Aaron Kardell: [00:00:00] An occasional SEO nerd myself, I was taken by your statement that there's so many Cassidy Williams, but you've managed to own three of the top four spots on Google by my account when you search for Cassidy Williams. So I appreciated some of your keyword stuffing, if you will, of who you were.
Aaron Kardell: And. Your approach to that, but tell us more about that.
Cassidy Williams: There is a scooby doo character named cassidy williams where I did not know this until
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: we just got done interviewing. cassidy williams. She's a prolific content creator, developer, evangelist, just a great resume across startups.
Aaron Kardell: But today we talked to her about her experience creating Jumblie. And Joseph, what were some of your takeaways?
Joseph Rueter: I came across [00:01:00] Jumblie, really enjoyed the process of being able to play a spelling game that I was good at. And I actually thought, Hey, this is like connections, a bunch of words, all in a theme.
Joseph Rueter: And there's a gift that is given to every player when a puzzle editor does a little clustering, right? And you get to unwind that gift or take the bow off. And so I really enjoyed And I found it interesting to hear the conversation where it's like, Oh, but now I'm a puzzle editor. So like the value of that process is also work.
Joseph Rueter: And it was great, to chat, fun to hear influences of AI in the gaming world come through in her story as well. How about yourself?
Aaron Kardell: Yeah. Likewise. I think accidental puzzle editor was a good takeaway. So you have to hear about that, but also just a cool story about Game taking off in [00:02:00] Korea could be a launching pad for getting more people to her game.
Aaron Kardell: So on to the pod so you can hear more about that.
Aaron Kardell: I'm Aaron Cardell and i'm here with my co host Joseph Reuter. Today we're excited to speak with Cassidy Williams, the creator of Jumblie. Cassidy is a veteran developer, programmer, and software engineer with a lifelong career filled with various software development and developer and evangelist roles.
Aaron Kardell: She's also a podcast host. She's pretty prolific on Twitter as well, has some really fun videos there. And aside from her decorated experience, she co founded Cosigned, which is the fastest and most affordable way for content creators to protect themselves and their life's work. Prior to that, she also co founded.
Aaron Kardell: Contenda, which recently went open source. Jumblie is a word game where you have to guess exactly four words that are hidden among the jumble of letters. These four words are always between [00:03:00] four and nine characters long with a color coded system where blue is the longest word and red is the shortest.
Aaron Kardell: Cassidy also wrote 13 Potions as a game prior to that, which I'm sure we'll talk about. And Cassidy, we're thrilled you're here.
Cassidy Williams: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Aaron Kardell: Cassidy, as we always like to ask, what's your favorite game to play?
Cassidy Williams: video game. is Civilization, Civ 6. I've sunk so many hours into that game.
Cassidy Williams: It is so dang fun. And plus, because it's turn based, I can play a turn and then answer an email and then go back and I feel very productive while playing it. That one's great. And then board games, I really Agricola. And that one is like a land management game where you're trying to build out your farm, feed your family, and beat other players to certain resources and Is it
Aaron Kardell: like Catan?
Aaron Kardell: That's great.
Cassidy Williams: Similar, but I think a bit more strategic because you, can have like different improvements and occupations in every [00:04:00] game that I've never played a game that's similar to another one because it, it is really randomized in a good way and balanced in a good way. And yes, I feel like Catan is a good, Like gateway drug to Agricola.
Joseph Rueter: There you go. the people I play Catan with don't like strategy, so I don't think we'll be playing this.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah, maybe, a different group.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah. Different group. new people. Cool. and, in the land of fields, we looked way back and Aaron and I are both in Minneapolis, the land of.
Joseph Rueter: General Mills and we, saw that you've got a cross path with some General Mills time. Did you actually go to headquarters or did you have a different kind of role back in the day?
Cassidy Williams: I did. So this was a long time ago. I interned at General Mills and I lived right next to headquarters. That was the best summer.
Cassidy Williams: Let me tell you, I always gush, if I ever did move to Minneapolis, I'm over in Chicago, I would [00:05:00] work again for General Mills in a heartbeat, purely because I had so much free food. I've been spoiled for cereal prices for the rest of my life, and, on the way from, the parking garage into the rest of the building, there was, like, a free room where they always just had snacks, whether it was, like, Nature Valley bars or, Muddy buddies or something.
Cassidy Williams: And I was at my largest at the end of that summer because it was so much food and it was amazing. And they'd like a grocery store in house and like a doctor's office in house, like a daycare in house. It was amazing.
Joseph Rueter: Pretty incredible. We've done work out there and know a bunch of people that work there.
Joseph Rueter: And I was like, you have an auto mechanic at the office. Come on guys. It's so good.
Cassidy Williams: It's like the gas station on site. I saved so much money on gas. Like it's so good. It has so many nice perks that like, I feel like people don't realize how nice that office is. And yeah, I have some friends who still work there from back when I worked there and I don't blame them.
Cassidy Williams: It's amazing.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah. [00:06:00] But then you took a turn to the south to a very questionable state, Iowa. How did this come down?
Cassidy Williams: I went to Iowa State University. Go Cyclones. I was the school mascot there. So that's, how much I liked it. I was wearing the big bird suit.
Joseph Rueter: You were a furry.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah, I've started to realize, oh dang, did I have a furry?
Cassidy Williams: Like spell, I, I didn't mean to, I just thought it'd be fun to put on the costume and this was truly my freshman year of college. I was just like, Oh, cool. It'd be fun to wear the bird once. I wonder if they ever need help. I don't know, waving in a bird costume. And then they're like, wait, how tall are you?
Cassidy Williams: Our side just graduated. And thus I was the mascot all four years of college.
Joseph Rueter: That's awesome. Free entrance to so many.
Cassidy Williams: So they have different costumes where Athletic Psy is the one that actually goes to the games. I was not athletic. You have [00:07:00] to like, be able to do a flip in the costume for that one.
Cassidy Williams: But I did like, all of the non sport events. And so I kicked off races, I did I would do side day Fridays, passing out water bottles. And the biggest one was probably just the Iowa state fair where I was like amongst the butter cow and like waving to all the kids and taking pictures and stuff I passed out in the costume.
Cassidy Williams: Cause it was so dang hot. It was quite the journey being the college mascot.
Nate Kadlac: Would
Aaron Kardell: you say that is that sort of your start down the path of. I don't want to call it entertainment, but you've got, some very, entertaining Twitter videos.
Cassidy Williams: I think I've just always been a clown, whether I realized it or not.
Cassidy Williams: And, now hindsight is 20, 20, where I'm just like, Oh dang, I have liked entertaining people, but it was more just like having a good time and stumbling upon various. Things that have led me to where I am today.
Aaron Kardell: That's great. one of our co founders often co host [00:08:00] Nate, when you first wrote into us, he sent over your video of, I think it was like a pull request for open source or something like that.
Aaron Kardell: And just all of the different personalities and comments and the furious type. He was like, come on, this is awesome.
Cassidy Williams: a lot of wigs and I put them to good use for that video.
Aaron Kardell: how many videos do you have now, do you think?
Cassidy Williams: I don't even know. I admit I, I slowed down making them when I gave birth because it's hard to take the time to make and edit a video when you have A baby rolling around, but I definitely made a lot. I actually first started making videos way, way long ago, like, early two thousands.
Cassidy Williams: And then video editing was so just cumbersome and took so long that as high school, college, et cetera, picked up, I just put it aside and I was like, videos are fun, but video editing takes forever. And then TikTok rolled around. And then back in like 2019, I. Kind [00:09:00] of just started playing around with it.
Cassidy Williams: And I was like, wait, this means I can make videos again. And it's so easy to just edit and hit submit. And then it's, and then it's done. And so then I started making a ton and then the pandemic happened and I had nothing else to do. And so I was making a ton more videos and I still like making them on occasion, but yeah, it's, I have.
Cassidy Williams: More limited time these days to do
Aaron Kardell: we can definitely relate to that. Forces some priorities. Yeah. Oh
Cassidy Williams: The small
Cassidy Williams: humans
Cassidy Williams: They're so fun. I love her. She's great, but she takes some time So
Joseph Rueter: yes, and they rewire your brain and we understand you spent some time in Spain also
Cassidy Williams: That was an amazing rewiring, honestly, and actually was, I've actually given a conference talk about how much it rewired my brain because it's such a great country.
Cassidy Williams: I love it. And it was really good for really getting immersed in Spanish and speaking better and everything. But yeah, I before Spain, I was so stressed [00:10:00] just because Trying to do everything and wasn't sleeping. I literally almost went blind in one eye because I was sleeping so poorly and just trying to do everything.
Cassidy Williams: And then I moved there and this beautiful land of olive oil and siestas. I love it. And I got to make so many good friends. This was, let's see, in 2012. Oh my gosh, it was 12 years ago. So many friends that I'm still friends with today that where I just got to know them super well, got to know the culture super well, and really just traveled the country and.
Cassidy Williams: Loved it. I, my husband and I still talk about what if we moved to Spain one day? And yeah, it rewired my brain to just be more chill, honestly. I remember when I came back, my mom was like, this is the most Zen I've seen you since you were like five. what's up and was a really great experience living there.
Cassidy Williams: I loved it.
Joseph Rueter: Wow. That's notable. I have one of the best lunches in my entire life on the South side of the Sierra Nevada area. We had done like the Birka ham trail, whatever, and then [00:11:00] forgot about Siesta. So we bummed some sandwiches off a place that we, clearly interrupted, but then found a grove.
Joseph Rueter: Had a beer, just
Cassidy Williams: that's magical, incredible.
Joseph Rueter: That country is ridiculous.
Cassidy Williams: It's so beautiful. And everyone is just so kind and nice. I actually visited this past fall and we brought the baby. she was only six months old and Oh my gosh, they treat us like royalty when you have a baby there, people were like making room for us to sit at their own tables at restaurants and, give it, give him her bread and we were able to just.
Cassidy Williams: Really just walk through the country in a place where they really care about kids. Not, that the U. S. doesn't, but it definitely, relatively speaking, it feels like they don't. It was a harsh reality coming back home because they were just so kind to us and letting us go to the front of every line and, just parks everywhere and everything.
Cassidy Williams: And even though she was very small at the time, oh, I can't wait to bring her back just because [00:12:00] it is such a nice country with really good people. Great food.
Aaron Kardell: I affirm all that loved my time there too. I think one of my biggest questions was do they sleep?
Cassidy Williams: They do just at different hours. That's very, they seem to get
Aaron Kardell: up at the same time, but they're eating dinner at 11 o'clock and party.
Aaron Kardell: I
Cassidy Williams: remember I, I'm not like a major partier, but one time I went out and my host mom, I came back and it was like, 4 a. m. And she was like, you're back early. And I was like, I am?
Nate Kadlac: And she
Cassidy Williams: was just like chilling with some wine on the balcony. And that's, they sleep at different times, but it was great. I can't emphasize enough how close I was to going blind from lack of sleep and just stress and stuff in general.
Cassidy Williams: And the fact that I came back and I was completely fine and sleeping normally, eating normally, seeing normally. I love that country. It was great. [00:13:00]
Joseph Rueter: Yeah, so good. Has it informed some of your, work between now and then?
Cassidy Williams: Yes, in that if there's ever an opportunity to do a work trip there, I'm there. And I've definitely spoken at conferences and stuff out there just because it gives me a chance to go back.
Cassidy Williams: But I also think it did teach me a lot of lessons on just burnout in general, where I have burned out a couple times since then, but it has stopped me from burning out way more than that. Where I can remember you could just sleep and take a little siesta or slow down a little bit, or let yourself meander a little bit.
Cassidy Williams: And it's better for your health in the long run. And I think that's something that has definitely really stuck with me.
Aaron Kardell: It's awesome. an abrupt change of topics, but as a, an occasional SEO nerd, myself, I was taken by your statement that there's so many Cassidy Williams, but you've managed to own three of the top [00:14:00] four spots on Google by my account when you search for Cassidy Williams.
Aaron Kardell: So I appreciated some of your keyword stuffing, if you will, of who you were and. Your approach to that, but tell us more about that.
Cassidy Williams: There is a Scooby Doo character named Cassidy Williams where I did not know this until far too late into, my life being like, why did I keep this name? She's ruining it.
Cassidy Williams: That is a joke. But anyway, yeah, I guess SEO is not something I'm an expert at in any way, shape or form. I just know generally, Hey, you should have certain keywords and have the right OG images and descriptions and stuff. And so I've always tried to do that on. And then I was very annoyed one day when I saw that I was still being overtaken by Scooby Doo.
Cassidy Williams: So I wrote a blog post where it was just my name and a bunch of keywords. So it could be like, this will at least help bump up my website a little bit more so that way, if someone's looking for me, they can find me.
Aaron Kardell: Did you ever ask your parents, was your name inspired by Scooby Doo or?
Cassidy Williams: They did not know, but.
Cassidy Williams: [00:15:00] And I also didn't know that, Cassidoo sounds a whole lot like a Scooby Doo reference. It does not.
Nate Kadlac: what can you do? That is
Cassidy Williams: just, that's a pun. What can you do? But anyway, yeah, it was all by mistake, but it's okay. She and I are friends now.
Aaron Kardell: So amongst, your many skills, a repeat founder, can you maybe tell us a little bit more about your most recent venture, Cosigned?
Cassidy Williams: So Cosigned is one that I almost wouldn't even call it the most recent. It's just been the longest where I started that with really awesome group of people back in, I think it was 2015, 2016 ish, where started out of the blue with a very funny coincidence where a mentor of mine, she had founded a firm that no longer exists called women in mobile, where it was investing in women building mobile applications and mobile startups.
Cassidy Williams: And. Or women innovate mobile. That's what it was. But then there was [00:16:00] another very large org called women in music and the W I M domain name was a major conflict there. And so my mentor and this person who was on the board of women in music, they. They were just like, Hey, we want the domain name. And then they realized just how big both of their organizations were and became friends.
Cassidy Williams: And so my mentor was like, you should talk to this person. Cause this was an accident, but she's really cool. And then as I was talking with her, she was talking about how so much of the music industry is still done via paper. Like writing split sheet contracts where if all three of us wrote a song together, we could say that, okay, each of us wrote a song.
Cassidy Williams: Own 20 percent and then the publisher owns the rest or something like that. Stuff like that is still done via paper a lot to this day still, or saying okay, I want this music in my movie. You have to get so many things signed off via really slow processes and legal processes that take forever. And also just copyright registrations in general, [00:17:00] still very slow.
Cassidy Williams: And if you make a mistake on your application, you have to pay the fee again and start over. So anyway, it was just a very, Manual process. And so as she was talking to me about what, about this as a problem, I was just like, what if we built this? What if we did something like that? And she was just like, this is what I want to do, but I don't know anybody technical and thus the company was born.
Cassidy Williams: There's a group of us now where, we made this product that now runs on its own and we're building some more features that I can't talk about currently, but it's very exciting where new copyright rules come out, we can build it into the platform and then publications can use it for copyright.
Cassidy Williams: And it's been something where it's still a side project for all of us, where some folks work on it full time. Most of us are on it part time as we do other things, but. That's the story of Cosigned and it's been really, awesome to work on.
Aaron Kardell: it's been fascinating. Some of the, Business podcasts I listened to, they've [00:18:00] done like side episodes.
Aaron Kardell: I'm just trying to understand like all the rights within music and it's super complex as better than any of us. And, I'm also reminded there was a show I used to watch in the, I think it was the early two thousands, probably long forgotten at this point. Ed, what's the name of it?
Cassidy Williams: Not Ed, Edd, and Eddy?
Aaron Kardell: No. never came out on DVD, never been streamed. And, the story is they just couldn't secure the music rights. And so you've got this show that had a committed fan base that, it's never going to be seen again because those music rights are locked up and nobody wants to figure it out.
Cassidy Williams: That's so frustrating. That's The Rodgers and Hammerstein Cinderella that has Brandy and Whoopi Goldberg and Whitney Houston. I love that movie. I think it's one of the best movie musicals of all time, if not the best, but they never made a soundtrack for very similar reasons where stuff got tied up and [00:19:00] the label wanted Brandy to be more hip hop oriented and everything.
Cassidy Williams: And, politics, later. The movie has seen a little bit of a revival with some of the cast coming back and doing interviews, but they still haven't been able to make the soundtrack, and ugh, it's such a bummer because the music's so good.
Aaron Kardell: That sounds like awesome mission and definitely filling a void.
Aaron Kardell: Yeah,
Cassidy Williams: and the team is really experienced with the music industry and stuff, and I've learned so much about it, where I just Truly came from the tech background and it's been wild to see just the innovations and changes that we've been able to do. It's, great.
Aaron Kardell: It's cool. And then, another startup you've been involved in co founding contender.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah. Yeah. That one. Oh man. It's still very bittersweet for me because we got, we're open sourcing and shutting that one all down and the team is splitting up and my CEO is trying to. See what things she can salvage from it right now. And so that'd be cool if she can build something. But anyway, Contenda was one that kind of came out of the blue as well, [00:20:00] where, as most things do, a random encounter ends up being really cool.
Cassidy Williams: Where, for Contenda, I have a Patreon group where I originally made it so people could get resume reviews and interview prep and stuff just to help me. Scale and protect my time a little bit better and it turned into just a really great discord community where now to this day, I think I've missed like 50 messages since this podcast started.
Cassidy Williams: It's, really active of people just talking about tech in general, what they're building games that they're playing, stuff like that. And my CEO at the time she was in there and she noticed that I was mailing stickers individually to people. Just as like a, thank you for being a part of it and stuff like that.
Cassidy Williams: This was back in 2020 or so. I think it was right around pandemic times. And she was like, Hey, if I built something that would help you automate sending stickers, would you use it? And I said, absolutely. Because I was like handwriting envelopes and stuff. And I didn't know of any services at the time. And a couple of friends, they ended up building this platform for mailing [00:21:00] stickers.
Cassidy Williams: And then they were like, wait, this is This is cool actually. And as they scaled it and messed with it, it turned into a really good, just platform for retaining subscribers. And they ended up helping Ludwig, the Twitch streamer, break a world record for the most number of subscribers on Twitch because he was mailing stickers to everyone with the platform.
Cassidy Williams: And that's how. Contenda started and from there, they were like, okay, stickers don't scale. What if we build different creator tools and pivoted a bunch of different times. And eventually I joined and we were building AI things before the AI hype wave started. So like before chat GPT and stuff, and we were building tools where you could take media like this podcast, for example, and then turn it into a blog post or a Twitter thread or highlight clips or things like that.
Cassidy Williams: And so we had built this tool. And then GPT came out and we, tried to refine it saying, Oh, but we can help with technical accuracy with these custom models. So you could say install react in a conference [00:22:00] talk, and it would actually have the code samples for installing that or something like that.
Cassidy Williams: But anyway, That was going well enough and then the tides started to turn economy wise. Unfortunately, all of our paying customers got laid off and that's just happens where a lot of our customers were dev advocacy teams or groups where they were specifically focusing on technical. Content creation. And not only were layoffs happening there, but then also GPT four came out and our edge started to go away as everybody was making a, turn a video or a YouTube into a transcript and a blog post and summarize it.
Cassidy Williams: And so we started. The pivoting process again, and our latest software that I particularly loved, was brain story where we had a few mini pivots in there, but then we started leaning into brain story where it took a conversation that you were having with the browser and turned it into a really good summary where you could say, okay, I want to talk about podcast [00:23:00] idea that I have.
Cassidy Williams: And. What it would do is it would, instead of generating okay, this is the podcast that you should do. It would just ask you questions. And it used Socratic questioning where you could say, okay, I have a podcast idea and say, okay, who's your target audience. And as you talked it through, it'd help you brainstorm ideas.
Cassidy Williams: And so I ended up using it for conference talks, for meeting prep, for blog posts. And that's, that was the main use case where a lot of people were using it to write essays or to write content and, or to again, plan for meetings and you could get feedback through it and stuff. And it was going just well enough that we really tried to hold on and make it work.
Cassidy Williams: But we realized that we had a really nice shiny nail or really nice shiny hammer, but couldn't figure out which nail that we wanted to hit. And none of the nails that we tried to hit were making enough money to sustain it. And so that's what led to us making a very sad decision to open source it and shut it down.
Cassidy Williams: But at the same time, I'm really happy that we are open sourcing it so I can live [00:24:00] on in some way. And I'd love to recreate my own version of it. Cause it's a tool that I've really enjoyed working with.
Aaron Kardell: that's always hard when a startup doesn't. Take the final form or life that you want it to, but it sounds like definitely a good journey and a lot to be learned from that for sure.
Cassidy Williams: And the team was so good too. Like I'm sad that it ended, but I'm really happy that it happened. Cause it was, a really good group of people to work with.
Aaron Kardell: It's great attitude. maybe we can, switch gears to talk more about gaming. So you talked a little bit about your favorite games earlier, and then you had written, A game that was released, prior to your most recent Jumblie.
Aaron Kardell: You want to maybe tell us a little bit more about 13 potions and your, journey creating that game.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah. So 13 potions was a game that I I made for a hackathon and I thought, I've always wanted to make a little game like this, where it was a little [00:25:00] character running around with.
Cassidy Williams: With arrow keys and stuff. And I really enjoy arcade style games. And there's this online hackathon that happens every year called JS13K games. And it's make a 13 kilobyte game with JavaScript and. Go, that's pretty much the prompt
Aaron Kardell: just to confirm is that I assume that's a max or is it a it needs to be?
Aaron Kardell: Exactly.
Cassidy Williams: That's that's the max and it is a very tiny max. And so you can do less you can try but It's tough. And so
Aaron Kardell: And minified is okay, I assume.
Cassidy Williams: I think everybody makes it as minified as possible. And I also, if you are interested in this game jam, I think this year is its 13th year. And it's going to be in September.
Cassidy Williams: I think when, they release or when they announced the. Newest challenge, but anyway, so I saw that the hackathon was starting and I was like, you know I've always followed it because it's been interesting. So I'll try submitting something and thus 13 potions was born where I originally was [00:26:00] thinking Okay, I found like this free tile pack on the internet what if I made like a little maze and as I was fiddling around with tiles, the map editor, I was like, okay, and instead of a maze, what if I tried to actually make it where there's a goal, instead of just going from point A to point B, let's make it more open.
Cassidy Williams: And so that, that's how I came up with the concept of things. 13 potions where it started with drawing. And then I was like, okay, let's, make it a proper goal. And it was a very fun learning experience where I made it. So that way you could have like randomized ghosts that slow you down. I learned about how you could do collisions and like speed changes based on collisions or color changes or, a timer that's always constantly going as you're running that sort of thing.
Cassidy Williams: And it was really fun to build. It was stressful because I had to do it under the deadline. Sadly, it was disqualified because I didn't realize that the game engine that you use counted towards the size. And so I was like, Oh yeah, I'm in the size [00:27:00] limit. I'm perfect. Yay. And then I realized that phaser is a very, large.
Cassidy Williams: Game dev framework. And so anyway, the game was disqualified, but it was very fun to build. And so it's worth it and you can play it on itch. io.
Aaron Kardell: a brutal realization afterwards, but sounds like a fun experience. Nevertheless,
Cassidy Williams: absolutely worth it. I, was able to accomplish some personal goals with it.
Cassidy Williams: So I'll take it.
Joseph Rueter: So you're working a lot on what seemed to be advanced. Like AI systems or complicated legal environments. But in the process, you've created these games. Do you take them as breaks one was for a competition, but now you've gone on to build another. We like to say that people play games in the cracks of their day.
Joseph Rueter: And that sometimes it's like quiet, like you want to hide it. How did games lay in to your development process?
Cassidy Williams: I've always wanted to make more [00:28:00] games, and I just haven't really taken the time to, where a notebook of game ideas. I love making games, and I think games are just fun in general, but also game studios are very scary to me, because you always hear about just how intense it is at crunch time, and all that, and so I've always wanted to just make more games.
Cassidy Williams: Fun little casual games where you could play a little bit and then move on with your life. And I have a whole mega list of them. And I think especially again when my daughter was born, I was just like, I want to make some of these games in those little in between times when she's napping, when I have these brief moments that I have to myself.
Cassidy Williams: I want to fill it with things that I really enjoy and things that I want to build. And so that, that's just how it started where I've wanted to make games, but hadn't really done it. And then I started and now, I've made a handful of little silly ones where Jumblie is probably the biggest one, quote unquote, because there's, so many regular [00:29:00] players of it, but I have always wanted to just make something where it is fun, low effort, might teach you something and is a good time.
Joseph Rueter: So you mentioned Jumblie. Take us through that. You get a bunch of characters, you got a spell, and I'm not the best speller in the world, but I enjoyed this game.
Cassidy Williams: Yay. Oh, I'm glad. Yeah. No Jumblie, believe it or not, that was also initially for a competition. And then it was fully not related to the competition.
Cassidy Williams: I made it separately after that, where a friend of mine, he runs a little game, not a game, Show, but a game show think great British bake off, but for developers, his name is Jason Langsdorff and you can find his content and it's really fun. But anyway, he had this challenge where it said, make a leaderboard, make something that has a leaderboard of some kind.
Cassidy Williams: And so I actually pulled out brain story, the tool I was talking about earlier, and I started talking through it saying, okay, I need to build something with a leaderboard. I'd like [00:30:00] it for it to be some kind of fun game, but I don't know what. And as I started talking out. I ended up fully neglecting the leaderboard part of it and just wanting to make a fun game.
Cassidy Williams: And that's how Jumblie was born, where I like word games like Connections and the Wordles and Crosswords and stuff. And so I wanted to make something like that, some kind of daily word game. I ended up coming up with Jumblie where I thought, okay, if you made it like a word search and you were trying to just find words within a pile of letters, that could be cool.
Cassidy Williams: Each word is used once, or each letter is used once, like connections, but it's actual words. And unlike connections, it makes for more creativity in my opinion, because you can make so many different words and try to think about it. When I initially made it, I was using my Google search. Like family group chat with my cousins to say okay, can you try this?
Cassidy Williams: And I didn't initially have a theme. It was originally just four random words in the English dictionary. That was not a great [00:31:00] choice. One of my poor cousins, he was just like, I've been at this for an hour. And I haven't found a single correct word. And I was like, okay, I need to make this easier. After putting together a huge word lists and then scraping the internet and everything, I realized, English is big.
Cassidy Williams: And so that's when I came up with the concept of a theme and the words could be associated with the theme, but that also makes for a harder. Puzzle creation process. Cause I can't just pick four random words. It has to be four random words that are affiliated together in some way. And so that's when I turned to AI to create a word list.
Cassidy Williams: and I learned a whole lot about LLMs in that process where I knew it from my work, but at the same time, LLMs are not good at counting, for example. So when I said, okay, I want each word to be like, Four, five, six, seven letters long. It doesn't know lengths of words. It just knows generally the vibe of the word that you want.
Cassidy Williams: And so I had to be a bit more loose on that and say, okay, generally give me [00:32:00] words related to these themes. And it was really decent for like the first 10 suggestions, maybe the first 20. But then after that, it just started to be really, obnoxious where one of them was like finance and the. The words were like macroeconomics, microeconomics, loan.
Cassidy Williams: It was, just doing bad words. And so I ended up using it to create a general set of the first 50 or so puzzles that were okay. I ended up having to tweak a bunch of them and. That gave me enough, runway, quote unquote, to be like, okay, I can come up with enough puzzles after that, that this game can sustain itself.
Cassidy Williams: And it got just popular enough. It, depending on the day, the puzzle, the, time, how much I might be sharing on socials or others might be sharing in their own family group texts. Sometimes we hit a little over a thousand players a day. So on low days, it's around 500 players a day, but it's just enough where I'm a puzzle editor now, and so I added the ability to [00:33:00] suggest puzzles so people can submit some.
Cassidy Williams: I add most of the puzzles myself and try to do it far enough in advance where I can still enjoy the puzzle later when I play it. And then I did ultimately, eventually make a leaderboard, but it's just a leaderboard with yourself and you can see what your fastest times are and have some visibility settings and things like that.
Cassidy Williams: And so anyway, that is generally how I made Jumblie and it's been really fun to play and work with.
Aaron Kardell: That's great. Yeah. So I hear you alluded to this, but maybe your family referred to it as torture at one point.
Cassidy Williams: That's when you know a game is not good.
Aaron Kardell: I will say from personal experience, and I just have to, it's so hard to be a puzzle editor and our new partner, Jeff Chen, I'm sure could affirm this, but there are some of your.
Aaron Kardell: Puzzles on Jumblie. Like I did one in eight seconds the other day, Cassidy,
Nate Kadlac: like it was
Aaron Kardell: in Nate. He's you just made that up, right? no, I actually did it in eight [00:34:00] seconds. And it was the, whatever. I forget the clue, but it was, the answer was he got the,
Cassidy Williams: Oh yeah. Where it was the, like the performing music awards or whatever.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah. So
Aaron Kardell: Grammy, Oscar, Tony. got that one in eight seconds, and then I think I had another one that I was still 20 minutes in, and I was like, I can't get this.
Cassidy Williams: It's interesting how, different people definitely are faster at other games or some themes more than others, where I remember architecture was one, and one of our friends who was an architect was just like, I nailed that, this is amazing.
Cassidy Williams: And then his wife was just like, this is impossible. I don't, building? That's it. What other words are there? And so it's fun to, to see which puzzles make people tick more than others. And my mom texts me each day saying this was a good puzzle or no, this was not it.
Aaron Kardell: It's good to get that feedback, huh?
Aaron Kardell: Yeah. Yeah. It's fun to get it,
Cassidy Williams: to get that feedback too from [00:35:00] people who aren't in my usual tech sphere, because so, many times I'm building developer tools or things fellow developers and stuff, but it's really fun now where friends of mine, just from other aspects of my life will be just like, Oh, my grandma really liked the puzzle today.
Cassidy Williams: And so being able to serve that kind of audience that I don't normally hit is really, fun just because I get to think about very different perspectives and I wouldn't do one where it's like programming languages, because even though that would be super easy for someone like me, someone like my own grandma would not do that.
Cassidy Williams: know what to do for that.
Aaron Kardell: Although I do remember, connections from New York Times and not too distant past, one of them was, programming languages.
Cassidy Williams: I remember that one too, actually. And I, remember thinking like, Ooh, but then some of them, I was just like, wait a minute. Does this person actually know programming languages?
Cassidy Williams: Because that one could be a programming language, but I don't think people actually know that it's a programming language. And [00:36:00] I got into a bit of a spoiler.
Aaron Kardell: I think some of your co devs have maybe mentioned, or I assume co devs on other projects maybe started reviewing Jumblie and referred to it as pure old school JavaScript.
Aaron Kardell: Is that
Cassidy Williams: a fair
Aaron Kardell: characterization?
Cassidy Williams: It is. I, because apparently I like torture, I decided to use no frameworks or, anything. I've, fully it's like making a cake from scratch. I built it all purely just in the browser, on the platform, vanilla HTML, CSS, JavaScript, no libraries or frameworks or anything, which in hindsight, I probably could have increased my dev time by a whole lot if I actually built it like a fancy way, but at the same time now, because of the way that it's built, I'm able to add features pretty easily because it's just saying, Oh, that's just that one button.
Cassidy Williams: I know how to edit that button and I don't have to edit a server code anywhere or database anywhere. And [00:37:00] also, If you were to download Jumblie, just like the entire web app, onto your phone or onto a device and then suddenly be lost in an ocean with no internet, it would still work. And so the entire game will still function for the number of puzzles that have been loaded into your browser at any given time, but You could be on a deserted island and play Jumblie just fine until you run out of battery.
Aaron Kardell: That's great. Cassidy, one of the, things that we got a chance to talk ahead of time, and you had mentioned Jumblie was actually compared to WordTower. I believe it's the Netflix show Devil's Plan. and that was actually part of, I think, how it took off. But. Tell us more about that.
Cassidy Williams: That was really convenient timing, honestly.
Cassidy Williams: Where there's this show on Netflix called Devil's Plan, and it's very fun. It's basically just a bunch of smart people in a room doing puzzles, and then people get kicked out if they don't do the puzzles right, and that sort of thing, and [00:38:00] lose points, and there's a big prize at the end. And one of the games, it's a, Korean show, but they, had all of these English letters and they had just a pile of blocks with letters and it was a lot like Jumblie where the big pie in the sky man was just like, the theme is animals and they had all these blocks of letters and had to pull out all the letters.
Cassidy Williams: All of the words that could be animals, and they had to pull out four animal words and spell it out. And honestly, that was incredible because English was everyone's second language, or maybe even third. So some people were just like, what are some other animals? elephant, and they would put in an F instead of a PH and they'd have to figure out, wait a minute, how do we spell this right?
Cassidy Williams: But anyway, so it was basically a physical version of Jumblie and It was very cool because suddenly I was getting all of these mentions on reddit for the devil's plan subreddit saying Hey, if you really liked that game, this one is like an online version of it. And so [00:39:00] suddenly just traffic spikes from that end of the world.
Cassidy Williams: All of these people in Korea started playing it and, It was very funny seeing the comments where people who English was their first language, they were just like, dang, they did this as their second language. This is pretty hard with English as my first language anyway, but that's where, that's where it got its first spike and it's been really fun to see the traffic from there.
Aaron Kardell: As you think about the future of the game, I think it seemed like you did it for this, not really competition, but thing, that prompted it. You made a comment about, you're now a, you found yourself to be a puzzle editor and that's not really what you set out to do. as you think about your next step on Jumblie, how are you thinking about that?
Cassidy Williams: Good question, because I'm trying to figure that out myself, because I love the game, don't get me wrong, but being a puzzle editor is hard work. And so I'm trying to figure out, is there a way that I can automate this a bit more? Once again, I added ways to like, suggest a puzzle now, and that kind of helps, but [00:40:00] yeah.
Cassidy Williams: AI is not reliable enough yet to be able to generate puzzles. And so it is very, human. And though I enjoy it, I'm trying to figure out what should I do in that regard? should I like hire a puzzle editor? I don't make any money on Jumblie. So that would just be negative dollars unless I change something up.
Cassidy Williams: Should I contact publishers? I don't know. So I admit I'm in a. Wishy washy place where I can't even give you a clear answer because I'm trying to figure that out myself.
Aaron Kardell: Totally fair. And I think, as somebody who's spent a lot of time just thinking about algorithmically generated, typically more mathematic or logic puzzles, it's always been interesting to me how Hard it is to do a good algorithmically generated word puzzle.
Aaron Kardell: They do exist, but often only within specific parameters. And I don't know, I wonder we [00:41:00] should reach out to, I should get you in touch with Jim Baumgartner, who I think he listens to a lot of these, but he was one of our prior guests, just a expert in algorithmically generated puzzles. I wonder if he's got any ideas of.
Aaron Kardell: to pursue on that front for you.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah. I'm very curious about all of that. We're like, I'm willing to do some of that coding and writing, but the attempts that I've done so far, I'm just like, you know what, it's easier to just come up with these puzzles myself. And so we'll see where we end up on that front.
Joseph Rueter: So you've, built two games that are in public. We do a podcast, we've got games. Weird things happen. Like you end up on a subreddit for devils games and South Korea. Yeah. What other kinds of fun things might've happened along the way? You gotta be a puzzle editor, but there's these upsides that might not have been expected.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah, it's really fun to [00:42:00] tap into a lot of these communities and learn more. And one of the games that I play off and that I honestly probably should have brought up before is Go, also known as Baduk in Korea. And it's the black and white pieces on the grid. And AlphaGo was a big thing a few years ago that was the AI playing it.
Cassidy Williams: One of the Competitors on Devil's Plan is a professional Go player that I actually follow on YouTube and I was able to talk to her at 7 and so little things like that were just like, Oh, dang, this is awesome. It has been really fun to see and experience for sure.
Aaron Kardell: Looking back on, I guess your Jumblie experience specifically, you've got so many rich other experiences, but is there anything you might do differently on Jumblie now with the benefit of hindsight?
Aaron Kardell: Bye.
Cassidy Williams: With the benefit of hindsight, honestly, because my main problems currently right now are puzzle editing, which, not a problem, something that I have to think about, I think it would have been interesting to add another layer [00:43:00] of hints or something, where I could, Maybe do the same puzzle again, but it has a different kind of hint.
Cassidy Williams: And that might be interesting like that where I've been thinking about, Oh, what if I made a hint where like easy mode colors, all of the letters in the words that they're supposed to be or something like that. Or if I added some degree of, challenge where there's like a stray letter that is added where I could do that now.
Cassidy Williams: But first of all, I feel like the existing players, they might be just like, I don't know how I feel about it. I could, I'm thinking about that, but something that would make it so I could reuse puzzles a little bit more would probably be nice for me in hindsight, as once again, as editing is.
Joseph Rueter: It's good. Are you familiar with Zach Gage's work?
Cassidy Williams: Yes. I follow him on Twitter. There you go. Yeah, I've seen his games.
Joseph Rueter: He has some interesting, he has some interesting conversation about being a puzzle editor and then what to do when [00:44:00] tutorializing. And when you mentioned adding a button or changing some things, it was reminded of our conversation with him where he was talking about building environments for persons to tinker and teach themselves the game along the way.
Joseph Rueter: I think it's a really rich path of Conversation and, maybe one to, I wanted to just encourage you to chase that one.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah, no, that sounds cool. And yeah, I think some kind of tutorial would be a fun addition to it. I was actually talking to Josh Wardle recently who made Wordle and. We were both lamenting about being puzzle editors, where for him, especially Wordle was only one word a day, but when he originally just got tons of words, there's a lot of five letter words in the English dictionary, and he ended up making a whole separate app where it was just people saying, I know this word, I don't know this word, back and forth until he had A good enough dictionary of words that he could populate his game with it.
Cassidy Williams: And he was saying there's ways to [00:45:00] automate it, but word games are such an art rather than, or compared to a lot of logic games where it is very math based and you can generate things more. And finding that balance is definitely challenging, but it's an interesting challenge because it's different for every game.
Aaron Kardell: Cassidy, this has been a lovely conversation.
Aaron Kardell: Jumblie, is a great game. It's great to get caught up on a lot of what you're working on and, connect with somebody who, I think I can safely say you're Twitter famous. and. Anyway, I appreciate the conversation. If you want people to find you online, where should they look?
Cassidy Williams: You can find me, you could just Google my name, but once again, I'm competing with Scooby Doo here, so Casadoo, C A S I D O is my username on most things, and casadoo.
Cassidy Williams: co is my website, and there you can find my newsletter. which is a weekly newsletter where I do practice interview questions, web news of the week, and I talk about the various projects I work on.
Aaron Kardell: Excellent. thanks for being here, Cassidy.
Cassidy Williams: Thank [00:46:00] you so much for having me.
