More About Us: Part 1

Hey, I’m Will Primrose, one of the co-founders of There’s A Way Studios in Vancouver, BC. Pictured here is my fiancée, Megaila who I love more than anything!

One of the guiding principles of There’s A Way Studios is designing games for players by players. Will Lewis and I are both players of many TTRPGs, and we wanted to contribute games that we would want to play. Hopefully, you want to play them too! At any rate, we wanted to make sure that there is a face, a name, and a story behind the games we create. This is part one of us introducing ourselves to you– Will Lewis will introduce himself in part two!

Where am I from?

I grew up in the interior of BC in a village called Chase. With a population of less than 3,000, Chase is the kind of town where everyone knows everyone (at least a little). It was a fantastic place to grow up– you were always within a 15 minutes walk to your friends’ houses, there’s plenty of nature to explore nearby, the teachers at my schools were great, and the town is located next to the Little Shuswap Lake on the traditional lands of the Secwepemc people. Growing up here afforded me a ton of opportunities, but the best thing about being from a small town is growing up with the same group of people for so long. My best friends growing up have continued to be in my life, even though we don’t see each other as often.

What led me to Vancouver?

Outside of playing and designing tabletop RPGs, I am a chemist. I earned my Bachelor of Science at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC in 2020. The journey to achieving that was long (and also a lot of fun) and maybe worth a separate blog post one day. During my time at TRU, I was engaged in a number of research activities and projects, and that got me hooked on doing research. I started looking into graduate school to continue my education, and my partner started looking into law school. Fast forward to April of 2020, and we had both been accepted to UBC in Vancouver! She accepted an offer to join the Peter A. Allard school of law, and I had joined the chemistry department under the supervision of Dr. Zac Hudson. Check out hudsonlab.ca if you want to see what kind of research we do– I’m probably biased but it’s cool as hell! I’ll throw some cool pictures of glowing stuff we’ve made below. Now, I’m in my 4th year of my Ph.D. designing luminescent materials for bioimaging and sensing applications.

How did I get into making TTRPGs?

My first intro to TTRPGs was with Dungeons & Dragons 5e. I played one or two sessions at the end of high school, and then began playing regularly the summer after my first year of undergrad. I was absolutely HOOKED. I was the DM for my first group, even though I had barely played a couple of hours prior to that, and that meant I was doing a lot of reading into rules, mechanics, and storytelling. I read articles on running the game and read posts by people far more experienced than me talk about how fun it is to make your own content for these kinds of games. From then on, I loved making homebrew content for my 5e games and I loved learning how other people made their content.

Then, in December of 2022, I met Will Lewis; his partner works with my partner here in Vancouver, and we got to talking at their holiday party about games. He mentioned he planned to start up a tabletop group playing Warhamer 40k: Dark Heresy (1e) once a week in the new year. I knew absolutely nothing about 40k but he seemed really cool, and our philosophies about how to run games seemed to overlap really well. I took him up on his offer, and through him found a great group of people here in Vancouver to play games with once a week. Throughout our time knowing each other, we talked about how each of us wanted to be involved in making our own games, until we finally decided, “Why don’t we work on our games together? Set aside a few hours here and there and hold each other accountable?” We both find it much easier to work on a project when we’re not alone (too easy to procrastinate otherwise) so the venture was quite successful. Eventually, we thought it might be fun to share our projects with other people, and that’s when we decided to form an official partnership: enter, There’s A Way Studios.

What’s next for There’s A Way Studios?

Right now, we’re working on launching our first game! Will Lewis is the mastermind behind our first title and let me tell you, I am SO excited for it to get out there! I won’t spoil anything before launch, but you’re in for a treat.

After that, we’re going to focus on two things:

Getting the first game out there and continually improving it for our players, and
Writing, playtesting, and releasing our second game.

It’s been a really cool journey so far, and I’m really excited for people to see what we’ve been working on. Game design is challenging at times, but where there’s a will…

There’s A Way. (Studios)

There’s A Way Studios is an independent game design studio based out of Vancouver, British Columbia.