- 00:00 – Introduction to John De Campos and Terrible Games
- 00:56 – Early Life and Inspirations
- 01:33 – Journey into Board Game Design
- 02:48 – Building the Terrible Games Team
- 04:34 – Challenges and Successes in Game Publishing
- 06:36 – Insights on Self-Publishing vs. Traditional Publishing
- 08:25 – Creative Collaborations and Game Development
- 20:49 – The Influence of Magic: The Gathering
- 28:01 – “Death to videodrome.”
IntroIntroduction to John De Campos and Terrible Games
John: my name is John DeCampos. I am a board game independent publisher, designer, and illustrator. I run a company called Terrible Games along with five other equity partners who are also a group of my very close friends. And to date, we have released: Token Terrors Battlegrounds Season 1, along with six standalone solo games, each one styled after a different faction from the first introductory season.
We also did Repugnant, the world’s most disgusting TTRPG. Our last project was a game called Valka, which is a one to five-player card clasher that breaks all the rules. it’s also our first licensed IP product by an artist out of Australia named Brooke Penrose. we also recently released a game into, the Retail space, and we’ve been shipping to people called Black Mold, which is our, two to five player co-op, until it’s not, survival horror escape game, where your turn lasts as long as you can physically hold your breath.
Michael: Wow.
Early Life and Inspirations
Tim: So how did it all start?
John: Raised by a single mother, spent a lot of time by myself, moved around to lots of different schools, had to impress people with skills or jokes because I had to make new friends a lot. I was obsessed with comic books, was convinced I was going to be a comic book artist when I was like 9 or 10 years old after looking at the X Men giant size Jim Lee comic books. Four panel cover blew my mind. I was collecting Marvel trading cards and stuff. Got a little bit older, started playing modern board games with Catan, was couch surfing for a little while and got into Dungeons and Dragons and Magic the Gathering.
Journey into Board Game Design
John: This made me want to create a token creature miniature that was travel friendly and pocket sized. We looked at our mini sculpts, said these guys could be in a game all by themselves. They’re super cool looking. That started me down the research journey of figuring out how to crowdsource on Kickstarter and publish a game.
Once I figured out how to do that and we had started going down the road of publishing and developing games, I just got obsessed with doing that because I was locked in my house because of the pandemic. So I made Black Mold. I made a couple of other games that we haven’t released yet.
Should I shop it to publishers or should I self publish? People always say if you’re going to self publish, then be prepared to be a small business owner. And since we had already taken that plunge and I was a small business owner at this point, we decided yeah, this a long term, like a business, a company, and I’ve been in the board game industry ever since.
Tim: Last time I saw you in person, I think was at Unpub Prime,
John: yeah, that’s the last time we saw each other.
Tim: yes, and then before that, it was PAX Unplugged, and then at PAX Unplugged, I actually talked to another person at your booth, the terrible games booth was slammed and unplugged, and so I got some audio, and I didn’t get to speak to you, and so can you talk to us a little bit about, please.
The collective or the group, how that came to be.
Building the Terrible Games Team
John: Sure, so there’s Tim Brosius, who does all of our media and like rendering stuff, he’s awesome, he’s been around since the beginning because I needed somebody to 3D sculpt our miniatures, and I just went to Facebook and I was like, do I know anybody who could do 3D sculpting, and he was the first person to reach out to me and say I’m down.
The first six or seven months was me and Tim, and then we tried to do proof of concept by doing injection molding in the United States, and we needed more capital in order to try and chase that down. I brought in my friend Phil Doccolo, who basically gave us budgetary funding for the first kind of development years of what token tears were supposed to be.
We ended up burning through a little bit of cash trying to make stuff in the United States, which was a bummer because we didn’t actually get anything out of that. it was a loss of cash. but Phil is also a great game designer, and he co designed Token Terrors and Black Mold, and did development on Valka, and is a budding game designer in his own right.
My buddy Lucas Gerace has just done a ton of development work with me behind the scenes, just helping me work Games and playtest them to death. so he’s like research and development. Also is getting into designing his own game. We released one of his games actually. It’s called Pocket Wars.
It’s a really small release. We didn’t do a big public announcement about it. We just made it as a proof of concept. And to just see what would happen with it. Really quick, really light. And then there’s Shannon Light Hadley, who does our graphic design, and my spouse, Bitsy, also, helps with finances, and helps keep me together, and also, earns, way more money than me, and allows me to be a small business owner, and chase down this stupid ass dream of being a board game publisher.
That’s everybody.
Tim: I actually wanted to ask you, and I don’t know if this is, I don’t think this is toxic, but this is based on one of your like TikTok posts.
Challenges and Successes in Game Publishing
Tim: You said that you’ve gone to a bunch of big. Cons before and so but you’ve never been able to go to Gen Con. Is that correct
John: that’s true. Although exclusive for this podcast, because I haven’t said it anywhere yet, it looks like we are going to be able to booth at Origins, which I’m very excited about.
Tim: that is awesome
John: last minute, shout out to my man Matthew Rodella, game designer. He got picked up. He got a booth, he got a first timer booth at Origins, and then a publisher picked up his game, so he was like, I don’t, Need the booth anymore.
So he’s trying to sublease it to me. I was planning on going anyway as an attendee, but now that I have an in for a booth, I’m starting to pull the strings to get everything together for us to actually be there properly with all of our stuff.
I asked Matthew to please review the boothing. Form and all of the different, rules and everything. He’s going to take a look at it and we’re going to figure it out. There is usually stuff about that when it comes to these booth contracts, but we’re going to see what happens.
Michael: You’re very much more like capital P then I would probably categorize like our prior guests. And so Increasingly, I’m interested in the logistics of the publisher business.
John: Like I mentioned before, my partner, makes a good salary working her day job, and she makes enough that, the monthly, operational bills for us to keep a roof over our head and food in our mouths isn’t in threat if I just stop working altogether. I could Do absolutely nothing all day and it wouldn’t actually create a threat financially for our household.
That being said, I don’t do that. I try to optimize my time and my freedom and privilege as much as I possibly can. for example, I still do freelance artwork for clients because I don’t want to have to lean on her for every single little expense that I want to do that includes social calls or helping out with the groceries or keeping gas in the car.
I try to contribute financially where I can. So I do still do freelance work. If I’m under a tight deadline or there’s a lot of urgency and in the boarding and publishing business, there are a lot of things that are that way. I can be solely focused on running the business full time if that’s what needs to happen.
And sometimes I do that.
Insights on Self-Publishing vs. Traditional Publishing
Tim: Or is there any outside or any future plans of Oh, we’re going to really expand publishing or is it just for y’all?
John: If we have the resources to be a little bit more widespread and handle multiple releases in a year, that’s what we’re trending towards now is we’re trying to do two releases a year. Valka wasn’t our release. That was by an artist who was making a little card clash game with his son, and I saw the artwork and was like, this matches our brand, I love this guy’s work.
I reached out to him, I asked what his plans were, if he was getting ready to self publish, he didn’t really know. I told him what my experience level was, and we ended up forming a partnership where he gets royalties and copies of the game and a flat payout. After the Kickstarter and did all the work, I developed the hell out of his game and turned it into a really engaging card game.
so Volca was the first one we did that with, and right now I’m actually trying to schedule some playtest time with my partners to try out a game I saw at Unpub called Fright Falls that I want to rename Camp Carnage. it’s a co operational four player slasher era horror film, and all of the mechanics just sung with the mood and the theme.
And what the game needs is an artist who loves horror movies and is deeply Passionate about the slasher era and I’m that guy so if it has my artwork and I like the mechanics and I can hire on a publisher who’s been working on a game for two years and would be thrilled to have his game put into the public sphere, then if it’s the right fit, it’s either going to be one of two things.
It’s either got to be something that I really want to work on. Or, that the team really wants to work on, that they bring to the table, and then we all have a discussion, Or, alternately, if I’m approached, or if I see a visual artist working on a game, I will maybe, if I like their artwork and I like their vision for the game, I’ll reach out to them and see if they want to basically follow the pattern that Brooke did.
Creative Collaborations and Game Development
John: Visionary artist making a game is like our mission statement. We want artwork that’s a little off the beaten path, that isn’t super polished video game concept art,
Tim: That’s what I like about terrible games. It sounds like a quote I always loved from Jim Henson is someone asked him, how do you do the things that you do? Instead of giving Oh, we do CGI or we do puppetry or what? He’s just no, I find an idea that’s cool.
And then, I collaborate with people and share it. And so it’s just really, I want to collaborate with the people I love. You know what I mean? Or my friends or family. And so it sounds like what you’re saying is like, Hey, this is vibes. Do we vibe? Oh, this is a collaboration. that happens in different ways, either with illustrators or game designers.
That’s super cool.
John: Yeah, I pride myself on, like throughout my. work as a musician and a person who’s done things in the theater community. I found that I can thrive really well off of other people’s positive energy and excitement when it comes to a project. Sometimes I get a little carried away and run off with the baton and do a bunch of other stuff, but, I try to be better about communicating forward motion on projects when I’m working with other people these days, because it’s not cool to do that we want to try and transmit people’s excitement about things that they’re excited to work on.
With the caveat of it being, if it’s not a visual artist bringing us a design, then the design has to be something where I can see myself as the artist and me fitting really well into what the game is doing. those would be the two criteria for us, like taking on other people’s design work.
Michael: That’s really interesting. Do you guys have like your own internal sort of brand style guide or to be on brand things must. Meet such and such criteria.
John: Yeah, I don’t think that we have any like formal guidelines, like a style guide or a slide deck that explains exactly okay, what are the boxes we need to check if we’re gonna release a game or if we’re gonna develop and publish a game. However, like a DIY punk or metal aesthetic doesn’t hurt when it comes to our stuff.
I can tell you that There’s an artist on Instagram who I’ve talked to a bunch. I could maybe say that I could call him a friend, but his name is Joda Cravo and he was working on this, They’re the Tetris pieces.
Polyominoes. Yeah, the polyominoes. he was working on a polyominoes grid tile laying game where different kinds of monster army units were printed directly on the polyominoes and there was like an adjacency point value system and some sort of damage lane and column exchange kind of thing and it was really neat but joda is a dyed in the wool death metal artist who’s done stuff for the devil wears prada and like motionless and white and stuff so i saw his i’ve been following his work forever and i love it and he started talking about making a board game and i was like dude whenever you’re ready to pull the trigger like I will help you make this thing real because I love your art.
And also, from my standpoint, there’s a really cool marketing hook for that game because each army would get its own artist. Johto would put out his polyhedral army of monochromatic death knights. And maybe I would do an army of bat rat mutants. Or, somebody else might do an army of cool neon pixies or something.
Tim: So it’s, I feel like those creative fusions always lead to cool shit, and that’s what people want to play.
John: We’re working on this game with these hexagonal six sided dice that also function as, terrain hexes that you can stack. the token tears are a gaming accessory that are supposed to be a token creature from Magic the Gathering, a budget minion for TTRPGs, but they star in their own game.
we just try to subvert the norm a little bit, subvert expectations and do things that are remarkably Away from what in the gaming industry already. In the case of Token Terrors, they’re monster miniatures that don’t have an attached base.
They’re really durable, they’re good to go. in the case of Volca, every card battle game usually has a mana system or an action point system and a hand limit, and you’re trying to deplete life total.
This is a card battle game that does none of those things. so we look at the lane and we’re like, we’re going to go next to the lane, like over here.
To self-publish or to not self-publish?
Michael: What are the criteria, to choose whether or not to self publish and if, whatever that criteria is, if they decide, publishing like me being the publisher, isn’t the way to go.
Where do they even start looking,
John: I think that blind playtesting with overwhelmingly positive feedback is a good indicator that you’re ready to go.
your proximity to the project is going to make it so that you are virtually blind to things that other people also won’t see.
You, Have to be thorough with those blind play tests and making sure that you’re being objective about your feedback and also not taking every single piece of feedback that you get, whether it’s really good or really bad completely at face value
Who knows if you’re talking to a buyer from the OP, that’s completely different from two guys who have been playing games in their basement for a couple of years. those two pieces of feedback are different. And also you can tell sometimes when people play a game, it’s just not their game.
You can’t make a game for everyone. You need to make the game that you want to make because you’re excited about it. And if you can make something you’re excited about, if you feel like you’ve done your due diligence to play test it and make sure you’re doing quality control, that you can scale the cost of something that’s attractive on Kickstarter, that is a good value proposition
I don’t want to miss this. Self publish. If you want to. Spend years sitting on designs and shopping it out to people who may tell you that it’s good or bad or whatever. Then see if you can get somebody to pick up your game and publish it for you. It all depends. And either, both of these things are going to require the one thing that all of us designers and indie publishers and small business owners have a lot of. And I would say, don’t rush to market and make sure your game is not too ambitious for your first outing.
Tim: We have a lot of game designers on the podcast or people who work in the game adjacent space, and we want to know their process or their thoughts behind it.
John: I try to do as much play testing as I can. but at the end of the day, I also acknowledge you can’t make everybody happy and trying to make a game that you’re just like this is good for everybody.
Like even family friendly games are fine and but that’s not a. For me, to be honest with you, I’m happy to play a family weight game with my kid because I like playing games with my family, but that’s not the game I’m going to be looking at going to the store to pick up. I want, I’m deeper into the hobby, so I’ve had a lot of people sit down and play our games and just say, they don’t get it and it’s not for them.
And I’m like, that’s fine. And I think trying to make something that pleases everybody or checks a box for every single person is a really fast way to make something that’s mediocre.
Things can have mass market success, they can be lightning in a bottle, we all saw what happened with, that Dragon Bakery game that came out, last year, Flamecraft was burning up the charts, And it checked a lot of boxes, but I still think that like games that do really commercially, they just have a lot of X factors.
And I would maybe assume that a lot of those factors have to do with marketing budget, that get them where they want to go. you have to get a little bit lucky in this business. you do have to get a little bit lucky to do really noteworthy six figure campaigns, but there’s all kinds of different ways you can go about it.
Contacting John
John: Yeah, we’re on Discord. I’m trying to be better about cultivating a community there. We’re in the infant stages of that happening now. You can find all of our games and info about them and a little bit about us as a company at TerribleGames.
if you want to reach out to me directly, my email is token terrors at gmail. com. I’m always happy to take a call with first time publishers or people who are breaking into the business and want to know a couple of things about my experiences. I don’t claim to be any kind of guru or authority, we’ve been around the block a little bit.
I’m sure that me 10 years ago when I first started this journey would be, pleased with the progress we’ve made so far.
Tim: Sharing is caring, so
Michael: A hundred percent, dude. Yeah. Give yourself a lot of credit too. terrible games has a clear brand, from visuals to copy and all of that. And the games are really cool too. so you are capital L legit,
John: we’re trying, I would be way more legit if I drew a salary, but I don’t,
Michael: There’s a whole episode we can probably do just around bootstrapping your own business.
This is a really interesting part of the space and I don’t know how many people are talking about it, but lots to chew on there.
John: Yeah, absolutely. Like we hold regular meetings. these guys will come to conventions and table booths with me. they help develop the games. they help get the final assets together and do stuff for the Kickstarter campaigns, I own over 70 percent of the company.
And I do more than 70 percent of the day to day work, and that’s the nature of our partnership. Everybody who’s in Terrible Games is a close friend of mine. Lucas is like my best friend on planet Earth. Phil is the lead singer in one of my metal bands. me and Shan have been working together for over 15 years between rock operas and other art related projects.
Tim is actually the only person who entered the company who was more or less a stranger. But, since he joined, we’ve become good friends. I was at his wedding. obviously, Elizabeth is like the mother of my child. So it’s yeah, it can be tricky sometimes, but we’re trying to make it work.
Tim: It’s inspiring
John: Thank you so much.
D12: A Game of Q&A
Michael: What is your most fond earliest game memory?
John: I am gonna say playing Mario 64 that game completely blew my mind. I felt like my brain was gonna jump out of my skull when I played that game for the first time.
John: Four.
Michael: Pantone, what color mode would you be? Why
John: CMYK. because I love the fuchsia, and not, what’s the other, it’s like sky blue, but it’s brighter than sky blue. Yeah, cyan, the cyan and fuchsia tones you get in the CMYK, is my color palette fave. I’m a big fan.
John: Twelve.
Michael: what is the most usable game that you’ve ever played?
John: Token Tailor’s Battlegrounds, obviously the components are magic, the gathering token creatures and budget minions for tabletop role playing games. And then the game that they’re in is a hyper portable, no luck, Highly deterministic, that plays in under 20 minutes and makes you use your brain and is a skirmish game.
Michael: What is your favorite dice?
John: B4. Because it’s a caltrop. Any of the polyhedra dice are a weapon, A D4 is a weapon by itself if you have enough of them.
Michael: Yeah, totally. It’s a huge defensive measure too. I was just watching how, the Romans would paper the ground with the Caltrops. So if you were trying to put them under siege, you’d have to walk over all this spiky shit the entire time.
Michael: In like an RPG, do you take the Paragon path or the Renegade path? Are you the good guy or are you the bad guy?
John: I only went Paragon Path once, and it was with a Dragonborn fighter named Abaddon Zev, the Destroyer Hammerwing, that was my first character, He could breathe all the elements, and when I took him Paragon Path, he sprouted dragon wings and a tail.
Michael: Oh my God.
Tim: Said he could breathe all the elements.
John: so when you choose a Dragonborn, you get to choose an elemental breath, and the first four, are ice, acid, fire, and lightning. and then later on, you can open up, I think they let you breathe bad energy, like darkness,
Tim: Yeah,
John: yeah, necrotic breath, and then I think there’s one other, I think maybe ice, by the time you go Paragon in 4.
5, you, if you go Paragon Path, Scion of Arcosia, and go back to your Draconic roots and kind of de evolve slightly, you’re at a high enough level where you get to breathe all the elements, and you breathe at choice, and you also get wings and a tail, and you can hover and fly, dude, yeah.
Tim: reminds me of, a Mystic Siege that subclass. I know it’s in Pathfinder, but it’s basically I’m such a high enough level wizard that I can do divine magic as well as arcade magic, and then you can change the types of elements. So the traditional fireball, you can turn into an ice ball, or
John: Yeah, D& D’s fun.
Tim: Mike actually runs a game, like an online game.
Michael: it’s a good one charting in the Netherlands right now, 72 on the science fiction list.
John: I rolled an eight.
The Influence of Magic: The Gathering
Michael: What is your favorite card game?
John: Magic the Gathering.
Tim: good. It’s a very good
John: It’s broken as hell. I love it.
Tim: I love it.
Michael: What game should everyone play at least one time?
John: Magic The gathering. same answer, and I’ll tell you why. Because it is by far the most influential and formative game to come out in the modern age ever.
I have heard, I can’t count how many times I’ve tuned into a podcast like this one, where somebody’s like, how’d you get started designing games? I was a competitive player in Magic the Gathering. I started getting into modern gaming when my buddy showed me Magic the Gathering. How many stories start like this? A lot.
Michael: literally our second interview of the season.
John: A lot of them. People, for all of the money grubbing and things that Wizards of the Coast does wrong and everything else, the game is, what, 25, 30 years old? And it provides so much educational content for people who are aspiring board game designers.
Tim: Becomes a meme. culture,
There’s certain things that you do in life. I think at some point experience, play a game maybe read a book.
but that changed the way you think a little bit. And you’re like, why is this, it’s caught up on you and you want to dive deep into it. And I feel magic is one of those. It’s like the first time I played magic that night, when I went to sleep, it was just like, Oh my God, what the heck? And because it is that primer of an education that you’re talking about, it has so much in it.
And just as the, think about it from the creative perspective. If you want to think of it from the theme side, like I’m a wizard, I’m making my spell book to go to a wizard battle to fuck up another wizard, I want to make flying walls that attack or someone else could do like I want a blue control deck
Michael: Yeah. That’s really fascinating. And I know this is supposed to be like 20 questions real fast, but, I’m not an illustrator, but I consider myself a writer and I remember just like how, I believe there was a card called like the Somnifor or something like that.
it was like this little, forearms creature or whatever. And that idea, that creature provided so much, creative anchor for a 12 year old me. that it’s still in my mind and I’m not a magic player. I just remember it anyway.
John: Yeah. When you’re deck building, when you’re looking at mana curve, when you’re thinking about what you want your deck to do and in how many turns, how you can take control of card advantage, the way that you want to let theme play around with your deck.
There’s just a million different directions you can go and it gives you a crash course in game design, but it also is like beautifully illustrated, has something to say artistically and from set to set. they’re keeping it within the stylistic lane of Magic the Gathering, but also giving it a complete thematic facelift from each jump from plane to plane.
The next one that’s coming out is called, Thunder Junction. and it’s the Old West. Set that people have been pining over for, five or six years, like, when are we going to get something that’s themed like the Old West? So now we’re finally get it. And yeah, it’s Old West, it’s also still Magic the Gathering, but they’re going to introduce new mechanisms, like Crime Spree and Mercenary, that are like these new things.
I still love Magic the Gathering, I just think it offers gamers so much to learn and explore.
John: my next answer is a number seven. Or my next question’s a number seven. Archduke,
Michael: to give yourself, what would it be?
Tim: Why Archduke?
John: because I was asked to give myself a title when I was in the artistic council for the Baltimore Rock Opera Society,
Tim: Oh, nice!
John: Thank you.
Michael: It’s such, an ominous title, right?
Don’t go riding in any like open cars. You sound like a Ghostbusters villain.
John: Yeah, that’s on brand for me.
Michael: Yeah.
John: finally rolled a one.
Tim: Ooh.
Michael: what is your favorite tool of the trade?
John: I’m going to say the Game Crafter because when I’m ordering stuff from the Game Crafter it means there’s a new prototype on the way.
Michael: Oh, that’s fascinating. Do you find a, have you played with like alternatives and stuff? Is there something about game crafter that you like potentially
better than others?
John: Yeah, the user interface on the Game Crafter, while not seamless, does provide you with a way to make sure that all of your assets meet the template standards pretty easily. It’s plug in and go. so you don’t have to deal with the guesswork of trying to negotiate, prototype copies from a Chinese manufacturer, which comes with, Sometimes communication barriers, sometimes it’s a timetable kind of thing.
Because here’s the thing with the Game Crafter. If you have your assets ready and you upload them to the Game Crafter, even though the game costs 130 to make a single copy of it, you can double that amount to rush order the game and get it in two weeks. I don’t have to mess around with international shipping.
I don’t need to worry about anything, once it’s uploaded, if all of the files are approved, it’s good to go. And they offer enough stock components in their catalog that I can fill in the blanks for the other pieces I need that I don’t need to illustrate or custom design.
You can do custom cut, die cut, laser etched, like double layer recessed boards, as long as you provide them with a vector shape for your custom shape. You can do pretty much anything you want on the Game Crafter. But the reason I like it as a tool of the trade is not just for prototyping, but because when I put in an order for the Game Crafter, now I have an exciting two weeks where I’m waiting for my first pretty version of a prototype to arrive and I get to get it to the table and play it, which is super fun and exciting.
Tim: That’s great. And a lot of people, when I went to unpub prime and saw you there, other people have said the same thing. At some point you’re like, Hey, Office Depot or Office Max has saved me like over the years.
But when you actually think about the money that you put into an Office Depot print versus Game Crafter, it’s almost you should just go to Game Crafter. It’s going to be comparable.
John: Yeah, and the other thing is that a lot of the assets you’re creating for GameCrafter that are compliant with their templates are going to be one to one transferable to the final. all of the artwork that you see in the production copies of Black Mold that are on the shelves at game stores right now, that’s the same artwork I did while I was locked in my house during the pandemic that I printed on the GameCrafter.
Tim: Good suggestion.
John: Six!
Michael: What game is a guilty pleasure?
John: y’all are gonna hate me for this one, it’s Magic,
Tim: No, I think it’s great.
John: Yeah, I play Magic Arena to a slightly concerning degree.
And I have deleted the app off of my devices a number of times in order to try create some space between me and the game because, left to my own devices, it’s a comfort zone, guilty pleasure kind of thing where by default, if I want to unwind or relax, I will fire up arena and play a couple rounds.
Tim: Yeah. Dead by Daylight is that way for me. I don’t know why it just has, I know people who Overwatch is that way for them or Destiny 2
Michael: Are you alternate history, fantasy, cyberpunk?
John: Dark Fantasy probably.
Michael: Okay. So if there’s a spectrum, I guess light to fantasy, dark fantasy, and then on the Y or the X axis, you have low fantasy, high fantasy, like, where are you?
John: High, pitch black
Michael: Perfect.
John: Bottom right quadrant, pitch black and high as hell.
Michael: that’s awesome.
John: Thank you.
Michael: As we come to an end, the lights are starting to dim. The camera pans to your direction, and you have just rolled your last death saving throw. You are dying. What are your final words?
John: Death to Videodrome. Long live the new flesh.
Michael: Nice.
Tim: I love it.
John: Oh, and then I whisper, Bones remain.
