We are excited to have Jamie Sabriel Flez joining us this year for the first time in Designer Alley, showing off their game Fight Sequence.
A little about Jamie, written in their own words.
Jamie has been in love with games for their entire life, and has been designing games almost as long. It started as a creative outlet when they were growing up, but their desire to design games for others to play has been a constant in their life. They designed their first hobby games to show to others in 2013, and never stopped. In 2018, they transitioned from a hobby designer to a professional one when they joined the Boston chapter of the Game Maker's Guild. When the pandemic started, Jamie established their game design and self-publishing studio Triple Rainbow Games. Their development in the world of board games didn't stop there - since then, they've been an active member and playtester of many board game Discord servers, became a moderator and event host for Break My Game, have been hired as a Moderator for Protospiel Online, and is now one of the rotating co-hosts of the board game documentary podcast Building the Game!
THREE RANDOM FACTS ABOUT JAMIE:
I've been a performer in various ways my whole life - at single-digit age I was a hip-hop/breakdancer for a few low-key projects, I've done standup comedy and storytelling for about 15 years, and most recently I was an improv performer and coach!
I formed and coach an improv team called NonBAEnary, which is all nonbinary improvisers and their allies doing completely genderless improv!
I once posted a strategy article on the mobile game Ingress [Niantic's first AR game, which became the basis for Pokemon Go] when it was in its early stages that people translated into over a dozen languages; it ended up getting over 10 million views worldwide!
THREE BOARD GAME DESIGN QUESTIONS:
Have you ever let go of a design or idea? Explain what it was and why you let go or why you have not.
Absolutely; so many! My transition from hobby designer to professional designer [which I mark as a 3-year period starting in 2016] was me designing and trying out as many different prototypes as I could, to learn fundamentals and see where my skills and interests took me. The two goals I had were to build as much knowledge as possible, and to not settle on a prototype until I found the one I never, ever wanted to stop playing. That ended up being Fight Sequence, which I've been working on since, and will be released later this year! I've been working on it for almost 4 years, and I always feel like I want to play one more game. That level of commitment is crucial, because if YOU aren't hyped about your design and remain so for it's life cycle, how are you going to get OTHERS hyped about it?
What pushes you to the end of a design, what motivates you to finish?
The first step is finding a design that motivates me as opposed to taxes me. I already touched on feeling passionate about the design itself, but to go into more detail here, I'll talk about specific characters [as Fight Sequence is a character-based game]. There are some characters that have gone through a number of iterations, sometimes alongside core rules changes, sometimes because of them. The key to know when I found the version of the deck I should stick with and stop experimenting with it in a high-level fashion is when I feel it's become a puzzle to solve as opposed to something broken I have to fix. The most important tool in your toolbelt as a game designer is your gut; if you feel like something's not working, that'll be obvious to more than just you. No game is perfect, but your gut will help guide you away from fundamental flaws more often than a lot of designers give it credit for. Find the puzzles to solve, not the problems to fix.
Who are some of your favorite designers and their games?
Paul Dennen of Dire Wolf Digital is one of my favorite designers - he's the person behind Clank!, Eternal: Chronicles of the Throne, and many others. Clank! is my favorite game of all time, for it's amazing blend of theme and mechanics, as well as the mechanics themselves being extraordinarily well-balanced. I have at least 40 plays of Clank! under my belt and still keep trying to get it to the table at game night most weeks! Sen-Foong Lim is another designer I thoroughly enjoy the games, and the company, of. He's behind a lot of very successful IP games, including the Avatar/Legend of Korra TTRPG that was hugely successful on Kickstarter last year. My favorite game of his is a co-design with Jessey Wright based on Legend of Korra's pro-bending arena from the first book. It's a deeply-strategic 2-player game [my favorite!] with satisfying spikes of intensity and a ton of little knobs and switches players can manipulate during the game to adjust how they play and adapt to their opponent. Sen is also just a wonderful human in the board game community, always ready to help new designers get their feet under them with everything from sell sheets to design brainstorms. He inspires me to do whatever I can to help out the community.
THREE QUESTIONS JUST FOR FUN:
What does a perfect gaming session look like for you?
Playing Fight Sequence for 6 hours, where I get to play each character at least once, then we break for pizza and play more Fight Sequence ;) Barring my own games, I'd say it involves me and my three best friends settling in for a day of games where we each bring one of our favorites to the table, and have a game that's new to all of us in the middle somewhere. I suppose there's also food at some point, too?
If you could meet one person (whether they are alive or not), who would it be and why?
Emma Watson! She is the strong, willful, effective feminist icon I wish to be in the world. I would love to pick her brain about how to channel that energy in my own life!
Besides Granite Game Summit (or its companion events) what is your favorite convention and why?
Protospiel Online! Every time it's run it gets better and better, and I love what an amazing job the team does to be an exemplary standard of diversity and inclusion in the industry.
JAMIE WILL BE SHOWING OFF THEIR GAME FIGHT SEQUENCE IN DESIGNER ALLEY AT #G2S2022
Fight Sequence is a reverse action-programming card game about psychics THINKING about fighting! Two players build and resolve sequences together, representing the ebb and flow of the theoretical fight the two psychics are playing through in their minds. Any card can be used as offense or defense, and strategizing how you build each sequence isn't the only key to victory - you'll also use your array of psychic powers to manipulate when, how, or IF actions resolve!
You can find our more about Fight Sequence on triplerainbow.games
