Nate Kadlac: [00:00:00] Any game, like where does the idea come from? Do you ever start with maybe even a domain name, and work backwards from that, or do you like, I'm kind of curious your, creative process around what you're looking for, what you're inspired by.
Daniel Tait: I play a lot of games, which obviously helps for inspiration.
Like I play tons of, whether it's puzzle games, sort of larger titles, just all sorts of games. So I think I understand basic game mechanics quite well in terms of the core need that a game has to have like a. Key feature or a mechanism, but to actually then come up with the different ideas.
I don't know. I guess I start the
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.
Aaron Kardell: All right. Well, I'm thrilled because today we just got done interviewing Daniel Tate and four of Daniel's games are now part of [00:01:00] the Hey Good Game portfolio. It was actually our first completed acquisition.
So it was great to have them on the podcast a little over a year later. Nate, what were some of your takeaways?
Nate Kadlac: Daniel has this ferocious sort of appetite to build and launch games. Without seemingly like a lot of hangups around without really feeling that intense sort of pressure to have everything perfect.
And it's something I struggle with, but if you go back into Hacker News and look at his launches, he's just launched so many games there. And I'm just really inspired to see someone who just continues to publish. And he's one hitting the zeitgeist, with a couple of his games, with AI and wordle.
And so, I'm really excited for this interview that we just did. What about you, Aaron?
Aaron Kardell: Yeah. Just said a prolific nature and the willingness to, Just put it out there, take a risk, not worry about perfectionism on a [00:02:00] first cut. And even more so, willingness to like, just because I posted it doesn't mean it'll be there tomorrow.
And willingness not just to post, but leave it aside if it's not carrying you forward, which I think is very commendable. So, we'll let you hear it here, direct from Daniel himself.
I'm Aaron Cardell, and I'm here with my co host, Nate Kadlec. And today we're excited to speak with Daniel Tate, the creator of Mathler and many other beloved games. Daniel is a programmer and indie hacker from Scotland, and he's created several puzzle games that we're proud to now have in our portfolio here at A Good Game.
Those games include WordGa, CrossWordle, Somplete, and Mathler. Mathler is kind of the big one that kicked it all off though, and it's a math based game inspired by Wordle. Requires you to do basic math operations like addition and multiplication in the different Use the [00:03:00] digits 0 to 9 to create an equation that equals the answer given.
There are multiple modes of difficulty with different conditions in them, so everyone can play at a pace that suits them. And recently, Daniel's embarked on a new site called wordnerd. co that I'm sure he'll tell us more about today. Daniel, we're thrilled you're here.
Daniel Tait: Thanks so much for having me.
Aaron Kardell: well, Daniel, it sounds like you're a frequent listener of the podcast and we're honored to hear that.
So I'm sure, the first question we're going to ask you, which is what's your favorite game to play?
Daniel Tait: Yes. So definitely a frequent listener. I think I have caught every episode so far, so I'm really enjoying the show guys. And yeah, excited to be here. my favorite game, that is a very difficult question.
I probably should have a better answer for since I know the question was coming. I would say recently, my partner and I got a Nintendo Switch. And it's the first console that I've owned in probably over 10 years now. So it's really nice to get back into some like proper console gaming. [00:04:00] We have a massive backlog of, games that we've been, like wanting to play over the years, but just never had the means to.
So we. we're just working our way through those. So right now we're in Zelda Breath of the Wild, and we're playing it sort of couch co op style where we just take turns about the two of us. So it's, it's been a, quite a nice evening activity for us when we check out from work, but, really enjoying it so far.
It's an awesome game. So
Aaron Kardell: that's great. And Daniel, it seems like maybe you come from a family of puzzlers, your games you give a shout outs to, I think your dad and your mom, but can you tell us more about that?
Daniel Tait: For sure, yeah, definitely a family of puzzlers. So, puzzle games specifically, my mum plays every night probably two to three hours of puzzle games.
A whole mix of things from the crosswords, sudokus, jigsaw puzzles, all sorts of things. My dad on the other hand, he's a bit more of an interesting story. So he's been playing, the Scrabble version on Nintendo DS, the [00:05:00] original Nintendo DS, Scrabble 2008. It's the only game my dad owns and pretty much the only game my dad plays.
So every night he'll sit down with his DS for around an hour while they're watching TV together and just play away on that, almost 20 year old game now. So a simple man with simple pleasures, but that's his go to. Yeah. So
Nate Kadlac: when did you get into What was like the first inkling of creating a game? When did that kind of pop into your head and yeah, I'm just curious like what your, story is there?
Daniel Tait: For sure. Yeah. I used to tinker quite a lot with little games way back in the day, even back in sort of high school. Early university days. I was the type of person that, I like how you introduced me as a programmer and I appreciate that because I'm not really by trade a programmer. I'm very much the type of person who was right clicking files on the PC when I was 10 years old and trying to figure out what was inside them.
And that was pretty much how I got into these things. I think the first game I ever remember sort of tearing [00:06:00] apart was a game called Tunnel Blaster on the PC. I haven't played it and haven't even looked it up in a long time, but it was a very simple. A PC game back in probably the 90s it was released and I just tore it apart and the packages inside all that I found the puzzle files with the graphics and all sorts of sprites and things like that and I started just tweaking them and making my own levels for that game, which was the first time I sort of think, okay, this is interesting.
I can change this here and I can change that there and I can change the speed of the enemies here. And, so that's kind of like the origins of me, I guess I've always been a big gamer. So I guess it just brings a natural curiosity to, to how things are made. But then fast forward, I didn't, I haven't really spent too much time in game development over the past five, six, seven years.
I've tinkered around here and there, but nothing until Mathler was ever released or shown to the world. So, yeah, it was nice to finally put something out there.
Aaron Kardell: And, since Mathler was kind of your first big game, I think [00:07:00] people would love to hear, just a little bit more about what was the impetus for creating that?
Yeah. How, did that go about?
Daniel Tait: Yeah, it's a good question. I sadly don't remember the details that well. It's one of these things that I'm the type of person that is kind of always hacking on something at the weekend, I would say, most weekends I'm working on some sort of side projects, all sorts of things you can see that I've released.
And then Mathler specifically, obviously Mordor was taken off massively at the time. I was playing daily, my whole family was playing daily. And we'd already been playing for months, I think, before I ever, sort of, thought of the idea for Mafler. And I think it was just sitting there at the computer one, one Saturday, wanting to build something.
Thought, okay, let's play around with Wordle and see what we can come up with in terms of some variations or some tweaks to it. And then how I actually went about building Wordle, sorry, Mafler, I found a open source Wordle clone online. You guys are familiar with the code, so you know probably better than I do at this point, but it was built on the Rails OR.
I very well put [00:08:00] together a Wordle clone that someone released on GitHub and I just started tinkering with that file and genuinely for the first version of Mathler, I think the only change that was made was I converted that word list into a list of mathematical equations. There was no other significant changes made to the open source Wordle game and I just thought, okay, this is interesting, let's give that a go.
And Yeah, it was, fun to play. I'm not even into maths really myself, but I enjoyed the game. There's not a category that I've ever really spent much time thinking about, but, it seemed like an obvious variation to try and it just seemed to work. it was just one of those sort of serendipitous lucky moments.
It worked straight at the bat. And I think I released it that day on Hacker News. I posted it and it started to get some traction and yeah, I had to go through some development after that. But that was the origin of the original idea.
Nate Kadlac: Did you do anything else from, kind of trying to get eyeballs on the game outside of Hacker News?
Did you promote it anywhere else or do anything? So
Daniel Tait: Mathler was solely [00:09:00] a single Hacker News post that launched it. I didn't even post it on Reddit or any other forums at the time. So it was one of these crazy, and if looking back, I don't even think it was a hugely successful post on Hacker News.
I think it got about 70 points or something. So not like a massive post. It must've, I think it was just the word of hype at the time was so high and then people were sharing scores in groups and it was just From that point, it really grew up quite fast organically with just a ton of direct traffic.
So I've never really been able to source the exact or pinpoint the exact moments that it started taking off. But that was the only remark thing I did for it. So it was a single post game. Yeah.
Nate Kadlac: I think when we were first taking a look at the game, we had noticed that there was quite a number of write ups about the game from a number of different publications.
Did you reach out to anybody or was it just part of the zeitgeist and the wordle kind of phenomena that was happening that they sort of picked up on that game naturally?
Daniel Tait: Exactly that. Yeah. No, I didn't reach out to anyone. I [00:10:00] think tomsguides. com was the first website to do a write up and from there, I think most other publications just took.
The information or the story from there when they were writing sort of different mortal variations that were out there. Yeah. So
Nate Kadlac: how do you think about creating a game? what kind of inspiration or where are you when you're thinking about these games? You've created a lot of games. It. Can you share how many games you've created?
Daniel Tait: Yeah, so, yeah, so since that point, obviously when you have something successful like Mafler and then you start to have an audience, it just felt like such a, as a, like you mentioned, indie hacker type like me that likes to make these side projects, that just felt like such a Awesome opportunity to build more things and to build things with an audience already there.
It's just such a privilege because Yeah, i'm very used to releasing things that get 10 eyeballs and then that's it gone into the abyss for the rest of time so it was really nice to have an audience. So yeah, I really took full advantage of that and Just started churning out games at quite a high pace.
So I think in [00:11:00] probably since then I would have to look back through my folders, but it must be 50 plus games from now. I've tried to sort of throw out there and see all sorts of variations on sort of common classics and then some more creative endeavors and yeah, just all sorts of things. You guys have seen quite a few of them.
There's some that I've done much better than others in that group. But it's been great fun, like it's just amazing to now launch something and have sort of a thousand people maybe look at it pretty quickly. And that's just a nice loop, to start building more things or to change features and it's something I have never had before.
So it was a real nice change. Yeah.
Aaron Kardell: One of the things that I really appreciate in your approach, Daniel, is not just are you, have you been prolific in creating the games, but you seem to. You're willing to throw something at the wall, so to speak, try it, and then you won't keep investing effort if you don't see an initial [00:12:00] spark or it's not working, and you're actually willing to wind it down and let it go, and it doesn't have to be all 50 of those games, I presume, don't have a permanent spot on the internet at this point, and I think That's actually something a lot of us could aspire to.
I think anytime creators publish, they feel like, Oh, it's so permanent. But you've got certainly an approach that you're willing to try and you're willing to just let it go if it's not working. So did you anticipate that when you got into it or, was that kind of just something you developed or learned along the way or what?
That hasn't been a typical approach I've seen.
Daniel Tait: Appreciate the comment. I think it is important to. Sometimes you just realize that things aren't working or things people in your audience don't like what you've created. it's perfectly okay for that to be the case. I've made some terrible, games.
I'm happy to admit to that. There's many games I played for five days and I don't enjoy them at all [00:13:00] afterwards. So it's also a self learning process of, I guess, what I maybe do differently than some other creators. Rather than playing the game privately, I'm going to that testing loop in my own sort of local space.
I just throw up on online and, get some other people to test it alongside with me. So there's many times I launch a site or a game and yeah, a few days later or a few weeks later, it just won't exist anymore because either I just don't think it works or the audience has kind of told me that already.
So yeah, I'm a big fan of just, it's something I love about building on the web as well. It's so easy to. to do that. And, there's a really quick feedback loop and it's really easy to sort of, I don't need to go through any approval system or any build process to, to launch things. So it's just easier just to throw it up there.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah. Any game, like where does the idea come from? Do you ever start with maybe even a domain name, and work backwards from that? Or do you, I'm kind of curious your, creative process around what you're looking for, what you're inspired by.
Daniel Tait: I play a lot of games, which also helps for inspiration.
Like I play tons of [00:14:00] weathers. puzzle games, sort of larger titles, just all sorts of games. So I think I understand basic game mechanics quite well in terms of what the core need that a game has to have a key feature or a mechanism, but to actually then come up with different ideas.
I don't know. I guess I start the sort of, I have my design process. like I say, I'm a weekend builder because I have a full time job during the week as well. So I typically set aside my time. I also kind of set limitations for myself, so I say, okay, I've maybe got six hours to work on something. What do I want to build in that time?
And let's say I'm interested in building something in like the word game category today. I have kind of a list of ideas of very one level ideas that I typically write when I'm on airplanes. I typically sit there. staring at a blank, note, Apple note on my iPhone, just sort of scribbling down very rough ideas for games or other websites and things like that.
So I've got a long list of things that I want to build at some point. And then, yeah, I set aside the time to throw [00:15:00] up a quick MVP, literally as quick as possible to the point where I can play it. It's a game or I can use it if it's a website and I just see if there's any sort of spark there to develop further.
So in terms of like actual specific ideas, it's, it comes from that, I guess that ideation and on my notepad. And then. the first versions or just get up as quickly as possible. Yeah.
Aaron Kardell: And so just thinking through the evolution of Mathler specifically. So you put Mathler up, if I remember the history, right. I think that wasn't that much longer after Wordle kind of hit the zeitgeist was maybe early in 2022.
Is that sound right?
Both: Exactly. Yeah. I think February 22, I think it was the launch. Yeah. And then.
Aaron Kardell: there are different levels to Mathler, so there's an easier version, there's a killer version, there's a hard version. [00:16:00] How much later did those other levels enter the picture?
Daniel Tait: They were quite quick. I Once the Mathler hit his sort of peak, or his very large audience at the time.
I thought, okay, well, rather than launching new things, I should really focus. It's, one of my definite, negative, things is that I'm not really a finisher typically. I'm definitely not a perfectionist in these things. And that's why you get a portfolio of 50 games rather than one really good game.
So, but with Mathler, I felt a deep responsibility to treat it well. and to actually develop the game further when it had such a large audience and it had people receiving a ton of positive feedback from people asking to develop it further essentially. And I think some of the ideas such as the different difficulties actually came from the little feedback button on the website.
I think some people mentioned we can try this, we can try that. I got tons of inbound those first few weeks from people with ideas. So I'd have to look back in my emails. But I think [00:17:00] some of the ideas for the difficulties definitely came from the community. So I went ahead and built those out. The funniest part of the story of Mathler is that the tech stack for Mathler was a stack that I'm completely unfamiliar with, to the point that I had no idea how to edit the game very well.
it was built in this TypeScript React tech stack, and I just have never used it before. I was hosting it in Netlify, which I'd never used before. I didn't know how to run builds for it. I didn't know how to do anything. So when I was making changes, I was actually editing the game directly in the GitHub web code editor, just writing changes and doing commits every sort of 15 minutes or so to push changes live.
so it was a very, dirty, messy process to make changes to Mathler at that time, but I kind of just kept going with it until I got features out. And yeah, that's where the, different difficulties came from and some other features that came later. Yeah. So you've kind of mentioned that
Nate Kadlac: you're, not really a programmer, but what, how do you identify and what do you [00:18:00] feel like, it just feels if you don't label yourself a programmer, it probably feels like there's a huge hurdle to actually creating games.
Yeah. I'd love for you to, speak to what you feel like you're good at.
Daniel Tait: For sure. No. And I would say obviously I have some programming skills for sure. And I understand some of the basics behind programming. I'm just not a programmer by trade, I guess is why I mean, and I'm sure when a lot of people look at my code, they're like, Oh my goodness, what is happening here?
Because the things that I, some of the things I do, I know myself that I shouldn't be doing them, but I kind of just build things to make them work rather than things to do it properly. If that makes sense. So I just like to build things. I don't really. If it's design, if it's coding, if it's writing, if it's whatever way to do it, I just use the tools that are sort of at hand to get things made that I can play with.
it's kind of my, what I love to do.
Nate Kadlac: Well, I know that you're a, you're an entrepreneur, but if we meet at a party, how do you introduce
Daniel Tait: yourself? That's a very good question. Nowadays, I have no idea. Honestly, I try and avoid the question. I just, [00:19:00] I usually tell people I just work on the computer and usually you don't get too many follow up questions, at least in my circles around where I live.
It's, that's usually a conversation ender. So it's quite simple for me to just try to move on from there.
Aaron Kardell: Well, so Continuing the progression of the Mathler journey, and we'll get on to some of the other games soon, but it seemed like it was maybe quite a while before you added ads to Mathler. Is that right?
Daniel Tait: Yeah, I can't remember exactly, but I think it was quite a while, yeah, maybe two or three months after the launch, yeah.
Aaron Kardell: Got it. And it seems like, on a lot of your other games, you're also maybe, Like that's a later consideration for you. It's is it safe to say you try to explore, is this going to work before you even really think about monetization?
Daniel Tait: Yeah, I think so. Exactly. And I think monetization is important and I would love to, when I have a large audience, I think it's important to then capture some value from that site so you can spend more time on [00:20:00] them and you can improve them and you can, release new products and features to that community.
I think it's, it's sometimes a mistake to. To not monetize these products and to sort of give it your all when you have the opportunity. But having said that I think a lot of products do monetize maybe a bit too early and it shouldn't be their priority and I personally just, I find that although I don't get a huge negative response when, for example, you add ads to a game, I do find that the engagement rate It goes down a little bit in terms of the community size.
I feel like actually people reaching out to you and maybe with some ideas or some product feedback just starts to decrease. That might also just be the life cycle of the product, so it might be nothing related to that. It might just be people are have already shared what they wanted to share with me, but definitely seen that in the past.
So I've. I kind of wait until I'm happy to, I don't typically monetize until I get the process at a point where I'm actually not planning to change it too much after that. Although that's more relevant to like the simple products, things like web games where [00:21:00] I typically get them to a point I'm happy with and then don't develop them too much further.
And yeah, monetization in the past has been simply through just display ads. I haven't really tried any other. I would love to give a try to some other ideas and how to monetize, but it just hasn't been a priority so far.
Aaron Kardell: Makes sense. Well, so we alluded to it in the intro, but four games that Daniel built are now part of the Higa game portfolio.
Frequent listeners will know that we're always looking to buy games and have had kind of our own journey with that. But Daniel's games were. We previously had three games of our own and we were excited to bring in Daniels as our first four additions. But even though Mathler was quite a bit bigger than some of Daniel's other games, there was actually another of his that led us to finding him.
And that was Someplete and Someplete got a little bit of notoriety for. Actually, Daniel's approach to creating it and [00:22:00] rather than me butcher the story, Daniel, can you tell us a little bit about just what was so unique about the creation of some plate?
Daniel Tait: For sure. Yeah. So some plate was made almost entirely through chat, GBT.
So at the, one of the early versions of chat, GBT as well, I think it was maybe the 3. 5 model. So probably over a year ago now. And it was the first time I was kind of testing these new AI tools to see what, you could probably tell from some of the stories I've told earlier, that like a tool like chat, GBT for me is an absolute goldmine for someone who just likes to build things quickly.
And, to have a tool like that on my side to help me with some of the more technical challenges is really unlocked a whole new world of, side projects for me, of things that I would never have been able to build in the past. I can now. I could now get some help from that AI assistant and yeah, build something maybe a bit more complicated or a bit more interesting.
So some play was partly that. So again, this is going back in time a bit, but I think the, origin of some play with chat GPT was, I was essentially [00:23:00] talking to it and asking it for ideas for a puzzle game for me to make. So it wasn't, my original idea wasn't actually to do any coding with chat GPT, which I hadn't done at the time.
It was just using it as more of a. Yeah, an idea sounding board to say, okay, have you got, and then my original question to ChatGP was, I really like playing Sudoku. Do you have an idea for a similar style puzzle as Sudoku? And it came back with a few different results, a few different ideas. And the one that stood out to me was this.
What turned out to be some plate a few hours or a day or two later, so it was Essentially a number elimination game. I think it's kind of people some people describe as a reverse Sudoku I haven't it's a little bit like that is obviously logic involved and a bit of math involved as well But it was definitely an interesting concept from the first time I saw it and what was particularly interesting was that I could play it with inside the chat GBT because it was able to give me a grid that I could actually play and try and solve within the chat interface.
So straight away, I had an MVP where I could play a few rounds of the game without actually [00:24:00] writing anything. So it was a great way to test, okay, is this fun? Is this an interesting concept? And I personally really enjoyed it. And number games are not even my Sort of speciality. So I thought great. Let's develop this a little bit further and that's when I thought well If we've come this far, let's just see how far we can push it.
So follow up questions asking tragedy to actually write the first version in HTML and It got me a playable version online and then from there. I started working with it to Create a generator. So it would generate unique grades with some unique solutions. And that, for example, is something that I would never have been able to code myself.
That sort of algorithmically generated puzzles with unique solutions was, would be beyond my capabilities for other projects. So that was a huge unlock for me. And yeah, it was a really interesting project to test these new tools. And it was, yeah, it was really well received from the audience as well.
That one in particular, I think the story really was, an interesting point for people. I think it was maybe one of the first [00:25:00] web games Chajupati helped build. And it got lots of positive and negative feedback for that purpose, because there's a whole range of different opinions on whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but that's possible.
So
Nate Kadlac: I'm assuming that you probably use AI in some large capacity at this point to create more games. Is that, true?
Daniel Tait: Yeah. Yeah. So. I went through a phase of maybe six, six months where I was using it a lot to generate all sorts of things. I've actually kind of reverted back a little bit now. and I'm doing some more maybe simple stuff just by myself.
It's, I kind of miss actually writing some code or doing some, of my own things, but I still use Chats GPT a lot of the time to, to check things and to give me a second opinion, or especially for my programming to, to tell me when things, why things aren't working. I was the type of person that was spending hours and hours on Stack Overflow, who has now never been on the site for two years.
So it really replaced that sort of need for me. And it's, yeah, it's been a huge unlock. [00:26:00]
Nate Kadlac: Kind of zooming out just for a second. Why do you create games? I get the sense, there's a point of there, there's some creativity, you're spending time on the weekends. maybe there's a little bit of learning, programming involved.
And obviously we've acquired some of your games, so you've been able to, exit a couple of those, but what keeps you building them? is it to create like the next Wordle or something like that?
Daniel Tait: It's really nice to build something. So games in particular, I've only been building since Maffler. So before Maffler, I was, my typical side projects were other, I made like an online birthday card website for a while.
I had a website where travelers could meet each other in different cities. I really like building things that people can use. In my other, my full time career, I build B2B software, which is, or I work for a B2B software company. So it's much less sort of hands in consumers and products that I don't use myself or my friends and family will never [00:27:00] use.
So it's just really nice to build something that I can send to my family group chat and say, Hey guys. I made this you want to give it a go and I know they love puzzle games and they're like my number one fans when I send them puzzles so that's really rewarding I think just building something for friends and family to use and yeah it's just it's fun isn't it just starting from a blank page and coming up with something and putting out there it's it's amazing we can do it from this little machine in front of us it's it's it's great
Nate Kadlac: well I gotta say of the four games that we acquired Crosswordle is my favorite and I just have to say I, me, my wife and I play that every single day and that's amazing.
That's been pretty cool. what, can you just tell me a little bit about the putting that one together?
Daniel Tait: Yes, so crosswordle. There have been a few games that have come out before crosswordle that were, had the similar idea of the swapping the positions of games, of tiles, sorry, of letters, with the same wordle [00:28:00] like scoring or tracking.
So you have waffle, for example, which is the 5x5. Or still the five letter words where you have to swap the letters to solve the puzzle. we loved Waffle Me, my family, we used to play that most days. I guess the biggest change was we thought this would be really interesting with more variation of word length and more type of a crossword style.
layout. So I had another game already, I'd previously built called killer crossword. A game you guys aren't familiar with, but it's actually been online the whole time. I just don't really talk about it, but it's, it's a crossword website that I launched a while ago. And because of that website, I had a crossword generator already built that generates unique crosswords on load.
So I just sort of took the code from that and plugged in the coloring dynamics from Wardo, and then Crossword was born pretty quickly after that. So it was actually a really quick game for me to build. And yeah, it was, we love it as well. It's one that I play regularly still. [00:29:00] And it's challenging.
It's a hard game. I find it quite difficult and it's, I enjoy the challenge of that one. Glad to hear you're playing as well as, it makes me very happy whenever I hear of a loyal player. So,
Aaron Kardell: Nate, are we going to do a deal right in this podcast? Are we going to
Daniel Tait: crossword? Is this a crossword? Killer crossword is a funny one.
That was one that had a big spike. When I, launched it and it kind of just faded away and I ignored it for too long, I think, so it's just sort of sits in, that one, it runs completely by itself, so I just have, I just never look at it anymore, it just kind of ticks away, and I occasionally get an email from someone angrily because I have a British spelling in the crossword or something, and I'm very upset by this, by today's crossword, so, but not baths, it's math.
Exactly, yeah.
Aaron Kardell: Well, Daniel, one of the things that one of my hobbies now is, just researching a lot [00:30:00] of indie developers that are creating games. And there's kind of this thing that's bubbled up over time where a lot of individuals are maybe. I'll just say working on a non game startup. And sometimes it's a B2B thing.
Sometimes it's not even software related, but they kind of have this passion project on the side of creating games. And it seems like that's the case for you. And what are your motivations there? what keeps you, coming back to games and how is that different than, maybe your day to day?
Daniel Tait: For sure.
They're very almost polar opposite pursuits, I guess. Like one of them is. Trying to solve a very specific problem for a large companies. In my case, regulation reporting, so not the most exciting fields, but something that's needed and they're useful for those companies. But it's not a product that you get a ton of [00:31:00] enjoyment from the design process and you never have thousands of people using it.
It's typically targeted to a single user and it's to sort of replace an old Excel spreadsheet somewhere into a slightly more useful tool. Whereas games, I just find that it's something that, because I think selfishly, it's partly just my own hobbies and passions that I love to play games. So it's, I play my own games every day.
I'm not afraid to admit that how embarrassing it is. I play my own games most days. I mean, my, my partner sit down together and we kind of go through them. And my family play them as well. So it's just very different than, I guess, sort of serving a customer. I feel like you get to be a lot more creative and build something for yourself, which you also know maybe some of your friends and family won't enjoy as well.
So yeah, very different process. Both can be rewarding for sure, but, I think they tickle different itches,
Aaron Kardell: Daniel having. Sold a few of your games. What was the best part [00:32:00] of on the other side of having sold those? And are there any things maybe you wish you would have done differently?
Daniel Tait: Yeah, for sure.
It's a good question. It's the first thing products or business I'd sold. So it was a new experience to me, that whole process. It was, surprisingly and, not just a plug for the podcast, an easy process, easier than I was expecting, which was a, nice surprise, but yeah, it came with definitely pros and cons.
I would say I guess the pros straight off the bat are, obviously financially, it was great for me. It gave me a. a bit of a security blank, I guess, for my other business and just my personal situation obviously improved a bit once I sold the games and that just gave me a bit of stability that I hadn't had in many years as a startup founder.
As you can imagine, I know Aaron, you've got a similar background with the startup side, so you know what it feels like. So that was a big plus. The second plus was probably the There was a weight lifted off the shoulders. there's the, although I loved having the portfolio [00:33:00] of games, it was also a burden to, to know that you had a sort of audience with an expectations of you maybe improving those games or maintaining those games.
And when I was doing it part time, it was, I felt like maybe too much of my time was going into that. And maybe some things, some more important things like friends and family and my partner were starting to fall off the wagon a bit too hard. So I think you, guys have saved some, some important friendships for me.
So I'll give you a good spot on the back for that. so that was a big relief. The negative sides is obviously I lost a big, part of my audience because they were within the games themselves. So that was, I definitely felt that when I released my next game and I couldn't post it on Mathler anymore and get that sweet referral traffic.
So that was a big miss. in terms of regrets, no real regrets. I guess I probably should have kept one of the ones that I sold you. I think I should have maybe not given the fool for Oh, yeah. And maybe kept one of them with sort of a slightly bigger audience because I knew I was going to build more games.
I [00:34:00] knew I was going to sort of cross promote. So I think I maybe could have given myself a bit of a head start on, on future audience building. But in all honesty, it's, I wouldn't, I probably did the same thing again if you guys emailed me this morning. So no real regrets.
Nate Kadlac: Can I ask, did you do anything to celebrate or did you buy anything right, right away?
Daniel Tait: No, we've just recently bought an apartment, which a big part of that is from the game giving us a sort of money for a deposit for an apartment. So that's a big step for me and my partner. So first I probably were, we're going to be buying. So it'd be nice to get out of the rental game and start to make a place our own.
Yeah. So
Aaron Kardell: that's so great to hear. That's really awesome.
Daniel Tait: Yeah.
Aaron Kardell: And, we definitely, Want to make sure you get some of that audience back. So, hopefully, if you're listening to this podcast, word nerd, CL Daniel's got some more games he's, released recently. Tell us more
Daniel Tait: about that.
Yeah. So word nerds, like the easiest way to describe it is obviously for people to go and check [00:35:00] it out and have a look, but in short, it's, A collection of all my favorite word game ideas I've had over the years in my little notepad. So right now in this side, I've got five, five games live. I've got probably three more coming in the next few weeks to sort of complete that set.
And I think it will stay there for a while. I think that's going to be sort of the. But the idea, I guess the rough idea is that I don't feel like word games have a true home right now compared to some of the other categories. I feel like there's, as a word nerd myself, I guess I don't feel like there's some default place that I go to play games.
The closest one would be the NYT for sure. Like I enjoy their crosswords and crossword is such a core game in the word game category. It really saw a lot of other word games circle around the original crossword. But some would argue crosswords is actually quite a lot of trivia in crosswords rather than sort of word semantics and that sort of more word puzzle logic.
So I enjoy more of the that [00:36:00] side of word games, I guess, more than the trivia. So a lot of my games that you'll find on WordNerd are a lot more to do with word construction. Or finding words within words, et cetera. So a different style of word game, I'd say. And yeah, the best way is just to give them a play and see what you think.
So it's
Nate Kadlac: fantastic. I was thinking about your, if Daniel had a blueprint, you feel like you're starting over a little bit. What's your four step or five step plan to launch a game? Is it stare at a notepad, a blank notepad for a while, come up with a little summary. what is your kind of like strategy these days to launch a game?
Daniel Tait: Yeah. So. I had a reasonably successful launch recently, so I can maybe just talk you through that because it's recent and it's in my head. So, I had a game called 23 Words, which I've released recently. So, the idea of the game is, it's a word jumble, which you have to solve, and there's 23 of them in a row, and you get 30 seconds to solve the jumble.
If you can't solve it, then you lose. So maybe you solve 13 that day, or you solve 20 out of 23 that day, and you've done really well. [00:37:00] And the idea had a whole sort of different stages of evolution. So the original idea was a word unlimited word jumbo, where you just go through jumbos continuously and you get like a streak in I score.
And I built the first version of that on a flight, which just sat there in Sublime. I, Just coded a basic version of that and me and my girlfriend sat on the plane and played it for about 20 minutes and sort of said okay this has like jumbos are fun it's a classic word game style but what can we do to make a twist on this so then i was just creating different variations it was like okay that's i think we need to have a lose state for this game because it's fun enough to play continuously but it does get a bit repetitive and it was bored and sort of kicked in and i think you I lost interest pretty quickly.
So how can I get a bit more interest? We need to have a fail state. So then that's when we added the timer. And then when you can lose after a few goes, that makes it a bit more interesting because you can start to compete with yourself. And okay, we got five this time. We got six this time, but still, I felt like when I loaded the game, it was like, okay, it's just, [00:38:00] I'm going to maybe play this once or.
twice and it was fun but I'm not going to really come back to it. So then it was the next stage was coming up with a pre set sort of target before you start the game and that's when the idea of 23 words came in and say okay we're going to set a target there's 23 jumbos to solve how many of those 23 can you solve.
The reason it's number 23 then that goes back to one of your Previous questions, Nate, was that was based on the domain name availability. I just went through all the numbers from 15 to 30 and saw which domain names were available and 23words. com was available. So 23 words it was. So that's why there's 23.
I get that email at least twice a day right now, why it's 23. And I just keep telling people the same answer, but maybe it's not a very exciting answer, but that's the reason. So 23 words. And yeah, it's doing really well. I did, I then went ahead to do my normal launch strategy, which is just a very simple hacker news post.
I've started to post on Reddit a bit as well, and yeah, it got received really well by that [00:39:00] audience. Cross promoted it on a couple of my existing games and that one's sort of been building up nicely since then. So people seem to have really taken to that one, including myself as one that I'm sort of playing every morning now religiously.
So it's nice to build something that I'm also enjoying to play. So.
Aaron Kardell: That is one of the best examples of starting with a domain name to influence a game idea I've heard. So, I
Both: love that. Thanks for sharing that. You guys know that I have,
Daniel Tait: imasuckerford. com domain names. As you know from Crossword Oh, the story there where it was, I went through three different names before I finally managed to get that.
I don't even know why. I don't think it makes a huge difference. Most of the games I play aren't on com domains, but I just, I'm an old school internet, I guess, person who still loves to have the com for my, projects. So WordNerd. co haunts me inside. That is my current website, but I, I'm sticking with it for now because I was just spending too long looking for alternatives.
So.
Nate Kadlac: Can you speak just to launching quickly? I know Aaron touched a little bit [00:40:00] on, publishing quickly, but even if I'm writing something, even a newsletter or, designing something, it's just so scary to put it out into the world. And do you have any fear when you're posting something on Hacker News, especially, you know what I mean?
Is it? Or you, have you gotten over that just through repetition?
Daniel Tait: Exactly that. So I've got, I just gotten over it through repetition. Like for sure, many in my first few years of building and launching things, I felt that for sure. And I released a lot more polished products than I do now. I just think my products have gone massively downhill over time in terms of aesthetics.
And because of that reason, I just released them quicker now. So I, some of my original, I look back at some of my original posts on Hacker News. I'm like, wow, did I build this? I don't even remember being able to sort of polish something out that nice. But, yeah, after spending so long on projects, I just gained no traction.
I just started thinking, well, what's the point in this? Let's just release things a bit quicker. And I started to just throw things out and try and get over. I guess one of the techniques for that is I don't really ever [00:41:00] read the comments, which is not great for a terms of feedback and a hacker news post, but I let the.
feedback come to me via the contact form on the website because I find that the feedback is far more constructive if someone opts in to sort of send you back, whereas, Hacker News is not the friendliest place at times, so I, skim through them, but I, just avoid any of that sort of say, this is a waste of time, or I could have built this in 10 minutes and so on.
So better to just ignore, I think.
Aaron Kardell: That's such a good filter. if somebody's willing to like actually fill out a feedback form on your site or send you an email, the higher barrier to that than,
Both: exactly. Yeah. I think it's some random social post.
Daniel Tait: And you get some really nice feedback. You guys went all just as well as I do from the collection of games.
You have the feedback people send us. It's awesome. Like people give you some really good ideas and they typically are the most friendly, nice people you ever speak to. I very rarely get, get much hate in an email. So.
Aaron Kardell: So you may not, but
Both: Daniel, if you want people to find you online, where [00:42:00] should they look?
yeah, so I don't have much of an online presence really.
Daniel Tait: So I would just refer people to WordNerd for my current project. you'll find a contact form in there in the menu and you can drop me an email. I'm quite old school. I still just operate by email mostly. So feel free to anyone to drop me a message.
I'd love to hear from other. Yeah, game developers or just anyone interested in getting into the space. It's, I'm always happy to have a chat. So,
Aaron Kardell: and,
Both: any last coaching advice you want to offer up? Yeah, I was thinking about the one thing
Daniel Tait: I would want to actually say in this podcast is, and I think it really is just to tell people to go and build things.
I think that's what it's all about really is just stop overthinking it and stop, Sort of planning too much and worrying too much about what people will think just build something and throw it out there And I want to say I have the most fun in the world. Just building some terrible games that Are forgotten about a week later, but eventually you'll find something that you actually like to play every day yourself So just [00:43:00] keep at it and enjoy it.
Yeah,
Aaron Kardell: well said well, thanks for being here Daniel.
Daniel Tait: Yeah. Thanks Daniel No, thank you guys. It's been fun. Yeah, wait to catch up again soon
