Nate Kadlac: [00:00:00] This is a great idea. I like the name of it too. Had you looked into inquiring middles. com at all? It looks like it's for sale for 25 grand.
David Turner: I did not consider paying for a domain name. I think that's just like,
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. We just spoke with David Turner of cemental. com. Which technically isn't his game anymore. He had a nice little acquisition at the end of that story, which you can hear more about.
Nate Kadlac: Really loved this talk with David. One thing that stood out to me was just this idea of where does a game idea come from? And for a lot of people, it's, you start with pen and paper and with David, it kind of starts right before bed. And then if it's, percolating enough, it ends up going right to the computer and actually writing code and building a [00:01:00] simple prototype for it.
Nate Kadlac: And so really that stood out to me. What stood out to you, Joseph? I
Joseph Rueter: think the way He talked about having built a game that was hard, and not worried about it. Like, he's like, really interested to be down the path of humans can do hard things, so learn something new. Yeah, this one's hard. Have fun. Which I thought was refreshing.
Joseph Rueter: So, enjoy this one, we certainly did.
Nate Kadlac: I'm Nate Kadlac, and I'm here with my co host Joseph Reuter, and today we are interviewing him. Very excited to speak with David Turner, also known as Novelist, the creator of Semantle, the unique word guessing game that focuses on the meanings of words. David is a programmer by trade and has a long history of developing software dating back to the early 2000s.
Nate Kadlac: He's worked for organizations like Open Plans, Twitter, now X, and Two Sigma. David is the creator of Semantle, a unique word guessing game that focuses on the meanings [00:02:00] of words. Players aim to find a secret word by making semantically related guesses. Unlike most word guessing games, Semantle focuses more on the meaning than the spelling of the secret word.
Nate Kadlac: David, we're so thrilled you're here today. Thanks for having me. So we usually kick things off. What is your favorite game to play?
David Turner: My favorite game is a word game called Montage. It takes exactly four players in partnerships. And the way it's sort of a cross between a taboo and a crossword puzzle. So you have a grid like a crossword puzzle, and you have some of the spaces on the grid have colored dots, each of which represents a five or six letter subset of the alphabet.
David Turner: So the orange one is E, B, C, D, and Z. And so imagine you have a three letter word, and the first letter is orange. So now you're going to give your partner a clue, and your clue has to be five or fewer words. So I might say household pet. And again, your first letter is going to be A, B, C, D, or Z. So I'm thinking cat, but my partner says dog, but they both match.
David Turner: So, either of those would be acceptable. Now, my partner has to guess this by knocking on the table before both of the opponents knock on the [00:03:00] table. If both of them knock, then I have to pick one of them to guess. And you're doing this all within a one minute timer, so it's very stressful, which I really enjoy.
Nate Kadlac: This is an offline game, right? You're playing with friends?
David Turner: And that's correct.
Joseph Rueter: It's like a board game.
David Turner: It is a board game.
Joseph Rueter: Fantastic. My wife asked why we don't play board games more often, and I had to remind her it's because she said I always win. We do. So, do you have a favorite board game? It would be this one, right?
Joseph Rueter: Yeah, that is definitely my favorite board
David Turner: game. You know, I like lots of others, too. I love Azul, Queen's Garden, and Rider Konnichiwa has a ton of good games, but Samurai I think I particularly like, because it's such a simple set of rules, and, you get it, you really have to think about, what am I, what am I going to do here?
David Turner: How am I going to arrange these, these tiles? and it plays quickly.
Joseph Rueter: Nice. I love that. And I understand that it's not only games that you're into. You've got some, some hands on creative endeavors in your life?
David Turner: Yeah, I do enjoy ceramics, although actually since I've been making games more, [00:04:00] the ceramics has fallen a little bit by the wayside.
David Turner: But my brother in law just dropped off a keyboard and says he wants some sort of ceramic enclosure for it. So we'll see how that goes. Ah!
Joseph Rueter: Ah! Is it the one with the little key, the number pads on the side, or will you be building something a little less lengthy?
David Turner: Keyboard itself is 13 inches wide, plus an extra two inches of printed circuit board on the various sides of it.
David Turner: So it's actually quite large. I can't remember if it has a number pad. I think it does not have a number pad, but it has a bunch of weird keys on it. It's from some old electric typewriter.
Nate Kadlac: That's fun. That's super fun. Fantastic. I COVID and, had such a, such a fun time doing that. But I'm kind of curious, just going back, what's your background in games in general?
Nate Kadlac: Like did you grow up around a lot of games? Like how did you, do you have any favorite memories as a child around games?
David Turner: Yeah, well certainly, you know, I was I think 12 or 13 when Myst came out and that was something that absolutely grabbed me. I played some Doom, I played some other games, but then I discovered the best game of [00:05:00] all was you could program your own computer.
David Turner: And it had the hardest puzzles, because the puzzle was trying to figure out how to make this thing do the thing you want it to do. And I sort of never looked back. I have clinically bad handwriting, so I had a laptop in school when I was a kid. And, you know, in theory I would take notes on it, and in practice I would program on it.
David Turner: So I learned something, but not necessarily the thing that they were trying to teach me. And then I, you know, found, sort of, fell into a job, a programming job. And Have enjoyed doing that ever since.
Joseph Rueter: Did it hurt when you fell into that?
David Turner: Well, you know it hurt less than being unemployed which
Nate Kadlac: Fantastic I would love to know a little bit about your process of thinking about games So a number of creators that we've talked to tend to start, you know with pen and paper or something as a simple idea and they kind of draw it out in front of them. And it sounds like your process might be a little bit different.
Nate Kadlac: How do you think about creating these games in your own way?
David Turner: Yeah, well, so often the time when I do game [00:06:00] design is actually as I'm falling asleep. It's a really good way to be thinking about something that is not a problem that I have to solve right now. If not, interpersonal conflict. And so either I will succeed and come up with something, or I won't.
David Turner: And it doesn't matter. I can fall asleep, but I can try again tomorrow. And so Simantol, I was thinking as I fell asleep, okay, so there's Wordle. And then I played Worldle, the one where you're guessing a country. And I thought, okay, so Worldle, you're guessing and you have a, you get a direction. So you have some like two degrees of freedom there.
David Turner: And in Wordle, you have, I guess, five letters. And each of those has 26 ways you can go. So what does something. that has lots of degrees of freedom, but not too many. And I remembered Word2Vec, which has 300 dimensional vectors. Oh, that's, that's great. This is a game, and either it's possible to play or it's not, and there's just no way to know until you try it.
David Turner: But trying it is nothing, right? It's like a couple of hours of programming, you know, download the thing and put it together, right, in the most macroscopic of frontends. And I tried it and I found that it worked. [00:07:00] And so I sent it to three friends. That's it. I can't tell if I'm serious about this or not.
David Turner: And one of them posted it on his message board and suddenly I looked up and I started having users and I, you know, in the little fact at the bottom, I linked to a friend of mine and my friend writes to me and says, Hey, I'm getting a lot of traffic from your site. So I looked at my logs, Oh my God, there's 60, 000 people playing this.
David Turner: And I sort of hadn't noticed because I put her up on the cheapest digital ocean server. And because it doesn't have anything to it, right? All it does is it sends you a vector. I was able to support a very large number of users on a very small server. So that was the process there. For the thing I'm working on now, which is a graphical adventure game in the vein of Myst, the 1993 version with, you know, pre rendered images, I've been actually collecting puzzles for this for over a decade.
David Turner: And you know, every time I have a puzzle, I write down ideas in my notes file, and sometimes I'll build a prototype and sometimes I won't. And sometimes the idea is vague. What about a maze that has a red part and a blue part? That's vague. But then to figure out how that goes together, sometimes you just have to program it and see what comes out.
David Turner: I'll use [00:08:00] Inkscape to draw things. Sometimes I'll draw things on paper if I absolutely have to, but I'd rather draw it in Inkscape because that gives me a way that I can rearrange things easily without having anything hung and erase this and redraw it.
Nate Kadlac: I've never used Inkscape. What is that?
David Turner: It's like Illustrator.
Nate Kadlac: Okay. I'm a big Figma user on design and branding and things like that. And so I imagine I can do the same thing with Figma maybe as Inkscape. Is that right?
David Turner: you know, I've never tried
Nate Kadlac: Figma. Oh, okay. So it sounds kind of like you go straight from. Percolating thought to write into potentially programming that idea out with maybe Inkscape as sort of an in between.
Nate Kadlac: That's a really interesting process.
David Turner: I've been programming for so long that it's often the quickest way to get an idea somewhere. And on my board games designs, I think I haven't done that. I've often gone to a paper prototype first because that's, you know, straightforward. But even there, sometimes there's some programming.
David Turner: Okay, well, I need to have five suits of and ten numbers each card. So I'll program something that generates the five times ten possibilities because that's quicker for me than [00:09:00] doing it by hand.
Joseph Rueter: Fantastic. And you've been using keyboards since middle school? Yeah, you said clinically bad handwriting before.
Joseph Rueter: Can you expand on this?
David Turner: I have something called dysgraphia where you know, my hand goes to write a D and a, A G comes out, it's not good. And so my parents said, okay, so type things and got me a. ThinkPad. And this is when ThinkPads were made by IBM. And so they are absolute tanks, very difficult to break, which, you know, for a kid is good.
David Turner: And they have on them what my friend likes to call the cursor locator interface tool. Some people call it the nipple mouse, the, track point. And, it's a little button in between the G and the H keys that you use to move the mouse around. And it's great because you don't kick your fingers off the home row while you're typing and you can just move it around.
David Turner: Not very good for precision, Very good for, I just need to click a button while I'm in the middle of programming something. And my hands have become so molded to them that I tried using something else for, I think two weeks, I instantly got Carpal Tunnel. So I, now whatever it is, I have to have a ThinkPad keyboard.[00:10:00]
Nate Kadlac: Okay. So you're, you're developing on a PC and you're. Loyal to, is it IBM ThinkPads, right?
David Turner: Well, it was IBM ThinkPads. Unfortunately, the, there's a supplier Lenovo bought them out and actually I just have to have the keyboard now. So I have a ThinkPad keyboard attached to a computer that some random person built and was trying to sell.
David Turner: So I bought her off of them.
Nate Kadlac: Is that sold separately still, or is that just something you've hacked together?
David Turner: Yeah, the keyboard is sold separately.
Nate Kadlac: Okay. Okay. You
David Turner: can just buy the keyboard, which is great.
Nate Kadlac: That's so cool. I tried that for, I don't know, I think it was when they converted to Lenovo. But I tried that nipple mouse and did not go well for me.
Nate Kadlac: That was really, really difficult.
Joseph Rueter: One of my first machines had said mouse. It's all worn off.
David Turner: Yeah. And actually just a little side note here. One of my first machines was the IBM 701C. And if you get a chance to look that up, do so. Because that's the one with the butterfly keyboard, where it was a 10 inch screen, but a 12 inch keyboard.
David Turner: [00:11:00] And the way they did that was when you closed the lid, the keyboard had split into two parts, which sort of folded and rotated to fit under the screen. It was wild.
Nate Kadlac: Oh, interesting. So would it kind of like pop up?
David Turner: No, it didn't pop up. The two pieces would go, they stayed on a flat plane, but they sort of rotated so that instead of the end being next to the B, the end moved to next to the G.
David Turner: And that gave it just made it just small enough to fit under the screen.
Joseph Rueter: That's interesting. So fascinating. Remember the, as Apple would make new laptops, they would change the size of the keyboard. Do you remember this? And then all of a sudden they got skinnier. And you're like, wait, no, no, no. I need the big screen.
Joseph Rueter: So the keyboard's normal.
David Turner: I've heard of people complaining about the Apple keyboard. Personally, I just can't use them. It's instant carpal tunnel. So
Nate Kadlac: yeah, yeah, yeah. So you mentioned a little bit about the origin of Semantle just played this morning, got mine in 15 tries. It's one of those games that it's actually, wow.
Nate Kadlac: Nice. I think I lucked it. Well, I did use a hint though. So just that got me to like a [00:12:00] 30 a score. I'm not exactly sure how you, you know, Talk about that. But could you maybe go back into the process of coming up with Symanto a little bit more and maybe just the things that you did to test it out? Were there iterations of it?
Nate Kadlac: How did it kind of get to its final form?
David Turner: Yeah, so it actually started pretty close to its final form, except visually.
Nate Kadlac: Okay.
David Turner: I came up with the idea. And I really had, literally, I'll just show you the raw cosine similarity times 100, so you don't have to look at the decimal point. And in retrospect, this was not the right thing to do.
David Turner: The right thing to do was that, like, I should have had it on a scale from 0 to 100, and scaled according to how close the closest words were. So the closest words should be at like 99 or something. But, This turned out to work just fine, and my initial test was, I'll pick a random word from the dictionary, and obviously there's some work that goes into the word list, but initially I think I was just using my local word list.
David Turner: So every Unix system, which is what I use, comes with a word list, and it's 70, 000 words. It's not what you'd call a good word list, but it's a word list. So I [00:13:00] had a word at random from there, and I said, Can I solve this? How many guesses is it going to take me to solve this? Can I even get close to solving it?
David Turner: And it turned out that I could. And once I had solved one, I said, okay, well, if I can solve one, then I can send that one to my friends and then my friends see how my friends do at solving it. And I sent it to three people who I thought were smart people who are good at puzzles. And one of them, I don't even think he tried it, I don't know, another one did say that she had gotten to it.
David Turner: And then my third one, he said, I can't get this, I'm going to send it to my friends. And that was how it went. How it started.
Joseph Rueter: Put it on a message board. His friends. So as I'm guessing, you've got on the top column, I've played this and it's all semantics to me, right? When you're listing similarity, like today, I started with bonkers today.
Joseph Rueter: And then I went to Apple and I've got a couple of questions here about effective strategies. Like I was trying to move around nouns and like sections [00:14:00] of. What is normal life, right? To see how close I'd get, but you've got a column for similarity where it's to two decimal places. Is this what you're referring to when you were talking about decimals?
David Turner: Yeah, that, that similarity number is what's called cosine similarity. And it's actually really hard to visualize 300 dimensions. A lot of our intuitions go horribly wrong. So you imagine in 300 dimensional space. You have, I think, a lot of surface area for a small volume. So it's really just a strange space.
David Turner: and you think, is this close to this? Is this between this and this? One of the ideas I came up with and implemented and then didn't publish was imagine you could say. Okay, I'm going to take pairs of words and I'm going to tell you where on the line in between those words your word is. And it turns out that everything ends up being between everything else in 300 dimensions, which is just not something you would ever expect.
Joseph Rueter: It's circular.
David Turner: It's not circular. It's, there's, there's a 300 linear dimensions. It's just that when you have so many dimensions, all of your intuitions [00:15:00] about, normal space go out the window. I was thinking, okay, well, so an orange is closer to a grapefruit than it is to a basketball, right? And you'd like to have sort of on a line, you know, is it in between those two?
David Turner: Where in between those two is it? That turned out to be not as useful as you would think. And in fact, I wasn't able to find it useful at all. I found it just tremendously confusing.
Joseph Rueter: I was with Bonkers, and then I went to Apple, and then I went to Flame, and I'm getting like 8. 79, 13. 5, so I don't really know what I need.
Joseph Rueter: And then I asked for it. I asked for a hint on guess 14, and then I got 23. 6. And then I typed in judge and I got 48. 84 what and on the next column over it says getting close. I'm at 992 of a thousand like help me finish this one. Like I'm super close. Maybe I should [00:16:00] ask Nate because he got it in 14. I went
Nate Kadlac: from judge to defendant to jury to juror and the last the jury to juror was like I don't think this is right.
Nate Kadlac: Okay. Cause jury was 65. 6. And, but I just kind of like went with it. And so that was a total, like, you know, guess, well, they're all guesses, but.
Joseph Rueter: I think the part that I'm most curious about is maybe something you said haphazardly earlier, and that was. that it's not intuitive.
David Turner: Yeah. So the, the play of the game, I mean, is, I guess, intended to be intuitive, right?
David Turner: You could imagine playing this with your friends in the car with one of you playing the role of the judge. Is this closer? Is that closer? And that was actually, I think one of the sort of background processes that went into this game is that I had, you know, 20 years ago, heard about a game that worked to that way.
David Turner: And the creator had called it French toast. And I said, I know exactly who I this. I have to tell my friend Mark. Go ahead, I tell my friend Mark, and he says, Oh yeah, me and Ranjeet invented that 10 [00:17:00] years ago. And I, you know, Mark is brilliant. I absolutely believe that this is true. He says he called it plenty questions, but his version is, is again, to compare to two different things.
David Turner: It's a little different. It's played with humans instead of being played with this absolutely impartial, perfect machine. Or maybe completely arbitrary machine, because obviously it's based on what the machine is trained on. and in particular, the machine is trained on news articles and. So, one of the cases where this comes up is a word like belt, where the only time belt comes up in a news article is in a topic, in a context of boxing, where you have like a championship belt.
David Turner: And so, the sports related meaning of belt, as opposed to a punch or a large drink or the roadway around Washington, D. C., the sports one happened to be a little bit more dominant.
Nate Kadlac: What I like about this game, I'm kind of curious your take on a lot of games that get shared early are ones that are fairly easy to there's like a nuance in the difficulty level of a game, right?
Nate Kadlac: And so if it's too tough, it tends to not get shared. If it's [00:18:00] kind of like too easy, you still won't retain that like that traffic. Do you feel like you just kind of accidentally landed on this, like, happy line in the middle of where, like, it was a little bit difficult, but easy enough. Like, how do you think about that when it comes to gameplay?
David Turner: So, Sabantle, I actually think, is probably on the hard end of games that people play of this sort. And I wasn't really thinking, oh, how can I adjust the difficulty of this? And the hint button is, you know, the way that ultimately I came up with it does adjust this difficulty. But, is there What you would want is something that says, Oh, you're on the wrong track.
David Turner: Try something a little more over here. And it's just very difficult to figure out how to tell someone that. So it's sort of luck that this ended up being playable at all. For other games, you know, often the difficulty is adjustable. So one of the games that I made after Semantle is called DecoDeck. It's a logic puzzle where you're trying to group cards into groups of five, and there's only one way to do that that expands the entire board.
David Turner: And there, for the difficulty, you can say, well, I'll [00:19:00] set a computer to solve it, and see how many steps the computer takes to solve it, how many blind alleys it goes down, how deep it has to go in its reasoning process. and there it's very easy to adjust the difficulty. and see, okay, well I'll have an easy puzzle and that'll be a Monday puzzle just like the New York Times crossword.
David Turner: And I'll have a hard puzzle and that'll be a Friday puzzle. And then you can pick, you know, what level you do and you can work your way up to the hard puzzles. And of course the other way to adjust the difficulty on that is the size of the puzzle. A small puzzle is going to be easier than a large puzzle.
David Turner: But semantical, there wasn't a good way to adjust the difficulty. It really was something that was almost more discovered than invented.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah, and when in that invention process did the big modal unload get added?
David Turner: I think once I started having Users, I don't maybe I I can't remember whether it was how early that was It was pretty early because you definitely need to sort of ease people into just how hard this is gonna be
Joseph Rueter: right?
Joseph Rueter: Yeah, I scanned it Just reading the first sentences. They're like, wow, I'll figure it out. [00:20:00] Then I hit refresh and had to go and get an incognito window just to get the modal again. It's like, wait, give me the modal again. And then that last sentence,
David Turner: there's a question mark button there.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah. Well, I didn't pay that much attention to it.
Joseph Rueter: Just, I'm just stumbling through the world here. The second to last sentence. You'll probably need dozens of guesses. It was so good because I'm like 14 guesses in like, yeah, I need a hint.
David Turner: Well, of course the competition at the time, especially it was wordle and wordle six is the number. And so when you come in expecting a wordle experience and you make six guesses and you don't get it, you're going to go away disappointed.
David Turner: And so setting the expectation there is really important.
Joseph Rueter: Absolutely. Do you turn to anybody in game design or do you know researchers? Do you have favorite resources for thinking about setting people up to succeed? Because as I've played this [00:21:00] one, my sense was like, I was set up to believe it was going to be hard.
Joseph Rueter: And then I experienced it being hard. And then I had this opportunity to like, continue. Or check out in the scrolly scrolly doom world. It's easy to check out and go get dopamine somewhere else. Do you have resources you go and look for inspiration or guidance in the gaming creation?
David Turner: The sort of standard advice that I've heard on a puzzle specifically is that you as a designer don't know how hard they're going to be.
David Turner: So in cryptography, there's a rule that anyone can create a crypto system that they themselves cannot break. Now that doesn't mean someone else can't break it. And in puzzle design, anyone can create a puzzle that they can solve, because they know how their own brain works, and they will make the right associations.
David Turner: So to create a puzzle that other people can solve, you really have to test it. Now there are certain sort of narrow genres of puzzle where the Paths have been worn smooth enough that if you make a crossword puzzle, you generally can just send it off to Will Shorts, and Will Shorts has looked at [00:22:00] 9 million crossword puzzles over the course of his career as the New York Times crossword puzzle editor, and he'll tell you that is a good clue, that is not such a good clue, this isn't a real New York Times crossword because it didn't use the word audio enough times.
David Turner: But for puzzles that are more unique, you really have to test them. And one of the experiences I had that, that helped me out on this was in 2011, my team who won the MIT mystery hunt, which is a collection of a hundred to 150 puzzles that's solved over the course of a long weekend in large teams. And the prize for winning as a year of hard labor, you get to write the next year's hunt.
David Turner: And so I wrote only three puzzles for that hunt, but I edited and, about 50 of them. And I test solved a bunch as well. And there was one in particular I remember looked at and. What happened is, the guy wrote about 20 puzzles and then says, I'm going on vacation, you test them, you solve them, tell me if they're solvable.
David Turner: I looked at this and I said, no one is ever going to solve this puzzle. This puzzle is impossible. But he's written it and he's on vacation, so I can't get any changes to it. I'll send it out to the test solvers. And the test solver solved it. So I was very impressed by that. And I thought, okay. So [00:23:00] I genuinely don't know what a hard puzzle looks like.
David Turner: All I know is this puzzle is hard for me, or this puzzle is easy for me. And so I try it, I send it out. And then I think, what do we need to change here? What hints do we need to give? and one puzzle that I was working on test solving, there was a hint. You know, there was a physical puzzle that had an electronic thing, and you soldered the thing together, and then there was a button and an LED, and you looked at the button, and you, first, I pressed the button, you looked at the LED, and you had to figure out what to do with that, and it turned out that the input was Morse code, and the output was Morse code, which, Morse code is not a difficult code, but it's a code that's difficult if you don't know it, and you have to do it in real time, as you're watching this LED blink, and as you're pressing the button.
David Turner: And so I'd solved half the puzzle, and, okay, so what do I do now? And they gave me a hint. There's a component that's not sattered in. Aha! That's the hint I need. And so I can't remember if we ended up giving that hint to other people during the hunt or not, but at least now we know, okay, this is, this is the place where people get stuck on it.
David Turner: And therefore, if we need to make it easier, this is the place where we need to make it easier.
Joseph Rueter: Sure. I felt that way on surf [00:24:00] words. It's coming too fast. Slow this down.
David Turner: Yeah, that one I actually, I sort of wanted it to be hard because my model was super hexagon. If you've ever played super hexagon, it's a very simple game.
David Turner: You're a little triangle in the middle of the screen and there's a hexagon moving in on you. One of the sides of the hexagon is missing and that's the side you have to aim for. And so your controls are rotate left or rotate right. And the first time you play it, you're like, okay, I survived for five seconds.
David Turner: And the next time, three seconds, right? And then eventually, oh, I've got it for 10 or 15 seconds. And that's a good game of Super Hexagon. Now, if you're the person who created it, Terry Kavanaugh, you can go on YouTube and you can find a video of Terry playing it, and he'll just sit there and play it for, I think, as long as he wants, because he's just that good at that kind of game.
David Turner: And surfboards, I'm not quite at the, I can play it for as long as you want stage, but, If I'm not talking to someone else while I'm playing it, if I'm not paying attention to someone else, I can survive for a minute. I feel good about surviving for a minute. And I also have it speed up a little as you go, like Tetris.
David Turner: Basically because I want you to feel stressed out as you're playing this game. I don't want you to relax.
Nate Kadlac: Sounds like that was, [00:25:00] goal was achieved with Joseph.
Joseph Rueter: I was like, wait, no, no, no, slow down, slow down. Where's the slow down button? Actually,
David Turner: there's controls in there that let you set the speed. And if after three times you've done like really poorly, it says, Hey, you seem to be having a hard time.
David Turner: Would you like to slow it down? And in particular, the version where you only show two letters in advance is a lot easier than the version where you show three letters. Three letters, I think is the true version of the game because that's where you really have to put your word skills to use. It's not that you have to know a lot of different words because the game has several word lists and it always tries to keep you within the prevalent, meaning commonly known words.
David Turner: But if you do know lots of words, it's happy to follow you into the incredibly difficult words.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah. That speed dynamic reminds me of some of our conversations in gaming, where especially Minesweeper. They're measuring the speed at which you can physically move a mouse around. And if your gameplay is faster than that, then you're cheating.
Joseph Rueter: But it's about logic [00:26:00] puzzles in Minesweeper, where this is word games.
David Turner: Yeah, and if you set a computer to play this, a computer would have no problem going at this speed. Right. In fact, the computer, in some sense, has to be ahead of you at every stage. Because when it's giving you a new letter, it has to give you a new letter that is compatible with what you have already done.
David Turner: If that is possible, and it tries to give you a letter that is compatible with a word that we believe that you're going to know, but if the only letter that is compatible is because you've gone off on some weird path, then we will give you a word that maybe you don't know because maybe your vocabulary is smaller than mine.
Joseph Rueter: My vocabulary is smaller than yours. Mine is too. We've talked to folks who play crossword and they've got different kinds of games For building vocabulary, have you worked with some of those? Do you, can you recommend some that have worked well for you?
David Turner: No, I just read a lot. I do do the crossword, the New York Times crossword every day.
David Turner: And I actually started the crossword because I thought, well, maybe it will make me better at trivia because I'm a member of alerted league, the online trivia [00:27:00] league. And at the time I was in the C level and the levels are A through E. And so C is officially mediocre and I wanted to get a little bit better.
David Turner: So I thought, well, maybe if I do the crossword, it'll sort of introduce me to who's that tennis player. And I think like. Twice I've come up with an answer in Learned League that I can trace back to having done the crossword. So it absolutely did not help with that. The only thing the crossword is good at is helping me be good at the crossword.
David Turner: And now I know who Arthur Ashe is. But I have somehow managed to get better at trivia. Well, I was in A but then I lost, got relegated this last round so I'll be in B next time. Some of that's practice and some of that's just reading more.
Nate Kadlac: Love that. So when you created Semantle, it sounded like you had some pretty early success in terms of people playing the game, traffic coming to your site.
Nate Kadlac: Were you monetizing the game before this acquisition or was that something that was a controversial decision for you to do?
David Turner: So I didn't put ads on it. I don't really care for ads. I understand that, you know, that's what there is now, but like I run an ad blocker. I recommend that you run an ad blocker as well.
David Turner: All of your [00:28:00] listeners should be running an ad blocker. I like you block origin. You know, monetizing was not necessarily on my list. I had at the time a full time job, so my expenses were very low. I think towards the end I had to put her on a bigger machine, and I might have been paying 50 or 60 bucks a month for it, but 50 or 60 bucks a month was not going to break the bank, so I could keep running it like that forever.
David Turner: And so monetizing was not really on the list, but then I started getting a couple of offers, and the offers were large enough that I said, Okay. I would like to do this, you know, maybe I'll sell this. And then maybe if I sell this, I could make more games. And so I did.
Nate Kadlac: That's great. So, and congratulations.
Nate Kadlac: That's a, it's a huge, you know, achievement. And I know a lot of game creators kind of stumble with that decision, whether to sell her or not, but could you walk us through that, that acquisition process? Like, is that they reached out to you? It sounds like, and was that a good experience for you overall?
David Turner: It was a great experience.
David Turner: Yeah, I actually had two offers, and one of them was sort of vague, and the other one was extremely concrete, and I said, you know, here's how much I would like to sell it for, and he said, well, I can't quite make that, but I'll sell it for another, [00:29:00] I'll give you another amount, and it was an amount that was going to, let's call it a year of salary, something like that, which, great, now I can quit my job, right?
David Turner: And obviously, I don't have to quit my job. I could keep doing my job and making games on the side, but after talking to my wife, I decided that I would quit. Try and make a living at this and see how it goes. And one of the big advantages of this is now if my kid has a day off school and I have to hang out and stay home with her, that just means my game comes out a day later and my wife can continue to work and make the big bucks.
Nate Kadlac: That's amazing. And we, we all relate to that. we're, we're all fathers here and that, sometimes those days get pushed often, more often than they want or than I want, but, you know, Oop, that's a week. That's not a day, that's a week. That's fantastic. So you are not actively working on Semantle anymore, or do you still contribute in some way?
David Turner: That's correct. Yeah, I sold it and the guy said to me, listen, I want to keep you, you know, make sure that you're available in case I have questions about how to [00:30:00] do things. And he did write me, treat me with a few questions, especially early on, you know, how do I do this? How do I do that? And then recently he had a question in a set up the necessary documentation and explain how to do things, I'm available because I want the game to succeed.
David Turner: And I continue to have a sort of a little bit of profit sharing from it. But obviously I want the game to succeed regardless. It's got my name on it.
Nate Kadlac: And so the graphical adventure game that you're kind of working on, is that the next thing that you're doing? Or has that been launched yet?
David Turner: It has not been launched.
David Turner: It's not even close. There's a lot of artwork that still needs to be done. And some of the puzzles still need to be implemented. I have, you know, either prototypes of them or I think maybe one case, I just have a document that describes how they work. But there's a lot of work. I think probably a couple of years on that.
Joseph Rueter: Wow. That's, that's a very different. Adventure than Semantle.
David Turner: Yeah, it's a different scope and it's a different style of game. But it's a style of game that I absolutely love and there aren't very many of them. I actually don't know why there aren't very many of them. Maybe the answer is that there's, you know, only a world market for a small number of them.
David Turner: But I think people who like them sort of like them enough that they're willing to play even the [00:31:00] ones that are kind of crappy. And I think a part of it probably is that it's hard to think about, you know, what is a puzzle that you can do that people will be able to solve without reading your mind? And it's not a puzzle that someone has already done before.
David Turner: So a lot of these you play them and it's like, Oh, it's a clock scheme. That one where you're sliding the blocks around. I've seen that before. It's a visual novel, except you have to do a sudoku every five pages, which to me, I guess I don't see that nexus. I'd rather see something that's a puzzle that I have never seen before that I really have to figure out.
David Turner: I even supposed to be doing with this collection of parts, with this collection of knobs. And then once you figure out what you're supposed to be doing, you know, how am I supposed to get to whatever the goal of this thing is?
Joseph Rueter: Sure. So it's maybe escape room. Yeah,
David Turner: exactly. The escape rooms, I think did take some of that, but escape rooms are very highly in quality and some of them are just, you know, okay, so if you see a lock that has four digits on it, then you know that somewhere in the room, there's going to be the four digits written down.
David Turner: Yeah. And it's fine if you like that sort of thing, but I often would prefer something [00:32:00] that has a little bit more creativity.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah, in that vein, you prefer more creativity. What are some takeaways that a new game developer, right? Aspiring game developer might hear from you if they sat down for coffee and they're looking to build their next games.
Joseph Rueter: Like from your preference, what's it take to be successful? In the game creation process.
David Turner: So, I guess, one thing I would say is that there's something that's simple but it's not easy, which is to do something that no one else has done before. A lot of people like to start by taking a thing that someone has done and building off of that.
David Turner: And that's how you get from, you know, 3s to 2048 to all the various 2048 like games. Some of which are actually kind of interesting. You know, okay, there's this, it's 2048 but it's real time. It's 2048 but then sort of crossed with Tetris. And that's certainly a way that you can go, but if you can go away off into the forest where no one else has gone, then you can often sort of pretty quickly figure out, does this work?
David Turner: Does this not work? And if it does work, then you have something that on [00:33:00] one hand, you struggle to solve to build. Your elevator pitch is, your elevator pitch is, well, it's cross between super hexagon and word game, which I recognize is starting from something else. But well, it's a new kind of logic puzzle.
David Turner: That's your elevator pitch, and it's a hard pitch. It's a game you've never seen before. It's so hard, it'll make your eyeballs bleed. But also, getting to testing pretty quickly is good. And you know, your first prototype is you test with yourself. If you're building a board game, you sit down, and you are two players or three players at the game, playing the game.
David Turner: Your second test, after you are satisfied with how you can play with yourself, is with other human beings, sitting down in a room with them. And this can be a very interactive test. You can say, okay, well, this isn't working midway through the game. I'm just gonna cut it off, or this isn't working, I'm gonna change that rule.
David Turner: A friend of mine brought me a game that his friend had created, and there was a, it sort of had two sub games. You were collecting cards, and then you were using them to fight. And the game was supposed to be about collecting cards, but the actually fun thing turned out to be, let's use these cards to fight.
David Turner: And have a card battle. And midway through the test he says, Okay, so this game is really not supposed to be about the fighting. So why don't [00:34:00] we just agree not to fight? And see how the other half of the game plays. Just to see how it works. And I don't know what happened to that game. Maybe the answer is that they decided to make it all fighting, because that was the fun part.
David Turner: Or maybe the answer is they decided to eliminate the fighting altogether. They're in a sort of a tough spot, because if the fighting is the fun part, you can't, well, make that part boring. Then my game will be awesome. No one is ever going to say that. But hearing the feedback from a user, Okay, this is the fun part.
David Turner: You say, okay, well, if this is the fun part, then I had better lean into the fun part.
Nate Kadlac: I think something you said in there was really interesting to me where creativity, you know, can doesn't always mean you're inventing something new, but it's really about the collision of ideas. And it's, we've seen that a lot with many of the other successful game creators that we've talked to.
Nate Kadlac: It's like, It's not necessarily like a, a wordle derivative, but it is taking some aspect of one thing and another thing and then creating something new from that, knowing that many things are a remix of each other. And so I think from my perspective, that's what you've done really well. Yeah. I don't know if you agree with that or not, but.
David Turner: It's [00:35:00] really hard to tell the line between, Oh, this is a remix of an old thing and Oh, this is a completely new idea that has never before, before been seen in the world. I think. In general, taking a thing you love and trying to make it better is a valid way of doing things or taking a thing that you wanted to love but actually just couldn't and trying to build the good version of it, can often be a productive strategy.
David Turner: There was a talk I gave where I heard someone give a talk and I said, this, I really wanted to like this talk, but I didn't, it didn't go anywhere. I'm going to give the version of this talk, there's the version that I wanted to have listened to.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah. It's kind of. innate, according to your own story or how you're, you view the world from your perspective.
Nate Kadlac: And I think that that's really important and embracing that if you were to do anything differently today with Samantha and, and building that game, were there any lessons that you might've said, Oh man, I wish I had, wish I'd, Yeah,
David Turner: I think there were a few things. I think the big one was that the similarity score, you actually don't really need to give a similarity [00:36:00] score to two decimals on this weird scale.
David Turner: I think if I'd sort of just given a score from zero to a hundred scaled according to how similar the most similar words are, you know, today the most similar words were I think at like 60 or 70, but sometimes the most similar words are at like 30 or 40. I think that's a change I would make. I think I would focus a little bit more on the visual design early.
David Turner: The early versions were very bare bones, very web 1. 0. I'm not primarily a visual person, and so I, if I can, I'd like to, I'd like to work with a visual designer, but even with my own. Incredibly meager visual design skills. I could have put less than, more than zero effort into the visual design of it,
David Turner: and I think that would've made a difference. I didn't expect to release it. The, like I said, I sent it to three friends. That's how it started. so if I had expected to release it, then I would've put the, the design in first. and these days when I'm testing something, I say, Hey friends, I'm sending it to you, but I'm not releasing it yet.
David Turner: and then I, I say, okay, fine, it's, it's time to release now that I, at least something that [00:37:00] resembles a visual design.
Nate Kadlac: That's great advice. And as a designer, I think more people should heed. whatever. So I'm curious, like before, before it was acquired, what was the traffic like at its peak, or maybe that day was its peak, but how many people were coming to that site?
David Turner: Quarter a million unique IPs every day was, the peak. And then I think unfortunately it's gone down since then. You know, wish it were more popular, but I totally understand why people don't want to, like, fry their brain every single day before work. And also, of course, at the time I released it, it was sort of towards the tail end of the lockdown portion of the pandemic when people were at home a lot.
David Turner: And now I hope that people are, you know, going out and seeing theater instead of playing games, or if they are playing games, playing games with their friends. That was one of the things that surprised me about Semantle was that I got a lot of emails from people saying, I am playing this with my friends.
David Turner: I am playing this with my family. and when I thought about it, I thought actually it makes a lot of sense. You ended up getting a lot more sort of divergent ideas. Okay, what is a word that's really different from all the words that we have tried so far? And it's more fun to be [00:38:00] stuck in a group, in part, because you have everyone else egging you on and you can't give up because everyone else is still there trying to solve it.
Nate Kadlac: I think that's, incredibly special and we've seen that a lot, you know, whether it's wordle and you have celebrities like Jason Bateman having their own wordle friends group with his buddies or, you know, my family playing some of our games and, and doing that daily. It's, it is, it makes it much more of an interesting game to play than, than going at it alone.
David Turner: Yeah. I think the one celebrity I saw playing, Samantha was, the guy who plays Donnie on orphan black. I can't remember his name, but I was like, Oh, I've seen him in that TV show. That was good.
Joseph Rueter: That's really cool. So you've been down this path on word games and you like board games about words. Are you building anything else right now or is anything like recently released?
David Turner: Yeah, so a few months ago I came out with Middles, middlesgame. com. The way it works is that I give you the middle of the word, and you have to figure out what's on the front of the word and what's on the back of the word to complete the word. [00:39:00] And usually I try and choose something that has a middle that is unique among commonly known words.
David Turner: So the example I give is, OBC is in the middle of only one word, OBC. that you probably know, which is bobcat. It's also in the middle of mobcap, which is some old timey kind of hat that no one's heard of. I hadn't heard of it until I did a grep through my word list, but one word that you've heard of.
David Turner: And so we let you guess, okay, what's on the beginning of this? What's on the end of this? Until you can figure out what the whole word is. And we give you 10 guesses. And because there's only one commonly known word, you are correct. Your score, is really just the number that you have. And you can do it in one guess if you're good at figuring out what the middle of a word is.
David Turner: But most people will try a few things on the beginning and the end until they figure out what the word is going to look like.
Joseph Rueter: You gotta end it in an S, but it doesn't work that well, does it? Today's word is engia. Today's middle is Yeah, I
Nate Kadlac: started shoving some letters at it. This is a great idea. I really like this game.
Nate Kadlac: I like the name of it too. Had you looked into inquiringmills. com at all? [00:40:00] Looks like it's for sale for 25 grand.
David Turner: Yeah, so I did not consider paying for a domain name. I think Boy, that's just like, that's a lot to spend on something when you have no idea whether you're going to have any traction whatsoever.
David Turner: and as it happens, I haven't had as much traction as I'd hoped for. I thought, oh, it's a daily word game that's, you know, along the lines of every other daily word game. Everyone will like it. But these things are a crapshoot. You just don't know what's going to be a hit and what's not going to be a hit.
David Turner: And so trying lots of things is the best thing you can do often.
Nate Kadlac: That's great advice. You're kind of back at square one with this, with this new game. And so, yeah, I think this is a great, great question for, you know, first time game creators, but going back to square one, what are you doing to try to get traffic to this?
Nate Kadlac: You know, with, with, Samantha, you shared it with a few friends and it kind of took off. It sounds like sort of on its own just through sharing with friends, but what would you do differently here? Are you doing anything differently to think about growth?
David Turner: So I've tried a few things for getting traction on various games, and frankly, none of them have worked very [00:41:00] well.
David Turner: You know, I had a publicist send out a press release on DecoDeck. I'm really proud of DecoDeck, and I thought, oh, this is going to be one that's got mass appeal. It's really pretty. everyone will love it. And it just absolutely sank without a trace. I think I tried buying some Google ads and that did nothing.
David Turner: It's interesting. Google makes a lot of money from ads. And so someone must be buying them and therefore someone must be clicking on them. But I haven't found it.
Nate Kadlac: They're also making a lot of money on ads that don't work at the same time. So yeah,
David Turner: yeah, that's definitely possible.
Nate Kadlac: They're banking on that a little bit.
David Turner: I wish I had advice. Foolproof way to drive traffic to your game. I know that people, you know, do TikTok. I did post on Reddit, I did post on Twitter, and maybe I just need the right people to find it, or maybe I just need the right game. And I think with the graphical adventure game, there's a community of people who are into these sorts of things, and people who are into them will find it.
David Turner: So I think it has a better built in audience. And so that's, that's the hope there, but it's also a tremendous amount of work because you have to have all the graphics that they put you into a place, and not to mention all the testing, and you're testing [00:42:00] a dozen or two dozen puzzles instead of testing one puzzle.
Joseph Rueter: And what's your timeline there?
David Turner: I would hope to release it by, the end of 2026. But, that's the hope. We'll have to see how, art comes along because that's really the thing that is, I think, the long pole there. Fantastic.
Nate Kadlac: Well, David, this has been such a fantastic chat. We really appreciate you being here.
Nate Kadlac: If you want to direct people to contact you in any way, where, where might they find you online?
David Turner: Yeah, if you go to games. novalis, N O V A L I S dot org, you will find me and, you'll find all of my games and there's an email address there and you can find me on, Activity Pub. That's Mastodon for most people and, I love getting emails.
David Turner: I've gotten some wonderful emails, about Semantle over the years. People, you know, old friends, people who say that they play with their family. So I, I love getting email.
Nate Kadlac: Love it. Thanks so much for being on the pod.
David Turner: Thanks for having [00:43:00] me.
