Happy New Year – Here’s a long post about what we’ve been up to!
2024 promises to be an exciting year for both of us! We make our tentative first steps towards registering ourselves as a business, finalize our first game and launch. And, full disclosure: Neither of us have done this before.
These entries are for documenting the journey we’ve taken to get here. If you’re interested in creating and publishing a game of your own, perhaps you’ll find this useful.
At the very least, it’ll be fun for us to look back on.
In this Update
The Story So Far
I had the idea to launch a game back in the tail-end of 2022. I slowly got to typing it up and trying to make something interesting of it but found I wasn’t making much progress. Life has a habit of getting in the way and there are always things to do that seem more urgent or even more immediately gratifying than drafting a game.
Then, one rainy day at Fan Expo in early 2023, I got talking to my friend and fellow gaming enthusiast Will Primrose about it. It so happened that he had a germ of an idea for a game of his own with an innovative magic system. We decided that both of our games stood a better chance of seeing the light of day if we joined forces and, in a sense, There’s A Way Studios was born there and then.
We started to arrange some weekend afternoons where we would go to one another’s place and, over a couple of helpings of sushi, discuss the games we wanted to make. We each have enough experience to ask insightful questions “How will this mechanic work?”, “What if a player wants to do XYZ?”, “Who is your game for?”, etc. This helped us hone in on what our games were going to be and what made them interesting. We’d then spend the rest of the afternoon drafting up our respective games.
What Went Well
We asked each other good questions.
Knowing a lot about games helped here. As did some of my background with Product Design. It’s important to know:
- Who is the game for?
Age, country, demographic, person with a specific interest, etc. Be as specific as you can here. Is your game solo or multiplayer, how many players do you need, does any player have more responsibility than others (think DMs in D&D or The Banker in Monopoly). You can also create an imaginary ideal player for your game. Always remember who your ideal player/players are and, with every decision consider if that player would like it. It might be someone doesn’t like a mechanic in your game – are they your target audience? If not, maybe you don’t have to sweat about it. - Why is the game fun?
Games should, generally speaking, be fun. There are some exceptions to this but, generally speaking, people play games to have fun. So what is fun about the game? Can you explain in a sentence what is enjoyable about it? - How do you play?
Einstein apparently once said “If you can’t explain [something] to a six-year-old, then you don’t understand it yourself.”. When making a game, you can think you know how something works until you have to explain it to someone else. So how, in the simplest terms, do you play this game?
We were strict with ourselves when deciding our launch plan.
I’m a perfectionist. It’s a problem. As an educator, I’ve spent hours adjusting fonts in my lesson presentations and agonizing on how I will word something. My bad habit is to get bogged down in the details. This is made much worse when I’m working alone because I only have my own (ridiculous) standards to live up to.
As well as my own impossible standards, it’s hard to put into words the emotion connection I feel with the game I’m making. It really does feel a bit like my baby, and I can visualise a gorgeous published hard-copy version with an intricately-designed box and instruction book.
The reality is, this would take ages to make myself with my fairly limited design experience, or cost a ton of money for graphic designers, printers, shipment (and all the taxes and logistics that comes with it). All of this with no guarantee that anyone even wants to play our game!
So we settled on shipping a PDF with a few design elements in it rather than shooting for the moon. Our reasoning being that a game that exists is better than that idealised version in my imagination. The game that exists is one that people can play and enjoy.
If we sell a few items we can put that money back into making games. If we get any kind of popularity, we could run a kickstarter to make the version of the game from my dreams. Until then, we’re holding firm to our principles of keeping our costs low to get games out there into the world!
We’ve had fun doing this.
I always feel slightly uneasy talking about things going well. Maybe I’ve watched one too many movies where a character is loudly talking about how great his day is going – an then immediately struck down by some freak accident. So, in full knowledge of the ominous powers I might be invoking: It’s been an absolute joy doing this, and a great honour to be working with Will.
I can see we have both taken great care to be encouraging and respectful to one another, to act in good faith and to be upfront and honest with what we are and are not able to do with regards to workload, timings and finances. We do our best in our meetings to keep one another apprised of what’s going on in our lives and how it might affect our projects.
It’s been great fun making games together and I can only hope it continues in this way.
What We Learned
It’s impossible to know what you don’t know. It’s also not possible to know how much there is you don’t know (because you don’t know it). Right?
I went into this process understanding there would be a lot to learn and I’ve certainly not been disappointed! Here’s what I’ve learned in the last year.
- Drafting is the hardest bit of writing a game, and editing is the worst bit of editing a game.
It’s fun talking about the game you’re thinking of making. It’s fun thinking about the game you’re thinking of making. It’s difficult writing it. Or rather, sitting down to write is difficult. I eventually found that the best thing for me to do was to designate some time for writing (I arranged a drafting session with Will, he’d come over, we’d split some food and just write for a couple hours). The other thing I ended up doing was writing without deleting stuff. Just. Get. Words. On. The. Page.
The combination of accountablilty from having a writing buddy as well as the attitude of “Just write it” helped overcome my second-guessing and rephrasing, but editing was another beast altogether.
Editing sucks. I don’t like combing through my work to find misspellings or poor turns of phrases. Probably because it’s kind of tedious more than anything. At time of writing I’m struggling to make final edits of my game. I’m going to try and set some time to do it and, failing that, I’ll arrange an editing session with Will so I actually sit and do the damn thing. - How to set up a business.
I won’t go into detail here because details will vary depending on where you live. But it’s been fascinating learning how to go thorough the process of setting up a business and figuring out the logistics.
Of course, things are a little more complicated when you’re working with another person – there’s two people to organise. We’ve had to think about how we’ll do finances, arrange social media, websites and more. - Networking is important.
It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Turns out that’s very true. I’m something of an introvert and find networking to be quite exhausting. Will Primrose is the extroverted one in this partnership. Still though, from what networking I’ve managed to do, I’ve found it’s definitely worth the effort.
I’ve managed to meet some really interesting people (and those interesting people have introduced me to other interesting people). Fundamentally, if no one knows about you, no one is going to play your game.
What’s Next?
It’s been a long post but I think we’re up to date now. I hope to post more of these Journals in the future to keep track of the progress we’ve made.
So what’s next for There’s A Way Studios? Well let me tell you:
We’re learning how to design a game!
When I say “design” I mean graphic design. We’re going to make our games look good!
Our first game is almost ready to be released. We’re learning about page design to make it look good and be easy to read when we release it.
We’ll announce our first game!
We’re almost there folks! We’ll formally announce our first game soon and let you know what you can expect from it. Stay tuned.
Playtests and Showcase
Come February, we want to show this game to the world. We’ll be showcasing at Quiver Game’s Checkpoint event and working with groups around Vancouver to get the word out.
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Do you have any questions, comments or ideas? Are you a game designer who would like to work with us in the future? Would you like to take part in any of our playtests? Keep track of There’s A Way news by joining our mailing list below.
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