Joseph Rueter: [00:00:00] So you've earned a bunch of awards in your academic career. What kind of sparked your interest in tech and mathematics?
Nildo Junior: you're throwing me back here, like way, way back. So when I was studying still before the fifth grade, I really wasn't that much into math. I was more into
Nate Kadlac: Welcome to the Hey, Good Game podcast, where we chat with the creators of your favorite games that you secretly play in the cracks of your day.
Aaron Kardell: I'm Aaron Cardell and I'm here with my cohost, Joseph Reuter. Today we're excited to speak with Nildo Jr. the creator of Contexto. Nildo is a Brazilian software engineer by trade working on a wide range of software from developing an online gamified platform to improving user experience by assisting application development teams.
Aside from being a [00:01:00] developer, he's also a writer who focuses on social issues and promoting inclusivity with a lot of articles being on Medium. Contexto is a word guessing game that works on a number scale guessing system where words are sorted by an AI algorithm and you keep guessing until you get nearer and nearer to number one.
Nildo, we're thrilled you're here.
Nildo Junior: Thank you, I'm thrilled to be here too.
Aaron Kardell: Nildo, what's your favorite game to play right now?
Nildo Junior: Yeah, my favorite game to play is League of Legends. Ah. I've been playing it for much more time than I wish, actually. But I do play it, fairly consistently. And it is something that bonds my family together, even.
So my whole family likes the game. So that's what I do.
Joseph Rueter: Oh, that's fun. Why do you say you wish that you played it less?
Nildo Junior: because I consider that it's a bit addicting, the game. [00:02:00] So I feel like I'm a little bit addicted to it and I don't like that feeling, but yeah, and it does bring me some joy and social interactions and, That's what I mainly play.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah, it's okay. Nate, one of our partners on this, is addicted to chess. I feel like,
Nildo Junior: that, that chess, there is a little bit of a social positivity to it. no one will really judge you for being addicted to chess, because that's Intellectual. No, we judge him for it. , you should judge him. Like most people would be like, yeah.
So you're a smart, Nope, we do. Legends is like, oh, the game has a bit of a fame.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah, it's immersive in a way that chess isn't. We've talked with people who've come. And encountered a game at certain times in their life. And they'll just be like, I hid it from myself. I remember chatting with somebody and they were [00:03:00] saying that they had just recently had a child.
And they came across a very immersive game and they played it once and put it away. Like playing this game and being a father were not compatible. So that was a testament to the strength of games, right?
Nildo Junior: In my experience, I feel like playing games is not something that you hide from people. I even, have a suggestion because, okay, I've been listening to the podcast before, right?
And I know that you're, what you usually say, right? For people, for the callings of the podcast or something. It's we talk about the games that you secretly play. And I have a bit of an issue with that word, secretly, because it's not true, people usually don't play games secretly, they play in public about it.
On social channels, you'll be public about it, right?
Joseph Rueter: Especially if you're doing any kind of casting, [00:04:00] posting your results, on what are daily games and so forth, yeah, but it's more you want to play when you're in class. You want to play when the other members of the family are doing chores.
You want to
Nildo Junior: procrastinate.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah. And we've bumped into research along the way that it's like high cognitive roles and businesses will have behaviors. of persons in those roles where they'll, sneak off during the day and grab three to five minute game sessions. And we think that's fascinating hiding that you're playing a game in between these high cognition behaviors.
So that's where that comes from. But You're right, there's a certain portion of the population that's very vocal about the gameplay.
Nildo Junior: yeah. And I also talk about, from my experience, what I see from my player base, right? They're not secretive at all about playing Contextual, for instance.[00:05:00]
Actually, they play it because they have someone to talk to about it. So they want people to know that they have been playing every day.
Joseph Rueter: They're super short, like games are ridiculous, but if as a culture, we were paying attention to the power of games and money and spending was any kind of an indicator of value, then the box office for movies should, be put in its place, right?
And so it's yeah, everybody games. Sometimes you talk about it. Sometimes you don't, by the way, do you have any idea how big this industry is in comparison to others? And so that's this kind of like, why are games both good and bad simultaneously?
Aaron Kardell: and you mentioned something about, being ashamed of how much you play or, something like that, but.
Honestly, like this social element of gaming, whether it's a more of an async game, like you've got with Contexto, where I'm going to play this on my own, but I'm going to share the results with my [00:06:00] friend, or whether it's a League of Legends, like you have, and. An affinity with and one that you play live with friends.
I think that social element is great and that's a reason to not, you're right. Maybe we should take away that play in the cracks of your day. But, nope. Joseph's saying no.
Nildo Junior: now
Joseph Rueter: I know it's controversial, so we'll just keep driving that one. You're going to pick your punches. So where do we find you today?
I understand you spent some time in Norway? I live in Norway.
Nildo Junior: Comfortably, but I live in Norway. What?
Joseph Rueter: Are you a skier? No.
Nildo Junior: Have not, never tried yet. I've been living here
Joseph Rueter: for five years. Taking a sailboat up the coast of Norway and No, I haven't tried skiing yet.
Nildo Junior: I've been doing it for 5 years and I haven't tried it yet.
I have tried it once, but it was a disaster.
Joseph Rueter: [00:07:00] Absolutely.
Nildo Junior: Kill it on the winter sports, like they do nothing on the regular one, but on the winter one, and skiers are very popular here. Like they are like the soccer players of Brazil and that's very fascinating for me.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah. So how'd you find yourself in Norway?
How'd you go from school in Brazil and find yourself? I
Nildo Junior: moved here for a job. So I was before trying to build a startup with my friends back in Brazil, after I finished my master's, our startup was trying to get to the teaching of computer science and programming to schools. For many reasons that did not work on a business level.
So after we decided to, okay, let's [00:08:00] take a break, I started looking for opportunities where I would get different experiences elsewhere. So I wanted to move abroad and I did. bunch of interviews with different companies and I ended up coming for a job here for a company in Norway. And then I stayed ever since.
But it was basically like, okay, I want some different experience. I want to move abroad and I will look for a job that I can do and get some more experience. somewhere else, but I really like the country. I think it's a very good place to be and a very good place to live. Fantastic.
Aaron Kardell: And as I understand it, we'll probably talk a lot about Contexto today.
I believe that's maybe your most popular game, but you got that started and then maybe kicked off, Daydash later on as your holding company, if you will, for games, can you tell us more about that journey of creating Daydash?[00:09:00]
Nildo Junior: I created as side project. It was the Corona Times. We were all having a lot of free time at home, and word was a big thing. This was in 2022. Then I remember discovering Word because everyone was playing it right? People were sharing their little Wordle squares all over Twitter and all over, even at work, people would share it in Slack and stuff, and everyone was playing it.
And with it came all the new games that now I call it all the Wordle genre of games, it created a whole bunch of Wordle likes. And one of them were, was Semento, which you already interviewed the creator of Semento, Dave Turner. I found out Semento on Twitter, like [00:10:00] someone I've followed there. I was navigating.
I saw someone sharing the, their, results for the day. And I was like, what is this? I clicked it and I started playing it. And I was fascinated by it because it was so difficult, but so engaging at the same time. It took me so much thinking to get the correct answer that day. And I was like, Oh, this is a very, good game.
I wish I could play it in Portuguese because in Portuguese things are easier for me. And then I looked it up and was like, oh, yeah, no, there is no version of this in Portuguese. And at the time, the code for Symanto was open source. So click the link there and you saw all the implementations for Symanto there.
The only thing that you needed is, to translate the interface and, to find a database [00:11:00] of word vector for your target language. And then you could make a version of Symantle for your language. A lot of people did that. So there is Symantle versions in Spanish and French, I think. Actually, if you go to Symantle now, I think on the frequent asked questions, you can get like links for all the versions of it that exist.
And then I decided that, okay, I want this game in Portuguese because I want people to, in Brazil, to be able to play it because it is fun. We had our version of Wordo, which is called Termo. Termo just means word in Portuguese. And everyone was playing it that also on the wave of Wordo players. so we have Wordo in Portuguese so we can play.
And I thought, oh, we should have some metal in Portuguese so we can play too. So I'm going to do that. But as soon as I started thinking about what was I going to do, I also started thinking about all the problems that cemental had, because I was playing the game. I thought it [00:12:00] was very good, like the play style of it, but it was also very hard.
And thinking about my target audience, I was thinking. People will not get this. People, this will not appeal to people, it's too much to think about. It's too much numbers. It's too much information. And especially my biggest pain point with the game is the main information that I got, that I used to guide me trying to find a word was the last column ending seman.
The last column was a number from one to a thousand, meaning almost the same as I did in context, right? But one was the a thousand word and the thousand word was the one that you were looking for. And then I kept guessing words and I got 997 and I was like, okay, but to a thousand, that's. [00:13:00] So I'm seven away, or if I got 500 something, okay.
How far away am I still going? And there was a mental overload for me during the game that really demotivated me a bit. And I thought this would be just so much better if the numbers were inverted. If your target word was the number one and the ones that you're guessing were the higher ones because you don't need to do subtraction.
So it's one less operation that you need to do in your head to play the game. So that was the first thing. But then I kept thinking like on, because in my work, I always think about usability. I work with great designers, but I also consider myself a bit of a, with a bit of design background myself.
And I help with, all, usability things that needs to be done in the products that I've been [00:14:00] working at. And that experience really helped me to shape okay, I think this game is great, but it really needs to be simplified. And by being simplified, people will not be afraid of it. Because that's what I felt like people were afraid of Symanto because It just felt like this is something that I will not understand.
They will talk about oh, we use like the name of the algorithm, like word vec to calculate the similarity with the cosine, differences between, and all these technical terms. okay, but that's not important for the game. This number of the algorithm is not important for the game. The only important thing for the game is am I closer or am I farther away from the, answer, right?
So I'm going to design the game such that this is going to be the main [00:15:00] mechanic of it. Number done.
Joseph Rueter: So I'm playing today and never is nine 13 and next is 8 22 and Nice is two 90. And I'm like, word must start with n . And this you talking about like the, front of the word is weighted differently.
Nildo Junior: No, it's not, it doesn't have anything to do with it, right?
Joseph Rueter: The spanning of the word doesn't count anything. I just jam stuff in here and try to, you're just trying to reverse engineer it.
Nildo Junior: yeah, and that's an interesting thing, people get, even though the game now is simpler enough, sometimes people just don't get it.
There is instruction in the beginning of the game, like a small text explaining things. And that was also very hard to make, to write, because I wanted to explain the game without [00:16:00] using any technical term for people, what do people need to understand about the game? And then, It's even funny because I released the game in Portuguese in February of 2022.
That was before Chapter BT came on the, like at least was released to people when people started using the word AI too much to the point where it we don't know what AI is anymore. We just refer AI to large language models. But at the time I was thinking, how do I explain the game in a simple way and also people understand that this list of words was ordered by an algorithm, by a computer, it's not by a human, because there was a big pain point in there.
And it still is people will complain about the order of the words because it doesn't make sense. Why is this word closer to that word? Why are those two together? and then,
Joseph Rueter: well, [00:17:00] lovely is three 58, but is it 68? Words from nice,
Aaron Kardell: don't, talk to me. Talk to the Stanford NLP group. Come on.
Nildo Junior: Yeah, I just wanted to explain to people that, okay, this is a computer. It's not a human. So if words are a bit weird, it's because the data they were trained on led to this and the algorithm led to this, but a lot of people also saw that as part of the game. It's Oh, can I think like a computer in quotes?
So I can, I guess what a computer is guessing. That's also a part of the game, but, the feedback that I get from people is they really liked the game. It is frustrating for many minutes. Once you get the answer. There is a feeling that is very good there, a feeling of [00:18:00] accomplishment that really gets people to, okay, that was nice.
I was suffering for this last minutes, like really frying my brain here, but it was nice to finally arrive to the answer.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah. What's like a standard session? How long does it take to go from frying brain to delight?
Nildo Junior: Yeah, so I don't know by statistics. I don't follow the statistics a lot anymore, but it would indicate that the average section on the website was 20 minutes, right?
Okay. but that can be people playing multiple games because we can do that on the, website too. But. Yeah, I have no way of really knowing, this, but I would guess from 10 to 15 minutes is probably realistic to think like that someone would be playing the game for that long.
Aaron Kardell: Got it. And by the way, for other [00:19:00] game creators out there, 20 minute sessions on websites is, That's good territory.
That's a place you want to be.
Nildo Junior: That is, crazy, actually.
Aaron Kardell: Yes.
Nildo Junior: That is very high, yeah, for a game, for a casual game.
Joseph Rueter: You've got good colors. The boxes are rounded. The words stack. I sit here trying to, use words from the ads. Yeah. I don't know, instant was just used. I was about to try that.
I think Joseph and I,
Aaron Kardell: we're fully here and present in the interview, but we're also racing each other to see who can win first. We're also playing the game,
Nildo Junior: but that is so interesting because this is such a common use case for the game. People usually don't play. people play along, but they, when they play together, they think they have more fun.
So much people have been coming to me saying, Oh, I played your game at my [00:20:00] school. I played your game with my coworkers. I played your game with my grandma. I think that's amazing. It's like it's creating a bond factor between people. An interesting thing too is that the game is way more played in the weekdays.
And, for a long time, I used to think that, yeah, people are just procrastinating, and playing the game. But, as soon as, we started, asking people, that's awesome. Some years ago, I think it was a year ago now, that we did a poll with people asking like, oh, where do you play the game?
They would say, no. I play at school with friends, I play at work with coworkers, and before that, I didn't think about school actually. I was like, oh, okay, yeah, people go to school on weekday. So it make sense that there will be then more players on the week based than on the weekends. But I only [00:21:00] thought about the work dimension of it.
But it's actually played at schools, like people who are playing with their colleagues and they have fun together and they compare like, how much tries did you, did it get you to do it? And then it's oh, it's fun. My friends even tell me that they play it on a bar. Like my friend was like, one day I presented your game to people at the bar and everyone started playing.
I'm like, oh, that's so fun.
Joseph Rueter: Buzzed. Contexto. you got to play when you're a little buzzed. It's maybe your vocabulary is more energized. So you've earned a bunch of awards in your academic career. What kind of sparked your interest in tech and mathematics?
Nildo Junior: you're throwing me back here, like way, way back.
So when I was studying still, before the fifth grade, I really wasn't that much into math. I [00:22:00] was more into language. I like to write, stories. I remember when I was at school, maybe on the second grade, I did a text. And then the teacher was like, Oh, let's do a theater play from this.
And then we created a theater play presented to, the whole school. And that was very interesting. But afterwards, maybe fifth or sixth grade, I started being better at math, but mainly because my math teacher was better. She was so good at teaching that math became my preferred, subject to study at school.
And then at the same time, they started in Brazil, creating this math Olympiads, specifically for public schools, because I always studied in public schools and there I won a prize like, Oh, you did good in this math Olympiads. So we're going to give you [00:23:00] some money and you can study extra math on the weekends.
And I was like, Oh, am I getting paid to study extra math? That's amazing. That's very interesting. In my mind, as a teenager, I was like, Oh, that's just good. And from there, I was really like just interested in math. And that came when I also got like a computer at home.
Joseph Rueter: I got a computer
Nildo Junior: at home like fairly late, I was maybe 12 or 13 years old.
And as soon as I got that, I was very interested and, went to some schools to learn how to use the computer, like how to use the operating system, how to use the text editor, how to use the spreadsheet. And in one of that schools, then I started being the teacher of some courses. And then I went to programming technical school, then I went to the university for computer science.
I did my master's, I studied one year abroad in, in California, [00:24:00] and then I started my own startup and I failed at that. And then I got the job, abroad and then I created this game and that's what I do now. But yeah, so back in the day, it was really like incentives from outside. There is one thing that I advocate for is education, because I wouldn't be here, I wouldn't have created Compactso if I didn't have a whole bunch of background in education.
If I didn't have my bachelor's in computer science to understand how the word vectors work, when I started investigating. How does Symanto do this? And I could actually understand the main responsible for that, for instance, is linear algebra. A lot of people in the university even would be like, Oh, why are we studying this whole math thing?
So we're not never going to use this at work. you might actually have, because, [00:25:00] because I studied linear algebra, I could easily understand something that. I actually in my computer science career had never seen because I did not study artificial intelligence or this kind of text processing techniques and algorithms.
I was doing network, I was doing network, algorithms and, things like this. So I didn't have experience with it. But I couldn't understand fairly easily because, I had some background in it. I had knowledge and I had experience with designing from work. I had experience with the technology that I used to build it, like the JavaScript frameworks and everything from work.
So there is really nothing that you can do that is a waste of time when it comes to acquiring knowledge. It's always good to acquire more and more knowledge. You never know when you're going to use it. And as my father says, it's something that no one will steal from you.
Joseph Rueter: Sure. And then [00:26:00] you get to mash it up and in unique ways later on.
Nildo Junior: Exactly. You never know when you're going to use the tools that you have. It takes a bit of luck. It takes a bit of luck. It takes some casual events, random things to happen for you to discover that you can do when I think about it, for instance, If I hadn't gone into Twitter, the day that I saw the tweet about mental, I probably have done anything.
Joseph Rueter: But you also had practiced skillset of asking a how question with a wonder. Hey, I wonder how that works. Like a disposition to curiosity is under all of this creation.
Nildo Junior: I usually say that sometimes the questions are more important than the answers. So as long as you ask the right questions. Getting the answer is nice, but sometimes the question is more important.
Joseph Rueter: Definitely. I just asked Contexto what today's word is and it [00:27:00] doesn't register.
Aaron Kardell: It's not. quick, mid podcast update. I've gotten the fourth on the list and I'm, I can get no closer. I, it's going to be a struggle. We're just going to say that if I can get to one before the day's out, like that's a huge win.
It's not going to happen before the end of the podcast. I'm already calling it, but I'm pretty proud of getting to four. Nildo, I'm curious, like we asked some form of this to a lot of different game creators, but how did you get to the first thousand players? Are there any takeaways other game creators can learn from how you got the word out?
Nildo Junior: I think that comes a bit on the aspect of the design of the game, actually, because I was thinking about this the other day. One big feature that I absolutely needed on the website before being released is the ability to share your results. Because that's what was making me discover the game in the first place.
[00:28:00] That's how I got to know so many of these daily games. Because, I'm a Twitter user, so I was on Twitter and people were sharing these kind of things. And I was like, okay, where is this one from? And I look it up on the website. And the one feature that I needed on the game, because I believed that the game would be played by many people, is giving the chance.
But the one feature was share your results and not only share, because I remember when I saw Samantha's one, it was just a text like, Oh, okay. I played Samantha and this is what I got. The proximity of, and a bunch of numbers there, but no emojis in the share result thing. And I thought, Oh, okay.
But we're in the other games. They really stand like they created this thing. It's. I think it's even almost a characteristic of the genre that what I'm [00:29:00] calling the general world is to have some emoji representation of your results that you're going to share in social media or with your family and friends.
So that was one feature that I really needed, on the, game. And that even, influenciated the design of the game, because before, so the process of me designing Contextual, I wanted to simplify the game. So I just wanted people to know if they were closer or farther away from the target word.
I thought this is the only information that is actually useful for this game.
Aaron Kardell: So I think maybe a little bit of a summary of that is you're, really leaning in on build a good game. So less about, build a good game and have a good sharing hook around it.
Nildo Junior: So this, the share, the sharing thing was very important because that's what made people.
Discover the game. What [00:30:00] I did in the beginning of the game was I created it. I put it online and I shared in a group with four, no, with three friends, four with me. Like we had a small group on, on a conversation app and I shared there, Hey, I did this game. Can you test this? And they picked up, they played it and they're like, no, this is very cool.
Can I share with someone? Yeah, of course. And they shared with people that they know they work with. And that was the only thing that I did, really, like not for, and again, for the Portuguese version of it, because I released it only in Portuguese at the time. And from there, it took maybe a month until very famous YouTubers and streamers in Brazil were playing it on their live games, on their videos.
And on a peak [00:31:00] popularity in Brazil, it had, I think, 300, 000 people playing on a single day. So it became very popular basically because people shared the game with others and on social media. We also found out that on our poll with users, where 90 percent of the users actually answered that they discovered the game, either through a friend recommendation.
Or through social media. So that's really it.
Aaron Kardell: I think a lot about go to market wedges and just finding your niche of where you're going to get successful first. And you had some white space out there in terms of there wasn't a great game for this in Portuguese. So you, had an area to go after first.
And then you also layered on we're going to have a really great design around this. We're going to have really great sharing. But you were able to lean in on, here's a cool concept I know about, [00:32:00] let's make it in Portuguese with a better design, and great sharing, and. We're able to get some traction that way.
You get it out there. It's about a month later that you've got streamers streaming the game and it's getting some popularity that way. People are sharing it. I assume with a lot of these game daily games, there's like an initial peak and then a long tail of there's still a lot of traffic on it.
When was your peak or are you still climbing?
Nildo Junior: no, not climbing. That's an interesting thing. Not very familiar with everything, but on our discussions, something stand out. In Brazil, it was very popular, like one or two months after release, and then it really declined and now it's not played that much, at least not played daily, by this much people anymore.
When I released it in English, then, and it got popular, the behavior was completely [00:33:00] different, actually. It didn't get so popular as in Brazil, so it didn't have, a very big peak of users. But it also didn't decline as like steeply as it did in Brazil. So it was declining. It's, it was declining, but it was declining like very slowly actually.
And now it has been more than a year, actually it's almost two years that we have the game in, in English. And we've been observing a seasonal o oscillation. in the game even. So people were playing less like the latest months and now they're starting playing more again. And we're hypothesizing about this kind of thing.
So okay, what is it? Is it summer vacation landing? Yeah, it might
Joseph Rueter: be
Nildo Junior: because people are going back to school, people are going back to [00:34:00] work, people are going back to the social environments where they are reminded. Of the game that they used to play with co workers and, and other students.
Aaron Kardell: You've got that in common with, chat GPT.
I, hear, chat GPT usage goes way down in the summer because there's so many students using chat GPT during the school year.
Nildo Junior: Yeah.
Aaron Kardell: Yeah. Maybe teachers are using it in classrooms or who knows, but that's, that's cool.
Nildo Junior: I've seen a TikTok, I've seen a TikTok teacher using it in the classroom. So I know that there is one teacher using it in the classroom.
Aaron Kardell: That's awesome. And also,
Nildo Junior: yeah, we've gotten some feedback from teachers too on our feedback link. So yeah, some use it in the classroom. And I'm very proud of that because. As I said before, it's one thing that I value is education. And if something I've done is being used to educate people, I was like, yeah, that makes me very proud.
Aaron Kardell: And how long [00:35:00] have you had ads on the site?
Nildo Junior: It's been around a year. No, wait. We added ads on the website in the end of 2022.
Aaron Kardell: Okay.
Nildo Junior: 23, 24. It's not, it's going to be two years now. So
Aaron Kardell: coming up on a couple of years, I won't, push you on hyper specific details, but is it fair to say this is your full time occupation?
Nildo Junior: Yes, it is my full time occupation. I had a big dilemma about it because I'm a very safe person, in a way. I don't take risks with things. So I had a good job. I had a steady job. And then I, I started monetizing the game really for an extra income, basically. So I was like, yeah, this brings value to people.
So why not get some value back? But then it started being too much work for me. Working a full time job and working on projects [00:36:00] that I really cared about, which is Contextual and some other games. And I got myself really exhausted at some point and I had to do some therapy until I was able to quit my job because I was afraid to let people down, basically.
But at some point, the game was, it's what I wanted to do, and it was more financial, rewarding than maybe the job that I had. So it wasn't really a difficult choice, but as a person with, People pleasing tendencies, it was a big, issue for me, but now it's my full time, occupation. Yes. So for developing context or further and, developing new games and, yeah, bringing nice experiences for people to have fun and learn new things.
Aaron Kardell: Yeah, it's a good mission. And that's, you probably noticed a little [00:37:00] defensiveness, before the call, during the call, We're pro games, like we think, like you can learn, and, I'm picking up that vibe a little bit from you too, there's an educational aspect to this. So you added two additional games, Konexo and Letroso.
Were those over the course of the last year that those were
Nildo Junior: added? Yes, basically over the course of the last year. Konexo is a bit older. Konexo is a version of Connections, but in Portuguese. at least in the beginning it was. It was the same thing that I did with, I basically am following the same thing that I did with Contexto with the other games.
So Connections came out and Connections itself is not new because before that there is the connecting wall in the BBC game, in the BBC show Only Connect that I used to, I watched too. And there wasn't in Portuguese and people in the community of the daily games, they're like, ah, it's too bad that we [00:38:00] cannot play this in Portuguese.
okay, I'm gonna, I see also an opportunity here to do something there. But I don't like, I like to do things in a way that I also think I am improving it, right? for instance, for Konexo. You can have unlimited guesses on, on your, because for me as, the designer of a, game that I call a puzzle game, right?
It's a puzzle. I think it's a bit weird that a puzzle has a loose state, like that you can lose at a puzzle. I don't think that should be a thing. A puzzle should have two states. It's either unsolved or solved. I don't think it makes sense that you lose at a puzzle. And for me, Conexo is a puzzle that you're trying to solve.
So you shouldn't lose. You might not be [00:39:00] able to solve it, but you shouldn't lose at it. And it's the same thing for Latroso. Latroso is a version of Diffo. But Diffo actually is the same, already has this design principle. But Yeah, as long as I'm making games and I'm calling them puzzles, I will never do it in a way that people will lose the game.
Because to lose a puzzle, you only solve it.
Aaron Kardell: That's super intriguing. I, love strongly held positions that sort of influence the design of games. And sure, a lot of people wouldn't agree with that approach, but I see why it resonates with you. And I like it. I like it. I dig it.
Nildo Junior: Maybe, it maybe has a little bit to do with feedback that I've been getting, from Contexto even.
Why? Because for the, yeah, the nature of Contexto is it brings feelings in people. People get frustrated and people get mad when they cannot solve the game. And I understand. Sometimes I [00:40:00] play it and I get these feelings and I understand people. So in the beginning, when Contexto was super popular in Brazil, I used to have my Twitter handle in the credits of the website and people would go follow me, send me a message, positive message.
I love your game. Someone sent to me, I play your game with my grandma every day. It's something that we do together now. And I, oh, that's so heartwarming. It's so nice. It's so good. And I was really enjoying myself getting this positive feedback through Twitter. But two months later, no one else would give me positive feedback, but I would get a lot of hate.
So when people would be mad at the game, they would look up the credits. Look up my Twitter and send swear words on my Twitter. And then I started being like, okay, I don't need this anymore. That's a little bit into me. [00:41:00] I removed my credits. And that's when the company or the, yeah, the company credit started being the thing.
It's okay, you talk to this institution. It's not me personally.
Aaron Kardell: As we wrap up here, any last takeaway, like for other game creators, things to do differently, things to lean into?
Nildo Junior: Yeah. One thing that I just thought about when you just gave me this feedback is that, as a game creator, you get a lot of feedback and actually you should actively look for getting feedback on your game.
But the feedback that comes naturally will usually not be good. It will usually be, Hey, this is wrong with your game, or this I didn't like, I wish it was different. And then you need to know how to handle these things. And even you need to know that most people that are playing your game, they're actually enjoying it, but you don't get the, good feedback.
positive feedback most of the time. And I learned this from [00:42:00] I think the most important book that I have read was the design of everyday things from Donald Norman. What I really learned from there that is very important is that good design is invisible, but bad design stands on your eye. And I think that's also the same for the feedback that you get on your game.
It's while your game is good. You hear nothing, but if someone thinks it's bad, they will tell you, they will seek you to, express either their frustration or their wishes on a different thing. So I think it's working.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah. I think we can take this as an opportunity. If you're playing a game out there, it's one of.
Anybody on this video or not, and you're finding some joy in it, grab that five minutes, hit the contact page and go yo, I play this on the train. I play this on Thursdays in bio class. I play this, right? Let [00:43:00] the game creators know because. The human disposition leaves 10 negatives for every one, and that's probably a better ratio than reality, right?
Like we're going to tell you when it's broken 20 times more often than when it's not. So I think that's a good hit and so happy to have had the chance to chat with you today. Thanks for coming on.
Nildo Junior: Thank you for inviting me. It was very good.
Joseph Rueter: And if crews around humans are looking you up on the interwebs, of course they can go to the games.
Is there anywhere else we should point them to?
Nildo Junior: You should go to they dot com. Say
Joseph Rueter: it again?
Nildo Junior: They dot com.
Joseph Rueter: There it is.
Nildo Junior: You're going to find all the, all the games there and, emails to contact us. So that's what I wish to do.
Aaron Kardell: But only see the good stuff. You
Nildo Junior: got to send some
Joseph Rueter: compliments. Tell him what a great job he's done.
yeah. But we can use the feedback as constructive. That's helpful.
Nildo Junior: Yes. Yes. Feedback's very [00:44:00] important, but, it's just a human aspect of it. The, when you only get the only negative feedback, you might feel bad. So I'm just saying Okay, don't feel bad. It's actually very good that people play your game.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah, exactly.
Nildo Junior: They like it. And that's, that's a good thing.
Joseph Rueter: All right. pull up Contexto in the cracks of your day, secret or otherwise, you can share your results and, thanks for being with us today. Thank you for
Nildo Junior: having
Joseph Rueter: me. Thanks, Neldo.
