What Weaves We Web

Or, a very short tale of a very long journey

Or, the story of Light Racer.

Inspiration from the grey goo.

I have a prolific gift for developing game ideas - but my skills end there. According to my Cliffton Strengths-Finder, I have strengths in ideation and strategic, and I suck at completion and achievement. This makes for poor bedfellows with actually finishing any of these ideas I have.

My notebook for work, with random board game & podcast concepts and ideas stuffed inside it.

Sometimes, it can feel like absolute chaos. I feel like I lose as many ideas as I write down. Each is a more-or-less full-game concept, not just a word on paper.

This brings me to why we’re here: Light Racer.

Sometimes, I browse game parts on The Game Crafter. I look at game pieces and imagine a mechanic or theme I could make with them. I did this a lot during the COVID-19 pandemic. I had just lost my game store to the pandemic and was missing the community we built there.

Not long into my search, I stumbled upon the ‘Stick, Acrylic, Transparent, Purple.’ It looked more pink to me than purple, and my daughter loves pink, so it caught my attention.

They’re very similar to the fences in Agricola or the roads in Settlers of Catan - so I first thought about building a SciFi version of those games. I played with the concept of laser fences and super mag-highways … hold up, I just had an idea for a game where you could domesticate alien animals … it’s like parts of Agricola on a strange world, but what the animals produce aren’t immediately known to you…

Let me add that to my idea book…

New game ideas aside, let me continue the story of Light Racer. After playing with the transparent stick idea for about a week, I put it on the shelf and moved on to other things to occupy my spare brain cycles.

But the plastic pieces kept gnawing at me.

Then, I watched a YouTube video by the Corridor Crew where they recreated the Tron Light Cycle in One Day.

Well… that was interesting. What would a Tron Light Cycle game look like? Then it dawned on me — the Fences! If I could make the grid on acrylic, I might be able to light the board and fences! It would look so cool!

I had the game designed in an evening, sketched out, and my Catan games had been plundered. Within a day, we were play-testing. Within a week, I had a first preview of graphics done. And within the month, I had friends over for the first time after restrictions began relaxing a little.

While waiting for players to arrive, we play-tested Light Racer.

The first edition of Light Racer was produced around October/November 2020

The game was fun, but the components were too cheap, and the tuck box could never hold all the plastic required (even reducing the four colors to just ten wall pieces). This disheartened me, and Light Racer was filed away in my idea box with Beep! Boop! and The Journey Within.

Then I successfully (barely) Kickstarted Stellar Empire: Skirmish. I had hoped to produce games like Light Racer with the extra funds I raised from my Kickstarter; however, I only had enough left to release the third edition of Art Major and our popular table game, Summits. We also released a second edition of our kid-oriented math learning game, Monster Bash.

So Light Racer went back into the box until we realized Frontiers was a giant pill that we could not swallow (for now). In one of our monthly business meetings, I recommended we pivot to Light Racer, and what if we tied it into the Stellar Empire lore, helping us avoid comparisons to its inspiration, Tron?

But why Male Models (or, why not make it Tron themed)?

It’s simple: licensing is expensive.

When you license something, you borrow that property’s hype and fanbase and then try to convince the fans your contribution to that property is worthy of their fandom and, ultimately … money. But to be allowed to borrow that hype and fanbase, you need to pay the original creators (or at least license holders) a fee for that privilege.

I’m not dogging licensing. I think licensing is essential, and some of my favorite knick-knacks in my office exist because a third party licensed the IP from something I am a fan of and sold me memorabilia that I really like.

The issue for me with Light Racer is that we don’t need to license the IP. One thing we have in abundance at Andak Media is creativity. We pride ourselves in building a creative community of creatives. This has given us a depth of talent to draw our lore, establish our IP, and ultimately make something people will become fans of.

We must build a Stellar Empire fanbase - or, more correctly, an Andak fanbase. At this point, we only use the comparison to Tron as shorthand;
“Light Racer is like that scene in Tron with the sci-fi bikes crashing into the walls.”

People get that and resonate with the iconic scene — even if they aren’t fans of Tron. This gives us the space to build a game with our own IP but borrow from the cultural osmosis of the scene to help build instant comprehension and recognition.

Let me explain… no, there is too much. Let me sum up.

This post has become a complete William Shakespeare-esk aside. I had planned on talking about how we use Trello to help us move the project forward and our process … but instead, you have a history in Light Racer and a tangent on licensing and intellectual property.

In my next post, I will talk about our process more and break down how we go about some of what we do.

Also, keep your eye on this Substack, and I will launch an Andak Games Lab podcast where I give 15-minute bits (or snacks) on what we’re doing, what we’re thinking, and how the campaign is going.