What is it that you do again?

[abbysdad]

I figured I would start off this discussion by telling the members of the community who don't know me a little bit about myself and what I do for the crew.

My name is Chris. I am a happily married man, with three kids. I work as a forensic engineer for a nuclear engineering and services company. When people are worried about things like earthquakes, cracking, crazy what-if scenarios, damaged components, inspections, emergencies, and general structural engineering, I'm one of the guys they call. If you remember Pulp Fiction, that fixer character, Mr. Wolf? That's me, but for nuclear power plants, and I don't have as cool a car. Also, what I do is legal. But very stressful. Which brings me to how I started working with Rob and Clint.

I started lurking around the forums and playing AE-WWII around 2008. My oldest daughter had begun to ask too many questions about the chaos beings I was painting for 40K and I was growing bored with that edition of the game. Tabletop Gaming News did a review of AE-WWII and that was it. I started playing with some friends in town. Plans were made to attend GenCon 2009. I met Matt and Rob and some of the playtesters. I went home happy and never thought anything else would come of it.

Then my son decided to stop sleeping for a month. Or, rather, he decided to stop sleeping in any position other than on my shoulder while I was up-right. My life at work had become extremely stressful. There was too much to do and too little time. My wife was pregnant with our third child. I had devolved into a kind of cube zombie. No fun. No time for hobbies. Not pleasant to be around at home. Not sleeping made things worse. Since my wife was pregnant, it wasn't fair to ask her to stay up with the little truant too. So I sat up with the boy, rocking him to sleep. Laid him to rest on my shoulder and tried to get some sleep too. But I couldn't. I was left thinking about all of the time I was up that I could be doing other things. And that made me angry because the things I was so concerned about doing weren't for my family or myself, but for work. It was bad enough that work was sucking me dry during the day, but now it was on my mind at night too? Was there no escape?

So I started writing. I started thinking and drawing about silly things. I started playing with the classic pulp ideas in the AE-WWII background. It felt great to spend some skull-time considering things for me that were frivolous. My mood picked up dramatically even though I wasn't sleeping and there was too much to do at work. After a month, I had some ideas in a form that was fit to share. I sent it to Rob. He sent it Clint. They asked me to come on board. Two books later, and four more in the pipeline, I'm still here.

[abbysdad]

"Yeah, OK, but what is it that you do again for Darkson Designs?"

Well, let's start with what I DON'T do.

I don't decide which projects we work on. That's Rob's job. Rob is the ultimate reviewer of everything we do. His stamp is on everything that goes out of house and he contributes a lot to the development of all the games we work on. He also works with painters, sculptors and other people in the hobby and game biz to make things happen for the company. He's the boss. I do not want his job

I don't do the money thing either. That's Crystal's job. She decides on budgets, and what we can afford, and works with our Print on Demand publisher. Crystal also contributes to game ideas and brainstorming. She is the editing maestra too, so she gets to crack the whip when it's time to put a book out. She's the super-boss ;D

I'm not the loremaster; that's Clint's job. Clint is head writer and in charge of the care and feeding of the background for all the games. Clint is a research fiend and goes to the ends of eBay and the earth to find material for each game idea. He's pulled ancient novels out of expensive ether to get classic pulp ideas into the game. Clint does a lot of the leveling in development too. Issues like "how weird is too weird" and what level of technology should be in the games are in his domain. If you like the feel of a faction or list, thank Clint. If you like the writing in the games, whether it comes from me or someone else, thank Clint.

What's left to do at a small game company? Plenty! I joke about being a monkey wrench because what tends to happen is that when there is a hole or somethings loose in what we're working on I stick myself in and try to fix it. Whether that's web design, graphics, layout, maps, finding historical photos, writing, game development, rules clarifications, working with play testers, running events, competitive research, building models to analytically test our games, managing a game project or selling minis at a con, I have some hand in what's going on. I get to propose a lot of ideas for what we work on and I've taken on a lot of the responsibility for OTW.

In short, it's a complete departure from my day job and I have a lot of fun getting to flex my creative muscles and play toy soldiers at the same time. It's a good thing that I am not in charge of what projects we work on. If I were, we'd never get anything done. I skip around to so many things that without Rob and Clint to drive the show we'd have thirty really cool ideas started but nothing finished. Working with them is one of the main reasons I can focus to bundle stuff up into a coherent concept so that we can work on it as a team and get it into production with art and minis.

So that's it. A run down on who does what. And why it's so much fun to work on this team.

[abbysdad]

"Alright, what are you working on now?"

A bunch of things. All at the same time of course! ;D

Family and work take up the majority of my time. Exercise and martial arts take up a decent bit too. The sculpting and painting muse has left me so I'm pouring my energy into writing and brainstorming lately.

For Darkson, I have several board game concepts I'm tightening up. The goal for the games is to make a fun beer and pretzels romp with minis that has a minimum of rules to contend with. Crystal's comment that I keep in mind when I'm working on it is "why all the +1's?" This board game engine keeps the feel of the AE rules, especially the drive mechanic, but does it in a simpler way. A single player mechanic is included. I'm trying my hand at digital paintings for one of them too. If it all turns out OK and Rob approves it, you will get to see it soon.

There's also two family games I'm working on. All of us on the Crew are parents and we'd like to make some games that our kids can enjoy someday.

For AE-WWII, I am focused on getting the Japanese out the door ASAP. I'm writing fiction for Rob and Clint to review, incorporating the latest round of edits from our play testers and making sure all three Japanese factions are balanced against the other factions. That includes the factions in the second and third pacific books as well as the British and the other European forces coming out soon. There's some neat maps I get to make for this book too and that's been a blast. I love maps ;D

For Bounty, I'm developing ideas for the next few books so that Rob and Clint can review them. One is fairly far along and you guys might get a chunk of sneak peeks soon. I'm also working on developing the background for the Soul Machine war that was hinted at in the Bounty 2010 GenCon packet. It's a lot of fun and I can't wait to share these ideas with other players.

When I'm not busy with all that, there's work to be done on a non-fiction book about US energy policy and some different ideas I hope to turn into a novel. I don't sleep much. But I have a good time working on all this stuff.