Think Like A Game Designer - Soren Johnson (Part I) — Building Civilization Through 4X Design, Bridging Digital and Physical Gaming, Navigating the Evolving TCG Landscape, and Crafting Games for Varied Playtimes (#49)

Episode Date: June 12, 2023

Soren Johnson is a legend in the gaming industry. He was one of the designers on Civilization III and the lead designer for Civilization IV at Firaxis Games. He co-founded his own company called Mohawk Games. As the studio’s founder and lead designer, he aimed to create strategy games emphasizing player agency, complexity, and meaningful decision-making. We discuss 4x game design, player interaction, and how modding affects the digital gaming world. The two of us had so much fun discussing games that the episode needed to be broken into two parts. So, enjoy part one of Think Like A Game Designer with Soren Johnson. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry, with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. In today's episode, I speak with Soren Johnson. Soren is a legend in the gaming industry. He has made games that have sucked up more hours of my life than I care to admit. He was one of the designers of SIV 3 and the lead designer of Siv4, that's civilization, Sid Meier's Civilization, one of the most popular game brands of all time and one of the most popular instance of that brand. We talk about what it's like to build these

kinds of massive 4X games. He's also built his own at his own company as a founding Mohawk games. He's worked on Dragon Age Legends. He talks about a lot of the process, not only for making these kinds of games and designing them, but also how players can optimize the fun out of these games and how you prevent them from doing that and how we can make these things be more accessible, the power of having passionate players that can access your games and modding games and the power of modding and how that develops the process. We honestly get so far into this conversation that we don't even get to like his current projects, which is rare, usually in an hour and a half is enough to get through some, at least the height.

of somebody's career, but there's so much deep dive in here that we've committed to doing a part two. So we have a lot of great pack content. I first got to meet Soren and really chat with him as we prepared for the GDC when I gave a talk on SoulForge Fusion. He was one of the people that helped to set that talk up and helped to guide me. He's a great educator. He actually has his own podcast where he talks to a lot of other legends in the industry. So his podcast episodes go on for three or four hours. You can see maybe mine are just too short.

but I really enjoyed the conversation. I'm going to bring this one to you now, and we will get you a part two soon. There's a lot of great lessons in here, so plenty to chew on while you wait for that part two. So without any further ado, here is Soren Johnson. Hello and welcome. I am here with Soren Johnson.

Soren, it's really great to have you on the podcast. It's great to be here. Thanks, Justin. Yeah. So, you know, we got to really interact quite a bit in recent months as I was preparing my talk for GDC this year. You were a really great kind of mentor guiding through what to include and how to edit it and how to put it together. And you've been running that or advising. I don't know exactly the nature of the role, but kind of helping to curate the speakers for that for quite a while now.

Is that right? Yeah, I've been on the board for about 10 years. And initially it was just, you know, the video game, video game stuff, video game design. That's what I tend to focus on. But I'd always wanted to, what Justin talked at was the tabletop summit at the game developers conference, you know, which is typically it's focused on video games. But video games and board games, to me, kind of feel like cousins often, especially in the strategy game space, which is where I am and most of the time. So, you know, we've tried to get more and more tabletop designers to come talk, you know, about what they're doing and, you know, get some back and forth, which is so far, so far been good. It kind of got derailed by the pandemic, like everything else.

But, you know, we're trying to get back, you know, back where we wanted it to be. Yeah, it's really, you know, it's one of those things. Obviously, most of my background is with tabletop games. I've spent some time working on digital games and then some. projects that are kind of living in both worlds like SoulForge Fusion, which is what I talked about, where we're trying to build it for both digital and physical. And the overlaps and the fundamentals of design are pretty enormous. Right. In fact, I generally advise new designers to try to start, you know, start working on tabletop games kind of first to hone the craft because there's so much

easier to iterate on and learn lessons on before moving into digital games. And I don't know if you you feel similarly or if there's a you know kind of since you've been so involved in kind of helping curate the educational platforms for for designers how do you feel about for people that want to kind of learn the craft what's their best on ramp typically yeah i i do think board game design is great place to start um like i kind of um it's not the advice that i've really taken um because i kind of got got lucky with my my first i was able to start on the civilization series essentially my first job at a college, which was kind of like exactly what I wanted to work on. But, yeah, I feel like I was always a little bit, a little bit jealous of board game designers,

just in the sense that they're able to work on stuff more quick, so much, so much more quickly. You know, they, yeah, I was, I don't remember. I've been listening through some of your podcasts. And I think, I think it was, I remember, I forget who it was. But, you know, oh, this project took forever. It took almost two years, you know. Yeah.

Yeah. For me, that's like, oh, man, I would love to be able to do something in two years. That sounds wonderful. Yeah. Yeah, no, the scale of work and effort and time and money and everything is like so different in the different worlds. But, well, let's, since you've kind of referenced it, let's get into your origin story a little bit. So, you know, you've worked on games. Probably, it's quite possible you've absorbed the most number of hours of my entire life. At the very least, you're a good contender. You're a good contender for it. So let's talk about what your origin story is. And I mean, I want to dive deep in some of the 4X world since you're a foremost expert on it. So, yeah, let's give some background to our listeners.

Yeah. So, you know, I grew up in the 80s, you know, playing, playing lots of video games. Played a lot of Sid Meyers games. So pirates, railroad tycoon, civilization. In fact, I think I bought Civilization on like the very first week of college. as a freshman. I'm shocked that you graduated. Yeah, which was maybe not the best, the best plan,

but it all worked out. And in college, I was a computer science history double major. And it kind of like, so working on the Silver Series would have been the absolute perfect path for me if I had thought of it at the time. It's just not the type of thing that would have been in my mind frame back then. Like if you asked me what I thought I was going to do, I wouldn't, I probably wouldn't have had a good answer for you. I was interested in programming, sort of. I don't particularly enjoy programming.

I just like being able to get computers to do things. And so, you know, there was, one thread you could see is like pretty much all of the classes I took at school. I was always bending whatever I was doing so I could make some sort of a game. Right. So it's graphics class like, oh, can I make like a Tron Light Cycles game? If it's like AI genetic algorithms class, I'm like, oh, can I make a little term-based, you know, a battle game where the AI like learns over various iterations or kind of the biggest, the biggest stretch was for my my history thesis project, like your senior project. I made this simulation of the life of a shopkeeper in early modern Oxford

because I got to go over there for a quarter, do some research. And, you know, I made like a little, you know, life of a shopkeeper. You see the prices go up and down. You manage your family. You manage the local guild. And yeah, you know, it was like I was, you know, I was bending everything into some sort of game-like format. But, you know, at the time, I still wouldn't have known if it would have been possible to make video games because I didn't know anyone who

was who made video games. I didn't really know how that happened. And I do remember that I bought a lot of electronic arts games when I was a kid. And I don't know if you remember what those games looked like back in the 80s, but they had like a certain aesthetic where they were trying to kind of like, they were trying to basically put forward game developers as kind of like the new rock stars, right? And this was back when like a single person could make a video game, right, or a couple people.

So, you know, they would have like splashy photos. And the games themselves were packaged like albums, right? Like the EA's products look totally different from everyone else's because it like, you know, literally looked like an album. You flipped it open and it had like really nice art. You know, like they'd really put some time into the presentation. And, you know, the floppy would be kind of like right there where the where the, where the the album would be normally.

And I remember on the back of it, it had like a little thing saying like, I don't know exact words, but like, you know, if you're inspired to make video games, you know, send us a,

you know, send us a line at, you know, this address in, you know, San Mateo, California, right? And I was like, oh, wow.

You know, I was like, okay, so it exists, but it still seems like a stretch. And I went, you know, I went to school in the Bay Area.

So it was like right down the road. And it turned out that a friend of mine, did have a did do an internship a guy named Jim Brooks did an internship at EA like the summer before and so he was like hey yeah I mean they you know they're always looking for for new programmers and so I got my first my first gig as an intern working on a game called knockout kings which was a boxing game and I didn't know anything about boxing and but you know whatever I just I just I just was very excited to be there.

And, you know, I worked a little on AI. I worked a little on, like, the replay camera and just, you know, odds and ends, what the intern does. But then I was like, okay, now I actually have, like, you know, I've got a credit. This probably looks pretty good on the resume, so let's start sending them out. And at the same time, I was starting to notice, you know, like, starting to actually look around the industry, learning like, oh, okay, there's ensemble in Texas that made you make the Age of Empires games.

That'd be pretty cool. I bet there's Black Isle down in LA. You know, they make all these great RPGs. There's Blizzard. You know, all these different places that would be really cool to work for. And then I saw that Civ 3 got announced, which was like, okay, that's a really cool project. And then, you know, maybe six months to a year later, it came out that the people who were, basically Brian Reynolds, the guy who designed Civ 2 in colonization, basically splintered off.

left for Axis to start his own company. And I had been following the development pretty closely because I was a big fan of SIDS games and also really liked Alph Santari, which was made by Brian and kind of his crew. And so I saw that like Brian left and then like all the other people that were involved in that game also left.

And to form what became big, huge games and eventually to work on Rise of Nations. But from the outside, it looked like essentially, like it was kind of hard to understand what's going on, because basically it looked like Fraxis was kind of like falling apart. Because all their veterans developers that were well known were leaving. And so it just, it seemed like, well, I have to, I have to find out if I can get a job working on this game because not only is it the perfect game to work on, but there's probably like a huge opportunity here.

I'm not going to, I'm not going to be like the coffee boy, right? Like they probably need me to do some actual work. They just lost all their heavy hitters. You need, they need support. There's opportunities here for sure. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And sent in my resume a couple times. It took a while before I finally heard back.

This is just through the company website or whatever. You're just like cold sending in the resumes. Okay. Just through the company was. I mean, I was doing that with lots of companies. Like I sent in my resume to Ensemble and Black Isle, some kind of the other companies I mentioned. And, you know, most of them I heard back from,

but I didn't hear back from Fraxis. So I actually took the time to print out my resume, stick it in an envelope, and actually mail it to them. And I heard back later after I got the interview and after I worked there for a while, but apparently the thing that made my resume stick out to them is that I played the cello.

They're a very musical focus company. Sid is, I don't know if you know, but he made this product called CPU Bach, which was like, it was the game. The thing he made right. right after SIV. He kind of like at that point had a blank check to kind of do whatever he wanted to do. And he decided to make this program that basically procedurally created new Baroque music.

But they kind of went through the whole company. It seems like half of the people being helping the all played instruments of different types and whatever. But apparently that's what initially sparked the interest in the thing I sent in. Flew me out to Baltimore, interviewed with Siss. and, you know, got the job. And what, what, tell me a little bit about that experience, right? So, so I know, I mean, I'm also, you know, kind of huge fan of Sid Meyer. Like he's, again, you know, just created this sort of genre and incredible games,

countless great games. I've sucked up hours of my life. And you had this similar relationship, it sounds like to then go and interview with him. Walk me through like that, what that felt like. And how did you kind of go into that? Yeah. Well, Sid, fortunately, he's a very down-to-earth, easygoing guy, so he's very easy-to-talk-to-talk-to-talk-to-sit. And I didn't know if I'd be interviewing with Sid.

So I definitely was nervous and I'm like, okay, now it's, you know, let's go talk to Sid right now. It wasn't a big company at the time. It probably would have been 15 to 20 people, you know. So I would have met, you know, most of the people who were there only, at that point, the engineering team was the audio guy and a, and an intern, a guy who was an intern in like six months before. Right. Like that was their entire tech team at that point. So there honestly wasn't even really that many people to talk to. So I wonder if I interviewed with Sid just because like, well, everyone, you know, everyone who would normally interview was already left. But yeah, went into his corner office and sat down and, you know, he asked me like very general questions. You know, just like, what are your, you know, what's your favorite game? And I was too like, I was too embarrassed to tell him my favorite game as pirates, you know, because it just felt a little too. to, I don't know. It's weird.

I don't know. I just couldn't feel like doing it. And so I said, well, I really, really loved seven cities of gold, which I also love. And that was like, it turned out to be very good answer because it led into the discussion of pirates. He's like, well, actually, seven cities of gold is the reason why I made pirates. You know, I made that game. That's a game of like discovery, of discovering the new world.

Right. And that's made him think about like, oh, wow, if you really make. It'd be really fun to make a game where you're sailing a ship around and you're having all these experiences, but maybe in a slightly different time of history. But, you know, basically, we, you know, we hit it off really well. And, you know, I was feeling really good about things. And, you know, they offered me the job. And I will say that they offered me, like, significantly less than every other job offer I got. It was by far the lowest, the worst offer in terms of money.

And, you know, I told them, I kind of knew I was going to take this job just because I could tell it was the right. It's the right. It's the perfect job for me. And it's the upside of the opportunity was so high. Is it just because you loved the genre and you felt like there was more opportunity for you to grow there than the other positions? That's what made it the right job for you? Yeah. I mean, I always wanted to make games about history.

right so it's got it's got that um i um i i hadn't quite i i was really into like war games as a kid although that's maybe overputting it because i didn't really have many people to play them with but you know i had a stack of like old spi war games and things like that and i was very aware of that scene um and i would play board games some you know like we had friends we'd play a lot of access and allies with and some risk and things like that. But I had not as of yet discovered kind of, you know, Euro games or basically better games, right? Like, you know, it was game, games improved significantly like during the 90s, right?

So I, I wasn't quite, it's like I had all of the, what's the right word term for it? All of the raw material to be into kind of like strategy gamey slash board gamey. design. But, you know, I hadn't necessarily put that all together as like, oh, I should really be making strategy games, right? Yeah. I didn't fully understand that yet. But I definitely had the history thing down.

I was really big fan of SIDS. So, like, working with him as a big plus. And then the fact that, you know, at some of the other companies I interviewed at, like, you know, I could tell that I would be having a very, I might be working on tools or whatever, not necessarily on the project I wanted to. So it just seemed like the opportunity for, you know, advancement as for access would be way above everyone else. And I remember I told them, I said, hey, you've offered me this. I'm actually worth this.

And I'm going to come back to you in six months and remind you of that. Right. Like I'm like I know. And you're, you know, once I'm here, you're going to, you know, you're going to like believe that. And that's basically what ended up happening, you know, like. like I took the job. I think I, you know, I bargained it up a little bit. But, but yeah, eventually went back to them and said, like, hey, look, I think I've proven

myself at this point. Because when I got there, you know, I really just, I just dove, you know, feet first in. We didn't have much time on the project. We had, there hadn't really been much work done. Basically, someone to take an Alpha Centauri and kind of like swap the art for Civ2, like, you know, clip art, basically. So it was kind of like, it's like the worst.

of all worlds. Like it looked like this really old mid-90s game and it was all of the old Elf Sintori code which was somewhat useful because, you know, there's, okay, there are tiles and there are cities

and there are these basic stuff. But it was written in this very kind of strange coding style, which very, I mean, the path this is all taken sometimes really kind of blows my mind

because many years later, I got to know Brian. I did a number of, I did a three-part podcast series with him where I went over this whole career. It went really deep in a lot of stuff. And one thing I found out is that the reason why the code for the SIF 3 code base was so strange.

And it was all based around these weird macros where things were like capital B, capital C, capital T, blah, blah, blah. And it was really unclear what stuff meant. And it had to, it was like, you know, discovering this ancient tomb and some old monastery or something. And no one on staff had written this stuff. So we didn't really know what it was all meant. The reason why it was so obfuscated is because when Sid and Brian left Microprose to form FRAXIS back in like 95 or 96,

they left and they started working, Brian started working on Alifil Santari, which is a game that's very similar to Civ 2 and colonization. and it's a you know it's very much like sieve but on alien planet oh yeah i've played i've played hundreds of hours actually you know what we should do because i realize these games are so like ingrained in my brain but we have younger we have younger uh people listening maybe we should give some context here what is like what is let's describe like what is a civilization as a game like the genre the differentiated just so so people have context if they're if they're not already as familiar with it as as as i am yeah so civilization is a game about all of world history And it's much very, also very importantly, it's a term-based game and it's a tile-based game.

Like almost all of the mechanics sort of hinge around that. It's commonly described as the Forex, you know, the, you know, maybe the birth of that, that genre. Forex is exploit, expand, explore, or explore, exterminate. I think I got it. It's also embarrassing with like, I can't quite name them all. But the basic idea is you start small. It's really important that you start with just one unit, like just the settler.

The first thing you have to do is just found a city, right? Because then it's like, okay, everyone can just do that basics. And then everything else kind of like just gets added on. So it's about territory control. It's about having a tech tree where there are different things unlock. You know, you invested research that unlocks more units. Eventually you're going to have diplomatic. issues, you're going to slam into other nations.

It has those type of aspects. Yeah. Yeah, this idea and it's like why it really does feel like this like great overlap with kind of tabletop gaming and that it's, you know, you've got the effectively a board, it's turn-based, but it just scales in sort of complexity

and scope far beyond anything a tabletop game ever should do. Anyway, that's how I kind of explain it to like people who really aren't into video games. I'm like, okay, imagine like a board game, but like, this huge board game, you would never want to play in person, but your computer can handle all the stuff, right?

It's kind of a bit like that. Yeah. And yeah, it creates this wonderful, like, capacity for scaling in that, yeah, you start with this very basic. All right, I've got one city to manage. I decide what the city's building, and I decide what kind of technology I'm working on.

And I have one unit to kind of start exploring and see what happens. And I can't see most of the map. So I'm just kind of learning and growing. And then, you know, by the end, you've got like this giant global dominating, you know, society that can have dozens of cities and all kinds of different tech trees and units everywhere

and it's quite shocking how much you can now kind of control and most of the time comprehend. And this is what you just described is really key to like the strength and the weakness of the 4X genre, right? Like the thing that makes it great is this whole like I started with just like this one cell, this one unit, right?

And I'm just growing. And like that feeling of growth is great. You're like, okay, I want to get that over there, but I also want this over here, and like, I got to balance, you like, whatever, but eventually I get that, I want that plane over there with iron, like, I really want that. It was almost like, get the iron and I get the swordsmen, and then I can go

take out the Egyptians, which is really great because they've got the pyramids, you know, all this stuff kind of like goes together, and that feeling of growth and expansion is really addictive, but the downside is that if you have this game built around just getting more and more and more stuff,

at some point, the fun kind of starts to disappear because now you just have a lot of stuff. And, you know, when you have, the more stuff you have, the easier it is to get even more stuff. But at some point, it's like, okay, to what end? Like, what's the point of all this? Right. Right. Yeah, the fun of the simulation and the fun of the feeling of growth, the kind of end games, and I've seen you actually written articles about this, you know, the sort of end games or almost feel like an afterthought in a certain sense. Like, you want there to be an objective. You want there to be an end, but it definitely can get muddy as terms like what that should be and how you that can kind of drive a satisfying

conclusion to a game like this yeah you know it's like the kind of idea if you never you know you don't want to you never want to leave you want to leave before things get tired you know and that's that's something that four exes have a very difficult time doing yeah yeah it's actually a funny thing you know is just relating it back to the you know my project like with uh with my deck building game Ascension, the game, you know, ends when there's a pool of honor that runs out. And as at the beginning, you're pulling very little out of the pool. But as you ramp up and become more powerful and that the deck building games also have this really nice aspect of scaling, then you start really like chunking a lot of that out of the

pool. And it's always like the, you know, you finish before you really get to do all the things you feel like you could have done if you had just a little bit more time. And so we get the number one request we get from players is always like, oh, increase the honor pool size like do what you want more and i'm like no like you actually don't want that i know think you want that but um so we love people do it in there you know they want to play on their own obviously or they want to play against day i go go ahead go to town but in a in a you know multiplayer games and extended experience that feeling of oh i just i want one more turn uh and i think fourx games are

just like at their best they always have that feeling i've i've had one more turns till sunrise uh many times yeah absolutely and then the the real curse of sieve is that they can't compress history too much, it starts to not feel like the reason why you want to play the game, right? Like, you know, there's, you know, people want, there's these certain eras you can't get around. Like, you need that, like, real early kind of like Bronze Age era. You need, like, kind of like the classical era.

You need something that feels medieval. You need, like, kind of like a gunpowder age. You need sort of a, you need like a World War II phase. and then you need like a modern phase, right? But very roughly, like, you know, I just listed six phases, six eras. I think that's what SIV. Siv3 literally chopped the game up into six eras. But kind of roughly, you need all that.

And if you rush through any of those too quickly, people feel like, we'll feel like the game's not delivering that history of the world experience, right? And like literally, that can just come down to how many turns, right? Like, yeah, okay, sure, maybe you have swordsmen, then, you know, chariots, then swordsmen, then, you know, musketeers, whatever. But if you only get like 10 turns to use your knights, then it's not going to feel right. Because what was the point of getting them? You might as well just jump forward to the next unit. So some games, like that's one of the advantages of working on something like old

world where we could we could have decided at the beginning like, okay, we're not trying to do all the world history. We could just decide up front. Okay, how long do we want the game to be? Right. Yeah. Or Alpha Centauri, which is this sort of far future world where we're like, okay, we're on another planet. Tech is all starting from, you know, we can do whatever we want with it and kind of opens up a lot more freedom. When you're really trying to represent thematically the history of the world, it,

you know, you're taking on a pretty big epic skill task to make it all feel right. And even chunking it out into those six pieces is kind of a funny thing. But, you know, you have to cut the line somewhere as to where, you know, and at a certain point, if I, you know, when my swordsmen are up against your artillery units,

it's just like, okay, this is not working. This is kind of weird. What do I do? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the design of civilization as core is really kind of audacious, you know. It's kind of ridiculous. Right. I mean, if you think of a more audacious goal, I'm going to have you play through the entire history of the world being able to architect your own society against all the other societies that are out there. I mean, it's hard to think of something with bigger scope at its core. So it's really, yeah, it's really impressive. So yeah, let me say one of the things because there's really interesting paradox at the core of how SIV came to be because, you know, SIV, civilization is now on a six iteration, right? And if you look at Siv 6 compared to SIV 1, you have a much, much more complex game, right? Like if you played Siv 1 and played Siv 6, it's it would feel like they're almost different genres at this point, right? There's so much more going on after, you know, each version is added more and more and more stuff and change. more and more things.

But I think that I think that Civ 1 could have only succeeded with a designer like Sid who like really has a like a hard-tuned eye for simplicity. Right. Like he was really he really like just keep simplifying,

simplifying things. And you could actually see that in he went back. The one time he went back to civilization was for Civilization Revolution, which was the console version. of the game, which is a much more simplified version of the game, but is probably at a complexity level similar to Civ 1. Right.

And I think that if you had taken me, for example, like a later day, SIV designer and put me back in 1990, and if I tried to make civilization, I would have screwed it up. You know, I would have made the game far too complex. And I don't think it would have ever gotten a chance to kind of like get that initial start. And now when you make a SIV game, you're making it in this tradition, right? So it's not like it's great to be making the game more complex,

but it's just like the audience has grown with the franchise, right? And there's just this sort of this weird kind of like symbiotic relationship that's been going on that has allowed the game to grow. But it really needed someone like SID to make that first version. But nowadays, I mean, there's there's no way sid would not be able to make a like a sieve seven successfully right it's just that's not the type of game that he designs i always i always find that tension really interesting yeah no that's fascinating and i'm glad you brought that up because yeah to me like it's always the thing

i really try to you know try to train into new designers and i i it's part of my design aesthetic very strongly just like simplify simplify simplify simplify like what is the core of what's going on here and how much can you get rid of to really make that shine? And of course, you know, certain genres require certain levels of complexity and you can create add on mechanics all the way through. But I just find that that that heart of it is so important. And then kind of tangenting on your other point that as the genre evolves and as the audience evolves, then it's easier to use those building blocks to make more complicated things. So the most recent example for me is taking, you know, Ascension tactics, right?

I took the core of the Ascension deck building game and basically just layered an entire, you know, tactical miniatures game on top of it using the same system. And if you know how to play a deck building game, even especially if you know to play Ascension, but if you don't play a deck building game, it's pretty easy to learn. But if you don't, that's like a lot. Like I can't even imagine making a game like that 10 years ago, right? Like it would just be like way too complicated. So there's this interesting thing that happens where you kind of can build on the,

on the building blocks of what are tropes that people already know. How much effort do you think, though, about what it does come? Because, you know, obviously new players are still coming into the genre. Is it, you know, with, in my world, I would assume, okay, I would assume if you've never played a deck building game before, you'll start with something like Ascension before you move to Ascention tactics. But in civilization, it's not like someone's likely to go back and start with Civ I, right? If somebody's a new player, how much thought do you put into that?

Or is it just, you know, the mechanics are so built into society that people will ramp up for it or there's a sufficient tutorial or how do you think about a new player acquisition? So it's a really good question. When I worked on when I, the SIV 3, I didn't really think about this stuff too much. But with SIV 4, like I very specifically thought through, okay, if we're going to add something where you should take something out, right? Like I kind of had like I knew that like just on an overall level, there's no way to kind avoid the fact that, okay, SIV 4 is probably going to, excuse me, it's probably going to have

more stuff in it in the SIF 3, even at just a mechanical level and Siv 5 will have more than 4. Like that is just, there's almost no way to avoid it. But we need to at least do something so that, you know, we're not, we're not just bloating the game. Right. So, you know, I had kind of the sense of like, okay, SIV 2 and Siv 3 had this many units in it, this many texts, this many or whatever. So we should aim to have a similar number. We're not just going to increase it by 50% or something, right? Because that's just, that list leads down to very bad. very bad bad to path. Right.

So the kind of, you know, kind of a static count of elements in the game was fairly similar. We also, you know, cut out things like corruption and pollution and, you know, basically I looked for things that were kind of like,

well, these were not great, or these were not great game mechanics to begin with. So I'm going to kind of cut some of these things out to kind of clear room for the new stuff. And then I also looked for, kind of like what I call like trapdoor mechanics, right? Like these, like SIV had these kind of some of these weird,

weird rules where, you know, because SID made SIV won in like nine months or something insane like that, right? It's, you know, he wasn't necessarily expecting this to be going on forever. But there are these weird situations where if you didn't have a city producing excess food and you started to build a settler, like either the city would just get caught in a loop forever or it would actually like disappear when the Soutler was ready or there's just a bunch of

weird stuff like that. So I wanted to clean all that stuff up. Make it make it make it make it so there is less ways for new players to basically screw themselves over. Right. Yeah, that's really that's really key. And it's very tricky, you know, especially in games like this where they kind of like exponentially curve, you know, resources where your early decisions have these huge long reaching impacts. It's very hard. I mean, the, the situation you describe are clearly worst case ones. where you literally, you know, kind of sabotage yourself completely. But even just getting a little bit off track can can really hamper you quite a bit in these kinds of games. Yeah, that's something I worried about a lot where it's like I had a pretty good sense of what the game would look like, you know, 50 to 100 turns in, you know, but but SIV, a full game of SIV is roughly like 500 turns and is like, who knows what the game looks like at that point.

It's it's almost impossible impossible to find out. And yeah, you know, you kind of do the best you can. But there was also a flip side of this, which is, is, you know, in terms of simplification, we also were worried about, I have a phrase for this, people who like optimize the fun out of a game. Yes.

And like what the, my first kind of like, I mean, I had a number of experiences. Working in a game like SIV where it's turn-based and it kind of rewards players to like overanalyze things. Like I kind of have seen this, this kind of pattern over and over again. But this is,

this is getting into the weeds just to prepare everyone. But like there's like a very specific. thing we did with Civ 4, which solved a problem for a lot of people, but it's like, it's not a problem that you would normally worry about when you first make a game. So let me just explain what I'm talking about. So in civilization, when your city is working on something, like a temple or a chariot or something, there's some sort of production unit. We might be called hammers or shields or whatever, but there's some sort of unit of production, right?

And there's a box that's going to fill up. And when the box gets filled up, your chariot pops out, right? So the problem is what happens when the rate that the box is filling up doesn't, like, there is a remainder, right? Like there's some excess that at the end of it, right? Like you have 48 out of 50 production needed, but your city is producing six. So four of those production units are going to get thrown away, right? Well, fine. first time you design a game

you just be like well okay whatever you know like that's just how it goes right but you know we learn from like watching the community and hear people talk about this they would go into this long detail list of what you need to do every turn and one of the things

you need to do every turn is you go through all your cities that are just about to finish something so you can move your citizens around to make sure you don't have any excess production right so that city that only needed two two more hammers like you got to take their citizens off of the mines and put them on some farms or on some commerce tiles or something

so that you get the maximum value from those citizens and you aren't wasting those four hammers, right? And just as a high level as designer, you want to think through like, I don't want people to be doing this, right? Like this is not an experience I want them to have. And even if they're either, they're either going to force themselves to have this like annoying experience or they're going to have they're going to play without it but be aware that they're playing some optimally which is not great either yes yes this is really really key that like there's there's a part and i i i you know i come from a pro card playing background right and so i was one of those players who would i could not resist optimizing everything even though it was way less fun and even when i would design games and i

could see it like i had a really cool game mechanic where you'd like flip cards off the top of a deck as part of the combat resolution for a game. But then what happened was that those min-mactors would then say, okay, well, that means I have to count every card in my deck and know the exact percentages of what the ratios are left in the deck. And then once they started doing it and their opponents saw them doing it, now their opponent felt they had to do it. And so it just spread like a cancer of no fun throughout the entire community.

And I had to destroy the mechanic, even though it was super fun if you just didn't worry about those sorts of things. But, you know, the players, if they have the opportunity to do so, will do so. So, yeah, it's a great, it's a great insight. And as you put it, they'll optimize the fun out of the game. Yeah. Really, really, really worth thinking through. So, okay, great.

So how did it? So you solved this problem and you solved it in CIV4 with your, go ahead. Yeah, we just, I mean, it's the simplest thing. We just took the overflow, like the extra four hammers. We just put it in a little box and saved it and applied it to your next unit, right? And it's like, it's just a very, you know, it's the same. simplest solution. But just taking the time to do that freed so many people from this thing that they were

like chained to. Right. And like to me, I mean, there's a few lessons here. But another key one is, which I'm sure you know, you're, you're well aware of it's just how important is to pay attention to what your community is doing and how they're actually playing your game as opposed to like your idea of how they're playing the game. Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

And learning from your community on these things is so critical. you know, and ideally you're, you're kind of thinking through a lot of the different player personas and you're getting feedback early on in your cycle, but, you know, especially once a game is live, you know, you need to, it's going to be in the wild. It's not going to work the way you think. And hopefully, you know, you learn and can adapt. That ties into another question I have because, man, when I think about testing and iterating on games, you know, pretty much any game I work on takes less than an hour to play. And so I can get through play test loops pretty fast.

Playing a game of SIV takes, God, I don't even, I don't even know how many hours, but at a minimum of dozens. And so what does play testing look like? How do you actually, you know, you said, okay, I know what the game's going to look like on turn 10 or turn 50 or turn 100, but it's going to go 500 turns. Like, you can't possibly be actually playing these things through. What does that look like? How do you approach developing a game at that scale?

Yeah. I mean, there's not really a good answer to that. But there's a few things that we would do. I mean, one, which is just a very partial solution, you know, but it's better than doing nothing is, like with SIF4, I would set up these AI runs where you just have the AI play itself. And every night, you know, I would run one. And in the morning, I'd come in and check on it just to get a sense of like, first of all, I was also developing the AI. So that was a very important part of that. to see how well they guys perform me,

but also just to see how far they're getting through the game. You know, at 500 turns, where are they? How far are they through the tech tree? You know, what does the, what's the map look like? You know, it gives you something. But, yeah, if it comes to actual, just the time it takes to sit down, like how many times did I actually sit down and play through a game of Siv4, right? Like two or three, maybe, maybe at all?

I don't know. I mean, you know, which of, you know, know, to, you know, how many times have you played ascension, Justin? Yeah, I can't. I can't count. But more than two or three, I'll tell you that. I mean, it's probably in the thousands, I would assume, right? So, like, you know, it's totally different.

And there were things I would, you know, I would, one thing, okay, I'll give you another one, is that we actually made SIF 4 and we did this again with Offworld training company and with Old World. We made it a multiplayer game first, right? which that decision for SIV 4 was pretty controversial inside for Axis, right? Because SIV 3 shipped without multiplayer, period. It had to be added on in an expansion. The first expansion plaque was added multiplayer to the game.

And that was like the worst technical experience in my life, right? Because SIF 3 was built just as a single player game. So when you wanted to do something in code, you just did it. Right. You didn't give any consideration to like, oh, well, are there multiple playing the game? And like, shouldn't, you know, you can't. I mean, multiple games work differently, right? You have to update everyone. You need to, you need to, if someone takes an action, it should go through a single point so that action can filter out to everyone. I mean, there's just, this is a whole bunch of stuff you have to do in a multi,

like in the single player game, when the game asks you to choose something. Like, hey, choose your neck tech technology. Originally in Siv 3, the way it worked, is the game would just hang until you made a choice, right? There would just be a loop just spitting, waiting for you to choose the option from the dialogue, because for a term-based game, there was nothing else that needed to happen on a machine. But obviously, a multiplayer,

if one of the players is choosing a tech, you can't just have everyone's game hang, right? Like, it's a completely different model, right? And going from one where you didn't give any consideration to that to going the other way around was just a nightmare. At any rate, so I knew up first. front, that was my initial pitch was like, okay, we don't want to ever do that again, right? So let's just commit to making this multiplayer game from the beginning, so we don't have

this horrible tactical problem. But the real benefit was that we were able to play games of SIF 4. I mean, actually, I have played, I have completed like at least tens of games of SIF 4. They were all just multiplayer games with, you know, other members of the team. And so, yeah, within like, three or four months, we were playing games of SIF 4 against each other. And, you know, we're able to experience all of the rules and have a real opponent, right? Well, why is that easier or why was that more effective in terms of being able to test the game than playing it solo, playing an individual game? Because of the lack of AI, basically.

Got it. You couldn't, you know, because there was no AI, you know, like the rules might be there, but you're essentially, you're just pretending to play the game, right? Got it. You know, you're making choices, but there isn't really the type of, the resistance you need to make it growing. There's nothing there. There's just kind of open-ended growth that has no tension associated with it.

Yeah, exactly. So yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you were able to get tested, but still, it's still way less kind of reps overall than for, you know, shorter term games. So you're, you really kind of got to maximize that time. Yeah.

Any other things to do that, you know. Yeah, there's a couple of things worth mentioning. One is, and this is something I didn't do with SIF4, but did with Old World, which helped a lot. If you boot up Old World, you'll see that there's a kind of a scenario kind of hidden on a side screen that's called the Barbarian Horde. And it's a mode where there is an AI and you just start in the middle of the map. And there's just essentially waves and waves of barbarians trying to kill you. And this was essentially the single player version. Like once we got the game kind of up and running, that was essentially what single-

player was in old world for the first year of development, you know, beyond the multiplayer, because that was still like, because that was a viable mode. It was less interesting, of course, because there's no diplomacy and there's a bunch of things missing, but at least, you know, we were trying to play the game for real, right? Like, we could lose, you know, you had that, that tension there. So that helped a lot. And the final thing is with Civ 4, we essentially kind of like did early access before early access just in the best way we could at the time, which was so the SIF 3 came out.

It had been tested the way games were just made back in 2001, which is you know, you hire maybe eight or ten testers, you have them play the game a bunch. They file bugs. They give you some feedback. Some of these people may be experts in Forrest games. Some of them may not be. Some of them may have just been tested.

in sports games and they're going to try, you know, SIF 3 and then go back to playing sports games, you know, who knows, you know, I mean, that's still going to give you valid feedback, but it's not necessarily going to give you the type of feedback here and you get from your community, right? Right. And SIV 3 shipped with a lot of, a lot of major problems. There's at least one unit in SIF 3 that just didn't work, like straight up, did not work.

It was the, the anti-er unit. And there was literally just a, like, you know, somewhere in the code, there was like an if, you know, if versus error, then does the damage. And like the, the, the, the not sign was flipped. So like literally did not work at all, 100%. Wow. And, you know, it's like even, even there's there's no substitute for like players who are not professional testers,

but are genuine people from the community who have a huge amount of passion for your game. There's no substitute for getting them to play your game. game. And I learned, like, I always say that, like, my game design education started the day SIV 3 shipped, because up until that point, I was just basically guessing, you know, I was just kind of like, I was working really hard, trying to get the game done, trying to, you know, put some things, put some ideas in that I thought were interesting, but I didn't really learn anything until the day it actually got in hands of real players, right? And that's when I, you know, became, you know, I just, you know, discovered Apolitan and Sif fanatics and, you know, all of the

these, back then it was forums, right? There was no Reddit or, you know, other things like that. But this is where I learned about the game that I had made. And we shipped four really big meaty patches to SIF 3, where we made really big improvements to the game.

And I'm really happy where it ended up eventually. But yeah, it definitely shipped with some problems. And so this is another thing that I was like, I don't want to do that again for Siv4. And so through that process, I met all of these people all of these kind of super fans on those sites.

And I said, hey, let's start this private group. Well, let's create this private forum, get you guys all NDAD up, and get you guys access to SIV4. SIF4 was a two and a half year of your project, and we got this to them a year and a half before we shipped. So for the majority of the project, we had people playing the game external of the company who were just, you know, volunteer testers,

giving us feedback on this private forum and giving us a lot of feedback. And I credit that as probably like the number one thing that led to like SIF 4 being kind of like a real big success. Was that there was just kind of no way to get, you know, no way to. And it was it was a pain at the time because we couldn't just let them download or I don't mean. The legal department didn't like this. So we had to kind of have a lot back and forth of them over that. But eventually we basically had to we shipped them.

Every one of them had to get shipped some sort of CD, which gave them like a lock for. version of the game and then we were able to get them to download this like patch every two weeks and that's was how they updated it was so much harder than it is nowadays um but yeah like just just be able to get that that feedback was so so valuable yeah there is no there's no substitute for your actual target audience's feedback um there's just no you know game designers we're you know your instincts get better over time as a designer but you really don't know until you have contact with the enemy i mean the player uh So, okay, well, so there's, there's a couple things now just to kind of tell the arc, you know, so you, you, you know, you took a job that really you felt was a good match for your skill set, even though it meant making less money. And you set up the expectations up front with your boss, say, hey, I'm going to take this. Understand, I'm taking a lower salary. And I'm going to demonstrate to you that it's a no-brainer that you're going to want to pay me more, which is just a great, really powerful way to be. I advise a lot of people, you know, even to do work for free. where they can to get in the door and just demonstrate your value and make it a no-brainer that, of course, people want to pay you. And so that's great. And you take over, you do great work on the project. You demonstrate your value.

You actually see things go into the wild. You learn from that. And then you move into leading the SIV 4 team and lead designing the project. And, you know, it's a huge step up at that point. And you've described already some pretty massive shifts that you led in the process. right to multiplayer first bringing in external players you know working on you know how did that transition come about and what you know talk talk me through a little bit what it's like to kind of go from you know i'm a designer learning and working with my idols to i'm now the

lead of this and i need to you know push even for big changes that maybe other people on the team are not not not in the same page way yeah um yeah i think this kind goes to a thing that that that um It's kind of hard to describe because it's very contradictory. But I think to be able to succeed, you need both like a, you both need like a really big ego and a really small ego at the same time somehow. Like, because the things that I was asking for, I didn't mention another thing was that we decide, I pushed hard for us to release the source code for SIV 4.

Like we wanted it to be the most modable version of SIV ever. And because, you know, modding to become more and more popular throughout that time period. And so, you know, we did a bunch of stuff to make SIF for a lot more modable. We moved all our data in XML. So it had like a standard format. But I also, early on the project, I said, hey, let's put all of our, all of the game code, meaning not the graphics or the UI or everything, but just the game code itself. Let's put it off in this little box here so that if possible, we could just release this code out to the community.

and then they could change the game at the most core level possible. Right. And that, of course, is another big, big left to run through corporate and legal and get everyone on board. And that's beyond the fact that the SIV franchise actually got sold halfway through the SIFFor's development, which was another kind of interesting process. Yeah, it went from Atari to take two. and I'll tell you what, take two got a deal in the long run. That worked out to be a very, very good deal for them, which is great.

I mean, that was, it worked out great. But yeah, like it took it. So, you know, these were big things Zach's asked for. And like, I had to have the, I don't know what's the right term for it is, but just. Hutzpah. I believe Hutzpah. That's really, okay. That is like, I'm hard to doing the Hough, but yes, that's the right word.

You know, you just have to be like, there's a little bit of like, like, you're, if you have to feel like you're a little bit of a, I don't know, I'm sorry, term before, a zealot, you know, like, like my, my opinions are not, you know, I know my opinions are going to be, you're going to appear irrational, you know, to some people, but I'm going to have to push for some stuff because I want, I want to move things forward, right? And so that's, that's true. But the thing is, those, That type of personality also needs to be able to balance itself with also assuming that a lot of your game design decisions and planning and choices you make are going to end up being wrong. Like I always assume that when I'm designing something like, okay, this is what I'm doing right now, but it's probably wrong. I won't know until people play it. So you have to be able to be able to keep both things going on in your mind at the same time. Right. Like I'm going to be pushing for some of these really crazy things that we haven't done before. And I'm going to have to change it because it probably is not going to work out the way I thought it would. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's like it's, no, it's a paradox. But it's like it's actually really powerful. I think most of what is actually just posted about this recently on Twitter this thing is like I think that the most skillful way to live life is to be able to hold paradoxical beliefs at the same time. Right. Like I take 100% responsibility for everything in my life. But I also recognize it don't have control.

over outcomes and my self-worth is not dependent on that. To be a lead designer or to be an entrepreneur, you have to, at a core level, believe you can do this thing better than anybody else. There's something that you can do that the world is, that other people can't and that you're going to put this vision out there into the world and you have to fight for it, right? Because it's very hard. And you have to be willing to take in feedback and recognize that, you know, get your ego out of the equation and realize that, you know, to me, it's always about how.

can I most efficiently test my most risky assumptions, right? I'm willing to put out assumptions and be clear, like, I believe this is better. In your case, I believe multiplayer should come first. I believe modding is critically important. I believe we need to have players in things. And then it's like, okay, how do you get to the place where you can validate or invalidate those assumptions or any of your given mechanics, right? And that I think is the kind of balance, the way you thread the needle between those two extremes is, look, I'm going to fight as hard as I can for the things I believe in. And as soon as I'm able to find evidence that shows me I'm wrong, I'm happy to 180 degree and then fight just as hard for the new evidence that, you know, what shows me what the right path is now.

Yep. Yeah. It's a it's kind of, it's hard to, it's hard to think through at the time. But I mean, I did have, I did, you know, I had a sense basically. I mean, what kept me going is I had a sense that like, okay, I see a path for so for that, that I feel like, no, I feel like, no one else is in a position to like see where we can go with this product better than I. Like I believe that. And then I wanted to go through the process of actually making it. Right. Like, you know, and then and knowing that that's going to have like a lot of unexpected turns, you know, which it did.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So amazing. And how big was your team for for for SIV for? It was probably like approximately. Yeah. It's I mean, it was kind of a weird process. because we didn't really get artists until the last year of the project because they're all work busy finishing pirates the console version of pirates or the new version of pirates basically and so we probably had six-ish six or seven core programmers and two like two artists and then for the last year of the project we got 20 artists so that's kind of it's kind of how it goes it's kind of feast or famine which actually was fine because I for a game like this this, you don't, you can, you can be, you know, like for a good year, all of our art was just little 2D billboards, you know, bopping around this, this 3D map, you know, and that was, that was fine. Some games you really need the, like a game that's like in a real time or involves like heavy

animation, like a combat, like a god of war or something, right? Like they fundamentally, they need that, that art to be part of the prototype, you know, process, right? Where with, you know, a term-based game, we kind of get away from that. Yeah, that makes sense. sense. Okay, so then, you know, this, you know, SIF 4 generally regarded as, you know, one of, if not the best in the genre, really huge, huge success. And it sounds like you're, you know, you're crediting a lot of this with the process that you built here, right? That, you know,

being able to test and iterate in a multiplayer version, being able to get feedback from players. Are there other things that you'd say were kind of your big wins there? I want to talk a lot about modding so we can we can dive into that one if that's one of them but what do you think was was really what differentiated it yeah i mean i mean i'll also say i think i should give a lot of credit to sid and jeff uh jeff briggs uh you know who were you know running for access because they did you know i was a young guy a young kid basically and they they did really put a lot of faith in me and just let me do what you know they they trusted me you know when i asked to like we should release the source code actually i think what i did is i just kept saying we would

I just kept repeating that we would until like eventually it just kind of happened. You know, but so I think I think that's definitely worth saying. And sorry, your question was. No, no, that's okay. I'll just, I'll pause on that lesson because it's another really powerful lesson too, right? Like as like leadership and there's the one sense of leadership, which we sort of talked about where you have to be able to like be willing to, you know, put yourself out there and own the consequences and, you know, have that that dichotomy of ego.

And then there's this other aspect of leadership, which you're, You're just, you know, Sid, just evidence there, which is like that ability to let go and let other people take the lead. And, yeah, it's how you grow a company. It's how you grow teams. How you grow, you know, everything. And so that's like not an easy transition. You know, not a lot of people can do it.

I know I've wrestled with it a ton. And where, you know, you're like, oh, I know how to do this. I can do this. But to let somebody else run with it and especially let them run with it in a way that you don't necessarily agree with. You know, one of my favorite expressions from Jeff Bezos in the Amazon culture is the disagree and commit, right? Like, I'm going to give you my opinion.

If you don't think it's right and you're the lead, okay. Like, I don't agree with you, but I'm going to do everything in my power to make, give you, set you up for success on the path you've chosen. Really, really powerful, important stuff. So anyway, what I was, what, the question I had originally asked was about what, what do you think differentiated, you know, what were the biggest wins and insights of SIF for? Why do you think it is kind of so beloved even to this day?

Um, yeah. I mean, besides the fact that, you know, we finally got, kind of got multiplayer right. You know, it was, you, you could tell that the systems all were built. That's the right way to put this. I mean, just everything kind of worked together, right? Like, it just had the iteration needed so that, like, oh, this wonder does this interesting stuff with these specialists, which impacts the improvements in this way. Like, you know, you could tell that we were, we, we didn't just get the game out of the door.

You know, we had, we had gotten the game to the point where we could actually, like, really polish it, you know, and think through what we're doing very, very intentionally. Yeah. I think that there was, I don't know, you know, there's sometimes, some, some things just escape simple categorization, you know, like, you know, like getting Leonard Nimoy to do the voiceovers for the text, you know, like, I actually spent a lot of time trying to get, trying to get the exact right quotes, you know, and, you know, because I, yeah, I kind of gather of them over the years from my history background,

but being able to get him to read them was fantastic. And I mean, Bobby Ettu, the theme song, it was by my college roommate, Christopher Ten, ended up winning a Grammy, you know? And like I had like, you know, commissioned that and like, you know, helped decide how the piece should be. And then he wrote this amazing piece. And at some point, like some of this stuff

is just kind of beyond the realm of like explanation. Some things was just kind of blessed, you know. And so it was a, yeah, it was a special time. You know, it was really amazing project to work on. Yeah, no, it's incredible. And so, you know, I'm grateful that you made such an incredible thing. And like I said, even if it sucked made too many hours in my life, they were, there were hours I do not regret. And I think that the, that there's a, you know, there's a lesson here too, right?

There's, you know, the, even though for a game like Siv where, you know, as he sort of said, the artists all came last, right? Like all the art and all those things you're kind of piled on at the end, but these elements that made it magical, right? It's, you know, letter Nimoy, really great quotes that helped to evoke what was going on with each piece in your history background. Like great music, great, like these things really do matter

in the scope of design in ways that are hard to quantify, but they really, it all comes together in a certain way. And I think similarly, you know, everybody wants to design that hit game. Everybody wants to design and create the thing that's, you know, everyone's going to love. And I think I've just learned doing this over the years.

Like, you just can't ever really predict that. Like, you can set up all the puzzle pieces. You can do everything that's in your power. And at a certain point, it's just not in your hands. Like, you just, the time is right. The, just the stars align. And, you know, you have a hit on your hands versus other games where I'm like, oh, wow, I think this game is better than one of my more popular games.

But I don't know, didn't take off at the same degree, you know. So there's just a, again, tag in the ego aspect, you got to be able to let go of the results sometimes. Yeah. I mean, that's, I mean,

this is one of the great lessons of life is that, you know, the right, right decisions don't necessarily equal right results. I mean, if anything, that's one of the great things games can teach us, right?

Like, because you have to learn to, if you play poker, you absolutely have to accept that, right? That you made the right decision. It just didn't work out for you, right?

That's right. That's like a super, super important lesson. I will say, one other thing, which is that, and I kind of saw this, this kind of got driven home to me at at GC this year, because two of the most successful games, at least artistically, I'm not sure exactly how well they sold from the last year was Josh Sawyer's Pentamette and San Barlow's immortality. And they're both very, very specific games. Like they're just super

games about that their designer's very specific tastes and the things that they're most passionate about. So San Barlow's Immortality is a game about

these kind of like three lost films from the 60s, 70s and 90s and like it is at his talk he went into all this detail of like trying to get the exact film grain right so that you could tell that like a 60s film look different from a 70s film. And you know, to me I'm just like like

okay. It's like way beyond something I would think. But you can tell, like, he just, he has that depth of passion for this, this specific era of film and what it means and moving that into video games. And Pentamintamut is a game about, you know, early modern, 16th century Bavaria, right? And a monastery and, you know, like the life of scribes and how it interacted with the locals and all of this stuff about myth and Christianity. and just it's, it's, it's, you know, it's another game that's just very down the rabbit hole of Josh's interests. And the fact that you could tell, like,

they were making the exact game that they wanted to make. Like, it just really comes through. And with Pentamintamut, you know, that's like, it's a game about, you know, early modern, 16th century Bavaria, about lives of monks in a scriptorium and how their lives interacted with, you know, town, you know, the local town. It's about, you know, myth, you know, German and pagan myth interacting with Christianity. And, I mean, it's just, it's a very, very specific game of a very

specific time period that Josh loves. And both of those games, you can just tell they're the exact game that the two designers wanted to make. It's all about their, their specific idiosyncratic interests, right? And Civ, Civ, 4 was kind of also in that kind of sweet spot for me. I was really just like the exact type of game I wanted to make from like point of view of like, you know, world history, but also, I think my natural inclination to kind of like board gaming mechanics and transparent mechanics, right? Like that's the thing that I think is also important to mention with Siv is that there is this kind of split between like, like, sometimes people compare civilization to games like Crusader Kings or Europa versus Universalis or things like that. But those games don't really explain what's going on behind the curtain. Whereas Siv, even though we violate the sometimes, it tries to show you how the machine works. Yeah.

So there's a couple things there, right? One, I think that that idea of designing the game that you're passionate about that speaks to like your core interest, I think it's such a powerful thing, right? I mean, you would never guess that, you know, the games that you describe that those genres would be popular or that, you know, a board game like Wingspan would be as popular as it is, right? about bird watching. It's like the power of, I'm, you know, I'm very passionate about this topic. I'm knowledgeable about it and I'm going to let that passion shine through is really great just from, you know, making an authentic feeling experience at the end of the day by giving you the sort of fortitude and energy to work through all the challenges that come from game design, right? Like that ability to know because you're passionate about it, you're going to, you know,

those extra iteration loops or spending that extra time to make sure you get the exact right quotes for Leonard Nimoy to say or, you know, all these other pieces, I think, comes. with passion. And I find, you know, if I try to build a game that I'm excited about, the odds of my being successful are far greater than if I try to build a game that I think is going to be successful. I find those rarely work. All right.

Now I really want to talk about the power of kind of modding and community-based creation in games. And I think it's possible. I don't know if the four-ex genre was the first to kind of really make this big or not, but it's certainly the one that was first brought to my. attention as I saw a lot of really wild creations get made. How do you think about that space? It was clearly important to you.

How do you think about designing games and designing tools for players to kind of create their own games within your play space? Yeah. I mean, ironically, I didn't really understand it much at first because I pretty much had never played a mod before. I mean, I don't know, really never played a mod until Siv 3 and still really didn't play them afterwards, but I became very close with the community, and I just saw them talk about mods all the time.

Oh, there's this different version of Siv 2, and there's this version of Siv 2 where you're, you know, you're Odysseus or you're, you know, your Frodo going through, you know, the fellowship of the ring, or you're this or you're that, and like, you know, here's all these things going on. I was like, well, that sounds, you know, interesting. And so, you know, we tried to push that sum with Siv 3. three because with Siv 2, they had a very, very good trigger and event system where if you stepped on a tile, something could happen.

But they didn't really have a good way to change like the inner, like a lot of stuff was like literally hard coded in the code of like unit number 12 is going to be the archer, right? And that you just have to deal with that. It wasn't really built to be what you might call like data agnostic. that essentially, you know, there's this split between the game engine and the data itself. That wasn't really a concept I kind of understood. And I was kind of led to this by the Age of Empires team gave a really good talk at GDC one year

where they kind of like explained this kind of like theory of development where, you know, the data is this thing that sits on top of your engine and could anything could be changed and the game should still run, right? And one of the reasons why game code would have a lot of hard coding of like, okay, this is the temple and it does this. One of the big reasons for that is it's a lot easier to write the AI if that's the case because you're like, okay, a city starts. The first thing you wanted to build is this unit. And then if this is the case, build a temple. If that's the case, build a library.

It's just a lot easier to write code that way. So, but I was like, okay, what would happen if instead, you know, we kind of built a game where we didn't even assume that temples or libraries or chariots even exist. Like, we're just going to be completely, you know, we're not going to take any assumptions into into the game code about what the kind of like the static elements of the game are. And so, you know, we did that, we did that with SIF 3. so that they could add as many kind of new units and buildings and technologies they wanted to. And then, but that was, we kind of had like a proprietary editor for that, which, which worked okay. But it meant that every time we wanted to expose something, we had to like basically build UI code to allow people to change it. And so it's a four, we're like, okay, let's put everything in an XML file.

So every time you add something, you're just adding a new line of XML somewhere. And so then players can, you know, monitors can basically just, you know, use whatever XML editor they'd like to change the code. And then, of course, eventually we released the game code itself. And I kind of knew that someone would make like a great fantasy version of SIV4 because we had already kind of laid down some of the tracks with the fact that units could gain experience and levels and get promotions. And there is this really great SIF4 mod called Fall from Heaven by Derek Paxton.

really by a team. I mean, there was like, you know, maybe 15 or 20 different people who worked on that project. It made this really amazing kind of like high fantasy total conversion of of SIF 4 that, you know, it's hard to judge how popular it was, but it's, it's, you know, it would always be discussed in SIV 3, in SIV 4 threads. I played it. It was awesome. Yeah, it was just such a cool experience that built, you know, this whole world on top of, you know, the whole fake world on top of the, you know, the kind of real world simulation that you guys did. It was really very cool, very cool experience. Yep. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's so rewarding to see that as a developer because, you know, you're kind of laying the traps and opening the doors,

but you don't know really what's going to happen. And when you see people start to play with that and, you know, put their own creativity in the game and start to build their own little community around their, their mod, I mean, it's just, I mean, one thing was really fascinating is just seeing what, you know, what we're called mod mods, which was like, someone would make this change to Sephora of like, oh, I'm going to do this thing that,

like maybe with the UI modding, because our UI was in Python, so people could change that too. I'm gonna make this change. And someone else does this other mod, and then you'd have these mods that would like conglomerate them all together, right? And people start to pick and choose what they want to. And you'd have modders who weren't necessarily making mods,

but they were making these components for other people, you know, kind of like, farther downstream, right, to use. It was this just amazing little kind of like machine to see how it all fit together. Yeah. And so, you know, it shows the dedication of a community and how you've got, you know, you're creating this whole other form of play where people get to kind of create their own, create their own games within your world.

And then there's this interesting kind of, I don't know, this sort of interplay between like how you as a designer sort of intending. game to be versus how you create it so that it is open-ended enough for players to create their own experience. And that could be as simple as, you know, just even in just normal civ experiences, right, I can choose to build my society one way. I can be very militaristic. I can be very technological. There's a lot of ways to play or in a trading card game that I could, you know, build the deck that I want to build and play. But then there's these, you know, okay, no, no, I'm going to change the rules. I'm going to play this new version of the game, in some cases explicitly adjusting things

as you would with a mod or in other cases like magic, the most popular play format is Commander now, which is not a thing that was the coast ever intended and even fought against for a little while. So what do you think makes a game more likely to succeed in that space? How do you encourage that kind of behavior from your players? Like what are the, you know, what makes a, what helps build a monic community if you wanted to try to intentionally craft one for your game?

What are the kind of tools that people should lean on? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think it's fascinating when players kind of take over a game and start to play it the way they want to. And it's really interesting to see how companies react to that, you know, which ones are, you know, open-minded, you know, to that which ones like kind of like keep resisting that like, no, no, you're not, you're not playing the game the right way. And it's, yeah, it's always, it's all the interesting process. I mean, I definitely kind of feel like if people are playing or people are choosing to play the game a certain way, like then you should really pay attention to that because they're they've they've found something there like they found like this diamond that you may not have been aware of right um and you know you

know that maybe it would have been impossible to to design on your own um i mean the whole path to to fortnight for example is like a fascinating one right like it uh you know that started as a you know daisy started as a mod for arma you know which then got turned into pub which is like a, you know, a mod that sat on top of that. And then, you know, Fortnite was sort of like a, you know, like we're adapting a totally different game to follow this other model. And like, you know, all these paths, like, no one who's really planning any of this stuff out, you know,

it just sort of happens. And, but it happens because players are, players have found something that they really enjoy, right? And so, like, I mean, by definition, like, it's really good to pay attention to that. So I think it requires a certain mindset And I mean, I don't know what I'm trying to think what

What's the best thing to It's the best way to describe it I mean one If you can make it so people can share mods Like that's obviously anyway, you're about to say something No well I think it's I think that that you know There's there's listening to your players and being able to You know if you know it's from one

of my kind of models like when in doubt make player instincts correct. Right. Like if you think a game is supposed to be a certain way, but players tend to always do a certain thing. Well, that means you need to either make that the right thing to do or, you need to kind of change the nudges in your system so that that's no longer their instinct. Right.

And so a lot of times just following the path of the fun, letting your players take you there is totally reasonable. And letting people, you know, have that experience and giving them the tools to do so, I think is great and super helpful. And I think these kinds of four, games kind of lend themselves to it because they're just so expansive there's so much kind of scope built in and then you know similarly you know you were you're one of the senior designers on on spore

uh which is not a game i spent uh as much time playing but i was fascinated because like man you think like the scope of like an entire history of civilization is is big no well okay no how about like all civilizations on every possible planet you can imagine it's like a pretty wild uh pretty incredible expansive concept. Maybe we could talk a little bit about that too as a kind of next transition point. Sure. Yeah, let me actually

just park my one thing. So one thing to point also about modding is I'm kind of curious how this would fit in with games like Magic and Ascension because they have a very different the business model is kind of very different and it's maybe a little more tricky for modding. But like with With SIF 3, the most popular mod for that game was this thing called Double Your Pleasure,

which is like essentially the, it's like the, the, I don't want to use it. It's like the simplest way to make a sequel to Siv 2, which is like, let's just double the number of units and double the number of technologies and double number of improvements. Like it was the maximalist version of a sequel of like, okay, great, you gave us some new stuff. But what we really want is even more stuff. And we'd already talked like maybe an hour ago about like why that's not a great thing. But another great thing for whom, right?

There are some people out there who that's exactly what they want. And so mods give you like this release valve for people who have that very specific interest. And there was this other really interesting mod for Civ. Well, I forget now. I think it was both SIF 3 and Siv 4. Rise of Civilization. It's a pun on his name. But at any rate, it was a very like hardcore game.

You couldn't even cross the desert until you, like, discover the certain technology. And it was really trying to pushing the game to, like, have more of a historical play-through, which is, you know, SIV is a lot of things. But if you play a game as Siv, it doesn't really look like this history of the world, really, right? Yeah. But, you know, it was, this was a really cool mod for people actually wanted that experience. It's something, it allowed moders to do things that Fraxus couldn't really do commercially, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's where like giving people the opportunity to play the game they want to play when they're in that niche audience is is one of the powerful things about modding or like, you know, we'll do this in, you know, in games like Ascension where we'll have like, you know, variant rules or, you know, kind of different challenge modes that people can can adopt, right? Like there's a solo play variation and there's, you know, different ways that people can play the game or, you know, we design the game such that in general, like every two sets. that we released were designed to be paired together,

but otherwise you were kind of, we envisioned you'd play them alone. But in the app, you could just shuffle everything together all at once, which is kind of a crazy mess experience, but it's also kind of fun, right? Especially if you know, you know the game and you're just kind of looking for like,

okay, whatever, random stuff's going to happen, and it's fine. Right? And so like, you're fortunate enough when you have a big enough audience and enough of a kind of content pool that you can let people kind of craft their experiences, you know,

individually, you need to be much more ruthless when it comes to cutting out complexities and cutting out a lot of the kind of niche potential appeal when it comes to your you know the core experience you're going to kind of get out of the box but but giving people those options I think is part of what the kind of modding community is and I think there's yeah I always wrestle with this stuff when I make games in in the terms of like the rules I choose to present to the players because right you know there's it's just there's a there's a you know quote unquote right way to play and where you present them the rules and this is what it is, but that's not going to be the best experience for everybody. So giving them the option to do other things is valuable, but most people won't go down those roads. So you just kind of create those little pockets for people to find as they get deeper, deeper into the gameplay experience.

Yeah. Yeah, I've always wondered, like, especially in concerns to like magic, like, there's been various different versions, digital versions of magic, right? And they're all kind of built around kind of like an ownership model, right? of you have you know what cards do you own and which cards do you not own but obviously it would be trivial for them just be like hey here's this like practice mode i mean i don't know maybe this stuff exists you tell me like this is this just playground mode where you flick a switch and you know

in every card ever made a magic and you can just do whatever you want to right or you can you know you can create your own cards um but i assume that like that could run you know in conflict with their business model basically um and I just always assumed that that like that would be a tricky a tricky situation. Yeah. So now yeah, again,

it's you're right and there's a lot to unpack there. Right. So it's like for, you know, with Ascension, for example, we actually, you can absolutely print your own cards.

We have a thing. You go to stoneblade.com and there's a link where you can actually custom create your own cards and we will print them and send them to you. Right. You could just do whatever experience you want. Right. So it's like a really fun part of the thing. It's like,

cool. Like I want to customize my experience. Right. But also we're not trying to buy We're not trying to get you to do repeat purchase with that game either. You buy a box and you've got it. Maybe you buy an expansion. But when it comes to these kinds of with collectible games or even, you know,

take Soul Forge Fusion, for example, where it's like this whole other model of algorithmically generated games where part of the fun is intended to be this process of like, okay, I've got to work with this limited pool of what I have. And if I just could literally custom craft exactly the deck I want, it kind of takes away from the fun. In fact, I know this because that's what we would do to playtest. You want to talk about things you can't possibly playtest. You know, and Soul Forge Fusion, there's over 10,000 unique possible cards

and then more deck permutations and, you know, grains of sand on the planet. There's no way to test them all. It's not even close. So we would kind of cheat and just like custom build the deck we want. And it's actually just way less fun than, you know, forcing yourself to kind of interact with what's there. So when it comes to these things like the, you know, magic playing with a perfect collection, I think it's less so because, you know,

know, if you're playing at a high level, you pretty much, you, you generally simulate that, right? You can just buy whatever cards you want. And there's plenty of kind of third party things that exist that are not totally kosher where you can do, you can do that. Yeah, but I think it's, it's a, there's an interesting balance there when it's, you know, okay, well, I can create my own cards for fun and play those kinds of fun games, which I think is just pure, generally speaking, pure upside, right, letting players kind of have that experience. versus the like, okay, I have access. The collection process of a game is entirely taken away from me.

You know, and then I'm just there. Like, you know, you started even starting a game like World of Warcraft at max level. Like, is that better? Like, maybe, but you lose like that whole progression experience. And so there's an interesting tension there, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, SoulForge Fusion is an interesting example because, you know, you're, I mean,

the idea is there's like one, like there is one, for each deck, there's like one physical copy and one digital copy. That's kind of the right way to put it? Like, they're linked, right? And so, you know, like that's just a core part of the concept. Right. So. Yeah.

And as far as I know, we're the only game that works that way, right? And it's where there's a, you know, this one-to-one correlation between a physical collectible and a digital collectible and that you have in your account. And I think there's something very cool about that. And it's part of like what differentiates the game. from other things, but, you know, of course, I can imagine people just wanting, you know, as a general rule, players want to have all the things. They want to have all the freedom.

They complain about magic because they have man to screw, but in reality, you know, that, that probability curve and having to manage that is part of, is what makes the game fun in the first place and, you know, this, this, but I think that the, I think that the collectible aspect, specifically with trading card games, part of why I made, you know, Richard and I made Soulford Fusion the way we did is because, like, the, the, the original idea of a trading card game when it was like, okay, I'll buy some packs and I'll build the deck out of what I have and I'll play against my friends who has their deck of what they have. And when I open a new pack, I'm discovering stuff that I'd never seen before. Like, that was exciting. And nowadays, with, you know, the internet and just everybody just kind of being able to buy in whatever cards they want on eBay or custom buy their collections, like that is largely gone. So the fun of collecting is, is, just for most people that doesn't exist nearly in the same way it used to be. That's where like, you know, games where you play with. a limited card pool like drafting and sealed have an appeal. So trying to get at that fun part where the,

you know, you're not designing just the game of like, what do I do when I play, you know, a game of soul fort fusion or game of magic, but the game of kind of managing your collection and acquiring new cars and having that experience itself be fun. The discovery of that,

I think is a really important piece that, again, if you give the sort of, you know, if you give people all the tools, you would actually take the fun away. Whereas, you know,

so it's sort of an interesting kind of tangents. point or maybe counterpoint to like how much freedom you give in the modding community in this world versus others. So it's kind of interesting. Yeah, I mean, all of my instincts about a lot of these issues are honed over, you know, like basically, you know, a couple decades of work making mostly 4x games, right? And like, it's a super important point for all designers to know is that like every genre and format has its own kind of like quirks of like what works well for your audience or it doesn't, right? And some stuff, some stuff, you know, travels.

Some stuff jumps from one genre or other. Some stuff doesn't. You know, some stuff, you have very different needs for the players. Yeah. Well, it's one of the things I love about doing this podcast because I get to talk to people of all these different genres. And yeah, you're, you know, it's hard to, hard press to find a better expert in 4X than you. And so it's really great to kind of mine that interest and, you know, cross-references with my areas of expertise.

and everybody else I get to talk to. It's like sometimes, you know, crossing over one of those things is like incredible because you can take an insight from one genre and, you know, bring it to another. And other times you're like, well, nope, that does not apply here. Yeah.

I'm curious, because I know how popular, for example, Commander is. Like, is that, have they rolled that into like their digital version of magic? I don't believe so. It's not, and I think it's just not, they don't, Magic Arena doesn't support multiplayer, or I haven't played it in like a year. So maybe it's changed.

Last I checked, they did not support multiplayer, which is intrinsic to the fun of commander. And so there's a, they have, you know, they've released cards over time. And they may have introduced the, you know, some of the mechanics, but I don't think so. Last I checked, they did not. Right. Doesn't support multiple, you mean doesn't support more of the two players? Correct. Yeah, sorry.

Yeah, okay. For the second, I was like, doesn't support multiplayer. No, no, yeah. Sorry. In the TCG world, it's assumed that you have one opponent by, by the first. Yeah. Yeah. That's actually very telling like one of those, it's such a core assumption. You would never even discuss it, you know. Right, right. No, yeah. Well, and there's, there's successful variants of the genre, right? Whenever you, I love challenging your core

assumptions, right? Like, you know, like the, the kind of rogue-like deck builder genre, like Slay the Spires. And that kind of ilk was all about that, right? Where it's like, oh, no, no, no, this is designed to be a single player experience, whether or not they, they tech on another, you know, some multiplayer modes or whatever. It's really like, no, no, you don't have an opponent. You're all designed to be single player. What does that mean? What's that let you get away with?

What kind of new space does it open up? And it's fascinating. So I think very often challenging those core assumptions, right? Like, is it, you know, I love 4X games and general, but I don't play them anymore because I don't have that kind of time in my life, right? I want, what would it look like? Is it possible to make one of those games that, like, could be played in an hour to three hours? Like, what does that look like? And some of the console version was a big step in that direction for Siv.

But is there ways to get at the core of what's here and challenge one of the fundamental assumptions? I love starting design processes like that. Yeah. Well, it's a big challenge for Forex games because it's, you definitely want to. I mean, we shortened old world a lot. Like, you know, we try to make every decision. We try to get rid of like the non-interesting decisions. try to get rid of decisions that were interesting, right?

There aren't turns where you just hit end turn to like jump through them. Like that never happens in old world. But on the flip side, to some extent, like the length of the game is core to like the 4x experience. Like if, you know, you can't really have an epic experience if it didn't actually take you at least like a few hours, you know? It's tricky. I think there's sort of like the tensions of a 4x game could work in other settings.

There's a pretty good game called Polytopia. I don't know if you ever played that. It's mostly a mobile game, but you can play on PC. But they've really boiled down a 4X game to, you know, like this 30-turn, you know, less than our experience, you know. And it's interesting. It's a really interesting game, but it just doesn't scratch the same itch. You know, at some point you're like, okay, this is fun for what it is.

But it's not necessarily what I would think of as the 4X game. Sure, yeah. Well, you know, it's it's it's it's it's boiling those things down. I haven't played it, but now I'm going to check it out because it sounds cool. Boiling those experiences down where it's not necessarily trying to target the same, you know, audience per se, but you'll capture some of that audience and potentially a new audience, right? I think about Marvel Snap. We had had been broed on the podcast and that you know, that's another one of those where it's like, okay, it's not nearly as deep as, you know, the traditional trading card game experience that you would expect, but it's got enough of that element to it. it and it's able to hit this whole new audience because it's boil it down into like, you know, super bare bones essence of it and, you know, wrapped it in a, you know, nice candy shell. And it's done. So I think there's, there's opportunities for genre bending in these kinds of spaces. Morales, Stapp's really interesting example because to me, they just took this one very specific

constraint. I mean, they got from, yeah, that they kind of picked up from Air Lanzi of like, okay, we're just going to commit to simultaneous play. Right. Like that both players take their actions at the same time. Right. And obviously that removes a whole bunch, that takes a whole bunch of things off the table that you can no longer do for your game. But the benefit of that is huge that you just, you know, you have roughly probably 40% less waiting time than you would in a game of even like Hurstone, which still goes pretty fast, right?

Right. And like just by committing to that, like, okay, this is how our game works, period. And now let's build everything else around that. You know, I think they've got a lot of a lot of their success based off of that choice. Oh, yeah. No, I mean, and again, just taking something that, you know, it's not that far different than what we're talking about here, right? Taking something that was, you know, a game of magic maybe takes 30 minutes, maybe 20. And then Game of Harstone takes seven minutes and, you know, game of Marvel Snap takes two minutes, right?

It's a pretty dramatic jump down to try to capture those things. And so is it crazy to say I can take a 4X game that would take 30 hours and, you know, compress it down to one or two? It's not impossible. Polytopia is a pretty good analogy to kind of like what snap did to magic. I mean, it's it cuts so much stuff off that there's a there's a little bit of like, oh, man. Like there's literally just one currency for everything, right? And it's it's so stripped down. But, you know, it does still hold together kind of like the way.

the way Snap does. I would love to know, like, what's the next level down from Snap? Like, what's... Yeah, yeah, I don't know. 10-second game of magic. Yeah, I mean, there are card, there are card battlers, you know, out there, but I don't, I think that they, and Snap sort of starts to get into that space a little bit, but it's not, you know, those, those break out of the genre to me too much to be, to be counted.

But, you know, it's a, it's a sliding scale, not a bright line. So maybe there's something else there. Yeah, at some point we broke the four minute mile, but I don't know if we'll ever break the three minute mile, right? Like, it's just one of those things. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, there may be hard limits in the world that you can't get past. But, you know, it's just like designing to constraints is just another great principle in general, right?

Like finding something where you're like, all right, I'm going to take this hard line thing. That's not easy, but it gets me some advantages and I'm going to build around that and really spend a lot of time wrestling with it. Because even if you don't end up landing where you think you can, you know, it really, the amount of innovation that can come out of that is really powerful. Like if people think that, you know, creativity is about open-ended exploration. And it's really, generally speaking, not it's working with constraints to force you to come up with novel solutions. Yep, absolutely.

We maybe need to wrap it up. But I also would be, I'd be fine to do another part if you'd like at some point. That'd be fine, too. I would love that. There's so much extra content. I have so many notes here that I want to talk about with you. So I appreciate we've already gone over with some. So like I let me just before this because we'll put some people will definitely be breaking this into a second episode.

For people that want to find more about you, if we're going to, you know, connect and find things. I know you have your designer notes. Where can people find your writing, your thinking, your stuff? There's a lot of great content you put out there. Yeah. So I have a blog designer dash notes.com, which which kind of links to everything. else. I've got the podcast, designer notes. And I'm a Twitter at Soren Johnson. So pretty much that will be where you'll be finding you. Yeah, it's awesome. Okay. Well, so I'm definitely, we're going to schedule another time to have another talk because there's so much great stuff here. I've really enjoyed. I appreciate all the time. And now I'm beginning to see why your podcasts are much longer than mine in general. So I love it. All right. So thanks so much. And we will pick this up again in a part two. All right. Excellent.

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