Nate Kadlac: [00:00:00] So how did you get to a thousand users a day? What were some of the things that you did?
Devin Spikowski: So I posted it on a couple of different.
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.
Joseph Rueter: All right. We're just off this pod with Devin of WordPeaks. It's not a normal texty text game. It was inspired by. The five letter word Explosion of games. I think it's really fun to think about all the variables that any one human can come up with on a simple game We talk to and have the opportunity to talk to just loads of people that tweak games like I don't know We'll change the rules here.
Joseph Rueter: We'll change the rules there. What Devin brings is that he Intersperses this word game with some art and with animation. [00:01:00] And he has this quote, and maybe the team has clipped it, but he's got this quote that says when you don't fully grasp what's going on in a game, anything is possible. And then he went on to like, you could see him in the video feed, enjoying the feeling of anything being possible.
Joseph Rueter: And he's got a little twinge. To his game design approach. That is kind of this enjoyment of tweaking people's experiences. And I think that whimsy makes these word games go further. And it's really encouraging. How about you, Nate? This
Nate Kadlac: is an art project in many ways. And I think that that's what stood out to me is just the.
Nate Kadlac: The, if you're an artist, just the kind of just always iterating, always crafting, always like just paying attention to the details. And this feels like an art project that will just continue to evolve over the next 10, 20 years, as long as he says he's interested in working on it. So it's kind of cool [00:02:00] to think about this game in that perspective.
Nate Kadlac: So that was a great interview. And on with 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 Devin Spikowski, the creator of WordPeaks. This happens to be the second time we're chatting with Devin. I had a little snafu on the first round, but we are thrilled to have you back, Devin, and. Devin is really, he's been working for a long time as an it consultant and as a passionate game developer, digital artist, animator, and musician with all of his skills.
Nate Kadlac: He has created several projects aside from word peaks, like snow stamp, a utility site for discord, snowflake IDs, D zone, an ambient life simulation connected to user activity on a discord server. And he also has several itch. io games like Spinblox, Hook, Lion and Spelunker, and Dungeon Grinder. WordPeaks is a word puzzle game that works similarly to Wordle.
Nate Kadlac: The catch with [00:03:00] WordPeaks is that it changes The color of each letter depending on the range of your input. Every guess you make also creates a really beautiful generated landscape based on your answers. Devin, we are so thrilled you're here.
Devin Spikowski: Yeah, I'm honored to be here again. I'm glad to, glad to be back to talk some more.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah. So we usually kick things off with what is your favorite game to play?
Devin Spikowski: I am very into Bellatro. It is a roguelike deck builder, which for those who don't know what that means is It's sort of a run based game, where when you lose, you restart your run. So you're building a deck of playing cards, and you're playing poker hands.
Devin Spikowski: But along the way, you gain these special joker cards that will modify how much you score with your poker hands and modify the rules of the game itself. It's a really brilliant indie game with, like, amazing music, amazing interface, animations, [00:04:00] visual flair. It's extremely satisfying and addicting to play.
Devin Spikowski: I love
Joseph Rueter: that. Oh, so fantastic. So like rogue poker.
Devin Spikowski: Yeah, rogues in the aspect that there's a lot of randomly generated. What you encounter in the game is very random and you get what you get. And if you mess up, you're starting from the beginning.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah, you don't, you don't throw a fit.
Devin Spikowski: You learn from your mistakes.
Joseph Rueter: I think of persons that I would play that game with who would be not capable of handling the fact that the rules change. Who do you play this game with?
Devin Spikowski: So it's single player and and you're not even playing the poker hands against another player. You're just playing poker hands to score points. Every hand has a point value but then you're also multiplying that up with the the different jokers you get or you can enhance the the playing cards themselves.
Devin Spikowski: You can add or remove cards from your decks. You could have a deck with [00:05:00] 20 aces and play illegal hands like five of a kind and whatnot. It's so fascinating. Yeah, it really explores what the meaning of poker or card games is. It's a really fascinating game.
Joseph Rueter: So based on what you did in the previous hand, it can impact the next hand.
Joseph Rueter: Is that true?
Devin Spikowski: Yes. Yeah.
Joseph Rueter: It's like bowling in that way. You get to count more in the next frame.
Devin Spikowski: Yeah. And what's interesting is when you play a hand, it goes through all your jokers and all the effects that are in play one by one. And you don't know how much your hand is going to score until it goes through and tallies it up.
Devin Spikowski: Which is really tense and exciting. You don't know for sure, unless you've worked it out a lot in your head beforehand, whether this hand is going to lose the game for you or beat it.
Joseph Rueter: Interesting. So you might have some encouragement to play wild.
Devin Spikowski: Oh yeah, definitely. You want to try new strategies all the time.
Devin Spikowski: Interesting. And where did gaming [00:06:00] start for you? So, pretty much my whole life, growing up, my first memories, we always had a Nintendo, the original NES. I can remember playing the original Mario Brothers, and I remember we had the one that had that orange gun, playing Duck Hunt. And from there, growing up, Sega Genesis, N64.
Devin Spikowski: But I also got into PC gaming very early. I remember SimCity 2000 on our computer in the living room. And I remember getting my first, my own computer to have in my room was the biggest deal ever. Because that, before internet, just being able to play games whenever I wanted to. And so I gradually moved more into PC gaming at that point.
Joseph Rueter: I've been telling my son that one day he'll get a PC in his room, and he texts me pretty regularly about it. Why I don't have one. What he needs to do to get one. [00:07:00] Is it about the internet or not internet? Is it like just he's so Singularly focused right now, and I don't know how to tell him like well, then I'll lose you to your room But it sounds like it was very influential for you Oh, absolutely.
Joseph Rueter: I'll have to second guess. I'm not introducing you to him. He doesn't, he doesn't need to know it was a positive.
Nate Kadlac: So after you, you know, obviously you're playing games as a kid. When did you get into development or creating games?
Devin Spikowski: So I think I first played around with the idea of making games when I found a very early version of GameMaker, which I think is now called GameMaker Studio.
Devin Spikowski: It was a very simple to use 2D game engine, and I think the most I really did with it was take the example games, like they had an example platformer, an example vertical scrolling shooter, [00:08:00] and I would kind of work based off of those, and draw my own little sprites, and you know, try to explore what I could.
Devin Spikowski: And this was all with no coding. There was a sort of node based visual scripting thing, but anytime I saw the ability to write code, I was shutting that out. Like, I, I didn't want to get into that at all. And so it wasn't until a high school class on Visual Basic where I started getting into code, and then I also, around the same time, got into web development and started learning HTML, CSS.
Devin Spikowski: And so that's, that's sort of how I got started.
Nate Kadlac: So what was a change for you? It sounded like you were kind of avoiding it and then something just switched when you were presented with visual basic. What changed?
Devin Spikowski: Yeah, I guess. So, I mean, I guess being, being a high school class, you know, I, I didn't, I took the class cause I was interested, but I didn't, I guess I had to do it to [00:09:00] know, I guess I never gave it a chance.
Devin Spikowski: And so I didn't know what, how I would take to it. And I'm very much a learning by doing person. I can't just If I had to sit and read about how to use a language or a library or something, I couldn't stand it. I have to make something. And better yet, if I have something in mind that I want to make, and then I learn how to do the parts to make that, that's how I've approached learning.
Devin Spikowski: All my projects to this day. That's how I do things.
Nate Kadlac: Well, I think Joseph and I are, have tried many times to dig into the code of things. And, I don't know about you, Joseph, but I've failed almost every time.
Joseph Rueter: Right up until about last year when chat UBT came out, I was like, Oh, I am a developer.
Nate Kadlac: But I think it's like, that's true, you know, I probably approached it the wrong way, like I, I remember just picking up books, you know, learning how to program in 48 hours or whatever it is, you know, and you just kind of go [00:10:00] through the long slog of variables and formulas and equations and just just like things that I didn't really feel like I needed.
Nate Kadlac: I was really pretty bored by it. And, Then I would just reach out to friends and then ask them to do it. So one thing that I love about your game word peaks, which is what we'll, you know, be talking a lot about today is it just has a really great sense of style. And I'm curious where that comes from.
Nate Kadlac: You just have an affinity towards thinking about the details. And I think that a lot of developers don't actually do that. And so where does that come from?
Devin Spikowski: So I've always, when I started WordPeaks, which was back in 2022, I didn't think much of myself as a UI designer. And I, up to that point, I hadn't put much effort into making a sleek UI in the little web experiments that I've created.
Devin Spikowski: [00:11:00] And so, I guess, with the gameplay of WordPeaks being nailed down, After, like, the first couple days of development, I felt like I had room to, okay, the game's done, now how do I improve this? And the obvious answer is the interface. And so I started putting my work into that. And definitely minimal art and minimal design is a big inspiration for me.
Devin Spikowski: When I see a design that's striking and it's minimal, there's something so appealing about that to me because it feels so graspable, because there's not a ton going on. So it's like, okay. There's so few elements to this that I can grasp this, and so maybe I can figure out why it works so well. And that really draws me in.
Devin Spikowski: That makes me think about design more than anything else. And so I, I go for those minimal designs, flat colors, simple shapes. I gravitate toward those because those feel like the most [00:12:00] approachable paths to take when I'm designing interfaces.
Nate Kadlac: I think that's, that's great. I. Are you inspired by anything outside of other games that you are inspired by?
Nate Kadlac: Or, I'm a designer, so I'm kind of curious about your design influences a little bit.
Devin Spikowski: Yeah, I mean, obviously I was inspired by, for WordPeak specifically, just looking at other, I made WordPeaks when the Wordle variant scene was really popping off, and just seeing The little twists that people would add visually to their games compared to the original Wordle.
Devin Spikowski: Really just like, good interfaces in games always make me want to, to, I aspire to reach that level, because it's what brings the game beyond, the game's not just a set of rules at that point, it's also the experience of interacting with it.
Nate Kadlac: Well said. Yeah. Yeah. So in terms of the game itself, what were you doing [00:13:00] when you first came up with this idea?
Nate Kadlac: Where did WordPeaks come from?
Devin Spikowski: So it really just came out of nowhere. I think just one morning I was thinking about Wordle. I had been playing for probably a month at that point, and game designers are always in the mood to come up with new games. And so I just thought of, okay, for each letter, Every letter, when you guess a word, every letter in your guess is going to be before or after the letter in the target word, so why not make a game about that?
Devin Spikowski: And so I just started sketching a board similar to Whirl's, you know, five letters long, and I drew little arrows on each letter. indicating whether the correct letter was above or below in the alphabet. And then from there, I started coding, started a project, and I started coding to see how easy it would be to do.
Devin Spikowski: And I got the game working in a day, which isn't that impressive because it's such a [00:14:00] simple game, but it always feels good when you can execute on a concept in a short amount of time. And not have it drag out and you start questioning where you want to take the direction. It's good to have a goal in mind.
Devin Spikowski: Okay, this is the game. Go make it. You made it. And
Joseph Rueter: is that where, like you got it in place, but you've got animations and if you let this thing sit around long enough, you've got some, some character and some attitude. You got, like, dancing letters.
Devin Spikowski: So most of that came after I publicly launched the game. It was better received than I expected.
Devin Spikowski: I usually don't get that much. My games don't Being part of the Wordle variant scene gave me a lot of exposure that my games normally don't get. And so that was really exciting for me. And I wanted to impress people even more. I wanted to do better and I wanted to one up myself, you know, and so I wanted to like take my game to the next [00:15:00] level and so But I didn't want to change the game, because once people start playing the game, they don't want the game itself to change.
Devin Spikowski: They want to go for, that can only upset people, right? Like, if you want to change the game, make a different game. So, I started exploring all the ways that I could enhance the game, add things to the game, without changing the gameplay itself. And so that's where things like all the fancy animations, the landscape, the dancing letters that come in.
Devin Spikowski: I wanted to delight and amuse my players. In small ways. And if they want to ignore it, it's totally possible. Like all the tile animations that appear when you make a guess, those don't freeze the game state. You can type guesses as fast as your keyboard will let you. So I don't want animation and style to get in the way of, at some point, fancy animations can get tiresome.
Devin Spikowski: And if they are blocking your ability to proceed, then they become more of an annoyance than anything. [00:16:00] And that's what I wanted to avoid. But yeah, I was interested in. And I, and I st and I'm still exploring, I'm still working on, adding things that are extraneous to the gameplay, but I wanna explore how far I can take this concept of visual enhancements on a simple game concept.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah, just words. Right now there's an F that's dancing in one of the boxes, and I don't know whether to use it or not. , and I don't know whether if I type F. We're going to make some sweet new art on the right side or not. I don't know. So there's all this intrigue and then I know that my word ends in an E.
Joseph Rueter: And that's where I am. I have two guesses left.
Devin Spikowski: That's another thing that inspires me in other games where you're wondering, when you don't fully grasp what's going on in a game, Anything feels possible. Like, when you don't understand all the clockwork mechanisms that make a game work, it [00:17:00] feels like anything could happen in the game.
Devin Spikowski: And I really like the fact that in WordPeaks, for people who are new to the game or they Or, or new to something like the, like a, a letter F jumping out. They don't know what that represents. So they might try to use F in the word, because, oh, is that a clue? Is that a hint? And the fact that people wonder about that is my goal.
Devin Spikowski: I want people to wonder, and I want people to read into things that I put in the game, whether or not they actually mean anything. That's really interesting to me. And if I can explore that concept, that's really rewarding for me.
Nate Kadlac: One thing I really like about the game is that when you play a lot of games, typically they kind of throw you in and they don't really help you out too much.
Nate Kadlac: Some of the best games, I think, really help nudge you along with little hints. And if you're watching the [00:18:00] video version of this interview, we have, you can kind of see that there's, you know, little hints in each tile so you know whether it's, you should be guessing a letter, like. Earlier or later in alphabet.
Nate Kadlac: I think it's just kind of a unique thing that feels like you're just nudging me along a little bit and kind of helping me understand like how to, how to play. So yeah, I really love all the details, the attention to detail in this game.
Devin Spikowski: Yeah. So I kind of explored, so when I first started playing the game after I had prototyped the mechanics itself, I realized that it was a lot harder to think of to guess after your first guess than it was in Wordle.
Devin Spikowski: Because in Wordle, once you get some information, you can look at your keyboard and see what letters are left, what letters are in the answer. You just stare at your keyboard and you try to form words out of that. But in WordPeaks, each of the five tiles has its own restrictions on the alphabet. And so you kind of have to [00:19:00] start trying words.
Devin Spikowski: And then if they don't work, you, you delete and, and you, you keep trying words. So, I didn't like that friction, and so I wanted to make it as easy as possible to come up with words. And so I, I let you click or tap on a tile to skip to it, so you don't have to write in a, an X or whatever if you don't have a, an X.
Devin Spikowski: specific tile, letter in mind. And I also have the letter ranges, drawn on the tile itself. And in the options, you can turn that on for all five tiles if you want, if that helps you. And also, if you type in a letter that is outside of the range, for that letter, that tile, it will turn orange or blue.
Devin Spikowski: As a subtle hint, you can submit this if you want, but this is obviously not the answer because this letter is out of range. And so I wanted to do as best as I could to make it easier for the player to come up with guesses.
Nate Kadlac: I hate when I choose the letter B and it's Like, Oh, no, you need C through Z. [00:20:00] Are there kind of tricks that you have when you play this game?
Nate Kadlac: I do recommend people start with certain types of words.
Devin Spikowski: So yeah, it's really boring, but I I've fallen into the habit of starting with the. Mathematically most optimal starting word. and a friend actually wrote a program to help me determine what that is. The word that best splits the answer list in half and is an answer in itself is Is null, K N O L L.
Devin Spikowski: So that's always my starting word. Double L's. Yeah, so the double L doesn't matter in WordPeaks, because each tile is independent, you know, it's not like Wordle. So, yeah, that actually is a thing that always trips me up, when people's, not trips me up, but when I see people comment that, I'm like, well yeah, in Wordle that would not be a good start, but in WordPeaks, it's all about finding that midpoint in the alphabet.
Devin Spikowski: So L is actually one of the best letters because it's right near [00:21:00] the middle.
Nate Kadlac: That's
Joseph Rueter: brilliant. I usually just go to Google, Nate, five letter words that start with S and end in E.
Joseph Rueter: So you were saying you go, you're seeing feedback. Right? Like, is it, it's Twitter, it's, it's YouTube, you're watching people play games. Talk a little bit about how you're incorporating that into the kind of dev design research process.
Devin Spikowski: Yeah, so I was amazed the first time I saw someone on YouTube playing my game.
Devin Spikowski: I never thought that would happen. Like, that's never happened to me before. That was an incredible thing. Obviously, I'd shared the game with some friends and they'd give feedback. Just seeing someone find my game. And thinking it was good enough to make a video on it, that's like, wow, okay. And so now I get to see someone that's totally uninfluenced by my If I say, oh hey, play my game, tell me what you think of my game, that's very different than [00:22:00] someone finding it on their own.
Devin Spikowski: and having a genuine reaction on the video.
Nate Kadlac: Also so scary.
Devin Spikowski: Oh, absolutely. Oh my god. Every little like, oh, is that a bug? Is that? No, that's a normal thing. But sometimes I have seen bugs and that's also like the worst stomach drop feeling. Watching people play is how I got some of those usability things, like being able to shift which tile you're putting a letter in without doing it sequentially.
Devin Spikowski: That was a thing I caught almost immediately. I saw someone putting in X's instead of. Real letters and so I thought okay. Yeah that I can improve that.
Nate Kadlac: So on that. Do you have a community or Some sort of group where people talk about your game that you can solicit feedback from or are there other ways that you that you get?
Nate Kadlac: Feedback,
Devin Spikowski: so I haven't felt like my game was big enough to build any kind of community like a discord server I I didn't make a Twitter account for it. I just used my personal account to me. My [00:23:00] community is friends that play it A small group of friends on Discord that play the game, it's, if that was my only player base, I would still enjoy working on the game and pushing out stuff that they thought was cool, because that's, that's enough reward for me.
Devin Spikowski: But the, the wider player base, the only feedback I get is seeing my traffic stay consistent at about a thousand players a day, and occasionally someone buys me a coffee, and with my donation link, and they'll usually include a nice message in that. It absolutely makes my day every time. But other than that, and the people who play it on YouTube or whatever, and TikTok, I'm largely unaware of the specific impressions that people have.
Devin Spikowski: I don't know. I have to trust that the things that I add that I think are neat are worth adding. For everyone else, or that at least enough of them appreciate it as much as I do.
Nate Kadlac: So how did you get to a [00:24:00] thousand users a day? What were some of the things that you did?
Devin Spikowski: So I posted it on a couple different reddits, subreddits, like Wordle and WebGames.
Devin Spikowski: Posted it on Twitter, posted it in a couple discords where people were playing Wordle. That's really about it. It kind of spread organically from there. I'm not that great at self promo. I'm not great at it, and I'm, I don't enjoy doing it. So I just kind of let it reach whoever it reaches. And, and so that way every time it, it, it kind of hits somewhere.
Devin Spikowski: That's extra rewarding, you know. I didn't do that directly. That just happened on the merit of the game. And that, that's kind of the best, best I could ask for. And so, every now and then, I'll get a spike because someone popular posted something. Or sometimes, I get a spike and I have no idea what happened.
Devin Spikowski: And I always assume it was like a TikTok live, [00:25:00] where there was no link posted, there's no record of the video, Just, I got a huge spike out of nowhere, and I can only assume it was something like that, where someone plays it on a stream and then a bunch of people go visit. I had one of those recently, and that kind of brought me a little bit above a thousand daily for the past week or so.
Devin Spikowski: And I also got, I've been getting like, one donation a day for the past few days, which is unheard of. So that's really cool. But like everything, everything, it'll gradually die down and I'm okay with that because I'm just going to keep working on the game as long as I enjoy working on it. And that's, that's all I need out of that project.
Nate Kadlac: I always think about what is the potential of any of these games and how much effort is required or not required to, to kind of like have something take off. You know, one thing that we've seen from other game creators is. An increase in traffic through collaborations. And so a really [00:26:00] good example of this was between Waffle and Knuckle, I believe, and Knuckle like made a kind of a, or Waffle made like a Knuckle inspired or themed game and Knuckle did the same thing and really helped both games out more so on Knuckle side.
Nate Kadlac: But yeah, I mean, it's, have you ever thought about doing any sort of collaborations like that with, with other game creators? Cheers.
Devin Spikowski: I have thought about it, and, the creator of Polygonal, asked me about that one time. And I was definitely interested, but at the time, and still, I'm so engrossed in my own ideas that I don't have the room for thinking of a good collaboration to do, I guess.
Devin Spikowski: But if a good idea comes to me, or if he comes to me with a good idea, Or if anyone comes to me with a good idea, I'm definitely interested in the concept. That sounds really fun. That sounds like right up the alley of the little experiments that I like to do in WordPeaks.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah. You definitely have to turn on a different part of your brain to switch into [00:27:00] marketing mode and do I want to spend time doing this?
Nate Kadlac: Oh, sure. Yeah. Joseph knows.
Joseph Rueter: You mean I have to switch that part off? Yeah. Fair. Yeah. Yeah. To go develop things. Right. Yeah. It takes more than a single skill set to build this stuff. Along the way, can you find things, people, places, books, stuff, that inspire your next steps? Like, where are you looking for sparks of ideas when you're building?
Devin Spikowski: I would say that those come naturally. I can't say I'm really looking for them. The next thing I'm working on right now, Came from the Discord group that plays my game. Someone posted one of their landscapes, which is always delightful for me, just seeing people share those, because when I was working on it, I had no idea how interested people would be in it.
Devin Spikowski: And it had a bunch of hills on it. [00:28:00] And someone said that it was satisfying to look at. And I'm like, huh, that's, okay. This just popped into my head. I jokingly said, what if you could pop the hills like bubble wrap? After you play, you just click on them or tap them to pop the hills for no reason other than satisfying to do.
Devin Spikowski: And so, right now I'm working on exploring that idea. Once you're done playing, I want to let you play with the landscape. Just to keep you on the page for another 30 seconds maybe. And so that comes with a bunch more user interaction work and animation work and ways to flex those muscles, those, design and animation muscles.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah. And you've got some of it in place now and you roll over the hills. They kind of duck like,
Devin Spikowski: yeah, the cursor
Joseph Rueter: is a bird or something. And if you click on one side, [00:29:00] you'll impact the trees and then in the little, I didn't know there were Hills. I was like, is it a house? I don't know what that is, but you've got some motion there and you're nudging folks to take the color out or copy the image or stick it in other spots.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah.
Devin Spikowski: From the start, I knew that I wanted it to be, I didn't want it to feel static. So adding in those little hover and touch interactions. Was critical for me when, when I made the landscape, but now I want to see if I can take that further.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah, you're gonna be sticking on a coffee mug, a t shirt, side of a hat.
Joseph Rueter: There's some generative fun, I can see why you want to play with that. Where'd you get started animating? I mean like on one hand, it's a word game and on the other hand, it's an art project.
Devin Spikowski: I think I started animating with Adobe Flash, which back at the, back then was Macromedia Flash. Yeah, I was [00:30:00] instantly addicted to that.
Devin Spikowski: At the time I was, there were Flash, or very early Flash animations on the internet, and I wanted to be like them. I wanted to make stuff like that, which was actually mostly stick figures in violent situations. That was what I was into when I was 12 or 13. So I started animation, animating in Flash, and I, That's kind of was my main program for doing animation.
Devin Spikowski: Like even when Flash stopped being supported, I would export to video and upload on YouTube, but having a sense for motion and the animation fundamentals is something that I've always had an interest in and I, and I like. whenever I get the opportunity to, to practice those things. And the dancing letters in WordPeaks in particular, having them move in a way that felt natural, having the timings right.
Devin Spikowski: How long does the letter [00:31:00] peak out before it goes away? How long do, do I build that anticipation for it finally hops out? How long does it dance for? Does the momentum look right? Does that look like a natural movement? All those little things that I've refined through animating over the years coming into play in a much less intuitive way to build those animations.
Devin Spikowski: I was literally typing in values for the timing and the coordinates to move to. There was no visual animating tool that I was using there. So I felt kind of proud about doing that. But yeah, that animation I think is a pretty critical part of making a good game. A dynamic feeling interface.
Nate Kadlac: Flash was so fun.
Nate Kadlac: It just gave so many people the ability to see animation and kind of like see bad animation. Cause it was so easy to just create a simple tween across the screen. And that doesn't look right. And then you kind of have to get curious and learn more. I was really into Joshua Davis. I don't know [00:32:00] if you ever came across his generative artwork for flash.
Nate Kadlac: Just so cool. That was such a fun time. Do you think. Going forward, are you working on anything next, or another game, at the moment?
Devin Spikowski: So, for the time being, other than working on WordPeaks, I am working on, this is actually complicated, so, I am a moderator for a Twitch streamer, and I created a little chatbot for the streams that's been really fun to work on, and I also created a stream overlay that was also just, the stream overlay is just a webpage with a transparent background that overlays over the stream.
Devin Spikowski: So it's, even though I had never made a stream overlay before, it was all second nature. It was just, you know, web design and programming stuff on the web. And so probably my biggest project ever that's been in the works for about [00:33:00] a year now is a website that viewers can visit to customize. So we have this thing that people can do in chat that a bunch of people will start spamming it to create a train.
Devin Spikowski: And I made a stream overlay that literally draws an animated train going across the screen. And each car in the train represents a user doing that thing in the chat. And so, I had the idea to make a website where they can go in and customize what their car looks like. So that's my other big project. I'm really excited to To get that out the door, because that's probably the biggest thing I've ever worked on.
Devin Spikowski: It's a full stack. There's the website and then there's the whole back end that has to make it all connect up with the Twitch bot and everything. So yeah, those are the two main things I'm working on.
Nate Kadlac: That's cool. It sounds so niche, which is also like [00:34:00] very, very interesting. So that's, that's cool.
Devin Spikowski: That's yeah, I like working on things that other people aren't doing.
Nate Kadlac: So I notice. Devin, on your, on your game, there's really, it's really clean. It's a clean interface. There's no ads, I'm guessing that I can see and people can donate, you know, if they, if they like the game. And so I'm curious, have you ever thought about monetizing in other ways or what's your take on that?
Devin Spikowski: Yeah. So I'm not fundamentally against putting ads in. With the size of my player base, it doesn't feel worth it. I've had an offer to integrate advertisements, but I just never felt like it would be worth it with the amount of players I have slightly worsening the experience to not feel worth what I would get out of that.
Devin Spikowski: And I do try to, to keep the interface as clean as possible. I put [00:35:00] my, my name at the bottom. I put a link to the GitHub repo at the bottom, because I felt like I imagine most of my players have no idea what open source even means. I felt proud to have an open source project out there. And like, hey, here's my game.
Devin Spikowski: You can fork it and make your own variant on it if you want. And I leave the donation link for until after they finish the game. Because, you know, first and foremost, I want them to play the game. You know, that should be the first thing they notice. And I'm, so I also am totally okay. And this is where.
Devin Spikowski: Other Wordle creators would probably disagree strongly. I'm okay with those awful sites that just embed a bunch of other games on them, like in iframes and stuff. I don't really care. I know they're making money off my game in small ways, but all I care about is people playing. They're not re hosting my game.
Devin Spikowski: It's literally just an iframe, so I still get that traffic. [00:36:00] I can still see how many people are playing when they go through sites like that. I hope that they eventually find that they don't have to use that site that's letterboxing my page with a bunch of other crap around it. But to me, it's just more exposure, so that's okay with me.
Devin Spikowski: One of the sites was gracious enough to ask permission to do that. I thought that was nice of them. So, yeah, I told him, go ahead.
Nate Kadlac: That's rare.
Devin Spikowski: That's where I'm currently sitting. Maybe in a future game, I'll feel differently. But that's where I'm at.
Nate Kadlac: That's fantastic. Devin, this has been such a great time chatting with you and about your game WordPeaks.
Nate Kadlac: If people, you know, are looking for you, where should they look to reach out? Either. To say, Hey, or kind of give you feedback on your game or anything else.
Devin Spikowski: So up on Twitter, that's a Vegeta, eight, nine, seven V E G E T A eight, nine, seven. I'm also on Instagram where I mostly post music on blue sky, the same username.
Devin Spikowski: Yeah. [00:37:00] That's where you can reach me pretty much.
Nate Kadlac: Fantastic. Well, thanks a lot for your time. And that's the pod.
Devin Spikowski: Thank you so much for having me. It's been great.
