#captain con

Chris Owen: What was the impetus for High Heavens?

Ryan Lesser: Well it was a couple of things actually. I love board games and tabletop games so I was really kind of itching to make a game that would allow people to play facing each other, hanging out together, and more casually. Giving people more opportunity to socialize while they’re playing. A lot of the video games I make are social games, but you still tend to look at the TV. So I just wanted to give it a shot.

I just love playing board games so much that I thought it would be fun and I also really wanted an opportunity to make art. I thought this would be a really fun way for me to get going, get my chops back up to making art all the time. So I did a lot of sculpture and painting.

CO: So how did you end up on a pantheon of gods?

RL: I’m a big fan of mythology and have been since I was a little kid. Greek mythology really grabbed me when I was very young. My parents bought me a book called “D’Aulaires’ Greek Mythology” which I still have. It’s all torn to shreds but looks kind of awesome. That made me sort of fall in love with mythology, and then I expanded it to Egyptian and Norse, and so on. So I just thought it would make a good theme.

I was looking for something that would make an action-based board game. I thought it sort of blended itself perfectly to it, and I wanted to be able to teach people about mythology. I know it’s kind of weird to say, it’s not a reason a lot of people get into making games, but it’s the same way that I wanted people to learn and feel the amazing vibe like playing guitar, like guitar hero. It’s a similar thing; I just love mythology and wanted people to get into it. That’s why the gods that are in the game are so rooted to their mythology based from the book, their powers and abilities. I tried to weave as much mythology into it as possible. I brought the gods in and put stacks on them based on their mythology.

CO: What was it like deciding the stretch goals when you Kickstarted the game?

RL: It was a few years ago, so Kickstarter board games were just blossoming. We didn’t really know what to expect, and I definitely didn’t expect the sort of roller-coaster ride that is Kickstarter. I would say that it was a tough lesson to learn to how to use Kickstarter. There wasn’t a lot of material out there yet.

Now there’s like really good websites about launching Kickstarters. So we were winging it and we had this interesting thing happen, where the minis got funded pretty late in the ark of the Kickstarter. It’s funny, once they got funded our funds started going much quicker. So it was clear that there was a group of people that were really interested in minis, and I think that has been proven over time on Kickstarter. Unfortunately the timing of it was that we crossed the threshold right as our Kickstarter was ending.

This weird thing happened where we had minis funded for the core game, but only cardboard stand-ups funded for the Egyptian set, which was a planned expansion. A lot of our Kickstarter backers had asked us to do a new Kickstarter. So we did the second Kickstarter which included the plastic minis for the Egyptian set. That was done much later because we couldn’t just wrap our heads around doing another Kickstarter so soon, but it was also so successful.

That was just one element of all the craziness that goes into making stretch goals and add-ons and stuff. We knew we wanted to do resins because I’m a huge fan of modeling and resins, and resin minis, and wargames. That was something we added on pretty early, and a lot of people were buying them even before the art was done. People were buying resins of Odin or Heracles. As we started getting the minis in, we would post them to the website. But those are just two elements of the sort of crazy ark of Kickstarter stretch goals. Figuring all that out is total black science.

CO: Was there any inspiration from wargaming at all in the design of the game?

RL: Oh yeah huge. The inspiration for a lot of my ‘user interface designs’ came from things that I don’t like in other games, that I do like. I know it’s a weird sentence but it’s like Warmachine and Warhammer; I love those games. But there’s a lot of record keeping in ways that I think Warmachine has done a great job of improving record keeping for all your minis and stuff. But I wanted to try to do better, or at least do better in my own eyes. So that’s where the ring chips came from. I wanted to instead of having cards on the side representing how well each mini is doing, I moved it to the board, to the actual place circles.

So now if you look at Odin and you see that he only has two red ring chips – health chips, you know he’s in trouble. I don’t have to refer to his card elsewhere to see how he’s doing. And so I’m keeping everyone’s focus on the table. In a weird way I was inspired by games that I like, and things that I thought could be improved. While at the same time, hugely inspired by war games for things that they do great.

Like I love Warmachine, and so I wanted to bring that tactical turn-based mini warfare to a pretty straight-forward simplistic board game. And there’s plenty of board games that do minis battle, I just wanted to do my version of it. I love the heroes, or casters or the one-offs in Warmachine. Sort of like individual superhero characters, more than just like a ton of grunts. So I also wanted to make a game that just had that, inspired by those games so that every god is unique and special. There’s no pawns, like twenty-five grunts that you throw at something.

CO: Now that it’s been out what’s that been like? Kind of like a breath of fresh air or like we have to do more with it?

RL: Kickstarter is a huge weight on your shoulders. You’re interacting directly with a lot of people which is really great in a lot of ways but it’s very demanding. So to finish that and ship to the backers was definitely a relief. But at the same time we’ve now transitioned over to the general public.

We sell stuff on our website and it’s like this whole other knotted web of craziness. Like getting the website up, getting the ecommerce and store running, and fulfilling – and all that stuff is pretty intense. One really fun thing that came out of it – both Kickstarter and selling afterwards, was like we got a space. Before everything was done out of our house, but once we knew that stuff was coming over seas and we knew how big it was, which was basically like a shipping container- we were like ‘Oh man, we need a space for all this stuff’.

So we got a really cool little loft space with a loading dock. We set up our shipping and receiving. It’s actually pretty fun. It’s like a lot of work, but it’s cool to have a space that’s all your own, filled with all of your products.

CO: What’s the next step for Wild Power and High Heavens?

RL: We have a couple of things in production right now. There’s a video game version of High Heavens being made that’s quite a ways through. We have online network gameplay working, we have pass and play working. The two main pantheons are in-game, we just need to put the art in and add the Egyptians to it.

I am also working with another designer who helped me a bit on High Heavens. We’re working with him on a brand new game. It’ll be a one to four player casual game. Sort of like an in-between; should be pretty quick, maybe 15 and 30 minutes per game.

And then with another designer who helped me very casually on the original High Heavens, we’re now starting to work on the fourth pantheon. I’m keeping it under wraps for now. One thing that was pretty awesome is that during Kickstarter we were able to poll our backers on what they would be interested in seeing next. We got a lot of good feedback, and we actually know that at least some of the ones that they are most interested in. An entertaining answer that we weren’t expecting was Elder Gods, was a massive one.

I thought we would be going into Native American, that was one I was really interested in, or maybe Gaelic, Celtic Gods. But I have to say that Elder Gods are pretty interesting. We hope to have many pantheons, it’s just which one do we do next.

For the full interview, you can find the audio file from CaptainCon where Chris Owen got to speak to Ryan Lesser of Wild Power games. There might be a ton of background noise, but the conversation is enlightening to how Kickstarter functions, and how High Heavens became a board game.