2022: Balance
Hey everyone! Thanks once again for subscribing to my newsletter.
This month, I'm looking back over the year we've had & thinking ahead to the next.
Mousehole Press—2022 Year in Review
Last year I said I'd like to try and write more than one game in 2022. I didn't do that.
Instead, I feel a lot better about focusing on one big project instead—finding a rhythm and feeling good about it. Ultimately, unless I make some major changes to my life priorities, I’m always going to be scrambling if I push my design work too hard.
It helps, of course, that Koriko was a blowout success. I'm really enjoying working through the writing and design at a sustainable pace. Moving towards Ulysses for writing and leaving Adobe behind for Affinity (still 40% off till 25th January!) both also feel like practical changes for my projects going forward.
In a similar vein: while I did a good amount of sales on my physical store this year, I quickly got very bored of packing and shipping. With the limited time I have to work on games stuff, I really don't want to be dealing with envelopes and missing packages. I'll be looking for a new distribution partner in 2023 when my store reopens.
Finally, I did my first bit of ‘proper’ contract work this year, delivering layout for Jason Price’s Notorious. Jason and I hang out every week and have done all kinds of work on each other’s games, but this one definitely moved into a ‘job’ more than a favour. An enjoyable job though—it was fun to be able to focus on the layout alone for a change, instead of it being something I do to procrastinate from tough design decisions 😅
Plus, it was absolutely wonderful to see both of our games (The Slow Knife and Notorious) make Gizmodo’s 20 Best Tabletop Roleplaying Games from 2022. List buds!
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Oh! Finally finally, I'm currently running a bundle sale where you can get all of my published games for $25. 100% of sales from this bundle will be donated to Magic Breakfast, a charity that provide healthy breakfasts to children and young people in the UK who arrive at school too hungry to learn. It's live for another week or so.
We're deep in the festive hibernation period right now, but please enjoy this picture of a very tasty mushroom wellington we made for Christmas lunch. HNY!
Thanks for supporting me through another year :)
J