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
You know, I've been in the gaming industry for a very long time. I've been making a living for about 25 years or so, which dates me a little bit, but I've been fortunate enough to release Ascension at this very show 14 years ago. We're now...
crowdfunding our 17th expansion i've been able to work with richard garfield the creator of magic the gathering i've been able to work on major brands like marvel and dc and world of warcraft and all kinds of fun stuff but honestly the thing i'm most proud of is the Think Like a Game Designer community.
It has been amazing to see how many people have come together. You know, we've sold over 15,000 copies of the book. We've had about 70 episodes with nearly a million downloads. We've had some of the best experiences with the Think Like a Game Designer Masterclass of getting time to spend with individual people. helping the community to help each other. That's actually the real superpower of the class is that the...
It creates a space where designers can help and support each other. They think they're coming for me and they are wrong. I'm the littlest part of the value. It's the value of that community. That's one of the reasons why I was glad to do the first ever live Think Like a Game Designer Talk because it can help build community right here.
So I'm going to go through and I'm going to give three principles that I think distill the best of what I have learned from talking to all the best designers in the world and people interviewing on my podcast, people I've called my friends. And then, and this is stuff that I've said before, but it's...
the fundamentals so it's really important to reinforce and then i'm going to talk about four principles that i haven't talked about before the stuff i've been working on for my next book and you guys are actually the first people that are going to hear about it so uh it's going to be some exciting that's right yeah you came out here i want to make it worth your while on a friday night
all right so let's get started and then we'll do a little teaser for uh what the information around the next thing like game designer class and i'll even have some goodies and freebies to offer okay so three steps for achieving greatness in your game designs That's it. Just three steps. Super easy. Step one is even the easiest one of them. I want you to play lots of games. But the hardest part is you have to pay attention to the emotional impact of play.
Okay, if you are here at Gen Con or if you're the kind of person that listens to anything I do and you play games, you do it because there's some kind of emotional impact that you get. There's some kind of an experience. There's something really powerful that's happened to you. It could be that excitement of a die roll when you're going to find out whether you listen.
or die. It could be the feeling of a strategy coming together when you play. It could be the bonds of laughter as somebody makes some ridiculous move or you're telling a story around a RPG game right there are some experience and emotion that you're having and as a player typically the response is that you're going to
Just be part of the experience, right? And that's okay. But as a designer, you need to step back a little bit and think, okay, wait, what's causing that experience? What are the different elements that are in the game that made that happen? Is it something about the tension and the fact that the points were scaling as the game went on? Is it something about...
the fact that there was a lot of flexibility and people had a space to use their creativity with how they would use an answer or the opposite was it a very constrained thing and you had an easter or risk risk or reward choice right thinking about or even things like components and a lot of different elements about how something is presented want to kind of look at it like a critic.
And not just like somebody who's playing, right? A good analogy is if you watch a movie, right? You can get completely lost in what's going on in the story, right? You lose all sense of surrounding, you're completely immersed in it. And like, I just saw Deadpool and Wolverine and I got that experience. I'm just like, all right, I'm just here to have a good time, right? But when you...
step back and you're like, okay, wait, what's the director doing here? Why is this shot here? What's happening with the music in the background, right? Same kind of thing with game design. And so this is not something like I can just teach you like that. It's something you have to develop as an instinct over time. And so the beauty is you're just playing games anyway.
You're definitely playing games. You're at home. You're thinking about making games. That's what you're doing. So it's just every now and then remind yourself to just kind of step back. Okay, I've had a strong emotional reaction. Somebody else had a strong emotional reaction. What led to that? And that's going to train your design instincts. Okay, so that's step one. Step two is the lesson I repeat over and over again, and it's the core design.
And this is the best way I have distilled not just the ability to create great games, but literally to create everything. I've done this to write my books. I've done this to build my company. And it's not just me. It's all of the creatives that I know use a process like this, whether they call it this or not, they use this.
system and it is the six-step process of inspiring getting something that's the core idea which eventually is going to be the emotional impact that you want right tying back into the first point framing which is putting a bracket around your idea right you want there's a illusion that creativity
thrives in open spaces. I've got a blank sheet of paper. I can do anything I want. I've got infinite budget. Isn't that great? Turns out that is not great. You actually want to work with constraints. The most important constraint is deadlines. Give yourself short deadlines. Deadlines are magic. They let you force you to focus on what's important.
and saying, okay, I'm gonna make a card game that I can make using components in my house and that my little brother can play, and he's coming in two weeks and we're gonna play with him, right? That's a constraint. That's something that gets me moving.
Brainstorming, there's a specific process around brainstorming. I don't have time to go into it all here, but basically you try to get as many ideas as possible, turn off the censoring part of your brain, get as many crazy things as you can, then organize them into find some sort of patterns, find the patterns. then ruthlessly cut out everything except for the one idea you actually want to test. And to do that you prototype. And the important thing about prototyping is learn to love the ugly.
Make sure that you don't spend time making a super pretty thing because you're inevitably going to change it. And pretty not only makes it worse because it feels worse to change it, you have resistance to changing it, and it distracts from the thing that you really care about, which is whatever the principle is that you're testing. As you move through the loop, you'll get better.
better prototypes, but really almost always I see new designers spending way too much time making a prototype pretty, and that time could be spent going through this core design loop faster. And then testing. Testing is when you actually have other people give you feedback on your thing.
And there are versions of testing that don't require other people. You can do mental playthroughs. And as you get better at this and you have more experience, mental playthroughs can actually get you through a lot. But you need other people to give you critiques. And you need to have some way to protect your ego from this.
I'm going to stop here because, man, I will tell you, if there was one actual hard part of this job, it is that. Because most of what you do does not work. Most of what you do is terrible.
Most of what I do is terrible. Let me not like make this about y'all. Make it this about me, okay? It is going to be, you don't know whether your ideas are good until you test them. And then when you test them, you want to, again, take that step back. That is like, you're a scientist doing an experiment. You're not like...
creator with your baby like isn't it beautiful it's like no your baby's ugly i'm sorry you gotta go go make another one no analogy breaks down a little bit there but you get what i mean
and then you iterate right and you go back through you take what you've learned sometimes the core idea is really good and you just need to refine some stuff and then you start making some more detailed things oftentimes the core idea doesn't quite work and you make a shift and say okay let's go back let's brainstorm some new things we're back in the court
loop you have to go to depends on the results of your tests but the goal here is you want to get better at going through this process quickly and efficiently without losing momentum or having your psyche break down right and so
Again, I'm giving you principles here that are not just about a game you want to work on. They are about any creative project you want to do, anything you want to succeed with in your life, you're going to go through this exact process. The better you get at this, the better you get at life, full stop. All right.
Principle number three, how do you actually grow a career? How do you turn something to being a way that you actually want to get better, not just in the single creative thing you do, but in the world around you? And the secret of this... is other people okay i talked about the power of community as much as you might want to be unless you might be
a genius on your own you're not going to get very far unless you have a community of people around you that is just not only people to help you people to give you feedback people who actually care
to listen when you say, hey, I've got a great game, would you like to buy it, right? And the ways you do that are the three steps here, which are adding value to the communities you care about. And that means not doing it because you want to get something back, right? When I make a call out for something.
I have given away a lot of value for free. I give away the podcast for free. I give away all these lessons for free. I didn't charge anybody to be here. I do all that not because I expect anything from it. I do it because I care about this community. And as it turns out, that helps me to build relationships. That helps me to...
bring people in and that helps those people are often there for me when I want to sell a product. I'm not just somebody that's hawking my thing, right? When you say, I want you to buy my game. I want you to buy my book. I want you to be my product. I want you to join my company. I want you to marry me. Whatever it is, right? You're asking.
something for you and hopefully the other person is going to say will be much more likely to listen whether they say yes or not different story if you've actually added value to their lives in the first place and so whatever it is my fiance is in the back so i got a good yes i got a good yes on this one
But also think about this in terms of when things go badly, right? And when there's people that, you know, to tell the story, I used to work at Upper Deck before I started Stoneblade Entertainment. The CEO at that time is a... legally documented, not good person. There was a lot of things that went wrong at that company. There's a lot of things that like were falling apart and it was rough, right? But what I learned was that there were some people who were just like,
you know, cover their own skin, throw the blame somewhere else, do whatever it takes to keep my job. And there were other people who were like, no.
I got you. I'm going to be here and we still care about making a good product. We're still going to be true to our word. We're going to do what's right, regardless of what the higher ups say. And guess what? Those were the exact people that I hired when I started my company. And then some of them were the same people who contracted me when I needed a contract to work. So those times when.
the world is out there and not going well that's how you show up i trust me that's how the world's going to show back for you so it's a really really important thing and then also let's be honest you're not going to be perfect
You're going to mess up all the time. The core design loop is about having ideas that don't work. We're going to not always be our best selves. We're not always going to get things that work. We're not always going to live up to the ideals that we have. But the important thing is to learn and grow, right? Perfect is not the goal. Better is the goal. And that's why this kind of like an upward.
arrow and trajectory right so this idea of the first step was very framed very much as game design specific but paying attention to where emotions come from rather than again if you're if you're starting any kind of business launching any kind of product you're trying to solve some emotional pain that you're customer has you want to understand where that's coming from how to fix it for games it's the same thing you're trying to create the positive experience then you want to be able to actually
test your ideas and work through them to the core design loop and you want to be adding value to communities you care about continuing to build those genuine relationships and then learning and growing and get a better along the way
I've been teaching this stuff for a while. I tried to distill it down to as pure a principle as I could. This stuff will serve you wherever you end up in life. I hope it helps you with your games, but this is super valuable. So that's the core of what I thought I could condense from a lot of years of work. uh and then let's talk about some new lessons here some new ideas so
I've thought a lot about games, obviously. I love games. And I think, why do we play games? Now, there are many reasons of things that we play games that are the same reasons why we do anything socializing and, you know, connecting and we just are drawn to a theme or whatever. But what is it about games specifically?
Because every culture throughout all of history, anything we have a record of, they all played games. Even animals will play and have different games experiences. So there's something built into our DNA about why our games matter. Have you ever wondered why that is? The core reason? is because we play to learn. Games are a great way for us to learn without the consequences of real life, right? If I go bankrupt in Monopoly,
That's sad, but it's not as bad as if I go bankrupt, I'd lose my home, right? If I'm playing catch and I'm playing ball, they're learning skills from more of the hunter-gatherer days when you have to actually care about actually hunting and surviving out in the world. All of these games... all these forms of play are here to help us learn.
The reason that games are great at learning, I've distilled down to four principles. I'm going to go through those four principles, and then I'm going to apply them to how they work for lessons you might apply in your game designs. How do you make your games better? And I'm going to apply them for...
lessons in life about how we might take the idea of what are games good for, how do games help us learn in life, to making our lives actually more fun and actually enjoyable and actually accomplishing this way to go. Does that sound like a good time? Okay, let's do it. Alright, principle number one.
Clear and meaningful goals. In a game, it's always very obvious what you're supposed to do, right? You have a go capture the king, reduce the opponent from 20 to zero, score the most points by the time the buzzer rings. Whatever it is, there's clear and meaningful goals.
Step number two, principle number two, is you want to reward progress. Games do this typically through points, through having different things that help you feel progress, help you feel growth, gain experience, whatever, giving you a sense of moving forward.
Principle number three is narrowing your focus, making sure that you're only focused on a constrained thing. And this is something that games are just great at, right? Because they give you rules. They let you play in a box. The world is like super fuzzy. You could kind of do anything at any moment. It's a lot to take in. Games will force you.
okay you only have so many resources this turn you only have so much energy to play with you only can do these number of things it helps you keep inside of an area that lets you focus on the problem at hand And the last one, and this one's probably the most important, and as a gamer you kind of get this for free, which is embracing an iterative mindset.
If I were going to think of one thing that distinguished the people who were my fellow Pro Tour champions and people who were winning in Magic from others, it was that when they lost a game, they were immediately interested in playing another one and figuring out, what did I do wrong? How could I do better? We've all heard the, oh my god, the bad beat stories. Oh, I can't believe how unlucky I got. I can't believe this thing. But the best players are like, actually, you know what?
If four turns earlier, I did a different thing here, that chance to get unlucky wouldn't happen, even if you did actually get unlucky there, right? And thinking through that stuff. And so, but in general, outside of a few, you know, rage quits and table flips, most people most of the time approach this like, okay, I lost the game.
you didn't work let me try another one let me figure out why and that iteration mindset is really key so let's look at this as some examples in games and in life right we compare those two things Magic the Gathering, right? Classic example, one of my favorite games. You know, your goal, reduce your opponents, it's your life. Very clear, very simple. Your rewards.
you every time you make progress you see the score change right there's actual consistent feedback you get to play bigger cards your mana goes up your opponent's life goes down um the focus you're very restrictive the first you're only allowed to play one land per turn the early turns are actually very simple right you can't
do very much and the game scales in complexity over time you don't start with like 20 cards and play in a bunch of creatures and a bunch of things that scales up to complexity focusing on what's important and then of course the mindset which I already talked about right when I lose I learn when I'm playing I try again I take it as
not a thing that is like a personal failure. It's a, okay, how can I get better at this? Now let's compare this to a common goal, let's say we've all had in our lives, and that is fitness. What's my goal? Get fit. What the hell does that mean?
How do I know when I'm fit? When am I fit? When am I not fit? Am I done? Am I still doing it? My rewards are like the opposite of rewards. I don't get to eat delicious foods that I like and I end up being sore and unhappy and getting hurt and not feeling like having a good time. It's the opposite of rewards. It's a very painful process.
of the time my focus typically is on everything if you look at anywhere on social media or the internet it's like okay I gotta have a keto diet and I need to take these supplements and I need to get this type of exercise and I don't know when cold plunging became so popular but like I hate whoever figured that out and decided
that was a good idea. I think it's Andrew Heumann's fault. I don't know. But it's one of those things where now you try to take all the stuff on at once instead of saying, OK, let's make one change. Let's focus on the first turn, one man of principle, right? Very different. And then, of course, the mindset, right? We've all experienced this, right?
It took me a very long time. I was about 30, 35 pounds heavier than I am now. And it was like, if I tried to do anything to dye it and the scale didn't move.
I'm a failure. I'm terrible. I give up. I'm out of here, right? So no wonder why we have so much more trouble accomplishing goals in life. Same is true, by the way, for your game design career, right? If you want to say, I want to be a game designer, okay, what the hell does that mean? Does that mean if you made one prototype, you're good to go? If so, congratulations, that's very easy. Does it mean that you have a game that you and your friends really enjoy playing? Does it mean you have a
job at another company does it mean you crowdfunded something does it mean what does it actually mean for you getting clear on that can matter right finding ways to reward yourself along the way because as i mentioned most of the time your ideas don't work most of the time you're kind of basically getting smacked in the face saying my game's not good how do you provide
rewards along the way. There's all these different kinds of things. So let's break it down principle by principle. Now you can see the gap, right? Why games let us learn easily, why real life tends not to. And we'll break it down principle by principle and see how this applies and how we can make both your games and your life better. So let's start with principle number one, creating clear goals.
A game design application, I'm going to use some examples from my own games, because obviously they're the ones I'm closest to, right? When you are making a game, start your rules with a clear objective. So most rule books do this, but you want to make it like, what is orienting the player? How do I know what I'm supposed to be doing here? Helps people to then frame the rest of your... rules.
and then making sure that that objective is clear and in everybody's sight in play. So the example I'm going to use is a game, You Gotta Be Kidding Me, which I actually released the original version of it like six years ago. And it's a simple bluffing game where you have a certain number of cards at hand and whenever you lose a bid,
you lose a card and the last person with cards left wins. But you had to remember how many cards everybody had left and it was kind of a little bit fuzzy when you're dealing them out. And so in the new version that we just released, available now at Target.
we included these really cute little scoring tokens. And these scoring tokens are actually just all adorable animals that are from my and my team's and our family and friends' pets. You don't need them at all to play, but they're cute. And they stay in front of you and say, hey, here's your scoring tokens. Whenever you lose...
You lose a scoring token and then you deal out cards equal to the number of scoring tokens same exact game But now I have a score that's in front of me. I can see the score I can see the status at any given point and it's easier in fact to play and keep that
front of mind, how many cards everybody has as the game moves on. Subtle change in design, big change in impact, right? So just these sorts of things, you think, how do I make the goal more clear? How do I make it more obvious what's happening when I play? Now let's talk about life applications. Now here's the fun thing about games. When I said you have to have a clear meaningful goal, games get meaningful for free.
Who cares if you capture the opponent's cake? Who cares if your opponent is 20 to zero? We take on this magic circle of like, okay, we're playing a game. You tell me what I need the most bananas. Okay, I'm going for bananas. Let's go, right? But in life...
It's not quite that way, right? You actually need a meaningful goal. So the first step is make the objective clear, right? When I talked about what does it mean to get fit? If instead it's like, hey, I want to be able to run a mile without stopping. I want to be able to get.
10% less body fat. I want to be able to, whatever the specific thing is that you know you'll have gotten there, right? I want to be able to play with my kids for an hour a day and not get winded or whatever, right? Whatever your definition is. And then make sure you know why that's meaningful for you.
Because we all have lots of goals in life. I want to be a game designer. I want to be a rock star. I want six-pack abs. I want, I want, I want, I want a Ferrari, whatever it is, right? But the reality is if it's not meaningful to you, then the day-to-day of your life will overcome this vague... desire that you have, right? The six pack doesn't stand up.
to the cheesecake. When I have the cheesecake right in front of me and the six pack is just a dream. But if I ask why, and I really do encourage this exercise, just like ask why, like multiple times. Why do I want a six pack? Oh, well, I really want to look good when I'm on the beach. Why do you want to look good on the beach? Well, okay, actually, I really want to...
find a mate. I want to be with somebody and I feel like I want to be attractive. Okay, why does that matter? I feel like I have something to contribute to a relationship. I want to be able to invite somebody into that. I don't want that to be stopped by my body or my own image of my body.
Okay, now we're starting to get somewhere, right? You start thinking about, I really want to find a partner and somebody I can add value to and I can be worthy of, and I want to be the kind of person that has a discipline to do that. Now you start to get something that can hold up. When I see the cheesecake, maybe I don't say yes right away.
So finding an objective that's meaningful is kind of the biggest leap to go from the life goals, game goals to life goals. And I think that you can find that. But once you do find that for you and you make your objective clear, it makes a huge difference in how you go through things.
all right let's talk about rewarding progress this one's probably the easiest and most fun one in games right you want to create a constant sense of growth and reward if you're playing building a tabletop game most a multiplayer game especially Most of the time, most of the people are going to lose.
right you can't you can't fix that uh if you're in a digital game you can kind of tweak a little bit but the idea here is that you want to make sure that people have feel like they have a sense of progress and that they're sort of winning along the way even if they don't win quote unquote the ultimate game so deck building games are great for this right
One of the reasons why things like Ascension are so powerful is because you start with a really lame deck of cards, you get better cards over time, you feel that sense of growth, you accomplish some objectives. Even if you lose at the end, you felt like you've had that growth and things moved along.
We did this extra, we really added a lot to this with Shards of Infinity, which we have the new Saga collection, which we're showing off here, and I think we've got a few copies left at Gen Con. It'll be available in late October, I think, at retail. But we added the mastery tracker and this is like literally like a single tracker like an XP tracker that goes up each you can pay resources to make it go up
all the cards that even in your starting deck improve. And so again, you feel that sense of progress automatically, and there's this super exciting goal of if you get to 30 mastery, one of your starting cards does infinite damage and you just win the game. So again, whether you get there or not...
The granular feeling of progress is helpful. Video games are great at this, right? You just have tons of XP and ladders and repeat things. But for board games, you really want to be conscious about how am I rewarding people along the way. In life.
I have very much spent a lot of time thinking about this, right? Because again, as I mentioned, the hardest part of game design, the hardest part of going through the core design loop is avoiding the uh willpower sapping that happens as you hit failure hit failure hit failure don't have the things work don't have the things work and so you want to create little rewards for yourself along the way um that's why i created the level up journal um this is a
little gamified way to go through life and do your habits and the only reason i made this is because i wanted it for myself i was doing the exact same process and you can too on an index card i write down the top three goals for the day i write down three habits that support myself i write down three things i'm grateful for and then i check
off each day it's only that fits on a little little book or a little index card so it forces you to really focus on things and you get little rewards and i would give myself rewards after i checked off enough of these boxes i could get something like a new game new video game or
I go out for ice cream or whatever it was, right? Whatever the reward is at that time in my life. Cheesecake. Cheesecake. Exactly. Cheesecake. I'm not saying don't have cheesecake, folks. Let me just make it clear. I love cheesecake. I had a bourbon, was a bread pudding at Harry and Izzy's last night, which was delicious. All right.
Anyway, so finding ways to build reward structures into your own life and give yourself those little wins, everyday little wins. And that's why even little habits, right? Whatever it is, hey, I worked on games for 20 minutes today.
15 minutes, 10 minutes. I don't care what it is. Build something that's small enough that you feel like you can hit that reward and give yourself the win because that win will compound over time. And if you're not hitting your goals, my biggest advice is shrink your daily goals. You can have a big excitement.
long-term goal but shrink what it counts to get the win to get the dub because it feels good to get the w and it will help keep you giving your progress keep you moving along all right principle number three narrow focus all right we're doing pretty good on time uh Games in this way you want to make sure that you compress the complexity, especially at the beginning of the game.
Video games, again, get this really easily, right? In Soulforce Fusion, we have a tutorial. The tutorial really gives you only a few options. You basically can't lose. It gives you a few principles each turn. Then you move into a campaign where the first fight's really easy. and then they get harder over time.
In tabletop games, you don't have quite the same number of tools, but you can make immersion complexity happen over time. So in TCGs, things like Magic, where the mana system only progresses slowly, so you only have a few options at the beginning of the turn. Having common cards or available cards early that are simple. In the game I designed Bakugan.
We had a, this is a toy, it's a kids game, right? But it had a full TCG built into it. They have a toy, you roll the toy, they pop open, you compare numbers. That's the fundamental part of the game. And so we had a basic version of the game where that was all you did. You roll the toy, you compare numbers, bigger number wins.
Very simple. And then you can add the TCG parts on top. So you can think about in your games, are there ways you can create emerging complexity where you, you know, you want your game to have depth, but you don't want to overwhelm players up front. You want to make sure that they can focus on the simple short things. and then complexity evolves over time. And now in life, this is very simple. Do not compare yourself to level 50 players when you're level one.
right we are bombarded by social media by images across the world of the best of the best at every damn thing everybody's you know we got billionaires and we got people with you know fitness models and we got everything out there the most successful game designers out there right
You don't have to be at that level. You need to be at the level you're at. You're at level one, you know what you focus on? Getting to level two. You're at level two, you focus on getting to level three. And so being able to do that, there's no easy formula for you. right but it is really writing down okay where do i want to get to and think okay what what would be the middle of that
What would be halfway between here and there? Okay, what would be halfway between here and there? You can actually work your way back a little bit. All right, if I want to have a job at a game design company, all right, first thing I would want to do is have a prototype game, maybe do a sell sheet so I can make a pitch. Or maybe actually I want to be able to get into a...
volunteer at Gen Con or an event and I can actually make some relationships there. Okay, that's not that hard. What do I have to do next? My next goal is actually apply for these things or go participate in the forums or attend Gen Con, go up to a booth, say, hey, I'd love to help out in the future. What do I do, right? Now, those are wins that move you from level one to level two to level three.
even though you want to get to the point where your career is wherever it is you want it to go, right? I think this is really important because it can, again, be very discouraging when you're trying to solve all the problems and do everything all at once. Oh, this is another key thing, right? We all have a lot of goals and a lot of different careers. I want to start a business. I want to get married.
want to be shaped i want to have kids i want to blah blah blah blah right trying to do all those things you could do anything you can't just do everything all at once so trying to pick a few goals that are the primary focus of your life at that time not saying no that's gone forever but for that now
can really help you because you're going to make a lot more progress when you're focused on, say, three to five things instead of every single thing you want to do in your life. All right, that's focus. Now let's talk about the iterative mindset. As I mentioned, you somewhat get this for free with games, but when you're designing games the way you can make your games be more iterative is you reduce the pain of losing.
right? You want to make sure that if I'm going to play a, and there's two really sides to this, right? One is how long do I have to sit and play a stupid game when I already know I've lost? We've all been there. If this is a three hour game and 45 minutes in, I'm like, there's zero chance I could win and I have to sit here and do this. That is terrible. The odds I play again are very low.
And similarly, you want to make it as quick and easy to reset and play again as possible. The setup time, the clear up time, the ready to go makes it more likely to move forward. So one of the mechanics that I actually, people often...
critique me on but i will tell you why i said i did this is in ascension we have an honor pool that's fixed there's a certain amount of victory points that are available which we call honor and those are available at the center of the and when as you play the game you earn honor and when that pool runs out the game is over
And they're like, man, I really want to play with more honor. I wish there was more because I want the game to keep going. I purposefully shorted you on honor. You heard it here. I did it on purpose because my job is to frustrate you. Now what I want to do is I want you to feel like, oh man, if I just had one more turn, I could do this, this, this, and this.
Let's play again, right? That's a very conscious decision because the other side of it is that people are doing crazy. The decks have gone nuts and you've all been on this side. If you played any deck before the games, it's like, all right, that guy just took a 10 minute turn. He's going to take another 10 minute turn next turn.
I don't want to play anymore. I try to minimize that as much as possible. Every now and then it's fun. But so thinking about how you do this in your game, reducing the time that exists either. And this another thing I did in Ascension that you can also do is obfuscating, use tools to obfuscate when the game is over. Right. So in Ascension.
I could have, every time you bought a card, given you the same honor like when you kill a monster. I didn't do that. All the cards you buy in your deck are worth honor, but they're in your deck. It's a little too much for 99% of the planet to keep track of. And so...
you don't actually know if you've won because you have to count the cards in the deck. So you're still playing. Even if, in reality, our world champion, the one that we had our world champion today, would know for sure you're dead 10 turns earlier. You don't. And so you're still enjoying the game.
And so being able to obfuscate the victory condition, and that could be through a lot of different means, can also help to make this more fun, right? And keep people excited and keep the intensity all the way to the end. You can increase the amount of points that are available at the end of a game. You can have different ways for comeback mechanics.
create opportunities for people to make very, very high risk, very high reward plays. Lots of different tools to make sure that the game is exciting all the way till the very end. And now let's talk about it in life.
This is the biggest part of what I talked about with the core design loop. You need to view your losses at less as lessons when and I'll you know, I'll just speak for myself here, right? I have I can look back on all the things that happened in my life and i want you to take a second just kind of think for yourself think about the really bad things that have happened to you
from a while ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, things that were pretty devastating, right? I almost went bankrupt with the company. I got divorced. I've had a lot of projects that failed. I've had to lay people off. I've had a lot of tough stuff that have happened. I've lost people.
Well, I don't want any of those experiences anymore. Well, I don't want to repeat those experiences. I don't even want them for my worst enemies. I don't want those. But I can look back and I can see that those things created the seeds of who I am today. I wouldn't be able to be up here talking to you if I didn't have those things happen. I wouldn't be the designer I am, I wouldn't be the leader I am, I wouldn't be the partner that I am without those things happening to me.
And so when you realize that that's the case, all the things that are going to happen to you from now going forward are also going to be opportunities for you to learn, for you to grow. The more that you can do that, the more that you embrace the iterative mindset in life with your businesses, with your relationships, with your games, with everything, the more you're going... to be able to
actually enjoy the process of life actually enjoy the setbacks too right we have i my my game my life is awesome i get to make games for a living it's great but there are plenty of challenges people on my team will tell you we face them all the time um but it's working with people that are awesome
getting to work on things that are awesome and learning and helping each other grow. Those are the three basic principles that we live by at the company. We repeat them every week. And so it helps to say, okay, how do we get better? How do we grow from this? And if you can adopt this principle, it's a real superpower. So bringing that in and bringing that iterative mindset from...
into your life, probably one of the most powerful things that I've learned and hopefully that you can take away from this talk. Okay, wrapping it up. For those that actually can see a screen, I kind of put all the principles on the screen to make it easy, but the three basic steps for design greatness, play lots of games, pay attention to the emotional impact of play, use the core design loop to generate and test your ideas, and add value, build relationships.
and learn along the way. And the four principles of learning that make games great, that you want to apply both to your game designs, that makes them great at learning, is learning tools. You want to apply both to game design and to your life, creating clear and meaningful goals, rewarding progress. narrowing your focus, and embracing an iterative mindset. So, let's get to the fun bonuses and the bonus surprise here. The Think Like a Game Designer Mastery Course.
I run this one time a year. It takes an enormous amount of effort from me and my team, but it is super worth it. We've been almost 18 months, I think, since we ran it last time. We run a little late in the year, but we are starting it on September 4th.
For those of you that took the time out Friday night here at Gen Con, there's a QR code on the screen. You can scan it. If you fill out the survey there, you will get a bonus unavailable anywhere else discount to be able to join. And we'll follow up with some cool information and some freebies and behind the scenes. things. It's the most fun and rewarding thing I've been able to do to be able to actually go and do the work. You go through 12 weeks.
Each week, we work with you on your specific game. By the end of it, you are ready to pitch your game to real publishers. Of course, we have a lot of real publisher friends who have been very happy to take our games.
It turns out I tend to actually hire a fair number of people from this course, including Lucas, who is here, who is our first hire from the Thinklight Games Editor course. We actually are working on and we have a secret prototype of his new game that we're going to be working in crowdfunding in the very near future. So maybe we can find a way to sneak some of you.
into a play test of that before the weekend is through but it's something I'm very excited about if it's something that calls to you check it out if not of course we'll continue to share lots of those fun lessons here we are going to open it up for Q&A and I have some freebies including some of these level up journals for people who are brave enough to ask some questions and get things started. And so thank you all very much.
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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. I've taken the insights from these interviews along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast. Think Like a Game Designer. 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.
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