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Episodes
The best panels and seminars about analog game design & publishing.
Episodes
Sunday Jul 17, 2016
Sunday Jul 17, 2016
Sanity Points
Recorded at Metatopia 2015
Presented by Elsa S. Henry, Will Hindmarch, Kelly Osborne & Craig Page.
The worst thing that can happen to you in a horror game is either that you die, or that you lose your mind. In games that focus on a world “gone mad”, how do we support real people living with mental illness through our game development? This panel will focus on revisiting systems like sanity points, and discuss how to address breaks with reality and surviving the very worst that horror has to throw at the world without treating mental illness as a comedic happenstance, or as something to be dismissed.
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Saturday Jul 09, 2016
Saturday Jul 09, 2016
GMing Outside Your Comfort Zone
Recorded at Metatopia 2015
Presented by Cheyenne Wall-Grimes, Sarah Richardson and Elsa S. Henry
We all have games that we love to play and GM, but what happens when you break out of your normal type of game and venture into unknown territory? How do you deal with a new group of players who are into something very different than what you normally run? Whether it’s in a campaign setting or running con games, we’ll go over some of the things to expect, avoid and how to bounce back.
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Friday Jul 01, 2016
Friday Jul 01, 2016
Recycle! Using Material From Other Games Ethically and Effectively
Recorded at Metatopia 2015
Presented by Justin Jacobson, Cam Banks, Jeff Tidball & Andre La Roche.
At one time or another, every designer gains inspiration from existing works. Whether it’s snagging a single mechanic or repurposing an entire game with one crucial tweak. What are some tricks for finding that inspiration and using it in interesting ways? What are the ethical and legal considerations when using material? When does inspiration cross the line into plagiarism or, worse, infringement? What sort of attribution should you use?
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Friday Jun 24, 2016
Friday Jun 24, 2016
Patterns and Shapes in Larp Design
Recorded at Metatopia 2015
Presented by J Li and Jason Morningstar
From spatial layout to information management, this workshop lays out some of the architectural and psychological principles behind LARP design as craft. What’s the difference between a three person conversation and a four person conversation? What does time pressure do to plot? How do you change the outcome of a game by placing chairs? Join us in exploring the fascinating complexity of building stories out of spontaneous human behavior, and playing with the tools we can use to shape it.
Associated information is available at larppatterns.org
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Friday Jun 17, 2016
Friday Jun 17, 2016
How to Give and Receive Critique
Recorded at Metatopia 2015
Presented by Joshua A.C. Newman, Hannah Shaffer & Rachel E.S. Walton.
Planning and running a Kickstarter campaign for your game can be like designing and playing another game. Will you hack an existing formula or take a risk on an unusual approach? Will it include lots of fiddly mechanics and rewards or will you take a more artistic direction? When you’re running the campaign, how do you play the roles of marketer, designer, publisher, business person, and artist? Join panelists as they talk about the design and management of Kickstarter campaigns themselves. In what ways have they evolved into established systems (stretch goals, etc.) and how are some creators breaking those conventions?
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Tuesday Jun 07, 2016
Tuesday Jun 07, 2016
Kickstarter 101 (2015)
Recorded at Metatopia 2015
Presented by JR Honeycutt, Joshua A.C. Newman & Chris O’Neill
Planning and running a Kickstarter campaign for your game can be like designing and playing another game. Will you hack an existing formula or take a risk on an unusual approach? Will it include lots of fiddly mechanics and rewards or will you take a more artistic direction? When you’re running the campaign, how do you play the roles of marketer, designer, publisher, business person, and artist? Join panelists as they talk about the design and management of Kickstarter campaigns themselves. In what ways have they evolved into established systems (stretch goals, etc.) and how are some creators breaking those conventions?
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Saturday May 28, 2016
Saturday May 28, 2016
Cinematic Plays
Recorded at Metatopia 2015
Presented by Will Hindmarch
What are cinematic game mechanics? What makes a game cinematic and what do we call it when a game is not cinematic? In this presentation, writer/designer Will Hindmarch examines the languages of film and what we can borrow from cinema when we make our games, our adventures, and our plays at the table.
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Saturday May 14, 2016
Saturday May 14, 2016
Game Distribution
Recorded at Metatopia 2015
Presented by Brian Dalrymple and Darren Watts
An overview of the 3-tier system (Publisher to Distributor to Retailer), following the course of a game after production (solicitation to wholesalers, trade shows and open houses, discount structures, buying patterns and reorder cycles, the preorder system, flooring, and more…), and covering how stores discover, order, stock, and merchandise, as they try to put them in customers’ hands. Viable alternatives to the 3-tier system are also discussed.
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Saturday Apr 30, 2016
Saturday Apr 30, 2016
Agile Design and Publishing
Recorded at Metatopia 2015
Presented by Rob Donoghue and Emily Dresner
Join our panelists for a discussion of how nerdy business concepts such as Agile software development to can be applied to your gaming experience. Key concepts of agile software design include rapid and flexible response to change – let’s talk about how to apply them to running games.
More about Agile from Rob over on his site, at this blog post!
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Saturday Apr 16, 2016
Saturday Apr 16, 2016
Creativity In Business: Pixar’s Success and Lessons For Tabletop Publishing
Recorded at Metatopia 2015
Presented by Jeff Tidball, Cam Banks
Managing a company of creative people can be challenging. New ideas are always being introduced into structured spaces that resist change and fear innovation and imagination. Tabletop game publishers and managers can learn from the success of Pixar, Inc, who have mastered the art of ushering in and protecting the new, releasing their employees from common limits on creativity, and not being afraid to try things in often radically different ways to create bigger and better projects
As a fine example of creativity in business, the kickstarter for Unknown Armies 3rd Edition is currently up. Dig into the occult weirdness from Atlas Games!
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Thursday Mar 31, 2016
Thursday Mar 31, 2016
Project Budgeting For Tabletop Games
Recorded at Metatopia 2015
Presented by Jeff Tidball, Cat Tobin & Justin Jacobson
The process of producing a board game, card game, or role playing game is lousy, with opportunities for financial disaster. Learn what financial factors you should take into account when planning a game production, and walk through a spreadsheet that’ll help you plan your own projects by estimating their profitability (or lack thereof).
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Wednesday Mar 16, 2016
Wednesday Mar 16, 2016
Formalizing Your Game Business
Recorded at Metatopia 2015
Presented by Fred Hicks, Steve Segedy, Darren Watts and Brennan Taylor
Is your company ready to take the next step? We’ll discuss how to turn a tiny game company into a slightly-larger game company.
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Saturday Mar 05, 2016
Saturday Mar 05, 2016
Matters Of Scale: Running A Small Gaming Business
Recorded at Metatopia 2015
Presented by Fred Hicks, Rob Donoghue and Steve Segedy
Game publishing is a very different beast depending on how new you are to the industry and how much reach you and your game might have. Small press and independent creators will find that which printers, distributors and fulfillment channels they might use varies wildly depending on their goals and how much risk they’re willing to take.
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Saturday Feb 06, 2016
Saturday Feb 06, 2016
Genius Loci: Your Setting is the Character
Recorded at Metatopia 2014
Presented by Will Hindmarch
Places, rather than protagonists, are often what RPG campaigns have in common because the characters are bespoke but the setting is shared. How does your game’s space inform its setting – and vice versa? How does setting pose and reflect theme? Settings can be characters in their own right, tuned and portrayed through your design to dramatize the themes and issues at the heart of your game. In this seminar, I’ll share some of what I set out to do and some of what I’ve learned designing Project: Dark and its play spaces.
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Monday Jan 18, 2016
Monday Jan 18, 2016
Opacity, Transparency, and Player Incentives in Your Strategy Board Game
Recorded at Metatopia 2014
Presented by Gil Hova
Do people understand what’s going on in your game? Not just the rules, but can they tell who’s winning? If they should watch out for a dangerous player? If they know exactly how their move will impact their next few turns? Join designer Gil Hova as he discusses transparency and opacity in strategy board games. We will discuss what makes a game mechanism transparent or opaque, how they work (or fail) in existing games, and how to use them to incentivize players to make interesting plays.
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Saturday Dec 05, 2015
Saturday Dec 05, 2015
Lovecraft WTF
Recorded at Metatopia 2014
Presented by Julia Ellingboe, Kenneth Hite, Darren Watts & Bill White.
H. P. Lovecraft is one of the grandfathers of weird fiction and horror. His racist and anti-Semitic beliefs are no secret. They are the foundation of his fictional worlds. They are interwoven throughout his work and for many readers, impossible to separate from the genius of his writing. Can a Lovecraft-inspired game make his work more accessible? It’s okay to like problematic things. This panel will be neither an attack nor a defense of Lovecraft’s work. In a broad sense, it will be a conversation about how designers might interpret or use source material with themes or images that are problematic.
Apologies for sound quality issues.
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Saturday Nov 28, 2015
Saturday Nov 28, 2015
Explicit vs Role-Based Knowledge
Recorded at Metatopia 2014
Presented by Clark Valentine, Shane Harsch and Evan Torner.
This seminar poses the question of whether it is possible to support a detailed, knowledge-rich environment for an RPG without creating a situation where the character that should know how to do something actually does not. Where is the balance between detail and role?
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Sunday Nov 22, 2015
Sunday Nov 22, 2015
Editing Rulebooks
Recorded at Metatopia 2014
Presented by Joshua Yearsley.
Your rulebook is the heart of your game, so why not give it the love it deserves? In this seminar, you’ll learn ten best practices for improving the structure, style, and clarity of your rulebook. Got any burning questions about rules craft? Get answers from a professional rulebook editor.
Additional references and a copy of the presentation is available at http://joshuayearsley.com/case/ten-things-you-can-do-to-make-your-rulebook-awesome/
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Saturday Nov 14, 2015
Saturday Nov 14, 2015
Social Media Action Steps
Recorded at Metatopia 2014
Presented by Beth Rimmels.
Social media is a crucial marketing step, especially for new and small businesses. Even better, it can cost you little to nothing, but can be confusing or overwhelming. This panel will explain what’s essential, where to start (and on which social media channel), free and low-cost tools that will make your life easier, and how to grow an audience organically.
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Tuesday Oct 13, 2015
Tuesday Oct 13, 2015
Executing a Smart Crowdfunding Campaign
Recorded at Metatopia 2014
Presented by Fred Hicks, Joshua A. C. Newman & Hannah Shaffer
How do you plan your crowdfunding campaign? How done do you need to be before you open? How do you engage your community? How do you plan for all possible outcomes? Joshua A.C. Newman (Mobile Frame Zero: Rapid Attack and Shock: Social Science Fiction), Fred Hicks (Fate Core, Designers & Dragons, and more), and Hannah Shaffer (Questlandia) share their experiences and then ditch out on their planned talk to address your questions once they realize they can’t afford shipping.
Special Kickstarter Mentions
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Saturday Sep 12, 2015
Saturday Sep 12, 2015
The Best Practices for Information Organization in Tabletop RPGs
Recorded at Metatopia 2014
Presented by Brennan Taylor, Matt Wilson, Meredith Reitman, Krista White & John Stavropolous
Tabletop RPGs serve as both a “let’s play!” and a reference document. RPGs designers and writers often attend to one of these goals at the expense of the other. Come to this panel to learn about professional theories of information organization, best practices for making the important information in your games findable and learn lessons from experienced game designers who have made information organization innovations and mistakes in their own games.
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Saturday Aug 29, 2015
Saturday Aug 29, 2015
Learn RPG Design Redux
Recorded at Gencon 2015
Presented by Jason Pitre, Caleb Stokes and Andreas Walters
This panel, sponsored by the Indie Game Developer Network is a fresh new exploration of how to start roleplaying game design by focussing on mission statements, the important questions of game design, and other gems. Also an absurd number of references to games including, but not limited to: Inspectres, Headspace, Dog Eat Dog, Paranoia, Fiasco and Apocalypse World.
There is a reference to cards with links to a ton of resources? All of that treasure-trove is available over here.
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Saturday Aug 15, 2015
Saturday Aug 15, 2015
Women in Game Design: Building Networks and Forming Mentorships
Recorded at Metatopia 2014
Presented by Emily Care-Boss, Julia Ellingboe, Shoshana Kessock, Amanda Valentine & Avonelle Wing.
The “gaming industry” has been a brutal place to be a woman this year. Join our esteemed panelists for a conversation about the need for strong support networks and finding mentors in a turbulent and sometimes hostile industry.
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Saturday Aug 08, 2015
Saturday Aug 08, 2015
Dramatic Editing : Creating the Editing Bay
Recorded at Metatopia 2014
Presented by Will Hindmarch
How does your design facilitate dramatic editing at the game table? Do you have strict mechanisms that put editing into the hands of the players or their characters through overt metaphors or in-setting magic? Or do you provide procedures and guidelines for collaborating and revising action during play? Dramatic editing at the table allows for players to propose and explore actions without them necessarily making it “on stage” or committing it to “film” and that can be a messy freedom or a beautiful drudge. Let’s look at ways to facilitate what you want to happen at the table.
Note that the sound quality is lousy in the first minute of audio, but it gets much better after that point.
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Saturday Aug 01, 2015
Saturday Aug 01, 2015
Gaming With, and Designing For, Young Players
Recorded at Metatopia 2014
Presented by Cam Banks, Lisa Bowman-Steenson, Clark Valentine, Amanda Valentine & Brennan Taylor.
Young players can present unique challenges to game designers and adults at the table. Attention spans, play styles, system mastery, and age appropriate subject matter can vary a great deal. Be part of a discussion about making and running games that work for young players.
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