Thinking Like a Game Designer

Hello! Can you tell us who you are and what you do?

Hey there! I’m Justin Gary, the CEO of Stone Blade Entertainment, a former professional and champion Magic: the Gathering player and creator of the critically acclaimed Ascension, a deckbuilding game series.

I’ve been in the gaming industry for decades now, with my experience as a former competitive player, being an award-winning designer and leading my business. I’ve written my game design techniques and workflow in my book titled Think Like a Game Designer, which is a pretty cool read if you’re working in the gaming industry, so check it out when you can!

What are games to you?

I think we all have some core traits, like why we, as a species, play games. It's a weird thing that we do. We take on these bizarre, unnecessary obstacles and create challenges for ourselves that don't actually accomplish anything in the real world. And somehow that becomes a fulfilling thing that we do that many of us have devoted our lives to. And I think that there are a few different traits that come with it.

First is that games are this place where we can learn and experiment with who we are and who we want to be and how we face challenges in a safe and controlled environment. I can lose a game of chess or go bankrupt in Monopoly, but I still have my home, right? And so there's a piece of that learning and growing that I've always been very connected to.

And second, I think there’s the trait of building connections. Playing Magic: the Gathering, I would play in tournaments for $30,000 and travel around the world, which was really cool. And I enjoyed being able to make a living doing that instead of being a busboy at the local deli, which I was before I became a pro.

The reason I stayed with that game is not because of the money and not even because of the game itself, but it was because of actually the friendships and the connections that I had built. Many of those friendships I still have now, 25-30 years later. Games provide a way for us to connect around something that we love. And that is something that has always stayed with us, so those are two of the major pillars in my mind.

And then, looking at it all as a creator, I think we are just called to create. Like, being able to be creative and put things out into the world is not just about the thing you create. It's about that ability to express yourself and to put a part of you out into the world. And so that, learning, creating, connecting… that's what I'm all about in life.

And that's what games have provided for me and a lot of people I love.

What’s your favorite game to play?

Well, of course, Magic: the Gathering has to take the king there. It changed the course of my life and pushed a lot of things forward for me. Nowadays? Frankly, I don't have a lot of spare bandwidth cycles for games that are not my games, right? One of the ironic things about making games for a living is that we don't get to have as much fun as we used to. But I will say I've gotten re-addicted to Civilization.

I love these kinds of forex turn-based games. And so I've been playing a lot as Civilization VII just came out. We're going to go play that with some friends this weekend. And just that sort of epic scale and scope of kind of literally going through the ages of civilization and being able to have these battles and all these different mechanisms that go with it is something that's always hooked me since I was a kid.

And, actually, Alpha Centauri was the one that really hooked me, where you take the same concept of Civilization, but you bring it out into space. And I had so many late nights that I would suddenly see the sun coming up because I was just taking one more turn every single time, and that addictiveness has always stuck with me.

What makes a game a social hit?

Let’s think of it this way. Civilization, what makes us all unite around Civilization, versus what makes us unite around a similar game? All different answers, right? Wordle’s genius is that same word a day for everybody, right?

The social groups will be like, “How many guesses did it take you to get Wordle today?” Or “Can you believe the answer today?!” We can now have this shared experience around this sort of temporal moment. That's actually really powerful. And this used to be the kind of thing that old school TV provided, but it doesn't quite anymore because of the internet and accessibility nowadays.

Because it used to be, we had to go, “All right, it's eight o'clock on Thursday and we're going to tune in and watch Seinfeld.” Or whatever your show of choice was. If you missed it, you missed it! And that was it, that shared cultural moment that made the experience special. Wordle broke through the usual problems in creating a shared cultural experience in a modern setting. Now we can have this sort of shared struggle and shared moment.

Things like Civilization are some of that shared struggle, where we can share strategies and things. But I think a lot of it honestly came down to the customization and modding community around those games, and that was a huge part of it. It allows the players to be creative and be a part of crafting an experience and share different aspects of it.

That ability to take ownership like, “This is my thing!” and this is the version of this that I like to play, and this is the way that I can express myself and create inside this broader framework... That type of thing extends the lifespan of a game and extends the community connections of a game. Not everybody's going to be making mods for Civilization, right? Personally, I never have. But it lets the people who want to go all in dive as deep as they can and lets other people connect around those different experiences.

So I think each game needs to independently answer, “How are you building community?” and “How are you connecting people around your game?” Because no matter how good your game is, if people don't form communities around it, it's not going to stand the test of time.

On the meteoric rise of casual and daily games

I think there's this like “new world” that's coming as simple games become more popular. Simple game development gets easier and easier with new technology that keeps coming out and it’s guaranteed that there'll be a lot more of these bite-sized game experiences that I can quickly filter through.

This is already true to some extent in mobile gaming, but it still entails a significant cost to develop. I think as that goes down, you'll see a lot more of these kinds of micro games and those micro games will create entire new communities, entire new systems and modes of play and gathering around individual designers who might design a game a day and post a game every day because of these things.

So there's a fascinating world that I think we're on the cusp of that will change the way that everybody engages with games. 

What role does AI play in this new age of games?

I'm happy to talk about it. It’s deep and controversial and a lot of people shy away from it, but I do not. At the end of the day, there's no stopping this.

This is a technology that's already revolutionizing the process of game development. It will only get better and continue to be. And so the question is, how do you want to adapt to it? Cause you don't really have a choice otherwise, right? So this is a tool that will allow individual indie creators to create far more, far better games than they ever could before.

It is going to equalize the power of the thousand-person team to a 20-person team. And what does that mean for people's careers? And what does that mean for how the industry is reshaped? Those are hard questions to answer. But I think as an individual creator, probably the best time to be a game designer would actually be now and probably for the next couple of years.

I started in the tabletop gaming industry. I made my game Ascension around 15 years ago, and it’ll be the 15th anniversary of our first copy in August. I now go to shows and have people like a father who would say, “Hey, my daughter and I bonded over playing Ascension and she's thirteen.” She wasn't even alive when I made the game! And so that's really cool. But then, the year after the Ascension app was released, we were the first deck-building game to come to mobile. And that was a huge success. It was an amazing thing, but I had to work with an outside team of engineers and they had this whole process that I couldn’t fully grasp, as I could never program myself.

And then I started working on SolForge and SolForge Fusion, where I had to hire teams of engineers. And I have been kicking myself for over a decade for not learning to program. As a designer and as a CEO, I understand the basics and I can lead the team, but I was hamstrung.

I can't rapid prototype like I would with a tabletop game. So much of the process of game design is about that core design loop and being able to iterate. And now I can use what they call “vibe coding”; it is the thing where I can use plain language and the AI tools to code things.

And I'm not going to make something that's a finished product myself, but I can make a thing that's a good prototype and start testing and moving forward. And the engineers that I had that actually know a little bit more than I do can now use this to accelerate their design process or their process of creation, and so it's been amazing.

And again, when we're just at the forefront of it. But I think that the capacity that one has, if you're somebody that's coming up as a designer, you should be playing with these tools and experimenting with them and getting ahead. I will reiterate this again, the number one thing that I tell new designers is to reduce your scope.

Like most people, they're like, “Oh, I want to make a game that's like Halo and Fortnite combined with World of Warcraft.” I'm like, “You've never even made a game before. Stop. Your scope is crazy.” Your goal is to make something that's very small and bite-sized so that you can practice going through the core design loop, testing and iterating and learning.

And that still holds true, but now the capabilities of what's possible for somebody that's starting out, what that scope can be and how quickly you can escalate that scope are so much better than it was. And even though there is a lot of upheaval and there'll be a lot of challenges as there is with any new technology and any new evolution or technological revolution, I think overall, there's a lot of cause for real excitement as a creator.

What parts of your core design loop can be enhanced by AI?

It absolutely can help you with every single step of the process, depending on where you are and which part you want to be the one to add value. Inspiration, step one, is really about what is driving you to make a game. What is the core of the game? Usually, we'll frame this as “What's your elevator pitch?” Or, “Why is this unique? What's the hook that you're trying to get at?” All in all, what's motivating you? If you don't have any ideas as a designer, you can go ahead and ask AI. “Hey, give me a hundred ideas of a game designs that are like combination of A and B.” or “ Do that, but in this category and with a twist because I really want it to be like a puzzle game but with cats.” AI's pretty good at throwing out a bunch of ideas for you and it's not that the AI is going to be the idea that you use, but it will help you to come up with that inspiration. And it's helpful to bounce ideas off of, all in all, that’s part one.

Part two is framing. Framing is really about putting parameters around your game and giving yourself limits, like reducing your scope, putting yourself in a box. This is probably where AI can contribute the least, but it can still be helpful.

Brainstorming is a great aspect where AI can help. This is where you're trying to get as many ideas as possible. It would take, I say, around 20 minutes for just writing down as many ideas as you want and you're lucky if you get like a hundred. Meanwhile, AI can get you a thousand in 30 seconds.

It’s crazy how many ideas it can have. Once you have those, then you filter those down. At the end of the process, you go from open ideation to organization, where you find the patterns and find the through lines of all these different crazy ideas. Then you’d get to elimination, where you now try to get to as simple a thing as possible that you can prototype.

AI is also obviously very helpful for prototyping. As I talked about earlier, I can now prototype a quick digital app just by talking to the AI and going back and forth with it, as opposed to actually having to code something myself. And then, when it comes to testing, believe it or not, AI is actually good at simulating a testing customer.

It's not going to replace a customer, but you can actually say, “Hey, you are a 40-year-old mother and from the Midwest. And I'm going to present this idea to you and you’ll give me your feedback.” And there’ve been studies that show it's pretty good at this. Again, not replacing doing real testing with real humans, but it can help with those first core design loops and those first iterations you go through, you won't try to go through them fast.

I even tell new designers, your very first core design loop, your very first playtest, you should just run it through in your head, like step-by-step in your own head. Imagine what's happening in the game. Imagine what somebody is playing. Where are they getting the information? What are they motivated to do? And you can actually catch a lot of stuff in a mental playtest. And this is a step significantly better than that.

And then, when it comes to iterating, this is the part that is, generally speaking, you're going to be on your own. But again, having the AI as somebody to talk to and bounce off ideas and next courses of action with can be helpful. You are able to use it as a kind of tool, as a sounding board. There’s even a concept called a rubber ducking, which is an idea from coding where you just talk about your problem to a rubber duck on the table. And what is the rubber duck doing to help you? Nothing really, but just the fact that you are talking about the idea out loud as though you’re talking to another person helps you solve problems.

And so AI can just be a better rubber duck and that's fine. If you want to dive deeper into this. I highly recommend the Think Like A Game Designer podcast episode I did with Ethan Mollick. He is one of the foremost experts on AI. He wrote a book called Co-Intelligence, and we go deep into all of these different aspects.

More on the eventual breakthroughs of AI

There's a hypothetical world in the not-too-distant future where AI is just better at everything than we are, and which is going to really change the way things work.

But I think we're in the best of all possible worlds as far as AI is concerned, for probably the next two to five years, I guess, for someone who is really motivated and curious. You now have so many more tools at your disposal than you ever did before, and you can learn anything that you want. You can build things that you could never build before.

When we talk about the core design loop, there are a lot of different principles I teach about game design, but this is the most important one because it really is just about how efficiently one can move through this process of coming up with ideas and figure out how you're going to test the ideas and morph those into something testable. You have to figure out how quickly you can get the feedback from that test back into the cycle. And the faster you can go through that and the more you learn each time, the better a game designer you're going to be!

So anything that can support you in that process is a plus. My advice pre-AI, and it's still good advice, is literally just find whatever you can do to test things, keep it simple, keep it ugly, be happy that your prototypes are ugly, just churn out something to test as fast as you can, make that happen. Get used to the idea of a very rough testing and prototype period. 

Actually, you see a lot of people who design and make their first prototype of a game, and they invest in really great UI/UX, or they're building a bunch of really cool art and they'll, if it's a tabletop game, print a really nice board professionally. And that's the worst thing you could do. It's the worst thing you could do because not only does it take you weeks upon weeks in the best case scenario, to get something done first.

So you're going to be slow to get something to the table, but also you build up this substantial unconscious resistance to not changing the thing. Because, like, I invested so much in it, if I have to scrap the core principle, now all of this artwork I did is useless, and all of this coding I did is useless.

You're going to feel resistance to that. So you actually want it to be ugly. I will literally take a Sharpie and write and cross out things on the cards or hack together or code something really fast. That ugliness is a strength, not a weakness, in this world of game design.

And so I just want to encourage that for anybody out there to let go of this idea of trying to make things pretty and perfect.

Can you tell us more about the core design loop?

We all want to make great things. And as you go through the core design loop, and I go into more detail on this in the book, we go through what I call the “phases of design”.

What I'm talking about are those early phases where you're trying to find the fun and find the fundamentals of what's happening in the whole thing. What's the core? What's the heart of what I'm doing? And as you move through to future phases, into development and into polish, then you can start worrying about the other things. It’s like if you're trying to build a house and you're really worried about where you're going to hang paintings and what color you're going to paint the wall, but you don't even have a foundation yet!

You haven't done anything to work on yet. So work on the foundation, then worry about the paint later. 

What do you think are the essential factors in making something that gamers will like?

This is one of those core universal principles of games and, frankly, art in general. What we are doing is trying to create an emotional experience in our audience, and for most games, that means your players. 

I could give you a million tips and tricks. We talked about the core design loop, which is a process thing. I could talk about little tips about how you balance a game and different mechanics, or which code base you want to use or what art you want to use. All of that stuff has to serve the player experience. If it doesn't make the player experience better. Get rid of it. It's useless. If it does make the player experience better, fantastic! Slot it right in! 

I came at this as a very analytical person. I started off as a professional game player, where my job is to break the game down into its constituent parts and then just break it in half so that I could win the game, right? That was my whole mindset. And when I became a designer, I had to slowly unwind and untangle all of that stuff and be like, “Oh, actually, I'm a feeling guy now. I need to make feelings happen.” And what does that mean? So that's why I wrote my book. I had to construct a model for how all this works.

And so then what it comes down to is. You need to train these instincts to understand what's happening. And so for anybody that's out there, even if you're far from making your first game, you can start doing this right now. You like playing games, presumably, or you wouldn't be listening to this podcast or reading this article. Just pay more attention, that’s the big step needed.

So there's one thing when you get lost in an experience, right? Everybody's had this, though it's maybe a little easier to talk about with movies. You get into the movie theater, the lights go down, the screen lights up, and then you just get lost in the story and you feel the excitement and the drama of whatever's happening, right?

And you just forget you're in a movie theater. You're just participating, and the same happens in games. If you're really in a game, there's excitement, you're rolling the dice and hoping for the thing, or you're fighting the boss. Whatever it is, you get lost in the experience as a player, and that's great.

Creating an emotional experience and connection

As a designer, you need to step back a little bit. You need to start thinking, “Okay, wait, when I feel that intense emotion. Why do I feel that intense emotion? What's causing that?” It could be that when I do this attack, it makes me feel the weight of my action. Or because the life bar is flashing red, which is giving me this feeling like I'm almost gonna die, and that is actually impacting emotionally how I feel. Or maybe I have this new card that gets flipped off the top of the deck right now, and it’s gonna massively impact the game.

There are a lot of these little pieces that you start to realize, “Oh, okay, if I want to ratchet up the tension in my game, I should do this!” or “Oh, if I want to make the game calmer and more of a relaxing experience, do this.” And that's one thing you could just see for yourself. And then the next step is to start looking at it from your players’ perspective and other people's.

And, again, it doesn't have to be your preferred games. It could be any game. If you see someone leaning back and checking their phone and like disconnected, “Okay, wait, what caused them to get disconnected there? What are they doing? Is there too long a wait in-between turns? Is there something that's made this not interesting?”

Or if you see somebody the opposite, getting up in their seat and getting fired up, starting to chat and there are a lot of those things... Now you start to look for non-verbal cues and other things that people are giving off and you could be like, “Okay, what caused that emotional experience in them?” ‘Cause not everybody's the same.

Your instincts are going to be the most important, but you want to be able to train and learn from other people. And this also helps with your testing process because people will tell you things about your game that are flat-out lies. Now they may not be intending to lie, but they just don't want to hurt your feelings, or they're confabulating.

A lot of times, people will think that they want something, and you, as the designer, have to have the instincts and the awareness to know that's actually not it. And you could see it from how they behave and how they react. So training your instincts in being in tune with your own emotions, with other people's emotions and then noting the connection between the tools that you have as a game designer is crucial.

The rules, the components, the interaction between players… all of that. And connecting those dots together is the baseline of how you build that core intuition so that when you do start making your own games, you're going to start to be able to use those intuitions to tweak the knobs and tools that you have available to make great games.

How does AI fall into the community-building aspect of game development?

I've tried. As I just discussed, community is one of the most important things. It's probably the hardest thing, from my perspective, to create and maintain, and I've been making games long enough, so I’m pretty sure of what I know.

I know making a great community can be very hard, even though I've done it several times. And so I've asked AI about these things and its answers weren't bad, but they're basic. They're stuff I could have found elsewhere. There's also stuff that I already knew. So if you don't know anything about building community, sure, go ahead.

Just like you'd Google something, you could ask AI and it's fine. But I don't think it's like solving that problem for you. On the AI side. I can imagine worlds where the AI is simulating a community for you a little bit, where you can have bots in your game that feel like they're people and react more, and some games do this better than others and have done it even before the current generation of large language models.

So there's some aspect of that, but really, what we care about is actual humans, and I plan for that to be true for a long time. How do you attract actual humans to the thing and the thing that you're doing? And I think that over time, the answer is different based on the different games that you're doing.

How you build community around Wordle is different than how you build community around a deck-building or collectible games like SolForge Fusion or Ascension, but the things that I have found that really work are the genuine want to create, and there are intriguing hooks that bring people to it.

There's the aspect of learning and growing, there's aspects of connecting, there's aspects of competing, there's aspects of expressing yourself, and you want to find ways to give people those tools to do so in a shared format. And so there are a lot of different formats that work depending on the mode of your game.

For example, in my games, there's a lot of strategic competition in a lot of these games, right? Specifically, things like SolForge Fusion and Ascension. So we create major tournaments in those, and those are tournaments that you can play. SolForge Fusion is a hybrid game. So it actually exists both in physical tabletop form and in digital form.

And every physical deck is algorithmically generated and printed. So it's all one of a kind. You can scan it into your digital account. So we run events at physical tournaments, conventions and more. We just did one in Denver, and we're going to do another one at our championships at Gen Con in August.

And that brings people together physically in the room, so you get to make real friendships, and you get to sit and share experiences and stories. And we also do digital events, where anybody can access them anywhere in the world, and there are easy touchpoints for you to come into the game. But then we also want to hook people in with stories, so that we have a storyline mode of the game and a storyline of events that people can actually follow. Check our website, solforgefusion.com and click on the story button.

Not only do we have a lore that we have built, but players influence the story and change the world based on the events that they do in their tournaments. And then we would actually tie a custom-written story to the digital code of their deck, so it stays with that deck forever. And it changed which cards appeared in future sets and which characters rise and fall, and which ones die and live. And so you get to become invested in the story by being a part of the lore in the world. This way, some people love the competition and some people love the story.

Those don't often overlap, right? Some people love the art of the world. Some people love just being able to earn money from playing. Some people love to just see what new content is coming out and try weird formats and weird decks. And so when I try to build what is the SolForge Fusion community, I'm trying to put hooks out into the world for every type of player that is going to form this broader community, and then continue to deliver the things that are going to appeal to that particular demographic and psychographic.

Community identity through interaction

Through these things, you help build something the community wants to identify with. For example, even though someone says they love Wordle, they don’t go wild over it and identify themselves as, “Hey, I’m a Wordle player.” Most of the time, it’s just, “Yeah, I do play Wordle.”

Whereas, a game like Magic: the Gathering, Warhammer 40k or SolForge Fusion, those kinds of games become a part of their identity. So you've got to get a lot more invested in those kinds of hooks, because it really does become a part of who people are, and that's at the core level of building a community. You make enough people want it to the point that it's their identity and they're a big part of it. 

And then they become the hubs that spread the word. Because you don't get to build identity, your fans build that and the community. And those super fans, you've got to give them reasons to become super fans and make this part of their identity. And then they're going to gladly show the game to everybody. They're going to tell all of their friends. They're going to bring everybody in! 

That's how you really build a movement, not just in games, but anywhere, frankly. There are other tools that help in spreading your range even further, like making your game easy to share through social media and whatnot, making it easy for me to post and share my Wordle score and show you where I got it and how I guessed it, which then starts conversations. Giving people pride and a reason to do that works well. Making your game easier to stream also works well, as now more people watch games being played than they do play games. Having things like visual appeal and being able to have something that captures people's attention and brings them in is obviously important as well.

And then I think the last piece I'll say on this is that being a real person who's actually engaged with the community really makes a difference. This is why I just love to do podcasts like this, and I also participate in AMAs, spaces, Discord, etc. And I talk to the players and I listen to the players and I let them hear my genuine thoughts of what's going on, because when you're trying to make games that stand the test of time, they’re going to make mistakes. They’re going to do things you don't like. They're going to have moments where they get disconnected. And having a relationship between the players and the developers helps build trust and has people willingly come along for the ride.

As you're making new content over time, you've got to constantly thread that needle of “same, but different.” People are playing Ascension to get a certain experience. But if I just release an expansion that's the exact same experience as before, then why the hell would the players bother? Why are they going to buy that expansion? So I got to take you somewhere new, but it's still got to feel like home.

Does the core design loop apply to anything else?

This line of thinking is actually the book I'm working on right now, on the realization and application of these principles. The same things that you do to design a game are the same things you do to design a business, to write a book, to design a life, frankly. It is not different.

The creative process, the core design loop and other aspects of it are universal. And so whenever you're addressing novel problems, like if you're trying to put something into the world that hasn't existed before, or trying to do something different, this is how you do it. And so that's been a really big thing for me.

And I've been very lucky as a founder, entrepreneur and game designer. I see the parallels so much. And so being able to apply those parallels and help other people to apply them as well, and then use the tricks that I've learned as a game designer to make the process more fun, it’s a special thing.

As you're building a business, you will struggle and will keep struggling. I've been doing this for 25 years and I still struggle, but I’ve learned that you can have fun in the struggle. Because, again, I could be in a game of Civilization and I could be getting my butt kicked and I'm down a tech tree and I'm trying to find a way to survive and still be having a blast.

And so the same can be true in your business when you're running out of funding, your game's not quite working and you're trying to get your metrics up. You could still have fun with that, too. And that's the real shift, not only just the tips and tactics of how to design an experience like this and design something that will work, but also how someone can enjoy the process. Games give you a goal and that goal is arbitrary. It doesn't really matter, right? It's Capture the King, or get the ball in the hoop more than the other team does. It's whatever, right? It’s really not that significant, but we choose to make it significant, we choose to care about that in order to have the experience, the fun of the challenge and the game. 

Do you consider community building as marketing?

They're all related. The goal of marketing is to put out the bat signal, right? You're trying to call the people who would be great members of your community, who would love the thing that you've built. And you are also trying to do the opposite, which is that you want to repel the people who won't be the right fit.

And it's very hard because a lot of people, by default, think they're building something for everybody and everyone's going to love this game. And if you're building something for everybody, you're not really building anything for anybody. Marketing follows the same principle. I was very exuberant about how incredible it is to be a creator nowadays, because the tools are so much easier and the barrier for entry so much lower, there's so much you can create.

Right now, I think it's one of the hardest times to successfully market something in the history of gaming and the history of the world because it’s so much easier to create. There's more crowded stuff in the marketplace. There are more channels that people are paying attention to. There are more games to take away their attention, time and the dollars in their wallet. And those games are all competing over the same channels. It used to be that you would just advertise on Google, but that's not very cost-effective for most people now. Even advertising on Meta isn’t very cost-effective right now.

When marketing through the usual means didn’t pan out, they’d say, “Oh, just go work with influencers.” And now that industry’s prices have gone up as well. The goalpost is constantly moving in marketing, so you gotta get creative and you have to think of different ways to get that asymmetric advantage. Where is it that I can pull people in a way that is genuine and will bat signal to the right people? And how do I scale that? 

I wish I had a great and definitive answer. Do step one, then do step two, then do step three, and that's it, right? But this is exactly the kind of thing you need to apply the core design loop for it, because the right answer of how you market product X might not apply to product Y.

I'll give a good example. I've got a game called You Gotta Be Kitten Me!, which is a hilarious and fun party game where you're bluffing and the cats all have different hats and accessories on them and stuff. And that's a different target, as most of my games are either more of the heavy hobby type or core gamery kind of games. But the difference is, I know how to reach that audience. I didn't know how to reach the audience at Target. So we ended up spending quite a bit of money and more than I care to admit to try to reach those audiences and do TikTok influencers and do different things to build awareness. And it was very tough, and it was a marketplace where I learned a lot, and in some painful ways.

The game was successful, but I definitely overspent for what we did. And so the answers I thought I had for how to reach the audience I know didn't quite work. And so I think anything you can do to build your own platform as a creator is valuable. Anything you could genuinely do to add value to the world without expecting a return is valuable. I do a podcast, and I've been doing a podcast for free for about six years. I do digital courses, teach people design, write articles and post them, do interviews and things like that, where my goal is just to add value to the world and try to do the best that I can.

I don't expect anything in return for it, but what I have noticed is that as I continue to do those things, the more people follow me, and those people, some of them, will buy my games. But again, I hope it’s clear that I do all this because I want to and I genuinely love doing it. While doing all that, it creates something that now helps market myself in a way like, “Hey, do you like design? Do you like games? Do you like talking about these kinds of things? Then you might like some of my products. Come check these out!”

And so that's, for me, probably been my most effective channel and marketing strategy, if you can call it that, which is just add value consistently to the communities that you care to serve. And eventually, that will pay its way back to you. That's the best answer that I have found personally.

If it’s anything else, I think you’ve just got to, for any specific product or game, apply the core design loop. You've got to test different ideas, try to test and learn as cheaply and quickly as possible.

Can you tell us more about your team at Stone Blade Entertainment?

We have a team of 14 full-time people, and we have about six to eight contractors part-time, though we'll expand as we need.

I've got a very wide-ranging business. We have a digital games division, which does things like SolForge Fusion. We have a tabletop games division, which does our tabletop releases for Ascension and others. We also have a consulting division. So we'll partner with other toy companies and game companies and even businesses. We do consulting with the Wharton School of Business and teach creativity and design to Fortune 500 companies.

What are you working on right now? What are your next plans?

I've got five or six projects in the pipeline at any given moment that are very active, though there are more on the back burner. SolForge Fusion, actually, I don't know when this is going to be released exactly, but SolForge Fusion is releasing its fourth expansion called Shadows Over Solis.

And we're going to be moving to mobile. And that game has a whole Web3 crypto component to it, where you've got $100,000 worth of prizes that are being given out in the next couple of months. So a million things are happening with that project alone.

I mentioned that Ascension's 15th anniversary is happening, so we have not only our 17th expansion coming out, but our entire back catalog is also coming back into stock for the summer. For the first time in 10 years, we have a new crowd fund—the 15th anniversary crowd fund—that we're going to be launching this summer as well.

We have two new projects that we'll be launching through Stone Blade, my publishing company, one that we partnered with a regenerative farming group with, and it'll be a game that helps teach you about how to help save the world through regenerative farming. Part of the proceeds are going to charity to help try to save the planet.

We also have a partnership with another company called Japanime Games, which is making a trading card game that's based on VTubers, which I didn't even know what a VTuber was, but they're massive. There are these whole digital avatar streamers and stuff, and there's a whole TCG for that, and that's going to launch in May.

I mentioned that I've got a new book that I'm working on, and we're going to be launching a new digital course over the next couple of months. And I have two other projects that I'm not allowed to talk about, but that's what I'm working on right now. 

What advice would you like to give our viewers and readers?

People say that when you do something you love, you never work a day in your life. And those people are liars. It is a lot of work, but the difference is, when you're passionate about it, you're willing to push through those challenging times because you really care about what you're making.

And that's exactly the situation I'm in right now. We do quarterly reviews with the team, and at the beginning of this year, we had a big one. It was like, “Hey, are we doing too much? Do we have too many projects? Do we want to cut it?” I was like, “Okay, great. What do you guys want to cut? What do you guys not want to do that we're doing?” And nobody had an answer.

We are all very excited about all the things in our timeline right now, even though we don't always hit the timelines that we say we're going to hit. And we definitely make sure that there are clear priorities.

And this is the top thing we do. I try to make sure there are no more than three core priorities for any given quarter, and that these are the top three things. Everything else, we make progress on as we can, but I do believe that I work better having multiple projects at the same time.

Not everybody is like this, but when I hit a block on a game or a project and don't know what I'm supposed to do yet, I can take a week and shift to another game. And then when I come back, the solution is magically there because I was able to let my brain shift and let my subconscious process it. I like having a lot of things to shift between and I've optimized my team for that. 

My company is also a hundred percent remote. We have a lot of autonomy, and we make sure that they get in positions that work well for them. You also have to bring in the right people who can survive and thrive in that type of environment. We also do a lot of work to make sure that the culture is strong enough to support that and that people understand what we value here as a company. We make sure we're the right fit for them and that their vision is aligned with ours and that our vision is aligned with where they want their career to go. And if it's not, then we help them find a job somewhere else. 

Where can we find you to learn more about you and your projects?

You can just Google my name, Justin Gary. My Substack is where I post most of my content. If you want to find out more about my games, stoneblade.com is my publishing company. Solforgefusion.com is available as a free download on Steam right now.

We're still in early access, but as we mentioned, there are lots of exciting things to come on that project. You can join our Discord, join our community! I'm always in there chit-chatting, so lots of ways to come and find things. And of course, Think Like a Game Designer podcast, totally free, downloadable games and books are available.

I have lots of fun conversations, not just with other game designers and industry leaders like Alex Seropian, who created Halo, but also people from other industries like Morgan Page, who was a Grammy-nominated EDM music producer and Steven Pressfield, who wrote War of Art, which my favorite books on creativity.

And this is part of where I talk about how the creative process is universal, I like bringing these people in because they show you exactly that. They also go through the core design loop. They also do these things. Lots of fun conversations, which again, I love having these kinds of conversations, and that's what I do on my podcast as well.