Repeated Pleasant Games

Progress on Repeated Pleasant Games ground to a halt shortly after achieving multiplayer, and I've actually taken a step back to redesign the project and better evaluate the opportunities I have been looking to capitalize on.

Consequently, I've made the decision to shut down Repeated Pleasant Games and go quiet for a while as I continue tinkering with the project. With this, I've started looking for a job. So if you are interested in having an extra hand or know of any opportunities, I'd be glad to hear about them!

After a little under a month working full-time (partially due to moving and other life things), Repeated Pleasant Games finally has something approximating a product!

This was done after spending this week streaming my work on Twitch, in an effort to work in public and build early interest in the product as I push it towards its minimum-viable state.

The Tuesday after Memorial Day I sat down at my day job and the first thought in my head was "why am I here." I'd been struggling for months with the question of leaving a job where I was the only developer on a last-ditch project, but that morning I was decided.

I put in my two weeks, and on June 15th, 2021, I began my full time work on Repeated Pleasant Games with a revenue of $0/mo, a move into a new house on the horizon, and a whole lot of uncertainty about how I was going to make this all work.

But it's time to find out.

This is about when I committed to the project. I had just crawled out of a major episode of depression (in which I experienced more than a few psychotic episodes), gotten diagnosed with PTSD alongside general anxiety and depression disorders, and was getting medicated.

I had never felt better in my life, but I needed something to do.

TableTop had been sitting largely untouched since February, though it had since been rewritten in TypeScript. I decided to dust it off and start over. I began another rewrite, but this time I was focused on keeping most of the functionality and adding tests.

While I was working on this project, my partner mentioned that TableTop wasn't very SEO friendly. So I spent a while thinking of a name, but nothing stuck (or had an available domain). Then I logged into Discord and the name of my friend's D&D Discord server caught my eye: Repeated Pleasant Games.

It was perfect, the brand and culture was baked right in. All at once, I had a name, a goal, and a direction. The game was on.

Well before this milestone, my friends and I used Roll20 exclusively to play D&D together. I hated the app, but didn't have the desire to come up with anything else. Then I started looking for a job, learned a bit of Clojure, and decided that I might as well try to impress people with what I could do.

Enter the prototype for Repeated Pleasant Games, simply called TableTop at the outset. When I told my friends what I was doing, they started getting really excited, because, to no surprise, they also disliked Roll20.