Kicked in the Dicebags has a discussion of Synapse in their latest podcast. It is right after the announcements at the start of the show. It is glowingly positive. During the show, they raised several questions I actually have to answer right now, or else I will totally be unable to sleep tonight because my brain will be thinking about it for the next 3 hours unless I just barf it out here. So here goes....
First off (and I say this with a grin on my face not a scowl), never ever ever never ever again say "this book is... shit, let me recompose my thoughts". On audio, there is no division there. That is a run-on sentence. It says "this book is shit, let me recompose my thoughts". Dude, you about made me die of a heart attack.
Second.....
THANK YOU
My wife is going under the knife Tuesday morning. It is not a major surgery, but it is something we had been trying to avoid for a while, and I was kinda anxious tonight heading into the week. I am going to be glowing all day tomorrow now, and probably feeling a lot better on Tuesday than I was going to be, especially as tomorrow I will also be burning 5 games and 1 module onto CDs to mail off to the Ennies as my submissions. A more self-consciously anxious time is hard to imagine as a new game designer. So it couldn't have come at a better time.
So thank you thank you thank you.
What is the elevator pitch for Synapse?
Adam tried to answer this, but here is my pitch to you.
Synapse is a game about the human mind. It models the human mind. It models you from birth to adulthood, models your biological basis, your cultural environment, your specific life experiences, and the people that you know in the world. It corresponds with how a real person is created. And I believe that this strategy creates uniquely deep characters that a player can become strongly attached to.
Why did I write the original portions of the book that explain what an RPG is?
This question wasn't directly asked, but all the discussion about it kind of raised the question. I feel like Synapse could be a gateway book to intelligent women who are turned off by the male-dominated industry design standards (see next question for more on this topic). So I wrote the introduction there for the same reason that Wayne complains on FTB that comic book companies only seem to advertise to their base. RPGs are similarly navel-gazing a lot of the time. I wanted to create a book that would be free, portable, and functional for this purpose. That focus led me to try to hammer out a great introduction to RPGs at the front of the book.
Where did I get the art?
This question also wasn't directly asked, but all the discussion about how amazing it is to have good art in a free RPG kind of raised the question obliquely. All of my art was directly requested from the artists by me. I laid out my project goals, what I intended to use the art for, and I was very honest with them. I avoided people who did a lot of work in the industry, but instead focused on people who were students, professors, concept artists for movies, stuff like that. Just to give a shout out to a few artists (it's hard to choose just a few), but Frank Hong donated some great pieces for Synapse. He is a matte painter for movies in Hollywood. Nicholas Kay donated some pieces, he is a card game designer. Both of those are Americans, but I have a lot of artists from around the world in Synapse, especially Eastern Europe; Croatia, Russia, Czech Republic, etc. If you go to creative people and say "I have this vision and I want your help. I'm not trying to make money, just be awesome". A lot of them will help you. Not all, heavens no, not all.
In the case of Synapse, I specifically pitched to artists that I was trying to design an RPG with a different look with respect to gender. Almost all the character art in Synapse is female. None of them are in subservient roles, they are all strong powerful characters. There are a few that have a hint of sexuality in there, but I used them in places where it was appropriate and not about dominance. This really resonated with a lot of female artists and you may notice there are a lot of female contributors to Synapse.
What are the steps that one takes to become a game developer?
The praise from Chris Hussey and Chris Mais was extremely powerful for me. The reason is that podcasts were what made me realize that I needed to design games. I have been a fan/follower/lurker of both Chris(es?) for quite a long time. I started listening to podcasts in early 2009. My friend recommended I check out Fear the Boot. And that became like my cocaine for a week, burning through 6+ hours a day in the background as I did my job. Shortly after exhausting FTB's backlog, I found http://www.rpgpodcasts.com/ and I went through a period of about 4 months where I listened to 4-5 hours a day of RPG podcasts. By now, I kinda feel like I have listened to all the backlogs I care to listen to. I only (haha, only) listen to about 2 hours of podcasts a day right now. I am coming down from the high. :)
I do layout design for my job. I had the ability to make the PDFs. So after several months of RPG podcasts taking over my thoughts, I decided to throw my hat in the ring. I had been increasingly disappointed in video games, so I just gave them up and turned writing RPGs into my past-time instead. I now spend 2+ hours a day working on something related to RPGs. It has become my entertainment to write this stuff.
But I really do credit RPG podcasts. Because they broke down the barrier in my mind that game design was something people did in offices with big art budgets and they were these impossible-to-achieve positions to me. The barriers were just collossal. I still feel that way about video game design. But I realized that there are so many people out there like me, who think about RPGs a lot and want to get their ideas heard. I just felt like I had to join in. But I didn't have audio skills, I had layout skills. So I wrote instead of talked.
And that's pretty much how it went. I started writing Synapse around Thanksgiving 2009. It was a long road from there to release of the 1st version in late August 2010. I know these dates very well because it is pretty much the duration of my wife's pregnancy with our 2nd child (no, he was not named Synapse) who was born in early August. He was actually a couple weeks early, and that delayed the release of Synapse for about 3 weeks because.... well...... having a newborn is hell. Since then, I have written 4 other games across different genres and with different lengths. Errant and Cascade Failure are both about 100 pages. Statecraft is about 40 pages. And Oceans is only 11 pages. You might want to send Oceans to that guy who e-mailed you about the group template of the Oceans 11 movie. Just a thought.
So that's where we are now. The next year is full of potential. I'm eager to get to work.
Will I remember Kicked in the Dicebags when I "make it big"?
Of course. This is even a question?
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