#63 - A Week in the Life of a Game Designer

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

And do you have a co-host? Yeah. You normally introduce yourself. That's how we always do it. Well, I just felt like with that one, you always call me A to the J. I was really hoping that I... I'm A to the J. To the brain. And today we're doing a very special episode where we're going to tell kids to do drugs. We feel there's enough advice telling kids not to do drugs. Let's really take that opposite angle and, you know, capture that part of the market.

AJ, what are we talking about today? I did just start taking drugs for ADD, but still. And I just started taking kids for...

Today we're doing a day in the life of a game designer. I don't know if there's a specific person who asked about this or what prompted you to think of it, but I think this is a really interesting idea because there's not that many full-time designers out there. And few are still that talk about what it actually looks like.

So you wanted to go through our days and just talk through point by point exactly how we spent our time yeah i i've done something like this before on facebook or no twitter back back when twitter was twitter and i used twitter and just literally for a day i just logged my day and people really enjoy it people just like seeing what i was up to and that kind of stuff people who were trying to be game designers people who weren't trying to be game designers it's just interesting especially like

when you're on on the outside so to speak just being like because you know this is this is the majority of my income at this stage and it occupies the majority of my days and what does that look like excellent question aj so i'm sure we've talked about this before but i time track so i actually have like to the minute what i do every day of my life and then as well as that i keep a career journal so every day i sit down and write out what i did the previous day this is

really helpful for me just to revisit and and like i i have this terrible habit of forgetting that i've said i'll do a thing so by revisiting what i did yesterday i was like oh that's right and in that meeting i said i would do this and then it goes on to do this if it wasn't already and also it's really great to i've been doing this for five years now so i can go back and you can pick any day in history and i can tell you what i did that day which is

really fun for me and useful to be like wait when did i pay that bill or when did i see that doctor or when did i see that movie etc etc uh sometimes you've even been like hey aj do you know today's the two-year anniversary of us like starting on this game that sort of thing yeah very fun yeah the diary software i use is called Diary.

So diary with an L between the R and the Y, and it has an on this day function that I check like once every month or so, but it's always fun to be like, what did I do this day four years ago?

And so this is not one of our intense, useful, actionable episodes. This is more of a bonus episode because we thought it'd be fun.

So I'm going to start all the way back to Monday. We're recording this on Friday, the 23rd of May, and so we're just going to do Monday through Friday of this week. And uh aj i'm relying on you to tell me and i'm going to too much boring detail.

You're always i'm a poor judge but i had a weird i had a weird monday i woke up at 8 a.m which is very early for me went back to sleep woke up at noon which is late for me and then after about an hour of just doing little tiny bits and bobs which is kind of the point of this so i reprinted some cards for my game tiny phone cafe i replied to some emails that i had to reply to i had a quick chat with a different co-designer about a game that no no i didn't have a chat i found

the cards that i did from a different game to use for a prototype and then i jumped into meetings meetings meetings so much of this week particularly was meetings but also a lot a lot of my weeks and especially i think your weeks are meetings nowadays yeah so yeah you want to keep going, yeah so aj and i have mentioned this a billion times so we will mention a billion more, on tuesday of this week no sorry tuesday of next week i'm leaving for a month-long vacation basically i'm going to

england where i will work but i'm trying not to take meetings and aj and i are working very intensely on a project that is with ag that is a lot of work a lot a lot a lot of work and so in order to get to the point where i can take a month off we have been pushing really hard this week on this game so monday we had a one hour art meeting you remember what that was.

I think that was us talking through a lot of the changes and updates that I was making to the art brief that needed to be discussed and we need to get on the same page with some of those different... No, you know what it was? It wasn't a meeting. This was me. So we have been hired by AEG to not only create the game as game designers, but we're now also separately doing development and art direction.

And so for the last seven years, AEG has been putting together a huge art document and I have not had a chance to sit down and read it.

Until monday when i thought we had a meeting starting at two i realized the meeting was starting at three so i was like okay great let's use this hour to go through the art document so that was me finally reading through and making all my notes so that wasn't a meeting that was just me going through aj's brilliant wonderful art document disagreeing with huge chunks of it agreeing with with the rest and then we had a one hour meeting oh sorry 90 minute meeting.

Probably to go through it or was that with someone else from ag i that would have been with just with to you that was not with anyone with ag all right cool so yeah then basically i finished reading it and i jumped on i was like hey aj here's all my thoughts on the art document which was very useful i have i have art directed 20 games at this point a bunch of like jellybean coffee bean games uh this is aj's first and so he is he's less jaded but also i have more experience yeah and also just

jump in if you aren't familiar with jellybean games i think the art is always very good i i I think for a lot of our early games, the art is much, much, much better than the game for sure. Well, I mean, at least you're an excellent art director, if not a good game designer.

Obviously, I think that he's good at both these days, by the way. So we met on that for 90 minutes and then we play tested for two hours. So this game that we're working on has asymmetrical factions. We've talked about this before. We'll talk about it again. And we have been meaning to for a while, just sit down and run each faction against each faction.

There are six factions running each of the games each i think is 15 games yeah which sounds like oh 15 games the games take about half an hour maybe an hour like that's not too bad except, it's very rare that we run it once and we're like cool okay good to go aj do you want to dive into that a little bit further it's a nightmare it's uh it's this is one of the most ambitious projects i have ever worked on we think it'll do well because of that but it is a lot a lot a lot of work go ahead

honestly i'm surprised you said one of i am very curious what rivals this but maybe you can't talk about it i have a game with alex coming up with cardboard alchemy which i would i would put on this level cool like i'm not i'm not going to say it's exactly one-to-one but it's definitely in the same tier and then the area control game i have is definitely below it but it's still like a lot and then a different game without designer is i would say at this level or above in terms of ambition.

Well, I hope everyone's enjoying hearing us vaguely talk about that, but to answer your question, to answer your question. So what makes it so challenging is, and we talked about it a million times before, so I'll say it very briefly, this is a root-level asymmetric skirmish two-player game.

So think something like Unmatched, but with a super root-level asymmetric engine for both players, but you're operating on the same board and interacting with each other fundamentally by attacking each other's pieces, trying to defeat each other's leaders.

And so when you have that many different factions and that man and and they also each have different content for the game this is really important peter really pushed this early and he was extremely right too i think the game is a million times better for it that there's different content that every game you don't necessarily see all the content in the game and at the very least the order of them coming out is very different and you if

you if there's one piece that you really want you might have to go digging for it so all that is to say oh and the the core action selection of the game is you have four action tiles i have four action tiles we shuffle them snap them together when i choose one of mine then you get the one that's linked to you so every time we sit and play we also shuffle those so every that i don't think that's ever caused a problem with the balance of the game i think there was in in the early play test it

was more of an issue than it is now now we have a lot of what's it called humility on the tiles yeah flexibility.

Yeah so when aj and i sit down to play one of these matchups ideally it's like cool this works but we are deliberately starting with like the ones that we are most worried about and so we play it and what i would say happens 90 of the time is aj just absolutely crushes me and i get very whiny and say aj this doesn't work we need to fix it i also do go first every game so that's probably the other reason.

But I am very, very sensitive to not having fun. I had a big spiel about this on the Discord. That would probably be an interesting episode, too. But I am very sensitive to, like, I don't feel like I have a chance. And sometimes I usually be like, well, actually, if you did this, this, this, this, this, and this, and the dice came out perfectly, and this, then you would have had a chance. I'm like, cool.

That doesn't actually address the issue. I'm not trying to say that you're dismissing the thoughts, but, like, you will sometimes see a path of play that I didn't see.

And i'm like great cool but if i don't see that path i still need to be able to play the game and feel like i have a chance and so the last like five matchups we've played we've been like cool this player just didn't have a chance almost always me when i beat aj you are less sensitive to it so it's actually sort of less useful data because you're like oh yeah yeah you beat me and i'm like cool uh yeah i felt really powerful that was great but when i'm losing i can

i i'm very sensitive to how unfun it feels so then we have to rebalance play it again rebalance play it again and then when you rebalance a faction you have to play it against another faction that they're really bad against or really good against and make sure you haven't overpowered it or underpowered it it is a it is a it is a hellscape that is of our own making very literally so many different axes that can become problematic like in the last one that we were working on earlier today.

We had probably what would of all if we if we made a hundred more factions it would still probably be in the top like one or maybe three at absolute most highest mobility factions so that means that if a faction can't deal with that we have to completely rebalance them to be able to deal with high mobility which is completely different to what they need access to in order to deal with a huge swarm faction that has a million guys which

is completely different to something else so making sure that all those factions always have access to their tools they're not relying on content that they might not be able to have access to, And all those sorts of little nitty gritty interactions where it's like, well, if you have this piece of content against this faction and they don't have this, well, they're screwed. Like we have to find all those little things. Yeah, which I think we're getting better and better at. Oh, yeah.

I was talking to my wife just before we record this. I was like, I think we, as of this week, have gotten so good at making those changes.

And i think if we uh for future factions that we do i think it will go from like we've been working on this for two years right and we're still in the first six factions i think it could be down to like weeks to get them to the from brand new to the point that they the factions that we currently have i think we're really you're a man built of idealism and i love it but uh i do not i do not share your hopes there i don't know if you remember on monday i was so i was so yawny even at

the start of the meeting and so after we met after i read the doc and then we met for four hours.

I just went and collapsed on the couch and then 10 minutes later realized i had organized a different play test so i got up and played my my game that signed with keymaster for two and a half hours with two percent of the podcast i think brandon joel who were very very lovely and didn't mind me being a grumpy bastard as i was what happened with that is that keymaster we signed this game with keymaster keymaster were like look we love this game we love it love it love it

here's the big thing that we don't like and basically the it's an area control game where you do all your actions and then just resolve all the areas and that felt too deterministic and we like added literally like in the content one or two things that made it not deterministic but 90 of it was just pure deterministic and they wanted to fix that and that is a huge that is a huge problem to solve especially because my co-designer matt and i we're not going to settle for anything other than the

smoothest most elegant most integrated most simple solution.

And so he came up with something i came up with something and then from that we came up with something that incorporated both those ideas in a really smooth way and this is my favorite part knocked out a whole part of the game that we didn't like already that every round had five resolution phases one of them came up one in every three games don't do that we've talked about this from the daniel.games quote your game should either have a lot of something or none of it and i hated

that we had this really necessary thing that happened one every three games so when you're going through the resolution, you had to be like, and does this happen? Nope. Okay, cool. So we managed to eliminate that and add in basically a really organic way of like messing with the things that.

It heightened everything and so i that we came up with this idea literally i never played it so i just wanted to run it with people we ran it it worked functioned hooray then we ran it with key muscle a this week which i'll get it to you and then i crashed because that was what seven hours of consecutive meetings yeah so my monday obviously pr said the stuff that we did together, i don't remember what else happened that day my days are very chaotic

and which you'll see when i get to my more detailed days because we only decided to do this on wednesday i didn't have any notes for monday but i'm just going to skip ahead and do my tuesday and then peter can do his tuesday in a little more detail because my tuesday is very short tuesday i would have woken up about noon spent the first hour prepping so i woke up too you're noon very nice and then i play tested for about an hour maybe an hour and a half and then i

had a while you play tested yeah i play tested game I'm co-designing with with the listener Stefan and that's the Mad Max game I think I mentioned it a podcast or two ago shout out to Stefan Stefan's great and then I had a doctor's appointment where I upped my prescription of ADD medication which we'll see how that goes I've had a weird week so I'm not sure how that will do but then I got home and then I did a few miscellaneous work the game is called

blades that we have with AG I did some miscellaneous blades and.

Work on the back end of stuff you know some of the art brief stuff lore stuff stuff like that things that aren't hugely important but things i need to do and then at about eight i hopped on and played helldivers 2 for basically the rest of the night how's it nice chill video game yes.

Gotcha i do not know it tuesday i woke up around your noon which is my 9 a.m i did my inbox zero so every week i try to hit inbox zero on my email i am a man of systems i have many many systems built into my life you already mentioned that i track my time and that i keep a career journal i live off my to-do list so i use to-do list and i have a bunch of recurring things every monday as a high priority item i have inbox zero and it

just means i go through i use a software piece of software called airmail which means that if i press e on my keyboard it archives an email and gets it out of my inbox i also use uh a an app called sane box s-a-n-e box which is like a subscription thing plugs into gmail and it sorts all your emails into i have you know inbox i have one called reading which is like long form stuff that i don't actually need to book at any time but it's there if i want to i have

news which is like newsletters and stuff like that i have later i don't even know what's in that one and i have that's for later and more and so i try to go through and go through all of those inboxes and empty them and i am an aggressive unsubscriber so if there's something where i'm like i don't need to see this gone and at the end of each week i either have an empty inbox or more likely an inbox of just stuff that i need to reply to at some point but it's not.

All urgent so like an email from my friend in san francisco because he said we couldn't meet up and he's like we should work another time we should it's not urgent he won't be offended if i reply in two months so someday when i'm doing my inbox i'll be like oh i'm in the exact right mood to do that yes i try to clear my inbox that's that's a big priority for me every week just to be accountable and stay on top of stuff and not lose emails.

I am about to go to UK Games Expo, so my day was a lot of just prepping prototypes, writing up rules, printing rules, making prototypes, cutting stuff up. I have an assistant who comes by every Tuesday. She came by and cut out multiple games. She does my laundry. She empties my bins. She did my dishes, which she normally doesn't do, but I was so stressed that I got her to do that. Just all those little household tasks that I am horrendous at doing.

I worked out in 2021 that if I pay someone to come and do those things, it saves me money in the long run because i don't end up like i have no dishes so i just order takeout like i i save money and also i'm able to get twice as much done by having a system so very privileged position but it means that it keeps my life on track and keeps these systems in play so i just built prototypes oh good it can also be a sort of thing there's a bit of a tangent here but my dad is always this is not

a focused episode yeah this is a bonus bonus so my dad is very like like the frugalest man you'll ever meet it's incredible he would you know bend over backwards to to save a cent and the thing is is he doesn't value his time at all but for me i think of my time as like well if i was working how much money per hour would i be making for this hour of my time if this thing costs less than that amount it is a net positive no matter what so if it you know if i

if i value my time it's say $40 an hour for developing a game or something cool if i have to pay someone 20 or 30 an hour to do some work for me i am effectively making 10 an hour assuming that i'm actually using my time to work i one of my many systems i'm sorry we mentioned this in the finance episode is that i. Track my per game per year income and how much money sorry how much time i spent on each game so i can tell you this this is going to be a truly ludicrous number

but there are some there are some outliers that way sway the number my average per hour rate for working on a board game, is six hundred dollars that is a game that is published and signed and like if it keeps selling for 10 years all of that like you know let's say i spent 40 hours on a game it sells for five years cool that that 40 hours is now more and more per hour but my my hourly rate for a published board game and not all my games get published

not even close to all my games get published is about six hundred dollars so that that's why i'm very easily able to justify having a system under that, some people some people make me not make me some people want me to feel really bad about that like Like, oh, you're lazy because you don't do laundry. And it's just this, I don't understand. I think I think differently to most people because I just don't get that reasoning of like, it is the morally correct thing to do your laundry.

I don't know. I mean, there's chores I hate. If I paid someone to do those chores for me, why is that wrong? I don't understand the way I'm thinking. I don't get it either. So she, yeah, she put together a prototype. She did some household-y stuff and then she helped me pack for my trip because she's great.

I spent 90 minutes finishing the rules for this other ambitious game but I was like the carbon alchemy one I have spent a lot of this week writing up the rules for that because I wanted to have them done before I left and that was it is a three hour euro so that is a lot of, it's not that the rules are long it's just that I need to work out how to arrange them and phrase them and all that kind of stuff actually I'm curious how many pages they are.

So that was an hour and a half on that an hour and a half doing the key master game because after that play test I was like okay I know the changes I want to make to the new system that we added the rules are 15 pages long in Google Docs, i had a call with my girlfriend who i love she's long distance so it was very lovely getting to chat to her this is vital information if you want to be a game designer i was going to jump in and make a joke that i was your girlfriend

but i didn't get there in time.

And then that night so this this this game that we're working on has the six factions and then we started to work on factions for the second wave and so after what's that and beyond yeah yeah and so after another hour of working on this game and feeling like i my whole day had been monopolized by must-do tasks i was like you know what i have an idea for a faction and so i sat down and designed the grasshopper in about an hour going from like first idea to ready to play with aj because it's an

idea that i've had forever and i was like oh i finally know how to do that i put that together in a rush and then took the night off went for a long walk read a book and went to sleep no no i didn't go to sleep i spent two hours trying to get a bit of software working which i'd never end up getting up working cool i just i realized that astute listeners might have realized that there's a huge time gap between when i finished play testing on tuesday and the

8 p.m helldivers i might wonder what happened in the intervening six or so hours uh and the answer is my doctor is from my old hometown which i moved from so it was it's like two and a half hours of driving plus and so i went with my wife and we ate out while we were there and then i ran a few errands. So that was the intervening six hours.

Okay, Wednesday. Wednesday. So this day I have notes on. So I woke up at about 1pm and lazed about for 30 minutes. At 1.30, I made a tea, had some toast, got dressed, found out by checking my phone that we had a surprise meeting. I mean, that we were trying to schedule with AEG. And earlier that morning, they said, cool, how about basically now? So I panicked. I want to go backwards very slightly. Sure. I find it very interesting. This has nothing to do with game design whatsoever.

Do you wear clothes around the house by default? Like you said, get up and get dressed. Is that like a thing that you do for calls or are you just always dressed? So I always get dressed, but my get dressed is loose, comfortable t-shirt and pajamas.

Gotcha. Podcast glitz. Yes. Yeah, like we just had an hour meeting before this call and I was, I'm going to tell you, AJ, in my underwear because I just, I don't understand the point of getting dressed, especially I live in LA where it's quite warm, assuming that's a fact.

If it's cold i'll put on clothes but that would be different i live by myself or if i have a girlfriend here then i just i don't bother putting clothes on and so i'm just always curious why like my girlfriend will she she despises not wearing clothes she she wants to be in clothes all the time 100% of the time 24 hours which is so weird to me i'm actually the opposite the only reason that i you know wear these is because they are

so loose and so comfortable but frankly if people weren't uncomfortable i would be a nudist like i i have no sense of like body shame Does your wife care? Yeah, my wife does care. My wife does not want me to be naked in public in front of other people. No, no, no, not in public, just in your house. Oh, no, she wouldn't care. No. Right. So why put on a shirt? Well, it's the temperature thing. It's like the right temperature for wearing a shirt in school.

And I could turn it up a few degrees and then not wear them. And sometimes in summer, you know, I will. But yeah. We had a sudden unexpected AEG meeting. Yep. So I panicked, threw up some notes, got prepared for the meeting.

And then I had some extra time so I answered some emails and then at 2, my time you came along with the rest of us for AEG for the meeting about art and then at 3, I had a follow up with you of course because after that meeting Peter and I wanted to debrief and chat about some things and get on the same page and figure out actionable items to do list, who's doing what, that sort of thing, and then that was about 20 minutes, then 3.20 I showered and then,

After that, for about half an hour, I was prepping Component Studio and updating Tabletop Simulator. I had a play test at 5.45. Was that with you, Peter? I think that was, right? That was with me, yeah. So then that was until 8.20. We played the Grasshopper. Right, of course. So yeah, that started at 5.45, and that went until 8.20. When I had my weekly gaming group, we played Gloomhaven digitally. And then I unlocked a new character, the Assassin. He's really cool.

And then I just had a quick five-minute break just to calm down and unwind after that intense game. But of course, I was actually looking up card stock and other production-related things while I was doing that because I can't take a break. Then at 10.30, we had another play test, Peter and I, and that went until 11.55, and then I updated TTS, organized notes, to-do lists for various meetings, and updated everything. And then at 1.25, I tried to relax, and instead, I just thought about the game.

I wrote some backstories for some of the new factions. And then at 4 a.m., I managed to get to sleep a bit. My Wednesday has some overlap. I woke up. My son called for a Minecraft call. We jump on Minecraft a couple of times a week and just play on a server called Hive, and we play like Bed Wars. I don't know if this means anything to anyone, but he's seven. So we're both very terrible at it, but we just have a good time playing and losing.

And then i tried i've been trying to get my knee fixed so i called the doctor and they're like yep call back in three hours i completely forgot to spoiler alert they'd not call the doctor back jumped on that same call at ag obviously um i had to run out of that to sell my car i bought my car from friend of the podcast alex and then i sold it to future friend of the podcast peter vaughn from carbon alchemy so that that car has gone through three of the staff members for credit kitchen so far

so far peter vaughn's going to sell it to the others it'll be great So that was a whole nightmare because I am very bad at paperwork. So I lost the title. I pulled out the title to have it and it was gone. And so that was an hour of my life just trying to find this damn title. I found it eventually. It was under prototypes. Trust me, it's so much. Yeah, it was not fun. I have these systems because I'm so bad at stuff. So I have a little folder that has all my important documents.

And I'd specifically taken it out of that folder and put it on the kitchen table. But then I had people over for games, so it moved. And then what I think happened is that all the prototypes I was making the other day went on top of it. So I eventually found it, but it was a hassle. We jumped back on, we playtested.

Because we are so exhaustively playtesting this right now, we are trying to make sure that it stays fun for us we are spending a lot of time together this week especially and fortunately.

But i remember on this day particularly we were starting to get real like raw robbing against each other in a in a grumpy way so what we do is we as well as playtesting the factions that we have to playtest we throw a new one so that's why we played the grasshopper we played your new, australian inspired faction we played one that was hella broken and finally worked out how to fix it which was great. I took a break, did some reading, came back on playtesting with you for another hour.

We just tested for that change. It was amazing. That was the cover you could walk on now. That was the big change that I'm so, so delighted with. That faction is a hidden movement faction that for a long time, a long, long time, you felt fragile. You had to be like, oh, I got to be really careful. I got to strike and then make sure I get away so they can't find me. Oh, hello. You've got a guest. Also in pajamas, wearing clothes. Crazy.

If you're listening to the podcast that's just a very random sequence of events, random sequence of words and so we at some point i don't even know how we got there we had made him really tough and oh i know how we got there yes someone on the team uh yeah someone on the team was not as good at playing him so we kept buffing him buffing him buffing him but when aj was playing him aj is very good at this faction so am i we are both extremely skilled at this one we couldn't,

beat him it was so frustrating and so we made this one change which again actually kind of cut a rule, and this change brought it back to that feeling of, ah, yes, I'm fragile. I've got to be careful. Ooh, I'm taking risks. Like, we recaptured that feeling. I was so delighted.

Took a break read some books and then came back on i ran it again it worked amazing and then we had another faction matchup which was just miserable and that was the bees versus the mantis yeah and it was just it was just a basically just an exercise in misery really really really not not a good time and so we sort of been very frustrated and peter was on the receiving end of the beating yeah and so that's that's as close we've ever gone to like just not yelling at each other not even

close to yelling at each other but like we were definitely like no you're like no this i was like no but not this and then you were like well i'm gonna go crash because i've exhausted i was like yeah that's probably a good call uh and then we got on this morning and talked it through and resolved it so that is that's the happy ending we're still talking in case you were wondering listeners yeah yeah uh that that was my 9 p.m so then i spent the evening putting prototypes

together for uk games expo that i'm going to i prepped one two three four five six prototypes Very, very exciting. Those are all games to pitch. Maybe not at UK Games Expo, but I like to have them ready and there. So if I can pitch them, I can. Especially as I'm going straight from there to Origins, which is a really good pitching con. So I just want to have a big suitcase of things.

The game that we play on our Wood Publish or Publishers series, I play in real life before deciding what to show them. So if I don't know the publisher, I'm like, okay, cool. What are you guys into? And if I have a selection of games, I can be like, ah, this is the game that would be good for you. Because I think I've talked to this a thousand times. I see people with a one prototype and they pitch it to every publisher and publishers are like, cool, that's a five minute party game.

We only do Euros or that's a Euro. We only do five minute party games. And I just, I don't want to ever hit that wall. I want publishers to know they can come to me and I'll have something for them. So I try to have a big bevy of games available. For sure. I think that's an absolutely fantastic way of doing things. That's why I try and do as well, have as many different prototypes as possible.

And even if you're limited on space, like I have, you know, 18 prototypes sitting around, you know i wouldn't necessarily bring all 18 but i would bring the ones that i i already have meetings set up for or the ones i think are the most likely to sell and then i have sell sheets for the rest so then if i'm talking to almost any publisher if they say listen i'm not looking for this but i am looking for this there's a pretty good chance that i'll have something that to show them even if

it's not for them at least you know it's it's a chance i i will generally have about 10 to 12 prototypes with me and about eight of those are probably pitchable and four of those are in progress and it's a similar thing of like we've got a group we're all sitting around we just finished a prototype we're going to dinner in 20 minutes cool i've got a 20 minute prototype i can bring out if no one else has one and that has like i think cons are the single best way to play test

because you have a big group of skilled people who are rotating out so you can just like run it run it run it i have i develop games faster to convention than i do anywhere else easily origins two years ago yeah probably two years ago i brought the aeg game and just ran it ran it ran it came back with like some of the most useful notes I think we've gotten outside of me and you playing it. So I'm just trying to build a big pile of prototypes for playtesting, for playing.

And my games tend to be pretty compact. So I've won a huge game, but everything else is like the size of, like this is a prototype. Oh, this is an actual... Well, this is tangentially related to what you're talking about, completely off topic for the episode. If you are bringing games to cons, consider bringing a mini version of it. Oh, that's interesting. I was going to bring a... I brought a game to Origins last year, and I was bringing so many games.

I was trying to fit every one of them into one of those colored little plastic tuck boxes. I think you have the exact same size as me, the suitcase with individual sleeves. And those are quite small. And so I made a mini version of one of my games because I was like, you know what?

There's a pretty good chance that nobody actually ends up playing it but i do want to at least be able to show it to publishers if they want to see it and i can play it in a pinch or you can even bring like a demo version you don't need to bring all the content for the game but i have to play a few rounds and then say and here's the rest of the stuff that's available with that with the full game yeah i i have a solo game that kirk signed kirk signed from smoke and dagger and i brought that

to a convention as it's a roguelike that has like 30 plus hours of play i brought the first 15 minutes of play just to show that the game works and he was interested enough that when i saw him next i brought the whole thing and and uh he signed it yes okay uh so i went to bed about 1 a.m well i'll do my Thursday and we'll jump back to you because you're eating noodles.

If you're listening to the podcast you would not know but aj is currently eating noodles, so i woke up i've been doing biphasic sleep accidentally lately like i keep waking up at like 7 a.m and then oh biphasic is in two phases so i'll wake up at 7 a.m be up for like an hour and then go back to sleep for three hours. It's honestly very annoying. I don't know why this is happening.

That's been happening to me for like six months because my neighbor got evicted and then whoever took ownership of the house is remodeling the whole thing start to finish. And they start at like eight and I wake up ideally at like 11, 12, 31.

I i will often get into a cycle where i sleep for like six hours at night and have a three-hour nap in the middle of the day this is like that but back to back it's super annoying so i woke up and jumped straight into a play test with keymaster showing off all the new stuff they wanted to play a whole game start to finish we kept talking discussing and it's on tts which always slows everything down so that was about almost almost three hours including teach two and a half hours including teach

just to show off this new stuff they loved it went really well this game has five genres that are going to come in in the box and we pitched with five genres and so they weren't sure if they wanted those five so they finally gave us not finally they gave us the list of the five genres so a lot of the rest of my day was like ideating on that so yeah two and a half hour play test jumped on a call with my co-designer and

just started talking through the new genres that they wanted and what they would look like i did some reading i have a daily to do item to do half an hour of reading and half an hour of cardio and i know that my life is in a stable place when i'm able to hit that consistently when i go a week without doing any reading or cardio i'm like okay something's gone wrong here i need to fix this but lately i've been steadily hitting my reading

and my cardio which is wonderful i had my co-designer was running around doing errands i kept jumping on for like a 15 minute call leaving and doing some housework jumping on for a 15 minute call leaving do some housework but by the end of it we had a pretty good idea of what the new genres look like what the new systems look like etc i spent an hour prototyping our game what the heck would i have been working on oh that's right yeah you you have a new faction where you wanted a visual

style not a visual style you wanted like. Diagrams to be diagrams thank you that's what i was looking for um so i spent an hour doing that went for my daily walk came back and my co-designer had had recorded a video that i said i would edit because i'm very fast at editing videos so i quickly edited that together and then i had a night off. I went out with my ex and we saw the new Mission Impossible film in IMAX, which I really loved. I had a wonderful time from start to finish.

We went out for dinner, we went out to see a movie, got home and I went to sleep about 3am out. Nice. My Thursday. Is yesterday. Yes, this is yesterday. Yesterday, Thursday. 11.30, wake up, laze a boat, make a tea, have toast, check your meals, etc. By the way, I never have toast. I never have toast. Part of this... I have evidence that you frequently have toast. So this is evidence that my week has been crazy. Whenever I eat, I make myself a really nice meal.

And when I don't do that, I simply do not eat. are you saying that toast is not a nice meal how dare you i have actually been kind of starving all week because i hyper focus on what i'm doing and this whole week has been a huge amount of work for both of us where we're doing the play testing we're doing so many behind the scenes things we're doing so many product things so many manufacturing things it's just like every possible angle

we're trying to cram a ton of stuff in before peter has to take off for a trip because this is much easier for us to connect right now and because we're trying to get the ball rolling for so many different teams so it's it's just been a lot and that is just a testament to how busy i have it it's like me not reading if you're eating toast something weird is happening in your life.

So that was about i don't know 20 minutes and then i didn't actually mark down that time, and while i was doing that i was listening to youtube videos on game production production values that sort of thing then until 12 50 i was doing some more research on production values and production in general you're noticing a trend here at 12 50 i started working on flavor text in the game component studio updates lore those sorts of things the all the background stuff for the game at three i had a play

test for blades and this wasn't with you this was with one of the That was the horrendous one, right? No, this one wasn't the horrendous one. This one was a perfectly fine one. We did, I think it was the Bombardier Beetle that we were working on with that one. Oh, that's right. Yeah, yeah. That's when you told me you needed the diagrams, so I wouldn't make them. Yes. So I did that for two hours, and then after I did that, at five, I played some Helldivers 2, again, a sick-ass video game.

You can say us okay fantastic all right 6 30 miscellaneous work updating components to you i tend to do that a lot don't i a lot of well i found with this one a lot of this week has been me sort of just looking literally just scrolling through every single like action tile every single unit card thinking about them holistically trying to think about the way that they interact with these different ones i do that a lot too and that's why

i like working in spreadsheets because i can look at it um i i first noticed this is a thing with dracula's feast which is my second ever published game and my second ever design my first published game was not my first design my first published game was much later design but i i had a little spreadsheet with all the powers and i would just read it and read it and read it and read it and like this is where i start working on wording stuff which i

think is less than priority for you i'm like oh i said this here but it's here no they need to be the same wording oh hang on we haven't done anything with this idea okay let's put a new character in that does this and this and this that is that is a big part of my game design for sure like just just i i think of it i don't know if i've ever used this metaphor on the podcast before you know how otters wash their food in the water beside them i assume yeah

yeah uh you know that otters wash their food no i didn't oh so otters otters will like take a bite wash the food or maybe not but like they're very they're very washy i. Think of as washing thoughts like pull the thought out wash it put it back pull the thought out wash it put it back i don't know why this visual metaphor works for me but like the career journal the time tracking my monthly review my weekly review all of this is just different ways of like washing it and so for me

with a game like like the ag game or the key master game or especially the solo game like i will just sit there and just wash the thoughts and wash the thoughts and wash the bullets and wash the bullets so there was an hour and 20 minutes of me doing that and throughout that pinging peter with messages being like hey i think we should change this to this i think that this wording would make sense over here if we change this this will be better blah blah blah, and then 7 50 i had dinner

and i messaged you for another hour and 10 minutes throughout that and again kept thinking through the little details at nine i did a lot of little things again basically the same stuff i've been doing all day and 9 30 i had to play test this was this is the night play test yeah that was the we were play testing a brand new well relatively brand new faction i think we play tested literally twice ever before twice ever

yeah twice ever and then made changes and not tested new changes right and this is against aj messaged me being like hey i'm playing the game who do you want to test i was like honestly anyone in the world try this one. And it was the it's against the weirdest matchup that we could possibly have like we have one faction that's the hidden movement game that plays so differently to every other faction and i didn't realize at first but it was literally impossible for me to damage my opponent if.

And it was just very stiff. There were a lot of problems. That's fine. That's why we playtest. We'll figure that way. And it's just a new faction. I'm not worried. Yeah, of course, of course. So then at 10.20, that was when the playtest ended. It went quite long. And the whole time through, I was talking to Peter. But after that, I sat down and messaged Peter. And we debriefed about the playtest and talked about some stuff. And then 10.40, I researched Deluxe Components.

And again, Creative Doc, all those sorts of things.

12 25 held average two again 150 get ready for bed and 3 45 sleep how do you know what time you went to sleep do you jot it down as you're like oh i'm about to sleep now yeah about there i kind of estimate it like if it's 3 10 and i'm starting to drift off i'm like yeah it's going to take me about 30 minutes so as as we speak it is 3 30 my time 6 30 your time uh what was your day look like aj oh yes so at 10 30 i woke up at 11 i got i i woke up at 10 30 i just sat my phone for a bit at 11

i got up got ready 11 20 we had the blades i said blades admin what does that mean blades admin today yeah 11 20 i was asleep so okay well you're gonna finish off that deluxify deluxification. Was that today? I think that was just more of that sort of stuff and emailing or messaging people like sort of thing prepping. So that was 1120. And then I did a lot of that. Yeah. Must have been a big mess of the different things. Don't know why I wrote admin.

At three, we had, I had a play test and that was again with the Bombardier Beatle test. I was also testing a weird new alternative rule. We'll see where that goes. If anywhere.

At 410, I had a play test with peter at 5 10 i showered and at 5 35 i started recording fun problems and is now 6 30 yes i woke up nine went back to sleep for another two hours i don't know why i'm in my basic sleep it's annoying i have a weekly jellybean meeting so i still run my company jellybean games we have a weekly meeting where we just connect on everything that went for about it generally goes for about an hour sometimes two hours sometimes like 40 minutes but mostly mostly

between an hour and two hours so i am generally scheduled to hit up aj straight after that meeting so i just message him and say hey i'm ready and that's when we do either podcast stuff or design stuff and this week a combination of the two and then we yeah we jumped on we we were actually planning on just starting with the podcast but i was like you know what you've already got the app open let's let's just let's that stupid

non-fight that we had the other day let's just play it again i played much better this time it's still broken but the changes we made definitely helped and now we're recording and then for the rest of the after this recording we are going to do as much playtesting as we get in because it's our last meeting before the end of the week but sorry before i leave and also go through i think three massive documents together.

Yeah, at least three. Yeah. And these documents... I have a whole other one I didn't even tell you about that I'm working on. So these documents, just to dive into it, because the point is to have a better understanding. In this case, we are doing more production and art design stuff than normally a designer would be expected to do. But we have a pretty clear vision. And so these documents are our way of formalizing the vision for each other. Going back and forth on anything we disagree with.

And then once we have it, formalizing it and presenting it to the AEG team. They are very correctly insistent that like everything is written out so that everyone.

In the project because like someone might come into marketing in a year's time we don't want to have to sit there and catch them up on where we are we want to have a document that we can send them to and be like hey here's the goal we're about to start reaching we're about to start reaching out to artists we need to have an art brief that aj and i've agreed on before i start art directing and say like hey artists do this they're just like whoa whoa whoa hang on we never

agreed this is this is too many too many swear words in the art we agreed to five max let's just pause for a second i'm just gonna go through the main things i've been focusing on this week so i i've alluded to them a bunch of times let's just say what the documents are one at a time so lore is the what sounds like it's background information for the for the game his histories of characters and yeah now i am not one of those

people who put five paragraphs of lore before you you played the game that is not me this is like how do we come up with stories and find subtle ways to hint at them. I like the iceberg method. You know, you have little things that catch people's eye and think, oh, what could that be? And there's enough clues that they can figure it themselves through flavor text, through background art, et cetera, et cetera. But it's not in your face. But for the people who care about that, it's there.

So that's been something I've been doing this week. I was also putting together, every time I say I, it's obviously we. So I did the Blades art brief. That was 60 pages. There are a number of images, of course. Yeah, a lot of pages are a single image, so that cuts it down a lot. Yeah. And that's for every piece of art that we need back from an artist. What is the brief for them?

And, you know, this is a lot of nitty gritty thinking about how it fits with the theme of the faction, with the culture that the faction is representing, leans into the right art style.

We have to you know have some have enough where we can push them into certain directions but without actually like you keep pressing on very correctly we don't want to like give them too more restrictions so that they can't be creative and do a good job you can't micromanage an artist you get bad art if you do that.

So going through all those things and then going over it, you know, again and again, trying to think of, is there, if we're having this cover token for this faction, what should the cover token look like? Well, if it looks like a shield, then that will imply that it protects them when it gets attacked. Those sorts of little things. This is a lot of what we talked about very, very early on the podcast of things like plants versus zombies.

Why do they choose plants? Because plants are literally rooted in the ground. It's a tower defense game. You can't move them. Why zombies? Zombies move very, very slowly and come in huge hordes. That's what the type of enemy they wanted. So they built it around that. So when we're building this out, we're trying to reinforce game mechanics, game feel, and theme through the art itself to make it easier for players to get into and appreciate.

The deluxification document is me going through every single one. Sorry, alignment is, I think, the word we've used before. We want the art and the graphics and the graphic design and the mechanics and the theme to all be in alignment. Don't want a crazy, wacky, joking person whose power is play man parlor. Absolutely. Absolutely. Good call out there.

Deluxification is going through every single component of the game and saying, what is the best possible version that this could be for the deluxe version? What are the options that we're considering? The publisher asked us for a blue sky document, which is a term that means like, pretend that there is no ceiling to the budget. There is no ceiling to what we can do. What would your ideal pie in the sky, blue sky version this look like?

A lot of writers rooms will actually come in a week before they start writing so so before they start writing episode one of the new season they'll come in a week early and just do a blue sky week and the office is particularly infamous for this because like one of the pictures in the office the u.s version was what if michael scott killed meredith big laugh everyone thought that was funny you can't do that but that

led to the episode where meredith gets hit by michael scott's car arrested development what if and i think mitch howard is that the show around michael herwitz michael herwitz yeah um mitchell herwitz yeah was saying are you googling me yeah i'm sure you're right but i i was just re-watching it i was like i was so sure.

It's definitely mitch mitchell mitchell he said okay we're gonna do some blue sky thinking now obviously there's limits we can't have bust to have one of his arms cut off and then they they fell in love with that idea that idea and so for season two bust his arm gets cut off and he spends oh his hand you know he spends the season dealing with the fact that his hand has been cut off, and so blue sky thinking is just a really valuable tool even even like in the

design process i'd recommend it as like if we could do anything what would we do and this is sort of one of the three hooks exercise that jay suggested that people in the discord have been really having a good time with like don't don't come up with an idea and describe it come up with a blue sky three ideas.

Anyway so yeah we've got a deloxification blue sky document that i just read through between our meeting and our recording and after this we will be discussing it if you want to what the rest of it's like but I've also been working on the creative brief and this is what Peter was talking about where we're making sure that if someone comes into this project partway through They're on the same page. This is what the product line will look like. It looks like now, what it will look like.

The ideal case is not that we get hit by a car, but the ideal case is if we both get hit by a car, someone can step in and see what we were doing and go for that. And so the information doesn't just live in our heads. Right. And then the last thing that Peter doesn't even know about, this is an inside scoop, Peter, plug your ears, is I've been updating a presentation that we gave to AEG that we are going to be having to do you can unplug them it's fine you're wearing headphones i can see.

We're putting together a follow-up presentation ag wants one every 12 weeks with like an update on where the game is and everything and i'm trying to pitch this one in a way that holistically gives them a really strong view of the blue sky project that we've been working on we obviously put to like i said we put together one initially that was like hey here's like the fact sheet and i'm trying to rebuild that sort of presentation as something that's like, this is now a sell sheet,

for the publisher for our dream vision. So that they give us all the money in the world so we can buy all the art. Cool. And then what have you done for the rest of the day? We're going to go through documents and then anything else today? Probably when we're done, I'm going to keep working on all these documents, on all the things that we discuss afterwards. And I'll probably do that until late in the a.m. And then I will try to take a weekend off.

So I don't know if you would call it a typical week for a game designer, but it's not an atypical week. Yeah. This is definitely the busiest week I've had in a year for sure.

But oftentimes it's like, four or five of my days look like this kind of a thing and then you know the rest of the days i end up not working or i'm doing like house stuff it's it's very organic right obviously with a job like this a lot a lot of the things that i have traditionally done a lot i didn't do this week is is drive to a play test either with a local la person or like obviously i've done a lot of play testing on tts this week but i would i will try to get some

physical play testing and i find that really valuable especially by my local co-designer matt and i i skipped some stuff not like booking you know all my bookings and all that kind of stuff because i'm about to travel so that's that's taking a lot of time and energy but for the most part it was yeah games games games i'm trying to make my trying to get my youtube career started a little bit and i had every day this week to work on a video and yesterday i

was like okay cool this is not gonna happen before i go to england so it's just being crossed off the list boohoo and i'm not i'm not crying about that but it is it is frustrating that i didn't get a chance to do the i was going to try and get a lilo and stitch easter egg video out in time for the lilo and stitch live action film didn't happen and is not is not worth like not working on a different project for yeah so i do juggle my

various careers but this this week particularly has been very very very very very board game focused and so i thought it was a good week to do a week in the life of game designer.

Aj you have a publisher tip for us i do have a publisher tip for us a publishing, publisher tip is probably the exact wrong terminology yeah it's tip to how to get published Yes. So this is one that sort of ties into something that we've said before in a publisher tip, actually. But the point is aesthetics matter. So unfortunately, humans, and men in particular, to an extent, are visual creatures. Unfortunately, how would you say it's a fact?

It's definitely something where a lot of publishers will say it doesn't matter. You know, if they see a sell sheet and it doesn't look nice, it won't matter at all. I believe that they believe that. I don't necessarily think that that is the case.

And i think that putting in a little bit of extra effort to make paul to polish it up i mean you've seen my sell sheets they're not like amazing but yeah well actually we've done now three episodes on sell sheets one just went live today we've got another one coming up in about two three weeks.

And it's notable that when we say looks good we don't mean has beautiful art because there have been i can't remember what the game was but on the one that we we've recorded that hasn't released shirt there was a game that we both we pulled it up i don't i think there was like two icons of like clip art but we're both like oh this is a good looking cell sheet like it just immediately gave us tone by the time this comes out you'll know what it is so go back and listen

but like go back and find that cell sheet but like that's something that's a really good example of a cell sheet that sold us the tone sold us the idea sold us a bunch of stuff without having i think any artwork at all so when you say good looking when you say aesthetic you don't necessarily mean art like you don't for your visual artist. It doesn't have to be, but the example I was going to have was that I had pitched a game that was purely cards. In fact, it's on the first sell sheet review.

Sorry, not the first sell sheet review, the Review AJ sell sheets episode, one of those all about me. The episode zero sell sheet review. Yeah, if you look back, I had the game overpowered and that's a very bland sell sheet and there was no art on the cards and I pitched it to a publisher and their only note was that it didn't have table presence and it didn't have, This, by the way, was specifically, they were asking for card-only games.

So the only table presence that could have possibly been on them is art. I'll disagree with that. You can build stuff with cards. That's true. That's fair. That's fair. But for this game, the way that the mechanics work, the only thing I could have done was add art. And in my reply, obviously, I said, yeah, we could add art to the cards. It's definitely an option. But what I think my mistake was, was I didn't help the publisher see the final

product vision. I was missing that one step to be able to say, hey, here's where the art would be on the cards because they're text heavy, which is why I didn't put art in them in the first place. And I think that in their mind, because it's text heavy, they're like, I don't know where I would fit it, blah, blah, blah.

Whereas if I had already done that work for them, have the art on the cards, even if like Peter said, it doesn't have to look good, it's on there, they can say, ah, so here's where the text goes, here's where the art goes. And I know what this would look like on the table. I think that's an important thing to consider.

I think I've given this advice before. so i'll throw it in here because if it's a double up i'm not wasting a slot if you have multiple cards that have unique abilities that repeat so like in radlands you know there's three of this card there's three of that card there's two of that card whatever pick a piece of art and give like an icon i i traditionally used to do this before i got into ai art generation stuff i used to just do this with noun uh noun project icons pick an icon give it a color

so a blue man cool these five cards that are all the same have a blue man and it means i very quickly learn like oh blue man is that power and i don't have to think about it anymore it's just like a really.

Cheap sneaky way of being like ah i know what that is or if cards are moving around a lot even if they're all unique just give them all a piece of art so i can be like oh he's got the red splotch i had that earlier and i know what that does like little stuff like that because the final game will have something like that, We've said this a thousand times in a thousand different ways. The more you can sell the vision, the less work the publisher has to do, the more likely you are to get signed.

A hundred percent. Completely agree. AJ, I have a fun question for you. What is it? I want to know how you have your toast. I fucking love toast. Oh, dang it, I swore. After all the discussion about swearing, I love toast. And so I'm very curious how you have your toast. And after this, I'm going to go make some toast because I'm in the mood for toast. Tell me about toast. So it's always mandatory to toast your toast. That's a very important part about toast.

Technically, I don't think it's considered toast, otherwise. You have to toast it medium well. Because if it's too toasted, it's black, it's disgusting. Oh, yeah. Whoa, whoa, whoa. You've jumped way ahead. What kind of bread are we talking about? Great question, Pia. Thank you for bringing it up. I think there are a lot of good options, but I am partial to just a simple white. You know, a sourdough is great, but I think it's too. I wouldn't have pictured you as a white man.

Of course not you oh me well what do you have on it hang on i figure we go step by step oh yeah okay so i i have this one when i moved to la i found this one time bread and i love it and i get sad if i don't have it it's dave's killer bread 21 grains it comes in a green bag there's two types you can get a thin slice or normal flat slice i like a normal sliced uh in australia we have it's been so long i haven't lived there for a decade now i think we call it multi-green toast or like something

like that it's that bit better it is like a moist bread it it stays for a long time like this this can live for like way longer than i'm used to bread surviving without you know going moldy or whatever and it is it is full of texture and i love it so that that is my toast i also am a big fan of raisin toast which in australia we call sultana bread well raisin bread toasted that is that is also a top favorite but in terms of

like what i think of toast toast dave's killer of bread 21 grains and seeds whatever it's called interesting that sounds good, So then how do you toast it? How well toasted are you? Four. If it's raisin bread, two. I don't know what these numbers mean, but I've experimented with my toast enough to know that those are the numbers. Is it like a dark brown or like a light brown? No, it's a medium brown, I guess, right in the middle there.

Because the raisin toast is so full of sugar, you have to lower it or it comes out like way too burned. But I like it to have a solid crunch, but not to be like charcoal-y hard.

Yeah, I don't want to bite and the entire entire bread is just hard all the way through oh yeah yeah no that's that's the worst yeah so then the next step is what you put on it and i generally go with either butter and a strawberry rhubarb jam or butter and jam interesting yes are we talking margarine or butter butter butter butter. Salted butter. I'm a margarine, man. Disgusting. Embarrassing. Humilating. And then your jam, is it like jam with seeds in it?

What kind of texture are we talking here? Is it like jelly? So jelly being just, there's no actual mashed up fruit in it, right? It's just like the clear stuff versus jam mashed up fruit. Definitely jams. Definitely jam.

My other one would be peanut butter and usually I use the, it's like just peanuts ground up, so it's it doesn't have any sugar or anything but then i will put honey on it and i like that combination because it's not too sweet but it has a nice taste yeah so my raisin bread is simple just butter oh just margarine easy done and raisins and margarine this is two of my least favorite things to eat yeah we have different tastes

so with my standard like multi-grain toast i'm thinking either very very rarely i'll just have bread with butter and honey if i'm toasting it, I don't want just hot. That's the wrong combination textures for me. So I either want chunky peanut butter, I skip chunky peanut butter with jam, or jelly, I don't mind, with the peanut butter, I don't care which one, or sometimes, and this is a bit of a sometimes treat, margarine and marmalade.

Never been a marmalade man. Yeah. And then obviously, obviously for two reasons, I have this, you don't, butter and Vegemite. Yeah. I was expecting that one. Yes. That one, that one is, lives in the cupboard. Very, we don't have, I eat a lot of like stew and soup and stuff like that out of a can because it's a nice like hearty warm meal in the colder months and I'll just have toast with butter or margarine just dipped into that. I love a dipping.

Nice. I loved this. Fun question. This was so fun. This is good.

Now, do we want to give the listeners a heads up that we might be on a brief hiatus while you're on your trip? Yes. So my next two months are weird. I'm spending three and a half months in the UK, coming back for 10 days and spending three and a half months in Australia. In the middle of that, I am visiting AJ for a couple of days with my son, Henry. We might record a podcast. We probably won't. If we do, it might have Henry on it. Who knows?

So we've tried to record ahead. I think we're like four episodes ahead. So by the time you hear this, I will be back from England.

But after that there may be a bit of a gap until i until i'm done with my travels, i'm taking a microphone we've had so many episodes like every week for yes we've been we've been pushing it hard um i am taking a microphone to england i'm going to try and record some youtube stuff so if the opportunity arises we might record there i am not taking microphone to australia australia is genuine like family holiday zero work that is

my it's going to be a weird time for me but i'm taking henry and my girlfriend to australia for the first time for both of them and i do not want to be thinking about work at all for that time so there might be a gap and that's actually a big reason i want to record this so we didn't just have a gap with no warning aj how do we want to say goodbye before our big gap goodbye before the big gap. 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 funproblemspodcast at gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you. If you enjoyed the podcast, please tell a friend.