Hi friends!

Ooof. It’s already March! Last time we talked was just before new year’s. So here’s what’s new in this message:

As you can see, there’s two big pieces of work news!

If you’ve been reading the last few letters then you’re probably aware that 2025 was a pretty bad year for the state of my mental health. It took a pretty hard nosedive in the first half of the year and then it just stayed down there. Oh, the joys of depression.

I’ve been doing what I can to find some way to make it better. I’ve started taking antidepressants and stopped. I’ve started therapy (and am still going). And now after more than half a year of floundering it’s starting to feel okay. Okay is a far cry from “great”, but it is an improvement. Still, I can feel the grip of depression on my mental health but the fact that it’s spring outside does lessen it somewhat.

You know what Crownbreakers is! It’s the video game that’s eaten up most of the space in these newsletters (and my head) for the better part of 3 years. It’s exciting (and a little scary) to finally have (a part of) it hit Steam. The reception of the players there is a big deal, so let’s hope they like it.

If you’re curious what I’ve been pouring all my time and energy into, give it a go!

And if you do, please let me know what you think! There's a feedback button in the demo that takes you to a form, which is probably the best way for your thoughts to get back to me in a way that isn’t easily lost.

And of course, if you can, please post a review on Steam. Positive reviews on Steam are probably one of the best ways to support the project and help it be more visible. The algorithm likes those. And you know how important the algorithm is.

My interns are no longer on board but in the last month we focused on the story of Crownbreakers. And with them gone I've kept writing the chats, figuring out how the characters talk.

There’s no big news in regards to this. Just wanted to say I’ve been enjoying writing. And if that’s something you want to chat about with me, reach out! I’d love to talk story and narrative!

The Crownbreakers demo launches as part of Turn-based Fest on Steam! It’s an event for turn-based games that runs this week and to help make people aware that my game exists, I will be streaming this Thursday at 2pm EDT (or 7pm German time). You can tune in and watch me play the Crownbreakers demo while I talk about its development.

I’m trying to collect some submitted questions to help me find interesting topics to talk about during the stream. Trying to be prepared and all. If you’ve got anything you’re curious about or you think would be something interesting to talk about, please let me know!

And here's the last bit of Crownbreakers stuff: I’ve put in a chunk of time preparing the crowdfunding campaign. There’s a lot that goes into that, like writing the page, creating graphics etc. But the hardest and most time-consuming part for me is to figure out the numbers.

How much should a reward cost? How many rewards should there be? What can I expect in terms of backers? Where should the stretch goals be placed? What are they? And how much is each of them?

So to get a handle on that, I do what I do and turn to spreadsheets! Luckily I have some successful campaigns already so that gives me some numbers to start with. My first step is to create a projection. Here’s a screenshot of the relevant sheet:

On the right side you can see my past campaigns. The black are stats taken from the respective campaigns, with the blue percentages calculated accordingly. Everything’s built up in a way so that I can extrapolate from pre-launch followers, which is the one number I currently have for the Crownbreakers campaign.

Then I created multiple scenarios on the left with different numbers. At the time I made the sheet the campaign was slightly under 200 pre-launch followers, so that marked my lower end. And then the blue numbers are different scenarios based on the numbers on the right. This is basically gut feeling.

The step after that is to figure out the stretch goals. That means putting price tags on these and figuring out how valuable they feel to backers. Sorting them by how important I think they are for the game etc. This is something I’m still working on and probably will keep pretty fluid up until the campaign launches. If you got opinions on things like that, let me know!

Another big open question is the idea of physical rewards. I love giving people physical things but the chaos of shipping and producing things is not to be underestimated. However exclusive physical rewards are quite sexy for backers, so I would love to find a way to make them work. I’m curious what about think: What are really valuable exclusive physical rewards for you?

Last week we released Nowhere Prophet for iOS & Android! I’m super happy that Nowhere Prophet has finally made it to mobile devices. But in the end it was made possible because my publisher No More Robots decided to invest some money into a port. Matthew Bloch did all the heavy lifting and pushed the release over the finish line!

The game is structured as a free demo with a paywall after the first map. There’s also only a limited amount of content available in that map, as the random-generator is limited to a few variations only. If players like the game they can pay to unlock the full game.

The game has been out for not quite a week and the numbers are… pretty solid. No breakthrough success but that wasn’t the expectation. On iOS the game got 8.000 downloads so far, which is nice. Of course, for financial success the sales are more relevant than the downloads. On iOS we’ve sold 400 copies of Nowhere Prophet. That means the conversion rate from downloads to purchases sits at 5%.

This is lower than other No More Robots games so we’ve talked a bit about why that might be. The current thought is that the difficulty, even with the “very easy” we introduced for mobile is still too high. I’ve tweaked it down some more and will roll that out to Steam as well, down the line.

Let’s see what the numbers say once we have a few more days in the wild and some info from Android. And who knows, there might still be a nice feature somewhere to push up those numbers…

An idea I had for a while now as to find a way to bring one of the characters from Crownbreakers into Nowhere Prophet as a playable class! However making the game has me so busy that I didn’t really manage to find time for that yet.

However with the new energy injected into Nowhere Prophet through the mobile release and the Steam Daily Deal (right, that happened in conjunction with the mobile release!) I wanted to revisit the topic. And then I thought that might make for a fun community challenge!

I do love collaborative creativity so I think it might be just a fun time and a way to activate the Discord Server. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Here are the things you can do to support my work:

And as always, here’s the various media I’ve been consuming since we last spoke:

And man. I think that’s it. I don’t think I read, played or watched much beyond that. But I’m probably forgetting. Usually I track things like this between newsletters, but this time I forgot. So that’s all I can give you.

So that’s it for today.

Hope spring blooms for you,

Martin