i'm a ''''game developer'''' (i made one game that got streamed by a kind of shitty but very popular guy 10 years ago) and i've been trying to make a new game but the first game i made was extremely full of copyrighted material because i just built it out of whatever i wanted, whatever came to mind, including mp3s on my desktop and things i just googled and added without a second thought.

now, broke and desperate, i have been forced by the Machine that zaps me whenever i can't pay it money to create something Monetizable™. i am trying to build the game but i am stricken with David Lynch's Thought Poison™ ("I didn't really feel like I had permission to make it my own. (...) little by little, I was subconsciously making compromises-- knowing I couldn't go here and not wanting to go there. I just fell, you know, into this middle world. It was a sad place to be.") because the part of me that just wants to put whatever the fuck I want into the game is fighting against the anxiety of knowing if I use AI textures or ogg files of 12 second loops from songs I like or pictures of public figures or art from random sources or fonts that I got from questionably legal websites that even if I make a really good game that I'm proud of, I won't be able to sell it to help myself pay the Eternal Zapping Machine. how do I navigate this moral and existential crisis?