Happy Wednesday, Geekly Gang! Kyra Kyle here. Today marks April’s fifth Wednesday, so that means our writers will share personal updates over the past three months or so since our last update. Honestly, I don’t know if we’ll hear from Season and Skye this month, but you’ll get an update from me. Here’s what I’ve been doing these past three months.
Kyra’s Personal Update
If you’ve been following my Game Design Brain Dump series lately, you’ll know all about the Great Plains Game Festival (GPGF) and how I submitted three games for its inaugural Playtest to Win Event. My designs weren’t checked out as much as I would’ve liked, but I got some good feedback. Spill the Beans and Whirligig Pets received mostly praise, so those two games are pretty much ready to submit. And I have begun submitting Spill the Beans. That’s one part of my New Year’s Resolution down. I have a submittable board game, and I’m submitting it to various companies.
Whirligig Pets needs a promo video, but that may occur as soon as today. I have a script and a ring light. Let’s do this thing. I’ll share whenever I begin submitting Whirligig Pets and whatever happens with any responses. Fingers crossed that I’ll hear something back from my first wave of Spill the Beans submissions. While I’m sure these companies receive multiple queries daily (I went with some larger board game publishers first), I was hoping I would have heard something back from someone by now. I may wait a week or two and follow up.
I also submitted No Kings to GPGF’s Playtest to Win Event. That one needs more work. I’ll try various things to see if I can jazz up the gameplay. I’ve mentioned in a past Brain Dump that popular art’s sweet spot between familiar and strange could lie in the following Venn Diagram.
Evidently, No Kings leans toward the “Potentially Boring” side of this Venn Diagram. I have some ideas to shake up the design, and multiple people signed up for No Kings’ notifications. No Kings had more followers than the other two games. Most people who responded sounded as if they would give the game another chance. But before I send the game back into the wild, I’ll send it through the meat grinder a time or two.
Moving from the games I’m designing to games I’m playing, I’ve dove into the Marvel Multiverse RPG or MMRPG or the d616 System. That’s a lot of nicknames for one game. Anyway, I will be running a one-shot MMRPG scenario at the Nuke-Con Aftershock Event next month (May 16, 2026) at the Bellevue (Nebraska) Public Library. If that goes well, you could see me at a Free RPG Day Event at the end of June. Regardless, I’ve busied myself by converting some of the TSR Marvel RPG of the 1980s into the d616 System. Roll Charts! Woo hoo! My future holds countless hours of rolling up characters with ridiculous origins and powers.
And since I’m old enough to have played the 1980’s TSR Marvel RPG, I regret to inform you that I’ve had lower back pain for the past several days. I haven’t been able to leave the bed too often. While that helps me read four resource books for the MMRPG and catch up on some other reading, I haven’t been able to sit for prolonged periods. I’m on the mend. I’ll get back to writing and game design real soon.
I’ve been submitting here and there to literary journals, but for the most part, that’s all I have for these past couple of months. Let’s check in with Skye.
Skye’s Personal Update
Long story short: I got a new job.
This has taken up the majority of my time over the past few months. I wasn’t getting enough hours at my movie theater job, which was having a negative effect on my income and prompted me to seek out new employment. Ultimately, I landed a job at Carvana. In all honesty, I didn’t even expect to get an interview for this position (let alone get hired), but I’m very glad that I did. I like going on adventures with Carvana.
So far, things have been going well; the only difficult part has been sorting out my hours between my new job and my theater job. Yes, I ended up keeping the theater job. The good news is that I’m getting the hours I need; the bad news is that my free time is completely unpredictable now. I’ll still try to post and update whenever I can, and I still love being a part of the Geekly Community.
We geeks gotta stick together, right?
Hey, hey! Kyra Kyle here again. Thank you for reading, and wherever you are, I hope you’re having a great day.
jkgeekly.com 