Think Like A Game Designer - Jane Chung Hoffacker — From League of Legends to animating Arcane, Rhythms of Guitar Hero, and Mastering IP Creation (#62)

Episode Date: March 12, 2024

About Jane Chung HoffackerJane Chung Hoffacker, an Emmy Award-winning producer for the acclaimed "Arcane" series based on League of Legends, is an incredibly accomplished jack-of-all-trades. She graduated from the Wharton School of Business with a degree in economics and then went on to get another degree in Game Design. She’s worked on everything from indy games to huge IPs like League of Legends and Guitar Hero. As CEO and Co-Founder of Incredible Dream Studios, she has channeled her passion into creating a game studio dedicated to bringing together communities through shared adventures. She’s an inspiration to me and I’ve waited a long time to have this conversation!In this episode of "Think Like A Game Designer," we discuss the art of developing intellectual properties, thinking like you’re in a writer's room, founding an animation studio, and exploring the concepts of "Red Ocean" and "Blue Ocean" strategies. Get ready for an episode brimming with insights—you’re about to fill your notebook from the first page to the last! 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

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So if you're listening to this anytime in March, please go to SoulForgeFusion.com or search for SoulForgeFusion on Steam, and you'll be able to wishlist the game. And if you're listening to it after that, you could actually play the game. There'll be at least a demo available for free and tons more exciting things available to you. Soul Forge Fusion is the world's first hybrid deck game, meaning if you're playing it on tabletop, every single one of your one-of-a-kind decks can be scanned into your online account and played online,

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Go to Soulforce Fusion.com to find out more. In today's episode, I am speaking with Jane Hoffaker. And oh my goodness, am I excited to share this episode with you. Jane is an Emmy Award-winning producer. of Arcane, the League of Legends animated series. She's also the CEO and co-founder of Incredible Dream Studios,

a game studio on a mission to bring people together for shared adventures. And she has previously worked on a huge IP like Guitar Hero and the previously mentioned League of Legends. She has a Bachelor in Economics from the Wharton School of Business. She is an incredible do-it-all person. She's very self-deprecating in the interview, but I was able to piece together and pull out all of the incredible business. of wisdom that she has shared with me in the time that I have known her over the last several

years. We talk about how to build great IP. We dive deep into the concepts of red ocean and blue ocean strategy. We talk about what it takes to make a hugely successful animation studio and animated process, including how to run a writer's room, how to create great IP through the process of board games, how to find your fans, how to build community. We go through so much in this podcast. It is chock full of incredible insights, great stories, including running away from cat-sized rats in our mutual experiences in the wonderful city of New York. There's a lot of fun stuff. Honestly, Jane has been someone I've been wanting to bring on the podcast for a long time.

She is super inspiring to me. I know she's going to be inspiring to you. That's a big part of why she even started her company. And you can hear that whole story in the podcast. So I will stop with the intro and let us get to the episode with Jane Hoffeker. Hello and welcome. I am here with Jane Hoffaker. Jane, it's great to have you here.

Hey Justin, thank you so much for having me. Oh, my goodness. This is one of those that I feel bad that I have waited this long to get you on the podcast. We have had so many great conversations about the industry and design and all kinds of things. I think you were the one that first reached out to me at a GDC, if I remember correctly, and we hit it off right away. So I've been excited to share your insights in some of our fun chats with more people than just myself. Well, I'm super honored to be here. I was like scrolling through all the really impressive guests that you've had on the podcast.

And I'm just like, oh, crap. I don't think. I was like, I'm not worthy. But, yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much. Yeah, no. You're a badass. And my audience is about to figure out why.

So let's start with a little bit of your origin story because I don't know your full story. And I think there's a, you've got a finance background and a Harvard business degree and or something or what in business degree. I don't know. There's a lot about you that I didn't know until I started doing research for this podcast. So maybe let's start on your origin story before we get into all of the cool things I already know about. Oh, man. Yeah, so I, you know, as you mentioned, well, school-wise, I went to school for economics, of all things. And it was really just like, I don't know what I was trying to do. Like, I think I was like every other kid where, like, you kind of graduate from high school and you're like, well, I like business-y things. I guess I'll go to business school. It's just that simple. And so I went to Wharton, you know, graduated. Everybody was doing finance. and econ, so I did that, and then everybody was doing banking, so I did that. But like, those are all terrible ways to make life decisions. And so, you know, I quickly figured out that

that wasn't what I was really excited to do. And so then I quit. I went back to school to get a master's degree in game design, which I will say right now is not a prerequisite, as you already know, for they were getting to game design. But it was just my way of making my way over. I was an indie game designer for a bit. And, you know, yeah. Let me pause. Let me pause you there and I apologize, but I'm going to interrupt a lot because it's like, you know, most listeners to the podcast and I think you would know my foray into law school and what it was like to kind of get out. I was in the same mindset, right? I'm like, I'm good at school. I kind of want to do some kind of businessy thing. Law school seems like a great idea. I went down a miserable path before I had a very tough time to be able to break out of it. And so I've shared that story here before, but I'd love to hear a little bit more of the details of your story here. Like what, you know, when you, you know, you've, you've, you've, you've, you've, you've, you've, you've, you've, you've, you've, you graduated from school, maybe there's some debt, you're going into, into this, you know, into business and you're, you know, where are you? What's it like? What makes you decide that it's got to, you know, I'd love to just kind of dig a little deeper into, because I think there's a lot of people out there

that are trapped in this way and don't feel like they can break out. So I'd love to get a little bit more detail and that's part of this story. Oh man, I'm going to like dust off, you know, brush off the dust on this. But yeah, yeah, and you want to go deep. I think for, for me, it was like, yeah, there was a lot of debt. Like a private, private school like Wharton, it was costing me the same as like a Mercedes Ben every year. It's 40K a year, not including like living expenses, whatever. So very expensive school. And, you know, I was I was paying my way through college as well. I was like bartending and all this other stuff. But that's not going to repay this debt plus interest. And so, you know, you go into banking because it's a good way to make your money back, you know, supposedly. It's a good

starting salary when you're starting out. But I was doing that in New York. And that was, Even back then, New York rent was expensive. I think I got two paychecks a month. One of my paycheck went completely to rent. And I was living at the bottom floor of a really crappy apartment in the Lowery side. Like rats. I would see rats running across my window all the time. And like, you know, one of my paychecks was going for that.

And, you know, luckily because I was working like 80 to 100 hours, like all my meals got comped because you kind of have to when you're living at the office. So like I got to save a little money on that. Yay me. But yeah, I mean, I'm sure it was the same for you, but like you work so many hours. And then it just, it just eventually, if it's not for you, life has a way of waking you up and being like, hey, this is crazy. If you're going to work this hard, go do something else. And so, you know, just had one of those realizations. Yeah, yeah.

That's, it's, it's, it's, it's a while. The amount of mirrors of the story. Yeah, for me, it was cockroaches in my Brooklyn apartment. Same, same, very similar story. And I, I really feel like the, the, the, the superpower that you're, exhibiting here, right? This ability to like work really hard at something is one of the more precious skills to have, right? But what will happen inevitably is that work will lead to burnout when you're not doing something you're passionate about. I think the superpower and, you know,

feel free to, if this resonates with you, like the superpower in by working on something you're passionate about, people say, oh, if you work on something you're passionate about, you're never going to work a day in your life. That is a lie. It is a lot of work. But it's just don't let anybody tell you other ones. But because you love it, because you're passionate about the result, you can push past the discomfort of the work and it doesn't, you know, it's not, it doesn't feel as painful and you're, you're able to work the 80 or 100 hours weeks for a much longer periods of time, you know, still I recommend rest and whatever, but that's what gives you the juice, the fuel to push through and keep things going.

I agree, but I will also add that like having friends in the industry, such as yourself, like, and other people that have gone through it are super important because like, I've had days where I wake up, I'm like, why am I doing this to myself? Like, you know, I can have a nice, stable job that is a, isn't as risky, more nine to five. And why am I doing this? Why am I pushing? So.

Yeah. Yeah. No, surrounding yourself with people that like, so our, our company motto is, you know, work with awesome people, make awesome things, help each other grow. And I,

I do that and not just because I think it's a good recipe for a company, but I think it's a good recipe for life, right? If you're creating things that you're proud of that add value to the world, you're surrounding yourself with people that you love and that, you know, that inspire you. And you're continually growing and improving. Like,

you could, the rest of life often will take care of itself if you have those things. things. It really makes a big difference. And you're right. Surrounding yourself with those people is maybe the most important thing. I bet you, you know, even jobs where I wasn't as happy when I had friends around all the time, like, eh, I could tolerate quite a bit more. Yeah. Oh, quick question about Brooklyn, though. Like, did you also, I saw a king rat, like a, maybe not the right term, but I saw a cat-sized rat in Manhattan. I don't know if you also had those in Brooklyn. Oh, my goodness. I don't think I saw that, or at least I blocked it out of my memory. I, uh, no, the, the, the, the, I mean,

literally I would wake up in the morning and I would go to like, you know, early in the morning so I could catch the train through the snow to get into NYU. And I would like, I would turn the lights on and the cockroaches would just scatter out of my kitchen. It was like, it was so gross. I think back to I can't believe I lived like that for years. Like years. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. I think, sorry to change the topic. I tend to do that at a time. But like going back to your point, though, I think it's, yes. You know, if you can find your passion, surround yourself by people like-minded.

and help each other grow. I think, like, yeah, I think the peaks will take care of themselves as really managing yourself through the valleys. Yeah, yeah, that's right. The peaks will take care of themselves managing yourself through the valleys. That's a great. That's a great line. I stole that, I think, from Quincy Jones, but yes.

All right. Well, you get credit for the podcast anyway. I think that the, so, okay, so then we'll manage this transition over. I am curious before we shift into the, you know, what you learned and the value or lack thereof of a, you know, going to school for game design. And if there are of the business skills and the economics degree and the things in banking, are there any things that come to mind that really have carried over and had a great value for you? Like, I could think back to my law school degree and what I had.

Like, my ability to understand and read contracts and negotiate contracts was been incredibly valuable to me. Right. I understand. Like, I don't, you know, that is one thing that carried over negotiation skills and contract skills that I've like, probably, I don't know if it's worth the hundred grand or whatever I lit on fire. But, you know, it's probably. in lawyers fees over the years. So is there anything that comes to mind for you in terms of, you know,

kind of key values or transmittable lessons that are top of mind? Gosh, you know, I haven't, I feel bad because I don't think I've really thought about this that deeply. But, yeah, I mean, I do think that the business background did end up helping, like, I think being able to build my own financial models or like doing, you know, being able to model out and predict like cash flow and try to budget. that way, like, and thinking through things like that was definitely helpful. I think certainly, like, as we've gone out to raise money as well, that was really helpful

to be, I think, comfortable with economic terms and talking about them and stuff like that and understanding certain economic principles definitely helps in the background. But, yeah, I think it's like, it's more about, like, the practical kind of experience, I think, that helped me through business or in terms of the business background. It's like, you know, I feel like, game design. I understand this a lot, but like, you know, in business and stuff, you often debate a lot of different things, different possibilities. You have to use your analytical mindset to kind of weigh pros and cons and commit somebody else of making this decision with you or not. So those are definitely skill sets that travel over. And the only other thing I would say is just to your earlier point, hard work ethic. Like, you know, I think in anything Wall Street and like consulting all that stuff, like they burn you hard when you're fresh out of school because that's when you got the most to offer. And so you learn a lot about what you are capable of doing at that point. Yeah.

Yeah, no, that's it. I mean, the ability to work hard and the ability to kind of learn, you know, from your mistakes or ideally the mistakes of others, I think of the two like most important things, right, to be able to succeed over the long run, right, as long as you're able to keep sustain that. And so that feels, yeah, that certainly resonates. And I can, you know, I have had to kind of, you know, back in the envelope math, my way to a lot of my, you know, business projections and deals before I kind of learned more and

started partnering with people who could do do a better job with that. So that's definitely a high value skill. So that makes sense. Okay. So now let's get into the game design stuff. And I think the, you know, I never went to game design school, though now I teach game design schools. So I'm curious what that process was like and what you felt you take from that. And, you know, you said it's not a prerequisite. But, you know, do you consider it to be a, all things being equal, something you do recommend people do or just kind of get to building or, you know, how do you feel about the, the game design schooling experience? For me, I valued my experience going through it because, like, I had been on a completely

different track, completely different life track, right? I think if you're somebody that grew up paper designing games and doing all this thing, things on your own, and, through life's many randomness, like you had the opportunity to kind of pursue this track and get early feedback and advisors, you certainly don't need it. And I think that's true of almost any career field, right? Like, I think if you have that path early on, that's great, you have a head start. I think in my case, like I had spent most of my life on a completely different track learning finance, being on Wall Street, all this other stuff. So for me, it was just a way to fast track a switchover. And it was also for me a way to understand really if this was something I wanted to

pursue if like for me I saw it as a safe environment to kind of see like, okay, do I like the subject? Do I, especially the course I was taking. I was at the Guild Hall at SMU and it was very project based and team based. So it kind of simulated what the game development environment was. And so for me, I saw it completely as a chance to just see if it was right for me and if I wanted to change back. I knew I always had the finance degree to go back to. Yeah, this is this is really one of the keys to like help reduce the fear of like jumping off the track, right? Like this is the same thing for me with law school. Like I could always go back.

I can always go back to that path. You know, there's this fear that like once you go off the beaten path, you're doomed, you know, you're trapped. And it's just very, very rarely is that ever the case. So having that, you know, kind of realization that the fear is illusory is really powerful. And so then you make the leap from that to independent. design and independent running your own company at that point, like right away? Oh, no. I just, I was like a young game designer fresh out of school working at an indie studio.

Like, we were doing like Xbox arcade games or something. I'm like the game I worked on did not get published. So I didn't even succeed. It was rough, right? But I got a taste of like indie studio life there. And then like, you know, I went back to my alumni network from my game design school, which was really also helpful. Got helped finding another opportunity after that one.

So somehow through networking, I managed to get an amazing job in production on the Qatar Hero franchise over at Activision. So that kind of helped me get my foot really in the door on video game industry and then kind of just grew from there. Okay. So then and then this, you know, working at this kind of indie studio, what you viewed as a failure, I like to, you know, not to suffer through it again, but to linger on the failures a bit because I find that those are the areas where we learn some of the more powerful lessons. And so were there lessons you took from that in terms of life, either, you know, do's or don'ts, right, in terms of how you manage either an indie studio or designing games in that space or, you know,

what would you say? Was there any kind of takeaways from there? Like, all right, never doing that again? Or, oh, actually, this path might have been better if I'd gone down that road. Yeah, I think what's a good lesson? I think like, so the indie studio, it was, they were doing a lot of ports to other consoles at the time. And so I was doing, I was working on the one and only original title that they wanted to release. And again, it was supposed to be an arcade title.

I think it just like, you know, honestly, it came down to disagreements on approach. And like I was very big into paper prototyping. it felt like that was going to be the least expensive way to kind of test out ideas. The owner was very against printing paper. It was a fundamental disconnect. So it got so bad that like one day I went to go print something and he just like he removed the ink. I was like, okay, how do you want me to do my job? Wow.

Yeah. Wow. Took the ink out of the printer to cut you off at the knees. That is, that's amazing. Yes. Yes. Yeah. I don't know.

I can't. Yeah. No, I think you're right. Obviously, this is a message I echo a ton, right? Like, you know, you want to find the cheapest way to test and validate your ideas, paper prototyping by far the cheapest and, you know, until you need to get to a stage where you have to test things. You can't test on paper. So, yeah, okay, great, great lesson and hilarious, hilarious specific.

I'm taking the ink out of the printer is amazing. Yeah. Well, it's all good. I think, like, I don't know what lessons are to take away from that particular experience. But I think back then I was very sad because I was like, you know, it's my first job in the industry. And like I couldn't even convince the owner that I needed to do this in order to do my job. So I think that like, to be honest, I think that overly made me like sad about being a game designer. And I think at that point I kind of resolved I should just stick to something more like production,

which is why I ended up taking that next job, which was, you know, a producer, which actually took advantage more of my business background. And I felt more confident in pursuing it. And maybe if I had a better experience back then and my first job and more self-confidence back then, then maybe I would be still on the designer track. So regretfully, that's what happened. No, but this is, again, this is one of those, I thank you for sharing that because it's a great opportunity again for people that are out there that are at those stages of their careers

or you face setback or you face a boss that's crazy and takes the ink out of the printer or whatever, right? Like, you know, it takes like a little bit of encouragement can go a very long way. face somebody. I mean, I remember when I was working at at Upper Deck, you know, the, eventually I kind of started moving up the ladder. And the CEO there was, you know, ended up getting a lot of criminal charges, you know, so a lot of civil charges, like was not a good human. And I was discouraged that that was the person, that's what business was, right? Like I had the opposite. Like you had the experience like game design has this negative.

In fact, I had the, oh, business is just a bunch of these sharks that are all trying to like, you know, take the most money and grab whatever they can and don't. care about their customer. And, you know, that really soured me to it. It took me a while. And I had to end up working with a lot of other actually great business people, like some of whom have been on this podcast, like Peter Atkinson, who are like good souls and humans and also able to create, you know, create these massive games and massive businesses to turn it around. So finding some mentors and preventing hopefully your story can help some people who maybe feel like they're in one of these discouraging situations, not to get quite so discouraged. But I'm really, yeah, yeah, I'm really,

I'm really interested to move forward with this. What is a what is a producer? Because that's a, that's a term that could mean a lot of things to a lot of people. What does a producer do? I mean, back then we used to joke, can I curse?

Yeah, you can curse. I don't know. It was like back then the joke was we get shit done, right? I mean, I'm sure everybody feels that they're the ones that do that for their company. But like for producers is just like, oftentimes you just fill in the blank, right?

You have artists who do art. You have engineers who engineer, game designers who design, and then producers just kind of fill, you know, was kind of the main thinking. But yeah, I think at least in video games, there's, there tends to be two different main branches of producer. You're either on the studio side, so you're actually working with the game developers. And a lot of what you're producing, you're managing is the schedule, budget, and scope of the development team. So you're like overseeing that process and making sure that you're delivering on time for milestones, et cetera, et cetera. Oftentimes, either the same

people that like set up the table and order lunch and then clean up the table when no one throws away their things. And like, you know, it's like, not only are you at the macro level planning things, but you're also like sweeping up after everyone. So it's a, it's a weird job. And then I was actually on the publishing side. So a publishing side producer, at least how it was at Activision, you're basically like you work with the studio side. producer and try to like land the plane every time there's a major milestone. But you're basically handling everything on the production or publishing side. So you're you're interfacing with PR and marketing, making sure that they get what they need to in order to market the game on time.

And then legal to make sure that the legal checks are happening, that all the contracts are properly reviewed. And then finance to make sure that all the payments are made and, you know, QA to make sure that the game is actually tested and will pass back then certification through first parties. So it was like a lot of else that got managed on the publishing side. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So it's a, you know, manager at varying tiers of, you know, the, the, the, whatever, you know, things that have to get, have to get managed and, you know, having a decent understanding of all the parts that are, all the moving parts, having a decent understanding of how to manage people and move the ball forward with various people. And, you know, the numbers and the dates, the deadlines and

everything. So it's a very, you know, it feels like it's a good, a little bit of a good kind of CEO training to a certain extent. Sounds like you kind of just need to like run your little fiefdom or, you know, manage a fiefdom anyway within a large organization. It's not bad as a, you know, training ground for being a CEO, I guess, because it does give you a view into how the different pieces of the machine kind of work together. And like, I don't know, you pick up on weird people skills. Like I distinctly remember we would go to cost. go to buy like trays of food and then take it over to like your QA like leads just to kind of convince them to check our game first.

Uh, maybe I shouldn't have been that loud. But you know, you do all these little things. And, you know, I think what I, what I appreciated a lot about my experience as a producer is just learning the, the people dynamics and how to work with people, as you mentioned earlier. I think that was, um, I didn't learn those things in, in business as well, as much. Yeah. The, the food, uh, food, food, food, food is a motivator cannot be underestimated. I actually do think this is a good little extra hacks.

The, okay, so then you're at this associate producer role and this producer role in Activision and walk me through then what, you know, what happened there? What happened next? What else got exciting moving on your path? Oh, sure. So, so yeah, it was going well with Guitar Hero. We were doing way too many of them. It was, you know, we did like, I think it was like six skews within like two years. It was just insane.

But I got a lot of rinse and repeat practice, which was great. But then because there were way too many music, rhythm genre games out there, and then, you know, you have rock band. And then everyone in their mom was starting a, like, you know, rhythm game instrument, video game thing. It just was too much for the market. And so the market kind of collapsed on itself. And, you know, they decided to wind down the whole franchise.

And so yeah, there was massive layoff, my first big one. Is that, yeah. So is that what, do you think it was just this, just too much saturation? Because I remember I had a plastic set of drums and plastic guitar in my house and we would get together and play with friends on the weekend. It was like the coolest thing to do as kind of ridiculous to think about. But it was definitely fun. And I played it a ton.

And then it just seemed like almost overnight, the entire genre disappeared. It was, was it really just market saturation? I heard some rumors that it was like the rights to the music got more expensive. because the people were ripping the stems out of the song, out of the tracks. Was there any, do you know anything about that? Or was it just market saturation? For my, and these opinions are my own, obviously, of nobody else. But, like, but yeah, for my opinion, it was market saturation because, like, yeah, we,

as a publishing side producer, we worked a lot on the music rights and the, you know, all that stuff, which music licensing is its own beast one day. Maybe you'll cover that. But, and it was expensive and hard to manage. but like that wasn't the reason. I think at the end of the day, it was like, you know,

there was a race to kind of get in on the music genre. And I don't think any of the big players back then really thought they were growing the pie. I think everybody knew that they were just fighting for shares of the pie. And then I think at some point the strategy was to just overstuff the market and kind of like a raised, raised earth kind of strategy there. Wow.

Okay. All right. Interesting. Yeah. I often think about these kinds of things, like how the market just goes. I had a friend who was, she was the number one female guitar hero player in the world and was like number four ranked overall and had just like done, you know, the kind of little circuit around that and had some notoriety and fame.

And then suddenly that market just disappeared. You know, and like I happen to be, you know, a top magic player in the world at a point. And turns out that genre continues and I got lucky, you know, and she didn't. And it's just kind of a weird thing to see. which genres choose to survive and grow and which ones don't over time. I don't know if it's easy to predict these kinds of things. If it was, I guess more people would chase those dragons. I actually have a hypothesis on that,

which is like I think the difference between magic and guitar hero is the ecosystem around it, right? With magic, you know, the local game stores are in on it. There's events. People are holding tournaments individually. This is not even managed by Wizards of the Coast, right? And so there's an ecosystem of people, and there's a secondhand market.

So I think it's the ecosystem that keeps a genre alive and sustains it over time. Guitar Hero didn't have all that. Everything was through like a walled garden that was owned completely by the publisher. And do you think that's exclusive to things that require some kind of like retail presence? Because I mean, obviously other game genres like, you know, first person shooters or whatever, don't have that same infrastructure and they stay popular and continue to grow over time, right? Is there a, is there, does, does, does your theory cross over some way to those things? Or is it just different in kind?

I think like for, I think the difference between something like, the rhythm genre versus first person shooters is like with first person shooters, like, you don't need the big plastic controllers and all that other stuff. And it's actually really super competitive to design in, right? Because like, you know, it's often, at least for us when I was learning video game design, it was like the first kind of genre that you work within because it was, you know, you point and shoot and you're building maps basically, right? And I think that's where you tend to see a lot more Red Ocean kind of fighting over the next big thing.

And then, you know, every big title kind of steals from the one before it and builds on it. And so there's innovation in that way. I just think that I guess to use a business term, the barriers to entry for a first person shooter in terms of design and innovation are a lot lower. And you don't need to sell expensive hardware to your end consumers either. So that's a bit lower. whereas with this, like the ecosystem was very much dependent on just the publisher. Yeah, yeah. And then Bear's entry, our audience will be familiar with.

We've talked about that in previous podcasts. But Red Ocean is another business-e term that maybe people won't be familiar with. So maybe you just want to define that quickly before we move to other topics. Yeah, sure. Sadly, I should know the book to quote it from. But like, it's based on a business book that's out there. I'm sure somebody will comment on it. It's Blue Ocean Strategy, I think, is the,

the book, but that could be wrong. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it just kind of signifies like, you know, there's blood in the water because like so much competition has been fought in this space, right? And so the advice is to go pursue the blue ocean where there's less signs of strife in competition. Yeah. I think it's important. It's just an important concept we haven't talked about on the podcast before. And, you know, when you're thinking about designing a game, right, if you're moving into a crowded genre and there's a bunch of people, right, so even just to use the example we talked about, right, training card games. And it's, it's very successful, very big space, but incredibly crowded and requires a lot of, you know, resources and assets to do it right

and to convince people to come in. So trading card games in general would be, you know, kind of red ocean. And so even for me, who's been doing this forever, you know, I'm like, okay, how do I shift genres or find some differentiator, move myself over, you know, so we do the algorithmic generation with Sulfurge fusion and have the hybrid games. And it's just trying to find different ways to push yourself out because you could win a fight in a red ocean, but it's a lot harder, and it's much easier if you can somehow claim this territory that nobody else is fighting for. And so when you're making designs, I think from the very beginning, when I'm working on a new game concept, and I always say people should be working on the elevator pitch and

working on the like, okay, how would I choose to sell this and represent it? And what, what niche am I carving out that doesn't already necessarily have, you know, a dozen other games? Because I can make, I believe in myself as a game designer, I could think I could make a better, a game that's better than the dozen other games. But if I'm fighting for that same space, even if I'm 10% better or 20% better, very, very hard to pull people away from those games rather than try to do something that's totally different and new.

That sounds similar to how do you approach, like thinking about your game designs, you know, whether, you know, nowadays, at least in those terms. Yeah, no, it's very similar. And I have to say like with Soul Fusion, everything that you've done with the hybrid digital and physical card space, it's really, I don't know,

you're so brave because it is red, Red Ocean, but like I love the strategy and approaches that you take. It's been super impressive to watch just from the outside, right? And I completely agree on like trying to find sort of what you're bringing that's new to the genre or the type of game that you're offering or just a different way to think about and stuff like that. So, you know, I think like, you know, fast forwarding to what we're doing with board games, for example, I think like, well, I don't No. I think, well, I mean, kind of to back up and zoom out too, like I think for me, with Incredible Dream, a big piece of what I'm hoping to accomplish is like just creating

and incubating new original IP. So, you know, even before we sit down to talk about game design, it's really about like, hey, like what new kind of fantasy genres can we think through or like what kind of worlds and experiences can we kind of create? And then, you know, we work with Kevin, who's our game design director, kind of think through like, okay, what are great games to kind of bring these experiences to life and like how can we bring gameplay into it? So it might be kind of a backwards way of thinking through it or a different kind of take. But yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Well, I'm going to stay with this because I find it really interesting. And we'll get back to the timeline later. But so with your current company, what I heard you say is that your IP first, right? So you're trying to build a world and story and characters that will hook people that can move, not even necessarily the ones, not even necessarily the ones that best serve the game, but the ones that could best serve a longer term multimedia experience, right?

That the IP is the real important part of the value. Is that, is that right? Yes, exactly. Very well said. Yeah. So it's, and then that's fascinating because, you know, I don't think we've had a guess that has approached us from that way.

So I think now probably we should back up into a little bit more of your background to help people understand why you come at it from that perspective. and the lessons learned along the way there. So I don't know how much we want to skip over or whatever, but getting to the place where you become, you know, from where we left you to winning an Emmy. There's an interesting gap there that I want to fill in for our audience. So we could take our time through that journey.

And then we'll come back to how you build great IP, because I think that's going to be a deep conversation that will take a good chunk of our time. Yeah, sure. Wow, that always sounds funny. Yeah, so as I think I left the audience, you know, music genre kind of imploded. As you said, it did feel overnight. And for us, like, sadly, it was effectively overnight.

But anyways, you know, I wasn't directly affected by the layoffs. They ended up like, you know, because it turns out when you were in my position, you didn't get paid that much. So it wasn't worth cutting me, I think. That's the reason I played in my head. But, you know, I got moved over to Skylanders, which was another great kind of physical component meets gaming kind of thing. Oh, yeah.

But, like, I think it was, like, very, very sassy at that point of my life. I was just like, hey, I don't want to be on a kids game. So I was convinced that, like, people are put on kids games to just always be on kids games and that you could never rise out of it. So, you know, I just had a strong opinion. I don't think it's completely true, but it was my opinion at the time. So that forced me or caused me to start looking outside of the company and just finding something else I wanted to do.

I was really interesting because I always loved business and entrepreneurship. That's actually what made me want to study business in the first place. I loved this idea of entrepreneurship. So I wanted to be at a startup to see how it was done, had the opportunity to join a scrappy startup that turned out to be Riot Games. I was there early days, did a lot of stuff helping to launch League of Legends international markets. So that was like first half of my decade there. And then the second half of my decade there, just a series of unlikely events.

got the opportunity to run and build riots animated animation department. All right. I want to, I'm going to pause there. This is great. We're keeping teasers for the audience and we'll get to the animation part. But this, you know,

oh, this little, just little scrappy startup riot turned out to be a pretty good bet. And, you know, what you're being responsible for sort of launching at international markets. I want to understand what does that look like? How do you launch a game in international markets?

What does it mean to take something in international markets? says what does it mean to take something international and how do you kind of successfully do that especially obviously at the scale that you succeeded at with with league of legends yeah sure and you know full caveat like it wasn't me alone in isolation like there are people responsible for the strategy and like you know helping to figure out the right path and all that stuff my very specific job was to you know work with the local team in some cases help build up the local team like helping them to kind of understand what worked before them, different frameworks and structures, hiring and all this stuff, making sure that they had the resources from headquarters, et cetera. And then it was to work with

them, to then identify what the local market wanted and needed any unique features, and then work with the HQ development team to then build those features and effectively get the, do all the things required to have a game that would launch and be live and available for players in that market. And so this is a world where you all already have a launched successful game, you know, in the U.S. and maybe some other markets and you're targeting specific markets to localize and market in the, you know, figure out how to get it out there and make sure it has the features they need. What, what and then, but you're building this, you're building the teams internally. So it's still a riot, you know, division in

wherever Hong Kong or wherever the regions are. And then you're kind of making sure that they're correctly interfacing with HQ and getting everything done. Yeah. Okay, great. So then what, are there any, we don't want to linger too long here because I'm really, I got to bring us back to all the cool IP integration stuff, but I do, are there any interesting either stories or counterintuitive localization things or that you ran into to kind of bring to market things people might not expect from this space of, oh, well,

we have a successful game here, but to bring it to here, we have to, like, I know there was like a thing in World of Warcraft, as I remember, where they had to, like, you couldn't kill pandas or something. And they had a panda race and there was some problem with getting into China that you had to manage how you treated pandas in the visual thing. Are there anything along those lines or in terms of interesting other stories that come to mind? Um, I, well, things that at least I found interesting from that experience was like, I mean, yeah, like every market, it's, it's beyond. like text translation. I think there are cultural aspects like the, you know, what's culturally

acceptable with the pandas or like I think skulls and bones are also not acceptable in China, for example. But like every market has their thing either from the government or culturally that is not good or perceived poorly in that market. So I think for our strategy, it was good working with people that were actually local to that area to really understand those nuances because it's hard to see from the outside. But I think one interesting insight that I learned, was actually working on Korea, which was that we, in order to succeed in that market, it was actually really important to work with the local, the PC bongs, PC cafes, because that was like the main way that young people actually play games in that market

is to not play in their house, actually go to a cafe somewhere, meet up with their buddies and just enjoy an evening there, which is completely culturally different than what we experience in the state sometimes. And so like that local mom and pop PC bong was very essential. And we had to figure out as a, it's a digital first, digital only company how to work with these mom and pop shops and like what systems and things that we had to put into place to make them successful. Oh, that's, that is fascinating. It sounds similar to kind of, you know, the hobby gaming market to some extent, right? You have to, you know, working with the kind of mom and pop shops and the network of hobby stores to kind of really help with discovery and get, you know, get people hanging out and playing your game in the stores. And it's not an easy thing to do.

I have to imagine it's, yeah, pretty challenging for the digital side. in another foreign country especially. Yes. So I don't know. I think that the whole PC bonding experience is what made me appreciate this idea of like an ecosystem beyond the publisher to support a game and like how important that can be. And like I think even in that market like, you know, PC, the PC bonding revenue and the PC bonding sales were at least as big as the direct to consumer sales.

Fascinating. Okay. All right. So now let's go. You've now created an international empire for Rai. you. Now, how do you then get from there to working on animation? It was definitely not a straight path or one that I could have predicted. So I apologize. I don't know how much of this is usable. But like, you know, a hefty part of it, I think, was luck

and being in the right place and the right time, right? But I'd like to think also being ready for the opportunity when it arrives. So like there's a little bit of that perhaps. But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, sometimes when you're a company for a long time, one of the advantages to that is building relationships. And so people get to know you, get to know what you're capable of, what your strengths are, where your weaknesses are too. And sometimes on a particular project, even if it's not directly, what would be in the career path of somebody like yourself, sometimes there can be an opportunity that comes up that could really leverage your skill set. And so more or less, I think that's what happened in my case. So I had this unique opportunity to join one of riots's many TV and film projects at the time. I mean, nascent, nascent.

I mean, like any company you do a lot of R&D to kind of figure things out. So I got to join one in particular that I believed in, got to help get it greenlit, and then that kind of turned into all these other, you know, just, you know, in order, it turns out to make your own animated TV show if you're going to do it in house. You kind of need your own studio. And so that became its own scope of work. And then to do your own studio, you need to understand. unions and TV and films.

So that became a different scope of work. So it just kept on growing. Yeah. And so what was your role in that process? I mean, this is like figuring, oh, yeah, you know, just need to build a studio. Oh, yeah, I just need to understand unions. Oh, no, just need to understand how to get these things publishing right.

That we're like, these are massive arenas people spend their entire career as figuring out. And so you're just charging ahead and figuring out as you go. Doing my best as one does, right? And, you know, I think a lot of it was just, being aware where I wasn't the expert. And so in a lot of these arenas, like, oh, how do you build an animation studio? I don't know because I haven't done that before.

So recognizing when you don't have the expertise and then going out and finding people that can bring that expertise in. So I think mostly that's what I was doing is just being like, huh, there's a gap of knowledge that seems really important here. Let's go find somebody to help fill that gap. Let's work with them.

Let's figure out how to work with them. And let's figure out which pathway makes the most sense for us. Okay. And then in terms of the creative process, how involved were you in the creative process of, you know, scripting and test animations and understanding how do you build? There's a lot, a lot of successful games out there that have tried to do, you know, movies and animation and TV and the vast majority of them are terrible. And yours was not. So what was that creative process look like? How did you get from, yeah, let's do this and let's have a nascent studio to, well, actually, we've got something that.

that's, you know, really successful and really well received. Yeah. I mean, on that front, like, you know, as, as, you know, as attractive as it would be to sit here and be like, oh, yeah, it was all my idea. Like, it wasn't, right? And we had, my creative involvement was very minimal. And I think I tried to give the creatives on the project the space to run it and own their vision for it and support them in that vision. So I didn't, I didn't try or wasn't trying to insert myself too much in all that. that process, right? Like, there was a showrunner. It was Christian, believed in his vision,

and wanted to help make that happen. The parts of my role that did end up having an impact, I think, on creative was, you know, as a producer, like, well, first of all, we had to get the show greenlit, and we've had a lot of starts and stops trying to get the show greenlit. And so, you know, at the end of the day, after failing a couple times, it was like, you know, helping to kind of figure out in the writer's room what talent we needed to be able to carry this across the line. And so then a lot of it became reading through a lot of scripts that got submitted to us, learning how to work with agents and hiring a script writer and hiring in a writer's room. And then like what kind of processes needed to actually run a writer's room? So like,

even if I wasn't sitting there being like, Vye has pink hair, you know, it was this very like kind of influencing the conditions and the talent working on the project. Okay. Let's, I mean, I'm fascinated by the processes, right? I think actually the, you know, the creative horsepower and room is not nothing, but the processes that help enable them to work well together and to turn it into a finished project are actually, in my opinion, far more important than the, you know, 10% smarter or more creative person in the room. So maybe talk to what does a, what does a process of running a writing room look like? What's a how does that, what what, what makes that more successful or less successful? What, what, what tactics did you put into place to kind of help

facilitate the creatives in the room? Oh, I love that. Because I think writer's room, it's such an interesting process on TV shows that they have, and it's highly collaborative. And I think I would love to see it more used throughout the industry or in other industries in general. But I think it's a generalization, but usually kind of start with like the showrunner, who is like, you know, often given an executive producer credit on TV shows, so that's one way of identifying them. They can also often be the director of an episode, but not always. But usually the showrunner is the person that kind of owns the vision. for the, I guess, entire season, at least, of the TV show often as the creator, but not always as well.

Usually the showrunner also has executive producer responsibility, so they are actually responsible for a schedule and budget of the room as well, but in our case, it's a bit different. And, you know, each showrunner will kind of have their own kind of creative process, so you kind of have to figure out which one that you want to work with and all that stuff with your budget. But usually they're kind of given, like, hey, you have 11 weeks and this much budget to, write 22 episodes or whatever it is. And so they go out, they hire the writers in the room. They kind of find, you know, sometimes the approach is, hey, we need levity in the scripts. So let's bring in somebody with more comedic writing style. Or like, hey, we need more character-driven stuff.

So let's find people that have worked on character-centric stories and TV shows in the past. Or one goal of ours was also like, hey, there's half of the lead characters in the show are female. Let's try to get a diverse room in here so that we can bring some author. authenticity to those voices. Right. So you kind of look at it kind of mechanically in some aspects, but you're trying to build the right team to kind of carry the script and build it together. Okay.

And then from, so making sure that the right people are in the room and you've got the right, you know, let's say ingredients for your meal that you're trying to prepare, we need a little bit of salt. We need a little bit of pepper. We got to have everything in the room. But in terms of the cooking process itself, right, is there, is there beyond, just the kind of you have you know X money and X time to build Y episodes whatever is there things about the way that the was there any kind of process within the room is it more just like

person X is responsible for bringing a script and everybody just comments on it do you comment on it ahead of time is there debate in the room like just I'm really I love teasing apart kind of how this creative process aligns with or differs from the kinds that we use in game design or in you know other fields oh sure um So usually the showrunner will or somebody will come up with like the show Bible. So it's kind of like the, maybe it's kind of like the game concept doc or something that you might start with in game design. And it kind of does an overview of like, you know, who is the audience and what's the high concept for the show? What are the major themes and the moods?

And if you have the resources for it, you might even have like character artists kind of show like thematic and visual tones and references and stuff like that. And so once that's approved, like and people are on board with. that idea. Then you kind of move into the actual, like, writers room and the staffing of it. And, you know, for some creators, they just have it in their head and it just pops out. And they're like, these are the beats and you will write this episode. And here you go, run off. Our process was more collaborative where, you know, it's more brainstormy. Like, you kind of, like, have rough beats and rough character outlines. And then ours was very start and stop. It was like, you kind of like started an episode and then you went back and then you're like, oh, we have a gap with

this character. Let's start over and kind of flesh out more the character background stories and stuff like that. Or like these beats aren't working. Let's rework this and kind of massage it better and stuff like that. But generally you want like an outline beat that kind of does the emotional highs and lows of the story points throughout. And then you know, you do, you have more technical checks like does every character have a satisfying arc or every main character that you want? Like how do the challenges and sort of the conflict feel? So you ask yourself really technical questions throughout it. And then once you're happy with the outlines, then you're you assign episodes to writers, they go off and write it, and then you kind of have a feedback

process. I'm like zipping through all this, but hopefully it's helpful. No, yeah. I mean, you know, like, we can only get so, so deep in this podcast, but I love, you know, giving a big picture and, you know, this idea of like, you know, we need, you know, where are our emotional highs and lows? How is the character arc going to evolve over time? I mean, these are, there are, you know, it's different when in games, because games players have agency and you're playing around within that their agency, but you're still trying to do the same sorts of things, right? I always try to think, okay, what are the emotional impacts I'm trying to get onto my player? What is what I call the core tension where, you know, where am I frustrated the players in

creating those negative experiences that they can then either overcome or not throughout the game? What is the different, if they're player archetypes and stories, moments that are happening? What does the beginning feel like, middle feel like, and feel like, you know, how am I appealing to different types of players? Like all of these things kind of, there's, I see resonance across. And I love this idea of, you know, creating these broader beats, you know, kind of the, again, just to roughly correlate, right, this kind of larger, like engine that's going to drive everything. When I would, you know, it's sort of what I call engine design and in the game design process. It's like, all right, here's the larger structure.

And now we're going to get into the components and the individuals. Okay, here's the individual episodes. Here's the individual stories. This part's not working. This part's not working. And sometimes it requires you to go back to the broader structure and say, actually, you know what, this character can't go this way. We've got to change this, which has ripple. effects on everything. But hopefully the broader structure is more stable, which makes it easier to

play within that structure for the smaller spaces. So it's, I, it definitely resonates with me generally. And I love, I mean, I really just get excited about seeing, you know, these different genres, right? Where I talk to, you know, Grammy nominated music producers or award winning writers or, you know, people in animation, like there's, there's, there are just similar themes about how the creative work is done with obviously the kind of little unique caveat. So, So this is great. I'm really fascinated. So what, and you know, you can dive into any other areas that, that you're excited about.

But what is the, what does the timeline look like from, you know, kind of starting to, we've got a writer's room ready to go. And from writers room ready to go to, we're ready to kind of put this out there. What does that, what does that creation process look like in terms of scope? Well, I think, I don't know, it's hard to answer because we had to build a studio so that, Most people don't do that as part of like a project. So I think like normally if you have a studio that's ready to go, then, you know, like once the script's approved,

and it sometimes, it depends on where you're at, but like sometimes there's a lot of approvals and a lot of voices that kind of come in the script writing process. But eventually when it does get approved, then you hand it over to a storyboard artist and the director. They work together to kind of actually like, and the storyboard's great. It's like, you know, it's the first time where you cinematically,

kind of see the different angles and the shots. And then like, you know, you're kind of defining and blocking out the action that's being taken. And it depends. But like, you know, oftentimes they're adding layers to the story that weren't on the page and the script, right? Because they have this, they're also bringing their creative and adding layers to it, which I think is really beautiful and interesting. And then, you know, you'll review the story boards with the showrunner, executives,

whoever else needs to approve it. Then you approve it. Then it goes into layout. So then you have like, you know, somebody will come in and start. blocking, just like you do white boxing in video games. It's just like white blocking out the different scenes that are expressed in the storyboard. And then once that's approved, then you kind of block in the animation. So, you know, you're just incrementally building on it. You know, separately as a separate process, you're concepting out the different characters and environment

pieces in 2D. Then once those are approved, then you kind of send it out to a modeler and then the animator and so on and so forth. And then the rest feels a lot more similar to a video game, I think. Yeah. I feel like storyboarding is uh ties back to our uh, you know, paper prototyping, uh, to some, to some extent. Uh, and, uh, I'm glad nobody took the ink away from you for, for this process. Um, thank you. Um, so, okay, so now we, uh, you know, uh, now I, I, you never know, when you're going to produce something like how it's really going to be received, but, um, you know, of the sort of overwhelmingly positive response and, you know, the kind of the Emmy process. Like, talk me through what it felt like and what was happening as this thing got launched.

And as you started getting in the responses, like, this must have been, been pretty incredible. Yeah, it was, it was very surreal. You know, at that point, I was already starting my own board game company. I had left riots. It was kind of like, oh, like, it's finally happening, like that kind of moment. And so it was very exciting. Yeah, it just was surreal. It was just like watching it launch, seeing the kind of early feedback popping up on rotten tomatoes and all that stuff.

And like, I don't know, it's nerve-wracking too because it's just sort of like, oh, like, do they like it? And what's the opinion? And how did they interpret this scene and all that stuff? So it was, it was, it did way too much reading and doom scrolling that I probably should have. But it was great. Hard to avoid at that point. Yeah. It's probably not healthy to read too many reviews of your work on the internet because it's just you get everything.

But yeah, I think there was that. And then the Emmys itself was amazing and very surreal. It was just over at like the LA Convention Center. So really cat is where E3 used to be held every year. So it was like, oh, I've been here before. And it was like this, I don't know, Hollywood in general feels like a house party. And like for me, I was never part of the friend group. And so I felt like an outsider being invited to a house party.

Don't know anyone. Clearly everyone knows everybody. and so it just felt like weird. But yeah, I mean, that was kind of exciting to see how these shows, like the award shows are done. And then the after party was really cute too. And so I will just say the Emmy is heavy. I know, poor me, but it's like a full seven pounds.

And so they actually make you carry it around the entire evening, which is great. But like, I don't know. Sorry, I'm not complaining. The Emmy is heavy of all the people. I was like, what's it like to have it with the Emmys? You're like, oh, you know, it was kind of heavy. Yeah.

Oh my goodness. All right. Love it. Love it. Okay. So, so, so, um, that's fun, fun details. So, okay, now we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll back up because in between I've, I've launched this in, you know, created this incredible animation series. And when it actually starts getting the awards and releases and accolades, you quit a successful career and a successful company where you've been able to move around and accomplish a lot to come. and start, you know, for a big video game company. You start your own board game company. I know, we have talked about this some, but let's let's dig into some of that story for those listening. What motivated this? Seems crazy to a lot of people. I'm sure you heard that from plenty of people in your social group or family at the time,

as I know when I quit my job to start my own company. So tell me, tell me more about that journey. Yeah. I mean, I think it might have been easier for me than for you because, like, it was pandemic era. And like, I think everyone was in their own headspace being like, what's happening anymore? Who am I? Yeah.

So I didn't get too many questions. And my partner, by the way, is super supportive. Like, he's been supportive from day one. And I'm endlessly thankful for that. And I don't think any of this would have been possible without his support. But yeah, it was just sort of back then, like, I, you know, a lot of things were happening in the world. And I was feeling very frustrated and just wanting to do something that had meaning for me personally. And so for me, like, one of those things was like, you know, I wanted to see more different content made in video games and, you know, kind of the mediums that I was interacting with. And I thought my son would eventually grow up to interact with two. And I felt like, you know, I wanted to see more diverse people also running these efforts and kind of being behind the decisions of doing it because the people behind the scenes making the greenlight decisions, I think, are widely impactful on like who's what projects are even getting made, which content.

is acceptable, what creators get to make them. So I saw that a lot of that impact. And I wanted to be able to open that and widen it further. And I felt like, hey, you know, one thing I can do with my career is potentially just try it, right? Try to do that for myself. Maybe I succeed and that sets a good example. Maybe I fail, but it encourages somebody else to try. So that was kind of the general thinking. Yeah. So, I mean, that's a very powerful thing. And again, this is, you know, this is a platform for this exact purpose, right? I want to be able to help empower people, empower people who think they couldn't otherwise do the kinds of things that you've been successful doing. And so, you know, what message do you have now at this stage of where you are, you know,

to those that feel like they're stuck by gatekeepers or feel like there's not people that look like them or that have their experience or the possibility of getting into this space and living a creative life? Like what, how do you, how do you advise people like that? And what, what message would you give to those listening right now? Oh my God. It's really hard. No pressure. No pressure.

I think in general it is super tough and I had no illusions about how difficult this would be going into it. I think it is really tough, but I think like if it and it kind of connects to stuff that you were saying earlier is like if you're passionate about what you're doing and you're driven by a sense of purpose to do it, it does make it easier. And I think my hope is like more people doing this just makes it easier for everybody else kind of trying to do it for themselves. And I think if more people try, eventually it should become easier. But like, you know, it's got to start somewhere is kind of my opinion. And if you think you're ready to try it, take your shot, right? Like the worst that can happen is that it doesn't succeed. And then you can go back to what you were doing before.

And I think you would at least even in that scenario be enriched by the effort and what you learned from it, right? Yeah, no, I couldn't not agree with you more. And it's the hardest thing. Maybe the most important lesson that can be taught about the creative life is that these leaps feel unbelievably scary. And the reality is that if you take this leap, you know, there's a chance you just live your dreams and everything is amazing and you have the best possible outcome, which of course you're glad you did. And then there's a chance, often a big chance, right, that it's not going to work. and you're going to end up, you know, either struggling or having to go back to what you did. But that cost, that downside ends up being very short-lived, right?

You can usually within months or even a year get back to where you were. You haven't lost very much at all. And you end up having a level of growth and learning out of those experiences that will carry you forward and apply to whatever it is you're going to do going forward in life. And then you have to contrast that fear with the alternative fear, right? Because the alternative fear is you never take your shot. You stay in the path of a banking or lawyer or whatever family business or whatever thing you think is safe for you. And 20 years, 30 years, 40 years down the road, you look back and you're like, wow, I wonder what if.

I never took my chance. I never had the opportunity to live that life that I could have lived. Now, that to me is the nightmare scenario because you can't recover from that one. That one you're stuck. And so I think that that ability to push past that. And again, for people who don't feel like this is an option for them, you know, want to show these examples. And I want to also one of the goals is to share the struggles to, right, share the hardships and the lessons from the hardships so that people can understand and normalize it. And even for people who have been doing this as long as you have or as I have that we still have struggles and failures and challenges and setbacks.

And that's just, you know, that's okay. It's not, you know, people see only the big successes, typically by default. They see, you know, the awards and the accolades. They don't see all the struggles behind the scenes. And I think normalizing the sharing of those struggles. And reducing the fears of taking action are two really powerful goals that I know I have for doing the podcast. And it sounds like you have not just with your sharing your message, but literally your career.

I mean, you kind of put that on the line in part to serve as an example, which is really powerful. Oh, thank you. It sounds so much better coming from you than what I tell myself late at night, being like, it's okay. You made the right choices, Jane. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Honestly, in my time knowing you, I find you're, and you're here, you're very, you're very self-deprecating, which is, which is charming, but also I think you, you, you undersell yourself in what you're, you are, I sorry, you're a badass. And it's awesome to get to, to learn from you. It has been awesome to get to learn from you throughout the time we've known each other. And to, you know, to kind of share, to share this journey with you here in a sense. And I think it's, it's important to acknowledge what you have accomplished. and the fact that you are a role model to so many people. So I'm excited to get to call you a friend. Thank you. And likewise, like really excited when you agreed to meet with me at GDC because I was just like, man, this guy's amazing. I hope he responds.

And so that was super exciting for me. And I've continued learning from you. So thank you so much. All right. Enough of the warm and fuzzies. Let's get into the thing I teased earlier. You know, how will we build great IP? because you have now sold, you sold investors, you've built a team, you've launched, you left

a major company to launch a tabletop game company that is, you know, it's hard about building phenomenal IP that can be transmedia, that can stand the test of time. First of all, maybe a little bit on why this path, like why is this the, why is this the journey? Why not any other thing you could have done, right? Why focus on this? And then let's talk about how we do it. Like, what's the, what's the recipe for, at least that you're trying to be able to repeat this process of creating great IP? Yeah, sure. Thank you for the opportunity.

I think, as you said, I believe strongly in the power of IP and just sort of like, you know, I've worked with a number of big video game IPs before. And I saw kind of the strengths and the opportunities that an IP has to kind of move into different genres, right? Like when you have a fan base that they want to see an animated show or music video or whatever, There's a lot of exciting places that you can take it creatively, and I want to build something and help drive those decisions once it's that big. I think why board games specifically, you know, in a nutshell, I think great franchises can be

born anywhere, like Hello Kitty started out in coin purses, Pokemon started out with trading cards and like, you know, Marvel with comic books, obviously. So I think, like, you can really start a new IP anywhere. And I think the real truth of it is finding your fans, finding people who like what you're doing are ready to jump on board early, even if it's a really tiny niche community. Like finding them, engaging with them, learning from them, building that conversation, the relationship and the trust, and building from there is kind of what I believe is important to incubating a brand new IP from scratch.

I think if you're trying to start at the top, like the most visible, the most mass market top, I think that's harder to do, harder to find your fans and evangelist and talk to them directly. And so, you know, I think that was kind of the angle of board games. Yeah, no, I think that that makes a lot of sense. And it definitely shares some of how I think about this sort of thing, right? Most of my business is tabletop games and card games. Some of it is, you know, in the digital space and the building digital games is so much more expensive and so much more competitive even than, you know, that it becomes very risky

to try to incubate IP in that space. Whereas doing a tabletop game or a comic book or something is much cheaper to be able to sort of try and see if people resonate with what you're doing, to be able to then grow it from there. So that makes sense as an incubation tool. And when you talk about, you know, you say find your fans and a tiny community, those are terms that maybe you're worth unpacking a bit more, right? How do you find your fans, right? What is it? How do you reach an audience? Because arguably, you know, the cost of producing everything is dropping dramatically, right? Cost of tabletop games, even the cost of digital games. Who knows? Maybe I'll be able to just tell chat GPT to build me a game soon. Who knows? But, but the, the noise in the marketplace, the ability to find those fans is way, way harder and way more difficult to push through. So how do you think about that? And then semi-related to that, you know, tiny, what is a tiny community? Is there, is what's too tiny? What's too tiny? What's too tiny? too big, how do you know what the right target audience is and how do you reach them? Yeah, I will say, we'll push back on one thing.

Like, the cost to produce a game just in terms of like the tools we have now to make amazing art or like, you know, grammar or correction and your writing and all that stuff is like way cheaper than it ever was. But like at least in tabletop, like the cost of manufacture, the freight costs, like all, that's actually kind of gone up, which has been a pain if you're tiny. So I just wanted to throw that out there. But I would say like the way that I look at the space, I mean, like how tiny is too tiny of an audience?

Like, and how do you find your fans? I think on how you find your fans, I think you have to just put stuff out there in any form, right? Like, you know, you could try that on a loud mass market forum. And if you manage to cut through all the noise, good for you. So that's very viable. Or you can find like, like we mentioned before. or like a bluer ocean, like a space that is less loud and less crowded, try to put something

forth in that market and then see if people respond to it. Then once they do, you have to be there to respond to them and then hopefully form a conversation. To me, it just starts small like that because I think like, I think anybody that reaches out for based on content that they see, they're looking to form that kind of relationship, right? So. Yeah. No, yeah, I just want to get, I want to just get specific.

So what forums do you use? What does outreach or content, initial content output look like? You know, just I want to kind of make this concrete for people. Oh, got it. Well, I think for us, we started, we launched our first game through crowdfunding on Kickstarter, right? And Kickstarter, you know, I'm sure you, I don't know, we could go into all the good pros and cons of that. in of itself, but it's a good place to go to an existing community. It's an existing

billboard where people are looking for new projects from small creators. So it's a good platform. If you're one of those to go out, pitch your idea, see if people are responding to it, and then have a measurable way to know that, hey, yes, that people are interested in this. This is worth pursuing. And, you know, at least for tabletop games, raising some stuff, some amount of capital through Kickstarter helps because you have to then purchase this big, inventory purchase and then manage everything from there so it it becomes helpful I think I'm getting nitty-gritty but yeah so Kickstarter was a yeah there's no there's no there's no there's no downside to nitty-gritty here you can go as as as as high level or as in the details as you want yeah um but in

in addition to Kickstarter we did also uh work with some creators that kind of put out a webtoon uh so a free comic on webtoons um and i did that because like you know games aren't always the best medium to tell long-form stories in detail. Like, I personally as a gamer, I don't like board games, a little paragraphs of stories. I don't like reading a novel before I get to play. But I wanted to tell these stories. And so we were using the Webtoons to kind of flesh out the world

for folks that wanted more lore. And so we worked to kind of put that out. And Webtoons is a free platform as well to kind of put out content for free. You just have to kind of get the art and the words together and hopefully people find you and fall in love. and then we tried a bunch of other stuff. Like we recorded our own play-through series and then put that up on YouTube.

We tried a bunch of social media to try to like, you know, post our artwork and see if people were gravitating to that. So we probably went to almost every free platform out there for creators through stuff at the wall and we're looking for things that stuck. Yeah. And what does, how do you know if something has stuck, right?

This sort of ties into the what's the right community size. Like is there a specific metric that you're looking for? Is there just a, you know, you've got some, a couple core engaged people is enough or wherever gets the most is where you continue to dig. What is what is? Because it's very easy. I, one, I do agree with like, you know, put your stuff out there, see what, see what

resonates, like find your audience, find your tribe. But it can also be exhausting to be trying to hit every platform and keep up with everything and every new platform, whatever it is that's coming up. And you're supposed to be on TikTok and Twitter and or X or whatever the hell it's called. Now, you know, it's like it's a lot of things. What, how do you, how do you manage that? How do you know when something's worth doubling down on or when you should maybe focus

a little bit less on a platform? Yeah, I mean, that's a golden question. I think, yeah, you have to, it's hard because like, I think when you start your own business or a project or whatever, you get a lot of well-meaning advice about like, ah, you got to be doing this. Why aren't you doing that or like, oh, all this stuff? And so I think you have to, I mean, I've fallen prey to a lot of that stuff personally. And I think it's just over time, you kind of slowly begin to figure out what is working for you.

And you do have to sit back and think through like, okay, is this working for me or not? Or, you know, right now we're debating, like, should we stay on X or not? Because it just seems like people are kind of slowly leaving. But like, enough people are still there. And so, like, you know, you can have specific debates over specific platforms. but I think how big is enough, how do you know you've got resonance? It's like, I don't know, there's no concrete formula for that. I think you kind of have to like take a scientific approach.

You have to be like, okay, I'm going to raise this Kickstarter. And if I can get this amount of backers for it, you know, that's enough for me to actually do the project. And then I can go forward. And like, you know, then I think I have something here. And it's, I think in the beginning, especially for brand new IP where you have no data about like how well did this do before, what exists for it already in terms of fans. Like, yeah, you have to just kind of create your own watermark, aim for it, see if you hit it or not,

and then decide if you hit it, obviously you should go forward. If you don't, that's often the hardest is deciding. Is that the time to give up? Yeah. That is, yeah, that's, it's really the tough, it's really one of those tough questions, right? You get these two messages throughout society. There's the, you know, kind of stay, that you have to stay with it, right? Right. And this is just true. If you want to succeed on any of these social platforms, right, the people who are at the top, they do this like every day for years and get to that point. Most of the time, it's like, you know, takes years to be an overnight success, right? But on the other hand, they fail fast and focus on, you know, other things is the other side of that. And knowing when you're in the fail fast versus the stay with it side of the equation is not an easy thing. I don't think there's a formula for it. Although if you have one, please tell me because I would like to know it.

Well, I do have a specific example, which maybe you would appreciate a bit, which is like, you know, so last, at the end of last year, we launched Boundless Stride, which is our Kickstarter, right? And I actually, I made the call to cancel that campaign before we hit our funding goal, right? And that was extremely painful to do because, like, you know, we did have some people on board, but it just, I think ultimately the reason why I decided was not good to move forward was like, usually when you launch a Kickstarter campaign, you want to see a certain trajectory. Like it needs to be like, like you're hoping for something exponential where every day there's just exponentially more people following the project. But at the very least, you want a straight line to the top. And the last thing you want is a plateau or a dip. And unfortunately, with that campaign, we were seeing a plateau. And it looked like we were about to see a dip. And so, you know, for me, I wanted to cancel before we hit our funding goal so that nobody actually got charged and like the headaches of the backers were lower. You know, did we decide too early to cancel it? Maybe.

Like I think the thing with, you know, running your own projects is that you have to be prepared to be wrong, right? And you have to accept that you can be wrong at any time. Because there's nobody with the answers, right? And you just have to do what you believe is right based on the information you have. Yeah, nobody knows what they're doing. That's the real, the real secret. I mean, when you're trying to do stuff that's new, right? I mean, you talked about, you know, hey, we need to, when we're trying to build an animation studio, you're trying to do something that, okay, a lot of people have built animation studios,

I'm going to go find someone that did that, and they're going to help me. But what I'm saying, hey, I'm going to launch this new type of game, this new IP, that's always a unique process, right, the creative process. There's nobody that can tell you, oh, yeah, no, this IP is going to be a hit. As it turns out, Pokemon characters with guns didn't need it to exist, and now that's a blowout, you know, a blowout success, right? Whatever. Like, the, there's just a, it's just the struggle as a creator is there.

But I guess, you know, making that decision to cut a project, in a world where I don't know if you'd set a funding goal that was sort of too low and you didn't think it was going to be able to be able to probably get it done where you were or just your objective is to make IP that has a global resonance or huge resonance and this metric wasn't enough. So even if you could have made that game maybe profitable, it wasn't worth your time to keep doing it. Is it more of the latter there or was it just very off? I think for me it was just seeing the traction and momentum die so early in the project was a red flag where I worried that like hey maybe this isn't the best launch maybe we messed up on the marketing

maybe the product offering itself isn't compelling or maybe there's something wrong in the mix of creative that we have going on like I didn't know what the issue was I think in the moment all I could tell was that the momentum wasn't there yeah so do you do any testing and or audience building before going to crowdfund. Because in my experience, I generally advise people to do quite a bit of that, right? That you don't just go into Kickstarter with a product that you haven't built an audience for ahead of time.

It's very unlikely to succeed. And so I'm curious how much upfront prep you do or testing you do so that you're, or is Kickstarter, that's your metrics, that's your validation to see if you have an audience or not. We do testing, like in Boundless, for example, did like a community play test and we had, I think, something like 50 people kind of tested on their own and give us feedback and stuff like that. Definitely wish we could have done more,

but I think it's always your strap for time and resources as well on testing. Of course. But yeah, things were positive. I think, I don't know. Like, you know, it could have been we should have done more testing. One thing we didn't do is take the game out to conventions. And so I had taken Can Fire Chronicles out to conventions, right? And so maybe that was a differentiator. but I think it's hard to tell like what, you know, are you doing enough? Yeah, yeah. Well, that's, again, that ties in this thing, right? You know, double down or cut your losses or how much do you have to invest up front and how much is enough?

No, there's, I like talking about these things and wrestling with them so people can see how creators like you think about it and how we think about it because there's, you know, there's not an answer, but there is a, you know, kind of way you approach it. Some of it comes down to, okay, what does my gut tell me here? Some of it is metrics, some of its data, but there's always just kind of this intuition at a certain point that you kind of, yeah, this has got something or this doesn't. So let's cover a little bit of the earlier process a bit more because I know we're running short on time. I'm not going to get to everything I want, but so be it. I'll get to follow up with you after. But for the audience's purposes, when you're creating this IP and creating these games afront, you have a game director in-house. you have a, do you use a similar kind of, you know, show Bible process when you're talking about building your IP in this world?

Is that like what does your, your writer's room of sorts work like when you're working with a tabletop game as your primary medium? Yeah, it's interesting because like I think for Kinfire specifically, we did kind of start off with more of a writer's room approach. You know, I asked Cuba and Matush, they were, They were just consultants for us, but they had worked together on The Witcher 3, did a number of interesting things. Cuba is like this amazing novelist in Polish award winning, has like things optioned for Hollywood and all this stuff. So amazing talent there and a big found following. But we brought them on to help consult and help us build sort of the world. And like kind of like we were just like blue skying it for a bit and just trying to figure out like what would be an interesting kind of original IP world.

that could tell a million stories and not get old and has like a source of conflict that would be that would keep it interesting and kind of like keep it from being a done story if that makes sense. So we worked a bit on that and kind of a similar process of TV like, you know, first went through concept pitches and once we liked the concept for the world, had that fleshed out into like more outline beats and character backstories. And then once we approved all that, then, you know, we worked with Kevin who was involved from the beginning too, which I like having a game designer involved that early with story. But like, you know, I think with the game design that he was coming up with, we had to sit

down and figure out what slice of the story are we going to tell with this game. Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean, I've worked with, you know, animations and toy and game concepts with, you know, things like Bakugan and Reda Kai and games where I was sort of involved very early at the process of, okay, we're making this game, we're making a toy, we're making a show, what are the stories, how do they interweave? And I found that process to just be so fascinating and like so much fun to work on because you've got so many different competing interests and you're trying to make sure that they all align.

And when you get the right group together, everybody respects what everybody else is doing and you know that all the pillars have to kind of support each other. I think it can be just a really fun, fascinating creative experience. Yeah. I've heard of that. The legendary like, I don't know, like in Japan they do that level of partnership so much like, you know, the animation boss and the toy boss and the, you know, comic boss, they all kind of get in a room and make it happen. Yep. Yep.

That's exactly what it's like. And it's a, it's a really, really great experience. Because, you know, again, you coming in, I come in with my own zone of expertise and I'm in there in the room with people who are just like masters at what they do and just to kind of see their perspective and bounce them all off. It's like, it's really fun. I mean, obviously it's incredibly ambitious projects, very expensive to develop. You know, your barrier for success is super duper high, right?

If you're making $50 million a year, it's a terrible failure. You know, it's like very crazy numbers. from my perspective. But it's a, it's very fun to be able to get a, to be in the room for those sort of things. So to be able to build that at the small scale, right,

when you're saying, okay, we're doing web tunes and we're doing a board game and we're trying to, you know, but we're still building for that same possibility of a long term goal is something I'm very excited about. I mean, I know I spent a lot of time on my own IP for things like Ascension. There's a, you know,

deep story arc. I had three years of story arc built before I launched the game. We've built all kinds of cool narratives and characters that recur. involved, but I would bet 99% of our audience has no idea about most of that, right? It's behind the scenes and, you know, maybe it's a little bit less now. But it's, you know, the vast majority because they don't, they don't experience it that way. They experience their own story in a game of ascension, which is the more important thing for a board game, right, that the player's story arc comes through than that the broader narrative

of the world comes through for my experience. But I want to be able to get better at telling that story in other ways. So you've given me a lot of great insights for that. So thank you. Yeah, no, I completely agree. And we overbuilt the story because we were taking an IP approach. Like obviously, most of what we wrote and our ideas for it are not nearly, they're not in chronicles. They're expressed somewhat in there.

But I think one last thought is like, I remember I was talking to a former Imagineer, a Disneyland Imagineer. I remember he was telling me about their process for the Disney castle and how like, yeah, you could just design a castle. But they actually spent a lot of time figuring out, like, this is what the castle was before. and these are the types of people that lived here and like, you know, building out these stories because even though no one ever reads the story, you end up kind of feeling it through the details. Yeah, I do believe that.

I think that there's a lot of things that people pick up subconsciously by the fact that a story, a world, a game, it feels cohesive. There's something that happens. A world feels lived in. I think it's really important and really powerful. So even though, I mean, honestly, from my side, like I'd never expect a sense to actually take off. I mean, I was making a game just for me and my friends.

And I made three years of story because I love making stories. I love making worlds. And I thought it'd be really cool. And it's just kind of what got me excited to make the project. And it turned out three years of story was not nearly enough. So, you know, you never know, which hooks are going to matter for people. But, you know, being able to do the things you're passionate about. If you're passionate about story, tell great stories, right?

There's never going to be a downside of telling great stories. I don't care what your business is. You know, people love great stories. that's what keeps us and unites us and connects us together. Okay. I want to give you a space here because I just want a little rant to share, not just what you're up to now where people can find your games, more about you because I know I have continued to,

you know, I've only scratched the surface of the great insights that you have to share on this podcast, I know from experience. So for people that want to see more from you, where should they go? Yeah, please. Our studio website is Incredible Dream.com. You know, if you want to check out our games, it's Kinfire Chronicles.com.

We do make Kinfire Chronicles and Delve and all that stuff, but we're also coming out with new games like a Gentle Rain is a remaster that we're getting out there, which will actually be in Target. So, yeah, there's a lot of different places to find us now.

Excellent, excellent. All right. Well, Jane, thank you so much as always for your time. And I look forward to the next time we get to have one of these conversations in person, what sounds like maybe very soon. Yay. Thank you, Justin. Thank you so much for listening.

I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platform, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listener reviews and shares make a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast. Think Like a Game Designer. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great

designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at think like a game designer.com or wherever find books or something.