‘It’s all about that one moment’: inside the game creation industry with Drew Richards
Game and product designer from the Makerversity project talks about behind-the-scenes, destiny and expectations
If Drew Richards could define the process of creating a tabletop game in a few words, they would be: “thirty-three, thirty-three, thirty-three.”
Imagine the following scenario: choosing a game, setting up the pieces on the table and having a good time with friends or family for a few minutes or even hours. Easy, right? When we’re having fun, we don’t even realise all the work that went into making that game. But the game and product designer of the Makerversity project in Somerset House talks about the (often harsh) reality behind the scenes: “It’s like 33% making a good thing, 33% it’s what the companies are looking for and 33% is just luck, timing.”
“You need a bit of mental fortitude, because you pitch a lot of games, to a lot of companies. And a lot of them say no, like, a lot. You have 57 pitches, 57 meetings, and 57 nos. There’s a time you think you can’t do it anymore, but then you pitch for the 58th time and it can be a yes. It was like that for me,” Drew says.
The joy of having a game accepted by a company, however, can be bittersweet. “You can make a game and show it to a publisher, but they might change it quite dramatically,” he says, recalling that this has happened to him a few times. For example, you could create a card game whose characters are animals from Antarctica, but the company might decide to publish it with animals from the African savannah.
There are reasons behind these decisions, of course. Companies are always thinking two or three years ahead. It all works like a big guessing game, where that 33% of luck and good timing is decisive. The company may be about to launch a game with penguins in two months’ time, but they like your idea enough to want to produce it. So they turn penguins into lions. The characters aren’t what you thought originally, but at the end of the day, the concept is still there — and that’s what matters.
Having been in the industry for over five years, Drew advises that you can’t be too precious about your idea: “It doesn’t benefit you to be the stroppy angry artist who’s like ‘no, I want it like this’. Those people just wouldn’t want to work with you ever again. So, I view it like a collaboration. I give them a start point, something they can run with.”
Once the idea has been approved, a whole host of other professionals come into play to bring the idea to life: artists, manufacturers, licensors, publicists and financial managers, to name a few. From the negotiation meetings to the arrival of the game on shop shelves, the whole process can take two to three years.
It’s a tiring process, but certainly a satisfying one. Drew says that his view of the games industry has changed since he entered it as a creator a few years ago, and no longer just as a player — which happened totally by chance.
With a degree from Kingston School of Art and an MA from the Royal College of Art in Product Design, Drew has always looked at games as a way of understanding people and places. One day, he went to a board game club, where he spent a few hours playing and having fun with people he was seeing for the first time. Conversation came and went; he met people who worked in the industry. The next thing he knew, he was working with them.
Now, working as a Lecturer at Ravensbourne and developing games for companies, Drew has a more commercial outlook on the whole thing. Even so, he still thinks games are “a way of empowering people, inspiring communities and understanding the world around us.”
One way or another, what he seeks to provide with his creations is a moment. Or the moment. “For me, it’s all about that one moment at the table, that one little moment of magic, that split second of ‘that’s why I’m here playing this game’. It’s that exciting moment in it,” he explains.
And what is the moment in his own first (and only, so far — spoiler!) game Yes, Yes Yeti (2022)? Everyone chooses a card with the number of squares they want to move on the board, but there is another deck of red or green cards. From this deck, you need to turn over the number of cards corresponding to the number you’ve chosen to see if you are allowed to advance or not. That’s where the tension builds with every second. “If all of them are green, then you’re fine and you can move. But if one of them is red, it’s like: ‘green, fine; green, fine; green, fine; red, f*ck!’” he says.
Yes, Yes Yeti, however, was not the first game created by Drew — nor the first to feature the Yeti. “I went home for Christmas and I was digging through a lot of old stuff. And I found this game that I made at school. I was, like, 7 or 8. It was a card game and you had to run away from a Yeti. It wasn’t good. It was pretty bad. And it’s funny, because I’d forgotten about it, but obviously the yetis were sitting in the background of my head for a long time. I guess it was kind of meant to be.”
Now, leaving the past behind and talking about his expectations for the future, Drew is optimistic. “Thousands of new games come out every year and the designers are getting better and better and better. There are good, interesting games, beyond Monopoly that was made in the 30s. So, I want people to be willing to play more new games. A bit more open mindedness to it’s when we start seeing games in Tesco,” he teases.
