Think Like A Game Designer - Kohji Nagata — Building Parallel, Designing with Obsession, and Falling in Love with Your Creations (#84)

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

Kohji Nagata has worn many hats—software developer, musician, podcast creator—but today he’s best known as Head of Design and co-founder of Parallel Studios, where he helped launch the massively successful Web3 trading card game Parallel. What started as a passion project has become a genre-defining phenomenon, valued at one point at half a billion dollars. Kohji approaches design from a deep philosophical place, wrestling with fear of failure, perfectionism, and the drive to always improve. In this episode, he and Justin explore the creative tension between success and self-doubt, dissect the mechanics of resource systems in TCGs, and dig into the role of AI in the future of game design. Whether you're an aspiring creator or a veteran designer, this conversation offers a rare window into the mind of someone building at the frontier of games and technology. 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 Koji Nagata. He has worn many has started his career from software developer, podcast creator, musician, to one of the co-founders and head of design at Parallel Studios, where he has launched the parallel TCG, as well as other games that have gone to achieve levels of success,

I think even surprised him. At one point, being valued at half a billion dollars. This is a Web 3 TCG that has done a lot of things right and is continuing to evolve by the frontier of what Web 3 gaming AI technology, as well as classic TCG play can bring to the table for the modern gamer. And we dive into a lot of really great subjects here. We start at a very deep philosophical level. We talk about how do you deal with success and how do you deal with fear of failure

and how do you deal with the consistent concern that what you're doing is not good enough and the focus on what needs to be improved and how can that drive you and how can that set you back and how do you handle it. And then we go into a very deep dive into TCG mechanics, the tradeoffs of different resource systems, the systems of mana versus leveling up in SoulForge Fusion versus playing and discarding cards for resources and the trade-offs of those. If you are a TCG designer or if you love TCGs, that section in the middle of the podcast is going to be for you. Then we start going into AI development and their recently announced game, Colony AI, which they dub a 1.5 player game, where the AI is kind of playing in the background and you can jump in and give them advice

and help suggest different paths. It's currently in development. We talk about what makes those games successful, how AI is transforming the world of gaming. We talk about how the stickiness of games like this isn't so much about the game loop, but it is about the characters and how closed systems and designing characters

in a way that is more scripted and reactive, like in a game like Baldur's Gate, versus one that's a little bit more open and reactive, where AI is allowing some more flexibility and how that compares with things like rogue-like games that are algorithmically generated, We deep dive into all of that stuff. And so there's a lot of meaty stuff here, whether you are just kind of an entrepreneur or

just getting started, the philosophy section at the beginning is for you. If you really want to understand what makes TCGs tick, the middle sections for you and for anybody that's facing, developing, and creating things in the near future, understanding AI is for you. So Koji and I clearly could have talked for another two, three hours. And I think we're definitely going to do a part two because we love deep diving into the minutia for those of you that love that sort of stuff. this is the episode for you.

Without any further ado, here is Koji Nagata. Hello and welcome. I'm here with Koji Nagata. Koji, it's really great to get to chat with you, man. Yeah, good to chat with you. I've, so I want to, you know, typically I'll start going into kind of people's backgrounds on the podcast, but I want to talk a little bit about our intro and why I was so excited to talk with you. We met up at GDC doing an escape room or a couple of

scape rooms together, I guess as it turned out. So we got to experience life in the game and in a situation. We got to see how your mind worked quickly. And we started chit-chatting about the process of making games. And there was a specific comment that you made that made me like absolutely want to have you as a guest of the podcast. And I don't know if you remember what it was because I think I called it out at the time. Do you remember what that was when I mentioned it?

I have a feeling. I think it was my, my feeling towards when I look at the games that I make, the only thing that I see is all of the mistakes or all the things that I want to improve or, you know, what's left to be done as opposed to, you know, what the product actually is. Yep. That's exactly it. And, you know, your project, which of course we'll get into with, you know, with parallels and other work that you're doing is like, you know, a massive success. by any metric. It has a large following of fans. You've accomplished an enormous amount, especially as I've dug in research for this podcast, dugging more into your background as kind of,

as far as I can tell this is the first sort of game that you publicly worked on. Is that accurate? Yeah, yeah, that's correct. Yeah. So an unbelievable success and accomplishment. But I think that that trait, because I feel the exact same way about my games. It would immediately, the comment immediately resonated to me,

I've had a career that I can recognize has been very successful, but it's a, I am always focused on the things that are wrong. I'm always focused on the stuff that is not up to the standards that I would want them. Where do you think that comes from for you or how do you kind of channel that energy? Because I see, you know, there's upsides to having that kind of approach. There's also some downsides to my mental health. I've noticed at least to having that kind of approach sometimes. So where do you think that comes from for you and kind of how do you channel that in your, in your day to day? I mean, it's hard for me to determine exactly where that comes from.

I think that if I had to guess, I would say that's probably something to do with my parents, only because they've raised me with a healthy or maybe unhealthy amount of fear in my life. And I've also been the type of person who's never gone without a job. The longest I've ever not worked for is like a couple weeks. And that was only because I had another job lined up. And I mentioned that only because I think they just drilled into me that like, you know, you got to work hard and you always kind of have to be on top of your game. And I think part of that bleeds over into this.

And then another thing that my dad was really big on was like quality. He was like, look, it doesn't matter what things cost necessarily. You get the best version of that thing if it is actually the best. and not just price wise, but like, you know, the thing that's going to last forever, that's going to provide the most entertainment, et cetera. And those two things smashed together is like, leads me to like, I got to work hard at the job that I do and I got to make the best version of that thing. And when I look at it, if I don't see the best version, which inevitably you probably

never will, it is motivation for me to just keep pushing harder and trying to make it better. Now, you mentioned the mental health part of it. And I do think that there's a bit of an issue with it's not. Sometimes because it's impossible to slow down when you think that way. You know, you want to just keep pushing. Yeah, yeah. And I, you know, I think I appreciate you sharing kind of that, that backstory. Because for me, it definitely comes down to, I absolutely come from my parents, right?

It comes from my sort of early, you know, early on I was praised not just for sort of hard work, but for like being successful, right, or being, you know, the best at what I was doing. and on the one side that chasing after that sort of, okay, well, you've got to be number one. You've got to be at the top of the class. You've got to be at the thing. Of course, push me to success. But then it also creates this feeling of, you know, when I don't hit that,

when I'm not obviously at the top where I make a mistake or it doesn't quite achieve it, then that this like feeling of not enoughness, right? This feeling like I'm not, you know, I'm failing and that's not okay. And I have had and I owe a lot of success to that. So I can't like write it off. But I have worked over time, especially over the last five, five to 10 years to really shift that mindset some to especially appreciating because I've learned to appreciate the failures more than anything else. Right. And maybe this is this, this will resonate with you where it's like the times where I've made the biggest mistakes, the times where I have, you know, had the life punch me in the face are the times where I've actually gotten to learn the most and I've gotten to grow the most.

and then new opportunities and capabilities that I would never have imagined before were now possible because of that. And it wouldn't have been possible if not for that. And so it's sort of shifted my mindset around kind of failure and mistake as less about me being bad or not okay or not enough and more about that's just sort of the process and it's got to be okay. And you have to learn to sort of enjoy that iterative loop, what I call the core design loop for any creative work.

I don't know if you've encountered this or if there's stories that come to mind as I as I kind of share that around, around key failures or mistakes or, or, you know, times life punch you in the face that have ended up turning out into this growth opportunity. Oh,

100%. I think that like, with everything you do, failure is a key element. So I'm, you know, a real world example is a lot of the people that I started parallel with and where we started parallel together,

we worked at a, at a previous company. Now, um, that company did well. And, you know, we operated,

uh, for a while, but we made some mistakes. And eventually the company folded. Right. Um, and we learned a lot doing that. One was,

um, how to work together as a team. We obviously solidified a relationship, such that when the opportunity arose to do something again, we were all ready to go and work together. But we, we also learned sort of like, uh,

how to deal with success, I suppose. I have a hard time even saying success because, like, I don't know. Like, we do okay, but like, anyway, whatever. How to deal with success. It's just like good times aren't good times forever, you know? And until you're there, it's hard to, when things are on the up, you're like, okay, like you start projecting models where it's like, okay, if we stay at this level of revenue and if we do this and we do that, like, okay, we'll survive forever.

right but then you kind of fail to to take into account the extent to which the market can shift or just powers outside of your own can shift things that you don't have any control over that make it very hard to operate and so this time around you know we've learned a lot of lessons about operating a business with a healthy amount of runway so that when things take a turn you know we're totally fine yeah so so let's talk about that because I want to get I want to get really practical and granular here because I think, listen, we're recording this conversation, you know, for context. This is, this week is the 15th anniversary of my company, Sumbla Entertainment. We've recently, most of that business from most of that history has been

a tabletop business that has been solid and consistent over many years. And now we just got hit with, you know, tariffs that may or may not last that are threatening that side of the business. Market conditions are up and down and the, you know, with the, on the crypto sides of the business and the digital side with Sulford. So all of these things are now, you know, many people out there in the world, I'm sure, are facing these kinds of fears, these kinds of threats. And so this operating a business was sufficient runway and capital. Like, what does that mean to you? How do you operate to do that?

I know you guys have done several fundraising rounds. Like we can get into various degrees of this, but like in terms of like distilled principles of saying, okay, I know how to deal with success, which you immediately turn to. I know how to deal with the fact that success is not guaranteed. One of my mantras is cultivating comfort with uncertainty and impermanence that you just have to be okay with this case. How do you deal with that? How do you recommend others deal with that or prepare to deal with that even if they're not in that condition right now? I mean, I would at a very base level, I would just say, think about what the worst case scenario is. A lot of projections that we do as a company are even though we continue to sell things, the games.

The products are monetized, what have you. We look at our runway, whenever we get together and discuss things. The first number we look at is if we made no more money starting today, what is our operating runway? And then you look at that and you're like, okay, would I feel comfortable with that? You know? Not like obviously if you're doing things right, there's still going to be money coming in over time and what have you. But like just look at it as if if we had nothing left or, you know, it all failed tomorrow. How long could we operate?

And if you're comfortable with that number, then everything else is kind of gravy, right? And then you're like, oh, wait, this is like less crazy than I would have thought, right? And I think that that's like number one. And then number two is just kind of being very realistic about, how do I put this? like putting some variance into whatever projections you have. So even assuming, you know, things are steady, that's fine. A lot of people like to like base their numbers on today. But I would say like give yourself like a, you know, 30, 40, 50% swing on either way and see how that affects your numbers.

And just like evaluate all possibilities because I think that it's really important to keep a very level head about what could possibly happen. Right? because we're seeing it now. Like so many companies, I'm sure, did not anticipate the tariff thing being what it would be. And I don't mean in Web 3. I just mean in business in general. And now they have to drastically sort of adjust their approach. Right.

And so I think that like if you have the worst case scenario in mind, then you're less scared when things like this happen. All right. I'm going to push on this on a couple levels here because I think it's a really interesting discussion, right? One, you said that, you know, if you're, if you're calculus in terms of, of safe runway is, you know, assuming no revenue comes in, are you comfortable with that number? That's a very emotional response. Is there a number behind that? That's like, what make,

what's your comfort level if you don't mind saying? Or what do you, how should, is it literally just a gut like, hey, okay, I'm, I'm happy to run on a 30 day runway or I need three years a runway. It's just an emotional thing. It's very hard to say, honestly. I don't pretend to be the big. business expert. And in fact, you know, parallel was started with five of my other friends. And each one of us has our own specialty. And I just happen to be the game guy. So like there's probably someone on the more business end that would say, you know, I feel comfortable with this. But like, you know, our rule of thumb has always been like year and a half to two years. It's like where we,

like to be. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. And then I think that that's a very like conservative, I think way to approach these things. And for some people, they may not be privileged enough to have that level, right? You have to just kind of start. Yeah, of course, of course. But I think it's like great to see that. And it makes a big difference, right?

Because there's a different philosophy in, you know, especially big tech where it's not about like conserving your runway and building for the long run. But it's about growing and scaling as fast as you can, right? And that philosophy is going to have a tradeoff against the more conservative, slower growth, slower, you know, less manager overhead. I'm definitely more on that side that there is nothing worse than going and over extending and realizing you're now have to lay people off and cut back and put yourself into a very tough tough situation. So I do think that there's I think I do think it is an emotional question to be honest, even more than than it is a business question to some degree.

It's like what's your tolerance for risk? What's your you know what's what's most important to you? And and I think building that level of emotional cushion for whatever your personal psychic makeup is and your couple of. company philosophy is is really important. I mean, I guess I would agree now that I think about it because like I was very hesitant to say it's an emotional decision, but I think that it is. But I think I would also put the caveat that if your emotional tolerance for failure is like a month and a half of runway, you're probably not the guy that should be determining

whether or not you have enough runway. You know what I'm saying? Like I, I, you know, fortune does favor the bold, but there's also like there's bold and and it's just like silly. And so I think that you have to also be willing to be brutally honest with yourself when you're evaluating some of this stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

No, being honest with what sort of, you know, knowing where you are, knowing your own sort of makeup and not diluting yourself. That's the hardest part when you're in these situations, right? Exactly. I think that I'm going to have pro, you know, things are going to turn around or I'm going to have this absurd growth and everything will be fine. It's very hard when you're in the middle of it, right? you're in the in the thick of the thing to see as clearly as as you need to so that that that's an

important skill for running a business like this um i'll pivot a little bit here because i think as you mentioned you know you're the game guy but i do think gaming and business are a lot overlapped right the same same models that we use to both design games and play games i think apply very much to business but um uh i want to talk about how you became the game guy because the background stories i know that um you know you have a backer background in playing TCGs, but all of your professional background was generally in tech and some podcasting and things like that. So maybe we can give a kind of a short version of the story of like what made you decide to get to making a digital TCG and going ahead and down this road.

Sure. I think the big thing is I've been an amateur game designer for a while. I used to host, And if any of the listeners are familiar with a website called Meetup, I used to host Meetups. There was a meetup down the street from when I used to live in a condo down the street from my condo at a board game shop. That board game shop unfortunately had to close down. And so for whatever reason, I was like, you know, who cares? Let's just move the meetup to my place. And it ended up being we had like three tables with like 20 some odd people every week coming to my place. And I remember one day somebody brought their own game.

And I was like, oh, that's interesting. You know, I've been tinkering with this, but I didn't really think of this space as a place to, to like put that out in the world. And so then I became obsessive about trying to make board games. And so I think that when my buddies, when we all got together, we decided to make a game. And then we went down the Web 3 route. it was natural to me to want to do a card game because, I mean, that most closely emulates the tabletop style of gameplay, which I'm sort of more gravitate towards.

And then it also lends itself to the tech and what have you. But I spent a lot of time prototyping bizarre, mostly terrible board games. And then, yeah, I guess when this opportunity arose, I just had an idea for a card game. And it was somewhere in between the games that I love. I used to be a musician as well. And one of the things that you do when you're a musician, or at least I think everybody does really,

is just like you take your favorite elements of all the bands that you love. You try and smash it together and make your own style. And that's essentially what I tried to do with parallel, which is like take all the elements of the card games that I love, smash them together and make something interesting. And also, I was designing with myself in mind. It's just like, what would I find fun? You know, I think a lot of people when they enter into this and maybe they're like better

at it than I'm, I'm not exactly sure, but they enter into it the idea of like, what would the people, quote unquote, like? And it's just like, I can't design that way out. If it's fun for me, I just hope that there are enough people who think the same way that I do and want to play the game that I made. Yeah. So your your background and process reinforced a lot of lessons that, I talk about a lot and that other guests have talked about, right?

You had a passion that you didn't get paid for, right? You were just hosting meetups for games. And then when you saw the prospect of building games, you got obsessed with it. You were curious about the thing. You got obsessed with it. And then you designed for yourself, right, something that you would know to love because it's the easiest way to know if you're succeeding or not. And I've definitely found that to be the case.

And that when you're getting started, the idea like creativity, you know, in many ways is theft. what, you know, hiding your sources a bit, right? You're taking multiple different things, smash them together. I also, I noticed a lot of the cleanliness in your design that I appreciate because that is, I think, a common problem with newer designers is that they, they smash things together, but they forget to cut things out, right? And I think that's one of the most important things. And I think you've, you've taken that to hard. It's like, okay, what can I get rid of here? How do I streamline things? And if you were going to pitch, because we have a lot of TCG players,

and there are a lot of TCGs in our audience, a lot of Tcg's in the market. But what would the, if you were going to make a kind of pitch to what, what does parallel combine and what does parallel streamline to that audience? What would you say? What does it combine?

I mean, I think it combines the, some elements of strategy that Magic the Gathering provides. I'm a huge, you know, I cut my teeth playing Magic the Gathering. I do think, that like for an online environment, the sort of constant stoppage in play that magic requires makes it a little bit more complicated. But it does allow for some interesting interactions. So we tried to incorporate some sort of like play on the other player's turn, that sort of thing.

And then I like the streamlined nature of Harthstone's mana system so that you know, you knew you were guaranteed one a turn and that allow you to plan your deck accordingly. But then sort of smashing that stuff together so that like the big thing for me is our banking system. That's kind of where the game started is you could take any card in your hand and turn it into mana for lack of a better term. So unlike magic, you didn't have to draw the mana, but unlike Hardstone, you weren't

just given it. You were like given a choice. And then we turn that manna area, which we call the bank. We turn that bank into a separate play area. So rather than just having a hand, a discard pile and play field, you had another area that you could interact with and do strange things with. And I think like magic kind of dip their toe in there a little bit. But they maybe were, I hesitate to use the term hamstrung by their design because I think

like their design is like as amazing as it can get up. But like, you know, in the modern era in the digital age, people are looking for something slightly more fast pace. So we tried to make it a little faster, a little bit in the case, but still in the competitive sphere. I don't know. I'm like, I'm like talking in a million directions at once because like I just feel like we just pulled all of these parts.

And to your point, like there's a bunch of stuff that we put in there that we were like, oh, no, this isn't going to work. Just knowing because, you know, it's a little too messy or we're trying to do too much or whatever. Yeah. Okay, so we're going to get deep into the weeds here. So this is going to be, this is going to be, I like how we kind of started, you know, very big and, you know, kind of philosophies around business and success and fear and, and, you know, managing a bank role. Now we're going to get really, really in the weeds and TCG mechanics because you and I are some of the few people in the world, I think really enjoy geeking out on this stuff.

But we're going to, the people that are listening, I know are going to love this. So when we are working on a system, because obviously we all started, magic started the whole genre. obviously I work with Richard regularly with with with Sulford Fusion we've talked a lot about these systems as well and did you play the versus system back in the day at all the Marvel DC yeah yeah so I have some unopened packs back there love it love it so so that was my that's where I cut my teeth as a designer right those were the first kind of projects I worked on the infinite crisis expansion was my first lead the full lead design but but the system was one of the first that tried to do the same thing everyone who was a pro magic player everyone who's

played magic, frankly, at all, has had this feeling that, oh, the mana system is awesome, but also it's terrible, right? And the feeling is, like, I don't have the reliability because I could get, if I don't get enough mana, then I can't play the game at all. If I get too much mana, the game is boring, right? So there's like this problem, quote unquote, that people want to solve. And we have now approached this in a variety of different ways to solve it. And it's probably like the heart of most TCG variation has been the, how do you solve this problem and what new problems come out of it. So I'll say from the versus system, since I think this is one of the ones that it's very similar to what you described. In this case, you would draw two cards to turn. You could

place any one card face down to be your resource. And then of course, you could play the cards throughout the turn. And one of the things that that did is it made it so that instead of getting the term of manna screwed is the common phraseology for magic where you just didn't get enough mana or manna flooded if you got too many instead of having that problem what actually mattered was how much were you able to optimize the use of those resources in any given turn right so if i didn't draw the right cost curve uh if it's i have four resources this term but the only card in my hand is a three cost card or a five cost card now that's my new version we just introduced a new more hidden version of mana screw or manna flut um and so uh and there was similarly so i'll pause there because that's one

challenge. Do you find that, how do you, how do you view that in terms of parallels and that, that new kind of obfuscation of the same problem? That's a good question. I mean, for me, it was, yeah, it was more about giving people more choice, I suppose. Like having, you know, we did a very similar thing, except you draw one card and then another card at the end of your turn if you banked a card in parallel. But having to decide, like, just the idea that you draw a hand of cards that you wanted to keep, you know, like you wanted all the cards in your hand, but you had to pick one or else, you know, you'd be behind the curve was like very interesting to me.

I knew that it was at least there was a nugget of something there because when I first tested the idea, I was like, I'm very, this frustrates me. And when I get frustrated playing a game in like an exciting way, not like I hit a dead end, but like, oh, I wish I could do this, but I can't. It, you know, it sparks something in me to like sort of push forward. So I think that like, yeah, it was more intuition than it was like me attempting to necessarily solve the, like I, I mentioned this earlier, but I feel like Harstone somewhat solved the man issue. Like obviously in a card game, you want there to be variants. you want there to be some element of randomness.

That's why we're dealing with carts, right? Because they can be shuffled. But I think that like magic's land system was too much variance. But then I also think that Harstones' mana system maybe led itself to too much predictability or at least making meta decks a little bit easier. I don't even know something along those lines. But so then that's where I kind of walked towards where we ended up. And of course, like our system isn't perfect either.

I think that like what we've done for better or worse, in my opinion, maybe slightly for better because most of our games are best of one, but like allow you to throw in a bunch of silver bullets that you would otherwise maybe not do if you have to construct your deck a little more cost effectively. But yeah, anyway, sorry, I hope I answered the question. No, no, no. Listen, and I said, like we're going to,

We're going to spend a decent chunk of time here going deep. And then for those that don't care about TCG mechanics, I promise we're going to get to some other really interesting other questions. But not a lot of people I can have this conversation with. I think for some people, they're going to love it. And I love it. So whatever. Ha, ha, everybody has to listen.

And no, because you mentioned a couple principles that are really important that apply to any game. One is the idea of the core tension, right? Like, this is something I talk about all the time. Like, my job as a designer is to frustrate the players. I am trying to put these blocks and walls in your way. One of my favorite definitions of games in general is the voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles. If I purposefully take on these inefficient ways I have to do things because it creates these

tensions for me and the ability to relieve that tension, either through making a good decision and succeeding or getting unlucky and not succeeding or whatever, that's where a lot of the excitement and learning and fun of games come from. So you've created these interesting tension moments here. and that drove your decision tree. And so I think there's no perfect answer here, but there's like, I'll explore this from the context of our two games,

right? We've got two digital web 3 TCGs. So with parallels, you've every turn, you're drawing a card, you have the option to kind of get rid of that card, bank that card, to then be able to turn that into a resource.

That creates a, that's a very high strategy, high tension decision. Almost any game that is going to have, discard any card for a resource or exchange cycle a card in this case, get rid of a card for resource, is going to create a higher skill testing environment,

and it's going to create a higher tension environment. And so there are other games that are not TCGs that you can learn this from, like Race for the Galaxy has a lot of this tension, right? Where you're going to like, every card I want to play, I have to discard cards from my hand, creates an enormous amount of tension,

enormous amount of difficult decision-making brain, you know, and a lot of can lead to brain, you know, kind of paralysis for some, players can be super exciting for others. And then whereas like in Soul Forge Fusion, we built it so that we got rid of the mana system entirely. We built a version where you can play any card out of your hand. And then we build them.

The resource system is built into leveling of cards. Right. So the cards I play now get better when I play them. The ones I don't play don't get better. And so the the ratio of which cards you choose to evolve and how will those cards evolve hides the resource system in a sense, right? If you're just a casual player, you just play cards and go. And then it creates more, more strategy.

And both of our games do the other thing that I wanted to circle back to, which I think is really important, is that both our games allow what you mentioned as silver bullets to be more prevalent. And so silver bullets for those that aren't familiar, right, the idea in a training card game, you're trying to create, you know, having some cards that are really, really good against a narrow subset of strategies, but otherwise wouldn't be up to par. And in a game like magic, they have to have multiple two out of three matches with a sideboard where you can bring those cards in in the right match because having a dead draw in a game like magic is crushing, whereas a dead draw in a game like Parallels or in Soul Forge Fusion is not as big a deal. And so there's an interesting tradeoff there in terms of how it evolves the game over time. So forgive me because I'm not sure like the game, your game's been around for I think about three, three years now, four years.

Well, we've been working on it for about that long. But as far as like as long as people have been able to play it, it's probably closer to like two or three years. Okay. So you've had a massive amount of growth in two or three years. How many releases or cards have you put out in, I guess, either question or both if you have the answer to stop the mind. Oh, that's a great question.

Okay, so we've had two expansions. And then the core set. The core set was like 300 some odd cards. And then each expansion has been 100 something or two. Honestly, like the problem is, and maybe people who are listening to this, and I'm sure you know those. we're now like two expansions ahead in our in our design so it's hard for me to keep track of how many cards and what we've released and what we haven't just because I'm thinking like

you know a year down the line or whatever so forgive me anyone if I get this stuff wrong but I believe yeah it's we have the the game and two expansions at this point or maybe we're about to release the second expansion a man it's all good this this this does you highlighted a very real problem as a game designers. Not only do I not know like what's generally speaking like what's live now versus what's not or it's a real problem because I'm I'm so future in the design but also card names are the biggest problem. People are like, oh man, what do you think about this card? This card. I'm like, oh man, they were not called that in playtesting. I don't remember what they actually were. Like that's

yeah, you're going to have to tell me the text and that that's incredible. Yeah, it's it's placeholder. It's always placeholder titles. And for me like, yeah, I'm people are always mentioning card names like rattling them off. It's almost the equivalent of an actor, you know, getting like in episode three of season five, like you did this and it's just like, I don't know, man. But if you should, yeah, if you give me the function or you show me the picture, I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I literally just had this. Somebody's like, you know, because we just, for Ascension, we're also celebrating our 15 year anniversary of Ascension this year. And I've been getting a lot, we've, we've putting all of our back catalog back into print. So all of the old sets are

back and people can get them after, you know, a decade of. that not being true. And so now I'm getting all of these questions from fans of like card interactions between like one set from year three and this other card from year seven. I was like, ah, you got to show me those cards. I don't know. I don't know what's happening anymore. So good problem to have, but funny, only inside baseball here.

Designers have this problem. I'm going to shift topics that we can, we can zoom out of the weeds of TCG resource mechanics, even though I love the stuff. And again, hopefully for those that are like in the space designing it, you can see these different kinds of tradeoffs. It's not like a right or wrong answer. There's like a, you know, variance versus simplicity versus, you know, all the different tradeoffs of like what type. And so this is where like knowing who your audience is and who you're appealing to really matters, right? And your personal tastes lead you toward in a certain direction. And there's enough people that follow that direction. It's great. But you're not going to appeal to the same audience as is going to be like a harsh stone or a Marvel snap who are looking for something that's much faster and lighter and. sort of what's my minimal like decision complexity that makes us feel interesting or minimal complexity to get to interesting decisions. So to zoom back out, I want to talk about, I want to talk about Web3 for a little while.

I want to talk about the choices there and how that influences your design. And then I want to talk about AI after that. So we're going to get to the more controversial topics from game design space. But let's talk about Web3. You know, we can relatively quickly go into the Y Web3 question because that's been answered a ton. and we've talked about a ton of the podcast, but how does it affect your design? How do you think about game interaction with,

you know, NFT collecting and token economy and things like that? Oh, man. I mean, that's a loaded question, I think. Okay, so how does it affect the design?

It depends on, on the, I mean, if we're talking strictly about the card game, it doesn't really affect the design too too much because, you know, one of the reasons I chose a card game and one of the reasons I love card games and I love the Web3 element of it is because I love the idea that, you know, I grew up as a kid going to the card store and just thinking to myself like, hey, wouldn't it be awesome if I could get that, you know, time walk or whatever, Black Lotus is probably the better example of people will know. Looking in the glass case. And I think that like what Web3 allows is like the digital glass case, right?

It's like fun for people to look at their collection. And, you know, I used to buy like Scry magazine and look up the prices of all my stuff every month and be like, oh, you know, like my collection's worth this much or that much or whatever. And I'd never sell it. But, but of course, like, that was just something that I was obsessed with. So I love the idea of like bringing that sort of excitement to the digital space and not just like having. Rarity in a sense that like a card is harder to pull from a pack. No shade to Harstone. I love Harstone.

But the idea that like the rarity just dictates how often you might pull it from a pack when you're buying packs from them as opposed to like how many are in the actual circulating supply. Because like it seems a little disingenuous to just be like, okay, you know, you give me money and then you get to pull the slot machine handle. And whatever comes out you can use in the game. But you don't, it's not actually yours. you know, that sort of thing, like, kind of drove me crazy.

So that's one piece of it. But as far as, like, designing for Web3, I think that, like, it's very difficult, especially when you have a token live, which we do, to make sure that you're kind of keeping things in order because obviously the game also emits Prime if you're an NFT holder. And then having to design a game that allows for that to happen without the, fear of cheating and things like that are an issue. And then of course, it's also just like you're adding another level of design

to the whole pie because now it's not just gamers and potential collectors. You also got these like flippers in the mix. And to ignore them to be like, oh, these guys are a plague, they shouldn't be here. So I'm not going to design anything for them. is like you're you're putting blinders on you have to kind of design a game that works for the gamers design a game that works for the collectors and design a little something to keep the flippers

busy so they're not like you know running rampant in your ecosystem or whatever and so it's just another level of a thing to consider really yeah yeah so that and that's and that's that's the level I want to get into not I understand not necessarily like that how it affects the tcg design but you have to game, you know, your game designing an entire ecosystem. So let's start, let's start with the first piece. I love the phrase you use, the digital glass case, right? This idea that I can have a collection. And obviously I'm sympathetic to this.

We've gone down the same path, right? Like I actually, you know, players actually owning their collection and can get the value out of it. And like, it's not just something you're just throwing money down a hole that doesn't ever, you know, you can't ever get it out or, you know, the you succeed as the game succeeds. Like all that stuff I love, right? We're aligned on that. But then what do you do as a design? or is it how you build the system

or to make that digital glass case experience more compelling or more exciting for players? What do you think is the biggest factors to make that successful and to help grow that and either capture that same feeling like you had in the physical glass case and looking at Scribe magazine

or even potentially exceed it and find new ways to make that collecting experience exciting. Yeah, that's interesting. I think that it's, well, okay, there's two answers to that question. The first one is probably the reason why we got successful in the first place, which was in the early days of NFT sales, essentially you would log on to a website or go on to OpenC or wherever.

And you'd say, you know, this NFT was minting. I want to buy, you know, this NFT. You'd connect your wallet somehow, send them some money. And then the NFT would appear in your wallet. And then there'd be like an unveiling period. right um and that's fine but what we realized was like okay we're making a game and right now we're selling these cards before the game is available so uh our experience has to be fun because for lack you know we don't have a fun game yet what we need to do is give them a fun experience and so what

we did is and we continue to do actually is to put a lot of time and effort into the you know what we called the opening experience. So with us, rather than just buying an NFT and they would appear in your wallet, essentially what you would do is you'd go to a website, you'd pay for it, and then that would reserve you a pack or however many packs you wanted to buy at the time. And then we would tell you to come back to the website at a given time. And when you came back, there was like a whole cinematic experience that you had. And then a very visual experience where your cards would be revealed to you one at a time in each pack. So you could see where you got the rare pulls, all this stuff.

But even before the cards were revealed, there was like this whole thing. You're, you know, one of them, you're running down a field that was like in the midst of full scale war and someone air drops you a package. The package hits the ground and it opens. And then in the package is your cards, right? And then we reveal the cards one by one. And once you've revealed it all, that's when we send you the NFTs. so that like you have that reveal experience then you get the NFTs.

And I think that like especially as early as we were to the whole thing, people that really excited people and we like this is something I'll never forget till the day I die. We were on our Discord, our very first pack opening experience. And in like a giant group call and people were just like hooting and hollering and being like, oh my God, I pulled this card or I did this. And they were like laughing. And it reminded me very much of when I was like,

a very young kid opening magic cards. Like, I remember the first time my, me and my buddy, we split a box of ice age and just ripping those packs open. We were like so excited when we saw certain things. And just to bring that back to people, I think that level of nostalgia hit them in a way that,

uh, all these other projects hadn't yet captured. And so, uh, that worked very well for us. And, but the other side of that, right,

is like when I mentioned the digital glass case, I'm referring to, you know, My local card stores are a card store called face-to-face games. There's a whole bunch of other ones that, you know, every city has their Friday night magic locations where you go and, but they have their glass cases. But the thing about those glass cases is they aren't owned by Wizards of the Coast, you know, or Hasbro or whoever owns the cards now.

They're owned by the shop owner. So I think that like if the game is successful enough, it transitions away from I mean, obviously, our pack opening experiences should still be fun and exciting. But once people have the cards, those glass cases should be curated by them and giving them the tools to be able to show off potentially sell or trade their cards in an exciting way is kind of important. You know, right now we're relying on opency. But eventually, you know, perhaps one day, once the clients all lock down, we can build our own sort of sell trade platform and, you know, bring the same level of excitement that we have in the game outside the game. Yeah, no, I think that's, I think that's great. I think that the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the emphasizing that experience at point

to purchase and experience of opening a pack, right? That, that was the, for me also the, the, the thing I was trying to recapture, right? When I first played magic, I first discovered it, I would open up a pack of cards and I would literally have no idea what was in it, right? I just didn't, there was no spoilers and everything back then, you know, just dating myself a little bit, but like, I would just open a pack and be like, oh my God, that's a shiven dragon. That's the coolest thing I've ever seen in my entire life, you know, or like, whatever, you

I just start imagining what I could do with a royal assassin or whatever nonsense. Oh, that's my favorite card, by the way. Which one? Royal Assassin. Yeah. Yeah. Great, great, great, great card. Great side.

Yeah. Just, again, the dragon is obvious because it's a dragon. It's cool. But the assassin starts to make you think, oh, wow, this cool little one-one creature can do so much. And it changes the way you play the game. So I agree with you. And I would get really disappointed every time I opened up a dual land because it was just boring. It was a land.

A little did I know those would be the most valuable cards of the ones I'd open then. But outside of that, you know, the, the, even now the days with spoilers and kind of the everything that exists out in the, you know, that the world discovers the cards well, well ahead of when you even get the pack. It ruined that a lot, right? So with with self-oafusion, we try to solve that by algorithmically generating the pack. So every pack's unique. And there's far more variety of cards that are possible with your guys is kind of having this air drop experience or, you know, this kind of cinematic drop experience. where people couldn't see. Did you preview those cards ahead of times?

Or this is sometimes these would be like the first times people could see it? So we would put up on on Twitter and in our Discord some of the cards, like some of the art just to like entice people. Obviously all we had was the art to sell it. But we didn't we weren't like here's the entirety of the set. Right. You know, they would, they would, we would always save some like real bangers for the pack openings. Yeah. I think that's great.

And that creates that excitement around that moment. And then I think you're right that the, you know, giving one of the things I love about, I think the Web3 community that I found is like giving the more tools that you give them, the more stuff they're going to do. You know, so we have fans that have created their own deck ranking system tools and different ways to sort your collection and view things and access. And we give them APIs so they can do that.

And so that giving the, letting the community take ownership of building that experience, I think is one of the best things about Web3 generally empowers players and helps them feel more ownership than traditional digital games have been. So I think I want to shift then to let's talk about the token side of things because when it comes to your prime token, first let's explain like what is it, how does it work? Let's give people some context in case they're getting lost. I think people understand the idea of an NFT as a digital version of a collectible card,

but you have this sort of, you know, the more fungible token and how it works in your ecosystem. Yeah. So Prime is the, you know, refer to it as the gaming token. Obviously, it exists in Web3. So there's like a value, a fluctuating value associated with it. But it essentially, we'll start with what you can do with it. So basically, A, you can use it on external markets. So like you can buy parallel cards on OpenC with Prime if you want.

And I think maybe Magic Eden as well. you can you can obviously use it to broker your own internal deals with players as well but but like within the game itself um you can trade it for uh premium in game currency so like the same way that you might put your credit card into a traditional free to play game you could use prime to buy uh things in the game cosmetics additional packs etc you can also use your credit card by the way in the game But the difference with Prime also is that all of the future games that we are currently building and will build as a studio will also use Prime. So it's kind of like a bigger piece in the ecosystem. There's also certain things that you can buy using Prime outside of the game on our website as well.

But the way that it works essentially is you get Prime by earning it winning in the game. So how does that work? Essentially, you need to own a certain amount of NFTs in your deck in order to start earning prime. The more NFTs you have in the deck, the higher the yield of prime. So if your deck is full NFTs, you'd have, you'd sort of yield the most prime. But the calculation is very in depth. It depends on what your rank is, how often you win, how many games you play a week, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

You can potentially earn more. But the game itself is also free to play. So if you don't have any NFT cards, you can play the free to play version. We have what's called apparition cards, which are non-NFT cards, but they don't yield you any prime. So you can think of this as like a very hybrid model. We have like a very web three-centric part of it on one side and a very free to play on the other. And your level of, I like to joke that it's like Fight Club or Project Mayhem. Your level of involvement is determined by you.

You know, you can kind of just decide how much you want to do burtosen. But generally speaking, when you start to climb the ladder or win in tournaments, we find that most of those players are going full NFT decks because they want the largest yield. I should also mention that because of the Web3 ecosystem, we have this thing called bonds, which are larger groups that own collectively own a bunch of the cards. And there's a built-in system that allows you to borrow cards from those groups so that if you felt like you wanted to earn prime, while playing and you didn't have a full NFT deck. You could borrow the cards that you're missing in your deck to get to the NFT

full NFT version. And essentially the way that it works is the prime that you earn while playing part of that just goes back to the Vaughn. And so in this case, is this built into the game itself? Like you guys built that tool? The Bond tool?

Yeah. So it's an external tool but we did help build it. So like we built it in concert with our foundation, which is called the Eschelon Foundation. They're the ones that emit the prime. And it's actually community-led organization. Sorry, I'm like all over the place here. But essentially, what happened is when we first started the game, we said that a certain

percentage of all the NFT sales would go towards starting this community-led organization, which is what we did. We gave it like some pretty large coffers. And then every year the community elects individuals to run this organization. And that organization is responsible for the emission and maintenance of the prime token. And so the community basically tells us how they want the token emitted in game. They tell us what sort of tools they might need. They have money to hire developers to build those tools.

But we also, if we're going to be using them in our game, we kind of help them build some of the tools. One of the tools that we helped them build was the spawn system so that people could lend cards to one another and get something back for it. Interesting. Okay. So I want to dig in and get in the weeds a little bit here too, right? Because you mentioned a lot of different aspects here. And I think that these are the complexities here matter a lot, right? Because when you're building a game, and this is one of the arguments in many places against building a Web3 game.

because the if you have a token that is fungible that people can sell and trade and buy, including with your your, your cards, right? It's a lot harder. And if you mess up your game ecosystem, the ramifications are, are massive and, and can take down a whole system, right? Even other successful, you know, games like Axi Infinity and others have had issues with this where suddenly the ecosystem goes, goes off the rails and it can tank and cause a lot of

problems. And you can, so there's, you mentioned, so I kind of want to get into. to why you made the decisions you made and what the details are here. So because the NFTs, I need to own the NFTs in order to get prime at all. So if I don't own the NFTs, I can't earn the currency. Is that correct? Yeah. So you need to have NFTs in your deck in order to earn the currency while playing.

And I mean, ownership is a little bit gray because like I said, you could borrow. Sure, sure. So there's a tool that can see. So either I need to spend money up front or. I need to get connected to this to this bond system, which presumably there's some kind of restrictions around who can rent what here or some some mechanism for that. But leaving leaving that one aside for a second because that's an interesting but other deep topic.

And so then you've built a system that says, okay, within a given calculation of how much time you've played, what percentage of your deck is NFTs, what your win rate is and ranking is, will then output some, some formula of like you earn this much. And you earn it like every game you play or you earn. it like after a certain period of time. Like how does that? So yeah, it's, it's in a 20, it's in a daily period. I want to say a 24 hour period, but like it's, it starts and ends the same time every day for

everybody. And it's based on all those factors, but it's your top, your five best games that day. So there's a calculus. And so the most you could ever sort of get paid out on is those five games. And then as far as the prime payouts as a whole, there is a maximum cap. So you get a certain percentage of that massive cap. So let's just say there's only one person playing that day, they would earn more prime because there's only one person as opposed to, you know, whatever, hundreds or thousands.

Right. So you're controlling your, because you need to predict all of these. models over time, right? And so you're controlling that by saying, look, in any given 24-hour period, there's only X units that are going to be given out regardless. And the formulas are all just like, how do we divide this amongst the current active player base? Correct. Got it. Okay. So that helps some, right? Because I think everybody that's doing this has to have some version of this to protect themselves. Right? If it's just like every game you play, you earn a prime, well, okay, people are just going to play 100 million games and you're going to, you know, bankrupt your

your economy or whatever. So there's there are versions of this that you have to you have to deal with these kinds of restrictions. Do you find that this counterweights or do you have other systems to counterweight that being a disincentivizing thing for people to play, right? You made a clearly a conscious choice that only your top five games matter. So playing more than five games, you know, maybe it influences my play. Maybe it doesn't. But I also don't get the rewards right away. I only get them later. So there's a less of a tight feedback loop. So are there tools that you've, used to try to fight this. And just to give you context, right? So like we in Sulf Fusion, we do this. We have a we have, we have three different types of currencies. We have the kind

of free to play currency, which we give away quite a bit of. And it's restricted in what you can do with it. And how we have a paid currency, which is in app, but stays an app, which is more like a traditional web two game. And then we have our token, which we only give out periodically in events or season rewards. So how do you, how do you do that? How do you deal with that in prime or in, in parallels? Yeah, so it's very similar. We have a few currencies in game that only stay in game. One of them is a more premium currency. The other one is more readily available.

And then we have Prime. And Prime is almost like a, we view it almost like a sweetener, right? It incentivizes people to come back every day and at least play their five games. And we found that especially at the top levels, you know, the players who, I don't know, for lack of a better term, like have the dog in them are, are, they want their, they're the best five games, right? It's not just enough that they play five games, but it's got to be the best five games that they can play.

But, but because, I mean, like I said, we view it as a sweetener. It's more like these people should, we try and frame it as if you're getting a reward for doing what you would be doing anyway, which is playing the game. So like, we have other reward loops in the game that, that, that are. are more frequent and you know like you mentioned you only find out at the end of the day how much you've gotten you've got to wait etc etc but we have like immediate feedback of things like you know your your typical battle passes we have in-game tournaments um with like giant prizes and uh in-game currency cosmetics more card packs etc and so like we have those tighter loops

to incentivize people to keep playing. But I think that like what Prime does is like a more long-term retention tool, especially the players that find themselves performing really well. They're more incentivized to A, have a full NFT deck, but B, come back regularly and see like, oh, I'm making some more Prime here. I'm making some more Prime here.

And we've noticed that a lot of the people earning Prime end up sinking it back into the game, which is, you know, what we want to see. And it's more so that they can, the stuff that they're sinking for isn't necessarily any sort of competitive edge. You know, they have access to all the cards that they want. It's more like,

we have these like little trinkets that you can throw around the board. And so they're like trying to get the rare trinkets. They're trying to get the rarer skins, that sort of thing. But yeah, I think to look at prime as like the main incentivizing factor is probably a mistake. You know, we incentivize our games the same way that any other Web 2 game would be incentivized. It's just that at the end of the day, you also get, or you could opt into getting some, you know, a little something back. Yeah. So that's interesting. I think, so there's a couple

thoughts here. One, I mean, I would argue that the only reason to have a Web 3 currency in the first place is to be able to incentivize behavior. I mean, it's why we have currency. Forget web frequency. Why we have currency, period, right? We want to be able to, like, incentivize behaviors and, like, create stores of value that we can then, in theory, use to grow the community. So I kind of want to push back a little bit on this idea that's like, it's just a sweetener.

I mean, if it's, you know, it feels like it needs to be, it's, it's kind of essential to the, to the model of like what it is that lets people feel like they're, you know, able to succeed and earn and attracting people even outside of what, you know, there's a million TCGs out there, but the fact that you can earn a currency like this is a big deal. I mean, yeah, no, I don't disagree with that. But it's almost like, I mean, it seems like it's cheapening it to equate it to a gift card, but it's almost like a gift card in that you're sort of capturing value and retaining it in your bubble for the most part, right?

it's because like it's it's actually easier as a game as anything really to give out a token that you've created than it is to give out money period and you know especially if you've incentivized things correctly that that token is more likely to be spent within your ecosystem than outside so I think that like while I would agree that like get you know people getting something back from playing is certainly an incentive and you know should be viewed such. It's also like, I mean, you shouldn't look at it like people are getting paid to play either. I think it's more like you're kind of reinforcing their sort of entrenchment into your ecosystem, into your offerings, et cetera. You know, we find that over a period of time, people stop associating

dollar values to cryptocurrencies and just view them on the, you know, currency number, you know, like someone being like, oh, that's just two Eath. Eath could be $5,000, it could be $1,000. And they're just like, oh, whatever, just two Eath doesn't matter. They're not equating it to real world money. And I think the same thing happens with some of this stuff. So when you do have exclusive offerings in prime that are like, okay, well, you can only buy this one skin that only exists for this month.

And the only way to get is if you have prime, you know, I think that people are willing to like pull that lever. Yeah. Okay. I like this. I think that there's a, so how much do you find your audience is motivated by these kinds of cosmetic, rare things? Is that generally like one of the bigger sinks? Is it just a, you just put a kind of massive price tag? So it's a, it's a, it's a luxury flex for people. Is it just a rare drop? Like, how do you think about, because I found in different TCGs, I've seen different metrics in terms of like how much people choose to care and spend on cosmetics versus other items? Yeah, it depends. You know, like we've been doing, like, we're still in an experimental phase of things. Like some of the cosmetics, they don't care about at all. And a couple of them there are really coveted. So like it's really focusing on the ones that people actually want.

And obviously in a card game, card variants are like the cream of the crop. So if you have a version of a card that has alternate art that only a few people have, that's like the most coveted thing you can have in a game. because people, you know, you look at the card art more than you look at anything. Even, even though some of the cosmetics are up on screen the entire game, you're so focused on the cards that, you know, so I mean, the answer is it's kind of all over the map. Like, I'll give you an example of some of the cosmetics that have had like sort of middling returns, which is we have heroes in our game, which we call paragons.

And you can kind of dress them up in various costumes. And some people, there's certain costumes that people are really into. and then the majority of them people are like, oh, whatever. You know, like, it's just sometimes people will switch it up to sort of express themselves, but it's not something that anyone's like actively chasing after, whereas, like I said, we had these trinkets that you can kind of throw around the field. We call them companions. There's some of them that people are like super, super, super into,

especially in competitive play. We saw it in our world championship. This guy, Zellie had one. And while it was his opponent's turn, he was just tossing it around the screen and the audience was laughing. and that really drew people to them. So I think that that's interesting. But of course, like I said, the card variants are the most sort of coveted versions of this.

And like there's only a few ways to get them. You know, I think we've had a few that were offered in prime. Some of them we only give away to contestants of tournaments. So like you have to have made it to a major or whatever to earn some of these variants. And so, yeah, I don't know. We're still in the process of like poking and prodding to see.

where the most prime sinks. Obviously, for us, the biggest one is just turning prime into in-game currency. Yeah. I think that that's a, yeah, we have a similar model here and that we found, of course, people want to buy the in-game currency to get their cool in-game things. We're actually working on our own kind of loot box experience with alternate cosmetics that you can't get elsewhere through that same model. That's funny that you say that because we're doing the same thing.

We're working on loop boxes as well. Yeah. So, yeah, obviously, I'm digging into the weeds on this, not just from abstract philosophical concerns, but also, yeah, I'm building the same thing. So it's a, it's an interesting thing. And I, you know, I think it's fun to chat about this sort of stuff. And I think I would, yeah, go ahead. Let me ask you a question because I think this is something that we've been messing with. I suspect that certain cosmetics become more coveted in a loopbox form than just like a storefront form.

You know, when you buy a loopbox and you make it fun and interesting that something rare pops out, regardless of whether or not that's like the type of cosmetic that people are interested in, they will become more interested in it because of that experience, as opposed to just being like, here's a rare thing that only exists in the store this month. What are your, what's your take on it? Yeah, yeah, strong agree there. Right. So, so kind of exclusivity and rarity are important. And the idea that it's exclusive in the sense of anyone who wants to buy it during this time window. does not feel the same way as the like, okay, well, maybe you get it, maybe you don't. Or, or, no, you only top four of this tournament get this thing, right? Now it's a status symbol, right? Or you've got this, or again, you can show off, like, look how cool,

look how lucky I am. Look, I got the thing. And this is awesome, right? There's a much different feel about it. So when I think about cosmetics, a lot of it comes down to like, how visible is this to other players, right? And how, what does it say about me? It's exactly like fashion, right?

I mean, it is exactly like that. So, and you see the different business models for games that are like Fortnite, right? They make all of their money on skins and cosmetics, right? Like near 100%. And it's because the game is so much about this social aspect. You're in a room, you know, you're running around with 100 other people. Your friends are in the thing. You're chatting.

Everybody can see you. And it's very visual, very visible. And that's like worth a lot, right? games like League of Legends and others make massive portions of their funds this way. The interesting thing about Fortnite though, sorry to interrupt, the interesting thing about Fortnite though is they don't use the sort of loopbox model. They do those sort of limited run in the store model and it seems to work for them like crazy. Yeah, yeah.

This was moving away from the idea of loot box is relevant thing. Right, right. Because I think what's important. Yeah, what's important and what I was kind of getting at is like where I think like game genre matters, cosmetic type matters. For example, and TCGs are a lot harder here because there's a lot more, you're less personified generally, right?

There's like your presence in a game is not quite as dramatic. So things like things that show up on the play mat or, little badges or your character. Avatar obviously is a worthwhile area to do it. But like people are more focused on the field and what's happening than they are on the peripherals and your character persona in my experience. And so things like alternate card arts or cool animations or things that don't show up elsewhere, those are more meaningful, I think, in a trading card game.

And then I think that because a trading card games in particular, the idea of random variance in the thing that you get is built in. I think a random loot box that gives you stuff that's not just cards, but also cosmetics, I think is going to just be more appealing generally. That's certainly the bet we're making as well. Yeah, yeah. One of the others that I neglected to mention actually that people seem to really like, especially since we've reworked them a little bit is like we call them field backs which is essentially like

what your side of the play mat looks like you can you can essentially select different backgrounds like you would your desktop or something and people seem to be into to that idea so i i would agree with you there like it's a lot harder to express yourself in a card game so having card variants the the card backs we have as well as is another big one having like an interesting or rare card back is is is is something that people seem to enjoy it. But yeah, it is, because of the lack of personification, I mean, unless you wanted to like put a floating hand onto the field and give the player, like a glove they could put on or something, like, I don't know what you would do.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's an interesting, it's an interesting model and, and a puzzle to crack here. I know we're running a little low on time. So I want to make sure we have another meaty topic I kind of promised I would talk about earlier and I'm interested to talk about, which is AI. and AI in the game development process. I know that you had some AI in parallels itself,

but you also announced another game, Colony AI that you are working on. I'd love to understand how you've used AI to date, how you think about AI and what does, you know, we can talk a little bit about your new project, what this all means. Sure. I think that AI is going to,

I mean, this isn't even a wild take, obviously, but I think AI is going to change the entire gaming sphere like you wouldn't believe. And I think the biggest thing, so I'll say this, we are building an AI game. We, you know, we've coined the term one and a half player game. Essentially, you are like an overseer for your agent who is on a planet in a colony. The game itself is called colony. And, you know, you're trying to help them survive. And they're coming to you with their thoughts, questions, et cetera.

You kind of direct them like, oh, maybe you should go mine. You know, they might say to you, hey, Justin's character, you know, cut me in line today. What should I do about it? You know, and you're like, well, give them a piece of your mind or whatever. And then maybe that later affects Justin's willingness to trade with you or what have you. And we're using AI to like build those personalities and allowing those personalities to grow based on your input. which I think is interesting. But to go back to AI and gaming and how I feel about it,

I think that designing games, it's going to open a new genre of game, which is something that we're trying to do. But what it's really going to revolutionize is sort of prototyping and executing on games, I think is going to be a whole different world, right? Because, I mean, I think we're both old enough to remember. You used to have to code websites in Notepad.

You would open up a notepad. You'd type in all the code. And then you'd rename the file from dot text, the dot HTML, and you put it up somewhere. And boom, there was your website. Very clunky, very hard to do, very hard to format. And then Adobe came out with Dreamweaver and you were like, holy shit. Like I can just drag and drop stuff and make a beautiful website. I can like create these flash animations and do all the stuff.

Insane. And now all you have to do is literally you go to another website. You don't even need a program. You go to another website. It has all these templates. you just drag and drops a few things in, and boom, you got a beautiful looking website, right? And I think that that's what AI is going to do

for gaming for the most part. So the barrier to entry isn't going to be, do I have the skills to make a game, but is, do I have a good enough idea to execute on? Is this game actually going to be fun? And I think AI is going to help people do that. I mean, you were already seeing projects like Farcade and a couple others that, like,

allow you to spin up prototypes very, very, very quickly. And I think it's like super exciting, you know? And as far as how we're using AI, I mean, we haven't gone that far down the road of like prototyping games using AI or anything like that. But myself, I'll say certainly if I ever get stuck on an idea, have some sort of writers block, you know, I go to my good friend chat GPT and I, you know, give it some parameters and say like, hey, can you like help me spark some some inspiration here? I'm sure, you know, a lot of people use it in a very similar way. And then, of course, like I said, there's calling. And we also have a product called Wayfinder, which is like a natural language model that allows people to navigate the blockchain. It's not even a game.

It's a tool. So rather than using like metamask or doing whatever, you can be like, hey, buy me Samith and stake it. Find me a high yield place to stake this stuff for blah, blah, or if you're a beginner, you can even just ask it like, hey, how do I get this Trump coin that people are talking about or whatever? I mean, I wouldn't buy Trump coin. This is not financial advice. Do not. No, no. No, no.

Yeah. Okay, yeah. So, so, yeah, strong agree in general. In fact, I actually just, because there's a lot of fear and, like, uncertainty around AI, but like, I think quickly the vibe is shifting generally from like, you know, it's going to take our jobs. What do we do? It's destroying creativity to like, okay, well, this is 100% a super useful tool for creativity. I actually started a new series on my substack.

I think the first one's going live like tomorrow as we're recording this, but it'll be live or anybody listening about how I use AI in my day-to-day work and with like specific links to the chats and to the things. Because I think you can't really understand its value until you start playing with it. And as a ideation tool prototyping tool, I think is like right now we're in what I'm called in the golden age for creatives, like this window where your ability as like a tastemaker and ideator and like long-term thinker still has enormous value and the ability to like the requirements as you mentioned the barrier to entry to like get something going and get something out

there and build something you could start testing and iterating on is so much lower than it used to be and is continuing to shrink there is a very likely window I believe in the not too distant future where that are our unique skills set does get eclipsed but for right now i say the next two to five years i think there's a really great time to be a creative and to be getting started and pushing in this direction. Yeah, what I'd say a couple points that I want to like jump on where, you know, off of what you said is like, you the fear of it taking our jobs,

I completely understand, but like, you know, stable hand used to be like a viable job that someone had or even like sell animator. You know, like those things were, and I'm not saying that, you know,

people still need their horses taking care of and I'm sure there's still traditional animation being done, but it's just not the same anymore. And I think that like industries will grow and change with this. It's not going to necessarily eradicate jobs, period. Like in the short term, some people might feel some pain, but it's also going to open up a new segment that we haven't even sort of begun to touch. And I also think that, you know, I couldn't agree more about you just need to touch it and see what you can do.

Like, so outside of all of this, I'm a giant movie fan. You can't really see it, but there's a whole bunch of shelves up here, stack full of 4K films, okay? And one of the things that I love doing is going to rep theaters, where they show like, you know, they'll screen like, I don't know, Ninja Turtles 2 or Jaws or what have you. And I, the other day on the weekend, I think, I was a little bit bored. So I asked Chat GPT like, hey, can you help me consolidate listings for all the rep theaters in Toronto?

And, you know, within a few hours, it helped me build scrapers for all the website, put together my own website that had ordered listings with filters and whatever. So it was just like a one-stop shop. And everyone who I've shown it to who's like loves movies, who's a Trantonian is like, this is incredible. Like, how did you do this? You know? And all I did was like, enter it some prompts.

And even when I didn't know what to do, like, I'm not a, well, no, I used to be a programmer by trade, but I'm also very lazy. So I was like, hey, don't tell me the Python code. I don't really care about that. Just give it to me in a Python package that I can execute, you know? And even if you didn't know how to do that, you could say like, okay, well, now that I have this Python script, how do I run it. And it will step you through, like step by step.

Here's where you download Python. Here's how you do this. Here's how you run a script. And it will teach you how to do all that stuff. And I promise you, you can build simple tools in a matter of hours. And it's like, it is absolutely eye-opening. So I strongly suggest that like even outside of gaming, if you have an idea, you should try and execute using GPT or something of that nature.

Yeah, yeah. The variety of the different tools, chat chit is a great starting point. Claude I find is a great creative partner and building projects and things around that. I think let's let's spend a little bit of time, you know, outside of it is a of tool for the back end, you know, you talked about this, you know, new types of games that it's creating. And, you know, you mentioned the kind of 1.5 player game is that the hook that you're building around yours, right? I mean, there have been plenty of games that have done this or some variant of it in the past, right? You know, civilization and have different personalities and

mentors and things that you do impact what happens down the road. And, you know, games, whatever, you know, you're from role-playing games like Night's of the Old, Star Wars, Knights of the Old Republic and others of all like, okay, the choices you make, change your alignment and change how characters react with you. AI adds more variety and replayability to that. It adds more nuance to it. It adds more uncertainty to it. Is there more to it than that? Or like, is it just a trend off like, you know, what we try to see with the trend of rogue like kind of games? We just, we just want that more variety and more responsiveness. Or is there something deeper going on here that you see that that's unlocked? So there's a couple of things. I think that like it also unlocks,

more personality and sort of generated personality. So the one thing I would say is like a lot of people took a look at AI and were like, oh, you could just like plug this into an RPG and all the NPCs would just have all this life and whatever. And I'm like, that actually is terrible. No offense to anybody. Like that's the opposite of what you want. If you've ever played Baldersgate 3, like all that dialogue is so purposeful and you

want it to be a part of a package. That's exactly what you wanted to do, right? It's like drive players in certain directions or like have funny quirks or whatever. But like part of it is crafting that story. So just to have an RPG where people prattle on forever is like, you know, essentially my nightmare, especially because I'm a completionist. I want to hear every line of dialogue, you know. But in a game like in a game like what we're trying to build,

personality is really important because like the stickiness of the game isn't necessarily even the game loops. It's the attachment to the character. Right. So you think of it like a Tamagotchi or something of that nature or like a pet or a friend even, right? And so what we're allowing you to do? We don't just assign you a colonist and we're like, go. You kind of start the game by crafting this person's personality.

I mean, the flavor is it's like a psychoval form that you're filling out for this person. And then your answer is depending on how wacky they are, spit out this person. And then the decisions you guys make together sort of impact. how they'll grow. The ultimate goal is, like, as an example, as you increase your science skill, let's just say, your character starts to become a little,

you know, for lack of a better term, a little nerdyer or a little bit more scientific or whatever. And maybe, you know, your initial creation was this like, cool, see, this is how old I am. I want to say like the Fonz or something.

Like, I don't know what a cool character is these days, but like, you know, the slick back greaser sort of like, like James Dean-esque. These are all old references. I'm sorry.

who's young, who's listening. But, you know, this like too cool guy. And then you make all these choices and it becomes just like Uber nerd. It's like kind of an interesting progression. But you're, you guys are kind of growing together. And what AI does is allow for that unpredictability. And of course, in this game, we have a lot of crafting. But we're not constraining the system.

So by too much anyway. So you can kind of create anything you want. And then the AI sort of assigns it values. I use it. Anyone who's familiar with like Dungeons and Dragons, right? Like, if you ever play like a home brew campaign, it's something more akin to that, right? Like you might be like, hey, I want to make a laser gun. And maybe like in your home brew version of D&D, even though it's medieval that the dungeon master is like, yeah, sure, you can make a laser gun. And it has like the approximate values of this like crossbow or whatever, right? And so that's kind of what we're

trying to do is allow for these emergent behaviors. And I'll tell a very, very short story. And then we can, we can move on. But one of the things that that happened in the game, in our early testing, is a player and its AI weren't getting along with each other. And he just kept hammering the chat with like, go do this, go to this, go to this. And the guy just wouldn't, he was like too stressed out. He was at the bar drinking. And the guy just kept going, kept going. And eventually the AI just got up, walked to the med bay. And we're like, what the hell is going on here? Walk to the med bay, talks to the doctor. And the doctor's like, hey, what's going? on and the AI is like, I'm hearing voices in my head and they won't leave me alone.

And we were just like, that's crazy. This is amazing. You know, there's got to be a way to like capitalize on on making this even more fun and interesting, but allowing for the behaviors that like even we can't predict, I think it like makes for a very exciting sandbox to build a relationship with an AI. Yeah. Yeah, that's fascinating. I mean, you could, you could try this right now as a, as a consumer.

or if you just want to even use chat, GPT or Claude, and just say, let's play Dungeon and Dragons. Let's play a game. And it will act as a really good dungeon master, like shockingly good as, and you could just play your characters or whatever,

create your world and participate. So it already has this capability kind of built in to just like play this game with you. And so being able to put that into, you know, some version of constraints and kind of, you know, overall like systems that,

that, you know, help to craft that like good, repetitive experience. What's your target like play length for a game or is this just kind of an infinite world type of game for college? So as it stands right now, the game is going to be essentially right now we're toying with the idea of like three days to a week. There's going to be a loop in which the colony is struck with a disaster. So like an ion storms on the way or raiders are about to raid the camp or whatever. And you have to like fortify yourself against these

particular disasters to avoid dying. And so it's you and the other people in your colony sort of banding together to get the requirements of the stuff. And as you do that, you progress your character. And as your character progresses, you hit certain milestones. And those milestones allow for permanent upgrades. And essentially, as soon as you fail one of the challenges, your colony gets wiped out. You got to start again.

but you get to keep some of the permanent upgrades. So the next time around, you have, you know, you're better at crafting or you're better at fighting or what have you. And, you know, some of your avatars and knowledge will be carried forward.

So, like, if you figured out how to make this really amazing, I don't know, cyber sphere or something, right? Like, you can recraft that spear very quickly

without having to do all of the research and what have you. So, like, our play time is, I mean, like, again, it's a one and a half,

half player game. So basically you're like checking in here and there. It's almost like looking at a fish tank throughout the day. And it'll, it'll ping you on your phone as well to be like, hey, I found this thing. What do you want me to do, et cetera? But like, uh, again, your level of involvement will be sort of determined by you. You kind of just decide how much you want to poke and probably this guy or how little. Uh, but, but like the, the sort of, you know, game loops, the peril will happen every like three days to a week. Got it. Interesting. So there's a, it's a, yeah, so this idea that there's a sort of like time based like the world is moving on with you there or not and you could choose to interact and like poke at the system as much as you want or not and eventually you know

maybe it'll die off if you don't do anything but otherwise it's going to so it is really this tomagachchi support like little character thing is really yeah yeah i mean we kind of joke around that we want you to fall in love with the character and then we just want to put them in danger so uh i'm a sadist i guess i don't know yeah yeah well it's a good it's a good motivating uh tool of I'm going to make you really care about someone and I'm going to put them in danger is a good way to get people to get people to act and talk about motivating behaviors. That's about the strongest one there is. So absolutely fascinating. And when is the expectation that people can play this game?

It's hard to say. I will say that like we're aiming for monthly playtest right now. We just we had one recently a couple weeks ago. And we're slowly letting more and more people in to, you know, test some new features, work out some of the bugs, etc. But I suspect by, you know, some of. sometime next year people will openly be able to get their hands on it, if not sooner. Okay. Well, I'm intrigued.

I want to get in on one of these play tests at some point because it sounds like a fascinating. And I love pushing forward the boundaries of what is possible in game design based on where technology allows us to be. It's what brought me to Web 3 in the first place. That's why I think I'm mostly bullish on AI and excited about what's possible. So it's cool to see you pushing that boundary as well. Lots of fun stuff. So, I mean, I could keep going forever.

But we're running out of time. So I want to make sure people, for people that do care about either this new project or want to check out parallels or other things that you're working on and learn about you more, where's the best place to direct them? What's the cool stuff that, where can they find your cool, your cool stuff? Yeah, yeah. The website is parallel.com. I would say you could go there. Definitely check out our Discord. You can follow us on Twitter at parallel TCG is sort of like the biggest account. And then I'm at parallel TCG pod. I will. say about the Twitter part of it. We joke in our company, but it's not really a joke that sometimes things end up on Twitter before they end up in our Slack. So if you really want to be on the cutting edge, you should definitely follow the company's Twitter account because we are the epitome of develop out in the open. I would say that like 90% of what we do is very, very public. And then there's like another 10% that we're sort of like pushing around behind the

scenes, but like, yeah, we are, we lay it all out there, you know, for better or worse. And it's kind of funny because, like, and I think you'll appreciate this as like a veteran of, of, of the gaming industry. A lot of the, the veterans that we've hired over the years to come work for us at first are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we can't, that, you know, we can't make this public. We can't put this on the internet. We can't do whatever. And it takes them a while to get used to the idea that we're putting like a bunch of unfinished stuff out into the world. But yeah, I mean, that's just kind of how we do. It's what, it's what, it's what got us here. And so that's what we're going to continue to do.

Oh, I don't admit. I'll look. Because I just, I remember, I saw your, you had a, you had an ex post that was just about this like today. It's like, you know, what they say, build in the open. What they want. Consumer ready, error free product with closed release. I can flex my access on the timeline. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not with it out. It's frustrations for sure. But, but I will say this, like from a pure game design perspective, you will never get better feedback. than you will when you put it out in the world like this. And I don't mean like the individual pieces of feedback. You can whatever, but you can gauge sentiment very quickly as to whether or not you have something interesting based on the level and fervor of that feedback, right?

Yes. Yeah, no. I mean, not, you know, the fervor is really the key here, right? Like the people like, you know, even people that are saying things that like are clearly wrong and not actually productive, but they care a lot is really important.

Right? Like you, a lot of you, a lot of you put stuff out there, people won't say much of anything. And then you're, you're really in trouble, right? Like, that's where the problem is. So I do think, I do think, I do think, you know, I am a believer in building out in the open. I'm believer in sharing principles is why I do the podcast and I don't really hide very much. I think understanding how to, you know, how to manage your messaging and how to manage the feedback. We could do a whole other podcast just on that, I'm sure. And you know what, dude, I would love to at least commit to doing that again because I think this was super fun. And there's like, a million topics that we've like only tangentially touched on. I would love to deep dive in. But thank you for taking the time, man. This was super fun. Yeah, thanks for having me. Hopefully I'm not all over the place. I will say to just like bring it all back around because you were asking me about my,

my beginnings. I used to be a kid who never finished my sentences because I figured people understood what I was trying to say already and I was ready to move on. So my mind is like, you know, that's how it works back here. So if ever I'm I'm explaining something to the audience here and it's confusing to them, I'm sorry, but like, I'm trying to slow it down, you know? No, no, no. I think you did great.

And again, my job as a host, if it's, if it is to help where there's areas where there's a, you know, a hanging bit to kind of bring it together. So if there was any problems, then that's on me. But I enjoyed it. You put out a lot of really interesting threads and gave me opportunities to, to deep dive into a lot of fun topics, which I am quite confident. There'll be a portion of the audience that's not listening at this point anymore because we got two in the weeds, but there's a portion of the audience that absolutely will have

loved the detail and the level of thought that you put in. to so many things as I do. And so I have no doubt, you've added a ton of value here today. Those are my people. The people who love to get in the weeds. I'm into that. Anyway, thank you for having me.

I'd love to come back. Awesome. All right. Well, I'll see you again soon. 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 sleep.