A Too-Personal Thank You to the Kickstarter Backers

As the Kickstarter campaign for Nevermind The Distraction comes to a close and almost all of the backers have received their games, I wanted to take a moment to express my heartfelt gratitude for everyone’s support during this endeavor. Anyone who has kept up with the monthly Kickstarter updates has probably gotten used to my particular flavor of oversharing by now and thinks they know about what to expect in this blog. However, in order to express the true depth of my gratitude, it will require that I reveal some personal context that I’ve been keeping largely to myself.

And you thought I overshared before. Consider yourself warned.

Alright, so let me pull out the context brush and paint a backstory picture.

I live for designing and creating things. I’ve been that way for as long as I can remember. I knew when I received my first LEGO castle set when I was seven years old that I wanted to be an architect. I pursued that dream with a tenacity that often baffled my close friends growing up. I became fascinated by the idea of being able to create spaces that could help, even heal, and found my career steering itself toward health care design. Over the last decade and a half, I developed a specialization for the design of mental health facilities and mental health became a particular passion for me.

Nevermind The Distraction came about in the summer of 2020. Work was very slow because of COVID and I was looking for a creative outlet to keep that part of my brain occupied. I watched as the world seemed to twist a few degrees into “off” and I wanted to find a way to help prepare for the oncoming mental health crisis. Designing psychiatric hospitals helps in a way, but only once things have gotten REAL bad. How could I try to help people before things got that bad? Preventative mental-healthcare as it were.

These are all things I’ve talked about before in various forms. Over the course of the last few years, I’ve been working on Nevermind as a passion project while also co-owning/running an architecture practice. Things weren’t always rosy—they never are when you are responsible for many things that are largely out of your control, but it was a life I’d worked very hard to reach and architecture is what I was born to do.

Not-always-rosy started to get progressively worse and the stresses started to pile up and really take their toll. I’d spent over a decade witnessing the effects of mental health trauma from the outside and suddenly I was seeing it from inside. I was being eaten alive, and I needed to do something.

So, in September of 2023, 6 months after the Nevermind Kickstarter campaign funded, I walked away from my 30-year career in architecture, including the practice I’d spent the last decade helping build from scratch.

This was NOT an easy decision for me to make. Architecture was my dream, my passion, my life.

I won’t go into much detail about why I left—that’s the subject for another blog entirely. It was a perfect storm of many things that all came to an unexpected head at once. The canned response I usually give is “Architecture got its 50 years out of me, it just took it in 30”. I guess you could say I burned out. Hard.

The thing is, this wasn’t like a career change that I had all planned—it was more amputation than transition. I didn’t have a backup plan. I’m a guy who knows how to do lots of things, but none of them well enough to have a shortlist for a Career 2.0. I was lucky in many ways though. My son is grown up and out of the house and I had enough money in my savings account that I could afford to take a little time off to plan. To grieve.

To fulfill my commitment to my backers.

That commitment became a lifeline for me. I couldn’t allow myself to spiral into the grief and terror of starting over at 50 from nothing because I had work to do. In some ways it also became a crutch. I didn’t have time to try to figure out what I was going to do next because I had work to do. In a life filled with nothing but uncertainty of the future, the only thing I could be damn sure of was that I was NOT going to let my backers down.

There were many last Mondays of the month that I was forced to set aside the nauseating maelstrom of emotions boiling through me to let the backers know that I had everything under control, to feel my confidence that they would get their games. I would often find writing from that more lighthearted “persona”—for lack of a better word—would carry with me for a few days and I’d feel better about my situation. I had no idea what the heck I was going to do with myself after it was all over, but for now there was never any doubt in my mind that I’d be able to fulfill the campaign.

And now here we are, at the end. All but a very few of you have your games and the commitment has been fulfilled. I hope you enjoyed the campaign and the sort of peek-behind-the-curtain I tried to provide along the way. It wasn’t always easy being transparent without being too transparent, because let’s face it, you wouldn’t have wanted to know all of this along the way.

Hopefully telling you this now helps provide some context for the depth of my gratitude though. Working on this campaign kept me going though a very rough time. I was allowed to grieve for a past life while still having a purpose. I was able to express my creativity at a time when its absence would have gutted me. Your kind words and steady encouragement along the way meant more than you could have possibly known. In the simple act of backing this project back in March of 2023, you did more to help me through one of the most difficult times in my life than you can possibly imagine and for that, I am so eternally grateful.

So now that the Kickstarter has been fulfilled, what does the future hold for me? Honestly, I still don’t know. I suppose it’s time for me to face that question head-on, without the crutch of the campaign to help me justify procrastinating. I do know, whatever else happens, I will continue to pour my passion into Zentrovert Games and Nevermind The Distraction as long as I’m able because I truly feel that there is potential in this game reaching people and improving lives. With some of the feedback I’ve been getting, I think maybe I’m not alone.

Thank you all for everything,

-AJ Plank