Hello my friends,

it's been about four months since my last letter and today is Christmas Eve so it's about time for another update. I've been very quiet because I was just so very busy. Mostly with my current video game project Crownbreakers but also with a deluge of other organizational tasks. But it’s the holidays so I don’t want to complain to much, so here’s the rundown:

PERSONAL

• Bluesky seems to be the place where most people are heading after the slow-motion apocalypse unfolding on Twitter. If you want to follow me there, here’s my Bluesky profile.

• Early in autumn flew to London with my partner to attend a wedding of two good friends. We spent a few days in London with family, where I had a chance to visit Super Rare Games. After that we went on a trip to the Lake District with a many of the wedding party for some relaxed hiking.

• In October, on what would be one of the last nice weekends of the year I took my motorcycle out for a spin before I was going to put it away for the winter. Except somewhere halfway on the trip it wouldn't start again. So I had to leave it and figure out how to get it from where it stood to the next repair shop, about 8km away. Luckily most of the route was along a river, going slightly downhill so I just decided to push it myself a few days later. Took me a little under three hours but I did succeed. It was a bit of a stupid idea to begin with but I guess I just wanted a straightforward task, something physical to do and the sense of accomplishment. Felt great afterwards.

• I am also hacking my way through a thicket of insurance topics. KSK, GKV, PKV and RV are just some of the German acronyms I need to deal with.

• Unfortunately I have been drawing far less than I would have liked to. I did manage to attend the local Drink & Draw. We had the opportunity to sketch someone with a historical uniform from the local royal guard, which was really nice! Wonderful shapes in that fancy hat!

MEDIA

• I started reading Hostile Homelands, a book about the connection between India and Israel. It's a tough read so I'm not quite done yet but it is super interesting to me so I would absolutely recommend it.

• I have been a little sick so I finally had time to watch Queen's Gambit. I was well entertained even though the story doesn't feature a lot of interesting conflict. However the story is still told in a way that it provides some refreshing turns.

• The video game anthology series Secret Level is out on Amazon Prime and I gave it a shot. Being an anthology it truly is all over the place. Some episodes had pretty good stories, others are merely amazing to look at and a few are absolute duds.

• I watched Copenhagen Cowboy, a very strange show. It was still interesting to watch, but you need to be able to enjoy it in spite or because of a lack of reasonable causality, unexplained characters and unresolved narrative threads.

• I did get my hands on a used PS4, so I have been catching up a bit on some older games.

  • I did try to play Watch Dogs and Watch Dogs 2 and just couldn't be bothered. A few hours into each game I just lost interest.

  • I really enjoyed Control though. Great moment to moment gameplay, even if the narrative and mystery didn't quite grab me. Wished there was a little more time to spend in there though.

  • I also played through Prey which was pretty solid. There was something to the nice power ups bringing a downside that made me not invest them for quite a while, making the game much less interesting until I finally decided to just go for it.

  • I played through Ghost of Tsushima, which I loved. So much so that I collected all the single player trophies. It's a gorgeous game with a few really nice mechanics. I think my favorite is that the navigational help is the wind - it will always blow to where you need to go and that just works so beautifully.

• I am also playing a little bit of Diablo IV. The last game of that series I played as the first installment and this one feels quite different. It’s visual are really high quality but the story and the gameplay just don’t grip me. Everything seems so frictionless that I don’t really connect with it. I think I’ll keep making my way through the story with some friends in co-op, but I don’t think I can muster much enthusiasm beyond that.

WORK

• The Mending Circle has been produced, shipped to me and fulfilled. All backers who have entered their information should have gotten their copies by now! It is also available in some select stores and through IPR!

• I attended Spiel 25 in Essen, the biggest board game conference. My friend Maxine has released a new expansion for her board game Witchcraft and she was exhibiting together with 1001 rats and their game Curses and Covens. As you can imagine it was a booth all about witches. And Maxine graciously offered to make some space for Mending Circle on the booth, which was lovely!

• I am in the process of founding a proper company for Crownbreakers and future projects. That comes with a chunk of organizational tasks but that's almost down. The Sharkbomb Digital UG will take up operations in 2025.

• I don't want to promise too much but I am also working on a new crowdfunding campaign. There's still a few things to hash out but I'll keep you updated here!

• A few podcasts and let's play groups had some fun playing Goblin Errands this year. I forgot to mention some of them in my last messages, so here's a bit of a roundup:

  • Calamity Vault ran a multi-episode game in January, and also organized a session for their local game store for a few days ago.

  • Roll for Felicity ran a hilarious session in May this year.

  • Twice Rolled Tales ran a game in March and again for Christmas just now!

  • Ale! and Well Met! just posted an episode of Goblin Errands on the Broadway podcast network.

  • And I got interviewed by Read Play Game about the game, but that one hasn’t released yet.

Crownbreakers

There’s been a lot of work poured into Crownbreakers over the last couple of months but now for December everything has slowed down as I am fighting with bureaucratic and organizational tasks. Still the game made progress. Apart from balancing changes to enemies and tutorial improvements, the biggest changes would be the new dialog system.

I designed the data format for the dialog files, wrote a parser using Sprache, that converts those into data the game can use. Then I created a screen that displays the dialog sequence. Doing that I fell into a bit of a rabbit hole on text animation but the final result is quite nice. I also decided to finally cave and starting using a Tween library (PrimeTween) and I’m quite happy with that! The nice movement of the bubbles below is fully powered by that and I would absolutely recommend it.

There’s still a bunch of work left before the prototype is done. A lot of the visuals are still placeholder so more concept. So more concept art and portrait work is underway. Part of that is trying to pin down how the magic of the heroes and enemies can look on the battlefield. Also the 3d environment is also being improved step by step and new bespoke music and sound effects have been added. Originally the plan was to complete the Crownbreakers prototype by the end of this year but I have decided to tack on 3 months to that, to give myself some more wiggle room to get everything done that I wanted to.

I will use this extra time to round out the prototype and prepare for the production phase. That means I am refactoring the prototype code now that the gameplay has congealed - streamlining existing paths, removing unneeded cruft. That kind of work. I am also planning the production timeline and budget, which includes looking around for talented folks, like a game designer, to support the game and more. I have even managed to secure some public funding and I am talking to a number of publishers to round out the budget.

So a lot of things are still up in the air and so the actual shape of the production is still in flux. But it’s only a matter of time. In any case, I’ll keep you updated right here.

Much love,

💚 Martin