New Momentum

New year, new hopes. For some reason, this really works for me. Closing one year and starting a new one—even if many projects inevitably carry over from one year to the next. I always look forward to the publishers’ royalty reports; it’s good to confront the sales figures, not so much from a financial perspective, but because they show how many people are actually playing my games. In the end, that’s why you do this.

For example, more than 20,000 copies of these three games have been sold over the past ten years, and it feels really good to think about that—because that’s a lot of people. I was reminded of this last year at a Jamiroquai concert; as a parent of young children, it had been a long time since I’d been in a crowd that big, and it was a great feeling to realize that even more people than that have my games sitting on their shelves.

Over the past period, I’ve been working on a lot of commissioned projects—some of them are still very much ongoing, and a few games are close to release. I’m not complaining, as this is part of making a living, but it does wear the mind down after a while. I recently realized that for months I hadn’t worked on a game just for its own sake; there was always some kind of pressure attached. Then, a few days ago, I suddenly went out and bought a couple of decks of standard playing cards, just to try out a new, random idea of mine.

I often use standard playing cards—they’re cheap and you can model almost anything with them. All in all, it feels really good to tinker with this right now, and it looks like the idea actually works and has found a potential place. That’s a great way to start the year: an original design idea, a publisher pitch… a strong opening.