Think Like A Game Designer - Alan Phan — Charting New Territory: From First-time Game Ideas to Million-Dollar Kickstarters and The Power of Nostalgia in The Grand Archive (#37)

Episode Date: March 28, 2022

Alan Phan and his team recently launched a million-dollar Kickstarter for a trading card game called The Grand Archive. What’s amazing is that he and his friends had never made a trading card game before, so today we’re going to learn a little bit more about Alan and his story. Enjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry, with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. In today's episode, I speak with Alan Fan. Alan is one of the creators of the incredibly successful Grand Archive TCG that seemed to come out of nowhere. and raise almost a million dollars on Kickstarter. I was lucky enough to get connected to Alan through a mutual friend, and he had a bunch of questions and things because he has never made a trading card game before.

He and his friends were just magic players and anime enthusiasts who were excited about the genre and wanted to make something new. And boy, did they ever succeed at that. So I was committed to bringing him on the podcast to start digging through and finding out what happened, what were the keys to his success. How did he go from having no community to having a successful community that brought in a million dollars in, you know, just a few short months of when he started reaching out? So we dig in to his background, to the story, to how it all worked, to how he built his community, to what he's facing now and the challenges and what really goes behind the scenes when you see a small team of people getting a million dollars in and the grind that really comes in from that. The whole story we get into on this podcast.

and it's really great to get to highlight this because I spend a lot of time talking to people who've been doing this forever and have huge amounts of experience and have lessons from decades. And so this was a great story to be able to tell of a team that maybe just like a lot of you out there where you love games, you're passionate about it, you don't know how you can kind of take it to the next level and maybe create a thing that you've been dreaming about for a while. And so I want to share the success story and the ups and downs and the lessons that come from it. And it's really great to get to talk to Alan. He clearly has a good heart and is really trying to build something that he would love as a player, which is, I think, so important.

So there's a lot to dig in here. And I'll end the intro and let you hear Alan Fan. Hello and welcome. I am here with Alan Fan. Alan, I'm very excited to have you on the podcast. Hey, pleasure. A pleasure to be here. It's really exciting.

So, you know, happy to be here, Justin. Yeah. So to sort of give some context, you know, you first came on my radar. I saw your Kickstarter for the grand archive of TCG and was blown away. You guys raised nearly a million dollars on Kickstarter, presumably even more after the fact. And I'd never heard of you before. And that is very rare. I feel like I know most people that make TCGs in the, you know, especially at that scale. And I was like, who are these guys? And I kind of wasn't able to really figure it out. And I sort of put it out of mind. And then, Fortunately, we got connected through a mutual friend that sort of connected us and you had some questions. And once I heard more about you and learned more about you and your story, I was immediately like, okay, I have to get you on the podcast. I have to share these insights because from what I can tell, your story flies in the face of every piece of advice I give people in so many ways.

And so I really wanted to be able to highlight it and, you know, pull out some lessons and maybe some counterintuitive truths or things that I'm not always. aware of. And so, so yeah, so that's kind of the precursor to get people kind of hyped and excited. So, so why don't you, you kind of start when introducing yourself a little bit in your own origin story and what got you to, to this crazy level of success that you have now? Yeah, thank you. Yeah. I'd be having to talk about myself a little bit. And, you know, it's a pleasure being here. You know, finding out like, you know, who you are too. It was like, you know, a big shocker. I was like, oh, our mutual friend kind of like put us together.

And I was like, wait, this is actually great because you were part of the research. that you know that when we were forming our campaign idea, one of your projects is like, you know, one of the ones that we were doing the research on. So, you know, it's really great to be here. It's like about me. Basically, I am like the project manager. Like, I do a lot of the business development for Grand Archive.

And, you know, putting us out on like Kickstarter. It's like one of the things that I, my major project that I had worked on whenever we got things kind of rolling. Long story short, like, you know, I am a, you know, computer scientists. You know, I studied computer science. This was like a passion project that my friends and I kind of started.

Biggest thing was like we kind of recognized the trend of, you know, Kickstarter, you know, putting a TCG out on there. And we kind of thought that, you know what, I think we can make something like, you know, really quality. Let's put some time and effort, you know, some of our own money into it. This idea that we've had like on the back burner for a while. we've always kind of wanted to do R and TZG, and then now here we are.

So I think whatever sort of questions you have, I'm happy to answer to it. Yeah, oh, I got a bunch. Don't you worry. So look, there's plenty of people. I guarantee it. There are thousands of people that are listening to this right now that have had a similar moment to what you've had, right?

You and your friends, you're passionate about TCGs, but you've got other careers, and you're like, man, I really think we could make a great TCG, or I have this problem with this DCG, or I really think this should happen. But very, very, very few people are ever going to go to that next step and actually get the thing done, let alone, you know, launch a successful Kickstarter. Maybe tell me a story about that moment, right? What was the moment where you really felt like, no, no, this is something we can do.

And what, you know, how did you even figure out how to get started? Yeah, I mean, so that things was like way back. I mean, like, my friend and I, our common passion is that we love games. game development, game design. It's like basically his big thing. And he's always talked to me about, you know, having an idea, like, you know, let's, you know, let's, you know, let's, you know, let's, you know, let's make a game.

And then we were just like, you know, I think like we could do something like really cool. And, you know, we tried it out. And then the more that I had thought about it, I guess it's like my inner desire to like, you know, do something like, you always kind of want to do like something greater than yourself, right? Like, you know, make like a big project or anything.

It was just like, you know, why not put 100% into it? Just life's like life's a big gamble, right? So you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. And that kind of spurred the spark. And we just put in the effort. I think we got really lucky. Like, you know, luck is a big part of it. We entered in the market kind of like at the right time.

And then that's like kind of what contributed like, you know, to the success there. Yeah. if I'm rambling. I might have... No, no, it's fine. Any... I'm gonna keep preparing you with questions because I want to dig deep. So, you know, A, of course, you know, any level of...

Anytime anybody succeeds at a super high level luck is a part of it, right? But there's... Right. I'll say the same for many aspects of my success. It's just... But there's also huge amounts of preparation mindset and hard work that are prerequisites to being lucky, quote unquote. Yeah.

So one aspect, obviously, you know, you kind of gave that that Wayne Gretsky quote, which I love, but, you know, you miss a hundred percent of shots you don't take and you took a mindset of you know look yeah you the risk of doing this and failing is far less than the risk of never trying right never six never really doing something that you're excited about and passionate about and that's something I really just always want to underscore for people like I know what that feels like both when I quit law school to become a game designer when I quit my job as a game designer start my own company and launch my own projects every time it was terrifying and I kept thinking I was going to you know what if I fail but that flipping that around and

saying, well, what if I never try? What if I don't ever do anything that I really make an effort to make something that stands a test of time or that I'm passionate about, build a community? And so it's great that you had that attitude. What do you think that came from? Because, again, it's not common. What do you think gave you that, that, what do you think that spark came from? Right. I mean, you know, for me personally, it's more of like, there are just some things in life that, you know, you'll never be satisfied with. And then that we kind of, our biggest things that we love anime, right? I'm not, I'm not hiding that fact.

I love anime, Japanese, you know, for people who don't know, like, what anime is, they're amazing, like, you know, check it out. They're Japanese, like, animations, like, similar to, you know, people in the U.S. could call them, like, cartoons, you know, whatever. But they're, like, these, like, animated shows

that explore different worlds and stories, you know, things like beyond our, like, wildest imaginations. And it's just, like, we wanted, to have some piece of that some way and then it would like you said like it's the the risk like you know the the risk of not being a part of it to me is more detrimental than not you know like you know never trying and not knowing what it's worth like knowing the feeling of like you know trying for something that you're passionate about it's like I couldn't ever imagine like living my life that

way right so um biggest part like put that spark under us was like we want to make something bigger than just the card game one day and that this was like a part of it and if we never do this we'll never get anywhere close to like what our dreams are. So it's just that's that was the main driver for like what

kind of started the project off having just like by having an anime card game that like doesn't exist right now. There wasn't one there was one that like you know they're not very like very good I would say in terms of

like, you know, organized play, community. Like, no one's like, you know, there's nothing going on. Like, you know, why not just do it ourselves and, you know, have something that we can be proud of that is part of the things that, you know, that part of the world that we love. So, you know, that's kind of like what started everything. Yeah. So you're passionate about anime.

You love TCGs. You don't find in the market there's no good anime TCGs. and or they don't have all the features that you're looking for. So you start working on it. And then where, what does that look like? You're, you're hanging out and playtesting with your friends or you, you're you and your partner,

you're recruiting other people in your community. Like at what point do you decide, you know, you're working on the game and you start saying, okay, yeah, we're really, we're really making this. Yeah, I mean, it was,

it basically came to, we were, you know, obviously we had some other ideas, they were bad and we like be like scrapped it. Most important thing was like, is it fun? Right?

Like the most important part was like one, it does not, it doesn't have to be just an anime card game. Like it's, it is a TCG that is fun and that you would play with your friends. You would invite over to your house and have fun. And it was like the one night that my friends and I,

you know, we were just running through idea at our local shop. You know, we printed out some like proxies. Just, you know, we were just taking like, you know, like just taking

out different ideas that we had and were testing them out. Eventually we came across one that was like, wait, I want to play this again, like, a lot. And it was at that moment that we were like,

this game is like really fun to us. You know, like we kept trying out. We really loved it. And we had some other of our friends play it. And they're like, hey, you know, this is actually like really cool idea. And

I think we kind of got, we kind of became in love with the idea of like, you know, this game's a lot of fun and we want to, you know, maybe that's when we kind of decided like, let's try to take it like, you know, to the next step, you know, if we think it's fun, then while looking at it objectively, of course,

like, you know, but, you know, there's always going to be some bias. There's always bias in these things, but like, we were like, yeah, like, let's just, let's just try it. I mean, this game's a lot of fun and we want to keep playing, right? So hopefully other people feel the same way. Yeah, well, having a good core experience is the most important thing, right? If the game's not fun, the rest of it is going to fall apart.

You can put all the work in it you want. So that's definitely, you know, you're speaking. You're preaching to the choir on that one here. But often before somebody is going to go launch a Kickstarter on a project, even if the game is fun, I very strongly advised they spend a good amount of time. It will either like first try to work with a partner or publisher or somebody else that has experience so you can learn that way, or at the very, at least spend a lot of time building your audience,

build a community that you then you add value to and then over time and then you can launch a Kickstarter and sell to them. But as far as I recall, I could tell that I didn't, I hadn't heard about you guys before. And certainly what, what, but what did you do to build that community or what do you think contributed to the success of your Kickstarter in this case?

Yeah. So when we came to like Kickstarter and we put up like a website for our game, and we're kind of getting things off the ground. I think we did, oddly enough, we ran like a couple of Facebook ads to like just kind of get the site promoted just to test things out a little bit.

And we've worked on, like, you know, different, like, projects of the past. And we were kind of using, like, our old experiences, obviously, like, things that I've learned from my internships and then from other mentors that I've had in the past. I used to do, like, I was, in business school at one point. And then one of the things I like my mentor told me and the things that I've learned from him, you know, about business. We were just testing out

like a lot of different things. Do you mind being a little bit more specific with that? Because, you know, this is one area where I always try to dig out where people's superpowers are. And you're background here seems like it's coming. You said you've got these great lessons from your mentor or things you picked up from business school. A lot of game designers have none of that access to none of that stuff. So what maybe, you know, kind of top two or three lessons come to mind that you were able to apply here that that that helped you succeed. Yeah, I mean, the biggest lessons that I learned from my time there was if I was risk management and then looking at your, you know, obviously if things were worth it and, you know,

a lot of it I learned like, it's part of like just luck and learning how to also manage your cash flow and like your, the amount of income that we had at the time, obviously we're paying for everything out of pocket. So, I mean, it was like things like that that ended up like attributing to like the decisions that we made. If we felt bad about losing $20, then you probably like should think about how bad it would feel if, you know, you didn't spend that money.

It's like things like that that ended up attributing to like the decisions that we made like overall in the end. I didn't spend very long. business school, so I don't really have like, you know, any like super big lessons, but I guess I think that I got from my mentors was like they were always into, like, they believed in their ideas and they believed like with anything, like, you know, do a lot of great research. There's a lot of great projects out there.

Somewhere or another, you learn to learn lessons from like other people who are also doing great things. I mean, I'm not sure if I'm like answering the question directly. So let me try to reflect back here what I'm hearing. So just to sort of tease out the principles. So one, on one level, understanding risk management, what I hear from that is that you, you know, you set aside budgets. You know that you can't guarantee success or return on an investment. And so you expect to spend some budget making educated guesses about what's going to work and what isn't. And then you measure those returns and then see what happens. And if you could find something that gives a good return, great, double down.

If you find something that doesn't, you don't let that stop you from experimenting because that's part of the process. Is that kind of summarize a little bit? What, you know, yeah, you put it in a way more eloquent way than me. I'm sorry, I'm not like the super the best of this stuff. It's fine. That's the fun. That's the fun of the podcast, right?

I know that there's, you know, you're sharing gold here and I, uh, I want to help to dig it out, you know? Yeah, yeah. And so did you have a budget in mind? Like when, did you guys commit to a budget up front and kind of spec it out? Or was it just kind of a let's see how it goes. Did it did that? Was that what was the you know, you can give specifics if you want,

but just want to understand it was like in principle where you were on that. On how much you were spending here. Yeah. So, I mean, the important thing for us was like, I can't exactly remember how much we were, you know, spending. But I know for a fact that if it's like, since we were paying things like out of pocket, if I couldn't contribute, I would make it very clear. Also, communication with your team is some of the most important things that you could have

for any sort of project to be successful, right? I think that's a given. And whenever I couldn't contribute something, I made sure the team to know that this amount of money was too much for me at this time. And just being realistic, if you shouldn't put yourself in a place where you could end up in a bad financial situation where you can't recover. I think that's part of that risk management thing.

But, you know, the amount of... You would judge it as you went what you were able to spend knowing you were never going to put yourself at risk of bankruptcy or anything like that, but you would kind of just as you go, be like, okay, I can spend another couple thousand dollars here, a couple hundred dollars here or whatever it was at scale. Yeah, exactly. You would kind of keep assessing as you went along.

Right. Okay. So, I mean, at this, I mean, the point in time that my friend who is, a bit more, was more successfully, financially successful than I was. He was willing to put in the money as long as I put in the work, right? So as long as we both, we were both working on it

and if, you know, we needed to do something that was a little bit more costly, you know, he was able to be, like, able to do so in that way. Or he was like, you know, we wanted, like, prototypes printed or you know, we needed like, you know, maybe some

for, especially for like the the UI, like on your cards, right? Like, you, we wanted to like have like you know what if we make it look really nice test out different designs and that's kind of the things that you know we were like oh wow these look great like you know we love this we love that and then uh i mean that that was something that was like attributing to like our success there right we weren't some of us were in better financial positions where we could you know take risk and feel okay about it right if we if we didn't make the money back on it it was something that you know nobody was going to suffer from yeah

You were, yeah, you only put in the middle of what you're willing to lose, right? And so, because when you talk about risk management, right, I didn't go to business school, but I did, you know, play pro poker for a little while, and I studied poker theory. And I found poker theory to be incredibly valuable when it came to business risk management assessment, right? You never know any given bet, you can lose, right? But you want to, if you consistently put money in on bets for you, the odds are in your favor, eventually you're going to win so long as you don't run out of money. So you've got to manage your bank role and you've got to be able to assess properly,

which bets make sense. And when you know you, the odds are in your favor and you're pretty confident. You're never 100%. But you're pretty confident. Then you really push as much as you can afford. So when it comes to this communication, you mentioned the importance of communication with your team. And you've mentioned that you have a friend who is kind of your main partner. How many people are we talking about when you say team at this stage?

Yeah. So at this stage, we're looking about five people. or there's, we have our, you know, art, we give each other, we don't really have titles, but we have our art director, I'm the project manager, my friend with the biggest financial contribution, he's also like the CEO of the company. And then we have also another marketing guy. He does, like, you know, manages all the sort of like products, like the additional products that we have, like, you know, posters, things like that.

those done and gets this out to events and stuff. And then we have another game designer, one who's more dedicated just to doing game design. But in the end, everyone works on the game design, right? We all share our feedback communication is key. And being a small team, you know, you can't, we don't really have the capital to like, you know, realistically say that, you know, to pay somebody and be like, hey, you can spend your life doing this.

We'll support you and like, you know, your family, whatever. We're not at that point yet. So, you know, everyone kind of understands like where the company is at at this point that everything is kind of for. We've all kind of like reinvested like any sort of money that we could have made into the company, which is like what we felt like was smarter. But yeah, no, it's important. It's important to highlight a couple of these things, right? One, this is 100% true.

It's still true for me to this day, right? We have a small team. I keep it small. And we have, you know, everybody kind of does a little. bit of everything still, you know, people have clear roles and responsibilities, but everybody contributes and that, that as everybody's pulling together towards a common goal. It's also really important to highlight you just mentioned, like for most people listening, when I said, hey, you guys did a million dollar Kickstarter. In people's heads, you're just rolling

in dough and you've got your yacht on the beach, you know, by the beach and everything's going great, right? And it is so far from the truth, right? It's so like, you're, you, there's so much that goes into, especially for a team like yours where you've never done anything like this before, the logistics, the cost, the management to do it, like, it's not easy. And it's a very, very expensive process to deliver on all those promises that, you know, because it's not like you have the million dollars and it's done. It's the million dollars is a commitment to get it done. And so I think it's worth really highlighting that for people. I mean, I lost money on, my first Kickstarter was half a million dollars. And I lost, I almost lost my whole company because

of it because it costs so much to make what we actually promised. So I learned a lot of those lessons the hard way. And it's part of why we first started talking is I wanted to help you learn those lessons a little deeper. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So obviously, I was like, oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to catch you off there. You go ahead.

Yeah, yeah. I was saying like, you know, I felt like there was a lot of, initially like there was a lot of feedback like online. People were saying that, you know, these guys are, you know, they could scam you. They could run away with the money and that's a part of the risk. And like, it was, it was crazy to me because I was doing research. When I was doing research, there are some projects that I was like, wow, like, you know, this is really crazy. They've raised a lot of money where, you know, I'm not sure.

Like, if I would put my own money into this, like, this looks like a little suspicious to me. And then, you know, a month later, here we are. Like, people are saying the same thing about us. And I was like, oh, man. But, you know, doing these things, like take a lot of money and a lot of time and, like, commitment. And then one thing that we kind of said, that was just something that we had already known. And what was more important for us was another amount of money that we can make,

like, off of Kickstarter was to make sure that we weren't going to give any empty promises. So anything that we put out on Kickstarter, we knew that, you know, we would be able to deliver. If we couldn't deliver it, then we wouldn't really offer it. Being realistic with your goals was like, we have realistic with our goals was like the most important thing for us. Getting in over our heads is something that we want to,

avoid at all costs and, you know, doing your research and trying to avoid that is super important. So important. Yeah. So doing that tons of research. You mentioned you researched a lot of other kickstarters. You research the production process. You research replaced in the market. You've tested research on different advertising as well. So a lot of that stuff is just so critical. Again, this this overnight success from a lot of people's perspectives is anything but overnight. Those principles are really important to highlight. And so you, there's a lot of threads I could pull on here, but I'm most intrigued in your, so you're, you have some background in, in internet marketing or somebody on your team does, right, to be testing Facebook ads primarily. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, but I don't think they're super difficult. I mean, obviously, like, there's a lot that goes into it, but, you know, we were testing out just like what we had available to us. Like, you can start on Facebook, like, you know, either your business suite and go and try to test ads like from there.

putting in like different sort of keywords, like things that people search up. It's a, so it wasn't anything that, you know, we were experts in, but somebody had to do it, right?

So yeah. And then, and so this is before the campaign starts. So you're just driving traffic to your website or to a pre-sign up page or something? Yeah. It was to our Discord. So the,

at the time we had like a website up. We did a little bit of ads. So the, some people saw the ad, joined the discord. and oddly enough, this is like where I think I attribute luck to is it's like one person kind of joined

saw that the game was really interesting, had a brief conversation with us and was like, you know what, I think I'll bring my friends into it and then word of mouth ended up spreading. We kind of went like a little bit viral in like the trading card community and a lot of people ended up joining the server that day and then we weren't really prepared

for it, but we did the best that we could. So what does what does what does viral look like here? Like where when you say viral in the community, what does that mean in reality? What are the specific sites or groups that came in? Yeah. I mean in the like I would say like the trading card like community people who have been like interested in the recent like flesh and blood, magic the gathering. I think it just happened to be like somebody who was also interested in of those things.

That's kind of like what the key words like we kind of. ran for, right? You know, in, like, what I mean by viral, we went from having about zero people in the server, like, or four people, like, you know, my team, like the only people in there, into probably, like, I think, like, 600,

like within, I would say, probably, like, the span of, like, two hours or so. Wow. Yeah, more and more people kept joining, and then, you know, friends bringing other friends and then bigger groups bringing in like bigger groups and it really grew like exponentially um so that was like on on discord and you know we really got caught off guard with that like you know we i can check like maybe our numbers right now is insane while you're

looking that up i'm just going to just going to react like the jumping to 600 like that in hours is so that i mean that shows a level of traction that is i've never even heard of i mean we have a Stoneblade Discord that we started up about two years ago now, a year and a half, right? You know, kind of started the pandemic, actually, because it was our main, now new mechanism to actually talk to people. And it's got, I don't know, a couple thousand people in it today. Like, so we're not even, even, I'm sure you got, you guys must have eclips,

and bounds at this point. So I'm really curious, you know, you said luck, but you can maybe share some of the specific numbers if you're able to see them. But then I, I'd love to get, dive deeper into what. what resonated with people? Is it that core premise of an anime TCG? Is there something else specific about what your message was that was like, when people joined, they said, oh, I'm here because of this.

Right. And so speak of the numbers a little bit, right now we're sitting about about 1,400 people in the server. So in total with like a, currently we have about like 500 online at a time. And I think like the one thing that people, All we said when they joined the server was like, oh, these cards look really good. So the initial website that we have were at grandarchivePCG.com.

We had done like, you know, we put like some initial cards that we had created, some of like the things that, you know, we were like, okay, we would be proud showing this, even if it's the prototype. And it looks really good. Our MVP, our minimum viable product was something that we looked at. We're like, okay, we could be proud of this.

is this was like if somebody saw us like online or playing at the store with cards that looked like this, we would be okay. And so when we put it out on there, I think more people are also interested in anime than like they have been in the past. So once people saw it, they were like, I really love how these cards look.

They kind of fit the bill of an anime card game in the West. There have been anime card games in the East, but not everybody loves the way that those games play compared to like, you know, what we're used to over here in the West with like Magic the Gathering and, you know,

flesh and blood, like those types of games and stuff, right? So that's like, I think what's also like had attributed to our virality. I think we met like a really we found a really nice niche in like the market that we were kind of aware of. And we weren't really aware of how much traction and how much

interested that would make people at the time. So yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, you know, one of the things you guys have a deep, longstanding love for many, many years of both anime and,

you know, magic and games of that genre of TCGs. And so you're able to bring that passion together. Right? And I have to talk about creativity as just being the combining of two different things in a way that hasn't happened before. So Western style TCGs that are clean and easy to pick up with anime style visuals that are executed well.

And you guys brought that together. where you now, so now the puzzle pieces are starting to come together for me a little bit because, you know, you test some marketing and then you see this viral traction, right? Because I always, I caution people against trying to buy users. It can be valuable, right? It can be. And you guys hit that secret sauce. But when you, you know, spending some money to buy users who then bring in other people and bring that virality, that is a great trait. And that's a great sign for success where I could see that as like, okay, yeah, we're probably in a good place to run a, to run a Kickstarter at this point.

I imagine your enthusiasm level jump pretty dramatically once you saw those numbers. Yeah, I mean, I was, I mean, like I said, like, as much as like, you know, we knew about the market and that we knew that, you know, there's probably a lot of people online that, like, would really like something like this. We never expected it's like, you know, like people get caught up with like, you know, thousands and like, you know, 10,000 and like the amount of usability, you never have like just like 600 people trying to talk to you all at once. And that's like, at that moment, we were like,

I think, you know, like, this is way bigger than like what we could have, like, gotten. And, you know, like, especially in our, for our Kickstarter, I'll share this, whenever we were, we obviously knew, like, how kind of Kickstarter works. And based on, like, all the research that I did, it was like, you kind of set a low goal and hope you go, like, really far over it. And that's great for, like, your page. or algorithm, like whatever,

things that you are aware of that are, like, important to success, right? So we were only, we were hoping at least, like, we set a goal for $50,000 to obviously, I hope to make more than that. Because you need a lot of money to obviously make things, to make something like this,

to make a project, like you mentioned for SoulForge, like you made, you did about like $500,000, which is like, it almost wasn't enough. It almost put you guys, like, making the product itself and delivering, on everything, could have almost put you out of business. So we knew, like, there was a lot of risk in, like, doing something like that, especially if you deliver on a goal without, you know,

really meeting, like, what, the actual goal that you needed. You know, so we, I don't know, like, the people were crazy at that point. Like, we didn't expect to go to, I think we broke, like, a Kickstarter record. I think we went. For a trading card game, we raised over $500,000, I think, like, or no, No, it's like $50,000, like, within the first, like, oh, man, I can't remember. I'm sorry. It was some.

Your numbers are clearly impressive here. You know, we already. It was, it was some crazy number, though, you know, like, these weren't things that we'd ever, like, expected. You can't expect things like that says, like, what I'm trying to get at. And so it was like, well, and so this is the thing that's really interesting to me, too, because it's not actually that many backers, right? I mean, it's a decent number, 1500 backers, right? Right. So people gave a lot of money to the campaign. And so now that we've talked about kind of, now I have a pretty good picture of like how you got your users and what the core principle was of the, you know, the core premise and the pitch for the game and why people came in. So now I love to shift to like, what do you think push people to go so deep into the game and kind of contribute? I can not do the math on top of my head, but a very, very high amount per user, bigger than almost anything, I think.

I've seen in the space. So, you know, when making a TCG, like it's a trading card game, a lot of people collect these games and, you know, stuff like that, right? I spent a lot of time at LGS. I've been

worked at one. And so one of the things I notice, like, I think what attributed to is, like, people probably spend more money than you think, like, on collectibles. Like the collectibles market, there's an obvious boom and increase ever since, like, COVID happened. Oddly enough, You know, people were seeing the prices, like prices of like old things that,

like I would say a great example is probably like Pokemon cards and stuff, right? So like they're, they have these old cards. They need money. Someone at some point in time probably told them it was worth something. So when they tried to go sell it, it was worth a lot of money, like way more than they thought. So more and more people realize that that attributes to like, you know, a lot of other people being like, man, I wish I got into that earlier. And I think a lot of those feelings and those things kind of attributed to how much people

were spending on our campaign. So I hope most of the people that were spending a lot, I think, probably felt like they'd rather invest into the game and the game looks fun, the project looks good. I'd rather invest into it now. If I lose this money and this campaign doesn't happen or like, you know, the Kickstarter doesn't go through, then at least. I lost out on this much instead of losing out on the potential

game they could have gotten later. Yeah, the FOMO is real. FOMO is real, yeah. So, like, it's, I think a lot of those feelings attributed to, like, you know, why Kickstarter TCGs are doing so well, a lot of people are worrying that they might miss out on the next big thing.

And, you know, we can only, we consistently try to improve, like, our product, like, making the game better, how can we make this the best and make these people feel like they got their value back. And not only in a fun game, but in how can we make this popular? And one thing that we always commit, like, we always think about it's like, how can we make this game popular enough to not only give it some collectible value, you know, people buying and selling cards singles on the market and opening product,

and while making a game that is also really fun, right? I mean, it's just like one of the things that we knew was like, you know, there had to be a business behind the fun game itself. So we knew that, you know, we made some, like, things that we noticed from, like, old trends that we've noticed in, like, magic the gathering, like, things that they moved away to them. Things that we personally didn't really like was also, like, something that we kind of made, like, decisions on.

So, like, um, foils, like, for example, like, I think almost all the current card games, you are guaranteed a foil in every pack that you, opened. And then one of the things that my friend and I personally loved was like, when you got a foil back in the day, it was really exciting. It was really, really cool to get a foil in addition to your other cards. And if you got like the highest rarity foil, that was like the jackpot. And then everyone got excited. Like in the LGS, I remember like when people opened boxes, like we would have like a great time just like seeing what

everybody was able to get and like, what foils were pulled if somebody pulled something crazy. Everything was really like, like hype, I guess. And then we kind of wanted to bring that back. So in the end, like we made the game more collectible. It just also like,

I think why people invested more in the Kickstarter too. So, you know, they're also making their collectible investment. Yeah. So I'm excited to dig into a few things there. One, just sort of the,

uh, kind of underscore the counterintuitive thing for a lot of people about how well TcGs and collectibles have done during COVID. In a certain sense, you know, you can't get together and play with people or couldn't for a very long time and still can't in many regions to play TCGs. So you'd think, well, these are not going to be doing as well. You know, organized play was shut down, everything. But the exact opposite has happened, right?

Magic has had its biggest year, is ever. It's grown like 35 percent something year over year. I think they reported nearly a billion dollars in revenue. That includes the digital version, but it's insane. The, you know, things like, I think games like Flesh and Blood would not have nearly had the level of like insanity and initial burst of collectibility and pricing and everything, if not for this trend and seeing the, you know, Pokemon cards and everything go up. So, so you guys, I think, did get to capitalize on that trend in a certain degree. But I want to dig into the, again, the specifics of the choices that you made. because you mentioned, you know,

making foils more rare and harder to get. You have, I think, a rarity reports that you're giving, where you, you know, you give people the exact concrete number of how much, of any given card exists and how many products are being printed, which I don't think anybody really does or I've never heard of.

I certainly, so what drove you to pick, you know, for those other items or what other things do you think are, other people should be thinking about when they're, if they're thinking about making their own TCG, you know, you have like,

or artist sign cards and other cool things. Like, what do you think is, is, is, is, is, is, is, good tips or what's worked well,

uh, in that space to really drive rarity and collection as the, as an excitement element, as a fun game in a many ways in and of itself, uh, which is often not, you know, my,

my default mode is always like, okay, well, I want the game to be fun. And yes, opening packs and discovering things is part of the fun, but, but you guys really seem to,

to, to dial in on that in a way, I haven't seen in a while. Yeah, I mean, like, so the question is, like, what, what can people learn, like, to, you know, when making, like, something more collectible, like, how to, like, you know, to make the, well, not, like, compromising anything of, like, of their game, right?

Right. That's where I was hearing. So, one of the things that was important to us was, like, you know, competitive play and, like, being, like, obviously, my favorite experience was, like, going to, like, you know, I don't think they call these any words, like, GPs like back in the day and for like magic the gathering.

So you wouldn't really want to lose to somebody who has like a card that is only available in one way. It was also really hard to attain but it's also very powerful. Right. So the most important thing for, I think

for anyone who's like trying to make their game more collectible is to not sacrifice your competitive integrity and to don't sacrifice the game's integrity. Don't make it things hard to get because and also very powerful.

I think a lot of people kind of miss that fact. If you lock somebody out behind a giant paywall, eventually people are going to really, really be upset and not enjoy your game and also hate you. And that's not good. In my opinion,

it doesn't seem good if people don't like your game and hate you, that does seem like a bad outcome. But if you're like, if your goal is to make a fun game that people will continue to play. I see it is that if you are doing so, if somebody is doing something in that way, you are more interested in the dollar amount

that you can get back. Like your amount of revenue that you can make back by creating something like that. And then if you realize that, my opinion is that other people will probably also realize the same thing that you realize. So, you know, it really depends on your message that you want. Like the, what we wanted to remind people

It was just like, kind of like the good old days and the memories that we had of like growing up opening like these like, you know, I just thought it'd be really cool. We thought it would be really cool if like we had signed cards. We also thought like, oh, why not know what number card that you have? Like you have the first copy like ever printed. You know, like because we have serialized cards, right? So one of the decisions making that was just like it doesn't sacrifice the game's, you know, integrity. and it also is something that we would have wanted and something that was cool

and doesn't sacrifice you know yeah it doesn't make the game fun right so you say you're serialized you're just talking about your super rare cards being serialized here not all of them right or does every card have a this is the 10,000 version of this

we're talking about like the the big ticket like items so like our collector rare where it has the artist you need signed card also with like the serialized number on there right and got it it was just something that we felt like maybe the market was missing like we didn't really know like you know why people weren't doing it like why magic wasn't doing it why flesh and blood didn't do it and so we were just like

why not we would like it why not why don't we do it you know yeah no it's funny that you mentioned that because this is another thing we encountered with Soul Forge Fusion because we're actually you know we're digitally printing every single deck as a unique one-of-a-kind thing with the way we're printing it. And so we actually took, we did exactly this thing, but every single deck that you ever receive is numbered. So all of them tell you, like, which version of this it is, which deck number it was that was printed.

And so there's like this thing was impossible to do with traditional printing, which we were pretty excited about to be able to do. So you can actually know which deck in the print run, which cards do you have compared to everybody else. So it's a really cool feature, which again, we all had the same reaction you did. It's like neat to know. It doesn't impact gameplay. It doesn't, but it's like kind of cool to know,

hey, I got the first version of this ever made or I got the, you know, first version of this particular card that was ever printed or whatever. So that's very cool. Yeah. It was just like one of the things that, you know,

over time I continue to notice like, you know, for me was important. My, I attribute a lot of like the decision that we made to my time at an LGS. Like I, you know, you maybe not notice it,

but the shop clerk probably, watches what you do more than, you know, more than you think. We're not just checking you out. We're like, we noticed, I noticed a lot of things going in and out of the store, what people were buying. When I asked people how they felt about a product, like, you know, you make mental notes like over time. Like, you hear a lot of common answers. You hear a lot of things that people wish they had. And it says that if we, I think we paid enough attention to those things where we were like, hey, I think, you know, like I said, I think like the collector's things like a lot of other people kind of the like a serialized number.

A lot of people other were like, oh yeah, that's really cool. I wish we had those things, you know. I wish we knew how many of these cards in print and then what would make it easier to sell, right? Like working at LGS doing the pricing, like, you know, one of my coworkers are doing pricing. It's just like it's nice to know how much of these actually exists and how much demand, like how many people are actually buying it. like, if it wasn't important, I don't think TCG player would probably tell you

how much things are sold for. And you can check, like, this land, there's like a market price history, you know, these things that we probably didn't have, like,

a long time ago, like, people now know, like, there's like price histories and everything, conditions sold. You can see, like, what's really in demand or what people are wanting.

speaking of anime stuff before I mentioned our game was focused on anime we'd also notice the really big moment that we noticed that we could really enter the market was like Matt in the Gathering kind of dipped their toes in that with sets like was it they

I'm Strick's Haven the Japanese set sold like hotcakes a lot of people bought into those cards so they like a lot of people bought into those cards so they love that art and they love like that Japanese like flavor and no that's also like why like why we felt we could enter the market at that time we just were always kind of like consistently watching these things and like gave our idea like more validation over time as well so I might have been I might be rambling at this point but yeah no no no it's great I mean I think that

you know also just learning more about your background like great but working at her at a at a game store and paying attention to the people that are around you and even for people out there that are, you know, whether you're working at a game store or you just spend time there, really focusing on what is it that people are excited about? What is it that people say consistently? It's like, oh, if only, I love this game, but or, man, wouldn't it be cool if, right? And keeping your eyes open and noting those things and ideally writing them down. And, you know, so that over time when you're like, oh, hey, now I could combine this idea with this idea. And, you know, anime did really well. And, and is anime people that are fanatical collectors,

just like TCG players or fanatical collectors. And so what can we do to make this more collectible and make the collectibility fun again, right? The process of opening packs and discovering things and hoping that you get the amazing, cool card being really exciting and fun is an important, it's a whole other game you're designing in a lot of ways, in addition to the fun play of I actually have my deck and I'm playing my deck or building my deck.

The discovery and exploration is one of the main reasons that people play trading card games. and it's the thing that differentiates it from, you know, just a traditional fixed box kind of tabletop game. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was, I don't know, like, you know, the trading aspect is like one of the things that I loved because you also interact with other people.

So I remember, like, nowadays, it's like a lot of what I notice, when I do, like, any sort of trade anybody, it's like, foils are so overdone in a lot of games where they're like, they're, nowadays, especially, to like collectors, like products. There's like a lot of, like, I go back to Magic the Gathering because we went in one of the lessons, you know, from them. They're like, they've been around for a very long time, right?

So I realize a lot of my like personal friends had didn't really like the, um, like some of the collectors products where it's like everything was foil or really shiny and it was really cool, but, you know, it didn't really feel great when you felt like you had a rare card. And once you kind of looked it up on the internet. that your foil isn't really worth much anymore. It's just a shiny piece of cardboard that probably a lot of other people have. And I think that kind of ruins the fun of it.

Like I spoke before, like on our experience, my initial experiences with like opening, like, you know, seeing people open like a foil and being really excited because it was, it was rare. And once you do away with that, then like the kind of, a lot of the fun kind of like disappeared. So I think that it's a lot of great insights that, you know, the scarcity itself can be provide the value, right? A thing that seems cool at first, if you get too much of it, it's not as cool.

And so, you know, a lot of people, you know, and it's important to highlight that shift of like the scarcity for gameplay power is a big turn off for a lot of players, myself certainly included. And but scarcity for, you know, shiny show things off and cool new thing that you don't get to experience. a lot or hopeful dream that you can find these cool one-of-a-kind experiences is a great thing. And is a net positive for players and collectors alike. It also means your game is more likely to attract more types of people and thus survive and extend further. So maybe we'll just shift then to talking about what's next for you guys. And what are you, you know, you're in the middle of executing this process.

you're staying engaged with your community. There's still just a team of five of you. Is that still correct? Right. Yeah. The team of five right now, while we may seem like small, but it's just, like I said,

you know, promising to like, dealing with like another employee is also to us something like being able to support their lives, like as a business. You know, we would love to, we couldn't really ask anybody

like to quit their jobs and come to do this. with us. Like, it's a trying to keep like, you know, like I said, like risk at a very minimum. We don't want to hurt the people that we care about or anybody that would have come to like work for us, right? Because it's risky. Startus are just risky

in itself. And our sort of next big goals obviously is to one, finish production of the product, two, to focus down on like organized play while working on the next couple of sets.

We have ideas for those already, but our biggest thing that people cared about a lot was organized playing and that we really cared about having some sort of competitive aspect to it. So we're trying to find the best solution to that. We contacted a bunch of local game stores across the US to kind of get them interested, show them that we care about their store

and that we're going to have a decent tournament software, how are they going to be able to get players rewards, you know, what are players going to be playing for? Where's the competitive aspect? What's happening? And then

after that, yeah, continue just to pump out a solid sets, not a lot of sets, but, you know, a solid, come up with, like, continue to make, like, unique ideas. You know, maybe that's a little too broad yeah yeah so it's not a guy i got a little too broad there maybe but um for our immediate

you know plans so i i'm speaking of like probably like the next like six months or so that's what we're looking at yeah yeah no it's i'm i'm really eager to see the the progress and see how it all plays out and of course um you know it's it's just it's been great to see you get here and i i appreciate how you look at this, right? A lot of, you know, being very, you know, hopeful and work hard, but be, you know, cautious and especially managing overhead. I know what that is like. And when, you know, there's nothing worse than having to lay people off.

And, you know, I've had to go through that. It's really just one of the worst experiences I've ever, I've ever gone through. And I'm very, very conscious of making sure that we keep our overhead as low as possible to be able to deliver on what we need to deliver. And only when we're really, you know, confident and absolutely. need more staff that we staff up because it's, you know, those responsibilities are serious. You're taking, you know, people's, I don't, I don't really stress anymore about my

own life and ability to support myself, but I very much stress about everybody on my team and making sure that they, you know, can feed their families and that they have, you know, some job security. And so every time I had someone new, it's like an extra giant weight I put on my back and then I got to carry around. And so it's great. And I love to have it, but it's, you've, you've had that insight early. earlier than I did.

So I apologize you for that. Yeah. It's just, I think, I think sometimes people forget that, you know, when you pay somebody to do a job, when you do anything, when you work with somebody else, you're not working with just like,

especially being on the internet, you're not working with, you can't forget that you're working with another person. And that games, like trading card games while they're being collected and played remember that they're always being played by people

people build without the people nobody will you can never succeed right so I think it's just important to never forget those things and that's sort of a philosophy for the whole team has kind of carried that no matter what at the end

of the day we you need to take care of yourself you need to remember that you're doing like you're being a proper human being. So it's just like don't forget those things, right? Yeah, yeah. Don't forget to be human.

That's a great place to leave it. I think it's just one of the things that I know, you know, again, it's just for my lots of experience in the industry, right? It's all about how you treat people. And that's true for your coworkers. It's true for your employers, employees. And it's true for your communities, right? You're going to make mistakes.

there's going to be challenges. And if you're good with people and communicative and take other people's interests and really care about others and try to serve others, then in the long run, you're going to be successful regardless of you. You can't predict exactly how and where and what that road's going to be, but I found that to be very, very true for everybody that I know. And so you clearly have that ethos. And so I'm rooting for you, man.

I appreciate it. Appreciate it. And so if my audience here, anybody listening, wants to come join you for the ride, My guess is join the Discord is the piece of advice. But why don't you tell where they can find you and what they should do if they want to join the Grand Archive community? Yeah. You know, please check out our website, grandarchivetcg.com.

Super simple. We have a button that says join our Discord server. Feel free to join. You can ping me at me. I don't really have any rules against that on there. Just if I don't get back your message, I'm sorry. But I love to talk to anybody who's interested in the game and tell them like, you know, our philosophy is,

our ideas like, just like the conversation I'm having adjusted here, it's, you know, I like to never forget, like, where we come from. So, join us on, uh, growing up at Discord. You can also check out our Facebook, um, Instagram, uh, Twitter. We post, uh, art updates regularly and, uh, we always share. We try to keep the updates super consistent and share what we are working on and showing people that, um, you know, where we are at in development. So, uh, just recently on Kickstarter, actually, if you, We had another bigger update last week and show more of our card samples. We're working on a card database as well.

So you can get a sneak peek at that. So, yeah. Awesome. All right. Well, this was a great conversation, Alan. I'm really, I learned a lot about the kind of modernization of the process here and still the same universal principles that are underlying all this stuff. So it's also helped me because the more I was able to dig into your story,

the more of these principles that people can apply, I found. So it was a real pleasure. And I'm looking forward to doing a follow-up and really seeing once you get this thing out the door, all the extra lessons that you're going to learn along the way. So hopefully we'll have you back again soon. Yeah, I hope to be back soon. Yeah, I hope to, you know, once I learn more things,

hope to be able to share it. And hopefully other people are going to see some success too. So best luck to everybody. All right. Leave it there. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. 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 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.