Think Like A Game Designer - Mike Selinker — Pioneering Puzzle Design, Crafting Immersive Game Narratives, Collaborating with Titans, and The Philosophy Behind Game Tension (#1)

Episode Date: January 22, 2019

In this first episode, I speak with Mike Selinker. Mike is CEO of LoneShark Games and a legend in the Gaming Industry. He has worked on huge properties like Marvel, Disney Animation, Harry Potter, and Dungeons and Dragons. Mike shares his insights and advice for aspiring game designers and veterans alike. 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'm proud to bring you my conversation with Mike Selinker. Mike is CEO of Lone Shark Games and a legend in the gaming industry. He's worked on huge properties like Marvel.

Disney animation, and Harry Potter. He's also designed perennial favorites, like The Pathfinder card game, Betrayal at House on the Hill, Dungeons and Dragons third edition, and far, far more. He's famous for puzzle designs. His puzzles have been published in the New York Times,

the Chicago Tribune, Games Magazine, and he's also a published author, including the Cobold Guide to Board Game Design. Now, Mike is very self-deprecating in his speaking style, but trust me that this is a master talking about his craft. In this episode, you'll learn how Mike got his first puzzle game published when he was only 13 years old.

You'll learn what Mike's collaboration process looks like and how it differs from mine. You'll learn how to get a job in the game industry, how repeated failures can lay the groundwork for success. Mike gives his advice for someone just starting in the game industry today, and you can learn all about the joys and perils of self-publishing and Kickstarter and oh so much more. I know I really enjoy my conversations with Mike whenever I have them, and I hope you guys will enjoy this one as much as I did. And without further ado, I'll give you Mike Selenker. I am here with Mike Selenker, and I am very excited to get to talk with you. You and I have been friends for a while. I've been playing your games for even longer than that.

You have an incredibly lustrous career. You've designed things like the Pathfinder Adventure card game, Dungeons and Dragons, Pirates of the Spanish Main, maze of games, lots of crazy puzzles for the New York Times and Wired, alternate reality games, all kinds of stuff you've worked with, you know, the biggest companies in the world. And it's really awesome to have you. Did I miss anything of your resume on there that you want to share with our listeners? I was just liking the part where you basically talk for the whole podcast.

I thought that was pretty, I thought that was pretty great. I mean, I think this is going to be a really good podcast for me. I do love the sound of my own voice, so that helps. Hi, everybody. I'm Mike Selancher. This is my friend, this is my friend Justin Gary, who is one of the best game designers on the planet. If you haven't played his games, Ascension and Soul Forge, you are missing out. Go to your internet immediately and buy them. Oh, this is, this is great. We could just promote each other the whole show. This is working out real well. I like this planet. So, you know, one of the goals of this

podcast is to really help kind of deconstruct the process of design, the business of design, and how, you know, we can make games and how other people who are listening can learn to make games. And so for a lot of people, there's the idea that you could even get started making games for living. This is even something that's possible is just crazy. So how did this happen to you? You started really young. You were, I think, 13 when you had your first published puzzle. Is that right? I think so. Yeah. I mean, it was not, I mean, there wasn't really a game industry when I started in a lot of ways, right? I mean, there was, there were a few Titanic companies like, you know, TSR and a few others, right? And so I just decided that I could

submit something to one of these places and they should publish it and they did. Like that's not a thing anymore in some sense, right? I mean, but we don't have magazines the way we used to have and things like that. But back then, yeah, I think it was just getting over any fear that I might be rejected real quickly. and yeah, so I sent in something to Dragon Magazine, I think, was my first place I sent something to, or maybe Games magazine, but basically around the same time, and they both printed them. And, yeah, I was off to the races. I think there's obviously analogs to that today and, like, you know, organized play and convention work and stuff like that. a lot of it is just saying,

yeah, I can do this. This sounds cool. That's awesome. And I definitely want to underscore the point of that, that being able to overcome that fear of rejection and failure is one of the most critical pieces of, I believe, any creative endeavor, but certainly games and that being willing to expose yourself to criticism

and kind of get beat up and come back out and just being willing to take those chances, is probably the most important trait to really kind of make it out there. So it's a great thing. It's amazing that you had that from such a young age. It takes a lot of us a little longer to be willing to put ourselves out there. It's also important to know that I did get rejected a bunch of times. Not like they accepted some of my stuff, but not other things of my stuff, right?

And so I had to learn from that. Sometimes I would get back letters that said, just be better at things. and I had to not go, well, I'm just better than you think I am, and instead internalize that criticism, and become better at it. And, yeah, it helps, you know, it obviously helps if you do it when you're not panicked about making the bills and, you know, trying to find time in your full-time job to get, but I think anything really is better than nothing.

My advice to folks is generally be the person known for that thing. Just do something, right? Do something that people say, did you see that thing? It was pretty cool. And it'll take off from there probably. So to dig into that a little bit, like you mentioned, you started, you submitted your work to magazines and that some of them got rejected, some of them got published. But that, you know, those magazines in the modern era don't really exist. certainly don't have the traction that they used to.

So if you were starting today, or if you're giving advice to somebody that's starting today, the one piece of advice you said is, make something great, how do you get people to notice you? What would you do if you had to start over from Ground Zero today? Well, first thing I'd probably do is go to a game convention. I mean, I'd start by finding out who the publishers of things were

and getting to know them. You know, try to volunteer, try to demo, try to put games that I made in front of folks, so that they at least got an idea of who I was, right? I mean, there is certainly some sense of trying to be the person who is aware of your surroundings and what you have to be published in. But the other thing that you have that I certainly didn't have was the ability to just put your stuff online, right?

I mean, it's so powerful to just drop something on Kickstarter or on RPG now or just what's it called GameCraft or any of those places and just have a place to be able to point people to something you did. That's pretty amazing. So I would just do that. Yeah, that's definitely great advice. I think going to conventions and getting in front of publishers. You know, most people in this industry are super, super friendly and really, you know, even if they're not going to publish your stuff, you can usually get, you know, somebody to look at it, somebody to give you advice. And if you take that advice to heart and you are able to keep, you know, keep trying and keep improving, it's worth its weight in gold. Yeah, I can give a concrete example of that. I can give several, actually. So there was this young designer out of Madison, Wisconsin, named Alexander Cobian. And he happened to be a fan of our puzzle hunt stuff that we've done. at GenCon.

Right? And so one day he said, would you like to see one of the games that I made? And I said, sure. And then he asked me who might publish it? And I said, well, I can't, but I think Mayfair could. And they did. Like, I mean, it's just that vector is not terribly hard to understand.

The person was interested in what I did. He made it clear that it wasn't just a one-way street. then he showed me something very quickly like he didn't take three hours to do it he just sort of said here's the game and I went wow that's really cool and I at Jen Con I literally walked him over to the booth at Mayfair and said you should take a look at this game it's awesome and then they published it like that's a that's not that difficult

a path it won't work 100% of the time right but but it isn't really complicated Um, another example of this is, uh, Liz Spain, uh, one of the designers at Lone Shark, uh, made a game from start to finish on Kickstarter. Uh, it's called Incredible Expeditions. And I happened to be sitting next to her at a convention and I just looked at it and went, wow, this is interesting. Show it to me. And I, she showed it to me and I hired her. Like, it was less than a less than like three weeks after the point at which I saw her game. Because she just made it. I mean, she showed from STEM to Stern that she could make a game. And it was a good game, right?

And so, I mean, those aren't, like I said, I'm sure there are lots of people who don't go through that process. They don't know how to do any of those things at school. But understand that for the people who can, it's a very quick process. Yeah, I think, you know, one of the lessons I try to teach people when I do lectures are in some of the articles I've written is, you know, just you need to put yourself out there and provide value and you will get into the industry, right? If it's, and it can be, you know, maybe you don't already know how to design games. There are plenty of resources to learn, but if that's

not where you're at already, there are other ways you can distinguish yourself, right? If you're part of a game community and you're writing great articles and you're writing about whether it's strategy or lore or different things that you start building a community, then people are going to take notice of you. I myself was not a designer at all. I was, a game player and I got noted for you know playing magic professionally and that's what kind of brought me into the industry and a lot of the people that I've hired were people who I was you know hang out at the car shop with and they just clearly had chops to understand how games tick and I could see where they could be developed into game designers and now you know now they're amazing but

you know these different different areas where you find where your strength is find what you're awesome at and then bring that to the table and you can kind of use that to get get leverage into the industry and get to kind of do what you want to do I think you also hit on something something really important there and that the word game, the phrase game designer is not the only contributing point in the industry, right? There's so many other things to do. And so if game design isn't the thing you want to do, but being involved in the game industry is, there are so many opportunities to do so. Most companies are currently struggling to find people to do quality editing on their products, on showing off their games, on marketing and sales and graphic design.

I mean, you know, it's not like the industry is just flooded with talent at all positions, right? And so I think it's really great if somebody comes up. Another example is I needed a website done for a political thing I wanted to do. and I couldn't use any of my current website resources because they were making my business website, right? So I just said, I sort of put it out, I said, does anybody want to do this? And a wonderful guy named Sean Garrity said,

I'd love to do it. Now I know he's a really good website designer, right? And so if I get another opportunity to make a website, I'm probably going to ask him, right? That sequence is available. There's so many people out there looking for help. And yeah, I think the really important thing is to not view us as filled with barriers. There are some, right?

There are some companies who won't look at submissions. And that's cool. But a lot of people are willing to. And I think it's worthwhile to just ask. Right. And I've found, you know, most of the time I will, you know, we have tons of people who will volunteer and do demos at shows or who will be part of our community. who we then hire because we see them work. We see them bring value. And it's easy to kind of bring them in-house after that because we know them. We've worked with them. They've built a

reputation with us with our fans. And in addition for, I know, I'm sure you have the same boat as I do. When you're, you know, running a small company, someone that can wear multiple hats is invaluable. I mean, you know, so if you can handle, you know, managing the website and making and designing games or doing graphic design and, you know, helping with marketing and demos, like, that's, you're gold. I mean, that is incredibly valuable. So even developing any subset of these skills together is a huge, huge asset. And I find that you tend to get drawn into the game design and development environment,

whether you want to be or not, if you're in that position, right? Like, we were putting together the betrayal at House on the Hillset that you worked on with me, right? And, you know, our marketing guy, Mike Robles was like, could I contribute, haunt and I'm looking at oh my god I have to make 50 haunts out of nothing yes Mike yes you can contribute a haunt my CEO Marie was said can somebody help me make a haunt and and uh Lisa Teague one of our our core designers on it said I'll help you make that right I mean you're going to get dragged in yep yep that's right and as as designers you know this kind of so you know I definitely want to dig more into the process of design but that ability to bring in other

perspective and bring other people that are either around the company or in your communities to test the games to give feedback is so valuable and the more you're around that the more you're just going to be a part of that process as much as you as you want to be typically so just sort of getting your foot in the door and being around the the design process will will intrinsically get you get you those opportunities yep I want to dig in a little bit on the the process of of design and and what when you start approaching a new project first of all, how do you decide when you're going to do a new project?

What are the typical things that kind of get you started and moving down a road saying, all right, I'm going to make this game? Wow. I mean, what you just said sounded a lot more organized than what actually occurs, I think. I mean, I'm not sure. There are definitely people who are good at, okay, we need to make a product for, you know, Q4, 2018. We should start designing it. And I don't seem to be that person. But I think that usually I start from a negative position.

What isn't there or what isn't satisfying my needs in the game industry or in game playing that I can come up with something to overcome? I think the clearest example of that, other there certainly have been others, was discovering that I no longer had time to play role playing games. Yep. I just couldn't get a group together. When I could get a group together,

it met every week, pretty much every 11 weeks, right? You know how that is, right? Right. And so I was just like, why is this happening? Maybe it's because nobody can make the commitment to, to invest in the character development or the design of the scenarios or whatever. There's something missing. What if the environment instead was much more streamlined?

What if you could do it in an hour and you didn't have to prepare and you didn't have to take notes? But you still got the experience of playing in a group and working toward a common goal and having variety of adventures and building your character over time. is that a thing that could occur? And so from the position, I don't have time to do something. I spent four years of my life developing a game where you could. So clearly I don't have a very good time management system. But I mean, that was kind of it, right?

I was like, there's a core idea here that my friend Ryan and I sort of explored together. And then I brought my development crew in Chad Brown and Gabby Weidling and Paul Peterson and to start and then others after that. And it just said, there's something here, right? And they had lots of experience with RPGs and the sort of failure state of campaigns that tend to leave with a whimper rather than a bang. And yeah, we were able to make something out of that.

So I think that that's how Pathfinder came around, but I think a lot of games come for the position of just sort of making a topic statement. you know, Lords of Vegas came from James and I sitting in a Chinese restaurant and, you know, one of us saying, wouldn't it be cool to make a game about casinos? And then the other saying, yes, last I heard when people make, I read an article that was, that showed that casinos tended to be retired about 15 years after they were opened, which is ridiculously fast for a building of any. kind, right? I mean, you wouldn't buy a house that you knew you were going to dynamite in 15 years, right? And so, and these are a billion-dollar buildings. And I was like, wow, in that environment, your value would start to deteriorate immediately upon starting your business. That's an unhealthy business in a

general sense. You want value to increase over time. And instead, what was happening was shiny new casino on the block and then downward path from the beginning. Can that be modeled in a game? Sure enough, when you're sitting across from James Ernest, the answer is usually yes. He came up with this incredible idea for a game that involved a track

around the outside, a number tracker on the outside, that all the numbers didn't appear on. You started seeing these gaps appear. Suddenly things were jumping by twos and then by threes and then by fours. And all of a sudden, the things that you did early on to make your little casinos that look shining new were suddenly useless and needed to expand them. And so Lords of Vegas came out of that kind of process. It's usually some combination of coming up with a really great topic sentence. I guess somebody would call that a theme, but I think that's overstating it. And, you know, one or two,

just killer mechanics that you go, yeah, we totally have to make that now. So unpacking that, what I hear is that for things like Pathfinder, this was very much about kind of scratching your own itch as far as like, this game doesn't exist the way I wanted to. I want a role-playing experience that I can have in an hour without a lot of prep. And that's what created that. With the Lords of Vegas one, it's not a little bit more like you had a cool, like a concept of saying that's an interesting feature of the world,

I wonder how I'd represent that in the game. And that kind of puzzle almost is kind of what drove you? I think so, yeah. I also sort of had in the back of my mind, I don't know, this is kind of a stupid way to go through life. I don't recommend it. But I would look at games,

I often look at games and think, what is my version of that game? What is the game that I could make that's like that thing I like? And I'm a big fan of the game, Acquire. And so, yeah, well, I mean, Lords of Vegas isn't a choir, but you can see the DNA going through a choir in Chinatown and getting to Lords of Vegas. And then sometimes, like in the case of Pathfinder,

nothing exists in that path. It has, the genre has to be created. And that's much harder, obviously, in a lot of ways, because you have no touchstones. You have no idea what anybody would like. You can put a lot of effort into something that nobody wants. So you kind of have to hope when you're creating a new game genre that you actually hit the first time

because it can be incredibly expensive if you don't. Yes, definitely. Mrs. Can be rough. I'm saying this to the man who decided that his tabletop card game could become a digital app, right? And I'm sure you looked around at all of the other. games that fit that description at the time and said, I want to do just like they did, right? Not exactly.

It wasn't anything. You had no models whatsoever, right? The only thing you had to go on was, you know, magic online, you know, magic, the digital application of magic was like, and that was like a million years from where you ended up. Yeah, that's right. And I mean, when you talk about the sort of the cost of failure and the cost of sort of missing the mark is so much dramatically higher in video games and in digital game production than in physical game production, just that I mean, the scales are ludicrous. As someone who has spent millions on making digital games, I could tell you, it's a, you know, it's just impossible to lose that much money on a physical game. Oh, I don't know.

I'm doing my best. I don't see if I can I can take that job no challenge accepted no I mean yeah it's absolutely true I mean one of the great things about Kickstarter has been that it can like putting out a card game isn't actually all that difficult and so while it is not not difficult

it's not a zero challenge the challenge you don't have to learn to program right you learn after you have to learn how to call a printer. Those are pretty different skill sets. One of those should take you about three years and one of them should take you one phone call. And so that's been fantastic, I think, for the game industry because people aren't letting people don't have a barrier to success that is based on their skill set. You started on a process. So then what does your process look like after that? You've got, okay, I know this is the kind of game I want to make.

I'm going to try. What do you do next? I get a lot of people together. This is the step that a lot of people simply do not do, and that's totally cool for them. I do not understand how anyone gets anything done on their own. I instead, for example, with Apocrypha, there was a point at which it went from being a pretty good idea

to something with a system in it. And I went off to my friend Keith Baker's house, and I wrote for a week. I just hung out in his basement and wrote. And then I came back, and I just said, everybody was excited to see me come back and presumed I had done something competent. And I gathered everybody together and just said,

let me talk for a while. I'm sure you'll have lots of questions, and I'm sure everything I'm about to say is wrong. but just let me talk for a while. Everybody agreed. And then I started mapping out everything I had come up with on the whiteboard in my office. And everybody was patient and they took notes and so forth. And then at some point I said, okay, I think I've done talking.

And everybody sort of looked around and went, that's really great. Now we have a million questions. And they tore it apart. But fundamentally, what I got, from that meeting was people who knew that they were necessary for the process because they had identified the weaknesses and the ability to fix the things that were in my initial design. And so from that point on, everybody had a role. Everybody knew what they were doing.

And that helps me a lot. I find that if people are all waiting for me to finish something and then expect, to carry it over the line, I think that's going to produce a worse result than if we're all involved early on in the development of it, even if it is really just one person's idea. I mean, the Thornwatch comes from Mike Krahulik, basically working on his own for a long time. And then he kind of came to me and showed it to me, and I went, this is really good. They asked if we wanted to make it. I said, yeah, but it means we're going to put a team together. And then since that point, He's had Rodney Thompson who made Lords of Waterdeep, and he's had Chad Brown, who made the Pathfinder Venture card game with me, and he's had me and other folks just constantly in this swirl of ideas, and then we'll meet once a week, and then people will go off and do the things they're best at.

And I think that, for me, working in a team is really necessary. I do plenty of writing on my own, plenty of game design on my own, but not for very long. I don't know. Are you like that? I love working in teams. I love being able to get constant feedback and

support. I think my process it's often a little bit more single point designer focused. A lot of times it'll be you know that I'll go off and I'll work on us getting a file together and getting a

process together, prototype it, bring it out to everybody, get all the feedback, do a review, and then kind of go back away again, fix it, come back, do it again. Sometimes we'll break stuff down into components and assign it out to different people. And getting that feedback and ideas from as many smart, talented folks as I can is always critical. But based on what you're describing, I think my process is a little bit more like single point kind of lead, design lead focused than it sounds like yours is. Maybe it's just a matter of emphasis. Yeah. No, I probably, but I mean, I'm definitely at the far end of the collaborative spectrum, as is obvious by the credit lists on most of my stuff, right? I mean, I probably could

have designed the trail at house on the Hill, Wooders Walk, by myself, but I thought it was cooler to have you and the rest of my friends contribute fantastic ideas for it. And, you know, I mean, I think I get rewarded for that in a couple of very positive ways. The first is, I think I sell a lot of copies of things based on, you know, having really good blenders of ideas all in one place and finding the best thing and cutting through the bad ideas and just drawing out the most amazing stuff. But the second is I also get the vector of all those people interacting with their fans, right? I think that there's such a sense that these collaborative processes make something that people will see their fandom reflected in no matter where it comes from.

And so I enjoy it a lot. I do make things by myself, though. I would say that the maze of games was me and then Gabby just basically sitting together and knocking it out. It's us. This is a very personal project. We're going to make it. And then bringing in Tannis to edit it and Pete to do the art and the graphic design from Elisa was still an incredibly small team by comparison to many of the other things. that we make.

And that felt a lot more personal. And I think it shows in some ways. I don't look at Widows Walk and say, that's my game, even though my name's on the box. I look at it and say, that was a pretty fun group of people to hang out with. Yeah,

that was an awesome project. I was honored and super excited to be invited to do a little part for that because it's a game I grew up on and to be able to contribute there was great. And I know I'm sure that all the other designers felt very similar that got a chance to participate.

So that was very cool. I think the great thing about the products is I never showed the totality of it to anyone during the process. I didn't let anybody get overwhelmed by the fact that we were doing the first expansion to a game in 12 years. Now it's a classic. Now it's part of history. And so you're caught up and I was just like, no, let's just focus on your thing. right let's you and me talk about clowns in the hallway of gamma right that's basically what we did yeah we're like this this aspect i think works great this aspect could be could be cooler and

and so you didn't have to worry about the other hundred plus pages in the game we just had to worry about your thing and that process was really good i felt that you know some people like you really experienced game designers, you know, I didn't really need to have deep mechanics discussions with, right? I was like, I was pretty sure your mechanics were going to be great. We're going to test them out, let you know if we find anything. Come back to you, you know, make some suggestions. Here's how the pie throwing, I think, should work, you know, that kind of stuff, right?

Real, real sort of basic game designer to game designer conversation. with other people like Anita Sarkisian or the double clicks or stuff like that, this is really the first time they're doing anything like this. So the conversation is at a much more 10,000 foot view at some point. It's like, okay, what do we want to happen? What are cool things that could occur in this context? What does it feel like? And then run off to the corners and say, okay, guys, Anita and I came up with

mechanic for a concept of plastic people all over the house. How do we replicate those people? How do they spawn? And then go back to Anita and say, came up with this, what do you think? I think that there's lots of different collaborative processes. And it's cool to be a part of them all. But I shouldn't over-dramatize it.

I really do value time just sitting by myself or with my dog on my lap. knocking out game concepts. Yeah, and I'll actually just underscore that. There's a point in there, too, that that setting aside time to work on games, to work on the creative project, it's shocking how many people who say they want to make games don't do that. I mean, it's not, you know, that creative genius is not something that's kind of out there. It's something that you just work and work and work and you make lots of really crappy things.

And every now and then you get something awesome. And then you can start showing that to other people and start moving things around, moving things down the road. And just that setting aside time to have peace and quiet and work in, you know, an environment that suits you and just kind of create stuff critically important. Yeah, I don't understand how, I mean,

we talked earlier like, you know, now there's no barrier in entry. You can come in, you can do it. But I think the biggest barrier to entry is actually time to get good at things. You know, I mean,

I have my 10,000 hours in. Right. Right. Right. from Malcolm Gladwell's outliers, right? I mean, I have done that. And so when people come to me and they say, I've got an idea and I can say,

well, here's a problem with your idea. I've got some basis for that. And so if you don't have time to make that a skill set and iterate and fail and iterate and fail and iterate and fail, I don't know how you get any. done. I don't understand how... I mean, there are definitely people who have hit

right out of the gate with their first idea without any of the time to do that. And I have just in awe of that. You know, the... William Atia made the game Calus. And I met him at Essen. And I don't know. Have you played Calus?

I really like that game. I haven't played through a full game, but I read the rules and watched. I'm familiar with it. So, I mean, it's very much, you know, it is a definition of a Euro game, right? And, you know, I met him as a young guy. I was like, how did you get to the point where this was ready?

And he just went, well, I made my first version and people liked it. So I took it to a publisher. I'm like, what? Is that a thing? That's a thing that can happen? because I don't do that. I come up with good ideas on my first try, but they're not publishable, right?

I mean, I don't think they are anyway. So every now and then I have a game like sausage party, right? Which was, I just, I came up with it, and I just said, I think this is good and it's ready to go, or unspeakable words is like that too. But I don't know if Bad Beats was like that for you. Bad Beats was pretty fast. It was pretty fast.

you know and the the but I still I mean I still went through hundreds of iterations it's just the game was the game took five minutes to play so hundreds of iterations went very quickly yeah exactly exactly yeah no I just I'm not I'm sure William worked very hard on the game after he took it to that publisher but but I don't yeah I don't have that experience I have the I come up with a big picture view of what I think might work and then I work on it for a near or more before it's ready to show. Yeah. Thankfully, I have other things to do in that year. Like, I'm not, like, solely dependent on the idea I just had to make us have money on our table. I mean, I, like you, I have a small company. We have about 10 people plus a whole bunch of freelancers. And, you know, we need to have to have things that we did.

Things that we did three years ago are paying our salaries today. Right. Because if it was just, I came up with this today, it's got to pay our bills in three months. That's just not a thing I have. That's not a thing I can do. And so, thankfully, I've got enough resources in place that the things we did three years ago are still doing a good job of paying our salaries. Yeah, it's one of the things I would try to have sort of a best. balance of like where you know we spend time on our bread and butter and working on the next

ascension expansion and the next soul forge expansion we spend time you know sort of working on new very speculative projects we spend time finding partners and other people that we want to work with or new IP we want to work with to kind of build out projects for that and and having that sort of balance in a portfolio um i found to be really critical to to keeping a company going and and not going crazy uh when when something doesn't work or an idea takes longer than you think it's going to take. Yeah, our company's been around for 13 years, mostly because of that philosophy. People will say to us, why aren't you just working on Apocrypha all the time until you get that done? Why would you take time to work on the trail at house on the hill or something? Well, A, we want to, but B, the creative

process isn't linear? We don't just come in and make, you know, isn't there, like there's a progress far and we've come in and it's at 68% today and we leave and it's at 72% the next day. Like that's just not a thing that happens with us. Ours is a much messier creative process because some things just don't work. With the Rath of Righteous set for Pathfinder, we made a really solid, functional game mechanic for how the concept of mythic characters, super heroic characters, would work in our game. And it was great.

We played it. We sent it to playtest. We had like 100 playtest groups. And it completely failed. I mean, 100% failure that we did not see coming at all. And people are like, this is functional.

Obviously, it all works together. It's just not any fun. And we went, oh, wow, that's really bad. Is it bad that your game's not fun?

Is that a problem? Yeah. That's one of the, Your higher order problems. So we went back and we did it again and we said, all right, scrap that. We need to come over a totally different way to express, you know, superheroic progression. Okay, got it? We figured it out.

It sounds good. We built it. We played it. We liked it. We sent it to playtest and it failed. Completely failed again. And now our publisher, Paiso, is saying, well, when are you going to be done? and we're like

not until this works and we went back we actually got a real value from having our friend Max Tumpkin at Cards Against Humanity come over to just playtest with us and I said

you know Max you're a good game designer let me tell you what's bedembling us today and he sat down and he said okay well let me try this idea out after a little discussion and he took a way that we'd never

thought of doing so. He said, you know, can you get, uh, can you get Paiso to pay for a token sheet? Darkman doesn't have any tokens. And he said, yeah, we can probably do that. What do you have in mind? And he basically took a whole bunch of coins and started using it to represent mythic power. And I was like, holy cow, we never saw that. And we played it. And we liked it. And we sent it to playtest and they loved it. And we went, okay, we just needed essentially a brain infusion we were and that process took that process was incredibly

messy so much lossiness happened in that process but by the end we were really good space for that but it was because we had the ability to get other people to look at our games

both as our playtesters and our collaborators and get beyond our view of what was a good idea it. Yeah. Yeah, this sort of reminds me of the common adage in designs. Like, you know, when you're 90% on, you've only got another 90% to go. I hadn't heard that, but I do like that. That's pretty great. Yeah, I mean, what's your playtest process like? Do you guys have a bunch of external playtester? What do you do? Yeah, we have, we have external playtester groups that we use. You know, we have, you know, obviously we play in-house a ton and work-through thing. We have a lot of, you know, for our different games, especially for the established brands, it's much easier to have playtest groups.

We have a bunch of Ascension Playtest groups, a bunch of Soul Forge playtest groups. When you have new games, we usually keep the circle a little bit smaller. And then I will actually just, I'll go to the local game stores. I'll go to different events. When we do conventions, I'll show them off to people and just kind of get that, that face-to-face, like really see how people react and get that feedback, which is absolutely critical. And so it's my favorite work. One of my favorite things of all time is actually getting to be at the conventions,

see this full spectrum of people like playing your finished game and being really excited about it and seeing your fans. And then getting people to play your brand new game and seeing how confused they look and how unhappy they are. And what things you've got to change? One of the time recently our CEO, Marie said in one of our playtests. And I'm sure you've had this experience, but for other people, it can be incredibly baffling where they're playing. for a while it's going fine and suddenly one of the developers will say let's talk about this and then a 30 minute discussion breaks out in the world right because you're like you have to resolve this before we can even move on in this term that's right and she that's right said um let me ask you guys

after like five minutes of this or 10 minutes of this let me ask you guys a question um do you think that you need to resolve this before we can go on and can I help you with that? You know, immediately the guys are like, well, yeah, no, we'd love your. Well, actually, no, this one issue requires vastly more knowledge about the system than you have at the moment. So you probably aren't going to be able to help us with it. She said, okay, great. And she went back to doing her email until they were done with that. And then she jumped back into the game, right?

I mean, like, that was fascinating to me to know that happened because, you know, it showed tolerance on everybody's side, like the guys wanted to make sure she was interested in helping until the point they realized that they literally were the only people in the world who could solve their own problem. Right. No other people could help them with that because what they were trying to do was patch a hole in the game that was that was evidenced by something that Marie did that they had done. simply never seen could exist. That's right. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's where the value of playtesting and outside outside playtesters comes in because they, you bring so many preconceived notions and assumptions in when you make a game and when you start playing that game and somebody else that doesn't have those, it's going to knock you upside the head and make you realize,

oh, okay, wait, I didn't think of this and this. And that means this thing doesn't work. And then I have to redo, you know, and it just kind of has this cascade effect where, you know, games are very sensitive creatures. And, you know, you change one knob and then everything else has to be readjusted to refit to that. Yep. So, yes, we've had many of those, we've had a five-minute, you know, five minutes of a game that turned into an hour and a half of discussion on a regular

basis. Yeah. And I think that nobody's prepared for that. They think that, they think that what we do is play complete sessions of games and then go off and discuss them. Right? And it just doesn't almost ever happen. That's right.

Yeah, not until very, very late in the process for usually. Yeah. And that's, and when it's happening like that, you realize you're in a pretty good spot. That's right. We were playing the base set for Apocrypha and basically done it. And so we were playing the last sort of missions to just make sure we didn't have a flaw somewhere. And they were just zipping by. And we're just like, does anybody have any comments on that?

And people would go, no, good. Seems great. Yep. Okay. You know, when you hit that, you know, it feels so good when everybody says, no, I don't have any changes, right? Yep. But you take a long time to get there. And, you know, I don't know what it's like to not have, like, like, I can't imagine hiring somebody who didn't understand that I wanted them to be brutally honest.

to me, right? Like, the fact is, there's a rule at Lone Shark, which is nobody gets to be right just because of who they are. And so, you know, I can get on there and I could say, look, guys, you're just going to have to trust me on this. And everybody will just sort of look at me. I go, oh, right, that doesn't work, does it? I don't get to do that.

I have to prove everything. prove it is the central ethos at Lone Shark. And we've discovered that it's really bad in our interactions outside of the design team sometimes. You know, because we'll be challenging people in the same way we are in the design. I'm like, why can't you just accept that this is the way this is? Yeah. Because I just told you it was. And I'm like, oh, right.

No, guys, guys, that actually is how the world operates. you go you don't go you don't get on a bus and then say to the driver prove to me that you're going to drive this bus downtown you instead note that you got on a bus that said downtown on it and that's the way it's going to be right there's no point where we take a pole of the bus riders to see if people still want to go downtown midway through right then just like but you know it's hard to get out of that design mode of, no, seriously, you have to prove everything you do. Otherwise, we don't trust. Yep. Yep. And I think for us, obviously, the reason we're that hard on each other is

because we know what it's like when the customer finds the things we should have figured out on our own. That's the worst. The worst. And it always, it's going to happen. Right. Yeah. But you want to avoid it as much as possible. Way better to beat each other up than to get beat up by customers or have them not have the

best experience they could have. Yeah. So everybody feels worse than. So it's much better to feel like 20% bad during the design session than to feel 100% bad after the game comes out. Right, yeah. And that just digs into the idea of being able to argue well in a way that is

you know that we are going to have different positions and we're going to have to defend our positions, but it's a way that everybody on that team knows we're all working towards the same goal, trying to make the best product that we can. and your ego never gets too tied up and whatever your favorite idea is. It's about serving the game

and getting to that best product. And I know a lot of designers that, you know, I've worked with in the past had a lot of trouble with that where they are fine working on their own, but if somebody doesn't like their idea, then it creates this friction and that just does not going to lead to the best product.

I think it's great to see like two of our designers, Chad Brown and Liz Spain, can get really heated with each other. they can get pretty up in each other's grill about, you know, I don't know why you can't see this. I am trying to explain it to you. You do not understand and you need to understand. And then somebody will come in and say, who wants to go to lunch?

And we'll go to lunch and everybody's great. Right. Right? Because they don't, their method of communication is to be passionate and to be, defending their position and so forth. But they know at the end of the day, we're just making games. Yep.

Right? I mean, it's just, it's not, like we'd much rather be friends with each other than agree with each other all the time. Yeah, no, I generally work hard to surround myself with people that disagree with me a lot. I enjoy that process and feel like it makes me better. Even if I think they're wrong,

the fact that I have to defend myself and articulate my position makes me better at doing what I do. We do understand we're mutants though, right? I mean, like nobody else is like this. Oh, that's, oh, that's totally right. Like, I, in high school, I was voted most likely to disagree with anything you say. Sure. I, I described, I had, it took me a really long time. It wasn't until college that I realized that most people don't like arguing. And I had what I called a broken pissed off a meter. Like I couldn't, I didn't even realize that people were getting really angry. agree what I was like debating with them. I at least have a good sense of that. Yeah, I figured it out.

I figured it out since that. But yes, I love it when I can, I try to surround myself with people who sort of feel similarly about the values of debate and disagreement and in learning and strengthening and understand. I have a question for you about some of the people that you work with. How many people that you've worked with came from the sort of competitive environment that you came from?

the sort of game play is a competitive money-making aspect? Quite a few. I think it's a lot of them not as many sort of made a living doing it like I did, but certainly Brian Kibler and a lot of the people

that I've worked with that do do that and still make a living doing that sort of thing. And the majority of the people that I've hired at least played competitive gaming at some level. It's interesting. The reason I ask that is because my crew is almost entirely co-op in RPG business. Right. Like none of them have ever done the play for cash environment.

None of them have been told over and over again that competition is the main thing. And yet I sense our teams would be very similar. despite having, you know, essentially been taught exactly the opposite lessons. Well, so, and I want to, this will be a good transition because I really want to, I want to dig into a lot of the aspects of game design that I think you are just the best in the world at and areas where I have a lot to learn from you. And some of that is that storytelling and world building component. I think you and your team do an amazing job of putting the story that comes.

comes across the world that comes across being immersed in the game as you play. And I want to dig into kind of how that comes about for you. Like when you know, like Apocrypha and the different things that I can see come to life there. And I mean, obviously, you know, building, you know, the classic RPGs and worlds and Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder. And it just, I feel like I am there and I am a character in this world when I'm playing. How do you achieve that? What is it that you think separates you from, you know, other games and designers that are out there.

Sure. I mean, obviously, I also have game designers that I think are really good at that. So I'm not going to wholeheartedly accept your painting of me as some sort of Titan in this regard. But yeah, I mean, we certainly do stress that quite a bit. I think a lot of it is me myself, right, that my interest is, is, not peaked by a mechanics only game as much as a lot of other people's is. So, I mean, I personally comment it, like, what's my motivation? You know, like the actors do, right? But I really try very hard to surround myself with people who are better writers than I am,

and I think I'm pretty good. but, you know, when we made apocrypha, I was like, wow, I'm going to write something that's about fractured memories. That sounds like a really cool subject, and I can write some, and I wrote up a bunch of them, and I think they're pretty good. Now, Pat Rathas, would you please write some of these and show me whether I write the best of these? The answer, of course I don't. I just gave this to Pat Rathas. I just gave it to Jerry Holkins and Aaron Evans and Kiddish Johnson and Keith Baker and, you know, people who just, and I said, look, I need a filtration system that produces just the best stuff in this regard.

That's the same thing on betrayal, right, with all the authors. So it's just like, I'm going to the most creative humans that I know to try to get the best ideas. So part of it is definitely what I want to be immersed in the world. So I surround myself with the people who can't immerse me in my own world. I think the other thing we do is that we spend a lot of time working on the concept of tension in our games, maybe more than anybody else does, I think. We spend most of our development time trying to strike interesting balances between decisions about time and resource management that give you the illusion that you're sort of in this pressurized setting.

I don't think, I think if you fail to do that, then you give people sort of an excuse to check out and check their phones and stuff like that. And in our games, that doesn't tend to happen much because we've spent so much effort on trying to create this knife edge that you're always standing on, that in Thornton, watch, you don't look away on other people's turns because if they don't succeed at their thing, then as a group, you are in real trouble. And so you need to help them. And so I think those two

things are pretty important. Like you want to get the most deep, fascinating writing and art and such that you can get. And then you have to surround it or put it around actually of this incredibly tight set of tense mechanics or all the work in the first part will be reduced to nothing. Yeah, yeah. I think that's that definitely comes across in the games that you do and I think

you know, for me when I think about storytelling in games it's, you know, there's the one aspect which is, okay, yes, there's a, there's a theme and there's, there's art and there's the actual written story and flavor on the cards, but there's the, you know, the story that the players are telling during

the game, which is what's critical, right? And that's where that idea of rising tension, that idea of like your character, your persona developing throughout the game and having these different critical choice point moments that determine, you know, who you're going to be and what the game is going to play out as, like that, you know, that, that interests me a ton in the way that, like, what, how games tell stories and how players tell stories through games is very different than how you tell a story in a movie or in a book where there's this sort of linear process that has this, you know, kind of neat tie-ins and everything

kind of fits in together. Here, it's a lot messier in a world of games because you don't as a designer, you don't control the full story. You can kind of put the set pieces down and kind of push people and create those little tension moments, but it's really the players that tell that story.

I think our games try to emulate how poker players talk about bad beat stories. Right. I mean, we want people tell the story of playing a game of Pathfinder, they don't say I said very often. They talk about what I did, right? But what I did is surrounded by so much backdrop, right? It isn't, I ran into a 9-9 creature,

right? That's not how you talk about your games of magic. Right, right? You talk about how you, you know, oh my God, the, I was able to cast verdant, shield and that was the only thing that stopped the the army of driven from from running over us right and so um people tell stories about the stories we tell them which is pretty great yeah i mean it's it's pretty great um and i think that not not all games need that to be successful like i don't really describe anything about a game of carcassone that i I play, even if it is a particularly great game of Carcassonne.

There's just nothing about Carcasson that makes me say, oh, the great thing is I was really careful and concealing that I had that last farmer on the field. Like, you never say that stuff. Because that game doesn't need it to be great. Right. Right.

But when you have set up the belief that your game needs it to be great, it better be great. Yeah, I think, I've heard this term, you know, referred to as the bomb, that games need to have these very high tension moments, these kind of

low probability, can't believe that happen moments, which is what you get in the bad beat stories, it's what you get in, you know, those high drama, getting the right card off the top of the deck things, and some games do a better or worse job of having that, but those are the things that create those memorable stories, those like just, oh my goodness,

and you tell your friends about it. Yeah, I think that we just try really hard to make sure that that happens. I think we also need to acknowledge that sometimes we're building the world ourselves, and sometimes we just happen to be surrounded by the best world builders. So with the Pathfinder Adventure card game didn't need to be the Pathfinder Adventure card game. It could have been Mike Selenker's fantasy dungeon Bonanza, right?

Except they had, you know, 15, amazing adventure paths for me to base our stories on. And every now and then we'd say, oh God, it would be really cool if we had a type of thing that made you examine

your decks more often. What would you do that with? Oh, look, there are nine varieties of Cyclops in this world. Right? Like, just surrounding yourself with the tools that you need to make this happen.

One of the reasons Apocrypha is taking so long is we built the whole thing from scratch. There's 600 pieces of art in the thing. Right. Because we needed to make sure that it told the story we wanted to tell. And that's why working, you know, our next project after that was working with Monte Cook games on the ninth world because we wanted to tell a fascinating future story and what better than somebody who'd already put out something that was a billion.

years in the future and freed us from, you know, all the, like, it would be a really different game if it was set 10 years in the future or 100 years in the future because you'd expect all these things to be true. But a billion years in the future, now therein you can state, okay, we can start our storytelling from scratch here. Right. We don't have to, and that's what we were looking for. And so, yeah, I think it's worked really well for us to, to, to, uh, to both create our own properties and to make other people's properties better. And I hope we get to strike that balance. I wrote a book called Puzzlecraft,

which is about how to design every type of puzzle that I know how to design. And my friend Thomas Snyder, who's a logic puzzle designer, co-wrote it with me. And it's there to say, okay, in bite-sized chunks, you want to try to do this kind of puzzle? Try this process. it may not be the only process to make this thing, but try it. And that will help. But, I mean, I think that the thing is, when we talk about game design, we're talking about a very small set of skills that have a lot of variation to them.

Right? Like, okay, nobody, I don't know, maybe this is true. I mean, ask you, is there anybody in your company who only does treasure design as opposed to monster design. No, nobody fits that description. It's not true at Lone Shark. Everybody's job is to design every type of card in a card game. There are no specialists in armor at Lone Shark.

Right? But there really are specialists in puzzle design. So there are people who can't design word puzzles, but can design really good logic puzzles. or people who can design logic puzzles, but have no sense of spatial dynamics. Like, I am like that. I am bad at space.

I can do procedure very well. So I can say, you know, the logic puzzles that are like, there are five people who in some combination have the last name, Smith Jones, you know, that kind of thing, right? I can design those really well. But if I have to design a thing where I have to keep track of, you know, like shapes that go together or number strings and stuff like that, then I start to get worse at the job than some other people, right? So each of those little puzzle processes requires some time to build, and there's hundreds of them. So you have to just sort of not try to be an expert in everything right at the gate.

I know people who are puzzle makers, who call themselves puzzle makers and literally the only thing they can make is crossword puzzles. And that's fine, because there are people who will pay them to produce crossword puzzles forever. But if I turn to them and say, I need you to make a Japanese logic problem, they just look at me like, I don't know what you're talking about. And I turned as those different people, I say, I need you to make Japanese logic problems. And if I ask them to make crossword problem, they would have no idea how to make it. So, yeah, it's a bunch of little micro skills. But the most important thing in the books that we've written on the subject is we try to teach people to design puzzles in the order and process that the solvers will solve them. That's the number one advice that I give people.

So people get like, oh, where's my cleverest bit? Let me build everything around that. It's not really what you want to do. What you want to do is start from a place where you can imagine people writing or solving, and they will then follow you through that exact process that you build. There's one slight variant is that sometimes you can start from the end and work backwards. You start essentially figuring out where they'll end up and build the process backwards to get to the point where they'll start. Either way. The point being, what you want to do is sort of put your mind in the mind of your solver the whole time, and you'll get a pretty good puzzle out of it, as opposed to if you try to abstract yourself well out of the picture, then you'll probably end up with something that's very abstract.

Yeah, I like that. So it's either basically start with the kind of the simplest hook that people will likely find first or start with the end in mind and then kind of figure out how to work backwards from there. exactly like i mean i think there's a parallel here in deck design you know when we make cycles for for various card games um we're thinking what do people want to do with that cycle right what do we want them to to what do we want that special deck to be we're not thinking what does each of the cards do right we're just thinking what are they getting out of playing this particular way. And then along the way, we go, okay, well, to get them to that point, they're really going to need a set of engine cards, you know, low power cards that they can get going early. And then they're going to need a really big payoff card that they can't fire off right at the beginning, but maybe

they can get access to if they do some clever trick, right? If you put yourself in that mindset for building a deck, you can put yourself in that mindset for building a puzzle. Awesome. That's great. And I've seen, I sat in on one of your classes on this at Pax Dev. So that was my first real introduction, which was great. I'm embarrassed to say I didn't know about the book, so I'm going to hunt that down. It's all good. I will say that you just mentioned something that I, you know,

we've been spending a lot of time talking. If somebody made it through all of this, then they're probably a game designer or puzzle designer at heart. You guys should come to Pax Dev. we have a really good convention. It is in late August or early September every year in Seattle. And it's a thousand of the smartest people teaching everybody else how to be awesome. Yeah, I'm going to second that recommendation. I've attended Backstaff for many years,

and I've been able to speak there for several of them. And it's always fantastic. Just surrounding yourself with the smartest game designers in the world. everybody just chatting and being super excited about it and working together and collaborating. And you can just walk up to people, there's some fantastic drink mixers. So everybody is happy to talk and connect. So Mike, you do a great job putting that together. And so, yeah, anybody that really is serious about game design, I can't recommend that event strongly enough.

Yeah, it's probably my favorite two days of every year. Because the great thing about it is we put a black box around it. So nobody can tweet or Facebook out of it through a whole weekend. or the weekends, middle of the week, but the whole couple days. And what that means is that everybody can just say what's on their mind because they're not afraid they're being recorded. Yeah. You know, they're not afraid that their stuff is going to get out on the internet.

They can say, this is where I screwed up. And like, those are the best stories, right? Every game designer has the point where they just wish they hadn't done that thing. And to be able to talk about it in a room full of people who've done probably that very thing. and really don't ever want to do it again. Like that is that, you can't beat that. You've actually done a great thing, and you've actually posted online the 100 games

that you absolutely positively must know how to play. That's true. I need to be careful, though. I wouldn't say those are my favorite games. Those are the games you have to know how to play to understand game design. Gotcha. Right?

To understand how games work. But there are games on there I don't really like. Like, I don't like where, wolf at all. I have found that it is incredibly painful, but I don't actually have to experience that pain very long because

everybody kills me on turn one. They know I'm a good poker player, and poker players are really bad to have in that game. So they know if we can get Selinker out of the way, then the rest of the game can probably just go. So I hate that game, but I think it's crucial that you know how to play it.

All right. All right. Fair, fair enough. So anyway, I recommend, again, for all the aspiring game designers, which you almost certainly are if you're still listening. Yep. Check out that list of 100 games he must play, Mike Selenker. That is great to know how to play those games. Ascension, by the way, on that list.

It is. I appreciate that. So then what are your favorite games then if you want to list a couple that are keeping your attention now? Let's see. I think we busted out code names recently at the Lone Sharks Summit. I don't think there's been a better word game. Well, maybe ever, but at the very least, not in the last five years or so. Great game.

We've been enjoying, I enjoy a lot of sort of indie role-playing games quite a bit. I love the work of people like Luke Crane and Will Heinrich and folks like that. that I wish I could be that in some ways. Like there's parts of my brain that I think would really enjoy being an indie RPG designer, but I can never never get to doing it. Right. I play Ascension more than any other game.

But that's, you know, that's, I think if anybody's listening to this podcast, they've already figured out that they like Ascension. I don't really need to recommend it to them. Maybe, I don't know. but I probably play Ascension on my iPad more than I play any other game. I really like Lords of Waterdeep quite a bit. Weirdly, I surround myself with the people who make my favorite games. That's funny how that works.

No, it's true. I don't think a lot of people would think of it that way, but fundamentally, the Lone Shark community, the people who are sort of the extended Lone Shark family, are all just people whose stuff I love. and so there's a decent chance that not only do I know the person who made something I like, but that I have gotten to express that to them and that they have returned that with, I really like your stuff too, right?

So I'm a huge fan of that. Antoine Bousa is another really good friend of mine, Bruno Fai Dutti. These are people who are just simply the best. There just isn't, like, you know. And so, but the cool thing is we can sit down with each other's games and at any time just have a good time. And we'll learn something about our own games that we didn't even know. So that's one of the reasons why obviously, you know, we're talking now. And I love all of our conversations.

Most of them have not been recorded. So that other people get to listen, at least as far as I know. I would say that that has worked out for us. in our number of conversations we have had that we would not like to have had recorded. This is true. And I hope one of our next conversations can be about a project we're working on together that nobody will get to know about. Yes, well, let's not talk about it. So if other people that are listening want to find out more about you or connect with you online, what's the best way for them to do that?

Well, I am Mike Selinker everywhere. So, you know, you just have to go to my Facebook page. I accept all comers. My Twitter accounts, Mike Selinger. Lone Shark Games has its own website, its own Lonecharkgames.com. It has a Tumblr account, as do I. It has a Facebook and Twitter feed. We really like communicating with people who like our stuff, and even people who don't.

And so definitely come find us and talk to us. you'll also see me at just about every convention. Although not this weekend. The weekend we're talking, there's like three big conventions, and you and I are both home. Yep, yep, an odd choice. I have enough travel coming up and that I've had in the past. Every now and then you've got to take some time off.

That's exactly what I did, actually, this particular string of time is I just said, I'm not going to Pacts Australia, I'm not going to board game geek, not going to Metatopia, I'm not going to Blizcon, I'm not going to Gamehole or any of these places, is not going to Essen. And everybody's like, you have the best stuff coming out right now. Why don't you want to go and show it off?

And my answer was, I just made all that stuff. I'm really tired. This would be the best time possible for me to go out and be really excited about interacting with people, except I just want to stay home. Yep. You learn to cherish those times, especially after a long convention season. So I appreciate you taking time out of your. your resting.

Sorry, hold on a second. You just used a term that doesn't exist anymore. Did you say convention season? That's not a thing. Convention season is now 12 months long. Yeah. That's true. Anyway, I'm glad you and I took the day off

and could talk about this stuff because it was really fun. Yeah, this was awesome for me. I really appreciate the time. And I'm hoping we can do this again soon. I won't see you at a convention soon. I will see you sometime soon. So thank you again. Mike. Anytime, sir. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to

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