I kicked off the month of October by wrapping up my honeymoon with my wife. We continued on from Dubrovnik to Kotor, then Zabljak in the mountains of Montenegro, up to the Serbia-Bosnia border where we stayed in a river-boat, and finally back home to Poznań with a stop in Bratislava on the way.

The Durmitor national park in the mountains of Montenegro

Our trip was wonderful, and it felt great to just be enjoying ourselves without wedding-related stress on our minds.

On October 9th it was back to normal life in Poznań, and I had a lot of catch-up to do. But I managed to both do that and jump ahead on my various projects.

Trophy

After getting back from honeymoon I built and shipped Rewards - a way for consumer apps to grant perks and, well, rewards, to their users for reaching specific milestones or taking certain actions. Once earned, rewards must be manually redeemed by the user.

Beyond that, I did some tech-debt housekeeping and started prepping for my November work. Boy will Trophy be changing in November...

Campfire

In October we finished Update 44, though it would only launch on the 2nd of November. This update brought Polish, Portuguese, and French language support to the platform, as well as a help center, mobile app improvements, and the initial rollout of Trophy-powered gamification features: badges and a weekly writing streak.

The streak & badges features are being A/B tested for new users only for the time being, but we expect to roll them out to everyone by the end of the year, along with the new Lodges feature. Lodges will be a place for writers to work together toward a common writing goal, like 1 million words in a month. There will be a bit of a social aspect to it, but of course the writing will be private.

Excited to see how that plays out. On the marketing side, unfortunately the second round of TikTok marketing didn't produce a positive ROI, so we won't be re-upping, and we're back to the drawing board. The YouTube Creator Program has been hit-or-miss, with some creators doing reasonably well but more who are yet to reach a positive ROI.

In November I'll be starting SEO and AEO work to try and improve how Campfire ranks for key queries related to writing software for writing novels, particularly fantasy and sci-fi ones.

Chunkyard

I moved ahead on Chunkyard in October and it's really coming together. In my November post I'll include some more updates, but it's becoming fun to use and capable of producing actually nice-looking games! I hope I'm able to create a community around it and build some momentum.

I should be able to launch it as soon as Steam approves my account, which is taking much longer than expected.

Homebrewing

I've been a-brewin! In October I backsweetened, pasteurized, and bottled around 7 liters of my spiced apple mead, and drank about another liter of it. While still young (fermentation finished August 16, so only around two months old) I'm rather fond of it. I tried it cold, room-temp and mulled, and my favorite is mulled - this time of year it makes for a nice warm evening mug.

Pasteurizing my spiced apple mead

I then got started on a new batch of raspberry mead, this time with less raspberry than the last one (which came out far too acidic). I started by defrosting 1.5kg of frozen raspberries and crushing and simmering them in a bit of water. Then I put them in a brew bag and squeezed the living crap out of them into my big plastic fermenter. Removed the brew bag, added 1kg of honey and some water, mixed it all up, added yeast, and put the brew bag back in with all the raspberry seeds.

By my calculations it'll reach 12% ABV, and with ~6 months of aging should be an easy-drinking rosé-style wine for next summer. It fermented in about two weeks and I racked it off to a smaller jar, where it will now sit for a few months before I bottle it.

Next Month

In November Trophy is going to completely transform, but more on that later. Campfire will move along, hopefully with good progress on Lodges. And I aim to launch Chunkyard as well toward the end of the month. So lots of movement and hopefully good results.