Ep12: Blending Trading Card Games with Augmented Reality
Join Josh on The Business of Gaming podcast as he visits with Andrew from Battle Bound Cards at PAX West in Seattle, WA. This episode discusses the process of blending trading card games with augmented reality games, lessons learned from using Kickstarter and advice for other looking to making their own games.
Auto Generated Transcript:
SPEAKER_00: 0:00
Hey, y'all. Welcome to the Business of Gaming podcast. I'm Josh with Game Haven Guild. And today I'm at PAX West with Ander, the creator of Battle Bound Cards. Ander, can you tell us about how you came up with the idea of this game?
SPEAKER_01: 0:10
When I was younger, I saw a lot of kids, including my brother, playing a lot of Pokemon with like Pokemon cards and stuff like that. But I could never really get into like the dice roll or the coin flip. And that's kind of like how the entire game runs. And so I thought it would just be so much cooler if you could actually see like the Pokemon coming to life and like, you shooting each other, lasering each other, stuff like that. And I think that's where I kind of got the inspiration for just making an augmented reality game where you can just see the things, battling it out, and
SPEAKER_00: 0:39
controlling the things. How'd you get the idea for this one specific? Because this game, your first one here, Battleground Cards Tanks. One of the
SPEAKER_01: 0:47
first Unity tutorials that I did was kind of this two-player tank game. It was local multiplayer on a computer, and the tanks kind of go around. They try to shoot each other, you know, And so I thought it'd be cool to take that game and kind of transform it into this kind of simple AR game where you're trying to go around. Instead of making something complicated like Pokemon, I'm not going to create something like that. So just going off of something that I've kind of done before and using that as the base grab for my game.
SPEAKER_00: 1:19
Was the thought to use the cards as part of the AR piece from the beginning? Or how did you think about integrating this card aspect to using your phone to play this game?
SPEAKER_01: 1:29
Yeah, so... Unity has a built-in AR thing called AR Foundation. And I started experimenting a little bit with that. And the way it works, it's able to do kind of two main things, which is face detection and image detection. And so I kind of started experimenting around with like printing out little pictures of something and just slapping a 3D object on there in Unity. And then eventually I was like, it'd be kind of cool to create this trading card game with that effect of being able to augment an object onto it and start controlling around tanks and stuff like
SPEAKER_00: 2:07
that. So you are a high school student, right? This is a big project for someone to be doing in high school. Talk to me about your support system and what help did you get with this and or having looked back now that this game is made, what would you have maybe wanted more help with when you were building?
SPEAKER_01: 2:26
Yeah, I'd say probably my biggest inspiration and help was my dad. He was kind of there helping me through it all especially because you know I'm a developer at heart and I haven't really done any marketing before but my dad has done a lot of work in that so he kind of helped me out with like my Kickstarter and all the advertising and stuff like that I would say maybe a little bit more help in the graphic design of the cards and also like the 3D objects in Unity himself I created all like the images and stuff with ChachiBT that was the easiest way but actually like having someone being able to make all that I think would give it kind of a cooler effect
SPEAKER_00: 3:05
so let's talk about the process then you got the idea for the game you built the game you talk about you've used unity a lot for that what's that next step and what got you to the Kickstarter points the games made and now you're ready for Kickstarter was there anything kind of between those
SPEAKER_01: 3:21
kind
SPEAKER_00: 3:21
of after
SPEAKER_01: 3:21
I made the game I was I was thinking about doing a Kickstarter to raise money for advertising and for like getting people to to do the graphic design for the 3D objects, like the tanks and all like the turrets and stuff like that. And kind of after I got that idea for doing a Kickstarter, I was like, okay, what can I do to make this cool? And I think the thought was just make as many power-ups as I can. So I made like, I don't know, probably like 50 of them, scrapped like the 10 worst and threw it out there just to see like how it would do with all those power-ups. And after that, I thought, okay, I think it's ready for the Kickstarter. And how did the Kickstarter go? Funny story. The first one was complete failure. I went to, do you know what Open Sauce is? Yeah, so we went to Open Sauce. I made like 100 of these business cards. The link to the Kickstarter was like, hey, if you want to support this, that'd be great if you could donate to the Kickstarter or back the Kickstarter. And I handed out all 100 and got no donations. And I was like, oh, that sucks. And so I started going through websites and stuff. How do you do a good Kickstarter? out that like the real work starts way beforehand you got to get out in front of an audience kind of hype up the community all right the kickstarter is starting soon and um after doing that and after making like hundreds of like calls texts to friends family finally got it there and it's
SPEAKER_00: 4:47
pretty sweet so you're starting now you actually need to print cards right you actually need to make the physical part of the game what are those kind of steps you went through to do that
SPEAKER_01: 4:56
so um we started out uh my dad found the site. I think it was called makeplayingcards.com or something like that. We pushed some beta cards through there and got them back. I found out that it was really, really expensive to do all those. Instead, from then on, we got this ink printer, got a bunch of double-sided glossy pieces of paper, and got all the ink, and then just started mass printing all the cards out, cutting the My dad 3D printed out like these like things that would like use a little templates that would help cut the cards perfectly every time and spent a lot of time doing that.
SPEAKER_00: 5:41
So now you got the physical product. Tell us about getting it out into the world. You're here at PAX. What is what else have you been doing? And then how's this experience kind of coming to a convention been like?
SPEAKER_01: 5:51
Yeah. So I've been to a few conventions like the Washington State Game Convention. I like the Museum of Flight. I was at my school. And I did a lot of advertising like on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Kickstarter, things like that. And I'd say it's really, really fun. I mean, like when I'm presenting it to like a little kid and then seeing the kid's reaction as I scan the battlefield, it's like, whoa. I'm like, yeah, it's pretty dope. And it's just an awesome experience seeing everyone kind of interested in the game and seeing like the game mechanic behind it.
SPEAKER_00: 6:27
Has any of your marketing worked better and or maybe what has really not worked that you thought may work i made a bunch of
SPEAKER_01: 6:34
different like videos like promo types of things and posted on instagram and um we've only generated like a few sales actually from the marketing on social media um i think it's better coming to these conventions and actually like showing the people because it's easy to like get um get the video out in front of people it's a lot harder to actually make them click on the link go and start buying So I think it's better coming to these conventions and actually showing the people, getting them into
SPEAKER_00: 7:05
it. So you've made the game. What regrets do you have around it? What would you have done differently maybe this time and or will do for the next one?
SPEAKER_01: 7:13
It was pretty hard kind of doing all the programming and all that kind of stuff by myself. I think it'll be a lot more fun in the future to get a team together. You know, one person's on like the core mechanics, one person's on the AR, one person's on the graphic design. I think working in a team and I've only worked together in a team once at a high school competition called TSA. But that was really, really fun because I didn't have to do all the work by myself and I got to instead commit and push and pull with other friends that are all
SPEAKER_00: 7:46
working on it. What is the future of this game? Do you think there's other versions of Battleground cards coming out? For this
SPEAKER_01: 7:52
game, I'm working on the marketing right now and all the advertisement and getting it out. But after I'm done with that, I'm planning on releasing a lot more power-ups because it's supposed to be a trading card game. So I'm going to try to get as many boosters out there as possible for people to buy and kind of increase the variety of the competition. I think in the future of Battlebound cards, not the Tank Wars, like creating other different games, I think there's a lot of potential. I think kind of the mechanic of using this frame of reference of a Battlefield card and getting other people to be in the same room we're doing augmented reality with each other. Could be using a lot of stuff, not just Tank Wars, but yeah, there's a lot of trading card games out there, and I bet there's a lot that could be put into augmented reality to give it a cooler effect, so.
SPEAKER_00: 8:43
Well, having gone through this journey now, what would be your one piece of advice to someone looking to maybe start their own hybrid card AR game? I'd say
SPEAKER_01: 8:53
in general, with just making games, just don't give up, because like... I failed a lot of times, like the Kickstarter. There were so many issues that arose, especially with like getting it onto the Play Store and the App Store. But I tried my best to persevere through that. And in the end, I mean, I think a lot of little kids are enjoying it. I think it's a pretty fun game. So yeah, I would say if you're making one on your own, just don't give up on it. Just keep trying and eventually you'll get there. And where can people find this game today? People can find the game on... Battleboundcards.com is where they can kind of see all the updates and get on the email list and buy the cards. And then I'm also doing some advertising on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, things like that. So if they want to see kind of updates on what's happening, kind of power-ups that are coming out, they can look at that too.
SPEAKER_00: 9:47
Andrew, this is an awesome game you've made. I'm looking forward to seeing what else you continue to make. Thank you so much.