#40 - The Best Design Advice on the Internet – Part 2

Music. Hello, and welcome to Fun Problems, the problems of fun. I'm Peter C. Hayward.

I'm AJ Branton. And this is part two in an infinite series where we go through the best game design blog on the internet. I think that's a fairly uncontroversial. I don't think there's a better game design blog on the internet. There are some people who disagree with you, and most people would be wrong. Please let us know if you think there are better resources out there, because we always want to learn more.

AJ, you want to give a quick summary of what we're doing for people who somehow skipped the last episode? Well, first off, go back and listen to the last episode. It was a great episode. But what we're doing is we're going through... You know what I loved about the last episode? It was the audio mixing. God, just impeccable. Yeah, really, really nailed it, as we do every single episode. So what we're doing is we're going through Daniel.Games' blog.

And I'm saying daniel.games to avoid mispronouncing his last name. It's Daniel Brandon. So he has an amazing blog. You should go check it out and read through the whole thing. We have already read through the whole thing and really, really enjoyed it. Got a lot out of it.

And we're talking through our thoughts on the blog because some of the points that he brings up, we strongly agree with and we want everyone to be able to know even if you're not going to go and read the blog, you should be able to find it somehow. But we're also talking about the things where we disagree with him and we feel like even if it's something a bit more controversial, at least you should be thinking that maybe it's not gospel what he's saying.

Yes. My notes are organized from agree to controversial to disagree. So I'm just going to be very agreeable for the next 20 episodes.

And then after that, I'm going to be very disagreeable.

So last time we finished off and i actually went looked it up in part six of 86 no sorry part five of 86 so we're entering part six this is why this is why it's going to be a long series but i just think there's so much gold in this blog and it brings up really interesting topics some of which we've filed away for future episodes some of which we want to briefly dive into aj i'm gonna i'm gonna start because i think you might have the same one uh so

the way we're doing this is we're just reading a quote from the blog then discussing it as mentioned all of mine are agree until i say otherwise aj is is a mix of agree and disagree and like maybe but has other thoughts you might you might people you might think people want something new but they don't they want to experience something they already like but in a board game. I really like that quote. Any thoughts on that? I just want to disseminate it a tiny bit.

So what he's saying is that if someone is really into science fiction, then they don't want to play a game where it's like, oh, you're, I don't know, you're someone who's an accountant and you're at an accounting firm and you're going to do some paperwork. They've never experienced being an accountant. They also don't have a fantasy about being an accountant. They already like science fiction.

They want to play a science fiction board game. that's why there's so many science fiction board games now this i think leads into the half new half old rule where you don't want to you know there's a trillion science fiction generic action board games there's a trillion fantasy games where it's a oh i have a plus three attack with my orc against your elf or whatever and that again isn't super compelling to people what people want is something where they already have some familiarity with this

thing they're like oh i like this thing and then you tell them and look and here's the twist here's the thing that keeps this fresh yeah this is this chapter is called relatability and this subheading is called familiarity so he's really like hitting this theme and and the point is that you you want it you want to hit stuff that people are familiar with people don't want something new they want something they like in a board game a because it'll

get audience in it's sort of like hook craft spirit like this is an inbuilt hook and also and we've talked about this i'm pretty sure extensively it adds stuff that they can just immediately like understand they can just grok straight away.

I just realized uh i'm i'm often louder than you i'm also if you look at our frames i'm so much bigger than you i'm so much closer to my camera than you are i'm just a petite little boy yeah and anyone who watches this is like ah yes that giant peter and that diminutive aj okay uh yeah what you got i actually didn't write any quotes for this one so i'm gonna let you go through i i there are things i want to talk about but i realized for the section i piecemealed when

i put this together so i missed them so you go through it and i'll just comment connecting theme and function is key to immersive gameplay if you can't do this because your game rules are too simple it means you need a smaller and less pretentious theme he talks about this a lot here and then also i think he revisits this later i was just reading it this morning and i was like oh these are similar which is that like. It's ludonarrative cohesion. You want your theme to match your rules.

You want your rules to match your theme. It's pretty one-on-one. I just think he says it all well. Oh, that's all I have for relatability. So just building on that a tiny bit, there's scaffolding. So he thinks that things should be relatable. I didn't write down the quote, but the quote is effectively something along the lines of, if you call a weapon the artifact of glismore, that doesn't mean anything.

We don't know what an artifact of glismore is. if you say it is a sword we understand what that means and so you want to make things relatable and understandable things that people already have some degree familiar with and even if it's something that's true to the theme people don't know it's true to the theme they're going to be confused in magic the gathering they did a bunch of different sets based off of well i say real world like mythological things like yeah they did some

existing uh concepts and existing mythology. Yeah. And where people, the average person has a fair bit of understanding about like mythology and that sort of thing, or Greek mythology as an example specifically. Norse mythology, there's a lot less familiarity and Camelot, there's also even less familiarity with. Like, did you know that there's two swords? There's the lady in the lake who has the sword and then there's the sword and the stone. Do you know which one

of those two is Excalibur? Yes, I do.

That's something the average person doesn't know. And so if you're making a game, pointing out the difference is more likely to confuse people than make them feel like it's got a cohesive theme you want play to what people think not what is real that's also why hollywood does a lot of exaggerating things you know if someone gets shot yeah if someone gets shot in a movie it's a lot more dramatic there's blood everywhere the person might go flying back yeah yeah i also didn't write it

down i think at this point i was conscious of how many notes i was but he has a bit that is something i've done but and i don't say any of this to be like i've already done this but like i just love the way they put these things that i was already thinking about into words in a way that's super accessible he says that in his sort of like you said instead of the rod of glab thor it's a sword whenever possible use objects that people

know and in village pillage we leaned really hard into this the cards in village pillage are called wall raider farmer they're not called terrence you know trevor etc etc they're all very specific.

Roles and then their action is directly tied to that and it just it just removed we were talking last time about like these gates of complexity and each one that you add reduces the number of people who will be able to access your game it's another one of those like if if it's just oh yeah we all know what an apple is oh yeah it tastes delicious and gives you health of course it's an apple like in real life apples don't even

give you health health is not a concept in real life but like numerical health i mean but we get how that works as opposed to like ah yes the mysterious fruit of the planet mars what does it.

Tie it to simple understandable things and this is actually a great point that's brought up by george fan creator of plants versus zombies yes he needs something i know i've mentioned this before but i'll just say it again really quick he needed tower defense systems where you've got things that cannot be moved well plants can't move they're literally rooted to the ground he wants slow huge waves of enemies what do people associate with huge slow moving waves of enemies

zombies if he had like spec op soldiers that would feel very weird if they slowly trudged forward and then punched the plants or whatever uh and actually if you zoom in even further does this with individual zombies and individual plants like the the fast moving plant that's right the fast moving plant the fast moving zombie is the football player he's also tougher because he has a football helmet on like he really just leans into like these tropes

that we understand and And sometimes they're very silly, but they still make sense. Like there's one where he's very, very slow and shielded because it's a guy reading a newspaper. Whoa. I don't know what just happened there. Sorry, if you're listening, that would make sense. My video just turned into fireworks for some reason. And then once the newspaper is gone, he moves much faster, but he's not defended.

Stuff like that. Like he just ties it all really well. Okay. What you got? So I'm in the make lots of games section. Is that where you're at next? No. I've got so much before. All right, go ahead. See, when I was doing my notes, I tried to stick to the things that were like, like more extreme, I think, but I'm probably everything valuable so that our podcast becomes the most valuable game design resource on the internet. I like it.

Big moves make the player feel free and powerful like they're exploiting the game. These are the moves that make for memorable gameplay. This is something I wish I could go back and tell my younger self. I was so weirdly terrified of letting the players have fun. I think I've talked about this before. Everything I made was very on rails, very controlled. Let people have fun. I particularly, again, I like the way he's put this, make them feel free and powerful, like they're exploiting the game.

As a player, I live for those moments. Those times where you're like, I can do, I'm going to just win. I'm just going to break this game and the game lets you get away with it. Oh, it feels so good. So yeah, just being able to put those in is very powerful. Any thoughts on that? People are going to remember two things about your game, how it ends and the most impactful moment. If you design your game to have big impactful moments, that is going to make it more memorable.

It means people are going to talk about it and it means people are going to have fond memories of playing a game. And it means it's going to be very exciting to play. If you don't want your game to be exciting, don't make big memorable moments.

Okay this is this is just really useful practical advice create cards actions options that have a variable or the word all in them gain one fruit for each tree you have is far more interesting than gain three fruit i really like this i think that i don't i don't know if i don't have these notes in context i just have them written out so i don't know if he goes into this but it just creates these like clever moments for the player where you

get to min max like min maxing is really enjoy it it's just inherently fun so if i have a card that says gain one fruit for each tree you have what am i going to do first i'm going to try and get a bunch of trees like it's it just creates more it inherently creates more interesting interactions it does and it also makes it so that the it also makes it so that it's easier to track i think most of the time if you have a card that gives you three of a thing and then you've

got a card that gives you four of a thing and then you need seven of this or whatever it can get really bogged down and if you instead of something where it's like you move any number of spaces in a straight line not only are you like setting up for that you don't have to count how many spaces you're moving we talked about this a little bit two episodes ago now reducing numbers the other thing about this.

It'll come back okay variable options can have wild and unbalanced effects but they are great fun and your game should be built to tolerate them yeah just like just really practical advice i i i want to do this more this episode is useful for me because i'm like oh right that is just more fun the the general like i can't remember what context i was thinking about this the other day but i was thinking games should only have the number one in them.

Either it's one thing or it's one per or it's any number but like you know fill up your inventory but one is is again platonic ideal extreme case aim for this and then and then adjust one is the only number that would be in a game i i think that's a really good ideal to strive for i i'm very much on board that uh his next one i really love this my job wasn't to stop the madness it was to make sure the madness was fair i don't even agree with that i don't even think the madness needs to be fair

but it needs to feel like like you didn't just win because you drew the best card like yeah you did an absolutely wacky crazy thing but i didn't feel like oh if i'd drawn that card i would have won he drew it so he won yeah this i want to do a whole episode on balance at some point, so I don't disagree with that statement, but I want to save some of the thoughts for past that.

I think that it's worth making a small note here that, again, these are broad, general things that mostly apply, and we're not going to belabor the point over and over again, but we haven't said it once this episode. We said it a million times last episode. If you're making a more methodical, slower-paced, more mild game... If you're making Sudoku the game, this rule doesn't apply. But let's not belabor the point. What's your next one? Actually, let's, sorry, let's jump back.

Can you think of an example of a published game you've played where you just got to do a crazy cool action that felt amazing? I just want to put a really concrete example in. I mean, I would definitely say Glory to Rome or any of Carl Sardisks' games, Innovation. In Innovation, actually, I think you did this to me. You had, we were playing, and it's going through like the ages of technology, essentially.

It's very abstracted, card-based. and basically i had some stone walls and like i was building castles or something along those lines and i was doing okay i was pretty happy with the engine and then you were like i've got a cannon i've invented gunpowder and it's like you can destroy my whole engine and take them as points and it was like what am i even supposed to do about that i said to watch as you slowly dismantled everything i'd

been working towards yeah and that must have felt awesome to you and it felt brutal to me but you know what a couple turns later we're rebuilding and we're so far past that point it's almost it's not that didn't matter but it's like putting in i'm pretty sure you won that game yeah i think so and that's something that i i feel a lot of very strongly about in terms of balancing these big moves is making moves feel much more powerful than they are is really

interesting yeah yeah i i just love this idea of the very variable he calls them variable options but there's this idea of like interlocking mechanics i'm not i'm not expressing this very well yeah rather than being didactic and being like yeah this is three be like this is.

Whatever you want it to be you just got to build towards that like if you invest in this this can be what you want it to be it gives players a line of play it creates more interesting moment it just does so much work oh this is the thought that i lost earlier something like one per tree instead of three is an example of increased complexity sorry increased depth with i would say no increased complexity or like an iota of increased complexity because

three is not more comp is not more or less complex than one per if you have 700 you have to count i'm sure but in in a reasonable case like one per is arguably more intuitive than an arbitrary number. And I think this is your point earlier, but I wanted to, we talked about complexity budgets last time a little bit, and I just wanted to tie it directly into that. This is an example of free depth. It's depth that doesn't eat into your complexity budget at all. It's the intern of depth.

And it's not just depth in terms of now you've got more play to your cards because you can build towards it. It also makes the game more satisfying and more rewarding to the players. And it even gives them mini goals. One thing I think that games should strive to do is give players little goals. That way, even if they lose the game, they can look back and say, well, you know what? I did pull off this crazy move where because I had 10 trees, I got so many extra assets.

Apples and then i could convert those into this system and even though it didn't win me the game it felt great assuming i lost that innovation game doesn't bother me because i invented gunpowder and destroyed your entire civilization yeah okay i've got every this is this i've talked a few times about how this this blog upgrade up level upgraded leveled up my game design this has leveled up all my creative endeavors this is i think perhaps the most valuable thing i've ever read in a how-to guide

every concept in a game should be significant or absent i had never thought about this in these terms before i apply this to my writing i apply this to my screenwriting i apply this to my youtube videos i apply this to my games obviously i apply this across the board whatever you're doing do it wholeheartedly or not at all don't have a moment of this because the people who like this are just going to be frustrated and the people who don't like this are going to be put off

work out what you're doing and do that wholeheartedly and nothing else i love this yep i don't think there's much to add it's great advice i don't what we up to i can't remember if i've caught up or not. I am at make slot make lots of games okay uh if you find yourself using the same text on numerous cards, you should turn that text into an icon. However, there needs to be a relatively high cutoff for this.

This is, again, just super practical advice. So I, as we mentioned, AJ kind of picked the most extreme stuff. I picked everything that I thought was actionable or inspirational. And I genuinely found this blog inspirational. After reading this blog, I made five games. Like I was just in such a great headspace and so keen to try out these new tools.

I just sat down and make games so again this this is one that i i was doing without being able to put it into words but i don't like text i think we've talked about this in the past if if i'm watching movies with subtitles i'm not watching a movie i'm reading i can't read graphic novels or comics because i just read and i get to the end i'm like oh right text draws my attention so much that if there is text there it blurs

everything else i love reading books because that's all text but like I don't like sometimes I can't enjoy subtitled movies. Text also takes up a lot more of your brain space. Sun Fung Lim posted around an infographic a little while ago just talking about how extreme the difference is in terms of perception. Because if you think of it, one icon can mean a sentence, right?

And a sentence is itself, you know, could be a dozen words and each one of those words is comprised of, you know, two to eight letters or whatever. Each of which is the same complexity as an icon. Right, exactly. Exactly. So the processing speed is enormously faster. And I think there's also something that happens in the brain when you see a big chunk of text that just makes you not want to read it.

George Fan, again, from his amazing talk about plants versus zombies, which I'll link in the show notes here, he was talking about how when you are making a video game, you don't want more than eight words of onscreen text at a time. And again, platonic ideal, he actually does more than that in certain points in plants versus zombies. But that's the number he's striving for because any more than that.

And it's just become such a big, thick block that your brain sees it and it doesn't want to have to read it. It's another one of those gates that we were talking about. I love a game where I can look at the board and it's just a bunch of icons. And even if I don't know what that means, I get excited by being like, you know what, in half an hour, I'm going to know what everything here means. I dread when there's a big display of text. I hate it.

My brain just gets overwhelmed and shuts down. Go ahead. But keep in mind that he says that there should be a high cutoff for this, right? And I think a lot of that has to do with if you have too many icons, or especially if the icons aren't super clear, then players have to learn a whole new language just to play your game.

And I think too, even if you see like just three icons on a card that you don't, or even if when I'm teaching the game, you understand each of the icons individually, it makes sense.

If you see three icons on a card especially in the conjunction in like a sentence like with what's that what's that card game no same designer tom layman it's the like the card res arcana thank you very much res arcana could have you know up to five or six of those icons in like one line on a card and whenever players see those even if it's intuitive which i think that those icons generally speaking are it makes your brain go

i don't know i don't want to have to put in the work of remembering all this. It's the same effect as a big block of text. Yeah. So I think it's just important to note that there is a limit to that and to be very conscious of that. And especially when you're playtesting with players, pay attention.

As soon as they reach for the guide to remind themselves what the different icons do, that's a huge red flag. Yeah. I'm going to give a negative example here with a company who I really admire. Cardboard Alchemy have a game called Flamecraft. I might've talked about this before. Every dragon, there's six types of dragon in Flamecraft. Every leaf dragon does the same thing. Every fire dragon does the same thing. Every iron dragon does the same thing.

Every single one of those dragons has unique art, I believe, because they went, you know, they made millions and millions of dollars and spent it all on, on really gorgeous art. And that is incredible. Like that was the right call, but every iron card says in text what it does. A lot of these cards end up being put out on the board. So as the game grows, you might have 10, 20 dragons around the board, all of which have text. That, once you've played half a game, you don't really need.

I get overwhelmed by this game. I look out of that board and I don't need to read that text. I can't stop my brain from doing so. One of my girlfriends has ADD and needs subtitles in movies, and that's fine.

Like i i would rather watch a movie with her with subtitles and not watch a movie but i do find myself constantly like flicking down to the subtitles flicking down the subtitles flicking down the subtitles same effect with flamecraft i would have i think i recommended this but they didn't go for it was too late or something like that i would have had a fire icon on every fire dragon just at the bottom where the text is and then a reference

card that says fire means this iron means this grass means this and that way when i'm looking out over this beautiful beautiful board.

I'm not suddenly panicked and overwhelmed which sounds like a very extreme reaction but it is genuinely how i feel looking at that game yeah just imagine you even even a simple example here right let's say that we've got five cards and each one has two sentences on it even if the effect is super simple you're gonna look at the card and be like you know i i do need to reread this and you're gonna have to absorb it and it's gonna like peter

says be distracting at least for some people myself included whereas imagine like actually let's take an example of one that works and then turn it around the other way if you look at dominion dominion doesn't say play this card to gain three coins which can be spent to purchase cards from the market at the end of the turn these coins go away it just has a picture of a coin with a three on it. Yep and then this this is not from the blog this is just my icon philosophy.

I tend to make icon-driven games. Not tend to. I will often make icon-driven games, Robotopia, Cartouche, probably a bunch of others. And sometimes I'll have the text there as well. But for me, the goal is for the icon to be so simple and clear that you can tell what's happening from the icon. And if I can't accomplish that, I rewrite the ability. So I use that as a filter, just as a designer. If I can't iconify this.

Then I don't want that ability in the game. Now, there is a risk, of course, that I'm losing, like, some, okay, I'm going, let's zoom out even further. There is this idea with, there's this FOMO in Designers. If I cut this, what if this is the most fun part of the game? This is the depth complexity thing that we're talking about? It's not. It's never worth it.

Like, yes, maybe I have to cut five really cool, interesting abilities, but the benefit I get from it far outweighs what those abilities do. We're actually having a bit of a debate about this for our AEG game right now.

Where i i want all of a certain action to work the exact same way and aj i think it's not unfair to say your stance is that the nuance between them is valuable enough to keep it you know this will be resolved by playtesting and by discussion with the developers and all that kind of stuff but this is an example of where i am extremely on one end where i'm like no i don't want i don't want that ambiguity i understand it as nuance and cool things but i want nuance that's how you but i want the

simplicity over that that's how i want to spend the complexity budget i'm not you don't have to defend yourself here this is this is an external debate.

For sure for sure uh and just for clarification well we're not at each other's throats guys we're still we're still good it could go either way and we'd both be happy we just want whatever's best for the game yeah you have a strong opinion one way i have a strong opinion the other but like there's value in both of our positions for sure uh do you have any more before we get to make lots of games i don't know because

i don't know where these from so tell me if this feels like it's actually after it actually just because it's it's so icon adjacent keywords keywords yes keywords and icons can almost be used interchangeably i think that there is some value to one over the other in different cases uh if you can say everything about this if you can replace an entire sentence with one icon that's amazing if it's just this action is now an icon or gain this resource is now just an icon.

That's better than a keyword for sure. If a keyword can be woven into sentences, I often think that works better than icons visually. I think, and I think like reading it, it can flow better, but I would say broadly speaking, you can interchange either or in this conversation. And I don't have a super strong opinion when we're there. I do lean towards icons, but that's because I'm at the fairly extreme end of every time I see text, Irene.

I can't stop. Like, I watch TikTok, and TikTok has subtitles you can turn off, but most people will put their own subtitles. There are channels that I watch like this, where I'm physically covering up part of the screen, because otherwise I'm not watching the video, I'm just reading the subtitles. Tell me if this sounds like I'm past you. If you are unable to accept and utilize feedback about your games, your chances in success in this industry are virtually zero.

Don't just accept change, sorry, don't just accept feedback, embrace it.

Consider yourself a chef only trying to please your customers your game is as good as your playtesters say it is so i obviously broadly speaking agree obviously the thing that i caution about is making sure that your playtesters are the appropriate audience yes so for instance i have a game that i showed to a lot of people and every single person i showed to had the same feedback they wanted to go change basically it was basically like a very very tight resource economy for me

who's designed it and played it a bunch i know that is not the case i or rather i know that it is a tight economy but it's totally doable you can you you have more than you need to do all the things that you need to do but people are wasteful with them and i could listen to them and make the change but i think it makes it a much worse game and it's and i'm as new player centric as it gets. Like I just said in the previous episode of this I would completely rewrite

an entire game to make it better for new players. But with this it's. People who aren't experienced in this sort of genre, people who aren't as good with this type of resource management, they aren't my target audience. I don't care about them for this specific game. This is a hardcore game targeting a hardcore audience that likes tight resource games. And I had yet to play with one. And I finished the game and I was like, I'm happy with this.

And then I mentioned it on one of the previous episodes. And a friend of the show, Nate Wall, was like, hey, I want to check that out. And he played it. And of course, no issues. In fact, he really liked it.

Exactly as in fact after that playtest i felt comfortable trimming back the resources slightly more which is where i wanted them to be so i would just say know your audience but again as i'm gonna say a lot don't use that as an excuse don't say oh my game is genius and everyone i play with i think there's a guy who's not in history anymore who famously like he he would he would quote this himself he said my my playtesters aren't smart enough for my game,

not an industry anymore you say yeah yeah.

I would say just just on that note if you're trying to find uh if you're if you're trying to see if you're falling to that trap or not ask your play testers do you like x or y game that is very similar to yours in terms of uh audience right if it's a super heavy economic game do you like super heavy economic games if their answer is no filter their feedback through that they may still be right in identifying issues but you have to filter it there is a corollary i guess like a,

counter to this which is the neil gaiman quote when people give you feedback their feelings are always right and their suggestions are almost always wrong which is which is sort of the counterpoint to this like the opposite of this don't just he says daniel dot game says don't just accept feedback embrace it consider yourself a chef only trying to please your customers i think that still applies. He's not saying take the suggestions, he's saying take the feedback.

And there is a really important difference between those two. Yeah, I think you're right that, like, target audience matters. So, like, I have a game that I'm working right now pitching to a very specific publisher who wants a very specific kind of game, and I take it to my events, which is full of people who don't like that kind of game. So I go in knowing that they're going to be like, what if it was seven times more complex? What if this? What if that?

And I can sort of safely pre-ignore that, because what I want to know is what's confusing, what breaks, how does it feel?

Not are you bored because this game isn't for you so yeah it's a tricky one but assuming that you've found the right audience for your game i think he's a thousand correct and actually that let me let me split up that first sentence if you are unable to accept and utilize feedback about your games your chances of success in this industry are virtually zero we've all met that designer who you they you play you should they show you a game you play

it you have thoughts they have an argument for every thought you stop giving thoughts and mentally are like cool well they're going to come to two more of these events then drop out and you'll never hear from them again which is pretty close to 100 true well they keep bringing the same one over and over again and no changes and yeah and they're just like validate me yeah so please please don't be that guy if you can't understand or fix what the problem

with your game is you need to go and do something else and put this game on the shelf for a while the game may simply not be good enough and therefore not fixable this is a hard one to internalize.

No one wants to kill their baby or, you know, kill their darling. But once you start doing this, I think that by itself levels you up as a creative, not just as a designer, as a creative, like accepting that some ideas. I used to be very much of the, of the attitude of like, everything can be great if you work at it hard enough. That is the opposite of how I feel these days. There's a book called Mindset that you read when you were part of Jellybean, I believe.

I think so. all of them sort of blurred together i read a lot of them that one talks about the fact that like if a teacher writes off a student that student will do worse if the teacher decides that student is going to fail that student's going to fail sort of self-fulfilling prophecy whereas when you know when they they brought a bunch of kids into a class and lied to the teacher and said these ones perform higher than the others the ones who they said performed higher

performed higher because the teacher focused on them so the sort of point of that book is don't don't abandon it like don't preemptively decide on a thing like going with an open mind i don't agree with that with ideas anymore i used to i've worked on games for years being like no if i keep powering away this will be great some games simply aren't good enough aren't fixable and that's okay the faster you learn this and we've talked about the fact that aj and i have different speeds of abandoning

games the faster you can leave it the the faster you'll get to the next great idea i mean i think you have probably faster paced than almost anyone i i don't know how fast i am compared to other people but i can't imagine too many people drop things faster than you and i'm also very successful yes very true very true i think the only count not not counter not counter i agree with all of it but the only thing i would say is that if

you are a very new designer if this is your first game you've been working on it for you know six months or a year or something very casually in your in your spare time. You know, I would be much less aggressive at just dropping things and starting new ones because frankly, this is going to come up later in the blog, all your early ones are going to be bad. Stick with it, get it as good as you can and just try to learn as much as you can from the process.

But again, that's not countering the advice of if you find a problem and you can't solve it, then shelve it or accept that you move on. Stephen King in his book on writing says that He will finish a manuscript, then put it in a drawer until the pages begin to curl. That's when he pulls it out and does the second edit. That doesn't work for everyone. That doesn't work for me. But it's an interesting

kind of similarity. We got an email- One quick note is just for context for this, like we and Daniel are talking to you if you are trying to be successful as a game designer. Yes.

If you want to get one game finished, it's like, this is my baby. Obviously, some of this advice doesn't quite apply to you. Yeah. If you are the preeminent sloth expert and you really want a game about sloths, don't abandon your game about sloth because that will directly counter your goals. This podcast in general and this blog specifically are about trying to get published.

I got an email from a listener a while but i think it was a listener someone someone who'd seen me in some context i think it was listening to the podcast who said hey i am having this trouble where i abandon my game you know i'll do two drafts abandoned do two drafts abandoned and he's never finished anything to that person if that's you i would strongly suggest finishing a game i think if you've never finished a game your priority should be finishing

a game this is also why we advise start small make your 18 card game and finish it and i think he replied being like cool what what is finished and i said for me a game is finished when i play it and there's no changes that i feel need to be made and you could argue you'll never get to that point i do and i don't think i settle i just like hit a point where i'm like okay any change at this point are lateral moves not improvements and and like

there's nothing to fix i guess so definitely definitely definitely if you've never done it finish a game bring one bring one mediocre game to completion will teach you more than abandoning 700 games but once you have completed a full game a few games that's when you can start to so there's sort of like two phases of career but. You understand that like don't take this literally and apply it to everyone at every stage of their career yes you have to learn.

To get to the point where you can do those things. Like I knew I was in that stage for a long time. And so I experimented, I did a lot of things that like, if I was trying to get published, I wouldn't be doing a lot of audacious things. And I sort of accepted that the, well, you know, the first four years, six years, something like that of my design work, I was doing it very casually, just on the side for fun. I was doing it for me and I was just exploring.

And I accepted that like, you know, none of these games are going to go to market. Probably like if they do great, you know, but I just wanted to stretch and figure things out. And I would say like 2023 was sort of the year where I was like, yeah, all right, I'm really trying to make publishable products and I know I'm good enough to be able to execute on weird ideas. Let's go. I heard this, I can't remember what context I heard it, but it talked about exploit and explore.

Yeah, I think it was exploit and explore. And it said that as a creative professional as an aspiring creative professional or as a creative you should always be alternating between exploit and explore and what this had no relation to forex games whatsoever what they meant was that there's two modes that you can be in as a creative one is explore which is where you're trying new things new things new things new things the other is exploit where you've started to find success however you define

it you found success cool keep hitting that note keep exploiting that resource until you're no longer happy with it or finding success then go back to explore and I just thought that was a really interesting cycle and I think this ties into what you're saying where like you were you've spent the last five years exploring and now you're at the point where you're exploring you know you got a game signed hooray you got a game signed by a pretty major company,

who were also very praising of that game like. You've hit exploit, now exploit until you stop finding success, then explore. I do the same thing. I had a bunch of games signed, so I tried a thing. I kept hitting that, and now it stopped working. Or once it stopped working, I switched to a different method. Exploit, explore. It's an interesting cycle. My next one is from Feedback, which is like 21. So I think we're up to your 11.

I think he might have rearranged this since we read it, too. I think so, too. I was getting kind of confused on that, because that's why I thought one of the ones was much further down before. Yeah. So in the make lots of games section, he has, sure, your game might be better than average than the average of my games, but I still probably have a five times greater chance of being published. This doesn't mean I complete all my games. I abandoned most of them early on.

My great games have not come from a stroke of genius, but from a stroke of genius on top of a lucky choice of theme or mechanic. Each new game is another stab at greatness. I'm increasingly convinced that most great games were not made by amazing designers, but were flukes created by reasonable designers. I've seen designers of some of my favorite games go on to make numerous mediocre and flawed games. I really strongly agree with this. I'm very curious what you think.

I think about this all the time. This is another one of those ones that just like lives in my head now. I don't know if I've discussed this with you, but my opinion is that game design is in some ways closer to songwriting than any other medium. Hmm. Do you want to elaborate? Nope. Especially like this quote, genuinely, it's one of those ones that like it runs in my head all the time.

This is something I believed so strongly and I tried not to say it too much publicly, because obviously it's not a fun thing to hear and it makes you look like a dick but i've i've thought this for for years i i yeah one of the things i love about this blog is that he says all the all the stuff that you don't say clementine morgan who i mentioned in the last episode is the same way she just like says it all so this in in this regard specifically most hit songs are one hit wonders or let me

try that again most artists who have a hit song have a hit song and i think that there's something about the simplicity and elegance of songwriting and the resonance of songwriting and the simplicity elegance resonance of game design that have this overlap that i don't think i can put into words which is frustrating as a podcast host and also a proprietor but like most artists who have a hit song have one hit song most game designers who have a hit game have

one hit game and like you said it sounds very dicky because i i i mean you could argue i've had zero hit games and that would be totally valid i don't blame you for that. I am definitely like consistent in my output. And part of it is that I do, as he says, and I make a lot of games. I make more games than anyone I know. And I also get more games signed than anyone I know. And I don't think that's a coincidence. So I'm reminded of Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.

And in that he talks about really successful people. And one of the points that he makes that I think has been very formative for me is it's not that someone gets lucky and then they're a huge success. It's not that someone is really skilled and they become a huge success. It's that someone is very skilled, consistently works at this and consistently puts out good stuff and then gets lucky with one of those things. And that's what lets them explode.

The Beatles are playing constantly every single night, putting on more- They did a residency in Germany, yeah. Right. And so because they were doing so much and being so good at some point, if a lucky break opportunity comes, they're going to be able to capitalize on it. And if you look at any of the popular games that sort of came out of nowhere, they didn't come out of nowhere.

This was someone who was working really hard on many things. And then one of them happened to explode. I think I've mentioned this fact before, but Ticket to Ride was Alan Moves' 15th train game. Like he was into trains and made a lot of train games. And so Ticket to Ride almost happens to be like a train game. Like I didn't know that before learning that fact, obviously. That's how knowledge works. But like from playing Ticket to Ride, I wasn't like, this guy's really into

trains. I was like, oh, this guy came up with a fun variant on Rummy. He did come up with a fun variant on Rummy, but it's not coincidentally train themed.

He started from trains it's yeah the actually have a i'm gonna say it's related because it's my podcast and i get to do that there is a chapter in outliers about soft skills he talks about this guy whose name i cannot remember who has like an iq of 180 like one of the most intelligent people in the world from a numerical point of view who dropped out of college do you remember this story.

No it's been i read it way way back i've been thinking about this due to a thing that i'll talk about in a moment so he basically he was in college and he had some class conflict with something. And so he quit college because he didn't know that you could go and ask for a class to be changed. He was raised in a situation where you didn't interface with the administration, whereas rich kids who were going to the same college knew that you could go and ask for things.

And so I think of it as soft skills versus hard skills. And a lot of people believe that in a true meritocracy, hard skills will get you all the way.

He is more intelligent than anyone else of that college therefore he should be the most successful but in reality it's this mix of hard skills which is raw intelligence quality of game design and soft skills which is how personable you are we're moving into unhelpful advice here but i was i'm trying to work out how much i should anonymize this story recently i reached out to a publisher who i've worked with and just said happy thanksgiving nothing

else an hour later i had three games closer to sign than they ever would have been had I not reached out and said just happy Thanksgiving. One, I cannot anonymize this story. So I'm just going to, I'm just going to skip the middle part. But basically this publisher led to a conversation with another publisher and that publisher expressed interest in a game. And then we workshopped a game together. And suddenly I have all these games that are more likely to be signed. Nothing is signed.

Thanksgiving was yesterday, but as there was now, had I reached out and said like, Hey, sign my games. I don't think that conversation would have gone that way. And had I like, when he was like, Hey, can you ask this other publisher about something?

Had I been like, no, that's not my job. i wouldn't have started the conversation with other publishers so it was a hunt like the games have to be good and this is sort of what he's talking about this is this is off topic from daniel or games it's more about the outliers thing you have to have a certain level of raw skill of hard skills but then the soft skills will get you way further like let's say of the 100 like soft hard skills get you 50 and then having twice

as many hard skills doesn't double that it gets you up to 55 percent whereas having the same amount of soft skills will get you all the way, i think also this is something where i mean if you're listening to this you obviously care a lot about improving yourself right right and i think that one thing we talked about a lot and it came up very recently in our podcast is how craft focused we are we had an industry talk episode and we like labeled it as an industry talk episode

where we talked about sell sheets and how to do that but that's not the main focus and that is the that's the thing that a lot of other places focus on and obviously we are more hard skilled focus with occasional drifting into soft skills most places are all soft skills not all but it's the opposite ratio. But I think a lot of designers, right? I wonder how much I want to step my, put my, put my, put my mouth here. Free the carefully, AJ.

I think that there are a lot of designers with imposter syndrome. And I think that there's also a lot of designers with the Dunning-Kruger effect where they think they know a lot more than they do. And I think when you have a hit game come out.

You probably assume that you're a really good designer because like oh i made this game it's a hit clearly that means i am a i'm able to make hit games and i think that maybe they care less about the craft or maybe they just think better about themselves or maybe they don't maybe they don't know but i think that's an easy trap to fall into whereas if you're craft focused and you're just i'm going to keep consistently working as hard as i can to improve myself and to make as good games as

possible and i'm not saying the people who have a hit and then don't make another hit aren't doing that necessarily but in terms of the conversation of making a lot of games in order to be successful this is where it happens because if you make a lot of games even if you make a lot of good ones the more of the good games you make the higher the chance you have that one of them is going to be the one that gets signed remember we said you have to be good make a lot of stuff get

lucky if you make a lot of stuff then that it means that when the chance comes by to get lucky you have a much higher chance of being able to do that and that's one thing where i've i'm super confident in my long-term success in this industry and so i've been very lazy about pitching to publishers and stuff like that because i'm like listen i'm doing this full time i'm just getting better and better at this and i'm just pumping out game after game and you know these games at some

point i'm going to get my lucky break and it's not to say that i shouldn't be pitching the more than i am but it's to say that because i'm so focused on this i'm confident that that's what is giving me the confidence because i'm working really hard, consistently, I think, playing out good games. And so when I have my lucky breaks, like with AEG, with AEG I had a lucky break and we were able to capitalize on it because we made a really good game together.

I think you're right. To return to the Daniel.games quote, He's talking about a different kind of luck, which I think is, is interesting and worth exploring. I'm not, there's not a rebuttal to what you said or anything like that, which is that when you're making stuff, sometimes you luck into a great mechanic and it feels like, you know, artists often talk about the muse. It feels like this external force.

Like it feels like it's not within your control. It's just a thing that happens to you and you're gifted it by the gods, gifted it by your muse, whatever. And that, that's sort of what, can you read the quote again? Because that's what he's talking about. Yeah, you're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. Sure, your game might be better than the average of my games, but I still probably have a five times greater chance of being published.

This doesn't mean I complete all my games. I abandon most of my games early on. My great games have not come from a single stroke of genius, but from a stroke of genius on top of a lucky choice of theme or mechanic. Each new game is another stab at greatness. I am increasingly convinced that most games were not made by amazing designers, but were flukes created by reasonable designers.

I've seen designers of some of my favorite games going to make numerous mediocre and flop games yeah i i captured that quote but just that sentence i'm increasingly convinced that most great games are not made by amazing designers but were flukes created by reasonable designers the the peter metaphor that i'm apparently going to go into is that like every time you increase your craft you're raising that platform and the higher the platform the more likely you are to get hit by the

lucky lightning of a brilliant design yeah and and someone standing on the ground can still get hit by that lightning but the higher you raise the higher chances of doing it so like craft craft craft craft and then abandon abandon abandoned abandon just means that you are more likely to stumble it like it's happened to me a few times where i'm just like oh this is something like and and a big part of it is just recognizing that it's something too which i think yes do you uh tell

the story of our game with ag how the the very first thing that happened with that. You go ahead. I assumed you were going to. You're trying to bait me into saying it. Yeah, yeah. I'm playing you. Well done. So Peter and I were hanging out, chatting about game design stuff, and we were talking about making a two-player dueling game together.

Peter didn't have a lot of experience in that genre and was interested in sort of stretching his muscles and trying something new and knew that I was really a big fan of tactical skirmish games.

That started from we wanted to design together and I was like, well, it would be interesting for me to design a dueling game with you because a i want to do that and b you are providing expertise and experience that i don't have and so then we were like okay we'll do that at some point and we we didn't really we kind of put up we kind of depend on it it was aspirational not immediate.

So then during that same visit, you were telling me that same conversation, maybe same conversation about a really cool mechanic idea that you had where you pair up two actions and you take one. I forget if it was originally you take one, the point gets there, or if you just take one, you get both. The original pitch was you have say 10 actions in a pool at the start of the game, you put them all out into pairs. And whenever you take one action, you take the other one.

And this, this I had been thinking about for a while as a way of like increasing variability, making like i'm obsessed with making every game experience different with the same game like that's so fascinating to me and so i i i tried this as like in one as a city builder game and it hadn't quite worked i've actually got a game that's about to be signed so i won't say what it officially is but it uses this exact mechanism in a really interesting way this is like this is

like my polyomino if i was uve rosenberg like i'm just fascinated by it i'm going to keep exploring it in different ways so i just mentioned that as an idea that i've been working on and then aj.

And i said that is genius that could be its own genre like worker placement and i was which i don't agree but carry on and i was like and that would be perfect for our game but instead of having it being an action where it's mix and match and you get everything on it you mix and match with your opponent you take one your punk it's the other it has inbuilt counterplay to it and really interesting decisions and as and peter obviously is even still a little less excited about

the pairing mechanic but I thought that was really genius and then when we went to the whole game work and come together and suddenly we had a full vision for a game from that, And when we pitched it to AEG, immediately they were like, this action selection is amazing. This is one in a thousand. Yeah. So that is an example of genuinely, like, I don't feel, it's weird. I don't feel ownership over that. Like, and I'm not saying therefore you did it. I'm saying like,

I don't feel like either of us came up with that. We're being very cocky here. Bear with us, podcast listeners. YouTube viewers, don't bear with us. Only the podcast listeners have to bear with us.

Very much like that feels like a gift. and that has carried this game through like the only game signed by ag etc etc along with a bunch of other stuff and yeah it's exactly like the quote says it's a bunch of like lucky flukes in a single design but we wouldn't have hit that without the skill base okay give me one more and then we might have to wrap up this episode sounds good yeah we can make so much less progress than we did last one let's see heavy bad heavy

bad light good section oh heavy is bad light is good oh yeah this is something i assume you disagree with i don't remember i i can summarize his position because i remember this pretty clearly he's coming i'm gonna i'm gonna excuse it first he's coming at this from a position of the goal is to make a hit game that's the goal like that's what matters he wants a game that sells a million copies cool that's a perfectly fine goal so his case is the only games you should work

on are light games because light games sell more than heavy games the only thing that's valuable and worth putting your time into because it has the greatest chance of success is a light game heavy games are a waste of time because they're going to sell one tenth the units and be one tenth as easy to pitch so don't even bother heavy games bad light games good i would take it a small step further which is to say that if you agree with his central

premise you know we're not going to rehash it all over again but you know his platonic ideal of a game. Then designing above medium weight is a waste of time. Yeah. What's your stance on this? Do you agree, disagree? Yep, yep, largely agree. Oh, so I think that he's very, like, he's focused on what he's trying to do. And the whole point of the blog is almost to be, like, super didactic about this. Yep. I think that there are enough exceptions that this, as a global rule, it's hard to say.

He does- Okay, it's coming from his perspective of platonic ideal of a game.

If you agree with the premises that you are trying to create around a central idea and everything should be built around it and anything that is not really pulling its weight even if it's fun is it being as amazingly fun as every other aspect of the game you should try back down if you agree with those premises then i would say almost every time this is correct it's funny because i've had lots of chats with joe from all play and he got into gaming as a heavy gamer that

was his starting point all play if you don't know doesn't publish heavy games like medium medium weight is the highest that they go and so he has sort of also taken on this attitude as a publisher which again makes a lot of sense like just one is going to outsell arc nova until the end of time oh let's see just one is going to outsell seventh continent you know why i compare those two specifically because they both have sevens

no they both have numbers in the name same designers oh really yeah wow that's amazing and i would posit that those those that pair of designers have made more than just one than they'll ever make from seventh continent.

So yeah it's interesting but obviously like we talk about this a lot on the podcast like the goal is not just copies sold the gold is not just this that like i love heavy games i've got a heavy game coming out from cardboard alchemy in three years it's taking longer than every other game i work on put together but i'm almost prouder of it so like and in the long term it might make me as much money i don't know it's hard to say probably nothing will

beat things in rings that's going to be my that's the one that they'll put on my gravestone oh what about it what about argue with the ag you don't think that one has a shot things in rings is i think it's okay for me to say this about to become all plays best-selling title of all time wow nice yeah it has been out also eight months this is i hope the start of its journey not the end so i i think our ag game will do well don't get me wrong no complaints about the eventual royalty

checks we'll get from that but things in rings is just like in its own little world and so i mean you know that that that's to the point of of daniel's statement but this is where you say what am i trying to make like am i just trying to hit those numbers because ultimately i think you're going to find that hollow like.

I like stretching myself i like like you know that's where that's why we started to work in the dueling game because i'm like i haven't done that that's interesting to me i'm working on some solo games i'm working on some co-op games i like to stretch myself and work on different things because that's super interesting to me as a designer. I get bored if I'm just doing the same thing over and over. I want to climb every mountain. So I want to climb the heavy Euro mountain.

And I would frankly be dissatisfied if I had never had a heavy Euro signed. That's not wrong, nor is it right to, nor is it right. It's just like, you got to work out, sort of like I was saying about working out what the core of your game is. You got to work out what motivates you and lean into that rather than taking Daniel's word as gospel. Yeah. Like we said a million times, like if TI, the core of TI, I would say is like, it's epicness.

Yeah. It's like by definition, you know, that is the core of the game. It cannot be a smaller thing. And every time someone says, oh, this is like TI, but only an hour, it's like you have missed the entire point of TI. Yeah. It's like just one bit complicated. Yeah.

Okay. Let's stop that one there. are aj do you have any fun prepared i do not but i can make up one i i came up with some between our episodes but i think they've all escaped me yep it's gone what do you got what is the most complicated project you've ever worked on worked on as in conceived or like finished, let's say finished probably my game providence is up there that is a complex game fractured date that is not finished yet but it is signed and has a release date so like that's that will

be finished by that date or it has a deadline not a release date outside of games probably as as you know in my other life i'm a writer and i've got a novel that is something like 250 000 words long which for context is about seven harry potter ones and that one required extensive notes i'm working on a lit RPG. Do you know that genre? Have I talked about that before? I don't think so. It's a new genre, which is unusual for any field. It's a new genre of novels where the character...

In a game, levelling up their stats. So lit as in literature, RPG as in role-playing game. So the character is aware that they're in a game. And there's a different reason for each one. The most famous series is called Dungeon Crawler Carl. And the premise there is that aliens come to Earth and kill 90% of the population and put the last 10% into a game and whoever wins gets Earth, basically gets the planet.

And so within the narrative, the main character, Carl, is crawling dungeons and leveling up so he gets xp like he gets an alert on his his hud and gets like unlocks loot boxes and new abilities and all this kind of stuff in the narrative the character is aware of this so when you're playing an rpg the character doesn't know that they have stats right in dungeons and dragons when you increase your strength the character is not like i just went from 11 to 12 instead they are just thematically

stronger this is a genre of novel where the characters are aware of their stats and leveling them up and it is they're not like themselves in a video game or anything right it's like it would be like if in real life i had stats and was just aware of those stats so there's a dozen different ways they do it sometimes it's a world where the cat like you said the characters just have stats and aware of it dungeon crawler carl he was in the real world and then the real world became a

video game when aliens come and put a containment field around the earth in.

Another another series i've read called stone haven there's two threads there's the character in real life and then they enter a game and they're playing a game and then there's a bunch where it's like an alternate world like someone dies and they wake up in a game i'm currently working on lit rpg it is the first piece of fiction i've ever had to write where i have a spreadsheet to keep track of like current quests level of xp what their stats are what their feats are all

that kind of stuff as a genre it is so weirdly compelling dungeon crawler carl is a big one i also really recommend stonehaven so i would say currently that like that's the one i'm working on at the moment that's the most complex but probably providence or fractured aether are my most like all-time complex there's genre an anime called isekai where it's like to teleport to another world and that's super common now but in every one

of those i've ever heard of it's always they know they're going into a game or that kind of thing and if they're going into a different world i've never seen it be like oh i'm in real life but that's i mean there's probably some anime that does that but there's overlap and there's also the the genre called progression fiction which is stuff like we are bob if you've ever heard of the bob of us which is a guy basically gets uploaded into a

van neumann machine which is a self-replicating thing so he goes he's now in a he's a robot basically who is like a satellite and he goes to a planet and makes two more bobs and then they go off and make two more bobs and eventually like there's a million bobs across the universe and they're all like it's super interesting so there's progression there's what do you call it a psyche.

Portal fiction is also known as and then there's lit rpg and they often have a lot of overlap between them what's your answer my friend i think probably either this podcast if you consider the whole thing rather than an individual episode because man is it taking a lot to like there's you know obviously writing their notes and everything like that and like learning ahead of time and then just recording it with all my millions of audio issues and then editing and

all that sort of stuff it's it's occupied a lot of things if not then probably something like when i was helping my dad build a house i didn't have to like know how to build a house i was a lot younger but it's still like a lot of complexities of things going on i'll tell you the one that i didn't really work on which is when i was when i was much younger i had this idea for a series of.

A series of media that would tell a story in 10 different formats and each of them would have 10 different formats within them so there'd be like 10 books and one of them would be a novel and one of them would be a cookbook and one of them would be a how-to etc etc and then it would shift to tv and one would be a crime procedural one would be a sitcom or blah blah blah all telling like then those games it was going to be like this type of video game that

kind of all telling one massive stuff is nonsense but that was that was my aspirational most complex project ever that reminds me when i was wanting to be a writer i very similar to board games i approached everything from the sideways angle of like what's something weird i can do in the genre so like i was doing stuff like what if i wrote a musical but like it's a book so so like you know like a character will burst into song but like i write

that they're singing and like the dancing things that they're doing as if it's like stage directions or whatever amazing that is all from us we will return soon we're probably gonna stick with daniel.games for a while and then shift back to other stuff but for now stay tuned for more daniel.games blog analysis that's all from me bye bye everyone. Music. Thanks for joining us. You can follow us on Facebook or Twitter at funproblemspod or reach us via email at funproblemspodcast at gmail.com.

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