#tabletop deathmatch

There's no better place to find yourself than in college. You can learn new things, do what you want to do, surround yourself with cool, like-minded people, and make crucial steps towards turning your passion into your career. For Skidmore College students Ayla Arthur and Tom Sellers, that meant pursuing their shared passion for game design with their debut game Skiptrace, a Tabletop Deathmatch finalist.

"Our mutual friend introduced us when we were playing Frog Fractions," said Sellers. "But our partnership really began when we went to PAX East last year. We were both just having a blast."

Immersed in the awesomeness of gaming culture, it was here where Arthur convinced Sellers that the two of them should try to get in on the action.

"We were talking with some of the developers at PAX East, and it was really cool to meet a whole bunch of game developers for both tabletop and video games. And I said to Tom wouldn't it be cool if we ended up in these positions one day? Wouldn't it be cool if we made games like this?" said Arthur. "When we got back to campus we started talking about doing a little mini game jam just to ourselves, and that's how we developed the idea for Skiptrace."

While developing Skiptrace's improv bounty hunting gameplay, Arthur and Sellers drew inspiration from video games and tabletop games alike.

"The idea for the bounty hunter came from the fact that I was playing Borderlands 2 at the time. So I had the idea of a vault hunter in my mind and going to do missions," said Arthur. "So we started with a word game where everyone is a bounty hunter. You get a whole bunch of cards akin to Cards Against Humanity and you devise a plan based on what cards you get."

One example Sellers gave was players having to explain why they'd be the best candidate to dance with a "14-year-old douchebag in the land of the Spider Queen." From the beginning, Arthur and Sellers wanted fun stories and interactions like that to be the driving forces of the game.

"I'm very passionate about doing a lot of improv stuff, and that was definitely a major creative influence that I wanted to bring in," said Sellers. "When I played my first campaign of this tabletop game called Fate with a bunch of friends it really reminded me of how fun it can be to tell your own story, to have that constant interaction back and forth and all the fantastic craziness that can happen," However, Sellers wanted to translate this experience into a more approachable form. "It takes a lot of time to play something like Fate. You have to do that over a series of weeks. So it would be cool to break some of that down and tell stories in a much shorter period of time."

As students, Arthur and Sellers were used quickly having to learn new things, but that didn't make the process of learning how to make a game any easier.

"I remember having a couple of meetings where we would both just sit down and not have the wherewithal to continue," said Arthur. "We had to be like maybe we should adjourn for the day and come back when we have our heads clear from school, and from working so much. Then we'll come back to it and do what we can on it. It became difficult to work on the game after the competition."

Sellers agreed. "We've been working on this game pretty hardcore up until August, September, and even going through the last several months," said Sellers. "But we were also back in school for September through December so we couldn't put as much time into the game as we would have liked."

And with Arthur in Baltimore while Sellers is in Seattle, most of the development was done virtually.

"It's really difficult to sit down for several hours at a time on a computer screen just talking about cards, just mulling over a document, just a whole list of 500 cards," said Arthur. "Our attention spans would get split between that and Facebook and Twitter or something, so it was difficult to stay on task sometimes. But we pulled through and we did a lot of good work."

That good work is what earned Skiptrace a spot on Tabletop Deathmatch, that and a sneak preview to some of the judges.

"I went to a screening of the first season of Tabletop Deathmatch in Seattle, and amazingly I ended up getting the chance to talk to Max [Temkin]. Somehow I managed to convince him and the several other judges there to play a rough prototype of our game," said Sellers. "It was a little bit of validation because they seemed to enjoy it. There were definitely some rough edges to smooth out, but overall they seemed pretty pleased."

The validation only continued after going through the competition itself.

"All of those people, those judges, have experience beyond their years in this field, and just speaking with them, and just having those multiple different conversations about game design ended up being really powerful for both of us," said Arthur. "It really helped us to be like holy shit this is a real thing, people can do this. People often get this idea that game design is bullshit, and that you don't necessarily need to put in as much work as other professions. But seeing all the people there doing their very best to create really awesome games, and to create games that really inspire people, that turned my opinion of design on its head."

While they're still incorporating tweaks and finalizing artwork, Sellers said Skiptrace is "pretty darn close" to finished. Next steps for the team include a return to PAX East, where their adventure together started, to show off the latest version of the game followed by a Kickstarter campaign. The relative ease of manufacturing Kickstarter offers tabletop games as opposed to video games partially pushed them in the tabletop direction in the first place. But Arthur, who has experimented with Twine, is also currently working on some video game projects as well.

Eventually school ends, but its teachings can form the foundation of the rest of your life. For Arthur and Sellers' lives as game designers, the same holds true for Skiptrace.