A new chapter!
Today, I unpublished my Patreon page. It was a really great run, and thank you so, so much to everyone who supported my work all these years. Some of you have been with me for 15 years at this point and it really means a lot. The TL;DR of why I unpublished the Patreon is that I do not expect that I’ll have enough new cool stuff to share with you, to have it be worth your money, and even if you are just a generous awesome person who doesn’t mind that, I mind that! It causes me anxiety and so ultimately it just isn’t worth it. I can always start it up again later if things change.
Over the last 6 months, or two years maybe, I’ve been going through a lot of life changes and re-evaluating what’s important to me and where I want to focus my time and energy. I had a thought the other day, which is that I sort of feel like I’ve done what I wanted to do in indie game design. I don’t know that it’s completely true. I still have great ambitions to make Through Broken Land, my RPG. But I suppose the other half of the statement that I’ve “done what I wanted to do” is that I’ve done what I wanted to do, within what I feel like I am able to achieve with no funding at all.
A thought I sometimes have is, if my games did better (as in, made more money, or just had more healthy player bases) then I might be encouraged to stick around and do it for more, and that is possible. But the thing that I am switching gears to, is music, and I am under absolutely *NO* illusions that diving head first into music is going to be any better in this regard! I spent a lot of my teens and 20s playing music, often times for a completely empty bar.
Communities
The difference, as I see it, is something that I’ve been increasingly informed by through my studies of politics and sociology. For a long time, my game plan was to build an online community, mainly through my discord but also theoretically on other social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, who knows). And while I do like discord, and I love my kbgames discord community and have no plans to stop engaging with them anytime soon, in general, it’s just not the same. It’s just not the same as a physical, in person community. And I’ve spent a lot of my life, physically isolated in a very woodsy Westchester location, far from any community events or other like-minded creative types.
So now, I am moving back to Brooklyn, to an area that has a lot of bars that play music, thrift stores, coffee shops, open mics, events and all these sorts of things, and my game plan is to really dive head first into all of that. I don’t have any ambitions of making money (expect actually to lose a lot) or really of having fans, but I do have ambitions of being a part of a community, a real, physical community.
This all being said, I love games, and I love game design, and my dayjob will continue to be doing game design professionally. I have a couple of little card game prototypes that I’m playing with and I might release one and make a TTS module and stuff in a little while when things are more settled. The Discord community will continue and I’ll look forward to doing game design book clubs, game jams, and occasionally streaming games. But I did want to let everyone know about this significant life change, and give it some context, for those who especially have been following me for a long time.
Thank you so much for reading. Continue to follow my other work on BlueSky and Twitter, or on my BandCamp page.
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