Think Like A Game Designer - Luke Peterschmidt — From Dungeons & Dragons to Bakugan: Leveraging Game Design in Marketing, Teaching, and Global Phenomenons (#39)

Episode Date: July 26, 2022

Luke has done a lot of incredible work as a game designer, working on indie games like Miskatonic School for Girls all the way up to massive games like Bakugan. He’s worked for a lot of awesome companies (Games Workshop, AEG, SpinMaster, Wizards of the Coast) in a variety of different positions and knows the industry from top to bottom. In today’s episode, we talk a lot about how the game design mindset applies to not just the game industry but also to business and life—Enjoy! 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 Luke, Peter Schmidt. Luke and I have been friends for years, and we have had countless deep-dive discussions on design, on the business of games, on marketing, on politics,

on how systems design in the world influences behavior of people, on how to teach design. And I have been waiting for many years now to be able to share this kind of conversation with you. Luke has more experience in more different arenas of the industry than maybe anybody I know. Not only has he taught game design and worked for huge companies like Games Workshop and Aege,

Spin Master, Wizards of the Coast, Asma Day, but he's also run his own studio and has created a lot of indie games. He has built, he's done podcasts, he's done all different kinds of aspects of what goes on in the industry. And there's just nobody more knowledgeable that I know with this breadth of experience than Luke. And we have so many overlaps in our origins and in the types of things we worked on. We both worked on the Bakugan property. He's had a huge, and we talk a lot about that and what it's like to work on Bakugan and

working for big toy companies like Spin Master and how designing those games. for big companies and working with them is different than building your own kind of indie games and what motivates you as a designer what motivates designers as they get older and as we have more career under our belt and more relationships what types of projects we want to do we talk about luke's origin story and the relatively common variation that dungeons and dragons help to influence that and all different aspects of what about that design idea that you can change and create games you go influence him over time there's some so much stuff that we can really break down in here, including, especially for those of you who like to think of marketing as kind of a dirty word, right? A lot of people don't like to market and sell if they think of themselves as the designer. Luke really breaks down why marketing and designer in many ways the same thing and talking about how you can think about this in a way that's productive as you get to know your players and your customers and how you build the designs around them. And so there is a mountain of gold here. I have always enjoyed my conversation with Luke.

I am confident that you all will. So I will cut this intro off here. And without any further ado, here is Luke Petershmit. Hello and welcome. I'm here with Luke Peter Schmidt. Luke, it's awesome to finally get you on the podcast, man. Yeah, it's great. We had some schedule conflicts, but we got it worked out.

And I'm no longer an idiot with my calendar. Yeah, no, it's, well, we may talk about calendar and, and management and productivity stuff because you and I have so many fun overlaps. It's kind of ridiculous, actually, how many overlaps we have. You're one of the few not just talented designers that's worked on elements across the industry and from, you know, CCGs and card games and board games and video games and also the same games I've worked on, including Bakugan and others, but also running a company, doing marketing, brand management, like having the entirety of the spectrum of the game industry under your belt in addition to the,

core design skills and I think an addition teaching design. So like we have so many cool overlaps and I think each perspective really helps to highlight the craft in a really powerful way. So I know you and I've had probably dozens of these conversations one-on-one over the years. I'm just excited to finally do one where we can share it with other people. Yeah, I feel like it's our job. We've stepped on a lot of landmines and learned some things and it's our job to tell people where those landmines are. Okay. So let's go let's go landmine hunting. I think I always like to start with kind of the origin story here. What got you into gaming, into the industry?

How did you kind of get your foot in the door here in this now, what, 20 plus year ride or so that you've been on? Yeah. You know, I think a lot of people in my generation got into gaming it with the same product, which is Dungeons and Dragons. But specifically for me, I remember a D&D session. I was a freshman in high school. And, you know, at that point, I thought D&D was about maximizing all

your numbers and that's what D&D was. And my DM, a guy named Steve Lediver, changed a rule because he wanted to. And I looked around the table. I'm like, you can do what now? You can change a rule because you want to. And I think from that moment on, I wanted to be involved in the making of games. It just was so exciting to see ownership taken of a gaming experience at that level. And then, you know, I played a lot of different.

D&D and some board games in high school and went to college and had a gaming club where I designed like expansions to access and allies for fun, which was fun. I think it's still a pretty good expansion if I look back on it. And then I got into workshop, mostly because I found an on-sale Adeptus Titanicus game and there were so many pieces. And then, you know, once you dip your toe in the workshop waters, you either jump in or you don't. I definitely jumped in. This is games workshop, Yes, games workshop. They're a British company. At the time, I would argue that they were the most professional gaming company in the world. They had staff. They had staff training. They had retail stores. They just seemed to be a step above everybody else. And what time? When was this approximately not to date you or whatever? I don't know. Date me all day. It is, I guess I graduated in 91. Okay. So this is like 90, 91, 92.

But when I went to college, there wasn't a degree in game design. My degree is in chemistry. And the number of people working in the gaming industry was really small, probably 5, 4% what it is today. So when I left college, the idea of working for a game company, let alone being a game designer, was as silly to me as the idea of being a movie star. right, like an irrational choice for a lower middle class kid to even go after. So I had a chemistry degree and I worked as a chemist, but I told myself I would never stop trying to work in the gaming field. So I set my sights on Games Workshop. I produced a fanzine.

I think it was called Warmaster, which I very specifically designed to not to look like a thing Games Workshop would make that wasn't like anything else they made. So I did articles on like how to photograph miniatures and I did campaigns you could play. But I never made new pieces or made new rules. That seemed like the junior move to me. And then my entire goal was to get that fanzine into the hands of people that worked at Games Workshop. I didn't care about anybody else. So every two months when I published, I would drive down 30 copies and I'd drop them off at the Games Workshop sort of HQ. until I was sort of known, I made sure to interview Andy Chambers,

who's a famous game designer when he was in the country. And I just tried to work my way into that company from, you know, three hours away. And eventually, I got a call to, I got offered the job to be the person that would take games workshop from what's called a, you know, three-tier distributor into one that deals directly with retail stores. this is all happening at a very slow pace, and in that time I'd become a pretty efficient manager as a chemist. Lots of training, lots of how to deal with difficult people. So I get that job offer.

And at the same time, on a completely parallel track, I was asked to playtest a game by a guy named Keith Parkinson. Let me pause there for a second. When you say this is a slow track, how long is this process taking? I guess not to from 91 when I graduated to probably 93. Okay, so two years you're putting in tons of effort. And this is just an incredibly recurring theme for a lot of people that make an industry. You're passionate about it.

You're willing to do what it takes and work for years without pay, without any guarantee of anything while you have another job or whatever parallel things you have to do to kind of find your way to get your foot in the door. It's just a great recurring theme that I think is just a really powerful lesson. and underscore. And then I want to dig in because as I mentioned, I think this, this sort of managerial efficiency and this ability to get things done in a variety of categories, not just designs and getting games across, is incredibly powerful. I'm wondering if you could maybe highlight some of the traits, lessons, or processes that you had there that you feel like served you in the company and as a designer and a design manager. Sure. So as a manager of chemists, you'll find that chemists are not social people like gamers are.

They like to work by themselves and get their work done and go home. And they can be really difficult to deal with because they're so solitary. So how do you manage solitary people? Well, you can be taught how to do that. So one of the sort of courses I took was they literally called How to Deal with Difficult people. Yeah. You'd think they'd be good at having chemistry together. There you go.

Good chemistry. All right. I don't get to bust that one out very often. You know, it's all good. All right. Sorry. Carry on. I apologize to our listening audience.

My best. I know Luke appreciates this sort of thing. So that's all I'm in here for. Yeah. So I took this class and it was, you know, you basically end up pigeonholing people into one of 16 different general difficult categories. And the real challenge of that class is the first thing you do is you figure out how you're difficult. And how you present to the people around you and the people who work for you and your bosses.

And that is a. a gut punch, right? Like, everyone has a blind side to how they're perceived in a negative way by people around them. We assume that we're given the benefit of the doubt. We assume that we're not being offensive when we're just responding in the way we naturally respond. So, yeah, finding out that, like, I have a certain difficult behavior pattern meant I had something to work on, but I also then learned how to manage people with various different aspects. And everyone is difficult in some way, right? That's just part of that.

Yeah, that's such a powerful, that's such a powerful frame, right? They like, hey, I'm here to learn to manage other people. And the first step of that is recognizing how, you know, to manage yourself, right? How is it that you are being perceived by others and how are you able to, you know, help to mitigate or address those negativity and concerns? It's something that a lot of people don't take that step to turn inward. And it is a very common thing when somebody is a, you know, not just in chemistry, but in, you know, game design or anything else where people will have their creative ideas and they'll have, you know, with the way that they behave when they're collaborating or getting feedback or they're emotionally, you know, or ego challenged in these cases like people lash out, they retreat, they don't respond in the right sort of way, which is to take those lessons in, learn, be able to collaborate. And that's, those are hard things to do until you spent the time to do the self-reflection and work, which you clearly had to do here. Oh, yeah. And it also makes it that you never really look down on anybody for their quirky,

behaviors. You never feel superior to anybody when you realize that you've got a flaw somewhere in the middle of you that probably drives everyone else crazy. So when I deal with a person who is like a, there's a particular type of person called that I know it all, right? There are people who actually know more than you do about the topic. And in chemistry, this was common. I was not a great chemist. I was a good manager. And it is really hard to tell someone who is a know-it-all, hey, can you teach me that thing that you're yelling at me like I'm going to idiot for not knowing, right? The job of the manager is to change the manager's behavior, not the behavior of the employee. If there's a problem in that relationship, it's the manager's job to change because there's no incentive for the employee to change unless you want to just fire people all the time.

It doesn't make sense. So, yeah, my management experience as a chemist was definitely valuable for that self-reflection. It definitely was valuable to see how a large organization works and know that that's not a threatening thing. But, you know, as I, as I'm being a chemist and I'm doing this thing with the fanzines and I'm trying to, I went to games workshop during this period, launched the Outrider program. It was the first demo program that I know of in this country and maybe anywhere. And I made sure I was the first outrider.

So I was the very first demo person. Because I tracked down the guy who was doing it and ran into a meta convention, right? That was my focus. And I should be clear, I never expected this to work. And if I did, I didn't expect to be a game designer. I expected to be sort of an office worker. So what, why? Talk me through the psychology there, right?

You love this idea of game design. And then you're putting in a ton of effort, kind of almost pathological amount of effort and stalking people down and everything to then become an office worker and not to be a game designer. The number of game designer jobs. back then was just a fraction. I mean, all the game design for Games Workshop happened in England. I didn't realize at the times they had hired a U.S. person before.

I think Matt Foreback worked there for a while. But almost everybody in that office that had creative power was British. The U.S. entity was sales, distribution, marketing, logistics. But just to work in the industry that I loved would have been enough. It would have been great. But if it didn't happen, the way I run my... life is to avoid big regrets, right? I never want to say I didn't try hard enough for something I really wanted. Not getting it, that's fine. That's a die roll, right? You're just, the dice

are going to come up bad sometimes and that's okay. But, but not putting in the effort and later on feeling like I should have done more is a feeling I avoid like the plague. I feel you. I think it's a great, a great insight and a really powerful way to live. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I mean, yeah, you know this. You're living a life with both arms out wide, right? You have lots of opportunity and you're out there grabbing it. That's, that's, yeah. Yeah, it means you don't get, you don't get a lot of downtime, but it's,

it is very rewarding. Yeah, yeah. And it's whatever your goal is. Like, it doesn't really matter. It's just having a regret is a, for me, about a large thing is a very powerful motivator to avoid. Yeah. So, yeah, I would have been happy if I said, you know what?

I was a chemist. I was a good manager. put in my 40 years as a chemist, but man, every weekend I worked on some cool thing. Remember, I enjoyed all of this work. I enjoyed writing these fanzines, and I enjoyed being part of that gamer community of games workshop. It was great.

And the odd thing is I didn't get hired by Games Workshop. So the day that they offer me a job, there's this completely parallel track going on where a guy named Keith Parkinson was developing a game in 93, designing a game in 92 or 93. to compete with magic called Guardians. And a playtester couldn't make it.

So one of my workshop friends who was there said, hey, can you go? And the guy lived just down the street from me. Like he was a 10-minute drive. And over time, I worked with him and to the point where I became the game designer and he just focused on art. It was a very strong moment in my life

where I came home from the first playtest with him. I wrote a bunch of feedback at break when I was a chemist. And then I had to decide if I was going to call him and say, look, I don't think your game's very good. And that's hard feedback to give a creative. And between the start of learning his game and this letter, I had learned that he was really famous. Keith Parkinson was one of the top five fantasy artists in the world. When I was in there, he was doing a book cover for an Orson Scott Card novel. And I remember staring at the phone.

Back then, we didn't have cell phones. I remember staring at the phone for a long, time getting up the courage to call him and say, hey, I don't think your game's very good. I'd like to help you fix it. And to Keith's credit, he just said, you know what? All of your points are really well thought out and you're right. You just do the design and I'll do the art and the art management. And so the same day, I get the offer to do a job at Games Workshop, I get an offer to be a game

designer. Which is crazy. Yeah, wild. What a, what a incredible day that must have been. Yeah. That's good. And I don't regret any of the work I did for that workshop thing. That's not the point, right? The point was put as many irons in the fire as you can and hope one hits. And the workshop job would have been much more stable, but the game designer job is like the sexiest job in game industry work, right? It just is. You get to be creative and make experiences. And there's very few of us. Now over the next couple of year, there were lots more of us because Magic sort of Magic the Gathering sort of opened up the chance for more people to design games. Yeah, I really transformed the industry.

And, you know, there's typically, and when I talk to people, there's two generations of game designers, those who came from Dungeons and Dragons and were inspired to come from that. And then those who came from magic. It is, I'd say, 80% of the people in the industry have one of those as their major touchstones, seems like. Yeah, yeah, I feel like Kickstarter is the other one. Yeah.

Kickstarter made it possible for me to be a game designer, right? I hear that a lot. which is great crowd funding in general. Yeah, that's the even later generation now. I think, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So that's how I got into the industry. At the time, I say this, very few of us were qualified for our jobs at the time,

and our responsibility just kept growing over time. So I did game design. I had no professional game design experience. I had to do marketing plans. I had no marketing experience. I remember one of the marketing promotions we did at a trade show was as many booster packs as you can fit into your mouth for $12. I love that so much.

I know. I know. And I got a hat tip, Dave Gensler on that one. He was like my assistant. It was definitely my right-hand guy for a while at this job. And that was his idea. And it was just,

anyway, that's the kind of stuff you do when you don't know what you're doing. Well, yeah. So that, yeah, I want to, I mean,

that story's great. So I'll heal more like that too. But yeah, the, the, when you don't know what you're doing. It's actually a really like powerful point to linger on, right? I've actually talked about this fair amount, right?

Like there's some, I've been doing this for 20 years and I'm still doing a ton of things where I don't know what I'm doing. Like I try not to hide that fact, even though it's scary to admit it out there. But it's always the case, right? You're always pushing boundaries. You're trying to build new things. You're trying to build new projects. You're taking on new responsibilities.

And so you're in this world like, all right, I've never made a marketing plan before. I've never made a game before in this case and both at the same time. How do you, how do you think through? how did you think through that then? You know, what maybe some specific stories, whether they be hilarious ones like the booster packs in the mouth or not. And then how do you think through it now? And maybe how has that changed?

You know, I think it's a very different situation. I think what helped then is I didn't look at very many people in the industry in these early years and say, wow, you know so much more than I did. Right. So there was a bunch of people stumbling around. Lots of people made lots of mistakes. and the clever creative fun, like the product guardians had a sense of humor to it.

And that gave us the freedom to do things other companies couldn't do because their products were definitely serious. Like tank combat in World War II or judo or, right, they just couldn't do goofy fun things. So we consciously made the decision to try to make our marketing fun and amp the fun up. But that was as bad as conscious as we went. Other than that, we all did the same things.

Somebody took out an ad in a magazine. We all looked at it and said, that's a good idea. We should take out ads and magazines. Somebody went to a trade show? Great idea. Let's do trade shows. Someone had a demo team. Let's do demo teams.

There were very few truly unique ideas that stayed unique. El5R had a unique idea that stayed unique for them for a while. Magic had the Pro Tour. That was pretty unique for a while. But most of us were sort of following a playbook. And what really set us apart was how well we executed on those plays. And then it only took a little bit of reading to feel like you were in the top 20%. You read Ogilvy on branding and then you feel like, okay, I know things now.

And I'm going to use these things to establish myself as someone who's making it add intelligently. But yeah, it is, I think the real trick is, and the thing that gives you confidence going forward, is if you don't look at each thing that you're about to do as something you don't know how to do, you look at it like, okay, I might not know how to do this, but I've done 20 things that I didn't know how to do when I started. The important thing is that I've proven to myself that I have the ability to learn new things. And once you reach that level of confidence, you'll do, you'll try anything. And respect the experts. Like I've worked for some companies who have, let's say, tried to get into, you know, we're going to make a console.

And I look at the company, I'm like, you have no clue what you're getting into. And it is a big, big thing to make a console. And, you know, it didn't work, not surprising. I think the stuff you take on, you got a scope correctly. Yeah, I think that's right. I think there's like this kind of like spiral up, you know, process that I've felt has been very helpful where you'll just, okay, I'm going to try a new thing that I've never done before, but it's going to be, you know, within this small scope.

Or like when I teach game design, I always start as like, look, start with something small. Like start with a simple card game or board game. Don't try to make, you know, galactic empires or World of Warcraft or whatever. Like when your first go, it's just like, that's not going to happen. It's not going to work. Start small. You're going to fail plenty at the small thing. And it costs way less and you can figure things out way cheaper.

And then fail at the next thing. And then the next thing. And then you eventually, you know, you kind of can get, you know, grow scope bigger as you built in the confidence like you've talked about, which is really important, as well as the You kind of wherewithal to know when you're within that playful edge at the edge of your ability where it's a little bit scary, but you're really able to do it and kind of be in flow, versus you're way out over a cliff and you're just waiting to fall. And it's like Wiley Coyote standing out there.

You just haven't looked down yet. Yeah. I think the key for me when I make these decisions is I either have to know the customer really well or I have to have the ability to know the customer that I'm trying to make this new thing for. I have to either know them really well, or I have to have proven to myself that I can learn something of this size because I look around and I say, there's a person doing it, and it can't be magic. So I look at what you've done with the Ascension app, right? And you know that customer so well that maybe you didn't know app design when you started. Like, I don't know,

But it felt to me like that product, which I really liked, was from a customer's perspective that you know, primarily. And I thought that was a great example of, like, I didn't know you knew how to make apps. But if I was going to make an app, that's how I'd want to approach it. Like, what do I want as a customer? Or what do I know my customers want? Yeah. That's a great, it's a great touchstone, right? At the end of the day, you're trying to build customer experiences.

You're trying to build. This is true for game design at its core. You're trying to build experiences for your players. It's true in marketing and business at every level. You're trying to find this way to provide value and understand your end user, however you define that as what they want, what they need, and how do you get that to them in the best way possible is really at the heart of it. It's a great thing to keep coming back to when you have difficult decisions and pathways to go.

It's hard to go wrong with that as your central focus. I think one of the unique things about game designers. I love the title of your book, right? I think like a game designer because I attribute a lot of my things outside of the gaming industry to the way my brain works because I've done so much game design. But people get confused when I say that game design and marketing are essentially the same thing. It is figuring out the thing that will bring an emotion or an action to a person and giving it to them in a way they're ready to accept. like if a game designer makes a game and does their job really well, it will have an obvious feature that the customers want.

And marketing is simply knowing what that obvious feature was, why the customers wanted and just explaining it to them. Once you're past that, you're just lying, right? Or at least you're not representing your product the strongest as you could. Yeah. Well, you want, and it's like the reverse part is true too, right? You need to know when you want to, like which customers you want to attract as well as which ones you want to repel, right? You want to make it clear that like this, you know, two-hour work replacement intense game is the thing that's going to appeal to a specific category of player.

And you don't want this to be something that mom picks up for family game night with the kids, right? You want to make sure that that's not the thing that they have. And marketing is very much about that too. Like trying, there's this, this challenge I think a lot of people fall into where they want to be everything to everybody, be that with their game design or with the thing that. they're trying to sell. And when you're trying to be everything to everybody, you're really, you know, nothing. You know, you're really not going to ever be that the perfect thing for the perfect person that really wants exactly what you have, which is, that's what, that's where gold comes from. And maybe, you know, there's, there's hits where your, your market extends

after that and you end up reaching bigger than you thought, but really knowing who the core person you're trying to serve is. What is the core community you're trying to serve is just so critical. Yeah. And like my friend Ryan Dan says, sometimes you got to fire a customer, right? Sometimes you need to be clear. In fact, I have a product I made that it's probably the artsiest thing I've ever done. It's a game called Miscotonic School for Girls. It's a inverted deck builder for those of you who play games out there. You build the deck of the player to your left.

And it's a game that was thematically designed on this Miscotonic theme about losing your ability to think clearly, right? Losing your mental faculty. And in the game, that is exactly what you feel like. You feel like you lose control and lose control and lose control, and then the last person standing wins. And it was the closest I've ever come to making, I'm not going to call a piece of art, but a game that has an emotion that is different than other games on purpose,

but maybe not the best decisions to make the best game likable by the most people. So I have been at shows, trade shows, with this game in my hand, had someone asked me, hey, I'd like to buy that. And I go, well, first, tell me what kind of games you like and why you like deck builders. And then if they say they like games where you optimize and optimize and optimize, I won't sell them the game and it infuriates them. It's just not for you. Like, we didn't print a lot.

I've only got a few copies left. I've put them in the hands of people who are really going to like them, and it's not going to be you. And lots of people really like that game. But I had to find the right people, people who were willing to say, okay, this game literally feels like I'm losing control. And by stretching myself, I learned some really interesting things. I learned that there are different styles of random and how different styles of random bring up different emotions.

I think sometimes we don't push ourselves to try to do something that's outside of our comfort zone and making a game with an emotion as a core theme is, it's not a big market. And I didn't make this game to be financially successful. That was not the goal, right? The goal was make a statement and make a product that I would be proud of with people who I want to make games with.

Yeah. Yeah. Fire and customers. is interesting. Usually you fire them because of jerks online. Yeah. Well, there's plenty of that for sure. But, well, I actually think it's interesting to dig into this a little bit too because it's for, this is now a world where you're not even just defining your customers, but you are defining, you know, for yourself, what is the goal? What does success look like? This is another really important piece. And especially it touches on a lot of your subjects, right? Because you've,

you know, you've worked as a manager and these different companies, you've published your own games, you've worked as a consultant, you've designed, you know, worked as a designer, you've done the whole gamut. And when people out there are thinking, right, a lot of this audience of people who like want to get into the game industry, I want to make their game, want to publish their game, whatever. It's which path they should take is, you know, a lot of people ask me, okay, how do I get in the game industry? What should I do with my game? And it really comes down to what is it you want, right? Do you want to be, you know, working with a team of people on some big projects that are exciting? Cool. Okay, this one path, right? If you want to just, hey, listen, I just want my game.

to look good and be something I can put on the table in front of my with my friends at our game night that's another path i want to do a kickstarter and really just like have my 100% control over everything and i'm willing to do whatever work it takes to do that okay there's another path right and so you're you know there's the these artistic as you put it like kind of goals for a game like hey i just want to express something which is always a key part of any creative endeavor as my main goal and i'm not trying to build the thing that's going to make the most money i'm trying to build the thing that expresses this particular value, goal, emotion, agenda, whatever, is a really, it's not an easy thing for a lot of people to do or something that people will subconsciously kind of,

kind of sort of do, and then push in the other direction and then end up with a muddled mess at the end. Yeah, and that never stops. Like, when you start in the gaming industry, it's good to have those thoughts of what you want to do, but it's reasonable to change as you learn more about the industry. I think equally as hard is when you're successful and you have one big success. And then you really have to recalibrate and say, okay, that was a big success. And maybe it was a financial success. And maybe you have this choice.

Like that big check was great. I want more big checks. Or can you say that big check was great? Now I want to do something that's more personally fulfilling. Or that big check was great. If I get another big check for the same reason, it's not going to be as great. So let's make my next big check come from something else. These are things that I have dealt with very consciously.

I noticed I was involved with this company called Sabretooth Games. I was an owner there. And we sold the company, oddly enough, to Games Workshop. And it was my first, like, big check moment in my life. Like, big check, you know, not a seven-figure check, but a big check. And I realized that I got less comfortable. with risk, risking money. Because up until that point, like, I had not taken a salary for months for Sabretooth.

I mean, I was all in. My kid's college fund was definitely on the table, you know, for that company. And then once I had a big check and I had a comfortable amount of money in the bank, I got less comfortable taking risk. And I got so mad at myself. Like, this is nuts. Like, I had to rejigger at my mind what the point of money was. and to me, I said, look, money is the takes away stress and gives me the chance to do things I want to do that might be risky.

And then I went right back to being risky again. And it's worked. But it allowed me to do things like that game where I didn't have to make money. That was a thing I never could have done prior to my first, you know, big money moment. Yeah, I think there's a lot of great insights there. And I think that the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, that what you want out of life and what you want out of your career and your creative work and frankly your relationships and everything is going to change over time is just a is just a

fundamental truism and it's not something that's as clear to you when you're in your 20s but when you get to your 30s and 40s it becomes abundantly clear when you look back at the things you want it then and whether you achieve them or not they seem kind of silly or they're you know you move past that that layer of karma or whatever however you want to put you know and yeah it does it matters and it makes a big difference. And when you're going to do, you know, you find that next thing that really calls you, that you're passionate about doing, that's what's going to get you and drive you to do something, you know, really powerful. And it could be both the regret minimization that you talked about, the sort of fear of the downside. It can be the love of the

upside, like with this, the Miscotonic game where you're bringing this thing to life, you know, that you're like, I want to see this. I'm willing to do, you know, take the risks and not make much money or whatever, because I want to get this thing to exist. And I feel that there's so many of my projects where it's been like that, you know, even now with Soul Forge Fusion. I mean, this was a game that I've invested a decade of my life to building and trying to put out, you know, through a lot of struggle as you, you know, I've talked about on this podcast and you and you and I've talked about because I believe in it and I'm passionate about and I'm excited to see it, you know, really come to fruition. And most people would call it crazy and, you know, it's, but it's something that I'm excited about, so I'm willing to do it. And then there's during degrees of projects. I actually think when I had Peter Ackison on, this podcast. He talked about how one of the reasons why he, you know, sold Wizards of the Coast and

went and started another company was because the Wizards had gotten so big that even trying to spend any time on a project that would make less than $30 million, it was never, it just wasn't worth it. It doesn't matter if it would be millions, make millions. And they were sure it was going to make millions. It was not worth it at that company at that time to focus energies on something like that, which he's like, I want to be able to do things like that. I want to make cool little brand. projects. And so he's like, this is not the place for me. And so it was very interesting. That really stuck with me because it's just the what matters you. It's not just make the biggest

thing or keep doing this thing that's worked. It's really what drives you? What's important? Yeah. And at some point, if you have the money in the bank to do that, it's a great like privilege to be able to do it. And imagine if you didn't. And then you listen to that regret thing. And 20 years go by and you think, man, I should have done, you know, something that I'm more passionate about instead of just hunt for the next big check. And be clear, if that's your thing hunting for the next big check, great. Like, that's, I have no problem with however people want to score their points in the world. Right.

Right. That's the money, there's nothing wrong with pursuing money, but it is definitely worth checking the impulse, in my opinion, because it's the natural, it's what our society pushes you to, and it's the easiest thing to count, right? Like if you're a scorekeeping kind of person, you're a gamer and you want to just like, that money just becomes our society's natural driver, which is often very illusory and does not provide the end value you think it is. So it's just nothing wrong with it, but it's definitely worth being conscious about what it is about it. Because I'll just say every time that I have pursued a project because I wanted to make the most money I could, it has turned out terribly.

It has turned out terribly. I mean, like, when I think of like Ascension, I did not ever plan to produce Ascension. I was just making that for my friends and we would just play with my friends and they were just like, you know, you should really try to put this out there. It's really cool. That's like, oh, yeah, all right, whatever. I'll give it a shot. And, you know, and I can speak to many other projects. Like, oh, yeah, this one's going to make us rich, man.

We're totally going to bust it. Disaster. So, yeah. Yeah, just, it's just a word of caution. Your mileage may vary. but I find that really figuring out whatever other passions are going to drive you or what the real like what the payoff is, right? Like even just to switch back to game design terms in case we're getting too esoteric for people. You know, when you think about a resource system that you're going to say, okay, here's where we're going to give you this mana system.

We're going to give you this point payoff structure. Those things are not what matters. What matters is the experience that you're going to get out of it, right? That's like, okay, what's the feeling of randomness when I roll the dye here versus draw a card here versus my opponent picks a number. number, right? Or like pulls a card out of my hand physically, right? Like all of those things have a different emotional payout that that's what you're really looking for. And the same is true for money, right? At a certain point, there's certain emotional thing that says, hey, I'm safe enough here or, hey, I have the freedom here. Or, hey, I can do this thing. And just being aware of what that

emotional payout is, whether it be in game design or career is really powerful. You know, I look at at money absolutely through a game designer lens, but a little differently. I I look at it and I say, okay, in a lot of games, there's a currency. And at some point in the game, you need to switch from gaining that currency to gaining victory points. And once you start gaining victory points, you tend to not get more of the currency. Right. That's a, if you play Dominion, for instance, in Dominion, when you decide to start buying

victory point cards, your deck doesn't get any better. And knowing that moment when you need to switch from money focus to other focus is a key. It's a guns and butter thing, I think, is that annoyingly, technical game design term, right? Yeah, yeah, it's an economics term. I never really quite understood why they picked guns and butter exactly. Maybe it's actually worth explaining it a little bit for people listening because it's a, it's a powerful thing, but it's a weird choice of phrasing.

Sure. So the phrase of guns or butter is a sort of pick, pick one or the other that you want, right? Guns can kill people and take over land and they express power, but butter is what actually makes people happy. So in a game design term, guns might be gold. It's gold you use to buy gear, right? And so that's great. And if you buy some gear that gives you more gold next turn, great.

You're building a little gold engine. But the way you win is by buying gear that's not very useful in the game. It's butter. It doesn't do anything. It's a victory point. So I can spend my money for more guns, or I can spend my money for more butter. and the person with the most butter wins the game, not the person with the most guns,

but guns buys butter. I don't have made any sense, but that's the analogy and, you know, I view money as the guns in this analogy. Money is the thing that gives you the ability to go for things you want. And to be there,

there are times when you take the best paying job, and that is the right move all the time, and I live most of my pre-gaming life as that person, right? You take the job that pays three extra dollars an hour because you're paying for your college or whatever, right? That's fine. But in the longer wind, like I'm obviously, you know, my 50s. So hopefully by the time you get to your 50s, you'll be making more butter decisions than gun decisions. Yeah.

There's another way I've heard it phrase, which is like the second mountain. And it was a, this idea that you, when you're young, you have to climb this first mountain, which is this mountain of achievement and capability, right? We all, we separate ourselves from our parents and we try to find what is it that, like, who are we and what are we capable of in the world? We find our place in the world where that's earning money, developing skills, finding, building relationships, building your own identity and kind of establishing who you are. And that's really about freedom and power. And then you get to the top of that mountain, and you realize it's not really that like fulfilling a place to be. And now you can see in the

distance this other mountain that you weren't able to see before. In fact, you would, wouldn't be capable of saying before that is this, you know, mountain of contribution and, you know, expression and connection and fulfillment. And that then you can now cross over and like climb that second mountain where you actually, in many ways, it's the opposite of this freedom and power. You actually sacrifice. You bind yourself to things like family and community and contribution and things that you now causes you care about. And those things now become, you have less freedom. You have less capability. But you do so in service to something greater and something that you find more fulfilling, which is maybe a nicer story than trade your guns for butter.

Butter, yeah. I have a very specific learning disability, which is an odd thing to just randomly throw into a conversation. But it means I can't learn foreign languages, which is an odd thing. And the way it's described to me is every new concept I've learned, I've learned from fifth grade and earlier. So I can't do calculus. My brain will never let me do calculus. My brain will never, because that's just weird math. That doesn't make sense.

But I can do algebra all day long because that's just the kind of things you learned be fifth grade and earlier. But it's made me very good at shortening things to my brain can take them by breaking them down to simple concepts that make sense. So I sort of think in grass and I think in charts. And that's why I tend to lean towards things like guns and butter because it's just like, that's just shorter. Sure. No, my story took a lot longer. I'll give you that.

Here's way more poetic. Like, here's a inspirational poster. Mine to be like, what? That doesn't make any sense. Yeah. I got a, I got a have tip to David Brooks. I think we wrote the book by that name where I got that concept. So it's definitely not me. But you know what I thought interesting about, like talked earlier about the people who, like the wave of people that come in and the wave of people that, you know, every hand there's a wave of new employees in any field. Some end up making it 20 or 30 years and and some don't. And that's fine. They find their home other places. I am stunned how many people who I have known for around 20 or 20 more than 20 years in this industry who, when I ask them,

like, what are they most proud of? They mention helping other people get into the industry. Yeah. And I'm right there. I'm right there. That is the thing that brings me the most long-term joy. 100%. I cannot like, first of all, we're talking on this podcast that I made. to chirp purely to help people get into the industry. I don't get paid for this. I don't make any money off of it. I'm here because I love this stuff. I want to be able to share it.

That's why I wrote the book. And now we have, actually this is a great, great segue, because now I have the, the, Think Like Games Center Masterclass, which I've now been teaching

for a year and a half. We've done a couple, three sessions. I've been able to hire people from that class and take people who were working at a hotel reception desk or a bank job or pizza delivery and like bring them into the industry or find them jobs or get them like find a hood real talent and we're able to just work hard and make it happen it's like so amazing to see

it's nothing feels better when I'm able to like help train and empower and like teach others and like help make that bumpy path uh you know avoiding the landmines as you put it earlier uh it's so rewarding it's like it's so amazing to be able to do and I didn't I honestly didn't realize I knew it was something I wanted to do and was called to do for a long time but I did not realize how much joy and value I would get out of it. And so yeah, that's why I keep doing it. And I know you teach as well. So maybe you can talk a little bit about your teaching process and principles and provide a little insight for people on that front. Sure. So I'm not actively teaching now, but I was an adjunct at Harrisburg University, which is a university of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It's the sort of newest

university in Pennsylvania. I decided at some point it was time to actively give back and sort of focus on spending some of my time every week in helping other people get to the industry. So I looked to teach and I had a choice of teaching at a school fairly close to me or one that was about 50 minutes away. And I chose the further away school

because it was a majority minority school. And for years, well before this was a topic in social media, decades, literally, I have been sort of like, and this is going to sound horrible, but the white male on diversity panels because I was passionate about opening up opportunity to people and new voices.

And I also felt it was important if white guys held all the keys to power and they felt threatened by this, I felt it was important for them in the audience to see a person on the panel who was excited about it, right? Who was like, no, this is going to be great. Like, this is going to be awesome. Like, not, don't fear the future. Like, this is going to make our entire hobby better. So I chose to teach there. and the class I taught was critical game analysis.

It was not a class about game design. It was a class about breaking games down into their components and then analyzing what makes those components tick. And then if we had time, figuring out how that is like part of your real life. Thinking like a game designer to me gives you lots of edges in the situations if you realize there's a game analogy. So, for instance,

the classes I would teach about catch-up mechanics, right? These are mechanics that are designed to help the player who's losing catch up to the leader. And the example I would give was interviewing for a job. If you're interviewing for a job and the person who interviews right before you, that person's father happens to know the person who owns the company. And you're going in after them, right? What is the right move? How would a game designer approach this problem? a game designer would say okay the catch-up mechanic I have to look for a catch-up mechanic here

I'm too far behind I haven't even walked into the room and I'm at a disadvantage I'm behind so I should and then there's a list of things you can do and what I suggested in the class was increase randomness

increasing randomness over time only helps the person who's losing so go in there and be extreme go in there and don't take it easy don't milk toast your answers be memorable at all cost because you're already losing

right that's the kind of thing that I wanted people to take out of that class and there's some other things like what is a rule and what is a like we like to think of rules as things you can't do but if there's a sign that says no parking here certain hours doesn't mean you can't park there

it means if you park there you might get a ticket right it's not a rule there's a game mechanic at play there right so when you start viewing all of all the systems like we're system engineers the end of the day whether that system is selling a product or making a game but uniquely we're system engineers who make systems that are supposed to be fun which is an emotion but also fair and and that is a fascinating way to look at the world what systems out there are working or not working because they are fair and you know what

once you realize something isn't fair, then you can act like a game designer to fix it. Right. Or a game designer to fix it. Well, yeah, this is an area that, again, you and I can probably, well, we have already deep-dived in for hours together. So I know we could do it here, but, you know, this, this taking the principles of game design and applying them to larger-scale systems. I know you're very involved.

You have, you still have the political podcast, right? Yep. We have a Twitch stream on the extra credits channel every Wednesday at 630 EST, where me and a bunch of other game folks. Try to look at politics as through the lens of a game designer. I will warn you, it can get pretty depressing. Yeah. Well, so I have a similar, I mean, I love this sort of stuff.

And I'm, I think I have a far more optimistic bent than you on these sorts of things. So it's, we can, we can have some fun chats on it. But I really do believe that, you know, and there's plenty that, you know, you change the systems, you change the rules, you change the defaults in various ways. And it has huge impacts on people's behaviors. Whether you think people are default good or default bad, it is clear that if the incentives and the, you know, UIUX is lined up in a certain way, you can move people in one direction or the other. And that is what, you know, the defaults of how easy do you make it to vote or what is the process through which this representation for different votes happens or what are the frameworks that you work within? Like all that stuff matters a ton for a democratic system.

It matters a ton for for companies, right, which is the smaller scale thing that you and I have both had very direct. capacity to do. And I think about it, like, how do I design my company? Building level, layers of transparency in how things operate and giving people the opportunity to, you know, rise or fall to the level that they want and making sure that there's productive feedback cycles, making sure that there's systems that don't disincentivize people for being right now, and especially is very, very common that being living in a different location or different times up. Right. Now, this remote work has democratized the capacity to bring in talent. A lot of the people I talked about being able to empower and hire are people from all over the country or all over the world that, you know,

pre-pandemic, I would never even have dreamed of hiring because we had a whole, you know, in-person, in-office culture. So there's all kinds of systems that we don't even think about until it's forced upon us, that you're realizing how much it opens up. Yeah, I feel like there should be a list of questions that every company manager or owner ask themselves that is beyond, you know, what do you want your company to do? Sell great product. Great.

okay, how do you want your company to be? Like, what do you want this company to, to, how do you want to answer your question so that then you can create a system to make that thing? I'm right now in the process of setting up a studio for Asma Day and I have to build a team of people I will not work with next to and probably never have. And that is very new to me. Like I've built cohesive teams with lots of virtual work. But in most of those cases, I've hired people I've known. I'm expecting that I'm not going to hire anybody I know here. And like, I don't know how to do that. So I'm going to have to do some work on how often do we bring the team together?

What's a process that I can make sure people feel like they're held to task, but not micromanaged. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. It's very, it's going to be a challenge. But, you know, 100%. It's an exciting, it's an exciting challenge to work through. And I think, you know, you and you and I have talked about this sort of stuff before, but it's for

me, you know, I found, we're actually having this conversation. I'm actually in an Airbnb here in Las Vegas. We actually got my entire team. They all, most of them just left earlier today, got the entire team to come out here, meet up, and have an in-person kind of summit for the first time since the pandemic. There were multiple people here who I have worked with for 18 months and never met in real life. And bringing people together and setting up a structure for brainstorming and ideating for just bonding and connecting for you know for gaming for being able to kind of create these functional groups was was a really important powerful thing even though I very much believe that you know we're better off for being remote most of the time I think having something

where there's whatever quarterly or six month get-togethers having systems for people to be able to you know be aware of what other people are doing if they want to be but not feel like they're being you know checked on or micromanaged but having a co-concessing feeling like I am connected to this larger group and I understand how my part contributes to the whole. We use a daily system of, you know, three, every post our top three priorities for the day and the week and how those things connect to the larger, you know, kind of team goals for the week or the month or the quarter. Really find that to be a very helpful tool when you have a million granular things that you could be doing and you don't have the ability to communicate them all,

nor do you want to, being able to have a few touch points that everybody can come in on is really valuable. Yeah, I'll probably be talking to you a lot about how you manage because I've been very impressed with the way that team, I met with your team earlier as when I was working with AEG. And yeah, that was an impressive group of people. My worry about putting a team together is both in the tactical getting stuff done, right, came people on task. but also that what you get from working next to someone is, oh, I saw how you just did that over there at your cubicle, and I've learned a thing.

All my artist friends used to tell me it was great to work at home for some amount of time, but then you'd get stale. And then they like to work in an artist bullpen with a bunch of artists. They could look over and see what brush you're using. That's pretty cool. I never thought of doing it that way. And so there's like a casual learning you don't get that I'm worried about. I'm a little worried about, I don't want to say mental health issues.

That sounds like I would know enough about that to be wise. But it's nice to know if you're walking past an employee and you can tell they're having a bad day, you can be an effective, you know, human and manager and help them out. Then you might not get that opportunity virtually. Yeah. Which can have some other negative, like company downstream effects. Like they randomly quit because you didn't even know there was a problem that maybe you could have helped with. Yeah, lots of challenges in this new world, but I agree a thousand percent.

Letting people work from wherever is just, it's amazing how much more we're all getting done. Yep. No, all those things are, this is another case where the exact principles you talked about earlier apply here, right? It's, okay, what are the things that really matter? And you've identified several of them, right? The things that came by default when the structure was up where we're all in the same room, what are the things that you really want to preserve or try to retain? and then you have to game design new systems to make those come to place, right?

So, you know, we had part of what we did here, and what I try to do is everybody presents something for 20 minutes or 15, 20 minutes of that is they, as a useful thing or insight or personal little tool or quirk, that they could share with everybody else. And it could just be something interesting like, hey, I know kung fu, which is literally the case for one of the guys here. It's just told us stories about his Kung Fu trading. It's like, okay, that was cool, right? Or another one that was, we use, you know, we have our own prototyping tools and things we've been using. But another one showed us how to use Figma and the Figma jam, which is a pretty popular design tool now, which was like, oh, wow, this is like, was a little intimidating to me when I first looked at it. But he walked me through the things. I'm like, oh, this is awesome.

And I'm literally like, but right before this call, was like sketching out a new board game on there. that way it was not much faster and easier than I was going to be able to do before. So these little, you know, kind of forcing function, you know, it's not going to happen as automatically. So you have to like push to make those things happen a little bit more and be more conscious with checking in with everybody, hey, you know, what are you most excited about right now? What are you most concerned about right now? And we do that every week with everybody.

You know, I weirdly, and this can go outside of just work to, I don't remember what year it was, but I realized I had a lot of virtual friends. They were real friends, but they just didn't live in my town. And I decided to hold what I called Luke Con. And it was a convention in New Orleans that was just me and friends I wanted to catch up with. And the original plan was that everyone had to put together a 20-minute PowerPoint on their life and what's going on with them and any struggles they're having. And then we would all try to help them with it. Oh, that's wonderful.

A much more casual thing, but it absolutely did the function. Like everybody got time with everybody. Everybody was completely open with what's going on with their life. And there were some pretty heavy stuff discussed. But that was the point. So you can do that exact type of like reconnect because we're going to have a bunch of virtual friends here shortly too. If you've never had friends that you've never met that live outside of where you live now, you're going to. Right.

Yeah. And it's that structure and systems design that helps to build those relationships. You know, it's actually one of the most powerful things in my, in the course. I teach, which I picked up from another group and course that I was in, which is just like exactly sort of what you talked about, which we call kind of like a mastermind roundtable where everybody has opportunity to like say what's going on for them, present the problem that they're facing that they want help with. Everybody asks like pushes the specific kind of clarifying questions because most of the time

people think they have a problem and really there's a deeper problem or some other frame there. And then people can collectively all work to help it. And just having that like structure and support and support and the right culture you create. It's amazing what you can get through, like very deep personal things or design problems or whatever is a very powerful thing. Again, with people I've never, ever met in real life, but we now have very deep connections and are able to help each other through a lot of things. So I recommend that kind of process very much.

Yeah. I agree. All right. We've gotten pretty, I mean, I love this stuff. So whatever. It's my podcast. So ha. Everybody has to listen. No, or not. But the, the, I want to circle back because I think I would be very remiss if we didn't talk about the largest game that either of us ever worked on that we both worked on, but not at the same time. Yeah. Which is Bakugan. You were the original designer of Bakugan and became part of its rocket ship success, not just as a designer, but also doing a lot of the marketing setup. And they brought me in as the B-team for Bakugan Battle Planet many, many years later for the relaunch. And it was a pretty amazing incredible experience.

It remains a pretty amazing incredible experience. So maybe let's kick off with kind of how you got into that and what that experience was like because it's, you know, for those that don't know Bakugan, it's, you know, it's just like a massive global brand and has every, walk to any Target or Walmart or Toy Store, you will find it. Cool toys, cool games, really fun project. But maybe you can talk a little bit about how this came into your life

and we can banter on designing toy games for kids. Sure. Most importantly, it was in the movie 21 Jump Streets. Anyway, so back to like trying to do new things. When I sold Sabretooth, Ryan Datsy and I started a consulting firm. And our consulting firm was called the core market. And our target was, our slogan was, we speak geek so you don't have to. And the goal was to go outside of the traditional core hobby market and help come

that we think could do well by reaching the geek market, reach the geek market. And so we did work with a bunch of companies, and we ended up doing some work with Mattel, which was great. And then Ryan got a job as the CEO of the CCP, which does Eve Online in Iceland. So it was just me for a little bit. And then Matt Forebeck, God bless him. Actually, Matt Forbeck is the way I got into Mattel. It was after this. The lady I worked with at Mattel started a company doing consulting for toy companies. And she put me in touch with Spin Master. And Spin Master was in this very unique situation.

They had a completed animation at TV show. They had tried to sell a game based on what was in the TV show. So technically, I'm the second game designer for Bach Gone, and I think you're the third. So eventually, this got in touch with Spin Master, and they had already designed the game for Baccagon based on the animation. And it didn't do very well. They knew their pieces were cool. I didn't know if I wanted to take this project on.

Jeannie, the lady I worked with, who was amazing. She sent me some of the toys, and I brought the toys to Gen Con. These toys are like marbles that pop open into little monsters when they roll over metal. There's a little magnet that triggers them. So I brought these things to Jen Con, and I just left them on a table at a bar I was in with some friends. and I saw how they couldn't put them down. They were the fidgety fun of these things is so over the top that I realized I had to go work on this game.

So the first thing I did was I gave a presentation about what was wrong with the current game. And no one likes to do that to another game designer's game. That's just not cool. But there were some sort of things you've learned if you've worked in collectible games that the original game just didn't do very well. And all I was doing was pointing out where I thought they could make better and that was my job. And then when I left, they called me back and said,

we agree with everything. Can you design the game the way it should be? Now, I had to design a game that matched pre-existing animation, which was not easy, and still have it makes sense. I should go back one tiny step here and say

that in America, you can't make animation that focuses on toys. It's called the He-Man Law. There's a long story. In Japan, they don't understand why you would ever make animation if you couldn't. So this was animation that definitely featured toys as the function, but the rules on the animation weren't 100% on screen all the time,

and that was their way to sort of get around it. So I had to make a game that made sense in that space. And it was just fantastic. The team at Spin Masters was amazing and intelligent in ways that I had never seen before, but they didn't know what I know. It was the perfect job for a consultant. Yep. I feel the exact same way.

They're incredibly smart, passionate, dedicated. The consulting for Spin Master, I consulted with them on a different project before Baccagon. And it was the first time I did. I had consulted and worked deeply inside like another big company. And it like restored my faith in big companies. Just a very great group of people. And they know what they know super well. They're passionate about making something.

good and they know what they don't know, which is exactly our skill set. Yes, yes. And I felt like when I would lobby for something, they would go my way about 90% of the time. And the 10% they didn't, they were right. Right? It wasn't. And obviously, they're right about lots of stuff we didn't talk about. I don't want to say, like, I made 90% of the decisions.

That's not true. But in my little realm, and these are decisions like making a product that you can only buy at a certain retailer. Like that used to be a big no-no for a collectible. games. You would never make a magic booster you could only buy at a specific chain of hobby stores. Right? They wouldn't do that back in the day. But they were right. That was something you did in the toy industry, and this was a toy. So they were right to do that. But yeah, I did so much there with that product. It was an 80 or 90 hour a week job. It was just me. I trained their

customer service staff. I designed their website. I even wrote one of their TV ads. Just one. only marketing TV I worked on. I wrote a big how to play video. I mean, basically everything that touched the consumer, except for TV advertising, either went through me or I did from beginning to end. That should have been a four-person job looking back on it. Oh, oh yes. No, I have a team helping me work on this project now. And they, like, I have not, I would, not, trying to do all of this myself is, would be crazy. It's like a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of work. It's amazing. So, kudos to you, sir. Well, to be fair, at the time, they were, I don't know, the 10th biggest toy company,

I'm making numbers up. But by the time Bacob was done, they were the third biggest behind Mattel and Hasbro. So they were growing at a speed where you couldn't be too slow, right? You had to make decisions and be quick about it. So that helped me be able to get stuff done and not have to worry about lots of back and forth. Yeah. But my favorite part of this job real quick was I got to do, I designed a mall tour for them.

And this crew went on the road, and they were like in 56 different malls over 56 different weekends. And in between, they were stopping at Boys and Girls Clubs. And it was an amazing event. It was amazing to design it. Very rewarding. But I would fly to like one out of every four, one a month. And, you know, I'd sign autographs. And that was all fun.

But watching, like, every time someone would get an autograph, I'd ask them a question. So it was this massive, like, kind of. customer know your customer thing, right? I don't know what eight year olds are into, like intrinsically. I know that. So I basically every weekend conducted 1,400, like, interviews of my players, of every type and their parents. And it really gave me a good sense of that customer.

So I felt like I could really deliver what they were looking for in a game, which was super fun. Well, that's a perfect story because the thing I was going to interrupt your story with was exactly that, right? How do you design for someone like that? Someone that's not in your target audience. Someone that's not you, right? You don't know well, right? I don't have an eight-year-old boy. I was an eight-year-old boy, but that was long enough ago that I'm not really holding to that memory as a guide as much. But what is it? So I'd love to hear your, you know, so you were able to do actual in-person interviews. I know we've done, you know, the kind of focus group testing where you got that one-way

mirror thing, which is often to watch. Also really painful. and the kids can't pick up the basic version of your game that they should obviously know. I'm sorry, no. Super brutal. It's super brutal. I wish I want every designer, if you have the opportunity to do this, you should because it's incredibly powerful learning lessons. Also, boy, oh boy, you're going to want to drink after.

But then specifically, so what do you think appeals? The other thing that's a challenge is when you're trying to design games, like the difference between a six-year-old boy and an eight-year-old boy is pretty significant or one-eight-year-old boy to another is pretty significant. What do you look for to succeed in that space? What do you think are the keys to do designing well for that category? So in that product, I set a very clear goal of like who I wanted to play the game well, who I wanted to play the game correctly, and who I wanted to have fun with their product. And those, you know, were basically six, nine, and twelve. So I wanted the 12-year-olds to be playing perfectly

and be playing competitively. I wanted the 9-year-olds to wish they could play as well as the 12-year-olds, but be playing correctly. And I wanted, like, seven-year-olds to be having fun with their game and experiencing the core idea of what was fun. But if they were making up their own rules, I was okay with that. But I wanted them to at least have the same basic play pattern.

So that was my sort of thought one, right? Thought two, I'm very fortunate. My wife's a teacher, and she teaches fourth and fifth grade, which is almost exactly the middle of that curve. So I could ask her, what level of math is okay here, what level of reading is okay here. And then the physical limitations. How many cards can someone hold in their hand at this age? How much can they remember? How much can they understand what like an atomic rule is, a rule that sort of hangs out in the back that you have to just remember is there? which is very little, by the way. They need the rules to be triggered by events. So, you know, if it's not in their hand or happening on the table, I told myself, then it shouldn't be in the game if possible. Yeah, so you have to physically look at the thing that's then going to make this new event, game event happen.

There can't be just an esoteric rule I have to pull from or remember there's another card that I'm not paying attention to that's affecting the thing right now. Yeah, and worse yet, a card that my opponent has that I have to pay attention. to, right? That's right out. Yeah. As a general rule, you try to make as few of these as possible, even in games for adults, but, you know, we have some tolerance for it. But there's, there's, there's, there's, there's a mental tax that weighs pretty quickly and pretty heavily on everybody. Yeah. So once I sort of set that out, and then I had the limitations of the TV show.

So I had to translate what was happening on that to a core, you know, I usually start my game designs, but by saying, what does it look like from 20 feet away? What's the emotional moment at the table. What's the emotional involvement of people during, it's not their turn? You know, if it's magic at the gathering and you're watching for 20 feet away, it's very quiet. There's people thinking very hard, right? For this game, I needed it to be a game where people could scream things out loud from the show before they took their turn. I knew I wanted the most exciting moment to be when the ball opened. So when the ball opens, if at the right time, you either win or it triggers a battle. And I didn't want to put too much

outside of that. So I limited the number of cards in your deck as we normally think of it in a CCG to three, and I just said, you get to keep them. These are your three cards. Play them when you want. I didn't want to introduce shuffling. If a kid had a favorite card, I wanted to make sure they could always play with it. Right. So a lot of these are more marketing style decisions, but also experience decisions and emotion decisions. So that's sort of how I set the guidelines of what I wanted to do. And then the game design sort of naturally flew from that. And then I had to sort of tell myself, what's the level of this card plus this card does something crazy? And how much do I want that to be how you win versus am I actually good at rolling this ball?

Which had to always be important. These games are called skill and action games. There's a skill, a physical skill that had to be essentially dominant. If you were terrible at the physical skill, you should always lose. if you're roughly equal, then the cards should make the difference. But if you're terrible at rolling, you should lose. And I had a very strong theory about teaching kids games based on the network effects, where the most important thing to do is teach kids how to play one way,

the correct way to play the game so that when two kids met, they could play. So I beat my head on the table. I said the first thing I have to do is teach them to play right. The second thing we need to do is teach them how to meet other people to play with. And then the last thing we do is make a competitive version, like a pro tour of a level of competition that was high. So by the time we got to doing a large four nationals that had a final in New York City kind of event series, we were several years in. But our champion was a 12-year-old who was also the three-point shot champion for the country and his

age or the runner-up was, right? And it was exactly who I wanted to be winning this game. It was someone with extreme skill and extreme smarts. So I still managed to make a game for 12-year-olds that rewarded the skill in smarts. But there was lots of eight-year-olds and nine-year-olds who were just super excited to be at the event. I know you run events like this too. There's always like something fun for everybody to do, right? We did this thing.

Yeah, we'd have we'd have, we'd have. not just like the game itself, but the skill shot, little skill shot challenges and all the different little ways to engage and have fun. And because you're crafting, again, an experience at the event. So it's,

it's, there's, there was so much gold in that, uh, that I, I hope people were, were paying attention to, right?

This sort of, what are these key emotional moments and marketing moments, these highlights that you want to make sure to hit where that's like, what's the experience at the table? What's the highlight emotional moment of there? What's it look like from a table distance? what's going to attract people to want to pay attention to this how are people going to share it what is skill is being tested how are people teaching connecting like all that stuff is so critical all like

the series of questions is just so important to make conscious and and and bring uh and bring to bear it's it's really funny too just because as you're going through it i'm just thinking about how i've addressed all these separate challenges and problems when i said okay i saw your game and i was like okay this is awesome and it's got a lot of cool things and then okay what what do we do like revamp revamping the items. And I was explicitly told, like, we want a version that ages up so that the people who played the original can also now be 14, 15 and still want to play, as well as these younger kids, which was like, okay, well, I can't just have one way to play. If we're going to have to, if I need, if I need six and 15, there's zero chance that's going to work. And so, so I had to address it, I approach a really interesting thing that way. So we had the core version of the game, which is identical. And then the, it's a lot of the, layer of the TCG mechanic on top of it where you can also play cards and have, you know, kind of a more more standard resource system type of thing, which was a really fascinating design challenge to work through and make, make function. But it's a, it's really,

to be clear, way harder than mine. Like, way harder. It is hard to take a beloved thing and then update it without upsetting people and then try to expand out because every time one of these things gets done, you always wants to expand out. I mean, that is. super hard. Yeah. No, it was years, years of work. Taking something, yeah, taking something that's super beloved and trying to make it, you know, expanded and new is without tape breaking away from the heart of it. And that's, and for me, that also comes down to that exact question, right? Like, what's the heart of the experience? What is the thing? Which is exactly what you identified for Baccagon. It's that rolling and opening the ball where you want it, when you want it, and having that

pop moment be the most exciting thing. And that was the same core that I identified. And it's like, okay, as long as this is still at the heart of what's going on. You're good. Yeah. We're good. And it's true for any game that anybody wants to expand, right? So again, for people we're talking about Baccon specifically because it's a shared experience, but it's true when I make ascension expansions or anything else, I need to know what the core

of the game is so I can make the 15th, 16th set that has all kinds of crazy things like pirates now or tactics, miniatures, or whatever. And I need to know what the heart is. And then I can take people in different directions. And so it's true for anything anyone wants to do out there. Or even if you're making a new game. you can take very often you're taking two things that already exist and combining them together and seeing the interaction between those two is now this new heart that you're now need to build

around. So it's so important to focus on. And you know, I thought, I think one of the unique challenges for Baccagon or any of these sort of toy-based TV collectible games that you work on is the challenge that toys are their own industry and they have their own sort of rules and flow that I was not prepared for. I remember the reviews when the first Baccagon came out were like, this game is great. When my burn came out, this game is great, and what's great about it is it's really cheap to get into

because the economy had just taken a dive, and it was like $5 to buy your kid something your kid wants at the store, right? And it was this callback to classic play patterns of marbles, and wow, we love this marbly game. And then season two, the spinmaster gives me toys that don't roll. And I'm like, okay, okay, I can roll with this. I can make a game about marbles with things that don't roll. And, you know, that's what I love about, what I hated about that, it was a huge challenge.

And I felt like that's not what this brand is. But then what I loved about it is that, again, they were right. That's what toys do. And it was a challenge I had never expected. You know, I don't know how you feel about ascension expansions. But when I work on a CCG and I'm in expansion three or four, it does feel a little more of the samey. This did not let me feel more of the samey. There's a triangle.

Okay. Yeah. So I love the challenge. And their drawings are fantastic. Yeah. I had the upside of this is one case where my job was easier in the sense that I saw what happened during your cycle through it. So all of the curve balls or knot balls that they threw at you. And so I knew for sure I had to build a system that could support like anything, like anything.

And so I specifically went through an exercise, a creator actually like, okay, let me think of all the craziest things I could possibly think that they would do like that are ridiculous. And then see how my game engine would handle it before the first set releases so that I'm like prepared to like deal with it. And that was I was very glad that that work went in up front because it was they threw a lot of crazy things at us. Yeah, that that was smart. I was not that smart. I was only able to do it because I saw what happened to you. You see, when you come from card games, where you're like, how many magic expansions are there?

They're all still, even if the cards are wildly different, two and a half by three and a half inch pieces of paper with art in one spot and things in a spot. But they've never had to change that because it's a core game and that's what people expect from a core game. Having your fundamental unit of interaction with the game, change in size and shape on you is is fun. Yep.

Yeah, it's great. And I think it's the thing that unifies us in a lot, well, one of many things, but we both love that, that challenge, right? We love that new, interesting creative puzzle. And you approach something like that, not as a, oh, my God, why me? But, oh, boy, like, okay, this is going to be hard. Like, let's get in. Like, let's see what's next.

And I think that that instinct is just such a powerful and useful one. if it's maybe a little bit weird and masochistic at times. But it is really valuable to be able to solve hard problems and make really cool things that people haven't made before. I get very frustrated when I hear game designers say things like, oh, you can't make a multiplayer game without chip taking or something that sounds like, I don't know, like they've just, they've seen the past and that's all they can imagine. Yeah.

You know, that has always, always like me. And I just like to challenge people with, well, if someone could, what would it look like? And that little sentence makes people go, wait a minute, well, maybe you could. Right. And if nothing else, the exercise is super valuable. Like I really, I always encourage, actually one of the, one of the best semi-tangential, but that's appropriately so. It's a great creative exercise from the book, a whack on the side of the head,

which was recommended to me by Mark Rosewater, who's head of design at magic. And he, it's a, if you feel like you're creatively stuck, just arbitrarily give yourself any connection point, right? Okay, how would you play this underwater? And then just like, okay, what TCG that you play underwater? So I need the cards to be some kind of plastic and maybe there's actually buoyancy to different ones so that you could actually like use the height of them to be a big deal and you put things physically on top of other cards to stack them to drop them lower and that, right? And just like, just, you know, start it down that path right now. But like you can see where you start to create these like cool new ideas. And maybe that game's never going to get made. But then it will spawn something.

where you're like, oh, okay, wait, maybe there's one where vertical positioning of a game of a TCG would be really cool. It would have a great table presence. So maybe there's just like a little tower you play on. You know, like that could be something, right? And so just forcing yourself to think outside of what you would think of as a normal constraint or connect to some literally random thing can break you out of these creative ruts in a really powerful way. Yeah, I got to tell you, I'm looking at all the 3D printing going on now, and I can't wait to see some of the 3D printer enthusiast make games. right now if I start a game, and I try not to do this, but I always do, if I want a card in the game or a thing that you hold in your hand that does a thing,

I go on to my program of choice and I make a two and a half by three and a half inch square, and I write things down on it because it fits into a card sleeve. It is a default that is not going to get me to that place that a 3D printer might with with something you hold in your hand that does a thing, right? So I'm excited to see where this goes because they don't think like I do with the people who are into 3D printing. Yeah. No, that's that's a really great point. Right.

You look at not just your constraints of like thought patterns from the things you've done, but also the constraints of the tools that you default to. Those things matter a ton. And I was, I forget who I was talking about this recently. I don't know if it was on the podcast or just a random design chat, but I had a, you know, I believe that like games and art evolve in parallel. to technology. Like it is always the new thing that we are technologically capable of doing that creates this new generation of games and art and fun, you know, so whether that be the plastic ball

that can pop open into a monster, which is a cool, just a cool toy that created the whole Bakugan phenomenon or, you know, Soulforge Fusion, the fact that we can make digitally algorithmically generated decks that could print as one of the kinds, which you couldn't do, you know, six years ago. And, or the fact that there's a tablet and that lets you play ascension on an app or any of a variety of things. Those things suddenly create whole new categories of games and whole new categories of experiences that then re-inspired new creative directions and then create the next thing. And I just love that process. And so it's always really valuable as a designer to think, okay, what are the new tools for play and new technologies that could lead to these kinds of interesting and crazy new experiences? Yeah, one of the things I think a joint friend of ours, John Zinser used to do all the time, and I had to stop because of COVID.

But he would go to, I think, the printer shows in China, where printers would just show off whatever they could make. And then he would come back with game thoughts. You know, oh, you know what? We can make these weird foam core four color things that are embossed and flip open and do whatever, right? Like, it means you got to stay at the front of, like, what's possible. and sometimes when you get locked into the run of the tools you use, you don't ever get exposed to it. I was really impressed with what you've done with SoulForge,

what Fantasy Flight did with KeyForge with Richard Garfield. I just feel like the people that are really pushing what a printer can do and who says it needs to be printed, but what a thing can do, right? They're always going to be, I agree, they're going to make fun stuff. Yeah, well, and that's where, and we're pushing that boundary too, like across the threshold, right? So Soul Ford Fusion, not only does, do we have a one-of-a-kind deck physically that you can play, but you can scan the QR code on that deck to put it into your online account and play

online. And we have our organized play system that links the two. So your hobby store match can level. And when you win, you not only do you get XP, but your deck gets XP and levels up. And the same is true if you play it online, the exact same deck that's only yours that no one will ever have. And it's like all these cool things. It's like, again, nobody could even conceive of, you know, just not that long ago. And so it's really fun to play around in this space and what new things are going to get unlocked by, you know, all sorts of new technologies.

It's like, okay, like just a great, it's a great area for those out there that are thinking about, you know, what kind of what the next big game is. Don't make, don't just try to make the last game, make, you know, think what's the thing is that couldn't have existed before. Or specifically, there's something that you're passionate about or something that you have a unique experience with that you can then bring into the field, right? whether that be categorically like, you know, wingspan and birdwatching as a game category, which I would never have thought of because it's just not my thing, you know, but or being this,

you know, a technology that people are excited about or if you're the 3D printer enthusiast out there or a marketing channel, right? You happen to be really, really good on Twitch and building a game that interacts with Twitch and players can actually interact or that looks really good at streaming and how that, what does a streaming game,

game built streaming for a tabletove game built for streaming first look like you know people who nail that are going to are going to crush it right now and and so maybe the next one is in whatever the metaverse or who knows yeah and don't be surprised if your idea if you're if you're too far in the front don't be surprised if at the end of this you have a hard drive full of ideas that didn't get made and then don't be surprised of a decade later or someone else makes one of them and they didn't steal it from you it just they they caught up but man I have a lot of those types of games on my hard drive that I was super excited to work on. They didn't get made, not surprising, doesn't really bother me.

But there are some that stick in my craw. Like, I still think that would be fun. There was a category for a short time of DVD games, games where you put a DVD in some quiz games, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I spent some time figuring out what kind of technology is inside a DVD and inside of most DVD players to try to make this

this game in the short period of time where there was internet connected DVD players. And man, I got to tell you, there's some fun stuff you can do with YouTube as the thing that pushes game content into a party game. But yeah, I was just a little bit ahead

and then the whole space that it was there fell apart. But it is in my head. I was like, that's that was fun. That is a really good idea. Just like YouTube clips and memes. as like a as a as a as a game category that you would just link to various different things or be able to use that as your as your game piece like you know imagine something like a like a like a like a code names or dixit kind of thing where you're but you're speaking in in youtube clips yeah yeah or like a what's that game that richard field did that's like uh what are what are you thinking i think what are you thinking yeah yeah so what were you thinking is classic right you just say all right the question is you know who would just in rather have over to dinner.

And then you just get four YouTube clips of crazy people from YouTube. You all guess, well, I don't know. It's just into the DMX guy or just to be into like the explosive dog that falls down steps. I don't know. Oh, man. That's really funny. And you could like now you could do it too where like would it would auto, like, it would auto.

Like you could have a, you could have a, you could have as a node auto generate just random URLs or like huge subsets of these things that you would then get access to. And the game would be different every single time. played. You just have these things on your phone. Like, okay, well, I guess we'll try this one. This is pretty weird. Yep. They're all just keyworded to like this, this clip has a person and an animal and action. And then the game would just have to reach out and say, all right, show me four people. Wow. Right. There you go. Internet. Go make that game. Yeah. There you go. Hits. Just delivering hits here. All right. Well, I think, you know, we're running here. I know it's late

where you are and I, you know, you and I can talk and continue this for at least twice as long. So I will, I'll kind of try to bring us to a close here since we've given a million dollar a deal away. I feel like people who've stayed here long enough or have gotten their value. If you have any other sort of tips you want to give, I know your current project is still in more incubation stage, but any other things you want to direct people to, they want to find more of your stuff or any just tips for somebody out there that's looking to follow in your footsteps and kind of get into the industry, anything, closing remarks of any kind here. You know, the tip I would give you is there are a lot of jobs in the gaming industry that are

not game designer and they are great, great jobs. Working at a game company means you're going to help bring games to life and maybe you move on from that job to something else. But a whole lot of people I know in this industry who are game designers now weren't when they started. They started in marketing. They started in trade shows. You'd be really surprised how if you have a skill in project management, how that can work into an amazing career in the game industry. And it is the whole industry that's good to work in. Maybe distribution is tough. There's not much creativity at use in distribution. That's more of a block and tackle kind of part

of our market. But it is a place for everyone. And don't let anyone tell you there isn't a place for you because there can be if you want there to be. Well said. Well said. Luke, thank you so much for taking the time here. I always love our conversations and it's always learned something every time. And I'm glad we finally got to share this with my audience. And I hope I will see you in person again.

But either way, we're having another one of these calls soon because I miss it. Yeah, awesome. I agree. And thanks for having me and thanks for listening. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platforms, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listen to reviews and shares make a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you.

I've taken the insights from these interviews along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast. Think like a game design. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring you. 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 soul.