The Future of The Parsnip Post

I started this blog a little over three months ago with a post on the importance of choosing your words wisely. The goal of the blog was to have a place to write down my journey in board game design and give myself more focus on certain aspects of development. It was also to help me learn how to build an audience and practice writing engaging content for a potential Kickstarter campaign. Since I started I have written 16 articles about varying topics focusing on whichever topic stood out to me that week.

In some ways I have achieved what I set out to do. Each article that I wrote has taught me more about the topic than I knew about before I started. For example, I never knew how colour blind accessibility should be considered in your design or how the sunk cost trap can apply to designing a game. I have also grown my audience, even if it is only by a small number of people.

This is all about the past though and the title is “The Future of The Parsnip Post”. So what does the future hold? Well, with my impending move to Germany I want to in a way reboot The Parsnip Post. Currently I write about whatever comes to mind when I sit down to write and they all get published to a continuous stream of posts. One week I post a review, the next week I talk about marketing, then I talk game development and it’s all muddled together. Perhaps people in the future will come here to look only at my reviews or only at the development diaries for my games. So with this reboot I want to make it easier to search or find articles for the specific topic. I also want to be more focused on what I post about so readers can grow expect what to read and I can have an idea of what to write about on a given week. Each month I want to have one article on the following three topics.

Wheel to Wheel Racing Dev Diary – Starting next week I will begin to give more information on the game I am designing that I started to blog about. The first few articles about the game will focus on the past year of development until we catch up to where we are currently. Once caught up I will give a monthly update on development.

Table For Two – This was an idea I had back in July and I made one article about Formula D. However, with the pandemic, living apart and everything else it has been hard to continue what I hoped could be a series of reviews. Thankfully once I move it will be much easier to play games with Ruth and we will be able to do one of these reviews once a month also.

Kickstarter Class – How a campaign page is laid out is one of most interesting parts of Kickstarter for me. It is usually the first thing people see about your game so it is important that it strikes the right note. In the Kickstarter Class articles will highlight some of the good and bad strategies currently used across different campaigns. I will mostly focus on board games but sometimes I might look at something entirely different.

Moving forward these three topics will be the main focus of the blog, but that is not to say it will be all I will post about. There will always be something that catches my interest that does not fall into these categories that I feel I need to talk about.

For now not much will change, I will still continue to post an article every Tuesday. The next step is to redesign the website to allow for better navigation amongst topics. I also have lots of other exciting things in store for once I am settled in Germany but I will keep secret for the moment. If you have anything you would like to see me talk about or do in the future let me know down below.