So, hi again.
It's been nearly two years since everything got turned upside down. Almost two years from when we were told to go hide at home and continue working like everything was normal. We had all hoped that it’d be easy to ride out the upheaval that a pandemic might bring, and that we could stay productive as ever. Maybe even more productive, with all of that time at home!
But everything wasn’t normal. It has been one year, seven months, and seventeen days since March 15 2020; roughly the time when everything shut down, and things are still not normal. We kept writing here, thinking we could keep the ball rolling, trying digital game nights and charity events to keep the motivation flowing.
It’s been a while since we’ve last posted anything official here, but we’re back now to finish 2021 strong! Here’s a quick update about what happened, and what to expect going forward.
So, What Happened?
We last published an article July 4th, 2021, which was almost four months ago. It seems strange that we stopped in the middle of the summer when things were supposed to be getting better from COVID, but there was a few reasons why things shut down.
Speaking for myself first, I had been working on closing on a house for about four months, with a deal finally happening at the start of July. Right as things were starting to close again thanks to the COVID Delta Variant, I had to organize moving in just a few weeks, losing internet for some time for the transition. This was on top of having a nine month old who would only sleep for two hours at a time.
You have not known what it means to wrestle until you get between a baby and their pasta.
For everyone else, there is a mess of reasons for the quiet. Our wonderful writer Shanna became a mother to twins. Our wonderful news writer Otto has been able to follow his dreams of writing full time for larger organizations such as Gamespot. Our editor Adam was pulled into a heavy work schedule, and our head writer Eric was balancing a full-time job with finishing up a college degree.
Long story short: Sprites and Dice is our passion project: a hopeful dream to do what we love. But we each have some pretty hectic lives, and trying to juggle both during COVID just became a little bit too much. After realizing all of us were burned out, we decided to step back for a while to reset.
But You’re Back?
Yes! We came together as a team and said we’d start getting content back out the door in November. Everyone is a little bit more settled now, and with COVID waning again, we’ve actually had a chance to hang out and play games once or twice. That does a lot for motivation.
Pro tip: don't play cards named after an elder god on your friends after not seeing them for months.
Starting November 1st, expect content to start arriving here at the main website, as well as work elsewhere.
What Can We Expect For The Rest Of 2021?
1: Our first goal is to produce consistent quality content you can rely on. There will be a new article uploaded every Tuesday and Friday for the rest of 2021, with an occasional news article thrown in during off days. We have quite a few games we have to review from the last year, but we are also hoping to get back to our original goal of writing more editorials and features about gaming in general.
2:Our discord channel has been a nice refuge to talk about gaming during COVID, but we’re hoping to give it an update to make it an easy place to connect with other gamers, find games to log into together, and create a community.
3: Streaming! We’ve been playing games on twitch on the side for a while now, but we’re going to be uploading a dedicated schedule to let you know what we’re playing. For now, expect November to have Eric playing the enigmatic Boyfriend Dungeon while I finish scaring myself repeatedly while exploring the watery depths of Subnautica.
There’s a variety of other things we’re hoping to bring back: Adam is starting to run TTRPG games again through our discord, starting with Cyberpunk Red in the next week or two. We’ll be ending the year with another charity stream, especially after we raised over $2,000 during our last one. There’s more we hope to achieve as we prepare for bigger goals during 2022, but we’ll reveal those as we get the ball rolling in the next two months.
Sorry For The Break, Now Back To The Fun!
For those of you still reading: thank you. While we might not be a large gaming website, we do really appreciate those that do read our content. If you’ve gotten this far, that means you are probably one of them, and we really do appreciate the fact that you enjoy reading our work. Whether its reading the website, hanging out with us in discord, or rolling dice in person (when we can do that again!), thank you.
It hasn’t been an easy year. It hasn’t been an easy two years. Gaming can be a good escape from the stress at times, but you can also burn out on your hobbies; where you do something to go through the motions, instead of doing something out of passion. We’re sad we had to step away for a while as a group, but we’re happy to be back out here writing about a hobby we do care about.
I’m hoping the next few months will be kinder than the first few months of 2020. Good luck to everyone out there reading this; let’s have a great time gaming for the rest of 2021!
