Think Like A Game Designer - Gary Arant — Ascending the Ranks at Stone Blade: From Intern to COO, Designing Iconic Card Games, and Challenging Assumptions in Game Development (#47)

Episode Date: May 8, 2023

As a member of the Stone Blade team, I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside Gary Arant since the company’s earliest days. Gary has played a crucial role in every game we’ve ever made, including Ascension, Ascension Tactics, Shards of Infinity, and SolForge Fusion. I was honored to speak with Gary on an episode of Think Like A Game Designer. I couldn’t be more grateful to have such a talented and dedicated colleague in the field. Gary’s contributions have been instrumental in shaping the games we create at Stone Blade, and I can’t wait to see what we’ll accomplish together in the future. 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 Gary A rant. Now, Gary is a designer you may not have heard of, but you should have because he has worked on pretty much every single that I have ever released. Gary Arant is currently the chief operating officer of Stoneblade Entertainment, my company, and he has been with me for the last 13 years. And we tell his origin story in this podcast, how I found him in a local card shop and what separated him from the other players and other

people who would love to have a job like he has today. We talk about the growth of him going from a junior designer to a senior designer, to head of R&D, to running an entire company and taking on all the different aspects of the business and running operations, helping manage all different processes, art, graphics, everything. And so he really has a full breadth of experience. And he's been able to help develop and improve our processes. We talk about the exciting new Shards of Infinity Kickstarter that's going to be coming out soon. That can be found at shards of infinity.com. We're building a brand new version of this game. He co-lead designed that with me back when we originally created it.

And we talk a lot about that process, what separates it from other deck building games and how it's evolved over the years. And we talk about a really important process that we've adopted at Stoneblade Entertainment about how we generate and challenge assumptions about our games and projects. And I really think this has been incredible technological advance from the way we thought about these processes before. And I think it applies to any creative field, any project that you're working on, really trying to make your assumptions as explicit as possible and how you should think about them and how you should test them.

And so we dig into that as well as a lot of other pieces. Gary is a brilliant designer, a great leader, and he's one of the people that lets me be able to do everything that I do. I'm the more public-facing person, so I get a lot of credit. But Gary does a ton of the work behind the scenes. And so it's my honor to be able to finally get a chance to share him with you on the podcast. So without any further ado, here is Gary A rant. Hello and welcome. I am here with Gary Arant. Gary, this has been a long time coven. I'm excited to have you on the podcast. I mean, we were just chatting for hours before this, but I'm excited to actually chat with you in this context. Yeah, we spend hours almost every single day speaking to one another, but we've never done so under the guise of a podcast. Yeah, it's actually been like completely crazy to me that we have not done this for this long. We have worked together.

now for what nearly 13 years 12 something years just crossed over 13 years just crossed over 13 years so you are the designer that i know the best of any designer in the world i uh we have worked together for so long i probably the reverse could be said uh you probably know be better than any other uh designers out there uh and so i i thought it would be a well a it's long overdue i'm really excited to share your story a little bit because uh you know well i i tend to get most of the credit for things as the most visible upfront dancing monkey. You are really the one that does a lot of the work and heavy lifting behind the scenes for all the games that Stoneblade does. And I wanted to both have an opportunity to showcase your design insights and all the

things that you do, and also to get your perspective on a lot of the stuff that goes on and give people more of an inside look into how things run and your own narrative and story and, your own narrative and journey here. So there's a lot of fun stuff to do. And I think we may even dig deep into some of our current design projects that, like, we're actively working on so that people can see what it's like when we, we just do the job. I thought would be kind of fun also. So a lot, a lot to unpack here. And I'll, you know, I typically try to start these interviews by hearing people's origin stories. I have, again, a unique perspective on yours, but I'd love to hear your version of it. How did you get into this industry and what was that what was that like yeah yeah you know the story pretty well

but i'll i'll do it for the for the for the for the listeners here um yeah so i i grew up in southern california and i was a kid who liked to play magic and uh you know i'd read people like yours articles and other you know i would i was an aspiring magic kid and then one day you and a bunch of of other magic pros showed up at my card shop because you all moved to Upper Deck, to move to Southern California to work at Upper Deck on the Wow TCG versus all those, all those great projects. And I was just a, I was a kid. I was the oldest, I was old enough to be the eighth person in the draft is what I tell people. And I was lucky enough to just kind of start down this weird journey where all my magic idols were hanging out in my card

shop and I was getting to play magic with you all and eventually, you know, friendships, all that kind of stuff traveling together occasionally. And I found myself, you know, just done with college and you were like, hey, I'm starting my own company, you know, I'm working on these contracts. I have this cool game called Ascension. And I joined up with you to be an intern and went from, you know, intern to junior designer to, you know, very, very various roles. I've done basically everything. There is that the company, you know, I've had my hands at just about everything at this point. Yeah, that's the, I mean, that's the quick story there. Yeah. And so now, you know, your, your title now is just chief operating officer, which is a kind of catch all in many ways to handle all aspects of the business, as you mentioned. I mean, basically you, you had the R&D team. You help manage our, you know, the connections between that and our production of all of our physical goods. and in relationships with printers and relationships with our distributors and sales. And really, as a kind of person that can have a hand in pretty much everything and an insight into everything,

you're the person I rely on the most by far on a day-to-day basis. And it's been amazing. And I want to, you know, the kind of version of the story as you tell it is, hey, I just happen to be hanging out at the card shop and all these guys shut up and, hey, look at me now. And I think that there's a couple of key lessons I draw from that. One, I'll tell it from my side of the story, you know, which is you, you know, there were plenty of people that we hung out within that card shop. And many of them wanted to get a, get a job and work with me and work with with my team,

some of whom we gave, we gave also internships to. And you stood out for a couple of key reasons. There were traits that that really stood out. One, you know, you were, you were a good person to be around, you were hardworking, you did what you said you were going to do. and would not rest until it got done. And that's kind of a real, just baseline trait. And the other thing that really stuck out to me in those meetings,

and it's very common for designers, especially new designers, but really everybody, just kind of like shout out their opinion just to kind of be heard. Lots of people in a room will say, just say things because they think blah. And you really struck out to me because you spent a lot more time listening than talking. And I think that's just a very rare precious skill. And then you would listen. And then when a meeting was done or something, something, you would ask questions and try to understand. And then when you did have insights and you

did have things to add, they were always really sharp, really, you know, really powerful insights that helped move us forward. And it was a real core part of your persona that both that work ethic, the curiosity, learning, and that kind of lack of ego that I think were real traits that separated you from everybody else that I had encountered to that point. Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, I think for whatever reason, I think, you know, you could, you could explain it in a variety of different ways. But, you know, I've never, for whatever reason, had trouble kind of admitting when I don't know something and wanting to learn. And I think maybe it was something about my family growing up or who knows, right? Like there's, you don't always know exactly why your personality ticks certain ways.

But even though I'm a person who, you know, as you know, I take pride in what I do. And I actually, when I do something wrong or we mess up, like, you know, I am, I'm maybe even too hard on myself. But then at the same time, like, if I don't know something, I don't know something. And I'm happy to learn and ask questions. So I think it's kind of, you know, some sort of trait that I picked up young. And I think it has served me well for sure. And I appreciate you calling it up. Yeah.

And then the other lesson I kind of wanted to pull from that was a similar one that we had from Brian David Marshall in the recent podcast I did with him, which is, you know, be put yourself in the right place, right? This was, you got, you know, a little bit lucky in the sense that your, your local card shop was happened to be near where a card game producer, Upper Deck, uh, was. And that was created a space where these, you know, the local people working at that at Upper Deck would come to the shop and create that space. And so I think for people out there, you know, it really does matter. Right. You surround yourself in places. You put yourself in places. where people in the industry that people you want to work with are going to be, you're much more likely to develop relationships and get a chance to prove yourself and go through all of that stuff.

So I often advise people to go to conventions, but even, you know, as something like, hey, yeah, Southern California is a hub for a lot of these things and there's a variety of other places. You're much more likely to find, you know, find those interactions than if you're, you know, remote and not putting yourself out there. And that can be done, you know, today much more digitally as well, right? Being in the Discord channel with our, in our Stoneblade Discord channel, for example, we see a lot of people for whom, hey, they're paying a lot of really good contributions. And so we will maybe we'll invite them out to come to a show or we'll, you know,

have them do some work for us. And so there's a variety of ways of, I think that there's no, there's no substitute for proximity when it comes to finding opportunities and being able to learn from people and being able to, you know, kind of build relationships that let you move forward in whatever aspect of the industry you're interested in. Yeah, absolutely. I'd say, you know, something that is probably universal, but definitely true. in our industry is learning how to invest in relationships,

and how to connect with people. It'll serve you in your designs, understanding what makes people tick, what people like to explore. But in terms of navigating the industry and just life in general, right, it's like connecting with people, asking questions, learning about what other people like and dislike. And maybe it sounds overly generic and simplistic, but it's it's very true, right?

And I think that that element is definitely stood out amongst people that we've, you know, had through our doors and and who've worked out really well in a variety of ways. Yeah. And, you know, listen, I share in this podcast, you know, the goal, I really like digging into sort of very unique and niche insights and things that other people can't find out. But I also think it's really important to repeat the basics because everybody out there is looking for some secret sauce and secret formula and crazy different thing. And it's like a lot of times if you just do the fundamentals, right, be a good person, work hard, learn, surround yourself with the people you want to be around and be like, you know, that's a, that is 90% plus of the way to get you to success. Oh, yeah. And so it's worth it.

You know, when I retell these narratives in the same thing gets repeated from, you know, all the great and successful designers around the world that I talk to that. you know, it's worth it. So hopefully, you know, that repetition sticks in. And frankly, I've, same for myself, right? I always continue to try to repeat even my own lessons back to myself because I forget them. And it's important. It's important to keep that top of mind. So even, you know, things are cliched in a lot of sense for a reason because they really

do have an important kernel of truth there. So I wanted, there's so many topics I'd like, I think we can dig into here and things that would be insightful for people, but my goal always with these podcasts and why I do the podcast, not only is to be useful to the audience, but it's most useful to the audience when it's actually super interesting and fun to me. And so I want to dig into a project, which I think this was true. I mean, you've been involved and had a hand in literally everything Stone Blade has done since the beginning. And the first kind of big lead project where we put a new game out was, in fact, Shards of Infinity.

And this was a brand new game category. You'd led designed sets of ascension before that, as I recall. That's right. Yeah, War of Shadows before that, I think, was kind of the time I got to sort of take some ownership over the design of an ascension set. Okay, so let's start there. Let's start with, so, you know, you came in as the kid from the magic shop, who proved himself and kind of worked his way at the ranks.

And then you move into a position where now all of a sudden, you're the lead design of an ascension set. And it's our 10th ascension set. It was a big, big moment. And what was that like? It's often cited as one of the more popular sets, has some really cool mechanics. Talk to me,

what it was like that transition from a kid on the design team to lead designer. And what was that project like for you? Yeah, I mean, I remember being really like, you know, the obvious stuff, right? I was super excited. I was really nervous. And it was funny because, you know, it wasn't like I was in my first year or two of working with you, right? Like, it had been years. And I had had a hand in everything that we had done up into that point.

And so I had a certain level of confidence. But at the same time, I found myself sort of reverting in a number of kind of like core principles, right? Like I started wanting to protect my designs until they were perfect. I wanted to be the coolest, most jaw-dropping ascension set that ever hit because that ego starts to step in. And I have this great team around me. And right, like, every time we had great success was mostly just like, I was kind of at the end of brainstorming or I was having a trouble problems. And like, I brought it to you and the team. And we worked through things, right?

So actually, there's this really funny memory I have of wanting something so specific because I had these. preconceived ideas about what my set was going to be. And if I could have just, if it were somebody else on the team pitching it to me, I would have just been like, we're over-complicating this, right? Let's get simpler. Let's just find a gameplay loop that's satisfying here that is kind of core into what ascension, like the strengths of ascension, right? So there's that little piece of like, you know, it was kind of the first time I had

to experience like, this is my set, like, and kind of work through. I think what probably a lot of people go through, which is, I want this to be the perfect set. I want this to be the one that shows everybody that I've learned so much, and I have all these skills. And I had, you know, there's a day and night mechanic in ascension War of Shadows. And what that means is, if you haven't played it, is every card in the set is tagged as either a day card or a night card. and whichever of those two types of cards is more prevalent in the center row, it's either day or night or neither dusk or whatever we want to call it. And then their cards would kind of hook into whether or not it's day or night.

And that was the final thing, right? But before I had this extra deck of cards that was trying to tell stories and flipping from turn to turn to change whether it was day or night, and there was this kind of big bad monster that was doing things, right? I had this cool story in my mind of this amazing mechanic I was going to show and bring to the game. And then I think it was you or maybe it was Ben Lundquist at the time. We were like, let's put this into the center deck. And we kind of evolved from there.

Maybe I don't need to go into all the details. But like the big takeaway was like simplify. Also like just focus on the job and the essentials, right? in designing a good game and leave the ego to the side. It was kind of the big takeaways. Yeah, yeah, those are great lessons. And I remember going through the exact same thing when I did my first lead design. And when it was the versus system, Infinite Crisis set.

And there was so many cool little tricks and interactions and clever things that I wanted to fit in there. And I fought for them. And sometimes I succeeded for the worst of the game. And it's, I look back and it's just like, just trying too hard to like prove how clever I was rather than doing what serves the game itself. And it's a really important lesson to drive home. And, you know, when it comes to ascension, I've talked about this on the podcast before. But, you know, at the heart of it is this tension around the center row, right? Like how do you evaluate the cards in the center row relative to what you need, relative to what your opponent needs,

relative to how your resources and your strategy shaping up? And I think that the light and dark mechanic that came out of War of Shadows where if the majority of the cards in the center row, are light cards and it's day and if the majority of the center of cards are night cards and it's night are dark cards and it's night and dark cards and it's night. And certain cards trigger off being day and night being more powerful, suddenly changed, created this whole other interesting axes to care about when you're buying cards. Like maybe I don't want to buy the cards that's necessarily good for me because my deck is a day deck.

So I actually want to pull more night cards out so that those cards are more powerful. It's just like fascinating, really cool new axes that that adds to the core tension of the game. So it was a really great, uh, great design, uh, great system that turned out. I think it was a real, a real winner, in my opinion, of our many, many expansions.

Yeah, yeah. The, you know, the context of what your deck, you're building and what deck your opponents who you're competing against our building, right? Like, there's a lot of things that the game does to make you consider certain cards over others. But the day and night in particular was so unique from game to game because of this just extra little thin layer on top

of, well, normally I wouldn't buy this card in this type of deck, but I'm going to have to figure this out because it's really advantageous for me to change the board over tonight or get me further entrenched into this day board that I really want to keep from turn to turn. And then so in that way, it's sort of forced some creativity, some variety, some, you know, just figuring out new card combos that maybe wouldn't be the most natural pairs from game to game. It was really fun.

Yeah. So I think that it was a great exercise for us as we were exploring the bounds of what we could do with Ascension. And we're still, you know, maybe we've made 16 different standalone ascension expansions and tons of cool promos and content. And then, you know, and then this kind of leads us into the origin stories of Shards of Infinity. And we definitely have not talked about it as much on this podcast. And so I think digging into that origin, why do we make Shards of Infinity? how did it come about? I think it would be good to tell that story.

What is it? And then we can talk about what's coming up for Shards of Infinity. Yeah. Yeah, Shards of Infinity is still one of the, it's one of my most proud kind of accomplishments in, you know, this long time that we've been working together. You and I, you know, we co-led designed, you know, we lead designed that game.

It was outside of Ascension, but it was, I got to take a lot of my lessons from working on so many deck-building games and kind of shift, shift things around a little bit and try something a little bit new, because Shards of Infinity is a deck-building game that, you know, where you're you're kind of producing this resource to fight your opponent and how to hit their life, you know, down to zero, similar to Star Realms and Hero Realms and a handful of other games in the genre now. Yeah.

And so it was, it was really an exercise for us. And, okay, we love making games in Ascension, but we always have to play kind of within the Ascension universe and within the Rules of Ascension. And what would it be like if we were able to start, kind of start from scratch with everything we learned, not have any of the restrictions or, you know, the kind of burden of a decade of ascension, what does it look like and how would we build it?

And Charger Infinity kind of came out of that. And it was a much more aggressive and fast-paced version of the game. And I think the mechanic that I was most proud of from that is the mastery mechanic. Do you want to describe that a little bit? Anything you remember about where that? came from. Yeah, yeah. So it's kind of, there's a lot of twists and turns because in the early phases of designing

the game, we had a lot of cool concepts that were like, well, maybe this should be a main part of this new deck building game, right? Like this concept of a draft deck, that you would actually have a secret set of cards that nobody could know that you had. So similar to Dreamscape, if you're super familiar with our Ascension stuff. So the Dreamscape, you'd start the game, you'd draft these cards. and you could have access to them. Sometimes they were like one-off effects or big heroes.

So we had some similar stuff like that in shards because we just really loved that mechanic. And actually we used what we called at the time tech, which was a non-purchasing resource, non-fighting resource. It was a third thing that you could accrue and build up over time to unlock your draft cards. And some draft cards would not unlock until you had 20 tech. Some draft cards

would not unlock, you know, they'd unlock really early. And so you could have this fun, like, do I really want to invest in these tech gaining cards? And eventually called mastery. So I'll just like mastery from now on. You know, how much mastery you were going to accrue because you had to buy specific

cards to get mastery. And it wasn't necessarily attacking your opponent. So there's this kind of like long-term strategy of if I get mastery and I level up my mastery, I'll gain access to these really big powerful effects, or maybe I just ignore it and try to win quickly, right?

It created this kind of cool dichotomy within the game. But it started off as a draft mechanic. And then we ended up ditching that because whatever, there's a bunch of extra cards. It was a setup process. And we discovered that even when we had the draft deck, it was cool if we had some mastery thresholds in the main cards. Because you're investing in mastery sometimes.

It's fun to have these aspirational cards that kind of level up over time. Yep, yeah, that's right. And so it was a lot of things where, again, the answer in many cases is like, how can we streamline and get rid of things out of games to make them better, right? Something that always bothered me about Ascension and all the deck building games is the always available cards, right? These like piles of boring cards that you kind of just have to have there for to make sure the game doesn't break, right? Even like Dominion had like a bunch of these, right? They had like six different ones, like three coin ones and three victory point ones. And when I made ascension, I was like, okay, well, definitely not going to do that.

Like what's the minimum I can get away with here? And we ended up getting it down to like three, right? It was like mystics and heavy victories and the kind of cultist is its own thing. And I was like, okay, well, I cut it in half. That's pretty good. And for shards, one of our, one of my goals anyway was like, let's get rid. What would it look like to get rid of that entirely? Can we have none of these stupid boring, like, you know, necessary evils of always available cards?

And the idea of a mastery track that, okay, any turn, I can spend an extra resource to increase my mastery. And then that would therefore make my starting cards better in addition to other available cards better, which could increase my net resources, which could let me overcome a bad center row or the increases was like very exciting for me. So it just even faster to set the game up, faster to play, less boring choices. And then it had this really interesting, as you mentioned, this kind of progression tension of am I going to spend my resources? on buying more cards for my deck, which is more traditional, or am I going to spend my resources to increase the net power of all the cards, potentially by scaling up my mastery and moving that forward? And so it's a very, like, really cool tension and a lot of great design space that comes

out of it, including like we could be a lot more. You know, the game is ostensibly about you attacking your opponents and, you know, protecting your own health. And typically in those kinds of games, you have to be very, very careful around life game. because if you have too much health, healing, and life gain, and the game is all about dealing damage and winning via damage,

you could have a game that stalls out and never ends. And because Chards of Infinity, whenever you get up to 30 Mastery, there's a card in your starting deck, the Infinity Shard that does infinite damage. At a certain point, the game is guaranteed to move to a conclusion. So we could let some pretty cool,

powerful life gaining cards become enter the field. And if you notice your opponent's getting a lot of those, then you could just race to mastery and counter them. So it creates this, like, a lot more interesting design space, a lot more of the heart of what I think makes deck building games great and drafting games, a lot of games of these types where it's the my opponent's decisions dramatically impact

what types of decisions I'm going to make on my turn and vice versa. And the more that that tension is there and I'm able to play in that space, the more fun I think these games are, especially on repeat play over time. Yeah, yeah. I just remember every time we added more of the mastery, you know, mastery kicker or mastery level up cards in the deck, the more like, you know, we were just on the fly, we'd be coming up with so many cool designs, you know, a simple character that stays in play that, you know, makes two power a turn for you to attack your opponent with. At 20 mastery, he doubles your power

every single turn, right? Like, but it's hard to get to 20 mastery. So these just really wonderful, like clean designs that don't overcomplicate 99% of the games they're in, create an aspirational card that could easily be anybody's favorite card that they're trying to go for, you know, just about every time they see it because it really resonates with them and it's really splashy. Right. And so like that duality of designs of this is a simple design, but it has this aspirational piece at the end.

Every time we added more of that stuff, we're like, I think we actually at the end had to pull back even because we're like, oh, this is so fun. Like I want more of these cards everywhere. I want to explore every threshold. I want five mastery thresholds. I want 10, 12, you know, and we just were going crazy with it. And I remember even coming into work one day and you, like, the look on your face, I knew you had something awesome and you were like, you showed me the idea of the infinity

shard, right? The starting card in your deck that at some mastery level would literally gain infinite power and win you the game. I was like, that's so cool, like to have a starting card that's supposed to be the basic stuff that you don't even care about, be this ultimate power. And it led to the story of the game. It was like, there was so much cool stuff that came from the mastery track. It was a lot of fun working on it.

I remember we'd have to stop ourselves from playing Shards of Infinity because we would play it for hours while we're working on it. Yeah, I think there's no, there's no question. Of any game we've ever made, I think I've ever made in my entire career, shards the one I'm most happy to just like sit down to play. like anytime anybody wants to play like that would be my go-to especially for one one v1 is where i personally think it it shines the most but that's my that's my go-to uh i i just love it so so much uh so um okay so i i don't want to you know we we've highlighted but it's like there's so much

like to unpack in terms of like why these design choices like matter and and all like the taking your boring starting cards and making them interesting having that build into a natural progression to the game, creating gates for the power level to progress, even while we could keep the cost of cards in the center row down. So you could still acquire super powerful cards early, but the master, you created the real gating system for the most ridiculous effects. And it did, it did a lot for the overall experience. And so, so shards, over time, we released three separate expansions for it.

There was a relics of the future where we added some extra custom powers for each of the characters, Shadow of Salvation, where we actually created an entire PVE campaign game experience with a storybook, choose your own adventures, individual boss battles. We actually had a voice actor read through so you could like to a choose your own adventure audio on our website. And then and then the sort of kind of conclusionish to the arc of the story arc that we built into the horizon, which introduced the future destinies and these other different cards you could acquire.

And each one of these things was like really fun, really exciting, really interesting. And we have not gone back to the Shards and Infinity world in good God. It's a few years now. Yeah. I mean, the last release I think was like right, like 2020 was into the horizon, I think. Yeah, I think it was summer of 2020. So it's been a very long time. Now, we are recording this podcast in early April.

So I don't know what time people are early April, 23. And we are now, we've just, we've taken the Shards of Infinity game and we are reconceiving it for a new Kickstarter that we are planning to launch this summer. So for people that are excited about this enough already, you can go to shardsofinfinity.com and sign up to get notified when it goes live. But the idea is we're calling it kind of the saga edition. This is still a work in progress. So one of the things I wanted to do is spend like at least maybe 10, 20 minutes of this. of the time we have here, kind of talking through the ideas. And so people can actually see some of what we wrestle with and how it works. Because you and I spend, again, more, I can't

even count the number of hours that we have spent talking about design ideas. I mean, it would, I don't even know how to do that kind of math, but it's got to be in that, you know, 10,000 hour range at this point, pretty absurd. And, and so I wanted to share that a little bit because I feel like it would be good insight. And so, so the high level of this is we get one box that can include everything that we've ever released in the game, right? All the cool stuff, but including cool new promo cards, cool new designs, and upgraded components, like fixing some of the little things. There's always little problems that creep up over time that you get to fix when you go back.

Like, I was really excited when we did a Sension 10th Anniversary Edition. We were able to, like, go back and make a few little tweaks here and there. Not a lot, you know, but if you, like, improve the art, make a couple of cards where you're like, oh, that was kind of wrong. in retrospect, knowing what I know now, that's not the right decision. So we're going to get to fix some of those problems. And then there's a different way that we think about this kind of project.

So what is it that comes to your mind when I talk about that? Either it be kind of problems to fix or new problems that come up when we're sort of saying, hey, look, how do we build this and make this a compelling new thing that we can introduce both new players to the game and that would still be compelling and exciting for people that have already purchased some or all of the shards expanses in the past. Yeah, it's about, that's exactly it, right?

How do we help? How do we give something that both groups would enjoy? And so I think, you know, with new players, I think it's, in this case, I think we're in a pretty good spot because we have what I, you know, we have a fun game. And if you're brand new to it, then jump right in, right? Our challenge is going to be making sure not to throw them too far into the deep end too quickly because we have four different designs that we've done, right?

Three expansions to a core game. And then there's, you know, how do we either add on to what we've already done or maybe we re-tool, you know, a part of the experience, you know, add a layer in that we've always felt was missing. You know, there's like a lot of things that my mind goes around to.

But in the case of Shards of Infinity, I think, you know, I think that the game is super replayable. There's a lot of stuff to sink your teeth into. And so my gut would go immediately to let's just make some more cool content in kind of in the play space that we've already made for the most part. Yeah. Yeah. And so there's a there's a lot of the extra design space in terms of extra content we want to have out there.

There's, you know, there's some clear gaps that we've seen over the years. Like a lot of the cool promo cards we did for like, you know, we did to support. The Man versus Meeple Kickstarter. We gave him a promo card. We gave some other things that are very hard to get now. So just giving people access to those. And then to me, there's like a rebalance, right? The balance between the different factions is kind of what fell off with some of the promo

cards. So maybe making some new promo cards to balance those out. And then I kind of started talking to you about this, but we hadn't gotten all the way into it. So I think we'll just talk about it some now, right? This idea, as you already hinted at, that there's a, you know, Stars of Infinity as a base game is a great entry point for anybody to play and come into. It's like if you know anything about deck building games,

you pick it up in two minutes. Even if you don't know anything about deck building games, you can, you know, you could still learn it, you know, as easy as any other deck building game. But then as you add expansions, as with every game, right,

you add new mechanics, you add some new elements. And so each one, if you take it one at a time, no problem, you could just, okay, cool, here's a new rule,

move to the next thing. Okay, cool, here's a new rule moves to the next thing. But if you take them all at once, it can get pretty overwhelming. especially if you want to consider like our Shadow of Salvation companion, where it was actually an entire player PVE game where you're just like cooperatively or solo playing against the villains. And they have an automated villain deck and process,

which is, you know, functionally an entirely different game. In fact, I think I have a podcast with Ryan Sutherland where we talk about that one, as I recall from back in the day. Yep. So for people that are interested to learn more about the Shadow of Salvation design process, you can listen to that episode.

But so one of the things that I had kind of we started talking about was this idea of creating a, you know, in charge of infinity, one of the things I was really proud of is like it's, it was the first project that, um, our creative director, George Rockwell was a part of and he was really focused on making a great story. And we really built, built what I think is actually a pretty compelling and awesome narrative that evolves through each expansion in a way that's really, uh, it's, I mean, just, I think it's actually a great story. And, uh, what I, uh, what I like is for players to kind of, we call the, we kind of call on this the saga edition, is to actually play through that story in this box. So it's almost kind of a legacy style game where the, changes as you go, where it's like, hey, when you open the box, you first play with just shards and infinity and then you hear the story of like, why do the infinity shards come from? What does it mean to be a shard bearer? Who are you in this game? What are you fighting for? And then there's a few conditions that if you meet these certain conditions, and you get to unlock the next piece of content, which is like the relics of the future, which is the first

expansion where you start to see visions of the future and you have these different paths ahead of you that you can choose between your characters become more fleshed out and get some more custom powers. And then you see these like darkness and the and the horror that's available and shadow of salvation is this sort of well whatever. I don't want to tell the whole story here because I think it would be more fun people to play through it. But this idea that there's a that even though you're given all the content in one box that's kind of parceled out, there's almost a game, kind of a meta game that you're playing as you play games of shards to, unlock new content.

I think that could be a really fun approach. And we've been talking about a little bit, but I don't know if you've had further thoughts in terms of how deep down this rabbit hole we want to go. I mean, when you pitched it and the outline that you put together, when I first looked at it, it addresses exactly that first concern that I brought up, right? It's, you know, when you have everything going on in shards at the same time,

all of the four years of, you know, four sets of content, It can be a lot, especially if you're learning deck building for the first time, right? Like imagine even just having to learn how a starting deck, you know, buying cards into your discard pile and resetting your deck works. If you have, you know, multiple expansions of new mechanics to take into mind. So I loved, you know, the legacy style content unlocking as a tutorial. And I thought it would work great. I think it also lends itself well to that telling of the story, right? you're focusing people on the different parts of what of the content that we made and how that

pairs within the story. Even in just little blur, in little spurts, you're going to be able to tell fun stories that even if somebody doesn't want to read a novel, they're going to be able to, they're going to be able to digest and appreciate. So, I mean, I like it. We're doing it for sure, right? So, good. Okay, yeah.

Well, so, all right. So we've got a kind of an outline. for this. And it's a great way for us to repackage four, you know, four sets of content with some new content thrown in and make it more fun and engaging and tell the story and have it be like an unfolding of the narrative and unfolding of the game's complexity and the experience. And of course, you know, people who already know the game and want to jump straight into the deep end, they can, but the hope is that by playing through it this way and having some interesting, fun, different ways that it can unlock and multiple ways that the game can develop, that that'll be interesting.

So let me, let me now, let's jump into something. We have not talking. about ever, which just occurred to me. So it'll be more fun because it seems like we agree too much already at this point. It's interesting for our audience. Let's say we want to do the same thing for Ascension. We just got all of a Stone Blade, we just got all of our brands kind of back in house. And we've got the 10th anniversary edition, always, you know, that's our kind of the core of the game.

It's always going to be there. And then we have 15 other expansions that we, you know, it's a lot, right? Somebody's going to pick up Ascension set 12 or 10 or whatever, right? You can get them all in the app right now, very cheap, and it's playable. Some people have them all, but realistically, we can't keep them all in print forever. There's so much content there. Is there a design or concept that's kind of like what we talked about with shards? That could be a new, cool way for reintroducing or helping build a collection of Ascension stuff.

So just kind of throwing this out there as a new design challenge for you, live on. there. Yeah, I mean, it's a really cool concept. One thing that I'd like to introduce potentially is a, you know, like avert, maybe like, okay, sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself. So when we're talking about like legacy style content, and we don't have to be, right? So maybe I'm stuck too much in the frame. But there's a couple things, right?

It's gating content. it's pacing you. And then there's also like that your choices sort of impact. You feel like you've had an impact on what happens, right? That's the other kind of concept here. And so for whatever reason, my mind would go to, there's so much ascension stuff that I feel like we could do more of a variety of things and make it more about an actual legacy experience.

Because with shards, you know, it's about that saga edition. It's about making sure that a very set amount of content is like digestible for people. With Ascension, I feel like we could go a different direction and possibly make more of a classic style legacy game. Yeah, so to riff off of that here, so in a sense, with shards, there's a clear narrative, there's a clear story you want to tell, and at the end, we can give you all the content, and that's like a comprehensible thing. with Ascension, there's actually, you know, several different Ascension story arcs that have progressed over the years. Trying to tell them all in one box, let alone, including all the cards, is completely ridiculous. And and, but since we have so much content, we could kind of reuse a lot of it in a way that says, okay, maybe not every pack is the same and you can, you know, the choices you make, maybe you end up going to the pirate realm and unlocking, you know, some Curse of the Golden Isles. or maybe you end up deciding to explore the Valley of the Ancients and start getting some access to some of that content.

And so there would be different ways that like, okay, depending upon what you do, certain pieces or new rules or elements would then get unlocked. Something like that. Yeah, that's what I was kind of thinking is we probably have, you know, at least four or five different stories, different kind of adventures that you could take people on with the existing content of ascension. or we could use those mechanics as a framework to make new, you know, new kind of more legacy-focused sets of ascension is another cool,

cool thought of not necessarily taking old dreamscape cards or delirium cards and taking you to the dreamscape, but, you know, kind of leaning in into people's kind of history with those mechanics and those sets and telling brand new stories. With Ascension, there's just so much to pull from. Yeah. Yeah, well, and there's another version of this instead of like kind of locking into this legacy frame, which again, I think we defined already, but just in case we hadn't registered legacy games typically are those where your decisions will permanently impact the game and how you play it will permanently impact the game going forward. And we've talked about those a lot in previous episodes of the podcast.

But I think the one of the things we'd also kind of bounce around over the years is the idea of a, a. kind of custom cube of Ascension, right? This idea that we would have a center deck that was available. Maybe it's random. You're not sure exactly what you're going to get where you could just buy it. And it would come with, you know, maybe a few different segments of cards from different sets. Right. So you need to chunk them together because a lot of the essential mechanics, you know,

require a certain threshold of cards to be cohesive to care about what's going on, that they could mix and match in ways that might be interesting for people to discover our old content, not necessarily presented in the same way, but with a new twist. Yeah, yeah, I love the idea of making these cubes of, you know, every cube is different or, you know, there's a multitude of different possibilities, maybe stealing a little bit from all that we've learned with SoulForge Fusion and our algorithmically generated content with that game, certainly is an exciting prospect with Ascension.

Yeah, there's a lot of really fun things to do. So, you know, for those out there that are Ascension fans or Shards Infinity fans and these ideas kind of resonate with you, message us. Let us know what you think because Shards is coming by the time you hear this very soon and we'll have made most of the decisions that we need to make. But you will be able to be involved in helping finalize it through the Kickstarter. The Ascension ideas we're talking about are still in the works and very raw. So I would love to hear from designers out there that think that they've been. got ideas for what we should be doing and what the future of Ascension should look like. This is a lot of fun.

We just finished Ascension Tactics Inferno, and we've done a lot of really fun different directions. We have some ideas for new Ascension content, but I really do think finding interesting ways to take what we've made over the last 13 years and find other ways to present it and bring it to players, especially new players that are coming to the game now, I think would be really cool. So, okay, cool. I wanted to hopefully people found that interesting, you know, to be able to kind of just see how we think through these kinds of challenges and different designs.

And I wanted to also shift gears to something that has evolved a lot since I wrote my book and since we have been working together. And you've really helped to drive this forward in terms of our process of how we make games and how we handle the kind of ideas and assumptions that we use in creating products. Maybe you could talk a little bit about kind of what I'm getting at here and how you think about assumptions and how we use that to drive our design process. Yeah, and specifically for practical purposes, when we're talking about it, right, it's in the setting of a team that's contributing, you know, across the departments and working on the same, you know, on a game, right? And we talk about it in terms of assumptions that we're making, assumptions that people might have.

And another way of saying that is kind of just what do we think this product or this project or this game is going to be? But it's focused more on the idea that we're designing. We're making these decisions in real time. You don't start off with the exact perfect, plan to spec on day one, but you need to start with something. And so instead of being in kind of the nebulous, you know, hey, one day we're going to get to that full spec.

But right now we're just kind of playing a game. It's like the idea is to as quickly as you can across, you know, your entire team that you're working together with, outline every possible assumption that you can about the project as we know it, whether that be game design related, whether that be, you know, it's types of things that we're going to market about the game or components that we're going to have or art styles, right? Like you can start somewhere and put something down onto a paper, even if it's going to be, you know, iterated on or rejected or whatever.

You're still, like, there's a lot of power in somebody putting down their assumptions of what they think should be done or what they assume will be done so that you can actually start having conversations and working through things. right, proposing solutions rather than waiting for us to find problems later. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's so in my book, I do talk about the idea we have, you know, both the core design loop, which is the whole heart of the process of design where you have a, you know, you have your inspiration. What is the idea that we have? You create the frame. You create the, you know, the parameters that you're going to work within. You brainstorm ideas.

You prototype something as quickly as you can test it, learn from it, right? And the goal of each those loops is to actually to, and this is the thing that you've made more explicit, is like to validate or reject your assumptions. And at the beginning of the process, they're very fuzzy, broad. Like, I think it'd be kind of fun if there was a deck building game where you attacked your opponents and had some kind of way to level up, right? Like, okay, cool. What does that look like? Who knows? Right. And then you get more and more refined as you go down and you're saying, okay, I think this game is going to appeal to specifically people who like, you know, people who like magic, but don't want to get as involved in investing in that kind of game or people who, you know, are looking for, are tired of

playing Dominion and want to try something new or whatever the, whatever the different audiences and types of people that you think are going to enjoy this. And then it goes down to the nitty-gritty of like assumptions like, okay, I think this, you know, this card should cost seven, not six or whatever right at the very end of the process. And that, that idea of having these assumptions as much as possible be completely explicit upfront for whatever you can, surface them as much as you can, debate them, challenge them. You know, even if you're, you know, you mentioned this in the context of a team, which I think is really valuable because it helps everybody to get on the same page quickly and surface where they're not so you can really target those areas. But I think even for an

individual designer working, like just making those assumptions explicit, hey, what's exciting? What's the unique hook about this game? Who is my target audience for this game? How long do I think this game should take to play? What are the different elements? And then and then you know that many of those assumptions are going to be wrong, but your goal when you're going through each iteration of your testing loop or whatever your goals are for this week or this month or whatever can say, okay, I'm trying to see, like, let's validate this assumption or reject this assumption this week. As we're testing, focus on, you know, is this part of the game really fun or not? Or can we make this work when, you know, players have half the life total they did before or whatever?

And I think that's just been a really powerful improvement in our process. Really, just over the last couple of years, I think it's really been refined. So I wanted to kind of, and I think it's been great having you drive that. And as our teams get bigger and we have more projects to work on, knowing that there's always, you know, kind of an assumptions document we can refer back to and say, okay, here were our assumptions last month. How far have we moved on those things? You know, because measuring progress on a game is very hard, right? It's a very fuzzy thing. It's not like, you know, you're cranking out widgets at a factory. You're trying to like a game needs to be as fun as it can be. And at a certain point,

it's good enough to ship. And everything in between the, I had an idea and this is good enough to ship is a, it's kind of, you know, hard to differentiate a lot of the time. So we found this, you know, this was, I really give you a lot of credit for, for kind of flushing out this system and I think it's pretty powerful. So do you have any other kind of tips on this? And thoughts of what's worked, what hasn't or what might be good stuff for people listening? Yeah, definitely, you know, I said when I first started kind of speaking towards it, that, you know, in the context that we're talking about is individual stuff.

But like the benefits are individual as well as collectively, right? Like there have been plenty of times where I was just racking my brain and this is a tip, right, like sit down and categorize the things that you're doing, whether it's departments that you're working with or parts of your game, elements of your engine, whatever, break things out is, you know, kind of structure things out. And then you just, I was trying to imagine going through the steps of finishing this project and having something, you know, visualizing what it is at the end.

You know, what are the instructions printed on? Like down to the detail. And the more stuff you can do like that, some of it will be obvious. But there will oftentimes be things that you realize way sooner that you have a choice, right? Like, oh, there's an interesting choice here. Or maybe there's an opportunity to go against something that we would assume here, right? Like you get too far into a project that maybe you can't, you know, you can't make changes to certain kind of base assumptions anymore. Right.

So like the whole concept of it is to push yourself to identify the choice. choices that you have. And it happens on an individual level as well as a collective, collaborative level. And another thing that happens all the time with it is somebody will say, you know, I'll put down an assumption and three people will be like, well, there's these different ways to do it better. Or I can imagine this being done differently. And it's like just really powerful in that regard because it focuses people to iterate even kind of like asynchronously in this kind of sense. Yeah. Yeah, and that's very valuable. And you know, it's actually funny because we used to do this more often and we haven't done it in a while. I think this is also

another really powerful exercise, which is just a pure assumptions challenging exercise where you go forward and you take every assumption you have about a project, even the ones that seem completely obvious to you, and then say, what if it was the opposite? What if this was definitely not true? And what would that turn into? What does that look like? And the number of times, Sometimes it doesn't mean anything. You're like, okay, that doesn't make any sense, like whatever. But the number of times, I think pretty much every time we've gone through that exercise, we've surfaced some really clever idea or something really useful that's like, oh, wow,

okay, we took this for granted and now we don't. And because we didn't, blah, blah, blah. And so I think that idea of like playing devil's advocate in general is a really powerful tool in any creative group, you know, a kind of positive form of challenging. but I think a explicit time that you carve out, which I feel like we should be doing again, you know, at least quarterly of like, all right,

let's take a project we're working on and just completely, what does it look like if not we just reject every single one of our surface assumptions? Really, really powerful. So just making these things explicit. Part of the point why I bring this up is like, just making these assumptions explicit is powerful in and of itself. You're not expecting them to be right.

You're expecting it to be taking the unconscious and making it conscious. Yeah. And as is often true in life, and work, right? Like the things that work well as a, like when you're working on a game as a team, I found that assumptions surfacing for family

trips or friend gatherings is helpful. And that probably sounds so, like, so ridiculous. But think about like the times where people had disagreements because there were assumptions that they were making that were in opposition with one another and they thought that you're going to do dinner, but

they wanted to play games. You know, like there's all sorts of funny things that are actually this is just a good way to collaborate, right? It's like, let's get our brains out onto the table. Let's talk about this thing that we're supposed to be doing together and see where we're bumping against each other. Let's see where we can improve something that we're just taking for granted or assuming is going to happen.

And it's just kind of a fun thing. Yep, yep, that's right. And yeah, this is really powerful. You're going to start a new project with somebody, start a business, a relationship, you know, being clear about what it is that you're assuming, you know, is as early as possible, you know, you want, you guys want kids or not, you want to have like, this goes, this goes to every level. Because if you just let it lie and you just work under different assumptions, because we, we, it's very hard to communicate. Communication is

very difficult in general, especially when it comes to kind of, you know, fuzzy or projects that are really important or things in life that are really important to you, that it could be very difficult. So as much as possible, making those things explicit is really great for yourself. when you know, like, what is that I really care about here? What's important to me? And for, you know, anybody that you're going to work with, so you can say, okay, here's where we overlap, here's where we don't, can we find our zone of agreement here?

Or, you know, do we need to break it into different projects or whatever, whatever the solutions need to be? And also, this is another one of those things I learned from Jeff Bezos, which I really like as a phrase that he uses at Amazon, disagree and commit. And I try to use that whenever possible. If it's, you know, look, I'm not necessarily going to agree, I will debate vigorously my position and what I think is going to be best.

But if I'm not, even though I'm CEO, whatever, the team generally wants to move in a certain direction, cool, I've been wrong plenty of times. And so I'm going to say, I don't think this is right, but I'm going to do everything in my power to make it succeed in the way that we want to execute. I think that's just a really, really powerful frame here as well that you can debate and disagree without being disagreeable

and that you can fully move forward and support the positions, of your teammates when it's appropriate, even if it's not your position. Yeah. And the disagreeing commit thing applies so strongly to and happens more frequently and in better timing with more opportunity to consider options when you're doing assumptions surfacing early, right? Because there's nothing more frustrating. I'm sure we've all been on a team or been in some sort of group where you had an

assumption or an expectation that, you know, you didn't say or wasn't known. and then something else is happening, and oh, I thought this component was going to be like this. I thought this art style is going to be like this. And if somebody else was just running with a ball with their assumptions, you know, if you're a passionate person, you want your project to be awesome

and you have all these ideas about how you want it to be great, it feels really bad when it's like, oh, well, your assumption was wrong, and we're doing something differently, and there's just no real time to discuss it. You're just going to have to kind of live with it and feel like, I don't know, maybe you were cut out, or maybe there was just like an opportunity for something to be better.

It's much better to surface those things, have the time, the space to talk about it, possibly who knows whose mind might change or what new kind of combination of ideas is going to emerge rather than just like, oh, well, we didn't talk about it, so too bad. Right, right. Yeah, there's another thinker in the space I really like is Seth Godin, and he talks about this idea of thrashing early, right? that if you surface your assumptions and you disagree and you want to make radical changes, it's so much cheaper and easier to do it early in the process than late process, right?

If you don't find out till after you've already like done the graphic design and designed all the cards and moved into development, then it's like, oh, no, actually, this was not the project we wanted. It's like, okay, that is a disaster. Right. You now have to like scrap everything that you've done and redo it and maybe months of work could be lost. But if you have that discussion up front in, okay, well, maybe there's like an hour of like difficult debating back and forth or you've lost a day of like your initial scope and your outline but then you can easily shift it and let that stuff go and get to a better place. And so this is just another huge value out of like surfacing those assumptions, having those

discussions early and then and and making sure you're focused on the right questions at the right time is one of the reasons why I always advise people that are like, you know, building your new prototypes and new game ideas. Don't waste your time trying to balance the cards. Don't waste your time trying to make everything look pretty because I guarantee you all that work is going to be completely wasted because some of your early assumptions, some of your bigger high-level assumptions are going to be proven wrong. And the cascading effect of all of that will undo all of your work. So making sure you know the tier of question you want to work with, what I call kind of the phases of design is so critical and being doing the hard work upfront of wrestling with the big questions.

Yeah, that's a big part of the assumptions process that we do, right? At the very beginning, it's, you know, game engine, it's target audience, it's, you know, is this a digital versus physical product, right? Like, it's not until you work through and start to actually get definition to these types of things that you start wondering like, oh, what might the theme be, right? Or maybe the theme comes earlier sometimes. So there's no, there's not necessarily a one-size-fits-all. But like, you're certainly not starting day one with, you know, should, you know,

should Superman be an 8-8 or a 9-9, right? But a lot of people want to get to that point. And it's because that's the fun stuff at the end where you're imagining this completed thing. But actually, 90-plus percent of the work is before whether or not Superman gets that plus one plus one. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think that that is, it leads into the kind of last major topic I wanted to kind of deal with in you. And this could go a lot of different directions. you know, as you've, you know, I had the privilege of kind of being able to see you when you were first getting started and help kind of teach you a lot of the principles and help guide you. And then now I am very privileged, even more so, to watch you do the same thing with our next generation of not just game designers, but, you know, everybody in our company. And so you'll, you do a lot of incredible coaching and leadership with everybody such that,

you know, and now my, much of my goal, I joke about the companies to try to make myself as irrelevant as possible because you're, you, it's true. I mean, I recognize just as my own, you know, it wasn't, there was so much time I spent kind of still micromanaging and feeling like I had to kind of do everything, that it wasn't until I let go, uh, and let you take on more leadership that I was able to see how much of a great job you were doing and how much I was actually holding you back. Uh, and so this is just a very difficult lesson to take in, uh, in general, but it was great to have someone like you there to watch you grow. And I wanted to give you a chance to sort of talk about, you know, we talked about what it was like to transition from, you know,

kind of kid at the co, kid at the hobby shop to junior game designer to lead design. And now I want to talk a little bit about this transition from being lead design to being, you know, the lead of all of R&D, to being really the head of operations throughout the company and all different aspects of it. You know, what, and you know, obviously there's a lot of ways you can take this, but, you know, what kind of jumps out to you and sort of what do you see that's helped you to be a better leader? What kinds of things have you learned now that you didn't really think about before? Just kind of try to pull some nuggets here out for our listening audience. Yeah, yeah, we could go a lot of different ways with it.

And you know, you know me. You know, my gut reaction is going to be like, well, you know, you tell me because like I'm learning constantly, right? And I'm, and I, we're both very problems focused people, right? So oftentimes the conversations that you and I are having, you would, if you just listen from the outside, it's like, oh man, nothing's going well for those guys. And like in reality, we've had this incredible time together where, sure, we've had plenty of failures. We had successes as well.

And like, you know, we're still working together 14, 13 years in, right? So it can't be all, it can't be that bad. But if you listen to our conversations, right, it would be very like negative, negative. Like, what's the problem? How do we fix this? oh, I messed up. Like, how do we make sure not to make that mistake again? So anyway, I'm going down a rabbit hole.

But I don't know, I don't have anything right off the cuff or what I've learned. That's a great. That's a great one. That's a great one to surface on, right? So it's a, this is absolutely true. It's true of both of our personalities. It's true of a lot of the personalities of people I know, especially that are entrepreneurs and people that are in business.

Like, you spend your time focused on what's wrong because that's where your time is most profitably spent. in the sense like, okay, my job is to like solve new interesting problems. You said we're focused on the problems. I like to think we're focused on the solutions, but it is always what's wrong and how do we deal with it. And I think that that is a powerful frame, but it also can be a tough one. And we've talked about this a lot of like, hey, every now and then, take your head up, recognize, be grateful for where you are, be grateful for what you've done, look at what you've done right. It's actually one of the reasons why I love going to game conventions, right?

we'll go to GenCon every year or go to these big events where we can show our games off and interact with fans and get that feedback, that direct like, oh, wow, we've actually like changed people's lives and made people happy. And we've got people that got married because of our games and that have kids and have their, like, you know, they're out there playing the games with their kids and having those connections. It's like, you know, there is a deep well of gratitude and well-being that's available for what we do and being, and for anybody out there.

It doesn't matter whether you're making games, whatever. Like, you know, there's so many good things that go on. all of our lives that we take for granted. And so I think that that shift of, hey, yeah, absolutely, we're going to be, you know, problem focused, solution focused. That's the thing that lets us move forward, but also being able to shift gears and,

and have that. For me, it's a daily gratitude practice. And I've talked about this with you and the team to help with that, making sure you have moments where you can really just appreciate how far you've come. I like, I have a both lists of, I have a list of both like accomplishments that I keep, you know, like all the things I've done that I've, like, really proud of. And I also have a list of problems that I've,

overcome, right? Real, real, I mean, we, this, this company almost went bankrupt at one point. We had like a lot of very difficult challenges and, you know, difficult employees and difficult, you know, projects have failed and all that stuff. And the fact that we are now still here and have overcome that actually is a huge source of strength. I mean, whenever it's like a problem that we're dealing with, it's, I can always think back like, okay, well, I've been through this before. In fact, I think that's maybe one of the best things about experience in design, more so than any specific lesson or tips and tricks. It's just that like I have been in the dark forest enough.

We have been in the dark forest enough together, you know, where it's like, all right, I don't know how to get out, but I know that I've gotten out every other time. So I know I will find a way out. And that's something that we now share and occasionally commiserate with and remind ourselves of. But I think it's a really important part of leadership, right? Like, yeah, you have to stay focused on the problems. Don't ignore the problems because they are there and they're not going to just go away on their own, Most of the time. Sometimes I do, but most of the time you don't. But still keep that positive frame. And in many ways, that's like a lot of it is helping to lead people through tough times. It's easy to lead when things are all going well, right? It's easy to everybody's happy. Everybody's making money. Everything's going great. But when things aren't, right? When things don't take the right turn, you need to be able to help focus people on the right solutions, go through this exact same process that we talked about with game design, like assumption surfacing and being able to,

address those problems and test those assumptions. I always talk about like entrepreneurship to me is like being able to, you know, surface and test assumptions as cheaply and quickly as possible until you find the thing that works and then just double down on that. And so it's a constant process of doing that and and keeping morale up and keeping people, you know, a higher vision of what we're up to,

you know, and, you know, we've talked about our company motto or maybe it's worth, you know, we could service things like that or like, you know, other areas of like how we help other people lead.

Yeah, I think, you know, I think it comes from the top, right? And that's so credit to you, right? Like there were times when I was younger where I was like, man, Justin's just too positive, you know? And it's like, it's such a, such like a simple, silly way of seeing somebody, right? I know you better than that, but like, you know, I had my downs and I, you know, I was like more kind of in the weeds or maybe, you know, in the focusing on, you know, maybe not seeing the gratitude as much, right?

Years and years and years ago. And like, you know, so on a personal level, like, you know, I've learned from you in that respect, not to say you're all sunshine and rainbows, but like there is that ultimate like, you know, we will figure this out. Like we're smart and capable. And that kind of like next step mentality, which I've, I feel like I've taken on myself, right? And we, and I think that that mentality has to come from the top. And so that's part of leadership too is like really leading, you know, being. the person to take those first steps and to kind of like, you know, lead by example. I definitely have in the last year, you know, you mentioned the lesson that you learned over time with like, you know, handing more stuff off to me and micromanaging lesson. It's like, well, history is sort of repeating itself, right? Because every time I've, every time I've found a way to offload, like, important things to people that I trusted and I knew could handle it, it's like, why didn't I do this sooner.

You know, and like we just had a bunch of talks today about some things we're going to start potentially spreading around to the team, right? And it's like there's that kind of baseline, you know, need to control. If I'm a person who doesn't like to make mistakes,

I'm going to want to manage everything, right? So just kind of learning personally and applying that to how we, how we, how we manage the team. And, you know, like new designer on our team,

uh, Andrew, uh, Andrew Millsap recently. Like I had too much on my plate. I wanted to design one of the tactics, Inferno, you know,

we wanted another campaign fight. And I was like, I don't have time to do this. And I just, but I just, in my mind, I was like, you have a good team.

Like, have somebody take this from you. And I handed it off to Andrew, who is, you know, one of our most junior designers, not coming up on a year soon here. But he hit it out of the park.

You know, it was a team effort. But like, it was just like, why didn't, you know, this is just, this is the way it's done, right? Like, believe in the team, uh, correct when, when we need to correct and, and like, collaborate together and we'll make something cool together. Yeah. No, that's, that's, that's great.

And that's probably a great place to end, uh, end this podcast. So I, it has been, as I said, a long time coming. I'm glad to get to share your voice and praise you and see, let other people hear, uh, all the things that I get to hear. see on a day-to-day basis, even when we're just doing it remotely nowadays a lot. But it's been awesome. It's been an honor and a privilege to work with you for all of these years. It is exciting, always the new things that we get to work on together, the interesting

problems we get to solve. And yeah, it's been awesome. So thank you for everything over these last 13 years. And thanks for being on the podcast. Likewise, man. I feel right back at you. And here's to another 13 years, you know? Here, here.

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 platform, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listen to 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 Design. 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 or something.