Think Like A Game Designer - Ivan Van Norman — From Broke Graduate to Geek & Sundry, the Reality of Scaling an Indie Studio, and Embracing Content Innovation (#106)

Episode Date: June 18, 2026

About Ivan Van NormanIvan Van Norman is a true powerhouse of indie tabletop publishing and media innovation, bringing over 15 years of deep industry expertise to the table. Our paths cross all the way back to the very first year Gen Con introduced Entrepreneur’s Alley, where our tiny 10x10 booths were literally shoved into the back corner of the convention hall, facing a wall right next to the food court. While I was out there hawking the first print run of Ascension, Ivan was launching Hunters Entertainment. Since then, Ivan has carved out an incredible track record, serving as an executive producer and host at Geek & Sundry during the wild dawn of the web-streaming boom, helping lay the early foundational blocks for massive cultural phenomena like Critical Role, and co-owning Hunters Entertainment. He’s the publisher behind brilliant, boundary-pushing projects like the silent, text-messaging RPG Alice Is Missing. In this episode, we discuss the brutal realities of transitioning from a broke creator to a successful studio owner, how shifting mediums completely transform the mechanics of storytelling, and why your graveyard of discarded ideas is secretly your greatest design asset.Ah-ha! Justin’s Takeaways* Everybody Prepares You for Failure, Nobody Prepares You for Success: When you’re broke and just starting out, you are completely free to take massive risks because you have absolutely nothing to lose. However, the moment an indie project hits it big, the landscape completely flips. Ivan shares a wild reality check about running his first hit Kickstarter as a sole proprietor and suddenly getting hit with a massive personal tax bill he didn’t see coming. Success brings structural obligations to payroll, to investors, and to an audience that wants you to repeat your tricks.* The Medium is the Mechanic: If you want your creative stories to break through the modern cultural noise, you have to design explicitly for the technology where your audience actually lives. Felicia Day and Geek & Sundry did it by leveraging the wild west of early YouTube and Twitch to unlock long-form TTRPG streaming. Alice Is Missing did it by turning a standard smartphone group text into an intensely emotional narrative engine. During our chat, Ivan’s insights actually inspired me start work on a brand-new design concept right at the table: how to build an ultra-short-form video RPG engineered entirely for Shorts, Reels, and Twitch.* Less Money Equals More Radical Execution: Starting out broke right out of college gives you a massive, counterintuitive edge, because without a cash cushion, you are forced into a level of radical execution you just can't fake. Ivan and I launched right in a brutal recession, building display tables out of inventory boxes and dragging ammo cans down the hot streets of Indianapolis. That said, the real secret to surviving over the long haul as a serial entrepreneur is a beautiful touch of amnesia. We are naturally wired to avoid pain, and if you perfectly remembered the bone-deep exhaustion and near-failures of a launch, you'd never take a big risk again. You need that selective memory loss to trick yourself into thinking "this next launch will be smooth" just to find the sheer audacity to stand at the starting line again. It acts as a psychological shock absorber, wiping away the baggage of past failures so you can always approach a blank sheet of paper with total confidence. 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 speak with world-class game designers and creative pioneers across multiple industries. Each episode takes you on a deep dive into the creative process, exploring the nuances of game design and the extensive cultural, technological, and business factors influencing various creative fields. Tune in for practical tips and inspiring insights that will expand your creative perspective,

whether it's inside the gaming realm, or beyond. I have something I am so excited to finally announce. If you are serious about designing games, not just thinking about games, not just listening to the podcast and dreaming about games, but actually finishing your own designs, then I have created something for you.

It is the brand new Think Like a Game Designer Design Lab. It is a step-by-step system that I have created and tested with dozens of other creators and other aspiring designers that includes over 60 less. to take you from generating ideas to building prototypes to finding playtesters, refining your core design loop all the way through publishing, running a crowd fund, and even getting hired in the industry. You'll also get access to my private design discord filled with me, members of the Stoneblade team, and other creators all actively building games.

Plus, I've got some incredible bonuses for people who join right now and for longtime fans of the podcast. If you're ready to stop pretending and start actually designing games with intention. Check out the Think Like a Game Designer Design Lab at justingarydesigns.com. In today's episode, I speak with Ivan Van Norman. Ivan has over 15 years of experience in publishing and tabletop games. He has founded his own companies. He's currently co-owner of Hunter's Entertainment.

He was the executive producer and show host at Geek and Sundry. And we have an incredibly overlapping background that starts with us both having a booth at GenCon the very same year that Ascension launched, he launched projects. We've had crosses in the background, but here we finally get a chance to really deep dive on the podcast. Ivan has a lot of really great insights. We talk a lot about what it's like to be founding a company and publishing things with themes and RPGs that you really want to play for yourself. We talk about the ideas of what made Geek and Sundry successful and the value of video content for role-playing games and how that got. founded and how it's evolving. We also talk about his Alice's missing RPG, which is a silent

RPG that the story is actually told through a group text. And then that inspires me to come up with an idea that we end up riffing on a little bit, which I have now been working on and we'll be having announcements about soon, of how would you make a short form video RPG, something that would work on sites like Twitch and shorts and reels and things like that, which I think is a really cool concept, which got inspired directly by this conversation. So you actually see the process happening live where the technology and game designs interlaced together and how he's used that in his career. And then you can see it happen live as I ideated and what's happening. And I'll have some things to reveal about that. Unfortunately, they're not ready right now. But I was able to build

in prototypes from pretty cool ideas pretty quickly in large part thanks to Ivan's insights. And he really talks about a lot of the counterintuitive challenges, right? Everybody prepares you for failure, but nobody prepares you for success. And the challenges that come when you're successful and how you can have audience capture and obligations that can constrain your creativity and create some problems. So really great insights from across the board from both hugely successful projects to succeeding as an indie creator and an indie publisher. So tons here for everybody. Ivan's a great guest and now I'm happy to say a great friend. So without any further ado, here is Ivan Ben Norman.

Hello and welcome. I am here with Ivan. Van Norman. Ivan, it's great to finally have you on the podcast. Hey, Justin. Thanks for inviting me. It's nice to be in a podcast space with you. Yeah. We have a long background, though.

It's like a lot of years gap in between a lot of times, right? I think I first interacted with you when Geek and Sundry when I was doing an episode and filming of some stuff up there. I have seen you presenting some really cool projects. And I think we were in Copenhagen and you were showing off the Queen by Minner. night products and, you know, we've got it around because you've done a lot of awesome stuff throughout this industry. So I know many parts of your story, but I'm eager to fill in the gaps. Yeah, man, it's funny too. I feel like the best way of saying is we've sputniked around each other.

Yeah. My favorite story is the we were neighbors in our first year at GenCon together, right? Yeah, yeah. The Hunter's Entertainment launched the same year that you guys did, right? and we were, we've basically been like two guys on two different tracks across the industry running alongside each other on the train. Yeah, yeah. It's pretty amazing starting in that Entrepreneur's Alley, a little spot with a small little 10 by 10. And we had slowly expanded and we took over another booth nearby. And that was the year that essentially launched this company and you launched your company. And it's very rare to be able to just still be around after that long, right?

Did you know what was the first year that Entrepreneur's Alley happened? Did you know that was the first year Gen Con did Entrepreneurs Alley? Was I, I did because I actually got, I ended up getting a 10 by 20 booth instead of the 10 by 10 booth because I applied for their marketing fellowship thing. So I, yeah, so we got that extra. Okay, if you're going to give us this opportunity, I'm going to take it. And yeah, we had applied and went through everything. So it's an incredible program and really great way for people to get started in the industry. It was one of the thing.

It was one of Scott's, it was like his thing he really wanted to do for GenCon, right? was to help enable new companies to come and go into what would otherwise be an incredibly intimidating space for people who have never run a company or done publishing before in that circumstance. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Scott Elliott, who was, I think, director of marketing for Gen Con at the time, is now running, I think it was called Mele Gigi.

Mele Gigi. Yeah. And so it does organize play events and stuff. And I actually worked with Scott back at the Upper Deck days. We worked together on the versus system trading card game and some other projects. So that was how I got, I knew about what was happening. It was like, okay, here's my chance. Let's go.

So, yeah. You remember you're facing the back. Do you remember, sorry, I just wanted to just a little, paint the picture of everyone's mind here. Our first years at Gen Con, we were literally facing the back wall. We were as far tucked into the corner of that convention hall that you could possibly be. Yes, it was in the back corner. And I remember we were facing the, there was like a little food area that was not that far away. And they had some circular roundtables for people eating food.

And so when people would buy Ascension games, they would. then go play ascension on those tables, which then became bonus demo area that people would come over. So we just pretty stealthily expanded our blue space. It's brilliant. Oh, I love it. I love it. I love it. Sorry, I didn't mean to crush you off. I just had that imagery in my head. I'm like, oh, man, and not only was it the first year, and not only did we both get marketing fellowship apps, but we were shoved in the back corner and just said to figure it out, right? Yeah, listen, and it was a scary.

thing at the time going in to try to figure that stuff out. I don't know where you were at, but I had pretty much put all my life savings into that first print run of ascension, into the expense to be at the booth. We made our tables out of the boxes with a tablecloth over them because I couldn't afford the tables. So we would lose tables as we sold product. Yeah. That was, I took about a personal loan. I was pretty behold into a pretty large family loan. And it was same boat. I went to a military surplus store and like bought all of these ammo cans and things and not realizing that I was going to have to haul it across the humid hot Indianapolis several blocks because I'm not loading in through the loading doors, right? I'm literally carrying duffel bags of t-shirts and pallets of hand

trucks of books across the sidewalk. Yeah. And man, it was, I was drenched by the time we even had the first day, right? Oh yeah. Yeah. If you're trying to load in and use the, the drayage and the staffing and everything there, that increased your costs enormously. So we just weren't going to do that. We're just going to carry, hand carry everything through and just figure it out as we go. Yep. So let's linger on that for a little bit, right? Because you and I both took this leap, right?

And there's a lot of people, I get this question asked. So I asked you, what gave you the confidence to do that or it's such a big risk? And what if things go wrong? And many people will come to me and just say, oh, I could never imagine it. I wish I could do something like that, but I'm not brave enough or I'm not willing to. What do you think, what would you say to people like that? I would, the young people's hubris, I'd probably say, in many ways, I was fresh out of college, right? I was in the middle of the biggest economic recession of the U.S. right out of school.

I moved to L.A. with a film degree during the writer strike, right? In many ways, I had, it was great. I had zero stability and prospects in my regular day-to-day work life, right? So in a weird way, I had nothing to lose, right? I was taking out this loan. I was already massively in debt with student loans, right? And I just, we had this game. And it was cool and it was a cool concept and we could make it work.

And I did my research and found out that there wasn't any other zombie game besides all flesh must be eaten. And at that time when we were going to GenCon, it had been out of print for a couple years. Right. So I just, in a weird way, it was more like we saw the small business opportunity and then jumped in on the hobby train versus it was, ah, I want to be in RPG publishing. So wait, walk me through that thinking then. So you, what you had made the product beforehand, had you validated it in any way? What was you set? It sounds like you're really triangulating a specific market opportunity here as opposed to this is the game I want to make. This is the thing I was made to do. Yeah, long story short, it was my business partner, now my current business partner,

Crystal Rosa. He was working on a zombie game. And before then, I didn't have a great experience with role-playing games. They tried to run my first game in middle school with the Palladium fantasy role-playing game. And I was a kind of a really selfish GM and I didn't like it when the friends didn't want to participate in my story. And I was a bit of a diva DM, right? And so I just kind of dropped it until I went to college with a whole bunch of other D&D nerds and then started having fun playing with them. But I was never really game mastering or being like the GM in any particular way. So when we got out of school and my business partner, Crystal Lerosa, was like, hey, I've been working on the zombie game. Do you want to play it? We just finished our big

D&D campaign. Do you want to play my zombie game? And like, yeah, sure, let's go look at it. We played it super fun, right? And then my brain just started to be like, hey, we should make this. We should do this. We should publish this. This would be cool, right? And then we said, okay, we'll wait. Can we do it? Right? And yeah, I validated it. Like you said, said, just validate is this the right thing? But we still were a bunch of dumb post-college kids. I didn't understand manufacturing cost of goods. I didn't understand which territories to print. And even back then, layout, my friend was a graphic designer and he was doing some great stuff. But Justin, man, I keep it here just to remind myself all the time, right? Dude, this is the first

audition. This is actually one of the books from that Jen Con, but fucking handwriting font, dude. handwriting fonts with sticky notes with giant orphaned spaces and tape and stuff there's no way this product would ever make

any kind of impression now but back that it was fine right in fact it was exciting and interesting that it was so different and it wasn't fantasy

and it was zombie survival and yeah it was a whole process right? Yeah yeah so it's a couple of things right there's the powers that come with being

dumb and broke or underestimate it. I really do believe that. In fact, I have a theory that for any kind of serial entrepreneur, you also have to have some level of serial amnesia, right? Because anytime you start a new business, anytime I start a new business or a new project or something, no, this one will be easy. And it's never easy. It's always hard. So you just have to forget that part to keep going. It totally makes it. You said it so perfectly. It's, it really is mostly about just challenging yourself over and over again and understanding that no matter what you're going to run into problems. But there's that weird joy. That's why serial entrepreneurship is really, it takes a special

kind of person who's willing to burden themselves over and over again, just to see something come out into the world, right? Yeah. Yeah. What I've, the moment that everything really clicked for me, I've told the story in the podcast before, so I'll keep it shorter here. But when I was working at Upper Deck and I was working on the World of Warcraft Ministers game and I switched from being game designer to product manager and brand manager. And I worked my way up the ladder. And I finally was like pitching the game to the CEO and the executives. And this is a company that's doing 500, 600 million dollars a year, like super fancy, like rich mahogany table in the boardroom kind of thing. And I pitch this game to them. And then I hear them talking, they start talking about the

project. And then I first, I'm like, oh, okay, I think they like it. I think they might do it. And then I realized they're just making things up. They actually, I've finally done enough research. And I knew what I was talking about that they just had no idea. what they were saying, but they just acted confident and that somehow they had successfully run this $500 million a year company. And I was like, oh, got it. Nobody knows what they're doing. Everyone is making this up as they go along. And that just clicked for me in a way that I was like, okay, I got that project out of the door and then I quit a year later and started my company because I know that I don't know what I'm doing. But I'm okay with that. I can figure it out as I go,

I'm willing to take the hits and the failures and then just keep moving forward. It feels like that's been the recipe for your life as well. because you have the audacity to keep trying, right? There's an old saying, and I love this. I actually saw it when I was like touring middle schools from my 10-year-old who's about to go in the middle school, right? But there was this quote on the wall that said, the only difference between a beginner and a master is that a master has failed more times than the beginner has tried. Like, guess what?

You're going to go out in the world. And I always tell designers this all the time, but it's like more times than not the first thing you do will be the worst. Right? Yeah. The first time you come out of the door, the first thing you're going to do is probably not going to be your best work. So just get over it. Just do it and get it done with. In fact, if anything, try to make your first endeavor as low risk as possible or go in with it and understand that if you have the capacity to roll into the next thing, then do it. Right. That's right. That's right. Yeah. The whole principles that I teach for game design in my course and in this podcast and my book, it's all about the core design, the iteration. And that means that you are, And iterating, spoiler alert, it's just a fancy word for failing a bunch.

You're just going to fail over and over again. You're just trying to minimize the time and cost of every cycle and maximize the learning of every cycle. That's the whole game. And it's not just for making games. It's for running a company. It's for writing a book. It's for figuring out pretty much any difficult thing in life that hasn't been solved before. You have to go through this process.

And so that relationship to failure and, training that relationship to failure, both divorcing your ego from it, being comfortable with uncertainty, just having a faith in a way that even if this doesn't work out the way I'd hoped, I will learn enough and I will figure it out and then something else, another door will open for me and I'm going to be okay with that. Absolutely. I would say it's also about leaning into your advantages as well too. It's one of those things where you are bringing something to the table. Every designer is bringing something that is not game design to the table with their game design. That's like any fine art skill, right? As you get older,

time, effort, and energy becomes less of a resource you have. But at the beginning, when you're first working on stuff like time effort, time and effort and energy are usually your most abundant resources. So use them in order to make the best possible product possible, right? Yeah. Yeah, I think that's not, that's a really great insight. And those are the general ones that everybody has, right? Use the advantages of, hey, if you're young and getting started, you've got all this time and energy and freedom. Do that. If you're old, and you have more connections and more capabilities, you can leverage those things.

There's also like the unique peculiarities that you have, right? Yeah. The fact that you happen to, you know, love zombie, the zombie genre, right, lets you have better ability to create that. Or my background as a pro magic player,

like I had that like, that I knew how to scratch that particular itch and could like make a very highly competitive game experience in a box. And so that gave me an edge. And so for everybody, it's out there, and it doesn't have to be some fancy degree or experience or championship title, it can literally just be like, I'm just obsessed with micro machines. I'm obsessed with them. And I could make a really cool little micro machine style game that nobody else is.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. You could be an accountant. You could be have something that is very what people might be considered to be like a non-creative or non-aggressive thing, but it's about finding the fun, right? Whatever you're doing and whatever insight you're bringing into the design that you're doing, it's about finding. And I think you said it really well. I know how to scratch that it, just like a pro magic player, right? What itch that makes you happy and how do you want to bring that to a wider audience? Yeah. It's, and also keeping in mind, too, that for every designer that's being creative, there must be someone who is accountable to that designer and allow them to be able to give them the parameters in which to create a round of. Because not everyone

can be a Pablo Picasso who can both make the work and sell the work at the same time. So one of the benefits that we had as hunters is I had my business partner who was a great game designer and graphic designer. So I took on the responsibility of salesman, marketer, and PR guy all on once. Yeah. Yeah. And as an entrepreneur or starting in a small company, you always have to wear a lot of hats. So this is another area where your unique advantages can come into play. Right. And for me, I love geeking out about these nuances and details of design. And I would do it for free and do it for free all the time. When we hang out at conventions, we should chat about all this stuff.

And so I'm like, okay, maybe I should just hit record while I do this and make other people to listen to it. Whereas for a lot of people, what, me doing the same thing, this would be very difficult in mind. I'm not making for them for me. It's great. I do this for free. This is super fun. And it helps to grow the audience and help people and do more stuff. It's insightful.

When I worked in animation, I had access to a whisper room. So I recorded commercials for my games when I was off the clock. But I had access to the whisper room. And I would just get my coworkers to do ad reads for my zombie game. Then I would put in front of zombie podcasts. And that was some of our early marketing efforts. So cool. Yeah.

And you look at even the stories of the mega successful entrepreneurs. And you look at people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. And they uniquely had access to computers earlier than other people. and they just were able to be like, okay, that small edge if you focus on, so I call it, you're a role player, so you'll appreciate this, what I call the core attributes, which is curiosity. So use the words core, C-O-R-E, so curiosity, obsession, resilience, and empathy. Oh, I love that. So you have to find something that you're genuinely curious about and just, and then become

completely obsessed with it. Folks, go into all the nuances, become like, this is my world. And then you have to have the resilience to actually face all the failures that we talked about, right, that getting punched in the face and things not working. And then the empathy to be able to reach your audience, understand what they want, and then eventually to try to build something that's serving others more so than serving your own interests. And I feel like those traits are what I think are the keys to success and certainly any

kind of entrepreneurial endeavor, but I think most things in life. I love that. I'm writing that one down and keeping it, Justin, because that is, one, I love acronyms. Anything that helps me compartmentalize really big concepts and put them into my little brain, which is totally an acronym thing. But I think you basically described everything I've tried to express in my 15 and 16 years of trying to do this, of like just being creative, finding opportunity,

being resilient and showing empathy. Like I, it's perfect. Like you, that's a book. That is a giant self-help book is what it is. For those listening, I am working on a book. It does have that concept in it. So yes, I have, I'm a, and this is the thing I,

and we talk about the stuff. I geek out about, which clearly you do too, right? This how do you, I don't, I never consider myself a creative person. I don't, at first I thought there were some magical thing that creatives had that I didn't. And that's, but when I started researching it and breaking it down and like my analytical brain, I was like, oh no, there's just like a step by step process for this stuff. And when it comes to trying to the whole point of this podcast is, I know there's a lot of people out there who are, want to live these creative fulfilling lives. And it's intimidating. I don't know what to do. And I don't know where to start. And then maybe there's those people that are on

podcast have skills and abilities I don't. No, there's just some things we just stumble into and just finding a way to articulate that and make it step by step is the way that I've tried to mentor the people in my team or the people that are in my courses. And frankly, it just makes me better at what I do, right? Because I forget the shit all the time too. It's like I got to remind myself. Exploring fundamentals helps you refine them, right? So being able to go over the fundamentals all over again in the process of teaching. It helped me too, because I started teaching my first board game seminars last winter as well too, right? Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, so I went and started going through the process of, it sounds like doing

what you've already taken a huge step into, but it's like breaking down these core principles, talking about how to engage folks, building that kind of iterative playtesting safe space where players can design. And one of the things I do is I basically do a 45 minute presentation where I talk about Halo for half of it, right? When I talk about core game loops, right? Halo for me is my perfect example of like, how do you describe what a core game loop is? Halos for me is a perfect example, right? All right. You want to give a little five-minute version of that?

Oh, sure. Yeah, here's a five-minute version. So every first-person shooter game leading up to Halo was like in the doom type of environment, right? Like running gun. But Halo at its core only does really a few things. It puts a character at the beginning of an open space and it asks them to get to the other side of the room. And it gives you the tools of cover and disposable weapons and multi-level platy.

platforming, right, in order to get there. That's it. That's HALA, right? And then you've got like, what, eight games that just do that over and over again. Every part of HALO, every room is just, okay, you start, and then you end in a space, and then the same boat. Once you're through that room, you go and you start, and then you move on to the next space. And it's insane how simple it is when it's broken down, but because it's so simple, it's so

easy for players to find the dopamine hits and find the joy of going through that space and just do it again, but just iteratively change it. So the tools of the cover and the disposable weapons, that doesn't overcomplicate the core game loop in any particular way. So I always ask my designers, I was like, okay, what is your core game loop? What is your destination A versus destination B? And then what are your tools? What's your platform disposable weapons and enemies?

that make the core game loop interesting, puts challenges in front of that game loop. Yeah, yeah, no, I love that. The concept I layer on that is the idea of core tension, right, which is that in this loop, there's always some kind of trade-off. There's some kind of thing that I'm trying to get versus one versus the other,

and that the trade-off between those things and how I have to make those choices creates that positive tension where when I break through it feels really good and when I don't feel bad, and I got to want to try again, right? So this idea of, do I stay protected in cover, but I got to get to the other side and I got to get over to the thing.

Or do I use my weapons and spray and pray or do I need to conserve it? Those are like kind of these tensions that you have to play with. And even at its base level, Justin, you're also describing, again, using Halo as like the hollow type port. You're just talking about health and shields. The true payoff and risk is I'm going to get damaged. I'm going to have to die. Then I'm going to restart.

And video games have been doing this for a long time. That part's not new by any sort of the imagination. It's just how that core tension is now being expressed through. It's this new iterative design that's not Doom anymore. It's not just running and picking up one weapon and ammo and health as you're like grinding through a level. It's doing this unique expression that makes it feel different and challenging. And that's really the key is that unique expression, right? Because what I found, which is generally true over the years, is as games evolve and as the culture of gaming evolves,

certain mechanics and themes and components become like essential building blocks. So for example, in Ascension, we took the Dominion, took the ideas that people were familiar with from a deck build, from a TC trading card game. And it's, okay, let's put those into a single box, but with a preset thing. And Ascension took that and then turned it into an ever-changing center row and the variance that comes from what's available changing. It's the core tensions of Dominion are still there, which are also some of the core tensions of magic. But now the thing that makes Ascension different was that changing sensoro, so everything has to hinge on that. As you said, Halo brought a lot of tropes and mechanics forward from Doom and from video games generally, but the things where it differentiated and it made the difference become what's important.

So for anybody that's designing games now, or even like when I made Ascension Tactics, which is a miniatures game with the Accention deck building game layered on, now the tension between the miniatures and the space with the cards, now that becomes the new focal point. So for anybody that's designing a game now, they need to think about, okay, what's in the market, what's available, what are the things that are now the building blocks you have available, and then from those, how do you build something that's truly unique? And spoiler alert, a lot of times the answer is removing things, not asking. Yes, yeah.

Bringing it to basics is huge, right? I'm a huge fan of take the classics, take the games that have survived for centuries, right? And find a way to make them fun and unique. It's so funny, we're in this tabletop discussion, but I keep thinking of video game comparables, but Balto or Balatro, right? It's poker with a couple of different unique elements added on top of it. And other miniature games are usually just an expression of the classic strategic move dudes across the board kind of attitude, right? Yeah.

It's my philosophy and my contention that these are not, none of these principles are unique to tabletop games or video games, right? And I guess I turn that back to you, right? Because you've worked as a producer, you've made books, you've made RPGs, you've made series, is you've like how does how do you think about this in those contexts like how do you think about this when you're making a show or making a book or you know presenting something else i guess that's a valid and it's interesting because whenever you're thinking about contents you're always thinking about content first and then an expression of what you know audiences expectations are and people take risks in that space too no one ever thought for a minute that it was a good idea to have a four hour long

video where people are playing dungeons and dragons right no one before that happened no one No fat cat executive in a content space was going to say, now that's the direction things are going right now, right? Sometimes you just have to do it and try. All of Geek and Sundry back then was a huge experimental. I like to call it Geek and Sundry University because it really did feel like a second college for me, right? It was a whole bunch of us who were just experimenting, getting paid absolutely no money while we just tried things for the sake of trying it, right?

Yeah. So give a little bit more context to that origin story and what Geek and Sundry was. I think most listeners will know, but some might not. So I just want to set the scene. I mean, story short, I started working with them for a long time. Geek and Sundry was built off of Felicia Day's vision to be able to make long form and short form content in a web space, right? She was the original innovator. She was originally the person who made the guild and wanted to see like this web series. thing come to fruition because she was trying to fight against the norms of traditional film and television, right? I've got a new platform. It's on a monitor. How do I make stuff that I think is interesting and unique and different for this one unique medium, right? It was successful. They got with Google. Google basically subsidized Geek and Sundry for years because YouTube was a brand new platform, right? They understood that they had to invest a bunch of money for people to make content for people to want to come to YouTube. It can't just be a bunch of candid home vids.

If you want something that looks good, you've got to inject money into it, right? So Geek and Sundry took advantage of that with basically every other multi-channel network like Smosh and Defi and all those other companies that were just taking that YouTube money for years. And they made successful properties out of it, right? And at some point, YouTube said, okay, we're done. We've achieved critical mass. Yeah, you guys are now. You guys are now going to make stuff because we're the place to be. Figure it out.

We've given you a million dollars a year for a couple of years. Now you guys deal with it, right? Yeah. And that was how I came in because Tabletop season three, Tabletop wasn't going to get made unless it was crowdfunded. So I was part of the Indiegogo project. That was my first real job in this space was working on Tabletop Season 3 as the crowdfunding manager.

And I didn't know what I was doing either, Justin. And I was still figuring things out. Crowdfunding was brand spank and new. And this idea of cultivating a community and giving people things what they want and doing for all intent and purposes a really real shotgun marketing campaign in 30 days in order to tell people what they want. And then hand them things and hope it works out. Right? Again, very fresh and new.

But after that had all done, success continued to show. They were acquired by legendary. So I started working under Geek and Sundry as acquired by Legendary. And that's when they started the Twitch channel because Twitch was a new platform. And no one knew what that was all about. So they're like, let's make content for Twitch. Apparently it just matters that you're on it all the time. So how can we do 12 hours of programming in a day?

And so I'd filled in. I pitched shows left from center, got a board game show, ran a D&D show, helped critical rollout for a bit. That just slowly started exploding as it got bigger and bigger. Community started showing up. CR started carving their own little piece of the pie and eventually CR went off to go do their own thing because just like a lot of companies, it's like you can hit a momentum, but if you aren't maintaining, right? And they took a big risk on just trying to make their own platform probably about two or three years too early, right? They were making a lot of original content versus a lot of the other platforms that start now where they acquire content

before they start investing a bunch of money into original content, right? Yeah. That's the real, that's the very rambly version of the history. No, that's great. So there's a lot of things. There's a lot of threads I want to pull on from there, right? Because I like to hear these stories because they're interesting to begin with, but then I like to think about, okay, what are they sort of universalizable principles here?

How does this apply today? And there's a few, there's a few aspects to that, right? One angle, which we can talk. talk about is the things that were at the time nascent, which is sort of YouTube, Twitch, live streaming, crowdfunding are now bare bones, non-essential puzzle pieces to massive parts of this industry, right? My business runs on crowdfunding. We have content. Probably we're not as good at YouTube and Twitch as we should be, but we do have content up on there. Obviously, podcasting is one one thing. So there's an area of, like, how do you nowadays break through the noise and what's the best approaches to those platforms? And then,

So we can go down that channel. Then the other thing is I think about the, I always am fascinated by the intersection between technology and creativity. Yes. And the opportunity that presents itself with a certain new form of technology or media or whatever it is that suddenly unlocks

a certain type of creative work that was there before, but it was waiting for this right moment. Yeah. So the YouTube and live streaming with role playing games was this perfect marriage, right? And it grew not just things like critical role

and geek and sundry channel, but it grew the entire role-playing game industry. I would contend that Gs are like a quarter of what they are now without these kinds of streaming shows because this idea of watching people tell stories and act and share and laugh and joke and be together. That's compelling. Whereas if that was all just happening in the basement as it used to,

and nobody got to see it, it doesn't spread as virally. It's not there. So that format, that medium and that message we're perfectly aligned to grow an entire category. And so I try to think about, given where we are today, and the new technologies and the new medium that are emerging today, what does that lean towards in terms of how creators should think about it or what industries might that empower in ways that have not been empowered before.

So two very different paths. I'll let you choose your own adventure, which way you want to go. Maybe we'll get to both. But yeah, which way do you want to take it? Okay, so I think the one that's probably the cleanest to talk about is this merging between technology and creativity, right? Because the only constant is change. And technology is evolving quicker than we've ever imagined, right? We're dealing with our own problems now, which back then, Twitch and YouTube were all new concepts too. And there was a lot of strong

opinions about whether these were good and what they did and what they did for society and humanity in general, right? So there's a little bit of going back to that, just shepherding the audacity forward to say, yes, I'm going to try this and let, see what happens. And we had the benefit at GNS of having a bit of a safety net, right? Like, I had a parent company, people were getting paid. There wasn't a whole lot of if we try this and fail, like we're all homeless now, right? There was just a little bit more room to experiment and breathe. But it was very quick, right? And I think applying it to the future context of now, we have platforms, new platforms that are coming out and that are going to be

putting people, they're going to be challenging the perception of what we're going to be entertaining for folks, right? I want to pause. I'm going to continue to this wrangle, but I just, I want to pause and push back on something that you just said, because I think it's interesting. You said, we had it a lot. We had it good because we had a parent company. We had cash coming in.

We were protected. And yet, at the very beginning of this podcast, we were talking about how much you were able to take a risk and start something because you had nothing. And you were willing to take those risks. That's true. That's true. That's actually valid. Yeah.

I wasn't getting paid a lot of money. So here's the difference. The difference is between my personal risks versus a company's risks, right? So Geek and Sundry had a whole bunch of viewers. They had like millions of followers on YouTube. They had nerdist as well, too. And they were just trying to find ways to monopolize those eyeballs, right? Yeah.

Me, as Ivan Van Norman, I was just a host and creative who had a platform, had keys to a truck that was very big. But I still was like, hey, look, I'm driving. this big truck, right? I don't know where it's going to go, but I'm taking it down the road. I was given access to a very, me and a bunch of other people were given access to this very expensive vehicle and we were just driving it. But we didn't pay for it. We did for that truck. I was getting paid a little bit of money to drive it. But I did, but versus like when I think about stuff now as a cereal as like a business owner, right? And a risk now on a new platform, like dumping a bunch of money into a new endeavor when I don't know what it's going to do.

That's what makes businesses hesitate on innovation. Sure. Yeah. The innovator's dilemma, right? Just saying it's like, so this is weird. What I hear you saying then is that there's actually this bizarre counterintuitive thing, which is, hey, if I'm broke, fine, no problem. And if I know I've got a ridiculous amount of cash coming in, I could take some risks, no problem. But there's this middle ground, which is, I'm doing okay, but cash is not infinite and abundant. So I'm actually very afraid to take that cash and put it towards unknowns and take real risks. It's a middle class problem.

Like in a middle business kind of issue. And yeah, when you're it's, yeah, I think you just said it. And there was something there too, especially when it comes to being broke, though, that I have to pull back and think on it. Because there was a little bit there that's that I think is actually very important. But continue your thought. It'll probably jog me again as you keep going. I brought that up because I felt it. Right.

We're an indie studio. We do all right for ourselves. but we're not flush with cash. So I have this all the time. There are some projects that I have in my pipeline, even some games that are pretty damn well done that I love, but they're really risky. They're very expensive to make.

They're not quite exactly our current audience, so it's going to require us to reach out. And so it's like, I'm in a holding pattern. And it's, if I had a little bit more money and I could throw some budget at just risky bets. The way I think about it, there's always 10% to 10 to 20%

depending upon where I'm at that I put in risky bets that I'm like, okay, I'm going to invest in crazy things. and see what happens, but really you want the bulk of your kind of portfolio to be stuff that you know your audience, you know how to serve that audience, you don't like deliver what they're expecting and what they want with the twists and be creative and keeping yourself interested, but still you know what your core is and you want some amount of your time still, you know, force some amount of your time to be looking at the new crazy things.

And see, and I think that's actually just where it is right there. It's just that like when you have an established audience, when you have and when you have customers, right, you now have some risks and responsibility. when it comes to cultivating those customers that you don't have when you're starting out and when you're just trying something and when you're at the start of the race, right? At some point, you've got to maintain your endurance and momentum if you want to finish if the race is the grand analogy for life, right? But there's a lot of things, another very fond saying that I will often tell game designers, especially ones that are looking to self-publish is that everybody prepares you for failure,

but nobody prepares you for success. It's very hard. things become challenging once you have found some success, and it's about making those decisions in order to either, A, cultivate, or scale that success that are not the same problems you'll deal with when you're just starting out. Because when you're starting out, you're just trying stuff. You're hoping for the best. You might be planning a couple of steps ahead unnecessarily, but at the end of the day, you're working off a pretty little experience. But once you've got a company under your belt once you start making some choices, once you start having risky projects versus your bread and butter, then you've got people who were beholden to you for their paycheck, right?

Then it starts feeling a little different. That's the hardest thing. And that that's really what it was for me is that I'm willing to take a lot of risks. I know worst case scenario, I'll be fine. If I got to go get another job, if I got to sleep on a friend's couch, it'll be fine. I'm not worried about it. But like when I have other people whose paychecks and livelihood depend on me, that's where I feel the fear. That's where I feel the risk.

And it's a lot harder for me to be like, there's been two waves in the company's history where I had to do layoffs. And the first one almost broke me, almost broke the company. And I waited way too long and went massively into debt because I just didn't want to do it. And I learned the lesson. And the second time, I was more thoughtful about it. But it sucks every time I never, I never, ever want to do it. So it's hard.

It's a tricky thing to balance that. As you said, you described that you've got these obligations. You've got obligations to your team. You've got obligations to your customers. You've got obligations if you have investors. And those things can start to weigh on you in ways that can be stifling to creativity. And I think it's important to balance those things. Which is why at that point then, too, you have to acknowledge that delegation is important, right?

And sometimes the delegation of creativity and also setting the expectations of what you want to do in the company. Right. I know we're most our, it seems like our podcast is mostly like, hey, we're a bunch of mid-sized publishing companies talking about business problems, right? It's totally valid when you're someone like Jamie Stigmeyer and you are the owner of the company, but you're also the head creative, right? Then you're probably not going to be the one balancing all of the budgets and the P&Ls on a day-to-day basis and worrying about what the current inventory in stock is. I know he likes to touch on that specifically more than other people, but you have to fill in,

if you want to grow and succeed, you have to acknowledge your weaknesses and be able to fill in appropriately for that, which then generate. it's more obligation and risk, right? Yep, yeah, that's right. I think about the scale of we're at about 15 people right now at the highest point. We're at 30-something people. And the amount that it takes,

what counts as success, the bar moves, right? A project that would have been great for me and a couple buddies and would have supported us and would have been a home run is now actually a failure. And I actually can't keep it going.

And so it's a very strange phenomenon. I remember that I had a, this is not just a small company phenomenon, by the way. So I had Peter Atkinson on the podcast, right? And he was talking about how D&D, that barely broke the threshold of worthwhile for them to do it all at 30 million a year. And they actually like raised the minimum threshold of what was like okay to work on as a company because he loved D&D so much. Because every dollar they would spend on magic was worth way more. And it wasn't worth it for them. To me, if you got, if I have a project that's making $10 million a year, I'm like dancing in the

streets for them. They're shutting it down. So it's yeah. It's every level. This is a challenge. Everything. So it's wild. So getting back to your people who are out there listening, right? Or are like, oh, what do I want to do? It's this is the time in which you were the most free. Yeah. This is the time in which you have the obligation. You have zero obligations in theory.

And the only risk you have is the risk you're willing to take, right? And whether that's you and a whole bunch of people who are willing to go and try something new, I've literally got done talking to a new designer. He's going to launch his Kickstarter. he's on launch boom he's got him and his eight college buddies and they're all working on this project together and i'm like that's awesome that's great who owns the company who has the LLC and he's i do i'm like okay cool now your obligation is different than everybody else's right and now you need to decide what you want to do with this IP if it's successful right and that was like a oh okay yeah you're

right i'm like yeah because it's fine when it's just you're all working on a project together but what happens if you make $30 million, man. Your friends are suddenly going to start having some questions about what are their responsibilities and what do they get out of the project now, right? That's right. Yeah. Yeah, no, solving that stuff up front. And that's where I guess it sounds like you've been doing with your teaching and I do with mine. It's like I'm trying to put this stuff out in front of people ahead of time because you just don't think about it. And yeah, you can figure it out as you go, but the lessons you're going to learn are way more painful. I did. My first book I ever published was my A, my kids books, the ABCs of RPGs. Man, I ran that as a soul

prop. He was the worst ID on the planet. And just so the consumers, people out there who can hear it, the reason when I say you ran it's a sole prop. So my kids book, the ABCs of RPGs made about $190,000, right? And I ran it as a sole proprietorship,

which means it was attached to my social security number. It was my personal bank account. So my personal income went from making like 50 to 60k a year to now making $2,000. 60K in a year, right? Because this Kickstarter brought in so much money and it was dropped directly into my bank account. And so my taxes were like, oh, yeah, you've made quarter of a million dollars this year. We're going to tax you appropriately. So I very quickly unloaded all of that financial responsibility onto my, onto hunters, onto my publishing company, which I should have done in the first place. I should have just ran it as a as a corporate entity. But it was a personal project. So whatever. Yeah, when you didn't, again, I love your quote. Yeah, nobody, everybody prepares you for failure. Nobody prepares you for success. That's probably going to be the title of this episode. I love it so much. And yeah, and it's, yeah, this is fortunately where my other separate failure of going to law school and dropping out helped me, at least as I already knew to form a corporation and how to do contracts and stuff. So I did come with that background. You had that prior knowledge and that's the thing. It's like you, I'm sure that your work for hire contracts were a lot tighter than 90% of entrepreneurs in the industry, right? Yeah. I've actually had many, because I, I do, in addition to the stuff I self-publish, I do a lot of design work with other companies. And I've had multiple companies where they give me their design contracts.

And I'm like, redlined it, talks these things. And they're like, wow, nobody's ever pushed back on this before. These are pretty reasonable claims. That's crazy. I'm just like, oh, man, I can't believe that. So, yeah. It's so funny. It's because literally before we hopped on this interview, I was going over our game acquisition contract.

Because I'm like, I haven't seen this in a few years. And I'm looking at it now. And I'm like, just like, crossing things out and redoing it again. because I'm like, that's not specific enough. That's not specific enough, right? Yeah. Yeah. I only know that because I've had the experience of having to go through it over and over again.

So you can't be good at something you haven't done over and over and over again. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's nice that there are resources available and people can research the things and learn from other people's mistakes more than was true when we were coming up. But it is true. There's no substitute for iteration slash failure as you learn. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

So I took us on this tangent away from the curve of technology and like how it applies and how change, how changing technologies and mediums influences the creative process. And I feel like there's more to say there. So I don't want to, I'm going to bring us back to that. Right. Yeah, no, that's totally valid. So the creative process, it's so funny. Because I, again, I think it just comes down to what, where are people at? Where are them eyeballs at, right? What platforms are being used? Where are your customers? What are people participating in? And again, and what can you do? to innovate in that space, right? I feel like every week I'm getting an email from some small business who is trying to merge digital and tabletop together. That's been true for the last 15 years.

That's been my entirety, more than that, even as much as 20 years ago, I remember, and also trying to do stuff like that. I've had Jordan Weissman on the podcast multiple times. He's a good friend and advisor. He was one of the first people innovating in this space. Very difficult to do well. Most of the time you end up with something that's worse than physical and digital when you try to put them together. And so much more money to do, right? Like it's just a more expensive process. Yeah, sure, now there's more tools that lower the bar when it comes to what you can do. But it's sad because we're basically been given this, I don't want to, I hate getting into this topic a little too deep into it, but we've been given this set of unethical tools and basically said, now go innovate with it. Right.

And we're being given these weird ways in which for every business to grow better and faster. And it's so tempting as a small business owner to be like, I can do the same thing for less money. And it's rough because it does in many ways water down the creativity. But it also dangles that carrot of, oh, you don't know how to write a legal contract. Throw it into chat GDP and have them go and, you know, fix your legal contract for you. which is dangerous. And it's so easy. You're not making the mistakes now.

The computer's making the mistakes. But if you take it as face value, you will end. Everything's just going to be homogenized. Everything's just going to look like the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're 100% right there.

And I've talked about the guy on the podcast a bunch and in articles. And I think it's a very complicated topic, which we don't have to get into a ton or we can. But to me, think you can outsource effort. You can't outsource understanding. There's a do. And you can't outsource the desire to want to see something amazing be done well. Yeah. And I think no matter how good the work of AI is, it's always going to push towards the middle, right? It's going to push towards the, because it's what it's trained on. It's trained on the whole corner of the middle stuff. And so it's going to

push you towards a normalized same as other things. And you as a creator have the opportunity, is we were talking about earlier to embrace your weird and push things to the boundaries. And yes, you can use this stuff as a tool. I talk about the concept of upstream art. When you think about what was possible, let's take a less controversial example. Originally, in order to produce music, I would have to have a full orchestra. I would have to have everybody come there, play it live, and have everybody play. And so now you get to hear the music. And then we have the ability to record that music. And then we have the ability to digitize and produce music with off of your laptop and produce a, now you can have bedroom DJs that become global successes, right?

Those technology changed what was possible and how the level of music and the things that you could create in that space. And I believe the same thing happens in each industry as technology evolves. Again, even leaving AI aside, the ability to produce stuff and make things has been easier than ever. The ability you were able to create an entire production studio and create content because streaming platforms existed. You didn't have to go to a network executive.

and have them your way through, right? There's, there are paths that are open that are only possible because of technology. And sometimes that technology down, degrades the value of another layer of artistic expression. Right. And that's just a fact. And it's unfortunate, but it is an example I believe is coming, which I think is really interesting, is if you look at the top 10 movies that are out in the grossing movies, right? They're all sequels based on tried and true IP.

And because no one's willing to take a risk to spend $100 million, on a super cool big budget action movie without knowing that, hey, there's already a built-in audience. It's just going to copy this formula. But if I can reduce the cost of producing those things from $100 million down to a million or even, who knows, maybe even a few hundred or a few thousand dollars, if I can produce these tools on my own, just like a DJ making music in their bedroom on a laptop, then so much cool art is going to exist. So many cool movies are going to exist.

And so there's a lot of contentious challenges that come with these things. but I think that if we focus on what creative aspirations are possible, then I think there's a really compelling positive world here. Or when you teach, you're teaching board game design now recently, right? I'm curious how you approach this now. Whenever somebody would come to me with it, I want to make this really cool TCG,

I want to make this really expansive game thing, my advice is always shrink your scope, do less, try something very small because that's just not practical at all. And now I'm loosening my stance a little bit because I think it's a lot more practical to do things at bigger scale than that was possible before. It's just about the complexity. The more components, more complexity, right? The more components, the more points of failure.

So it's also about if you've been playtesting this game for eight years and it's an $80 big box board game, if you've been playtesting it for eight years, it's probably as refined as it's going to be based off of whatever vision you had for the game. So the only questions I have at that point then is like how many other people have played it. And B, what's, is this truly your final vision, right? In the process. So for me, it's like the scope is dependent on how much effort and energy you've put into it already. Right.

And do you want this out next year? If you want to put out a big old board game and your timeline is three months, I'm like, yeah, no, keep it cool. So it's, I don't know. I think I agree with you. It's good to, it's good to be keeping in mind about what you should make the game you want to make, right, no matter what. But understanding the parameters of which you consider success for this game, because that's what I talk about with designers all the time too. It's what are your goals with putting this out? In the film industry, they talk about the triangle of priorities. You can have

something good, cheaper fast, pick two. For designers, I often talk about there's creative control. You can have creative control. You can have eyeballs or you can have money. Right. And you've got to put them in priority because if you prioritize one thing, it tends to deprioritize others, right? And this is just when it comes to whether you're making a deal with a publisher or whether you're self-publishing, you've got to prioritize those three items, right? Yeah. No defaunt. I mentioned earlier, I'm working on a new book. And it's about, a lot of it is about taking these principles of games and applying them to life, right? And how do you use those? And one of the things in the book, in addition to the core attributes thing is this idea that look in games part of why we like games

is that they give us a very clear goal they are very much here is the thing get the ball orange ball in the hoop capture the opponent's king get across the field with your with just some guns and cover right very simple stuff and it's very clear of what you're trying to do and life doesn't work that way by default your goals of publish publish a successful game what does a successful mean what does it mean to what do have a good business be fit like all these things are super fuzzy unclear what it means. And because you're chasing these fuzzy goals, you never know if you're going

in the right direction. You never know if you're going to get there. And so one of the tools to make life more like a game is to get very clear on what your wind condition is. And your wind condition should be personal to you. Like, just because you see the thing that's out there in the horizon, I would say, I mentioned I had this horrible kind of layoff experience in Stoneblade, and it was because I was chasing, I'm going to be EA.

I'm going to be this giant monster. I'm going to be blizzard, right? I'm going to go. And so we would just double. in size every year and growth is maximizing everything for growth. And after a while, I realized I was in a company. I didn't even want to be it. I hated my job. And it didn't feel good anymore. And it's crazy because you want to go back to just origins, right? My goal when initially doing this is have a book ready by Gen Con. That was it. Have the book be available to be sold by GenCon.

And slowly those goals got more and more complicated. So you're right. A lot of designers, even talking to this new designer just a few days ago, I'm like, what do you want to do? And he's, I want to be a producer for a company. And I'm like, great. You want a job and you want to show people that you know how to do this work. And now I have a very clear pathway in which to help lay out the breadcrumbs in which to get you there versus like, I want to start a company. Different set of breadcrums. Get you there, right?

That's why it's important to. And I still think, and I love this core thing that you've put out as well, too. But I'm always been leading a lot into the creative control eyeballs or just exposure. right and money. And sometimes exposure and money can be correlated, but not always because when you publish people's work, it depends. If you want a lot of eyeballs, then you're probably going to be losing creative control because you're probably going to be attaching something that's going to usually be more successful than what you would want to it, right, if eyeballs are the most important thing. Yeah. And I think like when you're thinking about what, how you want to build your career,

which types of, I think you also want to think about your kind of lifestyle, right? What is it that you want. I as a CEO of a game company, much less of my time is spent working on games than a person who's the people I hire as game designers. They get to just play games all goddamn day. I don't get to do that anymore. I feel you, buddy. It's so funny. God, Justin, it's so funny how much you and I are just in the fun house mirror of life. You and I were just literally waving at each other across a hall of mirrors at this point. This is my design day. Thursdays is usually my design day. But I'm like, but I'm enjoying this. I think this is great. This is fun. But usually this would be my time to sit down. And very rarely do I actually ever get any design to the table because I'm dealing with something always. Yeah. And to your point, there are tools that do help with this problem. And you've identified one of them, right? It's just blocking off sacred time for design and deep work. Right. And so my, for me, it's Tuesdays and Thursdays or that, which includes things like the podcast and writing and designing. But I don't schedule meetings. I don't do the day to day logistic stuff. I say I do that on Mondays, Wednesdays and Friday. And is to make sure that I don't let it because it will take it will consume whatever space you give

it, right? Emails are always there, problems are always there, people want to jump you into a meeting people. That stuff is constantly, life will distract you. And so finding ways to carve out sacred space for the stuff that matters the most, really helpful. I found finding, tracking what I do to an almost creepy degree was super helpful. I used an app called Rescue Time. It's like it's literally just like an app that spies on you on your computer and tells you at the end of the week how you spent your time and I found out that I was spending 14 hours a week on email. And that is unacceptable. I have made it. I didn't realize it. I didn't even know. But I would just like, just check email and just get sucked into it. Just check it email. Just get sucked into it. And so I was like,

okay, I need to restructure things. And so I block out, this is the time I do email. I even use tools like that I have a plug in called inbox when ready, which basically I can't even see my inbox when I go to my Gmail. If I need to just send an email or do anything, I have to unlock it to get into my inbox. And so specifically, yeah, or after, I'm only allowed to check it a couple times a day. So things that break the habits and force myself to be more conscious of what I'm doing and things that using, even though technology is the primary distractor in life, using technology to help reclaim that time, I found it be very helpful. I think I like, and I think honestly, in a weird way, we are coming back to small business problems, but we keep going back to this

edge of creativity and technology, but apply those kind of productivity, that ethos a little bit of using technology to make your job, to make you do the work that you are very good at better, right? Twitch worked because it made it very personable, very relatable. It was live, right? People love Twitch because it was live. People loved YouTube when it first came out because you can put anything on YouTube, whether it's a high production budget or a small little thing, you could get it on YouTube. People are on TikTok now because they want real quick, easy, digestible little videos or surprise all of these microdramas, there's a lot of money in these little microdramas

that are now showing up on YouTube now. And guess what? There's probably going to be people who are going to innovate in that space and they're going to decide, okay, what makes that fun? What can I bring that I love in the real world and bring it and innovate it in this platform? So the question out there for all the listeners is, what do you have? What do you have that's going to innovate in this technology and the space that you have available that brings the joy in things that you love in the world and bring it to a platform to other people. And that's how you make content that it's not just by making another critical role.

There's so many people out there who are just trying to replicate success by just having a mortis with two or three shots and people playing a role playing game. But I always tell people every day. I'm like, how can you innovate? These guys innovated way back in the day. taking a platform and a unique idea and merging it together into something that surprisingly worked. What do you have that you can bring to that table? They had the one up and the thing is they weren't even the first ones to start streaming role-playing games. There was a whole bunch of other people. My first thing I ever did online was a little company called saving throw, right? And they

were broadcasting and doing RPGs on Twitch even before CR did. But what CR brought was their professional talent as voice actors and personalities to the table. And then they had a big platform by being on Geek and Sundry early off to be able to get that front page support on Twitch that made everybody go, wow, what is this? So what do you got? 18 year old? That's hanging out on TikTok every day and what can you do to make that space unique, right? Yeah, yeah. Sorry, the last thing just and someone has made a metric ton of money just by mowing other people's lawns and posting it on TikTok.

SB mowers, one of the biggest TikTokers. That is wild to me. Continue. Yeah. You never know. No, it's great. And so there's like these different categories of innovation, right? There's categories of innovation along the audience,

like how you reach the audience and where the eyeballs are. There's categories of innovation in terms of the how you deliver. So even the sort of the back end productivity and tools and things that we have. And there's innovation in terms of the technology in what the medium of expression of the game is. So obviously, Ascension was the first deck building game to come to mobile, right? And then what's it like to play it on an iPhone? And as far as I know, the only deck building game in virtual reality still. And each thing brings us different challenges.

And I think you did the only, as far as I know, it's only like a text, like silent RPG. This thing was the first text-based RPG. And it's the first one where we've built a standalone app that you can go online and log in. from anywhere to play the game. So describe that a bit for the audience. Yeah. So Alice is missing with Hunters is a game by Spencer Stark, and it's a 90-minute game. There's so many unique selling points to this particular RPG because it plays in 90-minute

minutes. It's actually on a timer. The game's metrics is based on you. You have a 90-minute timer, and at these timing milestones, the game advances, right? The game forces you to advance with story points with these cards that have times on them, right? but you are at the end of the day, the entire game loop, the entire facilitation of this game is through a group text. So everyone's talking about their friend Alice, who has gone missing, right? And about this friend who has come into town and is texting their old group together to try to find out what's going on with Alice.

And it just devolves very quickly into this very in-depth and tends to be very emotional story about a bunch of of kids who are trying to find their lost friend, and it has multiple endings. But at the end of the day, it's not as free form as a classic role-playing game is, where you have ultimate agency so you can make whatever choice you want. You're playing archetypes. You are setting, they're setting relationships right off the bat, right? And you're under this very specific timeline in which the game is forcing you at some point to say, you're done.

You are done. And I love that. I've been wanting to see more and more games do that where they are at Gamma. I don't know about you, but like at Gamma this year, I was delighted and surprised to see the resurgence of the Zine style game or like the micro game come up and that I was hearing that a lot of customers were more willing to pay for $4.20 books than they were to pay for $160 book, right? And people want these more condensed experiences.

And I don't think that's weird because we went from. playing a bunch of $90 to $120 legacy big box board games in which we had all that time to sit and play them. But now everyone's super excited about smaller games that they can get to the table in an hour, right? Or even less.

Why wouldn't that be any different with role-playing games? People want to be able to say, I've got three hours blocked out. I want to guarantee that I get a game done rather than having this nebulous it'll be done when it's done. Oh, yeah.

No, that's definitely my life evolved that way. Yeah, you got a six-hour game night, no problem. And I'd play all of those games. And then it's, no, I just, that's not my life. I'd rather have the opportunity to get two or three games done in a three-hour night or just one, if I can, then hope that I can play a game and play a game in the last month. People are more picky about their long games. They're playing much more picky.

We're seeing a lot more board, we're seeing a lot more game shelves being purged than being added to nowadays, right? And people are a lot more picky with their time because there's so much choice. So you have to have a really unique offering, or you have to play with the time. scale a little bit. I'm working on a geocaching RPG right now, right? That's asynchronous. Okay. And the idea. What can you say about that? That's very fascinating to me. It's fascinating to me, too. I'm loving it. So it's what I'm working on today. So long story short, it's an asynchronous game where the game is all about making drops, right? So right now it's set in a world in which you can have a, I'm playing with the coat of pain a little bit. Right now, you're a rebellion selling a technocracy.

right and it's omnipresent it's always watching you so the only way to communicate the rebellion the only way to coordinate the rebellion is by doing dead drops right so the game is advanced by people seeking and finding these little caches of story and then they're advancing the story right and then they recash it for somebody else to find so it's the thing it's the thing i love about it and again it's very experimental still like deeply into play testing in it at this point right now, but it's looking good. The idea is that you can go play whenever you want, and you just know that there are as a cash out there that's ready for you to advance.

So the story's only going to advance when the players are ready for them to do it. So for me, I'm like you kind of set the metric. You either advance the story every three days, every week, or every month, right? So you can play a game of technocracy over the course of six months to a year, right? but you're really only putting in maybe one or two hours a week on it because you're having to find the cash, advance the story. And then you'll still come in for a couple of in-person meetings. But now to play this big, long game of rebellion, you're scheduling three in-person meetings

rather than trying to schedule a monthly six to eight-hour grind. Fascinating. So you put like a Gero like fence around the area where the players actually are to have things show up? So it's a local group. and you put a pin where the cache is, right? So just like, so geo-cashing is to be, also legal disclaimer, geocaching is a trademark term. This is not a geocaching RPG.

This is a seek-and-find game, right? But you put a GPS pin where your cache is, and you drop a clue because the technocracy knows. If you just say where it is, the technocracy will find it. So you have to use code and deception so that the players know where to find it, but you aren't putting exactly where it is on the internet, right? I see. So a game master is dropping these clues specifically in specific locations.

And players. And players are too, because once they've advanced the story, they have to recash it and put it somewhere, drop a new pin and say, hey, hey widow, right? Because they all have to use code names or whatever. Hey, widow, the next drop is the place is where the pets are, but no one can go and find. And if you look forward to the right and two,

up you might see where the bird lies, right? And then they've got to use that clue in order to find that specific thing because they're using code or whatever in order to break it down. Yeah, see, this is great. This is exactly what I've said. I love this example. I love that you're actually in the middle of building something that is at this forefront of technology and what's possible in play, right? You're taking the RPG genre that you know and love and have great expertise in and the Pokemon Go, for lack of a better term, like idea of geocash or location-based game. They're searching, yeah, because I love it. I love geocaching with.

my kid. Like we go out, whenever we go on a hike, whenever we go out, we always go find one or two caches and there's just something so satisfying about that. But then my question, the thing I asked, and going back to that innovation, is the question I ask is, how can I add a story to this? How can I meaningfully add a story to this and have it not feel like errands? Yeah, I like that. Okay. So I have another idea that I want to speak ball on, right? Because the Alice is missing concept I love and this idea that we were communicating like text messaging and group texts were relatively new and this idea of innovating there. And we just talked about this, the genre of a quick video, your TikToks and reels, et cetera,

right? Could we make a version of this that was more of a, you're actually sharing 30 second video clips as the way that you advance the story and we build that in some way that would like connect the. Yes, that's the thing. Use the tools in the place that are doing it. Like how can you Like that seems so ARG to me. That sounds so fun. The question is always like with every game designers, how do you put structures and guidelines so that it's not just free form, right? And you just have to make some decisions on like how do you gamify that so that it does

feel like there is some progression involved? Because that's the only thing within the RPGs that get weird is that when you have an idea and the story in place, but then it just has this nebulous with ends whenever the story ends. That's not very, that's okay when it's just you and a group of friends, but it's not a good product description. But to me, like what I think you solved this problem already, why I came up with this idea while we were literally talking here is like the idea of that Alice is missing,

that there's a timer and there's a specific set of things that are going to happen. So like a new clip will open up like from the story that will say, all right, this is the new thing. And you have this amount of time to respond to it before the next thing is going to happen. And like the idea that this could be done on a platform like a TikTok has all of these advantages because now not only we are playing the game, but other people could potentially discover it and then follow this chain of events. So if it's just like a channel that got stood up, where it's okay, this is the group, here's the things, and now it's happening. And you could have

everybody participated. I feel like there's a pretty cool recipe there. You might even be able to just like live create stories as you go. Like, all right, we're going to be running a game for this night for 90 minutes. The main story beats are here. I don't know TikTok super well. So if there's some way to create like your own group that now is like responding to it. And then the next story beat happens. and everybody could post and reply to this thing. There's, I feel like there's something really cool there. There's something there, especially with the right coat of paint, with the right, like, story in which you want to tell.

Because the thing that made Alice work so well is that it's about a group of friends who are looking for their friend Alice in the small town, right? Yeah. So there is always a little bit of what's the specific story that you think is going to be a medium for this really well? And how can you tell that story over and over again? Yeah. Yeah.

And again, I don't know if you're happy to keep ideas. doing it because I think this is fun. I have another crazy, I have another crazy vertical idea, but I'm keeping that one close to my chest because I think this one will actually make money, but I'll talk to you about that one afterwards. If you want to hear about it, I'll, I'll let you know because this is one where I think I could actually do this tomorrow. If I just had the time effort and energy to go and execute it, I think it would be pretty dope. And I want to talk to you about this, about this. Yeah, it's weird. It's like, it's not even about TikTok. It's about how do you make a, how do you make a telescoping video?

a story where you're like telescoping the video down. Exactly, exactly. It's like these very short connected little videos that are layers acting and taking their turn and the game responding with specific moments that help tell the story. I haven't seen that done before. It feels particularly unique to our time.

And I think there are, yeah, we'll talk more offline. I think there's. Going back to the game loop, execution, right? The good news about Alice Smithing, the game loop is sending a text message. So what's the game loop for something like this where it's like, how can you, how can you contribute to the story in like by picking up your phone and recording something?

And what is, what are you asking the player to do in this action that's going to be meaningful for all the other rest of the players? Yeah. Yeah. Those are fun questions. I love it. This is the core of design, right? It's asking these questions and trying to get that answer out of it.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. We'll go way too far down the rabbit hole if I keep talking about it here, because I have. have many ideas now. This has been my, this has been a thing. It's been on the, it's been on my back burner for a long time. I have, I love RPGs. I grew up playing RPGs. I've wanted to make an RPG for my entire career. I have like scrap notes and, you know, things and different ideas and even fully prototype things. I just have never had the right full recipe to make. Let's figure it out because I think there's, why not? There's something cool there. And I'm sure, I'm sure between the resources you have and the resources I have, I'm sure we can, probably bang something out pretty awesome. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Great. Loving this. Loving this. So, yeah, it's all happening live. You've heard of here first. And so I'll use this to pivot to another idea and we'll wrap it up soonish. But I think the, but when I mentioned my, my,

my graveyard of ideas and games, right? And you talked about the idea of the importance of execution. And I would love to riff for a little bit on how you relate to that because I talk about it as a graveyard of ideas. But really, there's a lot of zombies in that graveyard that could come back to life and have turned into new projects, even like a decade later. And it's really about what there's some magical combination of time and opportunity and ability and like having, as you said, I think you give a great point. You got to, what story do you want to tell with what mechanic and opportunity and innovation that's going to draw people in? Like, how does that come to a core game loop and a core tension? There has to be this sort of perfect formula here. So I don't know.

how that relates to the work you've done or what you decide to work with. Like I said, let's riff on it now. What you're doing? Like, you just came up with an interesting idea, right? And this was so funny because in my time spending did work with you on the podcast. That was only going to be my question for you. It was like, Justin, what do you want to do? Like, what do you want to do?

With infinite time, effort, and energy, what is the game that you would want to make right now with all of these exceptions stripped away, right? So it would be going back to that graveyard. If you've got that weird idea and just the opportunity, because sometimes you have a great idea, idea and it's just not the right time for it right or maybe not the light right license maybe like i've got a game i've been sitting on for two and a half years and it's a great game but it needs a license it just yeah right so i can't do it and i'm still but i'm also like not specific on what the license needs to be i'm just i just have that game it's sitting there and the moment that license becomes available or i think

i found the right one for it then i'm just going to i'm going to inject that that game with B12 and we're just going to get it done. Right. But yeah, but sometimes it's just, it's also just weird. Or those graveyards are like, they become,

to keep your analogy going, they become like body parts for another monster. Later on down the road. The zombies are Frankensteins coming out of there. Yeah. You just take it apart because you're like, oh, I really like this concept for this game,

but I think it'll be better in this opportunity later on, right? Have you read into that at all? Like, how many zombies have you risen from the grave? Oh. Oh, no, for sure, all the time. And also, not only is it the things that were on my cutting room floor, but even the games that I released, that I'm like, man, there's things I really want to change about this and I can make it better. Yeah, same. So, like, I did the successful ones. Like, I did the World Warcraft Ministers game, which was like a very successful game. But there were many problems with it and things that me as a designer 20 years ago,

I would not make those mistakes or things I learned only after it was out on the market. And I was like, ooh, that was a bad choice. Oh, that could be better. And so now only just recently we announced the gun the miniatures game, which has its DNA from that original idea, but has been evolved and is so much better now and has so many new mechanics and so many different things. So there's always room to grow from those mistakes, discarded ideas. And it's one of the things I tell people, one piece of advice I give is you've got to learn how to kill your babies, right? Yeah. Which is like this idea of letting go of the mechanic and the thing that you love, but it's getting in the way of the core loop of your game or the core tension or it's not right for this project.

And then what helps make that less ego damaging and less painful is like, no, don't worry. It could come back. You could have a zombie baby one day. Yeah, it helps me too. I'm actually holding on to one of those two because even the first game that I put my name behind as key designer on it, like it's filled with holes. And I'll even call it out, like gods of metal Ragnarok, which was our epic heavy metal fantasy RPG game. Great world. Great core game loop of this like, you're.

always succeeding until you have a big massive failure. But like the game really was trying to do too much and it was trying to build an identity that I think wasn't completely whole. And as a result, it feels a little bit like some of the mechanics are Swiss cheese. Right. And so now I'm like, all right, I've seen it. I've seen it in the wild. I know it's problems. I know it's problems even when I was putting it out.

But like, I know I can do better now. I know I can like this and one day I will one day I'll go and do a second edition and it's probably going to look like a completely different game but that's okay because yeah it's because all I really care about is the world and the fact that you have a D4 dice pool that always and only you get one big failure and then you have to go through that but then you're just back to being awesome all over again I love it I love it awesome man this has been so much fun and who knows may have been turned into a new exciting project. People have heard the Genesis live here. We'll see. We'll see where it goes. But you have many exciting projects that are happening right now. Even as we're recording this, I know there's a, you have a crowd fund live. This probably, yeah, so we have a cool system agnostic primer project that's out right now. It's called the zoologist primer birds. And basically, it's a way for you to incorporate birds into your RPGs, right? Like, it's really like a 19th century field guide

that also has rules and mechanics and story prompts inside of it. So it's been fun. I feel like I'm selling encyclotidia Britannicas all over again, but they're just filled with story things. And it's cool. We have the mycologist, which is for fungus. We have the geologist, which is for rocks. The herbalist, which is for herbs, right?

And now this is our first zoologist, which is around. I love that you could have a business and you just made a book about rocks. That is amazing to me. I'm so proud of you. It works. And people love their rocks, man. And sometimes you just, all you have to do is we call them adventure pebbles. So there's these little prompts that help you just build, incorporate rocks and rock mythos and stories into your games, right?

So this is it. This goes back to the thing we start at the very beginning. It's a perfect way to loop back, right? Embrace your weird. There is no thing that you can't with the right execution and passion turn into something that other people are going to love. that there's a, I love that so much as a case example. So for people that want to find your stuff, find more about you. Where should they go?

Yeah, check out hunters entertainment.com. You can go type in zoologistprimer.com to get an easy link straight to the campaign right now. It just raised $200,000 at the beginning of this weekend, which means we're now donating another $1,000 to a bird charity. Amazing. Because every milestone, we're giving back to the birds a little bit. So if you get in, you can, if we've reached another milestone, you can come in and vote. Unfortunately, we're closing voting tomorrow.

That will have already been in the past by the time this episode. Exactly. Sadly, that's not an option. But you can still check it out, see which champion was chosen, right? And then otherwise, just you can see our catalog of stuff at hunters entertainment.com. I'm coming a year off of hanging out no longer with critical role. But you can still check out Daggerheart and Daggerheart Hope and Fear, which was the last thing I got to touch before leaving CR. And you can check that out as well, too.

There's just a bunch of great games. And stay tuned for technocracy, the freaking geo-cashing baby. I'm working on. Geocaching slash not geocaching trademark. I actually took the time to research what's the appropriate nomenclature I should views for this. I should have brought that in my notes. So I was talking about it.

But then we're going to talk about a flipping video project now as well, too. That's right. That's right. Awesome. All right. I'm glad that our Sputnik orbits have now collided more directly. The gravity has finally called the gravity well has come in. So thank you so much for taking the time.

I'm super excited. And we will keep chatting after this because we got a lot to talk about. Yeah, let's go. Game design is a craft. And like any craft, it gets better with structure, feedback, and repetition. You're able to learn better when you're surrounded by like-minded people who support each other and lift each other up. The Think Like a Game Designer Design Lab is designed to give you all of that. over 60 lessons from idea to publishing, a private game design discord, and exclusive bonuses

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