#55 - Catch-Up Mechanisms and Hooks

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

Hayward. I am first name AJ, last name Brandon. Thanks for being a guest on my podcast, AJ. Always a pleasure to have you. The last episode we recorded, I think you said like four things, so it really was like you were a guest who I wasn't letting talk. Well, to be fair, with four people, hon, you know, you can only talk so much and it makes sense to have one person leading it, so it's all good.

Today we have an unseen guest which is regular listener of the podcast jay jay from australia this is 100% of what i know about jay is that he i think he is from australia and.

Jay as well as being in it what's that and as a listener and as a listener that's true uh jay as well as being in our discord oh by the way we did a discord upgrade recently so we went through it out a bunch of channels and it's really cool now you should come check it out link in the in the show notes as always as well as being that discord jay is also in the button shy discord which i've talked about before is just being one of the most like lovely supportive design communities

on all of discord and i thoroughly recommend it and he made some interesting points that i want to talk about after throwing over to aj as i remember to do thank you peter i just have a little bit of follow-up from some episodes one of them peter asked me to do when i this is a long time ago because i forgot to do the follow-up when i was supposed to but when i did my presentation on why your good game won't sell i was missing some slides which i didn't realize at the time and

i've realized afterwards and peter's wanted me to let everybody know in case there was any confusion as to uh why it was the way it was it's a little unfortunate i i remember there was one where i was talking about the publishers versus designers versus versus artists as like a brand recognition thing uh the thing that may have gotten it taken down was when i was talking about how hyper-sexualized characters and this day and age can really turn people off of

your product and are not going to and then you just played five minutes of pornography i remember i mean it was the most engaging part but also i can see why they took that down yeah yeah fair the other piece of follow-up is just in the last cell sheets episode that we did i made i think a pretty tasteless joke in retrospect when we were doing one of the cell sheets. I was reading up what their like paragraph of explanation of what the game was.

And it was quite long and i made like a fake yawn and i just think it was a little bit rude, especially considering, you know. I understand basically everyone who said, you know, tear my till she knew one, but that's in the spirit of constructive feedback. And what I did was just kind of mean when people are putting their work out there to be criticized. So I just want to apologize for that and say I will do better.

I have nothing to apologize for. And in fact, I'm going to do worse in future, just so I can also join in with this. We've talked about this before, but I struggle with a cell sheet episode because I'm so critical. I'm so hypercritical. And people on the Discord are very nicely being like, yes, Peter, that's what we want. But next time we do a cell sheets episode, here's a little preview for you. We're going to open with one of my worst cell sheets so that it's not just me being torn apart.

We also got some submissions of some successful cell sheets.

And so if if you've had a game signed for the publisher and ideally released so that we can look at the final version compared to the sell sheet and you're interested in having us display it please send it like that's a really interesting idea of like having a successful sell sheet because again we we are not the sell sheet experts we just happen to have a platform and we think it's valuable to talk about so yes if if you'd like a sell sheet featured to be torn apart obviously welcome

to funproblemspodcast at gmail.com but also if you have one that got signed let us know and we will we want to start opening the episodes with like hey here's a here's a sell sheet that worked and here's what we can learn from that just so it's less of a negative critical experience and more of a generally critical experience any other follow-up a to the j that's it well let's go to not a to the j just j to the nothing j to the australia so

this is a post that he made about catch-up mechanisms. And I'm just going to go ahead and read it. Here's the four versions of catch-up mechanisms that I can think of I'll probably unsuccessfully try to name uniquely. And I thought this was such a fun problems topic. Now, we've done some catch-up mechanisms before, I believe. Am I remembering that correctly? We've done 70 episodes now. Yeah. In fact, I think it was in the definitions one, we talked about headwinds

and stuff like that. And yeah, we definitely covered it before.

Okay so this this is going to have some overlap but i just thought it was a really useful breakdown of four like the four distinct it's sort of like the three types of cooperative games it's the four distinct types of catch-up mechanisms and aj especially if you have any that are not covered here i think that's an interesting topic so the first one he mentions is rubber banding which is when the distance between players is naturally pulled together by the game state of losers

making life harder for the winners and vice versa so for me the go-to example is um quacks of krillingberg the further behind you are from the leader the more of a boost you get and that is very classical rubber banding where is that rubber banding yeah yes where the game is just like hey you're behind we don't want that i've used that in games i've seen that in games i think it's a it's it's slightly clunky i suppose but it's a very effective way of just like making sure that no one's

out of the game uh so he calls that one rubber banding the next one is head or, tailwinds which he has separated from rubber banding where it's a natural consequence of the game state but not necessarily interactive so rubber banding is when you like look at you and look at the leader and like okay we got to get you close to the leader headwinds and tailwinds the example he gives is in dominion the more victory points you attain the slower you go

and so that is a way that has you know the other players have no impact on that is purely just like where are you oh sorry the the the moves that get you towards victory naturally slow you down.

The third one is blue shells oh okay so rubber banding was a was wrong okay blue shells is what is the example i gave so i should have read over this before starting blue shells is an artificial reward for those furthest behind or punishment for those in front that is explicitly baked into the rules and the examples it gives is quacks quillingberg so i think the difference between rubber banding and blue shells that is differentiating here is

that blue shells is completely artificial it is the thing i mentioned it's you're you're you're losing cool have some points like last place gets an extra turn or whatever whereas rubber banding is a natural state where they get pulled together and i'll try to find the example i gave because i didn't copy into my notes but do you have any thoughts while i google that nope that's that's uh i i guess for rubber banding or for for i guess a tailwind a tailwind might be

a better example i talked about blood rage before where the winner loses the card that they won with in combat and the loser gets to keep their card in combat. Now, that's not like an extra thing being handed to you on top of it, but it means that you now have an advantage to win the next fight. And there's other games that are more conflict-oriented where the winner loses their troops, the loser does not, which means that it's more likely that they'll win the next one.

Maybe that's what the rubber banding is in their definition. So I found the example, which was in pool. Or eight ball pool, billions, whatever you call it, the more of your balls that you have sunk, or Codenames is probably a better example, the more of your agents you have found, the fewer targets you have, and the higher your chance of hitting the opponent. So it is like a headwind, but it's a natural part of the game.

I'll argue against the Codenames example in particular, just because having fewer things that you have to hit also means that you. Don't need to overlap multiple ones, if that makes sense. No, sorry, sorry. I emphasize the wrong part. Let's say I've gotten five of mine and you've gotten none of yours. The odds of my team accidentally hitting one of yours is very different to your team hitting one of mine.

And I think that's what he refers to as overbanding, where the game state naturally condenses them. So unnatural condensation, that's not the word, unnatural moving together is a blue shell.

So that's like, you're in last place, have an extra turn. Cool.

That's what he's calling a blue shell. a headwind is oh man i'm doing so well that i've slowed down my own engine but it's not interactive and then rubber banding is that natural like it's sort of the combination of the two where the better i'm doing than you the naturally more chance i have of slowing down and the chance that you have of catching up another example would be let's say you have a bunch of tokens on a line this is a very boring game i'm

giving every time you move forward if that space is empty if that space is occupied you get to skip it right right yeah so naturally the further behind i am the further the easier it is for me to get ahead which is not the case at all if you're in front so i think that's what he's referring to as rubber banding which i think is a really interesting and useful term and then the last one that he lists is tall poppy politics have we talked about tall poppy syndrome on the podcast

before yeah it's the when it stands up too tall it's the one that gets cut down to size, which I assume in this context is referring to team up on the leader. Exactly, yeah, yeah. So this is very much going to be a mini-sode, or maybe we'll do both the J things at once. We've got two J episodes planned, guys. So those are the four catch-up mechanisms. And I thought that was just a really interesting and useful model to separate, like, as you know, this is my Jimmy Jam.

I love getting into, like, really the weeds and being like, ah, this is this, this is that, this is that, this is that. I'm going to add one more comment to this, which is not an additional catch-up mechanism, but it's that... I think for all four of these catch-up mechanisms, the way I think of them is they're not all catch-up mechanisms really in the same sort of sense. Like I would say Hedwin is a little bit different, but they're all trying to

solve the same problem. And in that sense, the fifth one I would add is obfuscation. If the problem that you're trying to solve is that a player feels like they cannot possibly win, then you can obfuscate who is ahead in order to make other players feel like they have a chance. And I'm pretty sure we talked about that in our board game terminology episodes because I have it in my notes where I talked about headwinds and catch-ups.

I want to go back to the first half of your statement. You said that one of them doesn't really do something, essentially.

I don't want to misquote you, but I didn't catch the exact wording. So they're solving the same problem? No, no, no. Before that, you gave an example of one of these four doesn't actually... The headwind. So all I was saying was that a headwind doesn't catch up someone who's behind. It pushes down the person at the front. And I think that that is a difference. Again, they're solving the same problem, but I don't think of that one as a catch-up mechanism in the same way as the other ones.

But specifically, there's head slash tailwind, where either it boosts the person at the back or it slows down the person.

Well, not at the back or front, but the person, the further ahead you get, the slower progress is. Right. And just, I don't want to split hairs here.

It's not an important difference particularly, but again, if we're talking about the problem that we're trying to solve here, if the person in first place slows down and still beats me that doesn't make the person in last place feel all that much better whereas if it boosts up the person in last then that can make them feel much closer to the rest of the pack in total if that makes any sense like it's a relative positioning thing in in a more than two player game yeah i i think

i do want to split hairs because i think i disagree okay so again let's use a really extreme example let's say to take Like, the first step takes one point, the second step takes two, the third step takes four, the fourth one takes eight, et cetera, et cetera. That's a very classic sort of headwind, I guess, right? Like... And why do you, and I'm just curious because I don't quite understand the logic here, why do you say that doesn't make the person in last place feel like they can catch up?

Well, so the point here is that the headwind affects the person who's doing the best, the most. And so that person slows down and brings the person at the front closer to the leader, or closer to the person at the bottom. But it's affecting the people in second, third, fourth, etc. Less because they're presumably not as close to them.

So in that example where it becomes dramatically more curtailed with each one of those steps, then the person at the front might be down a little bit further, but everybody else is going to be further up on the track than they would have been necessarily if there was just a boost to the person in the back. Let's look at the example of Heat. Heat has a very, very heavy-handed catch-up mechanism where the last person just boosts ahead.

Yeah, and we'd say that's a blue shell, right, under the system? Yeah. An artificial reward for last place. Yeah. So just in this case, that person can often just like win the game off the back of that, even if they're terrible at the game, to be honest, I've seen it. I mean, maybe they weren't, maybe, maybe it's on me for not utilizing the catch up mechanism, but it's, it's the point is that person gets super,

super rewarded. and it means that they're much closer to the rest of the pack as a group. Whereas if the, it depends on the headwind system itself, but if it's like, if it's very top heavy, you know what I mean? If it's affecting the person at the front the most, then that brings one person down relation, but then that could end up with a group of people who are still much further ahead of the last person. Yeah, that's kind of how I see it. Interesting. Yeah, so I understand your logic

now. I think I just do disagree and then this happens sometimes, guys. That that doesn't count as a catch-up mechanism. I suppose in a literal sense, you're saying like catching up is for the person in last place. Whereas I think...

If let's let's say first play again i'm just gonna use arbitrary numbers let's say there's 15 spaces in the race first players on five on 10 second players on eight third players on seven and last player is on one they're just they're just doing so badly and you're saying cool anything that just affects leader does not make the person in last place feel like they can win.

But i think anything that makes second place feel like they can win is more of a catch maybe it's relative it's more of a catch-up mechanism than not having a system at all right sure yeah and i I think it's just like the lens and the goal of which of these mechanisms you're using, right? Yeah. And so, okay, now that I understand your first point, let's jump into your second point, which is you're saying that obfuscation, it's funny because I'm so autistic

about this. I'm like, but that's not a catch-up mechanism. But you're right. If the goal is to make no one feel like they can't win, right, essentially, that's what we're stating the goal is.

For you it sounds like specifically the person in last place but i'm just saying like you want to make sure that i guess yeah it's the difference between making making it feel like anyone can win and making it feel like one person has won like those are kind of two extremes of the same goal yeah yeah that's a good answer and so obfuscation doesn't mechanically mechanically do anything but in terms of like vibe and feels you

don't know who's won until the end of the game yes interesting yeah so yeah i struggle to call that a catch-up mechanism but if you reframe it from the yeah yeah it's not and so it's interesting cool okay anything else on catch-up mechanisms.

Nope okay let's go on to jay's second point so jay posted a completely separate thing that i was like okay we're doing a whole jay episode which is the tabletop game designers australia which is the country i'm from aj i don't know if that's ever come up before uh has an award coming up called the take my money award for a game design that engages players and as the name suggests makes them want to buy it asap it's obviously a vague criteria it's obviously a vague criteria but to me it

means it's all about the hook yeah jay's listener so he's he's aware of our hook system looking at the stuff i'm tinkering there's some okay hooks but not certainly not take my money hooks given the increasingly competitive blah blah blah sorry not not not uh aj this is where you rudely yawn and you're like jay you said too many words uh make me feel real bad so i spent the last week or two doing an exercise so this this one's less of a model

and more of an interesting exercise to generate new ideas and it's been really fruitful here's my self-imposed criteria for each game design idea firstly it's limited to three bullet points if you can't make it sound compelling in three bullet points you've already missed the mark i love this.

We are we are doing this whole cell sheet series and so because of that aj and i i think are more in the headspace of cell sheets than i've ever been i can't speak for you but like i'm i'm thinking so much about cell sheets lately because we're actively talking about it all the time. And that's such a good system. Consider making the sell sheet first. Like, start there and then build the game that matches that really incredible hook.

And this is essentially what this exercise is. I just thought it was a really nicely laid out one. Ideally, all three bullet points are strong hooks. Even better if a mixture of different types of hooks. Mechanic, thematic, component. And he gave us a nice little nod about how we talk about that. Absolute best if these three tie into each other nicely for a case of vision. From that, I've generated 10 concepts with a few completely new ones that might have real potential.

All one came one that came to me late in the process has a lot going for it beyond the hooks is particularly exciting so it's literally what you said like there's i i do a lot of thinking about about youtube because i have a youtube channel outside of this one where i i review ted lasso and make easter egg videos etc and as part of that i did i think maybe it was during it off here i did a full two-month youtube course it was the youtube startup academy

or something like that run by oh i can't remember his name he's a british doctor who's gone to youtube and now has millions of followers and he runs a program and he said look start with start with the thumbnail start with thumbnail it's all about thumbnail it's all about thumbnail and mr beast obviously the most successful youtuber at least the the one that most people would know is the most successful youtuber he literally does

this he starts with a thumbnail and then he builds a video around that and there is an argument to be made that this is a horrible cash cash hungry corp you know soulless corporate approach to making stuff it's not art you know it's not this exciting like, oh, I've got this idea and I'm passionate about it. It's a very results-oriented perspective, which is also a little bit soulless. Is that fair to say? Or are you sitting here being like, Peter, what are you talking about?

I hear that perspective. I can't say I agree. I feel that, I think it's a very defensible position. Oh, I'm not attacking it, just to be clear. I'm just saying like, on one hand, you could argue this is a soulless way to make product. Yes i don't disagree that on one hand you could argue this is a source way to make a product.

But if you are trying to make it and we've always said that the the brief of this podcast is people who want to make games professionally like people who want to get a game published get a game signed make stuff for more than just the pursuit of art then i think i think that this is not a necessary first step because you can obviously make games in other ways but this is a very very very smart first step in making a game we were talking about doing a a book

list episode at some point and the the book that i think i referenced the most in my whole life is by oh god i can't remember his name now it's called so good they can't endure you and the central argument of that book is, don't worry about playing the game just make something so good that it just gets created and i i live by that philosophy for a long time and i strongly still believe in that philosophy, But at the same time, if you want to get a game made, you've got to think about

market fit. You've got to think about product. We do a lot of talking about product that we never used to do.

And that's because I'm not, I don't want to say I'm shifting away from that mindset, but I'm definitely very conscious of once I started thinking product first, I became one of the most signed game designers in the world. And like that is an undeniable one-to-one kind of correlation. So if your goal is to get games signed, make games in the way that I do. Then yes, I think you have to think about product.

So i want to ask you like when when you're deciding what to work on what is your actual process i don't know if we've talked about this for at least five years yeah the way that i do is you know i like i assume virtually all of our listeners have a million game design ideas bouncing around in my head and when i complete a project or i have time the way you phrase that sounded like our listeners have a million game design ideas bouncing around your head sure but

when i am looking for my next project i go down to through my list of things or if i come up with that idea and i just get so passionate about it then i'll just like immediately start on it and i follow the the framework that i've actually listed before on podcast and posted i'll put a link into this episode's notes but i literally write down what are the hooks like what what's the one sentence like vision which is separate from the hooks this is like the the tagline of the game is

how i think of it that's like why am i so jazzed to work on this game i write down that feeling there and then I flesh out a dock from there where it has like you know my my brainstorm of like here's mechanics I could do here's this and I build that out until I've got enough of a shape of a game that I just stop using that start working on the game etc and then what often happens is you know the game isn't good and I just stop working on it or I end

up having the the most common thing I find is I'm working on the game and. And in making it better, following the dog, as we've talked about, I find that I lost the thing that made it special. And it could even still be a good game, but that's like a really important inflection point for me. I'm actually just hitting this right now with a game that I'm working on with Co-Designer, where it's like the original hook of the game has gotten like pulled away.

And so now I need to decide, can I find a different hook in this or is this just a perfectly fine game?

And if it if i was under the model of like oh just make good art and i just i wouldn't care i just make it and it would be good and and all that but if i want to get signed to a publisher it needs that hook it needs to have something that makes them want to actually take that next step and see for themselves how good it is and that's that's again another point where a lot of my games will end up dying right so

this this process that we're talking about like start from the sell sheet that's that's not your process i'm not accusing i'm just i'm just curious no but it's close like i don't literally make this all sheet but i do have my hooks and i do have my vision and all that yeah and and we've talked about in our collaboration episode i believe like the the design document that that you like to make and it has those things so i should i should talk about how i make games which is probably very similar

in that like i i'm pretty much a mechanics first guy. I am all mechanics all the time. And again, the sole focus of this podcast for a long time was mechanics, mechanics. I did not want to talk about industry. I did not want to talk about sell sheets. I did not want to talk about product. And then it's shifted and people were like, yes, please keep doing this. So we have. But I care so deeply about making it.

So little about other stuff that i really have to force myself to i really have to be like okay let's do all this other stuff and i'm good at it and so i've had success but i you know if i if i could exist in the early 2000s when it was just like yep cool mechanic go cool mechanic go like that that that would be my dream design era because i would be knitsiering out more games that i do now even and so i need i need a mechanic first

and like you i've got this big long list and sometimes something will grab me and i'll be like oh this is this is gold like very occasionally i be like ah i found it i found that dream and maybe i'll noodle for a little bit i'm just here over here because this is where i do my early play like solo testing maybe i'll noodle a little bit but as often as not i will first sit down and be like what would from this mechanism what would

this product look like let's say i noodle for five minutes to be like okay cool this is not just a, hypothetical thing that sucks but i will sit down and be like cool if i like i like this mechanism i think this has the potential to carry a game and there's not many mechanisms that have an ability to carry a game especially not many new mechanisms cool what does that product look like and and just like you i need that whole vision before it's even worth working on

and do you want to just talk more about like the specifics of like the product vision product design that you go through yeah so i'll i'm trying to say okay i my my games are slim to two categories.

And it's a weird one because on one hand i think of them as the home runs like the product vision that 10 publishers will fight to have this game like and again that's i said that again a mechanism like carry game is rare this is even rarer i've hit it like three or four times in my life but something where i'm like oh this is going to sell like it's that classic thing where i can tell you the thematic pitch and you're like i want that game i can tell you like a single bullet point

And publishers will be like, I almost am going to sign it straight from that. And then very, very, very importantly, you need to deliver with the mechanisms. And that's the part that I spent years and years and years honing. So now when I find those like apex predators of a product, I have the game designed to support the rest of the ecosystem to make a very strange ecosystem metaphor. And so that's, that's type one. That's the home runs. The type two is, this is cute. Yeah.

And this is a very privileged position to be in, because those games I can sign because of my connections, because I can go to conventions, because I can get in front of publishers, and because I know that sometimes publishers just need something to fill a gap. And this is part of what our publisher series is about, where right before recording this, we spoke to CMYK. And they were at the end like, hey, you know what? We would really like a cool trading game or a cool social deduction game.

Or no, more accurately, sorry, more relevantly, they said, we're really hungry for card games. And so I'm like, oh, great. I have got 10 cute card games that I'm not super aggressively pitching because it's not even that they're a hard sell. It's just that they are going to be a fun little game, but they're not like, oh, bidding war over this game. So those are the two categories of the game. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I'm just going to restate your second line and make sure I understand correctly. So those are games that are good. They're not so good that you can just pitch it into a vacuum and you're confident that a publisher is going to sign it as is just because it's so unbelievably good. But it is good enough that if it's the right publisher... I don't like the word good, so I'm just going to swap it out for sexy. Sure.

So if it's if it's it's not super duper sexy but it is the type of game where if it's the type again that the publisher is already looking for it they need it for their line it's going to be a great fit they're going to sign it yes exactly and and it it's mechanically sound and they know that i'm nice to work with and and and so those are my two categories and i'll come back to category category degree b basically i have a hard limit of how much time i'll spend on it because i

can't put a hundred hours i can't put 300 hours into a game that and again i literally have a folder of these games that are all very cute fun games so i'll give you an example i was talking to a ip publisher they're a publisher who's just acquired a bunch of ips and they were like hey we need stuff to fill the ip great that is exactly what that folder is for so i go into the folder and i'm like oh man they have i'm trying to think of one i can mention without breaking nda,

this is not a real one, because the Pokemon company doesn't do this, but let's say Pokemon were like, hey, we really want a game that's like Go Fish, or that's like Uno or something like that. I can go into my little folder and be like, oh, I have a game that's like Go Fish. And with these tweaks, it's now Pokemon aligned, and I can submit that. And the odds of getting signed are very, very, very low, because they're looking at so many games.

But more often than you'd think, they're like, oh, yes, that is exactly, like, again, cute game is sort of the the way i'm mentally framing it because it's like it's not sexy but it's cute and so i've spent no more you know i haven't spent a hundred hours on this game and then be like oh man no one will even sign it and i i feel like early peter especially and probably a lot of new designers will put that hundred hours into a cute game and

you have to that's how you build the skills etc etc but i'm definitely the point where i can differentiate between like oh this is going to sign and this is going to be a hit to like i like this idea it works it's internally consistent it's fun i'm proud of it i'm not saying like i make stuff i'm not proud of but i'm aware that it's not a super sexy idea that is going to be signed with a big publisher yeah yeah or without without a separate hook like like they

desperately need a card game tomorrow or they have an ip in this batch is the ip yeah we were talking in our predictions video about like how many games we're going to sign and a lot of the games that i've got like 18 complete games right now how many of those games am i like oh that i like i'm so confident they're going to get signed because they're really good and i'm not even playing them in the same category as like you know the the the

super rockstar ones it's not our game with ag that one when we were done that i was like right that that's an example of i think i think rockstar is actually a really good word for it that's a rockstar game like that is a sexy game that people are gonna bend over backwards to get. And I've got games that I think aren't quite to that level, but are definitely going to get signed. Like, I'm so confident for that.

And I've probably got like two or three of those. And I've got about 15 games that fall into that cute category where I'm just waiting for the right time. I'm talking to a publisher and they're like, we really need X. I'm like, got it. It's right here. Yeah, exactly.

So I have, yeah, I'm looking at my list now and I have like maybe two or three unsigned Rockstar games.

And the fact that they're unsigned might make me say, yeah, they're not, but two of those three i have not even started pitching yet and one of them is with a publisher and he's just like yep if tariffs stop we'll sign this all of our predictions immediately became out of date because that was recorded before liberation day which anyway uh let's not go into too much detail on that so to answer the question that i asked you and now i've spent more time answering because i'm long-winded if it's a

cute game i will test it i will get it working i will come up with a. Pitchable theme but in the cmyk episode they talked about different levels of ceiling i know that this has a low ceiling i think that this could do well but it's not going to be the game of the year you know right and i think that there's a place for those games good i was just gonna say this might sound weird to some of our listeners because i'm sure everyone thinks that their game is their precious little baby but

once you've been in the industry for a while and you've been around the block you're gonna start to see that some games like you said have a low ceiling even if it does well for what the type of game it is it's not going to explode like some of these other ones it's just not that kind of uh game or we're not that kind of market yeah and then the the rockstar games i will build out a full sexy theme and i will build out the whole product vision and i will generate a bunch of art on chat

gpt or mid journey to just like show you what the product looks like so that when i pull it in front of a publisher they start to drool and they say give me this game that that that's basically my process so i i play it until i know it's mechanically sound i kind of mentally sort and there's games that are between these categories there's somewhere i'm like it's not like a fool's rockstar sexy game but it's not like it it'll definitely sign which a lot of

the cute games won't necessarily ever sign they'll often sit on the shelf and i've had so many games sit on the shelf for two years and a publisher's like hey peter have you got this i'm like yes i do and they're like here's a contract i'm like hooray.

Um it it's it feels like i'm cheating by signing like 10 games in a year because like three of them are from four years ago or whatever so okay i want to get so all that say that that that's the process so i don't i don't literally build out i guess with the rockstar game i don't literally build out a sell sheet but i am very consciously thinking component, mechanical hook msrp like all this kind of stuff whereas with a cute game i'm honestly just thinking,

a how can i keep it as component light as possible because the lighter it is component wise the more flexible it is who can publish it or b what is what is a component that could come into this i pitched one of these cute games to a publisher recently and they were like yeah yeah we're not going to sign this but here's some tips on how to pitch this exact game and then gave me some incredible tips and one thing he said was like every player has a token you're just using cubes go

and find like nice unique metal minis again this is all pre-tariffs and like put them in your prototype so the publisher can look at that be like oh we can make four metal minis that's that's not so much that we can't afford it but it's really cute and sexy another way to think about this might be using the our favorite term in the world folks a rockstar game has one or more.

Really really strong hooks and a cute game doesn't have strong hooks it's just a good game and maybe it has like a few maybe it has like five low level hooks sure sure yeah the hooks are not as strong as they would ideally be right yeah but it's still a good game and that's where peter's saying like he's not throwing them out but he's recognizing that they're not hitting the highs that we would ideally like to hit and so

he's not being as aggressive with them he's waiting for the right opportunity to fit them in so i i went to gamma with a big bag of 10 games and i got offers on five of them and three of them were cute games i just had enough meetings with the right number of publishers where i could pull something out and be like oh we actually want something exactly like that to finish the line or whatever again tariffs who knows if anything gonna get made but

it's it's really handy and and what i don't do and what i see a lot of designers doing and i I have a lot of empathy for it, is have a cute game that I'm pitching to everyone as the one game that I'm pitching for multiple conventions. Like, I know publishers who have said to me, like, oh, what's a made-up name? Henry, my son Henry. Ah, Henry's pitched me the same game for four years now with, like, mechanical tweaks. And A, it's a cute game. Like, it works, it functions.

But it's not sexy and they don't really want to see that same game again and again. They want to see what you have that's new. Obviously, everyone works differently and people do this for hobbies, etc, etc. But I definitely, I understand the publisher's frustration when they see a game three years in a row and they're like, do I even want to keep taking meetings with this guy?

Whereas I have a flurry of games. Every time you see me, I'll have not only a new sexy game, but like five new cute games.

And and the thing that i really want to emphasize here is that i am not the arbiter of what will succeed or not things in rings was a cute game i did not see that as a sexy game at all it is my best-selling game by far and that is the complete opposite of sort of my ethos here where i was like oh yeah i'll quickly put this together i'll show it to joe joe was like yes mind money uh which was very nice for me but also like i was like oh that to me that

game came out of nowhere that was a cute game that became sexy and so and and this is not to say like maybe your game is sexy pitch it for four years in a row but definitely like that that's something to be aware of is that the more the more swings you take the more balls you're gonna hit i want to get back to jay's exercise because i think i think it's really interesting so i'm just going to go over it once more which is you only got three bullet points you

want all three to be strong hooks ideally a mixture of different types of hooks and it's at its best if they tie into each other for a piece of vision. I think this is an amazing exercise and I challenge everyone listening. And in fact, AJ, let's go away and do this before our next podcast recording, sit down with a blank slate and just come up with stuff purely from a product perspective.

Don't worry about necessarily like having a game or knowing that it works. Just have fun. Treat it as like a fun little exercise, like coloring in or whatever. Have fun just sitting down and being like, what are 10 hit games that come out of my brain and don't exist? Because as Jay said, like at the end of that, he's like, oh, I really love this game idea. I am actively excited for this game idea. And it started from that point of strength. It's not like, okay, I've got a fun game.

Now, how do I make it sexy? it's oh i have a sexy hot pitch sounded like it was dirty uh how do i make this into a game that's a fun little puzzle for game designers sure sounds good cool i'm gonna make a thread i think in our discord when this episode comes out for people to to post their like maybe one or two favorites from this exercise because i think it's just a really fun one and a nice little community moment yep so what we're asking

for is your three hooks and three bullet points yep three bullet points and the and like the brief description right yep just three bullet points just those three bullet points god yep you are limited to three bullet points, and then once you've got this hopefully the sell sheet makes itself and the this makes itself and the pitch makes itself and so i just really like this i think i think jay is a great member of the community i don't think i've ever played any of the prototypes but they seem

cool and i was excited to dedicate a whole episode to you jay now as you may know every fun problems listener gets an episode dedicated themselves so just let us know what your two topics are aj how do i get a game published. I think it's your turn to give some publisher advice. Oh, yeah. I think you're right. I did throw it to other people. I already mentioned don't just have one game. The more, I mean, there's two extremes. Okay, so let's talk about Essen 2017.

I was in, oh, 2018. I was in Essen in 2018, and I was there as a publisher. So I was taking a lot of pictures, taking a lot of pictures, taking a lot of pictures.

And the two worst meeting, types of meetings I had, was someone who came in with a big stack of sell sheets and was basically like here you go here's a book what do you like right and the second worst was someone who came in and was like here's my one game i was like oh that doesn't work for me they're like okay so i just booked like a whole half hour slot to not take a meeting essentially so how do you how do you balance those two points obviously we all know that my

system is i design to a publisher i have a publisher in mind for every game that i design and i'm like ah this could work as an all play game this could work as a game head game this could work as an ag game i have a publisher in mind and i'm not saying that every single meeting you take you should have a game designed specifically that publisher but before the meeting do take your time to sit down and be like what do they

make you know obviously if we've done an episode go listen to that episode but for the we've only done three of those episodes and it turns out there's more than three publishers out there go look at their catalog see what they're not only have released historically, but what they're releasing now, then look at your big sheet of games, your big book of games and be like, ah, these three make total sense to the publisher.

Now, sometimes I will admit that I do this step later in the process, as in I'll sit down with the publisher and be like, hey, let's play a game. What would you have published this, this, this, this? What do you make? And by the end of that, I'm like, ah, okay, here's the three games that I have in my bag for you. Ideally, don't be me and do as I say, not as I do, and do that research before the meeting. But the two halves of it, I would say, are have more than one game.

I think you can go to a convention with one game, but it's going to be an expensive exercise. And secondly, don't come into a meeting with a brown sludge of 50 games that you don't care which one would match the publisher. Yeah, I think ideally you have one game specifically that you're like, you know, maybe one to three at most, where you're like, this is like definitely something that this publisher would publish because I've seen them publish micro

games. So here's one micro game. I've seen them publish heavy euros. Here's one heavy euro. And those are the two main things that you- This is different publishers. No, no, no, no. There's some publishers that publish micro games and heavier games. So I would just say, look at each of their lines, have one sell sheet per line is how I think of it. Right, right, I gotcha.

And then when you go into that conversation, whether it's email or whether it's in person, I think it helps to show that you've done your research and say, I think this would be a good fit for you because it fits in this line that has to do with these games.

And then, here's the extra good point, if it's not, if they've changed what they're doing in the future, or if they think that you've misinterpreted the line, they'll correct you, and then maybe you have a different game that you can be like, aha, now I see that you're not doing microgames anymore, but you really want abstract strategies. Here's my abstract strategy. I think that's an excellent piece of advice, and I was going to say something in response to that, and it's gone.

Sorry. No, it's all good. i should have written it down i'm only on a few hours sleep i don't know if you can tell if i'm more manic than usual oh god it's gonna annoy me so much we'll just have to do follow-up someday.

Yep you can keep thinking and i'll start with a fun question yes let's have some fun what are your favorite bands oh oh i worked it out i knew it i knew as soon as i started going down the road, it'll also make your make your reception much warmer again the the guy who he seemed like a perfectly fine designer but he sat down he was like here's 12 cell sheets what do you want and i was like i i don't feel special whereas if you sit down and you're like hi peter from jellybean games

i know that you made village pillage which is a highly interactive fast to learn game i've designed a highly attractive fast to learn game and i think it would fit either in in that line of games or maybe even in the same world i'm like oh this guy like i am so much more interested in playing that game and 90 percent of times design is wrong because people are people but i am so much warmer i am so much more interested in playing i'm so much more interested in giving

feedback if i don't like it that if i'm treated as like a nameless faceless like oh you're a publisher here are games you publish games right all publishers publish games therefore here is games such a difference uh just in how you'll be received okay aj do you want to have some fun i do want to have some fun peter what are your favorite bands like top bands yeah like three to five whatever give us a taste of peter's music vibes so i'm i'm weird with music,

Really? You're so normal in every other... I was having a conversation with my girlfriend's kid, actually, and in the course of this conversation, I realized that what I like in a song, is something that is just doing something that I haven't heard before. So right now, my favorite song is Little Girl Gone, and we've actually discussed this because it's just like, orally, it's just this whole other sonic experience that's unlike any other song.

I saw like bad guy by billy ellish for the same reason i'm like ah just doing stuff with your voice and with like mixing and all that kind of stuff so i tend not to go for bands as much as opposed to like i have a place of individual songs and if i like a song i'll go check out the other stuff but like the artist who made little girl gone i don't enjoy any of the other work i think it's fine and so my favorite band right now is ajr because ajr not no relation really make

sure that every song has like tiktok meme potential which means something cool orally and like every one of their songs i don't like some of them all than others of course but like every time i play an ajr song i know there's gonna be just something interesting and novel happening and that's what i want you know it's funny i heard about them like as as the band's name relatively recently and so i looked them up and i was like oh i like that song and i like yes and

i like that was my exact experience mine was through tiktok i spent a lot of i spent an hour a day on tiktok i have I'm set to turn off after an hour, so I know I don't spend more than an hour on TikTok. And so many of their songs, I'd get to the hook and I'd be like, oh, it's the meme. It's this one. Oh, that's that same band. Like they've really captured how to create in the modern environment. I want to go back like seven topics before getting your fun answer.

I was talking about So Good They Can't Ignore You. I'm reading a book by Austin Kleon called Show Your Work. And he talks about specifically So Good They Can't Ignore You in that book. And he says, So Good They Can't Ignore You was a great system in the 70s more so than today. To be an artist today, you have to be online. It is one-to-one. If you're not online, you don't exist. It's just that simple. And so the book's premise is like, hey, post about your process.

Show your work. That's the idea. But the thing that he said that really struck me was, yes, be so good they can't ignore you and then make sure that people can find you. So discoverability is different to designing to the sell sheet, designing to the thumbnail. So, for example, let's say I made an incredible YouTube video and never put it online. That's not going to be discovered. Let's say I made an incredible video that just doesn't have a good thumbnail.

It's really engaging or whatever, but it doesn't have that first five-second or thumbnail or the stuff you have to hit. You can still find an audience, but you have to put it online. You can't not put it online and find an audience. So, be so good they can't ignore you doesn't mean wait for them to come to your house. It means, like, be amazing and then put it out there.

And I think we actually had a big conversation on the Discord about this podcast specifically. We are not primed towards the observability.

We can't be this is never going to be a viral video like the most viral we got was was your excellent talk on on how to make you a good game better and that was like 1.3k hits which is great for us that's like five times as many as we normally get we're not hitting mr beast numbers like my ted lasso video essay has been online for four weeks and it's at 15 000 views and that'll just go up over time whereas our you know two-hour lecture about selling games has probably peaked

because it's a two-hour lecture about selling games so we are not trying we're not we're not discoverability first we are trying to make excellent interesting content and we went to youtube not to try to go viral but just to make it easier for people to access because we think that our content is really good we're very cocky in that regard but like we really we really put our effort into this but we are not thumbnail first we are not discoverable first so

there's definitely room for like a game design which is like whoa this is unlike anything else but it's never going to be the number one hit but still finding a home like still getting published that happens all the time and it's the difference between like do you want to make let's say gloom haven you you always like have to start from thumbnail and i realized that he probably didn't but like that that's the that's the correct path to making a

gloom haven versus just making something like i'm proud of this in order to exist and the more you do that more of an audience you will build anyway like.

Splutter spellin or cold world on a related note if you like the podcast like i say every episode at the end please tell a friend uh and come join our discord we we love our discord community aj do you have any favorite bands i do so i don't really listen to music much i'm not really into music at all generally speaking but sometimes i get to that point where i need to like focus just the right amount and i've got a lot of add so usually i'll throw a podcast while i'm doing work but sometimes

i need to focus more on the work and i'll listen to music and when i do that. I will listen to a lot of different stuff i listen to electro swing like Parav Stellar. Oh. Huss into pop. Hull City? Hull City, sure. I've listened to them. I wouldn't say they're one of my favorites, but I have. That's a little bit more like electric poppy. I like more electro swing music though. That's got more like energy. I like Olivia Rodrigo, Halsey. I like Epic Metal and Gothic Symphony from Nightwish.

I like The Mountain Goats, which is basically just poetry put to a lo-fi guitar. I would assume you went to video game music. That would have been my assumption. Sometimes. Sometimes, sometimes. Because that is designed to help you focus, essentially, or get you into flow. My answer was for my most recent band, but historically the stuff I like is Hilltop Hoods, which is an Australian rap group. Mountain Goats was my favorite band for a long time, and I listened to a lot of their songs.

I struggle to go back to their stuff these days because I'm so in love with pop now, and their stuff is very rarely poppy. But their album, the one that has Lovecraft and Brooklyn, is my favorite of their albums because they just have such interesting sounds on each one. I like Sunset Tree a lot too from him. But yeah, nowadays I'm just like, give me that sweet hit of song dopamine.

Uh i want to i want to go back to discoverability just very briefly because it's so directly relevant to this episode and will never be relevant again what would you title this episode aj j is the goat.

So there's sort of like the three different levels which is like i was seriously like we should just call this episode j from australia and that's a funny podcast name if we weren't doing an informational podcast like a lot of the stuff where it's just like you don't care what this episode is about you're going to listen anyway they just have like fun silly meme names you know and then the level up from that would be like two design tips from jay where

at least that gives you some idea but the most the most discoverable still never even in the realm of like mr beast would be like catch-up mechanisms and how to start a game like something like that and i think that's what we'll probably do because we want people who are we care about discoverability not necessarily for people finding it from the search page but people who are scrolling through episodes like oh actually i'm i'm working

on catch-up mechanism at the moment so i'm directly interested in that yeah we i've even thrown in a couple clickbaity ones there there's obviously fixing bgg which is the most clickbaity and one that i i don't like how i titled in the past but and why a good game won't sell is also very clickbaity it's very clickbaity in a good way like it's accurate too yeah that one i i'm more of a good one i'm more of a good one i'm more,

I agree. We could definitely put more work into making the titles make more sense. What I don't like is having titles that people can't read the title and understand what it is. Ludology is amazing, but Ludology will be like green flags. And you're like, what does that mean? Or like aprons. And you're like, what? Aprons could be an amazing episode, but I don't know what it is. Yeah, the ceiling for our discoverability is here.

So the effort we put in is also here because we could spend like an hour working on thumbnails and all this kind of stuff and it's not going to move that ceiling more than like a tiny smidge if that and so we went back and forth for a while on our publisher series and we finally came up with would publisher name publish this which is great for individual episodes terrible name for series because it becomes would publisher publish

this but i'm really happy with like i think i think we hit that ceiling of work and so that is as discoverable as those as those episodes can be, cool aj how do we end this podcast by saying goodbye everyone bye. Music. Thanks for joining us you can find us and our incredible discord community in the show notes or reach out to us privately at funpromispodcast at gmail.com we'd love to hear from you if you enjoyed the podcast, please tell a friend.