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 could find episodes and more at ThinkLikeAGameDesigner.com
including landmark titles like R's Magica, Over the Edge, Everway, and Dungeons & Dragons' third edition. In addition, Jonathan became a children's book author creating his very successful book, Grandmother Fish, the first book designed to teach evolution to preschoolers, and the story about how his game design skills and the lessons he learned through designing games applied to his process of making a hugely successful children's book come towards the end of the episode. It's really fascinating. We talk a lot about the process of designing Dungeons & Dragons.
We talk about the process of making a huge difference between how the game was created and how the process went from moving from second edition where the game was owned by TSR into third edition where the skills learned from Richard Garfield and Scaffolias about how to make great games and how to break games down into their individual parts is applied to Dungeons & Dragons third edition.
We talk about the counterintuitive lessons behind the open gaming license for Dungeons & Dragons and why they were so eager to make the game open but to make the world closed and you'll understand what that means when you get into the episode.
We also share a personal story about when Jonathan and I met in person over 12 years ago at Burning Man and there's a specific game that Jonathan designed for playing at live events like that that had a profound impact on my life. It literally changed the way that I structured my life and looked at the world.
I will leave it to you to listen to the episode to hear that because it was a really great moment and I think it actually surprised Jonathan and he didn't realize how much that story had impacted me until now and so you get to hear his genuine reactions to it.
This is a great episode. Jonathan is a legend in the game design industry. We talk about a lot of how he started. There was no real rule book on games. There was no process for making games. There was not a lot of good games in existing and he was either there directly or adjacent to all the people that were making the groundwork, the foundations upon which we talked about.
There were foundations upon which my teachings and my lessons have built upon around the whole modern game community. So this is an awesome podcast with one of the legends. So I'll stop the introduction here and without further ado, here is Jonathan Tweet.
Hello and welcome. I am here with Jonathan Tweet. Jonathan, it is great to have you here. Yeah, thanks very much for having me spent a long time. Yes, yes, it has. So we're going to get into a little bit of our connection and interesting backstory eventually. But I always like to start these podcasts by getting into the backstory for my guests. You have a very prestigious career, which people already know back. I'll tell them in the preamble.
But tell me a little bit about how you got started in games, how you got started designing and what we'll dig in from there. Yeah, so my real entry into professional game design was when my buddy Mark Ryan Hagen and I self published a role playing game called Ars Magica and I was back in 1987 and before that, though, I had spent years trying to get freelance work published for games like Roonquas, Call of the Thulu, Tunnels and Trolls.
And so that taught me a little bit about game design. I had a lot of sort of practice before I went into self publishing and then before I was trying to do professional freelancing, I spent years creating my own games, you know, when I was 12 after playing Dungeons and Dragons, I couldn't afford the next game,
but I had a lot of work to do with the game. So I started to work with the artist, the artist, the artist, the artist, the artist, the artist, the artist, and so I just read the back cover copy and I created my own game, sort of inspired by that. And that really started me on and designing games. And I think it's really important for people who want to be game designers is, you've, you've got to be designing games before you go pro.
And one of the things that's a pretty common thread amongst the guests here and people who've been successful in the industry is, you know, you do the job for free and on your own and for a while before you actually end up getting paid for it. Being 12 when you first design your first role playing game after playing Dungeons and Dragons, you know, that's a, that's a bit unusual.
What do you think it is about you that kind of got you going immediately down that path? Like, was it, were you, were you raised to kind of create things for you, just a storyteller to begin with? Like, I always think it's interesting. People that start quite, quite so young. I mean, I made up games when I was 12, but it was mostly my transformers battling each other. Okay, sure.
Very complicated. Well, I guess there are two things and one is I did come from a creative family. My father was an English professor and he really encouraged me to be creative and, and you know, read science fiction. I used to teach classes in science fiction. And so I was kind of steeped in that already. And, you know, as one of those kids who tried to make up his own language in grade school.
And, and, and, and like secret codes and whatever. And so, maybe it was kind of natural for me to fall into. And the other thing to remember is that, well, you back then, the games were not that good. Like, you, you, you know, you, you read one of the old games and you kind of get the idea that you could do it.
You know, today, you look at something like Dungeons and Dragons and it's, you know, so glossy and well edited and well put together and thoroughly thought out that, you know, it would be really hard to match, but games back then, you know, we're mostly designed by people who had not grown up playing role playing games. And they were experimenting and.
And it wasn't too hard to feel like you could do it yourself. Yeah, yeah, it's actually one of the things that's really interesting to me, you know, and whatever. One of the reasons why I made this podcast right is to start to like make the knowledge more ever present and institutionalized and available and create a common language around design.
You know, for my generation, slightly after yours, it was, we already had so many additional tools available that was still very formative that the idea of game design as a, you know, as an art form is still pretty formative and nowadays are so much available.
Yeah, and you know, you coming at this early on without having any of those principles and tools, where there, you know, some specific lessons or insights that you felt like we're kind of big breakthrough moments for you as you started moving from, you know, 12 year old designer to, you know, professional designer, like what, what, what, where did you turn to for insights or how did you, how did you craft those as you went along.
Yeah, that's great question. So another thing about the really early days is that there were sort of more games than there were games supplements. And so today, you know, once you've bought your rule books, there's no end of other things you can buy within that same game, but, but back in the day, there just wasn't much to buy. And T SR was actually they published Dungeons and Dragons, but they were pretty slow to publish like adventures and world settings.
And instead what they did is they published other games like Metamorphosis Alpha or, they had a war game, fighting the skies and whatever. And, and so it was really natural if you were a gamer back then to spend your money buying other games rather than more products for the same game.
And so I ended up playing Metamorphosis Alpha and Gamma World and Roon Quest and Traveler and, and it was sort of being able to see all these very different ways that, you could pull things together to, to make a rule set and, you know, very different assumptions, very different approaches. And, and that I think made it easy for me later on when I was going to, you know, create a game system or whatever.
I had a lot of examples to go by, good examples to emulate, bad things to avoid and sort of that breadth really, really helped me out. And games like Roon Quest had a kind of a core system so that there were one or two ways that almost everything worked, unlike Dungeons and Dragons where you had a sort of a different subsystem for each game or each thing you did in the game. So, Clarex turning on dead worked one way and saving throws worked another way and attacks worked another way.
And, tunnels and trolls, I even hold up as an example, they had a really flexible system for saving throws that I actually ended up kind of emulating in, in our smogica, which sort of uses the same system that people later. So, that people later saw in third edition Dungeons and Dragons. So, it's, it was seeing what everybody else did good and bad. I don't know if there was a breakthrough moment, but it was sort of this raw experience with different ways of doing things.
Well, I mean, it makes perfect sense. I mean, the, you know, play lots of different games is one of the first pieces of advice I can give people, which is easiest to follow in a sense, but also play that don't just play it like a player, right? Like don't just play it where you get totally lost in the experience, like zoom out a little bit and say, okay, wait, what systems are moving me here?
Where's the emotional impact? Where's the play to space coming from? How do I, and what could I pull from this to take, you know, if I were going to make my Frankenstein monster in the future of systems? Right? It's a great, it's a great tool and, and this, you know, this consolidation, this, there's a couple different routes. I want to go here. One, there's, you know, this, you know, understanding that building systems that can support multiple different modes of play,
different expansions, multiple different, you know, adventures, right? That's like, obviously, becomes very, very important as, as game systems become the dominant mode going forward, both in, you know, trading card games and role playing games and even, you know, expandable games, you know, is a huge thing. I wonder this jumps out of the timeline a little bit, but if you think that there's a, in a sense, more challenge now, right?
In the one sense today, we have more great games to, to peel from, but on the other hand, people tend to play one or two main games now more so than they used to. It's a little bit less diversity that creates some potential problems, right? If you're a magic player, magic player, if you're a does your dragon's player, your does your dragon's player.
And yeah, sure, there's plenty of different worlds you can play, but you're still playing the same damn rules. Do you think that there's a challenge there for, you know, people that are, you know, becoming more narrow, either as a, as someone trying to become a designer and learning more or even as a, someone creating games to get exposure and, you know, is it worth it to craft a new system in an RPG when you could just be making a module for D&D?
Yeah, I think it is, it is harder for one thing that games are longer, right? Like the games used to be kind of thin. And so you could read them and try to figure out how they worked pretty easily. And they were often a little bit of a mishmash. They were sort of less streamlined or less coherent than games are now. So that meant you might see multiple subsystems within a game that don't necessarily go together, but they give you then in this one game that's only 64 pages long.
And so it seemed like, you know, in the old days, there was sort of more fervor and more creative diversity. And partly because people hadn't figured things out that well. So there were bad ideas and good ideas and things all thrown together. I think these days it is.
There's so much more being offered and there's so much more within a game setting so that, for instance, if you like apocalypse world, now there's, you know, I don't know how many games that are that are powered by the apocalypse. And so you can play all sorts of different settings with sort of the same philosophy, the same game design philosophy behind them.
And it also makes it harder to sort of stand out. There's so much more out there now that, you know, if you try to self publish your one of many in a environment where there are tons of different games.
So yeah, I think on the one hand, it's easier than ever to do something like it's really easy to do, you know, like a fifth edition compatible adventure or product and get it out there and it can be print a print on demand or it can be PDF only and people know they can use it without giving up their game because it's compatible with fifth edition.
And so it's really easy to get something out there, but, but I think you're on to something when you say, maybe it's harder to get an appreciation for the scope of the games that are out there and to have sort of the breadth of knowledge that you need to, if you want to do something that's, you know, really new.
Yeah, I think I think the, you know, for those that are interested in in a career and design, it's absolutely critical that you push yourself outside of your normal kind of comfort zone of play, right. And that's not just saying, oh, I'm going to play different role playing games systems if you make role playing games, but also like, hey, I'm going to try new trading card games, casino games or whatever, like, you know, any kinds of things that are out there, party games, like see what things where you could pull interesting different mechanics and create more kind of grist for the mill of create.
I think is absolutely critical. That's something everybody has control over when it comes to the, how do you reach audiences and get people to pay attention to you in a world that's overcrowded with games like it's the exact corollary to games are very easy to make now.
Yeah, therefore there are more games there for a harder to break through, you know, it's just that's I think the biggest challenge. I think most modern designers face even, you know, even those with with pedigree and a reasonable audience is still a real problem. That's right. So I want to, I want to speak to innovation here and I'm going to, I'm going to linger on your game ever way.
Oh, great. Okay. One of the more, this is a game probably you have not heard about a lot of people haven't heard about. That's right. I found it to be incredibly fascinating. Thank you. It's a really pushed the boundaries of design. Yeah. And so why don't you let's talk about that game a little bit. We'll assume mostly on this doesn't know it. So kind of talk about what it is and how you got to that kind of design space.
Sure. So sort of the core idea of, well, one of the core ideas of it ever way is that instead of creating a character by looking at a bunch of words and numbers in a rule book. You're presented with a bunch of art cards that show fantasy scenes from different worlds and cultures. And you pick some of those out of the pool to create your character and then you build a story around the character that you've created and what those scenes mean.
So you might have one of the pictures might be of a warrior or a wizard and then you say that's your character. Others might be, you know, this is my family or this is something I see in a vision or this is my arch enemy. And you sort of pull out of your unconscious a story about your about this hero. And then since everyone is creating characters from different art cards.
You might have somebody who's a warrior from the frozen wastelands, you know, far to the north. And you might be somebody else who's from some highly civilized culture. And the way you bring them all together is you assume that the characters are going to be able to travel from one one world to another. And any sort of culture might be found on any sort of world with any sort of people. And so you don't have to even know the game setting sort of in order to create your character.
You don't have to ask the game master right like, you know, what's the culture like here. What's the religion, whatever you, you can, you can make it up. And that's the world that you came from. And even if no one's heard of it before, that's fine. So that's one of the big founding features of the game.
And we wanted the game specifically to be something that non gamers could appreciate. And I felt like, you know, the simulation value in Dungeons and Dragons and they're like rolling multiple dice and having these combats at last round after round. And then you know, the sub systems for all the skills you can do. Was just too heavy. It's just too Matthew for people who want to be creative. And so.
The conflict resolution system or the, you know, task resolution or event system is all based on a set of 36 cards that are sort of like the major arcana from the. So you have these. You know, the card of the fish and that represents the soul. And there's the card of the protector and that represents the powers of fire and air in.
And action and got eight cards that represent different sorts of deities and are all linked to different elements and sometimes some of them are linked to planets or astrological signs and. And then the idea is this. When you draw one of these cards, it provides sort of a meaningful input, not a numeric input. So if you get the card drowning in armor, it means that your protective measures have turned against you.
And so that's a bad card to get, especially if you're trying to protect somebody or protect yourself from something, but it doesn't have a numerical value. And the character stats were very simple. Since everything was sort of this new age, you feel to it with the cards and the people from all different cultures. Your stats were sort of the four Aristotelian elements, earth, air, fire and water. And those all represent parts of the parts of the person.
You know, your energy, your resilience, your intellect, the depth of your soul. And so, if a pretty simple system for assigning those points to your, your character and defining who you are. And then you wrap that all up and you've got a system where.
And then you have the sort of unusual one of a kind heroes band together and travel from one world to another world and sort of like Star Trek, you know, go to the new planet and see what the weird thing is there and cope with that and be a good person and stand up for good values or, you know, kill the monster.
Yeah. And so that's that's every way. Yeah. So I'm fascinated, you know, to take to take something that is, you know, kind of classically right like D&D and role playing games somewhat evolved from like war gaming, right? That's right. A very crunchy system. Yeah. And very much numbers based and very rules based. That's right. This is how we move. This is what we do. And then to evolve it.
And every way the first game that I came across that was this very diced list, very like anti, you know, anti rules and certain sense, or there are rules on. It's right. You know, it's it's a and that what got you to there. Cause I think that's just like it's something that has been such a powerful thing.
I've had a lot of RPG designer guests on the podcast and a lot of them that are broken the rules, you know, and sort of, you know, designing games like microscope and fiasco and other ones that kind of pushed in different directions. But I feel like you really opened the door here and I'm curious what motivated you and how you got to that to that design.
Yeah, that's an interesting interesting question. So at at the about the same time I was working on another game that was more miniatures oriented like it was about aliens have invaded earth and are pretending to be friendly, but you're part of the resistance. And it was meant to be played with miniatures. If you wanted to us just a miniature skirmish battle or, you know, as a role playing game. And so, you know, I definitely have my rules crunchy side.
And and for this, the idea was and I don't think it didn't really come true. The idea was that we wanted to be able to reach people that Dungeons and Dragons didn't reach. If if Wizards of the Coast was going to publish a role playing game and really wanted to shoot for the moon and swing for the fences, then it needed to be something that could reach an audience that Dungeons and Dragons wasn't already reaching or also it always, you know, be second fiddle in that at best in that territory.
Yeah, yeah, and it's very interesting to me for a couple reasons. Right. One, I mean, I think there's a version of this that it let you know it asks less of a player in terms of like I need to understand all these rules and all this math of these numbers, but it asks a little bit more of the player in terms of like I need there's some fuzziness in terms of like I need to I see a picture.
I need to be able to tell a story more openly about what's going on. So in a sense it's it's a you know there's a different kind of barrier you're putting in front of the player for some people they're going to love that for other people it's going to be a little tough.
Right. And and the pictures are there in a way to make being creative easier. And you know, I think it's still a big ask for a lot of people and maybe back then I didn't understand how intimidating it can be for a lot of people to try to be creative.
But for years that before then I had been trying to come up with ways to help people be more creative in their role playing games. That's really why I like role playing games is that regular people get the opportunity to be creative to do something new with their friends that known's done before and it expresses a little bit of themselves and get to explore ideas and I really love that.
And so I did a role playing game called over the edge, which like every way the idea was you should be able to create a character without having to hear about what the setting is. So the setting is sort of modern day maybe a couple years in the future on an island where kind of anything goes it's this wild like Willie must burrow's inner zone sort of thing.
And so since it's the real world, you don't need to be told what the setting is and because it's kind of anything goes kind of weekly world news paranormal. You can kind of make up whatever character you want and I and sort of like every way you come up with some weird character from someplace in the world and then you meet other weird characters who've all for one reason another come to this island.
And I remember I was running a game at a convention and young woman came by who was not really familiar with role playing games and wanted to know what we were doing. And I try to pitch to her like you you can make up whatever character you want and she seemed not impressed by that and so that got me thinking like what would it take to get people who aren't already steeped in role playing games to get them to want to create.
A character to think of a character and so the cards with the images on them are an answer to that right like if you tell someone. Look at these 90 beautiful color art cards and pick five of them that that speak to you and now make up a story based on them like I've seen people who are not gamers.
And I'm going to surprise themselves like what a cool character they come up with or how fun it is to tell a story because the cards give them that that crutch whereas you know the over the edge game I had done earlier is all sort of pulled out of your head.
Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. So and then the other thing that I've I thought about recently when when kind of just again doing the research for this podcast I honestly had forgotten about every way and I was like, oh yeah, this was really cool. I was talking about it and you know, there's still a there's still a core fan base out there and the silver edition that got made and that's right.
And but I think it's like when you're building a game that's so based around the art as guide so much of that comes down to like the choices that you made as a designer or whoever was doing the illustrations. Yeah, you know push in that direction. And now with the modern era where we have you know the ability to create a I art at at scale, you know suddenly you could rebuild this thing with almost any theme or create a far more open universe potential.
That's right. Which I I think could be really fascinating in a way to it could almost I could almost imagine a slightly different system where something where like you know you creating a I art as part of the game and the I art coming back at you as some ways to resolve things.
And it would be a really fascinating game system that gives you a little bit more little bit more control but pushing in different directions like I haven't I haven't fully thought this through but I'm going to be a fun thing to talk about with you because I think there's something like I again just full disclosure. I don't want to get into any of the like contentiousness around a I art.
But what it does to unlock like a new game mode that would be impossible otherwise like that's really interesting. So I'm curious what if that's what you sure hit on something that. For a lot of games, especially when like you're trying to launch a new game or whatever the art is the most difficult part right that it's expensive to buy art. It takes a long time to generate art and then the art always gets filtered through what the what the artist wants.
So so that has long been a challenge like all the way back to I don't know first edition of our smogica it was a challenge to get the art we wanted on you know on time under budget with the vision that we wanted and so yeah the possibilities of AI art that's kind of opening that up so that that bottleneck gets it's open. I think you're right that there could be a lot of really interesting possibilities. There are already.
You know there's a service online where you can create a miniature custom create a miniature and then have it sent to you. Guys in my game group have that you know their characters created up for for 30 bucks and that's another example of you know what used to be so difficult to get a miniature cast and now it's pretty easy. Even even as a one off and so.
I guess I look forward to seeing what people come up with along those lines the idea that you just sort of floated that you can somehow feed stuff in to the system and it comes back to you with original art based on your props that then has an effect on the game that's yeah that's pretty interesting.
Yeah yeah no I to me I always ask this question whenever it comes to new technology that exists right what new designs based is open up what new experiences open up what problems that existed before does this now solve right so yeah when we just you know for my own story working with working with Richard Garfield we did when they're back when the iPhone and iPads came out we were like oh wow.
This is a great medium for making games that we made the original version of soul for just a digital trading card game when that wasn't really a thing back then right and then now with digital printing the ability to make one of a kind decks right and be able to have those things we exist and scan and and QR codes letting you scan them in your account we now have
a self-portrait you know where you can buy a physical deck that's just yours no one has to have it it could be in your online account and you can play it online and have those things right and then you know we did I was essentially was the first deck building game to go into VR and there was cool elements around
yeah maxing like a like a tabletop thing and so I think these things like when I look into technologies like AI yeah technologies like blockchain like these things like that are you know there's obviously plenty of upsides downsides interesting challenges the companies these technologies but I love being at that forefront and saying okay what what can I do now that I couldn't do five years ago
and what does that mean for the craft of design I think it's just like a fascinating time to be and space to be exploring yeah I yeah I'll be really curious to see what what people come up with okay so we spent we spent time we've jumped into the future already I I want to make sure we cover a sufficient parts of the past because if I don't talk about a does the dragons then I will get riots from my eyes I think that's right so you know being being one of the lead designers for
Dungeons Dragon's Third Edition huge deal yeah I had a multi cook on the podcast before yeah but I'd love to hear this story from your side what was it like what what prompted it what what was the choices the tough choices along the way we'll we'll we'll dig into it I'm sure yeah yeah so yeah so as you can imagine the choice of who gets to be on the third edition design team that was a pretty fraught or politically sensitive or emotionally charged decision and so there there was a lot of
back and forth and some changes on on the team and for a while Peter Accerson stepped in and ran the team personally in order to sort of get it on track and I had started as sort of the representative of the non T. S. R. people like the other people on the team were from T. S. R.
and so I was sort of bringing the wizards of the coast angle to things Richard Garfield set up a really a really strong R&D department that could really analyze rules game rules and game systems and improve them and fine tune them and understand them and take them apart and put them back together again and so I sort of brought that to the to the team and is there I just to the great story but I will interrupt you
often sure but like that that piece is really important right like people were generally bad at games back in the day and that this idea of being actually able to break them down what were there anything's about the process of like what made how was I know Richard that I work with Richard I know he's great at this individually but how do you build a team that was great at this what does it mean to have a team that's great at this yeah so he actually had a project that was we
wanted to learn how to understand games we're going to learn how to how to analyze them and what's good about them and we're going to break it down into sort of components you know like speed of play and number of players and what are the what are the things that go wrong if you don't look out for them like a great example that he
gave us is the sort of the chip taking component there are a lot of a lot of multiplayer games where you know five of us are sitting around the table and every turn with my turn I get to decide who to attack and who to who to sort of weaken and you can think of it like who to take chips from and if you had a game where everyone started the game with
chips and every turn you take a chip away from somebody you could play that game like that and then you could end up with a winner of like whoever has the most chips or whatever but but it would all be there's no there's no rule support for tactics it's all personality and psychology and a lot of games are chip taking games but have sort of some rules
and then you can play it on top of it so it looks like you're playing according these rules but what you're really doing is you know try not to try not to pull ahead so people don't go down on you try not to draw attention to yourself so people don't take revenge on you and you know harbor your resources until the end and then win
and so by by discussing how rules work how games work in sort of abstract ways we were we literally put together a document that where you could assign points to games based on their different components I think they ended up making a textbook out of it Robert Goodcher a scuffle ice and Richard and and so there was there was an effort in in addition to whatever games you were working on and stuff that you were doing
everyone was also trying to figure out how games work and fly those those criteria those rubrics to new games that we were working on or games that were submitted and and that really that made the team really good at what we called developing a game like you have a game concept
and then it would get developed and a lot of that maybe came out of magic right so the legend set came in from one of Peter's friends was a super enthusiastic magic player who and that that guy pulled in all sorts of stuff from the D&D campaigns that Peter I could sort of run
and it was full of all these great ideas but they were all unbalanced and was like wow you can't do this with that card or whatever and so what the what the R&D team had to do was see what was good about what was in there and preserve that and maybe even bump that up and dial down the stuff that was out of control or whatever and so so that experience of taking a magic set taking a you know a big idea for a cool magic set and then giving it the
polish it needs to be a balanced magic set that that plays pretty closely into doing the same thing with games like what what's going to make this game rule work or does this game rule work at all or what does it have what effect does it have on the length of play what the effect does it have on the number of choices you're making in a turn.
Yep, yeah, that's great. Yeah and that book the book your reference is called the characteristics of games that lays out those fundamental principles and then that concept of being able to sort of move through the kind of core of the the heart of the game engine design into component and develop design and development is what form the foundation of my book as well as building off of them in terms of how you think about these processes and how you kind of can go step by step
through what what does it mean to refine a game from where's the fun what's the concept to is this balance does this work does this make sense you know all the way through that process. So okay great thanks for for that for that detour because I think it's like it literally is like this you know we started this conversation talking about like you had to start designing games when there were no fundamentals that's right and you were part of it you know either in some ways directly in some ways
adjacent to it's right part of the process that led to these fundamentals getting established and built I just I think it's one thank you to like it's great to call out and see so people can kind of see this evolution is going so okay so just to bring us back into the story with the coast had acquired TSR there's a very contentious process for taking what was second edition
does is drag it's turning into third is your dragons bringing in you're the iconic representative of the with the coastway bringing this game design philosophy and style into the TSR mix of the trade whatever throw all the things in and here we go in terms of the mechanics so okay go go from there right and so you know the the folks on the TSR side had lots of experience working with Dungeons and Dragons but not a lot of experience doing a new game or even a new addition
like even you know the second edition of Dungeons and Dragons didn't really you know go all the way and and handle the issues with the game design you know it's it clean things up a lot and you know the editing was way better but it didn't handle things like armor class goes the wrong direction or that sort of thing and so the first design that the team did before I was put on it didn't feel like Dungeons and Dragons and got
some real negative responses in a meeting where it was it was released and so there was sort of like a back to back the first principles back to the drawing board and and that's sort of what I showed up and if you look at the core system for third edition where you know your role your role a die and you add a bonus based on your skill or training and you add a bonus based on your your raw ability that's straight
out of ars magica where you had the same same mechanic and in fact the same year ars magica came out 1987 my ponsmith came out with cyberpunk which had not exactly the same system but very close to the same system
so I think that it was kind of in the water I had gotten the system I drive it basically from tunnels and trolls which had like I said I had a really flexible saving throw system and they sort of didn't take advantage of it and in some of their supplementary products so mercenary spies and private eyes was based on the same system they sort of move toward
you know really taking advantage of their system but didn't go all the way and then so ars magica was like I see what they're doing I'm going to just start over and going to do it right and I ported that system basically into third edition that became the core system great and then the you know the decision around kind of the open gaming license and the building that right that that has become a hot button issue over the years it was a revolutionary I'm sure it was contentious
yeah always contentious time talk to me about your your take on that and what role did you play in that that decision process right so so the first moment of gaming licenses some people might not know so it's just brief brief brief overview what that means sure so 30th edition change Dungeons and Dragons forever by coming out with an open gaming license that basically allowed people to do products that were compatible with Dungeons and Dragons as long as they didn't use
the name Dungeons and Dragons the trademarks or and then certain characteristic things were off the table like you couldn't use mine flares you couldn't use the the world's the D&D world's but you could you know create a bugbear and you know have an adventure with bug bears and silver pieces and plus one swords and all the regular stuff and and that was that was fine and that changed everything so in the year 2000 when third edition debuted if you went around
Gencon you know the really big game convention in the Midwest many many of the booths were staffed by people who are trying to get you to stop playing Dungeons and Dragons and play their game instead and that was they were all there to find Dungeons and Dragons players and get them on board with their games so that they could start selling their products to D&D players
well one year later 2001 Gencons back and very many of these booths were staffed by people who were trying to get you to play more Dungeons and Dragons but by their adventure by their gear book by their monster manual and play Dungeons and Dragons and so instead of everyone trying to peel customers away from us we had all these people who are dog piling and trying to like improve our network so now it's like everywhere you look it's going to be people playing Dungeons and Dragons
and that boy that was a huge change you saw it in one year so that was all the brainchild of Ryan Dancy and his big thing was network effects he said the number one advantage of Dungeons and Dragons is lots of people play Dungeons and Dragons if hardly anybody played Dungeons and Dragons there wouldn't be much reason to play Dungeons and Dragons because you would want to play whatever it is the game that everybody else is playing
and so he said let's just get more people playing Dungeons and Dragons let's increase that network so and he had the vision for it and he was right and it made a huge difference and it's very much kind of a West Coast thing right like we're going to give some stuff away to our competitors that they're going to use to make a profit but we're going to benefit like that
you know Hasbro didn't really understand that and people from TSR didn't really understand that and so there was real resistance and that and you've seen it that resistance has popped up over and over again it popped up with fourth edition which had a crappy license and it popped up again
was it just last year where Wizards was going to like retool everything and so it is a weird West Coast idea that lots of I guess Midwesterners and East Coasters just had a hard time getting their head around but man it worked gangbusters it really was something and I have always believed in systems that sort of transcend a single game so the first game I bought role playing game after Dungeons and Dragons was metamorphosis alpha and I was angry because it did not use the same thing
combat system it didn't use the same hit point system I was like I already know how combat works I already know how to roll dice for my character why are you making me do it a different way and it's not even better like it's just different and so I think that's when the seat was planted
in me to want to do something like the D20 system if I ever got a chance and so one of the things that I was working on when the D20 system sort of finally got announced was I was working on a version of Gamma World that was going to use the D&D system and my buddy Chris Premis was working on sort of a Wusha Hong Kong film fantasy martial arts game that also would use basically the core system we didn't call it the 20 because it wasn't the idea wasn't we're going to let other people use D&D
the idea was we internally are going to create other little games that use the D&D system and when I brought that to Ryan Dansey he said he would not do that in a million years and so both of our projects got shelved and I was angry because that's what I wanted to do since I bought Metamorphosis Alpha was to create a game about mutants with lasers using the D&D system and I was this close to doing it but he was right because what he needed to do when he took over the
when he took over being the what did they call him the creative director for Dungeons and Dragons for role playing games his number one goal was to get everybody back on the same page so T.S.R. had driven Dungeons and Dragons in the ground by creating system you know world after world after world after world and sometimes they were like sub worlds so domains of dread was a sub world of some other world that they were doing
mask of the red death was a sub world the remains of dread and the main to dread was related to something else which is like so if you play D&D you had to choose which are very many different worlds you are going to play
and when you went to go buy a D&D adventure you couldn't buy most of them because most of them were not in the setting that you were using so they took the D&D market and they split it apart they fragmented it so that people didn't want to buy the adventures they didn't want to buy the monster supplements it was nonsense
and as sales dropped they did more and more of it because they didn't understand what they were doing and they thought that they were getting new sales with every new world that they put out and what they didn't understand was they were just pulling sales from their other lines so Ryan Dances big thing was he turned attention back to core D&D like he took they were about to release a Ravenloft book a Ravenloft book of monsters
and he said that's great just take the name Ravenloft off of it and then it was a Dungeons & Dragons book of scary monsters and it's sold better than the other Ravenloft stuff because hardly you know most people weren't playing Ravenloft they were playing some other version of D&D so he did not want to see
player splintered into playing Gamma World or playing Wushia or whatever that was right I mean those games that we were doing only made sense in the context of the failed marketing system that we inherited from T.S.R. So it's fascinating there's this let me get correct me if I'm getting this wrong but what I hear is that they you universalized the system at the game rules system and made it open so that anybody else could create whatever worlds they wanted
but they would bring people into understanding does drag into bring them into the does is drag universe but that within T.S.R. or within the wizards at this point you are actually not proliferating the worlds at all that you're actually trying to consolidate the worlds and so the IP and the story you want that to be as consistent as possible and what you are delivering and you let everybody else do all the crazy worlds and at the same time you're building that universe of your game system
so that people can easily jump in and go to quote-unquote classic does the dragons which is what was the coast is putting out that's right that's exactly right and so that was the the interesting sort of conundrum or irony that you paradox that you just proposed is that we want to internally to focus on everyone playing the same kind of dunges and dragons so that our products would sell
but we also let people outside of that do whatever kind of crazy stuff they did because you always needed to play as handbook basically in order to play in this other cool worlds that people did that's right fascinating, fascinating okay I have this is this is great I love this tail and again for people that want more you go back to my episode of Monty Cook and his version of these these these
tails as well and various others but I want to jump to I want to cover some other topics that are not just sure role playing games sure even though I love your history in this is amazing I'm going to start I want to jump a little bit to something I don't know much about which is your time designing for Amazon and Facebook looks like there was a good five years or so of this window
yeah it's a very different world it was a different world back then that's right I want to know what that life was like and how your game design principles applied or got modified during those working at those behemoth companies and very different categories yeah that that was pretty interesting so I worked at Amazon for two years as they as a game studio they started out and I think they finally have a game that is successful but that didn't happen until years after I was gone the
first couple years of the studio are pretty tumultuous and my my goal was I wanted to set aside my own way of doing things and learn how these social media games like Facebook games worked so that when I when I came to understand that then I figured I would then be able to sort of combine what I know from the more hardcore games with what I know from with what I learned from Facebook and the general manager that I reported to had had a really successful
online game so I thought you know I was going to be able to learn from him and when I was going to sort of pick up how to do this new form at a game but you know when a studio isn't successful it's like nothing is successful in it right like and this so the management was bad the relations within the teams were bad the strategy was bad it was you know so I did manage to get a game out I'm proud that I launched a game when lots of other games just sort of
found it but it never did well and and the boss never wanted to come to terms with how the game was not keeping enough players because then he would have to explain to his boss and his boss's boss that the game was not keeping enough players so he just sort of kept things going as
well and everything was okay so that he would never have to you know reveal his weakness to the authorities especially because it's the worst possible it's pretty bad yeah that's right and it was like my game had launched and others hadn't so it needed to be a success and even though it wasn't we did it as if we should just keep going and it we never sort of went back and figured out like either how to make it work or to cut it and try something again
I learned a lot from that I learned a lot about my own weaknesses as a team member and a lot of my personal growth started with me being squeezed out of that in 2013 so I'm in some ways I'm glad I did it and made good money and made some friends there but so months in maybe maybe I was hired in July and in August Facebook overhauled their rules for Facebook games and notifications and whatever so so Facebook had such a rich environment for social games that that at one point
Zingha they had the most they had Farmville and the most popular games for every new player they added that player would bring in another 1.1 players and so that's just exponential growth like you're happy if for every player we add they bring in another one quarter of a player right and that is like okay so that that'll get us a little bit of growth but there was bananas and I don't know how many people remember what Facebook was like in 2011 but you I mean it was obnoxious the way that you
would get notifications from people playing games all the time and and whatever and so it was great for the game producers but it wasn't that great for people on Facebook and then Facebook changed their rules and suddenly it was not going to be as profitable to do Facebook games like we wanted and again you know the general manager couldn't go to his boss and his boss's boss and say we need a new plan the plan that I showed you is not going to work
he just never owned up to that and so we just sort of charged ahead on the on the original plan and guess what things didn't work so the general manager got a promotion and ended up at another department but the studio founded for years and years wow so his his his obfuscate tactic worked for him and working it's another job working well I don't forget man the other thing that happened was you know we were working with rich and scaff on game ideas and at every meeting you know
they would come in to talk to us about Facebook games and then scaff would say by the way you should be doing mobile games right but again to switch to mobile games what would mean he the boss would have to go to his boss's boss and say I was wrong about doing social media games we should be doing mobile games instead
and so we never we never pivoted until you know really really laid in the process there was a question of like hey I've got a game that you know it has it's the most successful game we've done so far could we put it on mobile but because we had never planned to put it on mobile the animations would not have translated the mobile and so we couldn't do it
but if we had thought ahead and said let's make something that'll be transferable to mobile that would have put us in a good spot so I guess I learned a lot I didn't learn what I thought I was going to learn but I did learn a lot from those two years so so if you don't mind lingering you you talked about learning about your weaknesses as a team member in personal growth
and I think that stuff's really really important especially you know we all think we're smart and capable in many ways we are but what it comes to working in the team there's a different subset of skills that are required and it takes it takes some humility and strength to realize that and grow from it and I'd love to just you know maybe serve us some of that a little bit more detail if we can for for people listening
yeah so so one thing was like I went there with the idea that I'm going to follow the boss's lead because the boss has done this before and I haven't and and so you know maybe I went too far in doing that maybe I should have pushed back more or probably I wouldn't have made any difference because you know like I said nothing worked at that studio for years
but it can continually surprise me that other people in the studio wanted to do things their way the artist wanted to do things their way especially and and you know like we're all on a team we signed up for this guy to be the boss and to set the direction and so I continually was struggling you know either assuming people were going to do things the right way and then being surprised when they weren't or struggling to get them to do things the the boss's way
and I never I just didn't appreciate people want to do their own thing and if they're not going to do their own thing you you got to persuade them you got they've got to want to do what they're doing they can't maybe maybe I'm unusual in that way or like I had a senior enough position that I felt like I could sit my ego aside and follow the boss or I don't know what it was but it's like yeah you can't just rely on people to follow the strategy you have to get them to want to follow the strategy
and so that was a big feeling of mine. Yeah, I also, I sort of more personally I think I discovered something about how disagreeable I am so for me this category ability has been kind of a super power in that I would look at a game and there will be lots of things I didn't like about it and I will say like that I think not have that And there will be lots of things I didn't like about it. And I would think about how to make them better.
And a lot of my game design has come out of the thing that these other people have done isn't good enough, or the thing that I just did isn't good enough. And so that that disagreeability has kept me from following along what's done before and always trying to do something new. But people don't like disagreeability as it turns out. And so... As it turns out.
And so, you know, I've often been able to do good work, but it's been hard for me to, you know, get support from a team or something like that. And so just understanding my own personality better helps me understand where other people are at. And so... So... So I think the whole process made me kind of more realistic. Like people aren't going to appreciate it if you tell them they're wrong, even if they're wrong. Right?
And I don't like being told that I'm wrong, but I probably take it better than a lot of people because I'm disagreeable and expect things to be wrong. And I often find fault in my own work, but most people are not like that. And so I think my approach was just really... Like if the studio had been staffed by people like me, it would have been great. Yeah, yes. If only I could find more people like me, everything would be awesome. Yeah, many times. That's right.
And so, you know, when things fell apart at Amazon, I had a choice to make, which was either to be resentful about all the wrong things that other people had done, or to take the opportunity to reflect on how I had contributed to it, and how I did things differently, or could have done things differently. And I picked that latter path, and I have had a lot of personal growth in the last 11 years. It's been really good.
I just have come more to terms with how my personality differs from other people's and what that means. You know, like in Amazon, the boss was sort of a smart, nerdy guy, and the leader of the art team was tall, well-dressed musician, and as well as artists, of course. And so, on paper, the general manager has the authority, but in the reality of the situation, people are going to follow the tall, good-looking, well-dressed musician, and I didn't take that into account at all.
Like when I was trying to figure out what's going on in the studio, and who do I need to have on board, in order to get things to work? And so, yeah, big learning experience. Yeah, that's great. Thank you for sharing that. I mean, one, you know, just understanding the principle of like, how do you enroll others, and how do you understand how the social dynamics of the situation work, to I can so relate on the disagreeability thing. I was literally in high school.
I was voted most likely to disagree with anything you say. I was, I'd buy default, and it's a strength in a sense, right? I find problems. I figured how to solve them. It's like kind of one of the colds of who I was, but I didn't realize I was pissing people off a lot all the time. Straight through college. I mean, I was like kind of a jerk, I realized, and right in the back.
And so, fortunately, I was able to take that feedback, realize there's some alternate ways to go, and other perspectives I could choose to take. That's right. And find that balance. And so, I think it's really important. And the most important thing, I think, is what you said, was, you know, look, anytime something goes wrong, you have two basic choices, is reframing you a little bit. Like, you can blame the world, or you can look to see what you could have done differently.
Yeah, and, being looking at what you could have done differently is by far the most powerful way to look at life. Even if it's not the main culprit, right? Even if, in fact, there was this, your boss was a jerk and finances were bad and whatever. The, what could I have done differently? I learned this during my early days as a pro magic player, because when, you know, you got out drawn, or you're a pro, you got lucky. Yeah, okay, you could complain about getting bad luck.
Or you could have thought that, actually, you know, at five turns earlier, I had made this different play. There wouldn't even have been an opportunity for him to get lucky later. Oh, yeah. You know, and so those players, the players that thought like that were the ones that were, you know, at the top of the game and winning championships, and the people who complained about their bad beats, were the ones that just got a chance to complain and went home, you know?
So, so those skills are really, really important. I, we're running, we're running late on time, as at least two more topics I want to get to. So I'm going to get to one, because we're talking about the idea of personal transformation. Yeah. And the lessons learned. And you were responsible for a huge lesson learned and transformation for me. Okay. And this happened when we got to meet at Burning Man, that's right, your actresses camp. Yep. And you ran a game. Yeah. And this game was a football.
It's game of exercise. I don't know whether you'd call it a game or not. But talk to, let's tell people what the football is. And I'll explain the specific thing that happened for me. I'll tell my version of this story. Okay. Yeah. Um, so it's a poll like P-O-L-L. And it's a football because it's a poll that you answer using your feet. So you have everybody sort of jumbled in the middle and then you have like a collar in front of them.
And the collar says, if you like star wars more than star trek, go to my right. If you like star trek more than star wars, go to my left. And so, and the further you go, the stronger your feelings are. And if you're conflicted, you stay in the middle. And so then people split up and everyone can see where everybody is. Sometimes the questions are like, you're trying to get to know the other people in your camp. And so it's like who grew up in a big city, grew up in a small town.
It's not opinions. It's sort of personal history stuff. But mostly it's, you know, do you believe in free will or not? You know, what, how big do you think innate characteristics versus learning have on your personality or, you know, what's, what's more important fame or money or that sort of thing. And if you get really fancy, you can do it in two dimensions, right? So we did, do you think aliens aren't in contact with humans, move to one direction? Do you not move to the other?
And then do you believe in God? Then you go at 90 degrees. If you do, and you stay put, if you don't. And so now you've got a two by two quadrant. And so like the y-axis that people are walking along is one question and the x-axis is kind of the other. Thank you. That's a great way to put it. Right. And so like what we found was that there were very few people who believed in one of those things or but not the other. And it was mostly people who believed in neither or both.
Right. Right. Well, I didn't, I didn't predict that, but that was interesting. And then you know, the caller starts with a bunch of questions that they have maybe prepared on a topic. And then other people in the audience can like throw out questions. And you just, you play over and over again, and you drill down on the places that are interesting.
And then you, you interspersed that with, you know, if that's the quantitative look of like how many people are in which direction, then you have sort of a qualitative angle where you get volunteers from one side of the other to talk about their position. Like, white, white, white, white, do you think women are inherently different from men or why do you not think that or why do you like Star Wars so much or and then it's not a debate.
You don't go back and forth and try to prove everything, but you try to like lay out differences so that so people, people can see what other people have to have to say. And they came up with this system as a way to control loudmouths. Like if you just had a popcorn question like, hey, who wants to talk about free will or whatever, it's going to be probably a guy who raises their hand first and probably a loudmouth. And I'm a bit of a loudmouth and so I cannot stand other loudmouths.
And this is my way of letting... Almost every talking a lot. It's going to be me. Yeah, that's right. And so in this way, you can state your position on Star Wars versus Star Trek without even opening your mouth. You just walk to one side of the stand or the other. And it lets everyone participate all the time instead of one person at a time. And I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to keep loudmouths from controlling a situation, whether it's like panels at conventions.
You know, I never do popcorn questions where anyone can answer, ask questions in whatever order because there's always loudmouths. And this is sort of the same thing. Fascinating. Yeah, I didn't know the origin story of it. And so I will tell my piece of this, which is... I thought it was really fun. It was a great get to know you thing. A great experience while I was there at Camp. And then there was one question that you asked.
And it was the first was how much do you value and feel like being connected, always connected is a good thing or a bad thing, right? This like being connected to the internet, being on your phone, whatever it was. And I was like, okay, well, this is... My whole life depends on this, right? I'm a, you know, I wasn't a full digital nomin at the time, but like I love being all these connected, you know, the freedom. I'm like all the way on one side.
And then and then says, okay, well, how much would you want there to be a connection internet at Burning Man? And I was like, oh my god, I don't want that at all. Right. And I went to the other side.
You know, so I'm in this like, is our corner now where all of a sudden I say, wait, hold on, I really value being always connected, but there's something very special here that I didn't realize how important it was to me until that moment that being disconnected was part of what made that an extra special. And that the power of being disconnected was something I had just ignored internally.
And so it was that whole that stuck with me now for like a decade or yeah, yeah, yeah, it's been a long time. And it changed the way I behave in the world.
I mean, it made it so that I actually carve out little digital Sabbath for myself where I will purposefully put phones away and devices away and I will like, you know, build out more conscious structures of when I don't let myself be always connected, even though my life depends on, you know, this sort of ever-present omnipresent connectivity. So I'm very grateful to you for that. I got goosebumps there. That's really quite a story. Yeah, you're welcome.
I mean, that's what Burning Man is for, right? Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So it was a really cool thing. So in addition to controlling Loudmouse and getting to know you actually kind of forced some insights for me personally. Yeah, good. Okay, I got one more topic to cover. Yeah, we got maybe a little, you know, not that long, but this is the topic I know you're excited
about. And I didn't know about before I started doing research here, but you are not just a game designer and event designer here, but you've written a book. And this is a book that's her children's book to really help move the needle forward. So talk about, let's talk about Grandmother Fish. I think it's cool. Yeah, that's right.
So I've got a 29-year-old daughter and I guess 25 years ago, when she was little, I wanted her to have a book that would explain evolution in a way that was scientifically sound, but approachable for a preschooler. And so I started working on that book. I thought it would be kind of easy. And boy, it took me years to put that together. This is all while I was working at Wizards. And there was a point at which maybe 10 years into the process that I thought I had it.
Like, I think I've got what I can, is good enough to send off to publishers. And one of my, the mother, one of my daughter's friends, who was in kids' books, took a look at the manuscript and told me it wasn't ready. And she was kind of nice and subtle about it. And if I hadn't been attuned to it, I wouldn't have really understood that she was telling me that it is, there's no point sending it off in the current format.
But I have a lot of experience play testing games and a lot of experience accepting negative feedback. And so I took that to heart and I shelved it until I could figure out how to make it really work. And then after I got pushed out of Amazon, I went to Birdie Man for the last time, came home from there. 2013 was soaking in the hot tub, smoking weed, thinking about the origins of language and how early humans must have used pantomime in order to express ideas about animals and stuff like that.
And then I had this eureka moment where I shook all over and I realized that if you want this book about evolution to work, you want to get the kids to mimic the ancestors. So they wiggle like a fish and hoot like an ape and crawl like a reptile. And suddenly it's like, this is it. This is the thing that is going to make the book work. And in fact, it makes the book reach an even younger audience because they can be even pre-verbal, but they can hoot or a crawl or whatever it is.
So I started working on plans to finally get it finished. And by this time Kickstarter had come on board. So instead of going to New York publisher or whatever, I found an artist and we put it up on Kickstarter. And that Kickstarter did great and then there was a positive review on an NPR blog. And I sold out of all the little self-published books that I had. Then an agent got ahold of me and wanted to rep my book and like three different book companies, book publishers sort of bid on it.
And we went with Macmillan and then within Macmillan, a couple of imprints within Macmillan. Oh, like pitched me on there. They would be the one to publish my book and I went with Fible and Friends. And so now it's in Japanese and Chinese and Italian and there's a Japanese television show, some like a made for TV movie that has some young woman reads the book and you know comes in touch with the value and wonder of life or something like that.
So it's like, oh yeah, it was one of the books featured in a Tokyo Natural History Museum. They did a big thing on kids' books for evolution and the guy running that exhibit was also the the translator so just been kind of a dream come true. That's amazing. To make that kind of a transition is so incredible. I love that you told very specifically the lesson key lesson from game design of you know, play testing except your negative feedback was critical to writing a book the same way.
And I mean, I've seen the book. It's available. People want to get it. It's available on Amazon and all different places. The reviews are outstanding. Yeah, that's right. That's just so incredible. And so it was literally just you did this on your own. Yep. You got feedback from some professionals or people that are working the industry to give you some of that data. Yeah. But then you made it, you know, hired the artist, went to Kickstarter and then the book publishers came
to you. Like you didn't write them out. They came to you. That's amazing. What a great story. It's a great great friend of mine that's working on a children's book as well as kind of the this. I guess I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about the name of it, but it's this you know, getting it tended to be a learning kind of children's book. And and so I've I've this is this is a great story. I'm going to have them listen to this episode.
So going in Kickstarter was also a big part of it because if you tell your friends, you know, I'm going to self publish a book or I'm going to ship a manuscript off to New York. It's like, okay, but if you tell them, I'm going to put my book up for the world to see on Kickstarter and we're going to see if people like it or not, then they want to help. And so like I had one friend help with how to do the typography.
And I had a husband wife writing couple give me advice on what the manuscript needed. One said you need more details and the other said you need fewer words. So it's like, oh, okay, I'll do more details in fewer words. But easy. Yeah, easy. And then got so so that was just a big big help. And people were enthusiastic about supporting it because it was on Kickstarter. Yeah, great. I love it. What a great what a great story.
We've covered an enormous amount of the breath of your incredible career here. And I'm glad I got to get to be a small little note in it and one of the. Yeah, that's a great story. So so since since we are kind of running out of time, we've already given people a lot of hints. But if if you want to see more from you or the other projects you're working on or anything, you want to direct people to, I don't know if you're involved in the social media or whatever.
Is anything any last messages you want to give to the audience before we wrap it up? Yeah, so you know, I'm on social media mostly on Twitter, but I'm also on blue skies. You can find me pretty easily with my name. There's a new edition of 13th age coming out that I'm working on with Rob Hainesau. And so we did this game 10 years ago and it's sort of like one reason I like the open gaming license is that it allowed Rob and me to create sort of our own version of Dungeons and Dragons.
And he was the lead designer on fourth edition. I was the lead on third. Those are two very different. Editions and we have a many differences in our play styles and design styles. So. Coming up with a game that pleased us both has been a real challenge. And I think has ended up being the sort of game that obviously neither one of us could possibly done on their own. Fascinating. Okay, well, I'm intrigued. I'm definitely going to go check it out.
Okay, yeah, it's going to go on Kickstarter leader this year. Okay, great. Thank you so much. I appreciate the time and of course the many great things that you've created as the world that have touched me and the audience directly. Love it. I appreciate it. It's been fun. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast.
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I've taken the insights from these interviews along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry and compressed all into a book with the same title as this podcast, things like a game design. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at thingslickagamedesigner.com or ever find the truth.