Think Like A Game Designer - Isaac Vega — From Humble Prototypes to Bioshock Tables, Navigating Unexpected Successes, and the Freedom of Forging One’s Path in Game Design (#44)

Episode Date: January 30, 2023

Isaac Vega has been designing board games for over a decade. Isaac has sold over 500,000 copies of his games worldwide and is an award-winning designer. He co-founded Rose Gauntlet Entertainment and is the designer of the hit game Dead of Winter. There are so many awesome lessons in this episode. Let’s get started! 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. All right, before we get to today's episode, I want to highlight something I'm really excited about. And that is our upcoming Kickstarter for Ascension Tactics Inferno. For those that don't know, Ascension Tactics,

we ran a huge Kickstarter for it back in 2020. Thanks to all the fun of the pandemic, we had to take a little while before we were able to deliver that to retail, but we finally got the game into retail in 2022. It's won a bunch of awards. People have been super excited about it. It's been in a lot of top 10 lists for the year.

I'm super passionate about it. If you want to learn more about that, you could actually listen to my previous episode with Ryan Sutherland. We talked about it in detail. But Ascension Tactics Inferno is a new standalone expansion coming that has all of the fun of deck building games, all of the badass miniatures and tactical excitement of a tactical battling game, and over 50 new miniatures, maybe even more, depending upon how well the Kickstarter goes,

an entirely new center deck of cards, having a new terrain, new story, new campaign. You can play it competitively in 1v1, 1B2, 2V2. you can also play it solo or cooperatively. We have a new mode that lets you play cooperatively with up to four players, playing through a campaign and all new storyline, all kinds of fun stuff. It takes all the cool characters of the Ascension brand, takes it to another level.

It's something I'm so, so excited about. And I'm sure I'll talk more about it and dig into some more of the design lessons and insights in a future episode. But I just wanted to give you my podcast audience a teaser. We're going to have an exclusive day one reward for everybody that backs the project on day one. We'll tell you more about that. But if you want to make sure you find out what happens, you can go to stoneblade.com. That's s-t-o-n-e-b-l-a-d-e.com.

If you've been listening to me for a while and you don't know how to spell that, then I've probably done a pretty poor job here. But that's okay. We're sharing it anyway. You can click on the links there. They'll take you to be following the Kickstarter, join our mailing list. You'll be the first ones to hear it. I'm going to get us back to the lessons and the insights here.

But if you want to see how I do this work, right, following along with the Kickstarter, you can see how I build the marketing campaigns. You can see how we design what it's the marketing. like to design an expansion for a game like this. There's lots of cool insights you can get by following along whether you back or not. And of course, I always appreciate it if you back and share, but I just am so excited about it. I want to share that enthusiasm with you all. So stay tuned for more information. I can go to stoneblay.com to find out more in the short term. And now let's get to today's guest. In today's episode, I speak with Isaac Vega. Isaac has been designing board games

for over a decade, selling over 500,000 copies of his games worldwide and has won multiple awards. He co-founded Rose Gauntlet Entertainment, and prior to that, he had a ton of hit games working for Plant Hat games, including the very popular Dead of Winter. Now, Isaac and I talk about all of these different games in the process for making them, but we also talk about how we met, which is at the Game Pathways event. Isaac is on the board of Game Pathways, and it was founded by the team at Brotherwise Games, Johnny and Chris O'Neill, who were guests on a previous podcast and are also incredible people. And what it really is is an opportunity and a location where we can help improve the representation and diversity in the tabletop game industry. So we had an event in L.A., which we talked about in the podcast, which is how we met. And I saw how great of a teacher, educator, influencer, Isaac was. And I knew then that I had to have him on the podcast.

And he certainly delivers. We get into a lot of really great lessons here, including talking about how you're able to find these jobs, right? how to be able to put yourself out there and really turn a passion for game design into a career of game design, how to be able to design for brands like Bioshock Infinite, and what it's like to experience games that blow up and have these huge popularity curve like Dead of Winter, as well as what is it like to be able to found your own company and to make those transitions from being successful as part of a company that is getting acquired and acquired again, versus trying to find your own path and the difference is an upsides of each.

So you get a lot of really great lessons there. Isaac is an incredible voice, great person. I'm really glad to now be able to call him a friend and to be able to share his voice with all of you. So without any further ado, here is Isaac Vega. Hello and welcome. I'm here with Isaac. It's awesome to have you here. Thank you for having me here, Justin.

and I appreciate it. Yeah. So, you know, we got to first meet, really, you know, the purpose of this podcast

is the, is the context of teaching people, design and people who want to get in the industry, giving them a door into that. That's a little easier than the path that we had to tread. And I was so excited to have you on here because we really got to meet and connect. I think we'd met before, but we really got to connect at the Game Pathways event in L.A.

A few months ago at this point. Maybe, I usually kind of, start at the beginning of the career. Do you want to talk a little bit about that event? And I think it's really pretty magical thing that maybe some people would want to get involved in. Yeah.

So I was reached out to by Brother Wise Games almost like two years ago at this point to be part of their board on forming the organization that became Game Pathways, which is a nonprofit organization that focuses on helping students in the LA area that are interested in potentially jumping into the board game industry. get more resources and information on how that would be possible. We hosted a design day that we were both participating in, and being able to kind of set up pods, challenge them to design a game together,

give them a little bit of information about our stories, as well as different possible pathways that they would have available to them if they decided to pursue this career. Overall, the event took place over two days, one and a half days, really. We got to play games with the kids, We got to design a game alongside the kids, and it was a really well-received event. We focused primarily on trying to attract as many BIPAC and underrepresented groups within the board game industry to the event, which was fantastic. And we saw a lot of great participation and a lot of people looking to potentially make this their career afterwards.

So I think it's definitely starting to take a wing. It's our first opportunity to have done an event like that with the game pathway. but I'm hoping that we get to do that every year and continue expanding to potentially other cities as well. Yeah, I was really honored to be invited to be a part of it. We gave out copies of my book, Think Like a Game Designer to all the students. I actually offered a path to scholarship to the master class

for people that wanted to follow up afterwards and that idea of a scholarship, especially to be able to bring in people from BIPOC communities and people who are in areas and regions and backgrounds that wouldn't normally have access to the kinds of game design education and really getting to connect with people in the industry that, you know, I've been lucky enough to have and a lot of people have had, I think is something I'm really passionate about. So I'm actually going to be opening up that version of scholarship to a larger community.

And I'll be talking about that again probably pretty soon. So it was just a great event. It was a ton of effort. It was to put together. So hats off to the brother wise guys, which we're all on a previous episode of this podcast. So people can listen to that to it. learn more about them. Anybody that wants to donate or wants to get involved, I think Game Pathways.org is the site to do that. It was just a great, you know, just very aligns with my heart and, and again, hearing you speak there and seeing your passion made it clear that we were aligned on this too. So just want to start off by how I like that. I just want to say as well, I really appreciate your contribution and the way that you

jumped in there at the last minute to help out and run the, run the pods. I think. think you did a fantastic job on guiding the students through designing their first game. And it was a really challenging thing to do. So I really give you a lot of cred for putting that all together because I think you did a fantastic job. Yeah, for context for people. So Eric Lang was originally going to be the person that was running this course and teaching. And he got stuck in Paris because he had COVID. He couldn't fly. And I get called up by the brother wise guys by Chris O'Neill. and he calls you a week before the event, like, hey, can you get to L.A.?

Can you make this happen? And I had no curriculum, no anything set up, but whatever. I was like, okay, well, I've talked game design enough times now. I think I can make this happen and, you know, got over there. And I was super glad I did because I was very, very passionate about it.

So filling Eric Lang's shoes is not easy. And again, anybody that hasn't heard Eric talk about design, he is also on a previous episode of my podcast, one of the most informative and interesting. I'm confident we would have had very, very different approaches. His style of communication is very different than mine. Tons of great insights. So anyway, I'm sure he'll get to do a future one.

Okay. I'm glad we got to do a little game pathways plug because I think it's a noble project. But I really want to talk about you because I know some of your background and some of the projects you've worked on, but I don't know, I don't know your story. And I'm sure a lot of the community does not. So why don't you kind of give us your origin story,

give us your superhero origin. How did you get into this industry and what kind of got you going in the world of games? Yeah, so, I mean, it all really started back when I dropped out of college and decided to move back home to Northwest Ohio and reconnected with some of my friends who I used to play like Magic the Gathering with, like the Dragon Ball Z card game when I was like in high school and middle school just on and off and never really knew anything. about actual board games to this capacity. Of course, I knew things like Monopoly, and I knew things like Sorry, but I didn't really understand that this was a thriving and interesting industry

that could potentially offer me a career. And those friends had moved on to games like Dominion and Puerto Rico, and were just introducing me to all of those games, and I immediately fell in love. And this started trying to design my own products within like six months of even finding out what the board game industry was all about. I want to dig into this a little more because like this is a, you know, this is a really interesting time in somebody's life.

And there might be people out there right now, right, who dropped out of college or aren't doing well or aren't, you know, their path that they thought they were on is not the path that they're on now. And then in that period, you're able to find something you're passionate about and then suddenly start grading and trying to turn it into a career. What was going on there? Tell me a little bit about how that felt or what gave you the kind of conviction to move forward there and let go of the other path that most people think is the one that, you know, the only way to go. Well, really, I felt very lost at that time.

It was a hard time for me and my family. I kind of came back at the perfect time to kind of be the big brother in my family and just did everything I possibly could to get as much money into my family. my family because they really need to help. So I was just taking odd jobs. I was working at different things any way I could in order to try to just get a little bit of money and get by. And it wasn't really any sort of like planned path. Like I didn't suddenly leave another career goal or thing because I literally came back lost. Like I just did not know what I would do next. And I took any opportunity that kind of fell in front of me. I was a social worker at a nonprofit organization for a little bit.

I tried to do my own photography studio. I worked at the post office. There was just random things that I was just, this is going to potentially make me some income to just survive right now. So when I started reconnecting with my friends, that was really the point of joy in my life, because everything else felt like just a slog. And connecting with them and playing.

playing board games with them, I was just lit up by that entire experience and really just wanted to connect more with that side of the world. And they started introducing me to other people that were playing games. They told me about like, hey, origins is a thing. And, you know, being in Northwest Ohio wasn't that far away. And like other conventions happen like GenCon and things like that. And there are people that our own game company is not that far from here. And I was like, what? You know, so like, having, having that realization was just like, well, maybe I could, I could be one of these people that's designing board games, who knows.

And it wasn't until I met Colby, who just randomly happened to go to the same church as my mother, who is the owner of Platt Hack Games, which really kind of started opening the doors because I showed him a game, started hanging out with him. and eventually he signed one of my projects. And from there on, I just went 150% in the direction of trying to make this my career. Okay. All right. There's a lot to unpack there. So there's a lot of these different stories around, you know, the kind of fortuitous meeting, right? Yeah.

Or, you know, you happen to be in the right place at the right time. And every single time I unpack one of these stories, there's an enormous amount of work preparation and diligence and or other key traits that people display that take advantage of those opportunities, right? This chance, chance plus preparation equals opportunity. And so what you came to him with a game design, like that shift of, I'm really passionate about this. I like this game. I like playing games. I like being in these communities to I'm going to make these. And then I'm going to have the chutzpah to be able to actually just pitch it to people. Talk to me about that process a little bit. Unpacked that for me.

Yeah. So I had always, like, I originally went to college to try to become a video game designer. So I couldn't afford to continue on with school. And didn't really, wasn't really inspired by joining the very at that time, like, corporatized, very, like, big budget style of the game industry that existed. It was before the indie boom. and it wasn't something that I was really encouraged by. I wanted to really be the person that kind of was in the driver's seat and being able to design the worlds and the characters and all those things. And my professors were very much like,

that's not going to happen. Like you're going to either be designing 3D models or you're going to be programming and maybe someday, one day, someone will listen to your ideas. And that was really discouraging. And then also the affordability thing came into play. and I was just like, okay, I'm leaving.

So for a lot of that, I learned some skills during that time period that I was able to then take into the board game side of the industry. I also developed some Photoshop and Adobe skills during, like trying to develop my own photography business, right? So as soon as I kind of had the inspiration to try to put something together, I was like, this is just cardboard and paper. Like, that's easy to make. You know, and I have access.

to these programs, let me go ahead and try to do as much as I can and put stuff together and try to create something. So I'd print it out, I'd show it to my friends, get their feedback from it, try again. And then randomly, my mom came home with a business card from Colby because he had given a talk to the youth of the church about his business and how it was going and how there was success moving forward and things like that. And she was like, well, my son's trying to design a board game. And she brought it home. And I was like, I don't know who this guy is.

I've never heard of him. He's not on any of the games that we've been playing or we've been doing. I don't know who this guy. Yeah, like, he's probably some weirdo that's living in his mom's basement. And meanwhile, I'm living in my mom's house. So, like, judging this person. I am the weirdo in my mom's basement. I am, exactly.

So, like, I'm just like, you know what? Like, I'm going to take a chance. Who knows what this could lead to, right? So I reached out, a schedule. He had, like, these normal game days. And he's like, yeah, like, come, come out, play a game and show me what you're working on. And at that time, I had spent so much time, like, trying to put this together. I used all my, like, very bad and very poor graphic design skills at the time.

and made everything I possibly could to make it look like it was somewhat professional, right? And now when I design games, I do them in the most minimal way possible. Right, right. No, this is a really, really important lesson, right? Like, this is like, you know, keep things simple and stupid.

When you're first making your prototypes, iteration speed is the name of the game and trying to make them pretty is a complete waste of your time. And it's something every new designer I know does. Same thing. You want it to look professional. You want it to look good.

But that's the opposite of what you want at the early stage. just so good good lesson so i spent all this time i showed him this game and he was not a fan but he was very nice about it and very encouraging at the moment and continued to encourage me to come to his weekly game days so i was like well this guy seems like a cool guy uh he has access to the industry um let me go ahead and keep get know him let me let me keep playing things and then within a few weeks i started describing this other game that i was thinking about working on, which became my first design city of remnants.

And he was like, that sounds amazing. Start working on that. Right. So I started working on that. And as soon as I showed him the first iteration, he signed it. That's awesome. How long was that between your initial pitch to him and the signing of this game? I feel like it was like a month and a half. Wow.

That's very fast. So how many iteration loops were you doing with him? during that timeline? So it still took about two years for the game to come out. So there were definitely multiple iterations throughout that process. So it took about a year for it to get to really to really get to the solid place. Colby was still learning too. He probably shouldn't have signed the first version of my game that early in the process.

But we were learning together and we were all hungry together and trying to figure all this stuff out. So it took some time, but it's still the core of what I was trying to accomplish ended up in the final product. Great. Okay. All right. Well, so, yeah, so you had, you know, you built that relationship early. You, you know, had someone that was, you know, sort of a mentor.

Also, someone you were a peer you would be learning with at the same time. And you were able to kind of get, you know, get a game signed in a recordly short amount of time from meeting and starting in the same. industry, but then was that, did that involve a paid position? Does that involve, I mean, you were hurting for money at this time. You still had to do other jobs. I was still doing all of the, like all of those things were still happening in the background.

I was still working, like trying to make my photography business go, still working at the post office and trying to make that life work. So I just get up early in the morning, go work at the post office, come back, see if I can get any photography clients, and then work on game designs on the side and try to to try to make all of that work and keep trying to pitch and provide value to Colby as much as possible and to the Plathack games, right? So it wasn't until, it wasn't until the Bioshock company, Bioshop Infinite, Irrational Games reached out to Colby and said, hey, like, we're looking for someone to make a board game. We heard some good things about you through a friend of yours,

and we'd love for you to design this, uh, Bioshocki, uh, and we'd love for you to design, uh, this, uh, No shock board game, you know. And when he came to all of his designers at the time, which was me, Jerry, and Beastro, who had did a dungeon run for him in Platt Hat games. And it was just like, hey, I need this game. I need it to exist. Are any of you interested in making it happen? Do you guys have ideas?

And we all were like, whoa, this is crazy. Like a big old studio is like trying to talk to this really small, tiny studio. that's only done a couple games at that point. And I was just like, whoa, like, this is a dream come true. A rational studios was like a big deal while I was in college, right, for video game school. And I was just like, wow, like, I have to be the designer on this game. Like, I have to do everything I can to be that. So I did everything possible to try to make sure that I was going to be the one representing the company with that game design.

So I kept designing iterations, iterations. We all came together and showed all our iterations. None of them worked. And eventually I was just like, nope, I'm going to be the one. And boom, I took everything that we were talking about and made another version of the game. And that was the one that ended up getting signed. And by that point, I was like, okay. This was who was it that was deciding the signs?

So you guys were all pitching to the main company, to Rational Games, or you're pitching to Colby, who's then Dave is pitching to them, or how's that process working? Yeah, we were all pitching to Colby at the time who would then decide on what we would pitch to Irrational Games. It was at the end of the day, Irrational Games final decision,

but we only wanted to present one thing that was very clear as far as what our vision was. So we only ever ended up presenting the game that I had designed to Irrational Studios, and that's the one that ended up getting assigned. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. in general if you're you're approaching a client or a, you know, licensor with something, you want a clear vision and presentation.

Not like, yeah, maybe this, maybe that. There's actually a lot of things with the game design in general. Well, we'll just put in like optional rules and optional different ways to play. And I, well, you know, every now and then I think that sort of stuff's okay. I think, you know, taking a stand and saying, no, this is, I'm the designer. This is the vision. This is what you need. This is the best experience is important for a lot of reasons.

Right. And during all that time, it was still like, I was not an employee of the company. I didn't actually get hired as an employee until the company until after I had already signed Bioshock, Ashes, and Dead of Winter. So Colby had maybe, I think, right after Bioshock had released, I finally was able to become a full-time employee himself of the company. And then about a year after that, I got hired as a full-time employee.

Yeah. Well, yeah. So it's, I like, you know, really these tales of struggle and ongoing, because even after periods where most people would call you a successful game designer, you still don't have a full-time job doing it, right? It's not easy. It's not easy path. It took three years to get there. Like if from me meeting Colby up until getting hired full time, it was a three-year process. And during that entire time, I was volunteering at every show. I was trying to, you know, show him new designs, all of the things. And time. I was just showing designs to other companies as well. And like I was doing the hustle, like as much as much as possible to be as valuable as possible to Plaid Hat games as I possibly could. There's no better trait, no better trait that I have found than just that willingness to hustle followed only closely by your ability to take feedback and iterate without your ego getting in the way. Are the two greatest things you need to succeed in this industry? I was, you know, I was lucky. I was lucky that I was I lived 15 minutes away from a company, right?

I was lucky that I was part of a wave of what Plaid Hat games ended up becoming, right? Like, it was just at the perfect time. It was a small company, a small hungry company that was willing to take chances and willing to do interesting things. And being part of that team and seeing us all come up and grow together was just a very, it was very, it was very, lucky, but also there was a lot of hard work. But in, you know, the door opened, but I had to walk through it. Yeah. Well, and yeah, most of the time I hear designers talk about those sort of things.

Yeah, they, they will undersell their own, uh, you know, work and contribution to it because, yeah, any given story involves some amount of luck to succeed. All of them do. Yes. But it's that work that creates the opportunity for you to have that luck. If it wasn't this, it was going to be something else. Uh, right. I, I really, I really believe that when I, when I, when I, when I, when I,

when I hear these things. And yeah, and I think, I think, I think there's a lot of people that would have, like, went to Colby that first time or, you know, a designer that was looking at their product the first time and would have just taken that, like, no as like, hey, okay, well, I'm never going to show you anything again, or I'll just go and pitch it to other companies or not, like, see the kindness and the camaraderie that was, was given during that interaction and the opportunity that like, hey, maybe this didn't work out, but let me go ahead and keep showing you things or try to figure out ways in which that I can be more useful to you and maybe in other ways

that would be beneficial to the company and just having the opportunity to listen and to learn and to be able to just have those connections with people that are also learning and becoming hungry and getting different opportunities within the industry is just a great way to just kind of like, all right, like you're going to learn new things alongside people, You're going to have the opportunity for those people to mentor you. You're going to have the opportunity to just see how they struggle and the things that they come up with and the opportunities that come their way. And then you're going to be the person that comes to mind because you've been so helpful for such a long period of time. Yes, 100%.

And I think that's always the, yeah, it's been true of all the people that I've, not all the people have hired, but a good majority of people have hired have been those people either in the community or from. my course or just people that have volunteered at conventions and done all this like you see what it's like in their work ethic and you see their ability to contribute and you see their value and it becomes very easy to hire them or get them a job somewhere else because you know there's somebody that somebody else is going to want when you see opportunities open up so uh that's i think i think that's uh yeah that's one of the more powerful lessons it's heard we've heard a lot and uh from other other designers of people in the industry too um i wonder if this is well okay before i tangent um i wanted I didn't want to lose a thread of like, you know, this Bioshock design, which you were super passionate about.

And other people were competing for within the same, you know, small group of people, right? Yours came through. And I think that one of the things I really love is fascinating when you're designing games for existing IP, right? So I worked on the Marvel and DC games. And then even more so working on a game that's also a game, right? So I, you know, I did the World of Warcraft Minutes game and worked on the World of Warcraft trading card game. To get a game like Bioshock, which, you know, it has an incredibly deep experience on its own and then converting it into a board game. What goes through your mind and what were you going for?

Why do you think your design was selected when you're trying to build something that takes one game world and translates it into another medium? Well, we knew that we, the hardest thing with Bioshock Infinite, and specifically, is that the game itself had not been released, right? So we were working with them off of just the information that we had that the entire, that the public knew for the most part. So I looked at trailers based on, to base most of what I could do. And I also knew that I had to tell a different story than what was going on in the product. So I couldn't necessarily utilize the character's perspective that takes place in the game. I had to kind of define the world. And then we also got the very specific instruction that Ken Levine,

the owner of Irrational Studios at the time, really wanted something that felt like War of the Ring, the board game. So he wanted that kind of feeling as well. So it was about looking at that game, looking at what had been released and what information we had access to and trying to put something together. as best we could.

And it was funny because there would be moments in which I'd present a version of the game and the studio would come back to me and say, this is too close to information that we haven't made public. So you need to remove it from the game. And I'm like, I can't know how to make something or that if I'm going to cross a line if you don't give me access to pieces of information. So it was funny. is funny.

That was so frustrating. Yeah, that was specifically a very interesting process. But, you know, it was also very cool because, like, after we had designed the game and gotten stuff, we got to come into the studio and play the game before it was, the video game before it was ever released. It got to see some extra stuff because the artists obviously needed access to that in order to make the game board and the cards and things like that, right? So it was an interesting process.

I don't know how I, I don't know if it's always that typical because most of the time when you're designing something, you're not necessarily designing it alongside the product that doesn't quite exist yet. I'm sure like Fantasy Flight gets a lot of this with the Star Wars line where they're releasing, they're trying to release toys and games that are based on movies that haven't yet released. So they obviously have some of that going on. But it's also, we see a lot in the board game industry. Designs of things that are already established, have already been released,

are already part of some sort of fandom or community already. So that kind of stuff, I had the opportunity to work on Video Game High School, which was another project that was already released, was already out there. So I had more material to work off of, which was nice and easy. year. But one of the things that like goes through my mind now didn't necessarily then is really trying to understand that like the audience that may be super attracted to this product may not know anything about board games, may not have an understanding of how much work and time goes into these products and may not have an understanding of what realistic price points

look like. When we released Biocococin, it was I believe $60 game. and the video game was also $60. So it was also, it was quite hard for a lot of people to wrap their heads around the value difference there because it's like, oh, this is just a board game. It should be like 20 bucks, right? And that's something that like we have to consider moving,

like when I move forward, if I move forward, which I probably won't, to be completely honest, on other IPs, it would have to, it would have to be something that would work for the price point of the audience that already exist for the brand, right? And that's, that can be a hard thing to do as well. But what's interesting is that now we have a lot of other games that have come out with IPs that are, more experimentative. Um, so that's, that can be a bit of a different world. But back then, honestly, like, there wasn't a lot of forethought in me, like, working alongside a company. I was

just trying to do the best game I possibly could with the information I had available, which was not much. Yeah, well, a lot of us learn our lessons through trial and error here. And so that's sort of the point of this podcast is to help other people learn these lessons a little bit easier than we did. But yeah, I mean, understanding things like, you know, the audience you're trying to design for, right, and that, you know, whether that be price point and materials and complexity and how much they're going to invest in the time for a game.

Understanding all of that stuff is important. Being able to reflect the IP well, given the world where you don't have all the information, that's one thing. I had this exact same experience when I was designing the DC Infinite Crisis expansion. It was my first lead design for Versus system, and the Infinite Crisis storyline was not out yet. And so we had to get information from DC, and they would actively lie to us. Like they would tell us wrong things because I didn't want it to leak out. So I was just like, all right, man, cool.

We're on the same team. But yeah, there was a lot of challenges. It's funny how in our industry, there is just so much information flow, even between competitors. So when we interact with other industries that are very, very much not like that, it can be kind of hard. Yeah, it's true. It's one of these funny things. Like I, you know, you have this impression of business as this, you know, very cutthroat kind of idea. And it's just so not been the case in my experience in the board game industry.

It's the most like warm and welcoming and connected group I've seen. And so it's really, you know, we do some video game design, digital game design. And we work for other, you know, other brands as well. And so yeah, it's very different, very different. So, yeah, it's a, it's a testament to the board game industry and a bit of, a caution for when you're when you're interacting in these other spaces. Right. So, so you're, it took you kind of three years to get into a full-time job at Plaid Hat and you got this, you know, this Bioshock design is kind of something you're very passionate about that,

that kind of opened that door. How long were you with Platt Hat? Like how what other, you know, I know you have a ridiculous number of credits to your name in terms of the number of projects you worked on there. How long has that lasted or what, what's that process been like over the years? So I worked with Flat Hat for 10 years. And throughout that process, Plaid Hat was purchased by F2Z. And F2Z was purchased by Asmode. So I really got to enjoy quite the different levels of the board game industry from a small indie company all the way up to the most corporate version of what exists in the industry.

Yeah. Yeah, Asmode is basically the behemoth of the board game. industry. Right. Right. So it certainly has been an interesting journey. And I spent 10 years of my life with Platt Hack Games. It was a fantastic time. They're fantastic people. But when they had the opportunity to pretty much buy back their rights as a company to become an individual, privately owned company again, they decided to do so. And I decided that my next step needed to be in a different direction so that I could go ahead and just grow in. for my own sake, right, and try something new. I didn't necessarily...

I really want to dig into the new stuff. I think we're going to spend a good amount of time on that, but I want this path from, you know, you know, spunky, indie, we're going to figure it out and scrappy and learn together into, you know, acquire, acquire Behemoth. I want to impact that more, right? Because people out there, maybe they want to work for asthma day. Maybe they want to, you know, do a thing. So what's it like? What changed and what was good, what was bad at each phase? Yeah, so the game that really changed everything for Plaid App was Dead of Winter, which was one of my designs. And Dead of Winter just blew up. Like, it was crazy how much that game stepped into, like, it just became a behemoth of the industry for a year that it came out in.

And there were just so many people like talking about it. So many, at that time, Geek and Sundry was like blowing up as well and doing a lot of other stuff. like featuring it and a whole bunch of stuff. And board games really started to shift, I would say, around the 2014, 2013, or 2014, 2015 time period where things started becoming seemingly like there were more mainstream representations of games, right? And I think like, I don't know if did stranger things come out around then

or a little bit afterwards. Yeah, somewhere in that neighborhood. Yeah, so D&D was also blowing up and the Walking Dead was blowing up. And just nerddom in general was just kind of going haywire. So it kind of all hit around the perfect time. And we hit a point as a company where it's just like we could not meet demand. Right. Like the demand was insane.

We were just like selling out and then we just didn't have quite enough to kind of like go to the level that we needed to. And then FDZ came along and it's like, hey, like I see that you guys are struggling here on this. aspect, we have a lot more money. And we'd love to buy your company. And we can also print tens, tens upon tens of thousands of this game in order to meet the demand and get it out there. Which, you know, sounded like a great idea at the time.

So help me insert. And I want to, you know, unpack this a little bit too. Because, like, some people don't necessarily understand, right? You have a hit game and you're a small company. It can be, it can be, it can be crushing, right? Because you don't have the capital to buy the stock that people want. And so you have to invest whatever you have and then wait for months. You have to put the money down to the printer and wait for months to get the product and then months for the distributors to pay you.

And then you have to take that money and put it right back into more product and it can take a very long time. And if while you're doing that, the window of like people lose interest because you're taking so long and it's been out of stock for so long. and you've invested in all this product, it can sink your whole company. I mean, there are real risks at this phase where success can kill you. So it's not a trivial decision. For us at that time, like a super successful game was anywhere between 3,000 to 5,000 units sold, right? And Dead of Winter came along and suddenly we needed 70,000 units. Right?

So to go into print run. And that's just a ridiculous difference when it comes to production. and money put in and seeing like if that would all pay off. And the amount of connections and things that you need to put in place in order to make all of that work was something that was way beyond where we were at at the time. But we had the opportunity. Colby felt like it was the right decision to move forward with F2Z.

He came to his team and we thought the same. And we decided to make that jump. And there was a lot of things that like some of the things I can say and some things I can't. I'm sure. I understood. I understand what you're able to say. You know, share what you're able to say and you can make vague hits of the things you can't. Yeah.

It was a struggle. It was a struggle for a small company to go from being able to control a lot of its decisions to going to a system that had more of a hierarchy in place, less of community driven kind of run business to more of a very structured hierarchy and like, hey, this is how things are. We can't talk to you about these things. And let's go ahead and you'll find out later on how we can go ahead and move forward with this or we just can't do that for reasons that we can't talk about. And that became a frustrating process.

And that was hard to do. And then also, because we had so much level, it also became. like, well, we need to get dead of one or two out there, like, immediately, right? And that was the first time where I wasn't able to really decide the course of my design direction, right? So you had some people that would take over as a lead design or they would, you'd have to pitch to internally and they would just decide no, go a different way? Like what is, normally what I would do is I would work on a project without really, really talking about it with Colby, and then come to him when I felt like, okay, this is ready for

Colby, right, for him to look on it. Like, so I'd work on off hours or things like that and say, like, hey, this is the next thing I want to work on. And, you know, there wasn't really that much of an established system in place because I had only been, by the time FDZ bought the company, I had been the second employee only there for about a year and a half, right? I was only working there full time for about a year and a half, and then we started adding more members to the team as well, and we were just trying to start to figure out our flow, right? So I was still in the position of being able to just say,

like, this is the next thing I'm going to work on, or finishing out the contracts that I had signed prior to me even being a full-time employee. Right? So I was taking those games to the next step, getting art direction done on them. I had stepped into the role of the art. director at the company as well. And I was just still finalizing a lot of the stuff that I had already put together. And dead of winter was a game that I designed before I was an employee.

So coming in, I was just finishing it out and getting the art direction and putting it into production and all that kind of stuff. Right. So all of these changes that were taking place suddenly put me in the position of not being able to decide what I was going to do next. like I had normally done for the last five years, right? So I had to work on dead of one or two. And that was a little bit of like a very big struggle because that's not necessarily what I wanted to do or where I wanted to focus on next. And it had to be completed within a specific time period, which I wasn't on that, I wasn't doing that before. Like I was I was working on the time period that made sense to me because I was the one who was bringing

forth these products. And I was able to, you know, break down games and put games back together in the way that I saw fit and didn't have to necessarily fit within a specific deadline. Now, Bioshock had some of that, obviously, like I

had done some of that before. But it felt very different when it was your day-to-day job versus something that you were trying to aspire to, right? So that became a point of tension. There were some employees that had a lot of tension with the new system as well.

And that was a very hard year for all of us. Yeah. It's a big transition to losing that level of control is probably the biggest key part of going to, you know, obviously working for somebody else in general, but certainly working for a larger corporation and not people that are, you know, already close friends. Yeah. And then in the middle of all of that, like, like a year later to the exact date, we were bought again. So literally at Gen Con 2014 or 2015, we were bought by F2Z, and then Gen Con of 2016, we were bought by Asmoday. And that came with a lot of other changes, but F2Z we were less familiar with

and less kind of fan voice of, right, coming into it. Asmoday was like the big brother of the industry, the thing that everybody's chasing to become, right? Especially with the fantasy flight crew under their belt. And that felt a lot more just like, whoa, we're going to be part of this team, the people that have been doing it right for all this time. Wow, this is amazing. Look at all these cool people that we've interacted with before, but never really gotten that close to. and now we have an opportunity to get close to all these amazing new people. Right.

But then it became a lot of the same issues just further down the line after we kind of lost that shine. Yeah, everything grass is always greener, man. It's right. Right. So what lessons did you learn in that era? Obviously, there's the key of, you know, you had, you know, we didn't really dig into the design for dead of winter, which I don't want to gloss over either. because I mean, that's, you know, not only a hugely popular game, but really kind of pushed a genre forward. So, you know, I'd love to, if you want to, you know, take some design lessons you pulled out of that or some, you know, kind of just business lessons and collaboration lessons around if you, you know, somebody finds himself in that position, you know, how to handle it.

I'd love to, you know, anything out from that time. Yeah, a couple of things on the design decisions as far as that of winner. What I really learned during that process is to start trusting myself more in the direction that I wanted to go in as a designer. And what I wanted to deliver based on theme and design across the board. And there was plenty of people along the line of the development of Deta Winner that said, don't do zombies. Change it to something else. There's so many zombie games in existence.

And I was like, no, this game screams zombies. this game is perfect for zombies. This game is bringing something new that zombie games don't have. And the other big lesson was just like knowing when a game is right and ready to be released versus when it's not. Because Dead of Winter was originally going to release

without crossword cards, which is the most, for people that aren't familiar, it's probably the most famous mechanic of the game. And the thing, that made people most engaged with the product. You want to explain it a little bit in detail? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Crossword cards are these story moments which offer players a decision that they can decide between that is going to allow them to make usually very critical decisions on how the game is going to move forward or how players will either have access to certain resources or not. And usually they come along with stories that are heart-wrenching because there's lots of heart-wrenching moments in the zombie zombie theme universe, right? And what was really special about them as well is that they triggered based on what a player did,

and players never knew when one would trigger because the player next to them would tell them whether or not the thing that they did triggered it, which became a very tense and interesting way of developing story amongst the players. and also giving a lot more weight to the decisions that they were making. So that was added into the game after we were already saying, yep, we're moving forward, it's going to production.

And I was like, no, there's something wrong. There's something wrong. It's not right. There's one last thing it needs. And I really, really, really, really think we need to focus on it more because something's just not singing. The playtesters were loving it. like Colby was happy with it. It was going to move forward.

And I was just like, you know what? Can we please just do a big game day where we literally just have everybody play this game like over and over again. And I can just sit there and watch them. And that's what I did. I just, I had multiple groups of friends like all in Colby's basement. Well, I just watched them play the game. And at one point, I think a few hours in, I went away.

went to the bathroom in his house and started writing out the first crossroad card just to have some space to myself and just writing it out. So the first crossroad card was literally designed in the bathroom. Yes. I was not using the back. These are the stories that I want to be pulling out this podcast. Isn't that the things everybody gets? You know, this is the most iconic designs out there and that's what it was on the John. I started writing it out and I came back down. stairs and I just stopped one of the players in in their mid-turn and said, how do you guys feel if this happened right now because you triggered it? And when I read it out loud, people lit up and freaked out. They loved it. And I knew that that was the thing we needed to do. Everybody

agreed that that was the thing we needed to do. We stopped moving forward with the production. We stopped we added all those cards. Colby wrote cards, Jerry wrote cards, I wrote cards. We all tried to get cards as many cards as we possibly could fit in this game and made it happen. Wow. And that was just a very big lesson in me and trusting myself and understanding when a game is ready. You know, because there's, and I think the part that really, really hurt me during the corporate years is that I couldn't listen to that thing anymore.

I had to use. Oh, yeah. I can't. I can only imagine in a big in a big company you suddenly being like, no, hold the, put hit the brakes on the production. I've got to make a design change. Yeah, that's right. That's not going to fly. Which, which, uh, just didn't work under a corporate structure, right? Like, if you're not hitting the game that's coming out in the quarter that we projected this quarter, we're not hitting the profits that we want to hit. And if we're not hitting the profits we want to hit, you're all very bad people. You are bad and you should feel bad. Yes, exactly.

Oh, man. Okay. So that, I love that story. That was definitely something I learned. That's a great of highlighting both, highlighting both things I asked in the same moment, which is wonderful.

Yeah. Cool design list in a moment. And then exactly highlighting why the corporate world doesn't quite fly there. And, you know, like I, I'm of both worlds. You know, I think that, you know, deadlines, deadlines matter. really well in that structure. Yeah.

Right. Like, there's a reason why that structure works for a lot of people and why that structure can be very, very successful. And I understand why, like, I definitely learned why deadlines are a good thing. During the course of that time process and how they can definitely help give everybody sort of a source of direction and understanding what their expectations are. But of the course, especially when you're running a big thing with a lot of people, right? Like everybody wants to be moving forward.

Everybody wants to be doing the thing that they're supposed to be doing. And if the designer is just titled around in the background trying to figure out the design, everybody else has to hold up and wait. And that's just not very efficient. That doesn't work. So it's, it's, it has, it's definitely a double-edged sword. But I do think that sometimes great work comes out of being able to listen to that voice and say, it's not ready yet,

but we need to try something different. How does someone know, you know, how does someone know or train that instinct, knowing that voice that's there? Because there's, you know, sometimes that there's that fear, right, that can be a little different than the voice. Sometimes there's a voice inside you that says, this isn't good enough, it's not perfect,

I'm not ready, I can't put this out there. And then I know a lot of people that end up never, you know, never finishing, right? never putting their game out there because of that. And then there's the other voice that's the, you know, this is the core. This is really what's important. This is the heart of the design.

How do you tell the difference between the two? How do you cultivate that inner voice that you can lead you the right direction? I personally think there's a few different things. I think one, as a designer, you really have to develop very tough skin and train the people that are giving you feedback to give you honest feedback. And try to very, very much get them to come out and say, like, this is why I enjoy something or this is why I don't enjoy something and getting to have them think about that more clearly.

The second thing is understanding how to watch and see how people react around different products. What I would highly suggest is watch someone playing the game they say is their favorite game and then watch them playing the game you're working on and seeing how they act differently and how their emotions are around that project, right? Like, if you see a lot of joy and a lot of connection and a lot of love around the thing that you've put together, you know you've got something special. And if you're being able to see that continuously and throughout a lot of different types of people, you know, you might have a huge hit. But if you can't see that, then you're not, then something's not quite working, right?

And it's fine. It doesn't have to work for everybody. Not every game is ever going to please every single person. And that's where the last thing comes in is where you really need to understand what you're trying to accomplish. What are you trying to put into the world? And is it living up to that expectation? Right. When I set out to create Dead of Winter, I wanted to make a game that truly represented what I felt was a thing that I connected with with a zombie genre.

When I made ashes, I really wanted to make a game for the young Latino boys. who couldn't afford playing card games back when he was in middle school. Right? So trying to figure out what is the reason behind what you're trying to create and why that should exist, why that's important to exist, and how you can live up to that expectation, and really, really try to make sure that you're delivering on that no matter what. And then the last thing is be okay with failing. and that's just the thing.

You just have to be okay with failing. It's going to be okay. As long as you put the love into it and you did your best and you tried to deliver on those things and you gave joy to some people, you're going to be happy at the end of the day, even if it didn't end up being a huge hit.

Nominal. You know, I normally make it a point of trying to restate core lessons to make sure they get through, but I can't say those things better than you did. So those are great. fantastic. Okay, so then this journey that you're on, now I can kind of, I pulled you, I pulled you back, but now I'm ready to go forward, this new phase of your life and this new company and this new path that you're on. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about Rose Gauntlet and

what's happened since you left Plaid Hat. Yeah, so I left Platt Hat in early 2020, not really knowing exactly the direction that I was going to go in, but knowing that I had to go, in a new direction. I thought part of that was a lot of community action. I really wanted to get more involved on local politics side of things. I got very involved with the Bernie Sanders campaign on trying to help that along. But then COVID hit. And community action was a lot hard to accomplish, especially trying to get people together.

So that all fell apart. There was a lot of actually very cool developments there. all kind of faded away. And it wasn't like I was trying to leave the board game industry. It's just I needed a little break, right? And I had the opportunity and I had saved, I had saved enough money to be able to take, take a little break, right?

And but then COVID gave me a big old break. That was a big old break. The whole one got a break. Everybody got a break. So that really let me turn more internally, try to figure out, what I wanted to do in the space, how I wanted to move forward with my life, and who I wanted to move forward with.

And the person that kept coming up to mind and the person that I've always wanted to work with was Lindsay Road, who is the co-owner of Rose Gauntlet alongside with me. She is someone who volunteered for Platt Hat Games in the past. She volunteered the year-dead of winter came out. And that's how I got to know her doing volunteer work, her expressing her, and want to become a designer as well, and me kind of stepping into a friendship slash mentor role with her. And we had always talked about wanting to work together.

And in around June, July of 2020, I was like, let's finally do it. I have enough capital saved up where we can start a new company and let's go ahead and make this happen, even though it seems like the worst possible time. And we did. We went ahead in September, started forming all the things that we needed to do to form the company. We signed Keystone. We moved forward. And then we announced in January of 2021 that we were a new company.

And we were really, really excited and still are. And with Rose Goplet, it's really me going back to that core thing that I feel that I lost. when things kind of started getting out of my hands with the company kind of becoming more of a corporate thing, but also giving me an opportunity to kind of be in a different position and learn new things. I'm still learning a ton of being an owner. There's a lot of different things that come alongside with that too. But I also get the opportunity to design in the way that I feel that I should and get back to the core root of how to bring something into the world that I truly feel needs to exist.

And I think is bringing forth the story and the theme and accomplishing the goals that I want to accomplish with the projects. And even right now, like the game that I'm working on right now, Wild Gardens, there are things that I'm fundamentally changing about the design based on some things that I saw. And I see in the people that are playing it and how they're playing it. And a lot of people probably in different positions and at different companies would say, no, the game is done. You need to move forward and put it in production.

Right. And I'm not there yet. I know I'm not there yet because I'm not accomplishing that core goal of what I wanted to do. And I have the freedom to do that now. And I'm so grateful for that freedom. Yeah. No, that's fantastic. And just to kind of unpack that freedom a little bit, right?

There was, we started a lot of the story where you were broke, you had to struggle and find, you know, work and then, you know, work on iterating a game and spend three years struggling to get to the place where you could have a full time job doing it. And then, you know, probably in no small part because of that experience, you learned to save and get yourself enough of a savings in a cushion that allows you this freedom to exist. I went through the same process myself and I saved up enough when I was working for Upper Deck that I could quit. and not knowing what I was going to do and eventually started my own company and that was Stoneblade Entertainment. So that was now 13 years ago, 14 years ago I made that choice. So it's not an easy decision to be able to make. You know, kudos to you for making it.

But, but, you know, people can, you want to build up to that, right? You don't just quit and run and do this with nothing on the bank account. Like saving up for this is valuable. Getting experience in the industry working for somebody else is valuable. So for people that want to live in that place where it sounds like you're doing fantastic and I similarly love, you know, I love owning a company, even with all the stresses and challenges that come with it. I love it because you have that freedom and control. You could build a team that you love and work with awesome people, make awesome things, like be, you know,

make all those decisions. But that comes with a lot of responsibility beforehand, during and after when you're making those decisions. So, you know, you've, you've done all that the right way. And it's a, it's fascinating to see. But I just want to make sure people now that they've learned your arc and can hear it, know, know what it takes that that's a, that's a, that's a, a 10 plus year journey no matter how you look at it. Yeah, it's like exactly you said, it took a lot of preparation. There were moments that I wanted to leave prior to when I felt ready. And I'm glad I trusted my gut and said, no, I'm not ready yet to leave. I'm not ready yet to go on that journey. I need to prepare. I need to put that aside. I need to, there's more

to learn here too, right? And I'm glad I took the time to be able to do that so I could feel the way I feel now about the company that I've started and being able to have not only the knowledge, but the capital to be able to make the decisions that I want to make is fantastic. And that sense of freedom is just amazing. But it takes time to get there. It takes time to get there. It takes a lot of hard work. It takes a lot of risk.

And all of that can be scary. But if you put in the work and you're okay with failing. It's worth it. It's worth it. It's been worth it. And me and Lindsay, what's been amazing is that we constantly check in with each other and constantly say about how happy we are with the decision we've made. And now we're over two years into it. That's wonderful. All right. Well, then I think, you know, we're getting along on time here. I think I want to just spend some of this time unpacking some more about why. Wild Gardens because as this podcast is live, it's not already the case. I think the game will be on crowdfunding or soon to be on crowdfunding. So I think it'll be interesting.

I think you've chosen Backer Kit is my understanding. I'd love to hear a little bit about the, you said what the vision for the game is, because you said that it's not there yet, but what is the vision for the game? And then maybe we'll talk a little bit about the choices about, you know, you're making along the way to get us through crowdfunding and beyond. So Wild Gardens is a game about foraging food and finding friends. I got really into

the foraging TikToker craze that was going on during COVID and still goes on. And what was really comforting to me is the way that people are able to find food security in the knowledge of finding out what is available to you around your area and around different areas, around the United States, and all over the world. And having that sense of knowledge is something that I want to inspire in people. I am nowhere near an expert forager, but I'm learning and I'm excited to learn. And I wanted to share that with the community. And I thought a game would be a fantastic way to do so. And the other thing is that I also love food and I love sharing food with people and I love being able to sit across the table and get to meet new people sharing a meal. And that is also part of the game's core essence about being able to meet these new eccentric characters, invite them over to a meal, and being able to grow from that and being able to contribute to your community by doing that.

And all of those different things are lining up with different mechanics in order to bring forth something that I think is going to be very special. And also is able to bring something to the board game community that I don't really see too much of. I don't see too many foraging style games out there. And I also think it's going to be able to inspire some people to potentially figure out different ways to get more involved in understanding food security and food. food access in their communities and potentially going out into their communities and doing a little bit of that themselves. So I want to make sure that the game is accessible, gives that core value to people that it can give them that sense of inspiration, have a sense of whimsy, have a sense of magic, and feel like you're bringing together a little community to take part in all of these

things. So that is still an ongoing process. I think we're close to it being where I want it to be, but it's not perfect yet, and I'm still working on. Right. Well, that's, that's, yeah, that's a theme that has run through this. So I'm, I'm excited to see that. I don't know. Then maybe I won't dig into the mechanics too much here. I'll wait for another episode afterwards. But let's just maybe just talk a little bit about the choice to go with Backer Kit and crowdfunding decisions in general. I get asked about the stuff all the time by the designers. So maybe we can illuminate a little bit about what your thinking is around that and how you've, could you put a lot of material out about the game already and even though it's still in flux. And so what, what, what, uh,

what do you think about bringing a game like this to, to crowdfunding? Yeah. So originally with our first game, we went to Kickstarter because obviously Kickstarter was more well known at the time. Backer kit wasn't even an available choice for us when we put Keystone out. And we had a good experience with Kickstarter like a lot of people do. But we knew there were some ways in which they could improve. We didn't love that there are two platforms that people have to go to in order to get their products, right? They have to go through crowdfunding, but then they also have to go through some sort of pledge management system in order to get their product. And with Backer Kit, we have an opportunity not to have to go through two steps.

Right? And also, like, we really are excited about their potential future, what they want to accomplish, how they want to accomplish it. When we went to Gen Con this past year, we sat down with GameFound Kickstarter and Backer Kit in order to figure out which was the right direction for us. And we decided on Backer Kit because we had a very fantastic meeting with them. They felt like they wanted to not only take care of a brand, but offered us new. and interesting tools in order to put our product out there.

Like, as you can see, if you go to our BackerKit page on Wild Gardens, there's just more material that we can share with the public on that than we can an early preview of something that we would be able to on Kickstarter. Their searching tools seem to be better equipped to be able to find our products on BackerKit that it is on Kickstarter. and we enjoyed the team and I sat down with a few people that I really trust that have run projects on multiple of these platforms, including Bacchert, and Bacchert was the one they suggested. So since we're young and this is our second game that's coming out through our company,

I figured if we're going to take a chance on moving to a different crowdfunding platform, this is the opportunity to do so and grow alongside them. Great. Yeah, well, I'm interested. I've only been running, we've only really run campaigns on Kickstarter. We've done quite a few on there. Probably around the time this is out, we will have, I don't know if I'll probably have run or we'll be running soon, our own Ascension Tactics Inferno Kickstarter. So it'll be, so we've been working on that for quite a while too. So we've thought about the idea of jumping, but it's been a little scary because we've had, you know, we've got success in a community out there.

So we feel a little bit locked in. Yeah, exactly. And that's totally understandable. I think if we were in the position that you are in, having, you know, had multiple products through one platform, we probably wouldn't have made the jump either. But since we've only had one in our community is still growing and people are still figuring out our brand and understanding our brand. And we're small enough. I think that it makes a lot of sense for us to shift and try something different. If it's going to work out, I think it's a good opportunity to try to figure that out now. Great. Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm rooting for you. and so let's amplify the noise here.

If people want to find wild gardens, they want to find Rose Gauntlet, they want to find out more about you. Where should they go? Yeah, well, you can find Wild Gardens, like we said on Backert Get. You can also just go straight to our website. It'll link you right to the Backer Kit page.

If you click on the Wild Gardens information there, you can find us on all social media prop forms at Rose Gauntlet, and you can contact us directly through our website. We have a contact form there as well. If you want to follow me, I'm Isaac on Earth on most social media platforms. And yeah, feel free to reach out. I love talking to anybody. If they have any questions, I will get back to you.

And on my time as quickly as I can. There's no doubt. Don't tell him what he's done. He'll be done what he's done. Yeah, exactly. And I don't know. This was all the key information, but I'm intrigued by this whole kind of scavenging, finding food, sourcing things.

Any pro tips for people that now decide, hey, maybe I can find some food in my own backyard or something interesting you learned and digging into this because this is just a fascinating new world to me. So find a little tip for somebody that wants to, maybe game design is not your thing. Maybe foraging is the thing. What people might want to look for?

Yeah, I would just highly suggest looking at local foraging books that are specific to your local area. They're really good about, giving people information on the types of flora and fauna that are potential editability eats that are safe. There's lots of different information in those. Definitely follow foraging TikTok.

My favorite forager on there is the black forager, Lexus Nicole. She does an amazing, amazing job of sharing her passion and her information. She's a huge inspiration as to why this game exists. So, yeah, I would definitely. check out different people that are talking about it that are far more experts than I am. But I'm just joining in. I'm joining the community. What's really cool about it as well is that it kind of gave me a new outlook.

My parents did some foraging and stuff when I was young, and I always thought it was such a cringe thing. Like, why are you out there grabbing food on property and different things? Like, we shouldn't do that. And now I see it as like, oh, well, they were trying to survive. Yeah. They were trying to help us survive. And it gives you such a different outlook on that kind of stuff,

especially when you're a person of color in this country and understanding, like, the different things that your parents do in order to give you security and give you joy. And I think this is a great skill to learn, especially if you have different struggles throughout your life and may need more food security and opportunities to find joy out in nature and searching for things and being able to find different things that you can make and try. And it's just a cool opportunity to get out of your comfort zone sometimes. I think we are so conditioned to food has to be a specific way in America that it's interesting. I would suggest for people to push themselves outside of that a little bit more

because it allows for a lot of different ways to see the world around you. Fascinating. I love it. Thank you so much for sharing. I mean, this is like a world I didn't, I don't know anything about prior to this. Yeah, that's what I'm hoping the game accomplished. Yeah. Well, yeah, you're already spreading it to our tens of thousands of listeners here. And I'm sure many more once you release the game and get it out there. So this is awesome stuff. Thank you for sharing all of your lessons and insight, your background,

and, you know, this story, which is just such a great hero's journey to follow you on. And, you know, your voices has come through. And it did, you know, during the first time when we met. And now I'm excited to be able to get to share that with my audience here. So good luck with this campaign. And I look forward to having you back on the other side to talk about some of the insights from how it went. Of course. Thank you, Justin.

I appreciate it. 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. Listener reviews and shares make a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews, along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry,

and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast. Think like a game designer. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at think like a game designer.com or wherever find books or sold.