As regulars will know, there hasn't been an issue of the Phaser World newsletter since the 19th of August. Those of you new to Phaser may not even be aware we used to have a weekly newsletter! Equally, I've not posted any news articles to the Phaser site since August, either.

Why the nearly 3-month absence? Truth be told, after 7 years of writing over 2,300 articles and game reviews on my own, never mind all the Dev Logs and tutorials, I was completely burnt out. I needed a break but then it reached the point where the longer the gap in time got without having written anything, the harder it was to think about going back to doing it again. I know this doesn't really make much sense. After all, some time away should have meant I could return to it refocused. Yet in reality, the break just felt like putting a band-aid on a bullet wound. It didn't address the source of the problem: that it takes up an incredible amount of time and concentration to maintain that volume of output for long, especially with all the other Phaser work that I need to do.

I have, in the past, tried recruiting people to help me out with this. I've offered to pay them to help write articles. Yet, it has just never worked out. They too got fed-up doing it and left after very short periods of time. I guess it really is too much for any one person to deal with.

I've not been completely ignoring it, though. I use the app Pocket, which I have installed on all my devices. Whenever I see anything Phaser related, such as a new YouTube series, game, or tutorial, I've been saving them to Pocket. The list has grown large and there are literally hundreds of games and articles waiting to be given a write-up and placed onto the site. And more are being added every week. It's not for a lack of content that updates haven't been happening.

The thing is, I'm not sure what the solution is.

I could open-source the web site or at least the news part of it. While it's possible some people may contribute articles to it, I think without an actual coordinated effort, it would become yet another repo flailing about in the wind.

I could try and hire someone again. Perhaps I was just unlucky the first two times and in reality, there's the perfect person out there reading this? It's possible. Yet it feels like the same problem of having all your eggs in one basket.

All I know is that I would love to get the content flowing again. We've over 50,000 subscribers to the Phaser World newsletter and more than half a million visit the site each month. That's a big audience and they deserve to be informed about all the cool stuff the Phaser community is creating! In the past, I would publish 2 articles per day: one game review and one tutorial (or video, or news item). I'd only publish Monday to Friday, so that'd be 10 articles per week. The articles were never very long, usually, just a paragraph cribbed from the source material and a nice image. They were meant more as a snippet to whet the appetite and you'd then click through to the actual site to read the full piece. This way, the original authors got the visits they deserved, and the Phaser site was more like a stream of interesting stuff you could skim through and pick from.

We don't have to keep to this volume. Maybe one article per day is enough? Heck, right now, one article per week would be better than nothing. This is all open for discussion, but I definitely feel that the content worked well as a constant small trickle, rather than large irregular waves.

I would also love to create a Phaser podcast. Yet I know from experience that you've got to have the content planned in advance, and that it really needs a couple of people hosting it, so it's more of a conversation than a monologue. Ahh, so many ideas, so little time :)

It feels to me that the best first course of action is to gauge the response to this post. If you're in a position to, and willing to help, please drop me an email: rdavey@gmail.com with the subject 'Phaser World Help' and give me a brief idea of what you'd be willing to do (i.e. writing articles, take screenshots, help organize contributors, collate content, etc). If you've any immediate thoughts about how we can solve this, feel free to post them as a comment below, too.

Hopefully, we can put together an editorial team, so that no one single person is ever responsible for too much again. By taking the divide and conquer route, it'd be great to try and steer this ship back on course.