James Pianka, from Predicate Group, joins us in this edition of The Game of Crowd Funding Written Interviews. Predicate Group has a Kickstarter project for Roots on Kickstarter going through November 20, 2014. Make sure to check out the Roots Kickstarter Page!

What do you do as a profession? (besides making games, and it can be generally and not specific if that is your preference)

I’m an entertainer and storyteller, which currently means narrative design for the game industry. Predicate is my day-to-day, but I also write card names and flavor text for Magic: the Gathering, as well as lore and promotional assets for Faeria.net – a forthcoming digital TCG.

What makes you a geek?

I’ve been in love with medievalist fantasy since that day as a kid when I saw Ocarina of Time in Nintendo Power. I can still picture that shot of Link, Master Sword in hand with Navi floating over his shoulder. No other aesthetic or period comes close in my heart, which makes a disproportionate quantity of my work about wizards.

Do you have a geek level passion for something that most people might not consider geek related?

I’m pretty into fitness, which might be the least geeky interest I could name.

Outside of gaming, what keeps you going and excited to approach each day?

I’m dating a beautiful girl who challenges and inspires me to be better, to reach new heights, to lay the skulls of enemies at her feet. It’s wild how motivating love can be.

The Internet crashes and never recovers, are you lost or do you thrive?

It would be like getting flushed from my Matrix goo-tank: I’d be shivering and naked, treading water in some forgotten sewer. I’ve put so much work into my online brand and following that the disconnection might cripple my identity.

Besides your own creations, what are the last 5 games you played?

SolForge, Magic: the Gathering, The Banner Saga, Telltale’s The Walking Dead, and a bunch of board games. There’s a lot I need to play.

What’s your favorite genre of game, and why?

I should say TCGs, since that’s almost exclusively what’s held my attention for the last three or so years, but I love MMOs for their worldbuilding, narrative depth, and character progression – I just haven’t let myself play one in a while to protect my time. The day only has so many hours, and I want something to show for each of them.

What’s your least favorite genre of game, and why?

Car-porn racing games like Forza and Gran Turismo are completely meaningless to me, but I also hate cars. I’ve also never been into sports games, but I played some rounds of NBA2K this summer that began to change my mind.

Do you have a moment that you can point to where you decided to move from casual game player to wanting to be in the game industry from a business perspective?

In college, while studying abroad in India and Nepal, I reconnected with the art-making that drove my childhood, abandoning the detour I had taken into more analytic, scientific interests. I knew I wanted to “make worlds,” but I also knew didn’t want to do so alone – that I was too social to hide in my attic with a typewriter. As a long-time game player and fantasy geek, the game industry seemed like the perfect place to surrounded myself with talent, to push storytelling boundaries alongside painters, musicians, programmers, actors, and designers. As that industry increasingly elevates narrative, I feel more and more as if I stand atop a wave. I’m only getting started, but I haven’t looked back once.

What’s a typical game design process for you?

Get inspired, produce a prototype, confront why it sucks, and reiterate until it no longer sucks.

Where does playtesting come in to your overall process?

Playtesting begins almost immediately – as soon as there’s something functional to playtest. Theory is irrelevant until it performs.

Do you have a litmus test for yourself on when a game is “done?”

Is anyone ever truly satisfied with their work? Outside constraints demand we call it done, and there’s always something I wish I could change. A litmus test for completion sounds divine.

How does collaborating on a project differ for you from solo design?

Teammates will both compromise and augment the original vision. Two tricks to making sure it’s more of the latter are to pick good teammates (assuming you have that power) and to be judicious with what feedback you accept. Not every reaction is helpful, and not every idea good. That said, almost every project of “mine” that I’ve developed with a team came out unrecognizably better than what I would have produced alone. Roots arrived at Predicate without a win condition – a problem I’d been trying to resolve for over a year. It took months of playtesting as a group to figure it out.

Give us your elevator pitch for Roots. Ready? Go!

Roots is a casual, narrative-driven tabletop game of inventing language. Players combine Prefix and Suffix cards to create new words, competing for the best connection to a Subject card. Gameplay functions like Apples to Apples meets Scrabble meets a philosophy class, appealing especially to argumentative creatives and teachers/students of the English language.

What was the driving factor that inspired you to create this game?

I wanted to create a discursive, generative system for storytelling that was also a concrete competition. Too often “storytelling” games are these loose, arbitrary half-games that feel kind of pointless, just durdling around under the specter of boredom. I wanted to make a game that empowered creativity without undermining the experience of playing a game.

What went in to your decision to go with a Kickstarter campaign versus seeking publishing?

Predicate as a team contains all the skills needed to design, develop, market, and ship this product, so why would we admit a third party? We’re looking into distribution options for future print runs, but for the moment, crowdfunding lets us bypass banking systems and begin at the consumer, funding the game’s production via its sales. It’s like commercial time travel, wherein the goal enables itself.

In the spectrum of “I love designing and don’t want to handle publishing at all” to “I love the publishing side and want to do that full time” where do you fit in?

I actually enjoy the PR/press coordination side of things, mainly because I thrive on social interaction, but I’d rather peel off my cuticles than handle manufacturing. Praise be to my more technical cohorts.

What are a couple of things you would tell someone on the fence about your project that would make them say, “I HAVE to back this right now!”

If you like flexing your creative muscles, Roots is your arena. It’ll deepen your awareness of the language we speak, and inspire cool ideas. It’s also super cheap and looks sexy as hell.

Do you have any lessons about the Kickstarter process that you can share with others that might be looking at launching their first project?

Reach out to publications and press venues on which you’d like to appear at least a full month before your campaign starts. Exposure is what keeps the numbers going, and every place with an audience has a booked schedule.

Where can people find out more about you/your company?

I do comedy and micro-narrative on twitter at @jamespianka, and Predicate’s main presence is on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/PredicateGroup.

We would like to thank James for taking the time to answer our questions and let us know a bit more about Roots. Make sure to check out the Roots Kickstarter Page, running through November 20, 2014!

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