Black Bear Creation has been through multiple iterations, much like the process of game design.

Art Mode!

When I originally started and registered my trade name with Colorado, Black Bear Creation was an outlet to sell my art. I have been an artist since High School, where I learned and developed a passion for creating mosaics, pottery, and glass fusing. However, deeper than that, I developed a passion for learning.

In most cases, sales are hard. I’ve worked in sales roles a lot through out my life. Selling products people want, products people need, products people desire, and even products nobody wants. I’ve sold direct to consume or business to business. Out of all of it, trying to sell art is the hardest.

People love art, desire art for their homes, but art is a pricey luxury good. It is also incredibly difficult for people to conceptualize the amount of team and energy goes into the creation of art. On average, I spent 75+ hours on the creation of each of my mosaic snowboards. Everyday people have a hard time spending $1750 on something like this. I often got super low offers, like $200, which didn’t even fully cover my costs.

I very quickly realized that my consignment sales were little to nothing and when I tried to get into bigger markets I never made the cut. Quickly, I took on a lot of classes and focused on the teaching aspect more than the sales aspects.

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The Transition

In Spring of 2022, I also found out I was pregnant with my second child. At the time, I was both teaching art in the evenings and still working my full-time job onboarding short-term rentals in our local resort locations, while fighting with fibromyalgia, which was especially vicious, as I couldn’t be on the medications that were effective for my condition while pregnant.

When he was born in August, at 29 weeks, I have to take extended leave from my full-time job. We spent 9 weeks in the NICU, which felt like an eternity. When we finally came home and my fibromyalgia was manageable again, it came time to start thinking what I wanted to do with my life.

I knew one thing for certainty, I didn’t want to go back into the hospitality industry.

At this point, I have been part of the hobby gaming world for a while. As a kid, I love playing board and card games, enjoying the standard mass market games like Clue and Life. I played card games with my grandpa, like War, Old Maid, Crazy 8s, and Mille Bornes. My brother and I also played a ton of board games we got from Toys R’ Us, like Don’t Wake Daddy, Mr Bucket, Cooties, Elefun, and The Lion King game.

When I was in High School, I lived with my dad, who loved to go to Barnes & Noble when they had all range of party games. He would bring home games like Apples to Apples, Argue, Last Word, and Scattergories.

It was after I graduated, in 2009, that I bought my first hobby game. I got the opportunity to backpack through Europe for 3 months. Each time I wandered past a game shop, I would wander in. So, while I was in Belgium, I bought a Dutch language copy of Citadels, which my CouchSurfing hosts graciously taught me and helped me translate the cards. Then in Frankfurt in the last days of my trip I picked up Rage, a small trick taking game, which had both German and English rules.

From there, my now husband owned and taught me Munchkin, and I dove head first into the gaming world from there.

By the time my second child had been born, I had been a hard-core gamer for many years, had a collection of several hundred games, and played many more. I had also been toying around with the idea of designing my own games. one idea I still haven’t figure out how to make work, and the other was Rescue Dogs, which I’m making good progress on.

So, Black Bear Creation evolved from my art and teaching art business, to my freelance business in the game industry. I started going to and working at conventions. I’d pick up part-time roles demoing games, and my first year I volunteered at Origins Game Fair. I went to other conventions, like GenCon and Pax U through Double Exposure. I focused on teaching games and expanding my resume at conventions, while also working on designs.

While at conventions, I would go hang out in the Unpub and playtesting areas, getting playtests in on DEER!, then go down to Denver to meet with the Colorado Game Designers Guild and work on my games there.

DEER! was my first completed design and I spent some time pitching it to different publishers. Now, I know, I’ve done the research and yes, I know the standard – if you’re getting no after no from publishers, don’t take it to crowdfunding. And I know, everyone says that their game is different, but DEER! really is.

I showed off DEER! at several Speed Pitching events, the Unpub Origins speed pitch from 2024 stands out the most to me. Almost everyone that sat down at my table with DEER! wanted to try the game immediately. Everyone that played got really into the game, were excited and enjoyed playing the game with me. I got a lot of positive feedback from this event. However, the thing I heard time and time again as well, was that it ‘just wasn’t a fit for their company”.

DEER! strides a weird line between mass market, but also hobby based on the way in which players engage and react with the information presented on the card. Anytime I playtested DEER! with friends, family, or on other situations, I was frequently asked when I was taking the game to kickstarter. People that I’ve played with in many different settings love the game, love the speed and the excitement of it, and want more. So it’s time to make it happen.

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The Road to Publisher

Now, my original goal, was to get a few games published, learn more about the industry, and then starting my own publishing company. However, running my own publishing company has always been on my mind.

Thus, it is time for Black Bear Creation to transform again. As of right now, I am planning on taking DEER! to crowdfunding in mid-late 2026. My goal between now and then is to work towards building community, getting more and more people playing DEER!, and getting professional art done for the game.

But I don’t want to stop there. My goal for Black Bear Creation is fund our first project, then work towards putting out two games a year for the next few years.

On this website, you can sign up for our newsletter, which I will use to share information on things as they progress, as well as more information on upcoming games. One of my next steps is learning how to put my prototypes on TTS, and once I have that, I’ll start running online playtesting. You can also find our upcoming projects on the Projects page.

This has been a ton of information about me and the founding of Black Bear Creation, but you can always check into the About page for more information.

Thanks for taking the time to take a look here and see where Black Bear Creation has come from and where it is going! Be sure to sign up for the Newsletter, and follow social medias to stay up to date!