Hot Ticket Tuesdays Presents Alex Seagrave and the Bearable Darkness of Awesome

This week's Hot Ticket is my good friend, Alex Seagrave. To give you a little background, Alex is married to Sarah, who was last week's Hot Ticket. I met Alex one day in September of 2007 when I picked up Sarah to go shopping. It was our first friend date--exciting stuff. I walked up to Sarah's apartment, and she introduced me to her husband. At this point in time, at age 24, the thought of having a husband was crazy pants. Besides that, Alex and Sarah didn't look like married people; they looked like, well, people. Anyway, Alex had this huge beard, which also kind of threw me off. I guess I didn't think that people in their twenties had beards or got married. Six years later, I have a husband, who has a beard. Oh, how times change.

For the past few years Alex has been designing a game entitled Attack the Darkness. Alex has designed the rules, artwork, everything, and it has been quite a fascinating process to watch. Something else you should know: Alex is great. Really, he is. And the game is brilliant. He talks about his trials and tribulations and joy with Attack the Darkness below.

Tell me about a craft and/or art project you made or are making.
The project I’m working on is Attack the Darkness, a complete tabletop role-playing game (think Dungeons and Dragons) mixed with a co-operative board game (think Arkham Horror) mixed with a card game (think Magic The Gathering). I’m doing this because I hate free time.

Your character in the game is your deck of cards; your cards are everything that character is and everything they can do.

Designed to be simple in its components yet complex in its combinations, Attack the Darkness allows for the speed and excitement of a collectible trading card game while granting the tactics and intricacies of a table-top RPG. Designed for 1-8 players, it features 7 unique classes and supports play either with or without a GM.

It’s being published by the same company that prints Cards Against Humanity.

AND you can PreOrder it now here: attackthedarkness.net 

What inspired you to make it?
That is a great question and one I don’t have a concrete answer for. I've been working on the game so long, almost 3 years, that it has evolved a lot and I don’t really remember what specific event triggered it. The going theory among those of us who first started trying it out is that a role-playing game involving dice one night went badly: A lot of people rolling terrible numbers causing everyone to have a bad time. I think I said something like, "It would be great if you didn't need dice for this,” and then my brain started buzzing.

Did you come up with the idea yourself, or did you find a pattern and/or template that you used?
This is all my idea, for better or worse. I honestly didn't know where to begin. Being me and more artist than engineer I jumped right into the middle and just started making cards. Once I had a few cards done, I started play testing with a dozen or so friends. Then I made a thousand or so more cards, made changes, started writing down rules and working on some artwork. Before too long I had a rough plan and had found my Terrible Purpose.

What type of medium did you use?
At first pen and paper, taping printer paper to bicycle playing cards. Then print stickers on cards. Eventually the cards were digitally formatted and printed in little online batches of custom cards. I ran a Kickstarter to raise funds to move from high cost one off printing to commercial printing. Now the game contains plastic tokens, poker size playing cards, mini playing cards, jumbo playing cards, cardboard punch outs, plastic trays, rule books, a two part box…A bunch of things I had never designed or developed before.

All the art started as pencil, watercolor and India ink pen on watercolor paper. In the end though, most all the finished work has been done in Photoshop CS6 with a Wacom Intuos Drawing Tablet.

What did you enjoy about making this project?
Heh. Rough timing for this question--I go to final print in the next few days, so everything about the process looks pretty horrific at the moment. I've had a lot of setbacks, mostly because of me not knowing what the hell I was doing and partly due to kidney problems. I thought game design as a neophyte would be the greatest challenge, turns out that was the easy part. Sourcing and formatting and financing a commercial print run were far harder than I anticipated.  I lost a lot of time and money trying to chase cheap/easy options early on in the process.

I have not answered your question yet, have I?

I really enjoyed making the art. I've never thought of myself as much of a 2D artist, so to be putting out drawings and paintings in a professional capacity was pretty scary, but the reaction has been very positive. It was also fun that so many of my close friends have helped me so much and enjoyed playing the game. That is very rewarding.

What did you think about while you were making it?
I actually thought a lot about my childhood, about what things in art, design, and games really excited me. I also thought about what things I was afraid of creatively and how those areas overlapped. Turns out I have a love of a lot of things specifically because of the feeling of “Oh wow I could never make that”--that sense of wonder or the impossibility of some complex creation. So wanting to make a thing I can’t make is an awkward starting place. For example I originally did not want any of my own art to be in the final game, it was all supposed to be concept art but in the end I couldn't afford an artist. So I've gone forward and given it my best shot, moving past those anxieties was a big part of my thought process.

I have a quote hanging above my computer from Nelsen Mandella: “It always seems impossible until it is done.”

Were you doing anything else while you worked on this project? If so, what? (For example, sometimes I watch tv while crocheting.)
Listened to a boat load of Pandora, until I think I heard everything on Pandora. Then podcasts until they were gone. And always the baby monitor at night, white noise punctuated by crying. Rinse. Repeat.

Were you pleased with the finished product? What pleased and/or displeased you about it?
Well I’m not precisely finished yet. But I have cautious optimism about the final project. I think the quantity of the physical components will be good, as I've said the same company prints Cards Against Humanity, which is a professional looking product.

I will be most pleased to have completed it. It’s a thing (making your own game) a lot of people talk about doing and don’t do. I now know why that is, it’s crazy hard and time consuming and expensive to the point of personal risk but I’m incredibly glad I've taken the leap.

I am displeased by a million little things. The financial, intellectual and medical setbacks have forced me to streamline things and accept things as they are more than I would like. I tend to obsess about getting things “more right” and I haven’t had the time for that. I would have liked more time. And money.

Will you make it again?
I will make a game again, several. I’m certain of that. Not…soon, however. I need to get back to earning regular income and other grown up things for a while. I don’t know if I’ll target something of such ambitious scope and complexity for quite some time.

Lastly, what is your favorite color and glue?
I like the color my brain makes when Orange and Blue are next to each other. It’s not a color you can get paint in, but it exists in my head.
I love tacky glue.