Ivan Van Norman is a true powerhouse of indie tabletop publishing and media innovation, bringing over 15 years of deep industry expertise to the table. Our paths cross all the way back to the very first year Gen Con introduced Entrepreneur’s Alley, where our tiny 10x10 booths were literally shoved into the back corner of the convention hall, facing a wall right next to the food court. While I was out there hawking the first print run of Ascension, Ivan was launching Hunters Entertainment. Since then, Ivan has carved out an incredible track record, serving as an executive producer and host at Geek & Sundry during the wild dawn of the web-streaming boom, helping lay the early foundational blocks for massive cultural phenomena like Critical Role, and co-owning Hunters Entertainment. He’s the publisher behind brilliant, boundary-pushing projects like the silent, text-messaging RPG Alice Is Missing. In this episode, we discuss the brutal realities of transitioning from a broke creator to a successful studio owner, how shifting mediums completely transform the mechanics of storytelling, and why your graveyard of discarded ideas is secretly your greatest design asset.
If you are interested in working with me directly on your project, and learning from my mistakes rather than making your own, you can join my Think Like a Game Designer: Design Lab.
Everybody Prepares You for Failure, Nobody Prepares You for Success: This is one of the heaviest and most accurate insights in the whole episode. When you’re an indie creator operating on a shoestring budget, you don’t answer to anyone. Yet, the absolute second you find real commercial traction, the entire game changes. Suddenly, you have a team depending on you for their livelihood and their paychecks, which turns every single creative gamble into a high-stakes business decision. You also have an audience that cares deeply your game and feels a sense of ownership of it, leading to a threat of audience capture if you cater to them in at the cost of innovation. Learning how to scale your success while fiercely protecting your original creative voice is easily the hardest evolution you have to make as a founder.
The Medium is the Mechanic: If you want your creative stories to break through the modern cultural noise, you have to design explicitly for the technology where your audience actually lives. Felicia Day and Geek & Sundry did it by leveraging the wild west of early YouTube and Twitch to unlock long-form TTRPG streaming. Alice Is Missing did it by turning a standard smartphone group text into an intensely emotional narrative engine. During our chat, Ivan’s insights actually inspired me start work on a brand-new design concept right at the table: how to build an ultra-short-form video RPG engineered entirely for Shorts, Reels, and Twitch.
Less Money Equals More Radical Execution: Starting out broke right out of college gives you a massive, counterintuitive edge, because without a cash cushion, you are forced into a level of radical execution you just can't fake. Ivan and I launched right in a brutal recession, building display tables out of inventory boxes and dragging ammo cans down the hot streets of Indianapolis. That said, the real secret to surviving over the long haul as a serial entrepreneur is a beautiful touch of amnesia. We are naturally wired to avoid pain, and if you perfectly remembered the bone-deep exhaustion and near-failures of a launch, you'd never take a big risk again. You need that selective memory loss to trick yourself into thinking "this next launch will be smooth" just to find the sheer audacity to stand at the starting line again. It acts as a psychological shock absorber, wiping away the baggage of past failures so you can always approach a blank sheet of paper with total confidence.
“Dude, this is the first edition: handwriting font with sticky notes, with giant orphan spaces, and tape and stuff.” (00:11:12)
If you are waiting until your game looks completely flawless and polished before you put it out into the world, you are paralyzing your progress. Ivan describes his very first print run, filled with handwriting fonts and sticky notes. I teach this to my design students all the time: your first endeavor is going to have major flaws, but done is infinitely better than perfect. Stop agonizing over the paint color before you’ve even proven the foundation of your game is fun.
“No one ever thought for a minute that it was a good idea to have a four-hour long video where people are playing Dungeons & Dragons, right?” (00:27:00)
When you are trying to innovate in a brand-new space, you have to throw the traditional corporate rulebook completely out the window. Before Critical Role exploded into a massive juggernaut, there wasn’t a single traditional media executive on the planet who would look at a four-hour raw stream of people sitting around playing Dungeons & Dragons and greenlight it as a commercial home run. Yet, Ivan and the team at Geek & Sundry didn’t wait around for anyone’s permission… they just completely focused on the content they loved and trusted that the medium would find its audience. True creative breakthroughs happen when you stop trying to satisfy generic industry expectations and instead have the audacity to build a unique platform around your passions.
“People want these more condensed experiences.” (01:02:40)
The macro landscape of player attention is shifting fast right now. While massive, $100 big-box legacy games will always have a dedicated lane, the modern market is craving tight, condensed experiences you can get to the table in an hour. Players are aggressively purging their shelves because their lives are busy and choices are infinite. If you can design a game that guarantees a complete, emotionally fulfilling narrative arc within a strictly locked time limit, you unlock a massive competitive edge.
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