[music] Inverse Genius presents On Board Games, episode 542, Scrounging for a Styrofoam Cup. [music] You are listening to On Board Games, where game industry veterans talk about the board and card gaming hobby, while exploring topics of interest to gamers, designers, and publishers. In this episode, Eric and Don talk to Jacob Bowers about how to break that game designer block. [music] On Board Games is sponsored by our amazing patrons at patreon.com/obg. Everything that comes in from Patreon goes to cover our monthly podcasting costs, and we really truly appreciate it. Thank you so much for your continued support over these 17 years. Hey, we have a merch store. If you want to get your On Board Games stuff, you can go to InverseGenius.com and click on the store link and see all the options that we have there. There's something you wish we had, drop us a note, and we'll see what we can do about adding it. Speaking of dropping us a note, we do live for feedback, so you can send us e-mail at onboardgamesmailbag@gmail.com. You can go to our guild guild 325 on board game geek, and of course there's always Facebook and Twitter looking for InverseGenius or On Board Games. Thank you so much for continuing to listen. Hello, and welcome to another fun episode of On Board Games. I'm Eric Dewey, one of your hosts. And you can find me at EricDewey.com or Eric, A-Y-R-K, all over the internet. With me, I have drag once again out of a good nap, Mr. Donald Dennis. Welcome back to get Mostly Be Sounding Me. Hooray! Hey, Eric, thanks for wrestling up another episode. I'm hoping over the next year to be a little more active with the podcast, so those of you who don't want that to write and complain to Eric immediately. But for the rest of you, hello, and yes, I'm Donald. You can find me all over the wilds of the internet as well, Spio. And today we have a guest that I'm excited to chat with about things that probably I should have talked about long time ago. Eric, introduce our new guest. Absolutely, we have Jacob Bauer's game designer. Jacob came to us and said, "Hey, I've got this really good idea for a topic." And I said, "Yes." So Jacob, why don't you introduce yourself? Hey there, everyone. Yeah, my name is Jacob. I am currently designing a board game called the Shadow of the NookuZaru. You can find me on the internet at weltedewallrusgames.com. You can sign up for my email newsletter there. You can also find me on boardgame geek at weltedewallrus. And you can also join me on my Discord server by heading over to my YouTube channel and clicking the link there. Also, Weltedewallrus Games on YouTube. But I've been designing this game since probably about last December or so, working on it through multiple iterations and made some progress on it. And I think we're just about ready to launch here this fall, getting all the numbers together and everything. And just about ready to go with it. Excellent. So before we dive into anything else, I'm curious. You did a good job branding Weltedewallrus. How did Weltedewallrus come up? Come about. I don't know. Mostly random brainstorm, I guess, just taking different titles. That was one that came up. And I think that's just kind of what we went with as the name of the company. Yeah. And the logo is almost completely pre-designed when you have a title like that. Yep. Oh, I was going to say the art for the shadow of Nokazaru. The art on that looks pretty sharp. I'm looking at your page now. Probably shouldn't be doing that. But... No, you're fine, man. But yeah, honestly, that was interesting. So some of the plan is that's actually all AI art made by Canva. Magic media and stuff. And so the plan is we're going to launch with that. But once we get funded is I'm planning on hiring actual artists to do... Hopefully art even better than that. Oh, yes. So that'll be nice. Yeah. Cool. If you had much pushback for using all that kind of art? Not particularly, actually. I mean, I'm not very active on a social media too much, but mostly just discord, personal friend sort of thing. But everybody I've talked about it with has not had much to say about it being AI art-wise. Interesting. Well, cool. Where is your logo? I'm trying to find the well-to-do-allorous logo. You can see it right now. It's just something kind of I threw together in Canva. The top left corner of the website there, if you can see it. Oh. Okay. I can send you an email afterward this show or something. I'm just envisioning a wall-risk with a top hat and a bow tie. But who knows? Yeah, that's pretty much it. Maybe a monocle as well. Got to have the monocle. Yeah, it's monocle. Yeah. Okay. Well, anyway, enough of my, you know, wanderings offs and, you know, no tangents for me today, right? So, let's continue with it though. Excellent. So, let's talk about some games we've played recently. So, Jacob, you played anything interesting or noteworthy lately? Well, I guess you could say, here recently, I've probably pulled out of what some people might call a classic. I've been playing Space Empires 4X recently. I actually got that last Monday as of this recording. Been enjoying it. Got the expansion with it as well. The first one. And it's been fun flying round spaceships, blowing up colonies, things like that. But I find that game pretty interesting because of the sandboxy feel to it. It makes it kind of interesting. You can know, because you can have all these different components. But, I mean, he's got a note in there saying that you can play the game and kind of change it to how you want it and you want to offend the designer. So, just interesting how that plays out and stuff. Kind of curious. What do you all think about sandboxy games, things like that? Oh, I certainly enjoy them. I have a lot of fun with them. My question, did you play this predominantly solo? Do you play it with people? So far, I've played it to player. I've read through a little bit of the solo rules. I haven't tried them out yet, though. Gotcha. And how long did your game take? So far, we've technically not been able to finish all of them. The first time, probably, we weren't being too aggressive enough. And then I took it down to play it with someone else. And then after that person had to leave, I swapped back out with the guy I was losing playing with. And we were playing a really large, huge map. So, it was going to take a while probably to finish that anyway. But that's still out on the table for now. Yeah, the large map basically takes up. Normally, when you play the game, you'll have it in maybe about half-ish of the map. But when you have the board, where it's like hexes and stuff. But when you play Space Empires 4X for the full game, you've got all the stuff laid out. And you take up every single hex for all these different places to explore. So, if you don't get like a portal, which we ended up getting like a portal, what kind of connected half one side of the board all the way to the other side, I bet that could take like ages that fully explore and stuff. Ah, nice. Yeah, it's kind of funny because you hit on one of the topics that I get in the most dumb arguments over. But when you called it a sandbox. So, I've got a couple of questions about this sandbox. In video games, sandbox means, hey, look, it's a game where you can just ignore the game and you can go and sort of mess about and do anything you want. And then eventually get back to the game if you care to. So, like, what is it in Vice City or in any of the Grand Theft Auto games, you can say, well, we're not going to just do nothing but be chased by the police and see how far we can launch a car or do these things. And it's not going to hinder your progress, your competition. So, what is it that really makes Space Empires 4X a sandboxy game? Does it have that same, hey, you can ignore the game and just keep playing? Or is someone going to slap you across the face and go win while you're overcoming the empire's largest potato grower or whatever? Yeah. Well, I didn't mean it. I guess it kind of with the sandboxy bit, I was thinking more like, you know, it has components that you can use or not use. Oh, okay, cool. And although he does have in, I think, the expansion rule set, like, alternate victory conditions you could do, like, throw in if you wanted to. Like, I think one of them was, like, king of the work point or something. And so, I guess if I recall correctly, I guess kind of like, you want to control the work point spaces too. But also, the main victory is blow up someone else's homeworld. It's the actual victory condition. So, if you can accomplish that, then the game will end. But also, there could be a point system you can add in where, if you get enough points, you could win that way too. So, there's multiple ways you could play it and turn off on and off different victory conditions and components and things like that. Oh, okay, cool. It sounds fun. It sounds like something I would love to have played back when I had no concept of time. Yeah, that is one aspect, unfortunately, of these big strategy games is, they do take a lot of time to complete a full one. Yeah, see, that was an approaching approaching. Approaching my umpteenth thousandth hour of playing Valheim or whatever, but yeah. That's video game time, though. That's a little bit different. Great. Don, how about you? You played anything interesting or noteworthy lately? You know, nothing really to speak about. I mean, I think I've already talked about the video games and stuff that we played, like a goblin. I've talked about goblin quest on the show, haven't I? Yes. Or not. Yes. So, no, mostly we've been doing a lot of video games over, or I mean, we've been doing a lot of role playing games over the summer at work. And summer's my busy, busy time, but we are going to start a, another weekly board game and tabletop gaming thing at work. So I'll be forced to play more board games. So I'll have actual content for the show to talk about. Oh, that's not fair at all. Wow. All right. How about you? Well, I had gotten some games in from Grand Gamers Guild. And so I finally got some of those to the table. These are their GenCon origin releases. In fact, most of their origin games, if not all of them, but I think most of their new origin games sold out at Origins, which was pretty exciting for them. One of which, which we'll be talking about soon, probably next episode, Turn On Oak, which you and I had played during the Kickstarter, we played prototype versions of. That's out. But one of the games that I got to the table is a game called Words of a Feather. And so this is a word game, as you can imagine. It is a very extravagantly produced one. It is kind of interesting. For instance, there's a bowl that the game comes with the whole, the scoring crystals. And it's a ceramic bowl. And the cards themselves are supposed to be shaped like peacock feathers. And so you make this really beautiful board out and then you will have five words in front of you and you will pick two of those words and you will give a third clue. And with those two words and that third clue, you will have written something down and other people are trying to guess it. So that's sort of the crux of the game. So the example they have is like fire and water and steam. And they're running the word bath. So they're trying to get someone to guess bath. And then once everyone has made their guess, you can bet whether or not someone else matches you. And then everyone reveals and you score points appropriately. So anytime someone, if you're the clue giver, anytime someone matches you, you get a point. If you bet stuff and you match anybody else, then you get points for that as well. The game just kind of goes that way. So it's a pretty simple and fun game. Some of the tricky parts of course are looking at these five completely unrelated cards and trying to come up with some sort of connection that you can make with them. But one of the things I really enjoy about it is if the clue giver is terrible at clues, right, they give this clue that just makes no sense to them. But somebody else is on your wavelength, even though you didn't match the clue giver, if you match each other and you bet, you actually get to score points. So you're not completely at the mercy of the clue giver. And so I think that was a neat little twist to the rules on words of a feather. So we've played it twice now and I've played it with completely different groups and had quite a bit of fun with it. So it's a beautiful easy word game. That's Birds of a Feather? Words of a Feather. W-O-R-D-S. Jacob, what else have you played that's noteworthy or entertaining? Well, here recently, if you can't tell, it's Space 4X Games. I guess this will kind of give it away. We had a board gaming day at our church and while we were there, I played Eclipse. Was it the second edition or first edition? Yeah, we had a full six players. We got about halfway through what we had to all head home. But it was nice playing that one. It was actually pretty interesting having it with six people. Because most of the time I played it with just two, I think. I think I got it up to four one time, but that was a shorter session. But the thing that I started with the most honestly on these games is getting enough time to play them. And that's kind of made me wonder at times, you know, what if someone designed one where you could play it like faster maybe somehow? Just kind of something I think about, you know, as designer, kind of maybe a cool to make one of those games where it could be played. And you still get the effect of, oh, this is cool, I'm building up stuff. But you know, you don't have to be there for half a day to actually, you know, accomplish stuff. Yeah, that's, that's, it's an interesting thing because I thought the same thing because, oh, one of our favorite games is Battlestar Galactica, which is typically a three hour commitment. And, you know, there are games that can do a hidden trader as well in a shorter time. Just like there are four X games I could play like last, that was kind of last light's big pitch was like, hey, a four X game in 45 minutes. But on the same token, the fact that like in your building up your empire over time, like in Eclipse is, is, is something I don't think that you can really recreate in a condensed period of time. I don't know, you have to start really looking at simultaneous movement, I think. I hope it can be done, but it's a bit of a challenge. I mean, maybe that'll be my second release here. Real time space for X. Yeah. Actually, you should go literal real time. So anytime a ship is moving from one planet to the other, you know, it takes months. You come back next month. The longest forex game in history. You'll definitely want to research your warp drives. Exactly. Well, I'll talk about one more game and then we'll jump into it, but I finally got to play worm span. I actually played it twice with two different groups. I have seen it played a few times, of course played wingspan a lot, was curious what the difference was, even skimmed the rules, but I finally got it to the table. So have either of you played worm span yet? I have played wingspan, but not worm span, but I've heard about it saying it was somewhat, it was not a reskin. It was like a bit different. Yeah, it's, yeah, exactly. It's like a cousin. It's kind of a thing. Like there's a lot of stuff that's very similar. You've got your layout, your enticing dragons, and as you do actions, you know, the more dragons you have, it's kind of building your engine. But there's also some simplification. For instance, the food, the whole rolling dice to get food kind of thing like you do in wingspan is eliminated. You generally get to pick the food that you want as you need it. And the other thing is that you have to excavate your caves. So you start with like the first column, but then any deeper columns you have to actually excavate along the way before the dragons will come in and nest, which is kind of a neat little mechanic. Whenever you excavate, you get stuff out of it so it's not like a dead turn. And so the game itself was quite a bit of fun. It really scratches a very similar itch as wingspan. I own wingspan. I don't feel the need to run out and get worm span. And I try to figure out why. Part of it is just that it doesn't do anything amazingly different. But if anyone ever wanted to play it, I'd be happy to sit down and play it. And the other thing is the art on worm span. So they went with kind of a watercolor art for everything, which looks great. But the dragons are all kind of goofy looking. I mean, figure it out. They've got to create a hundred and somewhat different dragons for the game. And so there's a lot of different looks to the dragons, but it's all in a consistent art style, but it's just an art style. When you compare it to that sort of vibrant birding book look of wingspan, you're just kind of like, oh, okay. Yeah, and I guess that's kind of where it comes to imagination. I guess you just, because with the birds, you can look at creation and see all the different beautiful birds that God's created. And it's much easier to take those to have, see what God's created and been able to put it into a board game. But I guess with the worm span, sometimes just a little harder, I guess, because, you know, limited capability, just having to think of a way to think of, I guess, just a new, I don't know what you call it, yeah, I guess, like an idea and stuff. You have to create your own kind of mythical creatures of something. So I guess this is the pilot. It's a much better job at diversification than, hey, I'm trying to make a new look for 100 dragons at one time. You know, it's like, oh. Yeah, after about the 40th dragon. Yeah. Yeah, after about the 40th dragon, it gets to be a little bit difficult. I mean, again, the art is great, right? But it's just, and the only reason I even bring it up is because the art of wingspan was one of the big talking points about wingspan itself. So, anyway, so that's worm span. Definitely enjoyed it or had a good time with it. Still has a candy cone of eggs. Oh, right. As much as I like the game for wingspan, I felt like that the sort of the spreadsheet showed through, you know, where you can sort of say, ah, I recognize sort of the bones behind the game, sort of how those, is that as obvious in worm span, or am I just over sensitive to those kinds of things at this point? Um, it's, it's fairly similar because, I mean, you know, you get your randomness in whatever cards you ultimately play, so your engine's going to be different each time, but the structure behind it's the same each time. Okay. Um, alright. So, yeah. Alrighty. Well, let's take a quick break and we're going to come back. We're going to talk about how you deal with blocks such as the artist block we just discovered, or more specifically, game designer block. So, one second. Hey, this is Eric. I just wanted to let you guys know that since 2020 we've been using Zen Caster to do all of our recording, which has been a huge help to us because what it allows you to do is have your basic website where you can connect with one another and communicate with one another, you know, like your zooms and your teams, but it also records everything in a separate track, which is critical when editing time comes around. So, hey, I encourage you, check out Zen Caster, z-e-n-c-a-s-t-r.com and use keyword on board games. All one word. Thank you. And we're back. I'm still Eric. He's still Don. He's still Jacob. And the topic that Jacob threw at me is something that is near and dear to my heart because it is something that I've suffered with and Don as well. And that is designer's block, right? Like, you are working on a game, you've gotten it, and this is how I envision it, and if you had a different vision, Jacob, please correct me. But, you know, you've gotten the fun stuff out of the way, the cool stuff that you're really excited to do, and now you're getting to that sort of other part of the game, and everything development-wise just comes to a crashing halt because you know where you want to go, but you don't know, you can't figure out quite how to get there. Is that an accurate statement? Yeah, definitely. I mean, for my board game specifically, actually, I've had the main concepts down, but you get to that point where you've got this one mechanic and you're not sure exactly, well, I feel like I kind of need this, but if I get rid of it, then the game doesn't work too well, but I can't figure out how to modify it just right, so you keep game balance and you don't have things running out and run away leader problem with just one guy obliterating the other guy, and it's just too much like chess, or for my game specifically, but for just board games in general, you can definitely get to that point where you feel like you have that one mechanic or maybe two mechanics that you're just almost there, but you can't exactly get it just right, and so hopefully at the end of this episode, maybe you'll be inspired just a little about how to solve this problem. Excellent, absolutely. So I know Don and I, we've had multiple games where we've gotten to that point, and a lot of times we just kind of shelve it and just wait until inspiration strikes. What were you going to say, Don? Yeah, the number of notebooks that we have with partially completed ideas is like, "Oh, I'm going to do this one where you're all controlling the same golem "to try and get it to mixed potions while keeping the other people from using the golem "to mix the potions that they want to make." Like, "Oh, this is great. "I have the core mechanism set up, but now I have to inject the extra fun." And so go go go golems is sitting on the shelf, you know, and you've got a hundred other games that we've sort of come up with a one-page write-up of, "We want a game to do this." And then we said, "Oh, wait, we have a podcast to produce. "Let's do that instead." That is true. And writers block hit so many places. It's like you're trying to come up with a game to do X, Y, or Z, and you can't figure out that, or you're trying to work on a game that's already existing. But I think, yeah, if we focus on the -- we've got a game, and now we need to turn it into a game, that's where the block hits, and there's a lot of ways that that can happen. Yeah. And so our number one rule for defeating designer block is don't have a podcast, because that will take all of your time away from focusing on that. But yeah, anyway, go ahead, Jacob. Do you have some more practical tips or experiences that you've had? Well, I kind of agree just the -- basically, just make sure that your -- my main point is that you just keep working on it. If you -- you can shelve it, but just don't forget about it. Make sure, you know, you can come back to it, and you work on it every so often if you can't think of a way. Even if you can't think of a way to do it. One of my ideas is maybe, like, maybe set a deadline to try and, like, I'm going to fix this problem by then. Write it down, put it up in places where you'll see it. Give it to a friend, you trust, like, hold me to this. I'm going to actually -- and check up on me in, like, maybe say two weeks, and then at the end of those two weeks, if you don't solve the problem, that's okay, but at least you know you made a good effort at it. And if you do solve the problem, then, hey, maybe you're one step closer to actually publishing your board game. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one of the things that's kind of funny, Genesis and Phil Collins did this a lot, is they'd be working on songs, and they'd just put gibberish in certain places when they had no idea what to put in there. And eventually, they'd replace the gibberish with lyrics or something, but sometimes they didn't. And so, for instance, the Phil Collins song, "Sasudio." "Sasudio" was a word that he just made up to fit into the meter there, and he was going to come back later and change it, but never did. And Abacab, the abbreviations there are just the different sections of the song, the A, the C, the A, the B, C, and again, they had kind of come in there. So I've tried to incorporate some of that on occasion, where it's like, just, you know, something happens here. You know, the trading occurs here. Don't worry about what the trading rules are now. I have no idea, but we're just going to trade. So, and then at some point, we'll come back and either fix the trading rules and we'll take over, hey, just free trade without rules actually works in this scenario. I was going to say, yeah, just sometimes just doing something, right? Keep the wheels spinning. I've heard artists say when they hit writer's block that, you know, just go write things, even if you have to write out a recipe, or you're going to, you know, journal your thoughts, just something to get that writing, that writing juice, you know, going. And I think that a lot of the deal is, set it as a priority. You sort of said that with, hey, Jacob's like, put a deadline on it. And yeah, the first time I got to demo games at Board Game GeekCon, I was like, well, I'm going to do this game for Board Game GeekCon. And so that made me streamline the game enough that I actually had a playable game. So I think setting it as a priority, I'm going to have a game ready by this time. Maybe it's not the game you're currently working on. I'd say that's probably both a good and a bad thing, is don't necessarily over focus on that one game, because especially if you're doing your first game, that first game that you're making is that precious little baby that's got to be completely right, and everything has to be excellent, and you want to hone it so that it is the best game ever. Well, nobody is ever going to make the best game ever on their first game out of the gate. Get a game made. Don't worry about that game. Like Eric says, throw the pieces in there, make it happen, get it to the play test stage, get sort of that excitement going amongst your players. And I'm going to warn you, player burnout, play testing burnout is as big of a thing as game design burnout. So you don't want to bring out your variant on shoots and ladders for the 147th time to play test group. You want to, second, you start getting bored with it as a designer. Your play test group is already going to be bored with it. So feel free to jump and change something else. But on the other hand, if you don't learn to focus on a particular project, what's never going to happen, Eric? You'll never get finished. It'll never get finished. So you're fighting two different ends of that spectrum. And yeah, so that's what I was going to say, sort of stuff to support. But both of you had already said, well, also saying, be careful. Don't be Donald. Because I get distracted. True true, but you also get stuff done. So what are some other things that you encountered, Jacob, just staring at the design notebook? Well, one of the things I kind of thought of, you could try to, like, get past designer's block is kind of like give yourself like a, what I call, call a design challenge, maybe. And kind of just think of like an activity or an industry or something. Like if you're stuck on your own game, just think of maybe you change it up a little. Think of like an activity industry and then just try to think of a way, maybe like just to make it into a game. That way you can kind of like, okay. So I don't know. Hit me with an example or something. I guess you could. I don't know. Fishing for dragons. I don't know. I don't know. But yeah. So fishing for dragons. So you could think of ways to like take mechanics. I mean, you've got, I think Borgang geek has like the list of like a lot of different mechanics that just, you can go down that list. Kind of look for things that sound like, hey, this maybe could work in the game. Kind of like piece together things into the rule book. And then also brainstorm yourself and just try and think of a way to maybe make a game that fits what you thought of sort of thing. And even if it doesn't turn out to be like a playable game or anything, maybe at least you learned a thing or two about different mechanics. And then maybe you can apply what you learned to your other game. So you could maybe get past the block you're having on your original game. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really neat idea, this idea. Especially if your main game that you're designing is pretty complex. If you have just this light, oh, I'm going to make a party game. And so you can almost have something else that you can just take a breath on, do something quick and light and then come back to the heavy later. That can certainly help. One of the things that we've talked about, I think we've had various designers, but especially people who go to like the prototype alleys and those kinds of unpubs and whatnot, they talk about just moving on to a different mechanic. Like I'm struggling with this one thing. So we'll just move later into the game and just jump to another mechanic. I personally am such a linear thinker that I find that very difficult to do. If I can't skip C to get to D, even though it's kind of a way to work. So obviously that goes to show that there's multiple ways to do different things, of course. But one of the options there is if you're stuck on one part of the game, move on to another part of the game, make that happen. And yeah, like you were saying there with the getting stuck on mechanics and stuff, so it depends on either way, if you know what the problem is, I'm having issues implementing this mechanic. I mean, maybe other ways you could go and try and play board games that you know have this mechanic in it and see how did they handle this mechanic and could maybe I remix it or reapply it to my board game to try and fix what I'm having issues with. Or again, if you're having issues and maybe you've studied the same mechanic for like six months or something and you're just still stuck on it, you can't get past it. Maybe you could try again playing a board game just with totally different mechanics, like totally unrelated to your board game. Just a new one just to try and learn different ways board games use mechanics. Because the main thing is just learning, especially when you're new, just knowing how to get all the different mechanics kind of learn. Oh, so this is what a market is and this is what a hidden movement is, et cetera. Just trying to learn different techniques and stuff to pieces you can put together to make fun board games. Yeah, and that reminds me a lot of Jeff Englstein and Isaac Shalev's book on board game mechanics. They basically, all it is, is a listing of different types of mechanics that are used in board games. It's a very dry academic type book. It's not like a reading kind of thing, but it's a reference material. But yeah, it covers exactly that. I think even to a lesser extent, Freedman Priest's 504 does a similar thing, where you've got all these different mechanics that you can kind of mix and match. And, you know, "Oh, hey, your auction isn't working. Maybe you don't need an auction. Maybe you should do, you know, a yachty style thing." Or, you know, something like that. And I can even see something like that leading to a completely different game. Like you end up abandoning the one that you're working on because this led to some other, you know, parallel development and you'll come back to that first one at a later date. Yeah, that's legit. It's like, "Hey, sure, I found this other solution that turns the entire game into a different experience. I'm going to want this other experience later once I figure it out. But we're going to dive into the dexterity version of an auction, whatever that might be, and play a wild or wackier game." You know, so that could be fun. Yeah, yeah, it could be. So Don, when you get kind of, when you struggle with art related, you know, blocks or whatever, do you ever just kind of take random inputs and try to make something around them? You know, like just have the internet tell you randomly something like, "Oh, you need to make a, you know, a dog surfing or something." Well, a project that I picked up for inktober one year was, instead of using their pre-generated codes, is I would deal out three code names cards and use those three things and try and make a picture that was just based on whatever those three things were. You know, how am I going to do, how am I going to combine those three things into a picture? And that was a lot of fun and sort of per people like that is so cool and clever. How did you do that? I'm like, "Well, this was literally the most obvious way I could think of translating, you know, that into a picture." And they're like, "Nope, I never were to come up with that." And I'm like, "Okay, well, cool, that's well done." So, yeah, I think taking random prompts and I was going to mention 504 as a, "Hey, go through there and you could try Lego-like to fit in the various versions of auctions or the various versions of a market or whatever it is, but you beat me to it, Eric. You beat me to it." Sorry, I'm sorry. It's boiling. Yeah, I don't even know if that is still available as is a game, but if it is, then it's a resource when you're saying, "I want to try this new thing in my game." You can see sort of pull a segment out of that almost whole cloth and add it to your game and see how it works. I don't know what would actually save you any time, but it'd make you feel like you were making any progress at all. So, yeah. Yeah, and sorry to keep talking over you, Jacob, but that makes me think. And it gets back to what you were talking about with the deadline is any forward progress is progress, right? You have to kind of remind yourself that. Sometimes you're just going to make very small progress, but you're still moving forward and you're still keeping that habit of working on the game. Yeah, the biggest thing for sure is always to take action with stuff because it's easy. Maybe if you get run into a wall to kind of just clam up and kind of shut down and not actually try to work on it because your brain kind of goes dead. Oh, man, I don't know what to do. And then you just stuck there because you put it on the shelf and then you just forget about it or something. So just always make sure that you're at least, even if you do put on shelf, maybe set, again, another deadline like, "Okay, after a month, I'm going to come back to this and see if I can work on it again." Especially if it's like an 80% game or something, you're almost there, but you just got that one or two problems that are not working. Just always be sure to try and come back to it if you can and work on it that way. Yeah, because... Good. I was going to say, and I would say for me, that would not work unless, for example, I set up some sort of reminder. If I put it on my calendar, or I told Google or whatever, remind me, "Go and today we're going to do another play test." So as I'm getting closer to that month or whatever I've set it aside, I have to go through and relearn the game. And maybe by myself having to relearn what I've done, I'll see some notes of something I previously talked about, or it gives me an idea then to fix it. But yeah, putting it away so it's not so fresh in your mind, and then having to re-familiarize yourself with that game is going to give you almost a new perspective on everything. Yeah, and that was exactly what I was going to say. If you don't set an alarm, one week can turn to a month, can turn to six months, can turn to two years, kind of thing. Yeah, for sure, definitely set an alarm for sure. You don't want to actually forget about it, because that would be sad. But you do get that moment of when you rediscover it, you're looking at it and you go, "Man, I was pretty brilliant coming up with some of this stuff." And you can kind of get re-energized. So there are times when you want to stick something away, hopefully you're working on something else instead. But I've had those moments of, "Man, I was pretty slick coming up with this." Yeah, and I would say also make sure you've got a project box for it, that you can put everything that you had in it, whether it's previous plate tester, handouts that you've given to people for comment, or whether it's any art assets you've created, or whatever. So have a folder for that project on your desktop, on your computer, also have a physical project box for all the pieces that you thought were relevant for it. You don't want to have to reassemble pieces for that project. And if you find yourself going to that project and scavenging it for pieces for other games, more often that you're designing than leaving them in the box, then maybe it is time to give up on that particular game. Or get back to it, if you're like, "I can't keep harvesting things and having this be useful, so let's finish the game." Yeah. Well, another idea, kind of off topic here, but another kind of idea I've had to try and get past some of this design block issue is just try and, if you haven't done it already, play test it with maybe some other designers and stuff, or other board gamers who kind of are in the hobby industry, and kind of get their feedbacks, bring it to the table and say, "Hey, I know this problem exists, okay, so we're going to play this." And while we play it, I'm having issues getting past it, so maybe you could give your feedback on it, your input, and tell me what you think, how we could get past this stump I'm on or something. And I actually have a Google form I use when I play test, and it asks questions like, "What did you enjoy about the game? What did you not enjoy about the game?" kind of thing. And so they can, after a play test, I can give my phone to them, and they can type in kind of their responses, and that way I have it saved in that Google form for later, that way I have it always like an individual copy, and I can't forget kind of what we discussed and things. Yeah, that is great. There is nothing easier than solving someone else's problem as opposed to solving your own, and having a new set of fresh eyes, looking at something is a great way to reinvigorate you and kind of potentially get solutions to your struggle. It brings into a slightly different topic, and that is under play testing as to what to keep and what to get rid of, and how to not let your ego get in the way, and also how not to let someone who's like, "Oh, let me tell you exactly how to fix your game and have a dominant personality change the game from your vision to their vision." But it absolutely can help move you forward, which I think ultimately is the goal. Yeah, it's definitely important to make sure that when you do it, that it's not going to become designed by this other guy with imprint from you, probably the other way around. So, but also make sure that it's not you who is just like, "I'm not going to listen to advice. I know what I'm doing." Exactly. Just always be sure you're open to new ideas with your board game and how to fix it. Yeah, because otherwise you'll end up with a game that only you want to play. If you're adamant about, "No, this is how it should be." People would be like, "Well, maybe not." No, you just don't get the vision. You don't see it. Yeah, that kind of thing. For sure. Yeah, not getting the vision or not being able to have other people see it means try it with different play test groups. Maybe you'll find one that actually, "Ah, yes, the people at the world board game champions chip love this game, but my friends who mostly play Uno don't." That could be legit, but on the other hand, if you can't find an audience while you're demoing the game, it's not the best game ever. It's not the best it can be. Yeah. Makes sense. Don, how about yourself? I asked you a question that started talking about myself. How about yourself? No, do that. How about myself? Well, I think the people who've seen our struggle to complete games for years now. We've constantly talked about how we're just too busy to get it done, which is why we have on designers on the podcast about us. Talk about them rather. Talk about their struggles, which honestly keeps us, I think, interested in designing games. Yeah, you mentioned how getting someone else to help inspire you or push you forward on your projects. A design partner is not a bad idea. I know that some of our favorite games are games designed by teams or folks who sort of have found people to work with. And that helps, but I think that my problem is not so much getting bored or getting blocked on a specific project, it's that I'm just so easily distracted. Yeah. So if you can be there to either physically or virtually work on projects with somebody, just to sort of keep you on task, that that's probably the way that I would find the biggest help of, yes, we're going to work on this game until it's complete. Maybe we wouldn't produce a podcast for two or three months, that would kill that project, is it worth all that? So you have to decide sort of how, where in your hierarchy of design and projects and hobbies that you've got at that moment, is your game design going to be there? Is your hobby designing games and not completing games? That's legitifying. You could say, this is what I want to do, I like to noodle around with the parts and I want to get through to it. Maybe they'll be a finished game at some point. But also I would say that if you want to be a published designer, then yeah, hang that up and keep a big project board so you know where you are in the project design process. And so I think the organization of your information is probably a big enough deal. And you're going to say, all right, we are not to the art stage, but think about everything you're ever going to need to do on a project, go listen to some of our earliest things, a podcast where we're talking about designs, and set up a big board that says, hey, these are the things that I need to work on for the game, keep that checklist. Here's when I want to have it done by, don't be anxious if those deadlines go past, just put a new date there by it, because you don't want to panic yourself out of completing it. Saying, well, I've already failed. No, you're just, these are just your estimates of what you think it's going to be. And then work your checklist, work your calendar, your schedule, or whatever it's going to be, so that you know how things are going to go. Because at the end, you don't want to have a completed game and zero idea of the artistic direction or of the theme or of the, you know, whatever it is, but just sort of keep a list of all the stuff that you think you're going to need. And that's going to be as helpful as anything else in overcoming, overcoming writer's block or designer's block because you can focus on something else on that list. Yeah, that's, that's brilliant. It's functionally an outline for the game. And, because I was like, you know, I don't, I don't necessarily get writer's block when I'm writing something. I would get writer's block when I'm outlining. But once the outline is done, it's just a matter of, of spending the time and actually, you know, each day writing something and wanting to apply that same methodology to game design. So, having, having what you just said, a checklist and outline, project deliverables, task list, whatever you want to call it, I think is, is critical to knowing where you are in the design and keeping forward. Let me put you on the spot, Jacob. Did you go ahead, Don? I was going to say, and that may not work for everyone. But as I've sort of fallen in love with bread sheets and using, you know, Google sheets or whatever it is, I've become more of that. Hey, let's put stuff in order and, you know, and get it that way so other people when they're doing game design, it might be, we want to get that game experience down first and then we'll worry about everything else. So don't think I'm saying this is how you have to do it. But yeah, hey, Jacob, did you do this? Did you come up with an outline of what you need to accomplish or do you just dive in? Yeah, I just got to dove in. To be honest, actually, I guess you could theoretically say I did come up with an outline somewhat. Because honestly, as I was writing the car one day, I've told the story on one of my YouTube videos, I actually just wrote out some of the rules on like a styrofoam cup. I'm just trying to get the different, like the different pieces, how they would move and things like that, I think. But I ended up like what I started with is I had just recently purchased tabletop simulator at that time. So I ended up like, you know, using some of the components and then I got, I was told to use Canva to help make the art and stuff for the AI art. And I basically, I kind of used the AI art and was able to use it as a kind of creative tool to be able to have a visual theme as well as putting the game together, and I was able to use it to import the assets and make the game there and tabletop simulator. But that's actually, that's a really brilliant thing, though, because you could physically, virtually play with the pieces without having to spend all the time designing the prototype pieces, and so you can kind of play around that way. Yeah, I mean, that can be a time saver if you can streamline the art and stuff, because also, what's really nice is if the game does work, in theory, you have enough art to make a cool looking prototype, because that is a big thing is a lot of board games are, you still have good design rules, but like, I'd say 50% of it is visual. You can have a great game, but without having art, the game can be rather boring to it, because our printer at home is like black and white only anymore, because our color broke on it. But you can still use the printer? Wow. Yeah, but what I did is we sent it off to, I sent it off to Office Max and got like a color version, and the difference between the color version and black and white was like night and day was like much better looking once I finally got it in color. And so it's been interesting to see kind of how visuals can play into an aspect of the board game there too. Yeah, yeah, it just gets you more excited if anything else, right? I mean, it gets you kind of more involved. Yeah. Which I think is another thing is when I said jump around to different parts on a game, find what it is that most excites you about game design and you can jump. Mine is, hey, we want to do the visuals right. I've got sketchbooks and sketchbooks of game pieces or components for games that will never happen now, but I will pick it up and start playing around with, well, what are these pieces going to look like? Knowing that this is not what they're going to look like, but if it got finished, I would have gone through a bunch of variants on, you know, my grinder's game like, oh, what are the gears and the spaces and the places like that work like. And, you know, that that's the fun part for me, the agonizing over play test or, you know, filling out lots of minutia forms and trying to not get typos is not my fun place. But working with that visual aspect also does it. So, hooray. Yeah. And I think probably the last sort of thing, and you alluded to this earlier, both of you is just kind of team up with people, right. Find someone who's got the strengths where your weaknesses are and vice versa. And then that way they can help you on the parts that you don't want to do. And you can help them on the parts that they don't want to do. So, this is us helping you do these things. Yes, exactly. Did you have any other tips or life experience to throw into the pot there? Not much. No. I think that's about it. I had one idea, but then I already forgot it. So, that went away. Yeah. Oh, now I remember. Okay. Okay. I remember now. Yes, it was to basically always be sure to while you're designing, since a lot of it is inspiration based. If you do get inspired, maybe while you're designing one game, you get very inspired to make another game. Write it down, write down the idea if you can think of them, write down the rules. Because it's probably kind of hard to initiate that kind of flow of writing where, you know, oh, I could see how all these pieces could go together, maybe. Kind of. And so if you can get a lot of that down on paper, then it would, then you can, you don't have to play just that maybe immediately. But if you get like the rules written out and everything, then when you come back to it, you've got basically the outline already written out. It might be easier to create the board game because you've already got some of the work done on it. And then having to start totally from scratch. Right down your vision for how this game is going to play, right? This is not just the rules, but sort of here's what I want to see in the game when it's going on. And then that way you have got context as well as as well as technical details. Eric. Yeah, I was going to say make sure you always have something to write ideas down on. Otherwise you might find yourself scrambling for a styrofoam cup to. Pretty much, for sure. And there's there's the name of this the episode scrambling for a styrofoam cup. There we go. I love it. That's you, too. Excellent. Well, Jacob, I thank you so much for coming on and chatting with us. And so letter listeners know again where you can be found and an approximate date when they can start checking out the shadows of Naki Zaru. Yeah, so you can find me again on weltsdowallriskames.com and sign up for my email newsletter there. You can go to my YouTube channel, subscribe to that, and also join my Discord server through a link on the YouTube channel as well. So do you? I've got a question. Are you accepting artist portfolios to review for your to replace the AI art yet? Or is that something that's still a ways down the road? I've been looking for artists. I think I've probably already found a service for it. I was probably going to go with PINGY if you've ever heard of it before. No. But basically they're an art illustration service and you pay for them by the month. And though as long as you're up to date on communication with them that you can basically put in requests and they'll make art for you. And so likely I'll be going with them for the art lives though. Interesting. I'd like to hear your feelings on that at the end. Not that there's anything wrong with it. Just kind of curious how that works as opposed to. Yeah. Maybe we can go back once we go live Kickstarter. I've got a physical copy in hand and we can talk about that or something for sure. How's that spelled? P-E-N-J-I. All right. That's a whole new way of doing business. I can't imagine doing that as an artist. And are they don't use AI to do their stuff? I think the guy told me to explicitly like request not to use AI and they won't use it. Oh, okay. Interesting. Cool. Yeah. That's a whole other idea of interest. Yeah. Cool. Jacob drops this whole new topic right at the end of the show. Good job. Way to get you. Make sure you get back on. Awesome. Jacob, I appreciate you chatting with us. Don, go ahead. I got one last thought. I've used AI to help draft out things and stuff before, but I've obviously never published anything that used AI and he's doing that. I guess you could ask chat GPT, design a mechanism for and see how dumb or horrible that is. But you know, I don't recommend, I mean, Scott, I think has used, you know, it to, for some of his classes, has used AI for examples for bad game design, I think. I don't know exactly how he's used it. But if you're just looking for inspiration, then you can do that. And also you can search geek lists on board game geek for games of X type. And so you can see how other games have done it. But, you know, some game designers play a lot of other people's games and some notoriously don't. Like, I think Reinder can see it doesn't play a lot of other people's games or didn't for a long time. So, you know, your method may vary, but I would not count on AI to write your rules for you for any check chunk of your thing of your game. And yeah, I'm not a lawyer, so I always talk to a lawyer with legal advice and stuff. But I believe there's some legal confusion, at least in the United States, with basically who gets the rights to stuff made by AI, and particularly with art, it seems to be the case that with the art, you can't actually like copyright it. So if you were to use it, your board game, people could theoretically just change your title, change your rule book a little, republish it, and there's basically be nothing you could do that for it. And I just, I wanted listeners to know that, hey, we're talking about using AI as a tool, not using AI to do all the work. You know, even though Photoshop has AI in it that you can apply filters or do weirdness or whatever, that's not using it to do the art, that's using it to, you know, to get the art done, if that makes any sense. Yeah, no, it does, it does, yeah. And you know, you chat GBT or something, you could throw out a, say something that triggers an inspiration on your end, so yeah, I agree with that completely. All right, before I sign us off, Don, any other things that you want to talk about? Nope, that's it. I'm Donald Dennis. You can find me all over the internet is Walsfio. Thank you for organizing this, and hey, Jacob, great to meet you. Nice to meet you as well. Excellent. Well, for having me on here. You're welcome. I'm Eric Dewey. I'm Donald Dennis. I'm Jacob Bowers. And you've been listening too? On board games! That's it for this episode of On board games. If you enjoy On board games, join our guild on board game geek. You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, hard us on board game links, give us a five star review on iTunes or patronize us at patreon.com/obg. Want to be on the show? Please be in touch with the topic ideas far and advanced as possible as our schedule does fill up. You can find out more about the On board games podcast at inversegenius.com. Email us questions, comments, or snide remarks at on board games mail bag at gmail.com. On board games is licensed under creative comments, attribution, non-commercial, no-derivative works, 4.0 international license. Thanks. Alrighty. Jacob, go ahead and say something just so we can make sure we have some waves. No testing. Do we have audio? Do we have audio? Yeah, yeah, there we go. Okay, I need to get closer to my mic. That's what we need. Perfect. I'm not using your headphones, Mike. No. Got you. It's all for show. Awesome. Alright. I think we're good then. So cool. Alrighty. Yes? No. I'm excited. Let's keep going. You just gave me another section to edit. Thank you, Don. (laughs)
