Think Like A Game Designer - Soren Johnson (Part II) — Innovating 4X Strategy Games, Insights from Civilization IV, and Designing the Future of Gaming. (#50)

Episode Date: July 24, 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 once again with Soren Johnson. To get a full introduction of Soren, please listen to the previous episode where it's part one of our conversation. And there's a lot more to unpack here in part two. So I won't waste a lot of your time, but I do want to take a moment because this represents the 50th episode of Think Like a Game Designer. We now have a community of tens of thousands listening to the podcast every month and almost

a million downloads. That is incredible. When I started this podcast, I just wanted to share the fun design chats that I would have with my friends and fellow designers. And now we have built a community of people that are now coming up to me with designs that they've come up with, saying hello at conventions, and being able to build their own communities of designers locally. I want to thank you all for being a part of this journey. I love doing what I do. I love the opportunity to get to talk with these great designers and share these lessons with you. One favor I would ask, if you do get a chance, please leave a review for this podcast or share it on your favorite podcasting platform. It helps to grow the community and it helps me to get more

and more exciting guests and lessons to bring to you. It is my honor to be able to continue to grow this community and build on the creative lessons here. And without further ado, we'll continue to do that with part two of Soren Johnson. Hello and welcome. I am back with Soren Johnson. Soren, this is exciting. We get to do a part two. Part two, I know. Happy to be here. Yeah. Do you remember where we left, where we live? left off. Yeah, I do. I do actually. So this is funny. So we're about, I think it's like a month or six weeks or so after the first recording, which is a kind of a rare opportunity. I've had a couple guests on multiple times, not very many. Basically, I think you're just in the, the Richard

Garfield is I think the only one that comes to mind right now that I've had on twice. So you're in good company, but those are very, those are years apart. Yep, yep. Yeah. It's a totally, totally different process because we're talking to have very different topics. And what I want to do is, build on what we talked about last time and then really dig into your time with Mohawk and your kind of transition to to kind of founding this company and what moves forward there. I'm very excited about a lot of parts of that. But what I want to start with actually is the Polytopia, because in the last time we spoke, you recommended that game to me.

And I played it maybe a dozen or so times. So I've got a lot of interesting insights now that I'm really eager. to talk about because I thought you were right that it broke down the genre into a very, very concise form, right? Which is something I really love and I always admire, but it was so short that I lost a lot of that feeling of epicness that that kind of 4x genre entails. And so I had ideas on how to potentially approach this and you being the foremost expert on this subject, I wanted to do a little design brainstorm with you if you're open to that.

Yeah, that sounds great. Definitely. So what Polytopia does, and again, for most people listening, if you haven't already listened to the previous part one of our episodes, that some of this won't make sense. So I encourage everybody to go back there. But the gist of it is that it's a 30 turns limited version of this kind of civilization style game, where you start with one city and a unit, and you quickly evolve until you get to a certain point. And whoever is the most, the highest score at the end wins instead of a kind of full complete dominance. And what I found that I was missing is that the jumps between eras was so,

you know, just happened so quickly that I didn't get that feeling like each era was its own discrete thing that was meaningful. And what it made me think about was because this was something you talked about as being really important, you know, could you accomplish the same goal by doing something closer to, say, play five or six turns in the Bronze Age, and then have some series of broader choice points that then like advance you up to,

you know, whatever, the next era of that you want to deal with. And then we go to the, you know, kind of to the meaningful, you know, to the industrial age, and we go to the modern era. And there's maybe like four or five eras and your performance in the previous ones then jumps you forward in a different way. What do you think about something like that where you're still going to have this 30 turn-ish cap, but it's broken out to give you that more formal feeling of each zone, of each era? Right. So do you mean that like literally be kind of like a succession of different games?

Like one game kind of leads into the next one, but the app is actually different? Or I'm just trying to understand what you're suggesting exactly. Yeah. So my goal is to just keep a game within this like, let's say under two hour to play window and have the feeling of progressing through errors. So it is sort of connected where the results of era one, maybe you're fast forwarding 100 years or whatever in time. And then you're now error two starts based on the results of error one plus maybe some variance or some, you know, kind of large scale decisions that you make that influence where you go. Right. And would you be, would would you kind of be starting starting over again in a different type of map? Is that I'm envisioning it.

I'm envisioning it as the same map, but you know, sort of imagine that you're, all of your cities now evolve so that they don't look like stone age cities anymore. They look like, you know, medieval era cities and your, you know, your ax throwers become knights and you're,

you know, so like everything kind of evolves to make sense in the new era. And then maybe there's a few more, you know, a few more cities that will develop by default or a few more, like there'll be some, some advancement that will progress along a track that you would expect and the, you know, the visuals are updated and the tech is updated.

And, you know, I know, like, I didn't actually play it, but I know Siv6 had this, you know, the idea of like after each age progressed, you would then, in the next age, you'd be at a golden age or a dark age or something, depending. Right. That your, your performance in time X influenced your, you know, advantages or disadvantages in time X plus one. And I was thinking something like that, but sort of more dramatic in the sense that your, your whole, you know, none of suddenly have to change the whole map.

but certainly evolve it from where it was. Yeah. So you're talking like kind of a time skip almost. Yes. Yeah. I mean, I guess I'm trying to think through whether that's any different or any, any better than kind of the way SIV normally handles this,

which is just they kind of just have all those changes rolling on at the same time. Right. And I mean, I'm sorry, there's like five or six things. bouncing around my brain all the same time. Oh, no, I just, I kind of just ambushed you with this like crazy concept. So I'm not expecting any particular direction you want to take this is all good. I mean, I'm and I also just want to acknowledge like I am, you know, long time player, but no design experience in the space and you have the most design experience of maybe any human on the planet in the space.

So, you know, feel free to tell me this is ridiculous, but it's fun to play. And while I have you, well, I have the time, I'm going to, I'm going to have fun with this. Yeah. So, I mean, basically the, the epic version has been around for a long time. Right. I mean, that's the way C. So if one worked and that's the way a lot of 4X games do by default, right? And the problem is that there's this kind of inherent issue with a game that goes on for 500 turns, right? That's just a lot of time.

It's hard to tell what's going to happen over the course of that game. It's just really hard to balance. And beyond that, to try to use something with Polytopia does where it's like, oh, we're going to cram this into like 40 turns. Like, that's really intense. And like when you when you crack open Politopia, one of the things that's really interesting about it is that it's not just that they boiled everything down to one resource, right? Like there is no science or production or growth. Everything is just these stars, right? But if you think about it, like there is actually no per term production, right?

Like that's one of the core ideas almost every 4X game is your cities produce something every turn or your nation produce something and boxes fill up, right? That actually doesn't happen in Polytopia. Like it's it's sort of like a shark, right? Like a shark can only survive if it swims forward, right? You only develop stuff if you continue to expand, right? Or grow. Like everything you add to the map gives you more stars, which then you use for more stuff or more technologies or more whatever.

But if you just sit still, like nothing happens, right? You won't. You literally won't develop. Right. So everything is like a question of like, investing your current resources into something, something for the future. And so, like, if you look at that game abstractly, that's, it's really more of a, kind of almost like a 40-turn push-your-luck game.

I don't know if that's the right way to put it, but like a 40-turn, you know, engine-building game, basically, right? Or not even inch-building, because, again, you don't get anything per turn. So it's just a question of, of, like, how to maximize your score. It's like a scorch chase game, which has a very different feel from a sieve game. And I'm trying to get around to is the first thing that popped in my head when you mentioned this idea is, I don't know if you've played either Pax Premiere or Oath, because both of those games, those are both cold worthy games. And they both kind of deal with this concept a little bit in that in oath, you know, you, it's meant to be kind of,

It feels a bit like a historical game in that you play out like the reign of an empire, and there might be usurpers or rebels who try to take it down. And at the end of the game, it's sort of theoretically a legacy game, but at the end, you basically preserve a little bit of stuff from the previous game to give you the starting point for the next game, but not everything. And you don't really, the people who play the game don't necessarily carry forward anything. they just play a new role in the new century or whatever. But it's kind of like if there was this windmill that was important in the previous game,

it's now still there on the map in the next one. And maybe it's a ruin or something, right? So it gives you a different context. And that's kind of interesting. But what really makes that work is that you're still kind of like starting over again each game. Yeah. Like that's the thing that's the thing that I would think would be interesting is if you do, if you could make a game where

you know, kind of like Dark Ages are kind of built into the whole concept of like, okay, there was the Bronze Age and then there's some sort of Bronze Age collapse, right? Then there's the Iron Age and then there's the Dark Ages. And so, you know, if you

made, I mean, if you made some sort of essentially like legacy version of SIV where you're kind of like constantly starting over, but you're able to carry a few things forward from the past game, like I think that, I think that would be yeah that's exactly that's exactly yeah that's exactly the kind of thing i'm thinking of i think it's i think it's great it's like you know that it doesn't start over is maybe a stronger term than i would

use but it's it could be it could be very close to that potentially right so um i i'm i'm what comes to mind is a kind of hilarious different style of game but uh if you ever watch the amazing race uh this the reality show right they they have you know a series of challenges and somebody can be way out front somebody could be way out front compared to the other people, like hours and hours and hours ahead, and they win that leg. But then at the end of the leg, there's like, you know, the people, the top two people only have like a 15-minute advantage over the next people, right? So it compresses each leg so that it's still a close race every time, which also addresses

one of the other problems of Siv games, right, is there, there's such an exponential growth curve of resources that if you're out front at the beginning, the odds are pretty good that you're going to be out front, you know, throughout the whole thing. So this gives you a chance to be like, okay, yes, what you did in phase in the Iron Age, matters in the medieval age, but it's not like you're totally crushing. So almost exactly what you're talking about, I think is how much you could carry over what the gap is and what the types of things you carry over. I think obviously would need to be tested and developed, but that idea, I think, would be pretty compelling. It's interesting because there's no reason you

couldn't do this with digital games because, you know, in a lot of ways, digital is a lot more flexible than tabletop, right? But it's interesting because for the most part of digital, games, they kind of are in one category or the other. They're kind of like these big sprawling games that kind of go on forever. Or they're very much single session where you start over again, you know, where somehow, you know, I think the development of the legacy games for tabletop has opened up this kind of really interesting category where people have this expectation of like, okay, we're going to be playing a similar game over and over again, but there's going to be a little bit

of carryover, right? I can't really think of any core, like anything that's doing that in digital that's similar. But, well, rogue likes are something along those lines, right? Yes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. No, that's, that's totally true. I'm kind of thinking in sort of like the multiplayer context. And, but I guess what I'm getting at is it actually seems to me like that's a really good theme. We should probably, we should probably define those terms a little bit. We've had those discussions on the podcast in the past, but maybe just so people that don't know, if the term legacy and Roguelike, would you mind doing a brief little, what does that mean? All right.

So, Roguelike descends from the original game Rogue, which was this sort of Dungeon, Asky Dungeon Crawler from the 80s. And what it's basically come to mean nowadays is a game that's heavily procedural and also has a heavy amount of like consequence. So permadeff is a like kind of an important aspect of that. That, you know, there's a good chance that you're going to die. And it's kind of the type of game that you play over and over again. And, you know, you're going to probably fail most of the time.

But also it's going to be heavily randomized. So every time you play, it's going to be very different, right? Like Spilunky is a great example of like a modern reinterpret, reinterpretation of a rogue like because they basically made like a, I remember Derek Yu and made a, a randomized version of like a Mario type game, a platformer, right? And you're going to get different weapons each time

and different objects and different items. And that's kind of been applied to a whole bunch of different genres now in the, in video games. So things like Slate Aspire or Into the Breach are kind of very much, Rogue likes, even though they're kind of very different types of games. And the fact that, and I don't know if Rogue did this originally, because all I know is, this idea that you, a lot of these games carry this, that you carry something carries forward from each

instance to the next, that there's some amount of progress or some round of remnant, which is why it's relevant to this discussion. Not all games do this, but some do. Yeah, interestingly, that's actually kind of a contentious point. There's actually a, like, I've heard of the term for it, but there's like a, like a Vienna definition of, I forget the exact term, but at some point there was a meeting where they like

literally defined what a rogue like meant, right? And this is, secret counsel defining the meetings of words. I love it. Yeah, some heavy gatekeeping. But that's actually, to the real hardcore, that's actually one of the things that they kind of dislike about where rogue likes have gone

is they kind of feel like rogue likes should not have any persistence that the thing that's persistent is your brain. right? Like your understanding of the game has developed, right? But that's not a very mainstream endeavor, I think, is the way to put it. Like the way that Rogue Glax became more accessible and more mainstream is that they did stuff like, I don't know, like Dead Cells does, where you slowly unlock, as you play, you unlock more and more stuff and you get slowly more and more, you know, you get these little tiny upgrades. And over time, the game in Hades is a good example of this as well. game kind of like just sort of pushes you forward because you unlock stuff and you get some persistence. So in some ways, that's actually a very different version of a roguelike. And so, you know, it's kind of, I don't know. All right. Well, it's the one I brought up and I intended for this purpose, whether the council is going to come hunt me down now or not. And you mentioned

legacy games. For those that want to know more about legacy games, check out the episode of the podcast with Rob Davao, who's generally credited with kind of creating the genre. And just the basic idea that you play a board game, normally at the end of the board game, you just reset it back to the beginning. Here, something you did in that game permanently changes the game. So the next time you play, it's somehow different, I think would be the simplest way to define it.

And so now we're applying these principles to circle back a little bit here to this 4x style civilization style game, where you could instead have these micro versions of the, of civ experiences that get you and evolve to the next phase somehow. Yeah. And I think the legacy format actually would be a very good model. It would take a lot of work because I know legacy games take way longer to design than sort of regular board games.

But it would be a very good model for someone if in the sense of like, okay, the players are going to come to the game and they already had the expectation of like, okay, we're going to go through all of world history, but it's going to take us 10 play sessions, right? And we're going to kind of reset every once in a while, right? or not everyone so we're going to kind of reset some each session and we're going to carry a little bit forward and that's kind of the point right um like i think i think that actually would be a pretty good a pretty good setup that would ironically i think be a lot easier to do in tabletop because i think you really have people people are much more prepared for that mindset um there hasn't really been it there's been some attempts to make like a four xes that are a little that are a little bit more like rogue likes but They haven't, there hasn't really been a great example of a success in that category, to some extent, because, you know, people still kind of feel like For X games should be these,

these epic things that take you through everything. You know, with Old World, we definitely get a lot of people like, oh, I had a lot of fun playing the game. I really enjoyed it. But, you know, I feel like it's missing all the rest of world history, you know? It's like, well, why is that, you know, like, why do you feel? feel like you need that. And it's, yeah, there's a lot to discuss there with like audience expectations. Oh, yeah. It's a huge, huge, huge deal here. Right. So, so on the one hand, it's incredible to be able to take from different genres or find ways to encapsulate small, you know, the sort of the gems from a single genre in a smaller experience under a different medium. And on the other hand, you've got, you know, all of the weight of expectations of the fans of a given genre or a game, game, game, style and then you're going to inevitably disappoint some of them by trying to cater to this or carve out a new audience with a new you know whether it be a hybridization of two different genres or a

reinterpretation of of of something which is again i love that space personally i think it's like some of the most fertile ground for design but you know some people uh get mad at me for it so i i deal with that as i need to but i recommend it it's a great it's a great exercise and again it's more uh you know I wasn't necessarily thinking you and I would start actually making this project, although, you know, maybe. But I thought it would just be fun to, because it was very top of mind for me, and I thought it would be fun to just kind of talk through a little bit here. Because I think there's this subtle distinction between, you know,

maybe it's just a spectrum, something, whereas I think of a legacy or a rogue-like in the, in the loose definition, as something where, you know, this game is over, but something you did will stick around and influence the start of what is essentially a new game. And I think here, what I'm saying or what I'm pushing towards is not this game is over. It's this phase of the game is over. Some things are reset, but it still feels like the same game that you're picking up at a fast-forwarded timeline. And it's a, you know, that may be a subtle distinction, but I think it could be an important one. Again, I started from the premise of wanting to build a game that I could I could traverse the arc of time in 90 minutes rather than.

you know, 20 hours. And so the jumps mattered. Yeah. Have you played history of the world? The board game? No. Okay.

Have you played small world? Yes. Okay. History of the world is basically small world. Well, history of the world came first. But small world is actually, I think they're both based off of Vinci,

another older game. But history of the world is kind of like small world in historical context, right? Like you know how in small world you might be the wood elves or whatever, and then you become the, I don't know, the forest giants or something, right? In history of the world, you play the game over seven eras. In the first era, one person might be the Babylonians and someone else might be the Egyptians, right? And someone else might be whatever the Chinese dynasty was at the time.

Right. And you kind of, you play through the rise of your empire and you have a certain amount of like kind of power going into it. You have like, okay, you're going to be able to, you have like six forces, you know, six moves basically on the board and you're going to see how fall out far you can advance. And then it goes to the next epic and you basically then draft for the next set of empires. And some of them, and it's not at all balanced, right? Like in one epic, in epic two, there's, uh, or whatever. In one of the epics, there's the Romans, right? And they come with like 25 units essentially or 25 moves, which is way above everyone else.

So it's somewhat balanced by the fact that you draft it based off of who had the least amount of power in previous turns and there's also kind of like diplomacy to pull the people back together. But at any rate, I love the game. I think it does it's the only game I've played like that where it actually does kind of look like world history because what you have is these big empires come into play. They blow up on the world, they conquer a bunch of territory,

and then they stop and you move over and you take over. Because at that point, it kind of has this kind of idea built into it that there's a certain, I don't know, vigor to a nation, right? There's a certain expansion phase. And then at some point, there's the decline phase, right? And you don't actually play out the decline phase. You just like stop and you move to be a new empire. And then you're essentially conquering all these old empires that are still sitting around on the board, right? And they don't necessarily do anything.

They just sit there to be conquered, right? They just slow you down, if that makes sense. Yeah. And I think it works really, really well. And it kind of feels like a legacy game before there were legacy games. So I think actually that model really would merit some investigation if someone wants to go down this path. Okay, great. Well, we can leave that there for any aspiring designers that want to pick up where we've left off.

I think you and I probably both have enough projects on our plates right now. But it's exciting. And yeah, okay. So I wanted to go there because, again, I rarely get an opportunity where, I have a conversation with the designer. They recommend a game to me to address a problem. And then I get a chance to play it and come back and then discuss the inspiration. So that was fun.

So what I wanted to do is also pick up, you know, I had a huge amount of stuff from my notes from our last time when I wanted to talk to you about. We didn't really get a chance to get to because we had so much deep diving done. And really, I kind of want to get to the story of the founding of Bohawk games and what that process was like and how you kind of decided to make. make that transition and then we'll start digging into some of the games that you make now and what all that looks like. Sure. So it's kind of odd to say that, you know, I mean, Bohawk has been around for about 10 years now. We found it in 2013.

So, yeah, this is our 10th year. And so, yeah, I'm kind of proud of that because I think it's hard to keep a company going for 10 years. Here. And you kind of think in retrospect that like, oh, he's very entrepreneurial or whatever. But honestly, I'm pretty conservative in terms to risk taking. And, you know, I kind of, I very much like the idea of like running my own company because I tend to want to work on the stuff that I want to work on. I guess that sounds circular.

But like, I want all the freedom and none of the risk. Yeah. I mean, it's just that like I've been a, I've worked. at various companies for the first, for 13 years of my career. And sometimes I was able, what I was able to work on lined up with what, sometimes my projects lined up with what I wanted to work on. And other times often they didn't. Or I was able to work on something I wanted to work on.

And then it got shut down for reasons that were outside of my control. And, you know, that, that was just, that part of my work was pretty unpleasant, right? You know, like I had one game in particular that I worked out for about a year that the team loved the place I worked at. We played it like literally every day. And we love the game. We're really excited about it. And then the publisher canceled the project for various reasons. And, you know, it was, you know, it was, you know, it was heartbreaking.

Like it was really, really difficult on me. And without that, those type of experiences, I probably wouldn't have. who have tried to start up something on my own. Like if I had been able to make the projects I wanted to make in larger studio, I probably would just kept doing that. But especially in the days before, I think now it may actually, strangely,

I think now it might actually be possible to make games like this because the market is such more has diversified so much. But back when I left for Axis in 2007, I think Steam had technically started, but it wasn't anything like it is today. They didn't really have third-party games on it. You certainly couldn't publish your own games on it. So there really wasn't an avenue for kind of these like offbeat games like Offworld Training Company and Old World where, you know, like it's it's it's it's targeting a less of a mainstream audience than you, a lot of games had to target when, you know, they're there with these big companies with these huge burn rates.

So, you know, so if there's a period of time where I had to, you know, I had some sort of general unhappy. this because I wasn't able to make the games that I thought I cared about, wanted to make. I wanted to do stuff that was innovative, right? Like, that was that, you know, I felt like was, you know, was kind of pushing, pushing video games forward in, especially strategy games. And so, you know, worked at, you know, worked at FRAXIS for seven years that went to work electronic arts. I can't say I was very realistic about thinking that I'd be able to go there and be able to

make the games I wanted to make. but spores seemed like a really cool project and it was a really really cool team so went for that and then bizarrely I worked at Zingo for a year and change so yeah and I know I started with and I definitely want to hear more of the Mohawk stuff but we didn't we unpack that that time that much either and are there any kind of stories that stand out or lessons to let you learn during those windows because again those are you know huge projects huge companies very different types of projects to some degree yeah that jumps out before we just leap past them.

Sure. I don't remember, did we talk about Spore much? I don't think so. I don't recall us talking about Spor or a ton. It's certainly an exciting project, which maybe just give a little bit of a... Yeah,

so Spore was Will Wright's, I guess, last big project at EA. You know, he had made some city and made the Sims. So he kind of, you know, put a back,

kind of puts him in a position where he can kind of has a blank check to like take some really big risk, right? And you kind of cash that check with Spore, which is supposed to be this game about everything that takes you from you know, you started, like literally you start to sell

single sub to multi-planetary. Right, to a creature, then to a tribe, then to a civilization, then to sort of a space-faring race. And beyond that, like, he had a concept that each of these levels were essentially video games. They mapped, they weren't just this evolutionary tree, but they mapped it to the other figure games. like the cell level was supposed to be Pac-Man,

the creature level was supposed to be Diablo, the tribe level was populous, the civil level was obviously civilization, and the space-faring level was kind of like elite, one of those type of games, or maybe Star Control. And it was a huge promise. It had this amazing demo reel that was shown at GDC where it kind of showed this kind of like scaling,

going from this tiny level to this big level. the pitch of it was kind of it was, you know, it was one of these concepts that sells itself really well, right? And, and yeah, I had kind of hit a, I kind of hit a dead end of Fraxis where I was like, okay, this is, here's, here's a game. Here's a game I want to make.

I'm telling you why I want to make it. This is why I think it's important. And, you know, they basically, you know, basically turned it down. And they said, well, you know, you could, you could do creative direction on Cib 5, right? And, you know, I think it's really sad because, I mean, I really love for Axis and, you know, I had a wonderful time there. I think just the world of that company.

And, you know, I don't think they were happy about telling me like, oh, you work, you know, you co-designed SIF 3. You were the lead designer SIF 4. Now we want you to, you know, go back into the SIV coal mines, you know, and work on SIF 5. Isn't it amazing how that progression happens, right? where it's like literally like your dream job to be able to work on a sieve and then to lead design a sieve and then it's become the coal mines right yeah i mean it's it happens to all of us it's just an interesting progression right that that too much of a good thing is uh is it's is the opposite and uh it's you know you're ready for the next challenge or the next thing so anyway just just worth interjecting because it's an interesting thing most people don't think most people think that if they just get this one thing this one job this one promotion this one spouse car house, whatever it is, then everything's going to be fine. Everything's going to be happy. I won't need anything else.

And then, you know, inevitably, there's another, another hill to climb. So, anyway. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's, yeah, put me in a weird, like, after a SIF 4 shipped, I mean, I've heard other people talk about this when, you know, you have a project and everything goes, everything goes really well, it is, it does lead this weird situation. Okay, well, now what do you do next, right? Like, you can't, do you try to double down?

I mean, I put everything I had creatively, emotionally. etc. I'm so fortunate that it paid off, a lot of people are in situations where they do that and the projects don't succeed, or maybe they get canceled, right?

Yeah. So people have to face the canceling thing a ton. And very few people get to get to experience what you did, which is a level of overwhelming success and global accolade and, you know, you know, it's a,

it's sort of like, you know, you won the Grammy or whatever for your first album or you know, second album and now what do you do? Yeah, yeah. Well, so Ford did literally win a Grammy, so. Oh, well, there you go. So you actually, that's a better analogy than I am and then I thought it was. Right.

And, yeah, so I guess I just want to acknowledge that because I feel weird, like, I feel like I'm complaining about that position to put me in, but it, it's more like I didn't have any creative juice left for the, the franchise, you know? Like, and I didn't, I felt like also beyond that, like, you know, we had a young designer, you know, John Schaefer, who was going to take over sub five and I felt like if I was stuck, if I was going to stick around, I would probably just keep telling him why various ideas he would come up with wouldn't work. I'd be like, you can't do that because of this. But like in, you know, in reality, you have to try stuff, right?

You have to, you know, like, yeah, maybe the idea, maybe the idea has problems, but that's game development, you know, so. Oh, that one hits close to home, my friend. That one is close to home. I literally just, I just had a meeting like this week where we're doing, you know, design on the digital app for SoulForge Fusion and there was a there was an element where I had that exact thing for oh for my experience on SoulForge the original 10 years ago this isn't going to work because X, Y or Z reason. I was like oh man I just did I just did what you said shouldn't happen which is the the trap right the I've got experience therefore I know and in fact what that that iterative learning and that new new blood there. All right I'm going to go back and apologize to my team after

this but anyway carry on. Yeah it's a tough lie because obviously sometimes sometimes you're right and sometimes you're wrong. And sometimes it's not even that clear, right? Like, it's just a question of like, well, we don't know. It's the unknown. So, yeah, I was afraid I was just going to be messing with them and not really contributing. And, you know, I don't think they wanted to put me in position where I was kind of stuck doing this either. They should definitely have anything else for me.

And honestly, I wish I just had more patience because it would have been okay for me to kick back and just do kind of like high level creative direction for a couple of years and just, you know, just relax. I had earned it, you know, but I was, you know, I was still, you know, I was a young guy eager to, you know, eager to make my mark. So I was like, okay, I want to look for, you know, I want to look for something else, you know. And so. Still hungry. Yep, still hungry. So like I interviewed it, I interviewed a Blizzard, interviewed Valve, interviewed with the sport team. And the sport team was just full of just these amazingly talented, creative people.

and, you know, it was a really, the project was, you know, fascinating. So, and I went to school in the Bay Area, so it was also, like, kind of really nice to the idea of, like, oh, nice to go back there. And so, yeah, we moved out and, you know, I joined the sport team. And it was a troubled project. You know, you're real, once you got in under the, you know, got inside, you know, I saw it like, oh, actually there's really big problem. was trying to like kind of staple these different levels together. And it really wasn't, in retrospect, I think the initial pitch was actually not, was basically not actually a good idea.

Well, it's like, I mean, it's so epic in scope. It's like, you know, trying to make five full-fledged games that all interweave together and that are all in of themselves complete projects that take a lot of work is a, I mean, ambitious is a, is a small word. to use for that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's hard enough to make one good game and then also to make five games where they also have this extra constraint of like, oh, and also the things you do in each one of them needs to be meaningful for the future levels, right? Like that was something that would come up a lot of like, oh, okay, maybe we can do this in the SIV game, but this doesn't

have anything to do with stuff from the previous levels, right? You need to feel like your decisions earlier actually matter by the time you get to the SIV level. And, um, It was just a really huge challenge. And also kind of halfway through the project before I got there, they kind of hit on this kind of idea of like player expression and creativity. And the one thing, I mean, there's a lot of really cool things that did come from Spore. But the thing that was probably the most successful was the creature editor, or just the editors in general.

The creature was editors was the best example of this, where you could model a creature in 3D and all sorts of, it gave a great amount of power of like, you know, put the legs here, make them longer, make them shorter, change the color, change the head, change the shape. And the system would just figure out automatically how to animate it for you, right? So no matter how many legs you gave it or what shape or whatever, it would end up walking in a way that looked normal and natural.

And that was really magical to people. And beyond that, it had this idea of like, oh, we're going to take your creatures and we're going to propagate them to other people's games. So if you played spore, you would see, creatures that other people designed. So there was also this concept of like user generated content, you know, that just kind of flowed naturally. And, you know, it was just a lot of really heady, crazy ideas.

They're all kind of smashing into each other. So there's a lot of really cool things about the project. But there was kind of a really big issue with cohesion. So I wrote a long blog post on my blog about that was kind of like my version of the Spore Postmortem. And so I'd recommend if anyone, if you were, wants to know more about my general thoughts in the project. They go dig that up.

It's called My View of the Elephant. And one of the lessons I really pull from that is that team cohesion is much more important than team quality, or if that makes sense. Oh, it does. Yeah. Like the actual, I guess, raw talent or brainpower or however you want to put it, is much less important to just having everyone know that the direction they're going. And it's the type of game that these people,

want to make, right? That, you know, the issue we had with the sport team is you had, you know, they picked all these amazing individuals, but some of them had the kind of like the Maxis, Sims, creativity, game as a toy DNA, right? And then you had a lot of people like me who has had the more of the game as a game DNA, that, you know, the game should have some challenge. There should be a resolution. You could win, you could lose, you know, like have stuff.

that matter. One of the things that came up in the editors a lot was this concept, like, okay, yeah, we can build the creatures however we want to, but are you trying to like make the best creature, like the fastest creature or the strongest or the whatever? And every time we did that, would end up to be happening. If we started going in that direction, then people are like, okay, I want to design my creature to have the longest legs or the this or the bat. And people started, they stopped being creative, right? So they kind of like lost that part of the game disappeared. And so these two approaches were kind of like inevitably in conflict, right?

And it was just difficult because I'm just not a designer who can really make a good game as a toy type thing. Right. And so I was in many ways kind of really out of place in the project, but they didn't really know what, they didn't know necessarily that that was the game they were making when I came on board, right? or that was kind of the best part of the game, if that makes sense. So, yeah, that's why I like to say is that, like, you know, when you're hiring, you really want to think in terms of, like, team cohesion. You know, it's very tempting to think of, like,

oh, we're going to put these people who have, you know, these very different views together and, you know, they'll be creative, the word chaos comes on my mind. I'm sure there's a better one, creative, like, debates or whatever. And, you know, I don't know. Thrashing is the term, right? Yes. Seth, Seth Godin uses that term.

It's like you really want to get that. You want to thrash, thrash early and often, but then where it's cheaper. But it's going to, yeah, you want to get your alignment quickly because once you start moving, it costs way, way more after. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, that's something I like to emphasize a lot when I'm talking to people putting teams together. Interestingly enough, though, Spore has sort of turned into kind of a weird success story over the years.

Like, it's, it's, if you go to, like, one of those, like, Steam charts websites, like, there are still, like, thousands of people

playing spore today. It's, it's way more people are probably playing spore now than any game, other, any other game released in 2008. It's that,

that creativity aspect of it is still very, you know, it's a very successful valid part of the game. And I constantly run into people, especially people who tended to have been, between the ages of like, you know, six and 14 when the game came out to them, Spore was amazing, right?

Like a game that didn't resist them and just let them express themselves. They really, really love Spore. So it's, it's been, it's been interesting to see that there's, there's, there's kind of this mismatch between what people thought Spore was supposed to be and what actually was. I mean, there's a whole other aspect, which was that it was, at some point kind of sold as kind of almost a scientific game, which was, just bizarre because if anything it was kind of like a god as like intelligent design type

situation right because you're literally creating everything yourself and there was i guess you'd say there was a bit of a backlash on that but it was just again it was just like this big mismatch between like what what's for was was sold as or conceived as and and what it actually was okay great all All right. Well, so I'm glad we paused there because there's a lot of great content. And then, yeah, people can go see your article in my view of the elephant to dig deeper. And so we jump now. Let's accelerate. This time I'm going to get to your Mohawk stuff.

I promise it. I will be much more relentless this time. But there's also a Zinga part of the story here. Yeah. Yeah. So I had sort of a shortcut through what we're called social games at the time, which basically meant Facebook games. and it's hard to explain nowadays, just how kind of like hot these were perceived of

back in 2009 or whatever. But I made a little RPG called Dragon Age Legends and kind of like my second half of my time at EA, which was pretty cool. It was kind of fun to make an RPG, but I realized that I kind of accidentally designed an MMO and like that's extremely difficult. It's really hard to be able to create content

that keeps people playing over and over and over again where they aren't kind of restarting. So I realized that I wasn't fully fully prepared for that. And it did it did all right. And it was it was fun to work on. But I kind of wish I had gotten a chance to do that over again from scratch knowing what type of game I had been trying to make. And that kind of put me a point where I was like,

I really didn't know what to do next because I was at EA. They had made this Facebook game. You know, it did all right. But it wasn't clear where I could make strategy games inside of the, structure. And, you know, I had some connections with some people at Zinga, especially Brian Reynolds, who was a designer of Alpsontari and Civilization 2. He had kind of befrived me after, you know, I kind of had come up and, you know,

did some work kind of in the civilization design club, I guess, design. It's an elite group. Right. And he had had some success making Frontierville for, for Zinga out in Baltimore. And he basically said, hey, you know, why don't you come on here and we can we can basically hide you here in the Zinga East team and you can just kind of prototype, you know, prototype something that could work on the web, right? And so I prototype this little, so many multiplayer only version of SIV. Like I wanted like a game of SIV that you could play in your browser. I made it with the Google Web Toolkit and it was actually pretty cool.

It was really, really interesting because you could just, you just. jump into the game with it, you know, just send someone to URL and they would just pop into the game and there would be this, you know, grid of tiles on your browser and you'd move your units around. And it was, it would run on like a 24 hour clock, right? So you would get your moves every eight hours or 12 hours or 24 hours or whatever. And, you know, you, you know, slowly, you know, inch towards the other, you know, your opponent. And it was the first time I kind of experimented it with the order system, which eventually came into into being with old world. but it was it was really just like a project that I made by myself

with like a tiny bit of art help and like a server engineer who was available to me just to do the basic back end and so yeah it was this fun little experiment but it only lasted about a year because a year later the you know the the social game boom was already starting to dissent a little bit. And the project the studio had made next, the Ville 2 didn't do very well.

And so it, along with the number of the studios, started getting shut down. And so I was just essentially a victim of that, I suppose. But it wasn't, it was fine for my point in view, because I was given a year just to experiment with this kind of interesting concept, which led to kind of some fertile ideas that I kind of used later.

But the other, upside of it, I guess, was this is the first time I'd ever been laid off. And the, it kind of forced me to figure out what I really wanted to do because, you know, got laid off from Zinga. Zinga gave a very, very generous severance package. So, you know, I was like, okay, I've got six months or whatever to figure out what I want to do. And it definitely seems like just joining these other companies is not working out because they have they have their own sets of priorities. And beyond that, even if your priorities are aligned when you join, those things tend to change over time. Right. And so, you know, it felt like, you know, I'm going to have a hard time achieving the

things I want to, you know, in these other companies. And so I started pitching, see if I could, I could pitch a game to, you know, various publishers. And, um, I already knew the game I wanted to make, which was Offworld Trading Company. And I envisioned it as I really loved real-time strategy games. There was a period of time at FRAXIS where we would play AJ Vampires 2 every day at lunch, just constantly. It was just the thing we did. And I remember when Agey Mythology came out, which was sort of the sequel, I guess I'd say. And also I had a similar feeling when age three came out is, you know, I got the game, played it.

And I was like, okay, this is really cool. There's a lot of cool stuff here. But like the very core of the game, like the dynamic of like, okay, I have to do this to do that. And then this happens and that. And that's a typical match was identical to the previous game. Like, yeah, sure, you're moving around, you know, in ancient mythology, you're moving around, you know, crocodiles that shoot lasers out of their foreheads, right? Like it's, uh, because there's like Egyptian mythology, you know, there's some,

some really new stuff here, but you're still like starting with a base and then you send some workers to gather some berries and then you build your first units and then you build another base and then you start building some knights or whatever, whatever they be. The heavier units, you go attack the other guy. The, the arc of the match and the, the, the, sort of the inner core of the decision making was just the same thing, right? And so I just didn't play the game as much because I'm like, I, you know, I've actually kind of already played this game. And, you know, that it got me thinking about, well, okay, what do I actually like about RTS games? One thing I really liked was, okay, these are, I like the format of the game.

Okay, this is a 20 to 30 minute game. All right, it's short. It's, you have to think on your feet. you can play with two to eight other people, right? Like it's a game that works really well multiplayer because it's real time. And there's a resolution at the end. And I was like, okay, and it's strategic, right? So like that's what I like.

Clearly there must be other ways to make games that fit that format that aren't just a game about building a base and then doing a tank rush. Right. And one thing that that popped in my head was one of the programmers at Phraxas, a guy named Mike Breckwrights, they started messing around with map scripts for Age of Empires, which means that age of empire, unlike a lot of Retroredom strategy games, has random maps, which is something that to me is very important, almost everything I do, has some sort of random map or procedural generation. It just seems like a great way to keep games.

you know, fresh and different. And he came up with this map where there was normally a map of age has a few huge forests on it. So there's kind of like essentially an endless supply of trees. And if you, you could theoretically chop down all the trees. But it's the games are usually over way before that would be done. So he made this desert map where there's just a few trees. around the map, but there's tons, but the whole map is just full of gold and stone or whatever.

And we played this game, and we were used to playing a certain way because it's like, okay, wood is easy to get, gold is hard to get, right? And naturally, some of the best units in the game, like the knights, they cost a lot of gold because gold is the less common resource, right? Suddenly here is a map where that's flipped, right?

It's hard to get wood, but it's easy to get gold. And you can see that, like, early on in the game, we were failing because people hadn't adapted yet. People hadn't realized, okay, actually, what I need to do is make as many knights as possible, right? And then, you know, we can see, like, halfway through the match. Then people were, like, figuring that out, trying to build as many nights as they can. And then the unit that normally countered knights cost a lot of wood, right? Because that's like a spearman-type unit. And then it's like, oh, my, the normal counter isn't available.

okay, what else can we do? So you can see that everyone was like thinking on their feet and like they were they were having to like adapt their strategy. And I was like, well, this is amazing. Right. Like this is a great experience. I don't want to play a game where we're just doing a specific build order. So I was like, okay, well, how can I get more of that intern RTS?

Right. And beyond that, like I had this thing of like, I don't want to make, I don't want to make a game. I don't want to make a combat game. Right. And so I was like, okay. So RTS is this real time strategy. And instead of the more classic examples like your, you know, Warcraft and Starcrafts, you want something where it's a little bit more of a economic or civilization battle.

Right, right, exactly. And then there's a bunch of other games that I kind of was also thinking about, like a railroad tycoon had kind of like a really great idea of like the resource tree. You know, you get the cat, you take the wood to the paper mill, then you take the paper to the whatever the, you know, the goods. plant or whatever. There was, you know, these like two or three step processes of moving people and, you know, raw materials around and to finish goods and then moving the back and forth. I was like, oh, that's really neat. There was this very old board game called

Belter from the late 70s, from, you know, one of those like SPI type companies, I think was GDW that was about exploring this asteroid field and kind of like discovering these resources and then putting mines and then shipping the, shipping the ore or the gas back to a market. And it actually had a thing where every time you sold something, the price went down. And then between turns, the price could go back up based off of various random things. At Age of Empires also had, they actually did have a market building in the game. I mean, this was the other thing that was really fascinating about that map, where there was all sorts of gold, but very few wood, very little wood.

There was this market building in the game that you could build, and you could go to it and you could buy wood, right? You could say, okay, I'm going to, you know, take my gold and convert it into wood. And the price would go up and that price would be global. So if you bought wood in your market, the price would go up for everyone else in all their markets. And we could really see that was super interesting in that game we played on that map because normally what you're doing is you want gold. So you're selling your wood, you're selling your stone, you're selling your food. You're driving down the price because you really want gold.

Right. And then if the price gets low enough, then it kind of switches and people are like, okay, actually the price of food enough is low enough now that I want to start buying. Right. And you got that. This core tension of the value of ever resources dynamically being adjusted based upon what players are doing throughout the whole of it. Yeah. Yeah. And that's interesting. Yeah. And in this game that we played where it's like, oh, there's not enough wood. It's only the price of wood just kept going up, you know, 100, 150, 200, 250, 200, 250, 300. Like this, we just never seen that we didn't even know. Like it's like, is there a cap on these price? like what's going to happen, right? Run away inflation, danger, danger, call in the Fed. Exactly. So I thought that was really interesting. And so I was like, I want to make a game that plays in this area that is all about this idea of like this, this, you know, global market. The prices are dynamic. The prices are going to change every game because you're going to have these random maps with different, you know, different sets of resources all over the place.

You're going to have these resource chains where like, okay, yeah, you can get the water and sell the water. but maybe instead you want to take the water and turn it into food. Or maybe you want to split the water into oxygen and fuel. And oh, maybe you want to turn the fuel into chemicals. But that's a very multi-step process. So probably most people aren't going to do that, which means that the chemicals are going to get really expensive, right? So maybe you'll aim to do that from the beginning.

And oh, you should also probably watch what everyone else is doing. Yeah. And, you know, go ahead. Sorry. I mean, I'm interested because I realize I have to be more ruthless than I want to be to get through all the stories with you because there's a lot of great ones. But I'm curious now. So you've got this, I understand the core tension of this game and the concept for it.

Now you're in a position where you were laid off from Zinga and you have a six-month window to build a thing slash pitch it to a publisher to get funding to build the thing. I want to hear a little bit more of that arc, the side of outside of the core mechanics of the game. We know what you're trying to build. what does it look like to be trying to build it? Because I imagine there's a lot of people out there that are the same situation. And I could tell the story where people that get laid off, it's a disaster, it's crushing. Whereas you framed it as what I think is a great opportunity. That's a great opportunity.

I've got this window now to do what I want to do. What is that process look like? Yeah. So that's why I kind of talked earlier about how like it's, I don't know exactly how to tell my story because I'm actually somewhat conservative. I'm not really a big risk taker. So I kind of had to be pushed to do that. And beyond that, I think it's amazing.

Every time I hear about these teams where, oh, we quit our job or we did this thing on their side, we built this game. And we got, you know, we got publishers interested or we sold it on early access. We got some players. We sold it on our website. I think that's amazing because I, because of my success with SIF 4, I was able to basically shortcut that whole profit. Like I was able to get a publishing contact because excuse me a publishing contract From Star Doc, which is a strategy game publisher and developer And I was able to get a publishing contract based off of essentially my reputation and

My pitch for the game, right? You know, I was like this is the game I want to make you know I've had success with Civ 4 and I'm ready to start prototyping it and I you know I was able to get the money before building the game and Okay, so just I want to unpack a little bit because obviously, reputation, big success is under your belt. And this is something I recommend for everybody that wants to start their own company. Generally, work for somebody else first, learn the lessons there, build a rep. This is exactly what I did before I started my own company. And so you have a reputation. And then how many publishers did you pitch to?

You didn't have a prototype at this point. You just had a pitch deck of some kind. What was to go from, okay, hey, look at me. I made SIF 4 and all these other things to, okay, here's a big check, go. Yeah, I mean, honestly, not that many. I had already developed a relationship, you know, with Brad and Derek at Stardock previously

because they had, Brad that reached out to me when I was working on SIV because his company makes Galactic Solization, which is a somewhat similar game, and we just kind of like traded stories and ideas and various things back and forth. And so he'd already kind of made it clear that, like, hey, if you ever want to make a game, like consider working with us.

And Derek, this is Brad Riddell and Derek Paxton, Derek who became clear of head of development to forget exactly his position, exactly. But, you know, Brad basically hired him to kind of run the studio. He actually kind of gained his notoriety in the industry. from working on a probably the most famous SIV 4 mod, which is called Fall from Heaven, which is essentially a fantasy conversion of the play that it's great. Yep, yep, it's a really great game.

Fantasy conversion of SIF 4. And I kind of had gotten in contact with him as that mob became more popular. And I believe like basically a version of it was actually included in the final expansion pack for for SIV 4. And it had a, you know, a big mod team and he was a, he was a well-known presence in the community.

And so, you know, he eventually came to work with. Yeah, by the way, just sorry I didn't know it again, but this is for, again, for those listening, looking for your route, right? So the story you're telling is the, you know, I had a great success. It's before now I'm starting a business and doing things. This idea that you just take,

be a part of a modding community, make a great game using the tools provided to you. Be active in the community. You can immediately use that as a way to rocket yourself into, you know, a known quantity and prove, really it's such an incredibly powerful tool set. So I interrupt, I just think I don't want to skip over that because it's really important for people.

I think it's one of the better ways to, I think nowadays to kind of get your feet wet and design and really test out your ideas. Yeah, absolutely. I give people that advice as well. I mean, Derek's a great example of the success you can have when you do that because it's really hard to build a game from scratch, you know, and if you have a lot of design ideas,

often it's a lot easier to build off of, on top of another game. And, yeah, fall for heaven is a great example of that. And, yeah, so I'd already, basically, I had these really good connections at Star Doc. I did talk to some other publishers about, you know, a couple different ideas. But, you know, they basically said, like, hey, yeah, we can, we can give you a few million dollars to, you know, make this, you know, found your studio and make, make this game, make what I called, you know, Mars or whatever. I didn't know what I was called, but eventually became off-world training couple. company. And so, okay, so hey, we're getting a few million dollars. And what is, what is it? Because I think a lot of people don't

necessarily understand the relationship between like developer, publisher, like your different company, but they're giving you the money to fund the thing. And maybe like, what is that, either you can talk about your specifics or maybe more broadly just so people understand what that relationship looks like. Sure. So it was kind of a very traditional sort of publishing deal. we were able, like, in the sense that what happens is they give you X amount of money. Usually there's a set of milestones in that, okay, we're going to give you this amount of money over this period of time, and you're going to get this chunk of it every so many months, and it's going to be contingent on you hitting certain milestones. So oftentimes there's a way a publisher can say, like, okay, if you haven't hit this milestone, we're going to, we're going to pay a kill fee, and we're going to stop the project, but then you can shop it around to other publishers, right?

But it is that idea. You don't get just this giant check of money right at the front. It's like, we're going to be kind of paying you as you go. And then as much as you can, you want to negotiate your own control over the project. Right. We, from the beginning, we said, okay, we're going to own the IP for off-world trading company. So if, you know, if something happens negatively, this will still be our game. We can go do something else with it if you're not going to be the public.

publisher, right? And then the financials look like there's going to be some percentage royalty that's where the revenue is shared between the publisher and the developer. And at the time, and this was fairly normal at the time, our percentage, it kind of treated that advance, the money we got, it treats it basically as a loan. So let's say, let's say we get 50% royalty. If we get half the money from the revenue

of the game, that money goes to pay back the loan. And so essentially, if we got X million, if we had like a 50% royalty, if you get X million in an advance, the game would have to make twice that much before you pay

off the advance. And it's a difficult model to actually make money on from a developer, honestly. But, you know, from my perspective, like, you know, I at that point, it was just an out-of-work developer, right? Yeah. And so I go from making no money for sure to getting paid to make a game and maybe making money down the road. That does seem like a better deal. I mean, you get, yeah, you de-risk the situation.

You get somebody else's taking all the financial risk. to make a game that makes, you know, some of it makes sense. I think the model's evolved a little bit since then, but it's not unreasonable. Yeah, the model has evolved a lot. And we did actually have some stuff in the, in the original deal that, like,

DLC, like revenue from DLC would go directly to us, or our percentage of the revenue to DLC would go directly from us so that it made sense for us to continue development of the game, as opposed to the money from the DLC, still going to pay back the advance, which I think was a good forward-looking clause that we together just wanted to put in the contract. And I've seen most people know what this is, but DLC is downloadable content. So kind of like add-ons and additions to the game.

Yeah, exactly. And I think since then, like nowadays, the models, the model has become more adoper friendly over time. Like even just like a few years later, it kind of moved to this model like, okay, actually probably all of the revenue from the game should go back to pay that initial advance. So you pay back the advance first, like 100% of the revenue should go to pay back the advance. So you pay it off faster. So if you get X million as an advance, once the game has made X million, then at that point you start actually getting revenue from the game. And now we're kind of at a point where there are actually a number of publishers who will give you, a certain percentage of the revenue just straight up, right?

Like, okay, some of the revenue is going to pay back the advance, but some of the revenue will just flow directly to the developer because publishers realize the developers need money to keep working on the games. We're no longer this world where you finish a game, you print a CD and you mail it off and you hope for the best, right? You know, really the actual release date is almost sort of like an arbitrary date on the calendar. Yeah, I'd love, I'd love for, you know, It's jumping around a little bit, but yeah,

flushing that out a little bit more detail because I think most people don't quite recognize this. And it's been a big evolution over time in the development of games, that this sort of, you know, live ops or variations of ongoing development are just critical to a game success. Maybe we can unpack what that means a little bit more. Yeah. So, yeah, so I've seen kind of over the last 10 or 50 years, seen kind of like the boiling of the frog change,

I guess you'd say, of how the business model between publishers and developers have changed, kind of in recognition of the reality of how games actually get to consumers now. Because the idea that, okay, you make a game and it has to be kind of as perfect as possible when you shipped was, you know, it wasn't because we were necessarily

had very high standards for ourselves as developers. It's because we had no choice because we were printing something on CD and if we got it wrong, it could be catastrophic. I remember we discovered kind of an important bug at the 11th hour. I mean, 11th hours, David Wright, at like 1159 p.m. Right before sending off the disc to be pressed for Civ 4. And I remember, like, we had a semi-serious discussion about using a helicopter to try to, like,

to get the fix ahead of the actual, the original disc that got shipped. And, you know, eventually we kind of like backtops and, okay, this is, we can still patch a game. This is this is not something most people experience. We'll just have to have to live with this or whatever. But basically, you had a higher standard for yourself because you had no choice. You had to really, really try to get it right the first time. But as soon as we went to digital distribution, even whether we realize it or not, we were now moving into this world of like live service, right? that because you can patch the game every way if you want, every day if you want to,

it meant a number of things. It meant that there was no longer going to be this arbitrary line in the sand of like, okay, pencils down, the game is over, right? Both in terms of, you know, of, in terms of like, okay, you don't have the fixed point. But also that like, yeah, and guess what? You can keep working on the game. You can keep improving it. You can keep doing that stuff.

there's also a way to do that to make more revenue, right? You can make, you know, you can do DLCs, you can sell scenarios, you can sell, you know, new versions of the game, you can spell it sell expansions, you can do all sorts of, do all sorts of things. And it was just one of these things. Like there's there's just no going back from that. Yeah. This is, this is a lot of ways where free to play games come from as well. It's like, okay, if we can sell stuff after people are playing the game and after we release

it, then we can make games, you know, we can just make them free to download, you know, that would have made no sense, you know, before before a digital distribution, right? Yeah. There are so many aspects to this, right? I mean, one, it's, you know, it's a boon in the sense, like I said, like, you know, free to play games, you know, say what you will about the downsides of the genre. The idea that people can play so much, get so much content for free is, it's pretty amazing.

And then, you know, you monetize afterwards. And then there's this, this, you know, what ends up being, I think, a pretty big downside in reality to designers, which is you're never. done, right? Like, like, it's always the hardest thing to say pencils down on a project. And, you know, with a still with physical board games, at least, there's, hey, this is going to print. Like, it is done. You know, you're, it is out there. You know, you can. And, and, and, and, but with digital games, that time is just gone. And now it's more of a, it's more just a marketing decision whether you call a game, you know, alpha launch, beta launch, real launch,

post launch, DLC, patch one. You know, it's all just, it's a very fuzzy space now. Yeah. We actually literally at our, we have a weekly design and tech meeting here at the company. And we literally this week had the discussion where we're like, okay, old world has been out for a year now. It's doing really well. We're making DLC. There's like maybe three or four different, you know, ongoing projects, right? There's people are working on a bunch of different things for the game. That's all really great.

That's really important. But if you're not necessarily working on one of those DLC projects, it might be time to start thinking about whether what you're doing is the right thing for the company or whether you're just kind of like you're just like a zombie kind of like lurching forward continuing to do stuff on old world just because that's what you did last week and that's what you did the week before right there's always more stuff to work on right but at some point you hit like diminishing returns of like okay

yes this is this is a this would make some small improvement to the game but it's probably something that only a tiny part of the audience would see. At some point, we do need to actually like kind of force ourselves to like pull off of the old game and actually start working on the new game. It's really hard to, you have to kind of get back to having some sort of arbitrary line. When does New World release? Right. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a fascinating series of discussions. It's something, you know, again, we're wrestling with now as we're building, you know, we've just kind of rebuilt our digital team and are building out the digital version of Soulforge fusion. as you know and it's all these different aspects of you know it's the game we haven't released yet so clearly there's plenty to do but you know at what point is the diminishing returns on this aspect of the game and how many other features do we want to develop how much do we want to devote resources to new things versus what we've worked on before it's it's a continuous evaluation there's no easy answers right you just need to kind of i think you have it right that you don't want to just by default to keep doing the thing you were doing because you were doing it but really just you know at least

periodically pick your head back up and look around and say, okay, what is, what's going to be the most, you know, likely high return for my time within the company and which projects I work on? Yep, yeah, exactly. So, so since we started talking about old world and since we can never finish, talking about everything we want to talk about, I want to, I want to dig into O-WL because I know you guys just released an expansion or DLC for it.

Yep. It's a, I think we've, we've talked a little bit about it, but maybe let's give a, give a, you know, kind of top line for people, a little elevator pitch for Old World in general. Now I'm talking about some of the things that are maybe a little bit more controversial in it that are interesting to talk about. Sure. So I wanted to make Offworld as kind of the first game because it was kind of like a,

you know, it was a really odd pitch, right? Like an RTS about combat. I know it was going to be very different. I kind of knew going in like, okay, this is a fairly niche game. So I probably need to make it with a really small team. But I also knew that like, okay, if, If Mohawk is ever going to make, you know, like a big game, you know, one that kind of, you know, sort of puts us on the map, so to speak, right?

At some point, I may want to think about going back to, you know, making a bigger 4X game, right? And I probably want to do that as our second project because at that point will be more established as a company, we'll have more experience, we'll know what technology we want to use. You know, I just felt like, and, you know, beyond that, we'll be in a stronger position to pitch to publish to get more money, right? Because we knew that we're going to need a lot more money to make old world than it would cost to make off world. And that's kind of the way it sort of worked out with, you know, offworld shipped.

It did pretty well. And but didn't do so well that we could like use the money from off world to make old world. That's like a whole, that's a whole other tier of success. That's still very difficult to get to. especially because, you know, we had relied on funding for for offworld. So, you know, most of the revenue went to pay back, you know, pay back the money to cost. And then, you know, it still took a while for profits to make their way to us.

So, but again, like, it was not that difficult for me as a designer of SIV 3 and SIF 4 to go out and pitch a game saying, like, hey, I want to make a historical 4x game that, you know, push the genre forward and does this, these, you know, interesting new things. things. This time through, you know, I probably contacted 30 publishers, maybe, 30, maybe even 40 publishers to see who might be the one that's most interested in this game. And, you know, I knew going into it that I wanted to mess around with orders. That was kind of the thing that, that was like the big learning from that project at Zinka. that the one that was on the browser

because that had an order system and it was really interesting it was actually invented mostly just to kind of deal with the idea that this is a game that's constantly being played that it's being played in real time my initial idea was like

ooh every you know you get an order every hour right and it would just kind of build you build up a little bank of orders and any time you log on, you'd have a number of moves to make, right? Which was kind of, you know, inspired by, you know, kind of the energy system that was seen in a lot of social games, where every time you logged on, you'd have a certain number of orders or energy.

And, of course, for social, for Facebook companies or whatever, Facebook game companies, the reason they did an energy system, what probably the biggest reason is because they can sell you more energy, right? Right. Yeah, you're gained. I didn't have any interest in that. I wanted my game to be still like, you know, a quote-quote regular game in that the orders that you get is part of the game economy, right? Like you've started a game and you get a sort of much each turn and, you know, you can build new buildings that might give you more orders.

But like it's still part of the game itself. There's not this outside game thing of spending money to get orders. But the project never got far enough along in Zingo where I had to have that argument with a product manager. about whether we would resist selling orders or not. And so it's probably all worked out for the best that, you know, the project. Spoiler alert, you would not. Right.

And yeah, so, but fortunately, I discovered that like, oh, but, but like taking orders and putting it kind of like slapping it on top of like a game that's otherwise very much like SIV was fascinating, right? Because it really opened up how you could play the game. And so you define an order as a time-gated number of moves that you're allowed to make? It's a move, right? So like in the really original version in the web-based thing, like every order was a move, right? And you get a move every hour.

We learned over time that that was way too crazy because then people felt like they needed to log in every hour to make a move. So eventually we kind of moved to something that's more player-friendly, which is like, okay, maybe once a day or twice a day, you get a chunk of like, 12 orders or something like that, right? But also when you log down, when you get those 12 orders, you can use them however you want to. If you want to just move one unit 12 times, you can do that. If you want to spend your 12 orders on 12 different units to move them each once, that's fine too, right?

And, you know, we learned these various things like, oh, you can't just let people attack over and over and over again with the same unit. So because that's kind of crazy. So, you know, like, yeah, you can move a unit multiple times. but if it attacks, then it goes on cool down for 12 hours or something like that. It can't attack again until tomorrow or something like that, right? And so I was kind of learning all these little lessons of like, okay, how to make an order system work in a more in a way that might work

in a more traditional SIV type for X structure. So that was like kind of like the very beginning concept of old world of like, okay, let's make a game like Siv. I kind of already knew also that like, okay, probably we want to limit it to the just one era. And probably initially, it's hard to remember the order of these things, probably initially, the reason I wanted to do that was simply that we're a small company. We can't afford to make like jet fighters and modern buildings and whatever. Like we need to, we need to limit ourselves to just one era because we want to keep our costs under control, right? But like, yeah,

let's just start in the era that everyone loves the most in Siv, which is the ancient era. You know, starts you out with a settler and let's just, you'll have a few units. and we'll give you some orders and we'll just see how the game plays out. And we'll build it as a multiplayer game at the very beginning so that we can play test it as soon as possible. Even though we knew like eventually like 90 to 95% of our players are really just in it for the single player, you know, we believe that like iteration is really important for game development. So if you can, at all possible, and this is true for this was true for Offer Training Company. It was also true for SIV 4 way back in 2003.

Yeah, you talked about that a lot in our last episode. It was a really key insight that that multiplayer allowing for iteration and testing way faster and earlier than you would have otherwise was critical to your success. Yep. So we did that with Old World and that worked out really well. The game developed very quickly. And we were in a position unlike with Offworld where we could start developing the, that's another thing. We were able to develop a prototype without having the funding. Like we did at least have enough money in the bank where I could kind of go off of my own, work on.

work on Old World, it was called 10 crowns back then, while the rest of the team was working essentially on the expansion and DLC for Offworld. And so, like, I remember making like a little pitch video where I showed myself playing like the first 10 minutes of the game, you know, which we could send off to different publishers. And, you know, we talked a whole bunch of them. Eventually, the best offer we got was from a publisher called Starbrees, which is a Swedish company. they make the payday games and they were making a push into

publishing back then with very good terms because they were originally a developer and they're kind of like, we're a developer, we know what good terms should look like so we're going to start offering them to basically teams that we really like. So they funded Cyclotauts 2,

they funded the System Shock 3 and us, old world because we were seen as like, okay, you guys are a Siv spiritual successor. basically kind of like new versions of games by the, you know, some of the key creatives,

you know, behind it's a reasonable strategy to de-risk, take proven teams and sequels to games people love. And hopefully those are more likely to succeed than random new projects. And, I mean, I guess I might as well get into it now, but as a complete sidebar,

Starbrees ran into these serious financial difficulties. And they eventually had to go through a restructuring process. They emerged from it. and payday three is on the way. It looks like they're going to do well, which I'm really hopeful for, because they were actually a very, they were a great group of people to work with.

We really enjoyed the people who worked with the Star Breeze, a lot of great people there. But they had, I don't, they took on some really big projects that did work out, which can sometimes sync studios. But fortunately, within, within Swedish law, they were able to work their way through the process of putting their

company back together and radically downsizing. But part of the downsizing meant that they publishing other people's games was probably not going to work out for them. So Michael Namark

was the person running the studio at the time. And he sadly passed away a couple years ago. He was a wonderful, wonderful person. He helped us through that process of giving us a a nice separation deal where we would give a small percentage of the revenue of the game that would eventually come out back to Star Breeze to kind of pay them back for the money they invested

they invested into it and at this point they made a small profit off of their original investment in old world which is which is nice but you know they were able to give us uh back the rights to the game we had when we negotiated the deal we were able to keep the IP because we kind of set itself as a standard for, I mean, again, they were making developer-friendly deals. We had talked to a lot of publishers where that was not on the table. So, like, if we're going to give you money for the game, it's going to be our IP, right? Yeah, that is really key to hold on to that as a really big thing to negotiate for. Yeah.

I mean, it's easy to say that. That's something you go to all these sorts of GDC talks and people always always, always, you know, hold on to your IP. But I've always felt that's, it's not disingenuous. It's just kind of like, I mean, hopefully you can negotiate that. But, you know, if you're a completely, you know, if you're a few students coming out of school and like you don't have a track record or anything, like, you know, I don't know if you're going to be able to get that term of the contract. I mean, you, you fight for it. But be aware that it's just a term like anything else. And, and, you know, I think there's sometimes when it might be better to take more a higher royalty or more money up front or whatever. If you don't think necessarily this is an IP that you're going to work on, you know, 10, 20 years down the road, you know, It's just, it's not an ironclad thing. Like, it's okay to sign a deal if the rest of it is, is okay. Yeah, that's great.

That's great advice. Yeah, so these tradeoffs, and we'll kind of wrap this up soon because we're going to run out time yet again. But I think it's important to kind of identify the different things that you could choose to care about, right? There's sort of how upfront payment and derisking what you've done and how much work you have to do before you get that. There's a percentage of royalty and how that kicks in and where you,

you know, what you're going to get for, for however long or ongoing. There's ownership of the IP and creative control. You know, maybe there's other things that are relevant here, but those are the big ones that I tend to think about. Is there any other ones I missed that that should be part of the discussion? Yeah, those are the key points. And, you know, we were, you know, so we had the control of the IP. So it was fairly straightforward once they, you know,

once we separate Star Breeze. Then we need to find other publishers. I mean, we were playing other publishers, as you can potentially work with, but we, um, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the opportunity for us was that epic was doing these exclusivity deals at the time. Um, and, you know, epic was able to step in, do something, get something going really quick. And, you know, this, uh, this, uh, this, this ramp to get the game out on early access early on this emerging platform

and put ourselves in a really strong foundation as a studio where we knew we're like, okay, now we have the money, not just to finish the game, but to support it for years to come afterwards. And it won't be in a situation where if the game doesn't necessarily do as well as we hope, we won't have the money to be able to keep supporting it and making new stuff.

And instead, that money's going to go to pay back the publisher instead. So we felt like that was the, that was the situation that was going to put us in position to make the absolute best game. So that worked out really, really well. Yeah, that's great. So if we have, we'll do maybe kind of a little bit of rapid fire before we close, because I have two questions I wanted to ask before. Are the last of the things on my list that I wanted to,

that's now taken us three hours or so plus of time to get to? One is, in old world, one of the things that's interesting is that your leaders die. Yes, right. This is controversial and very unlike the way that you know, you kind of have these immortal leaders, the sort of in all of the, pretty much every other Siv style 4X game I could think of where you just, you know,

okay, you're Cleopatra or A. Blinken or whatever, and you just have this sort of immortal leader that kind of takes over, which makes no sense, but it is the trope. And so you've, you introduce death. Talk to me about that decision a little bit and what it felt like. to kill players constantly. So in parallel, as I was kind of like letting my

4X ideas lie fallow for seven or eight years between SIF 4 and Old World, actually, I suppose it's more like 10 years. I saw the emergence of a lot of games that were like putting a lot of emphasis into characters and real people, right? And, you know, XCOM is a good example of this,

but especially the really big one is Crusader Kings. it became a very, very popular game. And it's sort of like a 4x game. We don't need to go into where it differs or doesn't differ. But the main thing is you really- A secret counsel that controls the names will be listening. So yeah, we want to go there. Yeah.

But what's really important is you're playing a character. Like, yeah, you're sort of control a nation, but you're really playing this person, right? And so you have your own traits and abilities and things you're good at and things you're bad at, like I guess like a role-playing game, right? But you also have these relationships with your spouse and with your children and with the leaders of other nations and with these important nobles in your empire. And those relationships can go up and down and you can get killed, right? Like you can be playing the game and you get killed and then someone else takes over. And so managing the succession is really interesting.

And then you can have all these events that are actually grounded in something, right? Like you discover that your cousin, you know, you've heard rumors that your cousin might be trained to poison you. You know, like, do you act on that? You know, maybe these rumors are true. Maybe they're not. And it just created all these interesting bits of, bits of gameplay, things that were, this kind of texture and detail that really was just completely missing from the civilization series because it has to function at such an abstract layer. You know, like, you know, early on in the game, every turn is like 50 years. You know, like it just, it goes so fast that you have to have these kind of weird.

God rulers, right? And where like, yeah, it does it. It works fine. But it's not something that you can really put kind of like human, human traits and strengths and weaknesses into. And so, so that was, you know, orders was one big bullet point that I, when I was pitching the game, like, we're going to do this different. And the other one was characters.

We're going to put real characters into like a historical 4x, right? So, you know, you're not even going to. going to be Alexander. You're going to start as Philip, right? You're going to start his dad. And you're going to be old. Then Alexander will be like a 16-year-old, right? And you're going to see him develop. And maybe you keep living longer or maybe you die like, you know, like Philip did. And Alex I was going to take over as a young ruler and, you know, have his moment. Or maybe he's going to get crippled in a training accident when he's 18 and he's going to have to become a scholar, you know, instead of a great warrior, right?

And we just found that there was just so much kind of rich gameplay that could be found there that also, and here's a really key thing that we didn't necessarily have to teach players, right? Like this is always one of the challenges of making games, especially strategy games. It's like, okay, yes, you can make all these mechanics, but a mechanic is meaningless

if you can't somehow explain it to the, player, get them to understand what's going on, get them to engage with it. Right. So if your mechanics are built off of these arbitrary things, you're just making a bunch of stuff up, which often happens in like sci-fi games or whatever, then you're putting a big load on the player to understand the game. If you make a game where you involve characters, everyone understands the idea of like, oh, I get older, so I'm going to get weaker or I'm going to die and this thing's going to

happen, or they understand like, I'm going to get married and we're going to have kids and that's going to have these implications or if my spouse dislikes me, then maybe we'll stop having kids or maybe this other thing is going to happen. People anticipate that stuff. You don't have to explain to them how all the rules are going to work, right? They bring their own experiences into the game. And I found that that was very, very valuable to making an old world and engaging game. Yeah.

The more you can leverage people's pre-existing knowledge to build your mechanics, the more deep and complex a system you could build, right? So it's just true from the basics of I understand what, you know, getting old is like or, you know, tropes from previous games where it's like, okay, I understand that if you tell me I'm a mage, then probably I can cast spells and I'm not that good in physical combat or if I see a little disc icon, probably that means I use that to save the game, even though nobody uses floppy disks anymore, right? Somehow that's now become the language for saving things and so, you know,

but because we have that as a built, I don't necessarily have to teach you that, even though most people playing games today have never actually held a floppy disk. Yeah, and it's a weird thing. As a designer, you got to keep contradictory things in your head at times. This is kind of a good example because there's this other aspect of this of

realism can be a real trap for games, especially historical ones of like, oh, we want to be as realistic as possible. And that often leads designers down bad paths. right because then they're they sometimes are making choices that uh you know it's not fun first anymore the realism gets in the way it's not fun first but on the other hand there's this other thing what i've just been talking about like you know actually this whole thing about like characters aging and getting sick and getting married and having these things that's actually sort of realism right like

it's just it's more like what do people it's important to acknowledge the realism that that comes to people's to the game from the player in terms of their expectations from how the world works. How do I find the fun in old age and death? But yeah, I mean, anything, you know, it is important to have a certain level of realism when you're trying to leverage stuff that people know. That's why physics games are really popular. Like, there's a lot of successful physics games because you're not, you don't have to teach people gravity, right?

Like they already have that expectation, right? Yep, yep. that ability, you know, even just the basics of like the most simplest forms of play of, you know, throwing a ball around or chasing, you know, there's the basics that these are basic skills and things that we understand. And the more that, you know, we build games that layer onto these building blocks, the more likely we are to, A, understand them and B, be attracted to them because there's skills and relatable things, right, if I'm learning about human relationships and processes of aging and the consequences of my, how I behave in relationships as, as you can in an old world, that's

going to be intrinsically engaging because we are super wired and super fine-tuned to care about that sort of thing because that's what civilizations are for humans. Yeah. Like we have a weird, a weird tiny old example of that in that how infertility works in old world. Like we're generally speaking, we're very transparent about everything. It's a bit of like the digital tabletop game DNA, which is kind of part of our company. Like we think that like we we think it's really important for a strategy game to be

very transparent about how the rules work. so you can anticipate the consequences of your decisions, right? But infertility is one place we kind of break that because we just feel like it's kind of unrealistic. I don't know, it just feels wrong, right? That, you know, you have a character and you see like infertile, right? Like it just is like, well, how did you know that this 14 year old's infertile, right? Especially in the ancient era.

And it's, it's, you know, it's just something that you will eventually infer once they're 40 and they've been married for 20 years and they don't have kids. right? And I can't come up with a simple explanation of when you should do it one way or when you should do it the other. But like this is just one place where I'm like, okay, I think we should be realistic here and not actually tell you, even though we're telling you like, oh, your character's proud and your character is debauched and they're witty and here's their wisdom rating. For some reason, it just felt like wrong to us to actually tell you that this character isn't fertile. That's interesting. Yeah. It plays into this broader question of

of, yeah, you mentioned, keeping contradictory things in your head. And sometimes you have a principle that holds one way. And then there's certain cases where your intuition, your playtesting, et cetera, makes you feel that you need to go to the opposite. It's an interesting, quirky example of it. All right. So we have, in fact, gotten to the end of our time. The last thing I wanted to ask about, we're going to give you, let's say, two or three

minutes to talk about because it's going to be converted into an elevator pitch, which is this recent DLC, I mean, a couple months ago now, I suppose, for Old World, the sacred and the profane. And you just chose to make religion

the focal point of an expansion, which is not the first time a civilization-style game has done that. But it seems, I've purposely avoided religion in any of my games, generally speaking, other than purely, completely fantasy things.

So maybe just talk to me a little bit about that, and you can go ahead and maybe give people, if they're excited about this, then where they can go get it. Yeah, I mean, we want to do something on religion just because we feel like it's a really important texture of the era. You know, this is a time when you have, you know, kind of the monotheistic religions that became kind of world religions and are still with us today, kind of like sitting, you know, right next door to, you know, pagan religions and cults and things that that worked much differently than how, you know, really stuff that's practiced today. And, you know, so we felt like there was a lot of kind of fertile ground to do some, some interesting stuff there. And, yeah, I know people, yeah, religion is obviously a very sensitive topic.

And I was the person who added religion for the first time to SIV. We, you know, Siv was the first time we, SIF four was the first time we kind of name names. You know, we, there was Christianity and Islam and Buddhism and Hinduism and so on. And but we did it in just the most like milk toast way possible because we were super anxious about it. You know, like the religions are literally just all the same. Like it's just just different flavors. And it kind of just creates a framework for if any, I mean, it does a number of things,

but one of the most important things it does creates a framework for diplomacy. Right. Like, okay, if these two nations have the same religion, they might tend to be friends. And they may, may just like a nation that has a. different religion, right? Like, we literally just kind of wanted, wanted something like that to give some sort of grit diplomacy. But over time, SIV 5 and SIF 6, and especially a bunch of other games, like the, especially the paradox games, have moved a lot more forward. They move forward because they saw that like, okay, having a couple of religions in SIF 4 wasn't the end of the world,

right? Like, we can start to experiment with some of these things. And, you know, this is part of a human experience. And it's good to have it in there. And at a higher level, this DLC, the Saker Than Profane, I'm really excited for it for a different reason and that I've often found it difficult to work on expansions for my games because I kind of view them like, in my mind, I want them to be kind of like this perfect box of stuff, right? Like everything is necessary for the game is in there. You don't need more stuff, right? Like it's, it's, it's, I want to be perfect. And of course, that's not how everything works in practice, but that, that's my goal, right? So it's often hard for me like to finish that and to be like, okay, now time to cram some more stuff in there.

Right. And so I was really, that was the things. One of the things I was really excited for the event system in old world because it actually is a place where you can just cram more stuff, right? Like the event system is this essentially deck of like 4,000 cards where each event has a, is a, set of prerequisites, oh, if you have a leader who's old and is a drunk and has a, you know, as an air that has these qualities, that this card is valid, right? And there's 4,000 of them. So there's a whole bunch of different things that can happen.

And in that one situation, variety is basically just a plus, right? Because if you add more cards, it's not going to weigh down the game. It's just going to make the cards you draw different, right, from one game to the other. And so essentially, if people like the Saker and the Profane, the way that DLC works, we could just keep making these kind of event decks indefinitely, right? So, I mean, so far it's been very popular. People really like seeing the new events that come in. And we do things like it has a special, this is something important on the business size.

It has a special frame when those events come up because, like, we feel like it's important. But when people play a game and they add a DLSA, they want to kind of see their money on the screen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, oh, this event, I got this event because I'd, paid the five bucks or whatever to get the to get the DLC. And presumably you wait you wait that content a little bit more heavily at least up front. The new

stuff's going to show up more often than the old stuff. We do a little bit of that but for the most part I don't think we didn't mess around with it too much because it does kind of hit like this different area. So if you start building these pagan shrines, you're probably going to get some of the new content. So it does allow you

You can opt into it if you want. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, great. Well, it's awesome. I love I love. I'm glad we were finally able to get through all of the things I wanted to get through. I'm sure we could spend another three hours deep diving into various points. So apologies for where I had to rush you through some things. But it was fantastic. It's the first ever kind of full two-part episode continuation that I've done and a lot of great content. So I'm hoping that the audience loved this as much as I did. So thanks so much for your time, all of your time. And I can't wait to come out and visit you in person and maybe spend another four hours on your podcast.

chatting about more things. Yeah, that would be, that would be great. There's a lot of really good game designers in the DC area. I don't know if you've come out to her. You know, I have not been to the DC area since I went on a high school trip. So I will add it. I am going to add it to my list for sure. I think it would be a great, you know, as a nomad, I have a fair amount of flexibility in where I go.

And I think it would be fantastic to come by and spend some time with you. Yeah, well, let me know because it would be great to have you on. Great. Awesome. All right. Well, so until our part three, which will be on your podcast, this is great. See you soon. Cool.

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