[00:00:00] Nate Kadlac: Just going back to the creation of Canuckle, where did that, I know you were playing Wordle and that kind of came up, but like, what were you doing and did you both immediately want to get involved in this together or did someone have the idea first? Tell us a little bit about that creation process.
[00:00:16] Jeff Rogers: I think it was pretty mutual.
[00:00:17] It was more of a chat thread. We should probably pull that up, Jeff, to see where that thread happened. But I think we were chatting about Wordle certainly, and it was definitely the inspiration and the basis for everything we built. There were a few ideas we were tossing around though, and part of me was just the engineer wanted to reverse engineer and see if it was something we could.
[00:00:38] 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.
[00:00:48] Aaron Kardell: Well, we just got done interviewing Mark and Jeff Rogers, who created Canuckle. It takeaways, Nate?
[00:00:58] Nate Kadlac: What I thought was [00:01:00] really interesting was the amount of collaborations that they've done as a partnership.
[00:01:03] And I think that something that I've never really put a ton of weight into, and I keep seeing it happen more and more, and something I want to take more seriously, but it was really cool to hear about all of the different collaborations that they did to kind of increase growth and awareness around Canuckle.
[00:01:20] How about you, Aaron?
[00:01:21] Aaron Kardell: You know, this is probably the first time that we've heard of somebody taking a break, kind of mid peak popularity. And there was a certain aspect of that, that I just respect it. They, they wanted to take a break. They kind of came back with a renewed sense of energy and purpose and rewritten code base and some ads.
[00:01:44] And a lot of people returned after two and a half months. So I think, especially on. These what initially started as passion projects. I thought that was pretty intriguing. All right. So here's the pod.[00:02:00]
[00:02:02] Nate Kadlac: I'm Nate Kardell and I'm here with my cohost, Aaron Kardell. And today we are extremely excited to speak with Mark and Jeff Rogers, the creators of the daily games, Canuckle and Canoku. Canuckle is a wordle based game with a Canadian twist. It challenges you to guess a five letter word that relates to Canada in some way.
[00:02:20] And Canoku is a Sudoku inspired game with a Canadian theme, and it's not a requirement to be Canadian to play these, but it's definitely an advantage, especially today because I lost Kanako with the word being Xenon, I believe, which I never would have guessed.
[00:02:35] Aaron Kardell: Spoiler alert. Yeah, exactly.
[00:02:37] Nate Kadlac: So, yeah. Mark and Jeff, we're thrilled you're here.
[00:02:40] Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. So we usually like to kick things off with kind of a simple, simple question, but I'm curious, what are your favorite games to play? Wordle
[00:02:50] Jeff Rogers: is still a daily game of mine that I play. I still love it. It sometimes gives us inspiration for our own game. I still like playing the variants like Quordle.
[00:02:58] And of course I play, [00:03:00] well, I guess I can't really say I play Canuckle because we Create the game every day. So that would be a little bit of an unfair advantage, but definitely play waffle, one of my other favorite word games and, yeah, that's probably the, a good start to get my brain going every morning.
[00:03:14] Mark Rogers: Yeah. So with me, I kind of have a morning ritual of going through a bunch. So I start with wordle. I like the connections one that they've got, but they've got a grid of four by four words, you have to figure out all the connections, spelling B just to. Keep my spelling up to snuff. And then I do Gordle too.
[00:03:30] It's all hockey player names for Wordle. I really keep the old games going. And last one is Worldle. I love that one. Just geography style.
[00:03:39] Aaron Kardell: Love that. Love it. Well, I think we've interviewed at least a couple of the people behind, some of those games. That's awesome. Fantastic. Did you both grow up playing games?
[00:03:50] Mark Rogers: Well, yeah, absolutely. I mean, definitely, you know, the Nintendo style game platform games. We, we played tons of games like that growing up and got more into like computer style [00:04:00] games when we got a little bit older, we've always been into that. Never been into actually developing games until now, but definitely always been an interest of mine and Mark's.
[00:04:10] Jeff Rogers: I'd say, Games Nights with family too, I mean, the traditional old school board games. Over the holidays, we always had like a huge tournament style family board game, like night Games Night, and a lot of those as well, right, Taboo, Pictionary, Scrabble, a lot of the classics. So definitely board games have been a part of our life for a while.
[00:04:30] Mark Rogers: And that games night story just, it wasn't just some casual games, like this was an annual thing. Like people had to book time off to be there at that time. My dad like did a grid of two on two teams. And you had to do a round robin and playing everybody. Like this was an intense board game, games night.
[00:04:48] Jeff Rogers: It's legit. There's a trophy. There's prizes. It's official. Yeah.
[00:04:53] Nate Kadlac: That's pretty fun. So sounds like pretty competitive family. Do you have, do you have other siblings at all? Yeah.
[00:04:59] Mark Rogers: Yeah, we've got [00:05:00] two sisters. So I'm the youngest, Mark's the oldest, and we've got two sisters in the middle. And yeah, definitely competitive.
[00:05:05] Love playing sports growing up, all sorts of different sports. Not really tied down to one, really like kind of playing everything. And yeah, of course, competitive. We always want to beat each other at everything we do and like keeps us motivated to go. So love it. Ask Jeff, who has the most family games night titles?
[00:05:22] we don't need to worry about that. You know,
[00:05:27] It's pretty bad. He has, he has a high number of wins compared to my maybe two that I've gotten over the years. That's great. Not competitive though. All good.
[00:05:37] Nate Kadlac: How does a competitivist play out in, how you work together now? Are you keeping track of
[00:05:42] Jeff Rogers: the games you play now or? I think we share our scores on a couple of the games but that's been more casual I think only because we've been focused on developing our own game.
[00:05:51] I would say the competitiveness there doesn't really bleed in into the daily sort of work that we're doing and or even in the game so right now more when we [00:06:00] play Wordle or we play a game it'll be more like oh did you see that word we could do something similar or hey we could build on that or do something else so it's more of the excitedness about You know, what we could do with our game as opposed to competing with each other.
[00:06:14] Mark Rogers: Although during COVID, when it was all starting up with Wordle and all that, we would definitely be messaging in our family group chat. Like my parents are obsessed. They were really wanting to get the high, the lowest average score basically throughout. And so they would be texting their score every day and we'd be testing, texting it back.
[00:06:31] And yeah.
[00:06:32] Jeff Rogers: That's really where it started too, right? Cause the Wordle craze that everyone, you know, Christmas, It's leading into sort of New Year, February 2022, peak pandemic, world craze, everybody texting. It gave us like that water cooler chat, that sort of consistency every day. And it was something that, you know, that really drove, you know, where we could go with it.
[00:06:52] The Olympics were about to be coming up, all this sort of Canadiana was surrounding us. And Jeff and I said, Hey, why don't we make a Canadian version? [00:07:00] What could we do? And we said, ah, there won't be enough words. We're not going to be able to do too many. And then it just went from there. It sort of exploded.
[00:07:06] And who knew we'd be, over six, 700 words now, which is pretty wild.
[00:07:12] Nate Kadlac: That's great. Well, before we get into the creation of that, had you built any games prior to this?
[00:07:18] Mark Rogers: No, so not really. So it kind of started, well, at least for me. So I, I've been working for IBM for over 10 years now, and I jumped into a role more where it's a mobile development.
[00:07:29] And so I'm not making games on, on the mobile platforms, but I'm doing more of the industry side of things, but I've always had an interest of making, you know, like small little games like that. And so it started with making some kind of little apps for my dad for curling that were almost game like in a way.
[00:07:44] And then that kind of allowed us to at least have the ability to talk about this being an actual possibility, so.
[00:07:51] Jeff Rogers: And we're both, computer engineers, so we have a background in development and coding. But the game, the venture into the game space is certainly a [00:08:00] first for both of us. Like, we've done web development, we've built web apps, as you've heard, mobile apps.
[00:08:06] But as far as something where people are coming every day to play something that you create, this is definitely a first.
[00:08:12] Aaron Kardell: What do you think was the most difficult part of creating Canuckle? You kind of indicated that you weren't sure if there were enough words. Was it, was that it? Or where was the biggest difficulty?
[00:08:22] Do you think?
[00:08:23] Mark Rogers: At the beginning of everything, the hardest part was, you know, getting everything together, building it up, making sure there weren't any bugs, you know, like we put out some versions there and then immediately we were like, Oh no, there's a big bug. We got to fix this. And then we got to turn it around real quickly and do all that.
[00:08:36] So. Earlier on, it was more technical issues, I'd say. And then later on it evolved more into, okay, let's make sure we can keep on getting content and putting it all together and wrapping it up. And even the, so the fun fact we do with the, after every word, you can go back to some of the earlier ones, like there was canoe.
[00:08:54] And I think the, the fun fact is like one sentence long with maybe 15 words in it. [00:09:00] Now we've kind of elaborated more on these words, kind of showing you kind of more about the, the Canadian involved. So, yeah.
[00:09:06] Jeff Rogers: Yeah, certainly the research is really the, not a difficulty, but it's the time consuming piece, right?
[00:09:11] It's doing the research, doing the validation of the facts, really trying to condense, you know, when you've got a word and you're tying it to Canada, how am I going to condense this into a couple of sentences that makes it a fun fact that people want to talk about and people want to share? So that's really, the effort has gone into Curating the words once we get a list and running them in an order that makes sense.
[00:09:33] As you know, Kanakola is very thematic. So we, we often have a word that will tie to a specific holiday or, if we have something on, on New Year's, for example, we'll do the word cheer. We did the word happy this year. So that's a fun part about it too, is a lot of the planning and the research to align with how we're going to run the words.
[00:09:51] Nate Kadlac: Just going back to the creation of Canuckle, where did that, I know you were playing Wordle and that kind of came up, but like, what were you doing, and did you both [00:10:00] immediately want to get involved in this together, or did someone have the idea first? Tell us a little bit about that creation process.
[00:10:07] Jeff Rogers: I think it was pretty mutual.
[00:10:09] It was more of a chat thread. We should probably pull that up, Jeff, and see where that thread happened. But I think we were chatting about Wordle certainly, and it was definitely the inspiration and the basis for everything we built. There were a few ideas we were tossing around though, and part of me was just the engineer wanted to reverse engineer and see if it was something we could.
[00:10:26] Build and do, and we threw out a couple of ideas. I think we talked about cities early on, which I, we talked about a couple of different options, and then I think we talked about, we threw out Canadiana or just Canadian words, and I don't think we came up with the name right away. That was something we sort of, Played around with a couple of things and then reverse engineered the Wordle code and we're able to modify it and change it and then we're both sort of all in at that point.
[00:10:51] It was, Jeff was able to make some modifications to the stuff that I was doing and we just sort of both started working on it, which was great. And
[00:10:58] Mark Rogers: eventually it turned [00:11:00] into being our own code repo that we started from scratch, but it started off at the beginning where we started with Wordle stuff and then just tweaked a few things.
[00:11:08] But yeah, so it started with Mark kind of saying, Hey, what do you, would we be able to even do this? Or he, I think you even said like, Hey, I tweaked a few things, check this out. And then I was like, Whoa, and then we could do this and then we could do this. It just snowballed into everything. And then we had to come up with a name.
[00:11:24] Jeff Rogers: And I'm glad we landed on that name. Cause I think we threw around some, some early Canadian names that really would have been a little bit weird. Like I think Beaverdoll was one of the words we, we started with. Moussel was one, Wordle A was like, just add an H on the end of Wordle, which is sort of clever.
[00:11:43] I like that one, but Jeff proposed Canuckle and, and it just stuck. So it was a good one. I think I was watching a Canucks
[00:11:50] Mark Rogers: game when it happened too. So
[00:11:53] Nate Kadlac: everything comes back to hockey. That's right. You got it.
[00:11:58] Aaron Kardell: Well, so in terms of [00:12:00] the research and kind of formation of the, the word list, how do you guys split up that work and, and do you have like words queued up for months now or, or what does that look like for you?
[00:12:14] Jeff Rogers: Yeah, I can start on this one. So it certainly is a lot of research and just sort of getting the words. We do have a bench of words, just sort of a shared spreadsheet, not super high tech, but a spreadsheet of words on the bench. And then we load about. 10 to 20 words at a time in advance. So at any one time, the words are loaded up until, you know, the next two weeks.
[00:12:34] And then we go in and look at the words, look at the days that are coming up. Are there any holidays or special events in Canada? We really try to be current and align with certain things. But certainly there's, we have about 200 words left on our bench. We're constantly adding to it. So we have enough words to get to Canada Day 2024, and we'll keep extending and keep adding to the list.
[00:12:53] But really it's, we share that sheet. We both work on fun facts. I do the main curation sort of [00:13:00] ordering of the word and sort of placing where they're going to go to make sure we don't do, for example, too many sports words in a row, or don't do as many plurals in a row and just sort of try to line them up so we wouldn't want to do say three words in a row that start with a letter T and try to really change the variability and a big thing we try to change is the difficulty level.
[00:13:19] We certainly don't want to throw. A bunch of easy words in a row. And we don't want to do a lot of hard words in a row. So today you guys were both stumped with today's word. It's a really tricky one. And we'll, we'll get a few emails asking about that one or maybe complaining a little bit about it, but that's okay.
[00:13:32] We all communications with us is great. We love hearing from players and, certainly we want everyone to enjoy their experience plan.
[00:13:38] Nate Kadlac: How do you foster that community spirit? Do you get kind of feedback through just email? Do you have a discord server? How do you kind of interact with the players and yeah, kind of keep up with iterating on the game itself?
[00:13:50] Jeff Rogers: Yeah, lots of emails for sure, but I'd say the biggest thing is our online community. No discord server, but we've got over 10, 000 followers as part of our Canuckle crew on Twitter. [00:14:00] That's sort of our main Twitter X, which is our main sort of channel I'd say for, for feedback. And the best thing about it is everyone on there is sharing their scores and it has created the community just naturally, just like Wordle.
[00:14:12] But I think, Okay. Because we're sort of a niche, sort of target with people who, you know, are typically Canadian. 90, 90 to 95% of our players are from Canada and they're playing it because they have some affinity to, to Canada and, and Canadian and love for the country and shows. I mean, they're playing the game, they're learning about Canada through the fun facts and, and that certainly is something that people align with when they're sharing their scores, they're communicating back with us.
[00:14:37] And, and we get in there and, and interact and, you know, call people lucky hoser on, on Twitter and just sort of play around with it. Right. That's a big fun part of it for sure.
[00:14:46] Aaron Kardell: Remind us of the timing of, of when this went live. He said, I think we're 600 some puzzles in now.
[00:14:53] Jeff Rogers: Yeah, we're actually coming up on seven 25.
[00:14:56] So we actually launched as Jeff mentioned earlier, our first launch was [00:15:00] February 10th, 2022. So that was the first iteration of the puzzle with a sort of a revamp of the Wordle code to give it that Canadian twist. adding features like the fun fact, changing the colours to red and really sort of giving it our own sort of Canadian flavour.
[00:15:14] That game, that first iteration of Canuckle ran until Canada Day 2022. And we had always talked about, you know, Wrapping up on Canada Day to sort of give it sort of some fun fanfare and, you know, really align with Canada's birthday. We thought it was sort of a nice tribute and just sort of a perfect ending to the game.
[00:15:31] We never thought it would really be something that would go forever. And we took a break after that. We took a two month break. But a month and a half over the summer months and it was, it was good because there was a lot of effort and a lot of work that went into the work early on and it was nice to take a bit of a pause and then Jeff and I chatted over the summer and that's when we came back with a totally revamped code base.
[00:15:53] built from the ground up that Jeff built. And we, we said, you know, we're going to come back with a version two and just sort of keep continuing. [00:16:00] And that came back October, 2022. And so we had a little bit of a break, October 10th, we came back or October 4th, sorry, October 4th, 2022. We've been back since, so we're coming up on almost two and a two and a half years of, since we launched about two years worth of games, which is pretty wild.
[00:16:18] Mark Rogers: And at its peak before the break, what was the day? It was on May 4th. That was our biggest day, right? It was, I think. 305, 000 users on that day. This is like middle of COVID. Everyone's like needing something to do. And that was one of the biggest days. Of course, after the break, of course, lost some users because two or three months of nothing makes them leave.
[00:16:39] But we were surprised to see how quick people came back to it. We're still hitting about 55 to almost 60, 000 a day.
[00:16:47] Jeff Rogers: Which is great that big day on May 4th, 2021, 22. I don't know if you guys were playing Canuckle at the time, but we ran the same word as Wordle. That day, which is why it was such a big day.
[00:16:58] So it just had a [00:17:00] ton of online press and social media chatter. Everyone was thinking that we were connecting with Wordle and we were, it was a complete coincidence. It was the word train and we both ran the word train and everyone was so excited because they were telling people and getting it in one.
[00:17:14] And it was a, it was a big, online day. So I think we need to plan some more days with Wordle like that. I'm curious if they'd be as open to that now as
[00:17:23] Nate Kadlac: they were at the time.
[00:17:26] Aaron Kardell: Well, that's maybe a segue. So you've, you've talked a little bit publicly about just, kind of protecting yourself in case, you know, the new owners of Wordle had any issues and can you tell us just a little bit more about backstory on that?
[00:17:42] Mark Rogers: It kind of started with the fact that we were, you were, it was a lot of work and we were wanting a break. We started with that summer break. And then I started to be like, well, like I could start making our own version of this and making a few efficiency changes here and here and here. And, Once I was able to [00:18:00] build that and we had worked on some words as well.
[00:18:03] And we started getting confident with the fact that it doesn't have to be such a Canadian word. It can just be a word that we can then just tie into it somehow that is Canadian. And so we started not worrying so much about the word being Canadian and just figuring out the fact that would be Canadian about any word.
[00:18:21] And with that change, we were like, well, this could go on for a year. And then, and then it kept on going and going and going. And so we changed that to our own code base. It wasn't even because of any sort of like legal issue. We just wanted our own entity, our own game. And then of course, later on, there were some.
[00:18:39] copycats that were getting kind of called out by, by Wordle earlier this, like last month or two months ago. And now that we have our own game, we don't have to worry about anything like that. It's completely written from scratch. Every single code was written by us. So yeah, that was the benefit that came out of that.
[00:18:57] Jeff Rogers: And that was a big driver for us to in adding ads to [00:19:00] the game. So the first iteration, because we knew we were using a modified version of Wordle's code that was available early on and, you know, before New York times bought it, but then was then purchased by New York times. We said, I don't think we need to, we should be monetizing this because this is really not.
[00:19:16] Our version of this code. So the first iteration, the entire time, even when we had our peak amount of users, we didn't run any ads. We didn't have any ads running. There was no, there was a, an optional donation that people wanted to make a donation through the Kofi platform, Kofi platform, but we didn't add any ads.
[00:19:33] So we said, if we re baseline this, write it from scratch, our own version of the code, then that's something we can. Drive some ads and, and sort of launch that, which we partnered with a media company, added ads, and it's been running since a version two of a Canuckle that launched in October of 2022. So we're pretty happy.
[00:19:51] It helps us keep the game free. It helps pay for our hosting and server costs. And, it's a big part of it for us too. Right. It helps us sustain the game.
[00:19:58] Aaron Kardell: Are you able to say [00:20:00] what media company you partnered with?
[00:20:03] Jeff Rogers: Yeah, we work with YOLA Media, Y O L A, and they're out in New York. Great company to work with.
[00:20:09] They've been fantastic. Actually connected through them, with them through Waffle, who used them as their first media company to start. And, yeah, we've been them, been with them since the beginning. Cool.
[00:20:22] Nate Kadlac: I'm curious, what are some of the lessons, if anything, if it's had any, you know, impact from, yes, your shirt is amazing.
[00:20:30] If you're watching the video version of this, yes. Is this mostly a thing that you do for fun? Is there any actual revenue coming in for merch and what should we be thinking about when we're creating a merch?
[00:20:43] Jeff Rogers: So, yeah, the merch is totally for fun, but there is money to be made. The margins are not high on t shirts and mugs and sweatshirts.
[00:20:51] But we were really fortunate to partner with a company, O Canada Shop. It's a gentleman by the name of Adam, who lives in [00:21:00] Ontario, just down the road from us in Ottawa. He started this a little bit before the pandemic and has got a bunch of Canadian themed gear. And he's actually partnered with a few other online content creators.
[00:21:10] And it was a natural fit. We hit it off right away. We did some design work with him and we weren't thinking that this was going to be too big. But to be honest, it's been, it was a pretty big take up. There was a quite a bit of interest when we launched. We launched in the fall of 2023. So just last year, pretty big spike early on spike during the holidays for Christmas shopping, definitely leveled out in the new year, sort of post a holiday shopping and post black Friday.
[00:21:37] But there's a lot of, a lot of Canuckle mugs, a lot of lucky hosier hoodies. A lot of fun gear that's out there. I've yet to see one in the wild, like some random person wearing one, but all of our family and friends are wearing them, which is great. So that's pretty fun. One
[00:21:51] Nate Kadlac: problem I've always had with merch is just when it's usually just too straightforward and maybe it's just the logo, but I really like you have a couple of shirts [00:22:00] on right now, which Incomplete games, essentially, right?
[00:22:03] And it allows you to guess the game on the shirt itself, which is really cool. Really, really unique.
[00:22:09] Mark Rogers: Yeah. Some of the best ones are just the ones that just say, sorry, people love it. It's like, how, how more Canadian can you get? Just saying, sorry. The ones with the unsolved puzzles are great. Cause someone can look at it.
[00:22:19] If they know the game, they can actually try and figure out what the word is. It's been good fun. Yeah, we've been happy with the uptake and it wasn't really for the moneymaker It was just see see what people would like and then if there would be any interest So
[00:22:35] Nate Kadlac: do you happen to monetize in any other ways?
[00:22:37] like do you have a way to remove ads if you wanted to or some of those other kind of or have you been thinking about Adding features like this
[00:22:45] Jeff Rogers: We don't have anything else, no in game, purchases, there's no way to remove ads, you can minimize the ads by, you know, changing the size of your browser to make it a little bit less, sort of, in your face for some of the bigger ads.
[00:22:57] For the mobile game, it's really just a [00:23:00] small banner at the top, we were really, sort of, diligent in making sure we didn't want screen takeovers, we didn't want full page ads, we really wanted it to be just, You know, unobtrusive, just sort of on the side or just above for mobile games. But no, we, we haven't monetized, any other in game pieces.
[00:23:15] We do have a partnership with CIRA, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority. They do, they're a partner with us. And, so we do a word of the month that sort of features them. That's a partnership we have, but outside of that, no other monetary, income coming in. It's just the ad stream.
[00:23:33] Mark Rogers: Yeah, and we talked about doing the paying for no ads and all that, but I mean, we, we don't take really any information from the users.
[00:23:41] So, if people wanted to pay for that, we'd have to then, you know, gather information like what's your email and then we'd have to store that in the game. And if it gets lost with the browser cookie session, then anyways, there's some technical issues and we just didn't want to have to mess with that.
[00:23:56] We want to keep it clean and simple.
[00:23:58] Jeff Rogers: Yep. No privacy, [00:24:00] issues, no, no personal information stored. And we sort of like to keep it that way.
[00:24:04] Aaron Kardell: Well, I saw the, powered by CIRA earlier today, and I thought that was clever. If I have this right, I think CIRA, if you want to register a dot CA domain name, you're, you're kind of working with CIRA in one way or another.
[00:24:19] So it seemed like just a really smart tie in. Can you tell us a little more though? You said there's a puzzle a month. What's kind of the approach on that and do they get featured specially once you win the puzzle or what does that look like? Yeah, it was a natural
[00:24:35] Jeff Rogers: fit for us with Sierra just being branding.
[00:24:38] ca. We have a ca. C a domain that we registered through them. They actually reached out to us and said, listen, we'd love to be part of, of your game in some way. And we had not considered having branding and having a logo on there. And it's actually something that we, we started thinking, Hey, should we have more, but again, wanting that cleaner look and really just having a brand that aligns with the [00:25:00] style of our game, just made a lot of sense to keep Sierra as our, as our main sponsor.
[00:25:04] The word of the month is just another way to, to feature them every, Time you solve a puzzle. It always says powered by Sierra at the end of the word. So the people get some, they get some branding, some sort of cross promotion. The word of the month is really a way to have a fun fact tie to an initiative that Sierra is working on.
[00:25:23] So for example, last month we did the word grant. And then we talked about grants in Canada for various programs and then tied into CIRA's grant program that they're working on right now. So it's an opportunity for them to be featured and all of our daily users get a little bit of a tie into an initiative or a project or something cool that CIRA's working on.
[00:25:41] We love it because it's. You know, it's typically promoting a local Canadian business or getting accessible internet for everyone in Canada. And it just really aligns with the type of values and sort of pumping up things in Canada. And we really, we really like working with them.
[00:25:56] Nate Kadlac: I think it's great. One of the most unique.
[00:25:58] Ways to sponsor a [00:26:00] game I've I found was we talked to this gentleman who runs cloudle app I believe where you guess the temperature of a location and so you're kind of you're you're given little iconography to to guess the location based on the last five days and He was selling spot like people could come in and buy ad spot so that he would Sell spots to like, like you or I, and maybe I wanted to, I think he had someone who proposed on his daily game.
[00:26:31] And so they would share that game out with their friends and family. And it was like 50 bucks or something like that. And they could take over the game, which was kind of unique. I want to talk a little bit about design. You know, I really like, especially on your Canoku game, it seems like there's a lot of work that went into the iconography, the design and the branding a little bit, like what's the story there.
[00:26:50] Mark Rogers: That just started out as a fun idea to see if we could make some other games that were Canadian themed. I thought that the idea of trying to think like, how can we do other games? And so what's [00:27:00] another big game that people love to do Sudoku. And so I thought, okay, how can we make that Canadian? It's just numbers.
[00:27:05] But okay, turning them into images and then I had to think of all these images. So it was fun figuring out which images to do that are Canada. Try not to do like all sports and all like cold themed, but we tried to, you know, just spread it out into different things. Yeah. Building the, the image was just jumping into illustrator and having fun with creating those images and making them as Simple as you can but with but also like detailed enough that you can still tell it's it's something fun and Canadian And then yeah, it was just an idea that we had to bring in something like Sudoku but in a fun way that even kids can love to do so I have a five and a seven year old and My seven year old and my five year old too, they love playing the just four by four Canoku.
[00:27:51] So it's got a four by four game, a six by six game and a nine by nine grid that you can do. Each one of those has five difficulties. And so a four year old can play [00:28:00] it, but also someone who is an expert in Sudoku can play it. So it's, it's just been fun seeing the kids enjoy it, but also the veterans loving it too.
[00:28:08] Nate Kadlac: Yeah, that's fantastic. How long after Kanoko did you create?
[00:28:12] Jeff Rogers: Canoku launched October, I think, October, 2023. And so it was, I mean, about a year and a half after, and it was a year almost exactly after we relaunched Canuckle. So it was sort of, we were back, we were established and I think Jeff was getting bored and wanted to create something new.
[00:28:30] So it was like. Let's Canadianize another cool game. So it sort of fits in our theme of, of Canadian themed games. And who knows if we're going to build more, we have created or partnered with the Baycrest defy dementia team to sort of create a bit of a take on Konoku, but make, we made a brain health edition of that game.
[00:28:50] So it really just changed the emojis and some of the wording and text, but it was all, we worked with Dr. Allison Sekulor. It was. The lead on the Baycrest defy dementia team and [00:29:00] built this really cool version of Konoku to help keep minds active and reduce dementia risk, which was a big thing for us. Our grandmother suffered from that.
[00:29:08] So it was something that was like, Hey, let's use our powers for good. And we can, you know, launch this cool game and, and maybe it'll help people reduce dementia risks. So fun to see little things
[00:29:18] Aaron Kardell: like that as well. That's really great. We've heard a little bit. So you, you had kind of this unique partnership with CIRA.
[00:29:25] We've heard about cross game promotion partnerships, maybe with Waffle. Just on, on the broad topic of partnerships, are there other partnerships that you want to highlight or other things that you've seen work well?
[00:29:41] Jeff Rogers: Yeah, we talked about the merch, which I call a partnership because O'Canada Shop has been so established, and we sort of jumped on their brand.
[00:29:48] We've done two collab games with Waffle, which were really fun. It was an opportunity for us to get our game featured on Waffle, and for Waffle to send people to, for us to send, Canuckle folks to go and play [00:30:00] waffles. So really some fun opportunities to do. We did the same thing with Squirtle, which is great.
[00:30:05] Had a really good time. They did a fun Canadian themed puzzle and we pointed people there. We were at an opportunity to work with a Nerdle as well, which was great. They had a fun Canadian themed and we had a word that they. Send people to Nerdle. So we're really all about cross promotion and, and, you know, introducing people to new daily games, especially when we've now been a brand that's established that people want to connect with.
[00:30:28] And that's pretty cool and exciting for us to work with. One of the other things we worked on was proxy is a, an online sort of community driven map service. And. Built a map using Proxy's platform that was an opt in, you know, identify where you're playing from, where you're playing Canuckle around the world.
[00:30:46] And it's a really cool map. And every single person is represented by a bottle of maple syrup. So it's a map of maple syrup bottles all over the world. And it's actually really cool to see. It's, things like that, that, are certainly fun. We're, we're totally open to connecting and [00:31:00] promoting other games and working with lots of other online, developers.
[00:31:05] Nate Kadlac: I'm curious, just on the topic of collaboration, is that something that you generally reach out? Are you being approached for a lot of these partnerships? And I'd be curious, like, if you could partner with anybody right now, who would that be?
[00:31:17] Jeff Rogers: Oh, great question. It's been a bit of both. I'll let Jeff add to it as well.
[00:31:22] Like we've reached out to a few, like I certainly reached out to Waffle and connected with them. Squared will reach out to us, but it was sort of through Waffle. There's been a lot of sort of partnerships that have been just introduced by different folks. Certainly when we were featured on CTV News, that generated a bit of, Promo and hype that, that helped us sort of get some more recognition out there.
[00:31:42] And that might've helped, you know, for example, Sierra coming to us to partner. So yeah, there's certainly been a bit of both. I've absolutely loved to connect with the folks at New York times and Wordle and even start thinking about how could we introduce a fun fact in Wordle. And how could we sort of get some of the [00:32:00] features that we built into Canuckle as sort of an additional thing.
[00:32:03] We often get a lot of people saying to us, I play Wordle, and then I'm often waiting for that fun fact to come up. It's just sort of ends and there's nothing. So yeah, if I could pick a collab or some sort of feature, it'd be really fun to work with the puzzle editors at the New York times, what do you think, Jeff?
[00:32:18] Mark Rogers: And we've been talking to as well, some of the NHL teams. I don't know, like if you're at the game, they've got any intermission and things like that. Just a little game that pops up on the big screen and it's usually a fan that they're talking to it, you know, talk them through it to get a prize or whatever.
[00:32:33] And I thought it'd be really fun to just have a nice, simple Canuckle puzzle to put up there. That's a, you know, less than a minute to solve. And we talked to them and there was interest. We're going to go going back and forth. It'd be great and awesome if we could get at least the Canadian hockey teams involved in supporting Canuckle.
[00:32:51] That was one.
[00:32:52] Nate Kadlac: Well, I think the hockey game, that sounds like such a fantastic idea, especially when you were just showing me the mug and having me guess there. Like if you showed [00:33:00] three slides on the monitor and then they go around with a mic and say, can you solve the last one right in the crowd? That'd be so fun.
[00:33:06] Mark Rogers: That's right. It doesn't have to start with a blank puzzle. Like it could give you the first two or whatever, and then you have to figure it out from there super quick. And then maybe a little link that says, go here and you can play again. Yeah. That I thought would be the most fun.
[00:33:18] Jeff Rogers: It always comes back to hockey.
[00:33:20] You guys call it.
[00:33:23] Aaron Kardell: Well, I am from Minnesota and like, I like to say it's kind of South Canada here. So we, we like hockey. I like that. Are there any words so far that you just, that really stand out as like, Oh, that was so clever. I'm so happy with our choice.
[00:33:43] Mark Rogers: One for sure was, and it was at the beginning. So not a lot of users probably saw it, but it was funny.
[00:33:49] We did a boot. And, so it wasn't even an actual word is A B O O T and got us a lot of emails sent to us. They're [00:34:00] like, we don't say it like that. You guys must be American. What are you doing? Anyways. And so we got a lot of hate from that, but I thought it was really funny and clever, but people really didn't enjoy that.
[00:34:12] Jeff Rogers: I think my favorite one of all time is again, a controversial one. It was on April 1st. So April fools. A Canadian actually invented the whoopee cushion and we're like, that's a fantastic fun fact. How can we do this? So we ran the word farts and we got more mail that day on, you know, how could you run a word like this?
[00:34:33] And, you know, again, number one, it's April fools, which is fantastic, but it was all about the fun fact and tying it to the creator of the whoopee cushion. So I thought that was a pretty fun one. I think a lot of people really appreciated it, but certainly there were a few that were not so fan, not, not so.
[00:34:50] Much of a fan of it.
[00:34:51] Nate Kadlac: So are these games, for the most part, part time for you, neither of you are full time on these.
[00:34:58] Jeff Rogers: Is that right? That's right. This is [00:35:00] a spare time evenings, weekends, sorta when we can put the effort in. The nice thing about it is we can work on it and sort of bulk load and sort of batch a lot of the work.
[00:35:09] So it's. It's not a necessarily a daily effort other than, you know, responding to some emails here and interacting on social media. So that for the most part can happen, you know, spare time and, and off work hours, which is great.
[00:35:22] Nate Kadlac: Do you think about growth at all or is kind of where these games are at?
[00:35:26] Is this enough for you? And this is just a fun thing to have, or do you think about, are you actively thinking about how can we grow this even bigger? I'm curious where your mindset is with this.
[00:35:38] Mark Rogers: Yeah, in terms of growth, I mean, right now we're trying to figure out how we can keep it going for as long as we can, just to keep the content relevant and good and not starting to get a bit, whoa, they had a real stretch there on that one.
[00:35:51] That's our main focus right now. We've definitely talked in the growth spectrum, trying to figure out if we could. What could we do to maybe get some more users? Again, the collabs [00:36:00] help with that, maybe introducing new people into the, into the system. But, I mean, other than that, we're, we're pretty happy with where it is.
[00:36:06] We're pretty happy that it had any success, really. This started with just a, hey, you think we could do this? And, and then it spiraled into this.
[00:36:16] Jeff Rogers: I think it's naturally been growing too. It may have been slow, incremental growth, but consistent. And things like adding a merch line were something we never would have thought we'd be doing.
[00:36:26] And the fact that people are buying and supporting our game and wearing t shirts with our game name on it is pretty cool. So things like that, certainly that's been a big thing. Adding Konoku was, definitely a sort of a growth piece. It's not our main flagship game, but just sort of adding to the Canadiana and Canadian themed game portfolio, I think is a big piece.
[00:36:46] Like Jeff said, we have words to continue. We're going to keep it going. We had considered things like expanding to six letter words, which would open up quite a bit of things, quite a bit of additional words and puzzles for us. Even a Canuckle mini version, which could be four letter [00:37:00] words. But we think the sweet spot is still that classic five letter word game.
[00:37:04] And we want to keep that piece going as long as we can. At some point, we may consider Reusing some of the classic words and some of the original words that maybe people didn't play for the first 100, for example, when we didn't have as big of a following, and we might be able to reintroduce those words with a different fun fact, for example.
[00:37:22] So there may be sort of like a throwback sort of reference at some point where we start to bring that back, but we're pretty proud that so far we've had unique words every single day for almost two years, which is pretty exciting.
[00:37:34] Aaron Kardell: Do you happen to use AI at all to help on those daily fun facts or on, actual word selection?
[00:37:42] Jeff Rogers: Yeah, we played with this a little bit, right? So Jeff and I both have connected and, you know, started saying, you know, asking chat GPT to come up with suggestions for us. And it turns out it's not very creative and it's not great at coming up with even five letter words. It suggests a lot. Six letter words [00:38:00] and seven letter words.
[00:38:00] So it's not quite there from that perspective, but the one thing chat GPT in particular has been great for is, is building and elaborating and writing copy on, on fun facts. So that's something we've just started doing recently. Actually, a lot of the fun facts now. As Jeff mentioned before, we have to give a little bit more context to tie that word to Canada and give what that Canadian theme or Canadian flavour is.
[00:38:22] So that's been quite helpful and sort of, we can then curate some of that content. It's all about how you give the input into ChatGPT to get that type of fun facts sort of pared down. But that's certainly been helpful, I would say, and more recently in building some of that content out. But you really do have to have the words yourself.
[00:38:41] It's not coming up with words for you.
[00:38:43] Mark Rogers: Biggest thing too is, even if it gives you a really good fun fact, a lot of the time, it's just a made up fact that it thinks is real. So, it's, it said, oh, do blimp, the Canadian invention, and then you check, and it's like, nope, that's an American invention, and it's like, oh, sorry, my bad.
[00:38:59] So, [00:39:00] you gotta really do a lot of fact checking when you're using any AI.
[00:39:03] Jeff Rogers: Yes, we can't quite trust it yet. They're not ready to take over. Ha ha ha. We've played with, some other AI things though. SUNO AI was a, a recent one that we launched that actually created a theme song for Canuckle and for Kku, which is pretty fun.
[00:39:18] So that was a, a music themed ai. We created a, a very on the nose, Canuckle mascot. Totally. I dunno if you saw that or if you've, if you saw that on social media. But we created a moose holding a Tim Horton's cup with a two holding a hockey stick, like it was fantastic Canadian that you can throw at it.
[00:39:36] Yeah.
[00:39:37] Nate Kadlac: Just to be clear, you use Suno to create music, right? Or did you actually create Suno?
[00:39:41] Jeff Rogers: No, we didn't. We used Suno. Yes. We use Suno. We provided the inputs.
[00:39:46] Nate Kadlac: I was going to say, I'm like really a big fan of Suno.
[00:39:49] Jeff Rogers: Yeah. Suno is awesome. I get by on my research? Yeah. There's a lot of cool stuff that's out there.
[00:39:55] And to be honest, it's for the most part, it's, it's supplementary. It's on the side, sort of [00:40:00] fun, promotional type of things. But I think we would plan to use chat GPT a little bit more in some of the content and, and even, you know, things like writing copy for our newsletter and giving some ideas on, on some of that creativity part.
[00:40:11] I think there's, I love using tools like that if they can help us, right.
[00:40:14] Nate Kadlac: So you both have a, or maybe just one of you, but some mobile app experience, and I'm curious your decision to, from what I could tell, I did not find a mobile app. Have you ever thought about creating one or are you just kind of sticking with the web based games?
[00:40:29] Mark Rogers: Yeah, no, that was definitely a big conversation that we had. We had to figure out, okay, how do we want to launch this? We tried to, at the beginning, just emulate, you know, what Wordle was doing and have it just being a website web game. And we definitely talked about making a native app of it. We've built it right now in Flutter.
[00:40:45] So it has the ability to push out into a web or native as well. But I mean, we like the fact that you can just. Have it be a part of your daily games on your, on your web browser. I mean, people are doing wordle, they're doing all these things. They don't want to do [00:41:00] that and then jump out and have to go into a different app somewhere on their phone and all that.
[00:41:03] It's just, it's there. It's easy. They know the link. It's part of their routine. So it just makes it more accessible. I don't know. A lot of the time, an app, you might end up using it for a bit and then you forget about it, but. This just makes it be a nice, quick, easy way to get at it. No matter who you are, if you don't know how to use an app store, then you can still use to get to our game.
[00:41:21] So yeah, that's part of it.
[00:41:24] Jeff Rogers: Yeah. I think the other part is that the expediency of deploying to web is quite a bit better for us. We don't have to go through any approval processes through Apple or Google and going through their store. So. For us, we really wanted that, especially early on when we were tweaking and adding new features and making things, we really wanted that control.
[00:41:40] And we had that in being able to push to that web, it did mean that we had to accommodate browsers from 1998 and, you know, phones from, from 2004 and people who are holding onto devices that are still playing, but as Jeff said, quite accessible, we've got. Text to speech, built in, we've got, accessible [00:42:00] colors for accessibility modes, all similar to what Wordle has.
[00:42:03] And we've built all of that in as well. And that's a big part of it as well. And I think we have that control with within as a web application.
[00:42:09] Aaron Kardell: Looking back, are there any big learnings that you have in terms of getting the word out on the game? Obviously you've done some cross promotion, but could even be a learning of, well, that didn't work, but are there things that you could share from that experience?
[00:42:24] Mark Rogers: Yeah, I mean, one of the biggest things earlier on was getting it on the news, especially during COVID. I mean, people wanted to know something that they could do because they're just sitting at home. That was one of the biggest things that kind of spiked up a bunch of users early on. So yeah, I get that was an easy way to get the word out because we didn't have to do it.
[00:42:42] The newscast did that. So, and it ended up being, I think it was on, it started CTV News, Ottawa. And anyways, there was a link on their website. So anyone in. That's looking on CTV news, was able to, to look at that and get it.
[00:42:55] Jeff Rogers: And we were lucky it got picked up nationally. So it got picked up across all the CTV news [00:43:00] stations across the country.
[00:43:01] And for sure that we, we went into the studio and played the game live as well on CTV morning live. So that was pretty nice way to help promote it. I would say social media certainly helped us. Because of all the sharing of the scores. And, and we had a lot of prominent Canadians start playing like Chantal Kraviazik started playing, Rafi, if you know who Rafi is from, children's music, he's played at Postas scores.
[00:43:24] We've got pretty big following online and I've had some, you know, prominent followings and retweets from Nahid Nenchi in Alberta, Brittle Star, Rick Mercer follows us. So there's a lot of fun promotion that's helped there. When we launched our merch, we reached out to a lot of these famous Folks and sent them some hoodies and t shirts and that's helped as well.
[00:43:43] I think just sort of get the word out. So really as much of that sort of online community building that we've done through like things like our monthly newsletter and sort of sharing all that information. I think that's really helped a lot. I'm trying to think of things that didn't work though. Jeff, what are some of the, the failures or things we've learned [00:44:00] from as we've gone
[00:44:01] Mark Rogers: through?
[00:44:01] Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's, it's also hard to tell like what didn't work cause. I mean, you don't see the potential users that don't actually end up going to the website, right? It's just for us, it's, it's nice, constant stream. There's not really like a big thing we've tried to do that that didn't really go very well.
[00:44:19] I mean, we went on a neighborhood parade to Mark's neighborhood and And tried to get the word out. We had to like float and everything for Canuckle. I mean, we didn't see a big gain of users. So we're talking about success. It was more fun to do that than, than have it be a, a get the word out. And I mean, just jumping on, on Wordle success, the way that they were successful was that people were sharing every day and being like, Oh look, I got this, I got, I got three and today I got it in three today and they're spreading the word out that way, that was one of the biggest successes earlier on too.
[00:44:49] Jeff Rogers: Yeah, I'd agree with that. I think that's been the big thing for us is that sharing we ran a couple of ad campaigns through through Facebook and Twitter X just to try and run some [00:45:00] campaigns, especially when our merch launched and different things. We didn't see a lot of traction from that. Like, you know, you get it.
[00:45:05] Click. So you get different things that run, but for the most part, it's been word of mouth. you know, I think we've sort of peaked out now at, you know, the people who are playing now are the people that have been playing for a long time. Like we've got a core group right now that they know what they're getting.
[00:45:20] They're coming for the fun fact, they're coming for a secondary wordle game that gives them another sort of brain exercise in the morning. And that's the best thing about it is people, Still talk about it. They still share. It's still going. I mean, who would have thought this many months, weeks, days after the pandemic and the peak craze that people are still playing a word game.
[00:45:40] I mean, but you look at that compared to, you know, a daily jumble or the daily crossword and people do that every day and that's still going. So it's exciting to see that that's happening. And I think it just will continue to just naturally be promoted by people sharing it and continue to come back.
[00:45:56] Nate Kadlac: I believe are in public service and I'm [00:46:00] curious how you've given back through the games that you've built through Canuckle.
[00:46:03] What are some of the things that you've that you've done or sponsored?
[00:46:06] Jeff Rogers: Yeah, we were fortunate enough to be able to sponsor a local Canada Day event in Riverside South in my neighborhood here in Ottawa. It's something that I've been part of and we thought it was a perfect theme to be able to align with the The Canada Day festivities by, by sponsoring it with a Canadian word game.
[00:46:22] So happy to, to be able to have sponsored that. And we're also able to sponsor a local minor hockey team that our nephew plays on. So really excited to, to see that Canuckle name on the back of his jersey. And, and pretty fun that, again, that game that we created is, allowed us to be able to sponsor a hockey team.
[00:46:42] So excited about that.
[00:46:43] Mark Rogers: There's also been some words throughout and some coming up actually where it's kind of spurred up some interest within ourselves to say, Hey, you know what? We should donate to that. So there's been some like great causes that are in our fun facts. And then in the end, we're like, we should like ask Canuckle or put a donation [00:47:00] into that to build awareness.
[00:47:01] And anyways, it's been fun having that and stuff that we wouldn't know unless we were doing this research and trying to get it out there. So,
[00:47:09] Jeff Rogers: Absolutely. That, that philanthropic angle is awesome for being able to raise awareness and promote things. for example, the Terry Fox run happened last year and we did a word that aligned with Terry and we, we would, in the fun fact, drop a link to donate.
[00:47:23] So if we can do anything to sort of raise that type of promotion and, and raise awareness for people to say, Hey, if you're able and you could donate to support this cause, it's fun to be able to, to raise awareness in that way through our game. That's fantastic. and
[00:47:37] Nate Kadlac: really great to hear. If people wanted to find you online and say hello or give feedback, where might they find you?
[00:47:45] Jeff Rogers: So you can find us on all the social platforms at Canuckle Game. Our website is canucklegame. ca. You can definitely reach out to us via email through the game, or you can tag us or message us on any of the social media platforms and [00:48:00] one of us will respond. Well, we appreciate you being here. Thanks for having us.
[00:48:03] Mark Rogers: Awesome. Thanks for having us.
[00:48:05] Jeff Rogers: That's the pod.
