My meeting with Alan Bahr, professional game designer

This last week I was supposed to meet with Alan Bahr. Alan Bahr is a professional game designer, meaning that his entire job is literally games. Unlike most every other game designer, who also has a full time job to support themselves, Alan doesn't; games are his full time job.

Anyway, I say was supposed to meet him Wednesday because what happened was during that time that we were supposed to meet he was on an important conference call contacting the manufacturing plant in Hong Kong with the miniature designer trying to work out what type of plastic the miniatures were supposed to be in because the company got it wrong the first time. Alan tried to email me about this, but it got stuck in his outbox so I never got the message. I emailed him after waiting around for about an hour and he got back to me apologizing and wrestling for the next day.

So, Thursday was the day I actually met with him. We met at Chipotle and he bought me lunch, and we talked about his job and I told him how I loved making games. He asked me about money, about if he liked the idea what I had in mind for payment. I had previously thought about this a lot and said that I'd like some sort of precipitance from each sale. I did research and for larger companies the designer gets about 3-4%. He nodded and said that they'd probably pay a little more percentage that that.

He talked about how to get the game on the market if he liked it, since I was a first time designer. There were a couple of different things they've done in the past, one was the game also went through the hands of a more well-known game designer and he makes a few tweaks to it (with the permission of the original designer, Alan was sure to add) and then both of the names would go on the box, so that the famous designer's name on the box would help it sell. After eating I got out my copy of Somerset and showed it to him.

He asked if you played as a certain character, I said no. He said he was a little bias toward Arthurian themed games (which Somerset is). He looked through the rule book and nodded a few times. He then looked through the pieces and asked me questions about them. Like I had little houses which he thought would be used as settlements but I said that those went on the government track but in reality just the little circles would do, like they did for white.

He said there might be a lot there, and for the first printing we could cut the magic book and spells, because he felt that that was the most complex thing in it, but then that could be used for the first expansion. That way it not only got an expansion right off the bat but also the main game could come with less parts, making it cheaper, making it so that more people could buy it.

Alos for a selling point, his company owns Pendragon and he said that if they did buy it they might relabel it under the Pendragon franchise to help it sell more copies. (Kind of like how Lords of Waterdeep is under the Dungeons and Dragons franchise.) I said I was fine with that (because let's be real, as long as it gets published it really doesn't matter to me).

He said that he liked the idea. He asked me what set it apart from any other game out there. I said that it was a worker placement game where you don't juts get your workers back a the end of every round, but you actually have to care about where they're at in relation to the other actions and care about how they move.

He siad he didn't want to take my copy of the game, but he wanted to play it. He said, "I'm definitely interested and I definitely love the idea." What he wants me to do so that he can get a copy of it to play is to upload my files and such and create a game on the game crafter so that he can buy a copy of it so that he can play it. So my next step is putting Somerset together on the Game Crafter and making it avertible to buy, then sending Alan the link so that he can buy it, play it, and (hopefully) want to publish it.

But even in parting he said that if if he liked it and their company decided not to publish it he would recommend it to other game companies (because, you know, he those kinds of connections). I thanked him and he said no problem.

Anyway, that was our meeting. So I'd say that it went super duper well. I can't think of a realistic way it could have gone better. So thanks for all your prayers and thoughts everyone!