For weeks, I’ve been a wreck. The stress dreams were relentless, my appetite was unpredictable, and I got massively sick for the first time in years.
My depression and anxiety have been as bad as they’ve been in months, and it’s been a challenge to get to the end of every day.
This is pretty normal for me when I care deeply about something, and I know that all of this has been anticipation about the release of Titansgrave, which is something I’ve been actively working on for about a year, and something I’ve wanted to produce since Tabletop first began.
I feel a responsibility to the cast and crew, to the editors, to the director, to our partners at Green Ronin, and to the thousands of backers who made it possible for us to create the show.
I’ve been making creative decisions every day, watching edits and rewatching edits and giving notes on edits and watching the edits with those notes applies so much, I started to lose perspective on the story. When I’m spending all of my energy focusing on what I can cut and what I need to change, that’s all I can see, and it’s easy for me to forget that there’s all this stuff there that’s genuinely cool.
My deepest fear has been that we wouldn’t be able to share with the audience how we felt while we played, that we couldn’t be able to communicate the fun, the tension, the camaraderie, the anticipation and excitement. I was worried that everything I thought was awesome, because I was there, wouldn’t translate.
By the way, I felt exactly this way before Tabletop was released, so this is nothing new for me.
As I told Ivan yesterday on Twitch: all I could hear was Carrie’s mom in my head, hysterically screaming that they were all going to laugh at me.
Well, it’s about 24 hours later, and contrary to everything I’ve been taught, I’ve been reading the comments. It looks like the hard work of our team from the first few ideas I wrote down in a notebook to the first few steps our party took together to the final edit I signed off on last week was worth it.
So far, everyone seems to love the characters, the players, and the story as much as I do … and that makes me so incredibly excited because I know what the future holds for all of us, and now I wish it was next week as much as you do.
Thanks for watching, everyone, and thank you for your feedback. A very, very special thank you to our backers, and to everyone involved in the creation and production.
Oh, and whoever decided that #SaveTheBeer was going to be a thing? You get +3 to awesome today.
