Stonemaier Design Day 2022

 Stonemaier Design Day 2022

Some of the day is a blur, but I'm pretty sure I remember Ron Swanson saying this to Chad and myself. What do you mean "the attendance list says he wasn't there"?

I remember working with a physical therapist who worked with a client of mine. She was talking about how much her daughter had accomplished as a professional dancer. As an actor and someone who has a cousin who has performed on Broadway, I think I'm a member of that limited population who can truly understand what a Herculean accomplishment that was. I said, "You must be so proud of all she's accomplished!" And this woman's response was, "Well, pride is a sin, so I wouldn't call myself proud."

At that point, I realized that there simply wasn't enough alcohol for this conversation and I moved onto another topic. But it's not just religion that encourages humility and condemns pride, right? It's our society, too! I have spent more time and energy on not being judgemental regarding other peoples' values, but in this case, what the hell?! It was really more important to point out that pride is a sin than to either feel pride or admit you feel pride in the stupendous accomplishments of your daughter? Pride can absolutely be a sin. Absolutely. Pride can cause us to make massive mistakes, both personally and professionally, and can hurt a lot of people, to say nothing of ourselves. But pride is also an emotion that comes with being human. Even one of the emotions that people may argue is one of the most harmful, anger, has multiple uses. One of the uses of anger is protection. Anger sometimes protects us from pain. So is wrath always a sin? I'd argue not. It gets a little murker if we go exclusively with the definition of "vengeance." But the other definition is basically just extraordinary anger. When my child does something of which he's proud, I think it does more harm than good to refrain from letting him know I'm proud of him; I take pride in his accomplishments and I think it's healthy to let him know that.

I mention all of this because I think there are times to be humble and there are times to set humility aside. Another good example! During Stonemaier Design Day, a friend of mine was demoing a game he has been working on for some time. I wasn't testing or demoing at the time, so I was just observing and seeing how far the game had come since the last time I had playtested for him. One of the players asked my friend, "Is this a co-design or did you do this yourself?" I could see my friend get uncomfortable, unsure how to answer, until he said, "Well, a lot of people had input, you know, and contributed to it." At which point, I interrupted and said, "He's being modest. He designed this game. Sure, he got feedback from friends and testers, but this is absolutely his baby." My friend didn't say anything, but the dude who had originally asked the question just nodded and said, "It's just impressive, that's all." In that moment, modesty did nothing to serve my friend. In fact, it actually would have been misleading. It's his game and he should take credit for it. He didn't get any more help in his design from friends and playtesters than all designers get.

In my design work on Familiars, I got really helpful feedback from a number of my friends and playtesters. One in particular, Roger, was instrumental in my approach to the design. But be that as it may, he wasn't my co-designer on this project and he'd agree that it was misleading to label him as such. However, I also pointed out to my friend that my game, Familiars, actually is a co-design, so I could identify the difference. The difference (to me) is that my friend's game absolutely would have come to fruition (albeit in a different form) without some of the input he got from each individual who offered him feedback. Familiars never would have materialized without my co-designer, Chad. I had what I thought was a good hook (players are Familiars in this pick up and deliver game, scavenging and stealing spell components for their spellcasting patrons) with an interesting dynamic (carried spell components offer buffs and debuffs as long as they're carried). I felt really good about the idea and spent a decent amount of time working through it. But ultimately, it could not have come together without Chad's design contributions: rather than Familiars just carrying cards around and having some arbitrary card or point limit, Chad suggested having to fit polyomino pieces in a pack. It made the game far more tactile and interesting! And then he came up with the notion of the middle of our game board being an interchangeable tile so that the hoard monster at the middle of the board could be swapped in and out in order to change the difficulty level and feel of each game. I've loved both of these ideas ever since he mentioned them, and again, the polyomino pieces have really pulled the whole thing from "kind of interesting" to "this is fun and can totally work if we find the right balance!" So in our case, Chad is very much a co-designer on the game.

And all of that bring us to: I'm proud of us. It's not a modest or humble thing to say, but it's the truth. I don't think we've created something brilliant and I'm not going to claim it's a game-changer or will sell a million copies or win awards or anything like that. I also acknowledge that we still have a lot of work to do on it in order to really make it a game worth buying and not just worth playing. So I won't let my pride interfere with the process or create any delusions of grandeur or anything like that. I won't allow my pride in the work Chad and I have done to negatively impact the process, the game, our attitudes, etc. But also, I'm proud of us and I'm going to say it out loud because we deserve to hear it. We deserve to celebrate the small victory of having created a game we could test with people and then receive the feedback that it's actually fun to play.

All of that is also to say that, for the two of us, Stonemaier Design Day was a success! Mainly because we walked in with no expectations and were just looking for a public venue in which to test our game with people who did not know anything about us or our game. So before I get into the day itself, I want to give a shout-out to Pieces STL Board Game Bar & Cafe for being as stellar as they always are. I've never had anything less than an excellent experience when visiting them. They've been so gracious in hosting regular fundraisers for the theatre company I used to run, they're extremely active in both the STL gaming community and the broader STL community, their game library is stunning, and their culinary offerings are delicious. So I figured even if the day itself was a bust, the bar and food wouldn't be. The day was thankfully not a bust, but the food and drink were still excellent! And kudos to Stonemaier Games (who absolutely don't need any sort of recognition or boost from me, but nonetheless...) who made this a reality. I've written a lot about the importance of community when it comes to gaming. I know I'm not the only one who holds that value, but it's always a privilege to meet other folks who live that value.

Chad and I arrived early, knowing we'd want all the time to set up and make sure we had everything we needed, as well as spend the last couple of minutes reviewing our approach to the event. Additionally, I have always showed up to auditions and interviews early in the past because it gives me an opportunity to shake out any nerves I've got. When it comes to auditions, I always left myself enough time to do t'ai chi outside of the audition space in order to slow myself down and make sure my focus is where it needs to be. I don't generally do Form 24 before an interview or event like this, simply because it's just a different space in which to exist and watching someone warm up is far less common in spaces that aren't artistic. Anyway, we set up and realized we were missing a single card, which was disappointing, but not horrifying. It was a thing we could fairly easily work around. We set everything up for a 3 player test with Chad teaching the rules and myself taking notes on player actions as well as any observations I had. Walking into Design Day, I'd created a new playtest form for our players that I thought would yield better data than the ones we'd used for the playtests we had run earlier in the week. Thanks to the work of Chad's incredible wife, Lisa, we had a complete gameboard that really popped with the polyominos! There were several things I knew from previous playtests that I still wanted to fix, but Chad and I focused on the essentials coming into Design Day. We figured the game was playable and fun so far, so any repeat notes we got would just confirm what we already suspected while not proving terribly detrimental to anyone's play experience.

I don't really want to get too deep into the details of our playtesting simply because we're still processing feedback and notes, and also, I'm not really sure what parts of the playtesting experience will be helpful to anyone reading this blog post. What I'll say is that all of our playtesters graciously offered no end of feedback, the vast majority of which was of the helpful variety! Very, very few comments were of the kind that tell us what players wish the game were instead of what it actually is. What I mean by that is not that the feedback isn't necessarily valid; I've played plenty of games and thought, "Oh, I wish it did these things instead because that's what I expected or like." But the thing all those games had in common is that they were already published. I wasn't giving that feedback directly to the creator. Not because I don't offer critical feedback, but because it should be centered on the game that already exists and the experience the designer is attempting to create. I feel perfectly comfortable asking an actor to re-examine their objective in a scene as well as what tactics they use to achieve said objective ("If you want this one thing and yelling hasn't helped you get it before, why are you yelling now? Why not try switching tactics to see if that helps you?"), but I'm not going to share an observation with them that doesn't help us get to where we're trying to go ("I wish you were taller so we could use this blocking;" "If only the script included these lines, it would make much more sense to play the scene this way!"). It's simply not helpful. The majority of notes we received were about what was fun, what was less fun, what was intuitive versus not, and some suggestions as to how we could navigate the obstacles that either slowed the game down or made it less fun. Perfect! This is the feedback we knew we needed.

We felt extremely good about the bones of the game after our first playtests revealed that the game was actually fun. But we also knew that it wasn't going to be quite so simple and that we were further away from a finished product than it perhaps felt after those first few playtests. The feedback we received during these games reinforced feedback we received from previous playtesters, but one of the things that really stuck with us was this: the theme is an enthralling one, so we should consider leaning harder into that sort of role-playing aspect of the game. After demoing the game a couple of times, it was time for lunch. And honestly, lunch couldn't have come at a better time, because my brain was totally drained. I'd been driving pretty hard for the duration of the previous week between work, design work, and other commitments, so I hadn't gotten as much sleep as I should have gotten. Plus, I was carrying way more stress about our design than even I realized. It wasn't until we were done and could pack up the game to move it to my car that I really felt all that tension leave my body. I wasn't as nervous about critical feedback as I was that people simply wouldn't have fun playing it. I've been an artist long enough that critical feedback rarely bounces around in my skull for terribly long because I'm able to implement it (or not) and move on. But if someone sees work I do and "just didn't like it," that's harder for me to reconcile because what can I do with that kind of feedback? I felt similarly about Familiars: if people played it and simply didn't have fun or didn't enjoy it, then none of the feedback is particularly relevant without either scrapping the project or overhauling it so as to be unrecognizable to the previous iteration.

But people did have fun. They thought there was something there. So I could take furious notes and read them later so Chad and I could debrief away from Design Day. We could eat lunch, look at other prototypes (and let me tell you: there were some really damn impressive ones present!), and get ready to play Biologique, for which we were scheduled to playtest after lunch. And man, it was a lot of fun! It was a heavier game, which we both appreciated, and we got to play it with two awesome folks from Stonemaier (sadly, I forgot their names, but they were super fun to play with) (Update: Chad reminded me that the folks from Stonemaier were Susannah and Alex!). The designer, Michelle, had not only given so much thought to her design, but had fabricated a really impressive prototype! The components were solid, appealing, and made gameplay much more intuitive than I would expect of a game that size in a prototype stage.

I went home after Design Day, ate dinner, walked the dog, and was seriously asleep in bed before 8pm, which very rarely happens. I was exhausted. Not just physically, but emotionally. Artistic endeavors are draining and are more emotionally-entangling than people often realize. We weren't officially pitching the game at Design Day or thinking our design would "be discovered" or anything in that kind of Hollywood-vein. But we'd spent a lot of time on it and as veteran gamers but neophyte game designers, we thought we had something. Whether or not other people thought the same (especially people who didn't know us and had no stake in what we were doing) would be kind of a big wake-up call either way.

It felt like we'd cleared a pretty big hurdle. We had a deadline, we'd met it, our game was deemed fun by all but one person who played it, and that was all enough for it to be a win. Seeing my friend's game fare well during demoing, consuming excellent food and drink at Pieces, and playing a prototype that was very well-developed and a lot of fun? Those were all bonuses that made the day that much better. Taking a little bit of time away from the game this week has already been extremely good for me. But even when I'm on vacation, after about a week, I start itching to be home and working. I love the work I do, so my brain sometimes sort of goes back to work even while my body is still away on vacation. Three days removed from Design Day, I know I'm relieved to not be working on my game this week, but I've also written down some ideas. I've reviewed the feedback we got and started turning it over in my brain. I have moments where what I want to do is sit down and get back to work on it. But I'm resisting that urge because I know I need the off-week. But it's very promising that my brain is so ready to return to Familiars and start implementing changes. I don't know that I necessarily feel the need to attend Design Day next year unless I've got a different design that's pretty far along in its development, but I'm so glad we did Design Day in 2022. It gifted us so much and has been a huge step in our extremely young game design careers. If you're in the process of designing anything, you might want to keep an eye out for next year's Stonemaier Design Day!