Connor | Always Awake Games

Aw thanks : ) I’m excited for you to get your game!

Yep! And it feels great once it’s going. Right until I ran out of tape 😭

A black cat climbing into a shipping box

Hazel’s in heaven

A table with packing supplies for two games I’m doing the fulfilment for

Slowly figuring out my system…but it’s happening!

Club Spooky and That’s the Spirit will be on their way soon!

I hope we’re still collectively processing that AEG and the boardgaming consciousness draw the line at being pro-AI and lowering the value of game designers…

But don’t draw the line at the insane levels of misogyny exhibited only 2 years ago?

It’s wild to me he wasn’t booted to high hell sooner…

Tbf getting full enjoyment from a high luck & high skill game requires almost a cognitive dissonance... You must try super hard to win, exercising your skill, but also not care much about the final outcome, which may be dashed by luck. (This is also the personality type I most want to play with.)

I’m definitely still in the camp of “there are no bad mechanics”, but I’ve also got a bunch of thoughts why I doubt I’d ever personally use it.

Thanks. Not the worst, we’ll see if they refund it. But also this is partly why I did a smaller campaign.

Literally just paid these the other day 🫠 It’s gonna be such a mess sorting all this out and it’s already caused so much damage.

Which is to say, I want that author's execution. Because the execution is the art. Not only as a physical product, but as an artifact that signifies their effort, practice, and intentionality.

Minus the ai stuff, if you think game design is just combining past ideas, I can’t imagine you’re making anything interesting. To what end are you doing all this?

The mechanics are nothing without the purpose you give them. That purpose is everything. The mechanics are just there to support it.

wow so great finally consequences for shitting on the creatives of the tabletop industry after years of zero consequences for shitting on women of the tabletop industry so cool I feel so much better about this company wow so cool so great

LOL. But this inevitable separation probably should have been clear when Dancey claimed a few years ago that women weren't succeeding due to inability to withstand creative criticism + not designing enough war games and giant robot games.

Today I want to share that Ryan Dancey and AEG have parted ways.
This is not an easy post to write. Ryan has been a significant part of AEG’s story, and I am personally grateful for the years of work, passion, and intensity he brought to the company. We have built a lot together.

No level of cleverness, time-saving, energy and water efficiency, or even ethical processing of data will convince me to use LLMs or AI models in my process. I love the process so much, and I express myself through every step. You can’t automate self-expression. [4/6]

And fair about game designers running businesses. But they never apply the same logic to themselves.

Business bros to game designers: just because you’re a game designer doesn’t mean you know anything about running a game business

Also business bros: I run the business side of a game publisher, so I know everything about game design

Just stick to the numbers…or actually put in the care and effort

Reposting with ALT because this kind of phenomenal disdain and disrespect from within the industry literally against two of their own titles and the designer who made them is important to recognize.

Right? I mean clearly these people have never actually appreciated or cared about any of the stuff they’ve “worked on” before. And I’m putting that in quotes cause really doesn’t sound like they’ve gone anywhere near the process based on all this.

And they’d put their foot in the mouth way less. Like he didn’t have to post any of the awful takes he’s posted over the years. But I mean it’s good to know what’s going on inside the industry.

Coming up with a single random idea is cheap, but thats that’s not even close to what designers do.

You have to come up with hundreds of ideas, filter them, test, refine, make prototypes, test more, iterate, ruminate and tons more to eventually get to what he’s hand waving away as “an idea”.

Well that’s depressing… It’s always the business types saying “ideas are cheap and easy” but then they’re never the ones that come up with those successful ideas. Almost as if it’s not that simple.

I use thenounproject.com religiously for my images and icons. And if I can’t find something that fits, I’ll just google and image and slap it on.

You don’t need any skills in graphic design (though perhaps you may need space to develop visual taste) to make a very suitable prototype for pitching.

I know I just said not to blindly follow game designers’ advice….but the one thing I wish people did understand is that every type of game, mechanic, theme etc has a place and purpose. Being smug towards easy, complex, fiddly, “more of an activity” or whatever types of games misses the whole point.

To be fair to those players, I think a lot of them genuinely just enjoy noise and fiddling with a lot of moving parts. Which is all well and good! That's totally valid and a big appeal of board games. This preference only bothers me when it veers into a sense of smugness or superiority.

Forage + Honeypot A pair of fast and fun games for everyone, from the team that brought you the smash hits Point Salad, Calico, and Cascadia!

It's live!! The game I designed, Honeypot, just launched on Kickstarter!

Two years of loving work. Would be grateful if you checked it out & considered backing!

It's an "I stack, you choose" game where you play as secret agent bears setting and avoding traps!

www.kickstarter.com/projects/fla...

I’ve been there. In our playtest group I make sure to emphasise that feedback should be how you feel, not advice on next steps. It’s made playtesting much more helpful (and pleasant) than back when I was getting “design advice from the pros”

I agree. Its the most important to find your own style and modus operandi. The way I work works for me, no clue if it works for someone else.
Plus one of the most important skills is to filter feedback, to decide what is helpful and what is not.

That's why when people ask me about advice about the industry I usually end up asking more questions than they do. By clarifying their intentions and goals it helps reveal the next step.

The difference between making an indie game, designing for retail, or crowdfunding a game is so vast.

This isn’t any one person. I’ve been stewing on this for ages. It’s a survivorship bias thing where a tiny few designers have made it big. Then you end up with a bunch of homogenous games as everyone’s chasing what worked for them even if their goals and contexts are completely different.