Monday, July 4

A Sabbatical

As I'm sure you're aware, this blog about designing and playing games has been very light on the designing for the last few months.

Since my promotion at work last October I've been doing a lot more travel for work, and with a young daughter and The Wife at home, when I'm around I've been choosing to spend most of my free time with them rather than designing games.

Added to that, programming which has been a major hobby and/or my career for the last thirty years is no longer part of my day job, and I miss it. When I have found some time to kill recently, I've chosen to work on my phone apps to scratch that programming itch, rather than my games designs. I've got a few ideas on the games design front, but I can't seem to get the enthusiasm together to actually make any progress on them.

Board gaming is still a huge part of my life (I'm on course to play more games this year than I have in the last ten!), but game design seems to have slipped down the list behind spending time with my family, learning German and Portuguese, programming and finally getting some exercise. Slipped to a point where it's just not happening any more.

I have no way of tracking how many readers I have any more (my stats are getting spammed by spider bots), so I've no idea if anyone reads this, but my guess is that those of you who do are reading it to hear about my experiences as a board game designer and former publisher, not talking about my programming progress or how I hope to do some games design next week.

So I'm going to stop blogging weekly, and just blog when I have something worth saying (and hopefully reading!) on the games design front. Thanks to those of you who've read my weekly ramblings for the last four years.

2 comments:

GamesBook said...

Yep, we will still be here (for some random value of "here")!

Good luck in your (new?) career, sans programming. The older I get, the more I struggle with it. But I am also not sure that I could give it up ...

Jackson Pope said...

Hiya Derek,

Thanks for your ongoing support! I'm now a full-time manager of a team of software engineers, sales people, marketers, scientists, tech support representatives and admin people, but still at the same company.

I still have a bunch of games ideas, but I'm just prioritising other things over them :-/

Cheers,

Jack