RV Games May Newsletter

An Interview With Sean McCoy

Good morning everyone! Here I am with the RV Games newsletter. First, I’m going to use this opportunity to remind everyone about our currently running Kickstarter campaign for Mitosis, the Mothership pamphlet adventure and diegetic board game. There’s only three days left, and we’d really appreciate your support.

With promotion out of the way. I’m very excited for this newsletter because it features an interview with Sean McCoy, the creator of Mothership. We had a wonderful asynchronous conversation about wellness, balance, and family. It’s hard in the indie ttrpg world, and it can be all consuming.

I’m doing some recalibration around this myself, so this interview with Sean has really hit me deep. After sharing Sean’s thoughts, I’m going to share my story that led me to creating ttrpg modules and other games. This is a real tearjerker, and I’ve never put my story out here like this. However, it’s essential to understanding who I am, why I design what I do, and what RV Games is all about. So, hold on, this is a long one.

How do you keep yourself present with your family? How do you go about balancing a family and running a company? How do all of us with day jobs and families keep this up?

It’s tough! I started small before Lindsay and I had kids, because when you run your own company it’s easy to just let work consume all available hours. But that’s really no way to live your life. So I started by just picking two days a week to be my weekend. No work, no email, nothing. 

These days I do a similar thing, I pick two nights a week to spend with my wife, and one night a week to spend doing my own thing just for me. So that’s the first thing, you have to set some boundaries.

Being present is tough, especially with my kids. I find myself on my phone very easily. I’ve tried a lot of different things, but it turns out it’s just hard for me. I deleted discord from my phone, stay logged off twitter, and I moved all our work to basecamp. I think it’s a mistake to do a lot of your work on social media platforms (like discord or twitter). They’re just interruption machines. Since we moved all our work conversations over to basecamp (which is just a nice little project management tool) I’m getting way less distracted. I used to send someone something for feedback on discord and then spend hours casually chatting between doing tasks and chores about industry gossip or whatever. I felt always on.

It had an adverse effect on my work too. Everything was always a chat, dates were getting lost, I’d get feedback from whoever was around, everything felt more stressful. Now things are quieter, slower.

We had our second baby right after the Mothership Boxed Set kickstarter launched and I severely underestimated how much that was going to upend my entire life. It’s been a fight (as I’m sure my backers have seen) to get things back on track. But also not to just hit fast-forward on my children’s lives so that I can get “back to work.”

It’s hard trying to balance this sense that you have to strike while the iron is hot with this idea that you only get to do this with your kids once and it’s just so so brief. 

So that brings me to my next point which is: know that you are dust and to dust you will return. You just have to really ask yourself the right questions: someday I’m going to die, what will I regret not doing? “I wish I had worked more,” is never at the top of that list.

You basically just have to remember that you’re making games for people and while backers may be upset, or you may be behind, or your work may be piling up, you’re still just a person, this is still just work, you have to live your life. There will be more work to do tomorrow.

So pick a number of hours in the week, for a parent that might be 5-6. Maybe 8. And you have to just say “that’s enough, I’ve done enough.” There will be deadlines and pushes, etc. But the challenge is to mold your work around your life, not the other way around. 

We know what life looks like now that I have two kids, what that does to our timelines, so now we know to shape work around those expectations. Someday my kids will be in school, or have left to live their lives. I want the minutes and days before that happens to stretch into the infinite. I don’t want to rush them through it so I can make some games.

I’ve had to just learn to enjoy the moment I’m in for what it is. This is a moment where work is hard, but my daughter is sitting next to me playing in a box filled with crayons like a little goblin. It’s a beautiful magical thing that I’ll never get to do again. There will be time to do more in games.

What is your thing that’s just for you now? I know that for a lot of us, making games started as that thing, and now it’s work, good work that we dream to do, but it’s still work.

Right now I try my best in my alone time to do something that can’t be easily turned into some money making scheme. I think I feel a strong compulsion to turn my hobbies into profit-seeking ventures so that they are “worth it,” which feels like a very sick way to live honestly. I get where the impulse comes from, everything costs money, if you don’t have a lot of money it makes sense to align your hobbies with some way to make money, right? Well, I’ve done that for about a decade basically – it’s a lot of how I ended up in graphic design and then rpgs. So if you’re truly in survival mode, I think it makes a lot of sense. 

But at some point, if you’re not in survival mode you have to recognize that and start trying to live your life. So it sounds dumb but something really frivolous for me, like playing a video game or reading a book, as a parent/business owner – it’s really hard to make myself do those things! Because there’s always another chore, or task at work, that I *could* be working on. Or maybe I should be working out, or whatever. 

We’re over a year late on our Kickstarter, right? That’s hard! It’s a lot of pressure. So I have work hard every day to make sure we’re moving forward. But does that mean I shouldn’t spend any time on myself? Or with my spouse? Or with my kids? For how long? At a certain point you just have to re-level set and say “this way of working isn’t sustainable if it means I won’t just *play* for the next 24 months.” TL;DR I’m reading Mistborn and I just finished playing Metroid Dread!

How does your spouse help you keep these boundaries?

Last year when our daughter was only a few months old I got this idea in my head that I wanted to learn Japanese lol. So she signed me up for some classes that I took once a week online. About once a month or two I get a cheap hotel room and go there and just pull a late night working.

What role does your spouse play with the business? How much do they want to know about it?

Lindsay’s my first sounding board and the person I go to most for advice. Specifically about managing people (she was my manager at Starbucks actually when we met). She’s got a world-class mind and an insane work ethic. She’s hired and fired and managed dozens of people, so she just has all this knowledge about how larger businesses run and operate and she helps me hold ourselves to that standard.

She likes knowing about the decisions and cool opportunities. She doesn’t love hearing about scene drama. Sometimes the ups and downs and instability of this kind of work can be a little anxiety producing. I forget how much of that I’ve just learned to deal with and that it’s not a skillset you can just assume everyone has. 

Also, our jobs are very different: I’m at home with the kids all day and she’s at work doing sales. So by the time she gets home, she’s ready to not talk to another person for 12 hours and I’m ready to just unload on another adult uninterrupted for as long as possible. So we’ve had to work through that and what that looks like for us so we both get what we need. Publishing, particularly in the RPG space, can be a lonely occupation. Almost everyone is working from home, remote, online, via discord, or twitter. So it’s important to reach out and connect with other people for real. I’ve got a lot of great colleagues that I check in with regularly which I think helps a lot.

Content and Trigger Warning: Suicide, Mental Health Issues, Stillbirth

As I read responses, there were so many parallels between our stories (and differences) that I wanted to share how I got here and how it influences RV Games. When I grew up, I had the same experience. Both of my parents ran their own companies, my mother doing graphic design. I always wanted to have my own thing in a creative field. However, I also love the technical side of things, so I went to college to become a computer engineering. At 19 years old, I had my first overworking myself nervous breakdown in my life. I got super skinny, frantic, and my father described me as pacing like a tiger. So, I became an English major. Throughout this school experience, I was making short films and music and hoping to be a director. I even tried to make an indie film that fell apart, and that was when I had my second nervous breakdown at the age of 22. Two weeks after this breakdown and major depressive episode, I met my wife. She’s the one who pushed me in the direction to become a teacher.

My career in education then followed a similar pattern. Before we had kids, we were both new teachers working 70-80 hour weeks together. We would sit and watch America’s Test Kitchen and Mexico one plate at a time. This is when I finally sought therapy and psychiatric treatment. I’d always wanted to move into leadership, so what did I do: become a department chair and yearbook advisor and got my Master’s degree while working. I moved on to be an instructional coach, and then I became an assistant principal at a high-performing school. I had always worked in urban and working class schools before this, and this is next time I had a breakdown.

The environment of the high-performing was toxic, we lost too many students to stress, eating disorders, and suicide. This weighed on me so heavily. We also had some teachers who were very old school and punitive. I did something that was the right thing for the students, but completely broke the terms of my teaching credential. I had gotten out of there, but I was under investigation from the state the entire time I was at my new job. I ended up having my administrative and teaching credential completely revoked. This was at the same time that my wife was now getting her Master’s degree and was pregnant with our second child. This is when I started to have suicidal ideation and didn’t tell anyone. I wished that I would have a heart attack or get hit by a bus, so my family could get my life insurance, I felt like they were better off that way. It also turns out I was on the wrong medication.

In the midst of all of this, we then lost our second child to a stillbirth. This was my third nervous breakdown at the age of 33. That grief will rest in me forever and whenever I’m losing sight of my life, I think of her. It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me and the best. It made slow down and reconsider everything. As I held my dead baby in my arms, all of my repressed emotions and everything that had ever psychically injured me as an Autistic person. I had the biggest cry I’ve ever had in my life, and I never cried before that except when my aunt died. She sacrificed herself for her family because she knew that we needed to reconsider how we were living. She still visits me in dreams as a four year old and as an amazing fiery adult who reminds me of Daria. She reassures me and gives me comfort.

However, sitting in that hospital room as my wife recovered, the Big Bang Theory, a show I hate, was on the little hospital TV. At that moment, I realized that I wanted to wear all of Penny’s clothes. I’ve always had some gender things, but they’d always been shoved aside: “I can’t be trans that’s other people, I’m just not a manly man.” However, it didn’t stop. Crossdressing wasn’t enough. I have a very close non-binary colleague and friend, and they had opened me up to many more possibilities than binary medical transition. This is when I came out to my wife, and my marriage almost ended. This was also at the same time that we were looking to move out of the SF Bay Area to Fresno for a new start where we could buy a house. We also started to consider bankruptcy because of the spending caused by undiagnosed mental illness and cost of living. I did get better treatment, and this is when I was diagnosed with Bipolar II and got my treatment plan in better order.

When we moved, I was unemployed except for a small adjunct teaching position, and it stayed that way for awhile. However, we only got to move in for six months before the pandemic hit. Before that, I did manage to meet River, my design partner (as I said in Notes, she’s taking a break from the gaming industry for a little while, but she is still my number one person to talk game design with). Throughout all of this, I hadn’t touched a musical instrument, a camera, or my fiction writing. I had subsumed myself with work and career. The pandemic saved us, the funds from the government saved us, and my wife and I remembered how much we actually enjoy each other’s company. We have a very different asexual relationship now, and we still have some issues around this (we practice polyamory now). This is when I started my first business, I had connections from my education career, and I was able to use consulting as a way to tide us over until I got a new full time job this Fall.

With all of this in place, River and I started our first creative venture together. She had attempted to be a Twitch streamer for three years, and video game streaming was no longer fun for her. This is when we made MST3K/Podcast/Movie stream about public domain Camp films (Camp in the true sense, not campy). This didn’t hit quite like we’d hoped, we kept it up for a year because that was our agreement. We were hoping for another creative endeavor at that moment. At that time, we were trying to develop a sci-fi RPG to play together for fun, and that is when I discovered Mothership through an ad from Monkey’s Paw Games.

I immediately became obsessed, driving River crazy. I joined the Mothership Discord and have been active there sense. I’ve met some great friends and mentors there. Within a couple weeks of being on the Discord, David Wilkie reached out to me to tell me that he would love to design work for me if I ever wanted to publish any of my ideas. I had never even considered this. This is when River and I put together our first PDF module and then physical module for sale to Tuesday Knight Games. We were working on another module, and on a lark I decide to put it up on Kickstarter for the August ZiMo. It funded beyond what we had hoped. Then in November, we published a set of Pamphlets for Chris Airiau, and then in February we signed on to distribute a ZiMo zine for Hammer City Games. Two months later in April, we launched Mitosis, a game over a year in the making, and here we are now. It’s been much slower funding than other things, and I will probably do a post mortem of this in a future newsletter. At first, I was too embarrassed to do this, but other creators need to learn about successes and failures and things in between. I did not become a ttrpg developer until I was 37 years old, so I feel like I have started way later and behind quite a few other people, which is hard to shake, I’m old and uncool and want to put out auteur art games and Camp schlock.

I’ve launched this business piggybacking on my consulting LLC. I’ve worked out distribution channels, I’ve learned to work with artists and editors, and we have warehouse space at Amplifier in Austin. I was in a rush to move this into a full-time job, I wanted to get my four Kickstarters under my belt as quickly as possible, so I could start having overlapping campaigns. I’ve been on track to do this in less than a year, which is really insane now that I write it down. River and I have had disagreements about that, and it can become all consuming for me. Her backing off and some other things with my life have led to me to stop self-medicating with substances, which just push me towards ADHD and Autism hyper focus around the business. I feel like I have the infrastructure in place to self-fund and distribute now, and I’m not charging nearly as hard. Slowing down is fine, I’m not desperate to have enough money to support my family anymore, and I like my new job a lot. This can be a self-funded hobby business for as long as I need it to be, going slower and only Kickstarting projects that are complete and just need funds for a manufacturing run. I’m also working on smaller Microgames and slowing down in the Mothership space other than publishing and distribution.

Orgy of the Blood Leeches is my big Mothership idea that I’ve had since discovering the game, and I want to do it right. I want it to be able to be a premium boxed module, and I want to take the time. It’s my novel or feature film. It’s 1-2 years away, and I’m chugging along on it a bit at a time, paying for art from Amanda Franck and dev editing from Christian Sorrell as I go along. David Wilkie is also laying this out as it is developed, not doing it all at once after funding. During my gender transition, my own child also started to question their gender, so now I am a trans parent of a young trans child. With the moral panic happening now, I feel a huge drive to make a pro-trans, intense, controversial piece of art with this adventure. I have to, it’s inside of me and has to burst out. This is why I want to spend the time to get this adventure completely right. It’s the work that I want to be remembered for. My other work has all been practice and building infrastructure to make Blood Leeches.

And, honestly, after Blood Leeches, I only have one other big Mothership idea in me. I love the community and want to support new people as a publisher and a distributor. I have more Microgame ideas and Panic Engine ideas than I do ideas for Mothership proper at this point. I’m also working on developing a player and Warden aids and dice sets box, but that is definitely something that is waiting for the final version 1.0 of Mothership to be released, and I’m in no hurry. Our June newsletter is when we are planning to have exciting news about our Microgames and an experimental distribution model that I want to try out.

Thank you for listening to my story, it is really scary to put myself out there like this. I will end this with one more link to the Mitosis Kickstarter. We really want this to fund. We believe in the whole package of the pamphlet combined with the in-universe board game, the quality of the work is excellent even though it might be too niche of a product. It’s not your typical Kickstarter board game, it’s fun, fast, and elegant with 90s style cartoon art. The pamphlet adventure is an amazing romp of a module, not too serious in tone, which is something that I think Mothership could use more often.