Visual creativity
Over the last few months, I've started to realize that I'm a very visual person, which is funny for someone who's nearsighted, has a bit of facial blindness, and probably has aphantasia or something similar.
When I started making music as a hobby, years ago, I trialed many different DAWs. Almost all of them have the same capacities, with a few differences here and there. After some months, I could replicate what I did in one into another, so making a choice should've been a question of "what's the best workflow for me?". But alas, it wasn't so simple, as whenever I decided on one, I always ended up missing something from another. In the end, I bought Reaper and FL Studio, both very good deals for a hobbyist, but was never fully satisfied with either.
Just recently I noticed that, despite both having a very window-heavy menu-diving workflow, they push me to make music in a different way due to the differences in the visuals. I can recreate what I do in one into the other very easily, but the way the interface is set and responds to my commands pushes my creative output in different directions. That's probably why the music I make with my two hardware synths also goes to another place. And it's not just a question of workflow or UX, but of the visual elements and how they react or give feedback to what I do. Even different themes or skins hit me differently.
Hell, the room I'm in hits me differently when doing stuff.
Sometimes I know what I want to do, but then things start sliding another way. That's not bad, but that's how I notice the visuals are influencing me a lot. I could still make music with a barebones interface, but it would sound very different than making music in a software with a skeuomorphic interface.
This also applies to other stuff I use on a daily basis.
The reason I think I clicked with Decker is because of its graphical limitations, which already create a consistent aesthetic that I find pleasing no matter what I do, and they don't clash with anything else I throw in there. Its "development environment" is also in tune with this, which propels me in a certain direction. When I'm messing around with Decker, I envision certain specific games that could be easier to make on Twine, but in Decker they seem to make more sense. The same is true the other way around: some things could be easily built in Decker, but Twine's environment (with the Chapbook style) feels more "at home" to go in a certain direction, even though there's no limitation in any way about this.
It's so weird how the visual aspect of a working tool, disregarding the UX, can still affect so much the direction creativity wants to go. I mean, that's probably not a novel idea, right? But if you know what you want to do, the tool should be chosen based on workflow, not aesthetics. Funny that, apparently, that's not how my brain likes to work.