In late May, renowned game designer and author Jordan Weisman (founder of FASA and Harebrained Schemes, creator of the BattleTech, Shadowrun, and Crimson Skies franchises) announced Adventure Forge, a toolset created with the goal of empowering game designers, game masters, and other creators to easily create games ranging from text-based adventure and visual novels all the way to isometric roleplaying games like those made by Harebrained Schemes.
Weisman, who left the role of HBS CEO in late 2019, founded Endless Adventures Inc. to pursue this dream of his. I recently had the chance to interview him and the new Chief Marketing Officer of Endless Adventures David Reid (formerly of Xbox, NCSoft West, Trion Worlds, CCP Games, and Behaviour Interactive). We discussed every facet of Adventure Forge, which promises to allow games to be created without any knowledge of coding or even scripting when it launches at some point this Fall.
The toolset will be available on Windows PC and Mac, though the games made with it will be released on more platforms, including Android, iOS, browsers, and possibly even consoles at some point.
Jordan, can you provide us with an overview of your illustrious career?
Jordan Weisman: I’ve been making games for a very long time. About a third of my career has been on tabletop. That’s where I got my stars and where I keep returning to because I love the engine and the creativity of people when they’re free to be able to tell the stories that they want in the social context of the table. The other two-thirds have been in the video game space, in virtual reality, augmented reality, and theme park design. Basically, any place I can tell a story or make a game or bring people together for the above two reasons.
When did you leave Harebrained Schemes?
Jordan Weisman: Mitch Gitelman and I founded Harebrained Schemes around twelve years ago. We started doing some mobile games (Crimson: Steam Pirates, Strikefleet Omega) and then did a Kickstarter to raise money to do what we thought was gonna be a small Shadowrun game.
It turned out to be that the fans really wanted a much larger, more immersive isometric RPG, which is what we had the pleasure of creating with Shadowrun Returns and then Dragonfall and Hong Kong. Then we did a couple of other interesting experiments: a hybrid tabletop game called Golem Arcana and a really interesting roguelike called Necropolis, and then BattleTech, at which point Paradox Interactive acquired the company. I worked there for the first couple of years on a new property that they just announced called The Lamplighters League.
I was there in the very early days working on the concept for that with Christopher Rogers. But I left almost four years ago to head up a large augmented reality development team. It started with just my wife and I. We built it into a very large 80-person augmented reality team, anticipating where the market was going with, for instance, the Apple Vision Pro, that fully immersive AR is going to be an enormous transformational change in our economy and our society. Walmart was very interested in not missing this wave of technology like they had missed the previous two.
So, as a stealth organization, we built this large studio and a big tech base and a bunch of compelling examples of what that’s gonna mean. And then I left there last Fall.
Throughout that whole period, my background project was Endless Adventures. It is something I’ve been noodling on for several years. As I left Walmart, then I really started to spin it up. Now we’re at 24 people and super excited about the progress we’ve been making.
I guess after this augmented reality project, you’re going back to more familiar ground, so to speak.
Jordan Weisman: Yeah, that’s true. I mean, I’ve always been a very big proponent of AR, and I have played with it for many years. Doing the project with Walmart was truly exciting just because of the scope we were able to work at.
But it’s not yet – I think AR will be a really interesting place for games. But what we were building was not games, and my passion is games and storytelling and empowering people to tell their own stories and make their own games. I think this represents a bit of a merging of the two sides of my career. On the tabletop side, what you do is you create a setting, you create a foundation, but it’s the players and the game masters who tell the stories, who create the excitement. The stories that they create through their play are the ones that live in their hearts forever.
The most exciting ones I’ve heard are when they tell me that right at a convention where they would tell me their great stories. I’ve always missed not being able to empower that same kind of creative energy on the digital side. Endless Adventures is really my attempt to bring both sides of my career together to do that.
I guess Adventure Forge is your platform, right? How is that going to work? Will people have to connect to your website, or is it going to be a downloadable tool? If so, will it be available on Steam?
Jordan Weisman: Indeed, Adventure Forge is our first product and it is focused on the narrative game and RPG space. It is a downloadable tool. We are planning on making it available on Steam and on our website and other places where it makes sense to do. The tool runs on Windows PC and Mac.
It is a full integration with the tool and the client. The client itself is also available on iOS, Android, and browsers, so the games you create on your Mac or PC can be played on Mac, PC, iOS, Android, or browsers and hopefully one day on consoles, but that’s down the road. On the Mac and PC version, it does connect to our service because we have a big backend service that provides all the saves and reversions and the ability for you to connect from multiple places.
The integration of the tool and the client is really important because in any kind of game, but especially I think in narrative games, writing is rewriting, it’s all about iteration.
The faster you can create, the faster you can experiment, the faster you can test, and the higher quality of a game and experience you can create. By merging those two together and simply making it a tab, you can go back and forth between the two. It allows you to create very quickly.
Something that’s pretty unique in our system is that when you make a change over on the editing tab and then you click back over to the play tab, you don’t even have to restart the game, the game state is automatically updated to the change you’ve just made on the editing side.
We’ve gotten rid of compile and uploads and downloads. Literally, you can just change on the fly as you go, so I’m very excited about that. The other key thing that we think is really differentiating in Adventure Forge is making creation a social experience. Most UGC tools are designed for an individual, but video game studio is a collaborative art, right? It’s a series of different people with different perspectives and points of views and different skill sets who come together to create a video game. We’re trying to empower that in a social way by making our game authoring tool actually a multiplayer game. It operates akin to Google Docs, where every change that any of us are making is registered. Let’s say invite the four of us to get together on Friday night and we’re gonna work on the game together. As David is editing a character, you’re editing the location, I’m working on a building mechanic, and Enrique is editing a bunch of tags for the system. Everything we do is simultaneously updated for all of us so that every time we hit play, we’re all playing with each other’s latest data and I can see what you’re doing, you literally watch it on screen just like you can with Google Docs. I’m very excited about what that’s going to create in terms of taking what has been a solitary experience and turning it into a social experience.
After you’re ready to share what you’ve created, you can do so via our app. You don’t have to set up your own accounts on Steam or whatever; you just publish, hit the button, and out of it goes. One of the key things for us is that you, as the creators, control who it goes to. Typically, you only have two choices. Either you’re the only one who sees it, or the whole world can see it.
We don’t think that’s really appropriate because a lot of times what you’re making isn’t for the whole world. You might be making it for one person as a little experience you want to share with them or it’s for your old D&D gang and it’s just filled with in-jokes that only your old D&D gang is gonna get. But some player who you’ve never met in Iowa isn’t gonna get it, he’s gonna rag on you in comments about how none of this makes sense because it wasn’t designed for him.
When you share something you created in Adventure Forge, you can decide to share it with individuals or with player created groups or you can share it with the entire player community.
You can also choose to monetize your content and then there’ll be a revenue-sharing relationship between us and the designers.
Actually, I wanted to ask about that. From your end, what does monetization of Adventure Forge look like? Is it just the revenue sharing of people who wish their creations to be monetized, or is there some sort of cosmetics that you are selling?
Jordan Weisman: I think initially it will be people being able to charge for access to their creations. Our goal long term is to empower the designers to have more flexibility in how they monetize their content by using those forms of in-app purchases and their designs and whether they decide to do that for content or apparel or other enhancements.
I think different game types really lend themselves to different types of monetization. We want to provide those tools to the creators and the designers that they feel are appropriate for their game and their players.
Will the tool be free?
Jordan Weisman: Actually, we’re still looking at how our go-to-market plan is going to work. But we do think that there are going to be some opportunities to help designers get along quicker and those may be indeed monetized. The tool itself may actually have some charge. We’re still working through some of the details there.
One of the things that we want to make sure we can provide is settings for people to work with. This is a bit more like what you would have in a tabletop where you buy a game setting that helps establish the world and has all the rules, initial characters, settings, and locations. Then you can develop your adventures on top of that much quicker than if you just started a completely clean sheet of paper and had to create your own rule system and universe completely from scratch.
We want to offer that foundation for Adventure Forge creators to work from. We’ll be selling what we call universe starter kits for some original properties that we’re creating. One of the first ones we’ll be offering is set in a magical Renaissance Venice called the Tales of Fortunata. It’s something Sean and myself have been working on. Then we’ll be offering others from classic, public domain properties like Sherlock Holmes or Three Musketeers or other things like that in the future, and also licensed ones from games and television shows, novel series where people have a lot of excitement about telling stories in those worlds. Those will be different kinds of things that will be available to creators.
Of course, they can also completely start on that clean sheet of paper and build their own world from scratch with all of their own mechanics and everything else. The tools are there to support it. We just don’t want to require that from everybody to do because it’s a lot of lifting and a lot of times the fun is telling stories in a shared environment. If we look at fan fiction as a good parallel, that’s where people love to cut their teeth in worlds that are established as they’re learning their trade before moving more and more into creating completely their own worlds.
Speaking of the Adventure Forge toolset, will it be possible to import your own assets?
Jordan Weisman: Yeah. Well, with the universes that we provide, we have thousands of assets already in them to work with. But as a creator, you can add assets to those. You can also, if you’re creating your own universes, do all that completely with your assets. You’re absolutely able to upload your own 2D images, 3D characters, isometric tiles and props, music, pretty much every type of asset and animations because we also support a lot of 2D animations and, of course, 3D animations. All of that is able to be uploaded by creators.
One of the main features of Adventure Forge is that it is essentially no code system, right? You don’t really need to be a coder to make anything.
Jordan Weisman: Exactly. That was very important to us because coding is a relatively rare skill set and an expensive one to employ. As a game designer, some of my best friends are engineers and we have a large and wonderful engineering staff on board.
But it takes a lot of time in a game studio between you writing the design doc and sending to engineering, and engineering has a lot of priorities. So they get to it as soon as they can. But then they come back to you and you get to play what you wrote down and it’s gonna suck because everything written down sucks, because it takes a lot of iterations to get something good.
One of the biggest things I wanted to do and the selfish reason I built this tool was so that I could play with those concepts much faster. I could design things, they would fail, and I could design again and again and again, and I could do that all night. I didn’t have to wait for those engineering groups to be able to test that.
A lot of times when people say no code, they mean scripting is still required. So you may not have to know C++ but you have to learn some form of syntax-based scripting.
To us, that really didn’t accomplish the goal of no code because I don’t want to learn a new language. What we evolved was this set of highly contextual dropdown menus. Everything we create, every character, every location, every prop, every tag, everything then automatically populates into these dropdown menus contextually appropriate to the logic I’m trying to create.
I can make all my conditional statements and all my outcomes and I never have to worry about getting syntax wrong. It’s impossible to get the syntax wrong. You can create logic that doesn’t achieve what you wanted it to do. But it won’t break the game and it won’t fail because of syntax.
That just was a really important innovation to empower designers and writers and artists who don’t want to learn a language for coding to be able to express sophisticated logic.
David Reid: Just to build on that a bit of what Jordan was saying. Obviously, we’re talking about the high level of the 2D isometric sort of things that Jordan and his team were able to do at Harebrained Schemes. But you can go all the way to the very shallow end of interactive narrative, sort of interactive choose-your-path adventure sort of thing where it’s very text-based, very narrative based, and all the things in between, right?
The interactive fiction that we see with choices and episodes, Telltale style games, things like that, even dating sims. The narrative space is really exploding and there’s no reason why you need to be an engineer to use the no-code platform to create a number of these things. I think that part of what’s exciting is you aren’t pegged into going into one specific genre of interactive narrative.
There’s any number of things that you can do and you can mix and match your favorite features from a bunch of these things to create it just the way you see it should come together.
I believe I read something about AI that you are using. Is that generative AI? How are you empowering the creators with AI? What do you think about the latest developments in this sector?
Jordan Weisman: I’m gonna divide AI into two subjects. First, there is game logic AI. Being able to have designers create A I for their characters and that I’m something I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished there because we have a very easy system to be able to create sophisticated character AI um in the traditional sense of game AI. In generative AI, it’s been an amazing, what, eight months? It seems like forever, but it’s only eight months in terms of the explosion of visual and then text-based AI.
We really feel that games are a human art form. They’re created by humans and they’re for humans and they’re about the human condition. It’s important for us that human designers and writers and artists and game masters maintain creative control, that whatever tools we give them allow them to really express creative intent and not hand over control to a chatbot, which you’re never really quite sure what they’re gonna say.
We are integrating generative AI while trying to be very thoughtful about integrating tools to help our creators. We do have a generative text integration so that at any place in the game where the designer is entering text, they can ask the generative AI for suggestions.
But then they are in complete control. They can do whatever they want with it. It can often help get you past the bottleneck of the clean sheet of paper there where you know you want a conversation and you know you want Sally to insult George, but you don’t know how to start.
You can ask the AI about giving you a line of dialogue. You will likely rewrite it, but hopefully, then it really got you further along. Behind the scenes, we’re taking everything we’ve written previously, your description of your universe, of your characters, of the scene they’re in. We’re using all that to create a much more contextualized response from the generative AI so that the suggestions it gives you are set within your world as much as we can with modern generative AI.
On the art side, as we discussed, the designers can upload any images that they want. So the only place where we felt that what we were doing could be specifically helpful was tiles and props. Our environments are built out of tiles and props. For the universes that we’ve created, our artists built thousands of assets to give you a pallet of pieces to build the world.
But I’m sure that we will not have anticipated every need that designers will have. They may want to add something to our Renaissance Venice that we hadn’t thought of. What we’ve been working on is an AI generator that is trained exclusively on the art that we’ve created. When you ask for it to provide a triple-size gondola with seven gondoliers, it will generate something that will match the style of the thousands of assets we have created.
At the moment, those are the two things. Obviously, as tools evolve, we’ll keep evaluating and adding appropriate ones for our creators.
You have mentioned tabletop game masters potentially being interested in Adventure Forge. Does that mean you see it as a potential substitute for Roll 20 or stuff like that, where a game master can completely manage their session with the group?
Jordan Weisman: Not initially. That’s a very crowded marketplace all of a sudden over the last couple of years. Really what we’re trying to present is a tool where the game master can create games where they are not there physically to have to run them.
They can take the world, the characters, the stories, and the scenarios they develop and codify them through RPG mechanics inside the game systems we offer so that thousands of people can play their games. I think we will find some next-generation Chris Avellone in that pool of Game Masters.
David Reid: That’s the thing that gets me excited as well. Of course, I’ve written amazing adventures. I know this because I’m a writer and I’ve seen the reactions from my players at the table and things like that. I’m one of the hundreds of thousands of these people who believe we write the best things ever, but we’ve never had the ability to share it outside of the table because we don’t all write code. We don’t all have the ability to do graphics, we don’t all have teams. This is a chance to find out.
Is my stuff really as good as I think it is? For everybody, that’s a compelling little fantasy to get involved in. ‘Let’s see how I do when I put my content up there with everybody else. Let’s see how people like it’.
So, if I understand correctly, Adventure Forge does not currently support hosting your own tabletop games. Right?
Jordan Weisman: It’s not at this time.
Okay. Speaking of the launch, I think the press release mentioned that you will be inviting people later this year. Is that going to be an early access launch? How is that going to work?
Jordan Weisman: That’s a good question. David just joined us and he’s helping us figure that out. But it is some form of early access. Whether that’s officially early access through Steam or just through our website or some other mechanism, we’re not quite sure. The goal is to start getting into people’s hands this Fall.
Do you envision improving the technology behind Adventure Forge in the future to be able to make even more complex games? Like full 3D games, for instance?
Jordan Weisman: Yeah. Our goal is to be able to keep working on it. We have so many more ideas of things that we could empower the designers and writers and creators with. We’re hoping that the economics allow us to continue to just add and add more and more power to this thing.
I’m excited that I think the product that we will have as we come out of early access, you know, later toward the end of this year or at the beginning of next year, empower people to do games every bit as sophisticated as the Shadowrun series we were making at Harebrained Schemes.
In fact, I think there are some significant improvements over what we could do here than what we were capable of in our internal editors at HBS. I think that’s quite amazing. I know people will do things much greater than we ever anticipated with the tools.
We see that even in the small number of people who have access to the tool at the moment. It’s pretty much a weekly phenomenon. We have a weekly show and tell with our entire team and every week the designers demonstrate something where the engineers go ‘I didn’t know we could do that!’ because there’s just so much power there.
When creative people get their hands on it and mess with it, they make you do amazing things.
Just one more question regarding the vetting process. Are you going to check every bit of content uploaded to Adventure Forge? How is that process going to work?
Jordan Weisman: We are working on a different kind of approach to that. We’re trying to find the right line between enabling very wide creative forms of expression and making sure that we’re creating a place that’s safe for people to come and have fun. We think that the answer lies in a couple of different ways of kind of creating different spaces where different sets of content have been vetted at different levels.
So that if you’re going into the most vetted space, you’re guaranteed to have only content that has really been vetted to make sure that it’s very friendly. Then there’ll be other places where we have kind of said there’s no vetting here at all and so go with that. We’re still really working on some of those plans. It’s part of what will be evolving over this early access period.
Thank you for your time.
