Nate Kadlac: [00:00:00] So what was the first game that you created?
Zach Gage: Oh boy. The first one that I can remember, I used to draw games. So I'd make a drawing and I would say it was a game and I would explain the level or like the characters that would be like a drawing and then below it would be like written out how the level worked and what was going on.
Zach Gage: And then I got into using a program called hyper studio, which was. Kind of like HyperCard, except it's maybe a little bit easier to use, and in color, and you could put sound effects in it, and stuff like that. And I don't have, I can't. I made a lot of games with it. The only one I still have, which someday I will get a disc drive and figure out how to play on an emulator is called.
Nate Kadlac: Welcome to the Hey, good game podcast, where we chat with the creators of your favorite games that you secretly play in the cracks of your day. So we just got done [00:01:00] chatting with Zach Gage, who is, you know, we can't really pick one game. He's created over 30 games, but what were some of your takeaways from that interview?
Nate Kadlac: Man, I
Joseph Rueter: loved his three steps, the three steps to game creation, starting with finding an idea and then following it. He approaches with some curiosity and just keeps finding ways to say what's next and maybe what could I? And then if I had more time, I'd spend with him. The first question on the top of my mind is how do you effectively keep people from feeling ashamed of themselves?
Joseph Rueter: Cause boy, I see that all over the place. And when he said that about game design and tutorializing, I really enjoyed that part of the conversation. How about yourself?
Nate Kadlac: The moment you open up one of his games could be something like good Sudoku could be really bad chess. There's usually some little witty copy to kind of set the [00:02:00] tone and the vibe of what you're about to play.
Nate Kadlac: And I think he, because their approach to building games is so unique kind of have to do that. And so I really love that. He really pays attention to design, the engineering and the copy. Of the game experience and that really kind of shows through everything that they create. So excited to have Zach on today.
Nate Kadlac: Let's get to the pod.
Nate Kadlac: I'm Nate Cadillac and I'm here with my co host Joseph Reuter. And today we are so excited to speak with Zach Gage, the creator of the popular game, And really we can't pick one, but we're going to go with good Sudoku here. And there's so many more creative games. It's really, we got so many to highlight.
Nate Kadlac: Zach is a game designer, programmer, educator, and conceptual artist with a majority of his work focusing on the powerful intersection of systems and social dynamics. And I beam alumni BAFTA nominee and Apple design and game of the year award winner. He has created a vast array of art [00:03:00] projects centered on his experimental approach.
Nate Kadlac: He has over 30 different games of varying types, mechanics, and themes. These games include spell tower, grit, really bad chess, which I love sage, solitaire, ridiculous fishing, and more. And his work has also been exhibited internationally at venues and events like. The New York museum of modern art, the Japanese American national museum, and many more.
Nate Kadlac: Zach, we're really thrilled you're here.
Zach Gage: Thanks for having me. It's exciting to be here. It's been a long time since I've been on someone's podcast that wasn't mine and it's always fun.
Joseph Rueter: Yes. Well, when this interview got locked in, I thought, Oh, Nate's going to be so excited because there was a period of time when I was.
Joseph Rueter: Looking back on my Sudoku addictions and going like, Hey, we should, we should build a really good Sudoku game. Like, you know, one that doesn't suck. Nate goes here. I'll just send it to you. I was like, [00:04:00] no, it's it's hockey been done. Yeah. Yeah. It's been done. And he sent good Sudoku. like, yeah, we're not going to do that's fine.
Joseph Rueter: It's been done. So super excited aside from that one. Cause it's on my phone. And It gets played. What's your favorite game to play these days?
Zach Gage: Oh man, what do I play? I, so I have two young children, and so I have barely any time between them and Puzmo. So I don't play a lot of games. I have started carrying around, I've become a bag person.
Zach Gage: I have a bag now. I was like a pockets, a cargo short guy, and now I'm a bag guy. Pretty much the reason I became a bag guy is so that I could carry around an analog pocket. So that if I ever have any time at all, I can play a game. Never have any time. So I'm like, if I'm like waiting at a restaurant, I can play a game.
Zach Gage: So I'm working my way through dragon warrior or [00:05:00] dragon quest one or dragon warrior one for Game Boy color, which is fine. I'm, I can't really, it's fine. It's a lot of grinding. And then at Puzmo, my co founder and I do our meetings in Apex legends. And so that's kind of my real game is we. Try to do well in that.
Joseph Rueter: So there's a lot of games in the world or, bags, bags in the world. What
Nate Kadlac: as bag, man, as bag, man,
Joseph Rueter: I have a bag company that sent me like a special, you're a great customer where I was like. How much have I spent there?
Zach Gage: What's your go to bag? I really, super annoying to become a bag person because like, there's just no way to figure them out except you get bags.
Zach Gage: But I hit it on, on the third try, which I'm pretty, and then I tried one more time and I was like, no, no, I'm going back to number three. [00:06:00] It's, this bag. Sling yeah, it's a small one. It's like they're three liter or something. I think it's basically the largest bag that I can attach to myself where I will forget that I have a bag attached to me, which is really important.
Zach Gage: And then I just, my recent trick is I have a. A clean canteen, carabiner to it, and I got the kid's size, so it's like really small, so it's like the size of a Poland spring bottle of water, but squatter, so that I can carry it around and I don't feel really much of it either. This really makes me seem like a smart kid.
Zach Gage: I actually hate stuff, but, but I just like recently I've been like, I got to get my bag sorted out and I got to carry a water bottle around. I'm trying to stop the micro plastics in my body. I've decided that this is the, the other thing that I'm getting radical on is like no more plastic bottled water for me.
Joseph Rueter: I decline all their receipts at grocery stores and stuff. [00:07:00] Because it's one of the main sources. Like, I don't want to touch that. And of course people are like, what? We're turning into a
Zach Gage: YouTube show
Joseph Rueter: here, I
Zach Gage: think. Yeah, right? I
Joseph Rueter: don't want
Zach Gage: to touch
Joseph Rueter: that.
Zach Gage: Look, we do all our own research and the microplastics.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah, it's awesome. Cool. Well, what got you interested in gaming? It's like, since we're gaming bags.
Zach Gage: I've really derailed us here. Yeah, reposition this podcast. Gaming. Well, well, you got to diversify. You got to get those other audiences in. When I was a kid, I played games at my friend's houses. I lived up the street from someone who had a Nintendo.
Zach Gage: I'd go down to his place and play Nintendo a lot. I wasn't allowed to have games, but my mom said I could make games. And so she said I could have two games. And so the first game was Prince of Persia. And then the second game I got was Lemmings. And then That was ostensibly it. I don't [00:08:00] know what kind of policy that was.
Zach Gage: That seemed like a really ambitious policy for an adult to be like, you can have two games forever to an eight year old, but it didn't really work, but it did work in the sense that I really got into trying to make games. Cause that was what I was allowed to do on the computer. And I don't know, I guess, I guess just like kept doing that.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah, yeah. Well, you can't have any more games. You just have to make your own, which is maybe not such a bad way to incentivize you.
Zach Gage: Yeah, I mean, ultimately what really happened is I discovered shareware. And so I just looked, I played a lot of shareware on the Mac, which I didn't really pick up on it until probably my like mid twenties.
Zach Gage: But I do think like having a childhood of playing games that were really obviously made by people and like, it had their names on the front of the game and the games were of a size that I could imagine, like, I really. I spent my childhood [00:09:00] recognizing that games were a product that was like a thing that somebody sat down and did, and it was something I could do.
Zach Gage: And I think just, That's sort of a very different way of understanding games than like my friend down the block who had a Nintendo and we would go and rent a game from the tape store every weekend, right? That really wasn't that kind of experience. That felt like a big media experience. And so I think it was probably really helpful actually to, to be on the Mac at that time scrounging for these little shareware games.
Nate Kadlac: So what was the first game that you created?
Zach Gage: Oh boy. The first one that I can remember, I used to draw games, so I'd make a drawing and I would say it was a game and I would explain the level or like the characters that would be like a drawing and then below it would be like written out how the level worked and what was going on.
Zach Gage: And then I got into using a program called Hyper Studio, which was kind of like HyperCard, except maybe a little bit [00:10:00] easier to use. and in color, and you could put sound effects in it, and stuff like that, and I don't have I can't I've made a lot of games with it. The only one I still have, which someday I will get a disk drive and figure out how to play on an emulator, is called Morzag in Time and Trouble.
Zach Gage: And I don't really know more about it than that. I think I made it with a babysitter when I was nine years old or something.
Nate Kadlac: So is it true that you come from a family of artists?
Zach Gage: I do. Yeah. My dad was a carpenter and my mom was a math teacher, but she's also a watercolorist and she's, that's pretty much what she does now.
Zach Gage: And, my grandfather was an art director and my grandmother. She painted posters for Broadway shows, and my cousins were artists. My great grandfather was a painter. He painted like, he was in the Navy, and he had like Popeye sailor arms and the tattoos and everything, and he, he [00:11:00] painted waves from his mind.
Zach Gage: Which is like pretty hardcore. So I've got some of those paintings. So yeah, it was definitely growing up in a family where art was a really big deal and being creative was really important and valued. And that was obviously huge. I think my mom had a rule where she really wouldn't buy me. Toys that I wanted, but if I wanted something for creativity, she would get it for me.
Zach Gage: And so if I really wanted to like get a really high value thing, people would like gleefully pitch in, I think like one year. And I can remember in like sometime in high school, I was really into photography and I had like a whole bunch of family members pitch in so that I could get a really nice Nikon digital SLR camera.
Zach Gage: And that sort of carried me through a bunch of years. That was a really cool experience. I think being able to have access to the kinds of things that I needed to do art. I remember as a kid being given a webcam so that I [00:12:00] could make stop motion movies with Play Doh basically, and that was really cool.
Zach Gage: Just anything that encouraged creativity was really a positive association for everybody. So it was pretty nice childhood in that way.
Joseph Rueter: It sounds fantastic. Did you find your way into exhibits? Like, in the educational process, the opportunity to exhibit? What might have been your first?
Zach Gage: Yeah, I mean, I think I I had a bizarre career, I think.
Zach Gage: I definitely In high school, I got some art award for something when I graduated, but I honestly can't remember what it was, and I don't know why I got it. I can't remember that either, but In middle school, I got to do I think I had like a Gallery Exhibits is This is sort of a thing that did happen later, but I definitely got a lot of opportunities to show off being creative.
Zach Gage: So like in middle school, I ended up doing some layout on the yearbook and I got an award for [00:13:00] yearbook page layout, which is a very silly kind of award, but it felt really cool at the time. In high school, I got some kind of art thing that I can't remember, but also as a side job in high school, I was making websites for local businesses, and I got to be really creative in Photoshop and design things for those websites, and then people would use those websites, and that was really rewarding.
Zach Gage: I created. a blog for all of my classmates and friends and everybody was sort of blogging on a website that I had created that I was sort of doing art and putting it onto. So that was really cool. And then sort of in college and post college, I got, I was lucky enough to be asked to be in a bunch of exhibits and galleries.
Zach Gage: I never really chased it down. But people would email me, which I still don't like, that's cool. I don't really know why that worked out, but I've been lucky and people have sort of come after me. I think when I try to get into stuff, it doesn't work quite as well. But when I just wait around, people come and ask to show things, which [00:14:00] is really cool.
Zach Gage: And it's been a very cool experience being able to show art in galleries. It's really different than putting stuff up on the internet and having people download it or having people write about it. I don't know. It's weird to be involved in a format that doesn't have metrics, I guess.
Joseph Rueter: More than just walking through the door.
Joseph Rueter: 43 pairs of feet walked in today. They stayed an average of, we don't have any idea.
Zach Gage: Yeah, no one knows.
Joseph Rueter: They thought these random things. Yeah.
Zach Gage: It's nice to like have something like that where you go and you just enjoy yourself and you feel like it was good. And then you go, ah, I don't know anything about what just happened.
Zach Gage: And that's fine. And maybe when I do know about stuff, that's kind of garbage. Maybe that doesn't really matter. There are a lot of aspects of it that we're really not capturing. I think when you make stuff online, you think that. You have the information and you really barely, barely do. And so like [00:15:00] our brains are so hungry for numbers that you kind of take the numbers and feel like they're actually painting a picture, but like you are barely understanding what those numbers mean.
Nate Kadlac: Well, I think taking from your childhood, this love of art and love of games, I think the first game I did play of years was, well, Good Sudoku, did that come out in 2020 ish? So after Really Bad Chess? Yeah, it was
Zach Gage: sometime during the apocalypse.
Nate Kadlac: Okay, yeah. And I think I played Really Bad Chess after that.
Nate Kadlac: But, I remember being enamored with good Sudoku, partly because of the design choices that you made. It was kind of unlike any other Sudoku game I've ever played before. It tried to be approachable from a onboarding perspective and its design was just really, really going against, I think, all of the rules.
Nate Kadlac: I'm curious to hear about how your approach is to designing games in a way that Absurd in [00:16:00] some ways, like absurd in the best possible way, but there's a process there that I'd love to hear about.
Zach Gage: Yeah. I think probably the part of the process that speaks to what you're asking about is I do a lot of design in places where I don't really have any understanding of what the game is.
Zach Gage: So like Sudoku, I really, I truly. This was also true of really bad chess. I had never really played Sudoku when I built Good Sudoku, and I built Good Sudoku because I wanted to play Sudoku, and I couldn't find a Sudoku game that would let me play it the way I wanted to play it, the way that would help me learn how to play it.
Zach Gage: Like, I literally could not find a game that would let me take two different kinds of notes. And that was the way that I wanted to play. And I felt like I couldn't learn how to play the game unless I had that. So the first [00:17:00] thing I did, I like bought a bunch of. crummy Sudoku puzzles and I built a version of Sudoku that would let me play by taking two kinds of notes.
Zach Gage: And then I wanted to have a couple, like, I didn't want to count. I had this sense that, like, counting was the part that sucked because it sucked for me. It was just a purely selfish thing. Like, I don't want to count. I want to play the game. I don't want to be like one, two, three, Could be a three, four, five, could be a six, like that part is not fun for me.
Zach Gage: And I had this, there's this thing. I don't know if this is real or not. I have like a, either a fever dream or a real memory of a study from a long time ago, a sociology study where they asked people to memorize a bunch of numbers in a room and then walk down the hallway and then write those numbers down.
Zach Gage: And for a subset of those people, they had them carry a slice of cake down the hallway with them. And the people who carried the slice of cake. Like could not remember nearly as many numbers as the people who didn't have the slice of [00:18:00] cake. And for some reason this stuck in my head and I've started calling some kinds of design problems, cake problems.
Zach Gage: Because when we think about design, you think about it as, at least I thought about it as like, usually you think like, You're building difficult problems for people and you have to help them solve the difficult problems better. But what the cake experiment revealed to me is that actually we're surrounded by easy problems all the time and anything you can take off someone's plate is going to help them Think better and think more clearly and solve difficult problems better.
Zach Gage: You don't have to attack the difficult problems directly. Sometimes if you just remove something simple, it changes the entire experience for somebody. And so I really wanted to get rid of this counting because I felt like it was keeping me from being able to access the rest of the game. So I added in a couple things, like when you click on a number, instead of just highlighting the rows and columns of your selection, it highlights everywhere that the number cannot [00:19:00] be on the puzzle, which I think is really sacrilegious to Sudoku.
Zach Gage: And I later learned it is really sacrilegious to the kind of Sudoku that most people play because most people play a kind of Sudoku where they're literally only looking for that piece of information. All they're doing is counting and trying to find those spots and that's what they enjoy. But I wanted to get rid of that.
Zach Gage: So I sort of added that in. And the game was kind of interesting. And I thought like, okay, these like basic puzzles are interesting. How can I learn like the more advanced techniques? And I, I started looking at the internet and I felt like the way that this stuff was being taught was terrible. That they would take, something.
Zach Gage: Like a simple idea. And then they would say, here are the eight ways this can show up in the puzzle. And here's like 30 paragraphs about it. And then you look at your puzzle and you're like, is that what this is? And then you look at the internet and you're like, I don't understand. I have to like cross reference this thing just to figure out what the next step is.
Zach Gage: And so I was, was talking to. Jack Schlesinger, who made the game with me, and [00:20:00] I said, look, man, this thing, I'm like, I kind of think Sudoku might actually be really good if we could like learn these later techniques, like it might be a really interesting game and I want to find out. And we got to like generate some more puzzles for this game and think about how we can get people in.
Zach Gage: And I have this puzzle generator that I have, and. It's terrible, but like one thing I noticed is that like, when you have a puzzle generator, the way that you generate a Sudoku puzzle is not the way you would think. It's not like some abstract mathematical process. It's literally you write a generator and you have it play the game.
Zach Gage: And that's how it generates puzzles. And it like finds the puzzles that are good. Cause it's literally playing the game. And I was like, look, if the generator is playing the game, then it can just tell you what to do next. And if we know what to do next, we can. write up a little thing that's like, Hey, you're looking for a naked single.
Zach Gage: Here's what a naked single is. [00:21:00] And so Jack built this, we'd like had all these conversations. Turns out it's really hard to build a Sudoku puzzle generator and there's no good reference points on it for the internet because of course, It turns out if you have a good Sudoku puzzle generator, you can make money with it.
Zach Gage: So nobody wants to actually like open source a really good one. And we had to build an incredible one because the puzzles in good Sudoku get really hard. And Jack was like, Oh, well, this is perfect because I used to work in cryptography for the government. So like, I know how to do all this stuff. And I was like, what is your life?
Zach Gage: And so he built this amazing generator. And then we spent a lot of time months and months and months, basically thinking about How to teach people all of these techniques, what order the techniques should be in, how we should reclassify. We renamed some of them. We added a new thing called split, which is not a canonical label for techniques, but it helped us sort of structure, like what order you should learn them in and how it should be approachable.
Zach Gage: And then just thought about like how people would learn that [00:22:00] in a game and sort of laid out all the pieces. And once we were playing and being able to see the techniques, it was a real like, holy cow, man, like. This is a really cool game and it's not as hard as we thought it was like once something's helping you it's actually like maybe anyone could learn these super advanced techniques and play these really hard puzzles and we put it out and it turned out yeah like almost anyone can do it and and i think it that was a real surprise to me that like one of the big things that came off of good sudoku is people Coming and saying like, I thought I couldn't do Sudoku and I discovered I can and like, I'm pretty smart and I'm good at puzzle games.
Zach Gage: And I, I didn't know that I was capable of this. And that was really cool that it just, just reframing something and building the right kind of support structure could help people do that. But, to answer your question, the radicalness is just, I try to work in games that I don't understand and then I try to understand them through making a game.
Zach Gage: And then when I have that experience, [00:23:00] I try to turn it into an experience that anyone can have. And so I think that ends up building a lot of games that feel really fresh and different to somebody who's in that category of, of enjoyment. Somebody who enjoys that kind of game, it feels like, Oh my God, here's my in for this kind of game.
Zach Gage: Something that can finally appeal to me. And that was true about Really Bad Chess. I had never finished a game of chess until I built the Really Bad Chess prototype and I won a game of chess. I won my first game of chess against the AI. Was it because you had five
Nate Kadlac: queens?
Zach Gage: Yeah. Oh, it definitely, it definitely was.
Zach Gage: And it was great. And I felt like, Oh my God, this is that, that game was really crazy. That one. I like got a, I had the idea. Yeah. I went to the Unity store and I downloaded a 5 like chess asset pack that could like had an AI that you could play against and then I like opened up the code and I was like, can I just make these pieces different?
Zach Gage: And so I did and I played and the AI played against me and I was like, Oh my God, I can't [00:24:00] believe the AI is actually playing against me. And I played out the game. And it was awesome. And I was like, ah, this is a game. All right, great. This is the fastest I've ever gone from an idea to a game.
Joseph Rueter: When I saw this one, I was, whatever, I used to play chess when I was a little kid, second grade, maybe I played my first game, a little, kind of like fold out with the hinge in the middle and you'd sit there like little tiny pieces, travel set, and then you get into like third or fourth grade and I'm in chess, chess league, you know, like it's such a rule driven.
Joseph Rueter: No, I can't do that. Right. Like slapping your hands and moving fast. And the aggressive logic of chess is just blown apart when you load it. And you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we loaded it. But the one today is just nights on the white side where all pawns should be.
All: Right.
Joseph Rueter: You load it. You're like, okay, I'm ready to play.
Joseph Rueter: And then there's this moment where you stop and go, wait. All I have is nights? I don't know.[00:25:00]
Joseph Rueter: Okay, and suddenly what was rigorous and boring and old and expected isn't. Right. If you're like, ah, this is fresh and new, different one little twist that creates intrigue and connection. And it's super fun.
Zach Gage: Yeah, it was, it's really, that game was a really fun surprise for me. I think like that is in general, how I like to approach games is like, I want them to be a surprise for me.
Zach Gage: I want. to have that experience that everybody else is having so that I know that the game is good. And that one was particularly special because, like, I really didn't like chess and I always wanted to like it. Usually I make games that I, like, didn't really like and now I'm interested. But chess was a game that, like, I wanted to love it.
Zach Gage: If you grow up liking games, chess seems so cool. And every time I tried to play it, I was like, this game sucks. Why does this suck? And I would try it over and over again. And so to, [00:26:00] get to play it finally was so exciting and especially because like like almost everything it's really beautiful and you get in these like amazing positions where the pieces are all connected in this super cool way and you figure out how to like break this defense and like I don't know it definitely made me respect chess a whole lot more to be able to play it in this way where I was just completely eviscerating the rule, the like big rule of the game, and it's still beautiful, and it still plays like chess.
Zach Gage: It still turns into chess by the end. I thought that was really cool and made me feel like there's something really elegant about this set of rules and pieces that this game is made out of.
Nate Kadlac: Sometimes when I'm writing an article, my favorite stories are the ones where I'm laughing as I'm writing, you know, and it's just hitting on all cylinders.
Nate Kadlac: And I was kind of imagining you building this game thinking. He's got to be laughing while he's like, designing or developing this game. [00:27:00] It's just like ludicrous that I'm, I click on, yeah, I'm good at chess. And then the next line is forget about your openings. Forget draws exist. Like forget everything that you know and care about.
Nate Kadlac: There's an element of copywriting that's happening in your games. Like how much time do you spend on thinking through the sentences and the words that you're putting on the screen when people load these up?
Zach Gage: That's a good question. So I think my game design. Process takes place in two parts. So the first, well three parts, but the middle part is just boring.
Zach Gage: The first part is like finding the idea that is really interesting and following it. Having a moment of like, what if all the pieces in chess were random? Would that fix my problem with chess? And then doing it and seeing what was fun and then trying to like, do the things that continue to fall out of that.
Zach Gage: Like, all right, so that works. Now, now what, how do I turn this into a real game? Like, what do I want to do next? I just beat the computer. [00:28:00] Oh, maybe I could like. Make their pieces a little bit better. Maybe I could build the daily puzzle. Maybe, you know, follow all of that stuff. And then the. The middle part is like the OK, now I got to make all the menus and then the end part is now how do I make sure that like this idea, this.
Zach Gage: This experience that I had sitting down in this game, playing it, having this sort of moment of weird joy and like seeing a game that was all nights and being like, Oh my God, I guess I got to figure out how this piece works finally. I guess I'm in that corner. How do I translate that to everybody else?
Zach Gage: How do I make sure that when other people sit down with this game, they have that same experience. And so the text at the beginning of chess and the sort of text and tutorialization in a lot of games that I make is. really intentional from the perspective of just like, I need to set your expectations in a place so that the experience that you have is something that I can expect.
Zach Gage: I think something that I've learned from a decade plus of making [00:29:00] games that's really sort of freaked me out about humanity is that like people don't have that many responses. Like it feels like everybody's really unique and interesting because the input that's going into everybody all the time is like.
Zach Gage: wild and varied. Like we're all living these different lives. We have different things happening to us. We're reading different things. Like we're being shot with like random number generators all the time. And so like, we're very different. But like if you sit someone down in like a highly contextualized moment and then show them something else, like, I don't know if you've had this.
Zach Gage: People really only like respond in like two or three ways, which is freaky and bad. I don't know what's going on with our wiring. Like that's a little frightening, but it's true. And so my experience with the tutorialization and the setups for these games are usually, I'll try one setup. And then I'll show it to some people, and then I usually have to make one change, and then it works.
Zach Gage: And it's a lot more [00:30:00] about like, the strategizing around what that structure is gonna be, usually more than like, what the actual copy is. So I'll give you a couple examples. So like, I made a game called Flip Flop Solitaire. And the biggest thing that people had a problem with, with this game, So Flip Flop is a play on Spider Solitaire, which is basically a game where you're moving cards around in a tableau, like Solitaire, and you're stacking them down.
Zach Gage: And the trick with Flip Flop Solitaire is that you can actually stack them back up. So you can stack like, a 9 on a 10, but you could also stack a 9 on an 8. And then, so you could have a stack that goes like, Queen, King, Jack, Queen, King, Queen, King, or something like that. And getting that into your head is this like, complicated thing, it seems like I could just tell you that rule, but that doesn't work.
Zach Gage: So there were two problems with that game. So the first problem was when I started the tutorial, I said, are you familiar with solitaire or do you not play that much solitaire? And 100 percent of people would say, I'm [00:31:00] familiar with solitaire, even if they had no idea how to play solitaire. So I added three options.
Zach Gage: I have, I'm familiar with solitaire. I know a little bit of solitaire. I've never played solitaire. And I know a little bit of solitaire and I've never played solitaire are the same answer. But having those two gives the people who don't want to feel like ashamed about themselves an answer that they can pick where they still like get the little bit of extra tutorialization.
Zach Gage: So that was the first thing was I had to figure out like, how do I just tell people a couple of rules? But then I discovered that like most people, especially people who were familiar with solitaire didn't, could not internalize this idea that you could stack back up because they had played 10 years of solitaire where they can only stack down.
Zach Gage: And so no matter what I would say to them. They would never do it. And the answer to that turned out to be adding a hint button. And when you click hint, what it does is it shows you every possible thing you could do right now. So it'll like literally move the cards and then reset them and then move the cards in a different [00:32:00] way and reset them.
Zach Gage: And sometimes the number of things you can do is like 50 things and you can interrupt it and stop. But just giving that button and having the game show you what your options look like and how vast they were turned out to be the magic trick that like allowed people's brains to like open up and be like, Oh, Oh, I see.
Zach Gage: Like I can do this thing. And that's a trick that I try to use in a lot of games is I never want the hint to tell you the answer. I always view the hint button as an additional tool that I can use to help you learn how to enjoy the game rather than help you get it. Solve and then be done with the game and I think that's really the big trick like it's not the copy is important but the real important thing is having an approach to Tutorialization that respects the fact that most people aren't going to want Tutorialization at all when you are tutorializing you basically get one opportunity to give someone A piece of information and then that's it.
Zach Gage: It's over. [00:33:00] You're never going to give them another piece of information I always think about like have you ever pushed a pull door? That's how much people read That's what you got in a video game. You get one sentence and people aren't going to read it anyway And so so you get that moment at the beginning You get your one chance and then Later, you have to set up for yourself a way that people can get the extra information when they need it in the moment, because that's when people will actually read.
Zach Gage: And so that's the structure. A way that we did that really recently is on Puzzmo, which is this website that I built up with my co founder, Orta, The Rocks, and a bunch of people. Other cool artists and then sold to Hearst. And we're now working on as like a competitor for the New York times. We just launched a game called pilot poker, which is like a kind of solitaire poker game that anyone can play, even if you don't know poker hands and trying to teach people how to play that game is really complicated.
Zach Gage: It's been a, an interesting [00:34:00] journey to think about how do you get people to learn how to play a web game? We're trying to get people who. They're coming in from Wordle or from Crosswords. They're going to click something that they've never played before. And we have this one opportunity to both convince them that this game is fun and for them, but also convince them that it's cool to be curious about games.
Zach Gage: It's important to try new things and you can do it. You can try these new things and get a rewarding experience. And so. Our initial approach to doing game tutorials, which you'll see across the website is when you first click in, if you're on mobile, it pops up instructions like Wordle does. But what we've learned is nobody reads those, right?
Zach Gage: You go to a game, you pop up the instructions. And the first thing you do is you close them and you start fiddling around with the game. So our new approach is to build games and write instructions in a way where you learn them by fiddling around. And the instructions are not there to teach you how to play the game, they're to teach you how to fiddle around in a way that's [00:35:00] productive, that will get you through the game so that you can teach yourself how to play the game.
Zach Gage: And so the way that we do them in Pilot Poker is we have a set of essentially achievements that are very simple. Put a card on the board, put two cards in a hand in a row, try to make a hand in one row, try to make a hand in a column, try to make a hand in the corners. And you don't have to accomplish them all in one game.
Zach Gage: So if you do one and then you, you lose focus and you play out the game in some weird way, however you want, the next time you play, the next one is still waiting for you there. And so it's this totally new idea of like how we can try to. Leave the information lying around about how people can learn how to, how to enjoy these things and never push them into something and always have the things that you need right at your fingertips to continue your journey of, of getting interested in this thing.
Zach Gage: So the real answer after all of that is that mostly when I write the copy, I try to think about how to make it as [00:36:00] short as possible.
Nate Kadlac: Love that. I think that there's. Part of the magic of that is you have one chance to kind of set a perspective, a vibe, right? And by being really specific about what you want them to do, even if it's to kind of tell me to ignore all of the rules that I know, like it's helpful to know that because I know what I'm getting into, right?
Nate Kadlac: And so just that little like switch is so a key to, to playing a game like yours. So we, you started to talk a little bit about And I'm curious, like what happened? You were building games with Jack and what happened with Puzmo? And like, what was the transition there? What did you see? Some success, like obviously had some success, but you were building games.
Nate Kadlac: Well, how did Puzmo come about?
Zach Gage: Yeah. So Jack and I were building games and are building games. We're still building the games that are going on Puzmo and I had. I met [00:37:00] this guy Orta Therox at a dog school in Manhattan where my dog was going and he was going and I had gotten this dog basically because, I don't know, it's too much information for a podcast.
Zach Gage: My wife was doing a PhD and she was working all the time and I was just like really lonely at home and I was like, all right, I'm going to get a dog, I'll go out, I'll have this dog and I'm going to take them to this dog school and play all the time. And then I was like, well, all right, I guess I got to make friends with the people at this dog school because I'm seeing them three nights a week.
Zach Gage: And I started talking to this one guy and I was like, what do you do? And he was like, oh, I'm an engineer. And I was like, oh, well, where do you work? And he was like artsy and I do like web stuff. And then he asked me what I did and I told him video games. And it turns out he's. like truly insanely talented engineer.
Zach Gage: And we were searching for a while to, you know, make stuff, things that we could do together. And one of the ideas that, [00:38:00] that we did was we built a game called Flappy Royale, which was basically this version of Flappy Bird, where you raced against the last 20 people who played the game. So it was just like, there were always, you're always playing against the last 20 people and it, there were just a lot of birds all the time.
Zach Gage: And it was like a different meta structure to play on flappy bird.
Nate Kadlac: So flying with 20 other birds, right. Is that what you're saying at one time? Yeah.
Zach Gage: Yeah. So it always felt like, Oh, I have this, I'm not trying to set a high score. I'm trying to outlast everybody. And I don't know how good they are.
Zach Gage: Sometimes maybe one of them's really good and, and sometimes maybe they all crash into a pipe early. It's just like playing with the meta around a game to see what kind of experience that would change for you in the game and so We did that for a little bit and then I sort of had this idea that we were talking over which was that the New York Times is Sort of the only player in the [00:39:00] daily game space.
Zach Gage: We looked Later and found out there are actually a lot of other people trying to do this, but none of them are really ones you would think of. And even the ones that are successful are not ones that you would think of. We were like, there's a space. The New York times is really the only player. They're making a ton of money.
Zach Gage: If we could be the second person in that space, that's probably a viable business because like, even if we can't overtake them, right. Like there's gotta be, and maybe like, we don't even really want to run this So like maybe someone would buy us and then they would run run it and we could just work on it Which is what we actually want to do.
Zach Gage: So We started working on this and and then we also thought like the New York Times like their thing It's like not very good. They have these games, but that's it It's like you go to their website or their app or whatever and it's just a bunch of links to games But if you play video games That's not the standard if you play fortnight or minecraft or apex legends or these are like [00:40:00] worlds that you or roblox this is like a space that you go into in your social with your friends and there are leaderboards and there are things to think about that are going on all the time and so We already had the games, because Jack and I, you know, I made a lot, and then Jack and I made a bunch of games, and so like, we had the games, we don't even have to find the games or make the games, we just need to rebuild them for this platform and spend all of our time really thinking about what would make an amazing platform.
Zach Gage: And, Orda was like, that's a great idea. That seems like something that could work. I'm going to leave Artsy and let's just try it for a year or two. Let's figure it out. And I was like, well, that's ridiculous, but sure. and then I had this sort of random meeting with this person from the Astra Fund, which was like a sort of charitable fund that tries to give money to puzzle games or games that are going to increase.
Zach Gage: Games for education, but not like [00:41:00] educational games, just games that are good for people, because you're thinking, which is like a lot of games. There's a lot of games that I think are good for people. And I felt like if we were gonna, you know, over the years, one of the things that people have asked me to make.
Zach Gage: People say like, could you please make a game like this? Could you make a game like this? Cause like now I've got this reputation of like doing twists on old games. And one of the things that came up a lot was crosswords. Please make a new crosswords. And it started to feel really important to me to make a crosswords because the things that I started to hear were things like.
Zach Gage: Oh, the New York times is really stuffy and the New York times crossword, like the standard crossword of our lives is like, not very modern. It's not really addressing things that younger people care about. It has a voice that's a little bit weird. It's maybe not as diverse and interesting as it, as it could be.
Zach Gage: And so I like, Wanted to do and then also I was like and also nobody knows how to play crosswords Like it's not teaching you how to play [00:42:00] crosswords. Just like Sudoku It's a an app that is just a product for people who already know how crosswords work It's not a thing for new people and I had this idea about how to make crosswords approachable by giving these bespoke little hints that we do on Puzmo and And it felt like if we were going to build this games platform, we had to build it around a crossword that had to be the centerpiece of this launching thing, because that's what a newspaper games page is, is it's a crossword and then also other games.
Zach Gage: And so you just can't do that unless you have a lot of organization and a lot of money. And so we met up with these Astra people and they were really interested and they were willing to fund us in a way where we could have three years of Runway to have crosswords and start to build this company. And we were like, well, that's wild.
Zach Gage: These people are just going to give us a bunch of money. That's amazing. I guess let's go for it. And so we started building it and sort of halfway through the process of building it, we got sort of cold called by Hearst who are just [00:43:00] had found me through some other means and, and we ended up having a bunch of conversations about them.
Zach Gage: Potentially acquiring it. And then they did. And so now we're, we got to do what we wanted. We don't have to run a company, but we're getting to build this amazing thing. And we have access to all of these resources and all of this promotion. And it's pretty cool and exciting. And for me, one of the, the really interesting parts of it is trying to figure out how to do, You know, in the same way that I try to, tried to figure out how to do interesting things with games, trying to figure out how to do interesting things with business structures because finally I'm in a place where there are business people who have objectives that are like, here's how you make money as a company.
Zach Gage: Here's like what a functioning business looks like. And here are the things that we have to improve to make that work. And we're in the newspapers division. So the people who are the business people really know about that stuff because they are like been in an industry that's struggling for the past, like 25 years.
Zach Gage: So they really know about business stuff. And it's [00:44:00] really interesting to sort of have these things filter through and have to think about how do we build a website. That is a great experience for everybody, but also leverages the things that we have to do to make money that now we know about. And, I don't know, it's, it's super cool.
Zach Gage: I'm really enjoying all the sort of novel problems that are, that are showing up. And I think we're doing it. Like, I think if you go to the website, I don't think we're doing anything that feels cheap or feels like a money grab, we're just trying to build a great experience that like also works as a business.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah. Fantastic. I've recently come. Just reading the newspaper to a new theory. I don't think I've shared this. You like, you read the newspaper, like, it's not even just like, go play a game. I think there's a certain section of the population that'll go, like, try to find a new game to play. But it's really small.
Joseph Rueter: It's like a tiny little group, right? But there's this large group of people that read the news. And then, you can't really do anything about [00:45:00] it. Like, the newspaper isn't set up like a sitcom, where in 20 minutes you get some ridiculous, funny problem. And then you get to see all the pieces of the problem and be smarter than the characters.
Joseph Rueter: And then get at the end and know how to solve it yourself, but laugh that it was solved a different way. You're reading the news and it's just terror upon terror upon ter Oh, there's an interesting thing. Hey, sports. And now I've started playing the games as like an off ramp to the news. It's like, huh, I actually like the game just as a reset.
Joseph Rueter: Into life again, and I had never seen it that way you were setting this up as like paper or a page Like it's a print form And, yeah, I'm excited. Do you see similar things happening there in terms of gameplay? Why are persons playing games in the newspaper versus seeking games independently? I
Zach Gage: mean, I think one of the things that's an interesting challenge with games With this particular [00:46:00] audience is that most of this audience does not seek games at all.
Zach Gage: They stumble into games and then they play games or they play games because someone told them to. So like my personal theory right now is that like a lot of the people who play New York Times games play New York Times games because the New York Times is thought of as an intelligent institution. And so if you can solve the New York Times games, an intelligent institution is telling you, hey, you're pretty smart.
Zach Gage: And that is, I think, one of the largest motivators that people have for playing these games. And it doesn't have to be the New York Times telling you you're pretty smart. It could be some other institution that you care about saying, hey, we really love this game. You should check it out. Or it could be your friends showing up and being like, hey, I just saw this amazing game.
Zach Gage: Like come play it with me or. Come help me do this thing in the game. And that, that's really the root by which people [00:47:00] end up playing these games. It's either they just purely stumble into them and they're fun and interesting enough right off the bat that they want to keep playing or they're getting them on some kind of major personal recommendation.
Zach Gage: And so. Trying to build a thing that like allows these games to spread far and wide around those systems is a really interesting challenge because that's like, we don't have direct control over either one of those things. We're not a big enough company that people go, Oh, well, Puzmo said I'm smart, so I'm smart.
Zach Gage: And we're not all of your friends. So we can't like, just, send you games that we really like. And so we're doing a lot of stuff around, you know, how to build community around games where community doesn't exist and allow people to build their own communities around games so that if you are that anchor person, who's getting your friends into it, we have the tools for you to, to start to do that and to get in as many people as you want.
Zach Gage: We're also [00:48:00] having a lot of conversations with. All, Puzmo is published in a lot of places, all of the newspapers in Canada publish us, The Skimm publishes us, Polygon publishes us, and so we have partners with whom people have a direct relationship, like with The Skimm, and so if The Skimm says, here's the game that we're really loving right now, there are people who have that parasocial friend relationship with this business in the same way that people do with the New York Times, where they go, oh, well.
Zach Gage: I respect these people, the stuff, you know, I've been reading them for years, and I respect their voice. And their voice is now telling me about this other thing that they legitimately find to be cool. And so, it's been really about trying to build something. that has those social things, but also is legitimately cool.
Zach Gage: And it's cool in a way that when we go to the people who run something like the SCIM, they go, Oh, I love this. I want to work with you because I think the people who, who are [00:49:00] constituents are going to like this. And we'd be excited to tell them about it. And we're not going to feel embarrassed to bring you to the party.
Nate Kadlac: I think one of the things that. A lot of game creators struggle with is distribution and you have, you've got that built to write in, which is kind of, which is kind of cool. How many people are playing your games every day at Puzzmo?
Zach Gage: Oh, I don't look at that. I die and do not look at the notice that I learned that lesson many years ago, but you know what, like I really think.
Zach Gage: One of the things that's cool about working with Hearst and with the business people there is the thing that I have stopped, that I stopped doing a really long time ago, the very first thing I stopped before I truly stopped looking at numbers was stopping looking at retention, which is like everybody feels like retention is this really important statistic and it's not, you don't have to look at it.
Zach Gage: It doesn't need to be a thing that, that you think about. And I always felt like. The thing about [00:50:00] retention is, like, if you try to increase retention, you are going against the values of the people who you are giving stuff to. Sometimes, yeah, maybe sometimes you made a mistake and you built something that people turn on or they don't like or they don't know how to get into and so, like, retention could be good.
Zach Gage: But a lot of times when people fall off, It's because you don't need to do something forever. If I asked you what your favorite movie is and you were like, Oh, it's whatever. And I, and then my next question was like, have you watched it more than a thousand times? Do you watch it every year? You'd be like, you're insane.
Zach Gage: That's not what a movie is. Like I, I watched it a couple of times and it really meant something to me. And that's how I feel about video games. It's, you know, like if you play them and you enjoy them and then you're done. That's great. Don't come back. Don't play it again. Like, you're done. And, part of our approach with Puzmo is like, we want to give you a lot of ways to play the games, and we want to give you a lot of games, because we think these games are good, and we think that you'll [00:51:00] enjoy, if you enjoy one, you'll enjoy a lot of other ones, because they're related in, in terms of the, the approach.
Zach Gage: And so, when you're done with one, And then check out another one. And then if you don't like it, then, you know, you can be done. You don't have to return to Puzmo every day, but we're going to at least try to give you a diversity of stuff that you can play with, but the newspaper division, they're like retention is really important because.
Zach Gage: It is really important if you're a newspaper and for business, retention can be a really important number. And so I think what we have now is like a really great and interesting relationship where we have a group of people who are looking at mechanical and like clarity means of retention because they're trying to improve retention in the places where You can just screw something up and somebody bounces because a button was in the wrong place, or they didn't know what a thing meant, or they didn't know how to get back to the main page, or they, like, had one really miserable experience.
Zach Gage: And so we have people who are looking at that, [00:52:00] and then on my side, we're not doing that with the games. We're not looking at, like, Spell tower and being like, okay, well, everybody plays spell tower until day 15 and then we lose 10%. How do we not lose 10 percent right. And to be able to separate that out and have those pieces sort of be looking at different aspects of, of the site I think is really healthy and really interesting.
Zach Gage: And, and that's like part of the, the space where I'm talking about it being like, interesting to be trying to build a business while still providing a really like reputable moral thing. Sorry, I don't have an answer about how many people are playing, but we have a very lively discord. That's great. We'd like
Joseph Rueter: to know how many people get to minute 54 of our podcast, but there's no way to do that yet.
Joseph Rueter: It's not worth it. I think there are some weird ways, but yeah, ours is not working. You don't need to know. You don't need to know.
Nate Kadlac: If people wanted to find you online and I mean, you have the greatest, well, X handle, I guess now Twitter handle Helvetica, [00:53:00] which is bonkers. I don't know how you got that joining really early.
Nate Kadlac: I suppose people wanted to find you online. Where, where should they go?
Zach Gage: You know, that has become a really tough question. I used to say. Follow me on Twitter, but I don't really use Twitter anymore. I think once they banned the third party clients, it just became unusable for me. so I don't, don't do much there.
Zach Gage: but I am on Mastodon, where I'm at Helvetica at, mastodon. gamedev. place. I'm on blue sky also for at just stfj. net, but I don't really post there a lot. I don't post much on mastodon, but if you message me on mastodon, I will see it. Cause I do check mastodon all the time or I'm just. Honestly, probably the best spot is in the Puzmo discord or in the Eggplant Show discord.
Zach Gage: Those are the places where I'm really am mostly, I've sort of left the, the giant public [00:54:00] media trash fire behind a little bit. It's a glorious
Joseph Rueter: burning fire. Yeah. It's got a deep orange glow at the moment. It does. Yeah. It's a little,
Zach Gage: yikes.
Joseph Rueter: It's
Nate Kadlac: We're both huge fans. how about this? If you were to tell someone to go play a game at Puzzmo.
Nate Kadlac: com, what game should they go play?
Zach Gage: Flip
Nate Kadlac: Art. Alright, there it is. Alright, thanks so much for being on the pod, Zach. So good. Thanks so much for having me. This
Zach Gage: was really fun. Pleasure.
