How I Learned To Fail Forward to Make Better Games

To understand how Luminous came to be, you have to first understand my history with games.

I grew up in a house that did not have many board games. My parents weren’t against them; they just didn’t make time or like playing them. They both worked really hard, and they took life and their jobs seriously. The only two games in the house growing up were a deck of playing cards my Grandmother I played with and a Monopoly board my little sister and I used.  

In middle and high school, the only game I played  was (Old School) Runescape.

I didn’t even really know you could play Pokemon; I only knew people who collected it. And I didn’t know anything about Magic: The Gathering or Yugioh. At 17, I had only stepped foot into a local game store one time. But by 19 years old I was working in one.  

I had ideas about world building and started writing short stories at 13, but I didn’t try to make my first game until I was 25.

The reason I start here is that I have met 12-18 year old kids at GAMA and Gen Con over the years who have attended every year of their lives and have made multiple games before they graduate high school. 

That just wasn't my upbringing or what I thought I was going to do in life. I think a lot of the last 8 or so years has been an attempt to catch up, to quickly fail forward, to learn and play as many games that I missed in my childhood, and to love and fall deeper into this amazing community we are so lucky to have and be a part of.  

My first attempts at game design

I needed to learn how to fail forward, a term my grandfather taught me. He used to say: “When you win, you win, and when you lose, you learn. Therefore, you’re always winning or learning, and with that mindset, you can live a wonderful life.”

The first game I ever tried to make was a competitive card game that was half deck builder, half card game called Mercenaries. The goal of the game is to collect gold and buy cards. You start with some cards in your deck; some of them provide you with gold coins, and you also generate one gold coin at the start of each of your turns. There was a secondary mercenary deck that all players had access to that would flip three cards face up every turn cycle, and you could pay gold to put those units directly into play. 

It was a great idea, but I had no idea how to balance cards, and the overall gameplay was more convoluted than it needed to be.Mercenaries was too small of an idea to be a game. Mercenaries also struggled with what I have now learned are negative gameplay loops and too much repetitiveness, where you bought the same units each game and played them. 

A lot of ideas are also fine for their first version of the game, but in a card game, you want to be able to scale them if they are successful and make many expansions. Of course, in my first game I wasn’t thinking about this at all, and Mercenaries was more like a board game in that way. It was a small idea to be played, rather than a competitive card game that could have many expansions. Some of the early ideas of Mercenaries have been reborn in the Xanthe faction. 

Lessons learned from friends

From ages 25-30, I was trying to throw as much spaghetti as I could against the wall. I would come up with game concepts and mechanics, trying to find something that worked. One of the most important people in this development time was Gabe. He’s now one of our head designers and CFO, but back then we were just good friends who met in college and both loved games. Every six months or so, I would call him, and we would talk for a few hours where I would throw these ideas at him.

Gabe had never wanted to be a game designer or developer, but he is a former pro Magic the Gathering player and has an incredible mind and depth of understanding of board and card games. I would call him because I knew he could always be honest with me about my ideas. 

For those five years, Gabe would never hesitate to tell me my idea wasn’t developed enough. Or it wasn’t good enough. Or it was overdeveloped and too complicated. The first conversations were about Mercenaries and trying to expand the game, but he quickly figured out that it was stuck between competitive card games and board games and lacked depth. 

The middle calls revolved around something called Raw Materials. It was too complicated. Then I made a less complicated game called  7 Elements that had 7 colored orbs in it. “Still way too complicated” was what I got back from Gabe. If Gabe was struggling to understand the idea and the rules, then everyone was going to. 

I thought I had to prove with complicated new ideas that I was innovating during these first few years of game design. It would take years of complicated ideas thrown at Gabe until I had the courage to make something really small and focused, that would blossom and eventually become Luminous. 

I found that it was always easier to make existing ideas or concepts more complicated by adding to them, but it’s very hard to come up with innovation in a physical space after 30 years of incredible innovation from many companies. One thing I noticed as I looked at the card game landscape was that many of the games that were coming out and not succeeding were overwhelmingly complicated. They seemed to be designed with very competent, high-level players in mind. They were games that competitive players would have fun to play. 

It was Gabe who first pushed me to think simple. He challenged me to ask a few questions: 

• How could we create something new that would have a low barrier of entry but an enormous ceiling? 
• How did we create a game that was actually easier to understand and easier to pick up? 
• How could we make a game that was less overwhelming to new players but still told a new story?

The birth of Luminous Card Game

About three years ago when Gabe was still living in Florida, and I had just moved back to Austin, I pitched the idea of a game called Orbs. This game would go on to be called Arduous, and then, finally, Luminous. I explained my idea for Orbs, and instead of immediately beginning to explain why it was too small or too big of an idea the way he usually did, Gabe just didn’t respond. 

In fact, I thought the call had dropped because he always responded, but he was thinking. And then he asked if he could think for a little longer before he gave his response. Once he did, I already knew we were onto something simply because we had been such good friends for more than a decade.

Following that conversation, I began real work on Orbs. In its first iteration, there were only colorless orbs as I began testing at a local game store in San Marcos, Texas: Alpha Strike Games. Colorless wasn’t working the way I wanted, so I switched to three colors: red, green, and blue for a few years. 

The game changed to Arduous, and concepts began to flesh out. Team members began officially joining and we created Luminous Games. We changed the name of the game because the game takes place in an arduous world, but we did not want to convey immediately to the players that it was an arduous journey you as a player had to go on. 

We had already been developing a card type called Luminous Blooms which are the source of all magic in the game and what powers the Orbs. We spent a long time running through different names and none of them worked. Some were too long, some were too short, some were just joke names. We were all at dinner together and someone just said “What about Luminous?” and there was no looking back.

In a future newsletter, I will go over more in depth of the orbs journey, but I hope this shows a glimpse of grit that coming up with an idea out of thin air is extraordinarily difficult. It takes years of failing forward of throwing spaghetti and a pondering of not listening to a podcast or being on your phone, but sometimes going on very long walks just with your thoughts

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