I ate'nt dead

This should be a nice, long update, so go and get yourself a cup of tea or coffee or a glass of mulled wine or something seasonally appropriate.

Sorted?

Good stuff. Let's chat.

First up: I'm still alive and still working on Horizon Wars: Midnight Dark as my current priority. Given that I've got the whole Christmas break off until 3rd Jan, this is what I'm spending my time doing, this holidays. I will have the latest draft ready for Elite level backers and above by the end of the holidays. I'm just trying to make it as good as it can be, text-wise.

My day job has been a bit intense.

I've worked a long time in HR and I've never known a job quite like this one in terms of just never giving a guy a break. For those who're interested, what I do is mostly what we call "casework". So if someone has been misbehaving, or there's conflict in a team that a manager can't deal with, or there's a dispute about terms and conditions, I'm the guy who makes sure that the matter is handled fairly, legally and quickly. And given that my current organization is in the middle of a massive restructuring, a swathe of redundancies and not one but two separate groups of striking workers, you can reasonable imagine that I have a lot to do. Also, because of my experience, I tend to handle the bigger, more complicated or more high-profile cases with the capacity to go completely wahoonie-shaped if we don't pay attention. So along with the sheer volume of work, there comes a considerable burden of stress. 

In principle, this ought to settle down in the New Year, because whereas I've been working the last few months in a kind of "floating troubleshooter" role where I pick up whatever no one else has time to deal with, from January I have a specific chunk of the business that I get to look after which, in principle, should mean halving my workload.

What this should mean is that, come five o'clock when I down tools, I shouldn't be quite so utterly wiped out that just making a family dinner represents the sum total of my capacity for extra effort. I should be able to make more time in the evenings to actually enjoy working on Midnight Dark and other projects.

Creative projects often become albatrosses around the necks of their creators. I deeply, sincerely envy people for whom their creative work is just some kind of perfect flow in which they just write, or paint, or sculpt and the end result is just always exactly what they wanted it to be at the outset. These people are very, very rare, of course. Far more common are people who struggle as much as I do with my creative work but who, for some reason, either pretend they don't and portray their creation as effortless or - perhaps worse still - turn their struggle into a performative act on social media.

My struggle is very dull. I tend to work in bursts, sometimes staring blankly at a screen; sometimes just sitting and rolling dice over and over again while I push counters around the table; sometimes spending ages trying to work out one tiny detail of an illustration or layout item, trying to make it look how I want or, just, not awful.

The best days are when I just get to write stuff, because I know what I want to say and I've already planned out all of the technical bits and pieces and it just flows from my brain onto the page via my fingers. Those days are rare days, but they are what it's all about - almost more than actually playing the game, sometimes.

Midnight Dark is looking really good, right now. My current focus is on getting the missions written up. I've designed and tested four PvP missions which can be played as standalone missions or as a short, two-player campaign. I've also written a number of solo missions, but I've not decided how many will be included in the rules. Probably four of these as well.

One thing that I've added, directly inspired by some chat on the Facebook group for Zero Dark, is variable table sizes. So each PvP mission can be played on a 3'x3', a 4'x4' or a 4'x6'. Playing the same mission on different table sizes introduces a particularly interesting variation in experience. The smaller table is more intense and bloody and well suited to high density terrain and street fighting. The largest table becomes more a game of manoeuvre, in which speed and agility are far more important than firepower.

The solo missions, meanwhile, only use a 3'x3' table. There's nothing to stop you using a larger one, but based on the assumption that solo wargaming will mostly be done at home, I figured it would mean less walking around and make it easier to play on the average kitchen table or coffee table.

Another thing I'm hoping to do before 3rd Jan is record and edit a new video - the long-promised CMON video. I've re-written it a few times, because I just couldn't quite get a grip on whether I thought the guys behind CMON did or didn't deserve a bashing. Also, I was kind of expecting them to just get entirely bought out by Asmodee (speaking of companies that might deserve a bashing) which would've made the video a bit pointless. However, as that hasn't happened (yet) I'm going to sit down and record... just as soon as this damn cough goes away.

Because, oh yeah, I had an utterly brutal cold just before Christmas. Not COVID. Just a cold. But whilst the other symptoms have all gone away, the cough persists, which makes it pretty hard to record. That, plus the fact that the same cold is cutting its way through my whole family and as the first adult to recover, I'm playing nurse to everyone.

Oh, the Kickstarter! That's finished. Mostly. Kind of. It was basically successful and I will be doing a video summary of my experience just for you guys as soon as I can draw breath. But it's pretty definite that I can't do another one while I'm also doing this current contract and trying to get Midnight Dark finished. I really, really want to and maybe if Midnight Dark can be a successful release I'll have enough financial room to take a longer break between contracts next year and I can run another KS for that long-promised custom card deck.

My current contract runs through to September 2023, after which I hope I'll be taking at least a month off, if not two, and that is my target date for publishing Horizon Wars: Midnight Dark.

My other big challenge, right now, is making time to actually play some games. I don't like New Year's Resolutions as a rule, because like most people I almost always fail to stick to them. But I'm going to try to roll more dice in 2023 and play at least one miniatures game per week. Either I'll get to the local club or I'll have a friend over (DK?) or I'll do some solo play.

The last thing I want to talk about in this update is events in 2023. At least one of you has already been kind enough to reach out and ask if I'll be at Salute this year and... I just don't know. I want to do more events, take demos and minis and stuff. They're great fun, good for networking and usually just about pay for themselves out of book sales. But they are also a huge sink of time and energy when, right now, I just don't know how much I'm going to have available after work, family and actually writing new games is accounted for. But if I am going to be at an event at all, I'll post about it here and let you know. If I do get the chance to meet any of you face-to-face this year, it would be great.

A huge thank you to all of you who are still supporting the Patreon. I've lost a bunch over the last few months for obvious and understandable reasons. I hope the next update on the Midnight Dark beta edition for Elite patrons and above, which I'll publish on or around 2nd January, will at least be somewhat worth the price of entry.