Spirit Fire AMA w/ Orange Nebula

0:01 all right we're going live hey everybody welcome back to the board game Spotlight it's Derek here and I'm really really excited for today's topic we're gonna have an ask us anything an AMA with orange nebula talking about Spirit fire so let's bring them on camera hey everybody hey we are on camera you are on camera now how are you we're really good we're really good Derek how are you uh I can't complain um you have a sick child um no so the children are good um it hit me a little bit harder you know kids going to school they're bring back all sorts of germs uh ended up with bronchitis last week but we're good modern medicine is godsend yes well good I'm glad they're doing well I yeah I saw a photo in my late night you know absorption of things and a lot of cuddles sick kids yeah no everybody's good we're excited to have you on the show here so for those of you who are joining us please ask questions you have of the orange nebula team in the comments we'll Splash those up over the last few days we've been taking Community questions and we're going to start with those as uh you might have I already see some comments filtering in here uh you're watching this on Facebook or YouTube thanks for joining us so let's go ahead and start with um first of all let's we're gonna dive in right like if you're watching this video you know why you're here you're excited for Spirit fire you're excited about the team behind uh behind with orange nebula so what was the initial spark like what

1:33 idea ignited Spirit fire how would you jump in I think the very first conversation was what would we do if we were going to do a Dungeon Crawler and and you know Spirit fire isn't really a Dungeon Crawler although it kind of has aspects and then the and then the conversation really rapidly evolved into well what if you just got the game and you open and you receed this box and this box was just you and you got to you got to create your character and you got to like make choices that would differentiate you so like when Tom opened his box he'd have a different experience than when I opened my box and how far could we go with that idea was a very initial concept that is like half the fun where it's like all right you've got your box I've got my box or just I'm alone by myself I've got my box like now I'm going to build this character and to have that be a fulfilling experience before you even consider the proposition of like all right and what are they going to go do like oh here's a world for them to go explore and quests to do and things to do but um yeah the idea that just this box that is you um we literally had a white sample where we just wrote the word you on this box for a while um just to sort of a framing device for us um the very first thing was what would an orange nebula dudgeon crawl look like but obviously where we've landed through the process is I mean there's still a map you know but so it it sounds go back and make a full-on Dungeon Crawl but we can't help ourselves things just become orange

3:04 nebula project we can make a realm for this As a Dungeon Crawl so it sounds like uh the character creation part of this is a game within a game right there's there's a lot of meat within the customization of your character before you even get into the game itself right yeah there there's I would say that there is significantly more than the average game where you make a character um it is not you know so incredibly robust like I don't want to oversell that like I know like sure my wife and I are starting a D and D campaign with some people in the neighborhood and like I have spent a week making my character you know and stacks of papers and books and it's like a full-time job right now to make my D and D character like it's not that involved but it is definitely more than like I pick this dashboard and this card and this and now I'm ready it was inspired by that it was inspired by that that feeling you get when you're when you're rolling up a character you know almost like you wouldn't sometimes in a video game you have talent trees and you spend a lot of time mid maxing and that experience is a lot of fun so we wanted that to really create yeah immersion before like like or or I guess Association in the roleplay character before you even start the journey you feel really close because you've made some decisions at the expense of others make it feel yours like it has your fingerprint and you've done some activities that make it feel personal you know so it's like a little you take these I don't know like for lack of a better comparison you know it's like a

4:36 personality test right you're doing like your little Myers Briggs thing and then it's like okay based on how you've responded to this quiz you know like here's an array of cards and here's an array of cards that seem to match your character's you know motivations and internal whatever's you know draft from those and so these little drafting pools are created um so it's not just like and here's your cards based on what you said you know you but there are um some sort of like sign posts and activities and things that guide you through and and make it feel more interactive so what what we're trying to do with the experience and a lot of it is still being developed um but what we're really trying to capture with the experience is something where you don't sit down and immediately say you know how do I minmax my character to do ultimate points and Achieve ultimate points like these cards combo with this really well like that's fun and is very much part of it but we want there to also be these little moments in the experience where you're thinking okay what is my character's personality and motivation and fears and driving forces and how does that influence which of these cards I should be Min maxing with and so we're trying to make it a little more thoughtful for you when you're playing um I love that and and I like the idea of boil down character custom ation as a big fan of games like Skyrim and balers game and things like that where you get to start

6:06 out with this character that you've created and assigned things to them I I love that so um great answer thanks for answering that one let's go to another question uh while I peruse comments for any other questions we have there but let's get into one of the things like I would say one of the signposts for orange nebula from the very beginning uh has always been the community you put Community First you love uh those who are are backing you you and supporting what you do so the community journey is a big part of this campaign uh and unlocking content so how big of a role did the community play in how you designed the game like you know when you started out building out out this campaign how how did you decide the community's involvement in that well we always want Community involvement in everything that we're doing um you are right to say that Community is very much at the absolute core of our mission statement and everything that we do um you know multiple times a year we have these sort of summits with the team where we um you know align and make sure that we're all pointed in the same direction and focused on the same things and every time you know we revisit just how much the reason that we are doing this is to not only connect with the community but to like Empower a community to be a different sort of space for themselves than a lot of other spaces that grow up

7:38 around like buying pop culture products or engaging in a hobby you know where it's like oh I'm into this video game and the only thing we talk about is this video game like I think that's great you know I love Dark Souls too but like there's sorry I said I Dark Souls as well I realize now I've triggered people but um the point being like if we're all in this community together it means that we have some sort of like shared underpinning as individuals that Drew us to all like this same thing and can we go a little bit deeper and start exposing some of these greater things that we have in common so that the conversations can go past this product that we all were drawn to why were we drawn here and how can we connect more and what can we bring out of ourselves in the process and making things at Orange nebula is something that everyone on this team has chosen to do at the expense of other jobs with more money everyone on this team left a higher paying job to come here and could go back to those jobs probably tomorrow yeah but we don't our because we wanted the experience of bringing something out of ourselves that our regular day-to-day life wasn't facilitating and we want that same exper ER for the community and so we try to have that be something that's part of the whole experience I was just going to say board games bring people together so companies should

9:09 bring people together you know and you can learn from each other and you can Inspire each other and that's just kind of at the core of what we do I love that let's get into some comments here in the in the chat so from uh Tony wants to know how many personal quests can be active at a timeon our favor is are like the we've had conversations about you in the office Tony you have a lot of fans Tony is holding it down in the comments on the kickstarter he is there before any of us can get there constantly with like very accurate and clear information love that Kickstarter that's great this's probably a different Tony that's like what are they talking about um you you can have as many personal quests as you can manage um Al although I think some of them will unlock others uh there's a very open system here that that we've developed in terms of the personal quests personal quests can be performed in any realm so they're not realm specific they're not tied to the stories in a particular environment they're personal to you so you can carry them with you from realm to realm and you can progress them in any realm which is what makes personal quests unique I don't know if that he's he's a bot don't tell Luna Luna would Luna is a jealous Soul um but yeah to to Mark's Point some personal quests will beget more personal quests you complete this part of you know so personal quests um often those are sort of like a quest chain you know

10:40 so it's like I complete this part of it which then lets me access these next two parts of it then which are a choice which will I do and then those kind of go over here and um as far as how many active quests can you have going at a time which is a good question because a lot of the personal quests are are available separ sear as these packs you can buy I'm going to choose to go on this personal Quest right now we one so one of our game design principles is we like to start with letting people do whatever they want and as much as they want um you know we only like to introduce a restriction because a restriction generally speaking is either something that the game has to maintain or you have to remember and if if we can just let people have as much agency as they want and it doesn't break anything then that's a better situation so right now what we're trying is you can load up as many personal quests as you want you could have 10 of them sitting right there that you're working on at the same time it is possible that over the course of development we may find hey that is proving like people are biting off way more than they can chew getting overwhelmed and then not liking the game we may at some point need to you know provide some sort of like recommendation or maybe even a hard rule um but right now it's pretty wide open and no one seem to have a problem with it okay that's great that's good to hear thanks for thanks for those questions and the comments and keep them coming as we continue I yeah we have no short answers sorry no it's good this is all

12:10 good we're we're definitely gonna hit our mark on time no I'm just kidding all right so can you talk about um the different Spirit fire resources and how they affect the different Decks that you so for example how might an a deck play differently than than say the int an intensity deck yeah the there are four aspects of spirit fire each of them has kind of a a personality or a characteristic that that makes it up um how it behaves what its motivations are for example illumination tends to be a little bit more about awareness and mental capacity and having more options whereas intensity is a little bit more about Vigor and resistance and strength and power and you will in the game the is it's so situational that you're going to be wanting to to revise your deck as you go based on what you're doing so you might find that if you face a particular challenge or a quest for example that you can prepare for you might need to stack your deck to get through whatever physical thing you might have or whatever mental challenge you might have or maybe it's maybe it's a negotiation and so you want to pull out all the aggressive cards and go with something a little bit more you know has a little bit more empathy in it for example and so what you're going to find is you're you're going to you're going to weave decks out of these suits sometimes you'll have all four suits in your deck

13:42 sometimes you want to go down to two or three um very rarely would you probably ever want to go down to one I don't think that would be super effective um but I don't know if that answers the question it's a little bit very situational and your deck is going to evolve and grow with you and the pool of cards that you can put in your deck grows and grows and grows right your deck stays the same and so you're just basically going to be using the things that you've learned in the game as opposed to what you've equipped to to to respond to the things that are happening in the world and and to initiate whatever actions you want to take and wherever you want to go okay great answer so let's let's get down to something that you know when I first heard about Spirit fire and some of the initial conversations Mark uh you and I had was the decision that y'all had about no combat so when when did you decide there was going to be no combat was this something from the beginning uh you know or was this something you realize the game needed uh as you started working on it I I would say it was probably about four months into to development we're about two years in and after four months we're like why are we even trying to do another tactical combat game like every other game has is centered around combat you know it's it's rolling dice mitigating stats doing stat checks and if we're trying to tell a story how much more of a journey is there than just you know combat and and there's like 99% of the of the other

15:14 part of the journey like isn't getting its due and so we thought well what if we could just start exploring all the other things that happen or could happen on a journey without you know killing things and taking their loot right um it just it just like what an opportunity it is very jarring because you know it's it's so prevalent in every game um that you know there's boss fights and you got to prepare and you fight there's defense and there's Health points and there's magical items and upgrading those magical items and we we originally I think went in thinking well we're going to do our version of that and I think our version of that is to avoid doing that and go into all of the other things that you could learn to do that make you effective in living and in the world and doing the things that you want to do without being you know engaging in combat yeah one of the things we were finding is it was it just no matter what was going on it kept being you've got combat and the other stuff you know so we wanted to have a whole lot of like okay well you know in like a role playing system you know it's like okay I'm going to try to do whatever pick this lock decrypt this thing decipher this thing have this negotiation and it's just like all right roll your dice what are your stats you succeed or you don't um and so everything that you try in the world is basically that and then there's like this giant elaborate system for combat and and what we were finding is that like we really wanted to focus on like what does it actually feel like to have a negotiation and how can we mechanically represent that and what

16:45 does it really mechanically feel like to try to you know do something mentally taxing like deciphering a code um anyways we also need this huge combat system and and like and it just became like no matter what we were doing if combat was involved in the game there was always just combat and the rest of the stuff and as soon as we took combat away and got to make the whole game about the rest of the stuff it became it just so had its own identity and so it wasn't like this really like high futin bougie thing where we were like you know oh violence like we're going to make this really peaceful game like you know I just referenced Dark Souls I'm playing bloodborne right now like we like those games you know we're not you know like morally opposed to combat in games but this thing found its own identity and told us it wanted to be this other thing and it is much better for it right and kudos to you for listening to that right in that development in the design of games it's it's very hard to find the personality behind the game in and it's even harder to to move in that direction especially when you have preconceived I ideas right you know you said four months into it so uh I'm that's awesome so really excited about that uh question from Facebook by the way if you're watching us on Facebook you can give streamyard permissions to use your Facebook profile so that we know who is saying what so this is from a Facebook user uh that says what was a design

18:17 roadblock you had to overcome so what what did Mark say I hate this and then Tom said well I hate that was there any inner office battles over anything in the game or was everything pretty much you know how How would how did that go where the whole office is just what we call the screaming room where we fight through these these details we have a high level of trust our whole team we all trust each other and love each other and respect each other and which means there's no we don't really barriers to appropriate behavior like we argue over over a lot but in a in a productive and in positive way if that makes sense um yeah yeah sometimes it sometimes it does get it has gotten intense you know at times but quite honestly it's not very often that that's the case we're pretty like-minded everyone here in the office and all although we come with Divergent views um and we don't always agree on things um we're like-hearted more than we're like-minded yeah I would say that's true and there are like innumerous amounts of roadblocks that we've had to overcome and and and Eric who isn't here with us he's he's been a big part of what we're doing too um there is there is a lot of diplomacy and negotiation that happens in design when you have more than one lead designer right so we're all kind of sharing that responsibility and so what you find though in the merging of those minds and viewpoints is that you have a more well-rounded product at the end it just takes longer and rmo kind of up till now

19:50 has been to take years in developing a game and kind of trying to make it clean um and we also like to take big swings and do things things that are different um which comes with a cost as well um yeah one of the educational cost is probably the biggest one that's hitting us right now like this is so different people are having a hard time understanding it and I think a lot of them are frustrated because you know it's different um but I think over the course of time um that's going to really kind of be minimized and what we're going to find is this is just a new way of approaching games we're not trying to say it's groundbreaking or anything like that but we are doing some new things here and um I think that's what's in it for us is we want to do we want to go into new territory and try new things and not just do another version of another game so people say well this is just like this other game I want them to be like I can't compare this to anything else that's our goal right yeah we we one of the things we talk about often is that we realize like hey we had a playable version of this game at eight months and again at 12 months and then at 16 months and at 20 months like we could have made four games in this time like we've had a game that was and was done like why do we keep burning it down and and it's we just have these really high standards and we're not comfortable with like it just doesn't it's not even that we're not comfortable even though I guess that's probably true it's just not it's not fulfilling to us to release something that just yeah you would get it and you would play it and you would say you're right this iteration is 10%

21:22 different and more interesting than those four iterations I see what they did that was different this is really satisfying I'm going to play it five times you know like we want to you know we're spending two or three years on each game and what we're finding is most people have much longer relationships with those games because of it and if you're selling if you're selling your life by the hour doing something that you're passionate about you might as well be proud of it when you're done regardless of what anybody else thinks and and there's a part of me that's just like I don't really care about the conversations to a certain extent because for people who don't understand the game yet because they will eventually but also like this is something that we are proud of and it's it's hard to be proud of things that aren't difficult you know if anybody could do it yeah you know it wouldn't be worth as much right so there is a threshold though sometimes we we over complicate things too and I do want I I feel like this is an appropriate moment to make sure that we acknowledge that at the start of this game at the start of this campaign um the gameplay video that we had planned were not we we didn't have those videos in hand and so we had to launch without gameplay videos and scramble here in the office to make our own videos really quickly um and you know those videos are going up and we did a written thing that goes up but I don't want this conversation about like what we're trying to do with games to like vend diagram over that pain point for people

22:54 to think that like oh they think their game is so unique that they won't even try try to explain it to us we want so desperately for you to understand this game and to see what we're doing and to be brought into the experience the no video at launch was a very disappointing reality um not what we had intended um yeah anyways no I mean that's that's it happens it you know and it does let's get to a uh comment here from uh um Marius I hope I said that correctly I apologize given that Realms seem to provide a lot of quest Discovery and opportunities to complete different personal quests any goals of how many Realms will be released over the course of maybe a year like in the future do you have any kind of ideas or or not yet we we liken this to like Planet boxes and unsettled unsettled has aimar model where every time you play unsettled you go to a different planet and it has its own Stories the Realms in spirit Fire have a lot more game time and a lot more intricate Integrated Systems that are very taxing to design and we have designed this game to be as small and compact as possible so that we can try to keep the cost down for for people and the shipping cost down but the amount of Labor that goes into them is probably at least five times what would go into like a planet for unsettled so and so is the amount of playable content in there oh it's so

24:26 it's going to take a each one has a lot of gameplay one of the things that's sort of unique about the Realms that's different from you know our planets reference for anyone who has that game and gets that but just other games in general is the realm is not like okay here is the next batch of content to consume there certainly is content in it to consume each realm has a whole bunch of quests and things to do and stuff to reveal and things to explore and all that but almost more than that one of the main functioning goals of the Realms is this is just a place that youly existing environment and in it you can work on all your personal quests and other things that you are doing it's just this new region for you to now go and exist in and sure it has its own Quest but that's not its Point its point isn't consume me its point is like hey you know I've been doing all my personal quests over here on the snowy mountain but they just released this crazy like inside the mountain realm like and going to take all my another shiny thing you might want to go look at yeah or or just it's a totally new context to be developing your character in um and the realm you'll never reach a point where you're like well the realm is exhausted it is done like it is still having encounters if you go into the woods and the woods have these crazy Stone frogs that do things to your mind like they are always in there and you can always

25:56 go and interact with them in ways that are going to help you on your personal Quest and growing your character and um NPCs continue to exist towns continue to still be there and offer the things that those towns offer so they just re they are building it's an open world you know so so each just expands this open world that you can continuously go and do stuff in that's awesome so talk to me broad brush brush Strokes here General time frame to play through a character this has been a tough one cuz people play differently and this is primarily a solo game so it's go at your own pace take your own time you know Eric when he sits down he might take 45 minutes to optimize his deck and make it perfect um and then when he does a quest he's going to take 20 minutes to redo his deck and I might be like oh just going to swap these two cards out and it might take me 60 seconds over the course of playing the entire game that way you know I might take 30 hours my mom might take 80 hours right depend depending on and so it's a very very Divergent number it's it's it's really hard to average that because people are so different it being an open world makes it you know it's not like okay the average person will take this long to go through this narrative like I think about like when when breath of the wild or tears of the Kingdom came out you know like the game drops and everyone everyone gets on it and by the end of the week people are like I beat it you know this this this was my experience I really loved it blah blah

27:27 blah it takes me like three years to play those games you know like someone else will beat it in 60 hours you know like how much time to be you know tears of the Kingdom it's like oh 80 hours to do everything whatever I play it for 400 hours you know so like what's the actual answer to how long those games take each each realm is you know the character box itself the the core box with the realm in it the the aw the original realm um is tens of hours of content for sure you know at least 20 um and the game rewards you for doing as much as you can so if your goal is to go in and break the game and go as fast as you can you will do poorly so it it'll affect your endgame and some of the things that contribute to what you pass down to Future characters because this is kind of an ongoing thing that you can just kind of extend this it's not really a legacy but that type of a a thought so two more little thoughts on this one what we're aiming for is for this to be you know it is a substant substantive experience you know it doesn't feel like oh that was over too soon we also are like not into like this game has 400 hours of gameplay like four people on earth have time for that you know like no one's realistically playing all the way through all that they're just buying that Vision but that's not what their life looks like and you know so we're trying to find this Middle Ground between right you know like we

28:57 want it to be potent and meaningful we don't want you to have to grind your life away grinding this game and so I think that's sort of like answer number one is what we're what we're aiming for is substantive but potent number of hours being bigger doesn't mean better in our opinion this is the type of game you get into like the qualitative versus quantitative stuff right like yeah I would just leave this set up like in my basement on a card table and just leave it set up and just go down and continue over the course of a year or more yep and just continue to progress and sometimes I would be down there all weekend and just be like I spent nine hours on Saturday playing this game and sometimes they be like I got 45 minutes I might as well do another one of these little quests type of things it is a big living open world and you can just jump in and jump out the other foundation for this question sometimes is coming from a really different framing which is this game has like a Rog likee element where you play you finish that character that character had their own story arc there's a cap on that Arc um but then the a lot of what you but then you can start a new character okay without getting into all the mumbo jumbo of how that happens but I'm playing I finish that character and then I start a new character and a lot of what happens with that character is influenced by what came before so there is sort of this Rogue like thing the world doesn't reset you know the world continues to move forward character to character but a lot of you know your cards get passed down through a system and the the

30:27 character creation is adjusted and changed and expanded based on some of the things that your previous character did cool by the way um nice but and so I think part of where this question comes from is a lot of people who really like like a Rog likee game um are really interested in the idea of like well how how often is this resetting like is you know and for some of those people the idea that a character is only four hours it would be like a selling point like oh because I like that Loop um right right and this is not that it doesn't have that repetition that a Rog like has this is more of a you're playing a campaign that then leads into another campaign um you're probably more in the you know you know 20 to 50 hours per character and not one to three you know it's so it is more of a so there is that Rog like bit but the more people talk about that the more it gives I think inaccurate perceptions okay let's talk about something you talked about there as far as like uh these characters and so we have a question here from uh snow drona uh are you a human or a being that depends on either your choice or maybe the ram realm's possibility so like who is is the the queen of our Discord ah okay all right so so uh dive into this a little bit like who is it that you're playing in this world we a lot of that a lot of that is up to the to the player right uh okay

31:58 you're not selecting a class and a race and you know predispositions towards you know anything combat or even or even other necessarily stats um you are selecting there's some disciplines that happen there's a purpose to your journey that happens but none of it have has to do with what you look like or even so much like if you want to be a you know a a half dragon like you can like that's something the story you can tell yourself in your head and we're going to include like a journal people can like make whatever they want out of it uh there there is however like the disciplines are aligned with human traits right so like the things that we know as human beings the game is based on that so and the discipline art does feature humans um okay sure there there are no you know we haven't said like these are the like six different species of sentient beings that exist and you you know here they all are pictured in the art elves and dwarves trolls and all that it is predominantly behaving on the assumption that you are human but you could certainly there's a lot of imaginative things happening right doing your own thing to it yeah creativity yeah um all right next question we have uh I like this one so for both for both of you do you have a single favorite moment in the game where something

33:28 happened and you're like that's it like that that was was what we wanted to happen over the course of two years I would say there's probably been at least half a dozen of those um one of them was no combat it was just like let's do it like why are we trying to build two systems when this game is about something different that was one of them or narrow one so that it can accommodate combat um I the the the other one that just strikes me as something that we were reaching for to do differently is is the fact that as you progress sometimes you're prompted to open up these sealed packs that are influenced and informed by the decision either that you just made or the iine that comes from that instead of like and spending your gold you get to open this pack and then like we've got these character packs in the Box too this is another thing that I like about the game these character packs are like your development like I don't want to say how you level up because there's not really levels in the game but how how you're adding to your abilities and each character pack just has a conceptual word on it and some artwork this one might just take curiosity this one might just say you know you know Mesmerize or something like that they're they're a little more consistent than that but then you get to open when you when you're prompted to open a character pack you get to open any one of them that you feel you want to for your character in the moment that you're in and then

35:01 there's something that happens in that moment and if and that choice has benefits and it has detriments mostly benefits because you're learning something but most of learning a lot of learning happens through pain and happens through things that are difficult and so the game kind of is very rewarding in that way I again I don't want to get into spoilers and stuff but that's was one of those aha moments where it was just like this is so different than a typical game where you just draw the top card and that's what happens to you right now I just like that to me is not really compelling I get to make an almost like an emotional mental Choice and then I have choices within that choice so I open up this pack and then like based on my wisdom yeah you complete the guru's quest you help the guru and he's like all right I'm going to teach you something what kind of thing do you want to learn and you've got these four packs and you're like well I'm I feel like curiosity is something I want to develop in myself and then you open that pack and then some more decisions happen and that's just so much more interesting then thank you for completing my quest here's the exact three cards that I teach you you like it just yeah if I had to pick some things there was a moment for me where we switched from because the game the card play in the game has a lot of roots in like collectible card games because we are recovering magic Flesh and Blood we're all yeah recovering addicts of ccg right and we when we when the card play went away from you needed to pay something to play the card um and we had a bunch of

36:31 different systems where it's like all right to play this card I need to either have pay these cards or pay this resource or this must be you know this prerequisite must exist when we went to just play whatever you want all the time you have five cards in your hand you can always play them it doesn't matter you just play cards play cards and like as soon as we switched to that it just felt like the game had like Shrugged shoulders open was like all right now we're now we're alive like and that felt really good um we like being alive and I loved when we when we introduced the milestones in the game which is when you complete quests and you complete encounters some of them will have these special icons on them and as you accumulate these icons they have different effects in the game so you know doing a bunch of quests that favor this group of people may like have a negative effect on how this group of people treat you or you know you might reveal a thing and it's like all right you've just encountered you know these Stone guys you know have you killed any other Stone guys not killed see we go right to combat but like have you interacted with them have you had a negative interaction with other Stone guys and you're like oh yes okay well then they respond to you this way because of you know so like the way that this Milestone track can take all of your behaviors and have them influence everything else that happen happens moving forward just blew the game open as far as how complex the interactions

38:02 between the different Quest and stories some things and you can digress other things based on those decisions so it's really cool awesome so let's talk about kind of like influences so what did you draw on to create the world of spirit fire um do you have any real world influences ancient fictional nonfic you know things like that we we strive really hard to build unique worlds you know so again this it's not filled with dragons and and trolls and Orcs And like kind of the familiar tropes that we have and um we try to to build creatures and experiences in places that are as unique as possible without losing your entire footing for what's familiar in fantasy um yes that's a that's my blanket statement yeah no and that's that's fine that yeah there's that's crazy it's really hard to pinpoint any I mean because every experience that we've ever had as a human informs what we're doing right you know so I think it's yeah I think I I think my answer to this question is that it's less important what we're drawing from and more like the framework with wi in which we're building so you know we do World building as a team in our in our in our conference room on the Whiteboard and um the discussions we have are about myths history things like that but

39:33 not our own it's okay what is the origin myth that the people in this realm believe and how does that different from differ from the other people in the realm what is the history of this world what is so we we look at those sorts of things and establish those sorts of myths and and cultural touchstones and and and broader things that would exist in the realm as how we build and doing that ends up you know so if there's 10 people in the room we're all drawing from our own little our own little well of like well what are the types of myths that can exist um but what we end up coming up with is something that just feels so much deeper than if we were just like started at the end point of okay what's today like you know oh there's a there's a village of people that are all Craftsmen you know like no what is the Hundred Year thousand year history that leads to this Village and why does it feel and behave and why do all these people in it have this relationship with the mountain It's like because they believe it used to be a bear and like okay what does that mean and so then the World building gets to have its own history and life it's about it's about new territory um we want to eliminate the first thing that comes to mind right so like you think fantasy Journey okay I love Lord of the Rings that's great how can we make absolutely sure that nothing in this game is ever like Lord of the Rings that's our conversation nice so before I have I

41:05 have one final question um but before I get to that I want to open the floor to to both of you um this is this whatever you want to talk about whatever you want to say uh the floor is yours so um go ahead I just want to say thank you to everyone you know we we we have a really really really strong community that is they they we are inspired every day and not in a like oh here I am to say that sort of way like like truly legitimately moved by the community every day and I know that there are a lot of new people to the orange nebula space on this campaign who haven't backed any of our games before they haven't been part of any orange nebula experience es before um and we just want to say like from the bottom of our heart welcome thank you for being here and like we know that you have lots of ways you could spend your time and energy and we take that responsibility very seriously and like you are going to get every ounce of our effort always to give you something special yeah we try crazy hard things because this is what we've chosen to do with our life and our career and it inherently makes it difficult to educate and share and like we're you know we're we're taking big

42:35 swings is what we like to say and and and we just appreciate people kind of rolling with the punches as it's hard for us to kind of explain something that's different than than what people may have seen before and also sometimes we just screw up and sometimes we just are not perfect at everything and so we just I love the grace that that we see in our Discord and and the grace that we see in the communities at large and not all of it is graceful don't get me wrong but I see a lot of it and that's really inspiring for us and it makes us want to keep going um because this is not the easiest career path in my opinion very true there are hurdles but but the product um is it's so satisfying um and and again the communities you build around that product are are why we do this right uh it's as as a huge baseball nerd um in you know uh there's a saying for the Love of the Game which I think translates extremely well into our our profession industry For the Love of the Game and that's why we do this um so I I totally get that so my last question is as a backer as somebody who loves orange nebula I want all the things is there going to be an all-in backer option for Spirit fire now maybe not during the campaign because I know how difficult it is to build that into a campaign while it's live but pledge manager like just a boom let me give you all my money for everything absolutely yes and and we've been working on that for a while and

44:08 it's going to be nice and clean and simple and very informative yeah as as simple as we can make it right relatively speaking Yeah no we know that people want that uh I you know we're just trying to Chisel it so that it's you know as informative as it can be and a really good value as well and it's one of those things where we like to be really really flexible with our campaigns you know like so you know what has happened what we've released on this campaign and what the activities have been and what you know those sorts of things are never exactly what we plan going into it we're not just like and on day three this will be released no matter what's happening like we like to be flexible and adjust and meet everyone where they are um so the work on an Allin can't even begin until nearing the end of the campaign so it's definitely a big undertaking but it is one that we are that we are doing and it will be up during the campaign very soon okay okay great that's awesome uh well as someone who's been a fan of your work for a long time all the way dating back to Vindication days uh with unsettled being one of the most unique uh and fun experiences I've ever had playing a board game thank you for that uh I'm very excited to see uh how Spirit fire plays out well thank you big fans of your work too Derek absolutely what a community You' built and Lizzie we know she does most of the work yeah that's very true that absolutely true she would have been here if she if she could have made it we just had some uh last minute

45:38 adjustments that weren't able to to tell her we said hi I will I'll pass I'll pass along the love uh thank you so much everybody for watching we we really genuinely uh appreciate uh the comments and your support uh for not only orange nebula but for the board game Spotlight so uh if you're not famili familiar with us maybe you're watching this on YouTube or you were brought over uh from the orange nebula campaign we have a board game Community called the board game Spotlight we would love for you to join that uh we are striving to be a beacon of light uh in an industry of Darkness so uh yeah so we're doing doing the best we can uh and we also as you know ascribe to the no combat you know the board gamees spotlights and no combat uh zone so thank you very much and uh Mark and Tom thanks for your time today thank you much bye everybody see you thank you