Think Like A Game Designer - JT Smith — Crafting the Game Design Journey: From Prototyping with Game Crafter to Navigating Digital Playtesting and Harnessing the Power of Audacity (#32)

Episode Date: October 30, 2021

JT Smith started designing games when he was in high school and wanted an easier way to prototype his game. His drive to find a better way to prototype led him to found the company Game Crafter, a company that allows you to print prototypes and even produce your game on a small scale. In addition to Game Crafter, JT has programmed a number of incredible tools for creating card prototypes, migrating your physical games to programs like Tabletop Simulator, and even running entire conventions. Thanks to JT this episode of the Think Like A Game Designer will, no doubt, make your game design life easier.  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. In today's episode, I speak with J.T. Smith. J.T. is the founder of the GameCrafter, which is one of the more popular digital print-on-demand game options available for designers. He's also designed tools to help with running your own events,

getting your prototypes into tabletop simulator, and tons of other tools that really have created the backbone for a lot of the hobby game designers out there. In my conversation with JT, we talk about the differences between artwork and U.S. And how his tool component studio helps people to build the layouts and designs of their cards quickly and then create fast prototypes. We talk about the different advantages and disadvantages of different kinds. of technology. We talk about the process of pitching to a publisher versus deciding to publish

your own game. We talk about if you are going to publish your own game, how do you build an audience? What are the different tools available for that? Whether that be board game geek or social media or your local gaming groups. And we talk about a lot of the different paths and really kind of deep dime into the types of things that you would have to think through if you want to make your own games or start your own business, right? JT really scratched his own itch by designing a lot of the tools that he did. And you know, you have to have to be a little audacious and try things that most people wouldn't necessarily think to try to push yourself to that edge. And JT. is really a great example of that.

He's provided a lot of great tools. He's built communities. He talks about some of the design competitions that he runs and how you should think about entering into design competitions. So there's really a lot of good nuts and bolts here. This is kind of a ground level kind of episode. Obviously, JT talks a lot about the tools that he creates, but a lot of the principles here apply regardless of what systems that you want to use in your design process.

The main thing that I always try to emphasize in my teachings in the book is you want to be able to prototype as quickly and easily as possible to reduce that friction. So as you're going through the core design loop, as you're trying out your different ideas and iterating and that you do something that's going to be as easy for you and as quick for you as possible. And so JT provides a lot of insight into that. So hopefully you guys find this helpful. And without further ado, here is JT Smith. Hello and welcome. I am here with J.T. Smith. J.T., great to chat with you. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, this is actually really cool because, you know, this podcast is generally, pretty much everybody I've spoken with has been a game designer primarily. We've been talking about the principles of design and really being focused on helping new designers, aspiring designers, people that really want to get into the game industry to find their way and be able to succeed. And I've had a woeful lack of focus on, you know, the process of getting your games actually made. And you're one of the perfect people to do this. So maybe you could talk a little bit about your background and how you got into this position, what you do and why you got there. All right. Well, I own a company called The GameCrafter.

Most people listening to this podcast probably have heard of it. But just in case you haven't, basically the GameCrafter is a place where you can get your game made. You don't have to buy a thousand copies. You can buy just one. So you basically upload artwork, rules, that sort of thing, to our website. You select game pieces that you would like to use.

We have a library of a couple thousand, and we also make custom ones if you can't find something you need. And then you buy a copy, and it comes to you in the mail about a week later. Cost you depends on what it is. Like a deck of cards is like six bucks, probably. A big game could be. I don't know, 20 to 50.

I guess it could be hundreds of dollars, depending on what you throw in there. How crazy do you want to get? That's right. Yep. So that's basically the game crafter in a nutshell. We manufacture short run games. Our specialty is kind of the one to 500 copies.

If you're looking to do more than 500 copies, you would go to a long run printing company in China. So we'll dig into a lot of this stuff. You know, the difference is. and what all that means. But I, you know, I've been eager to talk with you because even though I haven't personally used your services, I know a ton of people in the industry who have even very professional companies that have, you know, the highest quality of products.

And so you come super highly recommended. And I think a lot of people are very unaware of how easy it actually is to be able to print and, you know, get copies of your game in your hands nowadays. So I've been in this industry a long time. And I know when I first got started, it was nearly impossible or it's certainly incredibly expensive to try to do any kind of short run print games. So it's been pretty amazing. And you've really been at the forefront of making this just accessible and affordable for people. So what got you motivated to do that?

How did you come up with the idea? How did you get into this place? I've been designing games since I was probably in high school, something like that. That's a long time because if you could see my face, you'd see how much gray beard I have. But yeah, so I've been designing games a long time and I'd always, you know, prototyped them at home. And at a certain point, I was just like, this is stupid. There's got to be somebody out there. So I started looking and I found the husks of a bunch of dead companies that had tried to do this and failed miserably.

And I'm like, you know what? I could do this. So at the time I was, I owned a company. In fact, I still own this company called Plain Black. We manufactured software for companies and governments all over the world. We basically build web apps for them. And I was like, you know what, if I build this as a web app so that we don't have to deal with, you know, the injection of files. When people have to upload their files to us, everything will be formatted properly so that it can go right into printing.

And it will be an automated process. That will save us a whole lot of money and allow us to do this cheaper and still make a profit. And so that's basically how it started is I was like, I can do this. I convinced my partners. They thought I was crazy, which honestly I kind of was, you know, trying to do this sort of thing. But it worked out. And I guess the rest is history. Yeah.

So I think that the one of the things that I emphasize and this is true for pretty much every great designer that I've spoken to in the course of this podcast is, you know, the importance of being able to. to get your prototypes on the table in front of players as quickly as possible and learn from that process and then cycle through again, it's absolutely critical. And so for people that are trying to make prototypes on their own, when should they think about what's the right time for them to start thinking about, you know, using a game crafter and how does that integrate into the process kind of from beginning to end?

It really depends on their process. So for me, and I'm not going to be everybody. from me, from day one, I use the game crafter. As soon as I'm tweeting anything to paper, because I don't like the crafting process. That's the reason I created the game crafter. So I want to design games. I want to play test games.

I do not want to make the prototype. So basically, from day one, I'm doing that. There are other people that love the craft process. And so for them, you know, it's very late in the process. It's like, okay, I need to make 10 copies so I can send them out, to reviewers or publishers or whoever, at that point, it's probably the time for them. And so other people will fall in the middle somewhere, you know, maybe their first couple of prototypes will be hand drawn and then they'll go in, or maybe their first one, they'll print it

home and realize what a pain in the ass it is, and then they'll use the GameCrafter, that sort of thing. Yeah, and so when people are starting to, you know, the GameCrafter unlocks a lot of tools to build things that are, you know, potentially full final versions. But it feels like a lot of those tools can potentially slow down the process or, you know, as people are building UX and artwork in the game, how do you think about that way, either when you're designing games or in the people that you're working with for what stage should you be really focusing on, you know, artwork and getting a better frames and whatnot? Well, artwork is different than UX. We should separate those things. So, UX is just, you know, the layout of the card. How does it

look. It doesn't mean that you have all the colors right. It doesn't mean that you have good icons or illustrations or any of that kind of stuff or even fancy frames for your cards. It just means that you're getting stuff laid out positioned on the on the card. And for that, I actually built a tool, which is now available publicly. I used it for years before I gave it out. But it's called Component Studio. And basically, you can, you design one card or one token, one tile, that sort of thing. It designs the rest. All of the data gets pulled from a spreadsheet, essentially, and it automatically generates all the rest of your cards. So if you do that sort of tool, it's very, very quick to develop a prototype with full imagery, even if that imagery is low-res or hand-drawn or it doesn't have to be

final art. Just it's very quick to generate those kind of things. Versus if you're using Photoshop to make them one at a time or something like that, that could take hours. It's way faster to to draw them by hand. But if you're doing it, like I said, using an automated tool like Compotid Studio, it's faster than hand drawing. So that's what I do. That's great.

Yeah, we have a tool. It sounds almost identical that we use internally. For that, where it was sort of import a spreadsheet and pick the layout and it populates everything for you. And that is actually just a complete game changer. And so, you know, that's one of the things where I think when a tool like that is available, it is so powerful because you can just change things fast and move through it. If you have to, everything that removes any bit of friction from your game design process,

from the process, it's the time it takes from idea to paper to prototype, to learn to cycle again, is just, you know, huge, huge impact on how good your game is going to be at the end of the process. Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. So one of the other things that people have trouble, you know, don't have a lot of experience with when they're first starting to design, is thinking about how much their game is going to cost when they're done,

right? If you're the kind of person that wants to publish a game, self-publish a game, or put something on a crowdfunding platform and you're making a game, is there, how can people think about, you know, designing towards production cost? Right.

A lot of that comes with experience, but there are some kind of tricks you can do. Obviously, you know, looking at the GameCrafter, all of our prices are published publicly. You could just sit there and add it up. We have a nice little calculator there for you.

If you want to get a more exact price, you can do what's called an add a placeholder. So you basically go in and create the game in the system, but you don't upload any art. You add a placeholder for every component that you want to create. And that basically just creates this virtual component with no art on it so that it can generate an accurate price of what your game will be.

When you get into longer run, you're going to have to reach out to whoever you might be printing with, and they're going to have prices that will change monthly. So you're going to have to basically just get a quote, go through whatever their quoting process is. Eventually, you'll get a feel for it. But the trick is, whatever platform you're going to print with, you want to take advantage of kind of their process.

So in our case, if you're printing poker cards, we print 18 poker cards to a sheet. So if you are doing a 19 card game, then you're paying for a whole other sheet, even if you aren't using that completely. And that goes the same for, you know, if you're making tokens or tiles or any of that kind of stuff, too. Look at how many are made per sheet. The same thing goes when you go to print long run. They're going to print, you know, a certain number of cards. Maybe it's 56, maybe it's 60, maybe it's 52, whatever that might be per sheet.

And if you're going over on that, you're going to end up. up costing you're, you know, costing you more. Same thing goes when you're picking out components. So we have pricing at one, 10, 100, and a thousand components, you know, of a given thing. So if you need, let's say, cubes in your game as little counters, you could get, you could get one of each, but that's going to be, you know, one of eight different colors, something like that. But that's going to be more expensive than if you got 10 of one color, because there's some price break based on quantity. And those kind of things apply in long run, too.

If you are getting lots of colors, they're going to, when they mix up a batch of plastic or mix up a batch of paint to paint wood, it has to cover a certain amount, which means you have to buy a certain amount of that thing, whatever it is that you're getting made. And so taken into account the multiples of how much they're going to have to make is going to save you money when you go to make your game.

Yeah, and this always, this comes down to some of the key kind of risk factors. You have to decide as a publisher, as a self-publisher, right, how many units do you think you're going to make? And do you order the, how many you're going to order up front? Because you save per unit significantly as you scale up the number you print, you know, and versus it, but you're also putting out a lot more cash and risking a lot more. Yep. So how do you, how would you advise, you know, somebody that was trying to make this decision?

First of all, don't do long run to start with. when you're first breaking out into the board game industry, there are thousands of people trying to do just what you're trying to do. So what I would recommend is do get a quote from a long run printer, but plan, like if you're going to do a Kickstarter, for example, plan to do a Kickstarter having the game crafter print it. Because you can make, we'll give you a bulk discount at 100 copies. Technically we even give you one at 10, but it's not as very good.

So up at 100 copies, you get a really good bulk discount. And it is something that is achievable by, you know, somebody that doesn't have a huge audience. You can actually achieve selling 100 copies to somebody. Whereas if you try to sell 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 is your first Kickstarter. Unless you are extremely lucky or have a huge audience, that's going to fail most likely. But I said at the beginning, get yourself a quote from a long run printer. And the reason for that is if you do hit it. out of the park somehow.

You then have this option to go with a longer run and make more money per copy yourself, which might allow you to do other stretch goals or just profit more. Yeah, so I think there's a lot of really good pieces of advice there. So, you know, on the one hand, the, you know, setting yourself up if you're going to run a Kickstarter or try to crowd fund that you will set up for whatever the most expensive version of the game that you're going to make, if you sold, you know, whatever it is, the 10 copies or 100 copies, be charged so that you could be covered there and then have the ability that if you're making more, you can go with a longer run printer and save money and scale up. Also, just minimize your risk

up front. In fact, you know, a lot of the time, you don't need to, obviously, you know, a Kickstarter crowdfunding intrinsically is about risk mitigation, right? You can print a single copy of the game through something like GameCrafter, have it available, use it to show off what you're doing and then see if people want to buy it. So you don't have to invest more than, you know, maybe a couple hundred dollars up front to get that, you know, game made looking good enough to be able to show and prove the concept is there before you're going to spend thousands of dollars to really try to make something that a lot of people are going to buy. Tens of thousands of dollars. Yes. Well, I know that experience. Yes. Yeah. So it's, and, and then there's another

piece of it, which you mentioned is sort of not having a big audience. And this is something else I talk about, you know, so you have, you've done an amazing thing. And, and the industry in general, this has been, this has been the trend, right? It's easier than ever to make games that it's by leaps and bounds compared to a decade ago, let alone 20 years ago. It is, it's insanely easy. So that means everybody can do it. And that means there's tons and tons of games showing up all the time. So getting your voice heard, getting attention for your game has become the new real significant and challenge outside of making great games because people can make games. It doesn't mean they make good games. But what do you think, what do you advise for people that how do they build an

audience? How do they get attention? What are the tools that, that you see working for people that, whether they use your platform or take other methods? Man, there are so many great things. This is a topic that I'm going to self-plug here for my own podcast. There's the GameCrafter official podcast. We do a weekly show as well. We've got 250 episodes or something like that. And like a third of the episodes are about building audience in various ways. So definitely go check that out. But here are a couple of quick tips. I would say one thing is to co-op somebody else's audience is a great way.

So for example, there's a quarter of a million users that use the GameCrafter. So if you can figure out how to use our audience, we have a chat system, we have a Facebook page, we have a built-in promotion systems, that sort of stuff. Do that. Build your audience on board game geek. There are people that are liking specific mechanics and that sort of thing. Go there. You could do what many of our game designers that are in our community do,

and they have co-opting audiences outside of the gaming space for the subject matter of the game. So, for example, we recently had a lady on the podcast, Victoria Morrow, who designed a game about horses. and she has this, she went and found this Facebook, or created this Facebook community all about horses and her horse game. She's sold 2,000 copies of her game in the last year or so just through, you know, co-opting various audiences that she's aware of and that she interacts with that are about horses because that is her big hobby besides board games.

So she's able to co-op that. And there's been dozens, maybe hundreds of examples of people that, have done exactly that sort of thing in our community. They go out and use whatever community they have, whether that be their church or a mailing list or, you know, they work at a school. And so they have a whole bunch of teachers that they work with or they're,

you know, big in some sort of security systems. And so they know people through whatever and they create a game about security. There's all kinds of games like that, you know, just take advantage of the community that you have access to. That's a great tip. And it's one of the things.

I often use whenever I sort of talk about game design, I use something like Wingspan as an example of a very niche interest by most accounts of birdwatching and suddenly becoming this huge hit. And in part, you know, there's that you can reach out to this audience that would never have touched a game before, would never have paid attention to this game or that hopefully you have a personal connection to. And in part, I think there's another aspect to it, which is, you know, when you're building a game around something you're passionate about, that really helps to make the game great.

It helps to give you the motivation to keep iterating on it and drive it forward. So I think you're way more likely to be able to build something actually good when you find a topic that's like unique and something that you have a personal connection to. Yeah, I agree completely. And I think that that process of, you know, designing for a specific audience, especially when you're new to the process, really you want to be designing for an audience that you're a member of. Because it's much easier for you to know when you're on the right track or not than just trying to design for some hypothetical audience that, you know, is not not really your main interest.

Right. As you build your community, there is something that I've found. It's very key to ingratiating them to you, which is don't, whether you're joining someone else's audience or you're building your own, don't make an ask right off the bat. Instead, do whatever you can to give to that community. And then people will see that you're not there. You're not a taker. You're there to contribute. And when it's time for you to ask for them to do something for you, they're much more likely

to do it. Yes, 100%. I could not agree more. I feel like that that idea of building genuine relationships, adding genuine value to communities is the best way to get yourself, you know, sort of known and to get an audience that will be receptive to what you want down the road. I think the same is true even for if you don't want to self-publish a game and you want to work with a publisher, you know, doing things to help the publisher out, writing up reviews for their game, participating their forums, helping out at conventions,

like doing things that make the publisher care about what you're doing. And then when, well before you ask, say, hey, I have a game I'd like to pitch to you. I think is another really valuable tool. And so this ties into another question of mine, which is, you know, when somebody's thinking about self-publishing versus crowdfunding versus trying to pitch to a publisher, what are your thoughts on how they make that kind of distinction? Well, pitching to a publisher is going to be the least amount of work, even though it's going to be a ton of work to pitch to pitch to publishers. I don't want you to think that it's easy to get a publisher to pick up your game. It's a ton of work to do it and do it well. But it is every other scenario that is not pitching to a publisher is starting a business. And if you're not ready for starting a business, you shouldn't do the other things.

Because if you're going to run a Kickstarter, you're just going to self-publish and try to get into retail or however you're going to try and do it, you're going to have to pick up a thousand skills that you don't currently have probably. marketing, customer service, accounting. You're going to have to find a lawyer probably in an accountant. You're going to have to deal with shipping and manufacturing yourself. So you're going to have to go out and figure out how to do bids on those kinds of things. Find people that will handle that for you. You're going to have to learn about crowdfunding.

There is art illustration, hiring artists and illustrators and writers. There's all kinds of things that go into it. It's a lot of skills and it is quite challenging. So if you're not ready to pick up a bunch of those skills, then you're probably your best bet is to try and go find a publisher. That said, if you like the idea of starting a business, then definitely go the other route. I've done both. At this point, I have found that I really enjoy the design process. I do not enjoy the publishing process.

So I do not publish games anymore. I find publishers, but to each their own. Yes. And having gone both routes, both selling games and publishing games, I can very much echo the, you know, if what you love is designing games, do not publish games. I also think it's one of the things I advise, especially if you're new in the industry, it's really, really valuable to work with a publisher for your first projects. Because one, they know what they're doing and they can help to really shape and mold the final product in something that's going to work. Two, they handle all of the things that you just talked about. Three, the cost, actual costs that you have to put in are much lower. And four, once you have a game that's out there and published and doing the, and you have, you can establish a name for yourself so that when you do publish your own thing, if you want to shift into that goal, you already have some credibility.

You already have some recognition. You already may have an audience. So it's really one of the things I always push people to unless you absolutely, you know, have that entrepreneur bug and you can't help but want it all. And believe me, the control freak part of me has definitely led me down some very expensive paths over time. You know, you really should try to try to work with a publisher for your first time out. Right. I am an entrepreneur.

I love being an entrepreneur. I've owned, I've created 21 businesses over my career. 21. That is a lot. Your business is drink now. That's true. But the thing is, not every business is for me. And publishing is one of those businesses that I just don't enjoy the whole cycle.

I don't know what it is about it. But just because you are an entrepreneur doesn't mean that you necessarily will love publishing. It might not be the thing for you. So that said, I think that the experience you gain from doing a self-publish at least once is fascinating and very useful. So I would actually encourage people to give that a try. just know what you're getting into when you do it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The lessons you learn, as painful as it is, are incredibly valuable.

And also, we talked a bit earlier about sort of designing towards production costs, and you made the note that, you know, you kind of get a feel for it over time. And that, and that's true. You know, and once you have been, you know, on the publisher and production side and you had to work with artists, you know, to go through all that stuff, it does change. It gives you more context and capability when you're designing because you kind of know, when certain decisions are going to end up making your game more costly or moving in a different direction

or more complex to actually create and so you can kind of have a more nuanced view of the landscape when you're building your future designs. Yep, agreed. So I think as a game designer, what types of games do you like working on the most? What really drives you? What are you excited about these days?

I guess if you asked my playtesters, they would say that I create mostly survival games, games where life and death are in the balance. So the game that I'm probably most famous for, if you can even call it, that's nothing at an ascension level, but the captain is dead. Basically a spaceship crew, a captain has died. It's like Star Trek, the last 10 minutes of Star Trek, except things have gone so badly that the captain is dead. And now you've got to figure your way out of the situation. It's a co-op game, that sort of thing. Most of my games are co-op also. The game I'm working on right now is

called Gravesend, which is a massive, I guess the closest thing I could put it to is like Gloomhaven, essentially. It's basically a massive role-playing game that you play over kind of a hundred sessions. It's legacy. It is set in a modern post-apopopos. kind of situation. A monster has come, attacked New York City, killed millions of people. And now you're trying to figure out your way out of the neighborhood. You're locked in basically in a, well, kind of like today. You're locked in because the military has declared martial law and kind of locked down the whole eastern seaboard. And so you're trying to figure out a way out of the city because you're locked into the city with all these monsters that are killing everybody. And the military won't let you out. That sounds fun slash terrifying. Yeah. So I'm going to guess based on the way that you describe your games, that you tend to start with a story first and then build mechanics around that story. Is that an accurate assessment?

It depends on the game. But yeah, I think I would say probably at least 70% of the time I start with a story. And the story is the game in my, you know, I don't I don't try to say, I have to. to have Mechanic X. It's the story has to drive the game. Yeah. Yeah, I find a pretty interesting even split so far in designers that I work with where the,

between those that sort of start mechanics first, they'll have some kind of, you know, games mechanic hook and then we'll build story around it versus they have a story hook that they really want to, you know, story they want to tell and emotional. And then they'll build mechanics to fit to that. And then there's this third way that, it really I only kind of became aware of in the last couple of years as a full focus,

which is being components first, that very often a component or specific, you know, physical gimmick or thing can become the inspiration for a game. And when I actually have, you know, kind of just been trolling through Gamecraft or Components lists as a mechanism for this, do you ever think about things in those terms or do you,

are you innovating on new types of components that aren't out there as, as things that kind of drive design? I do. And actually, half of the contests that we run at the GameCrafter, we run a lot of game design contests like four a year. And half of them are basically what you just said. It'll be, look, this new box that we have, it's the mint tin box.

Go design a game that will fit in a mint tin box, right? So that kind of thing inspires hundreds of people to go out and design games that will fit using that one component. lately I have kind of a side project like I said Gravesend is the thing that I'm primarily working on but lately in the last week or so I've started on this other side project we make custom components out of acrylic will laser cut it for you and we can print on it that sort of thing and I've been designing this game that's basically like Firefly but the I'm designing a ship where you you can plug in various components using this piece of acrylic and And I don't know. I don't know why it came to me, but it was just like, man, we should do cooler things with the acrylic. So I just decided to start designing a game around what could I do with this? And so, yeah, it does hit me occasionally too.

Yeah. And I've noticed a trend in the industry overall that, you know, cool, you know, components and good table presence is really a powerful driver. You know, we talk about what's going to, you know, get your attention and break you out from the crowd. Like having something that, you know, a physical, tactile thing that's, that's different, I think is really useful. And especially, you know, in a world where, you know, you're competing for people's attention with digital games, too. The physical and tactile is more important than ever. Yep. So tell me more about these game design challenges.

You run like for a year. This seems like a pretty cool opportunity for people. What does that look like? How would people get involved? We basically, we announce it through our blog and social media, but you can go to the game. Crafter.com slash contests to see what is running currently. Right now we have one going on and another one being in judgment. So like it hasn't finished. We haven't gone through the judging process yet. But basically we have, we usually have a guest judge that will come up with a theme or something

like that that they would like to see games designed around. And they will kind of set the rules or at least set the tone for the game. The contest is usually somewhere between two months and six months that you have time to design the game. Usually there's a cash prize of, I don't know, $2 to $500, something like that, plus a bunch of other things. Like if it's a publisher that's doing the deal,

they'll consider the top five games for publishing or they'll give you games that they've already published or both. There's all kinds of things going on like that. So the game we have going on right now is a 20, the whole idea is that the game has to be in last only 20 minutes. And you have $20 to make the game. So it's the 2020 contest, if you will. I like it. Yeah.

And so that's the, you know, that's the impetus. It isn't a specific component in this case. It's not a theme. It's not a mechanic. It's these kind of constraints over time and money. Yeah, I think that's great. And I have no affiliation with anything that you're doing, but I actually really want to encourage everybody listening to go and check these out and participate because I think contests like this are great for a couple of reasons. One, constraints breed creativity.

I think having something like that where you're saying, you know, hey, make a game is very intimidating and staring at a blank sheet of paper. But saying make a game that costs less than $20 that you can play in less than 20 minutes, now all of a sudden, probably most people, people listening have a couple of ideas that start coming to mind and it really narrows your focus. And then the additional part is that, look, deadlines are magic, right? Again, you could spend any amount of time anywhere and always making a game kind of goes off and now, I'll get to it eventually, you know, but work and life and family and everything gets in the way. You know, if you have a contest, something you've entered into that you have a clear deadline for, right? It forces you to be like, okay, I've got to make a thing right now. I only have however many months, wherever long the contest goes

to get it done. And so I really think those types of things, even if it's not the GameCraft Challenge, people participating in their own challenges or challenging their friends to all, you know, have a prototype ready in time for their next game night, like creating something with some social pressure, some real deadlines, some real constraints,

to force you to practice and get some designs out there. I think is a wonderful process and a great thing that you're doing for the community to get that out there. Yeah, and it also inspires people. First of all, there's a collaborative element to it. Like when you're working on a contest with other people, even if you're not working on the same game, there's a whole lot of collaboration that can occur.

Like, you know, I had this idea, but I'm not sure where to go with it. And because everybody else is kind of working on their ideas, all of that creativity is focused in a single direction. So it can really help you in that regard. It also has inspired a lot of people, even if they don't end up entering the game in the contest, like maybe they didn't finish it in time. or maybe the idea didn't come out the way they had hoped. It might have, you know, and so it no longer fits the scope of the rule. So maybe you set out to do a 20-minute game, but it turned out to be a 45-minute game. But that's still a game you created, right?

It's a thing that you did that was inspired because of the contest. And that's the entire reason that we do the contest is for inspiration. It's not, you know, like the $2 to $500 that you make off the contest, that's not life-changing money. it's there as the kind of carrot, if you will. If you're getting into the contest for the prizes, you're probably doing it for the wrong reason, even if it's a publishing deal, which we've had dozens of publishing deals on there.

And almost every contest winner, I think there's only two out of the 50 contests that we've run, have gone on to either get a publishing deal or have a successful crowdfunding campaign after the contest is over. But even that shouldn't be your reason for doing it. It should be that inspiration of, you know, getting your brain working because likely, you know, with the hundreds of people that will enter a contest, you're not going to be the one that wins the contest overall. So you're doing this for as a creative exercise.

It's there for you to be inspired, not all the extra things that go with it. Yeah, that's well, well said. So, you know, you talked about collaborating. talked about being able to share ideas and work, you know, either with a team locally or at the very least, you know, and at the same time and on the same type of project as a bunch of people. There's this probably one of the number one, you know, easily top five questions I get when I see players at conventions,

people try to make games, they're like, well, what if somebody wants to steal my idea? What if somebody's going to, you know, if I share it and people could just take my great idea and they can make it before me? What do you say to people that have that concern? What's your idea? No. The thing is that everybody has ideas for games.

We've talked about earlier in the podcast here that there's thousands of people out there trying to create games right now. And the reality is because there are so many ideas and so much creative input going into it, no one's going to waste their time on your idea that hasn't been proven yet. it's just not it's just not a thing that will happen. It's so rare that it's not worth worrying about. And so I'd say just get your game out there. Do your idea and get it out in the market. And don't worry about whether or not somebody's going to try and steal it because I've already got 70 projects on the back burner of games that I want to make. I don't care about your design.

Yep. Yep. Yeah, I find, you know, no matter how great your idea is, if you can't, expose it to others and get playtest feedback and see if it really works, it's never going to get made. It's never as good as you think it is. And frankly, ideas are not as important as you think they are. It's, you know, having a good idea is valuable, but, you know, a good idea is maybe best case 10%. And then execution is 90%. And, you know, if you're not actually hustling, if you are willing to hustle and then, you know, let people chase you. And if you're not willing to hustle,

then you probably shouldn't be in this business. Also, the likelihood that you, will get a publisher if you ask somebody to sign an NDA or express that you are concerned about them stealing your idea is basically Zilch. And the reason for that is publishers see games all the time. And so the likelihood that they've seen something similar, even close enough that is tangentially similar that could be sued over because of an NDA, they're simply not going to sign it. So you will not get a publisher if you try to do that. So you have a unique position of being, you know, design. and Tabletop Publisher, as well as making, you know, digital games and programming tons of digital things, including the GameCrafter itself. I'd love to shift a little bit to talk about the process

of making, you know, for people that are interested in making digital games or perhaps apps for things that support their games. You know, it's something that can be very intimidating. How would you advise or what are your thoughts on sort of somebody getting into that water? Well, there's a lot of area there to drown yourself. No, there's actually an amazing amount of space available for every level of technology that you're willing to use or willing to learn. So at the bare bones level, you've got things like tabletop simulator, which make it relatively easy to make your physical board game into a digital board game. And I mentioned Component Studio at the beginning of this. One of the things that, you know, if you design your game in that, not only will it export to the game crafter, but it will export to Tabletop Simulator.

So making it easy to do those kinds of digital games like that. Now, Tabletop Simulator does not enforce the rules of your games. It just puts your game components onto a digital table and then hooks up everybody via networking so that they can all chat and see what's going on on the table, you know, virtually. And there's a bunch of apps out there like that, like Tabletopia and. I could actually, I have a bookmarked list, but that's enough. You just search for it. You'll find a bunch. Sure.

Yeah. I've not, you know, it's something I've often dreamed of kind of digging into, and I never really have. Because, you know, I have a team here and we're able to play test physically, but even just the ability to, you know, we have a bunch of remote playtesters, our cultists, as we like to call them, all over the world. And, you know, being able to play test your physical games remotely through one of these tools seems really appealing. How easy is it for somebody that's not. not super tech savvy to kind of get going on one of those tools. Well, Tabletop Simulator, I would say, is the easiest. The other ones, some of them don't even allow you unless you sign some sort of

agreement with them, they won't allow you to upload a game. You can just use it as a player. Tabletop Simulator is kind of free range. Anybody can do anything they want in there. You just pay the, I think it's 20 bucks to buy it on Steam. And now you can make games or you can play games that other people have made. and there are official games that are supported by publishers and all kinds of stuff in there. Anyway, from a technology point of view, if you can install an app through Steam,

you're probably going to be able to design a game in tabletop simulator, provided that you use some kind of a tool to generate the files that it needs. Again, Component Studio can do that, but there are other tools out there that can do that. They're not hard to generate. So if you're actually savvy enough to use something like Photoshop, then you can probably make those files yourself. They have documentation on how to do it. It's just easier if you have some kind of automated tool to do it. Gotcha.

So, yeah, it's really not that hard. And there's no programming at all. It's really just make the files, upload the files, and, you know, say, all right, here's the file I created that has my cards in it. Here's how many rows and columns of cards are in this image, that sort of thing. So it's all checkboxes, point and click, that sort of thing. No custom code required at all. Great. Then your next level up would be to use, there are, they're called game makers.

There's a bunch of them out there. Mostly they're available for making, you know, video games. But there are some that are getting there for making tabletop games in. The resulting app that comes out is basically, you know, like an iPad app or whatever. or a web app. But the idea is that you point and click your way with a minimal amount of code to making a digital version of your board game with rules enforced. They are, I wouldn't say that they're particularly easy,

but they're definitely easier than writing code from scratch. And so that's the next level. And then, of course, after that, if you're willing to pick up a programming language, you can write anything you want, a web app, a desktop app, an app for iOS or Android, any level there. And I would say if you get into any of those levels, don't do your first game as a multiplayer game. That makes everything way more complicated. Try to make yourself a single player game or a pass-and-play game, if you will, where the whole

game takes place right there on the screen. You never have to interact with multiple different devices because, yeah, that's a whole load to weeds you don't want to get into. Yeah. So if somebody is going down that road, so you said, so if I'm, if I'm, I just want to use digital tools to help me, you know, playtest my game or, you know, work on stuff. The Tabletopia or Tabletop Simulator, both reasonable tools, tabletop simulator being the easiest, but no, no rule enforcement.

If I want to build something that actually will enforce my rules, did I don't, did you suggest any specific programs or? I didn't because I haven't really liked any of the ones that I've seen. Gotcha. So there are tools for game maker. Yeah. If you search for the game maker, there are about a dozen different ones out there. And again, most of them are designed for making a video game, not necessarily a board game, but the tools will let you make a board game with it.

And then if we want to go to that next tier and, you know, I've had a, you know, so we've made here not only digital versions of our games like Ascension, but we also have launched, you know, we launched a digital. trading card game SoulForge many years ago, and I've worked on several other digital projects and partnership with other companies and managed programming teams. And each time it has been a nightmare that has cost, you know, 10 times as much as I thought it was going to. And again, three times as long. And, you know, so I've definitely become very aware, even with the successful projects of how expensive and dangerous this can all be. What is there a, you know, language or tool or thing that you would recommend people get started with. You know, the tip of start with a single player game is a great one.

Is there any other favorite or best practices that you'd recommend? Yeah. Again, there are all kinds of libraries. It depends on the language that you're going to use. So like the easiest thing to do would be to pick the platform and use the most popular language on that platform. So like iOS, it would be Swift on Android. It's going to be Java.

on the web, it's going to be JavaScript, you know, those kinds of things. Pick a language based on the platform that you're trying to deploy to and then start looking for libraries that will help you. There are literally hundreds of them out there, libraries that will literally, they write 90% of the code for you. You just have, you know, they'll handle all the rendering and object collision and all kinds of things like that. I'm getting into the weeds here a little bit. Sorry. So they'll handle all that stuff and you just have to kind of hook it together and throw in your

graphics. I can't give you a specific one because there are literally hundreds of languages that you could do it with and, you know, it really depends on what platforms you're going to. If you develop, if you want to go full Monty, I would recommend something like Unity. Unity is a full video game programming engine. Most of the popular games that you are familiar with probably were written in either Unity or Unreal. And the thing that's cool about it is you can write it once and deploy it anywhere. So you could write it in the native languages of Unity and then you can deploy it to iOS and Android and the web and Steve. and the Mac App Store and the Windows App Store, you know, all over the place, basically.

Yeah, that has generally been the number one answer I get from most programmers or people who advise it is to go the Unity route. It has the most sort of pre-built and scripted and plugins and everything that you might need, and it's easy to ramp up on in the beginning, but still, you know, robust enough to build anything you might want to build. Yeah, I would say that it's, having done it myself, I would say that it's not that easy to ramp up compared to, like, if you picked up Swift for iOS, that's going to be way easier to write a game in Swift than it is in Unity. The problem is that once you're done, you can only deploy to iOS. So there's, you know, and I think it's way easier to learn JavaScript and there's way more tools out there for JavaScript than there is for Unity. But again, when you're done, you're usually going to only deploy to the web at that point. There are some tools like Electron that will allow you to cross compile for various things.

But generally speaking, you're going to deploy to the web at that point. So you're more limited. Unity, the thing it gets you is it does have a lot of tools. It's very useful. It's used by a lot of people. So there will be people out there that can help you. But the complications of deploying to lots of different platforms makes it incredibly challenging to deal with, in my opinion. Great.

So we've talked about game design, production, publishing, digital, and the, you know, sort of ramp from, you know, pure physical to pure digital productions. Another topic I wanted to cover with you, you have an events and convention management platform as well. Is that, is that right? Yeah. I do a little bit of everything, don't I? Yeah, you certainly seem to keep busy. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Yeah, so we have a system called Tabletop Events. Again, it's another one of the many apps that I've written. And I don't write it mostly anymore. I have a programming team that kind of continues with the app development after I build the initial apps. And so they are doing most of the development these days. But Tabletop Events is basically a convention management system for board game convention specifically. Most people don't realize this, but board game conventions are pretty much the most complex

kind of convention you can run. And the reason for it is you aren't just buying a badge to get into the convention. You also have to buy tickets to every little event that you might want to go to, every single board game that you want to play. Whether those tickets are free and whether they're actually physically printed or virtual doesn't matter. But the idea is that you have to register for sub-events. within the convention.

In addition, there's usually things like it's run with volunteers. So you need a management system to handle all of the shifts of the hundreds of people that might be volunteering for the convention. You've got things like exhibitors and sponsors that you have to deal with. A lot of times they sell merch at those conventions and they need a way of tracking, inventory and all that. So it gets incredibly complicated, is the bottom line. And so we at the GameCrafter attend or sponsor about 100 conventions a year.

It's a lot. And we noticed a lot of people struggling as we go to these conventions, even big conventions. They struggle trying to manage all of this stuff. So we decided that we would build something to help with that. And tabletop events is the result of that. It basically automates most of the work of running. a convention. I'm not saying it's going to be easy to run a convention, but it's

going to be way easier than it would be if you didn't use tabletop events. What size of conventions do you support? It'll technically support any size convention, but we have conventions as small as 12 people that use it and as large as 6,000

that use it currently. And there's about not quite 600 conventions that run on it right now every year. That's awesome. So it sounds like you tend to just have a status of just taking everything that's hard to do in the gaming industry and then somehow programming a way to make it easier. That's, well, yeah. I mean, it really comes down to scratching my own itch, right?

If I wanted to make a board game and I didn't want to do the crafting process, so I created the game crafter. Then I hated photoshopping all the cards. So I created Component Studio. I hated dealing with all these conventions that didn't have a work. way for me to manage my stuff online. So I created tabletop events. It's really about, you know, making things easier for me than anything. But yeah, I do. I tend to tend to do that sort of stuff. Yeah. Well, and just to me, that just really does highlight that a core principle of design, a core principle of entrepreneurship, which is that that, you know, that scratching your own

edge, that finding a need and building something that you yourself would love and you would self would want to see really increases the likelihood that there's other people out there that are going to want that thing and will pay you for it and make it a worthwhile project in the long run and at the very least you've solved your own problem and worst case scenario yeah yeah and luckily i haven't i haven't had to want for users when when i create one of these things and and it comes down to the same thing that you were that you were just talking about it's you know if i have the problem likely there's at least somebody out there that will have the problem so Sometimes I don't recognize how big that is.

You know, like when I created the game crafter, my pitch to my partners was, you know, if we sell 100 games a month by the end of the first year, we'll be doing great. You know, it'll pay for itself. The whole idea was that it was supposed to be a hobby business that would just sustain itself so that I could have this mechanism that would, you know, do the crafting of the games for me. Within, we launched in the middle of July in 2009. So we only had a half month that first month. And we did 400 games the first month. So it was dramatically more than I was hoping we'd do even by the end of the first year. So it doesn't sound like this, but do you do any kind of like market research or any kind of testing before you start building one of these things?

Or is it just like, you know what? I know I want this. I'm going to build it. And we'll see what happens. The only one I did market research for of the three apps we've talked about is tabletop events. The GameCrafter, I did market research, just not like traditional market research about how much money I could make, but rather just was there anybody out there doing this. And basically, I created the industry because like I said, there were only husks behind me. When I was there, there was a bunch of companies that had tried to do it, failed, went out of business.

So, you know, basically creating the industry there, I knew that there was no competition. But beyond that, I didn't do any really research. I knew there were enough people out there just from conventions I'd been to and talking to other game designers, that there was going to be enough out there to pay for the equipment and the time writing it, that sort of thing. I didn't have any clue that there would be, you know, a quarter of a million people wanting to make games. With Component Studio, that was really entirely on me. It wasn't going to be a product at all. I just built it to make my own life easier.

And at some point, I showed it to some designers because they were like, well, how do you do this? And I showed it and they're like, why is this not a tool that everybody can use? And so they convinced me to put it out there. And then tabletop, tabletop events, that one we actually did market research on. And we talked to, we run our own conventions. We talked to a lot of convention organizers. We went out and did the traditional scope to see, is there enough money out there? and can we solve problems that others haven't, all that kind of stuff.

So that's the only one that's, you know, got the traditional market research on it. So I want to dig in a little bit as we, you know, to kind of the psychology here because you went and you said, hey, I want this thing to exist. He looked around and said, oh, look, all these other companies tried and failed. And you said, well, of course, that means I can do it. What was going through your head there? Why did you think that you, what gave you the confidence and the cave? ability to say, look, I'm going to give this a shot and go where others have failed to succeed.

Well, you know, audacity is a beautiful thing. Really, the idea is, can I make it, it wasn't about making it profitable. It was about making it, can I make it sustainable? And I knew that if I got rid of the biggest cost, and the biggest cost is a file ingestion, getting people to upload the files the correct way so that there didn't have to be any human interaction to place the order. That's going to be your biggest cost center because people are always your biggest cost center, or almost always in a business. So I'm like, if I can get rid of the single biggest cost from this, I don't think it's going to be a problem to at least break even.

And that was it. And I knew I could do that because I had been doing it forever. I told you earlier that I had made 21 businesses at the time that I made that. It wasn't that many. It was probably closer to 12 or 15. But even so, I had enough mileage behind me that I knew what I was doing. So it wasn't a huge risk. The worst case scenario was that it was a hobby business for the rest of its life.

Yeah. Yeah. So that this is great point to emphasize. Right. So there's the, you know, there's the audacity of. anybody that's starting a new project and saying, I can do this when others haven't. But there's also realistic risk management, right? You're doing a thing that's not going to break the bank if you fail, the barrier to get to a point where you can sort of break even or survive or at least learn from it

and move to the next thing and pivot is low. And so even this myth of this sort of super risky entrepreneur is really, you know, not as true. Like, yes, you're going to put things out there. You're going to take some risks, but they're all sort of mitigated. And you think, think through the consequences and and the costs up front. Right. The same thing is true, I think, in board game design, you know, with, if you're out here designing a game, there's, there's a bunch of costs that you can take upon yourself, but you have to choose what is your level of risk.

Like, generally speaking, it's not a good idea. If you're going to seek a publisher, it's not a good idea to go out and buy artwork for the game. It's just not. Like, they're probably going to replace the artwork. They may even re-themed the game entirely. if they choose to pick it up. But if you've got some spare cash sitting around

and you want to go out and buy some artwork for the game to make it pretty, it will help sell the game to a publisher. And here's the reason. They're human too. Everybody loves art. You know, art sells games. And it will be easier to find playtesters if your game is pretty. It's that simple.

I'm not saying that you should. should go out and do it. I'm just saying, check out your risk. Do you have some money in your pocket that you don't mind, you know, if you don't get that money back? Maybe this is a passion project where you're willing to put some cash toward it. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's, that's great. And, you know, how much risk tolerance any individual has is always a personal question. There's no, there's no right answer. It is, you know, based on your own circumstances, your own emotional state. And, and I think the other key in my mind is like, you know, really think about these things as learning opportunities, right? Like, you never know whether a given project or game is going to be successful. But if you're

able to create a thing that you think has a, you know, has a chance and you know that you can learn from that process, even if it doesn't succeed, you can take those lessons and apply to something else, then everything is a success. Everything is an opportunity. And I think that frame is just really, really important to because inevitably you're going to have you know challenges and failures along the way of those 21 businesses i don't know how many of them are you know thriving and profitable but i'm got to guess not all and uh you know i think that that is uh that's just an important lesson for everybody that uh is is on this path that you know my one of my goals in uh you know sort of writing the book and doing the podcast is to try to make this process easier

it seems like so many of your businesses are dedicated to making this process easier for people, but that doesn't mean it's easy. It's never going to be easy. And so that's that, that attitude of both being willing to take those risks and being willing to frame, you know, failure and setbacks in the right way, feels, feels absolutely critical. When you wrote your book, did you know that you were going to have a publisher for it? And did you know that it was going to sell well? Nope. I did not. Uh, I just knew. Huh? On either count? No, not on, not on either count. Okay. And did you go ahead. No, yeah. So I'll go ahead. Ask your question. Okay. So I was going to say what about the book? When you decided you were going to write this thing, you knew it was going to take a certain amount of time, a certain amount of effort over a certain amount of time. What made you go, this is worth the risk, regardless of whether or not anybody ever reads it? Yeah, that's a great question. So I, and the one, hand, I am a very big believer that the best way to really understand a subject is to teach that

subject. The process of writing and forcing me to articulate my thinking in a way that's clear enough for somebody to pick up made me a better designer immediately. In addition, it gave me the incentive and excuse to have conversations like these, right, and talk to, even though I already knew a lot of great game designers just for my time in the industry, to really have deep dive conversations with them and really pick their brains and learn the principles on it. And so it kind of forced me, it, you know, gave me a deadline and a specific purpose and a specific frame for really learning and dialing in on learning. So I knew that I was going to be, quote unquote, successful with this regardless of if anybody read the book. And then I also

used some risk mitigation strategies and I started up, I started up on my own blog. And I had Justin Gary.com and I would post articles about design first. And I would start posting there and I'd post on some other sites like Steam it and Reddit and some other places where it would be like, oh, I got a lot of people that seemed to like it and got a lot of positive feedback and then I started giving toxic events. Yeah,

and building an audience. And so all of those things tied in together and as I kind of built up enough of that and I did that for well over a year before I even started saying okay, now I'm writing the book. And so that really kind of gave me the confidence and then get the attention and everything that I needed to

be successful. So again, sort of all of the things, the principles we talked about, you know, kind of having an attitude of learning as the main goal, trying out smaller scale versions that had very little risk and then, you know, being able to kind of take it step by step from there. Every single project that I ever start, the first thing I ask myself is, what will I learn by doing this? Because that in and of itself, if I will learn enough, it doesn't matter what else happens. And that was like I did a video game project back in 2010, well, started in 2008 and launched it in 2010. And I decided it was a massively multiplayer kind of thing. I decided that it didn't matter if, you know, nobody signed up for it, let alone 10,000, 100,000 people signed up for it. Because the whole point of building it was actually to teach myself a whole bunch of new technologies that had come around in the last, you know, half of.

five years or whatever at that point I was like I want to learn all these things I need a real project to do it on and so that's why I did it it wasn't because I might make a bunch of money at this it was because I want to learn these things and like you said about you know teaching is the best way to learn something I think doing is the best way to learn something yep yep I think that's I think there's no there's no substitute for that and that's what you know sort of tying the two together is one of the things I talk about in the book. It's like, you have to practice this. Reading, watching videos,

even listening to this podcast, as helpful as I hope it is. It is no substitute for the actual practice of design and the actual practice of whatever it is that you want to do, whether it's publishing, starting a company, writing a book, programming, you know, all of it. You got to get there in the trenches. You got to build habits that let you do the work

and find out when you hit the wall and fail and push past that and learn the next thing and go again. That's the biggest lesson. any takeaway that anybody gets from every, you know, the things that the conversations that I have. And I really want people to just sort of drill that point home because it's, it's, people think it's some kind of magic mystery thing. And if I just learn a little bit more or watch another video or do another thing, it's like, no, you have to start. You have to start. You have to fall over. You have to get back up. You have to keep going.

Yeah. It's that simple. Just keep going. Keep trying. It's, it's a lot of work. But, and it's, there's a lot of failure and you just have to be okay with it. Who cares? you just get up and do it again. Yeah, and that's the thing, man. You know, failure is like in the kind of space that we play in. Like, you know, mankind has been through a lot of periods where failure meant, you know, death and isolation and horror. And here, these kinds of failures were just, you know, just like you just waste a little time and money or you, you know, you didn't make a thing that was as much fun as it could be when you're talking about games. You're like, that's what failure is.

Are you kidding me? Right. Go back. Don't, don't, failure is so much worse in your head. The fear of failure is way worse than failure. And I've had failures that almost bankrupted my company and had huge like, you know, real life effects on me. And still, the fear of those things was way worse than the actual thing. Absolutely. No question. When I quit my day job, so to speak, 25 years ago, 20 years ago, whatever it was, I was, I was really, like, I had been running businesses for that point while my day job

was going on. But for some reason, I couldn't get over. that hump and my wife asked me what's the worst that could happen and I'm like well I guess I'd have to go get another job with my you know amazing resume which would be really easy to do so yeah that was it my story my story is very similar I was actually in law school and I was miserable I had already made a living before that as a pro magic player and then I did a summer internship making games for upper deck and they offered me the full-time job and I was agonizing over whether to leave law school to become a game designer just agonizing and it was like well what's the worst that happens? I was like oh well I just go back to law school or nothing has changed.

I was like oh okay I mean it was such a painful choice for me at the time and just looking back it's like what what was I worried about the same thing when I quit my job there and started my own company exactly like you was like well just go back and get another job you have more experience. Yep. No big deal is the bottom line. No big deal. All right. Well, that sounds like a really good way to wrap up the lessons here. No big deal. Go out there and do it.

So, you know, we've talked about a lot of awesome things and ways that people can find you online, but let's put a bow on it. Where if you want to find the cool stuff you're doing, whether it's game crafters or otherwise, what's the best place for people to find you? You could search for, if you're looking for me specifically, you can find me on Twitter. I'm plain black guy. again, that's because I owned a company called Plain Black. That's PLA-I-N, not like an airplane.

And then if you're looking for the GameCrafter, just look at The GameCrafter everywhere, Twitter, Facebook, or The GameCrafter.com, YouTube, etc. Fantastic. Well, J-T, I really appreciate you taking the time. I think this is going to be incredibly valuable information for my audience and you have done an incredible service, really just changing the face of the gaming industry

with the stuff you've done by lowering that. barrier to entry and giving people a lot of great tools that you know you wanted and I know a ton of people did. So thanks so much for all of it. Thank you for having me and thank you for that too. 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 platforms such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listen to reviews and shares make a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews along with my 20 years of experience in the game

industry and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast, Think Like a Game 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 fine books are sold.