Think Like A Game Designer - Alan Gerding — From Core Principles to Kickstarter Success: The Psychology and Strategy Behind Crafting Mothership: Sci-Fi Horror RPG (#35)

Episode Date: January 21, 2022

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Hello and happy New Year, everybody. I am so excited to be here. I am about to introduce to you not only one of the best podcasts that I've ever recorded, which has a lot of great lessons and really cool stories in it, but I'm also excited to announce what I believe would be the best version of the Think Like a Game Designer Masterclass that I have ever done. You know, it was almost exactly a year ago that I launched the first beta version of the master class, and we have had so many great students and had so much impact.

and we've learned a lot over the last year and we've taken all of that stuff and we've improved the class because of it. In the dozens of people that have been through the class over the last year, we've had a student that's used the principles to publish their game. We actually hired one of those students

and we're going to be making their game ourselves and we have several other students that are in deep talks with other publishers working to get their games made, making progress continuing to add value every single day to the community that we've built to keep working together,

to keep helping each other's games. And honestly, it is one of the things I am most proud of in my career is building this community, building this course, and just helping to teach others from all the things that I have learned over the years and to learn from them. Honestly, the discussions that we have in our masterminds in that class are so informative and so valuable. I continue to learn from them. And so I'm hoping that many of you will come and join us. We are launching the new class right now. If you are listening to this, it is January 2022 and you can sign up for our course. We are closing signups at the end of the month.

So by February 1st, if you haven't listened to this podcast until then, unfortunately, we're going to be closed and we will hopefully run one kind of at the end of the year, but this is your opportunity to join. And just to reiterate, if you haven't heard about it before, the course has tons of material. There's over 40 different videos with step-by-step lessons from me and other top people that I've pulled in from the industry. You get access to the community, Discord with myself, the Stoneblade team, your fellow students, other designers.

You get access to monthly mastermind calls directly with me where you can ask questions about your game. We talk through your sticking points and we answer those questions directly to keep you moving to get your game made. But we've also learned, right? In the same way I teach about the iteration process in the core design loop in my books and in the course, we do the exact same thing for how we design the course. And so I've learned from feedback from students and we've made the course better than ever. So in addition to all the things that have been part of the course over the last year, We're also adding in a best of clips.

We've actually taken the best of all the masterminds from the previous year. We've edited them and we've set them up so that you guys can benefit from the lessons that everybody learned from previous classes. And we've also, in addition to those monthly masterminds, this time we're going to be running weekly mini masterminds to help hold you accountable and keep you on track. You don't want to have to wait a whole month to get feedback on your current challenge or your current game. So we're going to make sure that you can have feedback, direct feedback every single week throughout the 12-week course to really make progress to really get things. We also have weekly scheduled playtest sessions that include members of the Stoneblade team to help give you feedback on your game and cycle through, and we give you all the tools you need to playtest digitally and remotely as well as physically wherever you are. And you're going to have opportunities to play test behind the scenes are games, Stoneblades upcoming games. We've got a lot of really exciting project.

And the first people that are ever going to get to see them are those in the course, which is not only just cool because you get to see all the cool new stuff we're working on, but you also get to see how it's really done. You get to see how we actually apply the principles and how these projects that look awesome when they get out to the end user, but often don't when they're being playtested. And you can see those things and they really help. And the students from previous classes who've gotten to participate in this have gotten a lot of value out of this. So if this sounds cool to you, please go check it out. You can go to think like a game designer.com. And if you put in the code podcast, you'll get a special discount for being a member of this community because you guys are the ones that help make this possible. You are the ones that asked for this.

and so we built it and we continue to make it better with your help. So please come join us. Think Like a Game Designer.com. Now on to today's episode. Today I speak with Alan Gerting. Now, Alan and I have a deep connection that started over 10 years ago. And Alan shares a story in the podcast, but this is before Alan became a huge and successful game designer.

And it is actually, this moment that we share is actually one of the best moments in my entire career. It is something I go back to and revisit very often as one of the reasons why I do what I do and one of the coolest stories that I was able to help bring to life. And so I'm not going to spoil it for you now. You've got to listen to the episode, but trust me, it is worth it. Now, since that initial meeting of Alan and I, he went on to become hugely successful, launching his own game company, Tuesday Night Games, which launched the successful social deduction game, two rooms and a boom.

And recently he came back on my radar because he closed down a 1.4,000, or million-dollar Kickstarter for his own unique IP-RP mothership. Now, that has never been done before. Just to give you a sense of how hard that is to do, to launch an RPG without a big brand like Marvel or Lord of the Rings or something, and do that kind of numbers is outrageous. And so we talk about it. Not only do we talk about the secrets behind his Kickstarter success

and how you can lay the groundwork for your own success, but we go through all kinds of deep dives along the process, of making social deduction games, how are they fun, and what ruins them? We compare and contrast the strategies of my own social deduction game, Knight of the Ninja, along with his two rooms and a boom. We talk about how you should work with a partner on a new project, and what are the three key questions that you should ask before starting on anything new? And we talk about how do you break in the industry and what you should be looking for along the way.

And Alan, tracking his story is one of the best case examples for all of the core principles just summarized about how you should do it right. He really does an amazing job. He's also a great speaker. He's a teacher. He has his own podcast. And so his stories and his presence and the way that he presents information is honestly one of the best of any guests that we've ever had.

And so I love Ellen and I'm so glad that to see him succeed and to be able to have him on the podcast and to be able to share that story with you all. I promise you you are going to love this episode. And so enough of this intro without any further ado, here is. Alan Gerting. Hello and welcome. I am here with Alan Gerting. Alan, it is fantastic to have you here.

It's fantastic to be here, Justin. I've been a big fan of yours for a long time now. Well, you know, the funny part is that I know that, and I know that for a very specific reason. And it actually ties into what is for me one of the greatest highlights of my entire game design career. And it was, it is honestly. a memorable moment that I revisit multiple times throughout probably multiple times a year. And I think that our audience will really appreciate it. I'm sure it was a big moment for you.

Maybe you want to tell the story of how we first started to interact in this big moment that I'm referencing. I would love to. It is such a happy memory and it brought so many more happy memories. It really was kind of the genesis for so many great things. I was a struggling game designer. I'd go to game conventions and I would pitch my meager little games in hopes that a publisher might find them. And I also did a lot of playtesting for a lot of games. In fact, one of those games was Mage Wars from Arcane Wonders. So it was very typical for me to have games at my house and playing them. And sometimes I'd have to record sessions of me playing games so I could just send the audio or sometimes video to the publishers so they could just see my review.

So when it was time for me to propose for marriage to my girlfriend, she was used to me recording and doing all sorts of things with tabletop games, but the game that she loved the most that she liked to play was Ascension. And Ascension had one of its latest expansions coming out, but I had contacted at the time it was Gary Games, not Stoneblade, and I had contact you all and said, hey, is it possible for me to use the game Ascension to propose to my girlfriend, Crystal. You all said yes, and we got Eric Sabie to do the official art and whatnot and made a card,

entitled it The Ring of Gerd, and it said, if you play this, you agree to Mary Allen, and it was like infinite, heart costs, and there were all these custom icons. It was so beautiful to the point where when it came in, and I threw it into the expansion, Storm of Souls was the expansion. And I threw it in there and I knew it was somewhere in the deck. I'd been training Crystal, my girlfriend, for months to be reading the cards. I would never draw the cards. I would just say next card.

And she would draw every card and read it as it went on to the center conveyor belt, as we called it. So she was used to this. So I had primed her for months for this. So I set up the camera, said, hey, we got Storm of Souls. We're got to record it because Gary Games wants us. to do a little review session, she was super pumped. So she wasn't suspicious at all that I had a camera set up and I'm recording it. And sure enough, after a few hands, the card came out and she read it. And right away, she said, what is this? Because the first thing she saw was the illustration of myself

and herself on the card. And she didn't even read it. And in that point, I said, what does it say? And I pulled out the ring. My ears were red. I proposed to her. She had no idea. Totally surprised. She said yes, but here's the best part of the story. She was more into the card than the ring.

Like she wouldn't even pick up the ring or take the ring. She just kept on holding out of that card and picking it back up. And you can see all this because it's on YouTube. You can just YouTube a very gamey proposal. And you'll see me proposing to what is now my wife. of almost 10 years now. We've almost been married 10 years, which means that Ascension is well over a decade old

and still remains probably the most played card game in my household. I love that story so much. And I really do encourage everybody to just go on YouTube and find this video. It's, you know, it's three minutes or four minutes or something. And it's so sweet. And it's so cute. And it was, I did. I laughed a lot when I saw she was so excited about the card.

She took her a while to get to the ring. And you know, you just did such a great job of setting it all up and having it there. And it was so much love and just know that that a decade ago has you guys still connected here today is amazing. And I, you know, for me, that really is at the heart of what like to me, how I define success as a game designer is you are creating these connections and lifelong memories that really impact people. And there's no greater illustration of that. And just such a perfectly framed one too. I mean, I've seen people have a really big impact from games and things that I've created, but never just like so perfectly in frame and recorded and memorialized.

It's so genuine. It was amazing. Absolutely amazing. So I am ever grateful to you for letting us be a part of your special moment there. It really is magical. We still talk about it regularly, especially because we have the card framed along with, like, our wedding invitations at our home and whatnot. But I always find it so funny.

because there's comments on the YouTube video. This was obviously rigged. There's no way. People don't believe it. And I think they don't believe it because I think it's so genuine and true and saccharine sweet that some people think, ah, there's no way. But it's interesting that some people are so jaded. No doubt, 100% real.

And I think the best tell that anyone can see is the shade of my ears and head. change from a normal glow-in-the-dark, pasty hue to this beat, bright red. Total giveaway. That's why I'm a horrible poker player. Because if I get really nervous or excited, my color changes deeply. I will keep that in mind if we get to a poker game someday. Yeah, you live quite the life. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I'm intrigued, too, because you built one of your more successful games as a game about deception intrinsically. So I'm actually intrigued to tangent to that, but not quite yet because I'm, yeah, I actually did a similar thing. I mean, a different tack, but I, when I proposed to my now fiance, we, two years ago, we, I also filmed it, but we did it used a, I used a magician and we were doing a little magic act at our dinner table. And if he made the claim like, oh, I'm doing this for my Instagram or whatever. And then at the end of the thing, the ring appears in my hand and we do a whole proposal thing. So it was a I was also I could also tell my own ears being red and nervous and my heart pounding as I'm going through the whole thing.

So anyway, I can relate on many levels here. So all right. But enough about our, enough about our, our respective marriage proposals. I, so part of why I wanted you on this podcast now is because you have completed over this last decade such an incredible arc. you went from, as you just self-described just a few moments ago, this sort of, you know, kind of struggling game designer, trying to pitch your way to publishers, trying to make things happen.

And as we're recording this, we're in the last days of your Kickstarter for the mothership sci-fi horror RPG that is over a million dollars, one, one point one million as of right now. And I'm sure it's going to keep going because those last couple days are huge. That is incredible. In fact, I don't even know if I've ever seen an original IP, RPG go for this scale of success. I mean, if there is, maybe it's got to be very limited.

That's incredible. That's our claim to fame. You're right. We are, we've been told by many people that we're the first role playing game that isn't carrying a license. It's our own unique IP that has made it over a million dollars. So it's incredibly, incredibly unbelievable to us. We're just through the roof. So happy. So that is amazing. So now we've got, we framed this conversation with the kind of alpha and the omega, right? We started with the beginning of where we first started to interact and what it was like as the aspiring game designers are going to convention, struggling, hoping to make something happen

to now reaching this a pinnacle of success that in some, nobody else has ever achieved. And I was excited to have you here, both to share the, you know, our exciting order story. And then to walk us through. How do we get from really awesome, genuine, excited, you know, guy that's, and work hard to make things happen to blow it out of the water success. Incredible. Let's walk through that story because I know I want to hear those details because you and I have kept in touch kind of a little bit over the years, but not. I've never really gotten to dive deep into what's what's been going on. So let's just start from, start from, you know,

kind of the beginning. After I, after I last kind of interacted with you and the proposal and kind of let's walk forward and I'll probably interrupt a bunch for questions and digging deep. Please do. Yeah. Should I just dive on in then? Let's start. this whole story of the genesis of Tuesday night games and how it began. Yeah. Well, so I was doing a lot of play testing, as I said, and also peddling my wares at conventions. And one of the conventions I went to was the Gamma Trade Show in Las Vegas. And while I was there in Las Vegas at the Gamma Trade Show, I watched a presentation for an upcoming game called Mage Wars.

And the funny thing was, is Mage Wars, I'd already playtested and gave feedback and did some development work on. And I took pictures and videos of people playing the game. And I gave it to the owner. And in this presentation, there were pictures and videos of me playing the game and teaching people the game. And I said, oh my goodness, that's me. In the audience. And the owner was very nervous because he never asked me permission. to use any of them in any commercial type of capacity or anything like that.

So he invited me over his table afterwards and said, hey, I hope you don't mind. We used your images. Are you kidding? I loved it, et cetera. And we talked more and more. And this is one of our first times talking in person because all the other correspondence was through messaging boards and email where there was just a wide call for, hey, we're just looking for playtesters and developers. As you can often find, if you just follow publishers, social media on Facebook or Instagram or whatever. So when I answered one of those calls, long story short, we had an amazing evening that night at Las Vegas. One of those unforgettable evenings where we're out until ridiculous hours in the morning.

And one of the people that worked for the owner of Arcane Wonders was Sean McCoy, who, fast forward plot spoiler, is my current business partner and the creator of Muller. The Sci-Fi Horror Roleplane game that is now making over a million dollars on Kickstarter. But our whole relationship started because of that night. And we ended up hanging out until well into like two days later, almost nonstop with no sleep, enjoying Vegas. And I had been to Vegas a whole bunch because I used to live in San Diego and I would take regular trips to Vegas. And the funny thing is I'm not a gambler. I would just go for the shows and even some of like the dive bar experiences.

and so Sean had never been to any of, he'd never been to Las Vegas. So I got to show him kind of like the CD underbelly, for lack of a better explanation of Las Vegas. And like, oh, you got to go to this place. You got to go to this. Oh, this show's amazing. Not a lot of people know about this.

Oh, you've never seen Circus Saleh. Like, depends on what kind of show you want to go to. There's all different offerings, but we should definitely go to one, et cetera. Anyway, we bonded. And so Sean and I were having side conversations about, hey, maybe we start our own company because we're jiving so well and we have these creative ideas that we're coming up with. He's like, oh, maybe. And it was just something in the back burner that we

toyed with. But because of you and the proposal, I had an engagement party. So fast forward just a few weeks. And I have an engagement party in Ohio because I'm Cleveland board and raised. and we had what I called Crystal Khan, my fiance, her name's Crystal, and I had this like gaming convention weekend at my place in Cleveland, and Sean came. I invited him and he arrived and we played all weekend, and he was a guest at my place since he flew in from Dallas. But at the end of the weekend, I'm cleaning up all the games,

and Sean's flight leaves not for a couple days because we even decided we would go drive together to proto spiel. Are you familiar with Proto Spiel? I am, but you should explain it for our audience. No problem. So Protospiel is this event, and there used to be a couple. I don't know if Proto Spiel's still alive and well and thriving, because you never know with the pandemic and conventions.

But it's pretty small scale, and it was in Michigan, next state over. And this is a convention where it's all would be, want to be designers pitching their games and playtesting their games and publishers can come there and kind of just look at the untapped talent and maybe take a game if they think they like it or not. So it's a good opportunity to not only get your games play tested, but maybe to be discovered as a game designer. So anyway, going back, Sean and I are just hanging out at my place after our engagement

party, the Crystal Con, and he says, you know, I really want to make a hidden role game. And I said, I would love to make a hit and roll game. He says, well, I have an idea for one and I love to work on it with you. And I said, time out. This is really important because I learned this early on with game design. I asked him, is this a gift where you have an idea and you're just giving it to me and you want me to run with it? Is this a collaboration where you want maybe both of our names on cardboard?

Or is this something where you're just asking for some tips, where you just have a project on your own and you're helping for some guidance. Because I think before you even tell me anything, it should be very clear what you're asking for and what your expectations are, just so we don't get into difficult conversations in the future. He was kind of taken aback. I've never been asked that before. I guess I'm asking for a collaboration.

Yeah, I'd love our names to be on this. If we continue with this thing, like, cool. Hit me with it, Sean. What is it? And he described a game where there's Rob, and a bank heist and maybe you don't know who the robbers are of the bank and maybe some of them were in the vault and some of them in the bank. Sean is very good at theme forward. He comes up with these amazing themes and his weakness, at least it used to be, definitely not the case anymore,

was mechanic. So he was like the idea guy where I was more of the more mechanical, clunky design aspect of, all right, how do we actually make this happen? So he had this vague idea, but I remember thinking two different rooms sounds brilliant. I think there's something there. And no exaggeration within 20 minutes after you told me that idea, we had the fully fledged out idea of two rooms and a boom almost to the point where it is to this day. And so that night, just hours later, Sean, who's a master of graphic design. just printed out really quickly designed two rooms at a boom card.

So the very next day, we drove to Prototspiel with two rooms in a boom. And I remember we couldn't come up with a title and I said, why don't we just call it two rooms and a boom? This hidden role game with two different rooms, someone's a bomber, someone's a president.

You're trying to blow up the president. Two rooms and a boom. It's amazing. He's like, that's the dumbest name I've ever heard. I love it. But we went with it. We went with it. We went to Proto Spiel and I remember just one of the most memorable, amazing experiences is the first time we played it and it was gangbusters.

I had fun. He had fun. Everybody had fun. They wanted to play again. Our minds were spinning. And so many people said, I love the name. Two rooms and a boom. It's like, there you go, Sean.

I guess it's sticking. And so we ended up playing it again and again. And it was kind of the game of the show where people were. were asking to play it so much more. And we had two different publishers approach us and ask us if they would, if we would sign with him. We said we'd think about it. And Sean went back to his boss at Arcane Wonders.

And his boss said, how was the weekend? Sean said, it was amazing. We designed this game. And so what do you think his boss asked? Well, either they want the game or yeah, what's it? What's the game? Can we publish it? or they're, you know, that depending on the publisher,

some of them are not cool with people to designate games. I assume they were not that way, but. He was not that way. Yeah. His name's Brian. Brian was very cool about it and said, oh my goodness, is this something that Arcane Wonders could publish?

And so Arcane Wonders threw their ticket in the hat. And so we had this really rare thing. And I want to really emphasize this, that this, for my knowledge, doesn't really happen. That there was a bidding rule. for our unpublished game. So here we are having nothing published to either of our names individually. My name has been in a lot of manuals for playtesting and developing,

but my name has never been highlighted on a game before this. And we're in a bidding war where someone's coming back saying, I'll give you 3%, or I'll give you 4%. And I could give you specifics, but I'm not sure the classy aspect of telling you exactly what kind of percentage in royalties, because it also changes like how many free copies we get. Other things were included like,

we'll pay for your convention tickets if you come. So there's other things that were being offered. And then Sean and I made the really stupid decision of, you know what? Let's say no to everyone and publish it ourselves. So the actual funny story is, I said, we could make our own company, Sean.

And Sean's like, yeah, maybe. And then I thought we'd talk about it a lot more. But he calls me back the next day and says, I did it. I quit Arcane Wonders. We're starting Tuesday night games. Let's do this. And I was flabbergasted. It was like, whoa, you did what?

We didn't talk about this. And it was this big kerfuffle at first. Like, oh my God, Sean just basically wrecked his life in the hopes that we would start this. So I better follow suit. In the meantime, I was working no joke for jobs to make ends meet, one of which was an adjunct psychology professor at a community college. And they just wouldn't give me full time. But I said, you know what, Sean, let's do it, let's dive in. And so we got our LLC. We started Tuesday night games. We decided we were going to publish this thing. And then my college called me

and said, we want to give you full time. So for the last 10 years, I've had very little life because I have two pretty much full-time gigs between teaching psychology full-time and running this company with my business partner and best friend, Sean McCoy. Wow. It has been so hard to stop you during this story. You're a great storyteller and the story is riveting. There's a million points that I wanted to pull apart and dig deeper on. Please. It's really fascinating. So, you know, at the beginning, first, I think I may have glossed this over too much, but I really want to, I want to reemphasize it because we kind of started your story at the point where you had already been doing a lot of this work. You had already been doing playtesting. You've already been pitching your games to a variety of places.

You've already been laying the groundwork and building relationships and building the work and building this sort of backstory resume. And I just, I like to just reemphasize that because when you get the sort of the big boom here of this like overwhelming. success moment, I think people underestimate how much that precursor work, just in your own honing of the craft of design and being able to come up with these ideas, in your own being able to build relationships going to conventions and building the relationship with your partner that ends up turning into this incredible thing with Sean. All that stuff is just so critical. And it's the kind of advice I really like to emphasize because for everybody out there that's dreaming these dreams, right, laying that groundwork is critical. So I kind of just wanted to sort of start with that. And

And then I really want to dig into now when you're going through this process of bidding and you're, you know, this is sort of going back and forth and then you're trying to decide, do we want to do this? We're going to do this on their own. What was the decision criteria there? What made you decide like, hey, you know what? We're going to go and take this on our own. And what, you know, what advice would you have for somebody else if there, maybe it's not a bidding war, but it's certainly a lot of people have the choice of do I want to go with a publisher or do I want to self-publish?

How did you think about that? and how would you think, would you suggest somebody think about that today? It's such an important question. And I get asked pretty regularly, would I do it again? And obviously, now that I'm in the present, I would say yes. But there are plenty of times where I probably would have answered differently. I don't know. The main thing that Sean and I talked about is we had three major goals in mind.

when we sat down and said, if we're going to start a game company, we have three things we must always stay true to. And that number one thing was, have fun. If we're not having fun and it's feeling absolutely miserable, not that it's not going to be tough, not that there's going to be hard, long nights, but when looking at the big ishtalt picture, if we're saying, man, my life is kind of worse where I'm not smiling as much, that isn't meeting the first of the three criteria. The other criteria was I don't want to wake up screwed. I don't want to wake up and find out I have no money and I owe a whole bunch of money and people are after me, debtors, etc. That was condition two. And condition three was we have to have something to show for it.

What that is could be different, whether it be our naming cardboard, whether it be money, whether it be anything. But we want something to show for it because we don't want to put in all this effort if at the end of the day, we're not producing anything memorable. And those all kind of wrap into each other because it's not fun to wake up screwed. It's not fun to have nothing. It's all about having fun. And that is the number one piece of advice that I usually give anyone who ask me about game design. If you're doing it for the money, if you're doing it for some type of fame, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. The only reason you should get into this industry, and my thorough opinion is for the enjoyment.

And I think that's true for almost any industry, almost any, is that if you are hating it and not enjoying it, or even if you're neutral on it, I hate to see someone waste their life. And especially as a psychology professor who teaches things like positive psychology, when old age comes and you're on death's door, the most number one thing that people wish they spent more time doing,

was spending it with family and friends. No one on death's door says, man, I wish I worked harder. I wish I did those things that didn't really make me happy but brought me more money. It's what you can do with the time you have, which really counts. And so I've always tried to emphasize that with Sean,

and I think we've done a good job doing that. Yeah, yeah. I think I can agree with an enormous amount of what you're saying. And I, so I face this decision a few times in my own life, and I've talked about this before on the podcast, but I quit law school to become a game designer. And that was a very lucrative, obvious path given up for a far, far lower financial upside and a path that I was passionate about. And that was a decision that

was very hard at the time, but something that I obviously looked back on quite fondly. And then the same thing when I quit my job as a game designer to start my own company and make ascension. And both of those decisions were very difficult, but they were pushed on the path of like, hey, this is the thing that I'm passionate about. This is the thing I want to do. And likewise, I also am big into risk mitigation. I think it's a very, you know,

I'm impressed and scared and terrified that Sean just, you know, quit his job and ran with it without talking to you. That would terrify me too in that moment. But I, so for me, it was, you know, I had a job lined up as a game designer before I quit law school. And then when I quit my job as a game designer, I had a year's worth of savings set aside so that I could give it a run, a proper run as a game designer, as I'm sorry, as my own, you know, publisher. And so I think this is another one of those

things where you have, you know, you to this day still maintaining another full-time job is, is pretty crazy. But that, that having that kind of cushion helps you to make better decisions in the moment, right? You're not kind of like constantly thinking, okay, I need to make payroll next month or I need to pay rent next month, those things will make the process not only less fun, but also you'll just your psychology professors you know, right? Your decision-making capacity gets worse. Your creativity gets worse when you have financial stress, when you have these kinds of pressures. And so I always encourage people to find that balance so they can be in a comfortable place and enjoy that process. Well said, I have so many questions for you, but I know it's your show and

not my former podcast or our YouTube channel. I'm so used to being on the other end of this in interviewing. Because you came on our show one time to promote your book and that was fun. But man, I'm so curious as to what your family's response was, what other people's response. If you got encouragement from other people or if you were scared. I think I was very fortunate that there was a lot of growing up.

And for Sean and myself, we had already proven ourselves to be pretty good at living nomadic lives. lifestyles. There is no exaggeration when I say that Sean and I slept in our car at our first few shows. We didn't even buy a hotel room. We froze our asses off in the garage that we penny pinched to get. And we loved it though. I would hate that nowadays because we've grown up and it's like, you know what, it's worth the money for a hotel room. Yeah, yeah. Penny pinch. Yeah, absolutely. I didn't. Those days for me were back when I was on the Magic Pro Tour and yeah, I would sleep in somebody's closet for a tournament or I would just like whatever I could do I'd sleep in the

floor of the hall you know when I'm when you're in your 20s this sort of thing is not crazy when you're you know in your 30s and 40s yeah I'll pay for the room right exactly a lot of growing up absolutely but a lot of willingness to you know make the hard cuts and laugh doing it and I couldn't do it alone the fact that Sean was there and we had this buddy system also was why I'm able to have that full-time job, I would not be able to have both jobs if it wasn't for Sean because Sean works seriously full-time at the company. So without Sean, I wouldn't be able to hold both jobs down. Yeah, yeah, it was interesting. I just did a podcast with the Brotherwise team. And they, yeah, they're amazing. And it's a fantastic episode for so anybody listening to hasn't listened to it.

You should listen to that. But they had a sort of similar approach where they had, Chris, what started, you know, they started the company. Chris was the first one to go full time. Johnny kept his other job, you know, was working for a toy company, so it wasn't a terrible job. But then eventually when they reached a certain tier of success, then he was able to sort of jump on so they could both be on full time. And having that, that family connection or that, you know, that close partner there to lean on really does a lot of work. And having, you know, design is just a, it's a social collaborative process. It's just very, very hard to become, you know, this sort of classic cliche of the solo designer, or just sitting and thinking of things.

You know, you can do a lot of design work on your own, but without somebody to bounce ideas off, without the ability to get good iterative feedback, it just you're stymied from the get-go. Absolutely. Well said. So, and it was that other job that enabled me to have enough money because everything was out of my pocket at first. But again, I hate saying this.

It was disposable income because I was already working for other jobs, including psychology tutor, but one was I was a water delivery guy, that whole water guy that shows up with the huge water jugs. That was like my job for a while. And so when I got full time, I had less time on my hand, but I had a surge of income.

And I knew that I could spend, it was probably at the end of the day, $3,000 of my personal cash to get us going. And it was through Kickstarter that we were able to safely do more with our money. So we're very grateful for Kickstarter. And we were pretty early adopters of those of Kickstarter.

So I want to get into Kickstarter, but I feel like that's going to be a pretty giant topic as we go forward. Some of the other things I've made a few notes from, from your great kind of storytelling of throughout this. When you're going, I want to break down a little bit more of this process of two rooms and a boom design because it sounds magical, frankly. the speed with which it all came together, which is awesome. But I also really deep dove into the kind of social deduction game space recently

and launched Night of the Ninja with the Brotherwise guys as a kind of card game version of, you know, Werewolf Mafia, you know, variation. But, you know, mine, it has advantages of it takes five minutes to play, but it only supports up to 11 people, which by normal game standards would be plenty, but by social deduction game standards is meh. And it's, you know, it has to, generally speaking, you kind of need to be around the same table. And you've been able to design a game that is structured without a moderator, has, supports basically limitless numbers of people and has this like fun drama excitement to it. It's just such a huge accomplishment. It solves a lot of the problems that I was trying to solve

with Night of the Ninja and took it a very different direction. So I would just love to, to dive a little bit more into it. So it started with this story of, okay, we're robbers and we don't know where we are. And then you hooked on the two room portion of it. Can you just like expand that out a little bit more for me? Because I just, I really am fascinated by which features kind of drove you. Well, I'm a big fan of too long didn't read or didn't play type of synopsies. So I really did truncate a lot of details on that story because Sean and I have been talking about

hidden role games. And when I first interacted with Sean at a convention, I got to see him play his first game of Werewolf. He had never played any hidden role games. And at the time, I was a huge fan of hidden role games. And I still am, honestly. And so he played Werewolf and was floored. And I said, you haven't played Resistance? Nope. We played Resistance at the time. And resistance was relatively new then. I had been playing Werewolf since the age of 13 hosting it almost every weekend and then Tuesday nights, which is why our company's named Tuesday Nights. as I got older and older.

So everyone who knows me personally from my hometown of Cleveland, they know that I would host a crap ton of werewolf games on a regular weekly basis. So I have this very rich experience. And I didn't even know about Ted Allspach's Ultimate Werewolf at the time. I never even thought that there was a card game of it. I just knew the classic mafia and variant to make it Werewolf, where there's no cards.

I just tap people on their shoulder, hosted around a campfire, et cetera. So to say that I was experienced in playing werewolf as an understatement, and one of the things I did when I was trying to make it as a game designer was I said, you know what, I'm not going to pay for any more conventions. I made this decision. And so what I did is I volunteered.

And one of the companies I volunteered for was indie board and card games. And Travis Worthington owns. Andy Borden card games, and he had a representative at that proto spiel, and at a previous proto spiel, I befriended one of his representatives. Again, I just ended up working the booth and selling resistance. So literally, for weekends at different conventions, all I did was play game after game after game after game of resistance. To the point where I was very confident in saying no one has played resistance more than me,

I can't say that now. That's totally not true now. But after so many hours of doing it. So when Sean had never even played a hidden role game, and I got to show them resistance and werewolf and potentially other hidden role games, it really got his mind turning. And he thought I was this hidden role, aficionado, some type of mask. He was like, hey, I got one to design.

And I specifically said, here's what the market needs. This is what, in my experience, is really missing. One, one of the things that resistance nails that Werewolf doesn't is it eliminates player elimination. There's no player elimination. And also, there's no time limit because that's another thing about resistance is there wasn't a time limit and games could take way too long. A lot of talking hands not making decisions. But here was the biggest one for me. I don't know why I like three, but I said, Sean, here's three things that we need to keep in mind if we're going to make an enroll game together.

And this one was the big stickler for me. I am very big into the memories we make with the people with whom we play. And those memories should be very pleasant. When we're done playing a game, we should feel closer than we did before we started playing that game. For me, board games are just a social lubricant for the personal bonding we have socially. And if the game doesn't do that, it's not doing its job. and I love Don Eskridge and I love what the resistance has done

but man I've seen so many fights and arguments in Werewolf but definitely resistance I used to call it the friendship burner because so many friendships died while playing resistance and I didn't want that Order now for your family gathering Right exactly

So when we made two rooms a boom I really thought man having two rooms and having this, that may be the solution. So I came in kind of with my own ideas of what I was looking for in a hidden role game. And when he came up with the theme and this concept of two separate rooms, it was very serendipitous, where the two ideas combined, the tumblers clicked into place, Eureka, oh my goodness, thank you, Sean. Our lives will never be the same because of your idea and my preconceived notions of what I want

hidden role games to be, we've come up with two rooms in a boom, which is very quick, plays a ton of people, no player elimination. And at the end, even if you lose, you feel like all you did was gather friends around and work together. In fact, it's not really competitive game as much as it is a cooperative team-based game. You get together with your team, come up with a strategy if you can, try to enact it, and then see what the results are, rinse and repeat. So there was a lot of history before that quick few hours of that evening. So yeah, you're totally right. That is the exception to the rule.

And there are changes from the original two rooms and a boom, but not that many. Well, but see, that's why I'm really glad I dug into this, because these are the core principles that the kind of got glossed over in the first version of the story, which is a great way to tell the story, generally speaking. but, you know, we have what I call, you know, ABE, right, always be exploring. The idea that you are constantly playing different games and that you had years of experience working in this specific genre of games, you knew, and especially demoing at conventions, there is no better way to learn core design principles than having to demo games to people

because you learn very, very quickly, what works, what doesn't, where do people queue in, where do they get those aha moments, where do they check out? And so you learn a ton of value out of that. And again, just that grinding nature that's coming across as well, right? You did whether it's carrying water or demoing games or sleep it in the car, right? You're willing to do the work to get you across the finish line. And the adding value to the community and enjoying that process of playing games, right? Having a weekly Tuesday night games and game night builds that core community that's already going to be invested in you.

And then, you know, we'll use this soon to transition to the Kickstarter and how you got your audience out of, you know, seemingly. nowhere because I already know kind of those answers. And I think that those are just such important principles to do and saying, okay, here's the games I love. What are the things that I can remove or take away? What are the problems that I can solve to make this better, right? To take away the problem.

So when I was doing Night of the Ninja, I went through this exact same exercise. We used to play mafia with a group that we'd go down and we'd go down every couple months. We'd build a home down in Mexico. And at night, we would just play mafia for hours. And it was just over and over and over again for years.

you know, a couple years. And I was finally like, okay, there's things I love about this. There's things I hate about this. And, you know, exactly cue that stuff off. Okay, this thing could take hours. It takes too long. There's people are eliminated and they're out of the game. People get mad at each other. It's a little bit too free form. Somebody has to be the narrator, like all these different things. It's like, okay, how would I solve those problems? And then, you know, you find that moment down the road where it happens, right? There are sometimes you have games and you'll have ideas that you will sit on for years, years and years and years until that right small little thing comes along that brings it together to something that really cues it. So having a good log, writing things down, holding onto your sort of ideas and your,

your catalog of ideas is something I also recommend. And so I think there's a ton of really fascinating things. And I, so I just wanted to underscore a lot of the stuff I heard from your, your deeper version of the story. And then I want to dig in a little bit here to the, the, what I think is a pretty profound statement, but I also want to kind of push back on and tease, tease out. more, which is this, you know, games are here to as social lubricant, right? They're designed. The success of games is the, is how they bring people together, right? And to create these experiences that bring people together. And I know who I'm talking to, a Magic the Gathering champion where some people love to see their opponents crushed. It doesn't get more competitive

than that. So yeah, we may come from different backgrounds here. No, no, well, I, I cannot agree more that like the most important part of what we do. Like, so I, you know, my, my, my, my mission is, right, I'm here to entertain, connect, and inspire. That's like the core things that I'm here to try to do. And that connection, you know, is a huge, huge part of it, right? The reason, like, I made tons of money playing magic, but honestly, not so much so that I would have kept doing it if it wasn't for the friends that I had made along the way, right?

The coolest thing about being on the pro tour was that every few months, I could go to some exotic location and go hang out with really cool friends from all over the world that were smart and fun and we could just like really connect over these games. The winning and the competition, sure, it's fun to, you know, challenge yourself and see to see if you can win. But that's just one piece of the things that draw us to game. So I think both things, all those things are valid.

But I do believe community is the most important one, not just for, especially for the longevity, right? You might come first because you want to prove yourself or compete or because the game itself is interesting. You're going to stay. It's because of the community and the relationships you build. And that's the thing that you really remember at the end of the day, whether that's because you got engaged over a game or you have a group of friends that you see.

Like those are the things that bring you together and why why I do what I do. And so the reason I brought up was not to push back on the principle because it's important and I'm 100% on board. But it was to push back on the reality of how well you solve for that problem because in two rooms and a boom because I also see the problem. But the first time I experienced this was in diplomacy, which is it's like the best game that I will only ever play once because I lost friends in that thing. They were people who swore on their lives and their mothers and everything they cared about that we were going to be true to each other. This is not a game. This is real life. We're brothers.

And nope, just lie to my face. Lying to my face. And I've definitely had these things where I mentioned we played mafia and go down to, I mean, we'd go on home bills. Like these are people who are like sacrificing weekends and paying money to go build homes for the poor. Like good. You know, people were doing good work. And just suddenly there's just like cut through lie. cheat and steal in the context of the game.

And it's just like, I don't, I don't know if I feel the same about you at the end of this. And so I, I think that there's, you know, obviously groups when they bring the right spirit to the game and everybody's on the same page, I think those, those problems can be solved, right? Like if you just kind of, we're all in the magic circle of the game and we understand we're going to do, you know, what's okay and what's not okay. Yes. But, but in two rooms and a boom, aren't, aren't you doing the same? I mean, you still are trying to deceive people and convince the other.

people that you're really yeah so how does this how does this work how does this solve the problem i'm so glad you're giving me the opportunity to talk about this this is so fun because diplomacy and intrigue by definition if you've ever played the game intrigue it's basically the short form of diplomacy where you ruin friendships in order to win you have to lie and have to emotionally manipulate it is a requirement in order to win i've never heard someone winning diplomacy or intrigue with 100% honesty. So it's interesting that that's a requirement. Now, if you've heard otherwise, please let us know, you know, write in, whatever,

and Justin will let me know through his avenues, whatever, please. But with resistance, it helps you. It's not mandatory, but it really is a killer strategy to have that emotional manipulation, as I've called it, where I could start getting really angry and declaring, I'm telling the truth, why won't you believe me? and I'm almost flipping the table over, and people will bend to your angry will. And at the end, you say,

ha, ha, you fools, you totally fell for it. I won. And then people will ask, did anyone really win that game? Because we all feel horrible right now. I don't think you should feel good about yourself either. So in resistance, it's not required, but it is a superior strategy.

In games like diplomacy and intrigue, it is a required strategy, arguably. In two rooms and a boom, you can lie. Or you can totally win by telling the absolute truth. And I would say in my vast experience of playing germs and a boom, more often than not, that works because you're spending so much of the time, because there's so many players, too, convincing people of your loyalty and truth and being able to prove it because there's

player verification. That player verification is what really kicks it over into the cooperative nature of the game. I say I'm on red team. You don't believe me. I can show you my dang dang card. And right then and they're like, oh, okay, yeah, you're on right team because I just saw your card. But I know that the counter that is, don't you have spy cards in there, which you can only show the color of the card and not the entire identity? Yes, that's totally true. However, if someone's not showing you their full card, there's always that room for doubt. So it can be there, but I would argue it is an inferior strategy.

In two rooms and a boom, and I'm biased, Justin, but in two rooms and a boom, I feel that you're going to get a lot more flies with honey than vinegar. Well, sure, yeah. And it's, and you know,

this may come down to, you know, there's a matter of degrees, but I, and of course, as I mentioned before, it does come down to the social group. Some are more tolerant

of more, you know, extreme tactics. I've had amazingly friendly games of magic of gathering and resistance. True. Totally sure.

But it's, it's, and I just, I enjoy, you know, piecing this stuff out because it's rare they get to have someone with your depth of experience in this space. And like I said, I just released a game in this genre. And I tried to solve it in a variety of ways too. But one of the things I think is interesting is like making the teams even, which is something we both did, right? And I think does help as opposed to there being just the subset of betrayers. And I think that does change the dynamic quite a bit. I think that there's, there's also, as you talk about the kind of degree. to which you can go, like, how much is it the emotional, you know, manipulation enforced?

How much of it is the requirement of lying? How much of it is the only thing is lying, right? Like, so it's like, I take poker, right? Poker is by definition, you know, is a deception game by definition. Yes. But it's like people don't get the same as, oh, you bluffed me. I mean, it's sort of the whole point of the game. And so there's this interesting spectrum.

I think a lot of it, my instinct here is, and I'm kind of just exploring this, a lot a little bit here with you is that it's it really comes down to how much are you leaning on your social relationships outside of the game as your hook for why you should trust me in the game. And the more that you pull the social relationship in, the more hurtful or potentially destructive it is because you're using that as a chip in the mechanics of the game. You're brilliant. That's absolutely true. I love that you're able to take these concepts. and verbalize them. Because as you're verbalizing them and writing them down, it really does bring a lot of light to those thoughts that may have been fleeting or maybe ephemeral, but you're making

them concrete. And that is absolutely true, because if we're relying on that friendship, that means you're putting that friendship at stake. And using that whole chip as an analogy is wonderfully said, because that is something you can lose. If you bring it in as a component, you could lose that Chip potentially. Really well said. Yeah. My goodness. Well, I appreciate that.

I'm, like I said, it's this back and forth and it really is only crystallized as we're talking here. So it's, I very much appreciate the, the ability to go back and forth here on your depth of experience in the space.

I think that, so I had Elon Lee on the podcast also, which is another great episode. He does a lot of consulting for Survivor, the TV series. Oh, fascinating. I'm hoping that I can get Jeff Probst on here too,

because I think the process that they, If you want to talk about the epitome of, you know, social relationships and deception, the entire concept of the show Survivor, which is the sort of original reality TV competition, you know, is is all about that. And I think it's one of the most fascinating games on television for that exact reason. You see where those dynamics come into play. Anyway, I agree. I agree.

All right. So we've dug, we did a lot of good work here and had a lot of fun with digging into social deception. but I have teased now multiple times that we're going to dive deep on Kickstarter and your track and an incredible success and path on there and pull out some tips and tricks for people. So we've got the game. We've designed it. We've one founder quitting their job. We're all in on making this game happen.

What is the path now? How do we get to, how do we get your $3,000 to turn into a successful game launch? So we did a lot of pre-marketing, whether we realized it or not, before we even went on the Kickstarter. That included going to conventions and unofficially playing the game. And it was very easy to tap into the Werewolf Group. So there's huge Werewolf meetings that I was already accustomed to and already knew a lot of the people running the show there. So I said, hey, you know, we have this game. So we had a lot of Werewulfers becoming to Boomers.

as they've called themselves. We also released the game for free on our website for print and play. And we enabled people to give us feedback that way. And I remember very specifically a lot of people criticizing us for this, including the creator of Arkham Horror himself, said, you're idiots.

If you're just giving this game away for free, why would anyone buy it? But we also gave and are still giving away all these games for free online for print and play including mothership, the current Kickstarter. And man, he couldn't be wrong. He couldn't be more wrong in that it really does garner a community and feedback. And when people give you feedback as a side note,

and it's really solid feedback in play testing material, and there is that change in the game, that enables a lot of ownership and inspiration in the people that gave you feedback. And that's investment in your game. So it's, again, garnering this community before you even hit the launch button on Kickstarter. So we had a whole email list from people playing the game at conventions

or playing it through downloading our game, print and play style. And so we were able to hit an email to everybody saying, we're about to launch our Kickstarter before we even launched our Kickstarter. And I can't emphasize enough the importance of pre-marketing. Your game on Kickstarter can live or die in the first couple of days, usually day number one. And I'm proud to say that all of our games have funded in the first day. And that includes

games that Sean and I have given advice for or even done videos for. Because to make a little side scratch or even to promote our games, we tapped into the community and had people say, hey, we like your personalities. Would you mind doing the video for my Kickstarter?

So I've done the Kickstarter video for like Dead Men Tell No Tales, a cooperative game by Kane Clinko. and agents of Smirsch and Run Fighter Die. These are all games that maybe your listeners have never heard of, but they launched on Kickstarter and they funded on day one. And we did a lot of the research asking designers and publishers

how they got their games off the ground. And that's why your podcast is doing such an amazing service and your book as well, is that I wish I had all that material before we, we launched and really dove into game design because it is that doing the work and doing the homework and not going in totally blind. And as much as you get ready, we still learn more the first few weeks of our Kickstarter than we did leading up to it as well. As much as you prepare, nothing prepares you more than when you actually dive into the deep end of that pool. So we did a lot of pre-marketing and making sure that we had a bit of an audience before we even

launch. So people waiting to hit pledge on day one. It's so funny to me. I appreciate, you know, the compliment. And I, I wrote Think Like a Game Designer and I started this podcast to do exactly what you're saying, which is like really help other people on this path that feels like very intimidating and very scary. And the, but, and I was thinking the head, but right before you made that guy, I was just thinking, wow, this entire, this podcast episode specifically, and everything you said is the most textbook way I've ever heard of a successful. story come together. Like it is you grounded out, you went to conventions, you volunteered, you playtested other games, you did the, you know, you built the relationships, then you got a project,

then you did the pre-marketing, you gave it away for free, you added value to a community that you care about consistently for years. And then those things then lead into rewards and learnings. And you iterate and do, and you iterate on the marketing and the launching and all that stuff the same way. So you are, you are the ideal living example, I think, of anything, anything I've recorded for anybody out there that can go from zero to two, you know, million dollars plus. So it's, it's, it's your, you likewise by sharing this story are really, I think, a huge inspiration for the people out there.

So it's, it's, it's, is awesome. Thanks. Yeah, a lot of it. And I don't think I've ever actually said this in recording what part of the secret sauce of how I got involved with all these game companies and play testing wasn't just searching on social media, which is totally true. That is how I found Arcane. But I was part of a local game group called Boga, which is board gamers of greater Akron,

so in the Cleveland Akron area, and this is a group that met regularly. And there was an offshoot group of that called Boga DAP, which DAP was design and playtesting. And this was aspiring game designers. And the fact that there were enough of these individuals to get together and try to playtest each other's games was fascinating. But what I did was not only join that group that I found, locally. But I went to the trade shows, the conventions, and I told people at their booth, hey, I'm part of this Bogadab design and playtesting. If you have anything you want us to

playtest, we're totally down for it. We'll playtest it. Here is this piece of paper that we'll hand back. This is our standardized feedback form. So you'll see, and here's like the big question is, how much would people be willing to pay for your game? Because I think that's the strongest metric of whether people like your game or not. Because so many people say, oh, I love your game. How much would you pay for it? I'm not paying money for this thing, but I enjoyed my time with it. So that is putting money where their mouths are. It's like, what is the dollar amount? And that is a big piece of advice that I would like to give is when I went to these trade shows, I had something to offer all of these publishers, that they had something they wanted to hear from me and I had

something to offer them. Not just, hey, could I ask you a huge favor and take up your time and convince you to do everything I want you to do for me? Instead, it was, hey, I can provide a service for you. I'm genuinely curious. And I even had a little newsletter that I put out for our board gamers of Greater Akron where I interviewed individuals and say, hey, do you have time to answer some questions about publishing, et cetera? And the reality of it was, yes, I was totally interested in garnering that community and I totally was interested in playtesting. But if I'm being very honest and vulnerable, I also knew that I was rubbing elbows with the individuals with whom I may be working with in the future. As a game designer, maybe in the future, I'd say, hey, here's the

feedback. By the way, I have a game you might like. So instead of coming face first and saying, here's a game I want you to publish, here's a game you want I want you to publish, I was greasing the wheels for a year or two before that where they would recognize me and know my name and know the personality because I know from reading, man, I don't remember. It was an early book that one of the key things to game design and getting published is making sure that you don't scare your publisher away because personality is a big thing. They're not just publishing your game. In a way, they're publishing you. And if they don't like working with you, they're not going to publish your game. And so I took that the heart. So I wanted them to know who Alan Gerting was before I even started working with

any of them in a professional level. Yeah, I think that's, that's exactly right. And again, so I think I'm just going to transcribe this podcast and make it the addendum to my book, because it is, it's great. It's literally just like all of those, you just live all of the lessons, right? It's building relationships, adding value to the people that you want to serve, to the people that you want to work with, be good to work with, be the kind of person that is like positive, and follows up and is, you know, of course people are going to want to work with you after that, right? There's so many people for whom, and it's not that if this first idea or this first project doesn't pan out, then I'm doomed. Like you had an audience that you were serving when you're

having playtests and regular get-togethers and Tuesday night games. You have an audience that you're serving when you're working with publishers and providing playtest feedback and providing services to them. There's like all of these things that you're doing. And then at what point did the, did the podcast start up? Podcast didn't start up until two rooms and a boom had already launched. It was something I wanted to do in the back of my mind, but I didn't really have time to do. And to be honest, I never did. I was always scrambling to edit it quickly, and it was a weekly podcast. Freaking nuts.

It was ridiculous. And one of the reasons that I ended the podcast after two episodes was I really needed to take time to refocus on family and whatnot, because I was sacrificing time with my now wife for the podcast. Apparently, I didn't learn my lesson because now I'm doing the stuff. same gosh darn thing with the TKTV. Now we have our YouTube channel. But now we have enough resources that I can hopefully outsource some of the editing work. Because editing, oh my goodness. Oh, yeah.

No. I mean, I knew I wanted to do a podcast, but I was also, I was very conscious of these things. And I was like, I'm going to do once a month. I'm going to hire an editor to help me. And that's how I'm going to survive because I would never have kept this up if I was trying to do weekly and edit it myself. Never.

No, no chance. Well, you're a smarter man than me. That has already been proven on multiple levels. And that's just another example of that. It actually started with a fan of ours, SBJ, who ran a very successful and still does, Pokemon podcast. It's super effective. Super nice guy.

He was such a good fan. And then I found out he did a podcast. And I just happened since said, you do a podcast? Like, yeah, I do a podcast. I didn't even know that he had like one of the top 100 podcasts ever. Like, it's super effective is still one of the most. popular podcasts in existence. It's like up there with cereal. It's ridiculous. But then that's just the power of Pokemon. He's like the go-to Pokemon podcaster. I didn't realize this when I was talking to him.

I just knew he was a fan of Turums and a Boom. He came to every Gen Con played. And then we were both at this like group interview for Bored with life. And I was like, why are you here? I thought you were just a fan of Turums and a Boone. He's like, no, I'd do a podcast for Pokemon. I was like, what? I've always wanted to do a podcast about board games. And so he really ushered us and started us off because he was the first host and he got too busy and it was too hard for him to keep up because he needed to focus on his life. And then I just took it from there. He handed it off to me very gracefully. So I'm very thankful for SBJ. But that's the answer to that question of how the podcast started. There's always a story behind all of these things. It's always interesting.

Yeah, yeah. No, that's why it's fun to have these conversations. I did fast forward us a little bit too much with that. I think though, because I do, I want to get through. You did the pre-marketing. You've already previously worked on, you already previously worked on Kickstarter in the sense of recording videos for other people at this point, right? So you've, you've got experience kind of in the back end. You've done a lot of than your homework. You've built up this audience. You've gotten the pre-pleasures for day one. What else went into this project? Justin, I don't want to admit this next part, but I'm going to. And it's actually the biggest mark of shame in my life, which actually shows you how

gifted of a life I basically have. This is like my biggest mark of shame is that I wanted to do our homework so thoroughly that I wanted to do a Kickstarter before our Kickstarter. And so we said we're going to do a Kickstarter, boom or doom, about a documentary that we were going to film and record all about the process of us making it or breaking it using Kickstarter. It was like the Kickstarter documentary, Boom or Doom. And we asked for, I think, like, $1,000 and we got almost $4,000 for it. And we had different stretch goals.

And this was basically our excuse to get a fan base on Kickstarter, because, Kickstarter is another form of social media. You can follow people on there. You can leave comments, et cetera. It is a form of social media. Sure, it's not as popular for keeping in touch with friends and family like Facebook or Twitter, but it is a social media platform. And we wanted to get our feet into it and see what it was like behind the scenes. What is it like the launch a project? How much does it actually cost? So Sean has a very thorough background in film editing. And that was actually one of the reasons that I was really attracted to them is because I always thought that board games and YouTube and tutorials all came hand in hand and that they're very close to

each other in this family of entertainment. And I think that's still true. I think play-throughs and how-to tutorials are very much in line with board gaming. So we made this first Kickstarter, boom or doom. We have yet to fulfill in all those promises we made though. And that's why, it is an unfulfilled Kickstarter. We had t-shirts that we fulfilled. We had commercials that we filmed and fulfilled at different pledge levels. But the main thing at the base level

that you could back was a documentary. And we haven't done that. And I'm happy to say that one of the reasons I started TKTV and started learning film editing is Sean doing full-time. He's too busy to do editing. And he eventually, after years of stress and prodding and poking,

said, I can't do it. There's too much footage, too much editing time. I can't do all this and run this company. We can't fulfill boom or doom. So I started learning film editing next to doing editing the podcast and whatnot. And so this is a transition that this is the first time I've ever said this publicly. Our plan is after 10 years, our 10 year anniversary is I'm finally going to fulfill all of those boom or doom promises on YouTube. And so this summer, I'm not going to be teaching classes. I'm going to take my first break from teaching ever since I got full time. I'm going to spend the summer fulfilling boom or doom.

Wow. So we also did the homework on how Kickstarter works. And that's how we learned about the algorithm that you need from day one as many backers as possible. And we also learned by doing that initial Kickstarter that people can freely change their pledge levels. which means, and this is the dirty trick of it, you could have your friends and family back at ridiculous dollar amounts only to change their pledge later on. Of course, the consequence of that is that you may have your pledge count go down.

If you're like, oh, we're at a million dollars. Wait, no, actually, we're only at 900,000 for some reason. That's an exaggerated number, but it just goes to show that you have to be careful that you have family and friends artificially inflating your numbers that near the end of the campaign, there will be a little suspicion going on. But I'm giving away some of the secret sauce here.

That does inflate the algorithm for Kickstarter, and it does have your project show up as successful in day one. It's very popular, et cetera. And these were the kind of guerrilla tactics, for lack of a better explanation, that Sean and I learned as just two slubs bumbling around as best we could in the dark for those initial kickstaters.

So that helped us gain advantage of the algorithm, not just for our two rooms and a boom Kickstarter, but other kickstarters. I'm happy to say, now we don't have to use any of those nonsense tactics because we have that thorough fan base. We're thoroughly saturated in Kickstarter and we don't do any of those shenanigans. No more shenanigans sounds right. Guerrilla tactics shenanigans. it's it's stuff that's you know a little bit on the edge of not as ethical but also you're just you know you're working with an algorithm and you're trying to get attention and and that is uh nobody's heard at the end of the day i think i think that the real thing that uh you know there's the real thing i want to highlight there is just i want to empathize with you about that challenge of you know making promises and realizing after you've made those promises that you can't deliver on those promises that is that is a gut punch and i think that that anybody out there that's ran a Kickstarter has probably had some degree of that experience.

I know that I have. We had promised to do an art book for all of our Soul Forge backers that we never delivered. You know, there was just like, we had no idea what we're doing. And it was just like, it hurts. It hurts. It hurts personally. It's hard to sleep sometimes at night. It is.

It is something that I think I just want to, and the only reason I want to emphasize is not to sort of, you know, twist the knife or whatever, but because I want to, I want to help. There's a lot of people out there that have had this same experience too. and for those of you that are that are Kickstarter backers to understand that when you know it's so rare in fact I don't know the case of this but like I mean I've heard stories but I know like that when these things

don't fund it's not because there's some diabolical mastermind behind the scenes like ha ha I've taken your money and I don't it wasn't planning to do this anyway it's because these things are hard and a lot of times people you know we want to deliver you want to over deliver and you can oh we'll do this thing too no in addition to the game we're also going to make a video for it oh yeah we're going to have this art, so we'll just make an art book. We'll throw, you know, people throw on all these things with the, the genuine impression that we're going to, you're going to do it. And then, you know, sometimes reality hits and it's, and it's, and it doesn't, it doesn't come

to pass, but it's something that sticks with you, right? You're, you're just sort of announced here that a decade later, you're going to go and do what it takes to fulfill that promise. And, and I, I'm living that exact same thing. We just finished our Kickstarter for Soulforge Fusion. And now we're rebuilding a setup and I want to be able to relaunch the game and deliver on that on that art book and do all those things because, you know, I don't know how many people out there really even care.

It wasn't the main thing of the thing. I don't know. Maybe there's a dozen. I don't maybe too. I don't know. It could be, but it matters to me, right?

It matters to you. It matters to like, we want to be the kind of people that fulfill our promises. We want to be the kind of people that serve our community well. And that idea of like, hey, you committed, you're going to do something.

You want to get it done. And so it's just a, it's an emotionally challenging thing. It's a difficult thing for people to face. And so for those of you out there that are in that, you know, know that you're not alone. For those of you out there that are that are waiting on things that you've backed, have a little bit of compassionate patience,

but we are sorry. We're all sorry, especially now with all the shipping things and everything that's been happening. I actually, yeah, yeah, actually as anyway, well,

I don't want to get too into that because I, we, I don't want to run out of time without getting through the rest of this. We could talk about all this forever. Yeah. But you're right. It's at the end of the day, it's about integrity.

And even though we only had, you know, a couple hundred backers for that initial Kickstarter. it's still something that is important to me because it did affect us in the future because we had people asking us why aren't you on Patreon for your podcast? Why aren't you taking sponsors and whatnot? Why aren't you doing this thing? And it came down to like, I don't feel comfortable taking on something like that if we

haven't even fulfilled on boom or doom. I'd rather take that money and hire an editor or something like that. So it does affect the future of the workflow. And it's about integrity and just trying to live up to the person that. you want to be. Oh yeah. No, I mean after SoulForge kind of went through what it went through, like I didn't go back to Kickstarter for like seven six years, seven years. Like I was so traumatized from it and I didn't. I was like, okay, no, I've got to work through this. I've got to figure it out. I've got to make everything happen. And so it, it stunted my company and my ability to do things

and my, you know, just emotionally for a very long time. So it's not, it's not a small cost. But there's redemption at the end of these because you are honest with people and you're honest with your challenges and you do your best at all points to try to deliver as best you can on the promises you made and then to move forward and learn from those lessons. And that's clearly kind of what's happened here. So since, you know, two rooms and a boom, you had several other kickstarters that were all successful and launched projects. You moved, but this move into RPGs and getting it into this crazy level of success

like that, I got to hear more about that because I love RPGs. Like that was before I played magic, before I like got into this space. Like I was I played Dungeons and Dragons. I played vampire. I played like all these games. I loved RPGs. And when I started to design games, I was like, oh man, wouldn't it be cool? Like, Len, and the number of RPGs I played is dwarfed by the number of

RPG books I read. You know, like, I mean, literally. Same. Imagining what I would do here and what characters I would create, what worlds I would create. Like I loved it. But I always, I literally stopped myself from designing RPGs because I thought just there's no money. I mean, it's just like, it's just so hard to be successful. It's such a difficult space. And you've, you know, blown that assumption out of the water here. So, so maybe walk me

through your decisions to move into the space and what you think is kind of led to to the success you're seeing right now. Absolutely. First, I want to say, Justin, I really feel like you're my brother from another mother because of how similar our taste and our past experiences seem to be. Because I could say the same thing. I joined Bogodap because I had. role playing games I wanted to play test. Not because I had board games or card games. Everyone else in that small group would be designers had card games and tabletop games, but I was playtesting my role playing games.

And then finally, I made some crappy card game and everyone flipped their shit over. Oh, sorry. I'm not sure what the rating is on this. No, no, it's fine. We can do whatever we want. Okay, cool. Everyone flipped for the card game. And I thought that was easy compared to designing a role playing game.

because role playing game, you've got to run through sessions that are two hours long. This card game literally took 20 minutes to play. Oh, my goodness. And that was kind of a foolish thing to think like, oh, card games are easier than role playing games. They're just a different beast. And I found they're two different demographics. There is some overlap. We are examples of that, Justin.

But the communities at large are almost the jets and the sharks in a lot of ways. When you go to conventions, you can almost tell who. the role players are versus who the tabletopers are. And we found that to be really true at our Tuesday night games booth at Gen Con and Origins and Packs Unplugged where we would have our booth. And we had Dasknot Lemonade, World Championship Russian roulette, two rooms and boom, these tabletop games. And then we had mothership, a roleplaying game. And when someone would walk up to the booth, we would whisper to each other role player here for mothership or other here for tabletop games. And we were right, almost all the time. And I know that sounds very stereotypical. And that's probably not appropriate,

but I hate saying that it's based on some truth that you can even see the difference between role players versus table-toppers. And even that could be as simple as they're looking at mothership on the way here. And they obviously don't give a crap about World Championship Russian or let. Like, you could see what they're looking at. Other times it could be what they're wearing. But the point is, is that there are two different communities, but you and I are part of that group that has that Venn diagram overlap. So how did we get into role-playing

from Two Rooms and a Boom and these other table-top games we've published? Well, Sean and I have always loved role-playing games more than anything. Because as much as we talked about hidden role games, we talked about comics and role-playing games more than anything else. And Sean and I would talk about

role-playing design. He played one of my designs early in our relationship before we started the company back when he was there for Crystal Khan. And we have talked about our favorite, our favorite systems, like mine was Warhammer fantasy roleplay. We've played Mountain Witch, which is this really indie one-shot, one-shot type of role-playing game. So much fun playing role-playing games. And the transition was, again, being vulnerable and honest, is that Sean felt overwhelmed at some point with a lot of what we were doing with two rooms and a boom. We have so many plans for the future of two rooms and a boom, including two rooms and a boom too. We're changing some things around, making it even better, cleaner, tighter.

And Sean had his list of to-dos that he was going to follow up on. And I did a check in with him, like, how are we progressing with this? And he had one of those harrowing heart-to-heart with me. He said, I'm going to be honest. I haven't done any of the work. It's been months and Sean didn't do any of the work. I'm like, do you have anything to show for the last few months? Yeah, well, I made this role playing game.

Mothership. I've been talking with other people using Google Plus, which is Rip dead. But Google Plus, if you're in that role playing community, was the mecca for role players. It was very popular in that subgenre of RPGers. And Sean had become enmeshed in that. community. In fact, Sean became a judge for the any awards. And if you're unfamiliar with the any awards, that's like the Oscars for the role-playing games. And that's every year at Jen Con where they announced the awards. And he was a judge for the any's because he and I are so into

role-playing games, even though his workload was already filled, he decided for fun, he still wanted to be a judge and contribute to the community of role-playing games. So again, going back, I said, you have nothing to show. Well, I made this game mothership. is it publishable? Do we have anything? It's like, yeah, I think so. I've got enough. I looked at it.

It looked gorgeous. I said, let's roll print. And it was basically this unplanned fluke where we printed out these copies for origins. And we only printed out, I think, like 500 copies on a local printing press. And they sold like gangbusters right away. We're like, oh my goodness, we sold out of those in no time. but the biggest request we had was, do you have any adventures for it?

Because it was just the rules. There was no adventure. So Sean went to work with some of his close-knit RPG friends that he had made at Google Plus, and they came out with Dead Planet by GenCon, just like two months later, Jenkin. And we sold out of Mothership again, and we sold out of Dead Planet and realized, oh, my goodness, this playtest experience, this early, what do they call it in video games when you have a game that is early access. It was basically beta, early access.

We launched it in. People were buying it. And sure enough, it was lightning in a bottle, totally unexpected. And it went very well. And soon we had more and more people that were contacting us for more material. Sean wisely made a Discord channel and he made another Discord channel for people who wanted to be playtesters and developers. And that grew and grew and grew.

and the main question that we get is that when people see that we have this campaign that made over a million dollars, did you have any idea that your campaign was going to be a million dollar campaign? The truth is not very romantic because it makes it sound almost salacious. Yeah, we did have an idea that it was going to do that well because we did pre-marketing again. And part of that pre-marketing nowadays on Kickstarter is you can have people sign up for your Kickstarter before it launches. And we realized, oh my goodness, if just a quarter of these people don't back, meaning if 75% of the people that signed up for a Kickstarter back it, we're looking at a million dollars. And so we experienced this whole million dollar type of hope and energy before the Kickstarter even launched. And the other thing we did, instead of doing our whole guerrilla marketing, we decided we would actually invest in official marketing.

And we use BackerKit. And Backer Kit was brilliant. And Backer Kit is actually pretty choosy on the campaigns. They ask information. So they don't just work with anybody. So they've told that may be their sales pitch to us, but I believe them. But Backer Kit said, we'd love to do marketing for you, sending out emails, using a lot of our resource. We think your campaign can be huge.

So this is the first time we did it. They integrate themselves into your social media. They help with advertisements. So it's almost like a one-stop shop for marketing for us. And yeah, we knew. And so we went from just doing our own personal marketing at conventions, which we still did. And our own personal email addresses that we got from people signing up at conventions,

which we still used. But we also used official marketing. And it's been great. That's what led to this. You did 100% of your marketing through BackerKit? I haven't paid marketing, I mean. Absolutely. 100%. And do you mind going into some of the, feel free to say no here, but I'm curious about

the kind of scale of detail. So you say, okay, I see how many people have backed or pre-backed and that and we, and you, so you assumed an average pledge amount and that they would back at and then said, okay, this is, so you had, what was it, how many thousands of people that you had that you were signed up before the campaign launch? You know, that's a number I don't have in front of me. No problem. Enough to the point where we're like, this looks like it could be a million dollar

Kickstarter. Yeah. So for my, you know, for kind of as a as a baseline, right? So I always say it's like, look, if you don't, you know, you want to have at least a thousand people that are kind of watching your campaign before you launch, ideally to do like a normal, you know, project. I think that for something that's going to do a million dollars, that number must be much bigger, but I think that's kind of been my

metter, my baseline metric for campaigns when I'm advising people. It's a good metric. Yes. It's an easy number too, so it's nice. But then I'm always curious also like how much marketing that you spend, right? Where, you know, so, you know, I had Isaac Childress, who, you know, did the, the very

biggest of campaigns with Frost Haven. And the, you know, that he had a similar story, not with Backer Kid specifically, but with that campaign, he decided to kind of unlock the floodgates and spend a lot of money with a bunch of different marketers to bring in, you know, the whatever 14 million or whatever he did. And he spent the, you know, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing. I'm curious what kind of range you went with pre-campaign if or, you know, again, you don't have to answer the specifics if you're not comfortable, but I just want to give people a sense of what they should expect to be spending or what's a,

what's a range that, you know, you would say, okay, this is what we spent when we were doing our first campaigns and this is the kind of range of things we look at when we do something like this. Yeah, I think the easier thing is instead of just giving you an dollar amount is the percentage amount. Sure. Because the way that Sean and I worked on this was all towards that almighty price per unit, basically. So when we look at one copy of the game, how much money are we actually making? How much profit are we getting?

That whole profit margin. So advertising obviously goes into that. So what we did is we took it as one type of number for what is each unit costing us. And generically, and this is an oversimplification and really showing behind the curtain, I don't know why we'd hide it, to be honest, because there's nothing to be ashamed of. I don't think of this is secret sauce. I think the more information that's out there, the better for everybody. But when we look at it, we are basically making, specifically when it comes to the role-playing game,

we're making only about 30% goes back into the company. And that's very clear too. I think a lot of people don't understand that when you make a million dollars on Kickstarter, people think, oh my goodness, you're a millionaire. Like,

no, that's not going into my pocket. Yeah. That's an important note. Yeah. And that's what a lot of people think. And even to that worthy case, like,

all right, if that's the case, that means like Sean and I are splitting that 50-50. So realistically, I have 500,000. And people make the joke like, are you going to run away with the money to the Bahamas? Like, $500,000 is not enough to totally run away with and embezzle money to live forever. You need, you know, mad off money for that kind of stuff.

So anyways, made off money, rather, is what the name I was looking for. So what the number that comes down to is we're 30%. 30% is what we're making. So when you see that million dollar mark, we're going home as the company, 300,000. So what does that mean for us individually? Well, that depends on company and company. But Sean and I take a salary from our company and people say, what does that mean that your salary is going to be huge? Do you get bonuses? Well, no, realistically, what that means is maybe we'll give ourselves a raise if we have enough profits in the company. Because the life of the company and its longevity is really important to us. And so we're going to reinvest, meaning that now we can hire more artists and the people that we were giving friend rates to as far. as editors, like our copy editors, people editing, things like that, now we can give them very professional rates to make sure that they're getting the financial credit that they deserve. So it's more legitimate for lack of a better term. And I know that's not your question.

I apologize. I kind of sideline it into maybe answering future questions. No, it's totally fine. And yeah, I mean, to the degree that you're willing to shine light on what's going on behind the scenes and how this money gets used and how the campaign leads to success and there there's a lot of great things that came out of that and and i never you know whatever i don't want anybody to to share anything they're not comfortable with but i do i like to shine light on these things because i think for a lot of people they don't you know they have that oh they see a million dollar thing oh you're you know you're rich or or you know even for people who hadn't heard of you before this campaign because it's such a you know blood they're like oh

this is like crazy overnight success or they just got lucky or they just caught fire right like i like to highlight the story behind it the work behind it and then the work ahead right the work to deliver all these things is no joke. And yeah, paying, making sure the people that were there that got paid, making sure your overhead is managed so that you can keep doing this and keep succeeding, even if the next campaign isn't as successful or there's setbacks or shipping suddenly costs five times as much as it did a year ago or whatever. Right. We've, I mean, we've had to eat, you know, well over $150,000 of extra shipping costs on our last, on our Central Tactics campaign just because that happened. And so thank God, we've been cautious and saved.

some reserves so we can do it. But, you know, most, a lot of companies can't. And so, so that being cautious with overhead. I mean, this goes even back into the very beginning of our story, right, where, you know, you're like, all right, I'm going to keep my job. I know how to live lean. I know how to be a nomad. I know how to do this. Because it, the overhead is, is the killer, right? Any of the more you have these expenses, the more constrained your choices become. You know, I mean, there was one point where I had 30 people on my team and we were, you know, we could make an amount of money that previous to me was like ludicrously successful, but was not enough to keep the team going. And so all of a sudden, the types of projects I wanted to do were not even, couldn't even be on

the table. And so there's all these problems that come with what you consider to be fixed expenses. And there's all these problems that come with this, you know, if you think, okay, well, I've been huge successful. So I'm just going to take a bunch of money off the table. I do recommend you take some money off the table. Don't get me wrong. I think it's always important. But not, I think that's like, you know, when you're, this money is sort of coming in like 10% being used for, you know, bonuses to the team and rewards and surprise, you know, you know, making sure everybody feels good about stuff. And, you know, the, obviously the majority of it going to fulfill the promises and since the rest of it going into reserve or new projects, I think is

the right general attitude, which sounds like kind of where you're at. Yeah. So much to talk about there. And I apologize, I can't give you a specific number and the amount that we spend in Bacrecate. And one of the reasons is, is it fluctuates. It's much easier to give a percentage. But because of the ROAs, the return on advertising, it fluctuates based on days. And so we can tell them to tune it down, tune it up. And they're very transparent and very good at giving us reports multiple times a day. So we can actually change the amount that we're spending per day on it. And they give you recommendations and they really hold your hand and tell you their expertise.

So I think backer to kit does a wonderful job. So yeah. But to be honest, I don't have a lot of experience working with advertisers. So for all I know, maybe they're awful and I've just totally bought into the glam. Well, let's talk about, let's talk about those ratios then. Because so ROA is where your return on advertising or ROI or return on investment, right? For every dollar that I spend on advertising, how many dollars come in, right? And so you could make an argument that says, well, if I, for every dollar I spend on advertising, I get $2, that's great, right?

Hooray, let's do it. But in reality, no, that doesn't work because your game costs. costs you a certain amount of money to make. And Kickstarter takes a percentage and you have your overhead to manage. And so if you're only getting $2 for every $1 you spend on advertising, you're losing money with every dollar. And so you have to think about it in terms of what is the minimum ROI or ROA you're going to get on advertising that's going to make it make sense for you to have a significant

enough margin to make your game. And so that usually has got to be at least three to one, four to one, ideally more. And so the range of what you consider to be acceptable matters. matters how much margin you built in your product and all those things. So, you know, for some people, this may be just, I don't want to care about this. I don't want to know. But for other people, these numbers really matter. So when you start spending money, if you're like, hey, for every dollar I spend, I get 10 back, that's fantastic. I'll spend as many of those dollars as you want me to spend. And so, yeah, I'll keep, I'll turn the dial and go, right?

But those deals don't last long. And so figuring out where you can get your best return on investment, I've, I've experimented with Backer Kit. We didn't get quite the same results. And I've worked with other, other, you know, marketing partners before. I think it's, it's something I,

I certainly don't consider myself an expert at. I think my, the main thing that you've done to be successful to this point and that I think I, similar for me is like, hey, I've, I've, I've been around a while.

I've added value to a community consistently. I have an audience of people that I, you know, consistently communicate with and try to serve and they usually like the things that I make and they hopefully tell their friends. And that's been great, but to really hit the level of successes like you're talking about right now. And even some of the ones that we've done recently,

you do need to also learn some of the ins and outs of paid marketing because it's, you know, just the way the world turns. Yeah. And you would probably know better than I as far as using different advertisers and whatnot. So it's it's totally different. And the one thing I will say that I know about Baccarcad is that it changes. And they give you that report on what your return in advertising is. And you can ask for it daily.

or even mid-daily, and we can turn it down, as I said, or up based on it. And so you can have a goal, like, I don't want to spend more than this. And if it ever gets close to that or goes over that, you then turn down the amount that you're investing. And that goes with that inverse bell curve, too, with Kickstarter, because the first days are amazing and the last days are amazing. And then you have that middle slump that happens. And so you have to be careful with your advertising spending there as well.

So it's totally new and I'm totally green and being totally vulnerable. Sean is the lead on that because most of my effort is going down into community and design and response, et cetera, doing the things I'm doing with TKTV on our YouTube channel, that sort of thing. So I've been more about game design and the gorilla advertising and he's been taking the reins when it comes to being more of the numbers. Yeah, well, it's important to be able to divide the roles and lean into your strengths. know, that's definitely been another thing that I've learned over the years is like, I really, I can manage, you know, the operation side and getting things printed and getting things done. But I'm not as good at it as other people on my team.

And it drains me, right, I lose energy the more I do that stuff. But when I'm working on design, when I'm having conversations like this or I'm communicating with the audience, I love that stuff. I come alive. I love to teach. I love to be a part of it. You know, that's like, yeah, let's go. Yeah. And so the more I do that, the not only the better job I do, and the,

more I'm happy to work and do the job and the better other people can do the things that I'm not as good at, even though it can be scary to let go of control of those things or to have to rely on other people. I think it's really critical to being able to have huge, huge success and to be happy in the work that you do. Yeah. Well, to give you a very concrete answer then, the ROAS, return in advertisements, we try to keep it at three. So basically, yeah, that's our goal. And we're slightly over that right now. So we're tonally adjusting. But that goes into that whole, how much profit are we taking home?

Yeah, some of it goes to advertising, goes to royalties, manufacturing, a heck of a lot into shipping, et cetera. So at the end of the day, I think 30% is a fair guesstimation and how much will go back into the actual company. Well, I appreciate you sharing. So we've already run over time here. And I knew that was going to happen because there's so many things I wanted to talk to you about. we can talk forever yeah yeah so like you're probably the only game designer that i can think of that knows who tiesto is so like you and i are that similar i'm like oh my god you've been to a tiaso concert oh yeah i was just i was just there a month ago i was at edc vegas and uh he was

it was amazing uh yeah yeah ridiculous ridiculous so that's why like when i see you on facebook in your social media and whatever i'm like this guy's living a life that i can totally agree with Beautiful. I approve. Yeah, man. I honestly, it warms my heart to no end to have seen your journey and you have been a small touchstone on it. It is, it is fantastic.

And I'm very grateful for it. Bigger touchstone than you probably even realize, Justin, because you have given me a wonderful wife and so many stories and even legitimacy in the gaming community because so many people after that proposal video said, hey, you're that Ascension guy. And that led to more conversations and maybe I would have never met Sean. You never know,

the whole butterfly effect. If that hadn't happened, who knows. So probably more than you and maybe even I realize. All right. So there you go. Everybody out there,

you meet me, great success, guaranteed. That's the key. No, man, this is awesome. I am excited. We're definitely going to have to do another part too.

Either maybe I'll come on your podcast again for part two there also because there's so many more fun topics to cover. Absolutely. We are out of time here. So I believe that unfortunately by the time this is live, the mothership RPG will be over. I'm sure it will be, you know, many more successes in these final days. But if people want to find you, your stuff, your games, they're super excited about it. You've mentioned a few of these things already, but why don't you give the links or whatever

so people can come join and see all the fun? The easiest thing is just to Google Tuesday Night Games, and that's Knight spelled with a K. Like, ah, I'll save you, princess, whatever. And we own the domain for both of those, so it doesn't matter. But we have our web store. You can find all of our things there at Tuesdaynightgames.com. We have our YouTube channel. You just do Tuesday Night Games on YouTube.

But if you want Mothership specifically, we have the link, Survive, Save.com. and that takes you right to our Kickstarter or to our latest mothership happening. And that is based on the premise that when you play mothership, you can only do two of the following things, not three. You can never survive, solve, and save.

So pick two of those three and that's the whole premise of that. I love it. I love it. Thanks so much, Alan. I cannot wait. Thanks for having me. Yes. Nothing but appreciation.

This has been a real joy. Until next time. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platforms, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listener reviews and shares make a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast. Think like a game designer. In it, I give step-by-step

instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at think like a game designer.com or wherever find books are sold.