Hello world,
I wanted to swoop in like some kinda light bomber and drop a payload of update about this game, why it's on hiatus, and why it might not come back. I want you all to know that, first of all, I am exceedingly grateful for and humbled by the positive attention this game received while it was running. I don't mean this in a really gay "thanks for the support guys! uwu" way -- it is just really, sincerely heartwarming to see the effort and the care you all put in to owning this world and making it vibrant. I can't really praise you guys enough on this count, so I won't bother trying; the point is that the player base was as good as, if not better than, what I could have hoped for. It would be disingenuous not to name a few names, so I'll go ahead and say that J.K. Stockholme, Ahigin, Robert Can't, and Double A all impressed me with their gumption and world-building. Many others of you, Masada, Tyo, Tolni, and Johanna especially, wrote great, flavorful orders as well that helped put us in the "world," so to speak.
It is because I feel that this player base was better than I or Nuke deserved that I feel obligated to explain why we went on hiatus. The party line has been that, since it was reported that I was leaving for China, there was some uncertainty about whether or not we would be able to maintain our update schedule, and to avoid all that and create room to fix outstanding issues, Nuke and I "agreed" to schedule a return for January, when things would, presumably, be a bit more settled.
The actual reality is a lot bitterer and has mostly to do with me and misgivings I ended up having about the game as a whole. After the last big rules update, Nuke pressed, and I relented, for a quick update to keep the momentum going. In Nuke's view, speedy and regular updates were part of our "brand" and why people liked this game. While I think this is a reasonable view, at this point I was getting burnt out and there were several unresolved issues with the engine's implementation of the new rules. In order to meet this accelerated schedule, we rushed out the update and I cut some corners on the stats, hoping to finish them over the next week.
The rushed update, I felt, lacked some of the quality that made it operable, and it's hard to say this was not because the stats were completely wrong pending being "fixed." The moment I recognized this inconsistency, I pulled the stats and announced they were still being worked on, and then stopped working on them because I couldn't stop dwelling on certain problems in the canon of the update, and (big-picture) problems with the universe that, in my view, were compounding and spiraling out of control. Like any good manager, Nuke tried to pep me up, but it was no use: I had become completely disenchanted with the world of Blackened Skies -- and, worse still, discouraged that I was having so much trouble realizing my vision for the new rules.
During the "hot months" of May-June, as many of you know, I was processing major rules changes on a nearly weekly basis as part of my mission to create the complex but accessible game that I felt this hobby deserved. From the beginning, that's all I ever wanted, was to create something beautiful, and I really believed I could do it. I believed in this so much that I dismissed everyone who recommended that I slow down or take a more moderated approach. In the end, I crashed and burned and blamed everyone else.
So what about returning from hiatus? Well, at this point, I sincerely doubt I can muster the passion to reboot this setting until I have a much clearer idea of the game engine I want from a holistic standpoint, and a much MUCH clearer idea of what's going on in the setting, what is canon and not, and what will lend towards credible simulation of a World War 2-type scenario. I'm not exactly sure what that will look like, but the point is that I lack this impetus on both counts right now and do not see a change in this category occurring by January. I feel bad, but that's just the way it is. No getting around it.
In general, my belief in grand strategy/political roleplaying games and my belief in the power of tools to help realize complex worlds remains unshaken. It is only my belief in myself that has become compromised. This might sound like melodramatic sympathy-farming, and yeah I get that, but it's just the truth as most sincerely as I can express it. I don't require any pity, I just want you guys to know what's going on. I have some ideas for other game systems and scenarios that I hope to debut over the next few months.
Thanks for all the fish, lads.