#64 - Helpful Advice with Tim Armstrong

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

Hayward, and today we have no AJ Brandon. Instead, I've replaced him with the younger, sexier version known as... Hello, everyone. My name's Tim Armstrong. Tim is a designer friend of mine, and I wanted to get him on because, Tim, I feel like in some ways you're my friend, but in even more ways you're my nemesis. Really? I can see that. So Tim and I started around the same time. By the way, I'll point out the huge compliment of having you on.

We don't do designer interviews like every other podcast does, but I specifically wanted to get you on because we started around the same time, about 10 years ago-ish, and you immediately propelled to great success, whereas it took me about eight years to get a hit. But the reason I wanted to get you on is not only professional jealousy and a desire to take you down long after the fact, but because I feel like you're my nemesis in that you have like a complete opposite process to me.

Is that a fair thing to say? I think so. It's tricky. 10 years is a long time, and I think we've both evolved over that time. So my gut is probably over time, we have probably done a mix of diverging and then coming back together and then diverging again. So I definitely think that is a true statement, but I'm curious. We haven't had a chance to catch up recently. So there's a chance we're at a point of convergence. I guess we'll find out. And you might just actually repeat all the advice that

I always say. And we'll be like, oh, cool. I am worried about that. But we'll see. I think if that's true, hopefully it's good advice. And hopefully we'll find some cool ways we differ. So as mentioned, we don't normally do these design interviews. So Tim, I'm not going to ask you to tell me a story about how you started playing Risk when you were 10 and then blah, blah, blah. I will, however, ask if you remember how we met. Goodness gracious. Do you know the answer? I do. This question?

This is a quiz. There is a fail state here. Okay. I was worried about that. Recall is one of my weak points. Get you as a guest on the podcast and then just destroy your confidence straight away. That's the goal. Totally. We overlapped quite a bit. At conventions. Like you said, we've both been in it about 10 years. And so a long period kind of in the late 2010s, we were at the same places overlapping. I believe I first met you in a designer-publisher capacity with Jellybean Games.

I was trying to pitch you a game of mine, Raccoon Ragu.

Which I later stole and it became Critic Kitchen. Just direct one-to-one, copy and paste yeah that's that's the business everyone i hadn't actually made that comparison until this very moment no and and i know i know little about it besides the theme but i i think in in every other way it is drastically different but yeah it was based on idea by alex cutler so if if anyone stole from you it's it's him okay cool i know i know who to go after then um but yeah we we

started there and then over the time we've as designer friends and i guess frenemies slash rivals uh we both kind of had our own journeys uh moving forward i specifically remember that that day because i it was a speed pitching event so it was one of the i think origins uh speed pitching events running i think it was origins and i had just seen 11 awful unplayable games and i sat down and then what you did is so good that i actually not only do this but this is my

primary advice for anyone doing speed dating speed dating pitching is we sat down you like play like you didn't you didn't sit there and monologue for two minutes and then be like and here's all the sub rules you were just like oh tim tim armstrong's recording has stopped due to media disconnect oh your your microphone's unplugged oh you're coming through the wrong microphone now so good i can edit around this as long as we get it back up and running

worst case scenario we stop and start again yeah it's not great it's really it's really not as good there There was a what do I do button. But I pressed it and then it went away. I might just stop and start again if that's cool. Actually, down the bottom, can you just click mic? Do you have the option to choose a mic down the bottom?

I'm going to stop the recording. So I distinctly remember this because what you did is not only what I do now in speed pitching, speed dating events, but also what I recommend everyone do, which is I sat down and we just started playing. You didn't do a two minute monologue. You didn't tell me like how the law of the universe works. You were just like, here's what you need to take a turn. And I took a turn and bonus, it was very fun.

So as a publisher, I remember this in such detail i don't know why i was like oh can i take a copy and you're like do you have to.

I remember specifically missing tokens and being very concerned about that and buying a copy of no thanks so i could pilfer its tokens to give to you a fellow designer that also has an excessive amount of tokens um but you didn't know that then you didn't know that i was just i was just the publisher totally and and it's one of the things that might come up later but i i try to remove as many barriers as possible for publishers at any point i want to i want to reduce the number of points of

failure that might limit you from getting the game and if that means i bought a ten dollar card game so be it it is it is because the potential upside is very high and i i still like that game i didn't publish it as you may have noticed i'm sorry if i never formally told you um it's it's rough to hear the news now but figurative is coming but but i do still have the game and i use the sleeves in my british pants all the time which is perfect probably

horribly unprofessional but they were very good sleeves thank you i'm glad they've they're they're being used so if you if you're not someone who's known you for 10 years what would you say you're best known for in the gaming world what what are your what are your favorite games that you've made or what are your hits so what would you be most yeah absolutely over the past 10 years i've i've had six games published two of them are probably my most

notable successes is Orbis from Space Cowboys and Imperial Miners from Portal Games are probably the two biggest ones. And recently, probably, if you like...

Under 40 minute engine builders kind of card tableau style that's probably what most of my recent games have been and where i found the most success so as mentioned i want to get you on because my my philosophy is to go to a publisher and cross-examine them i think i think you've seen one of the two other episodes where i just like ask them would you have published this would you not publish this and then go away and i make a game with them in mind and

i come back and i pitch it to them specifically and i don't know your process but i wanted to reach out because a i suspect it's not that. B, you pitch to a market I just have no access to. You've got a Portal game, you've got a Space Cowboys game, and I've only worked with American publishers. I have one game with Amigo and everything else is with US publishers. And your style of game is also very different to mine in some ways.

In some ways, there's obviously overlap in that we're incredibly talented. So, you know, talent-wise, there's overlap, but style, I think it's quite different. So, without further ado, let me throw it over to you. What's your pitching method or Well, how has it evolved over the years, if you want to go back? Specifically on the pitching side? Yeah, that's all pitching for now, because I'm most curious about that.

This is really just an excuse for me to pick your brain, but you wouldn't agree to an hour-long phone call unless I recorded it. So I was like, okay, you're on the podcast. Those were the terms. So pitching method, I think there's a few things that... Have I skipped ahead in your notes? Yeah, I'm doing some light scrolling here. I think... Pitching is somewhere that particularly kind of earlier on, I was really able to differentiate myself compared to other folks.

If I was to define it, it's just hustle really hard, which borders on your unhelpful advice. But I think designers gravitate towards the work that they love the most, which is design. That's why they got into it. A lot of people didn't get into it because they love like B2B sales. That's not necessarily the passion that brings you to being a designer. But B2B is a business to business for those who are not in the corporate world.

Yeah, totally. So pitching to other businesses. So I think naturally people, when you think about how they budget their time towards the same game design like activities, most of the time is spent on designing and then less of it's spent on pitching.

I think I'm the same way, but I think I've also realized that, hey, if I can skew a little bit more of my time towards this pitching side, and not just the actual act, but also like the researching and the planning and the prepping of materials and such, like everything not designing is kind of in this bucket. There are dividends here. Let's dive into that. What is the prep phase for you, the research? How are you literally doing that? Are you just going on BGG?

Are you on the Cardboard Edison publisher list? What's your process? I think those, yeah. So I think part of it is identifying the potential publishers. I think Cardboard Edison's been a great resource that didn't exist when I first started, but now exists and is really helpful. I think BGG is awesome. For those who don't know, Cardboard Edison's a wonderful couple in New Jersey who run a site that just has every publisher currently taking pictures.

And they keep it, I think it's once a year, I get an email to the publisher being like, hi, we're updating our thing. Has anything changed? Here's what your last one looked like. Please answer these questions. If anything's wrong, let us know. And they really do try to keep that up to date as to who the publishers are, what they're looking for and how to reach out to them that's what that's what the compendium is so what other methods do you use.

Uh, honestly, a lot of the pitching that I was doing was around conventions. So I would use a convention as in a couple of ways. One, it's a forcing function for me. This is a part time thing that I do. I have a day job. So conventions were really useful as a forcing function to be like, all right, I have to do all of these things by Gen Con in August in preparation for Gen Con.

There are various ways to find out who are all the publishers that are going to be there you pull the expo hall list and you look through every single one and so i go through every list of a a game be like a publisher b publisher and i look through all of them i say who are you do i know who you are do i know what your target is do i know whether you're accepting pitches or not do i have anything that matches with you i go to the entire list i try to send out emails beforehand to set

up meetings and then when i'm there in my spare time i'm spending actually less time in the unpub room and more time so in the halls i've had multiple games come about from from just finding someone that i didn't know who they are starting a conversation during a lull learning about them so conventions are less play testing for you and far more targeted pitching.

So so absolutely that is that is the reason i go to conventions unless it's like a specific So when you're going through this list, do you have a, like, I'm going to say a minimum threshold of like, ah, look, you've got one game out, it's not worth it going to you? Or are you a shotgun approach where you're like, I'll pitch to everyone and...

I think more the latter. And I think one key thing for me is that the obvious reason that we pitch games is because we want to match up our games with publishers. But the other thing that I don't hear talked about as much is that pitching is the main way that I network with publishers, particularly new publishers. So if I, all of my relationships have been built off of pitch meetings, the reason I know you is because we had essentially a pitch meeting.

So obviously, if I progress with a publisher and I get a game signed and such, then our relationship evolves to more than just pitch meetings. But typically, for most of the publishers that I know and I see and I say hi to and I check in about, it is usually over a pitch meeting where that happens. So I want to pitch to a lot of people because ultimately only one person is going to sign it. And sometimes I get a couple offers.

Realistically, it's not like I pitch to 20 people and get 20 offers. but when i pitch to 20 people i get the chance to introduce myself to 10 new people and then re-establish my relationship with the existence and so have have you found that your games are generally going like are you i might i might i might i might have told this story in a previous episode we've done a lot now i learned from an actor once that you don't get the the first audition you

do for a producer you you will generally audition for a producer and then when you meet them for the third time they'll be like oh hey it's that guy that i liked and they're just kind of more warm to you right from the start is that your experience with like say space cowboys 100 100 uh space cowboys is a weird one sometimes you just get lucky and that's how i think about that one but it was space cowboys my game orbis which

was one of my first big successes i emailed space cowboys and got a response within the same week in which i emailed them a rule book and then the game was exclusively down within the following two weeks so it's like the if you put in And the hard work, sometimes you get lucky.

Yeah totally you got to take those shots and and sometimes you're going to get extremely unlucky, and and things just really aren't going to work when when otherwise help signs said they should have and sometimes you just get really lucky if you do a hundred pitches and straying into unhelpful advice a little bit i'll also say and i think i mentioned this in the unhelpful advice episode that like your games tim are just very good and

so when you bring a publisher game they're not like oh good it's this guy again they're like oh i didn't sign that one for whatever reason but i remember liking it and liking him and so they are genuinely very excited to see the next one.

100 yeah it's tough unhelpful advice to say just make good games it's not easy oh go ahead i will, i will say though if i am not getting if a game is not wowing people if i'm getting mediocre responses i really and i don't because i i remember if it doesn't happen a lot but i if i'm like wow wow, that really bombed.

You don't keep pitching it. I'm like, I need to take this back because I want people's reaction to be this person is bringing a very polished game and they know what they're talking about and they have a good eye for the market. I want every publisher I meet with to have those takeaways of they're good at communicating, they understand my needs, this game's really tight. Oftentimes it's not for them. A lot of great games get passed up for various reasons.

And I don't try to show someone a game if it's clearly not for them because that's demonstrating that I don't fully understand their needs. But if it can potentially be for them, I want to show up and I want that to be an example of that game to represent me as a designer. And you mentioned it earlier, like my success in this industry is built on the back of my failures. Every relationship I have has a trail of failures behind me.

My relationship with you is out of a failed, ultimately failed pitch. But I was still able to make an impression based on that.

Um so i want to dive a bit deeper into your convention then i promise i'll ask you other things but are you going around with a single game or do you do the binder of games are you somewhere in the middle i it's evolved over time usually i have three usually are you going to a publisher with hey i want to show you three games are you going in and saying i have a game and if you don't like that i have backups.

I think it's usually best to lead with your strongest. It depends. I don't have a clear answer here. It depends on the publisher. The more relationship I have with that publisher, the more willing I am to be like, I have these three. And typically, I usually, if I have a new pitch meeting, what I'll do is I'll start with the sell sheet. I'll put the sell sheet on the table, and I have a pretty streamlined couple minutes before I start pulling out the pieces.

Because the publisher, a lot of it is like understanding your audience and the publisher at the beginning is understandably wary. They're in a lot of pitch meetings. They love games. They do this because they're passionate. They want to find the right games. But you also realize that 90 plus percent of their meetings that they have are in hindsight a waste of time. I'm being less diplomatic. They're wary. Hot garbage. They don't want to.

Totally. So it's important to understand that from the perspective of the publisher and say, like, I want to understand that I don't want to be presumptuous. I want to kind of raise your level over time. Obviously, when they're circling around to my game already on the table in a speed pitch, it's a little different. But if we're new here, I don't want to be like, all right, like, let me start the five minute setup. No, we're not at the setup. They don't care about my rules yet.

They still are trying to evaluate whether I'm worth their time or not.

And so I kind of meaningfully keep it light. and sometimes when i when i don't know i will show them a couple of sell sheets and then i'll ask them right where would you like to go next um and i'm gonna allow them to guide it so i'm genuinely already so glad i had you on i wasn't until now tim i was horribly disappointed but now i'm like this i i had so again i'm gonna keep unpacking this so you'll come in so firstly you still make sell sheets for all the games that you're pitching right

that that's the that's the subtext there every single game has a sell sheet i got lazy in my success sometimes and didn't always make a video i'm going back to the every single game also you're the opposite of me i am so much lazier than you i love it i i do think this is a key area when i think about our compare and contrast i do think it's the key area of, I polish something to the nines. I do all my work before. I think you're much more willing to bring early things that are.

Basically, you are a professional. And I'm the privileged rich kid on the hill. It's great. And I think there's I think they're both super valid. So I think that's why I'm excited to have this conversation and be like, there are two paths here. There's good reasons to go down both of them.

I think for me my thought is if i can get a five percent increase in the chance that something gets picked up it's worth it if i've spent 40 hours in a game i'm going to spend that last hour it makes total sense genuinely i think you're and this is why i want to get you on i think your approach is quote-unquote better than mine i can only advise on how i do it i don't think i do it the right way i just do it the way that

works for me but i think i think yours is a more generally i'll put it in less definitive terms i think aspiring designers would do well to listen to you.

And do things your way than they would to to do the kind of lazy peter method the unhelpful advice method i i think so you know me well enough to know everything's got caveats and pitfalls not me fishing for compliments yeah totally i think i think there's a there are a couple costs of what i'm talking about here though i think one is if if your game's just not good enough than spending that time on the cell you are going to let me go back in time a little you might

learn more before you get rejected or you might spend more time before you realize oh no publisher wants this just because it's it's not it's not good enough so that's that's probably one of the pitfalls of of what i'm yeah but yours is also much and and just flat out much much better for those cold meetings where you don't know them and and that's literally why we call that I've said unhelpful advice. I was like, don't do this. This just happens to be how I do it.

I want to go back in time a little bit. You said that you bench a game unless it is wowing people. Are we talking playtesting or are we talking publishers exclusively there? Where's your litmus test held? Which hall? It is, I mean... It's both. You have to see certain checkpoints before it's kind of ready. But what I was specifically talking about there is I have in the past mid-convention benched games because of the feedback I'm getting out of publisher meetings.

Generally, I only show games to publishers if I am like, this is publishable quality. If they publish it tomorrow, obviously with graphic design and all that, but you'd be happy with mechanics going out as they are.

For the most part yeah and again as someone who's played your prototypes like not always the right call solid like every prototype of yours i've played except maybe one and you said this was an early one for you like i was like oh this is a published game that's just not published yet.

And i think the one you're specifically might be thinking about is an example of me pulling that i thought it was more ready and i had one meeting and it really didn't bubbles bubbles the marbles which oh i mean that one day originally oh okay but clearly you might have been early stage there so it did work out um but but yeah i think there are certain pauses obviously we constantly need to reevaluate like is this worth investing the next 10 hours into it's like a constantly a

choice but i do think specifically when you get to the point of pitching publishers i want every publisher to walk away and say, if I have a meeting with Tim, they're going to show me games that are of a certain publishable quality.

And because of that, I always want to take that meeting when they reach out. So if I'm worried that that's not when it's going to be communicated, then one, it doesn't matter if I have a meeting or not, the game's probably going to get signed. Two, I need people to have that outcome when they walk away of a pitch meeting with me. And so I'm going to pull a game if it's not going to happen. And this is very much, we did a lot of talking in the unhelpful episode about brand.

And my brand is I'm a blue haired Australian who wears zebra stripes and your brand and Tim please don't take this personally is you're a very handsome ordinary looking man you don't have a gimmick you don't have a peacocky kind of thing you you just you know you look like 90% of other game designers not an insult just a fact but you've worked on your brand being I'm going to show you a game that you're like oh even if I publisher don't want

to sign this right now this will get signed and I I've got to pay attention to this kid because damn, is he going places. That's sort of your brand. Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, if going back to my beginnings, like it, we've, we both have probably humble beginnings in our own ways. Most designers start humble. Okay. Well, your beginnings were even if, if you never were, but...

Like we were both unpublished designers like a visual like.

If totally and like my first convention i had i got a single pitch meeting i went to gen con and renegade a guy from renegade sat down with me and no one else did i i had a lot i couldn't even get the meeting and that's very normal but then more and more i had like now if i go to gen con i'll i can get 15 20 potentially more it depends i don't want to like but it's that's not to be cocky but it's more just like yeah i might be able to get x new meetings but i also am able to

go back and be like okay i i have relationships with even people who haven't published people and those relationships are even publishers you haven't worked with you've still got relationships with them yeah 100 there are and and that's and that's been a huge boon to me obviously there's always the advantage to being able to say hey you haven't met me but i i have credentials and and that's great um and and absolutely i benefit from that but a lot of a lot of my current benefit is i have built

relationships through existing pitching meetings and by demonstrating my brand during those they are going to say yes i absolutely think this is this is a strength and a superpower and as someone who you know i don't think you've pitched to me since then because why would you i don't really publish much anymore but we've often been at conventions and i've been like hey do you have anything that you want to play test and i'm always excited to play test your games which

is is the same thing like even though i'm not looking to sign them i'm like oh i like the way tim's brain works and i just like playing with the games that you have and i know that it's essentially going to be playing a published game but with a chance to give feedback which is which is the dream scenario for. Play testing in some ways so you said to me once i hope you don't mind me repeating this on the podcast.

You you don't work on a lot of games and and this is this is an area where we really differ so i i think we toyed to kerm rockstar games versus cute games was sort of how i differentiated them where I'll have like a rockstar game, which is sort of like a Tim Armstrong game where I'm like, okay, this is going to wow the publishers. And I know that someone's going to sign this. And now I'm just trying to find the best deal.

And then cute games where I'm like, this is a fun idea. And maybe a publisher will fall in love with it. And the irony being that Things in Rings was absolutely a cute game that Joe was like, I see it. And he took it and he made it my biggest hit. So that is one area where the Peter method sort of had strengths, but you're working on fewer games, and you're working on your fewer games much harder than I work on, say, my cute games. So do you have a... Because you don't go to every convention,

obviously. Like, you said you do this part-time. Yeah. Definitely not anymore. It is... I think my convention is just going back quite a bit. And so are you... But yes, it's still good. What was the phrase you used earlier? It was a great phrase. When you have, like, an upcoming convention, it's a... It's like a motivator, but forcing function. A forcing function, I think. So are you booking a convention using it as a forcing function?

Are you like, I'm going to keep designing until I have three games that I'm proud of. Three, you know, turn on strong rock star games, and then I'm going to go bitching. I need a rock star, and then I create, or I need a path to a rock star, and then I book the forcing function. Obviously, if I've got multiple, great. But I need a game to bring because otherwise there's no reason for me to be there from my perspective because I am all business, all pitching at conventions.

So I need something to pitch. Oftentimes I'll have other games. I'll kind of have a primary and a few secondaries that maybe didn't get picked up the last go round. And then I do need that forcing function because I have, as I get older, I find that there are more things in my life that compete for my time. And so it's important to have a goal to shoot for. Otherwise, timelines just expand. I found that a lot during COVID. Timelines just endlessly expand.

You have a life outside of this. Spend a year on this. It's very easy for that, just to not do this. But this is a hobby that you love and a profitable hobby for you, I would dare say. Yeah, totally. And if I look back, I am grateful for the time I spend on it. But I need those forcing functions to kind of keep my head in the game.

So let's let's let's pivot slightly i want to ask you about non-convention pitching you mentioned that the space cowboys you just emailed them yeah actually no let's dive into your niche a little bit because you you are what i would consider very much a niche designer you you've worked out what you're good at and you you you just do that i don't mean that in a derogatory sense i mean like you you've worked out your strength and you focus hard on those games that you are very

good at do you want to you sort of did it earlier but do you want to dive into what what a tim armstrong game looks like yeah yeah absolutely i think i've fallen into a bit of a niche i don't, because people naturally continue to do things that were successful for i have so many somewhat unintentional for that exact reason i'm like oh well that that was that worked.

Yeah you get you get feedback on on what you're the people around you like and what the publishers like and you naturally want to create things that are gonna make those people happy yeah go over well with the audiences you like so i think a few things about my my brand from a design standpoint, always under an hour i'm always in that entry gateway gateway plus gateway game gateway game plus is is really my audience i think it's just way more pitchable it's it's i don't know if you've listened

to any of daniel games episodes but this is a point that he makes repeatedly he's like you know you can make a three-hour euro and there are 10 publishers who will consider it you can make an entry weight 40 minute game and there are a thousand publishers that will consider it if you if you're just going to if you're trying to hit the numbers that one is clearly better than the other. Totally. And I have my game that is my heaviest game has really struggled to find a match.

And I think whether intentionally or unintentionally, I kind of absorb that information and it naturally navigates where I'm going to put new energy and new designs towards. It's like, okay, you want that $40 or less MSRP, it can shift sometimes what people's target price points are.

But generally, that's a pretty safe range to go for so so that's my main target and then unintentionally or not my my main design niche right now is engine builders i think naturally people people love an engine builder sort of splendor century spice road tried to wait stuff maybe it'd be a little bit heavier that but like in that range yeah maybe a touch yeah like gizmos kind of thing so like that may be that plus uh is is your yeah it's a bigger random design um you could say that.

Totally and yeah a few of my a few of my things have ways to reactivate cards in your tableau over and over again i think is an organic way to create that engine building feeling to create the arc of the game to allow people to naturally create cool combos that is those wow moments it's the the strong feedback of being able to do greater and greater things to be rewarded for a bunch of new stuff every time you activate your engine too it's a really

like it's it's worked really well for me in a few games i think there's a world where like at some point i'm going to kind of reach my limit there and i'm going to pivot like i'm still in my like uve rosenberg i found tetris tiles and i'm going to make five or so games on those and then i'm going to kind of move off of it but it having someone just do something more and more it it gives you that arc it gives you that engine building so things that players really like

it but it does it in a way that doesn't add complexity you're like you just did the same thing you did last turn but now you have two cards here in a row and it's like you can take create basic rules that create the structure that allows for that arc and allows for that complexity to the best example might be something like wingspan where you literally place it activate it then place the next one activate it and the plus one. And you're like, whoa, I'm doing it again, but as part of a combo now.

Totally. Wingspan is the best known game of this thing. Unfortunately, it's someone else. Wait, you're not the designer of Wingspan? What? It's amazing. Weird that you didn't mention that. I know, I know. Twist. I know. But yeah, amazing job kind of thematically connecting it all and everything. But that feeling that Wingspan has, I think many of my games have kind of tightening it in and crisping it and bringing it down from a 90 minute game.

And is this because that's what you as a player want to play? Or is your taste as a player wildly different to you as a game designer? No one's going to cancel you. Don't worry about that. No, no, no. It does align well with my taste. I'm trying to think about if that's the reason that I did chose this cast. I warned you, this is going to be hard-hitting journalism, where you have to really examine who you are as a person. That's what Fun Problems is known for. Yeah, I'm laying it all out.

Yeah i i do think it is the area that interests me i'm trying to think i think all of my designs are games that i i enjoy to play i think that's a basic thing i would suggest to people is you have to you have to play your games you have to play your games and also you have to be and you are going to interrupt you and say what you're going to say but first yeah this is our rivalry coming back to him every chance i get the the thing that i always think is like you can't tell if

something's not fun for your target audience if you're not the target audience if you're sitting there being like i'm having a great time and your target audience is hating it well then you're not going to be able to design as well as you can if you're like i like this oh i don't like this part of it let me fix that you know if but you can't detect that i think you can't detect that as effectively if you're removed from it so yeah you got to make something that you love and

then make it more something that you love. 100 i think i think you like obviously the people making children's games aren't children so there are exceptions but they're probably playing with a bunch of kids in a way that people have access yeah and and they're thinking about that and and yeah so totally like i think there's like, me being my target audience is a huge accelerator and boon for me because i don't have i can shortcut some of that learnings of like if i like it i'm a

pretty tough judge for these things like That gets me a good way through the validation process that I can do myself. So I think there's boons from an efficiency standpoint. And also, cool, you're signing up to play this game for 40 plus hours. And I'm doing this as a hobby because I love it, but I probably love it a lot less if I made things that I hate for 40 hours. If you got hired by Final Fantasy Games to start doing the Utoir and Pyram expansion, you'd probably have a bad time.

Yeah, potentially. It depends. Maybe you love Twilight in Hero, man. I just don't know that. I do. That's the thing is I don't, I love the type of games I make. I am a pretty broad liking gamer. I do like TI4. So there's very few games I don't like. I think this is a specific area that I do really find interesting. And when I play other games, I'm intrigued and want to see how they're doing. And we're talking about, I want to circle back to your brand.

So you've got this brand as a guy who comes along and doesn't waste publishes time. By the way, I just want to reiterate that that sell sheet thing is really clever because it is respecting the publisher's time and showing that you know what you've done and showing you've done the work. So showing the sell sheet because I've been in so many pictures where someone sits down and starts pulling out a game and I'm like, you know.

It's a tell for a publisher, I'm sure. Woo me a little bit. Just woo me a little bit before you start selling.

Yeah and and understand what my needs are and what my my like where am i going to be nervous show me that you respect my time show me that you aren't you taking the time to research me beforehand like i think there's things you can do to demonstrate that and there's also things you can do that kind of demonstrate the opposite that you are a little you're a little deaf to those needs and and i think that will start to shift people suddenly subtly again

all this is minor but accumulating five percent advantages or disadvantages so your brand is professional great games and you know that that's great stuff to have but obviously you get there the long way but then also do you find that having this niche in game design and and i don't mean like super narrow as in you're making the same game again again but you've definitely like found your target audience and your target publisher and is

that helpful or limiting or neither or both how do you find it. I think it's helpful. One nice thing about it is publishers also have niches. So the relationships I've established, some of them lend really well to what I'm talking about. Like if you, as you talk to publishers, you might, you probably can think of a couple of publishers that like, when I'm like, I want this weight game, this audience game, I want to provide the wow moments. I want to have engine builders.

I want to have kind of these simple terms and kind of unique spins on like all those things. I can visualize certain publishers that I know are like, yeah, that's the type of stuff our audience really likes. That's the type of stuff that I'll be publishing one or two of those every year. That's what we make. Because they're safe. We know how to sell it, yeah. That's what we make. And so I've, over the time that I've been doing this, been able to build relationships with those publishers.

I also have other relationships because not everything I do is cleanly in that.

But but probably those are the ones that are most fruitful for me because we just have really strong alignment between the stuff that i make yes i very much have that with all play just because joe and i have similar game brains and all play has not not a not a classic niche but they have a style for sure and i really like and design within their style of game yeah and you have like probably one of your strengths is like i should get you on the podcast more often just a couple

You kind of mentioned that. Right. You have the kind of fun off the wall, like the things in rings, like you have, because you do the breath, you have spins that are more, more left field at times. And I think, I think Allplay is potentially a company that they get excited by that. Oh, wow. That's really kind of left field. Some of my stuff is like, everything has to have a hook. Everything has to have a reason why it stands out and is different.

So I'm not bringing things that don't have that, but not every hook has to be dramatically different so my stuff is probably less dramatic in what it's doing it's it's a it's a small twist and a and a strong well-refined game let's vent that a little bit on the show we talk often about the three types of hooks which are mechanical component and thematic and obviously there's a bunch more types of hooks we just had a big conversation discord about experiential hooks or this hook or ip is

okay i guess that's the thematic hook but it's subtly different so mechanical hook is you know something like far away where you put down the cards and activate them in reverse a thematic hook is something like unconscious mind where just the very premise of the like the very story of the game is a hook and then component hook my go-to example is zolkin where the giant gears are just like i mean like oh i want to play with those or the eggs in wingspan

or the clicky clackies in azul or the quacks of quething bird like.

They don't have to be clicky clacky i just like clicky clacky bits as a designer who's had who's had quite a quite a decent amount of success how much are you thinking about those three types of hooks and how much are you targeting those towards publishers not at all a lot whether obviously not using my random terminology but like when when you're thinking about why will someone sell this game what what is the process that you're going through maybe i shouldn't

have started with my specific system before asking for yours no no no i i think it i think it's it makes sense based on the way that i've been talking about my design so far it's probably no surprise that i the mechanical hook first in my design philosophy. I think when I reflect on this, I think, The main reason that I do this is I've tried thematical first, theme first games of like, wow, this theme needs a game. Yeah.

Totally. Yeah, that one is theme first. Yeah, Raccoon Chefs and Dumpster Diving. This was before animals were on every single game. You invented animals, Tim, I'm pretty sure. It was a little more niche. I did, yeah, yeah, back in 2017. But I've just found less success with them, me personally, And I think for me, I have to get I have to get really excited about an idea and I have to kind of be problem solving it.

That's like my design process is like, OK, can I problem solve and can I like how does this figure out? And I've got, OK, I figured out this part, but I haven't figured out the end game yet. And all of this, I found that the games that start mechanically, they get the gears turning for me personally. And I need that self-proportionate. I need that excitement because, again, I have a day job. I have a lot of stuff going on.

We get it, Tim. You have friends. i need i need to find i understand at least at least three very needy they're very very time consuming very needy friends so i i think there's valid ways to approach both i think the key thing is the hook which you've kind of called out like you have to have a reason that you're you stand out in the market and you have to have that reason be something clear and easily articulated can you run us through like maybe two or three of your hit games hooks

if that's easy for you to do if not i can move on yeah absolutely so imperial miners is is one of my more recent games in it you are you're you're kind of mining down and every turn you play a card kind of digging further down in your tableau you activate the card you played and then you venture back up to the surface and in venturing back up you activate every card you pass through so the cards you're playing are.

That one's nice because there is some small theme tie-in. It's obviously not a theme first game. I think Portal did a great job bringing it to the universe. And if you haven't seen the art, it's amazing. But can you explain in one to two sentences what's the main thing you're doing? And you kind of talk about it a little bit, but you don't have to over-explain. You don't have to be like, and that's really cool because you get to act. You get to build this engine.

It's very show-don't-tell. But you're like, and then you go back up.

You don't explain why it's fun. you explain what you do and the fun is is is in the is in the listener's head totally and that was very like that's that was intentional in like that's what i tell publishers in my elevator pitch is something like that that's what publishers will tell people at the booth and that's what friends will hopefully tell other friends when they bring it to game night you need something like you want to think about like what is the cool thing and if the cool thing

is like and then you have to do this and then you have to do that and it's buried like if it if the cool thing can't be articulated quickly it's gonna not only not serve you well at the publisher front but even if it's published and goes on later it's probably going to stumble right in the word of mouth i i call that the last pitch or the final pitch the the pitch from like on game night someone pitching it to their friends that's funny you

also have that because it's it's so useful as a designer to be like go to a game night and just watch how people pitch games to their friends and just just see that and it's funny because like that that is a very obviously it got made i'm not telling you know anything you don't know it's a very strong mechanical hook but it's not sexy it's not like a oh man no one's ever done that and and again you know you know i think this is a great game and i'm not i'm not uh dissing you but

it's it is an effective mechanical hook that just gets you in the game straight away without needing to be sexy yeah. Yeah. And I will say like the ideal, I am mechanic at first because that's what excites me. I do think like in, in a perfect world where I could like, I think you want all three, like some of the best games have overlapping. Like you mentioned Zulkin, like Zulkin is cool component hook, but that component hook is also a mechanical hook.

Like they are, it is an overlapping and you can explain it in the sentence like the the dream is have all three hooks articulated in the same sentence because you can't just be like and then there's these cool bits and then there's this like you have you have one sentence to demonstrate your worth yeah but ideally yeah totally and like that being said like there are there are a lot of good games that have been hugely successful that that can achieve that but i do think that is the gold standard

and ideally you want to find those.

I want to do one more thing on pitching and then I want to pick your brain briefly on some other stuff I don't know what your time looks like but I could talk to you for hours the so that's the convention pitches that's when you go and you do your research and you find everyone and I don't know if this annoys you as much as it does me but you start looking up a publisher and you're like this is just a game store this is not a publisher at all they don't they don't

split them out in any way and so I just have to like filter through manually and they all are end with and so you're like maybe who's this new person totally now i i mentioned that you you've you've had a almost all of your hits with european publishers in fact i i you've got you've got a fireside game if i remember yes i i have a fireside i have a couple i think of gray socks is european but then but portal and yeah i i've had my two biggest games have been european and

and part of the reason is i mean it's just awesome to get with a company that's got more of a global reach just having access to multiple markets is amazing um but but yeah i've had so are you going to european conventions are you at essen every year are you going to uk games expo or anything like that i i have gone to essen once and i do think it's valuable at some point if you if if you are a game designer and you do money is not a constraint for you or not a large constraint.

Essen is is one of the the ones that i would recommend it's valuable to go to a convention that everyone's at the main convention everyone's at from the u.s is gen con it's one of the few u.s conventions where european publishers will have a presence there that maybe maybe now it's changing a little bit but like i always went to gen con because i could talk to space cowboys there i wouldn't be able to talk to space cowboys at origins they just went there so

you're um so but you've only been there once so. I've only been to Essen once, and neither of the two games I mentioned there were signed to Essen. I mentioned Space Cowboys was signed over email. So my friend Eric Slauson, I'm sure you know also, he once sat down and explained to me how good it is to pitch to European publishers because they read their emails and then they reply to emails. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

They what? That sounds crazy. So I just want to touch briefly on when you're emailing a publisher. You've got the sell sheet. You've got the three-minute pitch video. Any tips, any tricks? This is a weakness of mine. So I just want to learn. Yeah. So this is a newer thing for me, this one trick I'm going to share. So I don't actually know. It's untested. Again, sometimes I'm like, is this actually real? Or am I just like imagining it?

I have stopped putting any types of links or files in my initial email that I send to people. I just send text because other types will land. Really? Okay.

I think so. i've had i've reached out to some publishers that i was communicating through to other channels like i i've on occasion i've had a publisher be like hey i like your other stuff like over bgg or facebook or something can you send me stuff and then at least once i've emailed them and they said yeah i didn't get anything and then we realized that my files were going to their spam filter um and ever since then i'm like i never want that

to happen again so now my first email is like a paragraph yeah essentially i want to keep it short so i want to keep it to the like blurb where i want to kind of cover some of the key details about player count time weight, and get the hook in i also introduce myself and and mention a few of my published games and then i say like if if this interests you at all i'm happy to send more and then i i have the pitch video i have the rule book i have the sell

sheet um are the three that people typically are Are you recording pitch videos on TTS or are you pulling out a camcorder? A camcorder, like it's the 80s. Are you pulling out your iPhone or smartphone and recording from there? No, I do it with a camcorder, Peter. I'm a believer in the camcorders. I'm bringing it back. Camcorders are coming back. Yeah, I have to put in my VHS tape. I mail them a VHS and I'm like, here's the picture. I'm self-conscious about it. Yeah, exactly.

Now I'm doing TTS, which I find a lot easier. It's not my strength, but I think the most important thing is to have one, I think.

Um you have one and it's two to three minutes i think is is the most important piece and tts, pulling it out and putting all the pieces there and and doing it was was a very painful process and because it took a lot of time i just didn't do it as much tts i can just be like all right like, this isn't your favorite thing but take 15 minutes and just do it and now you're and then you're good gotcha i think that uh do you have any other thoughts on pitching or else i will jump

into have some notes here um so yeah i'm happy to move your your games are and again i don't i don't i'm gonna use the derogatory term and know that you're gonna take the right way your game sort of strain to the multiplayer solitaire kind of area i don't think they are strict multiplayer solitaire but they are they are low player interaction yes some of my games have more but the the games that i will be known for kind of that

are coming out recently and and upcoming yeah um that's that's the area that i've leaned into was that a deliberate choice of like you've seen where the market's going because i know the market loves a multiplayer solitaire or is that just a your preference thing or i have a lot of thoughts on this give me give me your juicy juicy thoughts.

Your arm is strong and your thoughts are many so i i think it is a needed choice for certain things that i am that i have kind of gone into with my designs particularly like card tableau games and like engine builders and such i have i have a couple strong thoughts one of my strong thoughts is like trying to tick a box for interaction is is pretty worthless i think either you need meaningful interaction or you might as well

have no interaction um and so sometimes you have this like low interaction area uh where you have like oh well don't you know we're like trying to, get cards from the same trade row like obviously there's interaction like i'm like you know that's yeah yeah that's artificial like it's it's like a bad argument like it's like pick a lane you're just picking a box at that point totally like i think and the key thing that i believe is

needs to be true is that to have competitive player interaction particularly, you need players to be able to easily digest opponent's strategy and their intent. Right, right. So a lot of people, when they think about interaction, they think about, oh, I just need an avenue for people to interact. I just need something for them to compete over. I need to have some reason. I just need to put in a card that says, like, screw over target player. And then I magically have interaction.

It's meaningless. I think that is part of it, obviously. but. It's meaningless if you can't if.

You're asking players to say hey for this interaction to matter you need to take time to digest what other people are doing and be like oh they really want this i think for my personal the the designs i've been doing recently it's a very complex player puzzle of kind of moving cards around or activating cards and resequencing cards i think it has a very satisfying kind of loop and there's a ton of advantages it's kind of a way to get depth without complexity it allows for something

different it allows for those feed gap so there's the good parts of it i do think of that choice to go that direction i never want to look at the other person and be like what is that what's that card you've got oh oh i see what you're trying to do like it would take me five minutes out of what you're doing here and now you have to go over there and process and understand it and then be like now how can i do that while also applying my strategy and that

that's not the game you're trying to make am i on the right track totally and it's not it's not fun and and i think you've mentioned in the past is like game design essentially is like helping create rules that line up like yes what's yes what's incentivized for the players being what's fun like i totally agree with that i could totally force interaction to some of my games by making a strong incentive for people to care about that

if it is not fun yeah you care about that and you don't want to do a little bit because you're doing it a little bit. You have to do it all the way there's a daniel dot games quote i was yeah i think about everything i do now which is a game should have a lot of a thing or none of a thing. Totally. That's how I feel about this one. I think interaction is great. I love games with interaction. I have some designs that are high interaction.

This particular space, I grappled with a lot because a lot of the games that have a lot of good that I've been doing somewhat recently, some publishers want to tick boxes with it and be like, well, where's the interaction?

Like and it is an easy place to kind of if you're a critic or you're a player or something like it's an easy place to kind of discount a game to saying well they don't they don't tick this box so clearly they're not it's not the game's not that good it may not be right for everyone i think it's right to have like targeted audiences instead of making a game for every person but i feel very strongly about like sometimes the right choice is instead of trying to create

more interaction it's actually like let me just cut the little bit of interaction i have and be able to use that as a way to streamline it i've moved multiple of my games from turn-based to simultaneous, by removing the last bits of interaction allowing.

Length of the game sorry no other way around the speed of the game not the length of the game well i've made it simultaneously yeah yeah four times as long i've done something very bad, yeah hopefully hopefully not but yeah like i think it's i think it's an interesting area to think about because a lot of designers as they're working on their games they are conscious of the interaction i think it is certain games thrive on interaction

i think interaction is amazing in that interaction provides built-in replayability like the fact that chess played for, hundreds of thousands of years like that's because it has that interaction like that it provides like an endless amount of replayability because on the other one where it is all about the person that you're, not only the person, the people that you're playing with on every level, like that, that's what the game is.

Totally and it and it's a it's a way to like to get that replayability to get that like depth and that that fun with with minimal complexity like you don't have to like just one doesn't have to like yeah make all those rules it's allowed to be effortlessly simple but then i replay it over and over again i think i think it's needed so i i guess it's like it is super good i think a common pitfall and something that i've kind of planted a flag and said i'm not going to try to do is like trying to

aspire for it in every game particularly if you're trying to tick a box with some low interaction this is a very kind of i guess it's not that solo it is a solo game with a with a central draft so you're always taking from the middle and and that's affecting it it's actually way more interactive it's a bad example but it it is in that middle space yeah that it is it is a sneakily it is higher interactive game than it's it's kind

of like splendor in that way They both have a good bit of interaction once you realize that there's a finite amount of shapes in Splendor. It's subtle. It's clearly not like a war game in terms of direct interaction. But both of them have... In Orbis, the hook is that there's a grid. And when you take a tile, cubes from that match that tile's color spill out to the adjacent ones. So you kind of want to like find where you can be, where you get all the tiles that have all the cubes on them.

And if you're over highly competitive tiles, then you're going to have to kind of take them before you want to. So it, it, and, and the cool thing about it is it has a very simple tableau in front of you that's easily digestible by colors. So it goes back to that thing of it, you're allowed that interaction because you can look and you say, oh, you're going for a lot of red. Like that, that high level of glanceability and being like, I get what you want

is key. To use this known metric glanceability. Yeah. And people love intricate puzzles. I mean, there's a ton of commercially successful games that have had a really juicy, satisfying puzzle. And that's been like a recent-ish area that's really thrived. I think there's certain groups that don't care for that because it does have

that multi-solitaire feel. But I think it's correct, because making me care about what you're doing when you have such a complex thing in front of you and you don't want to look away isn't the right move. You don't want to force people to do something when it's not natural. Azul, I feel like, is the one that has the most transparently interaction in what could be a solo-y game. Because Azul...

Halfway through your first ever game of azul you're going to be glancing over and being like oh i know you want that so i've got to think about that very very quickly so it's always a very high interactive game that with like maybe two tweaks could be a multiplayer solitaire game and be you know much much worse for it so it's it's it's like splendor like you said splendor takes you a few plays to be like oh i really have to start paying attention azul you kind

of pick that up straight away it's not leading to a question at all totally uh i have a few things i want to talk to you if you have to go let me know we can we can go fast fast fast so we've both been doing this for 10 years and i have i've been taking this month off i mean i'm in england right now i was gonna say sunny england but as we've been talking it's been less sunny.

And so i'm on vacation but i wanted i really wanted to get this podcast uh up with you before i before i got back to the states i don't like talking to you in the same country it's my it's my one rule no we yeah yeah this country ain't big enough for the both of us and so having just having three weeks off games and having said that i went to the uk game design i've been uh uk games expert i've been playing games yeah i congrats by the way on i don't i don't i think i

saw something oh yes yes critication won the one the family game of the year which which is very delightful thank you i would take the except the thanks but it's really alex's game i just put my name on the box it was very sneaky of me so i other than uk so i'm playing games with my friends and having a few calls with aj about our game that we don't ever stop talking about someone in the discord is nicknamed it pesticides which is such a cute

name we might we might nickname it that for now on i've not been doing games i've been like oh i think i needed a break i think i really needed a break and so i just wanted to check i wanted to ask not check i'm checking on you tim that's that's why i called you this is actually an intervention i want to ask about how you deal with like burnout and that kind of stuff because you have been doing this not full-time but like intensely for a decade now,

It's probably the topic I think about the most right now. Is that the subject of your next game? No, I don't make games because I think about them a lot. I make games because I think they're going to be good products. And I do not want to personally play a game about them right now. Could be a racing game. Burnout. Maybe there. Maybe we got something. It's a lot of what I described earlier

of like, just work really hard and go do all the things. and do every little thing that gives you an advantage. Yeah, it's that easy. Just work your butt off in every single area and never show anything less than perfection externally. All of that has its merits, and that's why I talked about them and I said it's good to do, especially if you're just really motivated and that's what you want to go do.

Keeping that up over a decade and through other life events that just make things tough to juggle, it is exhausting.

And and i think i have experienced burnout multiple times probably many designers that have been in the game for 10 years have experienced burnout it's it's when i talk to people that have been in it for this long yeah it inevitably comes up as a conversation it's a grind even with like three hits behind you you still like cool gotta grind because those those sales drop off shockingly fast oh totally yeah and and that's like the sobering truth of

yes success in this industry you are a new designer is a grind yeah it's fleeting it is it is fleeting and it's easy to have like when you're in there at the beginning you're like i just need to get a signed game and then everything's changed and it's and it's a whole new thing and then you you get to it and then you just realize that like this is it opens doors it undeniably opens doors oh it's it's a great thing and it's a huge milestone and to.

Be someone that has a signed game you are more fortunate than 99 of the other aspirational people out there like it is a huge milestone and at the same time there is so much more to have to go achieve and and then like what you meant like a game's like shelf life is three months it depends on the game obviously you want the evergreen hit that will kind of keep you afloat and provide opportunities and expansions and so on and such forth. But, uh...

Most games aren't that most games are fleeting and and like you said 99 like 99% of designers don't get published 99% of games don't get a second print run i don't literally know the numbers but it's i guarantee it's not far off that yeah 100 99% um and it's.

No one yeah but in agreement there of like it's tricky and it's and and so just trying to like take a step back and be like how do i do this in a more sustainable way what are your hot tips on how to do it in a sustainable way i think one key thing is and and it's a common framework and you might have it as well of like the results oh yes yes i learned about this about i think it's a childhood education which i didn't study

but i was reading an article about it and if you tell a kid like oh that drawing's beautiful cool you've taught them to aim for a result if they don't get it failed if you tell a kid like hey you know looks like you're having fun doing that they're like i am having fun doing that it's not directly what you're talking about but it's it's it has totally, 100 and and naturally i think the bias in this industry and with myself is result focused we we get into this oftentimes

because we want a game signed uh we want to see our name on a box we want to see it on a shelf or in a kickstarter especially if you're if you're going into a convention with that like i've got a pitch got a pitch got a pitch like i've gone to conventions with 10 games that I thought were going to be signed and walked out with not a single offer. And it feels miserable, but you got to start enjoying the process.

Totally. And that's the thing is like, it's a tough time in the industry to be really results focused. It's every, it's tough out there. It's really tough. I've been doing this since the mid 2010s. Every year has been harder to get a game signed.

But the crappy thing is every year, moving forward is also going to be harder. So it's kind of like...

It's there's if you're getting in now there's no better time than now to do it the only better time is if you had a time the best side of the back to like the beginning of the kickstarter boom yeah yeah totally so it's it's hard and so i think like if if the satisfaction you get is out of the result of it at the very end it's really tough um and so i've had to be very thoughtful about where i do that i think i i think much more about what is

good for me this year is much more about the processes that i'm able to do i want to i want to spend certain time i want to validate that the time i'm doing i'm enjoying it and and be excited about it take pride in what i'm doing feel really good about the small milestones and and about the work that i'm doing and that the ethic that the work ethic that i'm showing i think trying to derive that you're building an engine from that um and then also being aware literally like like

you play build but the process of pitching and signing and designing games is an engine and you've got to enjoy building that engine this ties directly back into what we're saying of like don't design a game you don't like like you will definitely you'll burn out totally as fast if you're not enjoying the games that you're working on you gotta love them yeah and and there are those moments like probably one of my favorite moments in game

design is when you find a cool solution for a problem and then a play test and it like and it plays the best moment is when you solve of the day problems with. One solution and you're like i am a god of design i have done the thing.

Oh it feels so good i'm floating for the rest of the day when that happens and and taking those moments and and appreciating what they are a good thing is i'm doing the exact same stuff i might be like i might be less all in on some of the pitching stuff because because again i was approaching burnout territory there but i'm doing a lot of the same stuff sometimes at different intensities but then also just a change in the mental focus of where i'm getting

the feedback and where i'm like celebrating do you only put it in front of other people what's your status for. It's a mix. It depends on the game. One nice thing about some of the games I've been making that are much more kind of personal puzzle is they are very solo testable. So it allows me to get really, kind of get those quick iterations, which I love. But then obviously certain games rely on the interaction that's needed.

And so if I can solo test, I'm probably solo testing every two times every group test I have just to get, it's all about the tightening of the feedback loops. It's such an accelerator. So when I can, I will. I really, I don't try to do it if it's going to be a mess and I can't fully replicate it. I will keep picking your brain as long as you let me. So you got to scratch your nose if you want to be let free. So like I said, this is our first actual designer interview.

You are the first in 50 odd episodes. So I'm going to do the very classic designer thing, designer interview thing of like your day job is a product manager, right? How does that relate to your game design? I just knocked my own power cord. By the way, if you're watching the video on fidgeting a lot, I am on a couch on its side because I wanted this nice background. So I'm like a kid fidgeting. I'm not uncomfortable. I'm just like, I set myself up in a very silly position.

Please, Tim, answer the question while I rearrange like a toddler. Yeah, yeah. It was worth it. It was totally worth the struggle. Yeah. Yeah. It's somewhat unintentionally that it landed up. What do you do? What is your job? Very, very similar. Product so i uh i work for car retailer in the u.s i just sold that car um i own i'm, Oh, very cool. I'm a product manager and my team owns part of the web experience for our business-to-business auction.

So the part that people don't think about. It's all tying together. Yeah. But what product management essentially is, is we are given a certain amount of resources. We have developers and we own a certain amount of scope and we have to create certain experiences that are going to hit our business goals. But the key to product is getting user feedback and making sure that what you're building is matching with what the experience needs are for it. It's a game design.

Exactly. It's ironically very similar. I think the key takeaways are like in the way that we have play tests, I have discovery sessions with customers. And I'm constantly kind of putting them through prototypes. We mock up prototypes. We put in front of them and we say, what do you think you would do in this instance?

What would you like to do here like what would what's possible what would you like to see happen here and then we kind of get that question you're asking play we iterate what's the thing we kind of what oh man that's such a good question to ask like what what did you think was possible that yeah what would you like to do in this game that you can't yeah yeah it's tricky it's a tricky one like of i i will say like yeah you take everything with a grain of salt you're not like all right

well now i gotta go build that thing but then if you kind of keep hearing a lot of it i love to do in playtests is just like what are the trends i'm like once is a comment two is starting to be like a trend and once you kind of hear it and then and obviously like if you hear from publishers or designers you kind of start to log in you're like yeah that's not the first time i heard that like that's that's something i need to take very seriously there's there's a mismatch

you're playing it with 40 people you're gonna have a product that's gonna have a thousand And yeah, at scale, you want one in four tables to be like, I wish there was this thing. So yeah, it's, it's all about like a lot of the things we talk about in game designers, same in my day job of like, how do we shorten that iteration cycle? How do I, the pitfalls are you work on something in isolation and you take a really long time to put it in front of anyone.

And then it's super risky. Sometimes you happen to be magically right. And the things that were, that were like in your brain worked out magically on the table. And that's lovely. But more often than not, your brain and the table don't one to one translate.

And you're like, man, that fantasy in my head that I was building towards really didn't come. And you want to say, okay, that took me a week to figure out or that took me a couple of days to figure out instead of, man, that took me two months. And we're really doing it. So it's cool in that way.

My day job and my hobby kind of mirrored each other a lot of ways in the fact that I'm, in both sides trying to minimize the iteration cycles and the timeline between them to try to get that feedback really quickly and and yeah and fail um that's great yeah i i didn't i didn't realize you i was gonna say literally do play tests not literally do play tests but essentially do play tests that's so funny like like the ones you see in the movies with the the one-way mirror are you behind the

mirror watching them and, yeah well we yeah we literally like can like watch website sessions and things like that so we can be like it'd be like if you had your game out to thousands of people and you were able to see them and and be like oh let's just go see how that game was going it's uh i guess bga lets you do that after the fact you can look at the stats and be like oh cool totally fix that before it went up yeah i think it'd be so cool at some point to have a game successful enough that

you got to do a second edition and there's certain there's certain games out there that i've been able to be like well tapestry as well i think thousands of play tests yeah like that's so cool obviously you first need to create a game that people want to play thousands and thousands of times and then maybe one day here's the question we ask every game designer we have on for an interview which is what are your game design weaknesses, I like how you said that and.

Yeah so ironically I think about this a lot, probably probably that yeah going back to that how do I get the right mental game probably need to work on that a little bit I, I think there's a few weaknesses I have one is as I mentioned I push really hard kind of pre-signing I'm like working really hard and I want to bring it kind of polished already. I'm just lazy. So there are a few offshoots of that. I've kind of mentioned the, hey, the burnout and you might overinvest in bad games.

I think a third one is like, by the time a game gets signed, I'm kind of burnt on that game. Like I love the game and I want the best for it, but gosh, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about it. Ironically, when people like, when the game gets published and people are like, oh, I can't wait to play with you.

I've played this. i'm done with this yes i i love i love you and i love the game and i will play that gap between like final files and getting the game is almost a mercy then because you're like okay i can't make any changes and now six months later you're like oh i have the game maybe i can maybe i can touch it again.

Totally but the weakness here sometimes is like in because by the time i get signed it'll sometimes sometimes it'll sit for a year or two and then it'll do some like developer iterations and things like that because i in the past i think i have been burnt out on the game and i've probably like under developed i've kind of let it be more hands-off and and and for better you're working with some amazing publishers when i look back there's a few errors oh totally and and that's

the great thing is all of my games have been in good hands and and there's a lot of really smart people that put out good products but even they're just like i've had a couple games that have had like uh and rule books and and like kind of final there's just things like that where like no i think i'm just like great if i trust the benefit of my method is that i am it's just tricky of like and i obsessively go over every single card every single

time like there's a new version of french toast coming out and every card is literally just an object and its name and And I'm still going through each and every single one of them being like, check, check, check, check, check. And I've missed that because I'm like, you know what? I will die if I trust you. But they're also juggling a ton of things. But I'm very not control freak at this point. Games of mine get themes changes and things like that. It's always a good thing.

Publishers like to have the final say and like to have that control. And I'm like, great. I trust you. I know you're going to make a good product.

Like, let's do this. but it has it has burnt me a couple times now i i try to write out exactly where the game is when i'm done with it because it's sometimes it's really hard to pick up when you're like oh this thing i think it was pretty good yeah go ahead and ship it like versus like no i knew that there's some stuff i wanted to do but it got signed and i knew the areas of weakness and then yeah just like helping set yeah and

then with the publisher trying to be better about like setting clear expectations of like hey like i'm gonna check in at these points and and see where we are i kind of just like let it and historically just like let it go in the ether and then they'll just be like hey by the way kickstarter is up next week all right i hope it looks good so i think one of the other things that i've noticed about myself on the weakness side i really fall oh oh it's devastating i the

the less the the more i'm able to detach from my ideas the better my games get it's a one-to-one correlation and like the more i can be like i like this idea but maybe it's not great it just gives you that freedom to mess with it whereas when you're in love with an idea it's it's it's great because you're energized and you're thinking like like you said you're thinking about it all the time and you're like i'm pitching a game that you're

in love with is so much fun because you just like exude excitement but the flip side of it is absolutely that you're like oh you you know you can't change that no it's perfect back off what are you doing. Is that the direction you're going? Totally. And I've definitely had, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I think there's a couple ways that it burns you. I think one is, yeah, like working with a developer or taking feedback over like people were like, yeah, I really think it was like, definitely not.

I made this game for me and I've let you play it. Be happy that you got to touch it. Yeah, I think I've learned over time that I just, sometimes I just need time to digest in the moment and the playtest session.

If you're just like i really think we need to do this or we just need to make everything way more powerful or i think you got back to me once like two weeks after initial reaction i'd play test during lockdown we were play testing on tts and i gave some note i literally don't remember what it was what the game was and i think like you'll sound like yeah no look this is this i know what i'm doing then two weeks later you're like hey i tried that thing and it worked i was

like oh i forgot about that entirely totally and i think now i just know that about myself is like in the moment if i'm presented with new information that kind of differs from the thing that i'm really excited about i'm definitely in the moment my reaction is to put friction up but more often than not i do receive that feedback and i do incorporate it and so now i just know it just has a cooling off period just yeah just take

take the time to to i just need time to process it in no way did you do this but the worst thing you could do when playtesting is argue notes and And sometimes I will question notes and sometimes if they really push, I'll be like, I think I want it to be this way. But like the best thing you can do is if there's a note you disagree with, be like, okay, interesting and write it down. There is no cost to writing it down. They feel heard. They feel listened to.

And then after that cooling off period, you can go revisit. Like if, if in, I've got a game, Tiny Folk Cafe, you've got these spell cards and there's a whole category that everyone thought were too weak. And I was like, no, they are so strong. Everyone is wrong about this. But I just noted every time someone thought they were too weak. The other day I was playing, it was like, man, these spells are too weak.

And it was just really good to be able to be like, okay, the thing that people have been saying and like, go back to what they suggested and what their thoughts were, because at the time I rejected it offhand because I know my game, guys, how dare you give me feedback on the game after the play test. But then after that, I was like, oh yeah, it should, like, what did they suggest? That would actually work really well. Yeah, absolutely. And, and, and it happens a lot.

Like, it's just like, people have valid things to say. Not everything is, needs to always be incorporated and pay attention to trends and such. But like, it's okay to not immediately have like, to be so open to it, take that information, internalize it, get over your own ego and your own thing that you're in love with and make the right decision. It's okay to be like, great, let me take that back.

Like, we don't need to hash it out right now. and then more often than not that those they do come out if it's a problem it'll it'll present itself like if it's one person's wrong opinion wrong opinion then it doesn't matter but if totally it's sort of the trends thing you're talking about earlier okay tim anything else either weaknesses or anything else that you want to bring up that we haven't discussed yet.

Nope i think i'm sure there are more weaknesses but we'll cut it out can i ask you if you have a pitching tip or a publisher how to get published tip for our audience i realize that that's what a lot of the episodes been about so i might have i might have exhausted all your ideas but we went pretty thoroughly through it i would say one publishing tip i have um that that i didn't directly talk to but i think i kind of covered a little bit is the

cell sheet it it has a few functions but one of the functions that i do really like is that it needs to be demoable.

You need to be able to demo it off of the sell sheet and i often will love one thing that i'll often do is like step one step two step three where you can kind of walk through and be like step one step two step three that's huge yeah it's so valuable when you have that because sell sheets serve multiple purposes they obviously are the the thing the publisher remembers you by it's the thing they might foresee but they also are the thing that if you're in person kind of standing at

the booth you can pull out a piece of play the game and be like let me let me tell you about this let me show you what a turn looks like and give you that demo standing up without having to set up anything with a piece of paper you can you can demo the game is it i'm just saying what you said again 100 like if you cannot demo your game off of the sell sheet you should strongly consider i would love to if you're able to get some of your soul sheets because we do cell sheet based episodes

and we try to start with a game that's been signed so that we're sort of showing like a game that the cell sheet worked before we start picking apart the problems if you're not comfortable with that that's okay but i would i think yours would be super valuable yeah had such success with them and and that that is a really useful tangible tip you can say no awesome yeah tim how would you feel about having a little bit of fun Thank you.

I love some fun we talked about the problems now uh so i've got a very targeted question for you tim what do you do to celebrate your birthday. No way what what a coincidence what are the odds of that yeah at the end of this month i am this is going to be the eighth annual timvitational board game tournament that i have so i for the The past eight or so years, I have a team-based board game tournament that is multiple rounds.

Two of the rounds are games that are not mine that we play, but then two of the rounds are Tim rounds, one for my prototype games and one for my... Oh, I love that so much. So I get people together. I force them to play my game for a tournament. It's your birthday present. They can win. It is. Because it's also been like an unofficial reunion of the friend group that I had back in the late 2010s. Half the people have moved away. But we've got people from like Portland and D.C.

And Ohio kind of all coming in. So it's unofficial reunion slash I force people to play my games and tell me that they like me and my games. And then one lucky team ends up with some 3D printed. Do you play or are you just the adjudicator? I do. Do you win your own games? Um, and, uh, I, yeah, my, the people that go to this tournament would, would, would give me a hard time if I did not say that I have so far. Um, so not only do I have my own tournament, I also invite people over to them.

It is a, it is a team based, there is a committee every year to, we have stats. Yeah. So, so a few other people get to win with me, but we have stats taken for everyone naturally.

And we have we correctly weight teams based on historical performance so it is it is third party audited I just happen to get lucky every year because Tim wins every year it's in the title, yes Tim invites it we play Tim games we award Tim with a trophy at the end it's a great day you didn't win one year I highly recommend it, Did you go home and like, okay, study up for next year. I am going to, I'm going to crush it next time.

Yeah. Everyone, everyone reminds me a lot. That's so good. My birthdays are much more low key. I, I generally take every year off something. So like last year I took off conventions, didn't go to any conventions last year whatsoever. This year, what am I off this year? This year I'm off eating, eating outside of, it had to get very specific. I don't eat, I don't buy food in LA alone or with people who live in LA. And it had to get really specific because I'm in the UK for a month and I can't

not go out to restaurants. Like, it would be ridiculous. And when my son comes to visit me in Henry, my son Henry comes to visit me in LA, or when Alex comes and visits, we've got to go out to eat. Like, you have to. And so it had to get really specific. But my birthday is often a cheat day for these things. It's a nice day where I'm like, you know what, I'm going to go to a nice restaurant. I'm going to have a nice meal this year on my birthday, which is very nice.

Tim, thank you so much for coming on. This has, I think, been super, super valuable. Obviously, obviously enjoyable. You know you're a charming, charming mofo, but really valuable and just so useful to get that, that non-Peter opinion. I sort of dominate the podcast with my opinions, weirdly, as the host. And so I think they're, I think they're good opinions. I've really enjoyed, I'm now a listener, really enjoyed listening.

But, but yeah, I will give a disclaimer, not to you, Tim, but to other designers out there. I reached out to Tim. I reached out to Tim and said, Tim, you have such a different method and I really think it would be valuable to get you on. Please don't reach out and ask to be on the podcast. So far, our guest list has been Tim at the end. But thank you so much for coming on and I'll see you at conventions this year, maybe. Yeah, let's find a time to meet up. Oh, yeah. We could do this.

Probably not, actually. Thanks so much, Tim. Bye! Oh. Music.

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