Shape the Future of All Things
Shape the Future of All Things
Take the Player Survey. You can win a $50 gift card!
GREETINGS, ADVENTURER!
Make your voice heard! Take the yearly Adventure Snack Player Survey and help determine our journey moving forward. Everyone who participates gets a free digital gift, plus you could win a $50 gift card! Afterwards, sit by the campfire and we’ll chronicle your heroic exploits of the past year. Tally ho!
New quests will hit your inbox in January. I’m taking a break to rest, recharge, and scribble quest ideas in my notebook. Enjoy your holidays!
First time here? Adventure Snack is a game series I email to subscribers. Play quests for free, twice a month, and turn your inbox into an adventure!
TAKE THE PLAYER SURVEY AND SHAPE THE FUTURE!
I’m not exactly sure what the device above is supposed to be, but it sure looks futuristic, right? And that’s a pretty good metaphor for my current thoughts on Adventure Snack: Year 4. I have a general idea of the kinds of quests, projects, and features we may explore, but I need your help to crystalize those plans and develop a roadmap. Let’s map out that road!
Last year’s survey led to me learning a damn programming language, so know that I take your feedback seriously!
The Adventure Snack Player Survey quick factz:
The survey is less than 10 questions.
It’ll take ~5 minutes to fill out.
Everyone who takes the survey gets a free print-n-play gamebook zine!
(1) lucky adventurer will win a $50 eBay gift card!
Complete the survey by Thursday, December 22nd to be eligible to win.
All the best stuff is on eBay. I got a vintage Flying Toaster tie on eBay for $5 recently. I know that’s off-topic, but still, it’s a very cool tie.
One last thing. A bit of feedback I got last year was to “gamify” the survey. So this year, I added a skill tree! In video games, skill trees are used to determine how a player levels up. For example, a player can go on a “Bruiser” path to upgrade their character’s strength or a “Magic” path to upgrade their ability to chuck fireballs at dumpsters.
You can level up Adventure Snack by helping choose what project we pursue next year. Here’s a sneak peek. The full chart’s in the survey…
Thanks for taking the survey and helping me make Adventure Snack the best email newsletter RPG it can possibly be!
YOUR 2022 QUEST LOG
The night air is crisp and the sabrewolves howl in the distance. They howl constantly and at a higher pitch than you’d expect. It’s super annoying!
But the fire is warm. Join me by the campfire, adventurer, as I regale you with the tales of our party’s exploits over the past year. Let me open the book and see what brave yarns lie in wait. Did you miss one of these quests? Complete it anytime, at your leisure. There are 80 quests in the archives.
You explored far-off realms. From the dark and decrepit tunnels of your disapproving moleman father to the oversaturated oceans of Lisa Frank dolphins, you were unafraid to venture into new and unfamiliar territory this year. Even when it made you extremely nauseous.
You faced-off against dangerous foes. You battled a hippogriff with an impractically long sword, took on subway werewolves with unstable magic powers, and faced a human-hating alien invader with merely your wits. (And in some paths, a pulverizer gun.) When it comes to mortal enemies, you never backed down from a fight.
You experienced our high-tech future. You used AI to create gorgeous and/or unfathomable works of generative art and learn the secrets of the universe in two of the most commented on quests of all-time. When it came to advanced technology, you mastered it all this year, even the cutting edge DVD-VCR Combo Player.
You cavorted like royalty. You threw some wild events this year, like an unruly monster mash and a giant robot spring break. It felt like the good times lasted forever, which was literally the case on your infinity vacation. When it came to living, laughing, and loving, no one did those three things better than you.
You triumphed over monetary adversity. You held down multiple jobs this year: an adventurer-for-hire with a shady client, a psychic-for-hire at your local Applebee’s, and a waiter-for-money serving the Grim Reaper. None of it broke your soul, not even suffering kid detective burnout or having to hunt down your bigfoot landlord.
You assisted those in peril. You helped a wizard counsel acquire their crystals, a superhero find their purpose, and a bunny rabbit get revenge. Not only did you save our world by playing Mr. Bucket, but you helped scientists discover a Wordleverse beyond our own. You were most generous with your time.
The campfire is still roaring. Before we put it out for forest safety reasons, I’d love to hear from you. Answer as many of these as you like…
⚔️ What was your favorite Adventure Snack quest this year?
🏆 What was a real-life accomplishment you’re proud of this year? (Thanks to
for inspiring this question.)🤔 How do you think you’ll remember 2022 in years to come?
Favorite game this year?
I think my favorite quest this year was Bigfoot Landlord. That one was hilarious and it brought me back to a really crappy apartment I used to rent. Bravo!
Real life accomplishment I'm proud of?
Does inspiring this question count? Just kidding, but it's always an honor to be mentioned in these hallowed gaming halls. The real life accomplishment I'm most proud of is increasing my daily step count from 8,500 to around 9,500. I was aiming for 10k, but I'm not mad that I came up a little short. In fact, just the opposite. I'm thrilled because I set a goal and I worked at it a little bit every day. Well, OK, not every day. But most days. Point is, I feel accomplished for showing up on the regular for that goal. That's the main thing.
How will I remember 2022 in the years to come?
That's a great question. Sometimes I picture myself as an old man. A really old man. Not Yoda old, but old enough where my age is kind of newsworthy. So anyway, I picture old Michael and he's being interviewed for a documentary about the 20s... the 2020s! Since I'll be one of the few people alive at that point who actually lived through the 20s (walking will keep me in great shape) it'll be me against the historical record. The interviewer will ask me about social media and all the mindless distractions we purposely engaged in, and there will be this implication in their questions that we could've dumped all that bullshit and made the world a better place, which is to say, we could've made the future a better future. Of course, the people of the future will be rightly pissed about the way things turned out, which is why some of them will produce this documentary in the first place. Anyway, their questions will catalogue the ephemera of social media in 2022, and I'll be there for every shallow meme, bullshit trend, and all the shit-posting. It'll be nostalgic. I won't be able to defend any of it. I won't even try. But after bathing in the filthy stew of 2022 social media, I'll point a boney finger back at the documentarian and tell them that all of their bullshit distractions are getting in the way of making the world better for the generations to come. That won't go over well, because nobody likes being lectured. So they'll push back on just how dumb social media really was, and that's when I'll tell them what I remember about 2022. The memes, the trends, the shit posts didn't really stick, I'll say, but somewhere around 2022, many of us (most of us?) came to see that the promise of social media was really an empty promise made by tech titans, and that their walled gardens were actually mental prisons modeled after the minotaur's labyrinth. This won't go over well with the documentarian either, especially the minotaur reference because they stopped teaching classics in 2033, BUT then I'll look straight into the camera and say, "Don't you get it? We began to escape this bullshit in 2022, and OK, we didn't fully escape until 2035, which was too late to save classics from an overwhelming amount of cyber-fascist shit-posting, BUT we did make it out before it was too late. That's what I remember about 2022. You're welcome, kid!"
Still gotta go with my Moleman Father, it paralleled so closely my relationship with my own father: he too lives in a hole in the ground (yet judges me for my life decisions).
As for my achievement, as much as I wish there was more Misadventure Adventure produced I’m really proud of what we’ve done with our tiny human in the house and both working jobs all the time. Also I’ve pretty much finished a film to send to festivals next year. I feel pretty accomplished looking back on it all.
You should be immensely proud of what you’ve done too, using my psychic powers at Applebee’s was such a hoot!