Think Like A Game Designer - Matt Place — From Pro Magic Player to Digital TCG Innovator, Embracing Randomness, Teaching the Fun, and Mastering the Autobattler Genre (#22)

Episode Date: November 30, 2020

Matt and I both started our careers as Magic Pro Players. Since then he’s garnered more experience in digital trading card games than anyone I know. Matt has worked for Wizards of the Coast, Dire Wolf, and Blizzard on games including Magic Online, Hearthstone, and Eternal. Matt is currently working on his own auto-battler game called Story Book Brawl. I’m excited to sit down with one of my oldest friends in the industry and talk about game design. 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 Matt Place. As you'll hear in this episode, Matt and I have shockingly overlapping backgrounds. We both started in gaming as magic pro players, then spent some time as poker pro players,

then tried to do something serious, quote unquote, with our lives, me law school and Matt in physics, before getting a job in the game industry and starting to work on trading card games. Matt has more experience working on digital trading card games than anybody I know. He worked on Magic Online, Harstone, Eternal, the precursor to what ended up becoming Roontera and is now working and started his own company to work on an auto-battler game, which we also get into. We deep dive into tons of fascinating stuff. We talk a lot about randomness and the value of randomness and how you should be thinking about

using randomness in your games, both positively and negatively and what the drawbacks are to different versions of randomness. We talk about the lessons that he learned from working with some of the world-class teams at Blizzard and at Riot and at Wizards of the Coast. We talk about the entire Autobattler format and the things that he's bringing to the table with his upcoming game storybook brawl. We talk about the process of tutorials and what tutorials need to be doing to be successful. We talk about the importance of Twitch and online streaming and how you can make your game valuable and better as a streaming audience and the importance of streaming audiences for modern day games and tons more. Matt and I have been friends for a very long time and one of the reasons I was excited to have.

him on the podcast is because we always have great deep dive conversations about design. And so being able to share that with all of you is something I'm very excited to do. So I will stop talking and let you get to Matt Place. Welcome. I'm here with Matt Place. Matt, it's great to talk with you, buddy. Good to talk with you. How's it going, Justin? It's going great. It's going great. You and I have known each other for, I was trying to think how long it's actually been. It's easily 20 years now, probably more like... Yes, I would say 24 years, actually. 23 years, maybe.

So this is going to be great because I always like to start these podcasts with the kind of origin story or something. You've been people, you always bring on people that are sort of hugely successful in the industry. And what is that brought them here and how people can figure out that story? And our origin stories have some significant overlap. So why don't you kind of kick it off there? And we'll bounce around to the very. topics of mutual interest. Cool. My origin, a lot like yours, starts in Magic the Gathering.

So I have a fond memory of, I'm at my house and my brother, Dan Berwick, who has also worked on Magic. He calls me up many, many years ago. This is more than 25 years ago, and says they have Dungeons and Dragons with cards at the comic book store. And I knew I had to play this game. I was young enough I didn't have a car, so I couldn't get to the comic book store, but I knew I had to play this game. And, of course, once we started playing, we were all in right away. And so we quickly, we went from basically our play group from the like, we're trading and we're kind of casual, quickly into the competitive. So later that year, we went to the very first world's tournament for magic. I got to witness Zach Dolan, the coolest guy in the world at

the time to me, win world, super fun. First time I interacted with Mark Rosewater. So right away, we jumped in. That was a few months after we started, which was 1994 June, legend set had come out. But yeah, so we went all in, started becoming competitive players just like you. And yeah, it consumed our lives. We were all in right away. Yep, that experience of just having something that becomes the main force of your life as a game. And I remember when I first had that realization where, you know, it was like, wow, like magic has completely dictated the course of my life. And at first I was like, that's pretty weird.

that I owned it, you know, and it's like for when, you know, there's this, this cultural pressure behind games aren't serious. Games aren't real. You're spending your time on games. That's not, you know, that's not a legitimate thing. It's, you know, fun as a kid, but not a legitimate thing to be spending your time on as an adult. And one of the nice things about playing competitively and sort of winning money and traveling around the world is it sort of gives you that initial sense of legitimacy. And then from there, there's still a lot of resistance, but you can kind of make that push from being a player to being a designer and creator, which I certainly find more fulfilling in the long run as well.

So what was your path like going from pro player and super invested gamer into the professional life that you have now? So it is funny how much overlap we have, Justin. I did take a detour, but I don't know that you took. I did the poker thing for a while. So professional magic player for only about two and a half years and then decided I was going to jump into poker when the poker boom occurred. What was that late 90s, early 2000s? And did that for a while. That got boring.

That got, you know, repetitive in a way that wasn't doing it for me. Yeah, I had the exact same experience. There was that window where everybody that was good at magic and anybody that was any good at games, you know, poker was exploding. You know, the world poker tour on TV. You had tons of cash games happening. You had the online play for like tons of money. And it was like an irresistible allure, especially because of that time, you know, the relative money involved in what you could win from poker compared to magic was just not close. Right.

But I exactly had the same experience as you, which is I found the gameplay to be very boring. Like correct play was very dull most of the time, especially if you're playing online where you need to be multi-tabling to really make a good return on your investment. And it was very, you know, kind of a very static sort of play, which I didn't find very fulfilling. And, you know, in the long run, I really had this deep sense of dissatisfaction, which I eventually identified as the reason, the only reason I'm making money now is because I'm taking it from people stupider than me. Like, I'm not actually adding any value to the world at all. And my entire feeling about the day was dictated like, was I up that day, then I felt

pretty good. Was I down that day? I felt really bad. and it was nothing, the world was not better for me being in it. Right. It's not creating and adding something to the world. It's literally just taking from this person that you might know personally, he's down money, you're up money.

Right. Right. And so, yeah, I just found that to be just this very just unpleasant thing. And in magic, it's funny because you could, you could make an argument for the same thing, right, as a magic pro player that you're sort of in that same boat. But it was very different, at least at the beginning for me, because one, there was this very creative process like of building decks and like there's there's an intrinsic design aspect to it it's one of the reasons why I recommend that people who want to get into design like you know play it doesn't

have to be magic but playing a collectible card game because you really do have this experience being able to design games within games when you're building and crafting these experiences and seeing how things move and seeing how things tick and so there was that and there was just this more sort of social intrinsically social aspect to it for me. But yeah, that was the big push for me in the long run, because I took another detour to law school because I thought I had to do something like that that was serious, serious.

Right, right. But then, you know, eventually got my way back to game design as something that was really fulfilling and scratch that itch that I had of really loving games and wanting to make things that made people happy. Yeah, it's funny how much overlap we have. You know, I had this serious endeavor as well going into school for physics.

and then, you know, but that was early on in my pro-magic career. I won a tournament for $255 back in the day. And I was like, why am I going to college? I could just make it play a good. Little than I know. Rich. Yeah, $0.15, man, 18-year-old with $255 in his pocket. It's pretty good.

But it's interesting, too, to look back and like you're talking about kind of the design lessons you can kind of dive into with creative games like magic. There's a lot of psychology lessons, too, from playing poker. You see these in Magic 2, but like the randomness of both of the games and how much that, how powerful it is, right? Like I'm sure you had the same experience, but going to a poker room and staying there for sometimes, you know, 18 hours, overnight, whatever. And so are these other nine people that are the table, right?

And we're all just like kind of glued to the table. What's going on that this is so enthralling and that it's keeping us there, right? And it's interesting the lessons that come from that. They're not all virtuous, right? It's not because the game is great. You know, we're both talking about how it's born. boring. But just the randomness pulling you in and how that can be a tool that you can use for, you know, a lot of ways, evil or good in game design, right? The whole loopbox thing is obviously

very tied to that. But there's also a lot of fun in like opening a present, right? There's good ways to do that in a game too where you're giving people something fun to experience that's unknown that they're looking forward to without it being a, you know, money grubby or negative experience, like I would argue poker is for sure. Yeah. it's interesting. Yeah, so let's deep dive into that. Because this is a hot button topic for people, and there are really valuable lessons to learn, right?

Where is variance a tool for your designs? How do you use it as a tool in a way that encourages your employers to be engaged and excited and having a good time? How to use it in a way that's ethical and not sort of just abusing these psychological principles? You know, I think let's dive into this a little bit. So, you know, I've talked about this some publicly before, of I'll kind of teed off with what I have used as my my my my kind of loadstone the

high end principle and we can get into tactics too but the idea that you know if somebody were to look back on the time that they spent on your game and be very happy with that time that that if they can in from that perspective not the I'm trapped in the heat of the moment and I'm not you know I'm not able to leave but that they can look back from a future standpoint and say, wow, that was time well spent. I really enjoyed that. That's a really powerful touchstone to be like, all right, if you're not meeting that bar,

then you're doing it wrong. And if you are meeting that bar, then you've got room to play. Yeah, I love that. That's a great way to look at it. Looking back, how does the person feel about their time spent? It makes a lot of sense to me. And when I think about that for poker,

a lot of the answer for me is, you know, playing casually, playing for fun with a group. You know, it's almost the D&D experience, is the positive memories of like, oh, yeah, we used to get together and play poker. And not as much my, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of hours, repeating kind of the same decisions, right? The, you know, Rosewater talks about kind of the crust of diving into a new game versus the inner bits, right? He uses the donut as the example. And, yeah, poker has that problem of like, there's so much to learn in the beginning.

That was fun. But then you've got these hundreds of hours that are not as fun. Why am I staying there? And it's a lot of the negative replayable randomness that, you know, obviously, like we said, shares some of the negativity with loopboxes. I think one of the ways to talk about the positivity is the randomness gives you kind of the unknown in a way that you are solving new puzzles, right? Magic is a phenomenal example of this of what is my starting hand, right?

How many lands do I have? Which land am I going to play first? The fact that I've played literally tens of thousands of hours of magic and I still have new puzzles to solve when I play a new format or even when I play the deck that I've played many times before is a testament to the power of randomness, right? The fact that I have a lot of fun playing magic to this day and to use your kind of metric of when I look back, how do I feel about playing magic? I have a lot of fun playing that game, even though it's highly random. As opposed to a loopbox game on the phone where I'm going to have a lot of disappointment if I've spent a bunch of money,

and I'm like, that game burnt out for me and I've got all this money invested. It doesn't feel good at all. there's a lot of interesting, challenging, unintuitive lessons, I think, from randomness as well, right? As a new game designer that I did not understand. So, you know, talking about my origin a little bit, I did get back into Magic a little bit. My rating was still high enough that I could play in some of the events back in like 2003. So I ran into Richard Garfield in Berlin at Worlds. And I just happened to say to him, hey, what should I do to get a job at Wizards? And that kind of created a domino effect where I actually did get an internship there.

And I look back on that, and there's so much I didn't know, right? I'm sure you have the same experience when you first got into game design. It's amazing how many assumptions we have that are wrong. And one of the big ones, I think, for a lot of people who are very smart and want to be game designers, is this assumption that randomness is bad, right? Or the randomness that they see in like, you know, obviously Harstone, the RNG complaints, etc. It's like, hey, can we do a game like Magic or Harstone without the randomness? And I think that's a super interesting question, right?

how do you do that? And so far I found you can't, right? Because the replayability is so tied to the randomness giving me not only cool new experiences I didn't predict, but also these positions that I'm in inside of a game where it's like, oh, I haven't specifically been in this position. So it's a new puzzle for me to solve. Right. So, yeah, I want to pull apart two key principles, I think, from what you're talking about, right?

One, I think, is this idea of the learning curve of a game and how randomness fits into that learning curve because I believe that the very fundamental there are many reasons we play games but the fundamental one the reason that distinguishes games from pretty much every other art form is that we learn from simulation that we learn from trying things in a safe space and being able to to gather skills

as we grow and as we as we are exposed to it right that's why you know animals play that's why children are play that's why it's where games are part of that process because I can experience and learn and grow and then once I internalize those lessons, the games then become boring and they become unfulfilling. That's why tick-tac-toe can be a great experience for a while. Eventually, it's not fun anymore because you've played out all the possibility space. There's no longer learning happening. And what randomness can do is it can extend the learning curve because when I have a variety, A, there's more possible experiences I can encounter.

B, I can't create rules that are as simple because I don't have all of the information or I can't necessarily know what's going to happen next. And C, there's this other, you know, you can, and this is where the more dangerous territory is you can have the other sort of little psychological rewards or, you know, the sort of randomized rewards that can just kind of give you a little bursts of dopamine as you're going through the learning process, right? This is like, you know, in playing like a world of warfare where you have the sort of gap between levels and the fact that you're getting randomized rewards along the way can help make that

process, even though you may have mastered your current level stuff, it can kind of extend it out a little bit further before you get to the next tier. Yeah, and it's interesting the games that do it differently that have the, like Diablo kind of shares that World Warcraft dopamine hits when I'm finding new items, getting new rewards. And Magic has that too with the opening of boosters, but it has it in a major way that Diablo definitely doesn't, which is that kind of new puzzles, solving new puzzles that are actually, what I would say is, you know, the useful part of the randomness, right, where I'm learning more. I feel like I'm, you know, upgrading myself, gaining new mastery. Yeah, it's interesting.

The idea of a simulation, right, I could do a safer version of what reality might be in this simulation to get better before I encounter the higher risk version of whatever it might be, right? Like, why do we play games? And it's interesting how much games can overlap with what our ancestors did. I always find this interesting, like, you know, farming, right? The randomness of is, are my crops going to be good, right? And how much our brains, you know, our ancestors' brains need to be focused on, okay, it didn't rain, therefore what do I do? Oh, if I put my crops closer to the river, what can I, you know, can I start, you know,

getting some water and, you know, is it easier to do it over there, et cetera, et cetera. All the things we've learned about farming throughout history is a lot of what, I think, why our brains are wired to play games. And randomness is why we focus on it for so long, right? we're able to, you know, just stay on these puzzles that are hard to solve. Right. Yeah. Those primary skills, right, whether it's like, yeah, resource, some, you know, resource management and, you know, as the farming model, whether it's social deduction and trying to understand the people around you, whether it's, you know, some dexterity skills or, you know, being able to sort of manage and track things and.

Right. Right. Right. Right. All these things are just these sort of critical ancient skill sets that are, you know, we really, really, really. really want to learn. And that's why the vast majority of games play on those things and why in many ways, you know, the types of games that exist largely live in that box because if it doesn't tag on to one of those primal learning curves, then we're not likely to be as attracted to it.

Yeah. And as a game designer, I find it very interesting to look at all the different games and not only why are they successful, but why are they replayable? I tend to, you know, you and I are the same this way. I love working on games that have that chance to be highly replayed. And it's interesting to look at different games, and they often, I think, have different reasons why they replayable. We're talking a lot about randomness, but there's something about just playing, you know, the physical activity of sports, too, right? Like I play a lot of basketball. Why is that so replayable? You know, I don't feel like I'm ever going to be done, right?

It's not going to get boring like tic-tac-toe. And yet the puzzles are not anything like magic, you know? And so it's interesting to look at that. Is it because it's physical, right? I need to keep in shape. Like, why is my body and mind wired to keep? keep doing that. Yeah.

And yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, I feel like, I feel like with physical games, the puzzles are very deep, but they're not, you know, they're not cognitively deep. They're, you know, motor skills deep. Right. I need to take this shot from this area in this position, you know, with this person guarding me. And, you know, so I'm both predicting them and their movements as well as like all of the physics of this moment, you know, try to get from here.

You know, and so there's a, I think that that sort of stuff is all. always pressured and interesting because those skills are there, you know, and you have, you're on the clock. And so everything that's like time sensitive intrinsically has, uh, more, you know, more, more challenge that comes with it as, as you're trying to ascertain even simple information quickly and move quickly, uh, that, that, that can keep you interested for a very long time. Yeah.

And you're training a different part of your mind, right? Oh, sorry. Yeah. You're training a different part of your mind than what you use to play magic or a challenging, you know, strategy game, right? it's very interesting. Right, right. I think there's also, it's interesting.

You know, I haven't looked as much into this as I'm sure people actually study it, but just there's something replayable to just rhythm, right? Like there's a rhythm to basketball, rhythm to dancing, rhythm to music that you don't get as bored of, right? But what I find very interesting about all of this is when it comes to replayability is how we as game designers haven't perfected it by any means. You know, you and I, you know, we both made games that we go, wow, that didn't do as well. we hoped it would, or we watch our other...

What you talk about. That said, you know, Ascension is very replayable, one of my most played phone games. But, you know, we have very smart friends that have funding and make games that, you know, aren't replayable, even though they were trying to do that, right? That's something I find very intriguing and what I think keeps me going at such a rate for game design is just seeing that it's still unsolved, right? What does it take to make a successful game? And yeah, and how much are we wrong on this?

You know, like I was saying, when I first started in game design, and I'm kind of curious about for you, too, I had so many assumptions that were wrong. As pro-magic players, we probably completely 100% overlapped on this, which was you have a bunch of magic cards that you would never run, right? And so you're like, this was a waste of time. Why make this card if I'm not going to play with it? If it has no use, why does it exist?

And then later we learn, oh, actually, it did have a use for somebody else. Or it has a use even if it's never in a deck, right? It might be, you know, Rosewater's talked a lot about this, right? It might actually be entertaining to just be a conversation piece, right? There's all these reasons why cards might exist that I did not get it all when I first started. And that's something I love about game design that poker was when there was a poker boom and magic was when magic first came out was, game design still feels like there's just tons to discover, right? Like it is not a solve system.

and somebody's going to make a game in the next three years that starts a new genre and blows our minds and is super successful. And none of us know what that is right now. That's amazing. Yeah. No, I love it. And like you, not only did I come to the table with tons of wrong assumptions, not just like why make bad cards, but the similar and most common fail I see from people who are sort of good at games that want to become game designers is the instinct is like let's reduce the randomness and make it more skill-based and more, you know, more strategic. and while there's obviously a place for that, people don't understand what the value is of that variance.

We've already talked about some of that here, but also being able to allow people with different skill levels to play, giving people the opportunity to discover when cards are bad or giving people the dream to live of a card that's not good, but on this off chance it could be, and that they have a story to tell. And all of these different elements that craft the experiences is because the experience that we've talked about the most probably so far is this idea of like solving puzzles, right?

And the interesting nature of like crafting and deconstructing a strategy. But that's only one piece of what makes games enjoyable, right? There is all of these other elements of being able to express yourself, of being able to reach different kinds of achievements, of being able to connect with other people, of being able to have all of these, as you mentioned, the idea of kind of flow and rhythm, right? I think it's one of the reasons why Ascension has been so successful. on the app is that there's just this natural flow to the game that you can kind of turn your brain off and just play and very rarely and then you know and just have that that flow

state that people are looking for and all of these things are part of of the game experience that you're trying to craft and the tools that you're trying to play with as a designer yeah it's very true and like we were talking about that stuff that I didn't understand the beginning so so I like being in a state of okay now what else do I not understand How else can I get better? And one of the major ways, right, just working with people that have good understanding. That was something that I felt from, you know, getting to work with Eric Dodds. I don't know if you ever interact with him much.

I bet you did. He was probably when you were doing Wow TCG, you might have chatted with Eric Dodds. But he's kind of the grandfather of Hartstone, right? He's been referred to as the Dalai Lama of game design. And it's great when people who you kind of observe, you know, Rosewater, I think has this too, Garfield, just people who are. are much better than me at just kind of having an intuition about fun and what should be included in a game, what should be taken out, right? And watching how they do it, right? And I think a strong

intuition is, you know, maybe just an inherent, you know, skill they might have started with, but how do they build it up, right? And one of the ways is lots of playtesting, right, and observing people who are not like you, I think is key to this, right? And so in Harston, I love this. I think this is great. Apply this to any game in different ways, right? Basically, interacting with people in a good, useful way that are not like you to get feedback on your game. So in Harstown, we did basically bring in groups that we thought would talk to each other well, right? So the setup was the design team is in the room, but most of us are sitting in the back kind of skulking in the shadows, just listening. And then we would put on the projector every card on the new set, right?

We go through it and just listen to this group of friends that work at Blizzard or whatever, varying skill levels, talk about the same. And this was a wonderful way to just get all these insights that were something that I could never have come up with on my own, right? Not only like on templating and like, does this card make sense, but like, is this card exciting? You know, and you're surprised constantly when it's people who are not like you, right? So that would be something I want to share with people is like it's really hard to get feedback. One of the great ways to do it is if you're surrounded with people who are like you is to try to interact with people who are not like you. Yeah, 100%. And you raised a couple of key points.

The value of training your intuition is critical to the skill of becoming a better game designer. And the way you do that is you play test a lot. You mentioned you observe people that are not like you. And when you are playing games, you have to shift your frame. Because when you're normally involved in a game, your frame is immersed in the experience. You're just having the experience. Maybe you're thinking about what your next move is or how you're going to win or what, you're just totally immersed and lost.

It's just like if you're watching a movie, right? you get lost. You don't even realize you're in the theater anymore. But when you're a designer, you need to step back and be looking behind the scenes, right? What are the director's choices that are going on here? When somebody got really excited and you see them jumping up and down, what is it that caused that? What did they just pop deck the card that they need? Did they have a plan that they were trying to build towards that all of a sudden came together? Did they see a cool picture that made them tell a story? Right. Like these things are what you, you know, some people have better or worse instincts when they start, intuitions when they start, but you absolutely, it is a learnable skill,

and the way to practice is fun because you're, you know, you're playtesting and you're watching play games. You just, it's just a small shift. And the other thing I strongly recommend is like, write things down, write things down all of the time. When you see things, you observe things, I have so many extensive notes from every playtests I've ever done, as well as random ideas that'll have from, you know, I keep a physical written notebook with me on all times too, because I find that's less distracting than a phone. If I have a random idea, while I, You know, at the grocery store or a random, you know, idea because I just had a conversation with a friend. I will always write those things down and then process them later because I think a lot, we all have a lot of great ideas and a lot of great insights.

And very often they just get lost because we don't bother to track them and keep them. Yeah. And I really like what you're saying, too, write stuff down because you're going to have ideas and thoughts while you're observing playtests. It makes me think of a talk that Mike Selnaker, who I believe you know. He was my first guest on this podcast. Oh, awesome. Yeah. So anybody that wants to hear Mike's insights, go back to episode one.

Yeah, absurdly smart guy, right? And he gives a talk at shows like Pax Debb and GDC on how to get feedback. And once again, it's very unintuitive, right? Like a lot of people come into it and are like, was this good or bad, right? Did you like it? Did you not like it? And his talk basically, like he focuses on just asking people, right, the right? And the right question he says is, what happened?

Not did you like it? Not do you think this card is too powerful or too weak, right? Which is what you definitely want to avoid is balance feedback. But just what happens so they just start talking, right? And the point being, I think, to his talk and something I've found to be true as well, is there's a lot of ways to not get good feedback, right? There's a lot of paths that the playtesters can go down. They want to talk about, oh, this card's too strong and I think you should do this instead. Instead of getting design feedback or design thoughts from them, you really want to get what was your experience, right?

happened here? And often it's not the literal words they say, right? It's like you were talking about somebody's eyes light up, you know, like, oh, I really like the story these two cards told, right? But getting into kind of their shoes as you're observing them and listening to them is a way to kind of, you know, get the true, the nut of the feedback, right? Which is not always the little words they say. It makes me think of when World Warcraft was first launched, an article, one of the developers, one of the designers posted was kind of like this, the players are good at identifying the problems, right, but not the solutions, right? Where there's smoke, there's fire, right? When the players are saying, hey, there's something going on here, they're right.

There's definitely, if they say something is going wrong and there, you know, there's a lot of posts about it, they have to be right that something's wrong. But are they identifying the right and are identifying what's actually wrong. That is not necessarily true, right? Like, players are often not coming up with solutions. They're not a game designer's right. They don't know all the constraints you have as a designer. But learning to kind of dig through that, right? And also, giving up your own like, well, I think it should be this. And the other person on my team thinks it's this other thing. So I'm going to use the feedback as evidence from my side. Get super far away from that too, right? You just want to like, okay, what is this person feeling?

How do I, how do I learn that is so essential? Because then you can make much better decisions when you go back to the drawing board, right? So, so much gold in here. I want to, I want to highlight a couple things, right? One, the principle you've talked about. This is, Neil Gaiman is my favorite author, you know, wrote the Sandman, American Gods, Graveyard book, tons of other things. He has the quote that says, when your readers tell you something is wrong, they're almost always right. When they tell you how to fix it, they're almost always wrong. And it's just 100% true in game design as well, right? The player experience is the only metric that matters. So if you're getting consistent feedback about a problem, it's a problem and you need to deal with it. But it's

your job to figure out how to solve it. So that's, you know, kind of a key point. And related to that is the thing you talk about is like being able to remove your ego from the equation. And that's true for the purposes of improving your game. That's true for the purposes of improving your life. You need to be able to step back and just start with the assumption that things can always be improved. And you make a new game, especially that you should, you should know with certainty that it is flawed and it is, and it can always get better. And your job is to find the flaws. If you're just pat yourself on the back and pushing off the people that are not give responding the way you want them to respond, you're never going to improve. And even if you start off in a decent spot, you're never going to get to true mastery.

And so it's really important to be able to take feedback and encourage the negative feedback in ways that are going to be useful. Right, right. I also wanted to kind of circle on the issue of, you know, how do you get good feedback? You highlighted, you know, I love the phrasing of Mike's question, right? What happened as opposed to, did you like it? As well as nonverbal feedback being way more valuable than verbal feedback most of the time. Right. Yeah.

And I also like to prompt people to get key, force them to give you some specifics. Like if you had to change one thing about this game, what would it be? If you had to keep one thing to say, you want to make sure one thing doesn't change, what would it be? You know, we can kind of force people to just see what things come up for them. when they have to be focused on, okay, no, this thing I really liked or this thing I really didn't. And then, again, it may or may not be the correct thing that has to be changed, give you some valuable information and force some more specific responses than just, yeah, that was fun. Or meh.

Right. And it'll show you what they were thinking about, right? What stood out the most of them will come up in those questions, too. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And when you're talking about the, you know, don't assume everything's right, or that your agenda, right, when you go into a play test is what you're trying to prove, right? be humble, right? You know, you're going to get some feedback that makes you sad or it makes you, you know,

might convince you to take out one of your favorite parts of your game, right? But you just have to be willing to do it because that's how good games get made, right? You might have to back up a few steps and change a lot. I really liked the kind of philosophy at Blizzard that the Hardstone team designers had, which was we're going to be smarter tomorrow, right? Like, we will know better what decisions to make tomorrow and how do we get there, right? We're going to have to keep learning and getting feedback and playtesting ourselves as well. But our tomorrow version of us might just know better and might have to make a change.

And what we think is right today, tomorrow we might know better. So it's a form of being humble while you're also kind of compliment yourself. You're going to be smarter tomorrow. But yeah, it's important. So, you know, you have, it's possible that you have worked on more impressive digital TCG projects and teams than anybody that I know. I think because you worked at Wizards, you worked at Wizards and you worked on some of their digital projects. You worked on Harstown. You worked on at Crypto.

I think you did the, were you working on their digital game also? Yeah, a little bit. I left very early on. So for two months, I was going to be the lead, but then I wasn't basically. Yeah. And then Dyer Wolf, you worked on some of their digital TCC products. Yeah, I got to work on Elder Scrolls, the card game there and Eternal. and yeah.

Yeah, so incredible depth of knowledge here and really fascinating. So I would love to, and you can attack this from either direction. One of the things I would say is sort of best lessons or best practices from each of those teams that you've sort of carried forward. And I'm particularly, I've worked with several of these teams in various ways, but mostly indirectly, as well as, you know, the maybe some distilled guides for people out there that maybe want to make their own TCG or digital TCG. Okay, cool.

Fun. Take that wherever you want to go. Yeah, okay, great. Well, I'll start at the beginning. The first digital product I got to work on was basically as a designer that gives feedback to the Magic Online team, right? And I think one of the big lessons that I actually referenced this a lot is, Wizards was not hiring people who knew magic at the time.

So this is a pretty simple one, but at the time, it really reinforced it for me. Hey, there's a lot, you know, those people were smart. They just weren't into magic, right? There's a lot of smart engineers

and people who want to make video games that also love magic, right? And just, it's night and day when you're working with the whole team loves the game you're making. That to me was one of the big lessons. Magic Online is such interesting experience, right? Because I came into it like, yeah,

It's supposed to be a literal translation, the transliteration of magic paper, right? Little did I know how much better TCGs can be than that, right? But at the time, it was we are, you know, just working on something that's just going to be an exact copy of paper magic. We progress a lot further than that. And we actually did that with the second one I got to work on, which was, oh, plainswalkers. What am I trying to say? Anyways, our digital product that was on Xbox, what is it, Justin? It's a dual-of-plane-war.

Yeah, dual-s of the planes workers. Tools of the points-waters. Thank you. Yeah, this was the, hey, what if we made it a video game, right? We start, that's like the beginning of TCGs starting to be reasonable video games, right? Actually having some, you know, the flying cards fly and the cards smack into each other. And a lot of the lessons we learned there came from its kind of predecessor that I didn't work as much on, which was the Magic Online tutorial. but learning so much about how teaching somebody the game rules is different than teaching somebody the game is fun.

And so we had this very, like, hardcore, you're going to learn magic tutorial that came with magic online and was included in magazines back when there was CDs and PC gamer and whatnot. And we got to do, I learned so much from this. We spent a bunch of money, a lot of money actually Hasbro would spend on us doing these playtests with just people from around the city that haven't played our game. before, right? We'd bring him in, we'd be in the two-way mirror, on the other side of the two-way mirror, and observe them. And I always remember this one kid who was learning from that CD, he got it, right? It was very hard to learn magic. You know this. Teaching people magic is very hard. Basically, the answer back in the day was you have to have a friend teach you. It's just such a complex game. But this kid got it from just playing on the computer. And I was so excited. Everybody's like,

wow, this kid knows how to play the game. We went in and talked to him. It's like, hey, man, so what do you think? And he's like, I never want to play that game again. I hate it. And it's like, oh, but you've done the best by far, right? Well, the game is teaching you like, you tapped wrong, untapped your lands. No, you tapped wrong, untapped your lands. So he eventually picked it up. But we had taught him this was like this horrible, like do it right or we're going to punish you game, right, that wasn't fun at all. We did nothing to teach him the fun.

We were trying to teach him with 3BB, right, some of a car that cost five, how to actually tap your lands correctly. Well, that's not the fun part of magic, right? The fun part of magic is the dragons and all the cool plays you can make. So that's been a powerful lesson forever. It's just like tutorials need to be about teaching the fun, right? Yes, they can teach some rules. But what if it didn't, right? What if your tutorial was really bad at teaching somebody the game?

But they thought it was really fun. Are you happy or sad? Right? And obviously you should be happy because they're going to come back and eventually learn the rules by playing the game. Yeah. That seems really, really powerful lesson, right? Tutorials should be about teaching the fun.

It's a really obvious frame when you say it. it that way, but it's not the way people usually think about it. They think about it, okay, how do I get people to learn how to play? And especially in the digital world, the learning how to play is so much less meaningful because the game enforces the rules for you in so many ways, right? Like, obviously, you want people to understand what's going on, so they don't feel completely lost. But in many ways, they can just discover and figure it out, right?

Whereas in magic paper, if I see a card and I don't know what it does or how it works, I'm kind of just stuck. I kind of just need to ask somebody. just kind of hope for the best. But in the digital game, I'd be like, all right, well, I'll play it. Oh, okay, that's what it does. Got it. Cool.

Do that next time. And so there's a lot of stage teaching. And it's funny because I've tried to find ways to do that, to learn from that in even physical game design. Can I get somebody started in the game with a lesser version of it that just gets them into the fun faster and then teach things gradually over time rather than try to teach them everything up front? Because that's one of the main advantages of digital.

digital tutorials is I could just say, okay, here's your first thing. Dude, just do this. Wasn't that cool? Great. Now we're going to add in this other part, right? Because people learn in increments far better than they do in giant chunks. Yeah, we tried a lot for magic. I mean, you know, trying to show the fun in a paper product is very hard, right?

Because you're both trying to show the fun and you have to teach enough rules that they're not just doing it all wrong. And like you said, it's way easier either in a video or in a digital product. But yeah, it's a crazy challenge, right? trying to make good learning products for magic. It's interesting how much the world has changed from then, too, right? Not only do we have a lot of digital TCCs, but just Twitch being such a powerful way to basically absorb a new game, right? Oh, a new game came out.

Let me watch it for 23 minutes on Twitch. Oh, not only do I have a reasonable understanding of the core mechanics, but I also have a good understanding of, like, what I like this game, right? It's just totally different than plucking down the money to buy a board game or whatever we had to do years ago. Yeah, well, I mean, the entire gaming world has now been warped, you know, for good or for ill, but mostly for good, I think, by Twitch and by online streaming, right? Like, as you said now, that most likely the way people learn and discover a game is through online streaming, reviewers, you know, people, whether that's Twitch or YouTube or whatever, like, people will see that. And people spend far more time watching other people play games than even playing games themselves in the aggregate, which is crazy to me. Like if you told me that, you know, even 10 years ago, I would have laughed at you. And now it's just taken for granted.

The same is true. You know, I work on games for kids. And the same is true, even more so for them. They spend enormous amounts of time watching other kids play with toys and play games way more than they do playing themselves. And so, you know, not only is this valuable for learning and when you're thinking about how do you teach people, but it's valuable for how you design your game for purposes of discovery. Like the viewing audience is now your target as much as the player. is. Right. And yeah, so the game I'm working on now, we actually think a lot about that. It also

makes me think of Harsstone, like, there's a lot of skill and luck, and I think that's success of Harsstone, right? Because it basically came out at the same time Twitch was exploding, right? Once the audience was really building up for Twitch, and Harsstone is very watchable, right? It's nothing like the other car games we've been talking about, Magic Online or even Dules. Harsstone is super fun to watch, right? Even to this day, it has probably over 20,000 people watching at this very moment. Yeah, now building a digital game, how good do you look on Twitch is such a big piece of it. And so the game we're making, we often talk about, like, hey, what do you think of this card? What do you think of that?

We're essentially making an auto-battle or card game, right? And part of our discussions on the design side are often, well, that's a really cool Twitch moment, right? This card is crazy, tells a great story. And if I was watching that, I'd be laughing, right? Like that's how, you know, that's important piece of the puzzle now, right? For us, that used to be somebody who's railburning or watching over our shoulder playing and magic can be a great moment. Well, now it's even more important to have those and identify those and understand those

as when you're working on a digital game. Yeah, let's deep dive into that part now. I want to get to auto battlers in a moment, but I think this is so important. You know, when we say something's a really cool Twitch moment, what do we mean by that? What are the things, the principles or traits or skills that we want to be focused on? when you're saying, I want to make my game great for viewers and great for online streamers. Right. So this somewhat ties back. So there's a broad answer, right? Part of this ties back to the randomness we were talking about, right? The edge of the seat often is because of randomness.

So if I'm watching my favorite streamer, Kri, and playing a game where I don't know what's going to happen next, but I really care. Right. And randomness is often the reason, right? What card is he going to draw? Or not just what play is he going to make, but what's going to happen when he plays jog or these other crazy random cards. That keep me interested, right? Also, just the visuals, like, is it rewarding, right? Is there a cool visual that ties to that moment, right? Do the fireworks go off in a way that looks good and goes, oh, yeah, that feels good, right? As opposed to, you know, once again, magic online, that doesn't have any of that, right? And so that's something we talk a lot about is the, okay, what is the degree, like, this moment has this much impact on the game, so our visuals need to match that, right? And

Is this the moment where we go, yeah, the blinding light, the angel wings go off and or whatever, you know, the cool VFX is going to fire here because this moment we want to communicate to people is like a big deal, right? They should get excited that they're, the guy they're rooting for has just done something amazing, as opposed to, you know, just the run-of-the-mill turn, right? What is the range of your moments and how are you communicating to the player that, you know, that they should be excited, right? It's kind of like when you go to a sporting event, right?

They have timing on when they're going to start blaring the music or the drums are going to start beating. What is your version of that in your video game for Twitch viewers? And also there's a lot of it just like the flow like we were talking about before. What does it feel like for the cards to interact or for your game pieces to interact when they get destroyed? Does it feel right? Is it clear? Right? To people who are watching for a minute and a half go, oh, I see.

Those two fought and oh, that guy's injured or that guy, you know, died and now he, you know, left something behind and yada, yada, yada, right? Like, is the, the game actions, are they making sense to people? Because if they are, right, you're going to get people more interested. And that's kind of the business model now for a lot of these games, right, is, the marketing is, hey, you've watched this game. It made sense to you and looked fun. The streamers seemed like they were having fun. Now you want to dive into it and you feel enough mastery, both in terms of how to play the game, but also just like, is it fun or not, right? You feel good about that. it's so important for your game to communicate that.

Right. Yeah. So there's these elements that we talked about of the, you know, having uncertainty and excitement and these big moments that people can be excited about, making sure that it's visually rewarding, tying into both big moments, and making sure that it's easy to assess what's happening, right? That you can quickly jump in and like you said, in 60 seconds, 90 seconds, whatever, I can kind of get a sense of what's going on.

Even if I don't know how to play the game, I can get a sense of what's happening and make it something. something that's interesting to watch and that I can then become invested in. That's, that's so critical. And that's been a thing that's driven a lot of decisions in games that I've been working on is like, how can I make this super clear what's happening so that anybody jumping in can see it? And I think there's some other elements you mentioned earlier, you know, the sort of, oh, this

will be a funny moment, right? I think that humor is huge in creating these sort of very funny possibilities and interesting social interactions, right? you could talk about, you know, the sort of phenomenon of among us, right? And a lot of that, just this, like, it creates this great social, funny dynamics, right? The graphics are terrible. Like, you know, there's not that much uncertainty except for this one element of, like, who's on, you know, who's with me, who's against me.

Right. And so, so, you know, the sort of humorous interactions and social interactions, I think, are intrinsically good. And then I think there's this other element that is sort of tied to what you're talking about, but I think deserves its own mention, which is that the users can kind of play along, right? Like, that they, you know, the reason why you watch things like, you know,

family feud, right? Right. Right. We're going to talk about making games that are good for viewers, right, game shows are a great place to take some lessons from, is that you're in your head while they're playing. You're thinking, oh, what would I say here? What would I do, right?

Well, you know, what's the answer or Jeopardy? You can feel smart because you're like, oh, this is obviously the answer. And I think giving people these opportunities to be like, oh, no, no, you should make this play. or what if he did this thing? I think is another really powerful tool to keep people engaged because they feel like they're playing. But we talk about games as learning with low risk.

Well, watching the game is even lower risk, right? I don't even have to lose. I could just watch somebody else. And if I'm wrong, then nothing bad happens. But if I'm right and they're wrong, then I get to feel super smart. Funny, yeah. Yeah, and yeah, that's a great point.

And yeah, when you're talking about the, you know, there's the unknown in a game like Among Us, right, that is kind of a different version of a randomness. It serves the same role. I play a lot of StarCraft. I love StarCraft, right? An RTS with basically fog of war, right? You can't see the whole map.

And it's not RNG, RNG, but it is, right? It is, I don't know what's going to happen. As a viewer, I don't know if he's going to run into the other player or whatnot, although sometimes they show me both sides. But there are, there's interesting tools that are not just straight up randomly do X that kind of can fill that same role of what we've been talking about of the value that randomness can bring to a game. game. And then there's kind of the in-between. So one of my favorite mechanics from

Harstone that you probably know is the mechanic of Discover. It is so good. It is random in the sense that you don't know. You're presented with three cards. You get to pick one to add to your hand, right? And they're not from your deck. So it's just from the game. Sometimes there's a range. But these are cards that you may never have considered putting in your deck, but sometimes they're the perfect for this moment. And you have to figure that out. And they're often tough choices. And I love that it's this randomness in terms of like, I don't know what's going to pop up. I'm in a new situation, new puzzles to solve. But from the opponent's perspective, it's not randomly win, heads I win, tails I lose type of randomness. It is, well,

he just got the card to his hand. He still had to pay the mana. It's kind of like he drew it, right? I don't remember which one, you know, I don't know if he put that in his deck or not. It just kind of showed up like other cards do, right? It's very low RNG negativity while being very high RNG in terms of creating new decision points and new puzzles for the player. Well, yeah. So this is another whole aspect of randomness, which is fascinating, which is where do you put the randomness relative to the player choice moments? Sure. If there's a player choice moment up front where I have this like, okay, do I want to take a risk and, you know, roll this die and see what happens? There's this excitement and tension up front.

And then, you know, I roll in, oh, I rolled well or I didn't. And that's just, that's one way that's sort of build the feeling and excitement. The other way is to have this randomness and then a choice following, which is what this discover mechanic does, right? Where I get the randomness, like, okay, I have this excitement of what do I get. And now given those options, now I have a choice to sort of play with that and use it in one way or another. And so it makes a big difference emotionally where you put the randomness in.

Also, how you represent the randomness visually and physically, right? Is it that the cards just appear in front of you? And then it's in my hand and my opponent never sees that what choice I had made, which means now they don't get that feel bad of they got the random thing. Is it, you know, when it's a die roll, you know, and I mean, the difference between if you physically roll a die or you visually represent a die on the board versus it just happens or you're drawing a card off of a deck, each one of those things, even if the probabilities are identical, very different to the player.

Yeah, the presentation matters so much there, doesn't it? It's very interesting, right? Drawing of cards, we kind of accept as like a random moment that's within the range of a card game. But we actually had this issue. Richard Garfield, I know if people played this game, Richard Garfield made a Star Wars TCG, right? And it was a TCG with dice. And a lot of the feedback that I believed was, hey, I don't want to roll dice. You know, there's other games that like the conceit, right, the core of the game is rolling dice, like a lot of minis games, where you don't hear that feedback, right? Because it's assumed when you're going in. But for a lot of people, it's like,

I'm playing a TCG that already has this randomness. And now I'm also rolling dice, and they weren't into that. Also, right, the icon of randomness just Some people are not going to like it, and some people are. And again, it varies by thing, right? So we actually had this, we were making the Ascension Tactics Ministers game where we, you know, we're building in the deck building and the process of what you're able to do, but there were no dice in that game.

And most miniature games have dice. And so we were actually worried that we might turn off miniatures players because we didn't have dice. Oh, interesting. And so there was this, there's this different expectations based on the format that you're in. And so with this, I'll give a lot of pro tip for people is, whenever you do have something where you're concerned that something's going to be a negative, make it a positive.

So all of our marketing was no dice rolling. So it's not a bug, it's a feature. Because for some people it is, right? They're like, oh, God, yeah, that immediately brings to mind those moments where you roll the one when you needed a two or better and you feel terrible. And that's like, oh, that's not going to happen to me anymore, even though you're also missing those moments where you get to roll the roll of 20 or whatever. Yeah, I like that. focusing on as a differentiator for a minis game is cool. It also makes me think of like,

you know, so I love Dungeons and Dragons, right? And we're talking about kind of, you mentioned the order of the randomness is the decision by the player before or after that random moment and how much that impacts the feel of it, right? And Dungeons and Dragons does it. You randomize after you make your decision. And I love Dungeons Dragons.

It's still fun. But I personally prefer to design and play games where the randomness comes first and then I make decisions based on that, right? That's a lot of the value of the randomness is creating that new puzzle that I need to solve. after the randomness occurs. And it makes me think of how minis games, which D&D sometimes is, a minis game,

that are like, and maybe you have this in wow minis, I forget, but you roll, and then now that you've done the random role, you pick which character you want to have, use that role. So I can still be like,

oh, well, this is a bad role. Let me use my back row character to just move away, right? That feeling of owning, making decisions after the randomist, I really like, and looking for that in games that, you know,

we're designing, right? How can we make people feel like the randomness is there, but they can overcome it. Their skill and their decisions are going to be kind of a bigger piece of why the game unfolds the way it does. And that's part of why I love these auto-battle or drafting games, right? A lot of the fun is the drafting moments. And yes, it's very random to, in Magic the Gathering draft, get a random booster put in front of you. But you clearly feel the skill, right? It doesn't feel like rolling a die in a minis game. It feels like a very skill-intensive

moment. Yeah, and I love it. All right. So now, you know, you've brought it up twice. It's the project you're obviously keep this guy right now. And I definitely want to spend some time talking about it. So let's talk auto-battlers. So for the people that are not familiar with it, what is an auto-battler and what makes it awesome? So auto-battlers are, the way I describe it to people who haven't played them is it's kind of combining the drafting of, like, say, a football draft, right? where you're picking which characters, which players you want to have on your team. There's a lot of skill there.

And then you watch them play. So in football, I don't get to control how my quarterback is going to play, but I picked him and I'm rooting for him. And that's essentially what we're doing here with a card game. So you are picking which cards you want to have to be on your team. The name of the game, by the way, is Storybook Brawl. So you're picking which storybook characters you want to have kind of be your little army. We've twisted a lot of them, made them fun.

and then you're picking the kind of the formation, right? So you get to set up the pieces, right? Imagine a chessboard where you're like, I want to pick the starting point, but then the AI is going to follow some rules to play out the battle. And honestly, if you had told me three years ago, this is super fun and I would be enthralled by it, I'd be like, I think I'd rather move the units myself, right?

I'd rather move the characters myself. But it turns out I would have been wrong. This is super fun. I love it, right? Because while I'm watching the fight and it's following the rules that I know it's going to, follow with some randomness, I'm thinking what I did wrong or what I could do different or what character I might need to shore up my weaknesses, right? And then there's a lot of mechanics inside

of the game that are, if people have played auto-battlers, it's kind of like the, it's a collection, you know, type of drafting, right? If you get three of a kind, it becomes a better card, right? Three cards morph into one to become better. We've kind of got our own twist on that to make it a bit more fun. But yeah, it's it's it's it's kind of that unwrapping presence like you feel in a fun draft style game mixed with the strategy of setting up a chessboard. And then with the fun of like watching a fireworks show of a combat go off, right, where you had a lot of input, but you're also, you know, on the edge of your seat, hoping things unravel the way you want them to. That's a great, that's a great description. I think the way that I would relate it, I guess it's

to something it's not surprising that we share, which is like, you know, to me, the most fun thing in the world is drafting. Like, it's the most fun. Favorite way to play magic is that idea of being able to like take this like subset of cards and try to build the best deck I can, given this sort of limited set of choices

that I have. In fact, it was an inspiration behind Ascension, right? I took the, you know, as a deck building game, was a brilliant way to try to take the constructed form of magic and distill it into a single box experience. And all I did was ask myself, well, how would I distill draft in that way?

And that's where the essential center row came from. And so it was like, that's the experience I wanted to craft. And it's obviously been a big hit. And similarly, I think I actually made a game called Dungeon Draft, where all you do is draft and play out your, you know, you play at your hand and draft again. And I think these auto battlers just scratch that itch in a new and sort of powerful way where it's like literally all you're doing is drafting and then seeing what happens. And it plays itself out.

So I think there's really something powerful there. And again, it's one of those things that you would, you know, hearing it described in the abstract, you know, hey, you pick your army and then you watch them fight. Right. That's not exciting. But in reality, if you've built the engine correctly so that the choices are very interesting and the watching the thing play out has enough uncertainty to keep it interesting and visual dynamics, et cetera, then there's really gold there. Yeah. And, you know, it also makes me think of this. kind of philosophy inside of Blizzard, which is the, there's, there's games out there that are,

that just need polish, right? You know, Blizzard, you kind of think of, hey, if I told you, there's a new, there's a new hero battler, right, a hero arena game, right, overwatch, coming out and Blizzard's making it, do you think it's going to be any good? And it's like, oh, yeah, it's going to be super well polished. The character's going to have tons of personality. And that's exactly what they made, right? So they take genres that might already have other games in that arena, and they bring the super polished, often the best version of that game. And very often what they do is not only do they have the great visuals and all that, but they're removing things, right?

They're taking out the pieces that don't need to be there, right? I'm not looting and trying to figure out what items I want while I'm playing Overwatch, right? It's just like, I'm shooting, I'm doing the fun parts, right? It is my favorite shooter now, right? And I kind of see the original auto battler, auto chess, being that for RTSs. Right? So I love StarCraft. I love managing my units and whatnot, but it is hard.

right and if you don't have that like click click click click you know you know you're doing it wrong right how many people watch start nothing go that's fun but i would never want to play that game right that's really fascinating yeah you're a hundred percent right because i love yeah i love starcraft too i used to play it all of the time uh but i can't compete with people that have far more manual dexterity than i do and it's just too much uh so i hadn't you know i thought of auto battalers is a distillation of drafting but the thing of it is a distillation of rts that the real-time strategy games is really fascinating right I want to keep talking about auto-vattlers too,

but I realize I also left an open loop around greatest lessons that you've learned from your various teams you've worked on and you just said some from Blizzard, which I just want to highlight for people because that idea of, you know, you don't have to innovate a genre. You can take what's out there and polish it, execute it well. That is Blizzard's 100% philosophy. They have not really innovated a genre at all, but they have executed so well.

They've polished so well on everything they've done that they've become, you know, one of the most successful. successful companies in the world. And sub lesson from that is that very often polish is not adding, it's taking away. It's so much about getting rid of what gets in the way and making a very clean experience that's beautiful and easy to access. And that's like where they, in my opinion, are just the best in the world. Yeah, I agree. Having played their games my whole life and getting to work there was a dream come true. And chatting with them. So I love this. And this is a bit fanboy. But I love talking to somebody like Ben Brode, Eric Dodds, you know, Mike Donet, and just being, okay, what they're saying

has a ton of value. Why are they saying what they're saying? And when they, when Eric Dodd says something to me that doesn't sound right, I love that moment of like, okay, am I totally wrong? I need to back up, figure out why he's saying this, what's going on here. And while I wasn't there at the beginning, I came in year two of Harstown. They, they had a lot of, sorry about the phone blinking there. They had a lot of discussions on not, you know, like we're saying, taking away. right and you and i both know why instance are great in magic right we could we could talk for hours on why instance are fantastic and why enchantments right all the things that harston left out of both magic and wow tcg uh why those things are great and then eric just had this intuition of like

why you're not supposed to put them in right like he he loves magic he loves wow tcg but he knew that for the digital version you're not supposed to have those in and i think part of the way to approach it for me now that i've learned those lessons is like okay what is fun about the game that i'm I'm working on now or I'm playing or this other game that I'm playtesting. And could you take pieces away and still have that fun? And often you just have to playtest or watch other people playtest to verify that. But it's such a healthy thing to do to say, okay, let's back up one step, two steps, three steps, right?

What can we cut? What did we add that, you know, maybe if we try to play test without it, we shed some light on whether or not we need it? And that's super hard to do sometimes, right? Because you're like certain that this new idea you have is awesome. And maybe it is, right? but maybe the game is actually better when it has less. That's hard to come to.

Play testing, like I said, is often the way to verify that. Yep, and it's new ideas and old ideas, right? So the example you're talking about is like, well, yeah, of course card games have instance. Of course they have instruments. And it's like, wait, no, what if we don't need that? And when it comes to new things, 100%. I think listeners to the podcast probably heard me tell the story already.

But, you know, when I first made ascension, we had a conveyor belt center row because I was very worried about things getting serious. stuck. Oh, sure. And the center row would move and the last card would slide off and a new one would show up. And it created tons of interesting contacts because the cards on the right were more valuable in the cards on the left.

And then you had different cards that could interact with it. And it was all kinds of cool stuff. And of course, there was always an ever-changing role. But it was like such a pain in the butt. And all of this like manipulation and things that just, and eventually I was like, what if we just don't do this? Actually, I think it was a friend of mine that suggested it first. And it was like, all right, let's try it.

And we played this. The game was instantly better. just by trying it knowing you don't get to try. And you knew right away. Yeah. Yeah, we knew right away. As soon as we played, it was like, wow, okay. And, you know, there are challenges to come with that, right?

I mean, there are bad, ascension experiences because the row gets stuck or clogged or whatever. It can happen. But those are the corner cases and the overall experience is so much better. It was 100% worth it. Similarly, like with Harstone, right, sometimes you feel bad because you can't interact on an opponent's turn or there's certain design space that gets cut off. But overall, the experience is so much. much better for the vast majority of cases. So those are those are the big wins. That's interesting. Yeah, I didn't know you had that mechanic. And the the willingness to play test without it is very

interesting to me, right? Like do you say yes to that or no, right? And what are the odds that it could be good? What do you need? Does it need to be a 10% chance, a 50% chance, a 2% chance? And I think that's part of the way to approach it. Even if it has a 2% chance to be better, but it only takes you 45 minutes to play without it, that's probably worth it. it, right? Because if you could do that 30 more times in the next two weeks or whatever, I guess that's too much more better. Two percent or five percent might be enough of a chance. So you don't need to be confident in this new idea, right? Especially when it's taking away. Yeah, there's this really interesting. I think you could probably draw a little curve for this.

You could graph it out where it's, you know, how much time does this new idea take to test, right? and how long for you to play test and iterate, how likely do you think it is to work, how much time do you have left to finish your project? And somewhere along that curve, you're like, yeah, for sure, let's test this. And somewhere along the curve, you're like, well, no, that's not going to happen, right?

And it's actually meaningful because it's meaningful, knowing that up front really can help dictate a lot of the types of games you work on and how much you focus on being able to reduce your iteration cost, reduce the speed, you know, the time within which you can test something, Because you don't, you know, when you're building digital games, a lot of times it can take a lot to be able to try something new, right? If you have to program a new engine and you have to work with a team

and you have to build stuff, that could be very high cost to try new things. So have systems in place that are let you test cheaply and quickly, whether that's building a physical prototype or having a light framework you can test from or, you know, knowing how to code a little bit yourself so you can kind of make some quick changes on the fly. Like all that stuff is really, really important. And also in the physical game, world, especially if you're first getting started, but even for me, this is super, like, I always try to make at least, you know, every year, at least I make one game where the game

takes like 10 or 15 minutes to play because they're so much fun because you can just iterate the hell out of it and try anything you want. And those are phenomenal. But I have a game I'm working on now, which is like this kind of big worker placement game thing, which is pretty fun and exciting. But, you know, every game takes like 90 minutes to two hours to play. And so it's very, the cost. of iteration or higher when we're playing these giant campaign games of ascension tactics where

you've got to like play through a whole campaign that can take you six hours it's like well okay we just don't get as many iterations and so yeah harder uh to to to be in that world yeah that brings up some like how do you what tricks can you do to be able to iterate on games that do take a while right so uh working on digital games right you could be you could approach it like well we need it to be digital all the time and that just takes a long time to code new mechanics or take out mechanics, et cetera. So on the predecessor to Runtera for Riot, right, our design team, we did a lot of paper playtesting. And we knew that we couldn't playtest all of our digital-only mechanics there, but it was still very worth it because all it took was us having the idea,

writing it down on a playtest card, and then trying it out for 30 minutes and going, oh, this is terrible. Oh, this is worth actually asking an engineer to work on. But yeah, finding tricks, ways to test, knowing where you're at in the process like you're talking about, Do you have any time left to do this? To do radical changes versus only minor changes. A lot of my career in card game design went from being kind of on the end of it, right? When we were doing balance testing, when I first got hired at Wizards, it was to basically balance test and just balance test, right?

No design work or just a tiny bit of design work. And over time, I moved all the way to the front. So I went, you know, my last few teams, I got to do a lot of teams with Rosewater. Zendikar was my last team where I was on what I like to call initial design. was what it's called design. And there you need to be very aware of like, not only are you, when you're in the beginning of a project, not only should you be trying a lot of new things and bouncing around, but if you don't do it and you have those ideas later, you might not be able to do it,

right? Especially if it's, you know, how many people downstream of you need your product right away, or were you spending a lot of money, making, you know, doing all the coding. So being very aggressive early, right, you know, is a good lesson in terms of being willing to change things radically, knowing that you're going to try new things, even if they don't sound like they are likely to work, you probably want to try them earlier the better, et cetera.

Yep, no, I love that. There's a principal Seth Godin talks about, he's not a game designer, but a really great creative thinker. It talks about, you know, look, you're going to have to thrash on any creative project. You're going to have this period where you're going to be like wrestling with what's the right thing

is to do and clashing different ideas and trying to figure out like where the magic is and you want to force as much of that thrashing early in the process as possible because everything earlier is cheaper you haven't invested as much it's easier to change you're not psychologically invested as much you know forget the financial and you know in time resort it's like all that stuff so you want to be as you said as aggressive as possible early to try lots of different things be willing to overhaul stuff be willing to try different stuff again be smart about how you know just cheaply but but but do that as much up front and then over time you have to get

more and more conservative, right? And this was actually a problem my team used to have because we kind of had this philosophy around like, we always want to make the best thing we can. And if somebody has an idea that could make it better, but we're, you know, even like a month away from shipping, but we really want to try it. Like we would be, it would feel like letting ourselves down if we didn't try this new idea. And that's not the right way to think about it. Because when you're at that phase, there's limits, you know, obviously if your game's not good, you don't ship it. But, but there's, you know, the window of what you are willing to try and invest time into has to, shrink as the game gets closer and closer to shipping.

Yeah, and that makes me think of another angle we haven't really talked about, which is kind of the morale of a design team, right? And as a leader on a design team, how do you rip apart design everybody who's been working on and keep morale high? Right. And I think there's ways to do it. You know, being excited about the new thing, talking about how your old ideas will potentially be useful in a different set, right?

Et cetera, et cetera. But also setting expectations, right, getting everybody on that page that we're going to thrash, the word you used, right? And that's a good thing, right? And even if we have great ideas, we don't ship, that's still part of the process. That's how we got to the different great ideas, right? It was all part of the building blocks. But that can be tough psychologically to see, you know, your baby's thrown out, right? 100%. And the same is true for managing your own psychology, right? Like that step one is, you know, you've got to be willing to kill your babies. You've got to be willing to divorce your ego from the

equation and the same is true for training your team to do the same as well as the way that you approach stuff right so many of the times you want to be you know giving credit for new ideas to other people as much as possible do not dig in on positions talk about principles right talk about like you know here's this sort of because because the principles of what you want it's much easier to get alignment on hey we all want this game to be exciting we want people to be instantly wanting to play again so maybe we want to change this rule for this right and if then they maybe will object to the specific rules change that you're you're talking about but then you can collaboratively work together to say hey look this game is just not exciting enough we need something else here and we can get to a

place where we can all agree or at the very least agree to try something no this is dumb we got to do it my way you know the more often even as a leader uh if the more often you say let's do it this way because i'm the leader the less of a leader you are right you really want to be able to get people along where you can you know sometimes you do you need to put your foot down and make you know forced decisions, but the more that you can get people on board with this philosophy, like, look, it's not about whose idea it is, it's not about who's right, who's wrong. It's we are collectively working on this process with the assumption that the thing can get better and working towards these common goals and ideally clearly defined principles of what's important and what we're

working with and as you're going through that design loop over and over and over again. I mean, it's one of the funny things we could talk more about two probably for a while is like, you know, with your own design team, like you're spending a lot of your time arguing with each other. Like a lot of your time just clashing and clashing and clashing. And so if you're not doing a good job of managing and making those conversations productive and building an environment of mutual respect through the way, you know, and a lot of even just very simple things, like the tone that you use when you talk with. Yes. Making sure that you compliment other people all the time, like as much as possible, anytime you see somebody doing something good or right or somebody else has

an idea, even if you don't agree with the idea, start with the positives of their idea. Right. I mean, this could be such a game changer. Just start. was saying, oh, wow, that's cool because this, this, this, this, and this. And then, you know, but what about this concern, this concern, this concern, or whatever, right? That is a big different thing that, oh, that's dumb or this, that, that'll never work because of dumb. You know, like, the way you talk and the way you communicate and make sure to highlight the right things is so critical. I totally agree. Yeah. And you mentioned the common goal. And I like bringing it up a lot. Like, what are we trying to do here, right? And what is our

victory condition, right? Because we're kind of competing with the world here. How do we win? And our win is, when we're all on a design team together, our players like it, right? People love this game. And there's a lot of paths to that, right? And it doesn't need, like you're saying, it doesn't need to be, it's my idea or your idea. But unfortunately, that's naturally how it goes sometimes. Funny, funny story before I got to Wizards, they would actually pay people bonuses based on

how many of their designs were in the file. And that is just such a bad idea. Could you imagine being in a room with me where I'm like, well, Justin, I like my idea, it's my idea. It's like, well. What a terrible way of building. It's horrible, right? So when I got there, Brian Schneider was my boss, and he was basically, we never, like,

he was like, never do that. You're not even allowed to argue for your own designs in these larger meetings, right? Because it just, it's a waste of time, right? If it's good, let somebody else argue for it, right? I actually like that. I mean, you know, to a degree. But, yeah, like, you're talking about with the positivity. You're like, we're doing something very fun, and other people having good ideas that

makes the game better is exciting. It's like, oh my God, you have a good idea that's going to make the game much better. That's fantastic, right? And, but we, it's hard because a lot of people, I don't know if it's specifically people to get into game design, but there's a type of intelligence and argumentativeness, right, that gets into game design that kind of has that, I heard your idea, but, you know, it's like you haven't even responded yet, but you already got this negative attitude about it, right? You got to get out of that mindset. You got to encourage people like you're saying, and still have healthy arguments. You know, actually something I missed, something I loved about working at Wizards, is just arguing with Rosewater. Right. And if people on this podcast know who he is,

he's a phenomenal designer, and he is loud and argues a lot. And explain the thing in a loud way to you. Literally, people at Wichens would ask to have their desk moved away from him because he was into it a lot of the time. Personally, I love it, right? There's no animosity. It's just really fun to have those good arguments. And if you could be in that space where you're like debating but still, you know, love each other, right? It's super fun.

Oh, yeah. No, he's, he's one of people who have had the most of those kinds of conversations with. He was second guest on this podcast, so episode two for anybody that won't. So to come listen to him talk,

as well as he has his own podcast. He also wrote the introduction to my book. He's, he is probably the person I learned the most from, uh, as a designer. Oh, I was funny.

Yeah, me too, funny. Articles that he's written on, are just some gold, especially if you want to do TCG design, you need to be reading Rosewater's articles. They're just incredible treasure troves of knowledge.

And he's just, he's such an interesting character because he is one of those people that has incredible instincts for design, but comes at it such a different place than you and I do, right? Where we're just sort of very, like, logical player mindset. He comes from a very creative. He used to be a writer on, like, Roseanne and, you know, Hollywood stuff.

And so it was a, there was a, lot of learning curve, I think, with how to interact with him and for him how to communicate with people like us to get those insights to be healthy in the way that that conflict happens. And so, yeah, I've learned so much from him over the years. Yeah, he's great, misworking with him. But yeah, the health of a design team is important. And yeah, it's true. It's true. So, yeah, I want to, I still left this open loop here, you know, obviously where, you know, key lessons that you've learned. I think we covered Blizzard pretty well. We've covered Watsy in depth. What about your time at Dyerwolf and working on things like Eternal and other project?

So I first started at DyerWolf to work on the predecessor to Rune Terra for Riot, right? So that was the not supposed to talk about it for many, many years. Project was super fun, super exciting. Unfortunately, it got canceled. So there's a lot of lessons that, you know, your brain reviews over and over what happened. And essentially, Heartstone came out. So we're making a digital TCG, and then this behemoth just drops on us

that looks visually way better than our game and mechanically, meaningfully better in a lot of different ways. Actually, when I started working at Blitz, I told him this story, I was like, yeah, yeah, they're like, oh, what happened to your, you know, the game you're working on for ride? I'm like, oh, well, you guys came out,

and then the two weeks later they canceled our game, and they all bust up laughing. And I'm like, hey, this is a very funny guy. That was my life there. Yeah, there's a similar narrative from Soulford, which we did release and head out for many years, but Harston very much ate a lot of them. But it's also great, right? Because it advances the kind of the tech, right? Like, how do you make a good TCG?

How good can a TCG be? And one of the things I love about Harstone, too, is that it showed so many more people that they love TCGs. Right? You and I have known how great that TCGs are the best game format for a long time. Harstone showed literally tens of millions of people that. And it's great. And the world now... The base of players.

The base of players is so much larger now, which is great for us. Yep. Yeah. I'm not even sure whether auto-battler format would exist without Harstown, right? Like that it's in many ways that, you know, getting people used to this idea of, like, you know, drafting cards and playing in a TG is a key part of, like, making these other games accessible and approachable. Yeah. And so the...

So a lot of the lessons were... you know, working on the predecessor to Roontera, we call it Bacon, was the code name for it. It was a good learning loop. We basically had all of Riot as like these playtesters, right? So a lot of the casters and just totally different levels of experience with TCGs

giving us feedback. And a lot of it was, it was a great immersion for me into the, okay, there's expectations with an IP, right? The characters already have game mechanics in another game. So how do you translate that to a TCG? and then get feedback on that, right? Are you doing a good job of this? What are fun ways to do these kind of what we call top downs, right?

Does it match the expectations for that character? And that was a ton of fun, right? Both as a character-specific, right, are you matching up with this character from the game in their specific mechanics and just the idea of leveling and all these things that weren't something we had in TCGs or hadn't played much in TCGs? Bringing that to the TCG arena was a lot of fun.

The accessibility, right, these were a lot of people who love video games, but did not like TCGs. So while we weren't all the way up to Heartstone, and we thought we had made progress on this, working on things like Dules of the Plainswalkers, it taught me a lot about, oh, wow, these things that I think are easy for a TCG player are not for a video game player, right?

So thinking in a different kind of angle on, hey, we want non-TG players to play our game, what should we do differently? How much should we take out was a lot of it. And then a lot of just, you know, and you've gone through this too, working with somebody who's kind of paying the bills and owns the IP, what does that mean for your relationship?

How do you keep them happy and into it while you're also doing the best you can to make a fun video game? And I've learned some lessons there. Honestly, I think working on your own stuff is more fun. That's one of the lessons in paper about it. Very interesting. Yes, I have a lot of experience. So, you know, working, you know, do a lot of consulting work and designs with other companies

and for other companies. And absolutely, you now have. not just I'm trying to craft the experience for the players, but I also need to craft an experience for my clients. I need to make sure that they're happy and they're getting the right kinds of feedback. And it is a different thing. And sometimes you have to make, you know, again,

what you don't, and the same can be true for people that are working for a boss or, you know, whatever, but that you need to make the thing that's going to make them happy as well as make players happy and how you manage that. And it goes back to sort of communication styles and how you're presenting, ideas and how you're getting other people's ideas or people to feel like things are their ideas. It's all very important.

And I think the same lessons that we talked about for how you manage a team morale can apply when you comes to managing a licensor or a client or a boss. Yeah, it's interesting. Talking about them thinking that's their idea is a very valuable skill to have. It doesn't sound great to say out loud, right? It sounds like manipulation in a negative way. But, you know, it is kind of, it's important, right? With the people who, you know, are stakeholders in the game being a part of it, right,

contributing to it, or, you know, or you kind of presenting the idea and then getting them on board before you tell anybody else, right? There's all these tricks to kind of getting them to think it's their idea or that they're a part of it before they can say no to it. That's been a lesson I've learned both at Blizzard, you know, working with a very, you know, established IP. Wow, we get to do fun things in Heartstone. But, yeah, it was important to manage that as well.

But basically, so we got canceled after Hars Stone came out and made Eric Dodds and Ben Brode very happy. And then we were like, okay, let's do another game, right? We still had enough money and funding that we wanted to make our own game. And that's where we started on Eternal. And we wanted to use all the lessons that we were seeing from Harsstone being such a good video game. And what we loved, that they left out of magic, right? So what is the opportunity to kind of bring maybe a more hardcore T.C. to that video game space, right,

where it actually is fun to play. And I think we did an okay with job with that, right? Eternal still exists to this day, so it's been out for more than five years. That's pretty good. But, you know, we didn't quite get there. And I think a lot of, so after that I would go work on Harstone and learn a lot about, you know, kind of the lessons we've been talking about

cutting from games and making them better. And I think I could have used that a lot while working on Eternal. Just are your core mechanics making sense to people, right? I think that's one of the mistakes I would say we made on Eternal. It's a lot like magic in that there are some confusing moments. There's a stack, right? The assumption that I have is, okay, people will, everybody I know knows how to use a stack, right? And I kind of knew that it was a confusing piece, obviously.

But I think I underestimated that, right? Like a stack is very foreign to anybody who has not played these types of games. Right. So if I got to go back in time, I'd say, hey, let's make this game without the stack, right? Do we need responses in this specific way, right? a stack way to make the game interactable, right? And one of the ways to look at that is say, hey, what is the value of an instant?

What is the value of a stack? It's this like live interaction. You don't know what's going to happen, right? And Harstown has kind of done a different version of that, right? The secrets, there's a counter spell that stops your opponent's spell that comes out of a card that you played the previous term, right? So it's not live. It's not an instant, but it is interaction in that way.

And I think a lot of what I've learned is, you know, not only trying to find ways for players to interact with each other, that doesn't need to use confusing mechanics, but also just me sending up a board that is a puzzle for you feels like interaction, right? That's a major interaction point in Hardstone. I don't know if that makes a ton of sense, but basically I kill your two guys,

and I still have a 5-1 left, and I made a new 6-6 that has a really powerful ability, and then I click done. And what I've done is said, hey, here you go, what can you do with this? And then you go, oh, well, I drew a good card. Hmm, can I actually deal with the 6-6-A and kill the 5-1? I don't know, right?

Like we're still very much interacting. That actually does feel a lot like the value of instance indirectly. And I think appreciating that a bit more has made me a better designer. And it always comes back and, you know, you want to zoom out from tactics to principles. Sure. The I need instance and therefore I need a stack where people can respond before things happen is a tactic. What you want is excitement, a feeling of interactivity, a feeling of uncertainty, right? That's what you want.

That's the gems that you're mining for. And so if you can step back and say, okay, instance have these problems that because of the format and whatever, what are other tactics we can use to get at these principles? That is where you can open up a lot of the space and be willing to get, you know, sort of get the best of both worlds. And again,

there are always sacrifices, right? The secrets in Hardstone are just not as, they're not as interactive. They're not as much fun as being able to play an instant at a key time on opponent's turn. However, they do provide a good chunk of that feeling at way, way less cost for the interruption

of the opponent's turn and provide its own unique values because I know, okay, you played, you played a secret, it's going to be one of these things. So I got to play around X, Y, or Z. What do I think you've done? Right. You mentioned solving a puzzle, which has its own interesting upsides. Yeah, and I actually think secrets are pretty good at that, especially your first, like, 10 to 50 hours of Hirststone.

I do think it's a little, you know what I mean, like that mechanic of like, what's list of possible secrets, let me play around them, that puzzle gets less fun, right? You know, because the list is kind of short, you know what people, net decking, you know what people are playing. So that one doesn't have the long-term value. We were actually, you know, that instance or even, you know, setting up different boards for your opponent to try to knock down, I think as we were actually having this playing our game story about brawl. I had this dragon called Doom Breath that could actually attack the opponent's back row, right? And so Matt Nass and Josh Uterlaten are teaming up against me.

I can hear them on our Skype call. And they're trying to figure out how to beat that. So it's still a ton of interaction, right? They're like, okay, what are we put in the back row knowing that it's going to get hit, yada, yada, yada, and that's a lot of interactive fun, right? Just having kind of the, we're going to fight and then we're going to do it again in an auto-battelor. But now I know what pieces you had, or at least I know what you had last time we interacted. Is a surprising amount of interactivity, especially when you're down to the finals when there's only two of you left.

Sure, yeah. So I think, you know, we're getting kind of towards the end of our time here. And I think this is a perfect, you know, key thing to close on, which is now, you know, we've distilled these lessons from these big places you've worked out on literally some of the biggest brands and digital TCGs in the world, the literally the biggest. And now you've started your own project. If I'm not mistaken, this is the first time you've kind of been on your own to launch something scale. And so I would like to ask the question. In that form, right now that you're sort of on your own and you're building this project

with some friends and you're not in a giant infrastructure, what are the key lessons that you've learned here and things that you're trying to apply that maybe weren't necessarily the case at the previous places or that you're trying to take it to that next level? Well, it's interesting, right? So wearing a bunch of hats, which you've been doing for a long time is an interesting experience. And so part of what we're kind of indie, right? So part of our calculus is what can we do to an A plus level? What can we do to a B level that's still good enough to make the A plus pieces show off and get us there?

So it's a lot of give and take. We're a small team. There's five of us that are full time. And we have a limited budget. So we're not going to have access to all these amazing artists and audio engineers that Blizzard has. So what can we do to get there? And so managing a budget has been pretty interesting. And honestly, I've been surprised at how just talking to friends, having a network,

knowing people that have worked at all these companies and saying, hey, do you know anybody who's looking for work has helped, right? I feel like we've gotten to a level that I never expected we would with these things that I'm not good at, like illustrations and making sound. So just knowing people, talking to people, asking, posting on Twitter, obviously having a network has been a big advantage there. But I've been pleasantly surprised with what. we're ending up with.

The kind of, you know, the, you know, you've gone through, like I said, you've gone through all of this, but valuing everything in just a different way has been a cool learning experience, right? Like our time, right? If we spend a lot of time doing X, Y, and Z, we're not going to be on the market. We're not going to be making any money and we're going to keep spending money, right? What does that mean for us? How do we manage that? And yeah, and having a much smaller group to give us feedback, right? One of the big challenges, especially with COVID, is how do you get, you know, at Blizzard we had this like, ask somebody else to set up a playtest and they will advantage, right? So how do you make sure you're managing your time with that? How do you get people

who are not you to be playtesting and giving you feedback? And one of the ways I actually love to do that with paper games. You might do this too is I just like going to random stores, maybe driving a little further to go to a store I've never been to and getting feedback. I haven't been able to do that. I want to get our game on a bunch of surfaces on a bunch of iPads or whatnot and just take it to people have never seen it and just see them play, hopefully next year when we can. Until then, we've got to solve this puzzle of like, keep getting feedback when you don't have access to that. You don't have access to a large company.

So we're actually literally opening up new playtest here next week just to keep opening it to new people, starting our essentially pre-alpha 20-person playtests. I'm very excited to start learning about that, getting all the feedback there. But yeah, it's, you know, I think a lot of it is finding the right people, using my contacts and yeah and just iterating and playing and yeah yeah yeah the key lessons there I can absolutely relate to you know the difference of you're paying the bills so you're very conscious of I'm an expense and every tradeoff is more meaningful you know I mean it matters and you think about it when you're an employee but when you're it's your baby and it's your company

and it's your money it really drives those points home very well and then and then the value of a network. And, and, you know, just sort of to expand that, because obviously a lot of people listening don't have that, that kind of network right now, but building that network and being focused on whether that's going to work for another company or whether that's being involved in communities online and, you know, or when we can, going back to conventions and, you know, being able to start, you know, even if you don't think that the people that are around you now are necessarily going to help you in the projects you're working on right now, over time, not only will those who will be able to help you, but maybe somebody they know will,

And if you are a good person that, you know, adds value to your community and to others, people will be thrilled to help you. And it is something that anybody can and should start doing now for the time when maybe 10, 20 years from now you want to start your own thing and you want to be able to call on people and do all that stuff. It's really, you know, being in this industry is a long game, right? You want to be. And frankly, it's also the best thing to do, right? You and I've been friends for 20 plus years now. And I absolutely called you when I needed help on something. and vice versa, right?

We've both multiple times we've been able to help each other out because we're friends, not because we're trying to get something or trying to quote unquote network. And so I find that stuff that fundamental of just, you know, being a good friend, finding people that you can connect with, adding value when you can is one of the universal principles that's guaranteed to have value down the road. Yeah, I love what you're saying long term, right? It's relationships and it is long term, right? And some of the advice I give to people that are trying to break into the industry is make your own games

and try to find places to playtest them with people who are in the industry. Right. If you live in Washington State, there's a lot of gaming conventions where professional game designers are playtesting their games. If you just go there and bring your own game or playtest with them, you're going to start knowing these people, right? There's ways to break into the industry that way. Just real quick, you know, I remember we put up a job opening for a hearstone designer,

right, which gets tons of applications, right? So we have to come up with, how do we call this down to numbers that we can actually read through. And one of the systems we had was, has this person made their own game? You know, so just making your own game, playtesting, learning those lessons, showing each other people, going to gaming conventions where you might interact with people who are in the industry, right, is a good way to begin it. And even if it doesn't get you a job in the next six months, like you said, long term, it is a long game. Right. Yeah, the, the different, I like the, the concept of finite and infinite games, right? When you're playing a traditional game,

whether it's Beharstone or Monopoly or whatever, it's a finite game. It's a finite game. and the point is to kind of, you know, you play it over to this period and you complete the experience and you want or you're lost and you move on. But the infinite game is the one that you play for your entire life, right? And the point of the game is to keep playing and keep getting better. And that's what, you know, a career and game designer in the industry is, right? It's what, you know, friendships and families and things are. You're all playing together to continue to level up and grow and keep going, right? I mean, that's like, what's your objective when you're as a game company?

It's like, well, I want to be able to keep making games. That's my main one. Don't stop doing that. It's still this advice down to stay alive, make friends. There you go. Great. There you go. That sounds like a perfect place to end.

Stay alive, make friends. Fundamental principles here. I love it. I know that a lot of people that have been hearing about storybook we're all here are going to be excited to learn more about it and know when they can play it. I hear more about your stuff. If they want to, what's the best place for them to do that?

Well, we have a few. If you do a search for us, you'll see some of our art, but we haven't gone public yet. So we're almost public is where we're at, right? We're still in pre-Alpha. So soon doing searches for Storybook Brawl will be the way to find us. Okay. Awesome, man. Well, I always love our chats.

It's been fun to be able to do this in a more public way. So thanks for joining me. And I definitely want to be on that alpha test when it's ready. Cool. Thanks, Justin. This was super fun. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast.

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