been working on lately. And I just... short-circuited a little.
Because the true answer — the one I'm actually living inside every day, the thing that's eating my brain and my sleep and most of my conversations — is exactly the thing I can't say. So I did the shuffle. "Oh, a game." What kind? "It's, um, early. Hard to describe." What's it about? "Can't really talk about it yet, sorry." And I watched the person's face do the polite little thing faces do when they've decided you're either being coy or you don't actually have anything.
That's the part I didn't see coming about keeping a project under wraps. It's not hard to
do. It's lonely. The most consuming thing in my life is a locked box I carry into every room and can't open for anyone outside the studio. You want to share it — of course you do, it's the most exciting thing you've ever made — and instead you get very good at saying almost nothing in a way that hopefully sounds warm rather than shifty.
There are good reasons for the box, and I stand by them. Being small means the one thing we genuinely own right now is the surprise of it — the shape of the idea, the
what is this of it. Give that away early and clumsily, to the wrong room, at the wrong moment, and you've spent your best card for a bit of dinner-party applause. So we keep it shut. Deliberately. It's one of the few grown-up decisions we've made cleanly.
But nobody tells you the emotional tax. You spend your days completely soaked in a thing, and then you step outside and have to pretend it's a hobby you can barely describe. Your friends start to think you're vague, or worse, that you're not really doing much. And you can't correct them. You just have to hold the gap and trust it closes later.
What's saved my sanity is that inside the studio, the box is wide open. We can say everything to each other. All the excitement that has nowhere to go at dinner gets poured, at full volume, into a group call at odd hours. That's its own kind of intimacy, honestly — the small circle of people who are allowed to know the whole thing.
So if I'm weird about my job next time you ask, it's not you. There's a whole animal in here. I just can't let it out yet.
Soon, though. That part I mean.
— Thiago, keeping schtum
Posted by Thiago Moreira · August 13, 2026
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