It’s been WAY too long since I’ve posted here — June 11th, just over three months. I’ve got to fix that. Time to shake off some dust and do some basic stretches (don’t want to overexert myself on the day back at the blog).

I know the big expectation from those who read these posts is that I’ll talk a lot about games I’m designing. I’ll get there today, but this story should really be told in the right order, and it doesn’t necessarily begin with design.

First up, why was I away for so long?

Well, back in late June, I was offered a full-time job with a company that was just starting up a tabletop games division. They were/are very new to the industry, and were largely learning their way through on the fly, but they’d also already had some enormous success with a recent Kickstarter launch for a party game. It sounded like a great place to jump in and help shape a young game studio’s trajectory.

Fast forward two months to mid-August, and I found myself facing a very personal and urgent need to leave the studio and the job. Without going into too many details, the company and I were just not a good match, and it was rapidly having a negative effect on my mental and physical health.

The most difficult part for me in the last few weeks of the job was not the specific reasons why I didn’t feel like I fit in there, it was the feeling that if I did decide to leave, I was giving up on something; that I was a quitter.

I hate quitting things. One of the family mottos my wife and I have taught our son is “We can do hard things”. I’m an Eagle Scout, and one of the cornerstones of achieving that distinction is showing a determination to finish what you start. Hell, I feel guilty about not having finished video games that I got distracted from by more pressing matters.

My first few days away from the job were a serious mix of relief and depression. Relief that I was no longer responsible for carrying things that made me deeply unhappy, and depression over the thought that I was letting people around me down. Despite the overall situation with the job being miserable for me at best, there were people in my immediate circle that I liked, and there was a strong sense that I was leaving them at a time when they maybe needed me the most. For my family, there had been a hope that the new job could be a big, positive development for our finances and lives in general, and that wasn’t going to be the case.

By the second week after I’d resigned from the job, I determined it was time to talk to my therapist. (You know what? Big reveal, I talk to a therapist every four or five weeks, and it really does help me keep things in perspective. Not a weakness. I recommend it.) The first thing he told me was that nobody worth paying attention to judges someone for quitting something unhealthy.

Therapist: If you quit smoking, would that make you feel guilty?

Me: Well, I’ve never smoked, but no.

Therapist: If someone ridiculed you for quitting smoking, do you know what that makes them?

Me: Wrong?

Therapist: An asshole. We call them an asshole.

He wasn’t wrong. There was a lot more to the conversation than that, but it mostly boiled down to that one kernel of understanding. My family understood that continuing the job wasn’t healthy for me. My friends understood the same. Even the people I was working closest with there could see the toll it was taking on me, and offered far more sympathy and understanding than judgement.

Leaving the bad behind was the right call. I made an informed decision to part ways with the job, and a week later I made the decision to part ways with the feelings of guilt. Also the right call.

So what’s been going on since then?

Mostly I’ve been back to working on the indie fantasy TCG project, doing Scouts stuff with my son, learning some new games, and reconnecting with industry friends I hadn’t seen in a while.

Progress on the TCG is still going strong. The author we’re building it for, Ryan Cahill, was able to rustle up some playtesters from his mailing list. Within 24 hours of him putting the call out to his fans, we had over 250 volunteer applicants for the project, and enrolled close to 200 on our Discord server. In the last two weeks, we’ve dialed in the core gameplay to a point where I think we’re just about locked in on the system rules, and we’re on to developing and tuning individual cards and demo decks. Very exciting stuff, and very fulfilling when we talk about my pride in my work.

Did some serious backpacking for the first time in close to 25 years with Smalls and his Scout troop. My son is one of the youngest (and physically smallest) kids in the troop, and was grinding out a ten mile loop up and down some considerable mountains among a group of high school athletes. They all made me look and feel every single one of my 49 years. My knees and ankles are no longer cut out for that stuff, not even close. Still, the camping was fun and the weather cooperated with us enough to keep everyone comfortable.

In the days immediately before and after that adventure, I met with friends up in Seattle who were in town for the PAX convention. The show is mostly about video games, but there’s a decent showing for tabletop games as well. It was no Gen Con, but it gave me a chance to see people I hadn’t seen in quite a while, and to catch up on the what’s-happenings of the industry at-large. It did quite a deal of good to refill my cup, and got me reenergized about creating and developing tabletop games.

While at PAX, I picked up a game I’d recently read about, and was pretty sure my family would enjoy. Cozy StickerVille, from Corey Konieczka and Unexpected Games, turns out to be a MASSIVE hit with my wife and Smalls. We’ve already plowed through 7 of the 10 “years” in the game, and are excited to see how the stories all end. I highly recommend this, well, cozy family co-op for anyone who’s looking for a few days of highly accessible dining-room-table entertainment.

Maybe the high point of all of this?

The combination of friends at PAX and Cozy StickerVille on our table has me feeling an itch to relaunch my work on Disco Candybar, the game that started this whole blogging experience in the first place. It’s still a quiet, almost background feeling right now, but I’ve taken a few steps to get myself really motivated for it.

There are similarities in the overall structure of Cozy StickerVille and Disco Candybar that make me believe again that there’s a real audience for the latter. The two are far from the same, but they hit similar notes in the way they tell their stories and grow their scopes over time.

I’ve had a few physical prototypes of Disco Candybar floating around the country with friends who’ve given me notes on it. Last week I began calling those prototypes back home so I can clean them up and re-ship them to others who might have advice for me. The ultimate goal would be to polish it all up enough to actually get it in front of publishers, and to identify who those publishers should be.

It’s going to be a LOT of work. I know the narrative needs work, and that my last stretch with that taught me that I want to find a project partner with more of those skills than I have. The game currently has one chapter, and it probably needs at least two or three more to really show the strengths and depths of its concept/proposition. There is networking to be done. Cards to be created. Dice to be rolled.

Hopefully, fun to be had.

And maybe with a solid prototype, before too long, publishers to reach out to.

---