I Quit My Job To Make Games

Or, I Finally Beat Inspiral By Nerfing Workdays

TLDR: Foolish Endeavor is how I will polish & publish Game Things in a personally sustainable manner: iterative, meandering, & unbound (read as "very ADHD").
Join the mailing list! Here's the first game I'm actually proud of!

The title is a slight exaggeration; there are many contributing factors for me leaving traditional gainful employment (including, I am constantly grateful to say, sufficient financial stability). But I am indeed, as of July last year, a full-ish-time, self-employed, (un)"professional" game designer, working under an unregistered but aptly named publishing imprint (for lack of a better term for this amorphous entity) that I have spoken into existence: Foolish Endeavor. 

Read much more below.

I'd love to make this real, or at least a sticker version...

Wait, who am I again?

I don't blame you. The veils of time and machine curation have obscured much of who I am to myself, much less to you, I'm sure.

I'm David Perry. Also known by curiousepic. G+ RPG circle expat. A miserable pile of game ideas. A semifluid demiguy. An aspiring elfgame artisan. A process in self-revision. And, if you do know me, it's likely as the composer and tripartite author of Principia Apocrypha (oft-overlooked behind the other names; my own dang fault for frontloading and embiggening them).

And, as of early last year (previously handwaved but blindingly obvious in hindsight), a confirmed victim-wielder of, as Hankerin would say, Attention Surplus Syndrome.

Prone to tangents, hyperfixations, Shiny New Things, fruitless deep dives, entrancement by the tiny ecosystem embedded in a carpet of moss on a tree when I should be navigating the forest, fugue states that only lift after I've figured out how to make a logo that looks like a cloth patch, weeks-to-months-long phases of fluctuating interest in diverse projects and genres (notably, I swing hard between Fantasy and SF, and that pendulum is heavy), needlessly- but with any luck poetically-exhaustive lists, and a hefty dose of self-conscious perfectionism that ratchets up the further into a project I get, causing an aversion to exposing my creations to the keen, imperious eyes of others.

This is a major reason that you have not heard anything from me in so long, and how I have easily slipped through the fingers of the algorithm.

But last year was a season of change. Of re-self-exploration. Of reinvigoration. Of bootstrapping. And of embarkation.

The Map & The Path

Foolish Endeavor is partly a map, a tool, (and a hope) for focusing my energies on finally polishing and publishing games from my deep, forsaken library of a backlog of nascent projects (and beyond), to increase the odds of Actually Releasing Things to the world at large.

However, I also need Foolish Endeavor to be an acknowledgement and acceptance that the path will be winding and forking. And, when I need to halt for rest, it will remain ahead of me, with obvious next steps to pick up my boots and tread onward.

And an acceptance that anything else would not be sustainable for me.

I hope you will follow along!

I speak to you now, faintly, from deep within the Algorithmic Oubliette I stumbled into (vulnerable as I was among the scattered masses stumbling out of the G+ Exodus), and at first struggling, then refusing, to climb out of by harvesting Engagement for the Engagement God.

I am putting the @lithyscaphe twitter account out of its forsaken misery (well, making it into a redirect of sorts), and putting any willpower to Poast that I can scrape up into new @foolishendgames accounts on Bluesky, and perhaps Instagram. I have no intention of interacting much beyond posting updates and responding to replies to them.

But it's ironic, in this day and age, it turns out the humble but historically scorned email is obviously the way to go for folks to follow the creators they want to support. It also feels way more pleasant to curate missives of nontrivial substance that I know will reach people who are actually interested in what I make and write. And, at least in my case, the content is locked in focus and isolated from the paralyzing vertigo of infinite potentiality (aka sidebars and blogrolls).

So if you like what I make or write, I'd truly appreciate you signing up for a simple newsletter. I'll use it to announce projects, progress reports, maybe a blog post digest, and perhaps bits of gameable content only shared there. Probably no more than once a month or so, quite possibly much less.

I considered but decided against launching with a Patreon. Perhaps later. If you'd like to lend me your support in another way, you can do two things:

• Buy the stuff I make. I won't even feel too weird about you paying above the pricepoint on itch, if you want to "tip" me, perhaps to show appreciation for Principia Apocrypha, or just general encouragement.
• Join the mailing list to be sure you hear about new stuff you might like!

So how am I going to
Actually Release Games?

My goal for now is to begin releasing my projects via an iterative, early-access Itchfunding-like structure. 

New, more complete and polished versions will become available as the prior sells enough to encourage further work and support commissions for editing, art, layout. The price will be bumped up a bit respectively - but if you pay at an earlier level, you will always get the subsequent updates for free.

This means I can lower my own bar for getting my early work exposed to the eyes of others, and kickstart the virtuous cycle of feedback and improvement.

It also means you can vote with your coin - interest in a given project among those I release early versions of will encourage me to refine and expand it. However, I don't want to guarantee that any given project will reach some sort of Final Form. But you know what they say about Perfect.

Okay so what am I making?

I will be following up this post with a docket of projects currently in the works to a greater or lesser degree. But right now I want to share the first game I truly feel proud to release into the world:

Quick & Dicey

A light, old-school adventuring framework fine-tuned to amplify the Quality Dungeon Time you can fit into your life. Borne from a focused intent to quell my anxieties and friction with GMing and playtesting; a catalyst and tool for the evolution in self confidence around game development that I've been living through. It implements my thinking around Problem-Solving Combat, and I'll be posting about my design intent soon.

And you can get it now!

And there are a few other goodies and hints at future work on my main itch page.

Lithyscaphe is now the blog of
Foolish Endeavor

Follow along and see where this winding, forking path leads