The plan was to write as many as five. It’s summer, and officially I’m the one at home with the kid, so I’ve declared that I only work one full day a week—which means things sometimes get a little tangled.

Though, to be fair, I’ve never actually had to make progress on five games at once before.

Well… it didn’t quite happen.

In the morning, I had a meeting with a graphic designer—we have to submit a game by late July or early August, so that took priority. I think the game itself turned out pretty well, and we enjoy working on it, but since this isn’t an original design and we're working on commission, staying motivated is always a bit of a challenge—and that’s the case now too.

For me, putting the final touches on something is always the hardest part. The game idea is there, it’s been tested, it works—and now we’re in the product development phase. When I’m working on my own designs, I usually follow this part less closely. I can step back then. But not here. In this case, I’m really showing up more as a project manager than a designer.

In any case, after the meeting I finalized the rulebook and sent it off to the client—so one task checked off the list.

The second project I tackled today was Num Tag. It’s a fresh idea, a personal design—so I just couldn’t set it aside.

Even though it’s just a print and play microgame, and I uploaded it for free, it still ended up being the thing I worked on the most today.

I managed to squeeze in a quick playtest, wrote the rules, made a Reels video, a product page, and some posts.

I really hope it reaches a lot of people—I’d be happy if it did.

I have another commission lined up for the end of August—a print and play game for young people, with an educational angle. I received the content brief 10 days ago, on the second day of my vacation, and since then it’s been quietly sitting in a small corner of my brain.

Today, I finally had to sit down and start gamifying the material, and I landed on the first idea, even managed to sketch out a draft of the rulebook. We're nowhere near the development phase yet—first, the client needs to approve the direction.

Hopefully, that will happen sometime this week. The deadline’s getting close—even if I don’t have to worry about production this time. I only need to submit the rules; the graphic work will be handled separately. Still, I’ll definitely need to do a lot of testing before then.

And then reality hit.

It was 5 PM. And my brain had completely melted.

I was supposed to keep working on two more games—both of them in collaboration with publishers. There’s no tight deadline yet, but since they’ll be manufactured in China, even though the release is scheduled for 2026, we still need to have the rulebooks done by this fall. That way, the rest of the development can be wrapped up, and everything can be sent to production early next year—by spring at the latest.

Now, I won’t have much uninterrupted time again until next Friday. Just scattered moments here and there. And even Friday morning is already booked with meetings.

But I’ll have to find a way to make progress.

They’re both children’s games, by the way—one is based on musical memory, the other on finger puppets.

Pretty exciting, right?