Chris Solis runs Solis Game Studies which has made Pocket Paragons and localized Frenemy Pastry Party, he’s the designer of Temporal Odyssey and Terrene Odyssey, and he’s part of Brieger Development.
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Signs a Game is Ready for Release
- The playtesting feedback you’re getting is really good and mostly positive
- People are doing things like making custom characters.
- Most of the playtesting feedback is ideas for more content
Story of Pocket Paragons
The game was in development for 7 years. It was originally larger and had a lot of fluff. One version was a mecha-game that Chris and the designer, Brian, really liked, but there was something off about the game. Chris was lukewarm about the game, but decided to put the game down for a bit to get more perspective on it and to distance himself emotionally from it. Then, he ended up putting it in front of other people and deciding that the game was not in sync with the core gameplay loop.
Motivation
Chris was not the designer of Pocket Paragons, but he was able to keep the designer, Brian, motivated to keep working on the game by keeping the publication door open for him. Instead of saying no, he said no to a particular version of the game, so Brian knew that there was a chance for publication if the game got to the right version, instead of saying no to the game as a whole.
Game Audience
The initial design of a game is usually what we like first, but then you have to identify an audience for the game and go back and forth between those two ideas until you create a game that you really like that also really appeals to a specific audience.
You have to identify an audience to target as you can’t create a game that appeals a lot to everyone.
To try to identify the audience of the game, you can see who are your playtesters that are really enjoying the game and go from there.
For Pocket Paragons, they wanted to make the game really accessible, so the complexity of the cards had to be really low and there couldn’t be a lot out at one time. The game also had to be as short as possible.
Games Worth Publishing
First, try to distance yourself from the game as you’re most likely attached to it and can’t entirely see it clearly.
Don’t think about how good the game is; this is a very important aspect of figuring out if it’s worth publishing. A game can be fantastic, but if it doesn’t have a large enough audience, it’s not worth the time to be published. If it has the wrong audience, it can die just as soon as it’s launched.
Part of what makes the audience is whether the game fits with the theme and the mechanics. If the mechanics and theme don’t appeal to the same audience, it can be a mismatch.
Adding Usability to Non Legacy Games
Legacy games slowly roll out the mechanics and get more complex as you play the game more and we can take that aspect and apply that to non-legacy games.
It can be a sort of rolling complexity, where you have all the aspects to the game on the table by the end of the game. You don’t want to start off too simple, though, where players are playing a nerfed version of the game.
A video game example of this is Hades. It’s a roguelike computer game where you’re trying to escape hell. Each time you escape, you start over again and it will throw a new mechanic and more story, so you understand more as you go. This way, the game gets more complex the more you play.
Accessibility
Always be thinking of where your information is and how people find and approach it. Think about what the layout of the cards is, if the icons and font are big enough, and try to not have walls of text.
You want to have distinct shapes and distinct colors with consistent locations so players never have to think about the text or icons. If you have an icon, have it in the same location every time, so players know where to look for it. You also want a large enough font size and to have consistent wording. If you use a certain phrase to describe something, always use that same phrase.
People only have so much bandwidth, so if they’re thinking about things like icon locations, they’re not having as much fun.
If you’re willing to change your game design to enhance usability, you might be able to get more people to play your games.
When you’re trying to increase usability, always think about what people are saying about your game. You can listen to playtesters, but also when you get previews done, really listen to the reviewers and what they’re saying.
Good and Final Rulebook
Getting a rulebook to be truly final is really hard, but one way to make sure the final rulebook is great is to put the rulebook on the internet. Make a note of all the questions that are asked, as those aspects aren’t clear to everyone. This also includes listening to reviewers during the preview stage, as you can still improve the rulebook at that time.
Chris also did something very different with Pocket Paragons; he made a small version of the game to give out for free on a fan portal. There was a feedback section on the portal, so if people played the game and reviewed it, Chris got to see where people got stuck and it was a great way to get more feedback on the game. You do want to make the fan site very visible and easy to access.
Chris used discord to create this fan portal. One easy way to get people to join was to give them free stuff, as everyone loves that. He also added the action to come hang out with them on the discord with all of his posts on social media. Once people got to the discord, he tried to really foster the community so that people stayed engaged.
An important aspect to this is to not spread yourself out too thin; Chris has a Facebook page, but he doesn’t tell people about it too much.
He does have a mailing list as well and when you sign up to that, you get a free print and play version of a game. It’s the same idea as the discord portal, where people get something for free, so they’re more interested in signing up and it was really successful.
For the free versions of the game, Chris made a bunch of demo copies preemptively with a print run of a different game. The marketing strategy is built into his process so it doesn’t cost as much as it would otherwise.
Good Enough for Illustration
Chris does things a little bit differently from most people in that he gets art for the game done really early, however, it’s only 1-3 pieces of art, so he can get a good vertical slice of the game done. This way, players can see what the end goal of the game is, but he doesn’t have to spend a lot of money up front. To him, marrying the theme and characters is really important.
Getting Games to the Done Stage
If you think you’re at the done stage, but you keep thinking ‘but wait let me add this’, then you’re not at the done stage. If you feel like you need to add in additional experiences, you’re also not at the done stage. You might think that you’re never done with a game, but it could be at the done stage if you’re just adding content and not mechanics or fixes.
Expansions should be extra layers of the core experience, so if you keep seeing yourself wanting to add content, you can add in expansions instead.
Things Chris Wish He Knew Earlier
Don’t buy a lot of art, focus on the layout and usability. We all have an idea of a world and can get caught up in that early, before you know really where the game is going to go.
Learn Indesign and data merge. Chris made his first game in Photoshop and learning Indesign and data merge made the process so much faster. It was 100% worth the 10-20 hours to learn the software.
Pocket Paragons: A set of Games
Can you tell us about Pocket Paragons and how you knew to make that into a set of four games?
Pocket Paragons is currently a set of four games. The game worked best at conventions with a lot of people and they wanted to make it IP driven and to get the sensation of mixing the boxes together. They would have made less sets of games if they didn’t want it to be a convention game. It’s a really fun experience to meet people and play a game and Pocket Paragons can allow you to do that easily. Even with the free decks, if you see others at a convention with a different free deck, you can meet them and explore the other decks in the game at the same time, which leads to a really fun experience.
You can follow Chris on the following
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/cgcfox
- Discord: https://discord.gg/Hxzdvp
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