Think Like A Game Designer - Paul Peterson — Unveiling Smash Up's Ingenious Mechanics, Game Design Evolution, and the Creative Challenges of Shuffle Building (#6)

Episode Date: May 21, 2019

Magic: the Gathering, Pokémon, Smash Up, Guillotine, and The Pathfinder Adventure Card Game are just a few of the games Paul Peterson had a hand in creating. In this episode, Paul talks about building a community and company that supports game design and creativity, from big studio work to boutique game design companies. His work in the field of game design has given him incredible insight into what it takes to design and produce awesome games. Enjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. In today's episode, I have a conversation with Paul Peterson. Paul started his game design career at Wizards of the Coast, working on Magic the Gathering, Pokemon, and his own card game guillotine.

Since then, he's moved between the worlds of electronic and tabletop games. His recent titles include smash up and unexploded cow, and he's a developer on the Pathfinder adventure card game. In this episode, we talk about how Paul got his start in the industry. We talk about the DNA of TCGs and how those are reflected in Paul's work. We have lessons for aspiring game designers. Paul talks about the difference between working with big teams versus small teams and solo projects. He talks about how he got his playtest group started and how you could start up your own,

and much, much more. I really enjoyed my chat with Paul, and I'm sure you guys will too. So here's a look inside the mind of Paul Peterson. All right, I am here with Paul Peterson. Hey, Paul, how's it going? It's going great. How are you doing?

I'm doing great. I've actually been wanting to be able to have a deep dive conversation with you for a really long time. I got to a brief time when I got to do it on your podcast at Origins last year. Right. And I'm excited to now have you on my... mind and have it be just the two of us to be able to talk about whatever strikes our fancy. I'm excited to. This is awesome. Yeah. So one of the things that, you know, the goal of this

podcast in general is to really help aspiring game designers to sort of learn about the craft and learn how to get into it. And hopefully a lot of even experienced game designers can get a lot out of it, you know, through some deep dive conversations. And I like to start off by really talking about how you got your start in the industry and a little bit of what got you excited about. games in the first place. And I know some of that backstory, but it's actually pretty instructive. So I'd love to hear you tell it. Oh, sure. I love telling the story. It's a little unusual. Most people can't really follow the path I followed. But I mean, I've always loved games and I've always messed around with games. Like game designers, game designers start with

monopoly, right? In some sense, you play monopoly with your family. And that's the first game most people tweak because the game doesn't satisfy you or you're just like, what? We have to play this for eight hours. And then at the end, it's not that exciting. So that's the first place most people start. And I certainly started there and started playing around with games. But being an actual game designer didn't really start until after college, I was working at Microsoft as a customer service. and I started playing this game called Magic the Gathering.

Some people might be familiar with it. It's an older game. It came out in the 90s. Tell me more about this. I'm not sure. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. They call it like a collectible card game. I don't think it's going to catch on.

All right. All right. Well, never mind then. No, it's okay. But it's important for my history. So I'll mention it a little bit. So I started playing Magic Day. Gathering. And if you played Magic the Gathering when it first came out, it was kind of the Old West.

Like, the rulebook was fine, but the game was so complicated that there were a lot of areas that it, that were confusing. And people had a lot of questions, especially about banding and things like that. And they, so they had back in the day, this is in the 90s, so we didn't have our modern social messaging systems that we have now. So back then what we had was a mailing list where everybody who wanted to learn more about the game would sign up for the mailing list. It was sort of basically a reply all thread where you'd ask your question and everybody on the list would get an email about the question. And then there were official moderators. It was like a forum without a forum. But there were official people on there who would answer the questions. And

And so I would go on there and ask my questions, and then I would just sort of be on there. And after a while, the people who were most engaged there, we would start answering the questions because the moderators were quite busy, like, making Magic the Gathering. So we, I mean, we would create, like, canned responses. And, you know, as soon as somebody popped in and had a question about banding, we would just, like, cut and paste our paragraph about banding into the mailing list. and and you know we did that and then there was sort of a fact thing that got made anyways can i can i just pause for one second because what what you know you not not everybody would

take that step right so you were you were passionate about the game you had questions you went and asked the questions and then and then you made a transition from sort of kind of trying to take value and really like learn and to giving value and answering what what motivated that for you what was that switch uh it was it was passionate about the game and i was very exciting and I was going to be there anyways listening when somebody had a new question. So yeah, and it was just, you know, it was, I don't know, maybe just being friendly too of like sharing the passion of this game, you know, old school geeks talking about Star Wars and all of that, you know, creating that passion and being excited to talk about other people that

have the same passion. Great. So I'm on there and I'm posting answers when people come on anyways. And after a while, like Wizards of the Coast contacted me and said, look, we don't have time. We don't have the kind of time you apparently do, Paul. Do you want to be the moderator, basically? So I became the moderator for Magic dash L. and I was suddenly the official voice for rules questions, for magic to gathering,

for many people who weren't like calling in or writing in. This was the way they got their question answered. In some sense, it was one of the highest paying jobs I ever had. had because they, in exchange for this, they gave me magic cards, which were early magic cards, really. Yeah. Now, I didn't really get the value out of them at the time, but if I had saved those cards. Yeah, in retrospect, you wouldn't have to work for a living anymore.

Yeah, it would have been quite a lot of money. But anyway, so I was doing magic dash out. I was the official moderator, and then they, I mean, the hunger for people to get their questions answered, especially once, you know, Arabian Nights and antiquity started coming out. As more stuff came out, people had more questions. And I was doing what I could for everybody who sang up to Magic Dash L, but there was actually, like, that's only a small portion of people who had questions about this. So Wizards opened up a customer service department.

And they interviewed a bunch of people, bringing a bunch of people in. And, of course, they wanted to know how happy I was at Microsoft. Which was, the answer was, I was fine at Microsoft, except I wasn't actually an employee. I was just a contractor answering people's, at the time, I was answering companies' questions about, I wasn't even answering questions. I was the person that they would call, and then I would decide whether their problem was worth a tech's time and set them on to a tech. So not even that exciting. And I was only a contractor. So I kind of jumped at the chance, basically.

And I went in and interviewed, and I was sort of their dream. Like most of the people they were hiring were fans who were or retailers or stuff who had, who had experience dealing with customers and answering questions and all that stuff and were very knowledgeable about the product. But what they sort of didn't have was my training at Microsoft in how there's a whole bunch that actually goes into being a good customer service representative and answering the phones properly and how to deal with angry customers is a very important thing, especially over the phone.

So anyways, I was kind of their dream, basically, to come in and do that. And I did that for, so I got hired and I started working there. And the next part of the story is sort of like, there's a lot of opportunities in the early days in magic. And one of those opportunities was, or at Wizards, and one of those opportunities was a chance to just play a lot of games with a lot of cool people, including Richard Garfield, the designer of magic, who was obviously there. And so we were trying to get Robo Raleigh out as well. That's an interesting story all in its own about the relationship of Robo Raleigh and Magic. But we were trying to get Robo Raleigh out, so we were playing a lot of Robo Rally, especially in the evenings after work.

And Richard and I, or we'd have discussions afterwards about what we liked about it, what we didn't like about it. And Richard and I would spend way into the night talking about a particular game we'd played or why we like this or why we like that. And he really liked some of my insights there. And so this one, I worked for customer service. It's less than six months for sure. Before one day Richard came up and he said, Paul, we don't want you to be customer service anymore.

I want you to come over and be a game designer. What was that moment like? I mean, you know, you expect it. Was it out of the blue? Like what was going through your head at that time? It was kind of out of the blue. I certainly wasn't expecting them to hire me as a game design. That was a surprise.

I was, I, I, I, I guess I had definitely been hoping that maybe someday I could be a game designer because I was finding this passion for how rules worked. And I was having ideas for like improving Robo Rally and VTES and other games we were working on. And so I guess I had sort of, I don't even know if I'd really codified it to myself that what I wanted to be was, a game designer. It's a long time ago now. But yeah, so it was kind of a surprise, but certainly I got to imagine it feels like, you know, when you're a college player for football or baseball or whatever, and you get the call from the major leagues that's like, come on up. So yeah, it was very, it was an amazing feeling. So I highly recommend that anybody can have

Richard Garfield tell them to come be a game designer that they should do it. Well, all right, hold on a second because, well, I agree. And, you know, there's a narrative here that's like, oh, you happen to be in the right place at the right time and you got really lucky and you were around the right people. And that is great, but not that useful necessarily to our aspiring audience. But there's some principles in there that I've heard echoed from other designers I've interviewed and I've tried to say myself, which is you got involved in the industry based on your passion. You added value to the community by just independently answering questions on us. an email thread or a forum and then you got noticed and you got involved doing not game design, doing customer support, but you continue to sort of do things on the side and get involved with the team directly. And actually, that is a pretty consistent story, regardless of the time and place you're at, most of the people I know, that's how they've gotten into the industry. So I don't think it's just get lucky and hang out with Richard. I think it's a lot of, you know, who you were and what you have done and the types of things that other people can emulate to really

get into the space. No, absolutely. Absolutely. And, And since like half my career has been in tabletop and half of it's been in electronic, and I can tell you like 100%, a pathway towards being a game designer, especially in electronic, comes in through QA, through customer service, through testing games. Like just, you know, when you're in QA for electronic gaming and you're playing the game over and over and over and finding problems with it, that's the first steps of game design. So yeah, it is absolutely how the overall narrative there is how a lot of people become game designers. And yeah, you know, the particulars of getting tapped on the shoulder by Richard Garfield is the funny part of it, but you're absolutely right.

There are many, many people who come through doing exactly what I did. Great. Okay. So then you became a game designer at Wizards of the Coast. You're working on Robo Raleigh and Vampire the Eternal Struggle and some on Magic as well. Yeah, I was specifically what I was actually hired as sort of like associate game designer. The R&D at the time was Richard

and the team from Pennsylvania who had designed magic with him basically, his team from there, people like Jim Lynn and Scappelias and Dave Petty and anyway, there's a large number of people who were at in Pennsylvania with him working on the game, and many of them had come over,

and they composed basically R&D for the company. And so I was hired in, you know, coming out of customer service, I was sort of like the helper guy, basically. But yeah, I was working on magic at the time. I think the first thing I really sort of dug into was some of fallen empires in the beginning and worked on products like Chronicles,

and, you know, third edition, maybe fourth edition at the time, Ice Age, that kind of stuff. But pretty quickly thereafter, so yeah, we were all working on magic, and I did some World Warholi work and stuff, but pretty soon thereafter, they came to me and they said, Paul, we've got this interesting situation. We've got this game called Jihad, which is the first sort of big multiplayer CCG

based on Vampire the Masquerade. and we have a problem, which is that many countries don't like that name at all. There are some issues with the name jihad for some reason, which is a perfectly reasonable term from Vampire the Masquerade, but in this case, it did not work as well for them in many areas. And they said, so there had also been some problems with the initial print run of overprinting boosters, not overprinting boosters, underprinting starting decks. And so a lot of people who wanted to play weren't able to play the game. So they were like, we're going to do another printing.

And as part of this, we're going to change the name to Vampire the Eternal Struggle. And as part of that, since we're going that distance to changing the game, what we really think we ought to do is take a holistic look at it and figure out whether there's anything else we can do. So they were like, so here you go, Paul. You're in charge of turning jihad into Vampire the Eternal Struggle. So that was sort of the first big, like, Paul, you're a game designer, and here's what you're doing now. So working on being basically the lead designer for Vampire the Eternal Struggle was sort of my next big step in the process. And how long had you been officially, whatever, an associate game designer or game designer before you got a...

Not that long. things moved fast at Wizards the Coast in those days. It had only been a couple of months, I think. Not very long at all. And I was still doing some work on magic while I was doing this transition. In fact, the transition was somewhat difficult in that I still had all these magic responsibilities. And like playtesting vampire requires you to get five or six people together to do the playtest. And everybody was super busy.

So there were a lot of struggles there initially with that turnover. And it was my first sort of big project, too. So it was, there were a lot of struggles there, but it was a lot of fun. And it was a... Would you say it was an eternal struggle? It was almost. It was almost eternal struggle. Because I was the lead designer for vampire pretty much as long as magic,

I'm sorry, as long as Wizards was putting, from that point on, was putting out the product. And I was the lead designer on all the expansions and, yeah, all the way up through, it's life at Wizards. I've I'm going to just jump on one issue that's a personal thing of mine because I have a bunch of

like multiplayer games that I have early versions of and I never get to develop them because I just need getting six people together to play a game consistently to get the kind of iterations that you need is so difficult

I found anyway. It's a real barrier to my actual development of like I have a some kind of werewolf variant style games that I've been, I was excited about, but I'm like, just the number of times I can get a group together to iterate on it is, is really, really small. So it's unfortunate. That's why I tend to only do games that can be played with two or three players, at least at a

minimum. Yeah, I'm lucky up here. I mean, I'm in Seattle, which is sort of a good mecca, but what's actually, uh, which means that I have access to, to Mike Selenker and, and James Ernest and things like that as, as, you know, regular contributors to things. But But the bigger thing I actually did is I just got some friends who were interested in playing games and who had some aspirations to be game designers. And we started with a small group of people and sort of built it up over the years. Like, you know, smash up came out of that, basically, with me and my friends playing games together and getting together every other week, you know, and like Seth John.

Johnson was in that group and some other people. And yeah, it takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of time. But now that group has like, I mean, technically that group has like 70 or 80 people. But we get together every other week and seven to 10 people show up. So if there's something that needs to be tested with that many people. I mean, most games, the majority of the test, most normal games that aren't like a werewolf game. You know, three or four people is a good test for it anyways. But when we need a bigger group, it's nice to have access to that.

It just takes a lot of time and work and networking. So can you dig into that a little bit then? Because I find what was that process of setting? What does the time and work look like? Like what was the thing to set up? Are you managing regular emails? Are you trolling local game shops for friends? What does it look like?

It was, so it started with, wow. I mean, luckily I had a lot of contacts from Wizards when I, you know, I was at Wizards until 2000. And then I went into electronic gaming for a while. And then when I came back to tabletop and I started wanting to make my own games, I started contacting my friends who I knew liked games. Adam Conis and I have been friends since high school. He put out a card game through Green Ronan called Torches and Pitchforks in the 90s, basically.

And he was interested in sort of gearing back up. And my boss at work at the time, his name was Isaac Barry, he was really gung-ho to help out in any way he could. So I grabbed him, Jeff Combos, who runs hidden, what it's a heck system. I always, hidden explorations for RPGs. He was interested in this whole process. So I just sort of found my friends who were sort of interested in making. games or were making games regularly and just like, hey, you know what? Let's get together.

Sometimes it would be once a month. Sometimes it would be every week we could meet. Sometimes it was every other week. And we'd just get together and we'd playtest each other's games. That was sort of a key ingredient there is it wasn't setting up, it wasn't trying to set up a group for me, which is totally doable. You know, if you gather up a bunch of people who are fans of your work and like the playtest groups for smash up, there's, you know, 10 or 12 groups running smashup play testing when we're gearing up for each expansion. And that's great. And they're all sort of doing it for my one game. But it's

easier to find aspiring game designers and say, well, yeah, come over and we'll play my game and we'll play your game. And it helps if you're someone like you or me, Justin, where we're like, look, I've been doing this a long time and I can give you some really good critiques on your game, I think. And I could really use your help on mine too. So the networking aspect cannot be underrated there. And that's sort of how things have grown. And now when I meet somebody and discover that they're, you know, any way local, I'm like, well, look, we have a group that meets every two weeks. Why don't you, why don't you come on by and we play test each other's games?

And it's sort of been really enlightening there as to how many people. people around. Like I said, the group has over 70 people, but in any particular week, they're seven to 10. And honestly, like, five of those are pretty much regulars and then sort of a rotating cast of other people who come and go, depending on their ability and stuff. And we have people come, we have people come from Oregon sometimes. I mean, not, not every other week, but, you know, from hours away to when they're ready to test their games. Great. Yeah. I think that kind of setup is incredibly valuable.

And for people out there who maybe don't have the same kind of audiences like you and I do, there's still plenty of opportunities to find local people to play. And, again, you just sort of build it up over time and get those opportunities or joining a group like the ones that you're organizing where people can kind of get experienced and help out a game designer and somebody that is connected in the industry. And then it's very easy to then ask, hey, you know, can you take a look at my game or let me bust one of these things out? you know, I think that's really sort of been the consistent message I give to people is like, you know, get involved with people that are in the community doing what you care, you know, doing what you want to do, add value to the community and you will, you know, inevitably you'll be able to get to that process of being a game designer and doing the work.

Yeah. And honestly, like, if you're, if you're in a big city anyways, you know, if you're out in, in the rural areas, it's going to be more difficult. But like, go to meetup.com. I was, I was frankly shocked at how many, like, game design meetups. just occur in Seattle. Just like random groups exactly like mine of people who are just interested in making games and stuff and get together, that's a, like I said, I was shocked at how many there are and what kind of a resource is available there. That's great. All right. So you were at Wizards for how many years?

Five and a half, six. Yeah, five and a half, basically. And what triggered the end of that and what came next? What triggered the end of that? The way I usually describe it, so Wizards got purchased by Hasbro, which was very, very nice for everyone involved, including me. But that made some changes happen at the company. When I got laid off in 2000, I think like Christmas time 2000, it's sort of famous at Wizards that they have in the past laid many people off during Christmas time. I got laid off at Christmas time in 2009 or like 99. Anyways, I got laid off right around then.

And the layoff occurred for, there were two things that happened right around then. Number one was, Hasbro had mandated that every department at Wizards of the Coast, regardless of what they were doing or who they were, was going to lay off, I think, 20% of the people. It was an across the board. It doesn't matter who you are, what you're doing. your department is going to lay off 20% of the people or something like 10% or 20%. I don't remember. It might have only been 10%.

So out of Wizard of the Post R&D, which was where everything, which is sort of the font of the company, basically, two people were going to get laid off. One of those people was the newest member who had just been hired fairly recently, like within a few months. So he sort of didn't have a lot of responsibilities and stuff, and it was a natural thing. The other person was me who was the one person in R&D basically who didn't work very much on Magic the Gathering. I was in charge of, I was the guy who worked on everything else. I was in charge of over the years. I was in charge of vampire. I worked on Netrunner and Battletech.

And I was in charge of like the Xena and Hercules that we did there. I was in charge of the WCW wrestling game. I worked on Harry Potter. I was one of the two guys who worked on Pokemon at the time. So I was the guy who worked on everything that wasn't magic. Part of the mandate that Hasbro was laying down was laying off just a flat percentage of everybody and pretty much like focus on magic as much as possible. That's Wizards brand, focus on and D&D at the time, but I wasn't working on that.

So I was actually pretty much a natural person to let go because I was not, in fact, working on the thing that they most wanted somebody to be working on. All right. So that's one of those traumatic moments there. You're in a dream job. You're feeling you're doing good work. And then all of a sudden Christmas comes and it's over. Yes. What is that?

Now, what happened there? What happened from that point? Um, that was that was, I had never been really thinking about what I was going to do after Wizards. I was in it. I was in for the long haul, right? That was that was my job and I loved it. So I got laid off and I started kind of casting about for what I was going to do next. It was, it was a, you know, I started putting it. I mean, they gave me a really good severance package and everything else. So I spent kind of a, the first couple months of there just sort of like moping. playing a ton of EverQuest, if I remember correctly,

and trying to sort of figure out what I wanted to do, basically. I had tons of good friends with good contacts, and I wasn't like 100% worried about what I was going to do next, but I didn't really, you know, and so yeah, so I spent a lot of time mope. Well, it's tough. I mean, every time, and again, I hear a lot of these stories from other designers and have some of myself where there's these, what, you know,

at the time seemed like catatical. climatic events and they're very devastating and then end up opening the door for other, you know, possibilities and, and pretty amazing things. So I, knowing, obviously, your career history since then, clearly at some point, this trigger, this did that for you as well. Yeah, this absolutely did. Um, so, uh, after I think about four months, uh, I got in touch, or I was talking with a friend of mine, his name's guest premier first. He was the original art director at Magic to Get for Magic the Gathering. He does. the card back, the initial look of the cards, all that stuff. And he's an amazing,

amazing guy. He had left Wizards much earlier, well, mostly because he was rich and he was doing more things that he had more control over once Hasbro took over, basically, I think, not to put too many words in his mouth. So he was working for a startup company out of Arizona, doing some art for them, basically. And he was like, Paul, look, they desperately need some game designers. And I was like, well, what are they working on? He's like, they're working on a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. And he knew how much I'd been playing EverQuest, and I loved those games.

EverQuest got me into Ultima Online, Meridian 59, all of those old school games. And he said, they've got a really interesting take on this. And I think you'd be a good fit. And so he got me in touch with them. I went and they flew me down and interviewed me and pretty much high. me right away. I was very, very pleased about that and very scared because I was, I had not worked, I had interfaced with some computer people a little bit at Wizards when we would do like the microprose magic the gathering game in the late 90s and things like that, but nothing to this scale.

And it was, it was, it was very scary, but also really, really cool in eye opening too. That was sort of my introduction into, into electronic gaming. Yeah, so that's, I really, uh, I really want to dig into. that a little bit because for you know most of the designers I talk to are you know primarily live in the physical gaming world and you know you and I are some of the few that kind of crossed over and do both and so what was that like for you making that transition like how are the skills different how are they the same what was the the hardest lessons you had to learn there well a lot of the skills the general skills have similarities at the end of the day you are especially from coming from

from Magic to Gathering, from CCGs, there's an interest, there are some interesting overlaps because at the end of the day, you were trying to compare on attack stat, especially in an MMO like this, you're trying to compare an attack stat to a defense stat, do some damage, you know, that kind of thing. I worked a little bit on some RPGs.

You know, I worked a little bit on D&D, very little bit on D&D. I had actually, well, I don't, remember if it was right towards the end of, I think it might have actually been a project I did after I wasn't at Wizards the Coast anymore, but I was working on the Warcraft 3 RPG. I actually wrote, I co-wrote that with another person. We, we, so I had sort of gotten a lot of, of grounding in how, in how to turn an electronic game into a, into a physical game and, and could sort of backpedal that or trace that back and do a little bit there. There's a,

there is a lot of overlap between RPGs and an online MMO, obviously. There's a lot of overlap in holding a lot of information in your head for working on a collectible card game and working on an electronic title and that. But then there's just a lot of stuff that it's just like, I have a distinct memory of learning about the fact that what you see, on the screen in an MMO is delayed by a second or two from what's actually happening in the world because of the communication lag. And having to keep that in mind is actually like a hard thing to do. How does that one second lag influence you as a designer? What's what's going on there and what choices do you have to make because of that latency problem? Yeah. A lot of times, a lot of times

it's okay and it's just a matter of like the player not the player not seeing a damage number flowed up in exactly real time with what the server knows is going on and that doesn't usually impact too much but it impacts a lot for things like movement like when you press the button to go forward like you're standing still and so you sort of know where you are on the server and then you press the button to go forward and then you press the button to turn and you learn a lot about how to make the client, which is what the player sees on their computer,

predict what's going to happen on the server when the player does something. So the client knows that when you press the button for two seconds to go forward, you're going to move to a certain spot in the simulation, and it just goes ahead and does that. and it's called predictive behavior. Or the client knows that there's a skeleton behind a tree up ahead,

and it's going to get angry when you get within a certain distance. And it has to predict that even though on the server you haven't reached that distance yet, that you're going to, and that it's going to get angry, and it's going to pop out and attack you. So you learn a lot about that kind of predictive behavior. That lesson may not be as applicable today as it was back then when people were playing on modems and things like that as opposed to most people playing serious MMOs

having access to broadband and stuff. So how big a team were you working with on that project? Initially, when I got there, I want to say when I got there was like maybe 40 people and I think by the end we had ramped up to 80. I got there. There was one other designer on the project. She had come out of working on Ultima online actually,

or on Ultima products. She had come out of over there. And so she was familiar with how to do sort of electronic RPG stuff, which was really, really super helpful. And then I was there. I was there. I was the second designer. And then while we were there,

we hired an ex-Watzi designer, who I knew really well, like one of my best friends, Sean Carins, we hired him to come down with us. And so it was sort of the three of us doing all the design, including, like, I was in charge of advancement and combat, and Sean was in charge of crafting, and Dina was in charge of the magic system and spells. And, like, we just had to make these broad,

like, you are in charge of all of this. And it's not like your team is in charge. charge of all of this. No, you're the advancement team. You decide how people get XP and advance in their levels and things like that. So it was a lot. Yeah, I found, you know, when it comes to working with large teams, you know, the communication challenges and coordination challenges of design and when you're working on a big digital project, the time lag between when you design something and when you can see it in action. And then if you want to make changes, how long that takes is a huge barrier and it takes a lot of adjustment. I don't know if that was a similar experience for you.

Oh, definitely, because we were still like, we started designing the quests and things before the tools existed to properly do them in the game world. And we designed the advancement system and we're like, well, here's how it's going to work. And then when the coders got to actually doing it, they're like, that's not how it's going to work. Yeah, it was, it was, and a lot of back and forth with art and programming and us and yeah trying to trying to get it all done. Communication is key, but at the same time, it's all sort of like, you know, design has to lead everything. The design has to be done before they know what they need to program. And in many respects, at least the core systems design.

And so a lot of that is like I said, doing it and then them saying, well, how about if we do it this way instead and adjusting on the fly? Right. Did you find any kind of best practices that emerged out of that for how you would be able to interact? Did you have looser designs up front? Did you try to, you know, do check in points during your design before the programers were ready? Was there any other things that you found were helpful or mistakes that you learned from along the way? A little bit of all of that. But the most important thing was sort of iteration is key and being flexible. And coming up with the design. meeting with the key players involved and having them say, yeah, that's doable or no, that's not doable. And or, well, it's almost never, we can't do that. It's almost always, yeah, no problem. And then you learn, you learn programmers speak, which is, yes, no problem, which is not

the actual answer you need. The answer is not can you do it or can't you do it. the answer is how much is it going to, how much is it going to take and how much is it going to cost? Because they're always like, as soon as you, like programmers are brilliant and they speak this language and with any language, almost all things are possible. And so when you say, hey, can you do it this way? They're like, yep. And then you find out they're like, well, no, that's going to take six months.

And you're like, we don't have six months. What can we do in three? And they're like, oh, well, you didn't ask that question. So. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I've learned that lesson the hard way. even more so when you do ask the right question and say, okay, yeah, you could do this in three months.

What that means is six months. Yes. Yeah, often, often. If you get really good, really good people or the other thing is we had some really good producers who, like I've had a gamut of producers in my career of people who were just sort of like making schedules and people who were actually getting things done to the schedules. and we had some amazing producers there who were total ballbusters about like you said this, this had better be,

this it better be true or there better be a good reason that you were wrong, basically. Right. Yeah. So, and that's, I think this digs into another question I wanted to ask. You've worked in a lot of different companies at, you know, sizes of all kinds, you know, wizards and Zingud, Pop Cap and Pokemon company. And I'm curious if there's, you know, sort of cultural trends or ways that those things about their company DNA that you've noticed that made them more or less likely to be successful or better or worse to work with or have you noticed any things that like you've had takeaways like, oh, okay, if I'm going to work at a big company or I'm going to try to do an ambitious project, these things really are critical. Like you mentioned, obviously great producers that can really hold a timeline together.

Right. Other things like that. Yeah, my career has sort of been, you know, going from a big company, going from a big company with where there are advantages and disadvantage to both big companies and small companies. Big companies have a lot of security. Like the company is probably not going anywhere in general. That's not always true. But in general, the company's probably not going anywhere. But you're probably also not, you don't have as much control as you want.

And then you go to a small company and you have a lot more control and a lot more freedom to do things. but everything's more risky because you don't have, you don't, nothing's guaranteed the way it can be at a big company. So like I bounce back and forth. It's like I'll work at a big company and then I'll be, and I'll just be wishing I was at a startup because, you know, because you're dealing with some big company issues like,

you know, oh, I don't want to do it that way. Well, that's too bad. That's the way the company does it. And you're just like, oh, I wish I had the freedom. And then you go to a small company and you're like, look at all this freedom. Oh, I've got to make sure that I'm getting a paycheck next week. That'd be really important.

Sure, sure. So there's, yeah, advantages and disadvantages of both. At a big company, to an extent being a designer, there is about learning how they do things and learning about, at a big company, it can often be like learning about who's dependable and who's not dependable and taking, you know, and dealing with things in the best way possible, knowing that, basically. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, my only really experience working at, working for another company was at Upper Deck.

And there was a lot of challenges while we were there, you know, that ended up with the CEO and lawsuits and all kinds of craziness. Right. But, you know, one of the great things about it, the story I often tell is that, like, I absolutely learned who I could depend upon because, like, you went through the fire together. You know, when they're just, everything's falling down around you and tons of people all just. trying to cover their own butts. And you know there are some people that really care about making a great product and will do what they say they're going to do. And those were exactly the people I hired when I started my own company because those were the people who were just, you know, you knew would get it done.

So it was a valuable experience even if it was painful at the moment. Right. And sometimes, and like, you know, companies don't hire people that they don't think are going to do a good job at it, but everybody has different skills and are good in different situations. And you can hire somebody who's just a workhorse and just puts their head down and does things but has no creative spark towards them. And that can be a really valuable person. And then you can hire somebody who has an amazing creative spark. But when you're like, oh, that's great, put that

down, make that happen. They're like, oh, I'm not sure how to do that. And both of those are valuable. And one nice thing about a big company is that you can kind of afford in a big company to have some of both of those. Whereas in a small company, you often need somebody who would better be able to do both of those to some degree. Yeah, everybody has to wear a lot of hats in a small company. That's something I tell my team as they're complaining about me assigning more work to them.

But it's definitely, I think also beyond just the fact of like persons' individual skill sets, I think that's where I mentioned culture before because I think the right and wrong culture can seriously motivate and turn on somebody to learn skills I didn't have. and really drive that extra mile, but the wrong one can just shut down even the most talented

of designers or employees and they'll just then shift into doing the minimum or, you know, kind of fade out. It's something I really try to pay a lot of attention to working my own company, working with my own teams of like, you know, what is it that, like you talked about giving them that right level of freedom to be able to kind of do things they want to do, even if they're not necessarily the way I would want to do them. But then, you know, enough control and direct to really get everybody on the same page and accomplish big goals. What's the size of teams that you've managed directly?

Have you managed people directly generally or have you just been working on large teams? Or how have you interacted with that system? It depends. Like, I've never managed a giant team. So specifically, like, the most people I've directly ever managed is probably like eight or nine. And that was, that's not, I can do that,

not what I love. Sure. So, you know, God bless you for running, for doing your, your company and stuff, because it's, it's, it's a skill. It's definitely a good, an important skill. I'm just not, it's not what, it's not what I like to do. In fact, there was a point at Pop Cap where, so when I was hired at Pop Cap, I was hired as a creative director.

And in Pop Cap terms, that's not sort of the same thing. Like, a creative director at most companies is the creative director. for the company. At Popcap, it was more like the lead designer on a particular project. But at some, at a certain point while I was there, over the four years I was there, it had sort of morphed from lead designer on a product, which often meant you were the only designer on a product to or with one or two other designers. They had sort of morphed it and they wanted more leadership out of it. And I said, well, that's great. I can do that, but it's not what I want to do and you're not going to get and if I'm spending my time doing that you're not I'm not I'm not

spending my time doing what I'm super passionate about and stuff and so I actually stepped backwards from a creative director position there to a senior design position there because it was just what I wanted to do and it all worked out better for everybody kind of that it so I have really enjoyed managing some people like at one point at Hidden City Games I was managing Luke Crane and Jared Sorenson who are like rock star RPG designers and I was managing them on an RPG product and I was just in awe. It's one of those situations where you have people who are technically working for you who are just like way better at what they're doing than at what you, there's no way you could do what they're doing, right?

So yeah, and I really enjoyed that and I've got really good friendships out of that. And every time I've ever, and when I asked them, they said I was a good manager so I feel good about that. But at the same time, I was just sort of letting them do what they needed to do and running defense for them around them, basically. Yeah, that's a good, that's a good manager for sure. I, uh, I

remember that was actually a big factor for me. Again, going back to my only time I've been managed with that upper deck is that I had, uh, I had some great, uh, bosses. Uh, Mike Hummel and then Dan Progenowski were two people that were like

very, you know, smart and capable. And then often when I was, I get a head full of steam and I'm running, you know, they would just get out of my way and help get other people out of my way. And that kept me happy for a long time. And it wasn't until I got a new manager, who I won't name, but was not, not the same. And my attitude shifted immediately. And it was, I, within a year of that, I had quit and started my own company because I just could not. You know, that difference to somebody who is motivated is gigantic. So don't sell yourself short,

even if the people that you're working for are doing things you couldn't do. Sure. Fascinating. Okay. Well, I will get way too much hate mail if I don't spend a little bit of time, at least talking about some of your original designs here. And specifically, kind of the biggest thing that I hear about all the time people love is smash up.

Yay, smash up. And I got to say I'm really, you know, I was really impressed by that design when I first saw it. And now I don't know how many different expansions there are, something like dozens. Well, that 70s just came out. And it's like 12, I think, I want to say. And we're like at least two ahead of it now in natural design and development.

Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. So it's really, And that's one of the things. I think I'm in a similar boat with Ascension in the sense that we are now on. Expansion 13 is coming out soon and we have a lot. Awesome. This is ongoing stuff, which is super fun. But I think you did, you know, even more profoundly,

you kind of invented a genre and the sort of shuffle building model, which what I love about it is taking and taking the essence of something that's awesome and in specific, you know, the CCG world, taking the essence of that and boiling it down. in a way that's simple and accessible and people can consume in bite-sized chunks is really impressive and I think Smash Up does that better than almost anything else I've seen.

The first question I'm going to start off with is why do you think this hasn't become more of a genre? I mean, I know there was that epic PVP came out that kind of used the same mechanic. I haven't seen like a, I would have expected much like Dominion when it invented the deck building genre there is a dozen or more, you know,

now dozens of different twists on that. Right. I felt like, I felt like Smash Up would inspire the same thing, but I haven't noticed that as much. Why do you think that is? That's a good question. I think it might be...

Maybe some of our audience may not be familiar with it, so maybe just do a quick, a quick synopsis of the gameplay before you go into that. Sure, sure. So, Smash Up is a game where you take... In order to play the game, the game is fairly simple.

There are bases out on the field, and you are going to play minions from your hand, onto the bases, each player is, onto any base you want, until one of the bases has enough minions on it, based on their power, to sort of decide that the

base needs to score, and then people get victory points based on who had the most power in minions there. But the core of the game is actually, before you begin playing it, you will choose two of the factions of which there are over 60 now.

Yeah, Yeah, anyways. Whatever you want, you will pick, like, I would like to take ninjas and dragons or steampunk and ghosts or whatever we have made. You can take any two of those and just shuffle them together and that's your deck. And your decision process there is based on do I like ninjas? But also, like, do I like what the ninjas do? Like, the ninjas are about destroying other people's minions because that's what ninjas do. They go assassinate people.

And the dragons are about modifying the bases that you're going to, that you're going to put on. So if you want to do, if you're like, well, what happens if I have a group that kills off all their minions and then makes the places where they are winning bad for them? And what happens if I play those two things together? Well, you grab the ninjas and the dragons and you play that set. But if you're more interested in, I want to draw a million cards and get them back from my discard pile, then you'll pick them. wizards and zombies because that's what those two do. So it's all about picking two mechanics or two themes you like and shuffling together. And that's the core of the gameplay.

And that's sort of where the original game came out of is my love. Like you said, it's one of the two things you do in a CCG. The one of them is play the game and the other one is build your deck. Yep. Yeah. And so why, and just then the other question I buried in there of like, Why do you think there hasn't been more of that genre kind of built out in the world? That's a really good question.

Part of it, part of it to me is that when deck building games came out, especially, so Dominion comes out. And it's almost its own, the first deck building games that came out are their own engines. like Dominion all that's going on there is deck building in some sense right it's you pick the card up and you you put it in your deck and you shuffle your deck and get to play those cards

but those cards basically let you get other of the same thing you have your deck and the cards that are on the table and that's what's going on and there's sort of a lot of interesting space just there like obviously Ascension did it in the cool way of

having the shared line of random cards instead of the specific 10, you know, piles of 10 different cards. But both of those games are sort of like, that's what the game is about. And it's sort of easy to see how to do it differently or better or in another way. And then it started evolving until other people were like, well, what if the deck building part of it isn't the game, it's the engine. And games like started being with, sorry, anyways, games that were like trains and things like that

where you're deck building, but it's in service to a board game that's happening there too. And not that those are better or worse than the other game, but what I'm saying, I guess, is that there's a big field there that opened up quickly. Whereas you look at smash up and you're like, yeah, the shuffle building thing's really cool. and it immediately is in service to a game that's going on. And so at that point, you're like, you don't necessarily want to experiment with the new thing,

the shuffle building, because that's like, well, how does that work? Well, obviously, you take two things and shuffle them together. You're done. Like, there's not a lot to experiment with there as opposed, and then you go from there to building a game for them to work on. And that's a, I think it's a more difficult step, between those, if you understand what I mean. Yeah, if I, if I hear that, you know, there, so there's the, the mechanic of shuffle

building is sort of, you know, trivial to, to clone and there's not much room necessarily to modify it or play with it, but. Right. The alternative is you have to design or redesign the kind of game that it serves differently than the way you, you did potentially. Right. And the two are kind of a little more divorced, too. Like, you can do, you can do almost any game that requires people to have.

have decks and put shuffle building as the beginning of it for them to have their own decks. And it doesn't, it doesn't require, it requires like significant design in both sections there as opposed to, not that there's not a lot of design and designing a deck builder, because there's tons, but you, you have more of a focus and a more of a place to start with, basically. Yeah, I'm interested, you know, because my guess is that you probably started from a similar place as being a more kind of traditional TCG engine, you know, kind of when you were building smash up and it, and I think smartly got simplified over time to something that was a little bit more open-ended and easier to kind of build 60 different decks that can all have a different style of

play and interact with. Is that, is that right? Is that kind of how that went down? Yeah, no, that is exactly correct. It started out, in fact, as I mean, the idea was always there of like I'm putting ninjas and pirates together, but the initial design was pretty much when I was playing around with it, it was pretty much kind of a magic clone. It was the idea that I would play a pirate in front of me and would start attacking my opponent with the pirate. Excuse me.

Or then I would play a ninja on top of it and turn it into a pirate ninja. Or I would play a ninja and then I would put a pirate on it and turn it into a ninja pirate or whatever. But in general, it was actually. actually sort of a magic clone in that, you know, I'd have a creature on the table that would attack my opponent. And I do not like that much at all. Yeah. Yeah. That's sort of interesting, you know, it kind of begs the question as, you know, sort of the in shuffle building, as you said, it is, you know, you do the shuffling up front and then you play the game. And then it, whereas deck

building, the game is the deck building, you know, maybe with some other, maybe with some other things happening. But that's what's going on. Had, and you said you started from a place where it sounds like the shuffling was during game, like I would play the pirate on top of the ninja or whatever. Is that right? So during play, you would add things in? Oh, well, you would still start the game by picking the pirate deck and the ninja deck and shuffling them together. That was, that was still the basis of, but during, but then during play, it was more about like, the idea there was that if I'm putting these two decks together, that I should be putting the pieces together as well. I see. Like now, like, if you play

smash up when you play the pirates and the ninjas and you put a ninja down you're never going to put a pirate you're never going to turn that ninja into a pirate ninja and you're what you're going to do is you're going to play actions you're going to play pirity actions that now the ninja participates in and so it's a ninja that does ninja actions and pirate actions as opposed to like strictly trying to make a pirate ninja basically okay and um had had you considered variations where the shuffling and things could change during play or a part of it or was it it was just always the shuffling subfront and then just what game serves this the best it's it's always been the shufflings up front because that's i wanted to sort of mirror the ccg of building your deck and then playing your

deck so yeah i think i think you just came up with some interesting ideas to think yeah yeah well that's where i was like i was thinking about this now i'm like all right wait a minute how do i how do i play with this as we go along that would be kind of interesting you start with like a ninja deck and then like pirity stuff comes up i mean in some sense that's uh that that that's similar to some of the things you've done in ascension where you sort of you know start with your base thing and then you sort of branch into different directions based on what's been what's coming up and and you a lot actually that's that's a good like building a good green engine in in ascension is about deciding to take the green cards and not to take the purple cards or you know

uh to take you in a direction because they all synergize really well right well and yeah So at the extreme, just to kind of collapse the two genres, and we're going to deep dive here because that's what this podcast is all about, you know, to collapse the two genres, on the one end, you know, a deck building game is basically shuffle building, but with one card at a time. That you're actually adding those decks one thing, one kind of a time, whereas the shuffling is done,

a shuffle building is all the way at the other end, where you shuffle it to two chunks, the sort of minimum number of choices to still be a choice. Those things happen up front, and then there's the other game happening. It'd be really interesting to think about some kind of mid-tier. There was a game, there was a digital game. I'm blanking on the name right now,

but it was kind of an RPG adventure style, and you had a character, and each of the item slots on that character came with like five or six cards, and you had like a deck-building game that you would play, so you would have like a chest plate that would come with five specific cards that were like defensive or attacks.

You'd have a sword that would come up with five or six cards. And so it was kind of... Right. Right. They had a couple iterations. It was... Card Hunter, I think it was called? Yeah. Yeah, one of them, either the mobile or the computer game was called Card Hunter.

Yeah, that was a pretty fascinating model to me and that, you know, sort of gets kind of in the middle of this that I find pretty interesting. And maybe there's something there. Yeah, that actually also has a history in other RPGs, like some of the Japanese role-playing games, where the different pieces you equip, especially some of the early Final Fantasy games

where the like equipping this sword makes you, makes you a samurai and equipping this wand makes you a mage and then you sort of modify with the other things you're wearing too. Yeah. All right. Well, maybe we'll follow up on this as a concept down the road. But specifically what you're talking about, card hunter was very much exactly sort of building,

doing, yeah, doing something like shuffle building on the fly or deck building in chunks on the fly. Yeah, so, and then, and maybe it's just like a staged process is the key here. Like, it's like, okay, you start off, you can pick, you know, shuffle these two things together. Then you play around and gain the opportunity to shuffle another thing or, you know, replace one of the things and, you know, kind of build those like chunk, then game, then chunk than game. Right. As a possibility to make that work. Yeah, and Carthenter was also, it had. it had a nice bit in that you were doing this building between going into the dungeon.

Right. And so you would, yeah, you would totally like, yeah, put a new helmet on and see how it worked when you went through the dungeon. And you had a new deck there, which is in some sense, it is more like shuffle building because those are the changes you'd make between shuffle building games where you'd be like, well, Ninjas and Dragons wasn't really what I really wanted. but so I'm going to go with I'm going to take the dragon cards out

and put in pirate cards and it will be ninja pirates now. Yeah, I've been really obsessed recently with Slay the Spire. I was just playing that this morning. I love that game. Yeah, and so, you know, they just have their new,

they're still in early access and they just have a beta branch has a new character that they added. And it's like really does a lot of things that like, I think, again, the sort of CCG deck building genre kind of wanted to do where you're, you know,

you don't have access to everything and the strategies you have to implement are changing all the time because of the way that the stage levels work where you, but it's very much a, you know, build, you start with a deck, you fight an encounter and then in between rounds, you're able to modify your deck in various ways or get new powers. You know, so it's that stage progress, which I find really fascinating. Yeah, it has a lot of mechanics that you find in good deck builders too, like stripping cards out of your deck,

stripping the initial, bad, sort of bad cards out of your deck and as you add through and I really love the sort of the discovery aspect of, oh, I should have taken that car,

that different card four times ago because they just set the card that combos with it. Right, right. Yeah, forcing you to have to make, like one of the downsides of, you know, games where you have the same stuff available all the time. This is a problem, obviously, with magic and collectible card games.

I also was one of the main challenges I had with Dominion, after you play it for a while, you figure out what the best strategy is and given this starting condition, do this all the time, right? And so creating conditions where you don't necessarily know what you're going to get and is key. It was one of the motivations behind ascension and having a varied center row. So the correct decision is not as obvious. And this sort of takes that even more to an extreme where you, you know, you'll only get, you know, one or three choices in a given moment and you have a lot of, a lot of crazy variations that can happen over time.

What other games? This is sort of a game I've been hooked on. You've mentioned you've been playing. What other games are you hooked on nowadays? Well, what have I? I've been playing a lot of Slade the Spire recently. Battletech just came out again, so I'm very excited about that. Before this, I've spent like hundreds of hours playing Monster Hunter recently,

which is just a fascinating kind of, I mean, I'm not, I don't play as many action games as I used to, and so it was sort of interesting to me to sort of jump back into those kind of genres by playing Monster Hunter. I'm not played Monster Hunter. What is? It is a, so it's, it's like a first person, it's not a first person shooter. It's, it's, so you have a character, third person view, uh, running around and you, this,

this is a case where you are defined essentially, what, what you're allowed to do is defined by which weapon you pick. And there are, uh, 14 different weapon types in the game, which is, which is a lot of weapon types, but this, this actually Monster Hunter as a brand has been around for a long time and has had so many iterations that they've sort of built on from the, from from from way back when. So there's like 14 different styles of play you can do. And they really do a good job of making each of those feel different.

Like the difference between, there's two kinds of lances. There's lances and gun lances. And the using them is, is quite different. So anyways, so your third person perspective, you pick a weapon and then,

and then what you do is you go hunt these big monsters. They, you know, there's one that looks. like a Tyrannosaurus and there's one that looks like a giant lizard and they get progressively crazier and crazier. There's basically flying dragons and things like that. And the reason you're hunting them, it's sort of, it's cyclical. You go and you hunt them and that and when you, when you kill them, you get pieces that you can then use to make a better weapon, a better version of your weapon.

Well, you can use it to make any of the 14 weapons. But so you go. hunt the Tyrannosaurus that breathes fire, and that helps you build the bow that breathes fire or the sword that's flaming or whatever else. And then you're like, okay, well, I got the pieces I needed from that, and now I want to go fight the electric lizard, and it'll give me pieces to make an electric sword and things like that. So anyways, but it's an action game. The fights are real time.

It's trying to kill you. It's attacking you while you're, you know, dodging you. while you're, you know, dodging to the side and shooting it with your bow and things like that. So it feels very sort of MMO-ish in the moment. You can, it is an online game and you can form parties of up to four people to go fight a particular monster and things like that. Cool. Yeah, I don't play that many real-time games anymore. So it's, that's good to kind of cross over into that space every now and then.

And it's funny, I talk, you know, about sort of designing and thinking about, you know, designing and what people do on their turn. you know, like, well, what do you do in real time? It's like, well, you're just, your turn is very, very short. Your turn is very short. And what's more important is not your turn, but what you can do between your turns, essentially. Right, right. Yeah, that, that interactivity during, you know, abodeant turns or while you're, you know, on cool downs or whatever, you know, windows exist. Right. The difference between firing 10 times per second and two times per second, but dealing more damage is, yeah. Right. Yeah. And so the. you know, that's where I try to talk to people who, you know, a lot of people when you say you're a game designer, they assume you're doing digital games and that the skill sets are just so remarkably overlapped, you know, that having worked on both, that it's just, you know, working with larger teams and having to communicate and understand programming restrictions and all that stuff. But outside of that, like that skill set and how you think about these things is, ends up being very, very similar. And, you know, you're uniquely positioned to be able to sort of confirm. or deny that theory?

No, there is a lot of overlap. There's also there, and some of it is surprising. Like an electronic experience, you have to be, you kind of have to be more focused on what the screen looks like at any particular time and where, where you put a piece of UI, you know, is it something that they need to see immediately in front of them that goes more towards the center of the screen? Is it something they can just kind of glance at and go towards. the edge of their screen. And those are all like super important, but those lessons actually translate

really well to when you're making a board game and you're like, well, what pieces of information, where is somebody looking at any particular time? Where are they looking when it is their turn? Where are they looking when it's not their turn? And what kind of information should you be conveying at those times? It's very, it's very cool and important to sort of see the translation there. Yeah, people understand user interface or UI as like a screen, but you're, you know, the graphic design and layout of your boards and cards and everything else is just, it's just as important and serves exactly the same purposes, right? You need somebody, you need an interface that is people want to interact with. It makes it easy for them to figure out what they're supposed to do and, you know, keeps information streamlined in a way that's useful, you know, it's available when you need it and not in your way when you don't. And that, that's a very, it's a, you know, kind of an higher skill set into itself, but is critical to letting your design come through. And, you know, the difference between a game that's people love and is accessible compared to one that is just too, you know, mind-numbingly obtuse is, it can be entirely

down to interface. Yeah, I remember when we were working on the MMO and I started working, we hired an interface designer, you know, graphic designer. And I was like, that's a thing. Why would you need somebody whose entire purpose is just to design the UI? Why can't we just have one of the modelers do that? And then I sat down with them. So that was just sort of a dialogue in my head.

And then I sat down with him and watched what he did. And I was like, immediately like, nope, this is exactly. You've earned your keep. He knows what he's doing. Cool. Well, as we're coming towards the end here, I always like to give people an opportunity. Are you have any new projects that you are excited about or things you want to hype, anything that you're working on that are exciting to you or that you would want to talk about?

I mean, this is an interesting time. Like a year or two, in the last year or two, I sold a bunch of games, and they're just going to start coming out now and next year. I think most of them next year. So I'll have a lot more to talk about next year. But right now, I'm really excited about, so a couple of years ago, do you know Boyan Radakovich? Oh, yeah. Yeah, he's a great guy.

And he used to be a producer on Will Wheaton's tabletop program, and he's done a couple really amazing designs. He and I are really good friends, and we designed a game together using Monty Cook's Numenera role-playing game. We designed sort of a board and card game that's set in the same world and takes a lot of flavor from the Numenera game. And it's finally coming. And then we went to Lone Shark, and Mike Selenker worked on it with us.

So the three of us turned what Bo and I had done into, like, Mike was like, can this be a cooperative game, too? and just kind of blew our minds and we went all in on that too. So I'm really excited about that game coming out. It should be out by Gen Con. I think they might even have some of it at origins in June. So look for that. And then obviously every year I have two smash-up expansions that come out.

Yep. Yep. Keep on. Keep it on. I love it. I'm just thrilled that every time we do a new one that I think up that I can still think up things that I think are fresh and clever and that people have are still like wow I you know that was that was a great addition to the game because when you do you know your 12th expansion you you still want people to be just as a especially for a game where the expand like the 12th expansion is designed to be played with the sixth expansion the second expansion the base game and everything else all rolled into one like a lot of games uh don't have that even when they do like I was

I was talking to Andy Looney and I was like well what happens if you shuffle two flux games together. He's like, oh, don't do that. So it's really nice that I can make a new one that is still fresh and still works all the way down the line. Yeah, that's fantastic. And it's definitely interesting. You have to sort of dig deeper into the engine that you built, which now really expecting that you were going to be making 12 more expansions out of it. Exactly. And especially when Smash Up is such a simple game to explain to people. Like, I'm often demoing it and I get to point and I'm just like, oh yeah, nope, I'm done. I've explained it. Yeah, that's, that's always key.

And great. I'm, I'm excited to see more, more craziness. And it seems like just such a fun game to be able to work on to do like literally any genre you can think of. And, you know, kind of tongue-in-cheek style is really, really fun. I've wanted to make kind of a humorous, expandable brand like that. That it's really, really neat to be able to explore the both mechanically and thematically. Yes, I love, I love it. And every time. And like, The fan, we've done two now that the fans have voted on and I'm always like, sharks, I have to do a faction on sharks, all right. And it's a really good design challenge to sort of live within a box that somebody else puts you in.

Yeah, yeah, totally. Okay, so then if people want to find out more about you or reach out to you on the interwebs, what's the best way for people to learn more? Twitter, basically, which is at Weirwolf Zero, Zero. row. But I'm sorry, it's W-A-R-E-W-O-L-F because I was clever when I made it up. Clever and hard to spell. Perfect. Yes. Well, you know, I was being clever. I was like, well, it's like software and wolf. It's clever. But yeah, it's just hard to spell now. So. Yeah. No, well, I'll, I'll end on my side

with a, with a brief story. There's several things I think are super clever. For example, are you familiar with the game? You've got to be kidding me that we produced about a year ago. Yes. Yeah, so originally that game, because it was a game, we went through a lot of different themes on the game, and before it became a cat theme, because everything was like about what was in people's hands, and you weren't sure what was there until you all revealed them,

the game was originally called Schrodinger's Hats. Which we thought was super clever, because, yeah, you know, it's indeterminate, it's super cool, all different hats and whatever, and we took it to Gamma, actually took that version to Gamma to show off and demo, And after the third time, I had to explain quantum mechanics to somebody to teach the game. I realized this was a horrible, horrible mistake, let alone anybody trying to spell Schrodinger.

That joke is hilarious to about 10% of the population. That's exactly right. 10% of the people loved it, like loved it. And, you know, 20% of the people had no idea what was going on at all. And the rest couldn't care less. and that was not a good recipe. No, not at all. We've done that sometimes with card names in Smash Up

where I'm just like, this is so funny. And they're like, to you, Paul, it's so funny to you. Right, right. And I think, you know, there are, when you're dealing with, like, games with a lot of different, you know, parts, like I think TCGs, for example, are, it's totally fine to have, like, one or two cards that are going to only appeal, you know,

in fact, many of the cards can be designed to only appeal to 10% of the population, because there's enough going on that those people loving it is worth it. But when it's the broader picture of your game, the entirety of the game or the name or something that's really a big part of what's going on, that's a recipe for trouble.

Yeah, totally. Cool, man. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today. This has been super fun. I've been wanting to do this for a while. Thank you very much. This is like my dream to spend a couple hours

talking to my friends and other game designers about game design stuff. So I love it. Yeah, exactly. That's kind of why I started doing this. So I was like, I just didn't an excuse to be able to do this. And I'll tell you what, next time we get together, I think we should explore this kind of shuffle during play expansion.

I think there's at least two companies I can think of, off the top of my head that might be really interested in that. Yeah, I don't think we'll have trouble finding an audience on that one. So we'll dig into that little bit. And our audience that's listened in along this way can chip in with their opinions when this releases. Great. Awesome, man. Well, it's been great talking to you and I'm sure I'll talk to you again soon. Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast

platforms, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listen to reviews and shares make a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast. Think Like a Game Designer. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at think like a game designer.com or wherever find books are sold.