Lyla Fujiwara - Google Jukebox Karaoke

 Welcome to A Role to Play, an RPG community podcast exploring the world of role-playing games.



 This is Episode 8.



 I'm Sara, your host, and today I'm talking with the multi-talented Lila Fujiwara of Jar of Eyes. When I saw the Kickstarter for the Jukebox karaoke game, I knew I had to have it. Maybe you do too. It's one of the top 14 games to check out this year, according to Dicebreaker.com. Lila is also the project lead for the Brandon Sanders and Cosmere RPG. At time of recording, it was known as the Stormlight project. Maybe you've heard of it. The Cosmere RPG set the record for fastest growing RPG Kickstarter ever. Today I talked with Lila about everything from Jukebox to the transition from working for Google to working in games, and how she's sharing her insights and recommendations for people who want to manage projects in the industry.



 Well welcome, Lila. Jar of Eyes.



 Hello. Welcome to A Role to Play. I just want to say that when I saw your game, actually it was a fellow gamer that brought it to my attention and said, "Oh, there's this Jukebox game." I'm like, "Oh, that's so cool." Literally I read up about it and I thought, "Wow, this is what an amazing concept. This just sounds so fun." Then I was talking to another fellow that's in my gaming community and I was telling him about it. He's like, "Oh, there's only 60 minutes left. I better..." He's like, "There, backed."



 It's a really interesting project. I read up a little bit more on some of the things that you were doing.



 I just thought, "Wow, this is really cool." Also, looking at project management in the TTE RPG space, curator transitioning into TTE RPGs, and then you have a whole other life or lives preceding this that I'm sure brings a lot to your experience today.



 I'll just finish with something about throwing lumps of clay and turning them into shapes. That got me. This is so interesting. I looked at all that and said, "Wow, I would have a lot to talk to this person about." Thank you. I actually just came from the pottery studio into this interview. Oh, did you? Did you? I was actively throwing some lumps of clay before this.



 Oh, that's cool. I know I digress, but how long have you been doing pottery and what were you making?



 It's a little bit tricky because the pandemic hit in the middle and that stopped my pottery for a little bit.



 I've been making, I would say, non-perfectionist, so not worrying too much about getting really good at pottery since maybe 2019, I guess. Maybe 2018. Today, I was making a mug and a couple of ramekins, little plates that you could put dipping sauces and stuff in. Oh, nice. Nice. Wow. Do you do that as a side thing to sell or is this just for yourself and your friends? It is literally just for me. I've made a lot of wedding gifts and I was slowly trying to replace all of my mass-produced plates with plates that I've made. Oh, so cool. They're all a little bit smaller than you want for dinner plates because I can't quite throw them large enough yet.



 That sounds so cool. I can totally relate. I would love to have a set of handmade pottery dinner plates and mugs. My brother actually made me this one.



 It's pretty old.



 It's special. There's something about that.



 Sorry, we can get into games, but I will say I think I've latched onto it and it's something that I...it's quite expensive, but I keep doing it because it's one of the few things that's not on a computer that I get to do. I feel like it's just really important for me to have...I mean, we might get into this because I'm turning role-playing games, which is kind of like a hobby, into something that I'm trying to make money off of just to have something completely different, separate that has nothing to do with being able to perform creatively well and is not on a computer. Yeah. Yeah, I'm wondering. Yeah, no, that's great. Just another extension of a creative aspect in life, but I mean, I think that's the common theme that I see when I look at your past experiences, of which there are many.



 So, yeah, why don't we start with the jukebox game? We'll just dive right in there, though I am also curious about the past pieces. Maybe those will come up as we talk about the jukebox game. Cool. I think maybe a good place to start is what made you think of it? How did you come to the idea?



 Yeah, so maybe I'll give my little pitch for what the game is. Sure, yeah. Jukebox is a game where you have Dungeons and Dragons and Call of Cthulhu, where D&D's theme is fantasy and Call of Cthulhu is this Lovecraftian horror. Well, Jukebox's theme is movie and Broadway musicals. I wanted to make a game for musicals. And the actual idea for it came as I was walking into a sort of Korean karaoke bar. It's one of these places where you can rent out of room and sing for a few hours with your friends. And I think I was, I've always kind of wanted to write games. I've been a dungeon master for many years, playing D&D since high school. And so I think there was just a little bit of me that was always noodling on, "Is there something I could make?" And kind of put out there. And I was like, it would be very cool to write a game that was meant to be played in one of these karaoke rooms and that involved karaoke singing and that I loved musicals for forever. So that's sort of what got me on that track.



 Oh, that's really cool. So I did a little bit of reading about this and I saw you, early edition of the game, you sold 11 copies. Can you tell me what that was like when you started to share it with, at least with your friends and they found that it was worth paying for. Like, what was that like? Yeah, I guess so the early version of Jukebox, well, the first time that Ashcan version of Jukebox that I published in 2022 was actually after like two plus years of on and off working on the game. I had, we could get back more into sort of what was going on with the game when I was doing it then. But in 2022, I had just quit my job. I had been working at Google and it was very lovely, but I was quite burnt out. And I had been getting up in the morning and basically being like, well, if I keep doing this, I know the exact direction my life is going to take. I can, you know, like a future or see where I'm going to be in like five years or 10 years. I'm going to be like a mid-level engineer at Google, very comfortable. It will have been okay, but I'm like kind of bored with that story of my life.



 So anyways, I have a lot of also like complicated feelings around privilege and stuff, because obviously, like the fact that I could have accumulated safety net to be able to not be working for, you know, a length of time or not or underemployed is something that factors kind of heavily into the ability to, you know, really go for creative work, or at least it has for me. But regardless, the I had signed up for this course, this online course from the Storytelling Collective, which is a company that produces online courses for a bunch of creative things, but their bread and butter is writing D&D adventure modules and making games. And I had actually failed to complete it twice. And after I quit my job, I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm going to finish this game. And so, you know, after having worked on it for a few years and playtested a bunch of different concepts, I had a more clear vision. And I then got that version of the game written, playtested and laid out in, you know, layout software in a month and put it out.



 Yeah. And so that felt very rewarding. And then I have an experience or I have an experience that I think is like, you know, pretty universal for people who are writing their first games or first anything creative and putting it on the world, which is like, I spent all this time and like, 10 people, you know, viewed it, which on one hand, it's like, that's cool. But on the other hand, like, I just been working at Google and I've had, you know, things that like, hundreds of thousands of people have seen. And I'm like, Oh, I really wish that, you know, this little thing that I, the amount of time and love and energy I put into it versus like how many people were going to see it. There was like a big discrepancy. I will say. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, but you didn't let that stop you. You, you, you, you, you continued to work with the game and you still brought it forward.



 So the reason behind that was it a determination to explore it and see where it could go. Was it a faith that things could still work out? Was it just, you know, I'm not going back to Google, damn it. What drove you?



 Well, I think there's like sort of a whole parallel part of,



 so there's a lot of stuff that specifically happened to me trying to figure out what I was going to do with, you know, the majority of my days and where I wanted to focus my energies that changed between I, when I published that initial Ashcan and getting to, you know, kick-starting the version of Jukebox that's out there right now. And so one of those, so I, okay, we go back to 2022. I just published this, it's like 11 people have bought it, you know, and I was walking around and talking with friends about how hard it was to, you know, make, you know, figure out how any of the like economic stuff would make sense with like making money off of publishing, you know, creative work. And part of me knew that like, I'm very proud of that game that I published. But also, like, I have not written a lot of games. And I knew that there was going to be a period where it's like, I need to learn how to write games, I need to learn how to, you know, write for D&D, like, if it's something that I actually want to do. And something that I knew about myself, because I'm a very extra rooted, like, and social person, was like, the model of, I just, you know, produce a huge amount of stuff, put PDFs out online, and, you know, hope that, you know, people, you know, buy them and probably spend a while getting only 10 people to buy every PDF that I, you know, put out there, like, that will kill all motivation for me. I, you know, like, I find it very hard to work alone. I, you know, need feedback.



 But I thought, I could actually I could do it if I had like, two other people that were also committed to, like, making games and working with me, if I had some, you know, collaborators, and they would need to be people that, like, weren't just doing this as a hobby, but actually did want to, like, you know, publish on a certain cadence of like, you know, make games. And I looked around at my friend group, and I'm like, there's some people that I could pull who would do it as a hobby, but they're not going to do it with the same sort of like, oh, could this be like a big part of my life, or, you know, something that I'm doing as a career. And so that I was like, well, how do I find, you know, these people if they're not just like, in my local, you know, friend group.



 And the long story short from that I ended up running a group project called Encounters in the Radiant Citadel. And we can talk a lot more about how I put that together. But I, the thing that I will say is the, I think the one smart thing that I did, or the one kind of like, clever thing that I did, was that.



 So prior to publishing Jukebox, I had taken this shorter version of a class with the storytelling collective called Write Your First Encounter. And it is a class where the goal is in a month, you publish a 500 or one page encounter, you can fit a little bit more than 500 words out there, but a one page encounter. And then they bundle up all those encounters, and they like sort of publish a little like student, you know, encounter bundle. And the month that I took the class, there was about 80 other people that had taken that class. And I was also in a Discord server, with like everybody who had ever taken a storytelling collective course. So part of me was like, maybe I'll go to this Discord server and try to make some internet friends or whatever. But I was a little bit nervous that the people who are the most opinionated or like active on the Discord server weren't necessarily going to be the people that I like wanted to work with. And I didn't want to like, sort of feel out and negotiate those relationships without seeing their writing. And like, I was like, okay, I'm not going to like do an open call on this Discord server. Yeah, that's fair. But I do have the this 80 page, or it was 240 page documents with one page encounters that everybody wrote. So what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to read through every single one of those 80 page or those one page encounters, those 80 different encounters. And I'm going to do those as writing samples for people who and I'm going to pretend these people like applied to work with me. And out of that, I'm gonna like look at you know, I'm gonna pick the so I did two things. I looked at them all as writing samples without looking about anything about their, you know, biographical details or anything. And that narrowed it down to like 20 or something. And then I went and I started looking at like, people's biographical details. Is this somebody that's actually, you know, trying to make it as a writer in some capacity, or, you know, you know, sort of intuiting why they're, you know, doing this and making sure all I mean, maybe this is a bit too much to say, but like, also, like, I looked to see interactions on the Discord server, and like, whether they had like posted their kind of thing, there was at least one person who had gotten into this like, long, you know, sort of nerd argument about some mechanics thing. And I was like, Okay, this is not a little bit of trying to be like, to the best that I could like, does this seem that like a nice person because I've never met these people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I reached out there was so I have my like, top six picks for people. And I reached out to them. And out of those six folks, five of them said yes. And then I also filled it I did have a few friends that didn't live geographically close to me, but lived, I think all in San Francisco, who I was like, Hey, you want to do this fun, like, you know, month and a half long project with me. And I grabbed them too, and ended up with nine folks I was working with to make a collaborative, like encounter pack. And I guess the end of that, I will say is if anybody's listening to this, and they're like, this is cool. I then went off to do a sort of like how to slash case study of that whole experience and how I organize this group of people. Because for me, I was like, there's a lot of resources out there, if you're a solo creator, who's just trying to write on their own, you know, kind of what I was saying before the storytelling collective that will, you know, teach you how to make your first game kind of thing. But there's not a lot of resources out there that will tell you how to like, foster and find a community and run group projects, which for people, I think is a, you know, the more and more I've been learning is like, for the vast majority of people, that's like a much happier workplace, they learn a lot more because you're, you're meeting other people kind of thing. So I think in general, it's like good for all around if people could kind of be working on group projects and meeting each other and like, learning from, you know, one another, but it's kind of the Wild West out there as far as how you learn to write role playing games or like write for D&D. And so if nobody's asking you to do it, you can be the person that's like organizing a group of people, you can get people together. So yeah, those are really great points. And I have heard of the storytelling collective. And I had a smile when you said that, because it made me wonder, I do have a friend that wrote one of those recently in the last few years. And I was like, I wonder if hers was in the was in the list. Anyway, I got to be one of her play testers. It was kind of exciting. So yeah, it was really it was really fun. So that's a that's a really neat project that they have going. And I also found your it's a sub stack that you have right on project management and leadership for newcomers in the Tt RPG space. Yeah. And right now it's a mix of like, how to articles for encounters, which it's taken me a lot longer to get through that whole thing. But it's basically becoming like a tutorial series right now. And I think I'm like eight to 10 posts into that. And then a bunch of content about jukebox because



 it's partially promotional thing, but also just like the act of physically printing something and fulfilling it and running a Kickstarter. All of that is also kind of like very intimidating and something that I had to learn. So I'm kind of blogging about that as well. I'm glad you mentioned that, because I think that, like writing the game is one thing, and there's a whole skill set with that. Doing something with a group of people, interviewing them, finding your people and then getting them to like, it could be like herding cats, right? Yeah. Finding a way to the way that you all collaborate together on this project. That's a skill. And then the Kickstarter, there's a whole strategy about how to launch a Kickstarter and be successful with it. So these are all big things on their own. Not surprised you're able to do it. I mean, looking at the things that you have done, I don't think that that comes without having some, like a knack, an ability to learn new things, pick things up, and a desire to. And I'm a creative person, so I tend to see creativity and all of these things and a passion of curiosity. How does this work? I need to understand it. I'm going to figure this out. But also, I think to be able to do these things in succession or even together and succeed with them, there also has to be quite a bit of discipline, I would think, and ability to plan and pull those parts together. Yeah. I mean, I guess maybe one of my hot takes is I think that like, there's a lot of things that I learned from Google, but similar to like being in school,



 Google is a very sort of like, there's a whole culture. It's very regimented. You're very much told what to do. I mean, it's a little, it's definitely better than in other workplaces, but I think that the one of the most interesting sort of reflective things for me is when I take away the boss, when I take away, you know, like the person, you know, telling me what my vision and my goals are, you know, whatever. I mean, you know, at Google, literally, we have like performance reviews that tell you, you know, how well you're doing and kind of can steer you. There's people whose whole job it is, is to get you to, you know, figure out what you should be doing or whatever. And so, you know, this whole experience of like, just throwing spaghetti at the wall and trying to make it in the TTRPG space is figuring out, like, yeah, one of the hardest things is like, what is my goal? What should I be spending time doing? You know, I don't even know if I'm necessarily I've got a very eclectic mix of things I'm doing right now. I'm creating a free, you know, stub stacks series of like tutorials, which is not creative in the like, you know, writing games sense. I'm working on, you know, getting jukebox out the door, which at this point also is like herding cats and getting, you know, hiring folks and doing layout and that kind of stuff. One of the most exciting things for me personally, is I recently got hired in part time capacity as the project lead for the Stormlight Archive, which is by far the largest thing that I've done yet. And I don't know, anyways, it's felt a little bit haphazard. And yeah, I'm kind of letting, you know, what seems to be resonating people, you know, what seems to be successful sort of guide me. One thing I just wanted to say from like an earlier comment was, you're talking about these different skill sets, right? And yeah, feeling of publishing jukebox and like 11 people buying it made me realize that the hardest thing about writing games, I will say, although this is not really, really, writing games, but the hardest thing about writing games is getting people to actually play your games. So people ask like, what's the, what's the hardest thing about all of this? And it's like getting people to actually, you know, play the stuff like it is quite hard to create something that like is good. It's hard to get it out the door. Like everybody should be like, very proud of themselves and celebrating themselves that they actually managed to get all the pieces together to put a game out there. But then you have this whole other thing, which is just like, how do you get anybody to listen?



 And that is a very different skill set. And at least for me, I don't write stuff just for myself, but nobody reads. Like I want somebody to actually drive joy out of the stuff that I've made. Absolutely. Yeah. So and I hate promoting myself on Twitter or making ads or like being a salesperson. Yeah. You know, but yeah, so it's been interesting because that was another part of it. When I started out, I was like, I'm gonna have to figure out how to get people to read my stuff. And, you know, and I'm bad at Twitter is sort of like, how do I how do I do this? Yeah. And that kind of goes back into the stuff sub-sack series, because I realized I was really bad or that I'm not, I keep saying bad, but I'm I struggle a lot with like, having like, Twitter is not my format, I guess. Right, right. But I've spent like 10 years, I want to say, maybe six years, I don't know, any large number of years writing technical tutorials and making online videos and like doing long form like content explaining how to do things. And I just read a bunch of tips from people, you know, if you're trying to get into the RPG space of like, you know, where do you invest? And they've been like newsletters as like, okay, I'm going to just start writing long form, like content that I think will help people and see where that takes me instead of worrying about, you know, tweeting every day. And that was part of your past as well, right, like instructional design, where you correct me, please, but like, you did a lot of work, like trying to understand like, how do people learn, how do adults learn? And how can you bring content to an adult so that they can learn better and retain what they learn better than just like, here, read this, read this hefty manual, right? Yeah, I worked at a so I worked at a company called Udacity, which makes online courses that teach people how to program my sort of, I got a computer science degree, but I'd been like T.A. and teaching throughout and then anyways, a lot of my sort of early career was all at this intersection of like teaching and computer programming. And so, but I think what is more universally applicable from that is the message of like how you take past experiences and sort of remold them to make a case for yourself in a completely new environment. Because for me, when I was, you know, trying to figure out like, how, why would anybody hire me to, you know, write a D&D adventure? And I was watching like YouTube videos of people talking about how you make your first content or something. There is this clip that I'm sure I have saved somewhere in a notes document from Celeste Konowich, I hope I'm saying her last name, right? But who's worked on, I'm pretty sure, Rime and the Frostmaiden, like a D&D, you know, official Wizards product, and is now like working at either Hit Print Press or Cold World Press. Anyways, somebody was very successful. And they were basically like, writing D&D adventures is not like writing a novel. It's in fact much closer to writing a technical documentation. And I like saved that because I'm like, when I'm in an interview, or when I'm sending an email with somebody and trying to convince them, like, that's what I'm going to use. Because, you know, I have this, you know, experience from that. So I think, you know, one of the things that I've discovered is like a lot of folks that are doing D&D is a sort of weird hobbyist industry, where a lot of folks end up doing it, because in their free time, they were like writing adventures, and they got like fairly successful. And then at some point, that becomes a larger and larger part of their life until maybe it turns into a career, or they, you know, decide to make the leap into that.



 But it also means that like folks backgrounds in D&D are very varied. And you don't have, like, very few people who I've talked to have been like, I went to school for creative writing, and knew that this is what I was going to do. And like, you know, really, it's like, no, it's sort of, you know, like me, like I was, you know, running, managing medical, you know, clinics, or for me, you know, working as an instructional designer, or like, you get all these sort of weird, you know, kind of backgrounds. And the reason I'm saying this right now is because if anybody's listening and going like, you know, could I do this, that was a very heartening message for me of like, Oh, there isn't actually a bunch of credentials that I've missed out on because I took the wrong classes in college, or I didn't go to some sort of like writing fellowship or whatever, although I'm sure all those things would have helped me. Anyways, it made me feel a little bit more confident being in the space knowing people that were professionally doing it that didn't have that the backgrounds were so varied. And then I just had to sit down and be like, okay, so how does my weird background? Yeah, makes sense for this. Yeah, yeah. But that's exciting. Like, that's like, just figuring out what is what is it that that does excite you? Where do you want to go? Like, what drives you? Who do you want to be? And how do you want to live your life? These are questions, I think that we should all be asking. And I find it exciting when when people make those decisions, like, I'm, I'm not going to go back to Google, I'm going to go and do this. And I don't know how to do this, but I'm going to figure it out. I find that very interesting.



 And it sounds like, like, the key points that you said about having the skills that you can then draw into, into your present and into your future, to develop those, those goals that you have for yourself and the curiosity and the courage to figure those those things out. But I see also like there's, if we look back, there's a there's a certain level of skill that says, yeah, of course you can do that because you have this and the way that you do it will be different than how someone else will do it. They'll do something different. They'll do it a different way. And that's part of what makes us unique. Right. And I think that that's part of like you said something earlier about attention and getting somebody it's not just to make the game, but to get somebody to actually play it. And I think that that's our attention is one of the most valuable things. It's it's difficult to give attention to something and for a period of time. And I think that this is also a space where role playing games are kind of unique and important because they bring people together to bring their attention together and to do something. And you talked about being collaborative as well. And anything you want to add on that? I guess one of the things that I was sort of touching on before is like, because there isn't because like, you know, the storytelling collective is one of the few places that like one can sign up to actually take a class. And then like, besides that, if somebody is like, how do I learn how to do this, there's actually not, you know, read a bunch of articles on there's not a lot of stuff there, you know, which might be true for other kind of like industries. And even then, you know, it's an online course that you take at your own pace, and you really do have to work to like find other, you know, your friend that had you play testing their game, like, yeah, that's you, you know, they already knew you, like, she had to find you or whatever you use. So there's like a lot of extra work, I think that's, you know, because if you go to like a university, okay, you know, so I went to college and got trained, you know, as a computer scientist, and the amount of people that I met there and formalized training that I got, like, but there was a very social element to it, which matters. Yeah. And, but it's kind of like, you have to, you have to figure that all out yourself, because there's not a specific space or place that like, you're told to show up, sort of, there are organically sort of made Twitter communities and Facebook groups and discord is really huge. But yes, not, you know, it's not similar to the way that you like apply for a program, and you know, you'll be in a space with a bunch of people, you kind of have to look out to seek those out and, you know, figure out what's good. And in some cases, like, get the invite to the discord server kind of thing. So, yeah, it's it's interesting. And then the other component to this, which I started to learn, as I frankly got very lucky, is that informal, formal and informal mentorship, and people knowing about you and recommending you some amount of like, being physically at conventions and like talking to creators and them knowing you, you know, from meeting you at a convention, there's a lot of these kind of like, it's networking, I guess, but like, because there aren't as many formalized paths, there's this huge barrier of just like being able to network, I think that is like, tricky. And it also means that like, some people don't have access to being able to pursue this as a career as easily because they are not connected to somebody who can mentor them. They are not in the, you know, convention spaces where somebody might know them or, you know, whatever, like, if you're really, if you don't have the money to attend to these places, if you don't have social connections to, you know, meet folks. And, you know, for the reason I said that I'm lucky is like, some of the early mentorship I got was because for various reasons, I happened to really be a fan of this convention called BigBadCon that I started going into in 2019. And the reason that I went to that convention is that it's a SF convention. And in 2022, after COVID, the next time that I intended it, there just happened to be this big people of color, POC, like networking event thing to try to get more designers of color into, you know, a fairly white, I guess, like role playing game space. And I'm just very lucky that I was thinking about getting into games, like, as that, you know, event was happening. So, and, you know, that got me access to, like, some folks that agreed to venture me in a fairly, like, life changing way. So, yeah, it's interesting. All the people stuff for, for DTRV just is interesting. I find it interesting that, that, that when, when, you know, you start going down a path, and you have that interest, you have that desire and that spark, and then the opportunities start to open. It is, it is like Joseph Campbell said, follow your bliss and doors will open for you or for others. They're only walls. Ed Greenwood talked about, like, just being a creative person having stories that if he has problems in the toilet, won't flush, at least you can write a story about it. Yeah. You also touched on, what is it? Stormlight. The Stormlight Archive. Yeah. Stormlight Archive. Yeah. That's a pretty big thing, isn't it? Yeah, I, I don't know how in depth I can get to. So I think I'll keep a pretty high level for folks that are not of the know, the Stormlight Archive is a fantasy series that is quite popular, written by Brandon Sanderson, who has written numerous other fantasy series. Sanderson raised, I think, the most money ever on Kickstarter, you know, doing a book drop for one of his books. So popular fantasy author. I am lucky enough to be part of the team that is making the Stormlight TTRPG in a project lead capacity of that. That's amazing. And yeah, no, it is, you know, they, it's always, it is intimidating, but sort of like a good sign for you when you feel like you're the dumbest person in the room, I guess. Like I'm not sure if that's going to say that, but when you're in a room and you look around and you're like, oh my gosh, all these people are so passionate and cool and like amazing. Like part of it is like, oh gosh, how did I end up here? But the other part is like, well, there is probably a reason that I'm here. And this is very, this is just very cool that I, that I get to be in this room and I get to, you know, play a part in this. So that's been a absolutely amazing experience. It is, you know, one of the things that I did when I first joined the team was like chat with a bunch of folks on the team. And, you know, across the board, everybody was just like basically having the best time of their life and having this sort of like, you know, pinch me. I can't believe this is sort of perspective on it, you know, just because it is like a series that has like a lot of super fans and stuff attached it. It's very cool to be on the project. Yeah. The thing that struck me is it was a very happy team.



 Like, and, you know, and I think for me, like reflecting on things, I don't want to work, even if it's something that's supposedly a dream job, I don't want to work on a team where everybody is miserable. Like talking to people and have them say that they're legitimately happy and, you know, having the best time of their life, you know, working on this thing is, is such a larger



 you know, what am I trying to say, like, it's it's much more meaningful for me and much more likely that I'm going to like actually take the work than a certain amount of money that folks can offer me and money is also great. Yeah. Yeah. When you talk about like, where, what are you trying to do with your life? And where do you want to be spending those eight to 10 hours, you know, every day? You want to you want to be spending somewhere where people are happy? Yeah, no, absolutely. And if you can, if you can pull all that together, like, that's, that's amazing. Like, that's, that's a life that you want to live, right? Like, that's, that's really cool. It's yeah. And it's, it's, it's interesting to you because it's like you, you've taken the steps and you're challenging yourself. You're going into these places where you don't know what's, what's going to come next. Like when you started this with the jukebox game, you didn't know that you were going to be given this, this offer. So you're at an interesting place where your path is unfolding and there's so much more yet still to come. I think, yeah, I think we'll be hearing more from you and, and it'll be interesting to see what other games you bring to the market and how you bring your own mark to this space and, and help shape it. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm more excited of the story of my life, I will say. Well, that's key. Listen, I, I know that you have a hard stop shortly, so I'm going to end it here. So thank you so much for the interview. And did you have anything, just anything else that you wanted to say before we close this off? Yeah, sure. I'll do my sort of final plug for jukebox, but so jukebox, again, a karaoke, a TTRPG. There are currently pre-orders. So if you search jukebox, a TTRPG Kickstarter, I am sure that you will come up on the Kickstarter page. A few weeks ago, we successfully raised over $16,000 to put the zine out into production. I am currently cat herding a extremely wonderful group of 12, both industry and newer game designers to make play sets for jukebox. And yeah, so we're basically spending the next like four months in a production phase and pre-orders are open. So if you find the Kickstarter, there's a big button at the top to do a pre-order if a Broadway musical inspired karaoke TTRPG sounds like a fun time to you. It is I make very sure to say that it is rules light, you can you play it in one setting, it's about four hours and you can learn it at the table. It doesn't require a fancy karaoke setup. And even if you're sort of karaoke shy, there's a lot of options in there for how you can warm up with, you know, group songs or do interpretive dancing or lip syncing if you if you don't want to send karaoke. So yeah, that's I guess that's my plug for jukebox. The other thing I normally plug is my sub stack, the Jar of Eyes Games Gazette, which has my articles that we talked about about project management in the TTRPG space, and then some behind the scenes stuff with like jukebox production, just go ahead to a jar of eyes games. And you'll be able to find the sub stack there is I actually have the web address jar of eyes calm. So that links out to a lot of this stuff too. Yeah, I did mean to ask you, if I may, why jar of eyes?



 This is sort of like another funny just throwing spaghetti at the wall thing. So



 I'll try to keep this short. I know I ramble a little bit. So right before publishing my first thing, I was getting some sort of advice from somebody who've been in a creative field for a long time. And they were like, just come up with like a company name and slap a logo on it. It makes you seem like much more legitimate if you do that. And this was this was during my like month long, like, oh, gosh, I got to get this thing out the door. Yeah, I went home and I wrote up a bunch of different like potential names for like a little game company or whatever. And then I sent them out to like 30 different friends and asked for them to vote, you know, which one they like the best or whatever. And sort of mysteriously jar of eyes was the winner. So I drew a little logo. And now I'm jar of eyes. Oh, excellent. I like that. I like that. Well, thank you. Thank you very much. I look forward to getting my copy of the care of the jukebox game and playing and actually playing. Thank you. This concludes Episode eight of the role to play podcast. Need a copy of jukebox? Head over to plus one exp.com and type jukebox in the search. You can order digital or physical copies there. For tips on working in the RPG space, head over to jar of eyes dot substack.com and be sure to subscribe to the jar of eyes game Gazette. A role to play is an untamed dandelion production. Thanks for listening. Until next time, make a wish. Dream it true.