Hi friends!

My last message wasn’t that long ago, yet here we are again. The year is ending so I wanted to write up another letter. Here’s what’s in this one:

So 2025 was a pretty bad year for my mental health. Breakup, depression, suicidal thoughts, plenty of disappointment and a helping of loneliness. The works.

I’ve managed to get help, which means psychotherapy and antidepressants, even tho I’ve reduced the dosage plenty because of the side effects. I’ve also clung to work as an anchor, spending quite a lot of time in the office. That’s both a positive and a negative thing.

I think in some sense my sense of responsibility to my work does act like a lifeline. But burying myself in work also means I don’t really get out that much. Every strength has within it the seeds for a weakness. So it remains a balancing act.

Anyway, looking back on the year I feel like I’ve developed a kind of nihilism. The experience just kind of hammered home for me that nothing matters. But just as with strengths having a flaw within them, the flip side is also true. So there is a sense of freedom in this nihilism. If nothing matters I can just do what I want, because it doesn’t matter either. I guess it’s a sort of actionable nihilism.

Not sure where that gets me though. I am still kinda unhappy, and I am itching for a change. But I don’t have a vision or perspective to give me a direction on where or what to change. Maybe I’ll just have to go traveling again, but at the moment doing that by myself doesn’t feel like a sensible option.

I’ll figure it out. Or I don’t.

Anyway, on to the light of my life: work!

The Ex Novo Kickstarter is done. There are about 30 stragglers left that haven’t filled in their shipping information. And a few packages seem to have gone missing over the holidays. I’ll have to resend them early next year but even with that in mind I think the Kickstarter is a resounding success. I’m particularly proud of the roughly one year turnaround. From serious planning, to launching it to 99% complete in about 12 months? That’s pretty good, I think.

Also, while I’m talking Ex Novo: A few books are also finally available at Indie Press Revolution in the US. And damn, I tell you - shipping to the US has become such a hassle since the tariffs have gone up…

I’ve always struggled with doing marketing for the game. It always felt like a terrible chore I wasn’t interested in. That’s why, when at the Rabbit, I asked to get paired with someone with marketing experience for some consulting. I ended up getting to know Irene Preuss and having two really nice and insightful chats with her.

And I think these conversations compared with my sense of nihilism actually worked.

I think what broke the topic open for me was to just care less about the results and to have more fun with it. Sounds so simple but it’s really the only way this works. If I’m not enjoying doing it, then it simply won’t happen. So I’ve done some more short form videos on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. But mostly I’ve been posting on Reddit. And it’s been sorta successful.

What I did was look for some fitting subreddits, primarily for gamers, not game devs. Then I sorted them by weekly visitors and created an actual calendar in which I can write down when and where I want to post. Since many of the bigger subreddits have self-promotion limits this helps me make sure I hit these:

I’ve also started posting Steam news on Nowhere Prophet page and that’s been pretty useful. My first post there was pretty buried and didn’t gain much traction, but I’ve decided to do monthly updates there and my last two posts worked pretty well. You can check them out here:

And if you’re curious about the actual numbers on these events:

So what are the results of all this work? Mostly I’m aiming at increasing Steam wishlists and the time I spent has definitely had an impact. How much so? Well let’s start with the daily wishlist graph for the last month:

The big spike at the start coincides with both the ComicCon steam event as well as a NowhereProphet news post. The second spike is linked to the most recent news post. So what that tells me is, that the steam news posts definitely work! My goal is to keep writing one of these a month. I’m already doing a monthly retrospective for a local game dev event so this is mostly about turning that into a nicely written post.

And what about all the reddit posts? This isn’t really visible in the graph above but the regular posting has about doubled the average daily wishlists. The numbers aren’t massive, but since these posts are also not too much extra work either, I think I’ll keep hacking away at it a little longer. Especially since these seem to bring all the Nowhere Prophet lovers out of the woodwork, which is lovely:

I mentioned the work on the 3d city in the last message and I’ve put in a lot of extra work. I think it’s looking much better now. It took a bit to get there, though. I had a moment where I wasn’t sure in what direction to take the visuals, so I asked around. I’ve got some nice feedback from some artist friends and in response I’ve been tweaking the colors and vibes a bit:

There’s still more work to put into it, before I’m truly happy with it (unique spire shapes, floating islands, glowing roads, ambient magical effects, better clouds…) but it’s pretty nice so far. The one thing I haven’t really solved yet is how to evolve the city. It would be super nice if the city would change and adapt as you progress through the story but I’m not yet sure how to visualize that properly.

If you’ve got ideas, let me know!

This is probably the most important piece of news for you: The Crownbreakers demo is ready and I want it to go live soon. But before I release it to the wider public I want to do a little bit of early access to get some feedback on it! So if you’ve been curious about the game, this is your chance to try it!

To help me keep a handle on the feedback I’ve set up a quick form where you can sign up for the demo. I’ll then roll out invites in chunks to people for a while. So, what are you waiting for, sign up:

Just like last time, besides playtesting the demo and sending me your feedback, here are some other things you can do to support my work and/or stay in touch!

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

And that’s it for this letter. Happy holidays to you all. May 2026 be a better year. I wish you all good times, good people, good food, and good fortune.

See you then,

Martin