Heya friendos! January is already almost over. Is it just me or did that go by way too quickly? Either way, I got a bunch of stuff done so let’s dive into it! This week we’ll touch briefly on many different subjects, including crunch and pie charts.

How Am I Doing?

Pretty great! I had a very productive week in the work department, as well as the social one. This week the Global Game Jam was on too. We were planning to check out one of the jam sites near my place; a creative space called La Gare Expérimentale. But those plans fell through, twice. Once because I messed up the dates, and the other time because the participants were essentially too holed up in their work to open the gate.

It made me briefly reevaluate crunch culture. There is a reason I haven’t enjoyed participating in game jams for a couple of years now. There’s a creative influx from doing game jams for sure. It incentivizes a small, unique idea for a theme. But it also incentivizes constructing a working game in a very limited amount of time. I wouldn’t willingly invite that stress into my heart.

A lot of my life right now is centered around slowing down. I can’t see myself doing weekend-long, redbull-fueled all-nighters anymore. Doing things fast and efficiently is so engrained in game development culture, that it almost grinds the joy out of the creative process. I aim to make a community where the opposite is true: slow and deliberate, hand-crafted projects that people love to work on.

What Am I Doing?

In one of the first newsletters I wrote, I talk about the pie charts of the projects I’m working on. I talk about how I want to have all the colors of the rainbow represented in my weekly schedule. If you were wondering how that’s going, I invite you to take a look at last week’s beautiful pie chart:

As you can see, it’s still leaning pretty heavily on business blue and YouTube red, but I’m already content with the variety. So what did I do this week?

I dusted off an old board game I was working on, called Distinction & Disgrace. It’s a Regency-era roleplaying game about gossip and I’m going to make you all play it as soon as the new version is ready.

I made a little intro animation for the new short-form series I talked about last week, now tentatively called Narrative Nibbles.

I’ve been working on the narrative side of Clysmoids. Nothing too interesting to talk about yet, but mostly brainstorming about the tone and themes of the game. I want to highlight the optimistic part of a post-apocalyptic world if that’s even possible.

I also made another deVlog! I recorded myself drawing some Clysmoid concepts at the start of the month, then forgot about it until last week. I almost considered not posting it at all, but the entire idea of the vlog is to put myself out there despite the low effort. So I wrapped it up real quick and posted it just yesterday. Go check it out if you haven’t already!

‘Moidpendium

Finally, it’s here! I’ve been talking for a few weeks about doing this now. The format and name are still a bit of an experiment, so are open to change for sure. Every week I will talk a little bit about the biology of a Clysmoid. This week’s entrance is Mimpy!

Genus	Mimpy
Family	Hairy
Physical Trait	Their eyes are permanently bleary due to the excessive amount of partying Mimpy partakes in. Allegedly, keeping their beard perfectly fluffy is a sign of superiority among their kind.
Behavioral Trait	They like to throw things off of great heights for no observable reason but for the heck of it.
Social Trait	Despite, or perhaps thanks to their unruly nature, Mimpy has been known to throw fantastic parties.

Why Am I Doing? (this)

So yeah, jumped back and forth on a bunch of projects this week, just the way I like it. I think I nearly went into a “heads-down, let’s churn out this video/feature” mode recently, but then remembered that… I’m not a content factory. I’m not here to efficiently poop out a bunch of games and videos. I’m here to enjoy the process of creating my own work. I’m here because I don’t want to crunch anymore.

Let’s not optimize the fun out from our lives!