So hey, this may not help but I’ll say it anyway.

Most of the best things I’ve written are reincarnations of the dead of my design history. I tried to write something like Hope is the Last Thing in 2003. It was terrible. And while the version of the game I ended up writing is so very fragile and twisted in many ways, it worked (mostly) to do what I wanted (mostly) when I wrote it again over a decade later.

I tried to write about Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland four times (late 90s, early 2000s, early 2010s, last year). And the last one I put out and play-tested and played, and it was only… partly successful. One of these days I’ll get it right.

And so it goes, for me. I write something, I do a lot of work, I trash it all. I come back months — or years — or once even a decade — later and make something I actually like.

(And there’s no reason you should really care, as like 40 people ever have played Hope, and only double that number have read it, so you know, successful it is not. But hey, design is design.)