Joseph: [00:00:00] Yeah, I was thinking about all of the AI prompting that's happening right now. And you're like, write this for, some description of a human living in a suburb, blah.
Peter: The AI thing is interesting because like beyond whatever tagging and waiting system that is put into it initially, a lot of these AI systems depend on
Nate: Welcome to the hey good game podcast where we chat with the creators of your favorite games that you secretly play in the cracks of your day
Joseph: Happy day. I'm joseph ruder and i'm here with my co host aaron cardell today. We're excited to speak with peter mohrbacher the creator of angelarium Peter is widely recognized as an artist who specialized in surreal and sublime, especially in the fantasy genre.
Joseph: Known for his work with extremely popular and [00:01:00] long lived card games, Magic the Gathering, he is also popular for his work with crowd control productions and his personal project, Angelarium. Angelarium is Peter's artwork project depicting angels of the Abrahamic religion and concepts from the Jewish mysticism, The Tree of Life, born in 2005.
Joseph: Angelarium is an encyclopedia dedicated to angels with Peter's interpretation.
Peter: Yeah, to be clear, Angelarium was born in 2005. I was born much earlier than that. Very good points.
Joseph: And I might mess that up. We're glad you're here. Thanks for taking us up on this one. Thanks for having me. Yeah, for sure. So we're commonly talking with game designers.
Joseph: We come at it from a lens that's like casual code development games, but as we've been working through the different themes and the blocks, the building blocks of gameplay, we've been delighted to find others and. [00:02:00] Others involved in the process and your work came forward and we're so excited to talk about Illustration and art as it impacts gaming today.
Joseph: But before we get to that, what's your favorite game to play?
Peter: I don't know if I have an all time favorite. I am returning to a much loved recent game Elden Ring right now Turns out that DLC is real good, and I've just been I made a fresh save and been spending all of my free time wandering around the lands between.
Peter: I think me and a lot of other people are doing that. Maybe it feels like a cop out for favorite game because it's, the recency bias is really pushing it up the ranks. But I'm comfortable saying it because I think it's a well recognized game. People think that one's real good. So it's a safe pick.
Joseph: That's awesome.
Joseph: What sticks out most about that one? What draws you back right now?
Peter: The FromSoft world building has always been really good. I've always really liked the flavor of fantasy that they create. There's something about that kind of sense of long history that's always existed in the FromSoft games that has [00:03:00] been really appealing to me.
Peter: And the sort of weaving of the gameplay experience along with the narrative, where the gameplay reflects the, I'd say that whatever the opposite of ludonarrative dissonance is, I know that was a popular term for a while. Ludonarrative symmetry, a thing I like about it. But the Elden Ring world, more so even than the Dark Souls world, to me feels like this larger, realized bit of fantasy history that has, it's like not, it's very comfortable with being grounded and being about human characters, but also has this grand scope that is like not afraid to get really weird and somehow this like incredibly strange world with all these really goofy things in them still manages to feel grounded and believable and it just gives you the freedom to run around and exist in it and just soak it in even when you're not actively engaging with it.
Peter: And, I don't know There's just not a lot out there that I feel like pulls all that off. [00:04:00]
Joseph: Yeah, and in a really immersive intense way
Peter: Yeah You get a sense of the actual like geography of the place because you're like, oh I feel nervous about being here or this is nice and relaxing And so you get these different Senses of places as you move through them because the way that the gameplay weaves In and out of different spaces.
Joseph: Sure. When you were describing that, I don't know why, but I was thinking about playing really bad chess. And it's a really delightful chess game where most of the rules stay the same, but some of them change. Like you might load the board and end up with all of your pawns as Knights. Then you have to figure out how to play.
Joseph: And it sounds like the variables here are coming together, right? Where you can immerse yourself in an environment where a bunch of variables changed enough to be curious?
Peter: I feel like there's not a lot of randomness in this game. It's a very curated experience. It feels like the director and the people involved in it [00:05:00] had a very specific vision and what you get out of the end product is a representation of somebody who really cared about what they were making.
Peter: It doesn't feel like a design by committee, it doesn't feel like something that was intended to appease an audience. It really just feels like there were some people who really wanted to make a thing and they made exactly what they wanted and That kind of a tour ship is something I always look for in games and art.
Peter: And so having a big media product like that, button to me is really special.
Joseph: Yeah, for sure. Have you been a part of some of those kinds of experiences across your career?
Peter: No, it's been quite the opposite. I dumped out of working in, games because I felt there's, there is a constant gravity that pulls companies towards a kind of.
Peter: Corporate culture and I, I never felt like I got [00:06:00] to be a part of something super special like that when I was working in the corporate world, which is why I spent the last 10 years working for myself because Angelarium has been my vehicle for just being able to be an auteur and explore things and care about them and do them because they feel like they're the right choice and not because it's what the audience wants or what will be good for sales.
Peter: Or what my boss thinks is good, it's like I just get to make the thing like it feels like it should be and let the project lead me around rather than all these other sort of false, bad faith expectations for it. And sometimes people get, I think that's what a lot of people work in entertainment or dreaming of, whether it's TV, movies, video games, tabletop games, that's what they want.
Peter: And rarely does anybody ever get to do that because the needs of the marketplace. Seem to always be working against that kind of thing. So when a big corporate entertainment product manages to actually feel like something that's personal, that has a [00:07:00] vision, it's cool. It's special. And I think it makes an impact.
Peter: sometimes it gets to make an impact. you get your metal gears every once in a while, something that feels like it's too weird to not have just been the choice of some guy who was given way too much control over a project. And then, most of the stuff that's out there, it's It's tough to make stuff like that.
Peter: And so I gave up on trying to find a, corporate home that was going to allow me the pleasure of being able to be a part of something that was special in that way. But I've always held out hope that maybe someday in the future, there's some indie game studio or, some producer with way too much control at a company would, want to work with me and make something like that together.
Peter: But in the meantime, I'm very content to just be self employed. And have that kind of creative control. It's been 10 years now. I'm just starting on a new project recently and getting into like the guts of it, the thing. And just at the beginning when it's all like [00:08:00] imaginative and it feels great. Oh, wonderful.
Peter: Even 10 years in, I still get to do it.
Joseph: Not ready to talk? I can talk about it a little bit. It's a bit of an offshoot. let's talk about Angelarium. There's all kinds of fun here, right? And it's just angelarium. shop is what I'm looking at right now. Angelarium.
Peter: net's the main website, and then the store's angelarium.
Peter: shop. And
Joseph: the art is immersive and fantastic. From what you were just talking about, it's the art you want to make. Yeah. Absolutely. What drives the process for you?
Peter: A lot of word association. Process is one of those words that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And I keep wanting to shout it at art students, no, process is important, but I think it's one of those things that's hard to define.
Peter: For me, the process of creating, I like to create based on concepts. rather than doing, top down world building, I like to think about the world. [00:09:00] My association with an idea, whether it's memory or rain or revenge, like whatever abstract concept there is, I always try to draw from the words I associate with that idea and imagery that pops into my mind when I associate with that idea.
Peter: And so I want to create all of my characters and creatures and locations. Always off of a conceptual base, rather than trying to start with an ecosystem and a series of politics and the names of a bunch of different factions and work my way down, top down, I like to let it bubble up, bottom up.
Peter: And with the angels, it was easy because, there's just these long lists of angel names where it's like, Semechiel, Angel of Vengeance. I'd hear that and go, that's a good idea. So I just I do my word association process and think about what I associate with this concept and just let it move intuitively.
Peter: [00:10:00] And that's always produced good results for me. But then when I put the name on the piece at the end, I get this result that's a little bit odd looking and then I put the name on it and so people see the odd image and they go, Oh, what's that? And then there's a name under it says Semechiel, Angel of Vengeance.
Peter: And they go, Oh shit, that's an angel. That's so cool. So the process ends up working in reverse with an audience member, which has been really nice. People feel like they look at my work and they say, Oh, that's what angels really look like. And I'm like,
Joseph: I guess.
Peter: This is what I came to, this is what my brain did, because it's not really built on an expectation of an end result.
Peter: It's an intuitive process that's, built off of my own personal experiences.
Joseph: Yeah, and I have. Angel of the void up, which I think if I was looking through a list of angels, I would have some challenge when you're making, when you're mark making for a void, but yeah, [00:11:00] in context, as you look at them, like sitting next to angel of pride and you're like, Oh yeah, that is a void.
Joseph: There is something going on there.
Peter: Yeah, you could, I think the assumption that a lot of people got to, I've done a lot of teaching, helping students figure this process out, and what happens, often times, is people will ask themselves the exact wrong question, which is what do I think other people think the void looks like?
Peter: If you try to look through it through this sort of speculative lens of what you believe another person thinks, A void is. You're just going to get a black hole. You'll be like, nothing's there. They don't see anything. But if we look inside of ourselves and we ask ourselves like, what memories do I have associated with a void?
Peter: What kind of emotions do I associate with a void? What kinds of Other words come to mind when I think about this. And what kind of memories and associations and emotions do I have associated with those words? [00:12:00] Like, all of a sudden there is this kaleidoscopic unfolding of an idea. And you have, you end up with more material than you can even use in a final piece.
Peter: To me it doesn't feel that hard. I came to the process intuitively early in my career. And I find that, not so many people are working that way. People want their work to be legible to others, and so drawing off of random personal associations is not something that they reach for quickly.
Peter: But, I think across a lot of different types of media, filmmaking, music, art, whatever, I found that there's plenty of other creators that work this way, and there's a general agreement that, if you just put your faith in an audience, and just make what feels right, usually they respond to it.
Aaron: I was talking to a recent guest of ours, a game creator, and he was suggesting this idea of, a lot of people really try to make a game [00:13:00] for the masses or for a lot of people.
Aaron: And in so doing, they You start to lose touch with, who is this for? And in his, you talked about just thinking about what this looks like to you, but to him, he used, he had one friend and he just was like, I want to make this game interesting for this one friend. And he, didn't have a much bigger audience in mind initially, but found some success that way.
Aaron: It sounds like what you're hinting at here is something similar. Like you can't imagine what everybody thinks of, right? It. You gotta own it yourself, right?
Peter: Yeah, imagining a speculative audience or art director, I find is pretty poisonous to the creative process. I think that if you had a audience member in mind, like a person you know and you know what they love, and you know how to make them happy through art or game design or music, then you could create with a [00:14:00] specific person in mind, I think.
Peter: But it's, that speculative general audience that people are always chasing. Or, speculative art director of a person who has refined tastes, whatever that means. you think I should make a good piece of art. Any, I find anytime anybody thinks they want to make good art, they've already poisoned themselves against making anything interesting.
Peter: Because, They're not asking themselves what's good to them. This idea of good art often is a phantom projection of whatever we think other people think is good. And that is, it's just impossible to launder ideas through that process. You can't know what other people think is good. We get such a small sliver of experience through our own life, that I don't really know if anybody's really that good at creating anything other than for themselves.
Joseph: It's the highest yield. Yeah. Or maybe
Peter: a small audience. [00:15:00] Yeah.
Joseph: Yeah. I was thinking about all of the AI prompting that's happening right now, and you're like, write this for, some description of a human living in a suburb, blah.
Peter: Yeah. the AI thing's interesting because like beyond whatever tagging and waiting system that is put into it initially, a lot of these AI systems depend on human feedback to say yes, that is actually a picture of a.
Peter: a girl holding a koala. And so it, it requires a lot of feedback training from people to tell it, this is a good image, this image sucks. But what you get is this soup of aggregate feedback from so you're, developing imagery for the average person, which is for everybody, but it's also for no one.
Peter: And there's ways of making AI images that like look more personal, but most AI imagery [00:16:00] has this look to it. That is soft, plastic y, maybe a little bit too, refined, I think is off putting to a lot of people. And we've grown a sense to how to identify it, now that we've all seen thousands of AI images.
Peter: And, this is part of the problem of it, is that there's not an individual's taste behind it. It is Literally just a thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters, creating all these millions and millions of images and then ranking them in some sort of big Universal aggregate and like it's just not a good system for creating good art.
Joseph: Yeah, it's really interesting to point that out I think a lot of it being photos coming out of AI Does look plastic. You can tell it not to, but given all of the plastic that's out there, like I load, angelarium and I don't feel that it's not there. It's not plastic. [00:17:00] It looks fantastic.
Peter: you can tell that it's like, there's one person behind it, you just take a look at it and through all the different diversity of types of weird characters and color palettes and different stylistic choices throughout all that work. It's clear it's just one person spending a ton of time making a bunch of stuff.
Peter: And so there's a humanity in it that's evident intuitively just by looking at a big pile of JPEGs. I think that's what a lot of people are after. certainly for myself as a consumer of art. Having somebody make something that looks like the House Magic the Gathering style, to me, is boring.
Peter: But when I see somebody who has a style of art that just shows their taste in specific, their own voice, I get more interested. Even if they're not as good technically, I want to see a human being in the work. It's more important to me than the work itself.
Joseph: I was walking around the lake today thinking [00:18:00] about some sketching and drawing that I've been doing.
Joseph: And I don't like showing it because I can see the imperfections. So when you're describing this, you're like, wait, no. The imperfection is the uniqueness in some degree.
Peter: And I got to tell you, as somebody who's been at this whole sharing art on the internet thing for a while, it does not get better.
Peter: I know so many artists who are, their main struggle in their career is the feeling of not wanting to do it. have pieces be judged poorly, and so they hold back a lot, and they, when they do share stuff, it's very anxiety producing for them. It's one of the main problems artists end up dealing with, I feel nowadays is.
Peter: the sort of panopticon like feeling. So it's, very uncomfortable to post art online these days.
Joseph: Yeah. Talk more about the panopticon. Break that one down.
Peter: Oh, yeah. I used that word with my wife the other [00:19:00] day and she, she asked me to define it. it's this prison where you have one central tower looking over a bunch of different prison cells and the prisoners have to behave because they're never sure when they're being watched and when they're not.
Peter: And we've locked ourselves in one of these things where we're expected to share what we do with the world, but we're never sure if anybody's actually paying attention. we're never sure If, because we don't necessarily even get feedback, quality feedback from what we post, Maybe our faults are being quietly tallied somewhere on the internet to be brought up against us at some future date.
Peter: Or maybe we will get away with some incredible heist. Who knows? And this feeling of uncertainty, of like punishment or reward for being an internet presence, it's Sometimes it's a little addicting, but sometimes it's just terrifying. The terror of that is hitting a lot of people these days, I [00:20:00] think. A lot of creators.
Joseph: Yeah, we've gone through the phase of make stuff, post it, right?
Peter: Yeah, but you have to post it. I'm always encouraging artists, please just post. The process of making work, I think, is made better by culminating it with posting. Because. There's this, you have this, uncertainty about whether or not something's going to be received well when it's in progress or when it's done, but you've never shared it.
Peter: And it's so hard to judge your own work. To, hand that process of judgment over to others, to me, feels like an essential part of the completion of a work. Because, it's not healthy also to just constantly be in a cycle of self judgment. And to allow others to like or hate. What's being produced, I feel relieves the creator from having to live in a permanent state of self judgment about what [00:21:00] they make.
Joseph: Ooh. I have a friend that is not a photographer by trade, but when you look at his work, it is so well done. Just executing it at an incredibly high level. And he doesn't put his name on anything, and people think, people go and ask him where he found the photos, and he's ah, I took it. And he's, and they don't believe him.
Joseph: what? How'd you get the water drop on top of the hummingbird in the dark? it was under an umbrella and it was raining. But there's this hesitation for him to call himself a photographer, but he's still doing it. And then sharing it, but not taking credit. It's really an interesting dynamic of self preservation, but a desire to create that is like rooted in humanity in some way that needs to be unlocked.
Peter: Yeah. As I was saying about how corporate products have this tendency to operate in bad faith, there is [00:22:00] a Forces of the market are always pushing us to against our creative urges, our best creative urges, because of the concern for an audience. is this going to be praised? Is this going to make money?
Peter: And building a firewall between the creative impulse and like the need for attention and money on the internet. is important because when you let them come in contact with each other, bad things can happen. And so I think that creating a, there's a lot of different strategies for creating that separation, but if your friend is creating it by using, posting the work anonymously, that's fine.
Peter: it's good if it allows them to feel like they can make the photos they want without concern over how it reflects on them as a person. That's healthy, though. Plenty of implications to it, but.
Joseph: It's so tricky.
Peter: There's definitely a need there to want [00:23:00] to preserve what makes someone want to make a great piece of art in the first place.
Peter: And creating some amount of separation between that and Praise and money. It's there's got to be some strategy in place to make it happen because if you don't it your creative Drive is going to be ruined You're either going to become fully demotivated or you are going to lose your spark and make stuff that people ignore One of the two will happen maybe one and then the other but it's bad So you need to like as somebody who's lived for the last 10 years exclusively off of making their own art and then selling it on the internet?
Peter: this is a problem I have to consider constantly because there's plenty of times where my need for money leaks into the work, makes the work bad, and then I need to then rediscover and recorrect how I can get back to creating for the sake of creating so that I have a product to sell to pay my mortgage.
Peter: And so it's this constant cycle of [00:24:00] failing and then rediscovering success and going back and forth with it over and over again. It's like never a fully solved problem.
Joseph: I wish we could just schedule it like Tuesdays through Fridays are for creating and all the rest of it. You only have Monday then for the business side, right?
Joseph: I've tried that. Yeah.
Peter: I think that's probably the right strategy for somebody. That's not for me though. There's like a lot of strategies for it, I think. And. Because everybody has a different set of needs. every creative, it's one of those things where you hear a lot of people give advice on this or that as far as being a creative online.
Peter: And the real difficulty of it is, that all the advice is right and all of it's wrong, depending on who's receiving it.
Joseph: Kind of like the gameplay.
Aaron: Yeah, I just, I don't know. It sounds like it's just one of those things you gotta constantly battle with. But to your point, you've been doing this for ten years, so it feels like you've Found a way to decouple those and to retain the creativity and, [00:25:00] and to be successful from a business perspective and to support yourself.
Aaron: If you had to try to boil down some advice on that to others, is there, can you think of a primary takeaway or two? I know you're just saying everybody's got a different take on this, but I'm really curious what your take is.
Peter: I didn't get into art because I thought it was a good idea. Yeah.
Peter: I got into art just because I became obsessed with it. And leaning into that selfish, obsessive feeling is natural to me. I just want to make my weird little guys. And at a certain point, I just lose sight of what I'm even going to do with this stuff. If I can point myself in a direction where I can create selfishly, then at some point that desire will take over during my work time and I'll make something good.
Peter: So I found that some artists have a really hard time getting to that space mentally because they're [00:26:00] always worried about what others are going to think about the work. They're wanting to please others, and I found that a lot of artists that do a really good job of having their own voice, they are just very, comfortable with a kind of creative selfishness.
Peter: And it's not like they are broadly selfish people. But there is this, I don't think I have a better word for it, but they just want to please themselves through this repetitive behavior. And it's like kink. There's like a certain repetitive behavior that just makes them very happy for reasons they can't explain.
Peter: They didn't come to a conclusion about it. They just discovered that it was in them. I've seen people just get so weird about their materials, they just love pencils and the way that paper feels, or the way that they feel about their material painting materials or like their digital art setups, and that they just [00:27:00] get totally locked in on it as a tactile experience.
Peter: and they never get sick of it. And so making room for that obsessiveness feels really productive. And then at some point, for me, I need to like make some money out of this stuff. So I've always been good at dealing with abstract systems. So the challenge of trying to figure out a marketing funnel, website building, merchandising, these kinds of like challenges to me look like They're like a series of interlocking pieces that marbles flow through.
Peter: And I like those kinds of games. I like those kinds of challenges. So it's this weird little puzzle thing that I try to solve and the points are actual dollars. And, I'm into that too. I've always been into that kind of problem solving as well. And so it's just another natural obsession of [00:28:00] mine. I used to think that a lot of artists were shortchanging themselves by not being more involved in the business of their work by Merchandising and stuff like that and over time I realized that a lot of my peers Really hate that stuff instead of it being like a fun puzzle game to them.
Peter: It is just like the most painful emotionally painful experience they can imagine and so I feel like I'm in this position that a lot of people want to aim Towards where you get to make whatever you want and you get to make a living off of it But I actually warn people away from this lifestyle quite a bit because I know that most artists hate the problem solving part of Merchandising and marketing and so usually I try to get a sense from people if they are Interested in that side of things and if they have an anti interest in it I try to advise them to never ever do what I do because it'll just make them very sad and [00:29:00] they won't get what they want out of it and it'll be a huge waste of their time.
Aaron: So I hate to interrupt, but if I were to paraphrase a lot of that, on the creative side, first be comfortable in your own skin, build for audience of one year yourself, and don't let the business considerations bleed in on that side. But, what you're also not saying is don't think about business.
Aaron: You're just saying. Don't do that in the midst of the creative process and still be very aware that there, there is a business to run and, you can make a game out of that. Like you can, think about funnel optimization and some of these other things, but that's a different problem to solve at a different time.
Aaron: Once the creative work is done, is that. Oversimplification of a lot of what you just shared.
Peter: I wouldn't say it's overly simple, but yeah, it's just, I don't know if there is a process to being a greedy little art goblin that just wants to like, Make their trinkets [00:30:00] just a certain way. I've run across a lot of people who really want to have their own personal voice in art that have a hard time because they're the kind of person, maybe they're like a child of divorce or something, and they just have lived their whole life trying to always fit into the social needs around them, trying to always reshape themselves to the needs of those around them.
Peter: And that's just how they are naturally existing. And so this idea of Oh, just make what you want. This horrible uphill battle because they have no analog in their own life, but I don't know. I'm pretty autistic. So like for me, the idea of Oh, I'm just going to treat this like a video game and I'm going to try to gain mastery in it for my own pleasure was like, just felt totally normal.
Peter: So I came, I went through learning art in college and Doing a lot of self teaching on the internet and to me It just felt totally normal to just be like trying to always answer the question about what do I want? What would [00:31:00] make me the happiest? What's given give me the most pleasure as a creator? And then I've you know emerged out into the world and got to know a lot of different Diverse people and discovered that is actually not an impulse that everyone shares equally It's an impediment in a lot of cases for people.
Peter: So that is, that's the primary challenge for a lot of people, and then there are some weirdos like me that fall into it so naturally that we don't even realize that it's a challenge for other people until we grow up. But it
Joseph: sounds like you've figured That game out on the, business side, we happen to have a gaming podcast here.
Joseph: So what approaches have you taken to the business side of art that were similar or informed by gaming or gameplay?
Peter: back when social media was good, it was like, you could try to figure out all of the different ways of making a post that would give the greatest amount of Outcomes like subscriber likes, comments, [00:32:00] subscribes.
Peter: And so there was like always this, like trying to post perfectly and, play the numbers on like posting frequency and different types of how you frame content and tagging and descriptions and like creating a brand in that way. It was always very gamified because it, it's got a lot of numbers attached to it.
Peter: These days, I don't feel like I understand the rules of the game anymore. Like it feels It all feels very much more random than it used to. nowadays, I'm honestly feeling like I am losing this game of, marketing and brand building because, the world has changed so much over the last ten years.
Peter: Ten years ago. Yeah, they're like the Instagram and Twitter algorithms were like I felt like they were sensible 20 years ago You know, it felt like deviantART. It was possible to get thousands of people to see a post and care about it
Joseph: Yeah, or even followers you get [00:33:00] 81, 000 accounts that have followed along there
Peter: Yeah, and so like I have some large following counts on some platforms But those were all made during a different era Back when it felt like the inputs and outputs on social media correlated to each other.
Peter: And now we live in this black box world where stuff just goes random and There are still best practices and I know some people who have a better grip on this system but there's something about the gameplay of the internet nowadays that just Alludes me and I am, I just feel like I can't wrap my head around it the way that I used to, but I'm still working on it because I have a strong interest in figuring it out.
Joseph: Yeah. In terms of art that you've made reaching itself into games rather than the game of business, but into games in general, what have been the most fulfilling experiences? I [00:34:00]
Peter: don't know. I'd love to be a villain about this and just shit talk everything that I've ever made for a company. Just because whatever creative fulfillment I've ever gotten from, working on a corporate thing is often undercut by either the brand doing something so horrible to their own reputation that I don't want to brag about it anymore, or they took my work, made literally a billion dollars off of it, and then paid me pennies.
Peter: And it's so demotivating to have, to feel exploited and coerced and taken advantage of, that I don't really have a lot of super positive feelings about my contributions to those I have some creative pride over work I've done for Magic the Gathering, but they have done a very bad job, in my opinion, of, properly compensating the people that work for them, especially during a time [00:35:00] when I think they were at their peak a few years back, record profits, quarter over quarter.
Peter: They were quietly funding all of their parent company, Hasbro, to the tune of billions of dollars a year, and almost none of it found its way back in the hands of people who actually made their games. Whether that was the designers, the writers, or the artists. I didn't feel like I knew people who were working inside the company even, and it wasn't like the employees weren't even getting paid well.
Peter: It was like it just all goes to board members and executives at the top. People who don't actually create things and don't care, who are just a bunch of empty suits, figure out a way of funneling literally billions of dollars out of the pockets of fans who care about these things. And it bums me out. So It's not a popular opinion, because the side of these things that we see are the fan side of things.
Peter: The people, who make it, who are all great people. The people who are those people's bosses, who are also creative people, also great. And to criticize a [00:36:00] product because of what happens from their corporate overlords, it's an arrow that has to first fire through a crowd of really good people. And it's it's tough to aim those shots.
Peter: Precisely enough to hit who you want and not do collateral damage. It stinks. And I find myself constantly at odds with this question. It's part of the, again, part of the reason I like to just work for myself, because creatively fulfilling, self publishing my own books to enormous financial success has been excellent.
Peter: But I haven't done a lot in terms of games yet. I'm currently, the thing I was mentioning earlier is I'm currently working on a tabletop RPG. I got a publisher for it and I'm building a world guide at the moment and I'm absolutely loving the process. It's super fulfilling to think about gameplay and factions and politics and come up with NPCs and like character classes and all this kind of stuff.
Peter: It's a joy and I'm just reveling in it right now. And then at the end of the day, I've got a good relationship with the publisher who is giving me a fair [00:37:00] deal as far as my ability to exploit the work for myself and own my own creations. And so I, I feel really good about it, but I mean at the moment.
Peter: It's all speculative like it's all a work in progress So I can't really claim that as big win yet.
Joseph: Not yet, but it's good to be on top of something Directionally that you're confident has an opportunity to be a big win. Is that project Morningstar?
Peter: Oh, yeah project Morningstar. It's the codename for it right now I've kept thinking about names for the book and I haven't come up with a name that I'm confident in yet So yeah project Morningstar is the angelarium tabletop RPG You The Angellarium books don't create a world that is a good vehicle for adventure.
Peter: I am creating a kind of spin off world that's set in the future of the hundreds of years ahead of the books to create a space to be able to create stories, NPCs, cities, factions, monsters, adventure, the whole [00:38:00] thing. And, my initial experience with it has been extremely positive. And everybody who I've pitched this to and showed concept art to has been giving me like massive thumbs up.
Peter: So I feel and I'm personally very fulfilled by it right now. So I feel like there's an interesting opportunity here because Tabletop, in the last 10 years became mainstream and got big. So going into, I tried a plane run with Tarot and divination, which is a natural fit for my brand. And I discovered that's like a super niche little community.
Peter: That's very noisy. And I wasn't, I'm not personally as into that. so I found myself working again in bad faith and then marketing to this tiny little audience and realizing like, Oh, what am I doing with this? And now I'm pivoting back to gaming, which is a personal love of mine. And, discovering that there's like a lot more opportunities there.
Peter: I'm really looking forward to making a lot of gaming related stuff over the next few [00:39:00] years with the tabletop RPG standalone adventure, plus a bunch of stuff people can integrate in their own homebrew games. And then I've got minis in the works. I'm going to be making some dice DM screens, like the whole.
Peter: Kit you could have a whole angelarium gaming kit if you wanted and I get off on that stuff So I'm looking forward to making it so I can have it for my own personal collection and then see who else in the world Likes it.
Joseph: Yeah, that's fantastic. Just looking at some of the initial sketches my stuff's blocked because I'm not yet a Patreon supporter, but how's that community been growing for you?
Peter: So I've been on patreon longer than almost anybody I got on there right when it launched and I grew it really fast during its initial Rise, and then there was a point several years back a while back where I pivoted away from handling a lot of Handling a lot of stuff myself. So I was doing all of my own printing and shipping myself out of my basement And I needed to off [00:40:00] site all of that in order to make more time for myself to be creative.
Peter: And also, when I went to go buy a house, I didn't want to have to buy a place that also had enough room to run a small business out of. And trying to run everything locally and by myself was just a huge drain on my time and attention. So I ended up having to reformat my Patreon to be a lot more automated and take away, have only digital products and not be able to offer physical stuff through it as much.
Peter: And so it declined pretty sharply. And then I found myself in some creative doldrums or like taking on side things like the tarot that some of my audience was into, some of it was not. And so it's been, the Patreon peaked years ago and has been a bit of a decline. But as of this morning, I've just launched a new initiative to Because I'm working full time on the RPG, I'm trying to make people aware of the fact that if they want to watch me build a world guide from scratch, and they want to be able to see what I'm doing and have feedback, they can come on to the Patreon and see the stuff.
Peter: I'm posting [00:41:00] at least five new concepts every Friday, sometimes Saturday if I'm a little behind. But I've kept a really good pace over the last couple of months with, making a lot of stuff and posting it. And now that I'm on that cycle and I feel confident I can keep it up, I'm promoting the fact that this is, The sort of new era for me right now.
Peter: The initial wave of feedback was like, people saying, hey, don't you just want to do a Kickstarter? And as somebody who's done a lot of Kickstarters, I gotta tell you, the answer is no. You've had some success there, right? Yes, but I had a big failure, which was, I did a Kickstarter for a book that was half illustrated and half written at the time I Kickstarted it.
Peter: I pre sold 250, 000 worth of books. And then it took me five years to fulfill them. The production, the writing and illustrating part of it didn't go the way I expected. Production went bad and then the whole thing ended up culminating during the pandemic. it was a lot of problems, many of which were self inflicted, [00:42:00] that were like learning lessons that I'm never going to repeat my mistakes from.
Peter: And the idea of trying to pre sell a book that I have done zero illustrations and zero official writing for, there's no stats for anything. I don't even have a firm grasp on what gaming system I'm going to use. And and people were like, oh you should pre sell it. I'm like, there's no way. I'll do a Kickstarter when the book is done.
Peter: When the book's ready to sell, when it's ready to send to the printer, I will absolutely do the biggest possible Kickstarter I can. And it will come with, I'll have tiers with minis and dice and DM screens and the whole nine yards. between now and then, I've got a long way to go. And I need to keep making money during that time, so I'm turning to Patreon to see if I can get the Patreon to create a kind of financial floor for me during the production time on this, and try to make the production a transparent process for my Patreon [00:43:00] backers, while just showing, more high level, farther away teases to people who aren't subscribers.
Peter: I've never done it this way. I don't know if it's a good idea. But we're going to find out.
Joseph: And some of it could just be timing, right? I've backed some kickstarters that just purely fail. You're like,
Peter: oh, okay. I haven't done that yet. I was at one point sending out about 1, 000 a week in refunds for backers who had lost faith and wanted their money back.
Peter: And so I had done a good job preserving the funds during that long production time on the Book of Watchers. And I was just handing heaps of money back. To people who had lost faith, who were convinced that it was a big Kickstarter failure. But eventually the book came out. I'm proud of it. I fulfilled everything that I promised in the campaign.
Peter: And I've gotten to do a couple campaigns since that did alright. So I feel like comfortable launching new ones when they're ready. When they're ready.
Joseph: Yeah, [00:44:00] that's great. it's like paperback book day at the end of the month. And I was just chatting with the team. I've got, a little like field guide for a topic I work on separately.
Joseph: They're like, maybe you should write your book. And I was like, in 14 days,
Peter: nah. I don't think so. I think there's a, an occasional classic novel that's been written in less than a month, but yeah, that's not typically how it works. It's not typically how it works.
Joseph: we hope, speediness and joy are mixed happily.
Joseph: And I imagine folks can follow along then via Patreon.
Peter: Yeah. The economy is turning weird right now, and people are pulling back on discretionary spending a lot, so I, I don't blame somebody if they don't want to pony up five bucks a month just to see me post concept art. As a well established indie creator, if somebody wants to watch a, a world [00:45:00] get built from zero, and get turned into a fully published, cool project, they have the ability to do that, because this thing's going to get done.
Peter: I've succeeded at enough of this stuff. I'm confident this book will come out and be good. When it's ready. And I think I could do it because I'm working with a publisher and they're like contracting writers to work with me and stuff, I'm confident I'm going to be able to do this in a timely enough manner.
Peter: So over the next year, two years, I think that people are going to get to watch this thing come together. And I think that there's hopefully some people out there who value that, that enough to come along with me and support the project. Yeah.
Joseph: It's 60 bucks a year. I can follow along.
Peter: Yeah, it's expensive. I don't know what the board
Joseph: game will cost, but it might be cheap.
Peter: Honestly, I need to find a way of making sure that the people that support me during this time are rewarded in terms of, being able to get access to the book or something. Definitely, digital products are easy, physical products are more [00:46:00] tough. But, yeah, the big reward when it comes to Patreon has always been the goodwill of, you want to see a project get made.
Peter: And so you throw five bucks a month at it to make sure that the creator is not going to have to switch gears out of financial needs. That's, I feel like that's always been the primary promise of Patreon, is to like, incentivize creators to be themselves. And so I'm hoping that the, I, the words, Angelarium TTRPG are strong enough that it brings people out to part with their five bucks a month.
Peter: Just to know, just to help guarantee that they're going to see what that looks like someday.
Aaron: I'm honored that you accepted our podcast invitation when perhaps rejected an offer from One of the more famous podcasters in the world.
Peter: Oh, that was a joke.
Aaron: Oh,
Peter: OK. I get it. So the story with that is about, it feels like about once a week these days, I get these [00:47:00] spam emails, these scam emails that say, would you like to be on so and so celebrity's podcast?
Peter: We'll pay you four thousand dollars to be there. And so they're like, oh, I'm a producer on the Joe Rogan podcast. I'll pay you four thousand dollars to be on the Joe Rogan podcast. And I'm just like, that doesn't make. Any sense. number one, I am not, famous enough or interesting enough to be, like, a guest on the show.
Peter: Number two, Joe Rogan's not offering Elon Musk 3, 000 to come on his podcast, it doesn't make any fucking sense from any perspective. And so I get these all the time and now I've just started messing with them. The way the scam works is they say, okay, we're going to have you on a Facebook podcasting platform.
Peter: Which you may know, there is no such thing as a Facebook podcasting platform. And so what they do is they have you log into your business. facebook. com account. And they have you set [00:48:00] up a, because the business suite on Facebook is so confusing, they have you set up a new user called podcast that is granted certain back end permissions.
Peter: And they say, Oh, these are the podcasting permissions you need. Then they have you generate a key that like allows you to authorize this user, like there's a link when you create a new user and you authorize it, it sends an email out to the, to the user's email with a button that's like here, click here to activate this.
Peter: And so they have you email it to yourself and then right click on the activation button, copy the URL and then paste it into your public facing website link. on your Facebook page. So that they can discreetly extract it, approve it, and then they have control over your Facebook ad account. So they can go and spend money to spam, they can spend your credit card, use your credit card to spam [00:49:00] ads on Facebook.
Peter: For whatever bitcoin scam or whatever they're running and so I've recorded myself following through these steps once to see if maybe I'll make A YouTube video someday about exposing how the scam works So I have some guy Some dude with an Indian accent like walking me through the steps and me screen recording myself as I go through it right up until the final step Say, hi YouTube, and then he immediately hangs up on me.
Peter: Ah! And I was getting these pretty regularly, and at one point, the one for, supposedly for the Joe Rogan podcast came up, and I was like, that's hilarious. So I publicly tweeted, that I refute, a screenshot of it, and be like, I refute the Joe Rogan podcast as though like they were ever really inviting me.
Peter: And a lot of people were confused. Some people thought it was funny when I tried to shit post, people don't know me well enough to think, to know what to think. And so a lot of people [00:50:00] get confused about what I'm trying to say or what the joke is or if it's a joke. So it's normal for people to not know.
Peter: What's going on? People, close to me thought it was really funny. but That's great. I also don't know how many people are getting this scam. I had to vet you guys a lot in order to agree to be on here. Because you're using this, the worst part was, you're asking me to be on a platform I've never heard of.
Peter: Whatever this web platform is. Oh, this
Aaron: podcast, yeah.
Peter: Yeah, I am the target of a lot of scams. I get a lot of DMs trying to have me sell people NFTs in a way that's just going to get them to like, Hack my bank account or crypto wallet. I get these podcasting scams all the time that are trying to give people control of my Facebook ad account.
Peter: And so when you're like, oh, it's easy to connect to this podcast. Just click this link to this platform you've never heard of. I'm like, these, this has got to [00:51:00] be the best looking scam I've seen in a long time if these guys aren't real. But I really had to very specifically vet you to make sure that this was a real thing because I get way, way more fake emails.
Peter: And so as an advice to you, whatever you can do to make it so that people don't need to click on links to go to web platform or whatever would be good because it's really dangerous out there right now. I get a lot of infected PDFs, scam links, to Google drives, and like for artists There's a lot of people who claim that they're going to commission artists and that they send over a reference file with a PDF They'd be like, hey, here's the reference for the commission.
Peter: I'm hiring you for and the PDF is got a either a keylogger or allows remote access to the scammer So there's like a lot of artists are like a really big target for online scams these days my InfoSec has had to go [00:52:00] way, way up over the last few years. But I don't know who else has seen, I don't know how pervasive these are across the internet, I'm sure that there's plenty of other people out there that saw, got invites to the Joe Rogan podcast as Well,
Aaron: glad we made it, through your filters. appreciate you, spending some time on that.
Peter: I'm looking forward to not having my Bitcoin wallet drained at the end of this year. We're not doing that.
Peter: I didn't even know there was an option. now that you do, there's probably more money in scanning people's Bitcoin than there is in making games these days, but, who knows?
Joseph: We've enjoyed this. Thanks for sharing your story, your process, some of the content around how to think about art and.
Joseph: Morningstar. I'm excited for you and, I'm eager to follow along.
Peter: Great. I'm eager to keep working on it. This is the most fun I've had making art in a long time.
Aaron: [00:53:00] It's a fantastic start, especially alongside, the advice he gave earlier. Peter, if, you want people to find you online, where should they look?
Peter: And my number one spot is angelarium. net. I try to keep that website current and it's got links to all kinds of other stuff. They got links, there's links to the Patreon, the Discord, social media accounts, everything from there. Plus you can see all the art and writing that I've done for AngelArm over the last 10 years.
Peter: It's all up for free. And, there's also a link on the shop there, which is how I end up paying all my bills. Right on. Thanks
Aaron: for being
Peter: here, Peter. No, thanks for having me.
