The Origin of Brave Legacy - Game Design Bio: Colin Hanna

There was always a feeling I had that certain playground games were just missing something. I wanted them to be more than just imagined tug-of-war between kids who always wanted to have the last word, declaring things like “I have force-fields, so your bullets do nothing,” and replying with “well, I have EMP bullets that nullify your forcefield,” followed by the inevitable “but I also have armor, so they just bounce right back and…” ad nauseam. I played my fair share of these games and implemented more than my fair share of one-upmanship strategies. But even though I could sometimes out-imagine a few of my friends and force them to give-up, more often than not, such competitions - while stimulating - were utterly fruitless from the start. 

And in my frustrations, I began to make rules. I would write down systems and draw sketches, and encourage my friends to play my games during recess. I eventually had my buddies playing grid-based tactics battles between mechs that they were piloting, and had meta-progression with money they earned from battles being spent to improve their machines and buy new weaponry. While a bunch of fifth graders playing self-designed pencil and paper role-playing games at recess wasn’t totally unheard of, it was still weird, and we had to learn to ignore the judgmental glances from the kids who were queuing up to play kickball while we huddled in a corner with our maps drawn on graph paper.

So I always knew that I wanted to make games. For a while, I thought video games would be my thing, but after barely passing a high school computer science class by the skin of my teeth, I realized two things: coding requires a lot of math, and I am not good enough or interested enough in math to enjoy the problem-solving that programmers need in order to thrive. I gained a healthy respect for (and a surface-level understanding of) the work that video game developers do. And while I thought I might try my hand at being an author, occasionally, I would be overcome by an idea for a game that I just had to try and build. I would hyper-fixate on a project and come up with a prototype after a late-night scramble and then draft all of my friends into playing it the next day. 

Some of them were functionally playable. And of those, some of them were actually pretty fun. In middle and high school, I had a group of friends regularly playing my games at lunch and in any spare minute they could scrounge in class. 

In college, one such ten-hour night of maniacal tinkering left me crackling with excitement, despite the darkening bags under my eyes. I had crafted what would become my first true passion project: Waves of Wealth and War. 

Waves was a grand strategy game where players built and managed a port city as its governor, directing trade in a fictional age of sail. They sent ships full of goods and manned by a sufficient crew to the ports of other players, earning tax wealth when ships visited them. It was a logistics game at its core, but it was also a political warfare game, and there was a lot of meat to it. My peers enjoyed it, and had lots of feedback. But this time, rather than letting it just be a fun weekend project, I took it back home with me. I made a fleet of eighty wooden boats in my grandfather’s workshop and returned with a colorful prototype, including printed cards and art for sailors, soldiers, and marines. 

And I kept working on it for years to come. I played it with my coworkers when I worked at Amazon, and I had artwork commissioned for the logo, the cards, and the ships. I founded Brave Legacy Games, LLC. I made a website and started a blog. I even went to a plastic injection mold facility to learn about production for the game. 

That was where I learned that it would cost several hundred thousand dollars for a full mold for the set.

Above: Corey's fleet of sloops was quite intimidating. Below: A close up of the 3D printed prototype for Waves. If you squint, you can just barely see a fancy hat and epaulets on the orange Lieutenant piece.

Kickstarter was steaming along with its board game revolution at the time, but even the most successful games never had such a high starting goal for their projects. I considered 3D printing, but was ultimately disappointed with the state and accessibility of the tech at the time, and though I did have a beautiful prototype made and shipped to me from Canada, I slowly lost hope in the realization of my dream. Waves of Wealth and War gradually sank beneath the tides of time, amidst returning to grad school to become a teacher, buying a home, falling in and out of love, and in spiraling through a whirlpool of depression and anxiety.  

It was years before I had a new idea that gripped me in the way that Waves had. And I fixated on incubating this new egg in a much similar fashion. For years I had an itch to make some sort of tile-laying game where players could build a map together, much like Carcasonne, but I wanted players to be able to manipulate the landscape, and have a godlike ability to change the map and affect the populations on it. But I couldn’t visualize the mechanics by which it would work. And then, one day, while reading a manga about Shinto-inspired deities called Noragami, it hit me. And that was how Apotheosis was born.

Apotheosis box front prototype

Now, like Waves, Apotheosis has gone through a gauntlet of playtesting. It has a library of commissioned artwork to its credit, and a near-finished design that I’m very proud of. It's a friendship-ruining table destroyer where players aspire to ascend to mythical godhood, convert the worshipers of their rival deities, smite populations with elemental calamities, and carve the world with their powers. 

God of the Sun - Fate card art by Tommy Graven

And it too, like Waves, will be very expensive to produce. Though many of its components are generic (far fewer custom 3D components), it would still be a major project, and a rather daunting one to use as the Brave Legacy flagship. Which, at last, leads me to the present-most venture on the horizon.

Last year, I made the decision to partner up with Tom, who was reigniting his passion for his old game project: Widgets. He was experiencing similar problems, realizing that the custom design components that he’d envisioned were ambitious, and nearly impossible to have produced locally or on a small scale. And so Tom and I came up with two new games, both of which would be much more straightforward to produce. 

Eventually, we chose Uncantations as our launch title. And a year later, we are increasingly confident that it is ready. Uncantations is a card game, and though it does have board components, all of the main bits are either generic or fairly standard, so it will be relatively easy (and much cheaper) to make. But more than that, Uncantations is by far the easiest of our games to learn, and will appeal to the widest audience. Whereas Apotheosis and Waves were both massive strategy games that would dominate the greater part of an evening, Uncantations can be played in between 20 and 40 minutes. It’s also team-based, and the cooperation with your teammate(s) that it encourages is rich and engaging. 

Throughout this whole process, I’ve had ups and downs, both with the creative work for the game and in my life. I’m not certain what it is, but it sometimes feels like there’s something invisible inside me, holding me back. Sometimes it’s in my head, like a weight attached to the back of my skull. Other times, it feels glued to the inside of my rib cage. I’ve even felt it welded to my shins. But wherever it makes its home, it weighs me down like a metal burden.    

When I founded Brave Legacy, I designed its emblem: a heraldic crest with a verdant field, but with no sigil, patterns, or adornment. Further, the shield was wrapped in vines and crowned in cobwebs, neglected and empty. Below, the inscription read: “How will the world remember your story?” It was meant to inspire and embolden, but even then, part of me knew that I made this design as an admonition to myself. I wanted to guilt myself into living up to all these lofty dreams that I have had. And because none of them had yet been achieved, the crest was still blank - a hollow, entreating void that filled me with increasing dread after every abandoned project. Every neglected idea became another wasted opportunity to live the Brave Legacy I had always dreamed of. 

I have been beating myself up for these failures for years. And it has taken me all these years to realize that guilt will never paint the crest I seek. I am learning that I have been selling myself short, because so many of the people who have played my games have experienced exactly what I always wanted them to: a sense of empowerment, of meaningful choice, of skill and strategy, of satisfying immersion, and of enduring impact. I remember how my friends at Amazon would come to work in the morning with data charts they’d drawn up to help them optimize strategies for Waves of Wealth and War. I remember the surge of pride I felt each time an artist realized my design for an Apotheosis card. And I remember the glowing expressions of strangers playing Uncantations at a local pub for the first time. 

The bottom line is that my games have already achieved the purpose for which I set forth as an absurdly ambitious ten-year-old: they create narratives where choices matter, and where players feel inspired to improve, whether in strategy, wisdom, determination, or creativity. So I’m ready to shed those weights, even if I have to carve them out of myself with my own hands. Or perhaps, I’ll have to just become strong enough to move on despite them. Either way, I have to share these story-telling engines with the world. It’s not enough to just let them sit on my own shelf anymore, where only I and a handful of friends get to fire them up every once in a while.