[Tim Gee]

So I am wondering whether game designers are creative in other fields as well. Who works in creative fields professionally and bring those skills to game design?
Who has other creative pursuits that you would consider a hobby like game design?
This all comes about after lying in bed for the last week and having to tell my three year old the story of the Three Little Pigs each night. Now this get quite boring and repetitive so I started to mix it up by giving the pigs different jobs and scaring the wolf off in different ways. (Oh and the pigs are all named after my kids).
One evening what I have encountered in my professional life (Primary school STEM teacher and librarian) crossed with the stories I had been telling my kids. For those of you who have small children you may be aware of the vast number of popular pictures books that centre around toilet humour. Dinosaur Dump, There is a Monster Under My Bed Who Farts, and Busting just to name a few. There are also quite a few revisionist versions of fairy tales such as Baa Baa Blue Sheep and The Cow Who Tripped Over The Moon.
My brain mashed these two popular concepts together and came up with a versions of the 3 Little Pigs where the wolf has bad diarrhoea while walking and is visiting the houses to use the bathroom, but her farts blow the houses over.
I told my wife and she immediately said I had to write that book. So I have an am now up to the third draft and a good friend who is an artist has completed a first draft of pictures for the book, all in about 5 days! I’m now looking into how to make contact with a book publisher to pitch the book. It will be interesting to see how board games publishing and book publishing compare in process and attitude.
Keen to hear any ideas other people are working on!

[Edward Wedig]

I have a BA in Studio Art, and have been doing freelance graphic design in the board, card and rpg industries for about 20 years. I would consider those creative. (My primary job is graphic production which isn’t really creative, but does require some problem solving skills.) I used to design small rpgs (nothing published) before switching to board game design.

As for reading stories, when my son was little, he really liked these Spongebob books, but reading the same book each night got really boring to me. Luckily, he didn’t notice when I would skip a few pages, and read and abbreviated version of the story. 🙂

[Tim Gee]

That sound great… what are some games that you have worked on?

I have definitely pulled the miss a few pages trick too!

[Edward Wedig]

I’ve worked on some of the Dungeon Crawl Classic stuff for Goodman, lots of Mighty Armies stuff for Rebel Minis, lots of Sailpower for Sea Dog Game Studios, and Seas of Iron for Battle Bunker Games.

[Matt Stow]

I’m a User Experience Engineer which is a fancy name for a web developer, but one that focuses on what you see and interact with. I also design web sites & apps too, so I guess you would say I’m both creative and analytical.

I also design t-shirts, make felt art, do pixel art and write children’s fiction.