One Saturday Eric went out for a run. He runs ultramarathons, so his version of a weekend run can take a couple of hours. When he walked back in, three hours later, he asked “what are you up to?” I looked up from the coffee table, surrounded by little bits of paper and said “umm, I designed a game while you were out. Wanna play?”
And that’s how I started. I can’t say exactly what inspired me to design a game. I’ve been playing board games with friends for years: starting with Settlers of Catan after college, picking up D&D in my late 20s, and going to PAX East for a decade just to play tabletop games. We’ve got the big shelf of board games, some of which we’ve played a million times and others that are still waiting to be played. But I’d never designed a game before.
I’ve designed a lot of other things though! For those who know me, you know that I’m always working on a creative project. A short list of the things I’ve done in the last decade: painting D&D minis, building a cosplay, songwriting, creating a backsplash out of pennies, choreographing circus routines, faux effect painting my living room wall, custom skylight shades, … the list goes on. And oh yeah, my job actually involves design too. I’ve spent years designing software interfaces and system concepts to enable tactical situation awareness and complex decision-making.
So it was probably inevitable that these two parts of my life would collide. Design brain, meet game brain! Let’s see where this collab goes :-)
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