Hello, and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry. with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You can find episodes and more at thinklikeagamedesigner.com. In today's episode, I speak with Eric Dulongard.
Eric is the chief marketing officer at Equinox, the collectible card games publisher that launched the largest TCG Kickstarter of all time, with their altered TCG raising over $6.6 million. in their campaign that launched recently that game is going to be coming out in i believe september of 2024 but we get into all of the details of what goes into making a game that can succeed at that scale and for a lot of people that just see the number come out of the blue
don't realize how much work it has in years and years of effort and development so we go into all the details about building the game building the technology building the marketing platform we also go into eric's background as a professional warcraft 3 player and his startup there we talk about his
time in business school and working in sort of more traditional businesses. We wind together his coaching background and all the different aspects that come together to make a successful role. And I think it's a really great example for those of you out there that maybe you're in your 30s. your 40s and you haven't found the exact path you want, you want to get involved in the creative industry or field, there is this great
path to wander your way into something that's a perfect fit for you. And we talk a lot about that in this podcast. So if you're interested, you've got a company, you've got a project, and you want to learn how to do a massive crowdfund and get something that's at this huge level of success, we've got lots of nuts and bolts details for you. If you're someone who...
doesn't even know where to get started, or you're someone who's trying to find your path in the world, you can find a lot of great tips here from Eric. I really enjoyed this conversation as I knew I would, and I'm sure you will as well. So without further ado, here is Eric Dulongard. Hello and welcome. I am here with Eric Durangar. Eric, hopefully I didn't butcher your name too much. It's great to have you here. It's all fine. Thank you.
Yeah, no, I'm often grateful. I just have two first names that are very short and easy to pronounce. So the worst thing that happens is people call me by my last name. But I'm really glad to get to talk to you. You know, you and I had met. years ago and you got to play my game Soul Forge Fusion. We chatted for a while. Then I saw your incredible success with the Altered TCG and we had a deep dive conversation and I want to be able to share some of your insights.
with the audience. But first, let's dig in a little bit because you have a really interesting background that got you to this place. So let's start with your origin story a little bit and what brought you into the gaming space. Okay, let's do that. Where do you want to start?
Well, my understanding is that you have both a business background, which is part of where you're able to come up with a lot of the great marketing strategies here, and you started off as a former pro player of a... video game and so maybe you want to talk a little bit about that and then we'll circle back to the business side yes okay so i'm the typical guy who didn't know what to do with his life
but who became a fan of any type of gaming. So I've been a very competitive gamer in my youth. I've played Warhammer competitively, Magic competitively, video games competitively. And so I skipped three or four years of my studies. Let's say that I had to redo them a bunch of a while. So I was a professional gamer on Warcraft 3 in my 2022s.
I was the first French player to ever win a major competitive video game tournament for record. But that didn't last long. I wasn't good enough to last. And it was a period. It was an era. because it was in 2002, 2003. It was an era where you couldn't live of this kind of hobby. I was too young for that. Nowadays they do, but we couldn't back in time. And I'm not even sure I would have been willing to become one. I don't know. But still
I had a mother and she was like very conciliant with me, letting me do whatever I wanted here and there as long as I had some kind of goal in my life. And when I started struggling with my video game skills and I was like not enjoying it.
much anymore you know spending so much time training and so on and i wanted to do something different i came back to studying that's when i really started my my studies that i i did finish for once because i i wanted to become a history teacher before that so i did to first year. Sorry, the lights is going to do that quite well.
That's all right. Most of the audience is just listening to this on audio, so that's going to be fine. And so I started studying business and I did five years apprenticeship. And I ended up in one of the top business schools in France. And I did work as a sales mainly, not because that was my first choice, because that's what came up when I was there. You know, I was really like this.
This dude that doesn't know anything about anything and doesn't know what to do. And it happens that someone comes up with a job and I'm like, okay, let's do that, you know. So I started as a sales. I did work for companies that you might know about, like Dell and IBM, for example. So after my studies, I flew to Dublin. I spent two years there. That's where I learned most of my English, as well through video games.
And I worked for IBM there. Then I came back. I lived in France. I had several jobs there. I lived in Paris for the first time. I had my girlfriend, broke up, went back to my hometown, Montpellier, in the south of France. did so much jobs. And after one, I was 34 and I wasn't really happy in my life because the reason why I was changing jobs and so on was just because I still didn't know what to do with my life. I just knew I wasn't doing what I had to do.
I started doing several different researches about jobs and I started spending some time in video game venues where I knew some people from back in the days. In particular, I met with my former manager. from when I was a video game pro player. And that's how it started all again. So he was living in Paris, he was still in the industry and he hired me. in the company he was working for, which name is Webedia, which is a video game entertaining web giant in France, more than 3,000 employees.
And that was when I was 34. I'm 41 today. So I spent four years in this company where I slowly climbed the ladder internally. I was a tournament director. Then I became the director of a video game brand news website. I mean, a website that's doing esports and video game guides. So, which name is Millennium. And I directed this website for two years and a half.
And then COVID came, I became unemployed and I wanted to do something different. So I became a coach, a life coach. This is a real job just for those that. that do mix-up coaches like sports coach and cooking coaches and so on. No, no, no. Life coach is not, I mean, the real coaching is a science, is a parascience from the psychology. science. The only thing is we don't do studies that are at least in France considered by the state, but we have to study.
And that's just to summarize what a coach is. It's all based on the present and the future. We as coach, we don't really care about the past. When we say we don't care, it's not that you cannot tell us, but it's just, this is not how we act on you. Our job is just to help you move one step forward, whatever happened to you. You know, we are into action. That's what we do as coach. And then after studying that, I started my company.
as a coach and i quickly realized how difficult it was to get some clients and to leave from that work especially in the beginning where you are unknown there are so many coaches around nowadays on linkedin they are everywhere asking you
if you need them. And there are coaches of coaches and so on. So I quickly realized- I lived in Southern California for a while. There was coaches and coaches of coaches and then coaches that coach the coaches who coach the coaches. It's quite the industry. Everybody became a coach.
because that's really cool. And in the U.S., being coached is something which is kind of familiar in France. We are the country that still think in terms of the... old psychology you know the old guys the the young the freud and so on so coaching approaches coming from america is something that's not really into the habit Whatever. I quickly stopped my dream of becoming a coach for a living. So I started looking for a new job. And that's how I came up with...
with this offer from Equinox. It was two years ago, and this is the best job I've ever had in my life, so I'm very happy. The company is great, and my boss is an absolutely Marvel guy. All right, we're going to spend a lot of time on Equinox and the process there, but like your story is fascinating. I normally interrupt a lot more as people tell their narrative, but it was such a...
an interesting tale of jumping around. And I want to highlight a few key principles here because, you know, this...
idea, I know I have a lot of listeners that feel like they should have things figured out, right? By the time you get to your 30s, you should have your plan, you should be on a track, you should be doing the things. And that is just often not the case. And in fact, the process of what I think you described as sort of flailing around or not, not really knowing and trying different things is part of the process of discovery and that that is.
not something to look at as a failure per se but as a kind of you know stepping stones to the path that you don't necessarily know where it's going to lead but it's about finding those different aspects and that you're able to take different elements of what you've done
and then bring them together to find that sort of right fit for you, right? So, you know, you mentioned that the networking that you did during your video game period helped to bring you some connections and bring you back into the space. Maybe... Their time as a coach wasn't necessarily going to be a...
career per se, but I'm sure that must help you with managing and working in a business context with others. I know as a CEO myself, half my job is coaching my team. My best work is done when I'm... not the one doing the work, but I'm helping other people and empowering them to do the work better. And so I think that there's a really fascinating jump around. I guess I'm curious.
during so i can i could clearly see where the coaching influence is i clearly see where the your your your background in gaming influences where what lessons do you think you took from your time at the kind of ibms and dell and other you know the sort of more traditional business path for those that are out there and I think a lot of people that love games but are in that space, what lessons did you take from that era that you maybe were able to bring to your current career?
Well, thank you for pointing out this analyze on my career because this is very true and I'm going to be making a summarized answer. But when you don't know what you want to do... You have two paths one is doing nothing like you just you just become depressed usually you know you you you you you just complain uh on your side you you don't do much eventually you're lazy you don't do anything but no one really does nothing you know so
What I wanted to do when I was young is I wanted to do something. I knew I wanted to do something. I had the energy of doing something. It's just it was so complicated to answer the question, you know, it's like.
How do I answer such a question? What do you want to do? We ask these questions when we are 10, 12, 15, whatever. And the only thing I knew is that I knew that as long as I didn't know, I had... to try different things in order to eliminate things that I might have thought about that might seem Being fantasies or things that I should have done because people thought I should be doing that or I or I thought I should be doing that and Then I tried and at least I could quickly
eliminate some stuff that i i just experimented like okay that that's cool that's nice but that's that's not me enough or that's not really me so i can't just you know Eliminate something from my mind and it piece it, you know, and I just narrow to something else. And you just narrow, narrow, narrow, narrow, narrow by trying you. You start learning who you are as well. You start learning if you want to work for someone or not. You start learning if you want to work with.
People are on your own, you know, as a single individual without teamwork. And that's all the very different aspects. And that's how I came up to understand who I was. And my learning from this is that it's not... always a question of job description it's a question of does it fits who you are as as as value and your values as a human being and in your skills for example when i used to work in ibm i was very good at it i mean i loved the place i loved the teamwork i loved
I could express my skills. I was really recognized as a performing individual. I was offered to climb up the letters internally. The only reason why I didn't stay in IBM at this point in time was just that IBM was so much processed, so much everything is written down years in advance. And I was so young that I was like, no, it cannot be.
defining my life for good for 30 years time because i was i wasn't looking to just get a good paycheck and have a wife and family and so on straight on i i was excited about doing something more meaningful so my my personality was winning more but the job itself was good and today i'm doing a job where my daily life is
is as rewarding as IBM was back in time. I mean, I love it as well. But the thing I am doing, what I'm doing it for, or the people I'm doing it for, is more powerful to me. That's my connection to my job today. Let me ask a question then, because there's another part of this that can be very tough for people, right? Which is...
I hear you and I 100% agree, right? You have to do things to find out what you don't like to narrow in on what you do like. I think that's just a really important insight. But there's other periods where you're like, hey, I do like this thing, but...
I can't make a living doing this or it's not working for me. Right. And that's very tough because the message that society tells us, right. It's like, keep going, push through, right. You, you were trying to be a pro gamer. You're trying to be a professional life coach or several areas where you're like.
hey, this is fulfilling for me, but I'm not hitting the tiers of success that I want. I'm not getting to where I want to go. How do you know when it's... the right time to persevere and to push through and how do you know when it's the right time to pivot and change is there is there because i think that's a really tough question that a lot of people face a lot of points in life
And I actually think we face it throughout our entire lives all the time. So what principles or what drives you when you're trying to make those kinds of decisions? My answer about it is that you're the only one. We are all the only ones able to know. If the answer to this question is true or not. So my advice here is that you have to know when you lie to yourself. Because...
You might think, hey, for example, Jordan. Okay, let's take someone we all know, Jordan. He was a basketball god, but then he went to baseball. Okay? Maybe he was convinced he could become a star in baseball. So he tried. He knew he was a try harder for basketball. He knew what it meant to work hard to become really good in his sports. All right. So he came to baseball with the same mindset.
But he was already like, what, 30 years old or something. And he wanted probably to catch up with the top level of baseball in like one year or two. You know, he was fantasizing that what he had learned from his previous basketball experience could turn up into. a baseball god very, very quickly. It didn't happen. But what he did well, he understood it. I mean, he had the fantasy. He wanted to try. He tried it. And then he went out of baseball forever.
i mean as a player perspective so it just needed to try to understand if he wanted it or not, if he could get it or not. It's not like he didn't consider or he still considers in his life that if he would redo it, he couldn't become a baseball champion if he started at 15. But just that he realized that, okay.
Maybe that's just for my dreams or maybe that's just for my pastime, but not my job. I'm coming back to basket because this is where I'm good at. And what I'm saying here is that once you can understand what you are good at, and it's not a question of...
the sport name it's a question of what you're good at doing by yourself i'm skilled at speaking to people for example so i know i'm a social extrovert type of guy so i know i can exploit that in various ways and i try to understand my core skills and i think As long as we understand our core skills and we have the humility of admitting we are done or not done for something, we can just go to the next topic. And there are always plenty of topics, not only one.
right right yeah and that this this this thing of uh you know just don't uh you know don't fool yourself right it makes me think of the richard freiman quote right the first principle is you must not fool yourself and you're the easiest person to fool um it's very easy to delude ourselves in these situations so having that self-awareness is important and then i think a a sort of tangent of what
What you're saying is that there's and this is something I do advise people a lot, which is like, look, just because you may not be the best. be able to become the best baseball player in the world or basketball player in the world or game designer in the world or pro player in the world doesn't mean that that skill set doesn't.
link to something that you are going to care about doing and being a part of what you're doing right like so you are exactly this case example right the you can you know you understand games and you're good at games you're good at working with people you're good at speaking so hey a chief marketing officer for a game company
wow, what a great set of skills, right? You now are perfectly, the Venn diagram works perfectly to be where you are. And I think a lot of people have too narrow a vision of what their... dream or success looks like and you figure it out there's um i really loved um scott adams has this quote about uh or is a book basically about you know how to fail at almost everything and still succeed and he talks about the you know like
The basketball is a great example, right? If you want to be the best basketball player in the world, you have to beat 99.9% of everybody on the planet because everybody's trying for the same thing. But if you pick a set of skills together...
And you can become the best of that, of the center of those skills, right? So Scott Adams was the creator of Dilbert. So he's like, you know, I'm pretty funny. I'm not the funniest person in the world. And I can draw. I'm not the best drawer of the world, right? And I also...
have an office career and understand office careers very much. And so now he could be at the 80th or 70th percentile of all of those, but the center lets him create the Dilbert comic and become a huge success. Right. And so this, this idea of finding the. the Venn diagram between your unique sets of skills and inclinations and what society needs can craft a position that's really powerful and unique to you. And I think that's a great living example of that.
Yeah, I wanted to complete something because we have cultural differences between the US and France. I had the chance of having a very supportive family that considered that as long as I... put some passion, some intent to something, would it be video games or anything, they would support me. Because it was time invested in something that I would do. You know, it's the difference in between.
just binge watching TV all day long, the same thing, but you don't enjoy it. You know, sometimes we, especially video game players, we play the same game for years and we enjoy it. We enjoy it. We enjoy it. barely enjoy it and then we keep playing but we don't enjoy it anymore you know we keep playing we keep playing but we don't enjoy but it's just such a habit we don't want to waste the investment the initial investment we've put in it we forget to
to realize that it's not what we want anymore and we forget to realize we want eventually to do something else. This is also the addiction type of things. And my family was very supportive as long as they felt that it was doing me good. even if I didn't make any money. But it's also because in France, my family's average salary in the society, so they could support me somewhat for some years. Then I had to sustain by myself.
But also in France, we have a very good social system, which means that if I want to leave the company... or if a company fires me i'm i'm not on my own instantly you know i'm covered by society
Because I participated in that society. So I'm covered for a year or two years. And I can take some time off. And this is one of the most important things I've ever had in my life. It's time off to just... empty my mind and start fresh with a new motivation so usually my behavior has been many times that i was off for three or four months before my brain and bodies could all together start willing to find the next step again. And that's...
That's when I started to motivate myself and to act every day. One thing, one thing, a small thing, you know, 30 minutes for emails, job offers, speaking to someone and so on. And just because. As long as you do nothing and you would like to do something, you're depressed. So my advice to everyone being unemployed and so on is just be at least proud of yourself, which means every day do something.
Do enough to be proud of yourself. If it's one hour of work and you're proud of yourself, that's what you need. You might not need to do eight hours of job seeking a day to be proud of yourself. It's all about you. Yeah, no, it's fascinating. I mean, obviously, we don't quite have the same setup in the United States in terms of that level of protection, but I did create...
I agree that the space is really important, right? I was able to take a year off between college and law school because of my winnings as pro magic player to just play magic and take my time and do that. And then when I was at... my job at upper deck and i was working there i'd saved up enough money to have a year off as well to figure out if i could start my own company and take a chance at
creating Stoneblade. And so if I didn't have that space and that opportunity, I wouldn't be where I am today. And so even though my parents were not quite as supportive of my shift in career as it sounds like yours were, they did come around eventually.
But crafting that extra space for yourself, I think, is important, whatever that looks like, right? Being able to have some area where you can freely explore and not fear that you're going to go starving on the streets is definitely valuable for growing the mind.
yeah if either being a place where that is that is there for you or if you're a parent being able to carve that space out for your kid or or doing the hard work writing and i mean it wasn't easy for me to save up a year's worth of savings i had to cut back on a lot of things but you can do it and you can craft the space for yourself
It's very, very powerful. I just wanted to add something here because I've never been able to answer this question of do you need to be on your own without anything to be motivated? Or do you need to be supported to be motivated? And I think the answer is neither of both. I think the answer about motivation is not about if you don't have money and you need to feed yourself because there are tons of people that are.
in horrible situations that do not know how to get out of them or that did not get any motivation out of that situation. Some do. And I do believe... When we are very young, the way our brain works is... we get models, you know, and we model ourselves to our very first meetings with human beings, our very first behaviors, even if we are just a baby or in our mother's womb.
the way we become is so much influenced by who we are as very young people and how we behave to our environment and as much as i can say and i don't know for you and i hope it is the case but the fact that I've been surrounded by energetic people. My mother is an energetic people. My father is an energetic people. So... I'm driven by energy. Even if I don't know what I wanted to do with, I was driven by pride, by energy.
by happiness around me. So I just know I couldn't just waste it and do nothing with it because I didn't live any big traumas in my childhood. And I don't know, this is an open debate here. Just not saying that the French model is the best one. You should have it in the US. I know you have different ideas and you consider yourself as leftist, but...
Yeah, well, I'm not going to start getting into the politics of France versus US probably in this podcast. However, I will say I do believe, actually, I'm happy to debate motivation and discuss that a little bit because that is at the heart of what I do.
talk about here because look i think there's a lot of different ways you can get fuel for the fire of motivation right it can be that you've had a joyous upbringing and everybody around you has been positivity and you're modeling that positivity or it could be that you had a real struggle And that you know you never want to go back to that again. Or you want to prove somebody wrong. Or you have ego that wants to prove yourself right. I mean, I had a fine upbringing, but I definitely had...
been given this model that I was supposed to be the smart, successful one. And I was driven to maintain that ego model. And I drove to a lot of success. didn't necessarily make me happy. And I realized later I had to sort of disentangle some of that and that my outer success is not what matters to me as an inner person and my value as a human, but that a lot of things can drive you. And I think over time, you want to...
The most powerful thing that we can do is twofold. One, surround yourself with people that are positive, right? Surround yourself with people that lift you up rather than bring you down. And that is a very hard thing because it means cutting off sometimes some longstanding relationships and being able to like actively put yourself out there into groups and finding people that are up to things that you're excited about. That's one thing because that will just like naturally.
like the force of gravity lift you up or bring you down. And then the other thing is over time, realizing that your self-worth is not dependent on anything you do in the world, that there is a value intrinsic to you if you just try to... do your best and grow and you live by according to values that you care about. That is what success really looks like. And that gives you the freedom, you know, leave aside the, you know, assuming you can.
find food and bad things. Outside of that, this fear of failure, this fear of putting yourself out there, this fear of trying something and it not working is actually what stops people. It's not that they're not motivated. It's not that they're not excited to have a career or making a creative life or playing games or help. others, whatever. Plenty of people are excited, but most people are afraid. And that fear...
of ego death, that fear of getting failing, of embarrassment. That's where I see the people that I interact with. That's where they get stopped. And I think overcoming that fear is the most powerful thing we can do to live a fulfilling and creative life. Yeah, and people should not forget that succeeding doesn't mean becoming rich. I'm sorry, I'm being French here, but succeeding is understanding how you can be happy, what makes you happy.
I have some friends of mine, very smart, very smart girls. I am thinking about three or four of them, very smart women. But they don't do something very hyped in terms of jobs. I mean, they didn't have the chance or they didn't study very, very long and so on, but very brilliant women. And what they do in life couldn't be regarded as... incredible for some of them just you know regular
nurse job or social workers and so on. But my God, they love the job. And I just love to see them happy with that. And they succeed in understanding. what makes them happy and it's not a big deal if it's not being a billionaire or building up a company myself i i've always thought why can i not become my own company And I barely made it when I became a coach. And all this time, I always think about it like, I like it very much having someone who takes...
everything on its shoulders and just being, you know, your ace pilot. But I don't really like so much to be... on top of the pyramid, if you speak so. So it's just something I realize more and more. Maybe one day I will. But this might not be my path, even if I have the skills to do it. It's not because I feel like I could be. that i will be yeah no there's there's plenty of uh you know uh this
of the kind of entrepreneur CEO role, but it is definitely not for everybody. There are a lot of downsides. Speaking as an entrepreneur CEO, I will say it is not all sunshine and roses. There's a lot of different challenges that come with it. But my personality is suited for it. And dealing with various amounts of uncertainty and managing through that is something I don't mind as much as other people do. And so it changes, but there's no one path, that's for sure.
Um, okay so let's talk about then let's dig into the path where you're at because you you know it's almost exactly two years you've been with equinox right like two years and a month or so and and so you joined directly as chief marketing officer like walk me through that process and then and then And getting the whole story of Altered, if that's what you started working on immediately and what brought it to become the most successful.
crowdfunded tcg of all time like there's a there's a great story here and so we're going to spend some some time unpacking it so walk me through where where you came into the process and we'll take it step by step so um The first thing is I didn't find the job offer myself. It was, I mean, Equinox back two years ago, they used a recruitment partner. which contacted a friend of mine who was already into marketing into a video game company.
And he saw the job of her and he thought that could be a match for me because he knew I was into magic back in the days and so on. He knew I was unemployed and he thought it could be a good match. So he sent it to me. And you know, this is...
You can spend nine months looking for job offers and every single time you instantly know that the job offer you're reading isn't really the one you wish, but you know, like, hey, maybe I should, you never know, you know, and you apply and you apply and you apply. This one was... the kind of job offers you're like yeah i know i want this job i don't even have to think twice you know so i saw the job offer i applied
And in my mind, I was like, I know I have a very big chance because the fit is really nice, you know? So that's how it happens. I met Regis and someone else named Maxim, who they were both doing the recruitment back in time. And we had this interview.
different processes, you know, tests and so on, but really much more about talking because Equinox is all about human beings kind of first among, I mean, skills and human beings are at the same level. You cannot come into and work for Equinox if the human beings isn't.
matching what we are looking for and and and and we we are good guys i mean i mean equinox is built around dreamers you know we are mostly utopians here you know realistic utopians but we are dreamers you know we we want to fight for human beings we are all what you can imagine from the french leftists and with various degrees, but it's not a rightist kind of company.
And we like to say we are hippies, you know, in France. Sometimes my friends call me a hippie just for this reason. Whatever. That's how I came up. And the interview... went very well. I knew it did go well, even if I criticized the game a lot. because I thought there were many flaws that were difficult to overcome because I was very analytical, very mathematical, and I was like, okay, Unicorn, really, what do we want to do with that? It's never going to work. You know, Unicorn, it's whatever.
But we discussed, we discussed, we discussed. And what I liked was that I didn't just say that out loud without any thoughts behind. So I was always able to explain my thinking, why I thought so, and I could judge that I had some expertise on the field in TCGs and so on, and in mathematics and analytics and so on. And I was coming from the video game industry for four years.
I have never been a marketing chief officer in my life, but I was a website director. So I did SEO. I did advertising, social skills, social media with our networks. grow some social medias from a few thousand to millions and so on with my community managers. So I knew my share about influencers, et cetera. And they understood that.
picking up someone coming from the video game industry who is like 10 years ahead in terms of means and ways of working compared to the board game industry, which is much older and much more the old way, was... an opportunity for them so that's why they hired me to to because i could bring some fresh air to the job and first six months i was completely lost Because I still think today that I was hired a bit too soon.
compared to where the project was at the time I came up in the company. That's why I was thinking for the first year. Nowadays, I don't think that anymore. But it was very slow, so I started building up my connections with Asmodee. Because from the start, I knew we would be working with Asmode. I was like the 17th employee in the company or 16th, something like this. So they were already...
like 15 people for a year and a half in the company. They had moved once from one building to another and they were just starting to build the marketing team. So I was the first hired to build the team around me. And I was in charge and I'm still in charge of all the relationships with external people. What was happening before that then? So you have no marketing team. The owner had sold the previous company to Asmodee. And then what are they doing during this time?
All right, 2000, Summertime, Regis Bonse, the one guy who founded Libellude. Libellude Studio is Dixit, Mysterium, Diceforge, Seasons and Others. He won the Spiel and so on. sold his company to Asmodee after 10 years of activity. So he became quite rich, let's say.
And he didn't know what to do. I mean, he sold his company because it was a good opportunity. It was the right time. And maybe he was fed up with his former company. He wanted some break. But after a couple of months, he was like, OK, no, I need to do something again. So he came up with what can I do? And he was a former Magic player. So he instantly...
hooked up the idea of doing something around TCGs. He didn't know what. He started brainstorming with Maxime and with some others. And very quickly came to us new ideas that if we wanted to renew the TCG industry, we had... to revolutionize it. I mean, the way that Apple revolutionized the smartphones.
um he just thought about what were the issues that the people had what did we lost with internet and so on like net building net decking and so on the pleasure of opening boosters and it became many ideas that became one He founded the company. There were four people, with one from his former company, Maxime, him, and another game designer. And slowly, they started recruiting artists.
director artistic director and and they started to build the core of the digital team which is the team working behind the digital aspect of the project and i came up later when they thought it was the right time So this is many years of work. Just for people to understand, for a lot of people, they saw an altered...
Just when the Kickstarter came out and they got suddenly, you know, saw this huge success that came out of nowhere. And I think it's really important to emphasize how many years of work go into one of these things. Right. And we've talked about this before. I was like, we, you know, I've been trying to address the same, many of the same problems with.
software fusion right trying to use digitally printed decks and digital physical connection and trying to get back to the same idea of what it used to be like to open packs and how do you revolutionize what was done before. Some people may still not be familiar with Altered, so why don't you give us a little bit of an elevator pitch for the game, and then we'll go back through the process of launching it.
Yeah, okay. Okay, I'll make and make it as short as possible. So altered is a TCG trading card game like Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon and the others. So we will We sell already boosters, boosters and starters. The difference is that when you open a booster of Altered, you open it, you get cards, and at the bottom right hand corner of your cards, you will find a QR code.
And this QR code allows you to register your card on an online account. So you will download the app to play altered. Not to play altered. You download the altered app. You will scan your accounts with the app. then your cards will be registered into your online account and you will play with the physical cards. That's a real TCG that you play in real life. That's also our intent to have you play in real life. But for all the services around the TCG that usually, for example,
to buy a single card, a specific card. You go in the U.S. on TCG player or to Star City games. And in Europe, that will be a magic card market and so on, you know, external places to buy and trade. Here, you won't have to... do that. You will be able to trade your cards through the app from your account to another player account directly. So which means that you only transfer the digital aspects of your card, the digital ownership of your card.
The physical cards you have, you can keep them because you don't really need to send them overseas to anyone or anywhere. The reason is we offer another type of service, which is print and demand. And print and demand is the ability for you at any point in time to choose cards in your collection and to ask for the closest factory we work with to print them again for you, brand new.
in the language of your choice and to have them delivered at your doorstep. Which means we have transferred the value of the cards from the physical ownership to the digital ownership even if you still play with the physical cards Basically, that allows us to tell you that if you lose your cards, they got burnt, they got smashed, they got stolen or whatever. It doesn't matter anymore that much because you didn't lose your collection. You can still reprint them and play with them again.
And the value of the cards compared to why should I need to have them online if I have them in paper is just because if you want to play in any official event, you will need to register your decks.
from the app into the events that are organized from the app and to do so you need the cards in your collection because you need to submit your decklist from the app and so on yeah so it's it's a it's fascinating and again it's it's very interesting because we both came at this problem again and you know similar times with some slightly different approaches um did you consider like so we you know we've obviously we built soulforge fusion with the same concept
part of why we built it as a, a kind of hybrid game with the deck is always together. And you, you know, you, because you could scan one card and scan the whole deck in rather than just scanning every individual card. The, um,
and then we built it so that you could actually play the game online as well right that seems like the natural next step is that something you guys are working on or that you're able to talk about or is it purposefully like no no this is a physical game and the digital is just for collection management Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, it's already... We've already been communicating on that aspect of things, and the game is already available from our doing on Board Game Arena.
you can play it for free on board game arena you can play it for free on some community applications and and board game arena is owned by Asmodee So the fact that the game is available on board game arena is part of our strategy of using Asmodea sets to do more than just what we are doing.
And this partnership with them will make it so that in a couple months, you will be able to play with your collection of cards directly connected to Board Game Arena. So any deck you would build within your application, you will be able to play with it.
it online on board game arena great yeah so this is this is i think what part of what uh that we're again aligned on what we think the vision of the future is here where i can do both right there's great things about playing online there's great things about playing in person i want to be able to do both i want to have one collection between the two different things so um that makes sense to me now when it comes to the ability to own trade sell
your digital cards you have you're managing a marketplace internally which means right you you could so if i want to sell something to you i'm using your proprietary systems for that right you have a marketplace i could sell and you process the fees and pay me and everything right so that i mean uh you don't sell to me as a company but if you sell to me as a player
there is just a transfer of ownership between my account or your account and my account and there is a fee that's taken away by the platform like on any other trading platform in this industry so it's a small percent of the transactions okay so you're you a player will sell so let's say i'm going to sell a card to you for a hundred dollars you as a equinox are going to take three dollars or whatever it is your percentage off of that fee
got it okay and what made you that those systems are very expensive and very complicated to build uh and and manage and own what because what there's you know we've chose to do a different route of using blockchain technology to allow us to do those trades back and forth. That must have been something you guys thought about. What made you decide to take the internal system route versus using something like blockchain and having people have digital ownership of NFTs?
First thing first is because for good reason or bad reason, whatever, that's not my debate here, but... nfts have a very bad reputation in the gaming community for some years now many big companies have tried to push the NFT model towards the players and so hard. And the NFTs have failed so hard to make people rich also for those fantasizing of, you know, buying anything that was called NFT. a billionaire based on their investments and the nft market has crashed and we were
doing our project right when it all crashed, you know, it all became this disillusion. So we couldn't do it just because the name only, the NFT name only was already something that could... would cost us a lot so we wouldn't like to handle that so we decided to do it on our database the usual way like any other video games like world of warcraft you know there is
action auction house this is our auction house you know you just go to the auction house you do your business and we just handle the auction house for you that's very simple Yeah, yeah. No, with larger companies and infrastructures, that becomes easier to do. And yeah, I understand. Certainly during the window, we were building this several years ago where that's, you know, there's all the negative.
negative press, you say the word NFT, people immediately hate you. I totally get that. I'm not going to do anything with that. I'm not going to touch it or even consider it just because it's NFT. And we've seen, I mean, so many comments came to us.
from anywhere telling that we were an NFT game until people realized we were not. So we had to educate our community to defend ourselves. And they were like, no, no, no, this is not NFT. And thank you to the community that after a couple of months right now. know how to speak about the game and explain people that no, this is not NFT because still people hate NFT and it might last a while. So no, no, no NFT for us.
Yeah, it's one of those things that it's interesting. Obviously, I don't harbor the same ill will towards it because it's just a tool for design and for play like anything else. But the many people who were doing the, I'm going to sell you a JPEG for a million dollars.
crowd certainly turned a lot of people off. I think the ability to just have, if anything, the digital ownership and trading of... uh trading card games is the most obvious parallel for anything else right whether that be on a server database or uh you know or on a blockchain this i know when i have a physical magic card or i can trade it to you and sell it to you and that is a game please being able to do that digitally however it's managed is something i think
is best for players, whatever the system is. So I think it's a powerful model. Time might make you right at some point. Someone is going to make it happen the right way and is going to succeed and is going to become the role model for the industry eventually because this is a nice technology. But currently, this is a bad publicity. So I mean, it wasn't even a question for us.
Makes sense. Okay, let's dig into the let's dig into this launch marketing strategy, because I think that this, you know, this is as chief marketing officer, you drove this, this strategy. And I think it was brilliant you know when we had our conversation about it i knew i wanted to bring you on the podcast and and i want to also just dig in how much
it takes to get something like this done this you know sort of what is there was seven million dollars or whatever the six six million six point two million euros in dollars i don't i don't remember something like that yeah so uh to get to that stage what does it take what was the process of rolling this out how did you kind of get to a place where you felt confident in your success uh in this uh this crowdfund um let's say i don't know what to start but
First and foremost, I'd like to say Regis is the centerpiece of the company and he brought up a vision. And this vision... was not easy to sell because this vision was so creative, so innovative, that we barely knew where to start in terms of marketing message. We had so much to say. There was so much into it. And it's still a struggle today to understand
Under what are we starting with, you know, building the website and the messages and so on. What do we put first? You know, marketplace, print and demand, unique cards. What do we do first? You know, so much or scanning cards or lower systems, whatever. That's cool because that's a rich problem. You have too much to say. But everything started really at Gen Con last year.
It was the first time ever that we had the opportunity to showcase the game to people outside of our own circle and even more because we are French, we were mainly... based on the french appreciation of the game we were doing so it was mostly friends or play testers but not a real audience so when we came at gen con
we knew we had a good product. Okay. First thing, I mean, if you don't believe in your product, if you don't feel like you have the right product, I mean, there is no future. There is no secret. A bad product doesn't become a good seller most of the time.
It hadn't happened, but that's not to us. So we knew we had a good product, and my God, we struggled to make it happen because the game designers, the oldest versions of the game, we were struggling with... big difficult things that we didn't know how to handle and that's always when Regis brought his most resource to the table because Regis isn't really game designing the game every day, he hasn't been.
He is managing the company mostly, but from time to time he comes and helps the game designer when they are struggling, or he used to do that in some critical points. And he, at multiple occasions, he saved the project.
bringing up some major ideas you know or just helping the game designers to think straight at what they really needed to do so at Gen Con hopefully we had the best game ever i mean this is our motto internally okay what do we need we need the best game ever we need the best game ever we need the best game ever as long as it's not the best game ever we can't go further you know
And we found how to make the best game ever or something we really loved. So Gen Con was easy from the product perspective. Because we knew. We knew we had a good product. It was easy for that. And this was how many years of development to get to that point where you felt like this was a great product from when it started? Three years. Three years, okay. Two and a half to three years.
It's great to just put that out there again. It's two, three and a half, three years of work to get you to a place where the product is good before you even start marketing and showing anything off. I think it's just really important for people to note how much that work these things take. And we mean, yeah.
Really good. I mean really good when you feel like you're making a difference when you feel like people are going to notice that what you're doing is fresh is good and This is also because our testing shown it we had We turn from, you know, we do grading from one to 10. We used to do that. So we had people giving us threes and five and sevens and eights and twos. And it was very random. So when we came up with the latest version, we had only minimum seven, you know, out of 10.
7, 8, 9. And further we went, it was 8, 9, 8, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9. So what was that testing process look like then? So during that window, are you having formal playtest groups? Are you sharing it with friends? Are you doing like... What is that process where you're getting this iteration done? Someone in the company, his name is Merlin, like the magician, and he's a user researcher and a game designer. So it's his job. I mean, his only job...
back in the time was to ensure we had the right playtest for the game and the product. So this is his specialization and he did organize and he still does organize a playtest session every week into the office. at least and we have two different teams we have what we call the asgard team which is the team of a pool of 50 players, let's say. Some of them come, some of them don't every week. And they are from various skill styles, you know?
They are very different types of players. And this is what we want. This is a rainbow pool of players. And we have the play team. And the play team is made only of professional Magic players. So we have Pro Tour players in the team. Not nowadays, but we used to have the Magic World Champion. among us, the 24 Magic World Champion and so on. So really skilled and they are here to destroy the game, you know. So you have the people here to...
give to speak to you about the feelings they have with the game and you have the people that are just destroying the game to Make it more balanced. That's how we work and We do as many conventions as we can in France whenever we have the occasion. So we did several where we just showcase the game here and there to different people.
Okay, great. Yeah, this is my entry into the world of game design was coming in as one of those people to destroy the game back in the versus system Marvel DC days. So I understand the different roles are all critical, right? It needs to be fun and the game needs to be enjoyable and it needs to hold. up to kind of rigorous strategic analysis in order for it to be a TCG that can actually last. And you also have this sometime we wanted only new fresh players.
So Merlin did recruit only people that had never played the game. Sometimes he wanted to have experienced players that had already had a taste of the game. And so it was different testings for different researches.
uh based on accessibility for example new players they need to know nothing about the game to test accessibility rulings how we write down rules and so on products look out whatever you might think icons readability and so on that was new players etc etc great okay all right great good great uh great little detour there because the product is the most important thing it's just one of the more important messages to highlight and how you get from
raw idea or even cool concept to something that's actually a 10 out of 10 and can really move the needle.
deeply important but okay now you're there you've gone to gen con you're showing it off what does that look like what does it mean to show it off at gen con so gen con our our first idea was we don't want to go public because this is the first time ever nobody knows us so who is going who is going to attend to the booth we are going to rent you know nobody knows us so our idea was we first need to meet with opinion leaders
and thanks to the help of Asmodee because Asmodee owns 40% of our company so we are partnered so we can use their resources and their fame and name and so on. So it brought us the credibility we needed in the beginning because we had none besides Reg's name, but it wasn't big enough, especially for the US where he's less known than in France. So Asmode helped us building a VIP event at GenCon. What we did is we organized two hours sessions with at most six people per session.
So we wanted big retailers. We wanted press reporters. We wanted influencers. And so we invited all those people to join us with the help of Asmodee. And we had four sessions a day. two hours, two hours, two hours, two hours every day where we made them feel home. So we had a private room, we had catering, we had drinks and we had time. And we wanted to have enough time for them to see a presentation, play the game, and ask as many questions as they wanted. Because we knew they would have...
so many questions. There were so many nobilities, you know, it was mindfucking their brains and that's how it started. And we had various results depending on people we met, but mostly...
They were very enthusiastic and very supportive. And from this, we had the start of our influential support online. That's how we had... an article and a video from a ballgame geek and from others you know and people started talking about us because you know top 10 things i've seen at gen con top five things i've seen at gen con my thoughts about best games coming out from gen
this year or whatever and we were in all tops in all all articles all topics from everyone altered was in because it's so innovative that it was worth talking about we knew what we were doing Was worth talking about even if it would crash three months later at least that was cool to speak about the topic so everybody talked about us and
Then that's how it started. That's when we launched our social media at the same time, our Discord, Instagram, Facebook, and so on. And we started slowly building that hype, which we renewed the same system at Essen. In Germany, it was the exact same system. We have two hours, two hours, two hours. We did five sessions a day and four days in a row. That was 20 sessions. I was just dead. That's a lot.
Yeah, but every session went very well. I mean, and this small format, very few people in the room able to talk as much as they want, you know, not afraid of taking the mic because very few people in the room, that's... good model costs some money to make happen but if you sneak peek if you pick the right people in the room and they love what you do they will speak about it and that's how we We replicated in Europe what we did in the U.S. and we had the same...
uh feedback and and an online cover from the european influencers so so yeah i mean some money is not it's not a not a joke right i mean it's a it is a significant amount of investment now you're still you know 10 months out or whatever from your plans crowdfund and you're three years into development and you're now rearing these rooms, pulling these people in, catering. You also mentioned you had your social platforms up and running from Gen Con.
um through till s and and beyond what was your were you posting every day were you getting a ton of engagement at that point were you just like just starting up and posting once a week or just having somewhere for people to land like what was your what was your campaign between those two shows you still like two months or so in between them so basically i mean posting every day when you start from zero it doesn't do much if you don't know if you don't know why you do it
So how we built it is I recruited a community manager whose main skills is to be really close to the people. I mean, you have community managers that are very skilled at global strategies. you know, macro-analyzing. They are strategists, but they just replicate some recipes from here and there and the same recipes that everyone has. Our community manager He comes from Ubisoft and he's been a community advocate for Ubisoft for Assassin's Creed's brand. And he even had budgets.
to make community videos where he would play within the video, where the CEO of Ubisoft would play into the video, you know, just to please his community because they allowed him to do what he thought that the community wanted. Okay, so that's one part of the thing we did. He brought up ideas on what does the community want. And because we had a small community, my objective for him was that...
spend more time with the existing community than you try speaking to the community we don't have yet. Because the community we do not have yet, it's more my job than yours to make it happen. I'm the guy who is going to spend money on paid media. I'm the guy who is going to organize. big events or come to conventions to reach a new audience and so on or speak to the press and so on. He's not.
So what we wanted, because our product is complicated, we knew we had to educate, we had to teach our community everything we knew about the game to make them so skilled about... the game and and in love of the game because we offer them attention okay we spend the first 10 months just replying every day to any comment to any private message and so on because people had so many questions
And we were the only one with the answers. But after a while, so many people within the community became skilled at understanding the principle of the game that they wanted to reply to the people asking questions themselves. And that's how you... By spending time very close to your community, you build fans and those fans... then they help you building up a wider community and they spread the word and they create French discords, Italian discords, Spanish discords and they start replicating.
their passion that you transmitted to them, our passion became their passion. which is becoming the passion of others. And for example, we had a two hours, no, one hour meeting just before our call with our community manager and Justin Parnell, our OP manager for the US. about what we will do at GenCon for the community. So we already know we are going to do a community event at GenCon.
And Pierre, our community manager, is here to advocate for the community. We are fighting sometimes. We did fight an hour ago because he's like, no, no, no. We need to do that. I don't care what you say. We need to make it happen. So he defends his point of view. And that's very good because he might be right in the end. And as much time as we can spend building up community rights is a thing to do.
So just coming back to your question and finishing up, we started small. We didn't post a lot. We did something that everybody does at some point. We did, you know, give away lotteries. Not lotteries, I don't know the exact term in English, but you know, like and repost. Okay, yeah, you get rewards for subscribing and liking. And so you get, you know.
contests and we gave away promo cards this way and so we recruited a bunch of people this way to start also we did the red show the red show is an event we started in a in a in november uh last year which is um we and it means money because it's huge investment, but we spent money to send demo players with promotional cards and demo material into stores close to our audience to demonstrate the game. People were willing to discover the game in many different places because of the hype.
of Gen Con and so on and they were rewarded for coming with promo cards. And there is a second retro that's coming up in June, that's starting in June until September, which will offer more dates because many, many people and nations haven't been served right. So we are replicating.
Since we know we have a success with the Kickstarter, we are spending more money on this system to bring the game to more people before the official release. So that was one more way of bringing up the game to a new audience. Yeah, so it's great that there's a lot there to unpack, but this over-focus on the community that you have, try to build up the core alpha players, the people who are just going to be your evangelists, your super users, and that are going to be the ones to...
to help answer questions for others and help build the community. I agree that's something that we take very seriously here as well. It's absolutely critical. Yeah, I know, I know. You've done very well as well. And then we value, and then the ability to acquire new users.
is you know frankly it's just it's very expensive right it's very there takes a lot of effort and time and money and and you know so it's physically going to events crafting your own events doing paid advertising online partnering with influencers or people who hopefully become genuine you know followers of your game not just paying people to
to stream your game or whatever, but to hopefully build people up that can then become more, help spread the word more organically. There's so many moving parts to this. Yeah, go ahead. One thing about the influencers, which is 99% of the time, I refuse that we would pay for content. Instead, I would rather like to pay them to join us and make themselves an opinion. What I mean is that, for example, at Gen Con, we didn't pay anyone to write about us, you know?
but we covered their fees for many of them to join us at Gen Con, you know? their flights, their attendance, or we had a budget for this. We did the same in January when we did the launch event for the Kickstarter. We invited many people from Europe and the US to join us. It was... a participation for some of them, more money for others, but they weren't paid to write something. They could come, dislike what they saw, come back home.
and say whatever we just invited them and that's how we want to build our relation to influencers as much as possible because even for the community paying for a content with a disclaimer that says promotional content and so on
I mean, it isn't what we want to do. We want people to be genuine because we know we have a good game. So we know if people have a very high chance to love our game because we believe in our game. So let's make it happen. Let's put... the influencers in touch with our game and if we've done the things right they should love it and then they should speak positively about it that's how we build it great okay yeah i mean it's a it's a it's you know there's a
I think nowadays, finding the right way to engage people with audiences, right? The influencer term is... kind of don't like but you know the idea of like people who have communities that trust them right that's how discovery seems like it happens more often than anything else right the uh you know even for me where you know back when i was launching
ascension and we would you know primarily we're talking almost 15 years ago at this point 14 years ago it was you know you could go to a convention people would go and the distributors and stores would promote the project and then
people would see it and then it would play. And that's just not the way it goes down anymore. Like it very much is people see something online from someone that they trust, that they follow anyway, or they hear about it from a friend. And then that's where you get this like influx of people.
It's a very interesting world to navigate. I think being able to push through, you know, you guys are an incredible success story. But it's one of the reasons why I wanted to share it is because it's such a... it takes so much work. There's so much that goes on behind the scenes. There's so much thinking that has to go on behind the scenes. Again, even after spending three years to build a revolutionary product.
And, you know, and I'll just say like, I played the TCG. It's, it's really good. Like I was not expecting to like it as much as I did. You know, I played all of the modern ones that are out there, you know, Star Wars and the Lorkana and like whatever. And those are fine, but there's nothing, they're not particularly innovative. I would say like they're good games, but they're not particularly innovative. And I played yours. I was like, OK, I have not played something like this before.
I was impressed. I was not expecting to be that impressed. So I will give my unpaid endorsement, as it were, at least as a core experience. I only played once. I haven't tried to break it yet, but we'll see when the game comes out. I'll maybe pick up a few. copies. I think we're getting kind of low on time here. There are a bunch of other things I wanted to dig into, including your unique card system, which is fascinating to me. But maybe we could dig into it just for a few minutes here.
talk to me about where yeah good i have no time limits if you want to spend more time with me if you have a time limit that's up to you but i'm just i'm just okay i appreciate that all right we'll go we can go another five or ten minutes here uh so then then i i because i'm switching from the marketing angle which
glad we we're laying it on into this what the the idea of the uh unique card uh and printing cards that nobody else has and and how this works so we algorithmically generate cards at soulforge fusion again you you and i talked about this some right but we
though i'll just i'll tee up the way we do it and you talk about the way you do it and we can like kind of compare and contrast because i find this it's fascinating right digital printing we could do anything we want right and so keyforge kind of started off this like digital printing trend by but they printed
they just algorithmically generated the decks for the most part, right? Every card was like a traditional TCG where you have 300 cards in a set and those are just the cards. And then they build you a deck of whatever, 30 cards that's unique to you. But the cards are basically the same everywhere. And they've modified a little bit.
over time, but that was the basics of it, where you're just digitally printing the configuration. We evolved that and said, look, no, we're actually going to digitally print the cards as well, but we are not going to... Some cards are traditional, like...
where it's just a regular card. But others, we did kind of a splicing system where it'd be like adjective nouns. So it could be a fire-breathing dragon and an ice yeti. And then those could splice in a different way. So it could be an ice dragon and a fire-breathing yeti. And so... while there are 20 000 possible cards that could come from those combinations in reality there's only a few hundred like
fragments so people can understand what those cards are and there's no like if you see an ice yeti everyone's ice yeti is the same there's no difference to them and so we did it that way to help people understand what's going on but that so there's some algorithmic generation of the cards
Our Forgeborn are a little bit more complicated. They all have different powers, but there's still a subset of powers they can all get. There's maybe a dozen different variations for each one, a couple more as the expansions come out. But we kept it within this kind of somewhat of a box of like, here's unique possibilities.
They'll never see the same deck twice, but we want to keep some variations. Nobody will ever have a card you can't possibly get, but they'll always have a deck you can't possibly get.
You guys are more traditional TCG, so you don't have the same tool we do of unique decks, but you went further down this road of unique cards. So let's talk about how you did that and what that looks like. Okay. First things first. I mean... we wanted to bring unique cards within our game because we wanted to renew with the the fascination of opening boosters with excitement of opening boosters you know and opening boosters nowadays
Online, you have every card, you know, every card in advance. They are all revealed in advance. This is something we don't want to do. By the way, we want to reveal all of the cards of Altered, set one before the release. So some are going to remain hidden. from everyone until the last minute. And also the unique cards are made to renew your experience at any point. Even if you know all the rares and commands from the edition, sometimes you will open a booster with a card.
which you will have to have a look to because this is a unique card you might have a good one or a bad one you don't know but you need to check it you know and that could be that could be the next black lotus that could be just a one cent card you don't know until you've analyzed it. So we thought it would be cool to have this sense of uniqueness, also because of the gaming experience where you could come with...
with a deck which you couldn't do without a unicorn because a unicorn would open a new space of playing, of ruling that you could play with. Also because you could surprise your opponent with cons that they would never know anything about. And we were like, okay. We love that, but we don't want it to become everything. Like, eventually, Soulforce is more about every card is unique. In our game, we only play with three unique cards into a deck.
Very convenient because we don't want people to spend some time to reach every single card that someone is playing because there is no standard. They are all different from each other's. It would take so much time. you just focus on three unique cards from time to time that someone could play. And that's a sense of surprise. I mean, you go to a tournament...
You have your own decks that you've brewed yourself. And at some point, you have your surprise card. No one knows about it. Because the way we design the cards, if you want to come to the design of the card, there is an algorithm. Yes, the algorithm is stating that This card is unique. So just to remind you about the family system, our game is made of common rares and uniques, and they all belong to the same families. So let's say you have a type of card that's...
WhiteRat, I don't know. And you have WhiteRat existing as a command, WhiteRat existing as a rare, and WhiteRat existing as a unique. They all share the same name, just one will be command, rare or unique. The rare is an alternate, a better version of the common usually. The rare exists in two versions, one which belongs to the faction of the common one, because we have six factions within the game, and you play mono-faction.
since you play mana faction, to give you more options of play, the rares comes in one from the same faction as the common, and the second rare belongs to another faction, which means you can use it within another faction. And the rare itself... is hand designed to match the other faction needs so let's say this one is doing soldiers maybe this one will do squirrels because it will belong to the green faction which is more about nature you know so it's hand design and then comes
the unicorns and the unicorns have at least one thing that belongs to their family which let's say they do soldiers in the blue family This one is going to make soldiers for sure because we are going to lock the main identity of the card to the card. But then everything else around is going to change into something else.
So we use color pies, authorizations, and so on. And we use a rational game design system, which means that every single stats you use for a card has a weight, has a grading. Let's say you give... one in in in mana cost and because it's a heavier mana cost you lose four in weight which means you have more space to add
pluses to your weight and maybe your maximum weight is 20 and you have strength and defense good stats but mana cost lowers that's how you balance the cards but this is very difficult Yeah, that doesn't work. I just want to say to everybody out there, that does not work on its own. Everybody thinks that you can just make a spreadsheet and that spreadsheet will tell you how to balance the card. That does not work. It's just a basic principle of how it works. Then you have to...
what weights what and this this requires a lot of playtesting and expertise and then you have to understand that some keywords are not matching with others so you have to understand whichever rulings could fall off. together and what it's going to create, if it's going to create a monstruosity or not, then you need to forbid the system to create that. So you will learn what the system can do. You will forbid it to create some stuff that doesn't work by learning.
And the more you test, the lower the amount of things you can do is set, but also the better it is. And the last step in the process, the way we did it here. is for every single unique card so every single family we have a hundred and i'm not sure about my numbers and 68 different cards in the corset i believe
And so, which means that you have more than a hundred unique cards because we only have the characters as unique cards, not spells and permanents. And those hundred characters all have one family and we print 200 unique cards for each. So we generate 200 different versions via our generator for one family of unique cards. We have spreadsheets, sheets of unique cards with all the same base ones, but different generations of stats.
mana cost and and powers and we just grade them manually so we have a team of pro players they do that the four of them and they grade the 200 cards individually each until we have
a score of at least 75 or 80 positive percent. I don't remember the number they have chosen. As long as you don't have at least 80% of cards that are considered as positive assets for the game, they just... continue modifying the algorithm based on the cards that have been refused by the play team until we reach this 80% satisfaction. That's when they are validated to go in production and we go to the next card and we go to the next card. So it's a lot of human work.
to teach the algorithm. So you functionally have 100 cards that are tagged as this. These will be turned into unique cards. Every one of those 100 will generate 200. Total unique cards that will be sprinkled throughout the set. So you're looking at the... And then it's actually a manual review process. No, no, no, no. What I mean is that in the set, you might find a...
10 000 of the same unique cards it's just that for because this is a human task we needed to choose a number uh which is 200 which believe was doable so we've just Based on this 200, we validated the counts we believed were correct. And based on the counts that were not correct, we corrected the algorithm. so that he couldn't generate those bad cons anymore one by one until the generation of cons
generation after generation until we found a generation where 80% or more were considered positive. That's when we stopped. That's when we knew that the algorithm for the generation of these unique cards was good enough to generate at least 80% of positive cards. based on whatever's the number of counts you would print overall. Got it.
Got it. Okay, so you never actually human validate the cards, the unique cards that are generated. You just do a sample test to validate. So if 20% of the cards are not, 80% is good, that means 20% are not. So that means there's still going to be thousands of... these not good cards even in your past situation right yeah but what we consider bad cards doesn't mean that they are not playable from a ruling perspective it's just that we consider they are
slightly not on par with what we expect from a unique card compared to another type of card, which is slightly better. You know, it's like, I don't know what the percent is. It's maybe 5% or 10% in terms of consideration of raw power. that we said, okay, unique cards need to be 10% above rare cards, but not 200%, you know? I see. So the more rare cards are better, the unique cards are better, but they're not.
too much better or too much worse you hope no okay i'm fascinated i'm fascinated yeah so we yeah we we went through a lot of work to get ourselves to a place where we could validate our system with the you know 20 000 cards and we had ways to surface the cards that would show up uh yours is even more complicated and fascinating so i cannot wait to see this thing in the wild uh it is a incredible yeah no i believe it i believe it um
All right. Well, unfortunately, I am running out of time. I could deep dive on this for another hour, I'm sure. I love... I love the fact that you have pushed the boundaries of design and that you are playing in the same space. I think it's really interesting to see the different directions we took the same.
types of technology. I can't wait to play it some more myself and see it. This will probably be coming out right around the time it's releasing. It's releasing in August of 2024. That's right. We've just moved the date to 13th of September. Okay, okay. Oh, you also face the same problems I do that it's really hard to do these things. So you have to put sometimes a lot of states gets pushed back. All right, great, great. So we'll have all that information up and link to the episode when it posts.
Thank you so much, Eric. This was really fun. I enjoyed our conversation. We got a chance to chat in person At Gamma, I'm glad we got to cover a little bit more of your background and varied history, which we didn't get to talk about there. So this was super useful. So if people do want to check out the Altered TCG or see more of your stuff or anything else, where should they go? Altered.gg.
Very easy. On YouTube, we have a YouTube channel and you will easily find the trailer and a video named The What Is. So we have a very beautiful four minutes video that explains most of what I've said in four minutes. Very convenient, very well.
made, just check it out. Or follow us on social as well. It's a way of doing it. You didn't even have to listen to this whole hour plus of chat. We could have just watched a four-minute video and we would have been covered. All right. Good to know now. All the basics. All the basics. All right. Thanks so much, Eric.
See you. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platforms, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listen to reviews and shares make a huge difference and help us grow this community and allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you.
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