Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Bonus Episode: Guest Host Will Munn of Adept Icarus
47 Plays10 months ago
This episode discusses mental health, as well as self-harm (briefly).
Guest Host Will Munn of Adept Icarus interviews Alan about cyanstarlight, an upcoming Adept Icarus release written by Alan. We discuss the influence of mental health on the product, it's goals and how the game industry and design work.
Link to the Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adepticarus/cyan-starlight
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction with Alan Barr
00:00:10
Speaker
I'm Alan Barr and this is Radio Free RPG. Hi, I'm not Alan Barr.
00:00:30
Speaker
But it's okay, I am. Welcome to Radio Free RPG. I'm Alan Barr, usually your host, but today we have a bonus double feature episode where my friend Will Munn from Adept Icarus is going to interview me about a game of mine he is publishing. Get you some insight from my side of the table.
00:00:52
Speaker
So we're going to flip the script a little bit and will is going to be hosting radio free RPG today. How are you? Well, I'm doing great. How are you? Oh, very well. Thank you for asking. Nobody ever asks. I'm kidding. They always do. Well, they should.
00:01:13
Speaker
Well, I'm excited for this. I think this is going to be very fun. I have a slate of questions to ask you. Excellent. I will try to have erudite answers for you there. But before we get started, why don't you give us and our listeners a small introduction to you and what you do.
Will Munn's Work at Adept Icarus
00:01:31
Speaker
Sure. Well, as mentioned, I'm Will Munn. I run the Adept Icarus game design studio or as sometimes called publishing studio, whatever, right? But Adept Icarus. Some of the games that we're known for is Arium Create, Arium Discover, and several other items that come off of that.
00:01:59
Speaker
I have personally been involved in a few other projects like Zorro the role-playing game and some other items like that, but essentially a few years ago I decided I would run a Kickstarter and
00:02:14
Speaker
and fund a really neat sort of world building concept that we'd been doing with a writing group of mine for years. And it really took off and did well. And so been excited to continue to work on that and new game ideas of which several coming out in the next year or two. But.
00:02:33
Speaker
Yeah, that's it. Excellent. We'll have Will on Radio Free RPG at a later date to talk more from his perspective and answer some questions. But today we are, like I said, flipping the script. That'd be a better pun if this was, you know, script writing podcast. We're changing the DAI system. Yeah.
00:02:59
Speaker
And Will, you said you have questions. I might have answers. Let's see. You'd better have a few. So why, Alan, why on earth would you, who is definitely an expert in publishing indie RPGs, come to someone else like me and say, hey, I have
Collaborating with Publishers
00:03:23
Speaker
a game. That's kind of cool. What do you think about it? Would you be interested in publishing it?
00:03:28
Speaker
That that is the million dollar question. And I think probably the one I get the most from other publishers when I mentioned that I do this, some iteration of but you own your own publishing company, you can just do what you want. And there's and I mean, arguably that is true. But there's a few reasons, some of which are mundane and some of which are maybe high minded. So let's start with the boring ones. It's a lot of work.
00:03:57
Speaker
And sometimes it's nice to be able to offload some of that work on other competent people while I focus on the core competencies of maintaining gout, right? So at the core level, sometimes it's nice to say, marketing, this game is no longer my problem. It is your problem. I'm okay with that. Sometimes I write a lot of games and if I were to wait to publish them all myself, I'd be waiting a long time for some of them, which is number two.
00:04:21
Speaker
As Gallant Night Games, I have a schedule I need to stick to, and I have certain product lines that have ongoing requirements I have to meet as a publisher. And some of these smaller one-off games don't easily fit in my schedule, and it can be beneficial for me to find a home for them somewhere else, because it lets them come out faster. And then, you know, there's the, I like money, and it doesn't pay as well as publishing it myself, where I get to keep 100% of it.
00:04:49
Speaker
but it does make me money while taking work off my plate and kind of create a small backup revenue stream for myself, where I am making money off stuff that I don't have to maintain every day. And that can be nice from just a kind of a financial security standpoint, especially in an industry as tight and fluid in terms of profit margins as the RPG industry can. That's one way to put it. Yes.
00:05:17
Speaker
And then the other thing is I've been doing this for a bit, uh, coming up on 10 years now, next year. And I've known you for that long
Alan's Experience and Teaching
00:05:27
Speaker
as well. Actually, we've started gaming together right when I started galling, give or take, it was pretty early. I don't know if I had started by the time we started gaming or if I was getting started, I can't really remember. It was really close. Yeah. It was all at the same time because I was living in Lehigh when we started gaming together.
00:05:45
Speaker
So part of it is I've done this a lot. I've worked on over a hundred campaigns. I've ran almost 30 myself as Gallant. I ran others under other labels for other companies as a project manager, et cetera. I've released hundreds of products. I released nine core books this year alone, not just counting all the other supplemental material.
00:06:12
Speaker
And I've learned a lot and it can be hard sometimes when you have developed a repository of knowledge to find ways to effectively dispense that back. Like I could write a bunch of blog posts, but then I have to worry about them getting seen. I could do videos, but the same problem. Whereas if I want other publishers to succeed, the best way to do that is to work alongside them and teach them what I know.
00:06:40
Speaker
Because getting in the trenches together allows us to learn from each other's experiences. And chances are, a lot of publishers I work with, I have more experience than them, especially if they're one-person outfits. And I like to be a resource. I like to give back to this community and this creative endeavor. And I can leverage what I built to help somebody else gain some financial stability off of some of my work.
00:07:08
Speaker
I can teach them what I know that they might not know. And I often learn something and it reminds me what it's like to be on the other side of the coin instead of being a publisher. I get to sort of go back to the roots of, okay, I need to remember how I want to be treated in this role and treat people the same way. Right. And so it kind of fulfills a lot of what I would call ethical and moral compass points for me in terms of publishing.
00:07:36
Speaker
That's really great. I think maybe the point that you left out is the fact that since we started this interview, you've already written three games, and so you don't have time to publish all of them yourself. That's an exaggeration. It was one. Thank you, Will.
00:07:57
Speaker
All right. It is a lot. And I I tend to write a lot because I find I it's like exercise for me, my creative muscles and my publishing muscles and my game design muscles to get stronger by putting the work in regardless of if I publish it or not.
Personal Influence on Cyan Starlight
00:08:11
Speaker
You know, and that's how the game you're publishing that I wrote, Cyan Starlight, kind of started. I was just doing it as an exercise one day and I got maybe two thirds of the way done or so. And I was like, hey, this this is coming out pretty good. And, you know,
00:08:28
Speaker
it morphed from just sort of practice or exercise into the final thing. Yeah. I remember when you first sent me a copy of it and I looked at it and I thought, wow, this is really cool. And it was already laid out and everything. And that was just kind of fascinating to me that
00:08:50
Speaker
basically you conceived of it while you were laying it out, is that right? How did that work out? Yeah. So I wrote that one into layout directly and I don't normally do that. One, because I'm not a layout artist and I'm not good enough to do that all the time. And two, I think my layout artists would kill me because I would probably make lots of little mistakes that they would have to fix down the road.
00:09:15
Speaker
But I had seen some other publishers talking about writing into layout, and I for myself did not inherently see any benefit in it. But I tend to believe that if I don't see the benefit in something that somebody else sees benefit in, I need to experience it as best I can to assess why or why not. Right. And so this was an experiment of. I had some art, I really liked it actually started with the art.
00:09:43
Speaker
And like I started on the cover page and was just playing around with art and titles and. Kind of I was like, and it all sprang from that single cover. Like I put that on there. I was messing around with the titles. I was practicing some layout entitled side and I hit on something I really liked and the image of the whole piece as a general. A general element really spoke to me. It was for those of you who
00:10:11
Speaker
I haven't seen the cover yet and you're listening to this. It's a cover of an astronaut walking across sort of like a plane of grass or some sort of vegetation with some hills in the background. And there is a single sort of blue, light blue, greenish blue, sun or sky, or not sky, but sun or moon, right? Celestial body in the sky. That's the only color on the page other than it's black and white. And I was sort of
00:10:37
Speaker
playing around with that and I ended up offshooting into this game just from starting on that cover page and working my way down the list page by page. That's pretty incredible.
00:10:51
Speaker
What was it that drew you to the cover art? I know what drew me to it, but I'm curious what spoke about it. If you want to see the cover art listeners, and we probably should have mentioned this in the onset of this, this interview is coming out the day that Kickstarter goes live. If there is a Kickstarter for Cyan Starlight, you will find the link in the show notes. Heads up on that so you can go look at the cover there and maybe back it, which is the point of all this.
00:11:22
Speaker
But no, so the cover spoke to me a lot on an emotional and mental level. I am I am bipolar. I am specifically type two bipolar with the variation of what they call rapid cycling, which means my mood swings are they occur at a higher frequency than other forms of bipolar generally do.
00:11:46
Speaker
Mm hmm. And and a lot of that is to say everybody's for everybody who has sort of a mental mental illness or neurodivergence. Wait, even if the name is the same, it is often very different
Themes of Isolation in Gaming
00:12:01
Speaker
on a personal and individual basis because everybody's brain chemistry is different. So my version of type two bipolar with rapid cycling is probably different from somebody else's who also suffers from it. But one of the things my bipolar has
00:12:17
Speaker
has, I'll say done to me, which makes me sound like a passive victim, and I'm not sure I like that phrasing, but I don't have better phrasing off the top of my head, is that I often feel, and often is almost all the time, I feel very outside and disconnected from communities I am a part of.
00:12:39
Speaker
I feel very alone even when I'm with people who I love and care about and like spending time with because the things that happen in my head due to my brain chemistry are always unique even if they're similar to others and that uniqueness makes me feel isolated because I feel like others
00:12:59
Speaker
can't or don't or won't or Couldn't understand or relate and even if that's not true You know, that's that's the mental illness lying to me in a sense, but it creates this ongoing new for 20 years now feeling of Pretty relatively complete isolation at a lot of times That must be really difficult to deal with and
00:13:25
Speaker
How how did that tie into kind of the the art and the design of this game? Like, sure. Yeah. So science starlight is about being the last human in the universe and waking up for whatever reason from stasis, from, you know, coming out of a wormhole. Your science technobabble reason is two degree irrelevant. What is relevant is the fact that you have
00:13:55
Speaker
emerged into a place where you are the last human. There are other alien species, other entities or civilizations or beings or intelligences around, but you are emphatically, as far as you know, the last human. Which, to a degree, is an exaggerated reflection of how that isolation makes me feel. Like even surrounded by things, I am a
00:14:24
Speaker
I am ongoing in this position of being alone, no matter what swirling around me in the cosmos or chaos. Jean-Paul Sartre said in his book about existentialism is a humanism. He said, man is undefined until he discovers and defines himself. And I'm paraphrasing relatively poorly there. But at its core, Cyan Starlight is about
00:14:52
Speaker
emerging from sort of an existential crisis and then discovering yourself and dividing yourself in the face of isolation. And that cover for me really sparked that. And because those feelings are so close sort of to the surface in me all the time, it was really easy to kind of draw on the sense of melancholy as I started working through the game. Hmm. So how did you decide that
00:15:21
Speaker
this was a game because as you mentioned, you write a lot of games and a lot of them don't ever necessarily see the light of day from anybody but you or maybe a few people that you share them with. How did you decide that this was one that needed to go out for people to see? Part of it was the amount of effort I had put into it. By working directly into layout using stock art or art I had access to from Patreons and things like that, I was able to
00:15:51
Speaker
sort of craft from the start, this holistic view of a game. And. It's. In a sense, the game is kind of me sending up a smoke signal or tossing out a road flare saying, hey, I'm alone out here. If you want to be alone together, let's let's play this game together, right? Yeah.
00:16:18
Speaker
Because I don't think I don't think this game is going to fix that for me or anybody else, but. It is sort of me waving a flag saying, hey, we're over here, right? And. That. And I don't know. Sometimes with that, with games and releases, it's just a gut feeling of this is good enough to release this, you know, or sometimes it's a gut feeling of, hey,
00:16:45
Speaker
I could eat this week, so I should release something. He says sardonically and cynically, yet with the disturbing amount of emotional honesty there. So the part of it's just a gut feeling like I was looking at it going, there's something here. And having another publisher's eyes on certain topics is really helpful because I will sit in my own head like I can make an action movie RPG because.
00:17:13
Speaker
There's no, there's, there's no personal or emotional stakes for me in that other than I like action movies. And I spend a lot of time thinking about that, but this kind of game, I think what I felt would benefit from somebody else sort of writing herd on it to use Midwestern term, uh, to, to sort of be overseeing it, to make sure I didn't either wallow too much in self pity or
00:17:39
Speaker
It never come out or something, right? Sometimes I needed somebody to be the buffer between me and this catharsis that was happening with the game development. That makes sense. When when you think about a game like this, like what what does you've written another game that's kind of in a similar vein and you mentioned it in the introduction to this to this game.
00:18:07
Speaker
Tell us a little bit about that one. So that one's a little more complicated. You're referring to Carian Lands. Yes. That one is not out. You can't get it. There's another publisher who's going to be picking it up actually. So if Cyan Starlight is about being alone no matter what,
00:18:31
Speaker
Carion Lands is about punching back against an environment that wants to kill you all the time. It is sort of to the to the depression side of bipolar, Carion Lands is more the maybe the manic side of the coin or that other side of the bipolar disorder. Right. And I, you know, and I mean, I originally wrote Carion Lands in 2018, 2019. It still hasn't come out.
00:19:01
Speaker
But, you know, I'm not I would have to revisit it to see if I still feel that assessment holds correctly. But at the time, you know, that that's where I would have positioned them, I think. Mm hmm. That makes sense. So are these would you call them maybe paired games in a certain way? Not not from a, you know, a setting or a standpoint, but maybe sister games, as it were.
00:19:28
Speaker
I would say they are paired in the sense that they come from the same emotional place maybe, but they're taking different routes out of that place. Their genesis might share a common origin, but the path they took away from that genesis is going to be different. All right. We all got bit by the same radioactive spider, and we're over here doing the spider man meme to each other. Right.
00:19:53
Speaker
Well, tell us a little bit about the system behind the game. How does it work? Like how this is a solo game, right? Yes. And that was important to me in the design because it would have felt like a betrayal to make a game about being isolated that you had to play with other people. No kidding. So having it be a solo game was, I think, key for me in
00:20:19
Speaker
the sort of the presentation of the aesthetic of the game mirroring the design intent behind it. There's a lot of tools that make a game work mechanically, and not all mechanics are levers that you're pulling with dice and tables or cards. Sometimes those mechanical levers are things like a really blank, spacious layout that makes the words on the page look isolated. Limited use of significant colors. How many people the game plays and how it plays them.
00:20:49
Speaker
That all matters. Those are all mechanical levers as a game designer I try to consider when I'm sort of building these games. And so one of the reasons this game works the way it does is I based it off the Breathless Engine, which is a Creative Commons licensed engine by, and I apologize if I'm saying this wrong, RP. I believe it's Fari games? It might be Fari.
00:21:11
Speaker
RP is from Quebec and so I never quite know if he's using his English or his French pronunciations for me. It's a little confusing sometimes for me because I'm from the Midwest where we speak Bison, I assume. I don't really know. In the winter.
Game Mechanics and Design
00:21:30
Speaker
Snow and snow and cattle. We're going to have to we're going to have to dig into that. I have to know like about speaking bison at some point, but that's a lot of grunting and mooing and smelling bad. OK. Have you met bison? They're terrible smelling. So this breathless engine works off this degrading dye system where every time you roll a dye,
00:21:54
Speaker
it steps down and die size. So a D12 becomes a D10, becomes a D8, becomes a D6, becomes a D4, becomes gone. And that's there to represent the fact that as the last human, you have limited resources to pull on. To bring things back, you have to scavenge, you have to find
00:22:15
Speaker
these tools or these resources, and maybe you're looking for a clue about humanity, but you're going to stop at this planet because you need fuel. Here we are, right? Right. And Breathless worked so well for that, and it's an excellent chassis for building really evocative games on. The same system we use for SEMA. Mm-hmm.
00:22:37
Speaker
Which is a really beautiful game, by the way, if you haven't seen it. So but Breathless, if I'm not mistaken, is really built around character structure, right? This game has a whole additional component to it. Yeah, it's about that. Yeah. So there's there's a character structure where you pick what your character sort of profession was before they became a space faring, isolated human.
00:23:05
Speaker
And then you define your starship, which includes resources and attributes and all this sort of a secondary character sheet that allows you to manage or maintain these elements. And it's what lets you move from system to system trying to find these clues. And so you're trying to maintain yourself, but you're also trying to maintain your starship because it's the last piece of equipment that offers you this thread to solve the mysteries that are in front of you.
00:23:35
Speaker
And they work off the same mechanical engine, to a degree, but just with different resources or attributes to represent the difference between them. Yeah, that's really cool. That was something that stood out to me as I looked over at the first time, I thought it was really, really interesting how that dynamic really plays off each other between the ship and the and the character. Yeah. And, you know, I grew up because I grew up in North Dakota, I grew up with a lot of
00:24:05
Speaker
sort of cowboy Western influences were very popular movies. A lot of people locally were reading those books. We had like a cowboy days like. And so this sort of almost mythical idea of the hero and their steed. Is something that's very present for me and a lot of things. Because a steed isn't just a tool, it's just not a resource. It's also a friend. You sort of personify it, even though it's not a person.
00:24:32
Speaker
You assign these human elements to it. There's a term in anthropology for that. Now that I've said that, I don't remember what the term is, but it's there and it's a thing. It's not anthropomorphize, is it? I don't remember. I don't know it either. I'm sorry. That's all right. I'm smart, but not that smart, guys. That's what you should get from that.
00:24:56
Speaker
But so the idea of this sort of this deed or this mount becoming more than just a tool or a resource or a vehicle, but becoming sort of like a steadfast companion is something that one, you know, sort of story structure wise is very familiar to me with how I grew up. But two, I think I think provided an avenue of.
00:25:19
Speaker
attachment for the character in Science Starlight, because you can attach yourself to your ship and it can become a thing that when it gets hurt, you flinch. And that's, you know, I think that's important because that's what somebody in the situation would do a lot of the time. Yeah. You've made other games that this isn't your first science fiction game. In fact, you've made quite a lot of science fiction games, if I'm not mistaken.
00:25:51
Speaker
I made a few. How does this differ in terms of how the ship and the character work? Because I think you even have some other games where you have the possibility to have a ship. Tell us a little about that. Well, in several of my other sci-fi RPGs, ships are treated as a means of narrative conveyance. They get you from point A to point B.
00:26:21
Speaker
And that and that's still true here in Science Starlight. But in certain other games I've made, there are times where I've just hand waved the ships away because, you know, this is not what the point of the game is. We're going to focus on something else or, you know, the ship is run by a team. So here I think the big difference is the ship is treated as a character in that you make the decisions for it, but it functionally runs itself. Your player character isn't doing much.
00:26:50
Speaker
to sort of maintain the ship directly because that's not how the game works, right? The ship has resources, they deplete, then you land and you go get more resources for the ship.
00:27:01
Speaker
It's almost like a giant sort of engine where you are funneling more fuel into it, regardless of what the fuel actually means. Right. And it might not be that different in some ways from other sci-fi games I've designed, but I would say that the fact that it's solo and the way the ship stats integrate into some of the gameplay procedures probably makes it stand out.
00:27:25
Speaker
even if the mechanical design behind the ships is not as different as it might appear when your clients have it.
00:27:33
Speaker
I mean, sheet to sheet, maybe not that different, but I think in how it actually applies and how it works. Definitely. Maybe let's talk. Let's talk a little bit about the gameplay loop. So it's a solo game and all solo games have to have a pretty tight gameplay loop. But what what's the gameplay loop like in Science Starlight? Yeah. So from a high level, you would move into a new system, which we represent with a hex map. Just each hex is like a new star system.
00:28:02
Speaker
We sort of pretend that they're, you know, roughly the same distance because it's just easier. Science is complicated.
00:28:11
Speaker
So you move into a new system and then there's a series of procedures, which I call protocols because it's science fiction. And these protocols have you move through certain steps involving checking to see what is in the system, checking to see what threats there are, what resources there are. And then you make a decision of if you're going to leave the system or disembark your ship to explore a planet or a space station or something like that.
00:28:36
Speaker
And so it sort of it sort of revolves around this gameplay loop of moving from hex to hex and deciding how much you want to investigate. OK. And I would say that's the core gameplay loop. Once you investigate, the gameplay loop expands into, you know, various enemies, sort of missions that you might need to solve or overcome, et cetera. But. Yeah. You mentioned the some of the different
00:29:07
Speaker
types of threats that you might run into. Do you have a favorite? The prophets of Nivisia, I think I called them in there. A little pomanto of Larry Niven and the Nicene Creed, which was a deliberate choice.
00:29:34
Speaker
Yeah, they're sort of these maddened preachers who wander from planet to planet stirring up sort of this cosmic horror meets religious fervor thing and almost like a virus that's inflaming various organs in the universe. Oof.
00:29:55
Speaker
And they were a lot of fun to write, just their sort of their action table and the names of their abilities. And I got to get a little purpley prose there. That's always fun for me. I don't get to do that very much anymore. Yeah, that is pretty fun. What? Let me ask you, so where are we? We're we're doing pretty good on time. Maybe let's change gears for a minute. Fire away. Let's talk about let's talk about you.
00:30:26
Speaker
What kind of sci-fi RPGs do you like when you go to play a sci-fi RPG?
Love for Traveler RPG
00:30:34
Speaker
So my favorite sci-fi RPG is Traveler, which something tells me you already know that answer. Because I think I made you make a few Traveler characters in your time. There is a possibility I've made a Traveler character or two. I love Traveler.
00:30:53
Speaker
And I like it for, I think, it's not what I've seen at least, a lot of reasons people don't. I like it because I love the spreadsheets of economic values. And like for me, the perfect traveler gameplay loop is loading up my ship, flying from planet A to planet B, selling the stuff on my ship for a profit, loading up my ship, flying from planet B to planet C. Like I can solo play traveler just by like doing the economic travels.
00:31:21
Speaker
That's all I care about because I find it so fascinating, this idea of a space mortgage on your Starship and trying to make it sort of the sci-fi high adventure, the Firefly, the Star Wars stuff. There's an Imperium. It's all great. I do enjoy that. I'm not saying that's bad, but for me, sort of the
00:31:42
Speaker
I wouldn't call it the gritty because I don't think it's as gritty as something like maybe Scum and Villainy esque or Firefly esque or Han Solo and Star Wars esque. Sure. But I would say sort of the we're working folk just trying to make ends meet. Traveler really, really kind of twigs for me and I love that. Like there is something in there that just has grabbed me and never let go.
00:32:08
Speaker
And so traveler is my go-to, but I don't get to play it much because pitching your game to your game group of guys, we're going to have a space mortgage always really falls flat. I've learned. They just kind of inherently go, why would we do that? Everybody loves space mortgages and the answer is always no, no, no. My spreadsheets. Famously, I guess. Right. Traveler is the game where
00:32:36
Speaker
You absolutely can die during character creation and character creation is quite an adventure in and of itself. Yeah. Traveler is fantastic. I love the fact that you get a character at the end of it that might not be what you were intending to play when you started. And I think that's great. I think it forces you to stretch as a role player and a gamer. And I like that a lot.
00:32:58
Speaker
What do you think about that? I mean, I know that was that was a big trend in the 80s. You'd see a lot of games like that, like Rollmaster, like Life Path. Yeah. But I'm seeing sort of a recurrence of that is every like every game to have a life path system. OK, I would line in the sand. This is my hill. I mean, is it I'll give ground on this hill? I'm not really going to fight over it, but also I'm not going to concede. Yeah.
00:33:28
Speaker
Every game should have a life path system. Says the guy who has never really worked more than one or two into all of his games. Is there a life path system in Science Starlight? Not at all. Oh, okay. Well, that's- No, it takes up with the publisher though. They didn't tell me to write it. Yeah, that guy's a jerk. Okay. No, I mean, I say that sort of jokingly. I don't actually, I don't believe every game would benefit from a life path system.
00:33:54
Speaker
But I, I don't think life has some would really harm very many either. Like, I think they're engaging. I think they're interesting. I think they do a lot, especially if you sort of have an implicit and or or not and not explicit or non canon setting. They do a lot to carry a lot of the heavy lifting for implicit world building. If you look at Traveler in the Mongoose when the Traveler book where it's decoupled from their setting of the Third Imperium.
00:34:24
Speaker
the fact that the professions are still called Star Marine Space Navy, right? And, and like they have all these little events and those events savings and they tell you a story and you can kind of piece together a setting that makes a lot of sense out of them, but they never have to explicitly tell you about the setting. I think that's really fascinating. So, I mean, I think there's a lot of great stuff in life path systems on, I mean, maybe we'll do one as a stretch goal for science starlet, I guess. I don't know. Okay.
00:34:51
Speaker
Or maybe I'll write a prequel game that has like this. Yeah, we should talk with the, ooh, we should talk with the publisher about that. That's a great idea. Traveler prequel game for my really narrative. So whiplash. Uh, you got it. You need it. Okay. Well, I think that was like, I like that as a diversion. It's interesting because I just spent some time at packs and plugged and
00:35:19
Speaker
I heard from quite a few people who are like, hey, I like this idea of like randomly generating a character. I think it's kind of making a, I think it's kind of making a circuit. I randomly generate all my characters. Yeah. I just throw dice and then that's what happens. Done. Do it. Even if the game doesn't have a life-ass system, I'm just rolling dice to figure out what I'm doing. Yeah. Amazing.
00:35:44
Speaker
Well, let's talk a little bit more about you. How long have you been doing full-time game design and publishing?
Balancing Creativity and Burnout
00:35:55
Speaker
As my sole source of income since the end of 2020. So this will be on January 1st, it will have been three years full-time. Wow. Okay. Congratulations.
00:36:07
Speaker
Thanks. Yeah, it's very cool. How how do you stay creative and motivated with, you know, so much kind of writing on that work all the time? It's hard. I mean, I burn out. Just frankly, it's hard. I don't have a perfect answer for that because I go through periods of burnout where I struggle to write. I go through. I think the thing that I've learned to do as having multiple things to pivot to. So if I'm feeling burnt out creatively, I pivot to
00:36:37
Speaker
sort of small business admin stuff like shipping packages, stuff that doesn't require the creative muscles, things like that, because there's always enough, there's always more work. And I think it's, you know, you can force the creative work to a point. And I'm a big proponent of the thing. It doesn't matter if you're the words you're writing or good, bad, whatever. You just got to put something on paper because you can fix it once it's on paper. You can't fix it if it never gets onto paper. Right. So,
00:37:02
Speaker
I always try to hit my writing goals for the day, but if I'm feeling really creative, I'll keep going. But if I'm not, I will pivot to things like marketing, shipping packages, stuff like that. I try to pace myself. I spend time with my family and my dogs. I play video games. I go to... I don't mean... I don't go to a lot of movies, but I watch movies and read a lot of books. I've known you to watch a movie or two.
00:37:25
Speaker
Yeah, I was just talking about this with my wife the other day. I think I can count on one hand the number of movies I've gone to in theater since the end of 2020. I just don't do it much. I still love movies. I watch them all the time, but I just don't really go leave my house to do it anymore.
00:37:40
Speaker
Yeah. I do like movies though. We're not doing it as much as we used to either. I, I do definitely blame the pandemic for that. What, what, while speaking of that, like any, what's your most recent favorite science fiction movie you've seen?
Review of Napoleon
00:37:58
Speaker
Ooh. Well, the last movie I saw was Napoleon. I went to that last week. I didn't go see that in theaters. Verdict. Yeah, that's fine. Okay.
00:38:09
Speaker
I mean, I normally love Ridley Scott historical epics. Anybody knows me knows that. But this one, I just I just didn't click with it. I don't really have a good reason why other than I didn't. And because I've gotten older, I've learned like, that's OK sometimes. I don't have to understand everything all the time. And this one, it was a good movie. I think it was pretty. It was well acted. I mean, I just I didn't click for me. There was some stuff I didn't like about it with time jumps. And I think I just was like, man, it's fine.
00:38:37
Speaker
Not upset that I saw it in theaters, but if I had waited to see it at home and saved myself the money, I'd probably been a little happier. What does it say? It was bad. I think the last science fiction movie I saw in theaters was the last, or was Rise of Skywalker. Oh, okay. One, I don't think there's been a lot of science fiction movies hit in theaters.
00:39:00
Speaker
Yes, Dune didn't come to theaters the first time, did it? The first day it actually did, but it simultaneously released on HBO. I watched it out. They came out. Yeah. I will probably see Dune to. Mm hmm. I am lovey, so it's not a movie, but my current favorite sci fi thing is the foundation TV series on Apple TV. Oh.
00:39:22
Speaker
which I like the books and I was very excited when the TV series was getting made. And I've been very excited about sort of how they've taken a lot of the concepts from the books. So it still feels like foundation, but they've reworked them into something that can be filmed and put on TV because I do think it would have been difficult to pull off. I'm not gonna say impossible, but I can certainly see why somebody wouldn't want to tackle a direct literal adaptation. I mean, the books are basically just a series of vignettes, right? There's no complete story.
00:39:51
Speaker
Yeah, and they they sort of kept that. That attitude with sort of an anthology style series, but they've added more connecting threads, which makes which I think makes it hang together really well. And watching Lee pace tear up the screen every time. It's just always a good opportunity. So yeah, no big fan of Foundation Lovett. It was a big influence on Science Starlight. I was watching it like a little bit before I started working on it. So I'm sure there was some elements there for it.
00:40:20
Speaker
There are a few callouts to or homages, I think, to classic sci-fi in this case. Several, yes. Yeah. At least two, three, maybe. Maybe six. Maybe 15. Yeah, there's a bunch. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. What excites you about the game design industry today?
Accessibility and Inclusivity in Games
00:40:49
Speaker
Oh, I think there's three things. And one of them is a double-edged sword. But I think it's more good than bad. So we'll start with that one. So the one I think is more good than bad, even though I think there is some double-edged blade there to watch for, is how accessible it is becoming to published material.
00:41:13
Speaker
because it's so easy to make PDFs now with accessible tools. It's easy to generate, upload something. People are releasing more systems under CC BY, things like that. I think if anybody wants to become a game designer, there are more tools out there to do that successfully with a lower barrier to entry than there ever have been between print on demand digital and all these tools. I think that's great. I think that's essential. I think it's key.
00:41:41
Speaker
The harder side of that, and I think it's just a thing one should be aware of and watch out for. I don't think it's inherently a problem, per se, is that because there's so much content out there now, it does get harder to develop your own skills because it's harder to consume quality material and learn from it.
00:42:05
Speaker
So when I say it's a double-edged sword, I don't think it's bad that everybody's out there, but if everybody's out there cutting their teeth together all the time, you can't learn from people who are more experienced because you can risk falling into this sort of feedback loop. So I think if somebody is serious about becoming a game designer and sort of learning the art of designing tabletop role-playing games or tabletop games,
00:42:27
Speaker
You have to make a conscious effort to experience new things to make sure you move outside of this little ecosystem and kind of push up against new ideas for yourself to grow. Yeah. So I think that would say I'd say that's a double edged sword there. And the other thing I think is really exciting is this is something I've been talking about for a while that I finally see happening and I'm excited to see it is tabletop games are learning to sort of
00:42:55
Speaker
sort of reintegrate ideas from other media or technology that they borrowed from tabletop games. So like you have tabletop RPGs and they formed a lot of early video game RPGs and still do to this day, Baldur's Game 3, right? And RPGs have never been very good about sort of stealing back what was stolen from us, not in a negative way, but taking that right influence goes this way, but it's not coming back the other way. Right. And so, but I'm seeing that shift.
00:43:23
Speaker
You know, and I think that's really cool and I think it's really important that as that we learn how we can reintegrate these other ideas back into tabletop gaming space.
00:43:34
Speaker
I've seen some of that with board games as well. Yeah. Lately. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, and I, I've been saying that for, uh, for a bit and I, and I haven't been in a position to leverage, you know, sort of that practice, what you preach, unfortunately, uh, kind of work I've been doing. It hasn't had the room to do that as much, but I think there's space to do that. And I'm excited to see it started happening and I've got some stuff in the works finally that I had some time to sit down and see what I could learn from that.
00:44:02
Speaker
Yeah, I think I saw something on one of your social media's preview that looked like it might've had some of that in it the other day. No? No, that's probably my personal Facebook page, so don't go looking for a listener. Okay. Well, I think that's awesome. So maybe another question around game design. Yeah. With respect to incorporating
00:44:33
Speaker
kind of elements of inclusion. How do you approach that in your game designs? What do you mean? I need some clarification, I think. Yeah, just incorporating elements of diversity and inclusion. Oh, I mean, that's an interesting question. So one of the things that's important to me, because I feel so isolated all the time,
00:45:04
Speaker
is that folks who experience my games and the community around my games don't feel that isolation. I tend to think generally games are for everybody to enjoy. And so a couple ways you do that, mechanically you make sure there's options for different kinds of character things. So you try to write your games in a way.
00:45:24
Speaker
But like, for example, I consider things like colorblindness. I have a brother who's very colorblind. And so I will often have him check art and be like, hey, I was thinking this might be difficult. What do you think? You know, I use a bunch of resources like that. We've experimented with various supposedly dyslexic friendly fonts and some of our layout stuff. We've tried different forms of layout.
00:45:50
Speaker
And so there's this element of always trying to see if there's a way you can improve because, I mean, from a selfish perspective, the more people who can use my games, because they're easier for them to access, the more money I'll make, right? So from a purely fiscal perspective, I lose nothing by checking to see if I can work with the dyslexic font or making sure something doesn't cause color blindness issues, right?
00:46:17
Speaker
The amount of money I'll make off one or two sales for that probably always the 10 minutes going to take me to check. Right. Um, but other two, I just, I want more people to game with. Like, and so the more I can get my games to people who can enjoy and experience and interact with those games easily and without unnecessary barriers, the, I think the better off we're going to be and I'm going to be cause all the robust, interesting game groups.
00:46:47
Speaker
Yeah. That's a great perspective. I like that a lot. With a game like Cyan Starlight, how did you balance that creativity that you were looking for and that exploration of catharsis that you mentioned earlier with playability?
Game Endings and Bipolar Reality
00:47:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:47:14
Speaker
I think the big piece there is that unlike a lot of RPGs, there is a definitive ending to Science Starlight. You can play it to a point where the campaign ends. And not in the sense of we're out of story, but in that the game will say, okay, you're done now. If you want to keep playing, you have to start over.
00:47:37
Speaker
And that's because as a last human, you have to balance his isolation. And you might find enough clues to get an answer as to what happened, or you might succumb to that emotional that emotional exhaustion and duress in the game ends. And so for me, that that balance isn't the fact that the game sort of posits that there is a linear flow.
00:47:58
Speaker
And it's a big flow. There's a lot of ways you can go there, but eventually, all lines in the game mechanics lead to this idea of you either found out the secret or you didn't. Yeah. What does that look like, finding the secret? Well, so the game features a mechanic called insights. Insights are things you can find on various locations. They're generated using some of the solo tools.
00:48:26
Speaker
And there are 24 possible insights and they're sort of paired in sets of eight. So when you find the first one is going to be one of the eight from the first set and the second one is to be one of the eight from the second set. And so that functionally makes 512 possible combinations that tell you in your campaign how the game ends.
00:48:47
Speaker
And they're written more as like narrative prompts. They tell a small story, but that interpretation is kind of left vague because obviously I don't know what the game you did at home looked like. So you will have to sort of marry those details together. And. The narrative there, but they are designed to sort of form an ending and each there are five. So there are 512 unique sort of narrative endings.
00:49:13
Speaker
that you are prompted to integrate into your campaign if you find all three insights. Alternatively, you can succumb to despair and then there's an echoes table you roll on that leads to a sort of, I mean, we'll call it what it is. It's unfortunate outcome for the character due to despair. And to me, it was important to include that
00:49:43
Speaker
Because that is part of living with bipolar disorder. This this idea that you don't always get a happy ending because your brain isn't going to let you write. And that's not it's not an attempt to glorify any sort of self harming behavior or anything.
00:50:04
Speaker
but it would be dishonest to present a game that was drawn from bipolar and pretending that every outcome eventually was sort of this positive take. It would be emotionally and intellectually dishonest for me to have done that. And I think it's important that the game presents both sides of that coin because it wants you to feel sort of that emotional weight. I think that's part of,
00:50:32
Speaker
some of the value proposition for the game honestly is that while no one can ever fully understand what's going on in someone else's head, like you mentioned earlier, and I fully subscribe to that, it is possible to potentially walk a little bit in someone else's shoes and get a sense
00:50:56
Speaker
even if it's just a really vague one of what it might be like. I think that's really important. Are there any game concepts that you really love that you would have liked to put in Science Starlight or anything that maybe you're still looking for a home for because it didn't fit in this game?
00:51:25
Speaker
I have some ideas that were left on the cutting room floor. So Second Starlight uses technology to help tell the end of this solo story. So rather than put it all in the book, what we've done is you generate these insights and then you go to a website where you plug them in and they give you each narrative prompt and you slowly build your ending. And I think that's really cool. I think it's a way of using technology for solo RPGs I haven't seen before personally. I'm not going to call the technology super innovative because it's just a webpage with like some dropdown numbers that
00:51:54
Speaker
generate prompts, right? No, it's not that innovative because I wrote it. And it's technology and it's just, I think it's using existing technology in a way that will feel innovative when you put them together, right? Sure. Yeah. Which I think is the goal. How can we use accessible technology to tell new stories? And so for me, I would have loved to do more with that idea, I think, but as I'm not a technology guy, you know,
00:52:22
Speaker
Yeah, I'd be like, yeah, we should just build a whole virtual tabletop for the game. Let's do it. Right. I don't know what that cost or looks like. Whatever. Not my problem. I have no idea of the scope of that. I mean, I do because I work in software and I know. But my point being, I think it would be difficult to have included more without overshooting the mission statement of the game, I think. But I would love, you know, for example, to have like
00:52:51
Speaker
QR codes hidden in the art that lead to clues, maybe more things like that on the bottom of the page where we have these like things you can plug in on the Web site that maybe unlock in the game, like integrating technology in the game a little more fully without compromising playing the game without technology. Which I think is the balance. Tabletop RPGs struggle to strike is how do we use technology to improve the game?
00:53:19
Speaker
without compromising the core value, which is a physical game you play with your friends. Right.
AR and VR in Tabletop Games
00:53:26
Speaker
Or in this case, a physical or digital game you play by yourself. Have you seen any games that do something like that? I've seen games that try with various degrees of success. Invisible Sun comes to mind. They hid stuff all over that black cube and they have their own Invisible Sun like campaign manager app.
00:53:48
Speaker
that's designed for offline play. But it is mostly like a messaging board with some character details and stuff loaded in for campaign management. You know, I've seen I've seen various attempts at different kind of things, but yeah, it's hard. And I'm not sure I don't I don't have a good enough grasp on the technology. I would need to have a technology person like sort of sitting alongside me as I made the game, making sure I want to stay in scope and to
00:54:14
Speaker
You know, maybe proposing stuff I don't know can be done. That might be interesting. Right. Yeah. Like, is there a way to like make it so like if you scan in a page, it does something like that would be cool. Right. Like or or a companion app that tracks some of this for you is stuff like that. Right. Like, I don't know what any of that would look like or cost or make. But those are the things that interest me down the road where I think we can learn from video games and other games and kind of pull back into the physical tabletop space.
00:54:46
Speaker
Yeah. Do you think there's any space where more emerging technologies like VR or AR or AI might impact game design and publishing? I think you'll see VR and AR impact virtual tabletops before they impact publishing per se directly because I certainly see the pathway to how VR and AR intersects with BTTs very clearly, right? Yeah.
00:55:14
Speaker
I sit at the table with my VR headset on. You sit at your table with your VR headset on and we play, you know, an RPG and we see the same battle map in the minis in this sort of virtual space on my table. Right. Right. I guess that would be ARG technically, but. I think.
00:55:29
Speaker
The difference is ARG overlays on your physical space and virtual reality is moving in physical space, but it's all virtual. But both of those, I think there's that value proposition really clearly for VTTs. So I wouldn't be shocked to hear about something like that coming out eventually and soon, frankly. It might be interesting to see something in addition to that for AR. I mean, I think you might even have, maybe you're sitting at the same table,
00:55:57
Speaker
but people are using AR and getting some kind of additional benefit out of that. What if my computer sheet was in AR and I had dice rollers in AR and I could send stuff for whatever, right? I think there's a lot of options there. But again, for me, speculating on them is more, I have a very basic understanding of technology and software from my corporate jobs. And that mostly means I know enough to know I don't know anything. Right.
00:56:24
Speaker
And so I'm saying, I think this makes sense to me. Like having worked in app development, I can see the path. Assuming it's similar, like how somebody will end up there sooner rather than later. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, it would be interesting to play something like science starlight in AR. Like it would be kind of crazy. Yeah, it really would. Okay. Well, I think we have time for what? Maybe one more question. One more question and I'll answer brief. All right.
00:56:54
Speaker
Is there a particular moment or achievement in your career that you're particularly proud of? Shout something awesome out to us. Jeez. I think the biggest thing I am proud of is that I've managed to, with minimal compromises, build Gallant Night and our associated community into something that is positive.
00:57:19
Speaker
ethical and fair to both creatives as well as the community space that it exists in. Like, regardless of anything, I hope that when I leave the game industry, I'm not remembered because I made the best games or I was the most financially successful, but that I did a really good job at helping uplift the community and make the space better for people who make games. Love that. That's an awesome spot to end. Yeah, I think so.
00:57:47
Speaker
So I'm going to rest control of my showback, Will. Thank you. Absolutely. That was a delight. So I always end on a couple of questions that are pretty key here at Radio Free RPG. And so I'm going to turn them to you. I know you weren't prepared and I apologize. Normally I brief everybody with my little press packet, but since you were hosting, I didn't give you a press packet. This is my fault.
00:58:14
Speaker
What is an RPG that had a significant design influence on you? And maybe a better question for you as a publisher is what is an RPG that made you decide you wanted to be a publisher? Because that's a different decision than making a game. You produced a game. You didn't just write it and then have somebody else make it. You handled printing, you handled it. You did the full publishing house suite of options here. Yeah, yeah, that's true.
00:58:44
Speaker
Interesting. That's a harder question than I thought it would be. Why on earth did I choose suffering? It's a great question. Well, it's not entirely suffering. I think Hobbes would say it's because that's what humans do. It's because, yeah, that's because that makes sense. Well, no, here's the short answer. I don't know if there's any one particular game
00:59:14
Speaker
that inspired me to become a publisher. But I will say that it's kind of my incessant need to learn a little bit about a lot of things that eventually drove me to become a publisher because
00:59:33
Speaker
had this tendency to just learn more and more about a lot of things and get just good enough at them that I can be passable. And it turns out that that is in many ways the exact skill set you need to publish because there are so many things. That is true. Yeah. Okay. I mean, good answer. So, and the second question is, is there a question that you've never been asked in an interview that you would like to be asked?
01:00:06
Speaker
No, I don't know. Just remember that for when we have you on to talk about some of your adept Icarus work, because you're doing some interesting stuff there. And I think we'll be having you back sooner rather than later. Folks, I'm Alan Barr. This is Will Munn. Will, where can people find you online if they want to look for you? They can find me at adept Icarus.com. That'll have links to all your social medias and other places where Will will be.
01:00:34
Speaker
Folks, thank you for joining us on this introspective and weird journey on our bonus episode double feature. And I want to thank Will for making the time to come on and guest host. This was a fun experiment and I will replicate it in the future, I think. My absolute pleasure. Thank you. Folks, I'm Alan Barr and this has been Radio Free RPG.
01:01:09
Speaker
you