Think Like A Game Designer - LIVE at Gen Con 2024 (Special Episode)

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

In this special live episode recorded at Gen Con 2024, I share key lessons from my 20 years in the game industry, including insights from working with industry legends like Richard Garfield and designing major games like Ascension, Shards of Infinity, Bakugan, and SolForge Fusion. Here are some key takeaways:* Emotional Impact: Pay close attention to how games make players feel. Player experience is the most important metric for a game.* Set Deadlines: Setting deadlines and doing your best to hit them will change your life—deadlines are magic.* Core Design Loop: Focus on regular iteration and refining ideas.* Community: Building solid relationships with other creators is essential for growth. Always ask what value you can add, and you’ll be headed in the right direction.If these ideas resonate with you, join my Think Like A Game Designer Mastery Course to receive hands-on guidance and turn your game ideas into reality. You'll have the opportunity to pitch your game to real publishers, work with a creative community, and receive expert feedback as you bring your designs to life. Sign up now! 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. You know, I've been in the gaming industry for a very long time. I've been making a living for about 25 years or so, which states me a little bit, but I've been fortunate enough to release Ascension at this very show 14 years ago. We're now crowdfunding our 17th expansion. I've been able to work with Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic of the Gathering.

I've been able to work on major brands like Marvel and DC and World of Warcraft and all kinds of fun stuff. But honestly, the thing I'm most proud of is the thing like a game designer community. It has been amazing to see how many people have come together. You know, we've sold over 15,000 copies of the book. We've had about 70 episodes with nearly a million downloads. We've had some of the best experiences with the Think Like a Game Designer Masterclass of getting time to spend with individual people helping the community to help each other. That's actually the real superpower of the class is that it creates a space where designers can help and support each other. They think they're coming for me and they are wrong. I'm the littlest part of the value.

It's the value is that community. That's one of the reasons why I was glad to do the first ever live, think like a game designer talk, because it can help build community right here. So I'm going to go through and I'm going to give three principles that I think distill the best. of what I have learned from talking to all the best designers in the world and people interviewing on my podcast, people who I've called my friends. And then, and this are stuff that I've said before, but it's the fundamental, so it's really important to reinforce. And then I'm going to talk about four principles that I haven't talked about before. There's stuff I've been working on for my next book, and you guys are actually the first people

that are going to hear about it. So it's going to be some excited. That's right. Yeah, you came out here. I want to make it worth your wild on a Friday night. All right, so let's get started, and then we'll do a little teaser for what the information around the next thing, like game designer class. And I'll even have some goodies and freebies to offer. Okay. So, three steps for achieving greatness in your game designs. That's it.

Just three steps. Super easy. Step one is even the easiest one of them. I want you to play lots of games. But the hardest part is you have to pay attention to the emotional impact of play. Okay, if you are here at Jen Con or if you're the kind of person that listens to anything I do and you play games, you do it because there's some kind of emotional impact that you get. There's some kind of an experience.

There's something really powerful that's happened to you. It could be that excitement of a die roll when you're going to find out whether you live or die. It could be the feeling of a strategy coming together when you play. It could be the bonds of laughter as somebody makes some ridiculous move or you're telling a story around a RPG game, right? There are some experience and emotion that you're having. And as a player, typically, the response is that you're going to just be part of the experience, right? And that's okay. But as a designer, you need to step back a little bit and think, okay, wait, what's causing that experience?

What are the different elements that are in the game that made that happen? Is it something about the tension and the fact that the points were scaling as the game went on? Is it something about the fact that there was a lot of flexibility and people had a space to use their creativity with how they would use an answer? Or the opposite. Was it a very constrained thing and you had an ease or risk or risk or reward choice? Thinking about or even things like components and a lot of different elements about how something is presented. You want to kind of look at it like a critic and not just like somebody who's playing. A good analogy is if you watch a movie, right?

you can get completely lost in what's going on in the story, right? You lose all sense of surrounding. You're completely immersed in it. And like, I just let Deadpool Wolverine and I got that experience. And it's like, all right, I'm just here to have a good time. Right. But when you step back and you're like, okay, wait, what's the director doing here? Why is this shot here?

What's happening with the music in the background? Same kind of thing with game design. And so this is not something like I can just teach you like that. It's something you have to develop as an instinct over time. And so the beauty is you're just playing games anyway. You're here at Jen Con. You're definitely playing games. You're at home.

You're thinking about making games. That's what you're doing. So it's just every now and then remind yourself to just kind of step back, okay, I've had a strong emotional reaction. Somebody else had a strong emotional reaction. What led to that? And that's going to train your design instincts. Okay, so that's step one.

Step two is the lesson I repeat over and over again, and it's the core design. And this is the best way I have distilled, not just the ability to create great games, but literally to create everything. I've done this to write my books. I've done this to build my company. And it's not just me. It's all of the creatives that I know use a process like this, whether they call it this or not.

They use this system. And it is the six-step process of inspiring, getting something that's the core idea, which eventually is going to be the emotional impact that you want, right, tying back into the first point. Framing, which is putting a bracket around your idea. Right, you want, there's an illusion that creativity thrives in open spaces. I've got a blank sheet of paper. I can do anything I want. I've got infinite budget.

Isn't that great? Turns out that is not great. You actually want to work with constraints. The most important constraint is deadlines. Give yourself short deadlines. Deadlines are magic. They let you force you to focus on what's important. and saying, okay, I'm going to make a card game that I can make using components in my house

and that my little brother can play. And he's coming in two weeks and we're going to play with him, right? That's a constraint. That's something that gets me moving. Brainstorming, there's a specific process around brainstorming. I don't have time to go into it all here, but basically you try to get as many ideas as possible, turn off the censoring part of your brain, get as many crazy things as you can, then organize them into find some sort of patterns, find the patterns,

then ruthlessly cut out everything except for the one idea you actually want to test. And to do that, you prototype. And the important thing about prototyping is learn to love the ugly. Make sure that you don't spend time making a super pretty thing because you're inevitably going to change it. And pretty not only makes it worse because it feels worse to change it, you have resistance to changing it, and it distracts from the thing that you really care about,

which is whatever the principle is that you're testing. As you move through the loop, you'll get better and better prototypes, but really almost always I see new designers spending way too much time making a prototype pretty, and that time could be spent going through this core design loop faster. And then testing, testing is when you, you actually have other people give you feedback on your thing. And there are versions of testing that don't require other people. You can do mental playthroughs. And as you get better at this and you

have more experience, mental playthrus can actually get you through a lot. But you need other people to give you critiques. And you need to have some way to protect your ego from this. I'm going to stop here. Because man, I will tell you this is, if there was one like actual hard part of this job, it is that. Because most of what you do does not work. Most of what you do is terrible. Most of what I do is terrible. Let me not like make this about y'all. Make it this about me. It is going to be, you don't know whether your ideas are good until you test them. And when you test them, you want to, again, take that step back that is like you're a scientist doing an experiment. You're not like the creator with your baby. Like, isn't it beautiful? It's like, no, your baby's

ugly. I'm sorry. You got to go make another one. No. Analogy breaks down a little bit there. But you get what I mean. And then you iterate, right? And you go back through. You take what you've learned. Sometimes the core idea is really good and you just need to refine some stuff. and then you start making some more detailed things. Oftentimes, the core idea doesn't quite work, and you make a shift and saying, okay, let's re-go back, let's brainstorm some new things. Where back in the core design loop you have to go to,

depends on the results of your tests. But the goal here is you want to get better at going through this process quickly and efficiently without losing momentum or having your psyche breakdown. Right? And so, again, I'm giving you principles here that are not just about a game you want to work on. They are about any creative project you want to do,

anything you want to succeed within your life. You're going to go through this exact process. the better you get at this, the better you get at life, full stop. All right. Principle number three. How do you actually grow a career? How do you turn something to being a way that you actually want to get better, not just in the single creative thing you do, but in the world around you.

And the secret of this is other people. Okay? I talked about the power of community. As much as you might want to be, or as you might be a genius on your own, you're not going to get very far unless you have a community of people around you. That is just not only people to help you, people to give you feedback, people who actually care to listen when you say, hey, I've got a great game. Would you like to buy it? Right? And the ways you do that are the three steps here, which are adding value to the communities you care about. And that means not doing it because you want to get something back, right? When I make a call out for something, I have given away a lot of value for free. I give away the podcast for free. I give away all these lessons for free. I didn't charge anybody to be here. I do all that not because I expect anything from it. I do it because I care about this community. And as it turns out, that helps me to build relationships, that helps me to bring people in, and that helps those people are often there for me when I want to sell a product. I'm not just somebody that's talking my thing,

right? When you say, I want you to buy my game, I want you to buy my book, I want you to be my product, I want you to join my company, I want you to marry me, whatever it is, right, you're asking something for you, and hopefully the other person is going to say, well, it would be much more likely to listen, whether I say yes or not, different story, if you've actually added value to their lives in the first place. And so whatever it is, my fiancee is in the back, so I got a good yes. I got a good yes. I got a good yes on this one. But also, like, think about this in terms of when things go badly, right? And when there's people that, like, you know, to tell the story, I used to work at Upper Deck before I started Stoneblade Entertainment.

The CEO at that time is a legally documented not good person. There was a lot of things that went wrong at that company. There's a lot of things that, like, were falling apart. And it was rough, right? But what I learned was that there were some people who were just, like, you know, cover their own skin, throw the blame somewhere else, whatever it takes to keep my job. And there were other people who were like, no, I got you. I'm going to be here and we still care about making a good product. We're still going to be true to our word. We're going to do what, what's right, regardless of what the higher up say. And guess what?

Those were the exact people that I hired when I started my company. And then some of them were the same people who contracted me when I needed a contract to work. So those times when the world is out there and not going well, that's how you show up. I trust me. That's how the world's going to show back for you. So it's a really, really important thing. And then also, let's me honest, you're not going to be perfect. You're going to mess up all the time. The core design is about having ideas that don't work, we're going to not always be our best selves. We're not always going to get the things that work. We're not always going to live up to the ideals that we have, but the important thing is to learn and grow, right? Perfect is not the goal.

Better is the goal. That's why this kind of like an upward arrow and trajectory. Right. So this idea of the first step was very framed very much as game design specific, but paying attention to where emotions come from rather than, and again, if you're starting any kind of business, launching any kind of product, you're trying to solve some emotional pain that your customer has. You want to understand where that's coming from, how to fix it. For games, it's the same thing. You're trying to create a positive experience. Then you want to be able to actually test your ideas and work through them to the core design loop.

And you want to be adding value to communities you care about, continuing to build those genuine relationships, and then learning and growing and get a better along the way. I've been teaching this stuff for a while. I try to distill it down to as pure principle as I could. This stuff will serve you wherever you end up in life. I hope it helps you with your games, but this is super valuable. So that's the core of what I thought I could condense from a lot of years of work. And then let's talk about some new lessons here, some new ideas. So I've thought a lot about games, obviously.

I love games, and I think, why do we play games? Now, there are many reasons of things that we play games that are the same reasons why we do anything socializing and connecting and we just are drawn to a theme or whatever. But what is it about games specifically, right? Because every culture, throughout all of history, anything we have a record of, they all played games. Even animals will play and have different games experiences.

So there's something built into our DNA about why our games matter. If you ever wondered why that is, the core reason is because we play to learn. Games are a great way for us to learn without the consequences of real life. If I go bankrupted in Monopoly, that's sad, but it's not as bad as if I go bankrupted, I'd lose my home, right? If I'm playing catch and I'm playing ball, it's they're learning skills from, you know, more of the hunter-gatherer days when you have to actually like care about actually hunting and surviving out in the world.

All of these games, all these forms of play are here to help us learn. The reason that games are great at learning, I've distilled down to four principles. And I'm going to go through those four principles, and then I'm going to apply them to how they work for lessons you might apply in your game designs. How do you make your games better? And I'm going to apply them for lessons in life about how we might take the idea of what are games good for, how do games help us learn in life, to making our lives actually more fun and actually enjoyable and actually accomplishing this is what I go. So that sounds like a good time? Okay, let's do it.

All right, principle number one, clear and meaningful goals. In a game, it's always very obvious what you're supposed to do, right? You have a go capture the king, reduce the opponent from 20 to zero, score the most points by the time the buzzer rings. Whatever it is, there's clear and meaningful goals. Step number two, principle number two, is you want to reward progress. Games do this typically through points, through having different things that help you feel progress,

help you feel growth, gain experience, whatever, giving you a sense of moving forward. Principle number three is narrowing your focus, making sure that you're only focused on a constrained thing. And this is something that games are just great at, right? Because they give you rules, they let you play in a box. The world is like super fuzzy. You could kind of do anything at any moment.

It's a lot to take in. Games will force you to say, okay, you only have so many resources this turn. You only have so much energy to play with. You only can do these number of things. It helps you keep inside of an area that lets you focus on the problem at hand. And the last one, and this one's probably the most important. And as a gamer, you kind of get this for free, which is embracing an iterative mindset.

If I were going to think of one thing that distinguished the people who were my fellow pro tour champions and people who were winning in magic from others, it was that when they lost the game, they were immediately interested in playing another one and figuring out, what did I do wrong? How could I do better? right? We've all heard the, oh, my God, the bad beat stories. Oh, I can't believe how unlucky I got. I can't believe this thing. But the best players are like, actually, you know what, if four turns earlier, I did a different thing here, that chance to get unlucky wouldn't happen, even if you did actually get unlucky there, right? And thinking through that stuff. And so, but in general, outside of a few, you know, rage quits and table flips, most people, most of the time approach this. Like, okay, I lost the game. That strategy didn't work. Let me try another one. Let me figure out why. And that iteration mindset is really key. So let's look at this as some examples in games and in life, right? We compare those two things. Magic's a Gathering, right? Classic example, one of my favorite games. Your goal, reduce your opponents is your life. Very clear, very simple. Your rewards, every time you make progress,

you see the score change, right? There's actual consistent feedback. You get to play bigger cards. Your manna goes up, your opponent's life goes down. The focus, you're very restrictive. The first, you're only allowed to play one land per turn. The early turns are actually very simple, right? You can't do very much, and the game scales in complexity over time.

You don't start with like 20 cards. in play in a bunch of creatures and a bunch of things that scales up to complexity, focusing on what's important. And then, of course, the mindset, which I already talked about, right? When I lose, I learn. When I'm playing, I try again. I take it as not a thing that is like a personal failure. It's a, okay, how can I get better at this?

Now, let's compare this to a common goal. Let's say we've all had in our lives. And that is fitness. What's my goal? Get fit. What the hell does that mean? What is that? How do I know when I'm fit?

When am I'm not fit? Am I done? Am I still doing it? My rewards are like the opposite of rewards. I don't get to eat delicious foods that I like. And I end up being sore and unhappy and getting hurt and not feel like having a good time. It's the opposite of rewards. It's a very painful process most of the time.

My focus typically is on everything. If you look at anywhere on social media or the internet, it's like, okay, I got to have a keto diet, and I need to take these supplements, and I need to get this type of exercise. And I don't know when cold plunging became so popular, but I hate whoever figured that out and decided that was a good idea. I think it's Andrew Hewman's fault. I don't know. But it's one of those things where now you try to take all. all the stuff on at once instead of saying, okay, let's make one change.

Let's focus on the first turn, one man of principle, right? Very different. And then, of course, the mindset, right? We've all experienced this, right? When I was a pro magic player, it took me a very long time. It was about 30, 35 pounds heavier than I am now. And it was like, if I tried to do anything to diet and the scale didn't move, I'm a failure. I'm a, I'm terrible.

I give up. I'm out of here. Right. So no wonder why we have so much more trouble accomplishing goals in life. Same is true, by the way, for your game design career. Right? If you want to say, I want to be a game designer. Okay, what the hell does that mean?

Does that mean if you made one prototype, you're good to go? If no, congratulations, that's very easy. Does it mean that you have a game that you and your friends really enjoy playing? Does it mean you have a job at another company? Does it mean you crowdfunded something? What does it actually mean for you? Getting clear on that can matter, right? Finding ways to reward yourself along the way,

because as I mentioned, most of the time your ideas don't work. Most of the time you're kind of basically getting smacked in the face saying, my game's not good. How do you provide rewards along the way? There's all these different kinds of things. So let's bring it down principle by principle. Now you can see the gap, right? Why games let us learn easily?

Why real life? tends not to. And we'll break it down by principle and how see how this applies and how we can make both your games and your life better. So let's start with principle number one, creating clear goals. A game design application, I'm going to use some examples from my own games, because obviously they're the ones I'm closest to, right? When you are making a game, start your rules with a clear objective. So most rule books do this, but you want to make it like what is orienting the player. How do I know what I'm

supposed to be doing here helps people to then frame the rest of your rules? And then making sure that that objective is clear and in everybody's sight in play. So the The example I'm going to use is a game, you've got to be kidding me, which I actually released the original version of it like six years ago. And it's a simple bluffing game where you have a certain number of cards in hand, and whenever you lose a bid, you lose a card, and last person with cards left wins. But you had to remember how many cards everybody had left, and it was kind of a little bit fuzzy when you're dealing them out. And so in the new version that we just released, available now at Target, we included these really cute little scoring tokens. And these scoring tokens are actually just all adorable animals that are from my and my teams and our family and friends as pets You don't need them at all to play, but they're cute and they stay in front of me and say hey here's your scoring tokens

Whenever you lose you lose a scoring token and then you deal out cards equal to the number of scoring tokens Same exact game, but now I have a score that's in front of me I can see the score I can see the status in any given point and it's easier in fact to play and keep that front of mind how many cards everybody has as the game moves on S subtle change in design big change in impact right so just the these sorts of things, you think, how do I make the goal more clear? How do I make it more obvious what's happening when I play? Now, let's talk about life applications.

Now, here's the fun thing about games. When I said you have to have a clear, meaningful goal, games get meaningful for free. Who cares if you capture the opponent's kick? Who cares if you're using your opponent to 20 to 0? We take on this magic circle of like, okay, we're playing a game. You tell me what I need the most bananas. Okay, I'm going for bananas. Let's go.

But in life, it's not quite that way, right? you actually need a meaningful goal. So the first step is make the objective clear, right? When I talked about what does it mean to get fit? If instead it's like, hey, I want to be able to run a mile without stopping. I want to be able to get 10% less body fat. I want to be able to whatever the specific thing is that you know you'll have gotten there. I want to be able to play with my kids for an hour a day and not get winded or whatever, right?

Whatever your definition is. And then make sure you know why that's meaningful for you. Because we all have lots of goals in life. I want to be a game designer. I want to be a rock star. I want six-pack abs. I want, I want, I want a Ferrari, whatever it is, right? But the reality is, if it's not meaningful to you, then the day-to-day of your life will overcome this vague desire that you have, right? The six-pack doesn't stand up to the cheesecake. When I have the cheesecake

right in front of me, and the six-pack is just a dream. But if I ask why, and I really do encourage this exercise, just like ask why, like multiple times. Why do I want a six-pack? Oh, well, I really want to look good when I'm on the beach. Why do you want to look at the beach? Well, okay, actually I really want to find a mate. I want to be with somebody and I feel like I want to be attractive. Okay, why does I have an end? I feel like I have something to contribute to a relationship. I want to be able to invite somebody into that.

I don't want that to be stopped by my body or my own image of my body. Okay, now we're starting to get somewhere, right? You start thinking about I really want to find a partner in somebody I can add value to and I can be worthy of and I want to be the kind of person that has a discipline to do that. Now you start to get to something that can hold up when I see the cheesecake. Maybe I don't say yes right away. So finding objectives that's meaningful is kind of the biggest leap to go from the life goals, game goals to life goals.

And I think that you can find that. But once you do find that for you, when you make your objective clear, it makes a huge difference in how you go through things. All right, let's talk about rewarding progress. This one's probably the easiest and most fun one. In games, right, you want to create a constant sense of growth and reward.

If you're playing, building a tabletop game, most, a multiplayer game especially, most of the time, most of the people are going to lose, right? You can't fix that. If you're in a digital game, you can kind of tweak you a little bit. But the idea here is that you want to make sure that people feel like they have a sense of progress and that they're sort of winning along the way, even if they don't win, quote-unquote, the ultimate game. So deck-building games are great for this, right?

One of the reasons why things like Ascension are so powerful is because you start with a really lame deck of cards. You get better cards over time. You feel that sense of growth. You accomplish some objectives. Even if you lose at the end, you felt like you've had that growth and things moved along. We did this extra. We really added a lot to this with Shards of Infinity, which we have the new saga collection, for showing off here, and I think we've got a few copies left at Gen Con.

It'll be available in late October, I think, at retail. But we added the mastery tracker. And this is literally like a single tracker, like an XP tracker that goes up. You can pay resources to make it go up. All the cards, even in your starting deck, improve. And so, again, you feel that sense of progress automatically, and there's this, like, super exciting goal of if you get to 30 mastery, one of your starting cards does infinite damage and you just win the game.

So again, whether you get there or not, the granular feeling of progress is helpful. video games are great at this, right? You just have tons of XP and ladders and repeat things. But for board games, you really want to be conscious about how am I rewarding people along the way. In life, I have very much spent a lot of time thinking about this, right? Because again, as I mentioned, the hardest part of game design, the hardest part of going through the core design loop is avoiding the willpower sapping that happens as you hit failure, hit failure, hit failure, don't have the things work, don't have the things work. And so you want to create little rewards for yourself along the way.

That's why I created the Level Up Journal. This is a little gamified way to go through life and do your habits. And the only reason I made this is because I wanted it for myself. I was doing the exact same process and you can to want an index card. I write down the top three goals for the day. I write down three habits that support myself. I write down three things I'm grateful for. And then I check them off each day.

It's only that fits on a little book or a little index card. So it forces you to really focus on things. And you get little rewards. And then I would give myself rewards after I checked off it off these boxes. I could get something like a new video game or, I go out for ice cream or whatever it was, right? Whatever the reward is at that time of my life. Cheesecake, exactly.

Cheesecake. I'm not saying don't have cheesecake, folks. Let me just make me clear. I love cheesecake. I had a bourbon, was it bread pudding at Harry and Izzy's last night, which was delicious. All right. Anyway, so finding ways to build reward structures into your own life and give yourself those little wins, everyday little wins.

And that's why even little habits, right? Whatever it is, hey, I worked on games for 20 minutes today. 15 minutes, 10 minutes. I don't care what it is. Build something that's small. enough that you feel like you can hit that reward and give yourself the win because that win will compound over time. And if you're not hitting your goals, my biggest advice is shrink your daily goals.

You can have a big, exciting long-term goal, but shrink what it counts to get the win, to get the dub, because it feels good to get the W, and it will help keep you giving your progress, keep you moving along. All right, principle number three, narrow focus. We're doing pretty good on time. Games, in this way, you want to make sure that you compress the complexity, especially at the beginning of the game.

Video games, again, get this really easily. In Soul Force Fusion, we have a tutorial. The tutorial really gives you only a few options. You basically can't lose. It gives you a few principles each turn. Then you move into a campaign where the first fight's really easy, and then they get harder over time. In tabletop games, you don't have quite the same number of tools,

but you can make emerging complexity happen over time. So in TCGs, things like magic, where the mana system, only progresses slowly, so you only have a few options at the beginning of the turn, having common cards or available cards early that are simple. In the game I designed Bakugan, we had a, this is a toy, it's a kids game, right? But it had a full TCG built into it. They have a toy, you roll the toy, they pop open, you compare numbers. That's the fundamental part of the game.

And so we had a basic version of the game where that was all you did. You rolled the toy, you compare numbers, bigger number wins, very simple, and then you could add the TCG parts on top. So it can think about in your games, are there ways you can create emerging complexity where you want your game to have depth, but you don't want to overwhelm players up front. You want to make sure that they can focus on the simple short things, and then complexity evolves over time.

And now in life, this is very simple. Do not compare yourself to level 50 players when you're level one, right? We are bombarded by social media, by images across the world of the best of the best at every damn thing. Everybody's, you know, we got billionaires, and we got people with, you know, fitness models, and we got everything out there, Most successful game designers out there, right?

You don't have to be at that level. You need to be at the level you're at the level one. You focus on getting to level two. You're at level two, you focus on getting the level three. And so being able to do that, there's no easy formula for you, right? But it is really writing down, okay, where do I want to get to? And think, okay, what would be the middle of that? Right, what would be halfway between here and there?

Okay, what would be halfway between here and there? You can actually work your way back a little bit. All right, if I want to have a job at a game design company, all right, first thing I would want to do is like, have a prototype game. maybe do a sell sheet so I can make a pitch. Or maybe actually I want to be able to get into a volunteer at GenCon or an event and I can actually make some relationships there. Okay, that's not that hard. What do I have to do next?

My next goal is actually apply for these things or go participate in the forums or attend Gen Con, go up to a booth, say, hey, I'd love to help out in the future. What do I do? Now, those are wins that move you from level one to level two to level three, even though you want to get to the point where your career is wherever it is you want it to go, right? I think this is really important because it can again be very discouraging when you're trying to solve all the problems and do everything all at once. Oh, this is another key thing, right?

We all have a lot of goals and a lot of different careers. I want to start a business. I want to get married. I want to be shaped. I want to have kids. I want to blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? Trying to do all those things.

You can do anything. You can't do everything all at once. So trying to pick a few goals that are the primary focus of your life at that time. Not saying no, that's gone forever. But for that now can really help you because you're going to make a lot more progress when you're focused on, say, three to five things instead of every single thing you want to do in your life. All right.

That's focus. Now let's talk about the iterative mindset. As I mentioned, you somewhat get this for free with games, but when you're designing games, the way you can make your games be more iterative is you reduce the pain of losing. Right? You want to make sure that if I'm going to play a, and there's two really sizes to this, right? One is, how long do I have to sit and play a stupid game when I already know I've lost? We've all been there. If there's a three-hour game and 45 minutes then I'm like, there's zero chance I could win and I have to sit here and do this. That is terrible. The odds I play again are very low. And similarly, you want to make it as quick

and easy to reset and play again as possible. The setup time, the clear up time, the ready to go makes it more likely to move forward. So one of the mechanics that I actually, people often critique me on, but I will tell you why I did this, is in Ascension, we have an honor pool that's fixed. There's a certain amount of victory points that are available, which we call honor, and those are available at the center of the, and when as you play the game, you earn honor, and when that pool runs out, the game is over. And they're like, man, I really want to play with more honor. I wish there was more because I want the game to keep going. I purposefully shorted you on honor.

You heard it here. I did it on purpose because my job is to frustrate you. Now, what I want to do is I want you to feel like, oh, man, if I just had one more turn, I could do this, this, this, this, and this. Let's play again, right? That's a very conscious decision because the other side of it is that people are doing crazy. The decks have gone nuts, and you've all been on this side. If you played any deck, well, the games, it's like, all right, that guy just took a 10-minute turn.

He's going to take another 10-minute turn next turn. I don't want to play anymore. I try to minimize that as much as possible. Every now and then it's fun. But so thinking about how you do this in your game, reducing the time, that exists either. And this, another thing I did in Ascension that you can also do is obfuscating, use tools to obfuscate when the game is over, right?

So in Ascension, I could have, every time you bought a card giving you the same honor like when you kill a monster. I didn't do that. All the cards you buy in your deck have are worth honor, but they're in your deck. It's a little too much for 99% of the planet to keep track of. And so you don't actually know if you've won because you have to count the cards in the deck. So you're still playing. Even if in reality, our world champion, the one that we had our world champion would

know for sure you're dead, 10 turns of it. you don't. And so you're still enjoying the game. And so being able to obfuscate the victory condition and that could be through a lot of different means can also help to make this more fun, right? And keep people excited and keep the intensity all the way to the end. You can increase the amount of points that are available at the end of the game. You can have different ways for comeback mechanics. You can create opportunities for people to make very, very high risk, very high reward plays, lots of different tools to make sure that the game

is exciting all the way till the very end. And now let's talk about it in life. This is the biggest part of what I talked about about with the core design loop, you need to view your losses as lessons. When, and I'll, you know, I'll just speak from myself here, right? I have, I can look back on all the things that happened in my life. And I want you to take a second, just kind of think for yourself. Think about the really bad things that have happened to you from a while ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, things that were pretty devastated, right? I almost went bankrupt with the company. I got divorced. I've had a lot of projects that failed. I've had to lay people off.

I had a lot of tough stuff that have happened. I've lost people. And while I don't want any of those experiences anymore. Well, I don't want to repeat those experiences. I don't even want them for, you know, my worst enemies. I don't want those. But I can look back and I can see that those things created the seeds of who I am today. I wouldn't be able to be up here talking to you if I didn't have those things happen. I wouldn't be the designer I am. I wouldn't be the leader I am. I wouldn't be the partner that I am without those things happening to me. And so when you realize that that's the case, all the things that are going to happen to you from now going forward are also going to be opportunities for you to learn for you to grow. The more that you can do that, the more that you

embrace the iterative mindset in life with your businesses, with your relationships, with your games, with everything, the more you're going to be able to actually enjoy the process of life. Actually, enjoy the setbacks too, right? My life is awesome. I get to make games for a living. It's great. But there are plenty of challenges. People of my team will tell you, we face them all the time.

But it's working with people that are awesome, getting to work on things that are awesome and learning and helping each other grow. Those are the three basic principles that we live by its company. We repeat them every week. And so it helps to say, okay, how do we get better? How do we grow from this? And if you can adopt this principle, it's a real superpower. So bringing that in and bringing that iterative mindset from games into your life,

probably one of the most powerful things that I've learned, and hopefully that you can take away from this talk. Okay, wrapping it up, for those that actually can see a screen, I kind of put all the principles on the screen to make it easy, but the three basic steps for design greatness, play lots of games, pay attention to the emotional impact of play, use the core design loop to generate and test your ideas, and add value, build relationships, and learn a lot of it.

relationships and learn along the way. And the four principles of learning that make games great, that you want to apply both to your game designs that makes them great at learning as learning tools. You want to apply both to game design and to your life, creating clear and meaningful goals, rewarding progress, narrowing your focus and embracing the narrative of mindset.

So, let's get to the fun bonuses and the bonus surprise here. They think like a game designer mastery course. I run this one time a year. It takes an enormous amount of effort for me and my team, but it is super worth it. We've been almost 18 months, I think, since we ran it last time. We run a little late in the year. But we are starting it on September 4th.

For those of you that took the time out Friday night here at Gen Con, there's a QR code on the screen. You can scan it. If you fill out the survey there, you will get a bonus unavailable anywhere else discount to be able to join, and we'll follow up with some cool information and some freebies and behind the scenes things. It is been, it's the most fun and rewarding thing I've been able to do to be able to actually go and do the work.

do the work. You go through 12 weeks. Each week, we work with you on your specific game. By the end of it, you are ready to pitch your game to real publishers. I have a lot of real publisher friends who have been very happy to take our games. And as it turns out, I tend to actually hire a fair number of people from this course, including Lucas, who is here, who is our first hire from the Think Like Games Undercourse. We actually are working on, and we have a secret prototype of his new game that we are going to be working in crowdfunding in the very near future. So maybe we can find a way to sneak some of you into a playtest to that before the weekend is through. But it's something that I'm very excited about,

something that calls to you, check it out. If not, of course, we'll continue to share lots of those fun lessons here. We are going to open it up for Q&A. And I have some freebies, including some of these level-up journals for people who are brave enough to ask some questions and get things started. And so thank you all very much. 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. Listen to reviews and shares with a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast, Think Like a Game Designer.

In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at think like a game designer.com or wherever find books or something. You know,