Downward Spiral

Hi friends,

it's been a while since I last checked in - four months (this hemisphere's entire summer)! I guess life just has a habit of happening, and uh, yeah... Life did happen. If you remember, last we talked I was sick with a solid bout of brain fog on top. Thankfully that has let up, but things have gotten worse in other ways. So, warning: this is newsletter might be a bit of a downer…

Let’s jump right into it:

My mental health and emotional stability has pretty much been in free fall since May. Full on depression, baby. Probably the worst bout I've had in the last 20 odd years. And also the first time I’ve gotten a proper diagnosis: dysthymia and depression. The inciting incident for this one was the end of my relationship. And even though that still hurts plenty, I wasn’t in good mental shape in a number of other ways for that event to derail me as hard as it did. Untangling those is it’s own issue but I think a deep dive into the structure of my traumas and hangups definitely breaks the limits of this newsletter.

But maybe this gives you an idea what’s wrong with me ;)

What I do want to speak about in more detail though is one aspect of this whole mess, that is relevant to this newsletter: work.

In the past few months I clung to work like a drowning man. It's not particularly joyful most days but the responsibilities help get me out of bed in the morning. That is positive, but it's also part of a vicious cycle in my life: when things go bad, I tend to turn to work to provide a reliable sense of meaning and purpose. Unfortunately that also easily leads to me working too much. And in times when I'm already operating with a limited capacity of energy, that leaves little room for other things.

So currently my days pretty are mostly spent getting up, going to work, coming home, and then watching some stupid stuff on YouTube. And if I think about it, there’s been a lot of that in at least the last year. I don’t have enough spare energy to do or organize much beyond that. So recently, I ended up sitting at home a lot.

(On top of that I don’t really have a social circle right now, that picks up the slack in a way that works for me. Granted, that is pretty hard to do since it’s so easy for myself to feel unwelcome. Still, there is a sense of disappointment about that and there’s a whole rant here about the fact that presence seems too big an ask. Maybe another time.)

And in the spirit of radical candor: I’m not writing all this from a vantage point beyond that depression. I'm clearly still not in a good place. I have since started taking anti-depressants and started psychotherapy (a first on both for me) but neither of these things has really moved the needle much (yet). I know you have to give these things time but at this point I'm just exhausted. Granted, at least now I'd call myself only "somewhat suicidal". So I guess that’s an improvement but also still a far cry from anything resembling good mental health.

Anyway, that's where my head is at, at the moment. I do hope you’re doing better.

It seems almost a little silly to talk about other things after writing about my struggles with depression. But it’s not all bad, all the time. So here's most of what I was up to since my last newsletter.

One of the few joyful things I managed to do beyond work was a some tabletop role-playing. I've started a new campaign using DURF which is a system from the old-school revival community. It's a different ethos than what I'm used to but after test reading the rules I was excited to give them a shot, and so far it's been great. Simple, fast and gnarly. I don’t think I ever had a campaign with that much character death.

I’ve also traveled to Vienna for the 3W6 role-playing convention. It was right after gamescom so it was quite stressful and exhausting. Still it was nice to spend three days trying out new role-playing games with people I've never met before. I’ve also left one day unaccounted for, so I took the change to meet up with a few old friends before I rushed back.

I’ve come back from Vienna with the idea that maybe I should just move there for a bit. It’s a really nice city that I’ve spent a lot of time in over the last years. Then again, how much of this thought is healthy, and how much is me trying to run away. It’s definitely a pattern of mine to go: “Situation bad? Change situation drastically!” Speaking of that, the idea of just walking for a long time (like a pilgrimage) also seems really tempting at the moment. No wonder my response to burnout was to go be homeless and travel for a while.

The big work thing is that my big video game project Crownbreakers has been properly announced with a trailer. So if you have a steam account, you should absolutely, definitely, please, please, please wishlist the game now! And tell your friends too.

So far the wishlist numbers haven't been as good as I had hoped. The announcement event wasn't really bringing much in and since Nowhere Prophet has been out quite a while, the cross-promo there doesn't bring in too many people either. But I have some ideas on how to improve these numbers…

Apart from the trailer and announcement, I’ve put a lot of time into the game itself. I’ve designed and built the entire meta/progression game, including all of the needed UI. It still looks a little simple, but it’s all implemented and it’s functional. It might be lacking content too, but I’ll get to that.

In August I’ve finally started focusing on the game’s content. All the other system-related things are out of the way so I can no longer district myself with other things. Now it’s all about making the cards (and enemies, and districts, and quests…) as good as possible. Here’s a look at the overhauled set of cards for the first playable class:

My hope is to have a playable demo out by the end of this year to start collecting some feedback from players and maybe get those wishlist numbers up. And I’ll also have two interns joining me starting this month, one for game design and one for art.

Konstantinos and I've been hard at work on the Ex Novo Kickstarter campaign. At this point the book is pretty much done. There's some final editing and art passes left but it's looking pretty good. (Even though I almost had a breakdown over the art at one point)

I’ve just ordered a second test print. Were well on schedule and I'm hoping I can get the zine printed this month and then start shipping in October. Though that might not happen for the US customers, since the tariffs are making things more complicated than they have to be. So much so, that DHL has stopped shipping merchandise to the USA completely. Thanks, Trump.

After the project is before the project. Or something like that. Which is why I've set up a preview page for Ex Umbra - my dungeon-drawing game. That way folks can sign up to get notified once the campaign launches.

There's no set timeline right now but I really do want to run the campaign and maybe even make a physical set of Ex Umbra cards a reality. I've got an artist-friend who I wanted to collaborate with for a while, and his style would be a great fit for nice illustrations on the cards. So that’s definitely going to be a stretch goal!

Here’s some places where you can see me talking or writing while doing my best impression of “totally-not-depressed game developer”.

At the beginning of May, before my mental health crisis really hit, I've went to A.MAZE in Berlin and held a workshop about creative crises. It's a topic I've been thinking a lot since my burnout and I wanted to share my thoughts and ideas with other folks. The event was quite successful as most folks seemed hopeful afterwards.

I've got another incarnation of this workshop lined up later this month. Initially it was meant to be a collaboration between me and my now-ex-partner but that's obviously not the best idea at the moment. And with my depression on top, I wasn't really sure if we would have had to cancel the workshop altogether. But I think it's too important a topic that neither of us wanted to do that so we decided that I'll be running it solo (as I did at A.MAZE) and I think I will just lean into the fact that I'm talking about crises while being in one instead of pretending otherwise.

And let's close this dreary letter out with some media I watched, in roughly chronological order. (This list does not contain all the YouTube I’ve been binging…)

As always, I’m sure there’s a chunk more that I just forgot. But the newsletter already gotten way too long already.

Stay safe everyone

🖤 Martin