Hi, everybody. Welcome back. My name is Matthew Boyle from www.languagecardgames.com, and this is a video series about how to go from having no card game at all to selling to your first customer. This video is going to branch right off the last one where we talked about materials and mindset. In this video, we’re going to talk about backstories.
Something that is very important to me and to a lot of customers is that the cards that you make for your game, that you can feel there’s some interesting stories behind them, some interesting characters and places and some kind of storyline. Even if that’s not explicitly stated in the cards themselves, you can feel that the game is infused with this extra meaning or these extra layers of meaning. So I want to emphasize that when you are starting out and you have those materials and you’re starting to brainstorm and make those mind maps and the creative webs of idea exploration, you also want to consider: what’s going to be the story behind this game? You can actually write out stories and you can write out some character sketches when you’re designing these characters. What’s their personal life story? Kind of like someone would do if they were just writing a novel; you want to explore who the main players are, what their motivations are, and what they’re trying to achieve as the backstory for the cards.
The reason why I think that’s so important to do in the beginning is because when you go to make the card, it’s kind of a condensed or a snapshot moment of those backstories. You have a picture; you have a name, some rule text, and maybe some kind of flavor text. And that could easily be very dry and straightforward if you haven’t thought through the back story of the game. On the other hand, if you’ve taken some time to flesh out these back stories, when you go to make the card, it will be all the more easy for those backstories to kind of seep into the work, even if you’re not consciously aware of it. So that’s my tip in this video about back stories: make sure you’ve taken the time. And to me, that’s really fun. It shouldn’t be a hard thing to do, to take some time to think about what’s the back stories behind the cards.
That’s it for this video. If you want to talk more about back stories, let’s do it in the comments section. But that’s it for now. Again, my name is Matthew Boyle from www.languagecardgames.com, and in the next video, we’re going to talk about the blue oceans philosophy, which I also think is very important, and it’s critical to talk about that in the beginning when we’re talking about back stories and the design of the cards. See you later!
