Think Like A Game Designer - Tim Fowers — Navigating the World of Indie Board Game Design, Direct Sales Success, and the Craft of Game Development (#7)

Episode Date: July 2, 2019

Tim Fowers is the punk rocker of game design. A purely independent tabletop and digital game developer, who distributes his games directly, rather than using big publishers and standard distribution channels. This allows Tim to stand out as a master of indy game design, who develop his games according to his artistic vision. There’s so much to learn in this episode – Enjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. In today's episode, I'll be talking with Tim Fowers. Now, before I get into talking about the episode, I just want to say thank you to the thousands of you that have subscribed, listened to, and downloaded the episode, and to the dozens of you that have written reviews and shared the podcast to help spread the word. It really helps make a difference, and it's inspired me to reach out to even more designers and to create even more involved

programs to help people like you, to design games, to help us all learn the craft together. And in fact, for those of you who have not had a chance to attend one of my Think Like a Game Designer workshops that I've been hosting around the country, I'm looking to build an online program that will allow anyone to participate, and us all to help each other in a private Facebook group to work on these principles and actually go through the experience of design. So if you're interested in learning more about that, sign up for my newsletter at stoneblade.com, and I'll be making more announcements there as that program develops. Now, to talk about Tim, this was actually one of the first episodes that I recorded.

So some of the audio quality is not as good as I might like, so please bear with me on that. But there's a lot of gems in this episode. Tim Fowers is actually one of the most purely indie developers, truly indie developers that I've had a chance to speak with. He doesn't use standard distribution or big publishers for either his physical or digital games. He's a very deep thinker on games. And he actually has his own website where he sells his games directly to fans, Fowers. Games. And it's really allowed him to create his true vision of what he wants to see and be able to be an artist that

succeeds in the marketplace in a way that almost no other designers I know do. So it's really great to see his perspective. And I think you can learn a lot about the different ways that you can succeed as a game designer and not necessarily fall into one of the patterns that people think you have to to succeed. So the types of things you're going to see in this episode are you're going to learn the real questions that you need to ask to find out what playtesters really think according to Amazon. You're going to learn how working on a game too long can backfire and how do you combat that problem.

You're going to learn a trick to get broke people to buy your game. And you're going to learn all about Tim's philosophy on game design and how he's able to make this career and create this niche for himself that has been so successful. I really enjoyed this conversation with Tim, even though it was a few, a while ago that we actually had it. The principles are still super relevant today. And I've had a chance to talk with him recently, and he's still doing great projects and launching new things on Kickstarter. And it's been a really awesome way that made me change the way I thought about my own business and my own career. So hopefully you guys find this as valuable as I did.

And without further ado, here is Tim Fowers. I'm here speaking with Tim Fowers, the designer of board games including Burgul Brothers, fugitive, paperback, and others, as well as video games, now boarding, clockwords, Sev Zero. Tim and I got a chance to meet Jen Con last year, and we instantly hit it off, and I really wanted to share some of the conversations we've been having at board game geek con and other places with my audience and then kind of dig a little deeper into a lot of the interesting things that you've been doing on both the art of design as well as the

business and the way you do game design. And so thanks for joining me. Hey, I'm glad to be here. Awesome. So, you know, I kind of gave a little blurb about some of the stuff you've done, but I'd love to talk a little bit more about your background, what got you into game design, and kind of what brought you here. Okay.

I was programming at a medical imaging firm. Yeah, oh, okay, college I did physics, and I really haven't ever used that. but I ended up falling into kind of medical imaging. You know, it's one of those things where you get out of college and you just kind of like go with whatever momentum is taking you. And you start working towards that. And, you know, I ended up in this job and a coworker mine had actually done some game development before.

And all these things kind of happened at the same time. I got really interested in indie video games. And I kind of discovered the whole Puerto Rico settlers, you know, the new war games. like in 05-06. And so kind of got inspired at that point and decided to like, hey, let's make a run of this. And it's one of those things too where it's like, I kind of arrived at like, oh, we got the house that we're going to be in forever. And like, this is the plan. It's just, you know, life has this momentum that'll, you know, just like, well, you know, you kind of assume those are your goals

and so you really start to question what's going to make you happy. And so I started to be a little more ambitious and a little more risky. And early on, I took some pretty ridiculous risks, you know, trying to make it as an indie video game creator. But kind of through that that crucible, I got decent at making games. Talk to me a little bit more about that because that's, you know, one of the things I always talk about is sort of taking these calculated risks and the value of falling flat on your face. So it's talking to me a little bit more about how that went down.

Well, I mean, what do they say? that the best test of whether you can be entrepreneurs, how you handle uncertainty in your life. And, and I mean, there's literally tests for uncertainty. You can be like, okay, this is, you know, this is how much I can handle my life. And, you know, basically early on, I was like, okay, I'm going to make video games. And I had a business partner. When you say tests for uncertainty, you mean like something like a form, like a thing I can fill out online that'll be an entrepreneur? There was, well, it wasn't tied to entrepreneur.

That's a, that's a connection. But it's, but you need to have a very high ability to cope with uncertainty to, to, um, not stress out too much when you're, when an entrepreneur. Um, because some people, you really want stability and consistency and, uh, you know, and usually specialization will lead you towards that. Um, if you're specialized in something, people will want you for that. But, uh, you know, when you're an entrepreneur, it's, you know, you're, um, there's a lot that goes into just entrepreneurship in general.

but there's a certain umph that that you get in a certain drive that you get when you know you've got you've got to hustle and you've got to you've got to make it to make ends meet and to eat your next meal but at the same time like for sanity I've always had a phrase in the back of my head it's like well I can always work at Wendy's and and and so despite all these risks I'm like you know I've done I've done a bunch of jobs it's like I can go do other stuff so how about I take a shot at doing something I really like and if it doesn't work out you know, they'll go back to plan B or something. But so early on it was more like, hey, let's go full-time indie.

And this is after maybe a year and a half of kind of working on some different projects, even spending up other businesses to help pay for being in Indy. But finally we're like, let's just do it. So we, you know, moved to Kentucky. It was a cheap cost of living there. I mean my business partner moved our whole family's over there. And we didn't really have much of a runway or that long term of a plan. It's one of those things like if you know all the risks up front,

you wouldn't really make those choices. Right. You don't know what you don't know. And yeah, definitely a lot of things. I'm like, wow, in retrospect, I probably should have done that. But then again, I learned so much and now here I am. Yeah. And that's also the other thing is a sign of an entrepreneur is how you frame failure. Because, you know, you really have to just see it as like, well, I learned about these things and I got better.

And, you know, even if it's just like the lesson was don't do that thing. A lot of people, you know, when they're risk averse, they still have dreams. But they really only think they have like one shot at it. They're like, well, I'm going to do the Great American novel or I'm going to open a diner or something. And if that doesn't work out, I'm going to go right back to whatever I was doing before. You know, it's like they only kind of, you know, project that through that one possibility. And in a lot of times, you know, obviously that's kind of setting up for failure because you're probably going to fail the first thing you do. And, you know, you just, again, you just don't have enough information going into it.

So, it was kind of thing. So we got going. And, you know, there was a sequence of fortunate events that led us to actually, you know, survive on being indie for three or four years out in Kentucky. You were a game, now boarding. Is that you had a team with you or? No, just me and a business partner. So the guy that was back at the medical imaging with me and he was kind of the programmer, I was the producer. or designer kind of everything else.

I just kind of helped with everything else. And actually, we made a couple games and we lived off them for several years. And then you kind of get to the point where, well, the games aren't really going well. It's just like, well, what do we do? I mean, you're spinning down. You're like, well, what's the next step? And so for me, I'm kind of- Sorry, I don't interrupt.

I just want to niche down a little bit more. So you made a couple games, meaning you designed some, you had some ideas for games, you, your partner programmed them. And you launched them. These are Steam games. These were on your website. What? PC download games.

So this is back in the era of Big Fish and kind of all that old PC download era, you know, like 04 to 08 kind of window. Gotcha. And also Flash Portals are really big. So we made a Flash game called Nowboarding and we used it to upsell to a download version of it. And so we were able to leverage all that audience coming from the Flash portals. into purchasing the game. Gotcha.

And then we did a follow-on with clockwords, and we made some mistakes there. But I can't say whether if we made the other decisions, it would have been successful. But either way, the second game kind of didn't work out. Those mistakes, are those, you know, we sort of talked earlier about the kind of lessons you draw, and that's one of the things that sort of,

is there, whether there are things that you teased out of that mistake Oh, yeah. I had a little bit of a design crisis with how I perceive, like, random drops. Because once you start to get into design and you start to get into like rarity packs or things like that, you start to get into the ethics of design and like what is fair to the consumer and fair to their time. And because there's hacks that you can always use. It's like there will always be a weakness in humans will watch progress bars until they

die. You can use scarcity to drive them towards things. Like there's as the more you design like, more you're into, and one of them like is is random drops. And you know, it's just like, well, okay, like Diablo. Diablo uses random drops. And you know, on one side you could see it as like, well, it's kind of a slot machine for gamers. Um, you know, if that's really what's driving in the game is the slots or the random drops. And so I had random drops in this, in this kind of tower defense word game called clockwords. And, and so we did it. like a preview version of it, and it did really well and got a lot of traction.

And so then we're like, okay, we're going to do the sequel and we're going to monetize it using microtrans and we're going to have some like premium versions of it and whatnot. We had all these plans. But like I got to this crisis where I'm just like, I didn't feel like I could have straight up random drops in the game. And it's one of those things where like I was still learning as a designer. And so I tried to make it more like a dominion thing.

and I try to try to kind of like, I don't know. And so it's one of those things because you're pivoting so much, now you don't know what the soul of it is. And so we kind of have these different modes that did a bunch of different things. But it was, you know, the design was kind of lost. And it didn't get traction. It didn't really do well. I find that really interesting because there's a couple, you know,

there's a couple of threads there. There's the, you know, the morality of design is something I've talked about. I did a talk on South by Southwest on that last year. I was talking about designing collectible games and, you know, how do you know when you've crossed that line into the dark side? And, you know, it's important. You know, it's important to think about it. You know, insofar as, you know, you're providing a valuable game and enjoyable experience to players, I don't, you know, I don't mind using those psychological tricks. But there's definitely a point at which, you know, it's more about taking value from them rather than giving value to them. And that's, I think, where that light gets crossed. Yeah. And I think it's, you know, there's always, you're always going to have your own kind of measurement of that heuristic. But. you know yeah I mean it's it's already being fair to their time I think that is a kind of a a fundamental thing but I don't know and there's always new tricks there's always new arbitrage

but there's but a lot of it boils down to to kind of what the casinos do I mean that's when you're getting close to what casinos do you know you're you know towards the bottom of the barrel but so I mean years later I mean since then I've actually I have several mentors in the video game industry and I had this conversation with one of them and and his his take was that, you know, random drops are necessarily bad. It's just what is the primary activity of the game? And in Diablo, it's actually, you know, killing monsters and kind of that bubble-popping satisfaction of, you know, constantly killing swarms of monsters.

And the random drops are just kind of this, you know, they're in there as part of the reinforcement loop. But they're not the primary driver. You're getting those weapons so that you can kill more things. You're not killing things so you can get more weapons per se. I mean, maybe they're even, I don't know. But, and so, you know, I think it was a good perspective, and it helped me kind of understand that there are a place for these things,

for these different tricks. It's just you need to step back and look at what you're making. Because in the modern age, you know, you're making psychological drugs. It's like there's, and there's some nasty tricks. I mean, Zinga really rode off of a lot of, a lot of arbitrage. Like, a lot of people had an adapt. to the model of what Farmville was doing with scarcity and with, you know, different kind of like, a lot of really negative reinforcement loops.

But humans adapt. I mean, in the end, we kind of see, oh, well, what did that do to my life? Even though I couldn't stop playing at the time and I wasn't enjoying it, eventually humans will adapt. And you'll be like, okay, I'm not having fun anymore. This is sucking all my money and I'm not, I'm just feeling obligated to play this game. And now you'll see more positive reinforcement loops when it comes to it. but there's still, you know, it's just, it changes, right? And some of them are really hacky and some of them are really elegant.

And even the perception, it's like sometimes you even talk to audiences and you say, well, how do you feel about, you know, these different games? How do you feel about what magic does? How do you feel about what Harstom does? How do you feel about what Riot Games does when it comes to, you know, the randomness or just to be a general addictiveness? Because random is one part. of the general kind of addictive loop.

Sorry, this is a whole, whole, this is a whole diet, you know, I could, I could go on about this. But to keep the story going, you know, our second game didn't go so well, and you kind of get to the point with a business partner where you're kind of like, well, we kind of want to make different things now. And it's the, you know, I know it's the cliche, you know, the band breaks up because of creative differences, and it can happen, you know. And so, you know, I decided to go into industry at that point.

and I thought I was a producer, and I tried doing a little bit of producing in the video game industry, and wasn't so great at it. I'm not super organized, but turns out I'm a good designer. And so I got on with Amazon Game Studios as a designer, and I was there for three or four years. And there's actually, there was a nice little studio there working on some cool tech, like we were working on the Fire Phone and the Echo and the Fire TV, like these new tech things that Amazon was doing. and they kind of wanted to see how games intersected with them. And that was cool. And then later on, it got more towards, well, if we're going to make games, you know, we need to make something a little more core.

So there's a big push towards core gaming. And, you know, it was kind of like, there's a lot of, like, where's my halo kind of thing with management? And that kind of pushed me out. I'm really a casual game designer at heart, or at least something that's more crossover. I make, I know, I play core games, but I don't feel like I want to design in that space

unless I have something really new to bring to it. So I learned a lot being in Amazon, a lot about how to playtest properly. You know, like one of the big ones was like, don't, do not intercede in the playtest. It's almost like a blind playtest. Don't intercede in the playtest until they put the controller down. Because there's these instances where people may seem super frustrated with the game

and they're actually having fun. and you as an observer often can't tell. Also just like, you know, what questions to ask, how to kind of measure the success of different prototypes, both, you know, as a good instinct, like how to read people, but then also how to read, you know, what's actually data? You know, what can you measure using surveys after a play test? So I learned, sorry, go ahead.

No, I'd love to hear more about that, because I think that's something that a lot of people don't do well, especially when they're first getting started, is knowing how to run a playtest and how to read that, right? Because just, you know, talking to people and asking them how did they like it is almost always useless in my experience. Yeah. I mean, the, you know, there's, I mean, there's lots of stuff about how to take feedback and, you know, and how to react to it and whatnot and how to respond to people. I think that's mostly been covered, but some of them were, some of the other ones were when you're, I mean, well, there's some tricks even. You can even say, like, this isn't my game. This is my friend's game.

And he wanted me to show it to you guys. And the honestness of your responses go way up. Granted, your honesty just went down, but, you know. So the other one, the questions we asked, and actually I know two different sets. The one that Andy Schatz uses, he was, he's like, what did you like? What didn't you like? What didn't you understand? Those are his three questions.

the three that we used at Amazon, well, there's some other ones, the word association stuff afterward, but the main three were on the scale of one to seven, apparently a five point or seven point scale is a good one to use from like to dislike. You know, how fun was this game? And that was the first question.

Usually we'd throw that one out entirely because it was useless. Right. But the other two was, would you play this game again, or do you want to play it again now? You can phrase different ways. and do you

would you recommend this to a friend? And those ended up being really strong indicators of what they really thought of the game. And so we were

usually my if I leave them with a prototype and I walk away and if they start their own game their own second game that's my

that's my usual good time. Okay. Yeah. I mean I'm kind of bad when I'm when I do when I'm doing development because oftentimes I'm not trying to test the new user experience because oftentimes the new user experience I'm relying on the instructions more for that. Oftentimes I'm actually

trying to test something deeper in the game and so I'll actually help these people out a lot to try to get to kind of the meteor strategies in the game because but oftentimes it's new people and so I need to kind of like bootstrap them up to kind of in a more advanced play level. I mean, oftentimes I make cooperative games, so it's a little different there. Yeah. But I don't know, so, but I get towards the end, I do more, I do more, you know, get towards blind tests or, you know, kind of more hands off. But I mean, instructions, man, instructions are tough, but. Writing rules, that's a whole, yeah, that's a whole other ballwax that I, we could probably devote an entire episode.

Yeah, yeah, that's, yeah, but because oftentimes I won't have reasonable rules until, you know, kind of right before the Kickstarter. So I'll do more hands-off demos. Sometimes I'll, sometimes I will do some remote ones. But really, the test is when you start sending it to you, like, okay, I think this is good enough for reviewers. And then you start sending up to reviewers and seeing kind of what responses you're getting there. And that's kind of as you're ramping into a Kickstarter. Not that Kickstarter is the answer for everybody, but there's a value proposition there.

It's hard to turn down a Kickstarter. I mean, besides like building a community, getting beta testers, getting, you know, your market testing something in really kind of a low, really low risk way, you can be like, is this something that people really want, you know? It really, I mean, people don't see Kickstarter as much for how good failure is on Kickstarter.

You can re-kick it. You can not re-kick it. Like, you can, like, you know, people think, I mean, obviously don't overinvest in the initial Kickstarter, but, you know, like the video or whatever. But at the same time, like, you didn't lose a lot. I mean, compared to the days when you had to go to a print run and hope it sold, you're just fine now. You go do a Kickstarter and you don't do okay or you didn't, you know, something went

wrong. It's fine. Even if it means that that game isn't going to be made in this version right now. You know, you, it's okay. But again, some people, when they see failure in kind of creative endeavors, get really, take it very personally. Yeah. Yeah. And this, I mean, in these, you know, to be fair, like, it's a lot harder for people when it's the sort of very public failure where you tell all your friends and try to, you know, put you.

It's a very, very good your face kind of failure for a lot of people. Yeah. Yeah. It is, I mean, it's also like as you start out as a designer and you're, and when you're doing your first. couple things. You get really, really defensive because, you know, you get all these people, they're like, oh, should I copyright this? Oh, should I have them sign an NDA? And what's at the core of that is their fear that this is the last good idea they'll ever have. I mean, that's really what it is. They think they've got their one shot and they think that this one is good enough

and that they should protect themselves against that, you know, that eventuality because, but then once you've done a bunch of games, you're kind of like, now if somebody's makes something really similar to an idea that I've done. I actually feel relief. I'm like, great. I don't feel responsible to make that game anymore. I'm going to go make something else. Totally agree. Yeah. The value of it's, you know, first of all, you know, it is the value of a good idea is maybe 10% of the total process or the execution is everything. And so, you know, that is where people should be putting their strengths and being afraid of failure or being afraid to reveal your ideas to other people and talk about them is the sure file way to not be able to execute well.

Yeah. And another experience I had. So I'll fast forward a little bit. So as I was kind of in the middle of my Amazon career, I was starting to spin up board games on the side. Because Walkstar was in the middle of Kentucky. I started on WalkStar while I was waiting for Tom to code some stuff. So I started making Walkstar. And I went through a whole bunch of publisher drama with that.

You know, Mayfair sat on it for a year. Not even gave me yes or no. And then I finally saw it with Z-Man. Z-Man sat on it for two years. So finally, I got the rights back from Z-Man. And even then, they were shocked that I took the rights back. You know, I got the rights back. And so now I had, you know, Walkstar back.

It's been, you know, I've been in Amazon for a year or two. And I'm like, man, like, if Walkstar had come out in like, 0-9, 2010 in the form that I wanted it, you know, things would have been, you know, it would have been a solid game. but but things other you know escape and some other games came out and started to feel like my game wasn't as you know like it had kind of been flanked like like other things you know other games were doing this real-time co-op thing better than me so I wanted to you know want to fix my game you know and it's one of those things where if you if you have a design for too long you start to second-guess you know design decisions and you start to get really nervous about it you start to

fret about things. And you start to polish the stone too much. And this is kind of the term I used. You just keep polishing the stone until there's nothing left. Or the thing you were trying to make is now really generic or kind of unidentifiable. And what I was lacking at that point was friends that I can go to that can tell me when I'm kind of going too far. You can't design in isolation because it's this hall of mirrors where you keep seeing. your own reflection constantly and you keep reinforcing certain ideas about things. So now I have friends that literally talk me down from different things. Even now with different decisions I'm making is, you know, sometimes with a game,

you have to see a game, any one creative thing you produce as a snapshot of who you were at the time. And now that I've had the experience of like over polishing that stone and because I went back to Walkstar and I kind of overfixed it. And now there's people like, I kind of like the first edition more. And for me that like cuts, I'm just like, no, I was trying to make it better in every way. And they're like, no, no, the first one was like, it had its quirks, but like they were quirks. You know, like, and so now I don't, it's hard for me to even look back on a game. I'm just like, and I'm going to do some sequel stuff from my, for my games.

But for the most part, I want to, I'm going to just move forward. And I don't sit there and see all the flaws in my previous designs. I'm like, that's who I was at the time. And, you know, it's just like I had Zitz in high school, you know, It's like you look back at yourself and you see your flaws, but then it's just kind of adorable. It's just kind of like, yeah, you know, that was that was a good time. I had a good time in high school or whatever. Let me ask a question then, because it's related to this.

How do you know when a game is done? I mean, I've been lucky. I mean, I can't not say that I've, you know, because I've had a lot of success with my games. But the ones that are that I really get to the point where pretty much everybody I show the game to really enjoys it. They're just like, they're like, you know, I'm getting questions like, when can I buy this game? Can we play this game again? You know, that kind of stuff. You know, that's my, like, my metric of kind of a done game.

I mean, that's kind of an easy one. There's other times where I'm just like, I think this is the best form of this idea. And I'm just going to, I'm just going to pick a date. I'm going to pinch it off. And like, we're going to, we're going to do this thing. Because there's always going to be something fundamentally wrong. not for the only minute, but like that you want to improve that you can't because you can't do without being elegant or you can't do with jacking with other systems.

Done is better than perfect. Yeah, that's good. I really, I do. I love by that. And another phrase I've heard often is, you know, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And I know I talk with my team here and I have a almost religious belief in the power of deadlines. Yeah.

They just have this magical way to just force you to focus on what's essential and move it forward and get it out the door. And you'd be surprised how many last minute things on my games certainly were super last minute. They're like, okay, this is going to the printer. We're already after the Kickstarter, you know, and just that pressure of like it's going to be final. But yes, absolutely. Things just kind of converge. Oftentimes with Kickstarter, you just pick a date. You're like, okay, I'm just going to launch on this date.

I'm going to work towards that. And that's going to be my, that's going to be my launch date. And then you just, you start, you know, backtracking. Okay, okay, I need, I'll have to have this ready by this date. And you start kind of calendaring the whole thing. And then you're in Kickstarter. And now Kickstarter, like you've now committed to a whole bunch of people to do a thing. So, you know, you now, from then forward, you're basically under the deadlines of the project itself.

Now it has its own momentum. them and you're just keeping up with it and trying to plan as best you can around that. Yep. But what do I say? Kickstarter is you're instantly famous for something you haven't done yet. It's an interesting place to be in. There's a lot of, there's a lot of just like Kickstarter management stuff.

I mean, just being transparent, being calm. I mean, most of the time, you know, I never ever respond to a critique of your game unless there is misinformation. The only time that I'll nip something in the butt

is like if there is somebody's playing something wrong or or doesn't have all the facts or whatever. But for the most part, I won't. It's even funny. Sometimes the most critical people of my games all kind of silently stalk. I'll see what else they like and what are the things they've reviewed. And part of me is like, maybe something I can make a game that that person will like. And it's just also the general thick skin that you get over time, both with, you know, like you'll have a playtest and things will just just go horribly. It's the first edition of the game, and you're openly apologizing for how

horrible this game is to the people that you've wasted their time on it. But, you know, you'd be really open about it. And then, you know, there's kind of the different phases of playtesting for me where, you know, a new idea will get me maybe through maybe three iterations of a game. And usually in rapid succession, usually in under three weeks, I'll kind of get through a couple different or two or three different iterations of a game. And then you start to lose steam. Because there's this vision of like, this game is going to be awesome. You know, it could be like, it's going to have this great mechanic or it's going to have this one moment in the game or it's going to have this emotional response. You have the goal. You have how it's going to play out

in your mind. And that's your anchor. And you're like, okay, I'm going to work towards that. And then, you know, you start working on it and you get your first, you know, go down and go to the gone to the craft store, print all your stuff out. You know, you play it, and it usually just falls apart. Just burns to the ground, you know, and you're apologizing to people. And there's a little flex of gold that you kind of pick out of the ashes to kind of go, you know, rebuild it. But there's this honeymoon phase where you have all this energy towards this goal. And then over time, that will kind of erode.

And basically, I find that I will often just kind of backburner stuff. I don't say cancel. I just keep, because I shift between a lot of projects. I kind of say backburner. all the answers for that game yet. But what happens is to get you to bridge out of the honeymoon phase for me is actually when it starts to click with audiences, even if some part of it starts to click with audiences, then I start to feel an obligation to those people because they'll be like, man, that was fun, but I had this problem or whatever. I'm like, okay, how am I going to address that

or am I going to address that? And I'll look at that, you know, seriously. And that will be my drive. Literally is just like, I want to fix the game for those people. And then later on, the game, starts to suck less and rock more and you kind of get to the point where you're like they're asking well when can I have this game and then you start to feel like man well now I have an you know now I really kind of feel obligated to to get this out to them and then you start picking Kickstarter dates and you kind of you know so like emotionally managing your own kind of creative processes is a big key if you're going to be doing this for a long time and then and then there's even the iteration step where you have to

decide if you're Columbus or you're going to the moon you know there's kind of that moment where, sorry, it's two metaphors. Yeah, you got to break that one down. So, you know, the Apollo program was like, we're going to the freaking moon. It's going to be awesome. And we're going to do it and, like, you know, get everybody pumped up. And that's sometimes that's, you know,

that's generally kind of what your idea feels like. It's like this game is going to rock. It's going to be, it's going to do all these things. And then, you know, your first iteration comes out. And then there's like Columbus. He's like, I'm going to go to India. And then it was like, what's this place? Oh, this is pretty cool.

let's stick with this, you know. And so there's kind of this choice you have to make as you're going through iteration is like, your game will often have something about it that's a little fleck of gold. And you're like, that thing is cool. And it was unexpected. But maybe it doesn't line up with your overall goal.

And so you have to decide, you know, am I going to chase that? And like, the game is telling you what it wants to be. And now are you going to double down on that? Or are you going to be like, nope, we're going to the moon? And you're going to keep, you know, keep moving towards that goal. of like throwing everything away

until you get something that resonates with the theme or the emotion of the mechanic, whatever your goal is. And, you know, I mean, talking to it like Ryan Lockett, he's local to me and we get together and do kind of design jams. And he's talked about, you know, for years he's been working on the sequel to Empires of the Void.

It's one of those ones that's like he's really wanted to do a fantastic second edition of it with a lot of new mechanics in it. And he's been designing mechanics for that game for years now. But almost every time, it's like, no, that doesn't work for that game, but it works. But now it's this whole other game. And so it's kind of like this mother tree that keeps bearing fruit to, that spin off into all these other games that are most of the games he's produced, all in an effort to, you know, driving towards this overall goal of making the sequel.

So, so oftentimes, just kind of making that decision like, okay, that's a good idea. Should I follow that idea right now? or should I park it, put it in my notebook, and keep moving towards this other goal? And that's, you know, that's another part of the management of, like, managing your creativity. So how do you make that decision? Just got instinct in the moment? Yeah. I mean, it's one of those, uh, yeah, it's, it just depends on where you're at, right?

I mean, you know, how important was the moon to you in the first place? You know, like, was that, was that, was that it? Who really cares about the moon? I mean, come on. Well, I mean, we have to decide. You know, it's like, well, that was cool. But maybe this is cooler, you know, or whatever, you know. I mean, this is why, you know, a lot of creative people, they say, you know,

an author is writing the same book his whole life. I mean, and you look at a lot of your creative stuff. Once you've done a lot, you start to see patterns. You're like, man, I've really been trying to do capture this one thing. And I, and maybe I haven't really hit it yet. And maybe that's why I'm still driven to kind of in that direction. And you can have multiple those. Like for me, it's like, I've been trying to recreate a,

Plynercel Pandora tomorrow is a multiplayer mode for that game, which is a sublime, you know, 2V2. Probably closest thing is Spectreops right now for, and I've been trying to recreate that and recreate that, both digitally and physically for years. And Borglebrose was just a byproduct of that, of that kind of crusade. So, you know, you've got you got, you pretty sure I'm just trying to magic draft over and over again. Right. But one day, one day, you know, you might get, I don't know, It's one of those things where if you get satiated, right? It's like sometimes like if you feel like you've achieved something, you know, it can actually erode your drive.

I don't know. Another creative, I think the more, you know, positive spin to that is, you know, you've fulfilled your karma on that path and you're ready for another one. Yeah. You know, I do think you can get, you know, there are journeys at each part of life, even as both as a designer, as an entrepreneur, you know, when you accomplish something that you set to accomplish or, you know, learn what you set to learn, then it's, you know, there's a little bit of floundering, a little bit of,

like, dip in motivation, and then you'll find that kind of next hook that moves you forward. Yeah, yeah. Another thing that I've been discussing with, like, Ryan and with some other people is the, there's this really great book, Ego is the enemy. And it, and there's just a couple of really good nuggets out of that. But as a creative person, you're always in one of three, stages. You're either creating, you're succeeding, or you're failing. Like, those are, you're always doing one of those. And in this book, they say basically, ego disrupts each one of those. So once ego starts

to interject itself and you start to get hubris, you start to get, you know, how you see failure, how you see success, all start to get corrupted. And, and so like they're talking about like, even in the early stages, when you're doing, when you're starting a new thing, you know, maybe a bad thing to do is to share your your moonshot. You're like what your overall goal is. Maybe it's not good to share that. You know, it's one of those things where, because we live in the age of a lot of open design,

a lot of even indie games now are doing this very open design stuff. But when it comes to your secret to like what you really want to do, maybe not, because when you share it, especially in the age of social media, and you have any, you know, your circle of friends or your fans or whatever. And they're going to be like, man, that sounds, that sounds great.

That's a great idea. And now your ego is satiated. Now your ego is like, yeah, yeah. And sometimes when a project's really long, you get really tempted to do that. You're like, man, I'm years away from this. But I just want a little taste of success. So I'm going to go share my idea with people just so they can praise me. And you don't think of it that way, but the praise is what you want out of that,

why you're telling them. And you get that praise. And now your ego isn't driving you as much. Now your ego is kind of satiated. That part of you that wanted to kind of prove the world wrong is kind of satiated. And you have just a little bit less motivation when it comes to the slog of the creative stuff and the hard parts. You know, because part of it, you know, that same part of you can drive you forward. And so balancing that is, you know, it's something.

that's kind of my current thing. Like some projects when I feel like they're too far out, or they're too core to an emotion I'm going for, I'll kind of keep them, I'll kind of keep them on the down low. But when it's like, this is a specific game, and I've kind of got it as a complete idea, and I need a sanity check or I need, if I have another purpose of sharing it with someone, maybe literally I need to market it. I need to get the idea out there so that people can be excited from my next Kickstarter. Go ahead and share it then. But if you're sharing just to, just to to feel better about the idea or um or or just to get some praise it just just just just hold off so so what um what channels when you're sharing and marketing what what does that mean for you

what are what are your channels and how do you um i i i don't know i've got this this thing where I don't like to do high pressure sales or my dad was a salesman. And I got his jeans, so I can do it. But I also felt like there's a lot of shady things when it comes to sales, when closing techniques and kind of using your friends and whatnot. So I've gotten to this point where I don't actually market a lot. I try to just make this artisan thing that like I'm going to kind of wait for people to discover. So a lot of my games, even my whole business model is based around, you know, making something I feel is unique, both thematically and mechanically, and just wait, you know, and I don't, I don't really care how long it takes people to discover it because if it's, if it has virtue, if it's succeeding at my goal, then it'll spread on its own and it'll spread at its own pace. I feel like a lot of the both video game and board game industry are so short-sighted sometimes when they're like, you know,

We need to have, you know, so many, you know, so much buzz and so much movement around a certain game. And, and you'd be surprised with board games, there's really this long tail if you just kind of stick around. And so most board game companies don't stick around to see if they're board games for it. Because with a board game, you literally have something that is viral by nature. Like, people have to play it with somebody. And so the word is going to get around. So, so sometimes, you know, just just waiting for the word to get out. and not overselling, you know, like don't print too many

and be kind of conservative with your initial estimates and just kind of always be around. It can spread. Like I saw that pattern with Walkstar. There's all this demand for Walkstar over various years. And I'm like, it was, you know, it was an okay game. But, you know, I just didn't think it was kind of worth all that demand. But it was really that it was, you know,

it kind of built up over time that this, this organic growth had happened with the game. And a lot of these companies like Steve Jackson and whatnot is really they've just been around a long time. And so in the board game industry, if you can just stick around, sometimes there is a bigger windfall by just kind of like always having a game available or whatever.

But there's, you know, and video game industry is also the same way. It's just like, if you don't show up on the App Store top 10, you're not going to get the additional traction that you need. And in that industry, it is kind of easier to disappear because, you know, there's solo games

and people aren't going to share them as much with other people. I don't know. I mean, it's like I say with Ascension, like everybody I know is a closet Ascension player. And then it gets brought up. It's like, oh, you play Ascension?

Oh, yeah, I've played that a ton. Dude, I've got this deck that's doing this crazy thing. And what's funny is how many of my friends are closet, but they didn't, but we never talked about it. Like, because we never really played it socially. I even know it had the only multiplayer, but it was always just like a thing I played in my own. And so it didn't necessarily have that,

you know, had the stickiness individual. but it didn't have kind of that that pass it on, at least in my circles. Right, right. Yeah, there's definitely an interesting difference there between the tabletop world and the video game world in that intrinsic virality. And so, you know, when video game design, you end up actually spending a good amount of time thinking about how you can build viral mechanics into your games, whereas board games kind of just do that automatically. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you get stuff if you share. I mean, we even did a little bit of that.

back in the day. I mean, I've done a couple clever marketing things along the way, but I don't do much now. Mostly, I just kind of like

keep working on the next game. I go to, and I do conventions. What's an example of a, of a clever marketing thing that worked out well for you? Okay, the one I think that I,

that I thought was fun, was, I'm like, I was making these flash games, right? So we have a flash game, and we're trying to upsell it. So we're like,

okay, who was on the flash portals? Well, 14-year-olds. Okay. do they have credit cards? No. So they all want my game

and they can't buy it without all that friction of getting their mom to buy it. So I'm like, okay, well, how can I leverage how can I leverage what I, you know, how can I leverage this situation?

Because I found what I'm cornered in like a bad situation. And there's another one just recently with Burgle Bros. I had a misprint and I'm trying to like make some lemonade out of that situation. But this one was, okay, here's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to do a, a thing where if you play the game, if you play the flash game through, and you get to the end, it does the normal upsell and everything to go get the download version. But then if you play the game again, and we can tell it pretty easily with cookies, if you're playing through the game again,

we know that like, well, you obviously probably wanted to play the other campaigns, but you couldn't. So now you've kind of self-selected into a group of people that can't or, you know, can't afford this game. And so we're like,

all the advertisement would change. All the upsell changed to click here to find out how to get a free. game. And that would take you to a thing. It was basically, you know, put in your email address, we'll give you a referral code, like a URL, and you go share it with all your friends and family or whatever. And if any of them buy it, the first person that buys it, you instantly get a copy of the game. And so it leveraged all these, all the, all the time and energy that these 14-year-olds had to spread it. And so they were just, they posted everywhere because they just wanted

their copy. It wasn't like, it wasn't a multi-level marketing or anything. It was just like, I just want my copy. But the nature of the internet is that these links persist. And so people that post stuff, a lot of those links would persist and lead to sales later on. And so there was, I mean, it wasn't a massive campaign. But it definitely was, you know, it worked out. And there was, you know, I think one account that I got like 10 sales from because he posted in all these message boards and whatnot. So another thing I wanted to dig into, you know, you kind of break with a lot of tradition with how you,

sell and distribute your games. Most people either will work with a different publisher or with distributors to then sell the stores. And you've taken a different tack than that. You know you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. Basically, what it came down to is a conversation I had with a person who had had a board game

that was selling 50,000 units a year. And so I had lunch with this guy. and and basically there's two things. I'm like, first of all, I was shocked. This guy was not full-time. Like, this guy couldn't, you know, wasn't making a full-time living off a board game. So that, which I'm like,

and I already kind of knew a lot of the numbers from dealing with Walkstar. I'm like, yeah, that's unfortunate. The other one was that he was looking for an exit. He's like, well, I want an exit. I mean, I want, I want to, you know, I'm going to get to 100,000 units a year, and that's when Hasbro or Mattel are going to come in

and they're going to, you know, they're going to buy me out. And so this guy was, there's different types of entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs who are looking for a lifestyle company, and there's ones who just want to have successful businesses. And he was the other type. And I just want to have, I just want to create things and share them. Like, that's what I want to do. So, so I'm looking for a lifestyle business. And so I'm like, okay, I have a job. So what is the best long tail kind of strategy

that I can do? And so I looked at Walkstar, and I basically decided I'm not going to use distribution because I saw the growth of the organic growth of it. And also, because of the audience, I was trying to reach. I was trying to reach Scrabble Moms. And I'm like, okay, if a Scrabble Mom is at a store and they see paperback on the thing, a few of them, some percentage, small percentage,

are going to be like, huh, what's that game? And they'll pick it up. But I think a majority of these Scrabble Moms that I'm trying to get are going to only pick it up if they played it with their friends. And if they played it with their friends, then you know, we live in an online age. Why can't they just

order it online? You know, it's just like, I have a website. You Google paperback game. It'll take it right to my website, and you can buy the game. And so I didn't see a lot of upside of going into, especially in the big box. I'm just like, you know, I don't really care. I mean, and I know how small the margins get. People don't always understand what you're giving up when you're getting into mass market. Because it's even more than distribution and whatnot. And so I made a choice. I kind of saw what Cards Against Humanity did, and I've kind of modified it. So I do a lot of. lot of the direct sales. I don't actually use Amazon. I just do direct fulfillment. And I don't

use distribution. Distribution does save a lot on shipping. And I have a lot of shipping headaches that I deal with. But I don't think that the distribution model has all the best interests of the healthiness of the board game industry at heart. And do you mind explaining just briefly for people that are listening to understand what the distribution model is? distribution is you sell your game to them for 60% off and they take most of your inventory and they package it up with a bunch of other games they offer a whole catalog of games

and then they get it to basically, they're known as wholesalers and they get it out to retailers at a 50% margin so basically the distributors taking about 10%, sometimes more and then the retailer needs about a 50% margin to be able to sell it. and but so so yeah

I don't want to do distribution I'm just going to wait I'm going to let it grow on its own but I also saw that Cards Against Humanity didn't really play well with retailers

they're like screw you retailers we don't need you now I don't believe that retailers are in a good position right now like retail is tough if you're not making a game cafe you're probably

your store is probably living off of magic or or Warhammer, but that's kind of fading even. You know, or some other secondary business you're doing, like comic books or whatever. So, I mean, you know, the retailers have got it tough. But Cards Against Humanity was so, you know, kind of modern. They're like, ask for you.

But there's all this demand for the game. So the retailers had to get it and mark it up, and it just didn't work out. And it really burnt them. Now, it also depends on your game. I mean, a lot of retailers are the center of the gaming community. So if you have a competitive game and you want to start to build a competitive scene, you absolutely have to work well with retailers and do everything to keep them happy. My games aren't necessarily in that bucket, but I decided not to alienate retailers.

So my policy with retailers is if they approach me, I will say, okay, here's my deal. It's about a 45, 50% discount. you know, if you, you know, add in the shipping and the cost of, basically the cost of buying my site plus shipping versus buying it from you, you know, you'll have a, you know, if you posted that price, you'll make a 50% margin and things will be fine. And a lot of retailers have, and they've been really, they've reordered, they're really happy. But I'm not actively seeking retailers. I'm just kind of letting them come to me.

And for the ones that do, I mean, a couple of them would be like, ah, I need a better margin or whatever. And I'm like, well, then you don't, you know, then you don't need me. That's fine, you know, I'm cool. And so that's, you know, that's, that's, and also, I, if you're cold calling a retailer, you're very much in this position of proving yourself. Like, well, I don't know you from Adam, so I hope these games sell well, you know, and you have to prove yourself.

But if they're coming to you, it's because their customers wanted your game. They're like, man, people keep asking for your game. How can I get it, you know? And so that's, and I'm like, okay, well, here's the deal. And most of them take it. A couple of them don't get the math and they'll kind of get mad at me or whatever. I'm like, well, then we're cool. It's fine. And yeah, so about 25% of my business, maybe 30% of my business is retailers.

And then the rest is direct sales. And the difference is that, you know, I can charge a reasonable price. I try to, you know, make a high value proposition for my customers, understanding the friction of them coming to me in the first place. But, you know, my margins are really, really good. I only have to sell about a fifth of as many games as somebody who's in distribution. But, you know, and there's people who've argued this with me to think, well, distribution is important for all these different reasons. But the main thrust behind, you know, my ideology now is kind of like I really want it to be a

meritocracy. I want it to be like the market, you know, like a crappy game, you know, doesn't do well in the marketplace because people don't go and find it because it's not good. And so I feel like it's going to keep me producing at a high bar to feel like, is this game worth people worth coming to my website and finding? And and other games, I think that, you know, it should work against that bar too. And then you're also training the marketplace to, to sponsor creators directly. I mean, that's a whole kind of artisan model where we're all just little craftsmen working on our little cabin on a mountain. And then people come and get it because it's artisan goods, because they're, because they're unique and they're handcrafted and whatnot. And so that's,

all those kind of things are things that I have to, you know, that I focus on. And so people feel rewarded when they find, when they find my stuff. So great. I love that vision of, you know, as the artist and designer. It's definitely nice as a, you know, somewhat different position than you're in. But similarly, you know, as any small, small studio and small team,

you know, it's really valuable. And that direct connection that you get with your audience is the most important thing. I mean, that's, yeah, good.

I mean, people don't really get the value of that because they're like, I just want to, a lot of people just want to get a game on store shelves. And that is okay. That is absolutely a, a success criteria. But part of a long-term gain is, you know, so now if I do a Kickstarter or I do an app or I do whatever, I have a whole bunch of emails. I have all these people that have

contacted me directly. I have relationships with them. They have some level of trust in what I make. And so now I just get more and more leverage. As I put new games out and more people find me, I can produce something and a lot of people will show up now in this kind of direct way. And so, you know, I don't have to worry about another platform or even if things change. Like if mobile goes away or board games change or whatever, you know, I've developed relations with these people. And so recently, another kind of like lemonade situation I ran into was I actually misprinted some tokens in the latest version of Burgle Bros. Once it's going out right now and it's missing like two or three tokens. But it was a situation where we made.

an earlier version. We accidentally printed the earlier version of the tokens. Because what happened is we're like, ah, when we were first printing it, we're like, three, three sheets is enough. Let's do a fourth sheet. And they're like, well, we got all this extra room now. What do we do? Well, let's put more of everything. And let's put these thermal bomb tokens. You don't really need them from the game, but let's throw them in there. It'll be fun. And so we screwed up. So we only printed three tokens or three sheets of tokens in all of these versions of it. And I didn't, I didn't pick it out. I got a sample sent to me the whole deal. I screwed up. So I'm like, okay, what am we going to do? Well, I've got to get people tokens. Like, I got to make good on it.

So I've got to get them what they're missing. So I'm like, all right, well, I'm going to offer it on my website. So I'm still putting this together. Offer my website. So here's a little sheet of eight tokens. And actually three new ones or four new ones that actually kind of are useful for the game. Just so just to make it worth it. And I'm going to add like a promo event. So an event card. And they're just for your time. And I'm going to lose money on that. I'm going to have to ship it out to kind of everywhere in the world. But at the same time, I'm going to upsell to a couple things.

And you're like, well, here are five new events that were created by the community. And it'll be, you know, two or three bucks for those. And if I can get them to upsell and buy those extra events, then I'll kind of cover the whole like shipping cost on it. And then people also have wanted extra meeples, because I shipped with two sets of stickers. People were mad about, oh, stickers wear out. So I'm like, here's two sets of stickers. And now people are like, well, now we want two sets of meatballs.

And I'm like, so, so, so I, so now I'm going to have upsell to a couple little things that can fit an envelope. And hopefully people buy the extra thing to help offset the postage cost and all that. But the big advantage is, of all this, is that now the people that bought a retail and they're like, hey, I'm missing this token. I'm like, oh, just go here. Now I have a way to contact them. Now, all those people that kind of weren't, you know, didn't, I didn't have a direct contact with, no, I do through this thing. So as much as it was a horrible situation, I'm like, well, actually, it's not that bad. Like, you kind of just got to pivot.

Let's ties back into what we started talking about at the beginning of, you know, how you face failures and setbacks and the values you can get out of those. So, yeah, I don't know. What other questions you got? So one thing I'd like to ask about, I know you do, you teach game design, and you've been involved in that process. And so I'm curious to see, how did you get into teaching? What's your process for that? Because that's, you know, sort of what I'm trying to do here and help, you know, help people learn.

And what's been, how's that been for you? Yeah, it was just a local state college. When I went board games full time, I ended up moving to Utah. And there's a local state college called Weber State here, locally. And a lot of game designers I know in the industry have kind of moved into doing at least some teaching. They find it rewarding. It's kind of like, you know, you get good at something, and then you kind of want to pay it forward. And it's also that game design is a craft. And I want to be, I want to be the kind of the Mr. Miyaki. I want to be someone who's handing this down and kind of

moving it forward because it's still very much an art. It's a mechanical art. And there's a lot of different facets to it, but, you know, I still feel like, I call it the craft, the craft of design and getting better at design and, and, you know, doing exercises, you know, design something, you know, like, like actually, I don't like word games at all, but I made clockwords and then later on I made paperback. Um, it almost as a, it's kind of a dare to myself, you know, it's like, you know, and I don't know, so, so, so getting better at. So, um, you know, they, they had a kind of a game design 101 class. And it was more just like, hey, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's review games, and it was kind of a, you know, a really easy, you know, freshman class.

But I had seen a set of curriculum that Stone the brand uses. Stone the brand is the designer behind Mex and Minions. He's a fascinating guy. He's done a lot of, he worked on Diablo 2, and he's done a lot of really, really cool, SimCity. I think, yeah, he did SimCity 5, really, really sharp guy. But over the years, he's developed a curriculum for teaching game design. based around using board games to teach video game design. Because I very much am, you know,

I developed as a video game and a board game designer kind of at the same time. Like they are always in parallel for me. So for me, they're very much two sides of the same coin. And so he's got this great curriculum with, it's a basically workshop class. And you work through all these different activities and learn different principles.

I mean, he has his own kind of philosophy of what a game is. And so he has this kind of like central model that he keeps referring back to. And then each, you know, kind of workshop focuses on a different part of that, that kind of overall model for game design. And I know him, and so he actually gave me some extra notes. He's like, this lecture, I kind of talk about these things, or refer to a Gamma Sutra talk.

And, you know, it's been a really, it's been really rewarding. I had a, it was tough. I had a really big class the first time. This next semester, I'm getting a smaller class. but I had like 40 kids. So I actually paired them up because so much of game development, when you're talking video games, is learning how to make the game run.

Like just getting the guy to run on the screen is a big deal. So a lot of your iteration and you're finding the fun and all the stuff is often like you have to learn that industry because you spend all your time getting your computer science degree, learning how to make a renderer or make, you know, animator, you know, those kind of things. Yeah, so a board game puts you immediately into iteration. So like week three, you've got a board game that is yours and you're iterating on it.

And over the course, over the course, you bring that game in with new iteration and you play test it and you play test it and you change it and you process that feedback and that whole process, right? But so much of that making video games, you just don't experience. And the great thing about board games is that is that is the, process. Like, you know, the rest of it is just craft time, just like printing stuff out and, you know, cutting it out and all that stuff. But the majority is the playtest. So, so yeah, it's, it was a lot of fun. I find myself, I really like to share. And, you know, and there was a couple people in the class that were like, you know, they may want to go down this path. And so I try to be as objective as I can. I mean, there's actually a lot of different types of designers. There's level designers and there's monetization designers. And there's, I'm probably a systems designer is what I do. A lot of board game people are thinking systems.

Yeah, I'm the same boat. Yeah, so, but you just understand there's other types of designers out there. And not all of them they're going to need to know the same things or learn the same things, but, but I, you know, that's, that was my thing. And also, I kind of ended up in board games because I can execute, because there's nothing in, you know, stopping me from making things. oftentimes when it's an app or something, you know, getting the money or getting a friend to help me with it or whatnot. It's,

it, and video games are hard. They just take a lot of time. And so I've designed simpler and simpler things. And eventually I started throwing out the electronic part of the game and just went with, you know, physical. Yeah. Great.

Well, I appreciate you taking the time and going through this stuff. I think your, you know, your background is fascinating. There's a lot of, a lot of great lessons for anybody that's getting started in either. you know, board games or digital games.

And I remember even from our first conversation, I was really fascinated by the, the path you took in the way that your business is structured because I think a lot of people think they need, you know, they need to be on store shelves. They need a big publisher. They need a huge budget, you know, and you've shown that, you know,

you don't need any of those things and you can reach a really, really significant level of success. So I think a lot of people will get inspired by that. I guess, I guess the only thing that the caveat to that is that you are, you know, if you're, if you're making, if you're going my model and you're selling direct and whatnot, it's like, it is good, but you have to understand that you're competing against Catan and Days of Wander and everybody else.

And if you look, there's something I've learned being in the indie video game scene is if you look at World of Goo and Braid and these really, you know, limbo and these top tier games, they are works of art. I mean, they're beautiful and the mechanics are very well thought through. And they are, you know, A-class games. I mean, they were clever because they're, they're. They were made by a small team. But still, they are, you know, inarguably, like a great game.

And so you have to understand that. Like you, you, and maybe it won't be your first game or whatever. Or maybe, you know, you're going to learn. You're going to get better. Whatever. It's the whole, you know, the whole Ira Glass thing about taste versus talent and go listen that audio. It's fantastic.

But there's going to be a long slog between getting to where you want to be. But just understand, like, do well. There's a lot of people in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, there's a lot of And there's a lot of lone wolves in board game design. They're like, well, I like working alone. I don't want anybody to tell me what to do. First of all, don't work alone. And then also, they kind of phone it in when it comes to, like, graphics and whatnot.

And you see a lot of really bad graphics and stuff on Kickstarter. And people know that. Like, you see the ones that people aren't backing. And you're like, yeah, you know, I can tell from your art that you don't have any particular art direction, that, you know, anything unique to bring on the art side with your game. So just understand, I can't guarantee my model works for everything. but but I but I do think it's worth it and that over you know that you can that you can get to that point and I think we can we can live in a in a I want to get other people to follow my path because I'm happy to cross promote those people and say like hey I know a whole bunch of people directly and I think you've made a great game hey let me send a lot of people your way and I've done that with like Kickstarter um where I can do an update about somebody else's game but it really has to be something I believe that they've executed well but I'm happy to share share that you know kind of like audience with other people.

I did it with my friend with word domination. And I don't know. So that's that's my, my, my, if you take this medication, these side effects might happen. Yeah, that's great. So now for people that do want to reach out and show you their game or see some of yours. How can people get in touch with you?

I'm just, Tim at Fowers.net, I mean, because email's great, but at T. Fowers on Twitter. I, you know, there's a lot of people that either at conventions or on Skype just want to kind of talk through things. And I kind of feel an obligation to, you know, to give them some time and to, it might be advice about their business model or advice about their design or whatever. But, you know, I think that we should, you know, we should work together. Fantastic. Awesome. Well, is there anything else before we close, you want to say to the audience is listening or any? I'm sure I can I can go on for well let's just ship it let's just ship this this podcast and just like all right we'll ship it we'll come back we'll come back for a part two at some point and and ramble on some more all right man thanks so much Tim this has been awesome no thank you thank you so much for listening

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