There's No Such Thing as Making It

Embrace the process.

It’s been quite the month here at TKG HQ. Here’s what’s going on:

Werewolf in the Dark, our first party game in years is crowdfunding and ends in the next few hours. 

Outside of Mothership this is the first time we’ve hit over $100k since our first game Two Rooms and Boom came out and changed our lives forever. That was ten years ago.

You should check it out now. It’s sitting at about $123k as I write this.

Two Rooms and a Boom is back in stock for the first time since COVID. 

Speaking of two rooms, this game has been an evergreen since it was released. But it’s been plagued with issues since its inception. Issues with plastic cards, shipping, manufacturers changing card stock without telling us, then supply chain issues. Despite all that, there’s really nothing like it in its class. We sold 1,000 copies the day it restocked. It’s back in stock here (for retailers too).

Mothership finally released to huge acclaim. 

Better late than never should be our unofficial motto. After hitting a couple big delays, the Mothership 1E boxed set released on our store last Tuesday and has been selling well. How well? Our sales in the last two weeks surpass our sales from all of 2023.

We’ve gotten some great reviews from Questing Beast and Dave Thaumavore with more on the way. And going slightly under the radar is WES, our online “Warden Educational System” that teaches you how to play Mothership. It hasn’t been talked about much yet, but about 200 people a day are using it to learn to play Mothership, and we have a lot more coming for it in the next few months.

So what’s next?

Well, a couple things. We’re going to ship Werewolf in the Dark (on time lol) and then we’ll be crowdfunding Wages of Sin, our bounty hunting book for Mothership (you can join 1,300 people and follow along here). We’ll be doing this as a headline to Mothership Month, a whole month later this year where TKG and a lot of our 3PPs all crowdfund Mothership books around the theme of “space crime” in a giant collaborative multi-project campaign.

And then we’ve got Fatherfog, Alan’s fairytale horror RPG coming up next year. We’re going to release a Dev Kit for the Panic Engine as a way to help designers jumpstart their games. We’ve got three more party games up our sleeves, a cool microgame, and then more Mothership, Null.hack, S P I R A L, and Heist. A lot. A lot a lot. Alot.

And we need to keep up the momentum too. We have more people who depend on us now, we have bigger ambitions, and to a certain extent we need to maintain our reputation for great games and improve our reputation for fulfillment.

Shipping Blues

These are all great problems to have. I am not complaining. We’re in a good position. Financially more stable, and we have good opportunities that a lot of publishing houses don’t get. In short, we’re very lucky.

When Two Rooms and a Boom finally released, it was beset with issues that put it over a year past due. I remember when I finally set Amazon to fulfilling I was working in Alan’s basement. I hit the button to start fulfillment and waited for my life to change. 

But nothing did. I went and saw Southpaw (2015) and drove around for a bit and realized that my expectations were too high. I was hoping that finally releasing this hit game, our first game, would change everything. And eventually, it did. But not all at once. I was still me the I was before. The only difference was that I had shipped. I had finished something instead of just talking about finishing. 

If you’re anything like me you’ll get a kind of postpartum depression whenever you finish a major project. I learned this from my early days working in film. You’d finish a shoot, intense connections with everyone and then just flatline when it ends. 

I say this so that if it happens to you you’ll know that this is pretty normal! Or at least normal for me. Recognizing that this happens and will pass has been helpful for me. I cope usually by throwing myself into a new smaller project that I can obsess over for a bit. Or just veg out or focus on some other neglected area of my life (like the house, or my fitness). This helps me a lot. And I think if you’re like me it might help you too.

Embrace the process

I love designing games, absolutely love it. And I love the process of publishing games too. There’s a lot of it that sucks. But there’s a lot of everything that sucks. But what I love is the day to day work of designing and publishing games. I love my little spreadsheets for character creation but I also love my little spreadsheets for planning out manufacturing costs. I just enjoy this kind of work as a publisher.

This helps because it makes me feel like I’m not just sitting around waiting for one of our games to make it so big I can quit and never do anything else ever again. I’m here to make games. Is this an easy stance to take for someone who just shipping a million dollar kickstarter? Definitely! But there were ten years in the business before that where we felt the same way.

Why bring this up?

I’m saying all this to highlight something: the end product won’t save you. There’s no kickstarter so big, no project so fun that finishing it will make you whole. That’s a project outside the scope of work. But the work is still valuable. Learn to enjoy the process. Even when you think you’ve made it, there’s really no such thing as making it. Just the work. And there’s always more work to do. So if you can, just enjoy where you are. Everything will change soon enough.