Aaron Kardell: [00:00:00] I noticed on some of the puzzles, it's almost there's an obvious, it could be this, or it could be that. And it was any of that intentional and how you fed the LLM, or is that just a happy coincidence? What I did was like,
Nate Kadlac: welcome to the Hey, good game podcast, where we chat with the creators of your favorite games that you secretly play in the cracks of your day. So we just got done chatting with Osebo. Who's really a great game designer, game developer. He's working at Castle. He's building couples. game. For me, I just, I loved just hearing his passion around this modern idea of building and involving cursor.
ai in his tech stack and thinking through paper prototyping, using AI to help code and then launching. And it just made it feel really lightweight compared to maybe the traditional way of building. Aaron, what did you find interesting in [00:01:00] that interview?
Aaron Kardell: Yeah, I'd echo what you said. I think his ability to go from concept to actual realized working prototype quickly was really inspiring.
And I think it is good fodder as some of our game creators think through how they create their next game. So onto the pod.
Nate Kadlac: I'm Nate Kadlac and I'm here with my cohost, Aaron Kardell. And today we are so thrilled to speak with Osebo, a designer at castle. xyz. His career in design has led him to working for companies like Tumblr, Oculus, VR, and Nike, where he had worked on releases like Fortnite, Tekken, and many more. He also powers independent radio stations through Evenings.
fm, a live audio streaming platform. Castle is a mobile game engine and social experience platform with more than 10 million downloads. With it, users can play various games, create their own using the simple yet powerful [00:02:00] editor. And socialize with other users inside the app. He and his partner also created couples.
game, a chain guessing game that refreshes every single day. Osebo, we're so excited that you're here. Thanks so much for having me. we, usually kick things off. I'm really curious. What is your favorite game to play these days?
Osebo Akhigbe: It ranges. I'll break this down into mediums. So I think I spoke to you about this before, but Zach Gage, I'm a fan of.
So my partner and I, she loves like crosswords and. different kind of word puzzle games. During the holidays, we actually went to Giant or Safeway, like the grocery store and picked up a bunch of magazine puzzle games that I'm not sure if people play as much back in the day, but I think are still quite relevant.
But I mentioned Zach Gage because I bought his crossword books. So we've been, working through those. To be honest, I'm not actually the best crossword [00:03:00] player, but I've been trying to get better. Bye. My partner, she smokes me a thumb, so I'm getting my reps in so I can get a bit better and hopefully complete them without having to get hints as much.
On console, so I have a Switch, and I've been also playing the PS5 a bit at some of my friend's houses, but mainly just play the Switch in terms of console, and I've been playing, you all know Bill Basso, I think that's how you pronounce his name, people butcher mine, so I think I get a free pass. But Animal Well, which is like a survival puzzle platformer that I've been, I haven't played through fully yet, but there's a lot of secrets and the art style is incredible.
So that's been a fun one to work through. I've also been playing just a lot of roguelikes generally. I would say that's probably my favorite genre. So I've been playing a bit of like vampire survivors, which is like a roguelite horror kind of casual game. Yeah, and then on mobile, [00:04:00] I would say, yeah, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't playing Bellatro, but I am, I'm definitely a fan of local funk.
I appreciate the pseudonymous, like anonymity and the way they've been releasing their games. And I think it's interesting that apparently You know, they were working this Zamboni job and grinding through making the game over a few years. So it's quite humbling to see that one, he released it solo, while also learning like sound design, art and programming all along the way and creating probably one of the best games of 2024.
But I actually listened to a podcast that he was featured in and he mentioned the game, Luck be a landlord. And it's like the slot machine roguelike that has this mechanic where you essentially roll the slot machine to get coins and the coins that you get after spinning you use to pay your rent.
[00:05:00] And I live in New York, I'm also facing some landlord issues right now, so the game has felt quite relevant to me. I'm gonna also say, I don't know if you all played Slice and Dice as well, the eggplant has pretty good, gameplay. Deep dive on that game, but it's like a dice battle roguelike That i've really appreciated it.
I was playing that earlier in the year, but i'd say that Bolachos definitely taken president a bit more very quickly Also two others I have to mention that I do play one in an asynchronous context which is like chess. com definitely spend a lot of time playing that and In New York, there's a lot of like chess culture has really picked up in like a social context, which is really interesting.
It's sexy now to have like chess kind of meetup events where some of them, there's a focus on chess. Some of them less so There was a chess group that collaborated with [00:06:00] Margiela, which is interesting. One other that I'll say, one other medium I have to talk about VR and Horizon Worlds, I can't say that I play all the experiences in Horizon Worlds and I'm biased, but, Super Rumble has been a lot of fun to play.
It's like this, it's this. Team Deathmatch, sorry, not Team Deathmatch, it's a battle royale style game where you essentially have an assortment of weapons that you can pick up and power ups to essentially win the round based on a point system. So that's been a really fun one and seeing the progression of that game from its original, which was Arena class.
So it's been the predecessor of that.
Nate Kadlac: There's actually a bunch of games you just gave me, I need to go research and play myself. So thank you. I am curious about one, one thing you said though, the, resurgence in, New York around chess meetups and things like that. Cause I guess I always imagined that was always the case.
What has [00:07:00] changed?
Osebo Akhigbe: Yeah. When you say that, you imagine that it's always the case. I think I understand what you mean in the sense that you go to the park and people playing pick up kind of chess in a way. And a lot of those people are very good and just swindle the average tourist. out of 20 and whatnot, maybe, but also more casually just playing, one on one, but there's a resurgence in a very like social context.
Like people will host these chess meetups that used to be more like intimate and casual and these venues where there's literally like a line to get in to go and play chess quote unquote, because I think sometimes it's. not always about the chess for some of the people who attend. It's more so like a social scene, if that makes sense.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah, it does. thinking, I'm curious, like where in your life games became a [00:08:00] thing for you? did you grow up around them? Do you play like, what's your kind of history and story and relationship with games in general?
Osebo Akhigbe: So I'm from DC, Maryland, and I was introduced to games initially through my father.
We don't have a close relationship. But growing up, we, he got me like a PlayStation, the original, and I would always like go to friends places and play the Nintendo 64. So some of my earliest memories were with those two consoles. I would play games like Frogger, and we played Tekken, often, like that was he loved Tekken, so we would just spend a lot of time playing that game, having, the versions that persisted through the original PlayStation 2, 3, and so forth.
But I also got into computer games, would spend a lot of time playing Roller Coaster Tycoon, things like that, but [00:09:00] also, I think where it really got deep for me was, playing games like RuneScape and World of Warcraft. I remember in school that we had a club where I remember our science teacher would take us on these like raids, or not raids, sorry, take us to the wilderness and RuneScape where we'd go, he was a relatively high level and had like full dragon and whatnot and would go around like looting and helping us like level up as individuals.
I remember that was a game that was pretty formative for me, but a certain point, I actually remember vividly how I stopped playing. I stopped playing because as someone who was naive, I was standing in the bank and someone who is a scammer then said, Hey, if you say your password out loud, then it will show up in stars.
Me having worked on my account for a while, I said my password and within seconds I was logged out. And I remember chasing them down. I leveled up a new account, chased them down, like screaming at them to give me my old [00:10:00] account back. And I think I, I said a few things that were not very nice and ended up getting banned.
Or that account at least. So that was the end of my RuneScape journey. I also did play D& D a bit and it was, it's within the same realm of the other games that I mentioned, RuneScape and World of Warcraft, but D& D is an interesting one because, there's a story on this where I had a D& D book that I think my mom donated, but someone who, So I worked at an agency that I ended up collaborating with.
They had messaged me on Facebook independently with my name written out in the book, and it was interesting because I, didn't realize that this book had been like sold off. So someone's messaging me saying hey, You're asking to return this D& D book. Is this your book? And I was like, no, but it like very clearly was my name.
And [00:11:00] as we were talking about before, I don't think there's anyone else who really has my name. So they're like, are you sure? And I was like, yes. But then I think five or six years later, I messaged them again saying Hey, that was totally my book. And they're like, wow, you really, came back for it that long after you'd been thinking about it.
But yeah, those are the games that were most formative for me and I think it's especially like World of Warcraft and like RuneScape probably were the seeds that kind of planted my interest in like social gaming.
Nate Kadlac: I know you have a really strong background in design, really sleuthed a little bit and really cool to see what you're working on, but did you ever, was designed in front end Your main area of interest, did you ever get into programming at all? Or I'm curious about, how you view games and maybe it's even leading up to what you're doing today, but what is that intersection for you?
Osebo Akhigbe: [00:12:00] So I went to school for fine arts and information systems. I, actually started with computer science, but then I switched because I wasn't able to also pick up the fine arts.
I wanted to do both. And at the time, the, I went to school in DC and the school didn't have a concrete kind of like interaction design kind of focus, which is what I was ultimately interested in. What was cool about the fine arts focus was I was able to choose an assortment of classes as long as they like constituted like art.
So I just chose like a bunch of computer animation, illustration, and graphic design courses. So that's where I got that foundation. And then my information systems focus also helped me pick up a lot of like programming kind of related classes. So the two work together super well. And at the time I had actually started my work doing, working at like [00:13:00] a local agency that was In D.
C. And that's where I really was able to focus on like craft, like that kind of environment. You work with a ton of different clients, all different needs, you're doing everything from branding to editorial, to web design, to like mobile design. So it was a great way for me to just go really deep and refine my design talent.
And, but I think that environment, it was great, but I actually quickly learned I like to just focus on one particular area and just go like deep. So I ended up working at a company called Splash in New York, where they make event webpages, or they have a tool that allows you to make about webpages.
I was a designer there and I enjoyed working on those products, but one person that ended up joining Splash had actually previously worked at Tumblr. And that's when I just hearing their experience working on it, [00:14:00] I realized, Oh, like that's the type of work that I am most interested in, like working on social systems.
So Yeah. Earlier on, I ended up working at Tumblr and it was an experience that was quite formative. I worked on an assortment of things from the way people post on Tumblr, like the camera and post composer and kind of messaging features and whatnot. Was
Nate Kadlac: this post Yahoo acquisition?
Osebo Akhigbe: Yeah. So this was right after the Yahoo acquisition and it was an interesting time because.
Yeah, the lineage of Tumblr is interesting because Yahoo had been bought by Verizon Media Group, who then rebranded to Oath. And I remember there was a time where they were asking people to write down their oath, which was, Tumblr is a group of people who are Seen kid ask, and it was not, of interest to many people.[00:15:00]
But then Oath had a moment where they were like in our notebooks, but yeah, then they were like, Hey, we are going to pull back our cloak and, we're Verizon media group again. Yeah. So that was an interesting journey at the company I had left at that point, but then they also sold the company. They sold Tumblr for, I think, like 2 million to Automatic, who is now the current owner of it.
God knows how that's going, but yeah, I started working on like social networking stuff at Tumblr, but that kind of led to me then joining. Facebook, I actually started off working on pages. I was working on like a redesign of the Facebook page and other stuff that was compelling at the time, like how pages connected the rest of the Facebook app ecosystem, like Instagram and whatnot.
But at the [00:16:00] same time, I was very gung ho about VR. I worked on some social VR kind of experiments at Tumblr, specifically like web VR. They were very exploratory. It wasn't something that the company was probably going to like really prioritize, but it was a fun way to figure out what these social systems could be in more of a spatial context, and it continued on when I joined Facebook because at Facebook, there was a group in Oculus that was focusing on essentially how you can create VR animations.
There was like a whole scene of Virtual animation happening. So Google had its own version called like Tilt Brush in addition to another tool called Google Blocks. Both of them are, their Tilt Brush was open source, Google Blocks was discontinued. And there's another company called Gravity Sketch that focuses on something similar, but more so for like product design.
So Nike uses it for like footwear as well as like Puma. And [00:17:00] there's automotive companies that use it for like Ford and whatnot for more like conceptual design. But that, those types of tools are really interesting to me because it focused on this theory of people creating within the medium that the product will be experienced in.
you're creating for VR, you should be able to design in VR, or like you're creating a real world product. You should be able to see it as quickly as possible in 3D. And I think there's, 2D tools that kind of have, the same thesis, right? Castle is one of them, where if you're designing in 3D, Games for, if you're creating a game for the phone, you should be able to design it on your phone and, play is the same thing for mobile apps, but there was a group specifically, this person named Inigo Quiles, who is brilliant.
He also started this. Project called Shader Toy that he's been upkeeping for a while. But he had built Quill during a hackathon where he worked with a guy named Goro Fujita, who essentially creates these co illustrations every single day. He's a [00:18:00] prolific animator, but they had partnered together and Inigo made a tool that Goro could then use to make these really compelling VR animations.
And when I saw this, I was very blown away being able to just like instantly see an animation in VR and also edit it and create it. Play it back. And I was able to get access to this tool that allowed these animations. Cause it they lived inside Quill. You could export them as FBX animations, which I was able to do, but there was also tooling that allowed you to they're quite heavy, they had a lot of like geometry, but allowed them to render quickly in Unity.
So I created a kind of like social VR museum of. virtual animations, pulling them from like Quill, Tilt Brush, Google Blocks, and some other tools. And there was someone else doing this at the time. It was called the More. We were the only two people [00:19:00] doing it. I was working at Facebook at the time.
This was like a project that I started and I'd sent it to a few friends who were working at Oculus and they were really like blown away by it. And Indigo ended up like getting access to it as well. And it was fun just like walking around because it was social. So you could have. I think up to 20 people like in a scene just walking around and like viewing animations and scaling themselves up and scaling themselves down and being able to move through very like micro parts of the, of each animation of each artwork.
And it was something that Inigo was really compelled by because the way the company was thinking about viewing these animations is more so in like a 2D context, like you essentially have a panel where you can flip through these different animations. And it was something that Inigo was really compelled by because the way the company was thinking about viewing these animations is more so in like a 2D context, like you essentially have a panel where you can flip through these different animations Zooming like into them and you view them in 3D context and zoom back out.
But it worked against the initial theory of if you're creating for 3D, view them in 3D. So I think the viewing experience should also be the same, which led to the museum. So long [00:20:00] story short, I joined the, what became like the Oculus Media team. Initially, I actually wanted to work on Quill, but at the same time, a friend and coworker, Matt Schaefer had joined, who was an incredible like VR animator.
He also came from like architecture. Truly talented person had just joined and there was room for me to contribute, but I felt that there was something more compelling. And another part of the org, which was related, but different, which was Oculus venues. I ended up joining as the design lead for Oculus venues.
And there's a lot that I can dig into there.
Aaron Kardell: So yeah, fast forwarding a bit professionally, these days you're involved with Castle mobile game engine. What did you mean when you said Castle is a cognition gym?
Osebo Akhigbe: Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, that was a tweet that I posted recently. I felt that a lot of the tools, specifically they're not even tools, but a lot of games that we see [00:21:00] nowadays are kind of things that you play in a mindless context and right now in a world where LLMs are increasingly taking away our autonomy to think, I felt that we are now more than ever in need of more like cognition gems and I think that a lot of these daily games are ones that encourage thought.
Castle is not a daily game, but it is a place where you can create tons of different games and the tools that Castle currently provides, the editor, is one where a lot of people, primarily in Gen Z, Gen Alpha, are using these tools to create games so We have our own abstracted programming system that allows people to create scripts, and you can also write Lua, but it teaches you some of those basics in addition [00:22:00] to using art and sound.
There's a DAW in Castle to create games, so it felt like something that really strengthened the mind and allowed us to help people think. So I see Cognition Gems as something that is really important now, and Castle is something that fits into that category of
Aaron Kardell: I'm curious, tell me more about the team at, Castle.
Is it, what's the team makeup like?
Osebo Akhigbe: yeah, Castle is small. It's about nine of us and yeah, I'm a designer. Charlie Cheever is the CEO and there's also David Cole, who's an incredible designer who co founded, head of design of Castle. He was one of the people who brought me on. And, I think holistically our mission is.
there's a lot of interpretations, but going back to the cognition gem, ideally we're making people more, we don't want people to be cognitively scrawny. We [00:23:00] want people to create games and ones that are both enriching and thought provoking and really speak to the culturals like us. But I think that, yeah, the team is made up with, of, David Lucas, another person who actually started working on Castle primarily through making games on Castle.
He actually. with someone that was recruited because he was making incredible games on Castle. And eventually we ended up bringing him on. And then we have a few other programmers who work on building the engine, work on building our social systems. What's also compelling about the design team on Castle is that like we all have chops in terms of how to program.
So a lot of us, and when I say a lot of us, all of us do directly contribute to the code base to some extent. While also like making content in Castle. And designing them as well in tools like Figma and whatnot.
Nate Kadlac: One thing when even just downloading the app, [00:24:00] at least the iOS app on my phone, going through the onboarding process and just how interactive the process was just to let you in the door where many of these could have just been graphic splash screens, large screens.
The zipper, the sound, the tactile feel. It creates this experience as soon as you get in the door. And I'm curious, what kind of games do you, are you hoping to see in the world that people make from this experience?
Osebo Akhigbe: Yeah, it's a good question. So right now on Castle of Ares, There's a lot of, there's millions of games and people have the tools and autonomy to really make anything and what's interesting is that the type of content that you see on Castle usually equates to social trends or like just trends in gaming, like you'll see a lot of FNF games, like Funky Nights.
Fun and flappy bird as games. We have different kits that you can use as a starting point to [00:25:00] make different games. So like we have a roguelike kit, we have a golf kit, those types of games are pretty popular on the platform. So we've created those kits as a way to see the type of content that we want to see.
But we also instilled this genre system as a way to create different segmentations of interest groups on the platform. So we have a genre for people who are interested in creating art. We have a genre for people that are interested in creating like horror games and so forth. So I think there's, we use it as a way to see the types of content that we want to see, but I think ultimately like personalization is super important because we actually ran this experiment where we're like, Oh, we know like the types of games that are best for our community.
So let's like make sure those games are the first ones that you see as you swipe through the feed. And there's three kind of canned ones or programmed ones that we. Hard coded ones, but after those, we gave people these [00:26:00] games that we thought were great. And very quickly, we actually saw that it didn't do too well with our retention, which made us realize that a lot of our community does want to see these games, or we call them decks, that maybe you could actually constitute as like brain rot.
I don't know how, familiar you all are with that term. It was like Oxford Dictionary is a word of the year. Last year it was Riz. I guess 2023 it was Riz, but you can qualify it as this low effort kind of content that is popular amongst Gen Z and Gen Alpha that is related to like meme ticks, but really it's something that I see as a reflection of internet culture today.
So I think like on Castle you'll see a mix of that type of content, then quote unquote like the good stuff that I would say is as someone who makes games or is looking for certain types of games. You'll be able to find [00:27:00] that puzzle platformer roguelike or golf game and so forth.
Nate Kadlac: I'm always curious about the percentage of, creators versus players on a platform like this.
is it there's statistics for most things. It's like one to 3 percent actually create and the rest consume. what is it for castle?
Osebo Akhigbe: It's definitely. There are more players than there are creators, but creators, in terms of time spent, are dominating. People love creating on Castle, and there's more systems that we're thinking about that will turn players into creators through collaborating, and I think I mentioned we have this function that allows you to Remix decks or games that people create, which makes it easier for people to get into that creator mode, within castle.
Nate Kadlac: That's cool. And then I haven't, looked, but how does castle monetize? Is it through the tools that it creates and do people pay for that or.
Osebo Akhigbe: Yeah, it's something that we're going to dig into a bit more this year. We've been really focused on [00:28:00] first making the creator experience one that is quite potent, one that allows people to create compelling games.
We over the last kind of A few months and going into this year, we've been focusing on the player experience a bit more. And, but right now you can buy these things called bricks and bricks are like the in game currency of Castle and you can use bricks to boost your deck so more people can see it. But you can also gift bricks to other people.
You can imagine in the future, people will be able to use bricks to buy things in the editor. So you can like, if there's a game objects that you can use or scripts that you can use or sound Need to use for your game. You'll be able to like use bricks to buy those things and You can imagine them using a lot of other related kind of contexts.
Nate Kadlac: So moving on to your, the game that you created with your partner, I heard that, is it true that you prototyped this game while en route to Jamaica?
Osebo Akhigbe: prototyping is an [00:29:00] interesting word just because when I say prototyping, I actually, we prototyped to a pen and paper and I think a lot of people equate prototyping with software, but sometimes you can just, you don't actually need a computer to prototype.
It was, we were on the way to Jamaica for a friend's wedding. And it was a friend that I used to work with at Oculus. We were on the plane and Z, my partner, she showed me this trend that was happening on TikTok, these word chains, but it actually originated with the game show chain reaction, and we spent the whole flight just like writing them down and really tweaking the mechanics to figure out okay, should it be like, Four words, five words, six words, seven words.
seven felt too hard, but five was too easy. And six created this dynamic where the third and fourth word felt like stragglers that you had to work towards. And. Then we were prototyping like this live system [00:30:00] where we would pass the paper back and forth. And she would say, Oh, you got it wrong.
And then fill out the letters that were right. And then say, Oh, but you lost a life. Like you didn't get the full puzzle right. And yeah, we played on the flight to the wedding and on the flight back. And immediately after I was like, okay, I want to quickly build this. So we can both play.
And when I sent it to her, I think she was pretty impressed at how quickly I was able to make it. Also with the caveat that I did use cursor a bit, which is a tool or ID with an L on the side, which really expedited the process of building this game, and I think that we are in an era where increasingly so obviously people will be using these types of tools to make games of this nature, but she felt relatively good about the way it felt.
I actually added a point system. That she was originally talking about, but I sent it a few other people shortly after, and they didn't fully understand the point system. So we ended up taking out and just [00:31:00] focusing on having three lives and the three lives equated to three missing couples or pairs of words that you're trying to fill out.
And after that, we continue to text the people. It was like one of the first things that I worked on where. My mom was really excited about playing and she was like sending emails about her score and other people are like, It's always a good sign. Yeah. The mom test. Exactly. Like she, she has an Oculus and it just sits under one of her desks and I'm like, you're not even using this.
let me give this to someone else. And she's no, I use it. I swear. But I don't believe her. She plays couples often and other people would be like, Oh, I sent this to my grandma. And it was just a really good sign that it was something that was worth sharing more broadly. I tweeted about it and I also realized that on TikTok and YouTube, some people started posting about it daily.
And I'm sure maybe you [00:32:00] are familiar with this, but the idea of like word talk, which is this community of people who just share. daily game on TikTok, but there was someone named Brian who was posting about it pretty consistently and I joined his discord and saw that people were frequently sharing their scores, which was really incredible to see.
And yeah, it's something that I realized like in retrospect, given this trend on TikTok, it made sense that people within this community on TikTok would Really eat this up. It even made its way to Elizabeth S who was the person who, coined the emoji grid that led to wordle going viral that Josh wordle implemented into his game.
So it's also cool seeing her play it. And she even posted on blue sky saying if I was paid for every time someone uses the emoji grid, I'd be rich, which is definitely true. And I wish. She could be paid for it, but I'm also okay with her playing and [00:33:00] continuing to evangelize the game.
Aaron Kardell: I think it's really well done.
I think one of the first questions I always have on things like this is In creating this game obviously use cursor to help Build it, which that's great. We're hearing more and more about the use of AI and that puzzle generation wise, are you and, or your partner or others you're getting help from manually building every day's puzzle or what's the inspiration for that?
Do you have that down to an algorithm? What's that look like?
Osebo Akhigbe: Yeah. So I've been thinking a lot about like the idea of a new newspaper game, newspaper games are just like things that people. We're playing the newspaper. And I think of a new one as ones that exist online, like a daily game.
And I think that a new newspaper game should use ideally be playable by everyone, including the creator. And that now could be very possible in most contexts through LLMs. And, Wordle is one example where he has a massive list of words that [00:34:00] it's possible for him to anticipate what the word will be given the gameplay, but that is not true for a lot of games.
So for couples to make it so I could play, we started by making a word list that I. manually inputted, but if you know the first and the last, like it's pretty easy to, if you've seen the word list, you probably know what the answer will be. So what I ended up doing was using an LLM to create a word document and list that I would not look at that it would generate hundreds of these.
So that's allowed me to play the game in perpetuity. And it's something that I think, we'll see with crosswords. I also tweeted recently about how we're talking about AGI, but still, LLMs can't create a good crossword puzzle. It can solve them, but it still can't create them, given, there's so much nuance with crossword puzzles.
But I think we will get to that point, and I, maybe people have different opinions about this. I am excited for that point. But yeah, I [00:35:00] think these sorts of games should be playable by the creator. I think that they should be like fun alone, but better together. For example, local multiplayer is something that is not as prevalent now, given console games are not.
as popular because people are playing on their phones, but the fact that at my Thanksgiving table and everyone is looking at the same puzzle and guessing what it will be, that same behavior is on TikTok where someone will be playing couples and like people are in the comments guessing what the words will be like, that to me is also an example of local multiplayer that's asynchronous.
And then as I said originally before, pen and paper, the fact that you can play the game of pen and paper is really. Important because it means that it's simple enough to where the natural kind of mechanic is something that Tangible and easy to grok, but putting it on a computer is, it just augments the core mechanic.
Aaron Kardell: there's two super [00:36:00] interesting themes in there to me. One is how can I make a game that's interesting still for me to play? I think that's really intriguing. And also we talked to a lot of word game creators and I think I've seen very few cases where like an algorithmically generated game is It's very different when you get into like puzzle or math games, but word games are just super hard historically to generate.
So I think this is an exciting new territory. It's, exciting to hear that's something you were able to. Pursue and find a path forward on, I was going to ask in that, is there a way that I noticed on some of the puzzles? It's almost there's an obvious, it could be this, or it could be that.
And it was any of that intentional and how you fed the LLM, or is that just a happy coincidence?
Osebo Akhigbe: I would like to say that it was intentional. What I did was I came up with a ton of them and just kept giving them examples. So [00:37:00] maybe what I gave influenced that, but I will say that. It was able to create some versions that were very nuanced.
I will say that people have also given feedback that actually literally yesterday, someone sent an email about puzzle 65, which. The answer was questionable and it certainly was. So from that, I did have to go back and just like double checked that everything was okay. But for the most part, I think it's been pretty smooth and there's new models that are coming out that are more intelligent and I think it'll just make it easier for us to create more puzzles of the sort I'll also say that.
We're getting to a point where, people have also mentioned that you can guess both compound words and phrases. And that's also been a tricky one with getting the rules correct, where you, [00:38:00] ideally, you have one singular goal and the answer to the puzzle is related to that goal. And having both compound words and phrases makes that a bit tricky, but I do think that it adds a little bit more nuance to the game.
It's a controversial take, but we have gotten feedback around that too.
Aaron Kardell: you just, made me feel way better specifically on puzzle 65. I've played, three so far and that was one I lost. So, thank you. There are people in the Tik TOK community talking about this. What are some other ways you're getting the word out and what's the uptake so far?
Osebo Akhigbe: Yeah. a lot of it has just been pretty organic. Yeah. Posting it on socials, texting it to people. Blue sky. Also, there seems to be, X's. going through all sorts, and I would love to spend more time on Blue Sky, X, I have been on there for [00:39:00] years, so I have more of a network there, obviously.
But Blue Sky, there seems to be more people actually like sharing, couples and other word games, so for any word game creators, I would highly recommend checking out Blue Sky, because there's a pretty early community who's really interested in this sort of stuff. And when I say early community, it's the same behavior as you see on X, but they're moving over to, blue sky, which is great to see.
Aaron Kardell: And what are you finding so far in terms of like how many people are coming to this daily or do you have stats like this?
Osebo Akhigbe: Yeah. Yeah. We, we set up basic Google analytics and right now it's in the thousands, but I haven't really checked it as. I've been like pretty interested in one, creating more daily games that kind of link to couples, if that makes sense.
So thinking about, I like the idea of like looking at existing communities of games that people are playing and [00:40:00] creating remixes, remixes of those. So I've been experimenting with that, but also tapping into platforms that increase the distribution of games like this. So looking at things like Discord activities.
I'm really, I love the work that the people of like Echo Chess have done and then even just like building it within other platforms that are that are related, but will help with broadening a network around it. So Castle is like a really, we've been thinking a lot about how to enable daily games in Castle.
Nate Kadlac: I'm curious, like how do you, think about talking to people? And it sounds like a lot of it's word of mouth. Do you have? Absolutely. Have you ever thought about setting up a discord or a community chat around this game? Or is this just more, Hey, send me email feedback and, let's chat about it.
Osebo Akhigbe: I thought about setting up a discord at one point, but it felt too mature to do for what it was. Like it was very much a, cause we even had like [00:41:00] agents reach out saying Hey, we'd love to create content around this game. Like we'd love to talk to your team. And it's Oh no, it's not. I guess if you call me and Zia team, then that's our team.
But Discord felt like it was in that realm. But I also noticed that, so Brian, one of the people who was posting the game, he has this Discord called Brian's Beach Party. And I noticed that a lot of people will share the game results in that Discord. So There was something interesting about that dynamic already existing, and us creating our own Discord obviously will help us grow our community.
We have a, an email signup kind of thing, so eventually if we get to the point where we want to do something like that, then we can. But there was something fun just about Brian having his Discord where everyone is playing and I'm just a part of that. And hopefully there's like other, there's one other discord I found too, but it's not as active as Brian.
So there's something fun about just seeing it exist on other networks instead of really focusing on having our [00:42:00] own, not saying that we don't want to do that. I think that could happen eventually, but just want to take baby steps.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. A lot of the people that we've talked to who have created games who have had success never plan for this.
They don't know what's going to work. It's almost impossible to have an idea of what will work and what won't. That said, after having built this, you have a little traction. Do you have goals for this game? Is it something that you want to grow and continue to grow? Or is this more just, I'm cool with what the way it is, maybe do the next thing?
Where's your
Osebo Akhigbe: heads at? I've been thinking a lot about what makes sense in terms to, I'm very interested in making more games that kind of connect to couples and it's hard to figure out, are people, do people just really like couples or are they interested in like more games that are connected to it and in this ecosystem?
But that said, I don't want it to feel like more than it is. I'm very interested in improving [00:43:00] the system and like community that we have around couples right now. There are very clear things that we can do. I'm actually pretty interested in like how it could maybe be more social, maybe even be on mobile, like mobile, not just web, but an app or something because then people have said, Oh, I want to be able to know if my friend played without having to message them.
that's like a pretty interesting, like asynchronous use case. There are other things like leaderboards and, I think a lot of games in this space don't take advantage of pretty basic mobile tech that is around and social. just given some of my past experiences, I think there's a lot of opportunity to maybe just focus on improving couples in those contexts and maybe add additional games.
But we'll see.
Nate Kadlac: For those who, you've got a really great kind of background experience of programming design. You can obviously see the intention [00:44:00] behind the design of the game and the layout, but I'm curious for people who maybe don't have a programming background, just quickly summarize your game development, like setup, like you went from paper prototyping, at what point did you enter cursor?
Sounded like it was pretty early. I'm just curious, like a quick stack of from paper to launching your game, what that looked like for you.
Osebo Akhigbe: From that experience, I definitely been trying to, and this is specifically for like word games, daily word games. I think for other types of games, this workflow will probably be different, but for like daily kind of word games, starting with paper and pencil is a great place to start and just like playing with someone else and seeing if there's anything interesting or fun in the mechanic that you're thinking about.
And then if it was maybe two or three years ago, I probably would have said, Oh, I would start using Figma and like mocking stuff up. But now realistically, I just immediately start working in cursor and then trying to get like the basic mechanic that I have on pen and paper working. And then I'll like [00:45:00] design in Figma, tweaking certain things, because right now it's not easy to make small adjustments.
you can in these, in like tools like cursor, but it's a little bit faster to just do in Figma. So I'm going back and forth between Figma and, Cursor to tweak the game. And then what I do then is I deploy the game to Vercel. Vercel is really great because it's like instant hosting.
And they also have analytics that you can embed in your game, like Google Analytics. And you can buy a domain on Vercel and connect it and everything just works smoothly. They also have Next. js. So if you want to have something stored in a server, then it. Handles that pretty quickly for you as well.
They also have a product called V zero, which is like cursor, but in the web, and to be honest, I don't use it. I just use cursor, but it's something that's worth checking out and it's in this V zero ecosystem. And once it's deployed on Brazil, then often I'll just start, I have a bunch of friends who [00:46:00] also are working on all sorts of side projects and whatnot.
And I'll end up just texting them and ask them if it's an interest at all. That's generally my workflow. And it's, important. And I think now we're at a stage where. One, we can focus a lot more on polish because it's very fast to make games like this, especially in things that don't require backends as much.
And it's important to just get it into people's hands. Like pen and paper is one way to start to figure out if there's anything interesting. And then the second you have something that's playable, like quickly give it to people so they can try the game too. I've noticed too, in that workflow, like I'll ask people not to share the game and then.
they ended up texting it to anyone, someone anyway, or there was one situation where a friend came over and they,
Nate Kadlac: that's a great way to reverse engineer growth, though. It's just, please don't share this at all.
Osebo Akhigbe: Yeah. Don't you think it's fun? They'll do it anyway. Like a friend had came over and I was like, Oh, I made this game.
And then he, Play that. And I was like, don't, talk about this. Don't do [00:47:00] it. And then next thing I checked my text and he had texted the game to himself.
Nate Kadlac: played.
Aaron Kardell: we're, we're about 65 days in now on this game. At what point, or if at all, do you think you'll start thinking about monetization or are you just thinking of this more?
I'm just focused on growth or hobby or where's, your head at on, on that front.
Osebo Akhigbe: So definitely not thinking about monetization. I think it's something that's, if it felt right, then it would be abundantly clear and then we'd do something like that. But I think just more interested in making fun games that, Our community can play.
And I'm also afraid of, about like focusing on monetization, sacrificing some of the quality of what the game offers right now. It feels like something that, you go to a lot of like game sites and it's just littered with ads and we definitely don't want to be at that point. So as I was talking about before, we are interested in [00:48:00] making it into something that can exist more on your phone and use some of the levers that, Phone systems have like notifications and social.
Aaron Kardell: Cool. one thing we didn't have time to dive into that I just super curious about is, your work with, is it evening. fm? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do you want to just maybe give us a quick minute on that?
Osebo Akhigbe: When I was living in San Francisco, so I live in New York now. I used to live in San Francisco when I was living in San Francisco.
I was pretty involved with the independent radio community and I still am. There's a radio station called Hyde FM that I would help get off the ground in a way just in terms of being a resident and having a consistent show and hosting events and so forth. And when I moved to New York, I wanted a way to still have a window into that community.
And what's interesting about these internet radio stations is that they [00:49:00] don't just exist in their studios. They also exist in venues and other remote locations, but often they don't have tools to broadcast from those locations because their setups are quite fixed where they are. So I was really interested in having.
More portable broadcasting solutions. So two friends, Nico and Cyril, who are in New York with me, they, I started working with them on a tool that allowed essentially like a Raspberry Pi in a box that you could bring anywhere, connect to wifi and independently without a computer, without a phone, you could push a button and live stream.
And it felt quite magical because one. Anywhere with these sorts of devices were set up, it was a very clear window into what was happening in that moment. we actually have a studio too. So a friend would go live in the studio and I would instantly know, Oh, okay. There's people there. And I would go and hang out as well.
And [00:50:00] we imagine that these are the kind of things that, you could easily set up in a venue as well. Some venues don't have great wifi, but like people were broadcasting with these tools at venues and it was quite mobile, which was incredible. So in San Francisco, A few people are using this to the system and there's kind of two parts of it.
One is the hardware that allows you to broadcast. And the second is the evenings that I found like hosting service, which a lot of people use to just run their internet radio station. So you, what you can do is use tools like OBS. I don't know if you all have tried any of these streaming tools before, but OBS audio hijack is another incredible one.
but you can connect. The software to those tools and broadcast your station as you normally would and then the hardware is like this independent tool To do the same workflow, but without your computer So independent radio stations like [00:51:00] Had FM, Lower Grand Radio, Suture FM All are using these tools to run their independent radio stations.
And we've been also distributing these tools to stations in New York as well, which has been really incredible. And it's expanded beyond just radio stations. It includes like venues and just individuals as well. It's been magical. Also just seeing the idea of online spaces being translated to physical spaces, a lot of these internet radio stations, as I was saying before, and people broadcast on Twitch or.
It's very much like someone who is independent in their room broadcasting, which is great. And I think there's that demographic on evenings as well. But what we're a bit more interested in is these more communal spaces. So as I was saying, like these internet radio stations are not just one person.
They're actually like, it started by maybe one, two, three people or so and more, [00:52:00] but they have these communities behind them. So Lower Grand Radio has like a hundred residents. people who come into their studio every day and broadcast and they do broadcast from libraries as well. Hyde FM also has 50 plus residents and Suture FM also has 30 plus residents.
So it's almost like this publisher, this community of people who are all kind of sharing cultural Zeitgeist through live broadcasts, live audio broadcasts. In New York, there's also some pretty interesting radio stations called like The Lot Radio. That's pretty prolific where it's a person, who was walking by the shipping container one day and saw this like plot of land where the shipping container was based, or the shipping container came later, but they repurposed this land to become this independent radio station where people broadcast out of the shipping container.
And it's become the space where a lot of musicians and, DJs, producers will go and broadcast, but it's also this Space where people even just, [00:53:00] stop during the day and have a cup of coffee and hang out outside. And it becomes like a cultural and communal like epicenter and not just a space to go live.
Aaron Kardell: Right on. Sounds like a great way to bring together, some cool communities.
Nate Kadlac: So if people want to find you online, if you want them to find you online, where would you like people to go?
Osebo Akhigbe: Yeah. So I'm Osebo on all platforms, but the first character is a zero. Also, I've been trying to write a lot more, so I Secretly, maybe not so secretly started a blog and it's just Osebo.
blog.
Nate Kadlac: Sure. yeah, this has been such a fantastic conversation. I've got so many things to look at. So many resources that you mentioned and brought up. It's great and really love what you're doing all around, but really I think couples is a fantastic game. And then, and people listening should definitely go play it, but thank you so much for being here Osebo.
it was really a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. [00:54:00] Absolutely. Thank you.
