Well, the last time I declared "we're back", it was six and a half years ago. In a fit of optimism, I thought that with a new job starting, I would have some new energy and find myself with new creative energy. That, needless to say, did not happen. That post was a stub, and the six and a half year duration of that previous job turned out to be my least fertile creative period of my life, not counting work. It's not easy to see how a job drains your energy while it's happening, and I'm certainly proud of the work that I did, but there was basically no way I was going to be able to produce anything significant with my free time.
In the month or so since I left that job, I have actually written the rules to a game and even put it on to the table for multiple tests. This is the furthest I've managed with a new game in years and years. And with that success, that optimism of a game that is actually fun to play, I wanted to resurrect this space to permit me to journal some of my design thoughts. Writing about design can help clarify my thinking, and placing this information on my personal website gives me control of it. Should I put this into a Substack? Yeah, almost certainly. But whatever. The process of writing it all down is more important to me than if anybody actually reads it, so even an audience of zero still allows me to accomplish my goal.
I did need to spend some time upgrading Ghost, and I'm sure there are still rough edges here and there, but I'll sort those out. Apologies if you try and read this and cannot. And thank you, by the way.
Anyway, uh, we're back! And just to make sure that things are different this time around, I'm actually writing the next post immediately after this one. It'll be about the game I'm calling Napoleon, Blown Apart.