[Squeaky Ideas]: Thank you so much for letting me interview you! Along with being very excited to play your games, I look forward to hearing your response and advice!
While looking at your social media accounts, I found that you like working on whatever your brain churns out (which is awesome, that is the dream for me!). Can you tell me more about you? What made you go into game development? What started your journey to be a full time game creator?
[Anna]: Fingers crossed you get to live that dream someday soon!
As for me, my name is Anna Blackwell, I’m a tabletop game designer from Scotland. I’m best known for my solo TTRPGS DELVE and Apothecaria though I’ve made quite a few now. I actually wanted to get into video game development originally but went to a university that had a very badly managed course and ended up graduating without a portfolio, coding skills, or an idea of how to get started in the video game industry. All in, I spent 5 years in college and university learning game development (badly) then eventually became a freelance journalist for Tabletop Gaming Magazine, Senet, Wyrd Science, and a few others. As luck would have it, I got given a copy of Artefact by Mousehole Press to review and through that discovered solo TTRPGs and ended up taking my shot with Kickstarter’s Zinequest and got very lucky. Now I make games full time and have all of my amazing fans to thank for it!
[Squeaky Ideas]: Can you roughly walk me through your development process? For example, what was the development process for the Apothecaria base game?
[Anna]:
Idea – DELVE started as a doodle. Apothecaria started as a desire to make a game that was focused on healing and positivity.
Refine – My partner and I had been playing an RPG campaign where she was an apprentice witch and we found diving into this magic system we were creating to be so fun and fascinating that I decided to gamify some aspect of that. I figured the potion portion of it would be easiest to explain to new players and started building on that.
Create – I created one Ailment, Fairy Fever, and then started making Ingredients that could be used to cure it. In the first iteration, the ailments were quite bland as there were additional complications to generate like the patient being stuck up a tree. After a while, I decided to streamline the process and focus on just the interaction between Ailments and Ingredients. As it was a zine, I was hard-capped at a certain number of pages so I tried my best to fit as much content into that space without bloating the game in a negative way.
Testing – Testing for Apothecaria was quite simple. I just played it myself and tested to see how long it roughly took me to do certain things. I probably could have tested it more but the focus was never on creating a balanced game but rather something that felt believable
[Squeaky Ideas]: You have a wide variety of projects and I was wondering if you juggle multiple projects at the same time? If so, what are some things that have helped you excel in balancing, producing and managing multiple projects? If you work on one at a time, what has helped you stay focused on that project, especially when you get ideas for new projects?
[Anna]:
Excel is not a word I would use for my management style 😅 I juggle multiple projects at once. Right now I’ve got 3 For Small Creatures Such As We expansions in various stages of testing and development. I’ve got my Hobbit inspired game Shirefolk in development. I’m wrapping up Death Road Services for the Death & Pottery Kickstarter. I’ve got several Apothecaria expansions in various states of pre-production. And that’s not even including my fiction work or projects I’m actively holding off like Witch Market and DELVE: Reforged.
Unfortunately, I have no good advice here except to pick something and see it through. Side projects are fun but you need to get things finished if you want to make this into a career.
[Squeaky Ideas]: Are there any good project management tools that you use with your projects that you would recommend?
[Anna]: No idea. Now that my partner has started working with me, we’ve tried to use things like Trello but honestly it gets neglected. Mostly we throw stuff up on Google Drive or Discord and it is such a mess.
[Squeaky Ideas]: For people who want to launch/create their first published project, what are some tips you have?
[Anna]: Start small and be focused. DELVE worked because it was all about creating a map of a dwarven stronghold. People knew what to expect and it was easy to keep tying mechanics back into the design pillars of Creativity, Story, and Fun Challenge. Zines are a great place to start because they are so low cost compared to massive books. Digital is even easier as there are so many storefronts that you can put your game up on for free now.
[Squeaky Ideas]: What are some things you wish you knew when you became a full time creator?
[Anna]: That Click & Drop is a thing here in the UK. I’ve been bumbling along with the Drop & Go service from the post office for the past few years and it has been such a nightmare that I have at times considered outsourcing all of my fulfillment to another company. Now that I’ve found Click & Drop it’s so much easier that I’m annoyed I didn’t know about it till now.
Other than that, I wish I knew just how much of this job was NOT designing games. Shop admin, social media, order fulfillment, customer service, etc. I think my week is about 45% game design, 55% admin.