Hey everybody Brandon here, we got something a little bit different for you this week rather than me and josh just batting back and forth on some topics. I ended up reaching out to a Brazilian tabletop role playing game designer, who I'd had some interactions with on twitter. His name says our papa kelly and he's designed a bunch of different things.
He has a really unique take and philosophy on game design and it has resulted in him creating some interesting stuff, including a game that's designed to be played while you sleep. Uh it's fascinating. But uh, he was in the process of moving from brazil to Portugal when we were talking. So we talked maybe like a week before he was supposed to go overseas.
Uh so I'm very grateful that he took an hour out of his very busy schedule to sit down and talk to me just about games, his philosophy, his history and everything like that. I hope you guys enjoy uh and be sure at the end to check out the links to his stuff that I'm gonna put in the show notes. He does most of his stuff on it dot io he has a lot of stuff up there for sale and he also has a print on demand store at lulu dot com. But like I said, I'll put all the links to that in there.
So I hope you guys enjoy this. We've got a few other sort of interview style episodes that we're working on just to try to do something a little bit different. So we hope you guys enjoy this. Let us know if you want to see more stuff like this because it's it's super fun for me, given sort of my career history as a journalist to dip my toes back into sitting down talking to people hearing their stories and things.
So uh I'm gonna turn this over to me from about two weeks ago now and I'll catch back up with you at the end by mm hmm. Okay everybody, I've got cesar apocalypse with me like I described uh and I want to thank you first of all, cesar for making some time to sit and talk with me tonight. I know you've got sort of a lot of stuff going on in your life that you, you know told me about as we were trying to get this set up, but thank you so much for making some time for me. How are you doing today?
I'm doing pretty good. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Oh, it's no problem. It's no problem. You know, we'll get into this a little bit. But um you know, I sort of discovered you just because I pay attention to like the tabletop role playing game twitter and stuff like that and I saw some of the stuff that you have been producing and you were talking about it. I went and checked it out. It's really interesting. I'm really excited to talk to you about some of this stuff.
Um I'd love, I'd love it if you could just sort of start off telling us all a little bit about yourself how you got into game design and then maybe we can veer into your game design philosophy a little bit. Of course. Yeah, so I think I started with game design about, I want to say six years ago, but more of like experimenting with hacks and everything. But this thing of designing games was with me since I started playing and that was probably uh 25 years ago.
I I don't think I remember playing a game without tweaking rules or in the middle of the session thinking to myself what if we had this but with something different. So I always had this itch To produce and I got encouraged to do something uh at around 2016 or so. So I released a few games in Portuguese and after I got some confidence with what I was doing, I decided to give it a go and publish some games in in english for the last year.
I quit my job and decided that it will be a full time game designer which is so jerry like I'm so jealous, I work in mortgages now. So I'm super jealous. So yeah, I mean I had a government job, I was at the environmental office, I was the adviser to the Secretary of Environment. So uh yeah, I was coordinator for Climate Change Action in my city, which is a 11.2 million city here in brazil and uh, I spent nine years there and I decided it was enough for me.
I needed a change of pace and I think, you know what, I don't want to get to the end of my life and think what if I had tried to be a game designer full time? So I'm giving him a shot and well, it's going pretty good. I can't complain. It's been a blast about how many products would you say you've released by now? And you know, like you can count your hacks or Anything like that, like how much, how many, like, discreet different things do you think you've put out in the last few years?
Uh more than 20, that's for sure. Uh uh the last year alone, I guess had produced 10 different games. Uh, when I started doing it full time, I first try to do a buy me a coffee kind of thing on which I promised to release a new game every other week, which was intense and very fun. So I I managed to do this for a while and I just decided to stop it. Not because I was going to get like burned out or anything. And just because I wasn't getting a lot of return from the buy me a coffee thing.
Uh as much as I was having sales from the individual games on h dot IO So I said, well, you know what, I can, I maybe can spend a little more time developing some of these games and polishing them and spending some time marketing them online. And that's so far it's getting a little better results than just having a game released every, every other week. Yeah, you actually have a really well built out itch dot io store.
Um, you know, I bought a couple of your items, uh, and you know, we'll talk about them in a little bit, but I bought those off of your print on demand lulu store because it was linked, you linked from a twitter conversation and I didn't realize until I went to your itch dot Io store like the other day. Um, like just how much stuff you had on there. It's, it's kind of a kind of amazing.
You have a ton of things here and I don't know how like in depth a lot of them are because I'm really only familiar with maybe like three of them honestly, but you've got, you know, quite a, quite a library going on here. Yeah, I know right. Well there are a lot of things from all kinds of sizes really. And I have Like six page games. I have a game on a mug, but I also have 80 plus page games as well. So it's kind of diverse.
Well let's, let's talk a little bit just about your philosophy of game design. I've got a couple of observations and I'll, you know, maybe ping you on those as you're talking. But I want, I want to hear what you think are. If you had to make like a bulleted list of like the four or five things that always had to be in a game that you design like in a way that you approach it philosophically. What, what would those things be interesting question?
Well, uh, there is a part of it that is, I had to realize assumed to myself that I am very much externally motivated. So instead of fighting against it, I leaned on it very much so. A lot of my games started with an external motivation be it, I don't know my nephews and nieces asking to play a game of some sort.
And instead of using one of the many games I wrote, I decided to write a new one just for that specific occasion or surfing the H dot Io game jams and finding different prompts for game design. This is where some of the ideas come from. But also what I have as bullet points for my game game design philosophy as you said, this one, the backlog of what if that I have eternally in my head.
What I mean by that is when I'm reading something, be it a game or I don't know a twitter thread or an article or I don't know watching a tv show, there are some sparks in my mind about what if we had a game that had this kind of aspect mixed with something else. So I don't usually design games as soon as I have those, what if moments but they sit in the back of my head for a while and then when I find another what if that's not necessarily related whatsoever to the previous one?
They cross paths and that becomes a game. So as an example, I think scraps I had this idea after I've read mouse Ritter that uses a kind of inventory system that is physical when you have those little tiny square cards to place on your character sheet to demonstrate there's lots that you have for inventory. And then I thought what if we had some kind of a factories like mechanic for managing inventory or managing anything really? And then this sits on the back of my head.
After a while I stumbled upon a game that had a very strong crafting aspect. So it crossed paths with these other idea of using Petrie's. And I said well we could have crafting game with Petra's like mechanics. And then a month after that I I was I guess reading Wonder Home or uh listening to a gameplay of Wonder home really. And I was really in the moment of a known violent uh fantasy, more pastoral fantasy. And when I stopped none of these things were a game.
And then when I stopped to create something all these three, what if mixed together and became uh scraps. So this is something that I try to do in most of my games. Cross these references that I get everywhere. And uh another thing you can interrupt me at any time. No, I don't want to I don't want to spoil your flow, man. You're doing you're doing great. All right.
So another thing that uh today is near and dear to my heart is exploring GM lays gameplay and I feel very strong about that right now because after a red iron sword, I don't know if they're from the owner of this game. Yeah, I'm familiar with that. I haven't played it, but I know what I know what you're talking about. Yeah, it changed my life because uh it is designed to play either solo or cooperatively or guided, which is the traditional way.
So what that means is that the game design has to provide tools for it to be run without a human being, taking care of things that are not explicitly written in the game. And this approach to game design is something that I value very much. Because if you look you can use GM to fill gaps that you don't feel like covering on your game design. When you design a game that can be run without a game, master your mechanics have to support gameplay.
And I think what you end up with is a game that gives more to players and leaves less for people to bring to the table. So I think it's more friendly in a way uh in which you have to support with mechanics. I don't mean that it has to be crunchy but everything that is in the game serves a better experience of what you think your game should be about.
Yeah, I don't yeah I've read through scraps and so I'm just going to talk about that since I can sort of see the parallels of what you're talking about there. But um you know one of the things that struck me when I first read it was just very very much how it could be focused on single player exploration and play.
And you know, a lot of these single player games you find um there's maybe like a card mechanic or something like that where you pull a card out of a regular deck of playing cards that will either have an item or motivate an event or something like that. You made really good use of tables In that, you know like D six tables. It almost had kind of a troika kind of feel, I don't know if you've ever played troika. No, I've read it but never believe.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's you know, it very much is a D. Six game and there a bunch of tables and stuff and it's kind of like a superficial comparison but it's it's kind of what I thought I thought about three things When I read this, I thought about troika, I thought about Tetris, and I thought about Minecraft, right?
Yeah. But yeah, the thing that really did strike me about it when I first read this, and then, you know, some of your other games too is just the emphasis on like, solo play essentially, because those are becoming, it seems to me more and more popular in the last few years. I remember maybe like, gosh, probably 10 years ago, something like that. It was maybe right before fifth edition dungeons and dragons came out somewhere in the last like, 7 to 10 years, something like that.
There were like jokes in the role playing game, Reddit communities about the single player game options that were out there. People just like, well, isn't that just a book? You know, that kind of thing? What attracts you about the gm less gameplay, I know you were talking about, it gives people less that they have to prepare if they're coming to it. Do you feel like it's more player involvement, like, it forces players to have more of a hand in creating the world they're playing.
That's one thing for sure. But uh after 25 years playing, I think I'm on a point in my life, it might change in the future. I don't know, I'm not interested in this imbalance of responsibility and authority in games and I don't meet a symmetry a symmetry. Super fun. Like uh layers is super fun and I saw this one. Spencer Campell released a game that every single character has different mechanics for combat and everything.
I mean really different like different dice pools different as fail and success standards. I mean I'm interested in the symmetry. What I'm I don't like very much is the burden that usually comes with being a GM and having this division of responsibility and authority at the table. And also what brings to the conversation you see about games?
I don't know if you have the same feeling as I do, but we have a lot of this course and problems with people discussing on Reddit and twitter of problems they find on their tables that I that could be resolved if there was there weren't this division between a person that is responsible to bring the whole world and the others that just show up.
When I uh my experiences with GM let's play there are more like a GM food play really everybody has a little part of a responsibility and it's spontaneous in the it leaves less room for this kind of abuse in both sides or one side. The GM can abuse power or abuse they are, they're interested in some kind of plot.
And the other hand is players just you know, I have no responsibility, I can just show up do whatever and screw all the N. P. C. S. And storylines just because and when you have this uh level of responsibilities and authority I feel that players are more invested in making that experience as good as possible for everyone. And you know that fascinated me. I've been playing traditional kind of traditional RPgs like you know don't go crawling and stuff.
G. M. Lists as well with the help of oracles and tables and sharing responsibility to create NBC's or obstacles or challenges. And man I've never had more intense and fun experiences with this. Uh as I uh it's been like 15 years that I didn't have as much of a fund of experience as I had with this examples that I gave you. So that's that's one thing that fascinates me. Yeah I'll agree with you because I like pre covid I would run a lot of public games in like breweries and other public spaces.
So a lot of times I would be playing essentially you know I was running pickup games for D. And D. As part of the goblins and growlers business model that we had.
So people would just show up we would have some pregent characters for them and we would run through sort of a home brewed module that we'd written and we're running for a bunch of tables and at a certain point um I started thinking about other ways that I could get people sort of just more involved to get more excitement at the table and things like that.
And I had been dabbling in some other systems like playing like fate core where everybody has sort of a hand in the world building at the beginning of it? And I started including some of that in what I was doing at the table.
Like, you know, I would sort of wash my hands of some of the prep work on some things not named towns, not talk about the things that were in towns not necessarily name N. P. C. S. And just when we get to one of those decision points, just go around the table be like, well what does everybody think this person should be named? What's their job be? What's their relationship to this situation? And it really does like bring so much more player investment.
Um and I'm including myself as a player in that too. Even though I was, you know, the G. M. But it makes me want to hear what they have to say rather than them just sitting there listening to me give a sermon essentially. Yeah, exactly. I mean the first time I I stumbled upon that it was with fate as well. And then later with PB ta games.
I think the first one that came to brazil, the first one I had contact with was doing your world and I've seen some game plays of it and the freedom of a player asking the GM at the point and that's do I know anyone in the city and the GM replying, I don't know, do you and giving this authority back to the players and what do you know about the city or thief? What's the last thing you stole here? How did you get away and easy step by step?
I came to realize that the GM was not as much of an necessary uh point on the game design for games like that to work.
Of course, if you have a huge lore or world building many plot points that you have to before you start playing, it may be necessary to have one single person that controls everything, but I don't know, man, I don't think it is honestly, even though with more traditional games, I can see you changing your stance from director to actor or from GM to player many times and deciding even how badly you fail. And surprisingly enough, when from the get go, everyone is responsible for everything.
They don't get, they don't go easy on themselves when something goes wrong, they decide, you know, you know what, I think my character dies here. I've seen this many times, because, you know, it serves the story is so, it's fascinating.
Yeah, it's almost it's like a successful democratization of the fun, because you get somebody who's, you know, I'm just as guilty of this as anybody in a g M's position, but you get somebody who's written this story and oh my God, this story is the best story that's ever been written, I did such a great job. I cannot wait for my players to experience my story, which I, you know, I'll look myself in the mirror and say that is the wrong way to look at it. Um but you know, we've all done that.
Yeah, yeah, it's it's just you walk into it, if you if you're trying to do more of a democratic storytelling method, sometimes you walk into it and you feel less prepared than you probably should be for the quote unquote responsibility you're about to embark on. But you know, every like everybody pitches in and supports and because so and so got their idea used and such and such got their idea used. Everybody just has all that much more buy in and you didn't have to do as much work.
Uh and everybody had a great time. Exactly, yeah, I mean, I know it's not for everyone as no game is, but for me, I had a hard time rap, rapping games because uh I was anxious. I was nervous, I was over prepping. I got the times, like two days before the session.
I said, you know what guys, I I'm not okay, let's keep the session and with this approach, it's just like showing up for a board game session, you know, you don't need to have this pressure beforehand because you know, everyone is there to share uh this responsibility, but I know that for some players that can be terrifying.
There there are people that say, oh no, I just want to sit at the table and just feed me all the information and tell me when I have to roll the dice and I hit people and I say my lines and that's all the experience I have. Okay, fair, that's okay, but I'm not in the position anymore, you know? Yeah, it's you know, you you grow in and out of things.
Um and I'm I'm not saying that kind of play is bad, I'm not saying it's more inexperienced or anything like that, it's just you know, depending on what's going on in your life, maybe that appeals to you a little bit, a little bit more like surrendering the control. So you can just sort of experience the story rather than being a full player in it. Um talking about Gm less games and things.
One of my favorite ones and this really this really opened my eyes to how much fun you can have in a game where there's nobody leading the action and you know, you get to a certain point where you have to ask yourself like is this a role playing game or is are we treading the line into like a board game or something like that. But one of my favorites is the Quiet year by Avery Alder. I don't know you played that before, That's a wonderful game.
You know, you can just sit there for four hours spinning some crazy story about like maybe some apocalyptic earth with your friends before the frost people come and kill you. It's just it's an amazing way to spend like a rainy afternoon just where the game provides the structure for you all to tell a story. Of course. Yeah. Quiet here is The Master. Yeah, I love that game so much.
Um but um talking about, you know, we touched on scraps a little bit when we were talking about, you know, solo play and um the Tetris stuff and everything. But you know, we can talk about GM less stuff and we can talk about solo play, like where do you see the distinction on that playing assault? Like what's the difference between a game with nobody running it versus a game where you're running it, but you're also playing it? Oh, it's very distinct.
Uh Although the mechanics don't need to be the experience. It is, I mean, it can't feel really, really weird playing a game by ourselves for the first few times, especially because there is no feedback from anything really. It's different from playing a video game alone, because there's everything else that is programmed to respond to you and when they were playing a role playing game alone, it's hard to do it by yourself.
And most of the times when you you start a solo game, it's easier to think on the journaling mode because it's a way for you to keep track of the story and feel that you're producing a story really, but that's not the only way to play solo games. And Iron Sword taught me that too because it's a low fantasy game uh P. B. T. A. Inspired just just for folks who don't know PB to is powered by the apocalypse, which is a framework essentially for creating role playing games.
Exactly started apocalypse. Word with the bakers. Uh uh Iron Sword in it. You play a solo adventurer and a low fantasy setting and uh you don't need to write a journal. You can role play out loud by yourself if you want to you can record as a podcast, you can write bullet points just to keep track of how your story is going. Or you can even just imagine in your head like daydreaming.
So it can feel a little weird and I think the biggest difference is not having inputs for anything that you do from another living being when you're playing corporately or with a guide. You have you can rely on people to feed back to you or suggest or give you ideas or fill in the gaps that you leave when you're playing alone.
You have to rely on the Oracles, Oracles for those that don't don't play solo games are mechanics like random tables or yes or no questions that answer for you, Things that usually Gm would, so you walk into the city and you ask uh do I have uh smith here, and you roll some dice yes or no, the you answer, or you can answer complex questions as well, like what's the weather like?
And you roll on the table and you get, like, strong and dark, so you're interpret that by yourself and you fill in the gaps by yourself. But I think for me it's a very rewarding experience. I came across solo games a few years ago, and oddly enough, we have a very strong solo RPG community in brazil. Uh yeah, the solo RPG Group on Facebook has over 3500 people, and I guess now near 1000 PDFs B it's uh little games or supplements or oracles or tables or gameplay reports.
So it's a very strong community and I got involved, it's weird to talk about a community of solo players, but uh we're full of a room full of only Children. Yeah, Yeah, exactly, but we exchange gameplay reports, like people post on their blogs, we read comments, we exchange uh oracle tables, hacks suggestions of games, online tools and everything. So it's a very vivid community. I love it very much.
So, if you haven't had the chance to experience the solo play, I strongly recommend you doing if you feel awkward talking by ourselves, which is fair, okay, it is what I do when I do is I record voice messages, as if I was recording a podcast. So I have a a log of my session as voice messages on a app like telegram or something like that, that I can save two audio formats and I have a log, which is fun or you can write or you can, they drink doughnuts.
I like, I like the idea of doing your captain's log as you're playing the game so you can go back and listen to it later. I think it's so funny. I think that I think that's great. Yeah. Um you know, I I am an only child, so I had to make a lot of my own fun back in the day. So it's kind of This is the kind of thing that I wish that I had back in the 80s, right, when I was looking for ways to entertain myself.
But you know, whether I'm talking to myself or talking to other people, I always feel awkward. So that's no different. So I should just be able to embrace that. Yeah, embrace of awkwardness and it will be fun. I promise you. So, talking about, you know, awkward and weird things. I want to I want to make sure because we're at about a half hour now, so we've got some time left and I don't want to forget about this. But I absolutely want to talk about a neuro not.
Um because this is a game that you did. I bought it off your lulu store. It's actually not that it's not that long at all, It's maybe like 20 pages this little book, but every like since I bought it and I read it in the morning before work after it came and I was telling people about it for several days and every time like almost without fail when I described the game to somebody, they're like, what the hell is that?
I would, I just want you to talk about it for a few minutes, talk about what it is, what you do and how you came up with it. It's just fascinating to me. Right? Yeah, that is exactly, that is weird to say the least. So yeah, it started with in this solo group on facebook, I told you about uh some people were telling their their strategies to play in solo games in any circumstance if you don't have dies or anything.
So I heard a report of a guy that said that he played solo games in his head while he was biking to his work and using the license plates as randomizer is to get results pretty fun. Right? So you have a deep tend to run when he was spot the license plate. So he came up with a sort of uh six or or more as a success. So he was imagining the scenes in his head when he had to roll for a test, he looked to a license plate and got the result while he was biking to work.
Oh, so I said, wow, this is fascinating. Right? What? Uh so this comes from another of those. What ifs that I told you about? I think another touch point of my game design philosophy is trying to reach to the borders to the edges of what is a game. What is not a game? What is an RPG? What is not an RPG? So I'm always trying to question those limitations. So if I said if this guy can play while cycling, what's the limit of a situation that you can play a solo game? Right?
Can you play a game while you are at lunch? Can you play a game while you are? I don't know at the dentist? And yes, some people said that they had a treatment on the tooth and they played a game while they are on the dentist's chair. I said, well what's the limitation? Can you play a game? Why are yours leap? Yeah. So that so that was the starting point for a near or not, which is a game that you pay play while you're sleeping. And I imagine now everybody listening is like now the what now?
So I would love you to just sort of walk us through the steps of what what a game of an era not looks like. Right. So on your own aunt is a game I if I had to summarize what I did was I gave a fight lucid dreaming. The lucid dreaming is this uh practice that some people do that you kind of realized that you're dreaming but you don't wake up then you have control over your dream. There is a very vivid Reddit community about lucid dreaming. People exchanging their experiences tips kind of diet.
They need to get better results and everything. And people practiced this. I have never practiced this before. But when I had the idea of playing game while I was sleeping, uh lucid dreaming came to my mind. So a game of neuronal is pretty much you are a soldier of an entity that lives in the dreams. That is uh any work for the soldier to try to claim ownership of the dreamland. I'm kind of paraphrasing myself here because it's something like that.
And uh what you do is you decided right before you go to sleep on a place you have to visit. And an action you have to do while you are dreaming and then you go to sleep, you put some meditation music on and you sleep and you dream. And uh you have to supposedly get control of your dreams and perform those activities in order to win a war against another spiritual entity that is trying to claim the dream lands for themselves. That's the gist of it. Mm hmm. And there's like different domains.
Um yeah, so I had to do a lot of research on the most common dreams you have and the most common things you experience while having dreams. So for people that never had the experience of lucid dreaming or you know, never practiced that they could enjoy the game without having to perform nothing too extravagant.
So just dream that you're falling or dream that you're flying or dream that you're naked, That common dreams that people have and those become the tasks that you have to perform y o yours have you successfully played a game of a near or not? I have, Yeah, a couple of times. I'm the worst list dreaming dreamer that I know. But uh I had this experience and uh but I didn't win the war. I kind of lost in the middle because I don't know, as I told you, I'm not very good at it.
But I had reports, I don't know if you had the chance to read the comment section on the neuro not page on edge. No, no. I just I just read the actual physical book. Can I blow your mind go for it, go for it. Yeah. A guy reported that his he was playing with a friend. What? Yes, they home brewed a multiplayer rule. So if they manage to drink about the same domain or the same thing at the same night, they scored an extra point. That's amazing. It is.
And they played for like 9-10 months and he reported back telling that they won the war After 19 months playing a cooperative game of in your dreams. A massive multi player dream. That's yeah, that's fantastic. Oh my God. And uh you know, I had this idea and it was one of those things that just said, I have to write this down because I need this to exist. I don't know if anyone else will relate to this game or they would just laugh at me.
But it was so weird, so strange that I thought to myself, this thing needs to exist in the world. And I have to tell you this is my best seller game. Really? It is. I mean, it's just like I said, really? Like, like, well, that doesn't make any sense. I didn't mean it that way. It's just uh that it is surprising, isn't it is because it's just like you talk about niche games like this is like niche times 1000. It. I mean, that's just that's fascinating though.
I mean, I encourage anybody listening to this. It is worth picking this up just just to read it and get the ideas from it. Like I I I plan to actually try this at some point. I've just had a lot of stuff going on like work wise that I haven't been able to focus on it up to now, but it's just such a cool idea. I can't wait to give it a try and see if I am as bad at lucid dreaming as you are, which I probably am. I probably am.
Yeah. well you know, uh there are some scoring systems by the end of the book that provides some extra points if you keep healthy sleeping schedule and everything. So it has been studied that practicing lucid dreaming can actually improve the quality of your sleep.
So if you don't win the war, I think you can get some benefits And there are therapeutical evidence that people that live with trauma or unsolved problems in their daily lives actually get answers to those problems and those trauma while lucid dreaming because you were free of the societal, I don't know, change, let's say. And when you're dreaming you're free to explore facets of yourself that you wouldn't otherwise. So it's a health experience. You're gamifying your own introspection.
Exactly, pretty much I am. Would you, would you say that this one is the weirdest game that you've ever put out? I think so, yeah, Okay, what what would be your close second on that? My close second probably is short rest, which is a game on a mug. I, you know, I actually saw that when I was looking at your store and I did not have a chance to really like explore it and see what it was before we were talking. Please educate me on short rest.
The game that is literally on a coffee mug, it is literally so short rest, it was a game I created because I felt well it can be played as a standalone game like you stop for a coffee or you can use it as plug and play to your either your solo or a group campaigns really. So when your character stops for a rest by the fire and I stopped to reflect about the experience they had, you can grab a cup of coffee in this case, this actual cup of coffee and there are a series of prompts.
They use uh same mechanic that Nero not uses to randomize a number, which is to look at the two digits of a watch and add them together to get a number from 0 to 14. It gives you a prompt to talk about experiences that you had as your character, past experience, your best memories, like a fight you had or your wishes, your motivations, things that you want to accomplish as uh, as your character.
And there is on the back of the mug, there's, there's a series of random words that you can place your finger without looking to get a random prompt and uh edit to your narration of the story. I'm looking at a picture of the mug now, it's like, it's like almost like a hex map and you've got words in different hexes and stuff. I see what you're saying when you're gripping the cup, your fingers going to land on or close to one of those. Exactly.
So you randomize a prompt for for example, something that you're going to tell on this uh short rest that you're taking, like things like a bittersweet victory ice car you wear with pride a secret. You need to uncover a fond memory of your childhood and you share this experience with your group or alone. If you're playing solo game using or not.
One of the words that you can randomize placing your finger on top of them on those taxes and the scoring system for this game is based on how much time you spend doing. So. So this is actually short rest is either it's a mention to the mechanic of a short rest, but it's also an incentive for you to slow down and appreciate some moment of reflection. And so it's an invitation for you, even if you're playing, it's not as a plug and play in her campaign.
You're playing by yourself to this, you know, just don't swallow your coffee and go do the next thing you have to do, stop there, enjoy this moment. They dream a little and then you go, So it's an invitation to slow down. So not only is it like a mini game for your own, for your character's development, it's also sort of like a meta mini game for your life to just sort of slow down for a few. Exactly. That's that's great.
Going back going back to the game design philosophy points that you mentioned in the beginning. Another strong one is I try to hide deep things under cute little looking games, like my cutest looking game, the land beyond which will play as a raccoon in a balloon exploring a land is actually a game about letting go about burden about guilt. And uh, the far you can travel with your balloon is based on how much you can let go of your past mistakes, your guilt and everything.
So it's all cute but when you play it you might cry. So yeah, short rests, you can play it uh, innocently as just an adult to your campaign. And I had, oh my God, the best report from someone that bought the game. He was running a 13 age campaign and brought the mug To the gameplay and invited the players to share this experience. They were in the middle of uh, I don't know, level 10 campaign.
Things were very intense and uh, he typed out everything that they experienced during this short rest and men, it was so deep, so rich and backstory and I thought, wow, it worked. The thing I wanted this game to do. It did. So it was very satisfying. Oh, that's all. Can you actually like buy it on a mug? It is available as a physical mug. Oh, that's fantastic.
I, I used to work in newspapers and I was always trying to find ways to like push the format a little bit, try to find other ways to get readers to interact with it. Like force them to turn the page or fold it or do something with it. So I always appreciate a really solid, like, like swing like a hard swing for an interesting use of format and putting it, putting a tabletop role playing game on a coffee mug is probably the new example.
I will give to someone for the best way to do something like that man. That was a lot of fun. Yeah, that one was it. I had a very good reception, people incentivize me to do the weirdest thing man. I mean I create a game that I think nobody will play because just so strange and weird and the reception, the weirder gets the better the reception I have. So I keep pushing.
Uh so I want to talk about your most recent game that you're itch funding not too long ago and I actually got the, you know, the pdf copy that you managed to like get done, I think just a few days ago actually, is that right? It is Starlight Riders. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that? Right. Starlight Writers was very much externally motivated. It's part of the Space Western Summer Jam.
So I was looking for the next game to make and I stumbled upon this a Space Western again and I didn't know a lot of about Space Western just by the name of it, I guessed what it was, so trying to investigate a little bit. I actually asked for recommendations of media on twitter, got a few died a little bit on it and I thought, wow, that can be a fun little thing to explore. And then as it usually does, it crosses my mind with some of the what ifs that I had in my head for a long time.
Such as using a strong car driven gameplay with custom cards. Uh and also sharing characters in a cooperative game, which was another exploration that I tried to do. So Starlight Writers is a Space Western games about heists across the galaxy. You play as this off loss. There is a, I don't know, two pages of Lore of is just a backdrop for the highest really.
Yeah, I mean basically if I remember correctly uh the wealthy people all left earth because earth was polluted and going to hell and they left all the rest of us here, but instead of just withering and dying, we were like screw those guys. So we took decades and we built our own spaceships and we followed them out where they were and then we were determined to just sort of Robin Hood them for the for the rest of their lives. Yeah, that's that's exactly the point. So yeah, I love heights.
That's another what if that was in my mind, what if I took a highest game and put it in his head and I don't know share the characters and everything and uh this backdrop is on the surface just a caper rest rationalization. It's I guess it's a on tv trope you can find it. How do you make people sympathize with people stealing? So yeah, you're stealing from very bad people.
But it is also a sort of uh critique late stage capitalism and uh so you're playing to show that we won't stand for you know, billionaire is just doing what they want to do. And you play I actually got inspired by the space Western tropes and went ahead and tried to find art for it. So uh I don't I can't draw to save my life. So everything that I I design, I have to rely either on public domain stuff Or things that I find on Canada because I can't afford to pay yet.
I can't forget to pay an artist artist to do stuff for me. So I stumbled upon a website that scans public domain comic books from the 50s and 60s and that's where I got all those designs.
So uh more than once the setting itself was inspired by all the games I do inspired by the art that I have available to do the games and there was no exception, the star like writers I think you know you may have lucked into it, but I think what you ended up having to do for the illustrations in it was just perfect like it it using the 50s and 60s comic books uh was just it suited it so well as I was reading through it as like I I 100% know what this is about,
like reading through this and seeing those images, I just I thought it worked great. Thank you so much. It was man, you can't imagine the tens of thousands of pages of comic books I had to scan through together and then uh just cut them out and treating a little bit on the Photopia, which is the Poor man's version of Photoshop, which is free online. Right? And but I mean it turned out with an aesthetic that I think it's kind of a cohesive overall.
I mean it gave me it gave me a very strong like cowboy bebop feel mixed up with like galaxy rangers. So yeah, so I that was exactly was aiming for us, I'm glad. Yeah, you know, one thing I thought was interesting when I was and we'll talk about the mechanics in a minute before we wrap up. But one thing I thought was interesting when I was reading through it is you ended up having to put a disclaimer in it about the art.
It was like, hey I know this art isn't really representative uh in terms of like ethnic diversity, gender diversity, but it's kind of what we had, so I did the best I could because there's kind of a lot of white men in this. Oh my God, you wouldn't believe it. And when we had some kind of representation of a different ethnic, you can uh it was disgusting the way they portrayed. Uh I don't know, Asian or African descendants.
So I had to repurpose those uh images I found because if I took them in the context they were written or drawn man, it was just not, it's not very good at all. So I have to rely a little bit on the understanding of the people reading it. I tried my best. I I found some at least some women uh, one or other native american people that was not portrayed in a very problematic stereotypical way, like two or 3 the most and some african descended two. But it's very, very hard to find from that era.
Something that is dignifying of diversity. Yeah. I encourage everybody. First of all, I encourage everybody to go to cesar itch dot iO store and I'll put a link to that in the show notes, but definitely check out Starlight riders for nothing else to see the art that we're talking about because you really don't have like, I think everybody sort of understands when we're talking about like comics from the fifties and sixties, like the kind of representation we're getting there.
It doesn't take too much for your imagination to get to. Probably exactly the right place that we're talking about in terms of the kind of stuff, Cesar was finding. But I want you to talk a little bit about the character sharing mechanics in this because I thought that was, I thought that was really cool.
Yeah, so I had this idea in the back of my head for a while and uh what I try to find it here, it was since it's a Gm less game and I intended it to be a very pick up and play experience, you can play one shot. But if you were going for a campaign mode, you don't even have to have all the same players on every session since the characters are shared. Because if you switch players, there is no missing another character.
But that was not the first motivation that I had, it was just a sort of sub product that I am very happy that it is there. But my first idea was that we could very easily having a game in which everyone is responsible for everything to choose a character to activate on every round that you play. And my first motivation was when I am reading through a book, an RPG book that has either classes or playbooks that I feel very excited to play them.
And you know the feeling you read, oh I want to play all of them. Yeah, you know, and then you commit to a campaign with one and you can't help but think what, what if I had chosen a different one or you see another player playing with you with all those cool abilities that you wish you could try all those things that this kind of character is under the spotlight and I think I thought to myself, well, you know what? I think I can fix that.
I think I can allow players to experience, to jump from character to character during gameplay and experience the facets there most interest or invested in from different playbooks or archetypes in a role playing game. Because when I was promoting Starlight Writers, I usually had the character cards showing people and oh, I love them all, I really like the face, but I want to play again, gunslingers. Oh, I couldn't decide. So I said, I thought, yep, I have the solution for you.
Don't worry when you get the game you don't have to decide. You can play them all. So that was my first motivation really. And although there is a limitation in the game that when you go to a heist you can't take all of them because it makes the technical choices, strategical choices, you make a little bit more high stakes, but even then you as a group can decide. So we're excited to have scenes with these five characters and we'll jump back and forth between them.
There's nothing stopping you to do so, so you share character voices and every time someone activates the same character they get to add a little quirk or a trade or a description of their look. So it's a it's not worth building. That's shared character building is also shared during gameplay. Yeah, it's kind of like a culmination of everything we started talking about at the beginning.
Like you've, you've taking a whole bunch of different things from your sort of philosophy playbook and combine them into Starlight writers. It feels like to me, at least based on what we've talked about. Yeah, definitely. For sure.
It's a culmination of a lot of things have been working on because the way the way the game works, just my like quick understanding of the mechanics from reading through it is at the beginning of your adventure, you pick like almost like the classic sort of ocean's 11 kind of scene of like, all right, we need this person for this and this person specialty is this and this person does this and you assemble your team the number of which depends on how many people, how many,
like humans that you have playing. Um, and then as you like, move your way through and take your turns, you can say, oh, I want the gun slinger to go do this and then you can come back on your next turn and say, well, as a consequence of all the stuff that's happened here. Now, I want the face to go do this. Exactly. That's exactly the gist of it.
So yeah, you create the job first really, which is a place, a location and I think that you have to get classic heist and then you together creates the steps, you have to get to this thing. But it's not more like a necessarily a list of obstacles you have to overcome. And more a list of moments that I call, That's another thing that is part of my game design philosophy is designing games around moments.
And what I mean by that is when you think of creating a game or even planning a session or even joining a game as a player in your head, you're thinking about those moments you want to experience at the table. Oh, I want to activate the certain ability because I want to feel the feeling of this happening in the story or I want to my players to come across this huge bridge over a canyon because I want them to experience being there. So those are moments really.
They're not rules, they're not obstacles are not encounters. So I try to focus my game of moments. It's almost like you're writing a script. Exactly. It's like you're climactic moments or your wide panning shots and stuff. Exactly.
So when you create those moments on start like writers then when you're assembling the team, which is exactly the ocean's 11 scene, you said, you can look at those moments and uh discuss with your group or if you're playing alone by yourself which characters I want to see on these moments performing their stunts and then you assemble your team based on that and I guess there would be nothing stopping somebody from essentially doing their own hacker, add on to this game,
to strip it of sort of the space western aspect and turn it into just a straight up ocean style heist game. Oh, for sure, easily. I actually recommend and give some tips at the last chapter of the book on how you should do that and I encourage you to do so if you re flavor, I mean I don't think you need to even to re flavor the character archetypes the roles that I put there.
Maybe the gun's linger to something similar to that the pilots to the driver, but it's a, it can be a modern ocean's 11 game for sure. How long did it take you to put this together? Well, it took a little longer than unexpected because I'm moving overseas. So that was a mistake, planning mistake on my part. Uh, but it took a month. This is longer than my average gaming design schedule for reference scraps that you, that you want on it was written, Laid out, illustrated everything in six days.
Let me stop you for a second and just tell you how jealous I am because I have so many ideas kicking around my notebook right now. And this thing that's stopping me is time like having time to be able to do that kind of stuff and like devote the sort of discrete chunks that I need to be able to put a product. Right? Yeah, I completely understand. I mean before I had the decision to quit my job and do it, I had lots of game ideas for ears.
But the thing is even if you have some hours, you don't have your best self on those hours, you usually stressed out or tired. And when I had my best hours, my, my most productive hours devoted to game design, I could pull out, pull off something like that, like scraps or six days and it's a 70 ish page book, laser surgery. I wrote, designed everything laid out and came up with the idea and everything and published in seven days and it's an 83 page book. So your, your productivity is biblical.
Almost literally. That's why I had this idea in my mind that I could do start like writers in 15 days, but doing that while moving to a different country, it was a small mistake. So I had the pdf file and I'm still working while I tear apart my apartment on creating the print on demand version to give it to backwards, Give the coupon to backwards and by the time this comes out you will be on the other side of the ocean. That's right. I know that that has to be, that has to be stressful.
It's like a problem for me to move across town. Uh, across the ocean, you wouldn't believe and I'm taking my wife and my dog. If you plan to take a dog overseas, you need four months of preparation. Are you looking forward to it? Oh yeah, sure. I'm very excited. I mean, I'm at a point that I'm so busy that I can't get stressed about it anymore, but I'm really looking forward to settle into my new place. All right, well, maybe after you get settled over there, we can have another conversation.
I feel like there's at least two or three more hours worth of game design chats that you have, but it's your about two hours ahead of me. So it's later for you than it is for me. And I know your sleep is probably pretty precious right now. So I'm gonna let you go. But if you would just let everybody know where the, where the best places to find you or you know, message you or anything like that are sure. Of course you can find me on twitter at capac lee. I know it's my last name.
It's kind of hard to, to memorize. I realized that I used my name as my branding and then, uh, I said, oh, nobody will never know how it just tell it, but think of it as capable, but with a C instead of a B. So it's c a p a c e O E. That's my last name. So at compactly and all my links are at compactly dot bio dot link. My games are compactly dot h dot io. And you can find everything on tobacco dot bio dot link. And I'll be putting all that in the show notes for for this.
But cesar thank you so much for taking time out of your evening in the middle of this, complete upheaval in your life. I really appreciate it. Um but thank you so much for talking to us. Yeah, it's been a pleasure. Brandon. Thanks for having me. Alright mm. Hey everyone, Future Brandon here. Uh I just wanted to circle back around and thank Cesar again for taking time out of this inordinately busy period of his life to spend an hour talking to me about stuff.
I just want to ask everybody at least take a look at says there's it's store. I'm gonna put a link to that in the show notes here along with just his sort of general link tree esque link aggregator so you can check out all the stuff he's working on. But give him a follow on twitter, take a look at the stuff that he's developing. Check out his lulu store. He's a really awesome guy. I'm glad I had the time to talk to him and he's putting out some really great stuff so we'll see you all later.