Nate Kadlac: [00:00:00] I'm curious if you had anything to say to a new game creator, if you'd have any words of wisdom for them, either in the actual building of the game or just trying to get the word out about their game.
Grant Warman: Yeah, that's a great question. I think it depends on what your goals are as a game creator. If your goal is
Nate Kadlac: Welcome to the Hey Good Game podcast, where we chat with the creators of your favorite games that you secretly play in the cracks of your day. So we just got done interviewing Grant Warman of Polygonle, and Aaron, what were your takeaways from that?
Aaron Kardell: Well, with Grant, we had a great discussion about Polygonle and Quadragonle and certainly the topic of collaboration with other game creators and how that can be a good launching point and also a way to give back to the community was also intrigued by just the, the world of competitive [00:01:00] super smash brothers play and kind of the segmentation of people sticking to a particular, device that was interesting.
Aaron Kardell: So how about you, Nate? What'd you?
Nate Kadlac: Yeah, well, I'm a fan of these creators who have their first game just blow up. It's so wild. And as we work our way up towards interviewing Josh Wardle at some point, it's quite cool to see that game continue to have a trickle down effect of inspiration for many of these people.
Nate Kadlac: And I don't think that that's necessarily a coincidence. So really excited about this interview. Thank you. We'll get right to the pod.
Nate Kadlac: I'm Nate Kadlec, and I'm here with my co host, Aaron Kardel. And today we are excited to speak with Grant Warman, the creator of Polygonle, the word game with shape based clues. Grant is a software engineer who's worked for companies like Verily and Google. And after creating Polygonle, he's [00:02:00] also made an offshoot game based on it called Quadrogonal.
Nate Kadlac: Did I get that right?
Grant Warman: That is one of the alternate pronunciations. I call it Quadrogonal. Quadrogonal. Quadragonle. But you're not the first to call it Quadragonle.
Nate Kadlac: That's amazing. Well, that is a new word game challenge that has 4x4 word grids with shape based clues as well. Polygonle is a daily word game that works like Wordle, but is a more accessible and challenging game with polygon clues.
Nate Kadlac: So each shape hint contains a specific letter and you get several attempts to uncover the correct answer. Grant, we're thrilled to hear. We usually like to kick these off with a question about what is your favorite game to play?
Grant Warman: That is a great question. And it's not a word game, unfortunately, but I play competitive super smash brothers melee, the old game for GameCube.
Grant Warman: That's my main gaming passion these days. And actually the idea for Polygonle was [00:03:00] spawned in. A discord group for that game.
Aaron Kardell: I have so many follow up questions only because tangentially my kids play super smash brothers on the switch. I used to play Mario cart a lot, but only on the Nintendo 64. So I'm curious, you, you play competitively on game cube.
Aaron Kardell: Why on game cube? I can imagine from my own experience, but what's up with that?
Grant Warman: Yeah. So this is. The second smash game that they created and it has unique game mechanics that were sort of removed in later versions. And it has this really fanatical grassroots community that just loves the game. And because the game hasn't changed and since it's released, I think it's been 22 years or so, it has developed this really remarkable.[00:04:00]
Grant Warman: meta that is evolving over time where characters that were considered very bad when the game was released, you're seeing people use those at the highest level. It's almost like chess in the sense that there are truths about the game that are discovered and people are ridiculously good at it now. So it's really fun.
Nate Kadlac: So what does that mean to be a competitive player? Like, do you enter tournaments pretty regularly? What's that like?
Grant Warman: Yeah, so the competitive nature of it is Attending tournaments in person, there is an online ranked format that some people have built on the side as a passion project, but the main thing is traveling and attending tournaments.
Grant Warman: So here in Denver, there's a tournament basically every day of the week in one of the cities nearby. So there's one in Denver, there's one in Fort Collins. There's one occasionally in the Springs. There's one in Boulder. There's events all over the place. And then there are also these larger events that you'll go and travel to [00:05:00] that have like one to 2000 attendees.
Grant Warman: And those are also a really fun experience because you compete and then get them knocked out. You just go watch. The pros and yeah, it's like a sporting event. It's really exciting to watch your favorite player compete.
Aaron Kardell: So is it competitively like you playing for money? Is it purely for fun?
Grant Warman: Yeah. So most tournaments do have a prize pool.
Grant Warman: Normally I have made a very tiny amount of money. It is certainly not even for the very best players. It's not very financially lucrative, but yeah. So when you enter, you normally pay some entrance fee that goes into a pot and then Depending on the size of the tournament, the top three players or maybe the top eight will get a payout.
Grant Warman: So yeah, that's how the payment bit works.
Aaron Kardell: Like poker. It's a game of skill and you got to buy in.
Grant Warman: Exactly.
Aaron Kardell: Love it. Are you ranked?
Grant Warman: Yeah. So I was close to being in the top 10 in Colorado and then I started working on some other [00:06:00] projects, but no, I'm not officially ranked. I've taken some games off some ranked players though, so.
Nate Kadlac: That is wild. You had mentioned. Chess a little bit. I'm curious, what are the overlapping kind of mechanics between that and Super Smash Brothers? Like you had mentioned there's some kind of connection there and I, I love chess myself, but I'm curious like what that is.
Grant Warman: Yeah. Good question. So chess is my other big passion I should have mentioned.
Grant Warman: And I think they are related if you play faster formats of chess, like bullet chess or blitz on a faster time control. So in chess, you'll have a tactic, right? A series of moves. Where someone will gain an advantage. And that exists also in smash, where if you are aware of what's going on and you hit the right opening, there's a forced sequence of moves where you can respond to everything your opponent does.
Grant Warman: and get a large advantage. And that aspect is similar. The other thing is [00:07:00] people discover like new techniques. So in chess, so what happens in chess is there are these high level principles that people try to follow. And then the best players learn when you can break those principles. And the same thing applies in smash where there's quote unquote, like good options in certain positions.
Grant Warman: And the very best players know when to mix in would typically be a bad option, but it catches their opponent off guard and then they gain some large advantage. So yeah, there are definitely some similarities and a lot of differences, but the cool thing is just there are truths about the game to be discovered.
Grant Warman: And they're still discovering things in chess and in Smash.
Aaron Kardell: Love it. So is everybody that does this competitively? Is it pretty much focused on GameCube? Or are there different segments that focus in on playing on different devices?
Grant Warman: Yeah, so we and GameCube are both [00:08:00] used for Super Smash Bros. Melee, which is the version of the game that I play.
Grant Warman: Like, if there's a smaller cult following that does the 64 version only, then that's And then, I think the bulk of the players play the newest game, Ultimate, which is on Switch. And those communities, there is some overlap, but they're pretty distinct. They have their own diehard followers and their own like personalities within the scene and everything.
Grant Warman: So, yeah, their own little communities.
Aaron Kardell: Love that.
Nate Kadlac: So, I play a lot of chess. com. Where are you and is that something you Stick your nose up too. Somebody who takes it seriously.
Grant Warman: I mostly play on lead chess. I play on chess. com occasionally. Yeah. But yeah, I started playing in my early 20s and chess is super fun.
Grant Warman: An easy place to burn time to improve. You could spend all your time just practicing puzzles and tactics and improve a lot, but I reached a point where [00:09:00] I'm good enough to watch and appreciate Grandmaster play. I think that is a good level and I don't have any serious aspirations of trying to get a title or anything.
Grant Warman: It seems like a enormous amount of work.
Nate Kadlac: I currently do not have chess on my phone for that exact reason, I'm playing too much. Yeah, it's so, it's so addicting. Delete it every few months. So kind of understand a little bit about. How games came to play a big part in your life? Like, do you have any memories from your childhood that have you been playing forever?
Nate Kadlac: Or I'm kind of curious, like where that, where that comes from?
Grant Warman: Yeah, that's a good question. I have always been very competitive and I think that is the central theme in my life with games that I hated losing and I loved competing. I played a Games like smash [00:10:00] when I was younger just for fun, but just competing against our friends.
Grant Warman: And then as I've grown older, I have really enjoyed this process of improvement of trying to identify the areas of weakness or your strengths and doubling down on your strengths and just The art of improvement in general is something that is really interesting to me, and games are kind of a vehicle for that.
Nate Kadlac: And was Polygonle your first game, or have you been developing games for a long time?
Grant Warman: Polygonle is the first game I've made. Wow. And I've definitely been playing games for a while. I was playing World during its peak, and I made Polygonle just as a fun little side project with no intention of it becoming something popular.
Grant Warman: and it kind of grew legs and became a thing.
Aaron Kardell: Where'd you come up with the idea for the shape based clue system?
Grant Warman: Yeah. So [00:11:00] this all started in the Smash Brothers discord group in Colorado. Someone had attended a tournament and they posted this riddle. Someone had invented this little cryptographic puzzle.
Grant Warman: And it was this picture with a series of different shapes. And there was just one answer. So those shapes, each shape corresponded to a letter, just like how it works in Polygonle. And there was one distinct word that fit that pattern. And if I remember correctly, it was like the word cataract or something.
Grant Warman: And so someone posted this puzzle and people were trying to solve it. And for a group of video game nerds, I was surprised by how excited everyone was to solve this word puzzle. So being the programmer I am, I wrote a script that solved it. And. I ended up spoiling the solution for some people and I felt kind of bad.
Grant Warman: And at the time I had just quit my job at [00:12:00] Verily. So I had a lot of free time on my hands. So I just started building some tools to generate these sorts of puzzles. And the reception from this community on those puzzles was really tremendous. I was really surprised by how many people were engaged and interested in, in solving these.
Grant Warman: And then I was thinking, I should try to figure out how to transform this into something that people can play regularly. And that was what ultimately led me to building Polygonle.
Aaron Kardell: Nate and I were kind of talking ahead of time and it's a tough puzzle to get into at first, especially, I like a lot of word games, but I also don't think my vocabulary is that great.
Aaron Kardell: For repeat players. What are you seeing in terms of how many guesses do they typically take to get to the answer?
Grant Warman: Yeah, it's a good question. I would say. The average player gets it in three to four guesses. It behaves very differently than wordle even though it's somewhat of a small [00:13:00] twist. The really advanced players will play on what's called hexpert mode, which will only allow guesses that conform to the pattern.
Grant Warman: So if you see a shape repeating, your guess has to fit that pattern. It is Far more difficult to play in that mode. It's I basically never play on that boat. It's really, really hard. The upside of that is. There may be only 40 different words in the whole dictionary that fit the pattern, or on some days it's just like two or three.
Grant Warman: So it might take you 30 minutes of thinking to arrive at the answer, but the likelihood of getting it in a few number of guesses goes up a lot. And then we also have another set of players who play it exactly like Wordle. They just think of a seven or eight letter word depending on the day. Get all the information they can.
Grant Warman: They don't mind how many attempts it takes. And then, you know, they just try to reason through with the shapes and then traditional reasoning, [00:14:00] what the solution might be.
Nate Kadlac: That was my first few attempts.
Grant Warman: Yeah. Unsuccessful. That's what I would expect for most people. I think the cool thing is seeing the different solving strategies.
Grant Warman: So a lot of folks, when they become more experienced with the puzzles, they start solving before even guessing anything. They look at the pattern of the shapes. They plug in some like suffixes or prefixes and see what words could possibly fit that pattern when they use that to have a really educated first guess.
Grant Warman: And then they'll normally get it in like two or three.
Nate Kadlac: I do like the mechanic of being able to place the letters wherever you want, because without that, I would be,
Grant Warman: it would be brutal. Yeah,
Nate Kadlac: absolutely.
Grant Warman: I think the first few social media folks I saw try to tackle the puzzle, they would use like X's as, as fillers.
Grant Warman: And. I very quickly was like, this is not, this is not going to scale. People do not want to play this if they have to [00:15:00] do that every single time. So
Nate Kadlac: I'm curious, how has the game changed? So that's like one piece of feedback or that you saw, you know, how many iterations or versions have you built from the original?
Grant Warman: Ooh, that's a great question. Trying to think of major changes I've made. So as far as the actual game mechanics, there haven't been super large changes. I think the, the cursor changes. What you're describing, be able to select an individual tile and fill it in. We've had a couple iterations of that. So there's also a version where you can have it automatically fill in the matching shape.
Grant Warman: And then the Hexspurt mode was something that we added after the fact. And I think most of our diehard players use that almost exclusively. They only want to solve it in that mode. The only other pretty large change we added was. achievements system. So there's some pretty [00:16:00] lofty achievements that people can earn for, you know, solving the game 500 times or a thousand times or something.
Grant Warman: And also solving on difficulty mode. So there's a whole host of achievements that people can try to earn. And that's a feature that's been pretty well received.
Aaron Kardell: Before we hopped on, you were kind of talking about just, you've got a good collaborative community working with other game creators, and we saw that you had collaborated with Thirtle maybe back in 2023.
Aaron Kardell: Could you tell us a little bit more about that?
Grant Warman: Yeah. So these collaborations have been. really helpful for growing our game. And as a result, I felt the need to kind of give back to some other newer games in the community. So I forget when Thertle was created, but they, they launched after us. And the idea of just having a crossover puzzle is great for both communities.
Grant Warman: It introduces a new game to a population that maybe has never heard about it. There's normally some like theme [00:17:00] that is spanning both of the games. So there's a fun aspect in that. We got the idea of doing this from Squirtle. I don't know if you're familiar with them. So Squirtle and Waffle did a really big crossover a long time ago.
Grant Warman: And the creator of Squirtle attributes a huge amount of their success to that initial crossover. And similarly for us, we did a crossover with Squirtle and we gained, I forget the exact number, maybe like seven to 8, 000 additional daily users from that one crossover. And the Thirtle crossover was. The reverse situation where they had a smaller population of players and we were able to help them grow their population.
Grant Warman: So.
Aaron Kardell: That's great. Love to see that when, when people get back and especially after you got some benefit in a similar arrangement yourself. So that's cool. Looks like you've got ads on the site. Is that kind of your, your primary path on, on monetizing?
Grant Warman: Yeah. So we, the [00:18:00] first nine months of Polygonle and we had no ads and.
Grant Warman: We reached a point where with the amount of traffic we were getting and some of the new features I was interested in building, we needed some kind of income stream. So I built a premium offering for no ads, then most of our users are playing the free version, which does have, have the ads and yeah, it's, it's been pretty remarkable.
Grant Warman: It's a lot more profitable than I ever would have thought. imagined when building this game as just a for fun project.
Aaron Kardell: You had mentioned earlier that you left fairly a while back. Is this kind of your primary income generator now?
Grant Warman: I would say yes. I am working on a new project now that's still in the game space.
Grant Warman: It's coincidentally related to my Super Smash Brothers passion. But yeah, this is this is my primary form of income. And then I was [00:19:00] I was working at Google and Verily, I don't know if you're familiar with them, but it's under the Alphabet companies. So it was originally one of these other Google bets that spun off into its own company.
Grant Warman: So yeah, I was fortunate enough to save a decent amount and, and, Work on fun side projects like Polygonle. So
Aaron Kardell: it's awesome.
Nate Kadlac: And not live in the Bay, right? So
Grant Warman: yes,
Nate Kadlac: save a little cash, a little bit more
Grant Warman: affordable.
Aaron Kardell: Although real estate in Colorado these days. No,
Nate Kadlac: you're right.
Grant Warman: Yeah. Not very fun.
Nate Kadlac: No. So. I was doing a little searching and I found a number of TikTok videos and other things.
Nate Kadlac: Has content ever been a strategy for you in terms of getting, you know, this out to new users, whether it's SEO or video or anything else? I'm curious if you've dabbled there.
Grant Warman: Yeah, absolutely. So I think when I first created the game, [00:20:00] I emailed some people who had blog posts about wordle games and I emailed some creators on YouTube and TikTok.
Grant Warman: If I remember correctly, I think it was in the first week, one of the TikTok creators made a post. It was the first post ever about our game and it had 300, 000 views or something. And that the TikTok growth, all organic, I mean, after my first email, I did basically no additional outreach and the game became really popular among a set of TikTokers who solve wordle games every day, like that's their whole platform is they're just really skilled at word games.
Grant Warman: They play them every day. They do all the New York time puzzles, and then they'll play some of the offshoots. And. That was all organic. I mean, there was nothing that I did other than just tell people that the game [00:21:00] existed. And we have tried some ad spends, which was very unsuccessful. So I would say the, the overarching trend was people liked to discover a new game when they see someone play it.
Grant Warman: And then I think their own little communities on Tik TOK. So when you have a creator who's playing the game. Every couple of weeks that creates a following of other people who want to participate too. So they want to play the same, same game and compare how they did versus how the creator did. And yeah, that's been a huge driving factor behind our growth as a game.
Grant Warman: Also declined as a game. Both facets are connected to the. Sort of TikTok social sphere.
Nate Kadlac: I'm curious if you had anything to say to, a new game creator, if you'd have any words of wisdom for them, either in the actual [00:22:00] building of the game or just trying to get the word out about their game.
Grant Warman: Yeah, that's a great question.
Grant Warman: I think it depends on what your goals are as a game creator. If your goal is I want to create a really popular game and you don't care about being artistic and creative. I think taking an idea that works well and putting a creative twist on it is a really good way to be successful. And part of that, it's similar to doing a startup company where if you're creating a whole new market, That has never existed before.
Grant Warman: The upside is enormous. Most people don't have the right ingredients to succeed when they create something completely novel. So there's a very small set of people that figure out those exact correct elements. And that's the benefit of starting from something that is successful and then putting a twist on it is hopefully the core mechanics, the core.[00:23:00]
Grant Warman: Game design components that made this inspiration successful will also benefit your game. And I've seen a number of games that have succeeded with that model. So have you heard of Contexto? Yes. It's a game where you're trying to guess a word and with each guess, it tells you how similar your guess is.
Grant Warman: to the target word. So Symantle is a game that first came up with that idea. And then Contexto is almost identical. In fact, I don't know if there is a twist, but they did create a more polished experience. And that exploded on TikTok. That was one of the games, maybe six months after I had launched Polygonle, this Contexto game came out.
Grant Warman: Then suddenly there are people playing this everywhere. And. It's interesting that they didn't really invent something totally new. They just took this existing Symantle game, did their own little spin on it, [00:24:00] tried to execute it really well. and they were really successful as a result.
Aaron Kardell: So one of the things that I don't think we've really.
Aaron Kardell: with any game creators so far is, where do you think the line is on good inspiration versus, Oh, it kind of feels like you stole it. And like, I, I know you've had people knock off Polygonle. A lot of people we've talked to have had knockoffs of their games and it's. Super frustrating, but there are these cases where 2048, you kind of see it both ways, if you're familiar with 2048, it was sort of derived from some of the mechanics of another game, but it was definitely different, but then there's a million and one clones of 2048 and sort of seems intuitive to me that 2048 as a concept was cool, but all these knockoffs weren't, but do you have any other thoughts on where's that line acceptable?
Grant Warman: Yeah, that's a great [00:25:00] question. I think if the foundation of the game mechanics is identical and the way someone plays the game is the same, then it's not a sincere attempt at generating a spinoff type of game. I think you can have a remarkably small twist and the way the game is played and the strategy can be completely different.
Grant Warman: That's how I've felt with Polygonle, where the gameplay aspect is very similar to Wordle, right? There's still a hidden clue. When you make a guess, it gives you some information. But the way you play the game and the way you problem solve around solving the game is completely different. And that is this kind of emergent property that I didn't design necessarily, but just the nature of the small twist of giving an additional piece of information at the start just completely changes the way your thought process works when you're trying to solve a puzzle.
Grant Warman: And to me, that, that is the important part in making something distinct. If [00:26:00] I just made Wordle that was six to eight letters long, to me, that's just Wordle, right? It's not, it's not a novel twist. It's not changing the way you play the game fundamentally, other than it just being longer words. So yeah, I think the key differentiator, it needs to have a different feeling when you're playing the game.
Grant Warman: And for those 2048 clones, that's It's the same game, right? There's no difference. There's nothing novel. You don't change the way you play. So those would definitely fall in the category of being a rip off.
Aaron Kardell: And at least a different name, right? Come on. Yeah. At least.
Grant Warman: Yeah.
Nate Kadlac: You posted, I think in August last year that you had 1.
Nate Kadlac: 1 million users from 147 different countries. I'm guessing that was a month of traffic or?
Grant Warman: I don't think so. That might've been our cumulative traffic.
Nate Kadlac: Okay.
Grant Warman: At our peak, we are around 20, 000 daily users.
Nate Kadlac: Okay. Yeah, I guess like when you [00:27:00] view Polygonle right now, do you feel like there is room for growth?
Nate Kadlac: Are you actively trying to grow it or are you, I know you're coming out with new games and we can talk a little bit about that, but do you feel like, is there room for growth for Polygonle?
Grant Warman: That's a good question. I think there are a lot of people who don't know about Polygonle who would really enjoy playing it and without me changing anything about the nature of the game itself.
Grant Warman: I also think that this is a game that is not going to reach like waffle levels of popularity. There is a smaller subset of like word game fanatics who really love the challenge of longer words. And this like problem solving approach. but I think it's a smaller population of users. So I don't foresee us growing like 10 X or anything over the next few years, but I think we'll be pretty stable and continue to have a really invested fan base.
Grant Warman: [00:28:00] I am not currently planning on putting a lot of more development time into Polygonle and yeah, I mean, right now when I quit my job at Verily, My original intent was to build a larger business and, I have some experience with startups in the past, so that was my original intent. And then this Polygonle thing was came out of nowhere, completely unintended, learned a whole bunch in the process of building the game, iterating on the game, interacting with creators, building that sort of network.
Grant Warman: So that's all been a great learning experience. But I reached a point where the next goal is to build a larger business that, you know, won't be a single game, but will be something that's solving problems for a wider set of people.
Nate Kadlac: Got it. Is there anything else you want to say about that? Is that, are you thinking like kind of like a studio or a suite of games, or is [00:29:00] this something separate from what you're currently working on?
Grant Warman: Yeah, so what I'm working on now is disconnected from the Word game or puzzle space, it's not building a game, it's building a platform for managing and running tournaments. So this is a big pain point for all my smash brethren. But yeah, it's disconnected.
Aaron Kardell: Well, I don't know if he'd consider that part of addressing the needs of E gaming, but that is a growing segment right now.
Aaron Kardell: So that's pretty cool.
Grant Warman: Yeah, absolutely.
Aaron Kardell: So Grant, after Polygonle came, Quadragonle, but tell us more about where that concept came from and just what went into the development process on that.
Grant Warman: I think we had this discussion about game design and what makes a game. unique and stand out on its own versus being more heavily influenced by an existing game.[00:30:00]
Grant Warman: And Polygonle was absolutely a game that was just a small twist on Wordle. So I was trying to build a game where you were just faced with this puzzle, there was no guessing mechanic, and your goal was to complete the puzzle, similar to a Sudoku. And after some iteration, I came up with this idea of a grid of words Just like Polygonle that you had to complete so that there were valid four letter words on rows and columns, just like a crossword.
Grant Warman: And my first iteration of this, I generated some puzzles and had some people try to play them and it was just way, way too hard, like no one could solve, but the few set of people who did solve them actually really enjoyed the mechanics of the game. So I ended up iterating on this idea a little bit and coming up with different difficulty levels.
Grant Warman: So just like with Sudoku, if you do a really easy Sudoku, most people can just solve it [00:31:00] using very simple deduction. If you try to solve an expert sudoku, many of us are not even equipped to solve them. So that was kind of my goal with the difficulty levels in Quadragonle, where the easiest puzzles, most people can solve them without too much outside help.
Grant Warman: But the expert puzzle, a very small set of people are going to be able to solve those puzzles. And the nice thing about this is the, the person who's a more casual word game fanatic, they can go and solve the easy puzzle and maybe push themselves and try to solve a medium puzzle, but the real expert players, they'll solve all of the puzzles and they can solve the expert puzzle in under a minute sometimes.
Grant Warman: And they're just really skilled at doing it. So it's nice to be able to build a game that appeals to both a casual user and a more serious and skilled user. And I think we [00:32:00] struck that balance with, Quadrigonal.
Nate Kadlac: How have you seen that perform in terms of crossover from Polygonle and just new user acquisition?
Nate Kadlac: Like any Yeah,
Grant Warman: so it's definitely still a new game in the sense that it doesn't have the awareness that Polygonle has. So I think, I forget the exact number, but on TikTok, Polygonle, the hashtag has over like 20 million, 25 million views, something like that. So there's a ton of just knowledge that Polygonle exists.
Grant Warman: And I think to date, we've had maybe three videos total on, Quadrigonal. So it's still very much a small niche community that is playing the game. There is definitely a crossover from Polygonle. We have it promoted on the Polygonle page, but I think because it's a different mechanic, it just appeals to a slightly different set of users.
Grant Warman: And it's been interesting to see it kind of grow and [00:33:00] receive feedback from people saying they really love how difficult it is and how challenging it is. Thanks. So that's been cool to see.
Nate Kadlac: So as you're getting feedback from people, how do you elicit that? Do you have a, an email list? Do you have a discord?
Nate Kadlac: How do you listen for user feedback and get those feedback loops?
Grant Warman: Yeah. So we have a couple different communities. We have. Everything from Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and Discord. And I think our most vocal community is on Discord. And we have a feedback section on there where people can propose new features for Polygonle, or just get feedback on game mechanics.
Grant Warman: And we had a, had a number of iterations on Quadrigonal, for example, where the first iterations were just too difficult, too frustrating, and, you know, it was When you hear one person give a piece of feedback, sometimes it's hard to know if it's just them or it applies to a larger group. But the nice thing is that our communities are large enough that you'll, [00:34:00] if something is really important, you will hear it more than once, you know, multiple people will share a similar sentiment.
Grant Warman: And that is normally what drives the things that I will actually incorporate. Same thing in Polygonle with the ability to select individual cells. That's a feature that very quickly we had numerous people saying, Hey, this would be really helpful if I didn't have to use these fillers. And it was a very straightforward feature to add, and people were really receptive to that improvement.
Aaron Kardell: They're awesome. But I think it, I love puzzle games and it's just the combination of the puzzle and the words that I, wish I was better at. These right outta the gate.
Grant Warman: I'm not very good at them either. So it's fun watching people solve my games really easily. There's a guy on YouTube. Well, first, shout out to Ranksk.
Grant Warman: I don't know if you've heard of this creator on YouTube. He does all the world games. It's R A N G S K. He's been super helpful. I think he was one of the first YouTube [00:35:00] creators that I sent an email to about Polygonle. He's given me tons of direct feedback through the process. He still plays Polygonle daily.
Grant Warman: But he is so good at these games. He will get the first word in and then instantly know the next word. Just, I have no idea where it's just coming from, but yeah, he'll solve it super fast. And when he was getting challenged by Quadragonle, I knew, okay, this is a little too hard right now. We need to add some hints.
Grant Warman: We need to give people more information so they can get started. But yeah, my, my mind is not wired to the way a lot of these things work. So
Aaron Kardell: I, I kind of assume from a difficulty perspective that you're, are you generating these by algorithm on both sites?
Grant Warman: Not on Polygonle. I mean, I, I had for Polygonle, I had a really relatively simple heuristic for getting the list of words.
Grant Warman: I filtered out words that weren't very common in the English language. And then I looked for words that had, they had to have [00:36:00] enough repeated characters. So that the shapes would actually give you a hint. And then the only other really big change I added is in the first few months, there were a ton of words that ended in I N G.
Grant Warman: So people would just consistently guess a word that ends in I N G and they would be right. And then I'd give them a bunch of information and that wasn't very interesting. So I removed. I left some words that ended in ing, but I stripped a huge number of these so that it was more diverse from day to day.
Grant Warman: Yeah. And then on Quadragonle, that was algorithmically generated all the puzzles and. It's very difficult to know in advance how difficult a puzzle will be, so I didn't put too much effort in that process on its own. It's more, the easier puzzles you get more information to start, and the harder puzzles you get less information, but there's still going to be a pretty high variance in difficulty.
Grant Warman: Yeah. So some days people will say it takes them 20 minutes to solve it. And some days they'll solve it in under a minute. [00:37:00] So it's hard to know in advance.
Nate Kadlac: I'm curious, like, do you have any, if you're willing to share any like engagement time, like how much time do people spend on your site?
Grant Warman: There is a feature I added actually to this, to address the problem of people not having eight letter words.
Grant Warman: Readily available. There's a little light bulb on the keyboard that will just give you words that are the right length
Nate Kadlac: to
Grant Warman: help like jumpstart yourself. I think the average daily engagement on Polygonle is around five minutes. And let's see, on a Quadragonle, it's about three minutes on Quadragonle per session.
Grant Warman: So I don't know if people are just solving it super fast or they're solving one and then leaving. Cause the original intent behind. Quadrigonal was also to build something challenging so that people are engaged for a longer period of time.
Nate Kadlac: That makes sense. I would have guessed a little higher too on Polygonle.
Aaron Kardell: On quadrigonal, [00:38:00] is there, is it possible to have multiple solutions or does your algorithm kind of filter out that possibility?
Grant Warman: Yeah, good question. So yes, we accept alternate solutions and that's something that people have been pretty positive about. Originally, my intention was for them to have a unique solution.
Grant Warman: I had a friend of mine work on generating some of these, and I think his approach was just not correct. I guess it didn't produce unique puzzles. And so I ended up just keeping the puzzles that he had generated and filtering down to, or sorry, just accepting alternate solutions. And it's interesting.
Grant Warman: Sometimes a puzzle will have a whole bunch of different solutions and people. There's a sense of achievement when you solve it, and there's an additional little hit, I guess, of endorphins when it's the correct one and not an alternate one, so.
Aaron Kardell: So Grant, if you want people to find you online, [00:39:00] where, where should they look?
Aaron Kardell: That's,
Grant Warman: I don't know if I have a really, a really central location for an online identity, but you can find me on Twitter. At blorp with five P's and an underscore at the end. It's very convenient, but actually you should probably go look up Polygonle game. that's where we posted about Polygonle
Aaron Kardell: right on.
Aaron Kardell: Love it. Well, thanks for being here, Grant.
Grant Warman: Thanks for having me. This has been really fun.
Aaron Kardell: This is great. Thanks Grant.
