Nate Kadlac: [00:00:00] Is waffle, your last job. Ever.
James Robinson: My last job. I've not, I've considered if it's my last job, but I wouldn't.
Nate Kadlac: Welcome to the Hey Good Game podcast, where we chat with the creators of your favorite games that you secretly play in the cracks of your day.
Aaron Kardell: All right. Well, I'm here with my host Nate Kadlak. We just got done interviewing James Robinson of Waffle fame and James provided so many great insights. What were some of your takeaways, Nate?
Aaron Kardell: We've talked to a lot of, a lot of game creators
Nate Kadlac: and many of the most successful ones have been sort of accidental successes. And James is kind of another example of this. And I find the fact that he's basically found his last job at waffle. It's pretty incredible and such a testament to the type of person and the values that he has as a game creator and really his [00:01:00] skill set.
Nate Kadlac: So really fascinated by this conversation. How about you, Aaron?
Aaron Kardell: Yeah, well, I'm just gonna spin off of that. Like, you know, I think his outlook is why would I sell like I'm doing what I love and now I have this platform. If I want to launch other games, I've got a large audience that I can showcase any other games I create.
Aaron Kardell: Two, I think he has a very good disposition for why he's turned down what seemed to be some, uh, life changing amounts of money to buy. And you know, I think he had all the right rationale for coming to those conclusions. So it's pretty cool to see. All right. So onto the pod.
Aaron Kardell: I'm Aaron Cardell and I'm here with my cohost, Nate Cadillac. Today we're excited to speak with James Robinson, the chief waffle maker of Waffle Studio. Take care. James, also known as Jessian, created the hit word game Waffle. Known [00:02:00] as one of the word games that can rival even Wordle, he founded Waffle Studio behind its massive success.
Aaron Kardell: Aside from Waffle Studio, James has been working on software for a long time and has worked in positions at companies Coral Tree Systems, Dootrix, and Cognitus Global. Waffle is a word puzzle game that challenges players to create words by rearranging a grid of letters. The shape of the grid is a square and it has tiles in it which makes it look like a waffle.
Aaron Kardell: Players create words by switching tiles all around on the waffle and each waffle has only one solution. Players can tackle the Daily Waffle, the Lux Waffle, or go through the Long Waffle Archive for more fun. James, we're thrilled you're here. James, we always like to ask, what's your favorite game to play?
James Robinson: I'm thrilled to be here too. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I got a shout out to my puzzle friends, Nerdle and Squirdle and Canuckle. I play those quite a lot into a lot of puzzles recently. Polygonal, that's a good one. I love [00:03:00] puzzles in general. I love paper puzzles. I've been doing a lot recently. I've bought a lot of puzzle books since I've been doing this endeavor full time.
James Robinson: So I've been doing a lot of those. I loved your chat with Jim Bumgardner because I've got a few of his books. Vampire Survivors. Have you played that one? No. That's a good one. That's a new, that's a bit of a different game. That's not a puzzle game, but I've been getting into that quite a bit recently.
James Robinson: That started out as a web game, which is interesting. using phaser and it just sort of blew up. So yeah, I find that quite fascinating. And it's quite retro as well. I like quite a lot of old retro games. I've got one of these game boys that can play a lot of retro games, all the sort of Sega, Capcom, PlayStation games.
James Robinson: So yeah, I've been enjoying that lately.
Aaron Kardell: That's awesome. Speaking of, of retro as a fellow Commodore 64 aficionado myself, I, I heard that's, you know, maybe where your dad taught you [00:04:00] to make games. Can you tell us more about that experience?
James Robinson: Yeah. So yeah, I mean, that was a long time ago. I mean, I don't know if he, uh, taught me a lot of things at the time I was so young, but I did pick up a lot of it.
James Robinson: He basically showed me how. Basic was the programming language at the time, how that worked and got me into it. And we would just, I would sit there as he was typing it out and he'd explain how it was going. And I remember debugging that sort of thing. He'd print it out on this old dot matrix printer and sort of go through it.
James Robinson: And yeah, he sort of encouraged me to learn programming. I, I went to visual basic on my computer and stuff like that. And I always tried to make little games with that. Yeah. So it was quite old technology that I started with. I had one of these Scion organizers as well. It was like this little, I don't know, it was a hand me down sort of thing that I got given from someone and you could program, and he had two lines of.
James Robinson: [00:05:00] Text on the display, but you could program it with basic. And so you could, you could type in these on these two lines, like a whole program, and I managed to make a very small gain out of that by just, I had a little character that you can move up and down between the two lines. And then it would have a sort of projectile coming across the screen that would try and take you out.
James Robinson: And you just had to jump between these two lines. And it would speed up and you get a score at the end, but that was very popular. I mean, I handed it around in class at school and people were, I didn't see it until the end of the day and people were trying to beat their scores and everything. And I thought that was a great example of a game that was very simple, but still addictive and competitive.
James Robinson: That was a good memory of, of one of my early programming attempts.
Aaron Kardell: Love it. [00:06:00] We gave a little bit of your, your background on just some of the different companies that you've worked at, but from that start in gaming, what's your experience over time been with gaming? And can you tell us just a little bit more about your journey in general?
James Robinson: Yeah, I feel like a relative. imposter in the games industry lately. I've been going to these games conferences, but I've never made, I've never managed to finish a game aside from waffle before. I've always wanted to make a game. I've always had it in my new year's resolutions to finish a game. I'll this year, I'll just do something that I can get out there and people can play it, but I've never managed to get past the sort of first stages of creating a game.
James Robinson: Like I get into the concept of it and then I don't get. to the end of it and actually finish it so people can play it. But it's always been in the background of my mind. It's always been something that I wanted to achieve. [00:07:00] So I've always and I've always tried to learn different game frameworks like Unity or Cocos2D or I did a lot of Flash stuff early on but yeah again, I never managed to get to that point where I actually Finished a game that could be played all the way through.
James Robinson: It was only when creating Waffle was using web technology, which was something I was using day in, day out. So it was a bit more familiar and I could knock something up quickly just using things that I already knew. It was very simple. So I actually managed to finish it and I could push it out there for people to play.
James Robinson: And it's been, yeah, life changing, I guess.
Nate Kadlac: I'm so curious about the design of Waffle. So my background is in design branding. Did you do all the design yourself? How did you think about the aesthetic quality of the game?
James Robinson: Yeah, I mean, yeah, [00:08:00] it was all, I mean, I did have a bit of influence from Wordle. You might be able to tell the color scheme, but I've always had an interest in design keeping in sort of minimal design.
James Robinson: Keeping things as simple as possible, but still having a bit of charm to them, like typography and colours and just things like that, little things. animations, micro animations, stuff like that I've always had an interest in since I was messing around with Flash when that was popular. Yeah, so I've always had an interest in design like that and music posters as well, things like that sort of art style.
James Robinson: I collect a lot of playing cards. You can get a lot of playing cards that are done by graphic designers and they have different designs on each card and I love stuff like that. It's a very small sort of art form, but it's still compelling and it's got like character and personality to it. So I guess it comes from [00:09:00] that,
Nate Kadlac: you know, when I, when I first found your game, I think that's what drew me in because you'll see a lot of these games use a similar template and yours just has so much more personality kind of embedded in it.
Nate Kadlac: And I think that that's what initially drew me in as someone who likes games, but is passionate about design really caught my eye. And so I appreciate that what you've built with Waffle.
James Robinson: Yeah. I think that's one of the reasons it's been so popular, I think is. It has got a bit of personality to it, I like to say, I, we try quite hard to make sure it has got something a bit extra and people can tell it's created by humans.
James Robinson: It's got people behind it that are putting in the effort to make it work. Make it enjoyable. Make it fun. Yeah, trying to keep it human, I guess, you know, I do this because I like seeing people enjoy it. So I try and put things in it to make people enjoy it more and just try and encourage people to play nice little comments and [00:10:00] jokes and Encouragement just try and be have fun with it.
James Robinson: And it seems to be Appreciated we get nice comments back. We get a lot of nice feedback about it. Someone said, I like one of the comments about our donations page, we have like a buy me a coffee page, ko fi. com, and someone described that as The most wholesome page on the internet because you look at that and you see all these comments that we get just people thanking us for the game and what we're doing.
James Robinson: And I think that's partly because they, they can see it's created by people and there's a person behind it and we try and push out messages to people just to say, hi, how you doing? Hope you're enjoying the game this week. Got another one. We're still going. Yeah. So it's nice.
Aaron Kardell: See, you can definitely pick up on that handcrafted feel like Nate suggested and like you just described.
Aaron Kardell: You know, having talked to a [00:11:00] lot of puzzle creators now, I'm just super curious, like the actual puzzles themselves, how much do you get some help from algorithms to generate those and how much of those are hand created or curated?
James Robinson: Yeah, I think curated is. Is a good word for it. I obviously, I created the original algorithm, if you like the generator for them, but there's certain things that go into creating a good puzzle that you need a human eye over it.
James Robinson: You need to check them and you need to play it and you need to get a feel for it to see if it is a good puzzle. And there's certain things in it that we can put rules in the code. So over time, the code has changed to be. Less sort of, it's not very systematic. It has certain heuristics, I guess you'd say about it, that choosing words that aren't too obscure, you could have one obscure word, but you don't want them all to be obscure.
James Robinson: It needs to, it's nice when it's symmetrical. I think it just looks [00:12:00] nice. Things like that. So, and we're always reviewing the words as well. That makes or breaks it, the word list that we're using, because we don't want words that People don't recognize or they're not internationally known because we've got British as well as American players, so I try and remove any words that are not cross Atlantic words.
James Robinson: I removed the word Dilly the other day. That didn't seem quite right. Good, it didn't seem to fit, so we removed that, and it's surprising how often they come up, I mean I, what I really need to do is go through the whole word list and just decide if certain words are good or bad, but that's quite a long list, and I just sort of pick them out as they come across and do it that way.
James Robinson: But yeah, so yeah, we do curate the puzzles and check that the number of moves that they involve and how difficult they are [00:13:00] feels. Good, but mostly, you know, as time goes on, that gets more and more automated, but we still check.
Aaron Kardell: Another design consideration is kind of the, the key game mechanics that you landed on.
Aaron Kardell: And I think your method of using stars is really well thought out. Can you tell us a little more, like, did you just get that right on the first try or how did you get there? What, what was the iteration process for you?
James Robinson: The origin story, well, didn't take very long. So I guess to start from the beginning, I was doing my washing up on evening and I was thinking about wordle and how that works and how it's luck based.
James Robinson: If there was a way to make a word game like that where you're trying to find a word that's not luck based, so if you were given the letters to create a word, then that would make it different because. There's only one solution that it could be based on the [00:14:00] letters, but then the only way that works is if there's several words.
James Robinson: So I tried to make words out of a four by four grid. So after I'd done the washing out, I quickly sort of went to my computer and I was trying to come up with words that fit into this game that Is compelling to play and solvable and four by four grid of four letter words was too difficult to create. I couldn't find enough words that fit in that sort of shape.
James Robinson: So I ended up going to five letter words because I think like a lot of people at the time, I had some code that I'd written to try and find the best word or starter word. So I had a list of five letter words already. So I tried to fit those into a grid and it worked. And we just ended up with this. The shape and this sort of puzzle that you could solve just by having given some letters, you could fit them into the shape and then it evolved over the next couple of days.
James Robinson: So I'm sort of working on what I'm getting to is the [00:15:00] process that I use was testing it with my friends. Really. I just sort of gave it to them and saw if, if they enjoy playing it or if they would play it at all, if it sort of captured their interest. So I've got a couple of friends. John and Rachel have got a little WhatsApp group with and I just sort of put this word puzzle in front of them and tried to see if they would play it.
James Robinson: And dragging around letters was good, but then that was quite difficult. They needed the clues of what letters go where, the yellow and the green. And then I thought you can just keep moving letters until they turn green. So there needs to be a limit on the number of moves. Otherwise they were just moving all the letters and it felt a bit too robotic.
James Robinson: So that's how I got to the point where I limited the amount of swaps you could do. And I thought you could then score it based on how many that you had remaining. So yeah, like the first version I had on paper was on a Thursday and then by the Tuesday, I'd sort of refined that to the point that it is now [00:16:00] really, where you've got this number of swaps and you've got to solve this, these words that are in this grid and you get, yeah, a number of stars.
James Robinson: The stars came later, I think, I think it had, you ended up with a score and then I thought you should get a star for each one that you've got remaining. That's a good way of doing it. Yeah. So quite quickly, I had that. Up and running and that's still pretty much how it is today.
Nate Kadlac: You probably get just massive amounts of feedback on your games.
Nate Kadlac: I'm curious, like what's the number one request people have right now on your game?
James Robinson: I guess, I don't know if it's a request, but the issue that comes up with a lot of people is they want to save their stats. They want to make sure their streak is transferred to a new phone, that sort of thing, which I didn't plan ahead for when I first started this.
James Robinson: And then it was just a. throwaway game that I wanted to put onto the internet. I didn't think people would be playing it long enough that they were precious about their score, but you know, it makes [00:17:00] sense. So that comes up a lot. Yeah, I think that's it really. I think people are quite happy with how it works.
James Robinson: They want more recognition for five stars, I guess, because it comes to a point. If you look at how it works, you can sort of get an idea of how to get five stars every time. Yeah. There's a certain sort of strategy to doing that. And so people are trying to get a streak of just five stars. They're trying to just achieve that every time.
James Robinson: So, you know, it's come up a little bit more recognition of that sort of achievement, I guess it's come up a little bit, but yeah, we don't get a lot of, um, feedback suggestions. So. I'd welcome them though, if anyone's got any suggestions for it, we're always trying to find new ways to improve it. We've come up with different ideas.
James Robinson: We've got quite a lot of ideas, to be honest, of things we want to do. But it's just sort of [00:18:00] finding the time to do them, which I was chatting to Richard the other day at NerdOr about this. And so we were sort of saying for a game that, Practically runs itself. I, I don't seem to find enough time to do the things I want to do.
James Robinson: And I don't know why that is. I'm hiring more people. So I'm hoping that we can fulfill some of the ideas that we've got. I mean, we have got things that we'd like to do with it. It's obviously only in one language at the moment, and some people have requested or even created their own versions in other languages.
James Robinson: So we'd like to sort of try and support that, create a few of those. But. I mean, overall, I just want to create more games, I guess, as well. I want to create similar games that have this same sort of level of compelling joy that this one does. I think I've got a lot of other ideas that we could take forward.[00:19:00]
James Robinson: So we want to do that. Yeah. We've got quite a long list of, of things we could do.
Nate Kadlac: Do you have an example of, of one or two that you'd like to share?
James Robinson: Of other games or features.
Nate Kadlac: Games or ideas that you want to implement?
James Robinson: So yeah, we've got another game actually that I did recently called OneWordSearch. com, so you can have a look at that.
James Robinson: That's, I'm quite happy with that one. That's quite good, I think. It's the same with Waffle. I think one of the things that was in my mind in the back of my mind when I was creating Waffle is I thought someone's probably already done this. Someone's already probably created a game that's got this similar mechanic because It seems quite simple and I thought it must be done before.
James Robinson: I mean, I've had ideas before about games and then you search for them and find someone else has, has done it in a far better way than I would have been able to achieve. But this one, I decided just to not look. I thought I just wouldn't do the Google searches. I'll just put it out [00:20:00] there and if someone's done it before, they'll tell me, they'll say, Oh, that's like this game that already exists.
James Robinson: But yeah, no, I was quite lucky. I think that. It doesn't seem like anyone has created something that's the same as this and I'm hoping that's the same with one word search as well. It's a new sort of mechanic. I think it seems original. I, again, there's probably. There might be examples out there of similar sort of word searches, but so far I haven't quite found something that works the same as this, so I'm quite happy with that.
James Robinson: That's the current one that I'm trying to slowly introduce to people. I haven't opened it up to the full waffle audience yet, but I welcome people to try it and let me know what they think. So far the comments have been good. I had a little feature in there where we get message. People can write me a message and give us some feedback and it gets sent to our Slack channel and we can see what people [00:21:00] think of it and so far people are quite happy with it, people are enjoying it, so that's good.
James Robinson: Yeah, more sort of minimal games like that that require logic and potentially word games, but will just be the general theme of things that I want to create. I'm just happy to have the freedom to do it now. I mean, I've, I'm doing this full time now. Yeah, Waffle allowed me to quit my job and do this full time, so I've got the freedom to fulfill some of these ideas that I've had in notebooks for a long time.
James Robinson: I've always been one to write down ideas in notebooks, so I've got a stack of notebooks on the shelf that have got varying Levels of quality in game ideas, but hopefully there's a couple in there that might be fun. We can just try them out now. We've got a good audience that we can just push things out to and see what they think, which is a [00:22:00] very fortunate position to be in.
James Robinson: It's a very good position.
Aaron Kardell: I can tell you, you really enjoy that freedom and, and you're making the most of it. Can you tell us a little bit more, I've, I've heard actually you're on record as, uh, being given a really good offer to sell. You decided not to, can you tell us more about your thought process on that?
James Robinson: Yeah, I've thought about it a lot every day since probably. So yeah, sort of late 2022, I was. Offered. I mean, I had, I had offers before that, but this was significant enough for me to pause and rethink the rest of my life. So I guess you'd call that a life changing offer. And I guess I had to make a decision whether I wanted to either sell and just live on a boat or something or go to other countries, [00:23:00] do anything, but, or I could just keep the game and, and make more of them because it's got such a big audience.
James Robinson: That if I didn't have that, then it would be a lot more difficult to test out new like game ideas and things like that. So I'd be losing a lot if I sold it and, well, did I just, you know, did I just want to go back to my day job, which wasn't a bad place to be, but I'd always dreamed of making more games.
James Robinson: So it was following that dream of having the freedom to make more games was worth it. More to me, I guess, than the offer that I had. That's not to say I don't, yeah, still think about it every day. Where, uh, cause I, it's come up a few times, we've had more than one offer put on the table and I have to think about it every time.
James Robinson: I think it's worth taking the time to consider it and be grateful to be [00:24:00] in that position. But so far, yeah, I've kept it. I'm carrying on waffling independently and, uh, Seeing where it goes. I mean, early on, we were at the point that I got the first offer. We had about 450, 000 players a day. So, you know, we were doing okay.
James Robinson: We were doing very well. I had enough to support me doing this full time as it was. So, and at that point, we hadn't even tried promoting the game to anyone. So it felt like there was still, you know, I mean, it still does feel like there's a long way to go with what we could do with it. So that factored into my decision.
James Robinson: Yeah, we felt like, well, if we've got 400, 000, 450, 000 players now, and we haven't even tried to do a TikTok campaign or put some ads on Google, then who knows what numbers we could get. It turns out it's a lot more difficult than that. We've tried doing a TikTok campaign. We've tried [00:25:00] doing ads on meta platforms with, I don't know, it doesn't seem to have much of an impact to be honest.
James Robinson: But recently we hit a new record. Anyway, we hit a record of 510, 000 players this week, which was great. And we don't know why it's just, it's just the viral nature of it. is giving us this very slow but steady incline. We have a very flat but slightly inclined number of players each day. It hasn't spiked, well it did spike a little bit early on, but mainly it's just been, it rose to 450, 000 and it sort of stayed there for a very long time and it slowly, slowly increased gently and We were waiting patiently for it to hit half a million and it did in March.
James Robinson: So half a million players in one day and then though, and it seems to have. I'm stuck around there now, so very happy with that.
Nate Kadlac: [00:26:00] That's wild. Yes. Half a million a day. Congrats.
James Robinson: Thanks very much. Yeah, no, it's, yeah, it's a weird sort of milestone. It feels like a nice round number, almost half a million at the time when I got the first offer, I wasn't sure if it was going to carry on like, but luckily it has carried on for about 18 months since then.
James Robinson: And so I'm, I've got more confidence now that. So this could carry on for a reasonable amount of time for me to enjoy and not regret turning down that, that figure.
Nate Kadlac: So which leads me to ask, is Waffle your last job ever?
James Robinson: Yeah, I saw that question. I wondered if that was a typo. My last job? I've not considered if it's my last job, but I wouldn't mind if it was, to be honest.
James Robinson: I mean, I wouldn't say Waffle is my last job. I mean, making games, probably going to be my last job. I'm 38 now, so I [00:27:00] feel like I've got a little way to go before I can retire, but, uh, I'm just enjoying creating more games. So my plan at the moment, after, you know, I turned down the first big acquisition offer, I thought, well, I've just got to go all in on this and quit my day job, work on this full time, see where it can go, try and create as much as I can, create as many of my ideas, put them into reality as I can.
James Robinson: And that's what I want to do. And that's what I'm doing. And it's luckily it's going well, so it can support that idea. That plan is going ahead and it seems to be going okay. So yeah, hopefully it's my last job because it's pretty good. Something I could have only dreamed about, but it's, yeah, it's going well.
James Robinson: So is it my last job? Uh, yes. Let's say yes.
Aaron Kardell: Love it. That's such an awesome [00:28:00] position to be in. It's really inspiring, James.
James Robinson: Another thing I can do talks about it at some point, because I do hope it is inspiring because without sounding ridiculous, I would feel inspired by me if I was listening to me several years ago, because I always wondered if you could come up with a game, is it, you know, is it feasible to come up with a game idea and get it out there and people play it and you can make a living out of And yeah, it is, it is, turns out it's still possible, which is.
James Robinson: Great. I mean, it feels like that's, I enjoy the fact that that's still possible in the modern age of the internet, that you can still make a little website at home and put it up on the internet. And it's practically free as well. You can put, you can put a website onto the internet, practically no cost at all if you know what you're doing.
James Robinson: And if people enjoy it, if it's compelling enough, [00:29:00] it didn't take me much to find people would come and visit. Either. So that's a great thing for the internet in general, that you can still do that. It's still quite democratized. Yeah. So I hope it is inspiring because. I was inspired actually by Josh Wardle doing a, he did an interview on another podcast about his game and how he, you know, chucked Wordle onto the internet without polishing it, just, it was a quick thing and he got it out there.
James Robinson: And that inspired me to finish doing Waffle. After my friends seemed to enjoy it, I sort of put it down for a little while until I had the extra motivation to finish the last part of it. And put it onto the internet
Aaron Kardell: You talked about maybe wanting to do more talks on this. And previously you talked about maybe attending more games conferences lately.
Aaron Kardell: I'm curious what games conferences have you been going to and [00:30:00] have you gotten an opportunity to do any talks with those?
James Robinson: Yeah, no, I haven't done any talks yet. I think I got invited to do a talk, but. I can't remember what happened about that, but no, I haven't done anything like that yet. Like I was, I think I was saying before, I still feel like a bit of an imposter in the games industry, to be honest, but I'm going to these conferences and I'm just trying to learn as much as possible about them.
James Robinson: And I'm learning a lot. It's a great industry to be a part of. It's very fun. I go to, so the only conferences I've been to are quite local in the UK. So I've been to Pocket Gamer, which is in London. That's good. And there's another one called Develop, which is on the South coast in Brighton. Yeah. And it's great listening to the other people doing their talks and just talking about games and the mechanics of games.
James Robinson: What compels people to play them? What do people enjoy about games? And we're still discovering that. All the time, which I find fascinating games are always changing [00:31:00] how they're created and what they appeal to and what technologies are being used, but underlying all of it is just the human brain and what people enjoy.
James Robinson: And we're still finding different ways to create enjoyable experiences, whether it's. Yeah, these massive games, AAA titles or farming simulators, or just a little five letter word game. It's quite a range of things that people are trying and still discovering. So yeah, so I don't know if I could do any talks.
James Robinson: Just yet, but I am learning everything about waffle and how it's been appealing to people. And I've got a lot of experiences from that, that might be fun to tell people about like I am now.
Aaron Kardell: So you mentioned a couple of times you feel like an imposter, but if you knew the palpable excitement that Nate and I had, just [00:32:00] that we're able to interview you today, you know, hopefully it chips away a little bit at that imposter syndrome in terms of helping other people out.
Aaron Kardell: It seems like at the beginning, you gave shout outs to some of your friends in the industry. I'm curious, can you tell us a little bit more about your collaboration with the Squirtle founder? Or creator.
James Robinson: Yeah. So I created Squaredle with an E. Um, I got in touch with him through, I think some discord channel thing.
James Robinson: And also Canuckal as well. We've done crossovers with them. That's the Canadian Wordle variant. And that's been, yeah, it's been really fun to do. It's sort of a good experiment. So the first one we did, I did with Canuckal was. It didn't go that well, to be honest, because we changed the colours of the letters, I used red instead of green, and it was, it was a bit disconcerting for some people when they came to the game and it was all [00:33:00] different.
James Robinson: People weren't quite so sure about that. Other than that, people did enjoy it, I think. We gave a bit of a twist to it, and And, you know, it works both ways that we sort of promote each other and we spread the word about these different puzzles that we've created. And yeah, with Squaredel as well, Squaredel created a waffle shaped version of their puzzle, and it sort of matched up with the waffle of the day, the same letters, and so that was really good, it really fitted well.
James Robinson: And yeah, I think people appreciate it. People enjoy. Being referred onto a new game that they can find and yeah, so it's gone down really well doing that and I would like to do more of that. And we've talked about doing it again as well. We did a crossover with Nerdle as well. We did a Nerdle coloured version of Waffle and yeah, that went really well.
James Robinson: So yeah, we'd like to do more of that because [00:34:00] it's just, it's just a fun little thing to add to the daily routine of the puzzle that people enjoy. Having a little surprise to find.
Nate Kadlac: How do those collaborations come to be? Is it you reaching out? Are people reaching out to you? Are you actively seeking to do things like that?
James Robinson: No, I haven't yet. I think they've come to me generally. I'm trying to think if I reached out or if they did, but I think they did. I love talking to new people about what they're doing. I think this has given me Through Waffle, I've met a lot of people that I, you know, wouldn't have otherwise got the opportunity to chat to, so I always enjoy doing that.
James Robinson: If I'm ever given the opportunity to speak to someone that I haven't met before that's got an interesting story about what they're doing or how they've got to where they are in their career, I always like doing that. So yeah, so just talking to people and seeing what they're doing with their games.
James Robinson: They've been certain there was a word or verse, [00:35:00] discord. Group and yeah, I think we just met on there and started talking about how we're getting on creating our games and it's just natural to see if we can do some sort of crossover that, that benefits both of us. It benefits both of us and also other people enjoy it.
James Robinson: So it's, it's a win win for everyone. And that's sort of how it came about. Just, yeah, just finding people to talk to about the games. And I think there's a lot of people out there since. You know, since word or other people have just tried creating very small games at home. I mean, they always have done, but more so there was a bit of a boom of, of similar sort of daily games, creating something that's compelling enough for people to play once a day.
James Robinson: And it's great. It's a great community to be involved in now.
Nate Kadlac: I think something that we found is just so many of these games are, have found some accidental [00:36:00] success and it leads to really interesting people like yourself who have built these games, but going back to launching your game and getting some traction, we have a database of thousands of games, right?
Nate Kadlac: And everybody's looking to figure out like how to get the word out. What did you do and did you do anything special in terms of just putting the game out there and letting people know about it?
James Robinson: I don't think I did. I did. So initially I just put it out on Reddit. On certain Reddit subreddits, sort of the web games one, and there was a Wordle group, and that was, that was sort of it, I think, and it sort of gained about 800 players in the first day, and the number gradually increased, but then it got featured in a PC games article that was just one of these list articles of games like Wordle.
James Robinson: And we got featured in that, and that bumped us up to a certain degree, and then we got mentioned in another article by [00:37:00] Lifehacker, they did an article about what's, about this new game called Waffle, and cnet. com had an article saying Waffle is the new Wordle, which, That's very nice, very appreciated that came across.
James Robinson: And then that just boosted our numbers to the next plateau, really. It sort of bumped us up to, I think, 430, 000 at that point. And it just stuck. Every time we had one of these articles, it would just step up. Yeah. Again, that wasn't anything that we had prompted. It just, spread, which is obviously a dream position to be in.
James Robinson: We didn't pay anyone to get into those, those places. I guess the only other thing I did was on Twitter, as it was known back then, I put a few sort of comments on people's Wordle scores, just if they were aggravated by Wordle, you know, it was quite natural that I would recommend this new game that [00:38:00] I'd cooked up I don't really think that anyone paid any attention to that.
James Robinson: So I can't. I really can't put any of Waffle's success down to that. We also got bumped up in the Google search results for the word Waffle, and I don't know if that really helped us. I mean, people were searching for Waffle to find our game, so the click through rate for Waffle searches is quite high, but it meant that we quickly became number one search result for the word Waffle in the search results.
James Robinson: UK and America and various other countries, which was no search engine optimization on my part. I have never been involved. Well, I've, you know, I know the basics of SEO, but I've never had to put much effort into that. I've never bothered. My cousin asked me, actually, she said, I was wondering, yeah, if we could have a call and you could just give us some advice about search engine [00:39:00] optimization and how we can boost our Google ranking.
James Robinson: I just had to say, I, I don't really know, to be honest, I, you just have to make a very popular, just
Nate Kadlac: build a game people love, I guess. Yeah, exactly.
James Robinson: Make a very popular website and the Google algorithm works and it will. Bump it up rankings, but I don't know if that's, you know, increased our numbers of people visiting our game, but according to our analytics, we have quite a lot of fans who are also food lovers or amateur chefs, so perhaps that is because they're searching for waffle recipes and they just so happen to come across a word game.
James Robinson: I don't know. I don't know. I think, yeah, it's just obviously the mechanic of sharing your schools with your friends, I think is something that benefits all of us. So that's, I think been the main driver, [00:40:00] but yeah, the main driver has just been popular. So it's grown naturally despite us trying to boost it further.
James Robinson: We just generally rely on the organic growth.
Aaron Kardell: Seems like maybe it's just not necessary for you, but have you ever. Try to make a run at getting waffle. com.
James Robinson: Yes, I have reached out to them. Shout out to eHobb. com who own that domain and their waffle cushions, but no, they're not interested in selling, which is fair enough.
James Robinson: I mean, it was a good domain to have. I would love to have it if they're still, obviously they'll be listening to this podcast and if they do hear this, we can always talk again about that because I would love to have waffle. com, but yeah, no, that's fine. But yeah, I have tried and I've made them what I thought would be quite decent offers, but they're, they're doing, they're doing stuff with it.
James Robinson: So it's fair enough.
Aaron Kardell: When was Waffle released in comparison to Wordle?
James Robinson: Yeah, so [00:41:00] I first came up with it, it was January 27th. 2022. So I think I'd only really discovered Wordle that week or thereabouts. It was still quite a fresh game to most people, I think, at that point. And that's when I was thinking about creating something different.
James Robinson: But yeah, so then I created it. It was by the Tuesday, which was 1st of February, that I sort of had it finished. And that was the day that the New York Times. bought Wordle that was the same day. So that, because I was looking back at my messages with my friends and sort of conversations we were having around that time.
James Robinson: And I was trying out this game and then it was around the same time that Wordle got bought. And I was like, wow, this is actually worth something to create a little web game. Beautiful that. So I guess that was, encouraging to do something. But yeah, so it's quite [00:42:00] around that sort of time. And I think a lot of people were, were quite inspired to make games around that time.
James Robinson: So. I wasn't the only one.
Aaron Kardell: James, can you tell us more about your thoughts on trademarks and if you've pursued those?
James Robinson: Yeah, no, that was a, I took a deep breath. Someone who's been through that. Uh, we tried to trademark Waffle. Well, we have trademarks, uh, Waffle in the UK and Europe. I tried to trademark it in the USA, but.
James Robinson: That was complicated, so we haven't done that. But yeah, we were just, there were a lot of copycats started coming out, and it's quite scary when that happens, especially if you've just quit your job. Uh, to pursue this, and then you see these copycats coming out, creeping up the Google rankings and in the app stores, so it is something we try and defend and try and, you know, reach out and just say, do you not do that?
James Robinson: Not directly rip off our game, that's all right, but it's difficult, I mean, I don't [00:43:00] know how much energy I should put into it, I guess that's a question that I try and ask other people in this situation, how much, how much should I worry about that? As long as our game is. popular and it's more popular than theirs, you know, then maybe I don't need to worry about it, but it just feels personal when it's something you've created and you're seeing these copies come out there.
James Robinson: So there are things you can do, you can try and send the right letters and you can try and reach out to them, but it's like whack a mole and they'll just, other ones will pop up in their place. So it feels like a bit of a futile thing to do, but So I try not to give it too much thought and consideration, just try and, you know, establish what Waffle is amongst people and hope that they recognize that ours is the original game of that name and playing it because ours has more character than the rest of [00:44:00] them, something like that.
James Robinson: There have been moments when I've felt more compelled to do something about it, but it sort of goes up and down, that feeling.
Nate Kadlac: So you've told us that Waffle is going to be your last job, and it looks like the way you monetize is, is mostly through ads. Is that right? Could you talk a little bit about how Waffle earns income?
James Robinson: Yeah, no, it's through ads. I mean, early on, we, I tried to avoid ads because. No one likes ads, and I know it's a common thing that comes up in other episodes of the podcast, but we know no one likes ads as they are typically presented, and they can be obtrusive. The way they work is, you know, disconcerting for a lot of people, and so I did try and avoid them for a long time because I don't like them either.
James Robinson: Um, so I tried getting people to support the game just for like one off [00:45:00] donations and things like that, but that was early on. And then one of the offers that I had to acquire the game, sort of not massive offer, but the guy basically said to me after I turned him down, he said, look, this is what I would do with it.
James Robinson: Put some ads on it because you can actually earn an income from it. And, you know, that was a big thing for me because that meant I could. Do this full time. And I don't think I would be doing this full time now if I hadn't tried it. We work with an ads partner, which is, makes it easier. I think like other people have said, you just in basic terms, you just have to give up part of your website to ad space and they sort out the rest.
James Robinson: It wasn't quite that straightforward, but. Let's say it was, but then yeah, you can, I wish it was, but it's not quite that simple, but yeah, I mean, I still don't like ads and I would love to have a [00:46:00] solution, which is not as ugly. Because, like you said, I've tried to put effort into how this game looks and keep it minimal and pleasant to play, and ads are not helpful in that regard, so I don't really want to have ads, but I do have ads because otherwise I wouldn't be able to do this as a full time job and establish what we're calling Waffle Studio, and we're going to create more games, and I'm using ads to be in that position and, and most people are fine with it.
James Robinson: I haven't had the negative feedback that I was expecting. I thought people would hate it. I was dreading the idea of sticking ads on my page, but, but, you know, I think people prefer that than having a game that they can't play because they have to pay for it. And obviously that's not the be all and, you know, you can have a hybrid sort of.
James Robinson: situation with free to play games. [00:47:00] They do it in lots of different ways, but so that's the position we're in at the moment. And it's, it's just after this guy told me that I, I realized how lucrative it can be. If you've got half a million people coming to your page, you can actually earn a decent amount of money to, to carry on and do other things.
James Robinson: It was a bit of a no brainer really.
Aaron Kardell: So James, I think there was a period of time where you maybe didn't have a mobile app for waffle and then, uh, you added one and as I understand it, you're now maybe doing some substantial updates. Can you tell us more about that journey?
James Robinson: Yeah, we didn't have a mobile in the app store for quite a while, I think, but there were two reasons for doing it.
James Robinson: I guess I wanted to have something in the app store because it always felt that was Where people look games and they want to find it in there. So I did a very simple version, which was just using Apache Cordova to create a version [00:48:00] of the web game that was in the app store, which is great. I've used Apache Cordova for a few things, and I think it's a really great way of doing something like that.
James Robinson: That's cross platform. It's on the web and it's in the app store. But also because we were just getting copycats in the app store. So people were searching for our game and they were just coming across something else that wasn't what we'd created. Again, another cousin of mine, she, she put something on Facebook saying, my cousin has created this wonderful game.
James Robinson: You should all try it. Here's a link to it. And it was a link to someone else's game. That was a copycat that was in the app store. Now's the right time to put our own app in the app store because that's probably happening quite regularly. So yeah, so that was another reason for doing it. But yeah, but now we have, we've been developing.
James Robinson: a completely new app. It's, we've got a development team called Lively, they've been creating it, and it's got [00:49:00] wonderful colorful art and characters, and it's much more of a, a, trying to use the word that isn't controlled by trademark, but it's a game where you go on a journey and you play lots of puzzles along the way.
James Robinson: So it's quite a different game, but it's using the same puzzle that we, and different formats and the same mechanic. Just as a sort of celebration of the Waffle Puzzle, and so we've been developing that for the last year, I think, with Lively, and it's being published by Miniclip. Yeah, it's on the app stores now in America, but we're just sort of testing it out, so we don't have a lot of players at the moment, because we've just been trying to soft launch it and see how it goes, because it is quite different.
James Robinson: It does have the Daily Puzzle, but it also has all of these other variations of it. Yeah, so it's a lot of fun and it's a lot more colourful and, yeah, we're excited to see how [00:50:00] that goes. I've always felt like, I don't know, obviously since the iPhone iOS app store and people creating apps for everything, it felt like a web game wouldn't even looked at.
James Robinson: So it was only until Wordle came along that sort of bucked that trend, it felt like. And it felt like people would maybe save a game to their home screen that was a web game. And so, yeah, I look at it a lot differently now. I'm not fully focused on creating an app first. I would create a web game first because creating stuff for the web is a lot quicker, you know, you can create a web game.
James Robinson: Well, I can create a web game a lot quicker than I can create something in Unity or anything like that. So, and we can try it out obviously with our audience and tweak it a lot quicker. If we want to make a change to it, we don't have to submit a new bill to the app store and go through all the certificates and [00:51:00] sorting all that out and app store optimization.
James Robinson: We don't have to worry about all that. We just put it out onto the internet. Try it out, see if people like it, send them a link and see how it goes. And then if it is popular, then we can create it into an app later and we'll know we can invest in it without having that risk that no one's going to like it because we've already tried it out.
James Robinson: So that's my current sort of process that I'm looking at with future games. It's going to be web games first. Long live web games.
Nate Kadlac: Absolutely. How has your strategy for launching something like this changing from launching waffle? Like, are you other than using your game to promote the new mobile app? Are you feeling like you need to do PR and reach out and do, do that whole thing?
Nate Kadlac: What's, do you have a strategy in place?
James Robinson: No, we, we just don't need to. I think we can just, we have that large audience now that [00:52:00] we can just, we can just send it to a fraction of our audience just to try it out. You know, we've got a lot of control over. Who gets to see it and who tries it and we can directly find out from them what they think of it.
James Robinson: So we still have supporters, we still have that part of our game and that gives us an audience of people that are very much invested in the game and they, they like Waffle and they like what we're doing so they are good people to try it out with. Yeah, it's hard to think how differently we would do it now, because that's why I wanted to keep Waffle, you know, because I don't, then I don't have to have that challenge because it is a massive challenge and I know everyone, how, how much everyone says it is.
James Robinson: So, yeah, that's, that's a reason to hang on to that for dear life because it's very valuable to have people's attention.
Nate Kadlac: So you mentioned a couple of times here, Waffle [00:53:00] studio that you're building and. Is it, is it lonely being a creator? Are you, are you looking to build something bigger? What are your, what's, what's the impetus behind building the studio?
James Robinson: I mean, I haven't been doing it on my own so far. I've got, my wife does all the social media stuff and I'm working with my consultant Charlotte. She's doing Charlotte Cook. She's doing a lot of the reaching out to, to partners and we can work with and different people and slowly introducing me to the games industry and.
James Robinson: Teaching stuff. So yeah, now I've always found people to talk to about the game and how it's going and the other game developers, but no saying that I still would like to build a team because I wouldn't say it's lonely, but I, I don't get enough time to. To fulfill all the ideas that I've got. I think that's the main thing.
James Robinson: I want some help to see if we can make some [00:54:00] of that a reality and try it out. So that's the main impetus for hiring people. But I also love sharing ideas with people. And I think it would be great to have a small team of people that we can, we can throw ideas around. And if we come up with something, we've, we've got the skill where we can create it really quickly.
James Robinson: Like I said, with web stuff, you can create stuff quickly and, and put it out there. And I think we need to take advantage of that as much as possible and streamline that so that if we do have an idea, we can just come up with it. And it doesn't take, it only takes a few days to put it out there and see what people think of it.
James Robinson: So that's a reason to have a good team just to make things like that happen. I also like working in an office on a similar sort of point. The office that I'm in now, this is a rented office that me and my wife come to, and when we're having meetings, we can invite people here and, but it's in a building of other shared offices.
James Robinson: So [00:55:00] we've got a shared kitchen and you can actually talk to real human beings, which I like. And yeah, so I, I'm excited about inviting more people into the office and having people around that you can actually talk to face to face. That's a good reason for doing it.
Aaron Kardell: We always love the, uh, family connections and, uh, just how different people have integrated their families into game building.
Aaron Kardell: And I hear your wife gets a lot of credit for just some of the formation story too. Are there any specific things you want to call out there?
James Robinson: Yeah, well, yeah, so my wife, Ness, she came up with a name for Waffle, which is great. I mean, I don't know. I think a lot of people can relate to the problem of trying to come up with a name for your game, and then you might be able to tell I'm not very good at it because our other game is called One Word Setch because that's what it is.
James Robinson: But Waffle is a lot better name. So, uh, so yeah, [00:56:00] that night when I was coming up with this idea I just drew it out on a bit of paper, as I like to do in my notebook, and I showed it to Ness and her first comment was, oh that looks like a waffle. And yeah, that was brilliant because that's. Obviously a great name for it.
James Robinson: And so that was one thing off the list to tick off because immediately we had a great name for it. Yeah, nest does a lot of the social media posts and Yeah. Replies to people for me and, and yeah, I think people appreciate that. I think it comes through when you're honestly replying to people, they realize you're a real person behind the game.
James Robinson: It makes a big difference and our audience appreciates it. Yeah. So. Yeah, we're enjoying that, doing it like that.
Aaron Kardell: I've heard you're maybe sponsoring a, or have sponsored a local hackathon in your area. What were, can you tell us what some of the motivations were on that?
James Robinson: Yeah, it's something [00:57:00] I've always wanted to do.
James Robinson: It's my first hackathon actually. And I've, you know, there's been a few people trying to encourage me to do it before and I always turn them down. So I felt like now was a good time because obviously I'm trying to build up this waffle studio now. And so I wanted to. reach out and see if people are interested in doing that.
James Robinson: So the hackathon is a good chance to meet people, meet more people that are doing things, who enjoy making things, because that's, that's really what, what I'm into. I just like making things and I've always just liked making stuff like this. And I'd like to find more people that are motivated by that, motivated by making something that you feel proud of and it's quick and you can give it to an audience.
James Robinson: Yeah, so the hackathon was partly to, to do that and just, um, see if there was an interest in doing that. [00:58:00] And partly just to see if my skills are up to scratch with other people's because I've spent a lot of time just working as a solo developer for people of recent years. So I felt like I needed to get out of that routine and integrate with other people.
James Robinson: Yeah, more developers were doing similar things and it was great. It's, it's great fun doing something like that. It's a lot of pressure on, on your skills to create something in a short frame of time, but I really loved doing it and, and it's great fun and you learn a lot from doing that sort of thing. So it's always worth pushing yourself to do something like that, that you might not initially feel.
James Robinson: The most comfortable doing, but yeah, once you're doing it, it's, it's good fun. It's great learning experience for developers at any level because, you know, you get a lot of skill benefits from doing that sort of thing.
Nate Kadlac: Well for [00:59:00] some of the developers who are just starting out or game creators just starting out, would you have any advice for them when building their first game?
James Robinson: Yeah. I mean, it's all about keeping it simple, which I've always known you've always wanted to create. The minimum viable product is what they talk about and, and getting people using it. But I don't know, there's, it's easier said than done. Sometimes you want to make sure that it's still a product that people aren't going to laugh at.
James Robinson: And so you, well, people are going to be like, is this the best you can do? So I don't know, you have self conscious. Thoughts about, you know, just putting something out there in front of people. But, you know, it's the best way of doing things because you get feedback very quickly. You find out if it works, you need to put it out in front of people.
James Robinson: You need to keep it as simple as possible. You don't need to worry about all of the little extras along the side. [01:00:00] You just need to work out what is your core. compelling thing and get people to try it and see if they agree that that's a good thing to be doing. Do they enjoy it? Do they enjoy doing that thing that you've given them to do?
James Robinson: So, so yeah, I think that's probably the main thing is just not to think too hard about it. If you can create something, Yeah, just, just do it as quickly as you can, as simple as, as you can with the technology that maybe you feel most comfortable in, that you enjoy using. That's how I, I got there.
Aaron Kardell: I really liked that last part of the advice.
Aaron Kardell: Work with what you're comfortable with. I think a lot of people sometimes overcomplicate things, even just on the creating it side, like, Oh, I got to learn a new, the hot new framework, or I got to do this or that.
James Robinson: Yeah. Yeah. Well. Waffle was created with jQuery. So if anyone knows what that is, that means a lot, I think.
James Robinson: [01:01:00] And it still is. I don't think I will be using jQuery for everything going forward, but that is something that you can create stuff very quickly in. That's not necessarily great for the long run, but that doesn't matter. If you can create something quickly, that's better than not creating it at all. So use what you can, create it quickly, and then you can always use it.
James Robinson: You can always sort that out later down the line if people actually enjoy playing it because it's worth finding that out first before you spend your time trying to Yeah, use the hot new thing and, and architect it to an inch of its life. So yeah, don't over-engineer it. Just get it out there.
Nate Kadlac: So James, it's hard to ignore how AI is impacting kind of everything around us.
Nate Kadlac: Does it impact Waffle in any way?
James Robinson: Not at the moment. I mean, I do try and embrace it, I guess. That's the main feeling I have about it at [01:02:00] the moment. We do try and, we write a lot of jokes. I'm hesitant about saying that. We try and write a lot of jokes or nonsense in our word definitions. If anyone notices, I don't know if a lot of people noticed, but we, that seems to be what we spend a lot of our time doing these days.
James Robinson: And we tried to use AI to do that sort of thing. And, and it didn't work very well. Turns out chat GPT hasn't got a great sense of humor yet. So that's one thing that it doesn't work for, but I think like a lot of coders as well, I use GitHub co pilot. So that helps a lot, you know, speeding up writing code.
James Robinson: And I think that's, that's. It's not a good way to look at it at the moment. It's a tool that can allow you to do things quicker. You still have to put the effort in to do it, but it speeds, speeds things up. We haven't found a way that I think would [01:03:00] work in the game itself. So it's just in the background helping us create things.
James Robinson: There are other games like Two for Goofoers, um, one that I've played before I met. Oh, I spoke to Colin who created that, that's quite a good game, that uses AI generated images as part of its game, and that's great, I mean that's a great way of using AI to create content I think, but apart from that, for Waffle in particular, the content that was created wasn't quite human enough for us I don't think.
James Robinson: It's not got the same personality as something that's created by hand, and people can tell for stuff like that. So, at the moment, it's there as a tool, and I feel like we need to keep up with it and embrace it along the way and don't discount it because it does help us create things faster.
Aaron Kardell: You haven't tried it as a prompt yet.
Aaron Kardell: Please write in the style of [01:04:00] James Robinson of Waffle fame.
James Robinson: I don't think we're quite there. I've tried to write things in the style of Giles Brandre, who, I don't know if many people know who he is listening to this podcast, but he's, he's been one of the sort of spiritual voices behind Waffle, so that sometimes helps.
James Robinson: But yeah, now we're just using human power for most of our stuff at the moment. But it's, it's an interesting thing to try. It can help inspire ideas, I think, as well. There's another good reason for it. It's quite a weird brain that it has and it can come up with some interesting things.
Nate Kadlac: So one thing I think a lot about is SEO and what might happen with AI and we get a ton of organic traffic.
Nate Kadlac: I'm sure you do too, which is why I think you're building a brand and an IP that people want to come to that people know about. And it's something I think we're trying to do as well. But do you have any thoughts on SEO? Maybe, maybe changing the future [01:05:00] and how that affects waffle?
James Robinson: I don't know. I mean, we would like to, you know, appeal to people that are looking for word games, which is.
James Robinson: Something people do search for and people are still using Google a lot just to find games, which again, that surprises me based on, you know, the app stores I thought were the be all and end all for people searching for games, but it turns out people are. Still searching through Google to find stuff that's just on the internet.
James Robinson: Um, so there's always, uh, improvements that we can do to try and appeal to those people, but so far it's just one of those things that's on the to do list of things to try and just see if we can appeal to more people that way. But there's lots of other things on that list as well. So I don't know if it will necessarily be something that we try soon, but yeah, the brand thing as well.
James Robinson: I, I want it to be recognized as. Just that people know the name of the game that we've created [01:06:00] and people can search for it if they like it and come up with us rather than someone else. That's all I would like, which I think is working so far. Yeah, so if people can understand what a waffle puzzle is amongst all the other sort of puzzles that are out there.
James Robinson: I try and collect, now that I'm doing this full time, I try and just collect all the different types of puzzle there are out there. I've always been fascinated by logic puzzles and not necessarily crosswords, but like sudoku and any other sort of mobile puzzle games. I'm always Collecting those ideas and just working out what makes them fun.
James Robinson: So I'd love to be considered one of those. Among the ranks of classic puzzles at some point.
Aaron Kardell: It's a good aspiration. Well, James have really enjoyed this. If you want people to find you online, where, where should they look?
James Robinson: Yeah, we do have social channels. If you come [01:07:00] through, uh, I think if you just go to waffle, really, if you look in the menu, there's some links to our social channels that we.
James Robinson: Pay attention to, yeah, and we, if we, if we release anything else, it's going to be through Waffle, to be honest. So, for instance, onewordsearch. com, that's something that we promote through Waffle, so. Just, uh, yeah, just play your daily Waffle and you'll hear from us through there. We push stuff out there quite regularly.
James Robinson: And I hope people enjoy it.
Aaron Kardell: So wafflegame. net or, uh, just waffle in your Google search, it'll be the top result.
James Robinson: Yeah. Just search for it.
Aaron Kardell: All right. James, thanks so much for being with us today.
James Robinson: That's okay. Yeah. Thanks for getting in touch. It's been great too.
