Raising $5 million on Kickstarter w/ Oathsworn

Jamie: [00:00:00] That’s like, that’s like 400 tons fran of games this time, .

George: These guys are counting in tons fran Fran. Like, they’re not even counting games or, or users, just tons

Jamie: fran.

Jamie: Yeah, that’s a lot.


George: Welcome everyone to the podcast. We have an incredibly exciting guest for you. Uh, my name is George, and with us we have francisco . Uh, and we have our guest, Jamie Jolly. Did I pronounce it all right? That’s right. You got it, mate.

George: All right. So Jamie has not only raised over 5 million on Kickstarter with his games, he has also, uh, run a circus . So we have a ton of questions for Jamie around both those things. The, the [00:01:00] game that he has run on, uh, Kickstarter, sculpt Oath, oath, sworn, did I say that right?

Jamie: Into the Deep Wood,

George: amazing oath thrown into the deep wood.

George: Uh, and we’re gonna have an amazing discussion today around art, AI generated art how he runs his team. And we are definitely gonna find out how and why and when he ran a circus. . Jamie, do you wanna, uh, start us off with a small introduction about the

Jamie: game? Yeah. So os one is kind of a, a grand dark Fantasy legacy campaign.

Jamie: It was really an standing on the shoulders of some of these giant games like King and Def Monster and Gloom Haven and things like that that just jump been these huge successes in the, in the, in the passing kickstart and really like opened the way. Just really just seeing what the pH physical max of a game can be.
Jamie: And this is kind of like that attempt, like what happened if you made the craziest, biggest thing you could make and, and put it in a box and really just go all out for making a world. So we sort of spent five years building this world and the concept is basically the world has died with the coming of something called the deep wood, which is this gnarly, chaotic, twisted forest that sort of popped out of [00:02:00] nowhere and destroyed civilization and mankind’s left living inside these sort of bastion cities, like islands in a sea of death and trees.

Jamie: And life kind of sucks in the cities. And if that wasn’t bad enough, then the monsters started turning up. And, uh, in answer to that threat, the answer to the monsters that was trying to scrabble their way into the cities and get to the civilians, you guys are formed, the oath sworn you are these, a bunch of bad asses who basically stand in the breach between mankind and what comes out of the woods.

Jamie: And and yeah, and then obviously, you know, the community responded and, and, and they, they, you know, up to this point, I think we’ve raised like 5 million or something on Kickstarter, which is incredible, you know, for for, you know, what was just an idea in someone’s head like five years ago.

Jamie: And now it’s, it’s, it’s in the world and people enjoying us. But yeah, that’s the, uh, that’s a con, general idea of postwar.

George: Amazing. Thank you so much for that intro. It’s, it, it, it is pretty amazing. You’ve, you’ve done this for in five years, you

Jamie: said? Five. Yeah. Fi five years it took to, to get, get this thing in a box.

Jamie: Cause the, the way the game works is you have, you have two sides. You have like an encounter with a big monster [00:03:00] and it has all these lovely like kind of euro hypothe, thematic combat e kind of mechanisms in that.

Jamie: Where you’ve got an AI that, a deck that runs the monster and how it reacts to you. And you’ve got this like team of, of hombres who are kind of going in and trying to use like their push luck, their luck, you know, luck mechanics and some like carve management stuff and, uh, called battle flow. And you’re trying to like beat, beat the monster.

Jamie: But before you get to that point, you actually have this story part. So we have this app, companion app that reads the story to you and we wrote a half million word story to make that possible. A playable story. It’s a, it’s, I think it’s the, i i I think it’s one of the first novels where it’s a fully playable novel that’s, and it’s as big as the Lord of the Rings series, I believe.

Jamie: I think it’s about 500,000 words for all the rings series as big as that. But, but playable, and you don’t do anything small, do you? No, it was a bit, I said it was just like, what happens if you just go to the absolute nth degree with something? Could it be possible? Could you do it? And that was that, you know, that’s where it is.

Jamie: And so, yeah, thankfully we got it in just before Covid hit because we would never have been able to, well we, we, we, we actually had [00:04:00] to be saved by our community because we actually run into such shipping problems. We literally didn’t have enough money to send it. And so for after all that, all that five years and all that f and all that amazing funding, we still couldn’t physically get that game to people at the price that we’d been able ask pre covid.

Jamie: And so the community gathered around and saved us, and they were incredible. They, they, they pitched in a load of extra shipping money to help us get it across the line. And we got there. And and yeah, so that’s like 250 tons fran of games actually managed to get their way around the world in the middle of like, the biggest spike in shipping costs, in the history of, of, of global, global uh, product movement, you know?

George: Wow. And that, that is kind of the, the power of crowdfunding, right? The fact that you actually just built this community and then you can actually go back to them and say, guys, massive problem, , we need more money. And they’ll actually go and do it. .

Jamie: Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s definitely strange. You know, you talk to other people in businesses, you’re like, so what?

Jamie: They give you the money before they get the product and then they support you with encouragement and like, and, and, and kindness and stuff like that. And then they’ve got, they, they show genuine interest in everything you [00:05:00] do. And they might even turn up for the next thing you do because they like you.

Jamie: It’s like, this doesn’t make any sense to, you know, this doesn’t make sense, isn’t how we do business, you know, like in the world. But it’s so, it is, it’s really wonderful and it’s actually something that’s really valuable to protect. I think there’s there’s a dangerous ball game gets bigger and bigger that it could become too commercial and too, too giant.

Jamie: And like the moment, it’s still just at that point where it can be, you know, it’s, it’s a group of, of people being people together, you know, like it’s, I, I, I hope we never lose that. Amazing. .

George: So with that wonderful introduction Fran, do you wanna dive into the art discussion with

Fran: Jamie? Yeah. So five years ago, was it when you envisioned the game or when you just had the idea that you wanted to make this game and then you, you started from that point or you already had a vision, you, you know, what he wanted to build and it took five years to.

Jamie: Yeah, it generally started like Sunday nights. Toby and I, my partner would gather and I’d be there with my glass of whiskey and we’d just just back things around for [00:06:00] hours and hours, just back like ideas for the world. For the thing. It was really decided that if, with this game, particularly, not all games, but with this game particularly, we wanted to build a world and the world had to have a background.

Jamie: It had to have a rich, like depth to it. And so we spent like six months just really just churning through all that stuff. Before we put anything to paper, we had no game mechanisms at that point. We had no uh, no artwork of any kind at that point. And so it was just like this, this pure ideas sort of level.

Jamie: And then obviously the gas it was when we found the deep wood, I really knew that there was gonna be a, a snowballing of that because the deep wood was this like antagonistic concept that just, it kept answering questions for us when it popped out. Like, this is, this is a really interesting concept.

Jamie: You can do all kinds of stuff with it. It allows us to kind of build a game system around it. And yeah, and that was. That was that was where things started to pick up. And then not long after that point, we then got on board our artists who then became you know, like big part of our team over the next few years.

Jamie: And, you know, he was, he was there with us as well, like, you know, when we were, we were then iterating on this core concept.

Fran: And was it easy to [00:07:00] communicate your vision, , at, at the beginning or did it have any issues?

Jamie: Yeah, I mean we we are very fortunate with. We actually, we’ve been through a bunch of sort of different artists and things over the time that we’ve had, and we’ve had obviously have graphic designers as well that are often artists are, they are sort of like the cross, they cross the streams a lot.

Jamie: But the uh, yeah, the, the, the conversation we were very blessed with Don Jones was Don Jones at the time. He was just between jobs. And he was, he was, uh, he was go, he was heading into Wetter Workshop, which obviously is this massive art studio, but probably the biggest, most influential one in the world, I would say.

Jamie: They provide a lot of the artwork, concept art for stuff like they did, like Lord of the Rings, for instance. They did a lot of hard Hollywood movies, Marvel stuff, you know, like they, they, lots of, lots of big, big, big, big IPs.
Jamie: And they provide a lot of the a lot of the concept work and sub concept art for those things. So they create, you know, weapons, creatures, uh, you know, environments, all this kind of stuff. And very, yeah, very, very, the highest sort of level of art. But he, but he was kind of not. Quite into that space yet, and he kind of committed to us and be part of what we were doing as well.

Jamie: And that continued on through his time at, at Weta. Yeah. And so he was, he’s, he’s [00:08:00] this, he, I mean he himself is a trainer of many artists. And so he’s a, he’s a a world level kind of artist who’s he has hundreds of thousands of followers in the art community. He has his own like, training school that he trained, training sessions and things that he trains other artists in how to to do rendering and, and, and all that sort of thing.

Jamie: So yeah, he’s very good at his communication and, and very, you can just give him, you know, a, a spec sheet. The way, just the way it works to give you an idea of how that comes, comes give you, you, you have an idea in your mind. You have the kind of world set in there. So you’ve got this idea, okay, right?

Jamie: You got a besiege city surrounded by the trees, and you’ve got this kind of like this you know, got a guard with a torch, like looking over into the mist, you know, with eyes looking back at him from, you know, you know, the shadow of the trees. You’ve got this kind of concept. You want a piece of art for it.

Jamie: So, what we tended to do, which was the easiest thing is. Try and create stuff like a mood board where we’ve been talking about like, here’s ideas of the composition of the picture. Cause there’s a lot that goes into a shot, like, you know, into an image. You have to obviously have the content of the image, like the characters in them, and then like the character, what stance are they in, what they [00:09:00] wearing you know, what, is there anything particular that needs to be said?

Jamie: And with the game, for instance, if you have like a player board that’s like this shape, like you have a load of information on this part of the player board and you. Don’t, so you don’t need the character there, you need the character out the way here. And so you have to compose the image put where everything is gonna be and sort of what zones need to be free of complex details so that you can actually put your graphics design over the top of it and your information on top of it.

Jamie: And so you kind of do that. You kinda make the spec sheet where you lay out the composition, the characters, the content, and you have like a mood board of like, here’s ideas of, of things that are kind of cool and exciting, these sort of colors, these sort of uh, these types of armors, maybe weapons and things like that.

Jamie: And you kind of give that as a basic thing. And then he goes away and iterates on it and comes back with these incredible, like, just super rendered images of, of ideas. And we we would have when we had time Back in the beginning we did, we, we did do some iteration backwards, forth, different things like the Adendry who are like plant-based people.

Jamie: We spent a bunch of time going backwards and forwards with them. Like they started off with mouths and, and we, we lost the mouth cause we thought it’d be more kind of like through that the alienness and [00:10:00] otherness that the, uh, the Adendry represent. And they, cause they have, they have like a lot of like cult like genetic differences from humans.

Jamie: Like they have hair that is vines. That itself helped create spores. And that spore is how they communicate with each other. They like release the spores into their community. So we wanted to kind of manifest that in the artwork as well. And so there’s a lot of light backwards and forwards about these little nuanced bits of the law that we wanted to see inside the artwork.

Jamie: So we could, we, we had time. To do that a little bit, but actually as you go on and we, we had like 500 pieces of art or something, you know, sworn. Oh wow. And, and, and by the time you get that, you can’t just keep iterating back so forth. It takes weeks, you know, it can take, know, you can have one thing, it take, it goes away, comes back, goes away.

Jamie: And you just can’t really justify that kind of time cuz you just need to be moving forward or as you’re never gonna finish the project. And so as we got for fortunately, we, we did plan it around that problem. So we, we started off with like the, the characters, the different racial groups and things like that within the, again, the different peoples.

Jamie: We built those out early cause we knew we wanted more time to spend with those. And then when it was coming down to things like weapons and arms and things, it was just quick one shots. Like, here’s an idea, here’s, here’s [00:11:00] a weapon we did, we need a big ax, double bladed. Please make something good.

Jamie: And he’d be like, go away and come back and it’d be great. As we got further into the deadline was we were getting quicker and quicker at getting stuff done. And fortunately we’d had the time originally to kind of get the main, the main design elements of the world sort of built out.

Jamie: But yeah, that sort of idea of spec sheeting is a, is a big thing like in the mood boards and, and getting the, you know, all those kind of bits of, of detail over is very good. We found another way that actually helped speed us up, which was pretty good, cause my partner Toby, he’s a, uh, 3D sculptor.

Jamie: And and so one thing we had when it was like coming down to the exact posing of characters and where they needed to be in the boards and stuff like that, we, we were struggling on that side a little bit in getting that without iteration. So what we actually end up doing is we ended up designing a bunch of characters in Zebra actually in three 3D characters posing them, say like, with a big blade in this sort of stance, looking over here.

Jamie: And then we’d put. into the kind of graphic design area that we knew so they could really see where it was going. Then he would, uh, Don John would be able to take that and paint over the top of it and then take it. He’d mold it and [00:12:00] add to it and make it even way better than we ever did in the kind of small uh, sculpting, uh, sort of jobs that we did with it.

Jamie: But certainly it was like, it was, that was quite, that worked quite well creating these 3D the scene so that we could just, cause just having more people kind of at it sped spread things up a bit. So that was another way we did it, is yeah, making these three dimensional uh, characters and then painting over the top of them to make them, you know, come to, come to life.

Jamie: Wow. That’s

George: amazing.

George: Can I just jump one step back because. Here you are having raised $5 million, and then you’re just, you’re saying, oh, we just, we hired this worldclass artist, you know, that to work at like the biggest studios and they just joined their team. H how, like, how, how do you, how do you find a Worldclass artist and then a, attract them to, to your startup, I guess, at that point, right.

Jamie: So yeah, so well we’re very fortunate and yeah, there’s a, I’m a university. I was voted most likely to become a salesman after uni. And, uh, and so like, there’s a little bit of that going on is that you have to be able to sell these concepts and [00:13:00] give people a really good, really good understanding of where things are going.

Jamie: Like you have to know, know the market is what, and the industry is, what we were doing really is that we, I, I knew board games. I’d been been a board game designer for a while at that point, and also knew the market very clearly. And so I was able to, with Toby, like explain it and give it, show it to Don John, just.

Jamie: Valuable, this kind of world can be if you do things. Now, the, the irony was, is that we ended up losing money on the whole project the first time around. Actually, we, we we’re only now making, uh, making profit on the second kickstart, which is fantastic. But but at the time, pre covid, the, the numbers were very clear about actually if you can make this and make it successful.

Jamie: And so the idea was, is, is, you know, if we were all prepared to risk this time together. And I think that’s another thing for things, we were all risking it together was the thing. Like we were a team that just, we all had. You know, at this, knowing that, you know, we were every, we all failed equally. We all lost equally in time if nothing came of this thing.

Jamie: And so we were, it was that kind of thing. Like I wasn’t just asking someone else to risk something and I, like, we were all kind of in it together with that. But yeah, just so, just explain to them like how, how actually [00:14:00] the explaining how the board game world is exploding as a big, big concept.

Jamie: And there’s this, you know, there’s these, there’s still these kind of giant super games that are being created that that there’s still space for them in the world and that they could be designed. But in terms of like the actual, uh, finding of Dodge as well, like, I mean, places like deviant Arts and Art Station are incredible, like sources.

Jamie: Art Station is probably like the main way that if you’re just somebody looking for an artist, you want to go find a profession or you go to art station. And uh, actually this’s where a lot of the controversy around the AI thing is coming from is, is the, is the use of art station in the database.

Jamie: Toby and I had, you know, we’d been around. Like games and entertainment and so lot of fantasy stuff and sci-fi and all that. So, so there was a bunch of artists we knew of, and Don John was right at the top of Toby’s List, actually. I didn’t know of him at that point, but Toby did.

Jamie: And he was like, what if we could, you know, just go and be cheeky instead of an, we’re like, hi, how you doing? You wanna give up two and a half years of your life and come and work for us to make a board game? , I mean, and you know, it ended up being that we just caught him perfectly at the right time because, uh, he hadn’t [00:15:00] got the offer to work for Weta workshop at that point.

Jamie: He was coming out of another job and he just didn’t have anything to do with that exact moment in his life. And I was like, that was perfect. And, and it does, it does seem to be that that’s how a lot of things do. If you ever watch like a lot of these the makings of films type things, like a lot of what happens is these incredible like circumstances where someone just happens to be between things at just the right time.

Jamie: And you bring together this super team of actors and writers and directors, and some of the best films you’ve ever seen are actually primarily a consequence of this. Happenstance of a team coming together and actually just well being available at the right time. And so that was what with Don John, he was just happened to be free at that time.

Jamie: And I don’t think we’d ever, if it had been a year later, we definitely wouldn’t have got him, you know, a year before we wouldn’t have got him. So just happened to be there

George: at the right time.

George: So the lesson here is to kind of, super boost your serendipity basically by just going for it, right?

George: Because you saw this amazing artist, you’re both thinking that it would be a bit cheeky to ask him, but you just did and you just, and then just happened to catch him at the right time. So, so I guess the, the, the big takeaway here for other [00:16:00] folks is just do it . Just send that message, just send that email.

Jamie: You don’t ask, you don’t get right. Like you just, and, and, and you don’t also, you don’t know like what position people are in. Especially I think with the, in the kind of fame world, there’s mm-hmm , a lot of, very famous people not doing an awful lot. Most of the time , right?

Jamie: Because they’re, they do something incredibly big and they do something incredibly well known. But then there’s a bunch of other little or smaller things that then people can get involved in.

Jamie: And really what they’re looking for is satisfaction in their creative outlets. A lot of ’em are creative people. They wanna do something interesting and something that excites them. And so the ability to say to Don John, do you wanna make a world, you know, do you wanna make a world? We’re gonna make something completely that’s gonna be insane and we’re gonna have all these kind of crazy monsters.

Jamie: And, you know, he, he was, he loves making monsters, but there’s not that much call for making monster. In the concept work that he was doing at the time. Right. And so it was like, there’s a, he was a so for hi for him. I know that was something that was very appealing to him, was the idea of being able to make monsters.

Jamie: Whereas, you know, his day job wasn’t letting him do that. It’s like our, our graphic designer is fantastic. He’s a [00:17:00] Turkish chap over there, but he, just wouldn’t be happy if he just got to sit down all day, painting skulls, . He’d be a perfect guy to be Kos like artists, you know, and that was the kind of pitch I did to him was like, I know you like making skulls. Do you wanna make like a hundred more of them? Because we’ve got a lot of skulls that need painting in this, game. Got a lot of like graphic design things that need to have this kind of dark, macabre kind of like Scully type thing going on there. And Yeah. He came in, enjoyed that.

Fran: When we go to your website, you see that the, the team group quite, quite a bit. So did that change the way you guys work or is it still

Jamie: the same?

Jamie: Yeah. I mean, he is still very much a sort of a disparate group of people around the world kind of doing specific jobs when and where we need them. So it’s, it’s a very large team in numbers, but, uh, but specifically you’re often dipping in and out of that pool of people to get the certain thing you need done.

Jamie: We’ve been very fortunate now is that we’ve got to a point where we can bring on a, an operations manager. We were able to get more security around up for our graphic designer as well and and sort of thing. So we’re starting to build a team that’s, that’s more able to commit full periods of time.

Jamie: But at the same time, you get a lot of [00:18:00] things in the board game world where you just need someone to do something for like three or four weeks and then you part ways for them for a bit. So that’s sort of, freelance world is very common in, in board gaming and sort of gaming general.

Jamie: So you guys are

Fran: about to start to work on your next

Jamie: game. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Getting, getting sort of wrapped up for that. We just, for this sort of closing out the file preparation for the big print run for the last Kickstarter that we’ve done.

Jamie: So we’ve got over 20,000 games that we’re making from the second Kickstarter. And getting, making sure those were all kind of, uh, like put to bed and, and, and safe and then getting ready. Then fall back into development for the next set of games we’re making.

Jamie: That’s like, that’s like 400 tons fran of games this time, . So it’s, yeah, that’s a lot.

Fran: Those are impressive numbers because we talk to some clients sometimes and they have issues with the minimum order for the factories, but you guys definitely don’t have that, issue.

George: These guys are counting in tons fran Fran. Like, they’re not even counting games or, or users, just tons

Jamie: fran. To be honest though, with this game, it’s, it’s kind of one to one, you [00:19:00] know, a ton to a game is basically where it , where it sits. Uh, the thing weighs 55 pounds, so it’s, it’s a big old, it’s a big old piece.

Jamie: Wow. But yeah, the, I suppose , there is something cause within the market of, light board games cause it’s like you can make a tiddly widdly game and you can go all the way up to this giant massive light al type thing. Is that within that you’ve got, within it it’s own little financially viable like, kind of like graph that kind of things work out So you can make a small game, but generally those types of games, they’re very difficult to make a splash with.

Jamie: If you want to. really kind of commit to something and make it your job and to be able to get to a point where it’s financially viable to make it your job, then it’s one of those things where you kind of have to be prepared to risk an awful lot to get that, to make that possible.

Jamie: And we are very fortunate, I think, very blessed that we’ve moved for this. We’ve been asked to get, to get there with OS one. But the other path that the majority of people have is that one, they don’t have the money to risk it in the first place and they don’t have the time to risk it, or it’s a bit too risky cause it’s just not it’s not something that people are, are kind of comfortable with making that [00:20:00] kind of risk.

Jamie: Mm-hmm. . And so with With, yeah, with a lot of the way goes, you make, you start making smaller games. But because the vast majority of companies that are in the board game space make smaller games at that level, you know, sort of, those are one, two man operations that are making these games and want to come in with a 15, 20 grand budget for their, project.

Jamie: And they’re prepared to risk that and get it that, because so many are in that, it’s a saturated end of the market, which is quite difficult to make a big impression in. And there’s an awful lot of iteration very, very quickly within that, that group of people. Whereas with the giant games, there is very little iteration and it’s much slower because it, because it takes you 200, 300 grand to make a game at that level.

Jamie: And it’s a huge investment of time. So, these games are like, giant icebergs slowly pass each other in time, and so with that, there’s a great opportunity to go places no one’s ever gone before because it’s just this great open ocean of space where you can make stuff.

Jamie: Incredibly risky. Incredibly dangerous, you know, you know, ships sink in that ocean. So you’ve gotta be a bit careful with, that. And so, it’s the success of one is kind of connected.

Jamie: That fact that it’s just so few [00:21:00] super giant games out there at that end of the market.

Fran: I’m going to move on to the next topic, which is a bit more controversial, Do you think someone using an AI image generator, would they be able to create something like, uh, Oathsworn or do you think it’s completely impossible?

Jamie: I’ve loved seeing the rise of this thing. It’s been a fascinating, because obviously if you spend like a couple of years when you’re just doing nothing but looking at pictures and doing art and making stuff for games, you get very interested in the process of this thing. So I got into the beater of Dali two when it first came out at the beginning of last year.

Jamie: And we were, I was, we were playing around with it and me and my friend were sitting there trying to get it to make Anersys, like the bear we were trying like bear warrior with, with armor brunick stuff, you know, character ax doing this thing, and no, we were trying to get it to make a dragon and you had that, this weird spaghetti monster.

Jamie: And it was all over the place and there was like legs and arms and things and just, ugh. And it was, it, yeah, it looked like something from the warp of 40k, you know, it was kinda this terrifying thing. And, and yeah, this, it really couldn’t do nearly anything that you wanted it to do at that [00:22:00] point.

Jamie: But in terms of a creative at like, like end of the market, it was, it could, it could do cats and dogs and stuff like that to a fairly reasonable degree. But then seeing it then grow from there into like stable diffusion and you get into mid journey and stuff like that and you’re seeing all those types of things popping up and then all of a sudden, , you are seeing them create stuff that is genuinely like incredible, like actual, like, like world-class level images.

Jamie: If you were to have an artist make those, they would be at a world-class level and have that happen in like six months, eight, nine months. It was, doing that in was insane. Like to see that level that how quickly that was. I mean if you think back to when we were doing, I mean you guys, you know, you’re probably around the same sort of generation.

Jamie: You can remember what the graphics revolutions were like in when we were younger in, in game. You went from like the, the Game Boy advance, you know, to, and you had to like the mega drive and, and then Nintendo 64 and a Dreamcast and you know, you kept and you kept going out and out and it just took like 25 years it took that long to go from this to this.

Jamie: AI has managed to do that 20 year cycle [00:23:00] in the quality of their images in about six months, which is scary, right? It’s insane. This is the thing that gets with AI is I don’t think people realize. We are not, we are not hardwired by any of the previous technology that’s come before to realize how quickly this is gonna iterate.

Jamie: We’re not, we’re not ready for it because we are not gonna be able to catch up with realizing just what it’s capable of, because it’s gonna be so far ahead of that. By the time we realize it, you know, there’ll already be even more things. And so yeah, that’s where it’s gonna gonna start coming in, that I don’t think that when, when people as a group, as a mass, a common sort of knowledge level group of people just don’t realize something quick enough. That’s where kind of stuff can start going off the rail a bit and go awry. Is we don’t realize this how impactful and how disruptive, I suppose it’s disruptive is probably the word this stuff can be. But yeah, so with the image generation though, even now like you, cause I’ve been playing around with Mid Journey as well, look that seeing what the sort of stuff that does, cause it’s quite fun.

Jamie: It’s really, really fascinating to, to kind of try and get it, to make something that you’ve got in your mind and put it out there in the world. And, at the moment it’s got to the point. It’s, it can now, instead of [00:24:00] making weird blobs of stuff that looks nothing like what you want, it can now make something that looks exactly like something.

Jamie: But it’s almost never what you asked it to make . So it’s incredibly good at making like a cat like jewel wielding knives or something like that. But it’s never the cat you want. It’s this, you know, there’s always like, you’ve gotta try and iterate on it. And it’s been aging ages trying to get it to change its pose.

Jamie: And like if I tell it to leap, we’ll leap make it work Now it’s just like no leap. It’s sort of light ends up in this weird kind of stance and then you’re like, no, once you know, how do I get the color of that hat to change? Like, no, why is the background sky now purple? You know, the experience has really been that kind of feeling of trying to make it do something.

Jamie: And what it turns out is incredible. If you just had someone walk in the room at that point not knowing what you’d asked for and it goes out and you go, wow, that’s incredible. That’s a world class piece of art. But getting it to make what you want, that’s the key. And I suppose that’s where the question is, can it get to the point where it really crosses the divide between the intention of the user and the, outworking of that image.

Fran: If, if that would happen, what do you guys consider [00:25:00] using, AI image generators at all?

Jamie: Yeah, some. It’s a really, interesting question. Really no nuanced question. I mean, the first thing I’ve been talking to our art team about this and trying to get their light impression on it.

Jamie: I was talking to Don John and, Francesca about it and all this sort of thing. And, and there’s obviously from that side a very clear, like there is a problem in the way that things are, are working right now. Primarily because of the way that like something like mid journey and things like that.

Jamie: They do, they often, they’re often scraping data from something like art station, which is where a lot of these professional artists put up their work to try and generate more work for themselves. And and so instead what’s happening is these, these AI have scrape able to scrape that data and then use that as the bed foundation of, images.

Jamie: And so, it’s Greg Brokowski, isn’t it? He was, he’s been famously like one of these color, the key art words and used in, in AI gen image generations. And yeah, he Yeah, he, he was doing a podcast saying, I, it was interesting cause he was saying that like, he’s got more work than he’s ever had before.

Jamie: I’m wondering if that’s because like, whenever he’s become famous as being a, a keyword and obviously everyone wants the real thing and so they’ve actually gone to him. So there’s a weird [00:26:00] side of that. We’re actually becoming, like, AI famous as an artist may actually mean you get more real world work out.

Jamie: I don’t know. But certainly the problem here seems to be there’s a massive lack of regulation over the whole system at the moment. Is moving too quick, way too quick and people don’t, and there’s not been any, you know, I think the regulations stuff tends to be five years behind a lot of this stuff, you know, and it, it needs to catch up.

Jamie: And so right now I think it’s incredibly dangerous for any company to, start using what’s available at the moment because you don’t know where the lawsuits and things, there’s already class action lawsuits around this stuff that have been been prepped and ready. You know, they’re kind of, they’re starting to move through the system.

Jamie: And so what happens, what happens in a couple of years time when, when maybe like, it does go that way and, and people, and the, you know, it comes down the side of the artists and then people say, well, you know, anything that was used from a data set, scrape from art station is no longer commercially viable.

Jamie: And you can get sued if you ever use it. And then you’ve, you’ve got all this artwork that you’ve been spending all this time trying to generate and prompt and do all this stuff. And actually none of it is [00:27:00] commercially viable, even though Mid Journey may say it’s commercially usable. And that’s really the question it feels very confusing.

Jamie: I think when you, when you join up with something like Mid Journey, cause you join up with Mid Journey, you have these tiers and you’ve got like a basic tier that just means you can just make some images and stuff like that. But then you have like a commercial tier that you can buy in at, which is a bit more expensive.

Jamie: And they say you can use all of those images. um, Commercially in products and mm-hmm. , I don’t know how, I don’t know how true that is, you know, in terms of the long term, whether or not that would actually be rescinded at some point and what would happen in that. Cause it’s just a whole new world. We’ve never had robots making something like this and then having to decide who owns the product, you know, when it’s taken from this stuff.

Jamie: I think it’s quite dangerous for any company to be getting involved in it at the moment. Cause there’s just too much unknown about where to go. So there’s that, there’s that side. There’s clearly the fact that there’s a regulation needed, which allows the artists to decide whether or not their data is usable within this, in this scene, because it is, although it’s creating something new, it is actually primarily only able to make that from the art.

Jamie: It’s definitely clear. The artwork that is [00:28:00] generated when you use a, a prompt name like Greg Rutkowski, the, that image is only possible to be made through the AI because it was absorbed this guy’s artwork from the database. Yeah. Taking the spirit of it and then can churn out something similar to it. And so that, that, that feels clearly that that guy should be remunerated for that if he and, and, and have the option to not have that included in the database.

Jamie: Cause if it’s copyright . What happens? You know, could we get to appointment from a regulation perspective, artists. Sell their artwork to the databases if they wanted to. I did actually ask my team if, if any of them would be happy to do that. Like, would you be happy to ever sell your art?

Jamie: And they would all say this was super short-sighted. You can’t think of many artists that would want to sell their art to the things you’re just kind of actively replacing yourself. Short-term game for long, long-term loss with that type of, with that type of activity. My response to them was, I wonder what happens then if you get like these mid-level artists that are that maybe are struggling and what if these these AI generating companies, if they start employing artists to start making art and say, look, you’ve got some [00:29:00] stable, cause it can be a bit famor feast, I think with the art world, right? Mm-hmm. , it can be that you end up, you, you, so it may be that, you know, to get a, a stable income, someone would just become an in-house artist, start making some of this stuff and start building up that database.

Jamie: And in that way nobody could claim then it’s being taken from somebody unfairly or taken from the art station world that in a way that wasn’t remunerated. And so if that, if that happens, then you get into a different question. It’s no longer about is this machine stealing somebody else’s stuff?

Jamie: Is the question is, is it okay that we live in a world where this machine is able to replace a lot of the, kind of the artwork at a quality level that’s instantaneous and very quick and very cheap? Like is that, cuz I think one way or another we are getting there. I don’t think there’s any stopping that at this point.

Jamie: I think we are gonna get to a point where every company has to decide, are you okay generating what you want out of AI or should you go through the more creative route of you know, of you of actually using, artists. That’s, gonna be coming. It’s just a matter of time, and everyone’s gonna have to decide that.

Jamie: AI will eventually be able to create much of what you [00:30:00] need from an art perspective. And it will be regulated in a way that this is, you could say this artwork was generated by somebody who was getting paid properly for it. That’s the question. Even if a bunch of other artists would say it, maybe agree that this is a shortsighted Position for the, artists who are doing this to take it.

Jamie: Cuz in any group of people, you only need a few of those artists to agree to it. You know, how many people would agree to a, you know, a hundred grand a year salary working in house and AI art generating company That could just start, you know, it’s very difficult to say no to that, especially if you’ve run into difficulty yourself.

Jamie: And of course this system really puts pressure on the art community in general. Right? There’d be more and more pressure on the art community to take a sure thing over. State, you know, it’s, it’s very difficult to see how that would, that would last. So I suppose this is a bit like the uh, comparisons like the, uh, the industrial revolution, right?

Jamie: And what happened there with like the seamstresses, you know, it’s all cottage industries. It was all these individual, like high quality creative. Seamstresses. And then the factories start opening, making dresses, and they’re just super quick to, they start churning their stuff [00:31:00] out. And in one, in one generation, the entire lot is kind of like replaced, you know?

Jamie: And it’s these, you know, these people were cast into poverty. And this is terrible kind of situation where, I think it was one of the sharpest drops in life expectancy, in human history happened around industrial revolution. When, where they just, when they came from the cottage rural industry in rural areas and went into the industrial kind of warehouses and the smog and the terrible wages and the lack of labor laws and everything like that.

Jamie: And so you can see how that could very easily come as a reaction to this thing from that side, from the art community, right? The idea that they could just be replaced very, very quickly. . And, and that you obviously in, in reaction to that, during the Industrial Revolution, you had the Luddite Revolution, right?

Jamie: So you had the Luddites tried to stand against this technology and said, this isn’t fair. This is destroying craftsman’s, you know, like jobs. And this is like this, you know, the, we need to protect these skilled laborers. You know, and, in the end that just failed. You know, it couldn’t stand up against the weight of progress and time and just the, the fact there was just too many people who were just like, I will not pay three or four times as much for that, [00:32:00] you know, that dress or that thing wherever I’m buying, you know, compared to, I’d rather take it cheaper.

Jamie: And that seems to have been the, journey of history. And so I don’t know if, I don’t know if regardless of whether or not there is a moral stance that people would say, this is definitely where she think should be, I dunno if there’s any stopping it now that it’s out of the, you know, Pandora’s box has been opened.

George: So in your dystopian vision, instead of the struggling artist in Paris living off of, one jar of peanut butter crying over her artwork in her studio, she’s gonna have massive sweatshops with artists. They’re not good enough to be working on oath sworn, but they are good enough to work for the AI companies just churning out artwork just to feed the AI and no one actually ever sees their original work and just feeding the algorithm.

Jamie: Is that may not even need to last that long. That’s the terrible thing that you only need them to do. You know, may only need a few million images, you know, and then the AI can take it from there, you know, and iterate on it even further. You know, it’s even worse than the industrial revolution in that way because this AI is capable of, taking that and very cheaply [00:33:00] innovating and iterating on those ideas to the nth degree.

Jamie: And I really don’t know if there’s a, if there’s an upside that will be able to be drawn from the art community from this, but then there is a, something I can, I can say at the moment, it’s so one thing that you can’t get, that’s that idea that AI images right now cannot get you to where you want it to be.

Jamie: Right. You can’t, if you wanted to, if I wanted to make, no matter how many times I’ve tried it, I can’t make something that’s in my mind, come into an image. It’s often just a slightly different thing. It’s okay if you want something very generic, if you want like a mountain with a lake because there’s no.

Jamie: no, there’s no right answer to what what a mountain with a lake looks like, right? There’s just a million different ways you could make that and be justifiably amounted with a lake. But if there’s something specific you want, like a particular people in a sci-fi world who have armor that has this particular thing and weapons that do a certain thing, and they’re in a scene which is this grand epic of like two warring factions in space, you know, with all these asteroids coming and the space ships here and this thing here, and there’s two main characters that are in the middle of the scene that are the focal point.

Jamie: And one of thems got this amazing like, you know, [00:34:00] thing this other, these other guys are, ah, you know, if you wanted to do, be like very specific like that, I don’t think you can get there now and get it to make that thing. And I don’t know if it’s gonna be possible in the future. So there’s, at that level, it may be that there’s just a, there may be a stopper on AI that just means you can’t, you can’t get the scene compositions and the content.

Jamie: Specific enough to make it commercially viable for the majority of big creative projects like sci-fi and fantasy and, you know, which is obviously a lot board games are based around. However, if you wanna do something like natural or if you wanna do something like birds and you wanna make a game about birds and just have them be in a particular outside, you could definitely do that right now.

Jamie: And it just, it just work immediately. So there’s always gonna be that. I think there’s gonna be that space for artists, at least for a long time with, that stuff.

Jamie: The AI is very good at replicating with iteration, but not necessarily good at taking that next leap in creativity that makes you go, wow, I’ve never seen that before. That’s awesome. A sword that is made of light . That’s all. You know, like that’s, you know, wow, what a cool idea.

Jamie: You know, and that’s it. You know, you that one idea and suddenly you’ve got, you’ve sold a [00:35:00] billion toys, right. . Right. But but so I don’t, there’s something there that I think the art, an artist will always be able to bring in a, in a much pure way than the AI will be able to do. And it might be that, what that does is, instead of, cause there are different groups of artists, to be honest, you know, being, fair not all artists are creatively minded, they have a skill and some artists are good at, executing that skill on a given task. So they’re good at perhaps the rendering of a thing and they understand the technical needs of composition and doing things like that.

Jamie: But in terms of creative, like we, we really have found that that is a very difficult part of the process, is creating the look of a new monster, creating the look of new weapons and new are, new arm, new people, groups, that sort of thing. Creating a new city that just looks like no city anyone’s ever seen before.

Jamie: Like that is a very specific subset of artists. And I don’t think that I, the AI can replace them. And I and also think that, that that group of people is gonna become more and more valuable in this world and that . The artists who are more skilled but less creative in their, designing [00:36:00] abilities is gonna be where that the AI starts to really heavily put pressure on them.

Jamie: Because if it’s just the fact that you have this simple thing that the world already knows exists and you want to make it manifest in a picture, then that thing the AI will be able to do. Especially anything that’s not sci-fi or fantasy or, you know, anything, anything too fictional basically.

Jamie: Anything that’s grounded in something that already exists is gonna be very easy to replicate.

George: Wow. I think this is the most balanced answer I’ve ever heard to this discussion because most folks are either like absolutely not or Absolutely. Yes. And I think you’ve actually laid out a well thought out path for how it might play out. Where, there’s just like a different role for certain artists and just how everyone will adapt to it. But you are of the opinion, right? That this is unstoppable and it’s not going anywhere.

Jamie: If you look back to history, I don’t think there’s an example of this sort of thing being kept in the box once it’s been opened like this, and it’s sad because the reality is that these are, the progression always comes with this thing.

Jamie: It’s just part of the process of, what we call [00:37:00] progress. But then, you know, always become debatable about whether or not that’s actually true when, you know you’ve got a lot of people, real people really hurting.

George: Here we have on the show a man who has raised over 5 million on Kickstarter. So why don’t we use the last 10 minutes to tease out a little bit how you did that.

Jamie: I think the success of, Oathsworn is there’s a hole in the market.

Jamie: There’s a place that you have to fight if you can see a hole. That’s where really where it started for us. We, saw that there was a, a hole in these kind of grand thematic stories. I mean, there, it was a very common kind of parlance in board gaming when I was starting Oathsworn that was like, there are just no good story games in board gaming.

Jamie: There are no good story games. I was like, huh, no. Good story games. You say, well, you know, now, gimme five years to see what we can do about that. You know, it was, it is that idea of there being holes that you can fill with ideas. And so it just, you know, it can take an idea, takes a bit of risk, takes some cash, it takes some hard work, and then, you might be able to get there.

Jamie: So I mean, board gaming is a bit of a weird spot. So if the audience is non-board game related, cause board gaming is like, it’s this, huge kind of niche that is nowhere near as risky as, you wanna create a new type of stamp or something, you know,[00:38:00] board gaming is like a nearly 10 billion a year industry at this point.
Jamie: And so it’s a massive deal. So if, as long as you know that industry very well . And actually a real key thing, I think that seems to be true of creating something new is go to the next, stop along the way. Don’t just go to the end of the journey with like something new.

Jamie: Like go to the next step. Iterate on what has come before. Know what’s come before, know where the next steps are. If you get to, there’s a weird thing that people love. Iteration, but not innovation, I suppose is the, you can actually be too innovative with a concept and it’s just the people may not be ready for it yet.

Jamie: And so you see this with with people throughout history is that they were just too innovative for their time and the world wasn’t ready for their technology yet.

Jamie: So just being aware of that, like not going too far ahead of where people are right now because there’s a safety in that and people can see the value of it much more easily. going very, very far into the future with innovation people cannot see the value of that innovation yet because you have to convince them. It’s maybe too deep a concept or too hard to, to get people to, acknowledge that and appreciate that.
Jamie: Or are you just being, uh, are you being [00:39:00] iterative And if you’re being iterative, that’s a pretty good place to be compared to like hyper innovative , which I mean, sometimes it might work, but I think generally that seems to hold up from what I’ve seen.

George: How did you know how to build a campaign, how to do pre-launch, all that stuff, and, and what did you do to get to these huge numbers?

Jamie: Yeah, so I mean, building hype is a big part of any Kickstarter. The, the hypes really started a, a solid year before the Kickstarter even went off. So you, you are talking about getting into the influencers of that product.

Jamie: Influencers are absolutely vital in today’s world, like knowing the influencers in your market and and being able to reach them with early prototypes and things like that, and being able to talk about what’s coming, being in the zeitgeist and the conversations that are happening. Obviously with that is the convention scene as well is a big part of the ballgame world.

Jamie: Cause there’s obviously a lot of influences at convention scenes that they get to talk to about and you get to meet a few thousand people and that really helps build that up. I think we had like 2000 people signed up through conventions we went to and we went to Kickstart with roughly 5,000 [00:40:00] people.

Jamie: Cause we built a website and we had the website as a sign up, which was Keith, like the newsletter. We had a newsletter we published um, uh, stuff through as well leading up to it to get people excited and kind of let ’em know what was coming and how what we were up to. As I said, we had roughly 5,000 at that point.

Jamie: We were very confident, having 5,000 people signed up, felt healthy, that we were gonna be able to reach the point of me on to make a couple of thousand games. And on top of them obviously getting on the Kickstarter platform.

George: How do you break through with, an influencer for example? Like how do you get them to choose your game to review instead of one of the other 8,000 that comes

Jamie: out?

Jamie: Professionalism is the first thing, it is a shame that if you don’t have money to make a professional looking product at the start, Kickstarter is not something where you can come with a dream where you have no money, and then make something that then we’ll raise money to let your dream become reality.
Jamie: That concept died like in 2013, right? Like it’s a long time ago that you could actually come with an idea. And so Kickstarter has now moved into a much more professional state where you have to come with an almost finished product to people and then say, can you help us get the enough of the manufacturing of [00:41:00] this finished product?

Jamie: And so that’s what you’ve gotta kind of like settle that with yourself, that if you go, if you want to get into making say a ball game, you need to have that. Utter, like professionally created full product and the ability to advertise that. For most influencers, that’s just the level.

Jamie: They need you to take it seriously to get to that point. And then those doors open, I think to them. Cause and genuinely though, they are really up for almost anything that’s professional at that level. You’ve got a prototype that is professionally done.

Jamie: Almost everyone will play that and look at it. Sometimes they wanna see it at a convention. You do a 15 minute pitch to them or something like that at convention before they commit to doing it more because they don’t wanna spend like six hours learning and playing your game for the first time.

George: If you have one big tip or something that you wish you, you knew then that you know now about running a big Kickstarter campaign or getting it to be big, what would it be?

Jamie: It’s difficult. I’ve had a. Journey in learning to let go of, some of the, crazy levels of control. If I looked back and looked at all the stuff that’s happened for OS one, I consider us more of a blessed company than a, proficient one [00:42:00] That so much of what happened was stuff happening just at the right time, meeting the right people, having good people you can trust and that, so having, I mean, just having people around that you can meet that you trust, like I think it’s a really wonderful time if you’re looking at yourself and thinking, have I got a product I can start making , can I start building a company that if you’ve got one or two good people around you, you can say, yeah, you know what?

Jamie: I trust this person. I’m they, we are gonna go on a journey together. You will have so much more power to bring something into the world with somebody you can trust that if you feel there’s a fracture and a disconnect with somebody and there’s like a real problem there. So you know that, that is wonderful to see that really at the heart of most products, it’s basically a bunch of relationships with people you can trust to get something done and it’s really encouraging And so I think that.

Jamie: Trusting in, the people in your team and asking the question, can you trust and do you feel like you’re gonna be able to do that together? And not underestimating how valuable that is to find someone. You can do that. Cause most of the, the majority of games and companies that I’ve seen fall down have fall down primarily just for the fact that at some level people distrusted each other and they did. And they couldn’t trust someone to work and turn up for [00:43:00] staff and do things and, and competency. So like, if you can find those people, they’re like gold, you know, to, a startup. And you can do a lot more than you think with those, with that group of people. And then just trusting the ride.

George: Before we go this circus , what, what, what did you do? You, did you, did you have a

Jamie: circus? Yeah. Well, it’s kind of a mobile circus that we used to do. It’s used to be called the it started out being called the Friendship Society Circus.

Jamie: It turned into the Ministry of Joy .

Jamie: And you get like three or 400 kids come in and you just let ’em go crazy. And you, have this chance to do a bit of fundraising, introduce ’em to a lot of the social welfare programs and stuff like that, like the youth groups and kids groups and you know, things that are framed.

Jamie: It turned out to be quite a nice sort of like place between, the unengaged kind of people who were in need of things and, then the charities that were in, areas. And so that’s what we, we did for a number of years. We went around with this kind of mobile circus, had a big top hat and we went around kind of doing pop-up circus things and silly games and, all that kind of,

George: Is it similar in, the feeling to promoting your Kickstarter sort of go going around town in a big top [00:44:00] hat and promoting your thing?

Jamie: Yeah. Yeah. , it’s funny, it’s not, there’s not a lot of difference between, and it’s not rocket science, you know, promoting it is, it is very simple, you know, it is, it is that idea of just , getting in front of the eyes , of the people who are your market, uh, the audience that you want to get.

Jamie: And then just, you know, picking whichever route you can get to, , meet those people. And, , make a good, unique selling point. Make a good, , make it a good price. , make sure that it’s quality and that you care about them. And that’s it. You know, customer service and you’re good to go.

Jamie: Amazing.

George: Uh, Jamie, thank you so, so much for your time. Incredibly inspiring. I, I feel like we could and should do this again and go way deeper on some of the topics cuz there’s so much to talk about. But this was absolutely insightful. Uh, so thank you again for your time. If people want to. Follow along or can they late pledge anywhere?

George: Where, where can people buy into Oathsworn right now?

Jamie: You can have a go to game found or go to our Kickstarter page. So if you type in Oathsworn, it’ll cut pop very quickly. Pop up with the Kickstarter page, go to the second Kickstarter, and you click the link on Late Pledge and it’ll take you through to [00:45:00] be able to late place the game and get that.
Jamie: And we, ’em, we’ve got a few a few more, uh, months where the late pleasure will be open. So if you did wanna come and join us, you’re very welcome too. And I’ll get you the game alongside all the other Kickstarter backers who’ve backed it. So you’re in good company. There’s 20,000 good, good men and women who’ve got the game already.