Think Like A Game Designer - Maxine "MJ" Newman — Leading Arkham Horror into New Realms, Unveiling Cooperative Game Magic, and Navigating Career Crossroads (#60)

Episode Date: February 13, 2024

Maxine “MJ” Newman joins me to chat about her leap from lawyering to senior game designer at Fantasy Flight Games. As a game designer at Fantasy Flight, MJ serves as the co-lead designer for the popular Arkham Horror card game and is also a developer on the Lord of the Rings card game. We discuss everything from her dad sparking her game design love to the Arkham Horror card game and its teamwork-boosting twists. Outside of her work, MJ is also a self-published novelist and contributing writer to publications like Dragon magazine. MJ discusses the creative differences between her career as a game designer and her work as an author, comparing the solitude of book writing to the team effort of game creation. If you're into stories of passion projects turning into careers, storytelling within card games, and how game jams can spark creativity, you'll love this talk. Tune in to hear how she's making her mark in the gaming world and beyond. Enjoy!Visit http://justingarydesign.com/ for show notes, game design lessons, and more! 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 Maxine M.J. Newman. Maxine is a senior designer at Fantasy Flight Games, and she was the co-lead designer of the popular Arkham Horror Living Card Game and also a developer of the Lord of the Rings card game.

As we talk about in the episode, she's also an author and a lawyer. We talk about a lot of really fascinating topics, the difference between living card games and trading card games, how you design cooperative games, the different aspects of challenges and insights and cooperation that hold those things together. We talk about the process behind Fantasy Flight Games annual game jam and the power of the different kinds of constraints and how that brings to, teams together. We talk about the importance of bringing emotion and power to your work from designs that really matter to you. We talk about how you can't let yourself worth get tied up in your productivity and really get into what drives her as a creative and what can help drive you as a creative. We have a lot of really great things in here. I was very excited to get to

meet Maxine and to be able to talk to her. I'm sure you will enjoy her insights and her background. So without any further ado, here is Maxine M.J. Newman. Hello and welcome. I am here with Maxine M.J. Newman. Maxine is wonderful to get to talk with you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. It's an honor.

Yeah. So it's one of those things. I didn't know your work super well before. I did a bunch of research around you. And I'm actually really excited. We have a lot of fun areas of overlap. Of course, game design, but actually a few other ones, which I'll save spoiling.

for until we get into it. So what I'd love to do, and I usually just try to start with kind of your, your origin story, your, your, you're kind of superhero, kind of when you started.

What was the radioactive spider bite that got you into games? How did you kind of get into this world? Oh, gosh. It's a longish story, but we got time. My dad actually was a game designer back in the day in like the 80s and 90s. And so, you know,

we had this basement. that was just filled with board games and filled with board game components. And I started getting into game design from a really young age, honestly, just kind of tinkering around with widgets and whatever things, Chatsky's that my dad had. And I would help him, like, playtest his designs and stuff. And he had weekly board game meetups with his friends that I would awkwardly join in on, you know, a bunch of like 50, 60-year-old guys, and I'm just there, like, I'm 10.

Um, yeah. So that was kind of where my passion for gaming came from. And for a long time throughout high school and college, I would make my own games and not really do anything with them, obviously, but just kind of like for me and my friends to play. Yeah. So let me, let me pause. Let me pause there for a second. Just because like, I think you're the first person I've spoken to for whom their dad was already doing game design before coming into it. So it's a really cool leg up on an option.

It sounds like your dad is, let's tease apart some lessons that you learn from your dad, some of the experiences maybe that you can remember particularly as growing up that how he encouraged you or what types of things you learned to do or not do from watching him do the work. So yeah, I should probably mention my dad is Alan Newman. He's made, let's see, his most recent game with. still quite a while ago. It was a game called Dark Minions for Z-Man games. Prior to that, he had a game called Winds a Plunder.

He had a really, really big, popular game called Super 3. As far as, like, lessons, honestly, I don't think he ever intended for me to get into game design. It kind of just spurred on naturally from, like, that shared common interest. his style of games very he he likes euro games and like classic old school board games um my my style of games are more like thematic and immersive and big and complex you know right so the cliche terms here you know we've got the kind of Ameritrash versus Euro games here

yeah yeah but you want to maybe just parse those out a little bit because some of our audience may not be familiar with either term sure Sure, sure. So the Euro games that my dad would enjoy are typically the kinds of games where it's highly tactical and it's all about getting points and winning generally. These are games that almost always have a victory point track that goes around the border of the board. You know what I mean? Like that kind of game. Whereas the games that I like to play tend to be, they tend to veer in the more cooperative. side. And they tend to be games that are, they have this, this lore that's built up or they're, they're very thematic. They have a very specific theme that the game is built for the theme, rather than it just being a really interesting and good game that just kind of has a theme. You know what I mean? Right. Yeah. It's a really important distinction that I think a lot of designers tend to bifurcate on, right? Where the, I'm a kind of mechanics, crunchy. I want

the, like, the interesting combinations of the rules to be the driver. And then there's a theme that gets matched to it. And then there's people who's like, no, no, I really want to tell a great story. I want to feel like I'm in the world of Arkham Horror. I want to feel like I'm a superhero. And the mechanics will be whatever they'll be to make that so serve that. And then, of course, there's a huge spectrum and the best games do the best of both. But that's kind of the, really a key focal, you know, kind of fulcrum between which different designers must kind of go between. Yeah. Okay. All right. So you were not supposed to be a game designer, even though your dad was a game designer. I got to know now because I got to, you know, in my research, you got a law degree,

right? I do. I do have a law degree. See, that's where I was like, I'm like, all right, I got to know what's up here. Because so my parents were lawyers and I went to law school because that's what I was supposed to do. And it took me, you know, some pretty, you know, crisis of conscience, really kind of, you know, figuring out that I really didn't want to do that and become a game designer. So you had your parents as game designers. It somehow you ended up in law school. I need to know what happened there. It sounds like we had the same crisis of conscience, to be honest. So I didn't have the same experience of like my parents were lawyers and I was kind of like supposed to do that. I actually went, I changed majors so much. In high school, I was really into science. So when I went to

undergrad, I started doing like physics and astronomy. And I was like, oh, I'm going to be like an astrophysicist. and I realized that was really bad at it. I was good at the high school level, but in the college level, I was not doing very well. So I changed to one of my other passions, which is East Asian Studies. So I studied abroad in Japan. I learned Japanese, and I got a degree in East Asian Studies,

which is a degree you can't do that much with. You can teach East Asian Studies or you can teach English in Japan, you know what I mean? or in wherever in East Asia. So I was like, all right, not really sure what to do in my life at that moment. So I was just, I'll just keep going to school. You know, that's the one thing that I'm good at is I'll just keep going to school. Yes, exactly.

Yeah, I had always been told that I like arguing, which I don't necessarily agree with, but I guess I can argue with people over whether or not I like arguing. sure seems like you like arguing to me yeah right um so i went into law school and um you know did did that did three years of law school graduated past the barring the first try and then i was like you know what i don't actually want to do this uh yes yes so so there's a lot of lessons in here and there's a lot of things i can relate to um you know this this feeling like okay well i'm just going to do what's next right i'm good at school I can keep doing. That's exactly what happened to me. And, you know, this, this, I think a lot of

people can relate to that. There's just whatever the thing that's in front of them, they're just going to kind of default do. And then you, you actually did do some things, which I really encourage, which is, you know, you found things you were passionate about and you started to pursue those. And it could be astrophysics, could be station studies. But in order to find something that's really going to be a career, you kind of need to be at the center of a specific Venn diagram. And that is passion. I'm passionate about this and I love it. I'm actually good at this. And there's actually a market for this. Yeah.

There's somebody that wants it. So you had the, I love, I'm passionate about astrophysics and there is a market for that skill, but I don't have, I'm not good at it. You had the East Asian studies, which you were good at and you were passionate about, but there was no market for it. And then now, you know, again, post-law school sounds like you're going to find game design where you could actually be good at it, love it, and be able to actually make money doing it.

Yeah, and I've been doing it for 11 years since then, so, which is wild to think about because it still feels like I just left law school. Yeah, so what was the gap as I didn't want to gloss over the like, okay, you, so I quit law school and became a game designer and I was fortunate enough to have a job, a game design job offer on the table. How did you get from, okay, I graduated law school. I know I had a bunch of debt from law school I had to deal with, but I don't know if you were in the same boat. So then how did you go from there to actually getting a job as a game designer? Well, I very thankfully did not have a lot of debt, which is incredibly, like, incredibly helpful. And I'm very, what's the word?

Lucky. I'm very fortunate to have not had a career, like, an massive amount of debt. But, unfortunately, I didn't have the best grades coming out of law school. I had, like, okay in grades. Like, they were fine. They just weren't, like, top of the class. And at the time that I graduated, which was 2012, the market for jobs in law was not great. So the people who were getting job offers right out of law school were the top 10% of the class.

You know what I mean? Right. People who went to the best of the school, like the top ones in the nation. I was neither. So I found it really difficult to get a job. And I'm sure I probably could have if I had kept with it. but at the time, as a hobby just for fun, I was designing scenarios for a little game

called Lord of the Rings, the Card Game. And I was posting them on board game geek and getting quite a few downloads, actually, like a thousand downloads or so. And I saw that there was a job opening at Fantasy Flight, just all on my own, just kind of noticed it. And I was like, what the heck, I'll apply. I'm not going to get it.

And then, yeah, I got it. Yeah, that's awesome. So wonderful. And this is, you know, this is great because it really does echo the same advice I give all the time and tons of other guests of this podcast have given. Right. You know, you do the thing for free. You put your work out there. And then that builds a resume for you and gets you, well, get you feedback, right?

If you didn't get those thousand downloads, you'd know you were kind of on the wrong track or you know when you're on the right track. And then gives you a body of work that helps you to get the jobs when you want to. apply for jobs and, you know, find, you know, take a look at the job boards of the companies that you care about and reach out to people there and, and you never know what can happen. So that's great. And I have to imagine this must have been still a pretty tough time for you in that you had, you know, you weren't getting a job. You'd been just finished through law school. You weren't sure what you're doing. You know, it could feel pretty dark. But it ends up, again, for me, I know, I felt that way when I was going through law school that it turned out to be one of the best things

that ever happened to me. It was the fact that I was, I had that suffering got me into, you know, my dream life. It sounds like the same has been true for you. Yeah, I'm happy that I went through the experience of going to law school because it really opened my eyes to a lot of, a lot of interesting facets of life in this country. But in the end, I don't think it was for me. Yeah. And I didn't quite realize it until I got this job and I moved out here. And I was like, find a job that you want to go to in the morning, you know? Yeah. That's, that's the, best thing you can do. Yep. No, I hear that. So talk to me. Now, Fantasy Flight has a, is a pretty, feels like, I actually don't know how big the company is. I know they have a lot of games of a massive

number of different games. How many designers do you work with? How big is your team? How does it, what's your day to day like working there? Yeah. So it's kind of changed a bit over the years. When I first joined, it was still very small. We hadn't been bought by Asmadee yet. We weren't under like the Asmadey umbrella. So it was a pretty small operation, maybe 40-ish people, maybe a little bit more than that. Slowly over time, it expanded to become a much closer to like 80, 90, maybe even 100 people. And at a certain point, then Asmody came into the picture. And a lot of those employees kind of got shifted over to that end of the business, right? Sales and marketing and stuff like that.

And so the actual fantasy flight crew kind of went back, reduced down to that original number of like maybe 40, 50 people. As far as teams, we're split into a couple different board game teams and a card game team. Well, that's not true. We were split into a couple different board game teams and a card game team. Now we're split into a couple just teams and then Star Wars Unlimited. which is like seven people all just working on that one game. All of the other designers tend to just kind of work on their own projects apart from one another, you know.

Yeah, and so for those that are not familiar with Star Wars Unlimited, maybe give a little brief overview of that. Yeah, Star Wars Unlimited is our brand new. It's coming out in March, I think. Very exciting TCG. that's obviously all about Star Wars. And it's characters all across all the movies and the TV shows and everything you can possibly think of. And you can kind of mix and match and play them in however way you want and fight each other.

So you can create like interesting matches of like, what if Anna or what if Luke Skywalker fought, you know, who's a character who he hasn't thought? I don't want to talk about it. You know, what if Luke and Obi-1 thought? Yeah. Like, that's interesting. Like, young Obi-1 versus young Luke. That kind of thing.

Yeah. No, and I've seen, I did a, I checked out the, I think there was a tabletop simulator demo or something of the game. I played already, and it is definitely a solid game with obviously a phenomenal IP, so it's going to be, I'm sure it will be a big success. It's always interesting now. I don't know what you think about the, the trading card game market these days because it's been, you know, kind of, it's had a new resurgence,

which is wonderful for those of us that love these kinds of games. But it's also gotten pretty, the market's getting pretty crowded with a lot of players and, you know, big brands. It sounds like, you know, I mean, Disney and Star Wars and there's, you know, and then the variations between the TCG model and the living card game model, which I think is what you work on as Arkham Horror. So it's a, it's a really interesting space. I'm curious to get your thoughts working, working in it, especially working in a big company that has a variety of different facets of it and actually created the living card game model. The two non-LCG card games that we've made are both Star Wars.

Star Wars Destiny back in the day and Star Wars Unlimited now. I didn't work on either of those or really play much of either of them because I've just been so busy with the LCG stuff. I know that there's a lot of, there's a big draw for. for both. And I feel like different people gravitate to two different ones based on like what they get out of it. You know, what, what, I like scratchoffs. So maybe, maybe I should get into Star Wars Unlimited because that's like half of the experience is opening the packs and seeing what you get and being like really excited when you pull like an ultra rare legendary card. That's an exciting thing that you can't get

in an LCG. But of course, LCGs also have their own. pros and cons so yeah so and then again just to to make sure the audience is following so you know TCG trading card game the packs are purchased and there's randomized content as you mentioned there's you know you can get rare cards or super rare cards or whatever and so there's there's some uncertainty in what you're getting a living card game is uh is not like that it's a game where there's a box set you get the same thing in that box and then there's consistent or semi-consistent content that gets released um throughout the life cycle of the game game. So it's kind of intended to differentiate it from a board game with expansions. It's kind of like

that. But I don't know. How would you? Is there a clear bright line between board game plus expansions and a living card game? Or is it just kind of like a we promise we're going to make a lot of expansions? I think the big identifier is the fact that the cards are what drive the game. Like there is no board. Sometimes there's cards that kind of form a board in a way. But it's really just it plays and operates like a TCG just minus the randomized distribution. Yeah, I guess the distinction then I might make there is like

for a living card game, you're still building your own deck of cards out of a total pool of collections where it's in a traditional board game, everybody's playing with the same starting set of cards or whatever. And then I make deck building games where everybody starts the same cards and you're acquiring cards kind of as part of the game. But here you're still building a deck, but it's building it from a non-random assortment of cards instead of random assortment of cards. Yeah, LCGs have a huge element of creativity, customization, and personal expression that a lot of board games don't have because they tend to be like, here's the curated experience that we made for you.

That's very good. You know what I mean? Yes. Yeah. So I tend to think about it in terms of, so the distinction between a living card game and a TCG in terms of advantages or disadvantage to the player, I think in a trading card game, The player has the excitement of opening up a pack and the fun of like what might be and the randomness and uncertainty of that. But it can also be very expensive, which is, you know, for collecting them, it becomes harder because chasing wear cards is not easy to do. Whereas in a something like a living card game, there's a, you know, because you know, let's say there's a pack every month or a pack every other month or whatever you know you're going to spend, you know, for $20 or $40 a month, you're going to be fine and you're going to have everything that's there.

It's more of a known purchase, costs less to the consumer to play in a living card game experience than a trading card game experience. Is that accurate or are there other things that you'd say differentiate them? I would say the only other big thing is in a TCG you can have draft, which is a really exciting and really popular mode. For those of which, for those of you who don't know, draft is where everyone is opening booster packs at the same time and they're passing, they're picking one card out of it and passing the rest. and you keep doing that over and over until you have a deck and then you play against each other. And typically you get to keep the cards that you drafted. Or if you're just doing it, you know, kitchen table draft with your friends, then you just put it back together into a cube and you're good. Yeah, no, that's a good point.

I think that's one of my favorite ways to play trading card games where you get the, you get random cards available to you and you have to make do with what you have, whether it be drafting or just opening up packs, I think it's quite a bit of fun. And for me, that's why we started working on Soul Forge Fusion, right? It was what we call the hybrid deck game where the cards are algorithmically created. So every single pack is going to be unique, right? You'll never, you have that experience of opening up new packs. You can draft them and mix and match them. But you don't have that same kind of, I have to go collect all the cards because I can't customize those decks beyond just which two of my shuffling together.

So there's a trying to get aspects of the excitement of I don't know what I'm going to open without having the infinite I have to chase after every single rare and go build the same deck everybody else has. So, okay, so then the other, have you been working on Arkham Horror? How long have you been working on that game specifically? Oh, boy, let's see.

I worked on Lord of the Rings until about 2016, actually, until about 2015, when we started development on Arkham Horror, and that released in 2016, and I was working on it all the way up until the Scarlete Keys released, which was 20-22-ish, I think. Okay, and then you shifted to other projects since then that you can't talk about right now?

Yeah, exactly. All right, cool, got it. So then let's talk about, since I think, both Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Rings was also a cooperative card game, right? So, yeah. This is, I think, a really interesting space. to talk about like building cooperative games versus competitive games. What do you think makes for a great cooperative game?

And certainly specifically when we're talking about a great cooperative living card game, because I tend to think about, you know, when I'm building decks and it's, well, my experience is all a bit about competition, right? I'm trying to beat other people. And when I was, you know, but, but here you're kind of building decks to, to collaborate with other people. So what, what do you think contributes to the success of those kinds of games? What's the experiences that matter to the most of players?

I think there's a couple things that play. One is you still want the game to have that tactical, strategic feeling that a competitive card game would have, where you're trying to build the most efficient deck. You're trying to be very tactical with the elements that you have in front of you and use your deck to the best of your capability, kind of pilot your deck the best way that you can. But there's this added element of teamwork and cooperation that doesn't exist. in most competitive games, unless it's a team's game or something. So you need to have, your game needs to have ways for everyone to help out each other

in interesting and tactical ways that feel really good when it happens so that you're high-fiving around the table and you're like, wow, that's so cool, I didn't realize that you could even do that move. And then the third thing at play is challenge. The game needs to have enough of a challenge that it feels like you're playing against like an intelligent foe, you know what I mean? If you're just kind of running through the motions, then it might not be as enjoyable in experience.

Although, obviously, we offer many different difficulty modes so that it's always going to be whatever challenge you want it to be. But I think that that's a really important aspect of it. And there's like an emotional element to teaming up with friends to take down something that's really hard. And I think that's super exciting. Yeah, that sounds very right to me. I think I actually even talk about this to my team at work.

That working together to solve difficult problems and overcome challenges is actually one of the best things in life. Sometimes it doesn't feel like it when you're working on a hard problem at work, but it really is. It really is an unenjoyable experience in games. A big part of why we pay games is to face those obstacles and overcome them and doing that collectively is quite a bit of fun. I find there's no bigger rush than swooping into rescue someone. who really needed your help.

Yeah. Yeah. So let's dig into that piece then because you mentioned it, you know, in this idea that you want to have these cooperative ways to work together, ways to swoop in and help people. How do you think about building those elements into games or, you know, how would someone think about it's like, okay, I want to build a cooperative game? What types of mechanics or systems or, you know, little tricks do you have available that kind of help you to build that ability to collaborate and swoop and help?

So obviously with both Lord of the Rings and Arkham, there's combat and there's enemies, which doesn't always apply in all cooperative games, of course. But in those games, it's very important that enemies were kind of attached to someone or engaged with someone so that if a ghoul is attacking me and you're free and you're free to do whatever you want, there's a lot of different interesting situations that could come up. I could be in danger because the ghoul is really is bearing down on me and it's going to kill me unless you swoop in and help me. But it could also be the opposite where I'm taking care of this enemy so that you can run off and investigate or quest or whatever, depending on the game. Both of those games share that element.

And at its baseline, I think there has to be some kind of mechanic where you can help each other. like in Archimits with skill tests. You can commit cards from your hand to help other people with skill tests. In Lord of the Rings, there's a lot of, we didn't call it this, but like collective tests

where everyone is trying to commit as much of a certain stat as they can, like willpower to overcome the locations that are in the staging area or combat to take down a really big, like, ballrog or something. Right. So there's like a communal element. into it.

Yeah. So either letting people all contribute towards the same challenge or letting people sacrifice some of their own resources in order to help other people in times of need, you know,

just as explicit rules are easy ways to build in these hooks. That makes sense. Yeah, and like play cards on each other, have cards that very specifically call out, like, play this on someone else. You know what I mean?

That kind of thing. We even have, we have quite a few cards in Arkham that are very specifically like a moment of someone swooping in to help someone else. Like there's a card called Get Behind Me, where you take an attack that's meant for someone else. There's another card called I'll handle this one, which is when you draw a card from the encounter deck, someone else is like, no, no, no, I'm taking that one instead. Yeah.

Yeah. That's not, so this is actually wonderful. So this is, this feels like one of those perfect marriages of like flavor and function and creating the story. I mean, you're literally telling people like as they play the card. like how to role play their way into the situation. It's like, that's really, that's really cool. I think that's like creates a really fun connection moment for people as they kind of like building their deck really is like building the personality that they want to have in the game. Speaking of which, there's there's also one of the classes in Arkham is rogue.

And rogues are the selfish class that don't really help each other. So they have the opposite going on. They have cards that are like, you handle this one. which is the complete opposite of the other one. I love it. I love it. Well, and this is a key aspect of any kind of, I'll say collectible game design, but really kind of this, any kind of customizable game design, right?

You want to give people the opportunity to, you know, kind of pick their lanes and say, okay, this style of play is available to me and there's enough tools of there that I could personalize it, but it needs to be kind of understandable, right? So there's, whether it be a class or a color or affections or, you know, these kind of categories, I feel like are some of the most important tools. Because when you're dealing with these kind of expandable, collect, customizable games,

you're talking about thousands of cards and and lots of different areas that people need to be able to access quickly, right? Even if I'm not buying every card or seeing every card, if I see something, I can tell quickly, okay, this is a rogue card. I can expect this from it. I can expect things. So I always tell new designers like, you know,

when you're trying to approach a project like this, which is way harder than trying to design a regular board game, right? There's just so much going on there that like, all right, first you really want to try to break things down into categories and say, okay, what are the buckets that I want to put things into? And then I'll turn this over to you shortly. It's like, when I'm trying to build those categories, I'll use cycles as a real tool to build them up for me, right?

So if I have a series of cards, one of them will say, okay, you get behind me. Another one will say, I get behind you. And then we'll say, we'll handle this together. And another one says, let's get out of here. Right. And so like there's like all the different categories. Like, what's our, yeah, yeah, exactly. I'll be over there later.

You know, and each one gives you a hook or the classic example for magic of like, you know, you have the kind of the every card from the first set that, you know, cost one and gave you three of something, right? So the white card gave you three life and the blue card gave you three cards and the red card dealt three damage and they were not balanced at all, mind you, but they give you a sense of what the cards would do. And so the, are there other, first of all, you know, assuming you agree with this or push back on it if you'd like, I know you like to argue, I've heard that. What tools do you use to kind of help you to design or develop or kind of build these

massive card pools and systems that keep people engaged? No, you're totally right. It's very important to kind of filter the cards into different buckets, as you called them, and dole them out to your different factions or classes or colors or whatever it is that your game has. And within that, you can create sub-themes as well. So, for example, rogues have a theme of they gain lots of resources. They also have a theme of they can loan out their resources or borrow resources from other people,

which is like a whole other kind of sub-theme inside the resource theme. You know what I mean? and so sometimes it's not just like the overarching class but also like specific identities. Like you want to be able to role play the exact identity that your player is trying to craft for themselves, you know? Yeah, yeah. And I think this is one of those other things that's like, you know, the style of game and how much you are encouraging people to role play versus be focused on the stress. strategy versus like just kind of be immersed in what's happening. It varies a lot, right?

I mean, Arkham Horror comes with it. You know, the IP brings a theme and an ethos that you're really trying to make happen. And I think the fact that it's a cooperative game and you're building in this world makes people more inclined towards the storytelling. And I think as you gave with the examples of the cards you mentioned, like get behind me and whatever. Like their cards are literally like they feel like role playing actions and things you'd say in a game. And so it really helps it to come alive and be.

visceral. You know, I tend towards, yeah, making things a little bit more abstract in the games that I'm doing with, I'll be like, I'm summoning creatures and I'm casting spells, but they're like, it's a little more abstract, like who you are and how you're doing that. So I really like this idea of just being a specific persona that has, each action really feels like something you could imagine someone doing in a game of Dungeons and Dragons or in a movie about, you know, Arkham Horror. Yeah, and Arkham Horror is very specifically designed to feel like an RPG. any LCG had a weird baby. But this is true, even if your LCG is a war game

where it's giant factions that are fighting each other. You know what I mean? We had, back in the day, we had a couple Warhammer games. We had Warhammer Conquest and Warhammer Invasion. And Warhammer Conquest was very interesting because you pick a faction, but then you also picked a warlord within that faction. That was like your leader, you know what I mean?

and that really altered the playstyle of your deck, even within that faction. So you could have three different space marine warlords who operated very, very differently from one another. And I always found that to be really inspiring. Yeah, yeah. We did the same thing with Soul Forge Fusion. We added the original version of SoulForge, you just picked two factions, shuffled them together. You know, you pick two factions, you built decks from those factions.

In SoulForge Fusion, each deck comes with like a Forgeborn, who's like our kind of of main character, you know, kind of commander type figure. And you pick one that's your main, that's who you are. And it makes a big difference in how visceral the game is. And like your specific powers changed the way everything plays. It was actually somewhat of an accident that we ended up there. We had to have some way to track every time you shuffled your deck. And so we ended up building a character that got new powers every time you shoveled

your deck. So it went from being a awkward thing you had to track to a thing you got really excited about so you could start using your powers. But I, yeah. But it's one of the, I love talking to just. designers that are very, you know, story first and theme first and trying to bring that out because it's one of the things I've worked on over the last five or six years, really, you know, I come from not necessarily a Eurogame background, but very much a mechanics first background.

Like I want to create really cool game experiences and tensions. And then I want a great story to marry it, but I don't start there. And I really have been trying to kind of make a lot of my more recent designs start from story and merge back to the middle. So it's great to hear insights from those like you that seem that lean on the other direction. Yeah. Oh, I lean in that direction, but I also really do, like, love me a good tactical experience. Right. Yeah. Yeah, that comes across in the projects you've worked on. I think, you know, again, the best designers do both, right? You can't, you can't have a great

game experience that's just like all story and the rules just fall apart or just super loosey-goosey. And I very few people like games that are, you know, very, very tactical, but 100% abstract that you can't really, you know, figure out what's going on. There's no story to tell. I've been playing a bit of battle tech lately, which is one of those games that's incredibly tactical and granular and like very complex, but also so thematic, like so perfectly thematic to what's happening to the point

where you have to like keep track of individual ammo and all your weapons. And I think that's the kind of game that really appeals to me where it's like, oh, I can totally picture myself in this, this, this machine. But also it's like very tactical, you know. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And it's again, it's going to be different, different players are going to gravitate towards different levels of this kind of complexity to immersion. I think it's often, it's often one of the biggest tradeoffs in terms of like, you know, I want this to feel like I'm really in a battle tech. So that means, okay, I got to track my heat usage and I want to be

tracking individual movements and parts of my thing can be blown off and I need to have rules for each different part and if I want to make a I want to ram a guy then I want rules specific right and so like what you're like because I only have one leg now exactly exactly and so you know the more little rules that you end up making to make it feel very much like it was a real fight the more complicated the game is the more it becomes down to like wait hold on let me look up this thing in the rule book and where is this in page 76 as you blah blah blah but it's a you know where where you end up on that spectrum is very different. I tend in my designs to value elegance and simplicity a lot.

My team will tell you I beat them over the head with this all the time. But again, it's just my design ethos. It's not right or wrong. That is a good thing to prioritize. Yeah. It makes your game. I would say by default. People to play it.

Yeah. By default, most designers, I know, start too far on the complexity side of the spectrum. So everybody, I think it's worth it for everyone to try to view through the lens of elegance and simplicity. And then you can decide where you grow from there. The way I like to think about it, I don't know how you approach these things. It's like for a given game, depending upon the target audience, I'm trying to hit,

I have a certain number of complexity points that I get to spend. Yeah. And so I make a game out of making a game basically. Yeah. Yeah. I do. I think it's like, okay, this is a family game. Family card game is supposed to be playable in 15 minutes or less and you can play with

your grandma. I have very few points to spend. Like every rule I have to look at with a really fine tooth comb. We have a really cool game coming out called You Gotta Be Kitten Me. It's going to be coming out in Target. And it's very much like a bluffing card game where you could put your own pets in the game. Very excited about it. I haven't actually talked about this anywhere.

I didn't realize that like kitten. Like that's adorable. Oh, it's adorable. And you literally can we have a thing that you can actually like print out your own pet and put a sticker on. So your pets are actually in the game. I want this. I want this. It's very exciting.

I'm sold. Whether or not, I'll have to guide when I can actually release this episode now, but it's coming out in targets across the U.S. in June. And I'm very excited about it. But that's a game. We had to be like very, very laser focused on every little nuance of complexity, right? But as a game like, you know, Soul Forge Fusion, it's like, okay, you're playing an algorithmically generated card game's got a lot, you know, there's a lot of possibilities because each card is algorithmically generated. So there's thousands of possibilities and we need to cover all of them. It's a, you know, there's a decent amount of complexity that comes in there. But I want to. I want to. to spend that complexity on you being able to understand the cards and be able to process them and level them up. And so the outer structure of it, like how the cards played and how combat work, I kept it very, very simple also because I want to focus all my complexity points, even though I have more of them into that space. So I know how you think about what's when you're targeting games from the realm of whether it be battle tech to Arkham Horror to, you know, whatever other games. How do you think about how you balance complexity versus immersion and your other goals?

I definitely thought about it in a similar way, although I didn't call it complexity points. It's more just like, there's a certain bandwidth. There's a certain level at which players break, right? Where they're like, okay, this is too much, I'm done. And you want to keep it under that level while still creating an experience that makes them think. You know what I mean? For me, I honestly, I make the games that I would like. That's kind of always been my ethos.

like if if I make a game that I would play in my spare time, then I feel like I've at least succeeded in that. And it just happens to be that a lot of people share the same interests. Yeah. Yep. Easiest to make a game for a target audience. It includes yourself. Yes. Yes.

And then how do you think about play testing and working on games? I know you've, you know, when you have, especially within your company, you've got secret projects. I'm sure you're testing them internally. But what stages do you go to? to, again, not obviously talking about your current project, but in general, how do you think about playtesting and when it goes out into outer inner teams, outer teams, stuff like that? Generally, once we considerate games core design to be, to be like in alpha, right?

Like, it's playable, it works, it's functional, and it's where you want it to be. Even if it's not perfect and it won't be perfect, that's when we start bringing in external playtesters because by that point, we've probably been playtesting it internally for months. And when you only have five people looking at a project, it's, you miss a lot. You know what I mean? So much goes over your head because you know what you want it to be and you think it's working exactly like that, but then someone else starts playing it and it's actually completely different for them. You know what I mean? So it's important to get them on board early, but it's also important that you have a nice foundation before you bring them on board. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah. So the way I, my language for this is, you know, I talk about core engine design and engine design versus component design. And so there's this area where the fundamentals of the engine are there. I know where the fun is. I know what I'm trying to do. And then, and I have a rule set that is comprehensible. And then I can start moving that out. And then, you know, so once I, then I move to engine development where we might be tweaking some of the kind of major numbers and scales and like, okay, this system needs to be pushed a little bit more or less. And then component design is where like, okay, no, now we're focusing on individual cars, individual abilities, like the classes and the categories and buckets like we talked about earlier in those areas, I can, I'll push things out more

broadly and then moving all the way to like polish where you're really trying to like template everything and get the art end and all that. Yeah, absolutely. So like anecdotally, the way it worked with Arkham, Nate and I, very early on, we didn't build any player cards. We just took a bunch of index cards and started making stuff up on the spot. And we would do that for months until the gameplay, the core gameplay loop was satisfactory. And then we scrapped all of that work and started completely scratch with that new, like, core design in mind. So we would have these cards, like, written down like, oh, I, you know what I have? I have a machete. And then we would just make up on the spot what it did. Didn't really matter. As long as the core like gameplay was, was functioning

the way we wanted it to, then we could then go back and be like, all right, scrap this card. Now let's start over with an actual card pool. You know what I mean? And so when you when you say core gameplay here, just, we're talking about like, you know, how the skill test work and how the rule, how combat works and like what's happening. Like, is this part of it fun and this interaction? Assuming I could have any card I can imagine is the things I'm doing with the card's meaningful and that doesn't make sense. Yeah, like, um, Arkham,

if anyone who's played Arkham before, it works on an action system. You have three actions on your turn. And those actions can be whatever you want from this pretty decently large list of different actions that you can do and you can play cards that gain you more actions. But that was not originally how we designed it. that was where we landed after many, many, many, many iterations on different core designs. You know what I mean?

Yeah, of course. Yeah. No, people, I love, I've tried actually just recently, it won't be that recent by the time this post, but I posted a design diary that we did because I love tracking that stuff because people don't realize how far away from where you started you can end up when you're making a game. And so it's the journey is, it's fascinating to like kind of go back, track. He's like, oh, yeah, remember when we had like fog of war here? And remember when we had this? Like, what was that? What was going on there? Remember we were rolling dice for combat? Like,

oh, yeah, crazy. Often that's what makes it good is all that iteration. If you think you know exactly how the game is going to play before you've started working on your game and you stick to that, right? Like, you completely stick to your guns on that. It's likely you're going to have a game that isn't like perfect, right? It hasn't like, you haven't hashed out exactly how this game should work. You've just hashed out how you want it to work.

Yeah. No, absolutely. Like I just, there's no substitute for the playtest iteration loop, right? That's the core design loop is what I call it. I think there's nothing that you cannot craft a whole game in your head and have it be great out of the games. You can have good ideas.

You can have, and I do recommend people do play-through. in their own heads like you kind of like mentally play through a game before you actually like bring it to the table you'll find problems and you'll fix you'll fix them but there's just no substitute for for really wrestling with those things trying different ideas working through them and and and you know killing your babies a lot of the time you're like you have these great ideas that you're like that just doesn't fit this game and what's helped me over the years to deal with that is that i you know i've been doing this long enough now that the ones the mechanics that i tried but didn't work for

you know game a can show up 10 years later and game Z and it turns out that's really good there. So I never think of it as, I always talk about killing my babies, but it's more I put them into cryostasis, you know? It's not that bad. That's true. So it's funny that this is where the conversation went because FFG has an annual tradition that we do a game jam. The entire company gets together. And no matter what discipline you were, you know, normally in your everyday job, everyone gets

together and they split into teams and everyone makes a game in like three days, right? And my team name, our team name in the last one that we did was called Kill Your Darling's. And it ended up being prophetic because halfway through the second day, we completely scrapped the game we were working on and started over. And sometimes that's just what you have to do. All right. I'm fascinated by the game jam. Talk to me more about how that system works. So you break up into teams.

How big are the teams? What are the parameters? What's the judgments? How does it work? The teams are about five to six people, maybe seven. And they try to split it so that people from different disciplines are always part of the team, right? You'll never have a team that's just six graphic designers. But you're encouraged not to just do what you do in your everyday job.

So you might have graphic designers who are doing actual core design. You might have game designers who are trying to do some graphic design, et cetera. And the goal isn't to make some... They made me try to do graphic design. I'll tell you that right now. Very, very bad. I will draw some great stick figures, though. So if you want a stick figure game, I am your man.

I wound up doing exactly that in our last... I wound up building all of the cards. And luckily, our game was very simple. So it worked out pretty well. But don't use me for graphic design. Like, just don't. Yeah, yeah. No, everybody has their skills.

But it's fun to try different things and understand how the other people's jobs are and gets it stretch those muscles. It's just maybe we don't expect a great output all the time. Yeah. That's why we all, that's why we're diversified. That's okay. But the goal isn't to create something that's sellable or even good necessarily.

The goal is to just create something, right? And they give out awards not based on qualities so much as based on use of, oh, yeah, I miss a very important thing. We're all given a prompt, like a very specific prompt. or you pick a prompt from a list that helps kind of guide the creation process. So, for example, the prompt that we had was a game where you had to feel like you're getting away with something. Okay, I love it. Yeah, like that kind of, like, it's broad enough that you can kind of make whatever game you want out of it,

but it's specific enough that it guides the process. And how you creatively use that prompt or how effectively you use that prompt, that's like the awards that were given out. And it's it's just for fun. None of these games are sellable. Actually, there is one that I thought was like top notch, but. Okay. So then what is what's the point then, right?

Why do you do this as a company? There's a few different reasons. Yeah. One is it's a team building exercise. It kind of gets everyone on the same page. And especially in this day and age where everyone's working remotely, it really helps to get the entire company in a room. It's a really nice bonding experience.

It also lets people branch out, like I mentioned. And it's just a good practice. It's a good practice exercise for how to make a game from the ground up. Because so often we're making expansions to games that already exist. And it's important that our designers know how to do a game from scratch. you know yeah no I love it I so we do you know I I was interested to dig into this you know you have a much bigger team than I do but I we do this sort of thing in our team retreats too and what I will do is I will actually I have a like a couple I have like a whole tub here of like random game supplies and like

random cool things little action figures and stuff that's just like basically my kids toy chest and I I bring that and I I dole out certain materials to every team and you have to use those materials to make the game. And so it creates this like intrinsic constraints, because I think constraints breed creativity and it creates a really fun process. And again, it does often come up with some cool, some cool ideas, not to expect a game that, you know, will come out, you know, of whole cloth that will be great. But it does come up with some cool mechanics and it's certainly fun. It's a great thing to remove some of the pressure of design too, right? You're just like, okay, this is just for fun. I'm going to make a thing. Right. When you feel like, oh, I've got to make the next Star Wars expansion,

it's a lot of pressure on you, right? It's a lot. Yeah. It's a lot. Yeah. It's, uh, So here it just sounds like a really fun way to engage with the process that we love. What you just said reminds me a lot of being in my basement, like, as a kid with all of the components. And like my dad had like basically cannibalized all of these games to have like a bunch of different components to use in his own designs. And so I would find the weirdest ones and trying to do something with it. Like, he had a seven-sided dye. A seven-sided die? A seven-sided die.

It was flat on two sides and then had five, you know, like it was like a pentagon shape. And the pips were on the corners. You know what I mean? It was so weird. It was almost definitely not weighted correctly. But it was so interesting and neat that I was like, oh, I want to do something with this, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, this is this is just, you know, I,

I really do believe, like, you know, if you just say make a game and there's nothing in front of you and just have a blight sheet of paper, very, very hard. Right. But if you're like, okay, here, use this crazy seven side of die. What does that do for you? Or make a game where you feel like you're getting away with something. Or here is some dinosaurs. Do some, you know, make these guys fight. I don't know.

Like, it just suddenly, your mind already starts turning in a certain direction. And so I find that it's just a really helpful trick regardless of what stage of design you're in. I find, like, giving yourself some random constraints is just a really powerful tool. Yeah. Agreed. So we only have so much time left and I wanted to make sure I got to this because I saw, not only are you a successful game designer, but you also have published at least one book, I believe, and you've written maybe more than one and have done some transmedia work.

So I want to talk about those things as well because that's fascinating to me talking about what your work in other forms of media. So I do have a book. It's self-published. I actually did a Kickstarter to raise the funds for it because, frankly, I did not have the money to, like, do it. The book was already completely finished by the time we did the Kickstarter, but it helped with editing and proofreading and artwork and stuff like that. And we raised about $10,000, which is incredible. I'm saying we, but it was just me.

The royal we. The royal we, yeah. Thank you, my subjects, for your funds. It makes it sound more official. But yeah, I wrote this book. It was kind of just a passion project for me that I was doing on the side. And wound up becoming like a pretty big part of my life, especially during the pandemic, which is like I did a lot of the writing pre and early pandemic.

I am working on a book too. I'm also working on a tabletop RPG based on the world that the book is set in. It's called The Key and the Crescent is book one. The series is called Dark Drifters. And you can find it on Amazon. You can find it on Barnes & Noble's. You can find it on my website, et cetera. It's about dreams and nightmares and fighting what haunts you in your head.

Yeah. So talk to me a little bit about the process and how it's different or similar to working on games when you're coming to writing books and kind of crafting stories that way. It's very different. Even Arkham, which is a game that has a lot of narrative, like, built into it, it's a totally different experience. For one thing, obviously, you're trying to sell a very curated experience, you know. Games are interesting because everyone who plays it is going to get something different out

of it. And while that is technically still the same for books, it's like you're presenting. sending a very specific thing and then they're going to perceive it differently rather than they're going to like enact things differently. They have no agency. This is all very obvious, but I don't know. That's the first thing that came into my head. For me, the biggest difference was it was all just me. There was no, there was no company overseeing it. There was no, there was no checks and balances. It was mad with power. It was scary though. It was scary. It was scary. because I didn't know if it was good.

You know what I mean? I still don't know if it's good. I'll be honest. I've been told it's good. Well, so, okay, but this is, this dies into like, I think one of the key principles. So I'm, I'm, you know, I'll tell you guys, I mean, I published a book on, you know, think like a game designer, not a, not, you know, not fiction, but, but, and I went through that process. And now I'm in the midst of writing another book that kind of takes the game design principles and applies them to life and has a little bit more storytelling in it. But it's it's very, I found I needed to apply the same principles I apply to games when I apply to writing.

Like I need to get testing out there. I need to put things out there. So I would test with articles and, you know, post things and share, of course, sharing it with friends and colleagues, but like even posting some stuff publicly short snippets to see how people react to be able to get me feedback to know if I'm on the right track or not. I was sitting in a cave and finishing a whole book and just not paying, you know, not getting feedback to me feels like, I don't even know. I would freak out. Also, I mean, it seems very tough. So, so what, you know, how did, how do you, how did you, how did you address that? Or do you still don't feel like you have? You just, you wrote it and you're good to go. I mean, you had an editor. You had, you had other people to check and kind of give you feedback along the way. So how did that process work for you. It was, it was a weird process. I would not suggest this. This is not like a, this is how you should do it. If this is just how it ended up being for me, I was just writing this for myself. I wasn't. planning on putting it out there in the world. I wasn't planning on doing anything with it. It was only until I got about halfway through that I was like, maybe I can actually publish this. Maybe I can actually do something with this. For the most part, a lot of it was just

coming from a little personal, but like the pain that I was feeling and everything that I was going through in my life and reminiscing about my childhood and a lot of different stuff. And so it was cathartic for me. I was doing. doing it as a form of therapy, to be honest. It wasn't until much, much later that I started getting other people involved. And handing the book out to beta readers, which yes, is very, very important, but also professionals. I think that's the biggest thing. There's no such thing as a professional playtester, right? Or at least there should be. But most playtesters are friends, family, other gamers.

And with books, I think it's very important that you have a professional editor who's coming through and cutting out paragraphs, sentences, words, entire chapters. Yes. That kind of thing. Yes, very painful, but necessary. Very painful. It's a cut into your POV character. Yeah, well, I appreciate you sharing, you know, the backstory and the personal nature of this.

I think it's an important note. You know, maybe a good thing for us to kind of close around is this idea of the creative act as one of personal expression and personal development and personal exploration, right? I mean, I find this, you know, certainly in my writing, it forces me to clarify my thinking and really surface stuff. I share a lot of personal stories in my new book that were very hard to write and that writing them helped me to process them. I think that there's, and even, you know, even in games, right, maybe they're not

is obviously personal, but there's definitely aspects of my personality that come out in my work, the kinds of whatever different, you know, a power fantasy from a game or these kinds of different aspects of feelings and emotions I try to evoke. And so I think normalizing that for people, letting people know that is really powerful. So I don't know if you have, you know, kind of message for people out there that might be, you know, in struggle, because I think there's a lot of power that can come from that, right? When you could take things that were hard for you and struggle for you and turn them into something beautiful and creative. And just, you know, that you put out there, like you said, for yourself, it'll tend to resonate.

I mean, raising $10,000 for your book on your own on Kickstarter as a thing is no small feat. I mean, that's amazing, right? And so clearly your story touched a nerve with people. So for other people out there that are maybe, you know, have some, some darkness in their past, I mean, everybody does, but to varying degrees and that maybe want to be able to convert it. What advice would you have? No matter what you're investing from yourself, I think it's important not to be too scared to put yourself on the line. I know that it's really, really scary.

It can be super scary to invest your heart and soul into something and then put it out there in the world for others to see. But I feel like if you don't, it will show. You know, you don't want to create something that feels soulless. So draw upon your inspirations, draw upon your creativity. and really put yourself in there. That's definitely what I've done. I've drawn on so many inspirations for Arkham. I played a lot of horror games when I was a kid

and also when I was an adult that have really inspired specific cards and specific moments and scenarios in Arkham. And in Dark Drifters especially, there's a lot of me in that book. don't I would say the best games are the ones that weren't designed for a like a specific marketing goal. They were designed because you wanted to. You know what I mean?

And like that goes for any media, like movies, TV shows, anything like that. Yeah. No, I've been, I've for sure that I've mentioned this on the podcast before. but I think every single time I've tried to design a game that, like, I thought would be a commercial success, it was a failure. And almost always when I make a game that's just like for me and my friends, it turns out to be a success. It's like quite the crazy overlap. But I think it's just, you know, when you know it, when you're building something that you're putting love and passion and excitement into, like, you know, the audience knows it, right? It just, it comes through in your work.

And so you can't. And frankly, in addition, like, regardless of the success of the process of the price, project, right? If you put something that you genuinely love that you would really put your heart and soul into, that is a huge success on its own. It doesn't matter if other people don't buy it or not, right? You can be proud of it. If you put something out there that's just designed to be successful, then you're entirely hinging on how many dollars you make or how many people subscribe or download or whatever, right? Then your fate is entirely in the hands of others. Whereas if you do something that's just for you and for your for your own soul and for your own creative growth, there's really

no way to lose, you know, the critiques are hard to face. It could be emotionally challenging. Believe, I know, you know what, but it's not, but it's a, it's a small price to pay for the upside that you can get from it. My advice would be, do not let yourself worth get tied up in your productivity. That's great. I'll write that one down. I always need that. That is a lesson that I have yet to learn, but I know. Yeah. You know what I mean? No, well, and this is why I like I've got, I've got, I always kind of try to take

these little nuggets of gold down and I have varying variations of this as mantras that I keep, right? You know, like self-worth, like all the things you care about, your sort of self-worth, you know, connection, belonging, peace, happiness. Everything you really want in this world is not found out there. They're found inside. They're found from you. And it takes a very long time to realize that.

Yeah. By default, we're wired to seek that from other people. We're seeking, you know, we're seeking validation. We're seeking connection. We're seeking, you know, whatever the resources the world has to provide. The most important ones really do come from inside. So it's especially true in this day and age where everyone is on social media trying to get as many followers and likes as they can, you know.

Yes. No, I think that, you know, social media has a lot of great upsides, it lets you stay connected, but it also has a lot of really powerful downsides because we're now all chasing this. You know, we're comparing ourselves to the most successful people. people in the world and they're only their best curated versions of them, right? Only the parts of them that they show, right? Like I, it's one of the things I, why I do this podcast is to show, you know, we have a lot of, we have, you know, the most successful designers and creators in the world on here.

And we show that there's a lot of warts and challenges and fears and everybody stumbles. It just like, you know, those that are at home that are hoping to get started. And so I hope that it helps to, to, to normalize the struggle and to help people, you know, take the leap because I think there's just no better. thing towards, you know, finding what your life's going to be, right? Whether it's East Asian Studies or you're an astrophysicist or you're a game designer, you're a writer, you're whatever, right? It's a, but you don't try.

You don't know. And so it's a really powerful thing. So thank you so much for coming and sharing your story here. If people want to find you, your book, your work, everything, what's the best way for them to come and find more of your stuff? Oh, thank you so much for having me. This has been a blast. You can find my website, my personal website.

is www. bewarethe blackcat.com. You can also find my, like I said before, you can find my book, The Key and the Crescent, on Amazon. But you can also just buy it off of my website. Don't give Amazon the 30% folks. You guys get by from her direct. My Twitter is at Natsunoyoru,

which for the benefit of everyone, I will spell as any, N-A-T-S-U-N-O-Y-O-R-U. Okay, great. I'm a dork. You're in good company. I mean that Twitter when Twitter was formed, man. Yeah, old Twitter.

Back when it was Twitter. Oh, I'm always going to call it Twitter. I'm sorry. Fair enough. Fair enough. All right. Well, thank you, Maxine. And I look forward to actually hopefully get to meet you in person one day, but this is a wonderful conversation.

That'd be wonderful. Thank you so much. This has been great. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platform, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listener reviews and shares make a huge difference and help us grow this community

and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews, along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry, and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast. Think like a game design. it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at thinklinkagamadgamesigner.com or wherever five books or something.