Thanks Ash and all... since i`m 2-3 years into my own game, catching videos from the people i enjoy really help me focus and know i`m on the right track. Look forward to watching this video. Fingers crossed my first KS this year....
Thanks all for this conversation. These kind of dialogues are too rare in creative art, relaying enthusiasm and foundational knowledge. When Sean said: “Core rules don’t make a game.”, that’s what each of you bring to your works. Y’all make the rules serve the story of the game. So, it was great to see & hear you talk it out a bit.
Absolutely fantastic talk! My game is sitting around 120 pages and its hilarious to see how some of the game designers I look up to took very similar approaches to how I started in my game! Can't wait for the next one!
Love it. A bunch of wacky, knowledgeable and experienced dudes talking about making games for their toy soldiers. My kind of people :) Also designers of some of my favorite games this decade. If I could go back in time and trade all of my GW rulebooks for those indie games I would, they get invalidated in like 8-10 months anyways usually while I got at least a couple of years worth of gaming time from Frostgrave first ed. as an example.
Nice discussion. As a game designer, this is the most common question I get as well. My response is always, "If you want to be a game designer, you need to write a game and you need people to play it. That's it." Simple but not easy.
Great video my friend in truth this could not have come at a more important time. I’m working on a horror game now for awhile and it’s been a long and in all truthfulness rough time but this video really did help
Thanks for that - always fun to see you guys sharing insights and having a laugh! I can't tell you how much fun you chaps have given myself and my friends playing your creations over the last couple of years since we all got back into gaming - long may you all continue!
Here's a topic that should be considered more. Tapletop gaming is getting swamped with ideas and games and it gets hard to find players because no one can buy everything. And the left over models from dead games you wanna keep using
i agree entirely! I'm going to do my part to try and push using proxies. just because you don't have all the models for some game shouldn't mean you don't play it! get the pieces you can, use any model that makes sense for the others until you can get the real model. I'm just ramping up a big collab with some other mini-tubers that's right up that alley
Great episode. Here's some random, wordy thoughts I had as I listened.. I'm more intrigued by interesting and fun mechanics than bringing an epic concept or theme to a game and designing mechanics around it. Makes me wonder if my game design will be good because of this? After hundreds of hours of development and play testing over two years, I was satisfied that I had a good design so I was going to begin the process of populating army profiles and so on. I then realized that the game I had designed was very similar mechanically to Kings of War, but with a couple of major "novel" mechanics added in. So I had to begin the process all over again to make my game's mechanics stand apart from KoW, as I didn't want to be labeled a clone. I've replaced the mechanics that are overtly similar to KoW with different mechanics that serve roughly the same concept, as these are not really the "it" factor to the game to begin with. Funny that one of the guys would mention morale check mechanics, that has been the most difficult part for me to develop in my game. Everyone is so used to rolling dice, and adding them together. I've found that my moral system, which involves rolling a few dice, and counting the successes against a target number, confuses people, not because it's complex (because it's not), but because it breaks from the norm found in most war-games that they have played. I really dig that you guys talk about so many topics that I have wondered about (siloing information, which I will do, designing games for miniatures and all that). I'm currently trying to secure miniature sculpts for my game, but as it is a rank-and-file war-game, and I'm not rich, this has been very difficult.
Great discussion. Would love to hear how you approach working solo vs when collaborating (or does that just descend into d6 vd10 v d20 fisticuffs?) eg if trying to write rules together? Or getting inspired by the artwork that gets attached to the game? Your chat has inspired me to create 'Smuggler surprise' - adventures in the seedy underworld of kinder mules.
Aaaa---aayyyyy!! A new Let's Talk! Been waiting for this. Utterly fascinating and enjoyable. Can't wait for more! I do have some small feedback. Maybe pare down the number of people? Everyone is awesome but some contributors barely speak. Also, maybe when introducing the topic let everyone give initial thoughts for a minute or so. Might get everyone warmed up. But either way really enjoyed this, I love getting nerdy on game stuff!
Thanks for Sharing the Talk! I wonder have you ever tried to reach out to Ed Teixeira and Andrea Sfiligoi considering how much ground work they have created with their designs in the indie scene of Miniature agnostic gaming? Also anyone who can link the Dungeon/wargame crafting communities with the narrative indie gaming creating communities is a big win for everyone. FYI: Target and most large box chain stores have carried Kinder Eggs for many years in the US. :)
Interesting talk. I think the work flow document style you described is also used in some engineering technical writing, and in gaming history it’s synonymous with SPI’s board wargames from the 1970s and Star Fleet Battles, so now it’s often associated with excessive levels of complexity in rules. Personally I liked the clarity that was possible with that numbered outline structure.
great job! after 20 years of playing games...mostly GW in all its version from 1983.... i enjoy the game building mechanics and how the functions work....one thing i would and to the next topic is....how to you encompass lore in your game design...crap games with killer LORE sometimes make the test of time....uhmmm. GW... thanks Ash... stay safe and well....and above all, thank you for what you do for our hobby
For me the thing I always do is have a pad and a pen with me at all times for when I get sporadic ideas. Admittedly I haven't made any games but I've got as least a dozen designs that are in varying forms of completion.
Thankyou for this video, I'm hoping it will spure me into finishing at least one of my game ideas. My issue for rules wise is because of my dyslexia it's hard to make things flow and make sort of sent. The kinder surprise thing in the US is a rule that no rule can not have something that is not edible within a food item.
I hear you. It can be hard. My advice is to just keep re-writing and re-writing. Treat the game rules and text like putty. The words will NEVER be right the first time, so just get some junk out of your head and onto the page. Once it's in front of you, you can poke it, push it around, fix it, break it again, write a whole other attempt just below it and keep them both until you figure out which one actually works. Two things that I've had said to me that really helped me: (1) "Writing is re-writing", and (2) "never judge your work in progress by comparing it to someone else's finished product". Happy designing!
@@crikeymiles cheers for that info it will help me and my friend that is in the same boat. Yeah thats the one thing I keep doing rewriting anything as and when I go and things slowly evolve. Fingers crossed that one day I'll have something(s) to share with the world.
Really great show! I know you said talking specific dice engines could cause some trouble, but what about discussing them in a more broad/general sense? Perhaps, where and how each type of die might be the most beneficial or immersive for what a game designer may be trying to convey on the table? Decoupled from your own personal choices as established designers, just conceptually why someone may arrive at a base dice choice for a specific game, and another for a different game... the theory behind the potential choice, rather than the choice itself... I hope that makes sense.
@@HasteHobbies I'm really interested in the philosophy behind each of the dice engines and there aren't a lot of vids out there on the subject, in a general sense. I think a broad, light dive into the subject would be fascinating (trying to avoid folks getting upset with each other ;) ) and could be infinitely helpful to those figuring out where to start.
Did Mike unintentionally reveal his next ruleset during this ep? What is the truth behind his gunned-up prehistoric saurian...? ;) Great discussion. +1 vote for an episode about "After the Game" and how to manage and utilise a game's community post-publication. This is an oft-neglected aspect in videos about Kickstarting games, perhaps because they perceive a successful funding campaign as the last chapter, rather than the reality that it's just the first.
Thank you for this. I started writing a game 2 years ago, got really excited for a few months then put it down. You've inspired me to pick it back up. Follow up: Complex versus simple rules, which is more attractive to the majority? I personally like complex but I think I'm in the minority.
Man, Ash! This is what I was talking about homie! My little brother broke my Vader’s head so Snake Eyes filled in! Hey you peeps north of the USA better watch out y’all saw what happened in Fallout, lol! Plus get Owen to break it, then see if it works!
As a thought for a game design question would be for follow up editions to a game : Re-Write or FaQ and adjust. I've seen many a game slowly killed by editions and it be neat too hear thoughts on that from game designers.
I'm starting to write by own game for an end of college project and this came out at the right time! And while I'm reading my fair share of rule books I also have to write a thesis along with it, is there a place I could find writen material about the hobby, the design and genre as a whole that I can pull reference from?
interesting - when I play test my Xeno Hunters, we do games where I am going to make a team of ALL of the same class of hunter, just to see if it is skewed.
im working on a project i would love your opinions on. I'm a father of 3 (soon 4) and I have the game premise and all the hard points figured out and even character art and miniature models! I just need to work on mechanics and figure out how to get the boards/ boxes etc made
FUTURE TOPIC IDEA: How does scale factor into your game designs? Do you stick to 28/32mm because that's what people have terrain for, or is it okay to breakout of that mold when it makes sense for the game?
For an indie designer makes miniature-agnostic rules, it makes sense to design for scales that are well supported by other manufacturers. Personally I would LUUURVE to make a 6mm sci-fi tanks game, but there's really not much for potential gamers to choose from there, versus making a game that requires players to have 28mm fantasy minis like Sean and my game Mystic Skies (mystic-skies.com) does in BLASTER Vol.2
@Greg Mate, learn the names of your guests and give them all a proper nice intro. It's demeaning for a guest when they get a poor intro and it makes the start look a bit amateur. Once everyone was was talking, the rest went quite well. Good show gents.
Thanks Ash and all... since i`m 2-3 years into my own game, catching videos from the people i enjoy really help me focus and know i`m on the right track. Look forward to watching this video. Fingers crossed my first KS this year....
Thanks all for this conversation. These kind of dialogues are too rare in creative art, relaying enthusiasm and foundational knowledge. When Sean said: “Core rules don’t make a game.”, that’s what each of you bring to your works. Y’all make the rules serve the story of the game. So, it was great to see & hear you talk it out a bit.
OMG I’ve missed your Let’s Talks!!! You continue to impress. Keep up the great work!
Another great show gents! More please!
Absolutely fantastic talk! My game is sitting around 120 pages and its hilarious to see how some of the game designers I look up to took very similar approaches to how I started in my game! Can't wait for the next one!
Love it. A bunch of wacky, knowledgeable and experienced dudes talking about making games for their toy soldiers. My kind of people :)
Also designers of some of my favorite games this decade. If I could go back in time and trade all of my GW rulebooks for those indie games I would, they get invalidated in like 8-10 months anyways usually while I got at least a couple of years worth of gaming time from Frostgrave first ed. as an example.
Nice discussion. As a game designer, this is the most common question I get as well. My response is always, "If you want to be a game designer, you need to write a game and you need people to play it. That's it." Simple but not easy.
Great video my friend in truth this could not have come at a more important time. I’m working on a horror game now for awhile and it’s been a long and in all truthfulness rough time but this video really did help
This great and so educational. As an aspiring game designer, this is so enlightening.
Thanks for that - always fun to see you guys sharing insights and having a laugh! I can't tell you how much fun you chaps have given myself and my friends playing your creations over the last couple of years since we all got back into gaming - long may you all continue!
I deeply enjoyed this and I can not wait for more. Now to get to work on my game.
THANK YOU, ALL OF YOU SOOOO MUCH!
I have wanted to try my hand at game design for so long. This is so helpfull👍👍😄
Here's a topic that should be considered more. Tapletop gaming is getting swamped with ideas and games and it gets hard to find players because no one can buy everything. And the left over models from dead games you wanna keep using
i agree entirely! I'm going to do my part to try and push using proxies. just because you don't have all the models for some game shouldn't mean you don't play it! get the pieces you can, use any model that makes sense for the others until you can get the real model. I'm just ramping up a big collab with some other mini-tubers that's right up that alley
This is really good inspiration!
Surprised to see this drop. It was awesome and look forward to hopefully many more.
Great episode. Here's some random, wordy thoughts I had as I listened..
I'm more intrigued by interesting and fun mechanics than bringing an epic concept or theme to a game and designing mechanics around it. Makes me wonder if my game design will be good because of this?
After hundreds of hours of development and play testing over two years, I was satisfied that I had a good design so I was going to begin the process of populating army profiles and so on. I then realized that the game I had designed was very similar mechanically to Kings of War, but with a couple of major "novel" mechanics added in. So I had to begin the process all over again to make my game's mechanics stand apart from KoW, as I didn't want to be labeled a clone. I've replaced the mechanics that are overtly similar to KoW with different mechanics that serve roughly the same concept, as these are not really the "it" factor to the game to begin with.
Funny that one of the guys would mention morale check mechanics, that has been the most difficult part for me to develop in my game. Everyone is so used to rolling dice, and adding them together. I've found that my moral system, which involves rolling a few dice, and counting the successes against a target number, confuses people, not because it's complex (because it's not), but because it breaks from the norm found in most war-games that they have played.
I really dig that you guys talk about so many topics that I have wondered about (siloing information, which I will do, designing games for miniatures and all that). I'm currently trying to secure miniature sculpts for my game, but as it is a rank-and-file war-game, and I'm not rich, this has been very difficult.
Great discussion. Would love to hear how you approach working solo vs when collaborating (or does that just descend into d6 vd10 v d20 fisticuffs?) eg if trying to write rules together? Or getting inspired by the artwork that gets attached to the game? Your chat has inspired me to create 'Smuggler surprise' - adventures in the seedy underworld of kinder mules.
Aaaa---aayyyyy!! A new Let's Talk! Been waiting for this.
Utterly fascinating and enjoyable. Can't wait for more! I do have some small feedback. Maybe pare down the number of people? Everyone is awesome but some contributors barely speak.
Also, maybe when introducing the topic let everyone give initial thoughts for a minute or so. Might get everyone warmed up.
But either way really enjoyed this, I love getting nerdy on game stuff!
We’re going to do the group once a month and the rest of the time it will just be one on one with me.
@@GuerrillaMiniatureGames oh, terrific.
That was good fun and interesting.
Great discussions, can't wait for more!
Thanks for Sharing the Talk! I wonder have you ever tried to reach out to Ed Teixeira and Andrea Sfiligoi considering how much ground work they have created with their designs in the indie scene of Miniature agnostic gaming?
Also anyone who can link the Dungeon/wargame crafting communities with the narrative indie gaming creating communities is a big win for everyone. FYI: Target and most large box chain stores have carried Kinder Eggs for many years in the US. :)
Interesting talk. I think the work flow document style you described is also used in some engineering technical writing, and in gaming history it’s synonymous with SPI’s board wargames from the 1970s and Star Fleet Battles, so now it’s often associated with excessive levels of complexity in rules. Personally I liked the clarity that was possible with that numbered outline structure.
Can't wait to new info
great job! after 20 years of playing games...mostly GW in all its version from 1983.... i enjoy the game building mechanics and how the functions work....one thing i would and to the next topic is....how to you encompass lore in your game design...crap games with killer LORE sometimes make the test of time....uhmmm. GW... thanks Ash... stay safe and well....and above all, thank you for what you do for our hobby
This is awesome, only complaint is it isn't long enough ;)
For me the thing I always do is have a pad and a pen with me at all times for when I get sporadic ideas. Admittedly I haven't made any games but I've got as least a dozen designs that are in varying forms of completion.
Lovely chat.
Thankyou for this video, I'm hoping it will spure me into finishing at least one of my game ideas. My issue for rules wise is because of my dyslexia it's hard to make things flow and make sort of sent.
The kinder surprise thing in the US is a rule that no rule can not have something that is not edible within a food item.
I hear you. It can be hard. My advice is to just keep re-writing and re-writing. Treat the game rules and text like putty. The words will NEVER be right the first time, so just get some junk out of your head and onto the page. Once it's in front of you, you can poke it, push it around, fix it, break it again, write a whole other attempt just below it and keep them both until you figure out which one actually works.
Two things that I've had said to me that really helped me: (1) "Writing is re-writing", and (2) "never judge your work in progress by comparing it to someone else's finished product". Happy designing!
@@crikeymiles cheers for that info it will help me and my friend that is in the same boat. Yeah thats the one thing I keep doing rewriting anything as and when I go and things slowly evolve. Fingers crossed that one day I'll have something(s) to share with the world.
This was so cool to watch. Can’t wait for the next installment.
So interesting.. cool.. I'm on the other side of the hobby, I mean, display or boxart painter and is really interesting this kind of video.
What a fun chat.
Really great show! I know you said talking specific dice engines could cause some trouble, but what about discussing them in a more broad/general sense? Perhaps, where and how each type of die might be the most beneficial or immersive for what a game designer may be trying to convey on the table? Decoupled from your own personal choices as established designers, just conceptually why someone may arrive at a base dice choice for a specific game, and another for a different game... the theory behind the potential choice, rather than the choice itself... I hope that makes sense.
Maths!
But I agree that would be interesting.
@@HasteHobbies I'm really interested in the philosophy behind each of the dice engines and there aren't a lot of vids out there on the subject, in a general sense. I think a broad, light dive into the subject would be fascinating (trying to avoid folks getting upset with each other ;) ) and could be infinitely helpful to those figuring out where to start.
Did Mike unintentionally reveal his next ruleset during this ep? What is the truth behind his gunned-up prehistoric saurian...? ;)
Great discussion. +1 vote for an episode about "After the Game" and how to manage and utilise a game's community post-publication. This is an oft-neglected aspect in videos about Kickstarting games, perhaps because they perceive a successful funding campaign as the last chapter, rather than the reality that it's just the first.
Thank you for this. I started writing a game 2 years ago, got really excited for a few months then put it down. You've inspired me to pick it back up. Follow up: Complex versus simple rules, which is more attractive to the majority? I personally like complex but I think I'm in the minority.
Your core mechanics should be relatively simple. As was said in the chat, in most good rule-books, the actual rules are a small part of it.
Agreed. Make the engine light and the chassis can support lots more bells and whistles.
Man, Ash! This is what I was talking about homie! My little brother broke my Vader’s head so Snake Eyes filled in! Hey you peeps north of the USA better watch out y’all saw what happened in Fallout, lol! Plus get Owen to break it, then see if it works!
As a thought for a game design question would be for follow up editions to a game : Re-Write or FaQ and adjust. I've seen many a game slowly killed by editions and it be neat too hear thoughts on that from game designers.
I'm starting to write by own game for an end of college project and this came out at the right time!
And while I'm reading my fair share of rule books I also have to write a thesis along with it, is there a place I could find writen material about the hobby, the design and genre as a whole that I can pull reference from?
Good luck!
Any chance of this coming to podcasts?
It’s already there on Spotify, or should be
@@GuerrillaMiniatureGames I’ll have to look that up. Thank you.
@@GuerrillaMiniatureGames do you have a channel on Spotify?
@@chadtompkins2282 there’s a link in the video description
@@GuerrillaMiniatureGames face palm. I’m an idiot. Thank you for holding my hand...
interesting - when I play test my Xeno Hunters, we do games where I am going to make a team of ALL of the same class of hunter, just to see if it is skewed.
50:37 Rifts!
im working on a project i would love your opinions on. I'm a father of 3 (soon 4) and I have the game premise and all the hard points figured out and even character art and miniature models! I just need to work on mechanics and figure out how to get the boards/ boxes etc made
FUTURE TOPIC IDEA: How does scale factor into your game designs? Do you stick to 28/32mm because that's what people have terrain for, or is it okay to breakout of that mold when it makes sense for the game?
For an indie designer makes miniature-agnostic rules, it makes sense to design for scales that are well supported by other manufacturers. Personally I would LUUURVE to make a 6mm sci-fi tanks game, but there's really not much for potential gamers to choose from there, versus making a game that requires players to have 28mm fantasy minis like Sean and my game Mystic Skies (mystic-skies.com) does in BLASTER Vol.2
@@crikeymiles That makes sense. I'm guessing that even if you're producing your minis, people may not want invest in a whole new set of terrain.
Grid vs free measure?
What dice is best? Go!
D10 and the occasional D6. Unless it involves Orks, than D6 by the buckets.
Scatter+Artillery dice. Obviously.
@@josephmcguire8503 i really like d10, I want to make some kind of game with them, I feel they are under-utilized industry wide.
@@itcamefromthedeep those need to come back into common use as well
D12 feels good
@Greg Mate, learn the names of your guests and give them all a proper nice intro. It's demeaning for a guest when they get a poor intro and it makes the start look a bit amateur. Once everyone was was talking, the rest went quite well. Good show gents.