Balancing Polish and Production

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Every purchase directly supports nonprofit initiatives led by Day of the Devs and the AIAS Foundation View the winners and secure your prints at gamemakersketchbook. com Hey everyone. I'm Trent Custers, co founder and studio director at League of Geeks And you're listening to the Gameemaker's notebook Today, I'm talking with my buddy, Jake Burket of Greay Alien Games. They're responsible, along with Night Signal Entertainment for the wonderful and quite spooky, if I must say, forbidden solitaire. That's right, it's solitaire but accursed CD ROM from nine hundred ninety five, which may or may not be hazardous to your health But anyway, we start off the podcast as we usually do. We talkking about the early days. We talk about how Jake went from hobbyist to game developer thanks to an initial inspiration from some government computing classes in school Working on small match three games in quick succession with short dev cycles And Actually, Jake's kind of infamous for having one of the most viewed GDC talks of all time over a million views on the official YouTube channel. U It's called sururviving Indie Dev for eleven years withithout a hit or something like that And anyway, it's one of the best GDC talks out there. And so we talk a bunch about that talk. The inspirations behind a lot of the principles and lessons he shares there gives us a bit of insights into some updated thoughts he has on that talk We talk about the story behind Jake's runaway discovery into the dark art of steam sales forecasting Burquet ratio, which he coined in twenty eighteen. But of course, we are here to talk about forbidden solitaire. We talk about their collaboration with Night Signal Entertainment, the co developers And the original pitch that Night Signal gave to Jake and Helen and the magic of that cursed CD rum concept and the nineties pastiche We talk about their carving out of responsibilities between each of their micro studios, how that worked logistically and their Oership The viral trailer, they created to market test the game and the success they saw with that. Even pairing down the design from its sixty page dock and eighty jokers into the tight execution you see today. And speaking of execution, Jake also talks about the idea and the execution and those things coming together contributing to their success Speaking of success, we talk about the moment of release, watching the sales and of course, hearing how Jake feels about finally getting his indie hit just over twenty years into his career as an indie dev Then we wrap up with some reflections on Jake's path to success and the role that generosity in giving back to the Game deev community has played in that Jake is someone I've known for many years and I've always relished the opportunity to talk to him wherever we meet, but it's not that often we get a chance. So I'm so excited to share this with you today. He's super insightful. He's one of these indndieevs that seems to have the right brain and the left brain of indndieDev completely talking to each other in sync. He thinks about the business, he thinks about the market. He thinks about the execution of games as a medium and as an art form So It is my absolute pleasure to introduce you to Jake Buquette Greay alien games Enjoy Welcome to G Maker's Notbook, a podcast featuring a series of in depth one on one conversations between game makers providing a thoughtful, intimate perspective on the business and craft of interactive entertainment. The Game Mak's notebook is presented by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences a member driven organization dedicated to the recognition and advancement of interactive entertainment Welcome to the Gameemaker's notebook Thanks for inviting me, Trent It's such a pleasure to be chatting with you. I think the last time we saw each other was, would you believe it? Steam deev days. Well, that would be twenty sixteen or the twenty fourteen one I'm yearning for another dev days greatreat events. There It was good. I still have both t shirts, including the second one, which is the best t shirt I own probably. You're not really a game developer if you don't have like a conference t shirt that you love right? whether it's GDC or Dice said, you know, I wonder we should be doing dice t shts. I think we are. I think I've got a game jam t shirt. Hre you got a game Jam t shirt on now? Global game sht, look at that. twenty in Vancouver, yeah Yeah All right, well, that's exciting. Youay a little tease about your time in Vancouver as well. We're going to take it right back to the start because weve got a lot to talk about with you certainly quite a storid careera Very cool stuff Why don't you tell us as I always get folks on this podcast too what your earliest memory in video games was and the one that you know set your brain alight with this love for this medium that we have Okay, I'm going to give you two earliest memories. love. One of them is I think I was about six and We moved into this house my parents were renting, I think, with another couple, right And they had a thing called a bea tone something or the other. And it was basically a pong machine, right? So you know Classic Game Pong and you had these little dials on these controllers that you would use to control the bat. It was on a black and white TV And you would use this bat to bounce all around and it had four modes and they were all kind of like the same Tinis. squash whatever. And I guess I used that a bit, but I was like, it didn't capture me I know some people you know, think that Pong was the game that sort of first introduced him to video games but it just was too fiddly, too difficult, it wasn't in a variety. It was black and white So my first kind of memory where I really got into computers was Maybe I was seven and a friend had a spectrum And they had a game which I found out years later was called Jumping Jack Very simple game with this sort of like like a platform game on one screen where you had to sort of run along and collect objects and avoid holes kind of thing in multilayers. And I was like, what I've never seen anything like this, right? It was way better than pong And then I guess, um We moved after that and the primary school had a computer. There's this thing in the UK where government kind of encouraged schools to get computers in the eighties. that would be the BBC micro And that was you know, an eight bit computer, but The school had a bunch of games and we used to play games before we started the lessons. So we used to play Chucky Egg or Pacman or various different kind of games. And that kind of made me want a computer. so we can talk about the phase next, but yeah, I guess those are my earliest memories deep cuts. I love it. You know, and this is going to be A very stupid question, but I just realized I've actually never Narn Is the BBC and BBC micro of the broadcasting company or is it a completely different relation Yeah, it was. Yeah. it was part of that Yeah. But what happened is they teamed up with a company called Acorn to um made the hardware and stuff like that. So Yeah, I just realized it was an assumption I always had, but I never never checked. Of course. Wow, very cool Ive gott to love that the government funded computer programs. That's awesome. And so was that where your kind of love for it began, I guess? I think so, I mean, playing it wasn't just playing the games, but also you could break into some of the games that were made in basic And then look at the code and our teacher encourages us to sort of look at that a bit. And I think he even coded games, this guy And I learned a bit of basic programming on the Booy Micro And really, it wasn't until I got a spectrum a a year or so later that which came with a manual. Back then computers came with manuals, right? It came with a basic manual and I read the whole manual learen to code. And u you know That was unusual. You know, these days you have to go on the internet or you watch videos and stuff, but when you had to learn from manual, there was no one else to help you out. You just had to kind of figure it out and do all that kind of stuff reallyally stuff like the BBC and then the low cost spectrum in the UK really kickstarted the whole bedroom coder thing and I'm still in a bedroom here coding, right? So but it kickstarted the whole thing and The UK was really a sort of powerful force in Gameedev time and I think that's still still the case today really. So Yeahah. abbsolutely. You know, we've obviously spoken to some storied you know, UK developers on here and so many of them have stories of like trading games that they've created or, you know, things like that at the disc markets and stuff like that at the swap meets. And you know, this same kind of beginning of getting into I guess computer. programming in their bedrooms thanks to these, you know, the home computing over the time I think it's kind of strange actually in the whole of human history to have been alive at a time where Yeah when there were no computers at homes in people's homes and people didn't have them and then suddenly there were. there were computers in homes and pretty much everybody has one That's a kind of a weird crossover time if you think about it Yeah, absolutely, especially when considering the you know, Moo's Lw and how fast it's all accelerating. I imagine people who are around for the invention of the printing press perhaps didn't see the kind of impact as rapidly as we have in our lifetime. T true. Yeah. So Jake, would you say that you came from like a family that was kind of like a computer household or a tech savvy? or was it kind of a what age were you when you got this spectrum in the household Yeah, like completely opposite. my parents were kind of hippies, I guess Um, you know Yeah, no completely the opposite. my dad was into playing folk music and to the extent where once I got one of his folks songs and coded it into my spectrum using the beep command and played it back to him. And he was sort of interested but like, well, it hasn't got the human touch sort thing, right? Yeah Which you know is a kind of contentious topic these days So no, they were not tech at all. but at some point I did say I really wanted a computer. You know, thank goodness, my dad said I could get one using my sort of combined birthday and Christmas. gift and then we got this low cost spectrum which was u like ninety nine pounds in the UK. but you had to buy an additional tape recorder in order to load the games off tape, right? Oh right. Yeah, I don't know if he just thought I was gonna play games on it, which is what lots of kids did U But I did learn to program it because games were expensive. L, you know, and I didn't have enough money to go out and buyload a game. so I just learned to program and it was fascinating and I've never stopped. Yeah. And so how did that kind of then translate into obviously it was a hobbyist thing that you were doing, but like when did it become apparent to you that maybe you wanted to do this as a job or it translated into something kind of didid you study computer science at university? Were you kind of on that path from the start probably wanted to be a game developer kind of like almost as soon as I started And that urge never really went away U I didn't go to university and study computer science or anything I just kept coding the entire time. In fact, when my you know, sort of peer group were at university. I was in a flat in my town, coding my amiga, my amiga twelve hundred all the time and making music on it and just doing that, I guess. But eventually I got a job in business software. Um, which I did for nine years, But I always secretly wanted to make games and eventually I quit that and then came in Iie death, which we can I guess talk about So yeah. Yeah. so working in the corporate were you making them on the side? And did some of those kind of two partter question, you know, did you keep up your hobbyist interests in it and make games on the side? but then also did working in kind of a more corporate setting for programming? did that and a business setting, did that inform any kind of programming practices and you know, did you have any good technical mentorship that you carried over into your video game practice, you feel? Okay, yeah, that's a good question. So I mean, I kept coding anyway all through my teens all the time constantly. And then I think When I was about twenty, I built my first PC to play Doom. and u And honestly, gamed was so good then my egro way maybe wasn't really doing much game dev of years because I was just playing these CD RM games you would get in the nineties and so on And then I was doing business software in the day, right? But then I did start to make things in DOS and other such things, right And that's when I think at some point I was in two thousand four, I got hold of Blitz plus, which is a language In fact, I used a language called Bitz basic two on the Aiga which is really good. I used to code in assembly language, you see. and if you speak to anyone who's done that, may perhaps you have yourself, it's very powerful, but it's quite laborious and it crashes a lot and stuff like this. It's really interesting. When I got Blitz Basic two, I was suddenly able to like be more creative and make games and just do stuff faster, o. A bit more reckless, right Yeah, and that was way more fun and it was still fast and powerful. So Years later, when ten years later I heard about Blitz plus For PC, I got that and was coding that and I was coding a game in my spare time actually in the evenings and weekends. but this is after like a full week of working in business software, right? And The problem is you get pretty tired when you're working full time coding and then you're coding in the evenings and the weekends and that's why I decided to go full time indie so I could just make games. Also it's because I was naive and I thought it would be easy Um Now, okay, so what okay, let's answer your second part of the question, which is id I didn't have any tech mentersorship. I actually was this is a small town. I got hired from a computer shop I worked in. right to make I used to build PC's, right? But this guy came in who wanted to run a business software company and he gave me the manual and CD ROM for Delphi Delphi two, which is a visual language a bit like visual basic back in the day And I went home and learned it over a couple of weeks, learned about databases, madea sort of pad app with Wizzywig Do you remember this term? What you see is what you get. Okay, Wizzywig. Anime a little gamer stuff. And he said, you're hired. And I was basically the senior developer, right? Even though you know, that was it. And there were some few other people came on board, but I learned things from different people learned stuff over the years And eventually I became manager of that company, but I didn't own it, right? So Being manager, I had to like do everything. So I had to to be the producer for the project or the project manager had to do the coding. I had to sell the systems to people, had to install them. We had to do help desks, we had to hire people U So marketing. so I knew an accounting. so I had to run a business basically. All of that sort of running a business and making production quality code. We supplied code systems to the UK government, for example and bookshops all around the UK. it was bookshop software multi user bookshop software U And I learned to just make good solid stuff that we'd tested and we'd thought about. and then I brought that across to games. so making solid games that were well tested, I guess. Um, and knowing how to run a business. So when I started my business, I knew how to do all of that sort of stuff, which is a thing that a lot of indie deevs maybe don't have at the beginning, right It may be our passion for games, but don't know how to run a business. And if you want to do it as a business, you need to figure that out or work with someone who can do that Hm So let's talk about that leap. And I mean it it's kind of all coalesing now, you know, knowing what I know about you, Jake and obviously, you know, the chats that we've had and having watched your GDC talks and various things over the years Um this's all kind of starting to make sense now with you being the manager of this company, right So talk about the leap out of this into like you say, it was kind of, I mean, I did a similar thing founding my own company at twenty four. It's just like all naivety and energy at some point. Was there something else there it sounds like in regards to your kind of belief that you could run this thing like a business or that you were kind of doing it already. And did you have any plans from the start? orr was it just like launching yourself into it and seeing what happens Yeah, Okaykay. so I was working on this game called Iron Fist, notothing to do with a Marvel or whatever. It was like a multid directional Kung Fu platform game, right I was making that m spare time and I thought Yeah, you know, I need to go full time. I realized the scope immediately was quite large and I thought I need to go full time to work on this. and I was losing passion for the business job and traveling around the country and and doing installations and all that stuff. and u Yeah, I think at the time I was reading some blogs by a guy you may have heard of called Steve Pavlina And He used to run a forum called the Dexterity Forums and then the very first sort of indie forums that were kind of worldwide And he also wrote kind of like self help type articles, you know, this is is still a big inomational speaker kind of. Yeah, yeah, it was quite a big then I read an article called Cultivate Burning Desire And how to cultivate that. And I read that, you know, and I realized that God, you know, I want to make video games. This is what I've always done. I've played them. I love video games. I've fiddled around with making games for years I want to do this as my job. I can transfer all my skills as programmer and running a business to making games And in fact, I played a couple of his games, Steve Pabin's games and sorry, Steve, but they were poor quality. And he'd somehow made a lot of money from them. And I was like do way better than this, right? You know, And so I thought I'd go I'll go Indie, I make laded games You know, I'd do way better. And the reality was very different. likeike you can know how to program, you know how to run a business, but In the past, I'd made bits and bobs of games, but I'd never made a commercial quality game and shipped it. And that is way more difficult than it appears and I had to get pro of that right and shipping a product. And so yeah, you know, I had to make several games and get through this kind of learning process to actually, you know, get good as they say so I was naive in my you know, young man abilities to do this thing. And I think I did run the business well. It was just It was hard to make money from games. and hey, guess what? notot a lotw has changed And so two things to help us kind of timeestamp this and get some context of like, you know, your ambition and what how old were you and kind of what was the period here that you're talking Right, so I was thirty and that was kind of the thing which happened was at my my thirtieth birthday was approaching I was kind of down about working on this business office stuff, knowing I wanted to make games And this is two thousand five Okay. So I'd already been doing this game part time time Iy. And, you know, I spoke to my wife and said, I really want to go full time and make games, you know? and She supported me in that transition, even though it was like giving up a sensible job with money and we had two small kids and all this kind of stuff. And your kids by this point as well. R Rightight Yeah, yeah. prettyretty young actually, like a year and Three years or four years. So young kids, a mortgage, a car, you know stuff for a cat and probably had a cat U And so it was a elap It was a sort of leap of faith where probablyrobably could have if it failed in other ways, I probably could have maybe found some other business software job at the time because There was a sort of boom in that sort of whole industry but I wanted to make games work. So partly was that. me thinking and this is a joke now, me thinking thirtty's pretty old I've really got to do this thing if I'm ever going to do it And so making that leap right And that was twenty years ago. Well, look, I am One of your numerous claims to fame, Jake is that you have one of the most viewed and also, as I may say If I may say sorry, as a member of the GDC advisory Board for Independent Development and Business strrategy, one of the best GDC talks that has ever been given It's also one of the most viewed, right? And it's called How to survive in game deev for eleven years without a hit? It was about nine years ago, am I correct Yeah, it was twenty sixteen. so ten years ago and actually I think that Maybe this helped get it get it viewed, but the title has been changed on YouTube, maybe for SEO purposes, right?ight My original talk was called the No hit Wonder at which makes more sense, right? The no hit wander was like, okay How do you survive without hits for a long time? And that because that was twenty sixteen I feel that and now we're ten years later, I feel that that kind of proved my case because I'm still here ten years later, right Totally. Yeah. The strategy must have worked, right? Well, look, I think I'm glad that you said the strategy must have worked because it's a perfect segwue because I actually, you know, usually this would be the part where we would talk about the next however many games you made and you're you know, and we're going to do and a bridge version of that. But I really want to implore people who haven't seen the talk or listened to it. you know, I would actually ask you to sit down and watch it because there's a bunch of great visual aids you know in Jake's presentation. But if you must, you can also, know put in your headphones or something and listen I would implore you to W watch the talk because it's absolutely incredible. And as you've said, Jake, just for our readers, our listeners here Jake essentially charts how over the course of eleven years after going indie that we've just heard about you manage to survive without a hit, right? Yeah. So Maybe we can talk a little bit about the principles of that and the things that you feel, especially now I guess with some hindsight, that got you through that first decade of indiev because there are some really and this is why I sort of use the strategy segue because You were quite strategic or maybe perhaps tactical about how you went about some things. it's clear that you know, you spoke in the talk about tracking your own time And so you have like an ability to check your hours and you know, after a projects been out for a certain amount of time and commercialize. You can see how much money you made per hour and all these sorts of things. I'm really keen to hear, you know, now with a bit of distance between you and the talk. What you feel some of the guiding principles were and the defining points of ensuring that stability through those ten years because the industry went through some crazy times as well. Yeah in that time, right I guess one thing I ought to say is everything is constantly changing. particular markets I was in at the time don't really exist anymore, which was the casual download market. So what that meant is if you imagine before mobiles C you imagine that? for mobiles or cell phones, wh whatever you call them, people were downloading PC games from certain sites like Well, there was a site called download dot com where you literally went and could pay for games and download them, right ames Indie deevs had their own websites and they would sell them on there with various widgets and tools. This is before steam and before mobile And then you had large sites like Big Fish Games, Real Arcade, Reflexive and so on. and they all sold indie games, and those indie games spanned a variety of things like sometimes they were shoed to maps or platform or games like you'd kind of expect But there were a lot of these sort of what I would call, yeah, casual games. and that started with things like Bejeweled, which a lot of people have played, one other sort of I can't call it original match three because there were kind of match three games in there. eighties and nineties for like mega dririve and things, but One of the one, right? Like that broke out that everyone. Yeah. I think it's the one that went big and that was popcaap who people would have heard offer us either that or other games And so u casual game market was doing really well and I looked at it and realized that The arcade style games that I was making at Kung Fu platformer weren't selling as well as the things like bejewelled and mastery games and other games, card games and so on And so I actually cancellled my Um Kung fu game. That's the kind of first game I've actually cancellled The only game we've actually cancellled, I think. And then I started to make match three games, right? And you know, a lot of people sometometimes think, oh well, You know, you sold out, you made l little amount three games. But what we have to get at is I enjoyed Bejued. I thought it was great And I really enjoyed the challenge of making an engine and it's quite easy to make a basic mastery engine, but it's actually quite tricky to make one with all the game feel that feels good and interesting to play and then add on power upps and story and metag game And every one I made I kept back a list of improvements that I could have put in put into the next one and made them better and better So that's actually A couple of points. So one was I sort of made a game that was suitable for the market and rather than just a pure passion project And I know that you do hear these stories of Indies's toiling awayay for ten years on a passion project and it comes out and has big success, but you don't hear the sort of thousands that do the same and it doesn't work. And you hear about, you know people selling out and just doing something just purely for the money. and that would probably be free to play games or something like that, right? Sorry, free to play game des. But you know, there's a certain thing and I was trying to do something in the middle which was there was there was a market for it And I enjoyed it and I could genuinely you know, improve and make good games in that genre. So this the other point which I think will still stand the test of time was I reused my engine. I made multiple games in a genre. And a lot of Indies make one game And they're like, oh, that was tiring. I'm sick of that now. I need to make another totally different game. Yeah. And that means you throw away huge chunks of your engine, maybe some people even change language. In the middle of a game as well, which is a real mistake. never do that Um, So I kept my engine, reused my engine, but I also gained domain knowledge so I got better at match Thes. and my seventh one The last one I made in twenty thirteen, spooky bonus That was I know I did this talk called No Hit Wonder. It was kind of a hit on the casual sites But those sites normally took something like sixty to seventy percent of your revenue. recall you saying from your talk, which is the inverse of steam and everything else Yeah. And we all complain about steam thirty percent now, right? And say it should be you know, people I'm one of the Yeah, I'm one of these people like it should be zero until you hit one hundred thousand or something. like just if you're not getting the visibility and you're not your game isn't benefiting from All the things that Steam say they offer devs then cut that amount down, right? When your game makes money, okay, fine, take your thirty percent. But yeah, they were taking sixty, seventy percent. So this match regame. it was a hit kind of It did very well on those sites. But they took most of the money, right? But you know, it was pretty good So I guess that's a thing that I did was I reused my engine, I got good at making a certain genre Okay. And in each time that meant I could keep a list of improvements and not put them try to put them all into this game. So I was good at controlling scope. That's the other thing. A lot of these games were made in a short period of time A because of reuse, B because of domain knowledge and C, I just was trying to get the thing out the door And that was partly because of financial constraints. L if you're not making a ton of money and it's not sitting in the bank, you have to make new games and each new game gives you a bump and then it goes down again and then a bump and so on So Those were key things and it was about being adaptable. you know, I had to do stuff like contract work grants, there are UK tax reliefs You even relocated the family at one point, right? Right Yeah.. And that was because after I was a contractor for Big Fish Games They like some of my early games They hired me to make a game called Fairway Solitaire with a designer, John Cutter who worked at big fish games. I was the programmer, He was the designer and he was very good and I made that game and that was another hit game, but not mine. They owned it, right? So this is when I call myself the No Hit Wonder. I mean games that I didn't really own any of them and they didn't take off in what you call a hit sense U So yeah, they then said they wanted to open an office in Vancouver. They were Seattle based. I went there to work for them in Vancouver and I worked on a game that they cancellled, which is sad but it wasn't because it's a bad game or anything. it's just because Facebook Ten Um And everybody do you remember Farmville when everybody was playing this farming games and clicking games and everything And so Big Fish wanted a slice of that action for to play games on Facebook And we all pivoted to making a thing called My tribe with Ryan Clark, who you probably know, right? crypt of the necroanzer fame Right. And you know, quite a lot of casual games before he worked for Big Fish games. and then he was in charge of my tribe and I was working on that with him U So yeah, I did work for them for a while. So what was good though, if they let me kept my company in the background, so it was still selling a few games in the background But on Iidle, like I wasn't releasing anything new. And then when I eventually quit bigig Fish games, I went back to being Indian carried on, but I had gained a lot of information and knowledge just from working with the people at Big Fish Games and Ryan and other people and meeting people in Vancouver I started up in indie meet up there. which is still going today, you know, and they do conferences annually and stuff like this. So full on indie Full I. ye. In fact, I think I've got the You're wearing the mch. Look at that. I'm wearing the mch. Um So yeah, that was that's one of those things I would say is a lot of Iies sort of go into this. H. just off their own back and that's cool. But it may be worth working with somebody else first, you know, like in a studio to get that experience from more experienced people, whether it's AAA or IndD, if you can or you've got to have a job on the side, probably why you've got to make make a few games that don't do very well and flop while you learn the trade. Like anything, you have to learn the trade, right Yeah,'m and you got to get good at it I mean, so I was adaptable financially, you know, I learned stuff, I work with different people. I reused my engine into the market, you know, all of those things I guess, and I' madej the games quickly. They helped me be sustainable and stay in it I it's the average kind of life cycle for one of your games. I mean, sorry, death cycle for one of your games Well, some of my early ones, believe it or not were only like three months amazing Yeah, only three months, right? And so that's why sppooky bonus is like my best dollars per hour game. It took three months and it made me well over sort of a hundred thousand dollars sort of thing. So the dollars was w That was like your fourth in the bonus series at that point in time or something? or Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I lose track. I yeah, I made quite a lot of them. Yeah I made holiday bonus Easter bonus, Exmas bonus, spring bonus. Yeah, okay. fifth, maybe fifth or something And I'm with all in the Match three thing. I was a big u puzzle questuest fan for me. Oh yees. great game. You know, this was like the depth in that for a match three game is just incredibly addicting and you know, really proves that what you're saying about the the genre there And we even used puzzleQuest was an influence when I first made our term based Solitaire combat games which we'll get to later on. Credible Yeah, really smart game designer, Steve Fulkner and his crew out here in Melbourne actually. Oh really? Yeah. I first played it on Xbox, I think, rather than PC. Y, so did I. Yeah. it was one of the early XBLA titles. Yeah Yeah. Okay. well look, your talk also, one thing I wanted to ask you and check back in on is your talk you famously Open up your talk with a line that you, you know, are positive to the crowd. And the line is You're not special, nor is your game and you'll never ship a hit. And it's immediate the reaction and the response that you get from, you know, from the audience and it's a brilliant opening to a GDC talk. Do you still believe that? Do you think it's it's more true now than ever? Do you think it's changed a bit Okay, I think I'm not challenging you. I'm just curious by it. I love it I mean, I open with that, I tell you why I open with that that another substory is When I went to Big Fish Games, they they were trying to grow the studio and they kept sending me to events and I had to do a few speeches, you know, or talks about game design and stuff like this And in Vancouver, I Tast Masters, which is an organization which teaches you how to do public speaking and so on I'm not as good as I was back then because I was practicing often, but one of the things was start with a strong opener and stuff, right Yeah And a good ending practice practice. and that speech Even though it's, you know, this one hour long speech or whatever, I practiced and prepared that for months. I wasn't like one of these people prepping on a plane on the way over and I tried bits of it out in conversation with people. so it kind of It took a lot of preparation and I think, you know it kind of showed in the end. So that's why I open with that line. So The idea really was to just get people out of this mindset because they'd all seen like indie game the movie which was like Yeah we'd all been poisoned by that. Yeah had Joonath Cne and McMillion and so on making these games well massive hits on Xbox arcade, right? And it was like, I could do that too. you know, And I was naive when I started. So I wanted to get people out of that naive mindset and say, lookook, you know For most of us, for whatever reason, your game isn't going to pop off and be a hit And u You know, and to get out of that mindset and just get into the mindset of look, okay, how can I make a good game, improve my skills you know, learn the market, run a business, do it all sensibly. kindind of like bide your time until you know, you get better and better and hopefully your revenue goes up or maybe one day you do have a hit. You know, you just keep rolling those dice. And then one day you get a double six, which maybe it's finally happened to me, but it took a long time Um because you cannot rely on having a hit straight out of the gate. And even if you do look into the backstories of people who've done that, you discover that they worked on a lot of other games first or worked in another company or there's a lot of skill Nledge going there. It's very rare to come straight out of the gate with an indie hit. and of course, a lot of Indies put everything they can into their first game, but at the end of the day probablyably not going to be their best game. Well the thing is it might actually be their last game if they don't budget time wise and stuff and they spend too long on it. That's why I'm always like make short games, makeake short games. Yeah, my go to piece of advice one of the top three for people who are getting a start in indie games or as developers, especially when they're making a game and they're in the midst of it. In fact, I gave it today to someone that I met with who's getting started is get your first game out of the way. Like just this isn't theag don't make this the magnamopus. Like just it, like get it out, ship it, get it done because then you've done it and then you know. And as you say, it's actually the vast vast exception to the rule that any of us are successful without. you know, with our first indie games as well, right? So I even spoke to a very experienced indndy Dv yesterday who has made a couple of hit games back in the day. I'm not going to say who they are And they've been struggling for years to put out another game and they keep kind of overscoping it and reaching the point where They then hit the dip. There's a thing called the dip that occurs in the middle of a long project. We are like, oh my go, I realize how much there is to do perhaps the motivation wanes. And now they've recently started a smaller project they're really enjoying and having fun with and they think they can get out the door a lot quicker. And I've really encouraged them to do that because I think it will help them get back on the wagon. I don't know if that's the right term or something, but you know, like Break the chunk, right? Yeah, justust get something out the door again and understand what the market and shipping is like today because it is not the same as five or ten years ago In fact, I'd go as far as to say Don't listen to the advice of anyone who hasn't shipped in the last one or two years on steam. It's so different. That's good advice. Yeah, that's really sound advice Um, o sorry. There is another big pivot in your career, which was from your match three days into your solitaire era. Okay we're kind of still in to this point, right. But it also brought about you know, there's some interesting stuff there But it also brought about Heo Pay alien games also becoming quite literally. I mean, every solo developer is kind of a family business to some degree, especially if you're you partnner supporting you or things like that you brought wife into the business as well with this. So talk to me about the advent of moving into, I mean, you'd worked, as you said on Fairway Solitaire. this kind of coming together of you and your partner to Make these games Okay, yeah, well, it actually happened because my wife Helen She knew the type of games I was making, she helped. In fact, she came up with the exploding pumpkin idea in spooky bonus Which is surely like the result of its success, right? It's like Yeah ultim a success So you're like, you got them It's right there at the beginning and it's like boom and it made this awesome noise Um So she understood this kind of stuff, what I was doing And then she said, actuallyually, I've got an idea for a game. Wh don't we make a card game set in the regency period? The Regency period being like when the Jane Austen novels are set of Pride and Prejudice and you know, all those kind of movies where they're flancing around in the costumes and romance and all that sort of stuff. Where a glance means so much more than anything around you know. So She came up with the idea because At the time, people fortunes were won and lost with cards. It was men playing with their entire family fortunes at cards. It wasn't solitaire, other types of competitive card games where you would win or lose And she thought, well, we could, you know put card game as a theme in this first game Regency Solitaire, where somebody loses the family's fortune, right and then you sort of have to win it back It's a bit of a loose link, but it worked for the purposes of this And so she came up with this idea and I thought that could work. because the casual market does like these kind of romantic games. No one's done a Jane Austen themed solitaire game before And we added a story. so most of the solitaire games, I think at the time didn't have stories. They were just like levels of solitaire or whatever. And where added this story and as you gain things through the story Those things went into a ballroom you were upgrading and then all the upgrades affected the gameplay So it was like story, metag game. improve gameplay. and that's a kind of thing I still do in all of our games ever since then This game was, you know, I wouldn't call it a hit, but it was pretty it did pretty well on the casual sites at the time And we put it on steam kind of as an afterthought because we knew it wasn't a good fit for steam. All right, this was twenty fifteen and you know, had a relatively weak launch like we'd expected And then someone from Giant Bomb played it and got really into it and was like, this is like really good. I don't know I'm enjoying this so much And it sort of became almost like a funny thing like how am I enjoying this game which is about you know, Jane Austin and and Reency romance and that helped it pop off a bit and in the end of it got stuff like It was on people's Game of the Year list and it got mentioned in top one hundred PC games of all time and stuff like this, right? So we're like, okay, so that was kind of interesting You know, it's still not made a ton of money on steam. what maybe maybe it's made a hundred thousand gross on steam, which is ret low over ten years, right? Yeah. We recently hit overwhelmingly positive, but it took ten years to get those reviews, those the five hundred review is the third. Right wow Whereas our latest game forbidden Solitaire got that in two days. Right? with just just to compare, right? Yeah years to two days. So yeah, yeah, worked with Helen on that. and then From then onwards, she worked with me on most games, not all games. Ancient ennemy was one I worked on with Jim Rossignol who used to own RPS Rock Pbe shhotgun and then was in Ind there for a while. So I worked with him on that though Helen came in at the end to do a whole lot of level design and writing I also made a thing called Tam minus thirty, which was a sort of fast paced city builder with Ichiro from Dejia Barn Games. Yes you know him, I'm sure. And so that was she wasn't involved in that at all. And I kept telling her, oh, you probably won't like this, you won't be interested in this. And then when I finished it, she played it for days and days and days and really liked that game. So that was kind of Interesting. but yeah, she's definitely worked with me on the solitaire games including Forbidden solitaire, yeah Amazing what a partnership Now the Solitaire games there's obviously been a decision to continue them. What were and you know, you've spoken about sticking to the same genre, same tools and everything was Did you know that in moving into this solitaire game and you know you and Helen working on this idea that you were kind of making a decision that this was a new direction for the company? or was it after you'd released it and some of the positive response some commercial indicators that it was worth pursuing more, what was the decision to continue on with the Solitaire games Okay, I think the decision was that we made it and it was popular And then a friend of ours, Cliff Harris from Positech Games who made the democracy series of Games and gratuitous space Battles and so on He offered to publish our next Um, Solar tank game, right If we came up with a pitch that was suitable for steam This was the thing, right? Because steam was really kicking off at the time and people were making a lot of money. He did extremely well on steam. So he said, makeake a pitch for a solitaire game that we can put both on the casual portals and steam game turned out to be Shadow hand So it was kind of like a follow the money decision, right? which A lot of devs are in, right U And so we did that And that's a whole notother story because basically it took too long and you know, so in the dollars per hour for that game was quite low and you know, I definitely had a burnout after that. did not succeed on steam, right Um You really You released a new version later on that had some things stripped out I believe. or Yeah, I mean, it's got a happy ending in the end, which is so we release Shadowham which is like our first turn base combat solitaire game which is where I sort of innovated that particular idea Though it turned out by the way, a segue, I found out another dev was making a turn based solitaire game because I thought I must be the only person in the world doing this. sureurely. it's pretty obscure. And then I found out this other dev was making solitarica and I messaged him and said, Look, hey, I see your games coming out soon We're making one as well J just so you know we haveve not copied you type thing. And they're like, No, they were like, this is cool. And actually, both games came out with totally different implementations of the idea anyway I was fine So yes, shadow hand. I want to go back to your question really about Um following the money. So we We thought that it was a good idea to sort of take this money and work with a publisher and do something on steam because everything was kicking off on steam. In hindsight, you know what? I probably should have made spooky bonus too U I probably could have made spooky bonus two, three, four, five, six, seven eight and I'm not even kidding I could have done that because I know other devs that have made extremely long series of casual games And each one has sort of increased the audience size and then the audience goes back and buys the previous games, like the franchise effect Joe Kasaver calls that who's made nineteen clutter games R? And he's still passionate about them and loves them and he's in his sixties, so you know, more power to him, right? And they've done very well So I could have just done that or maybe made Regency Solitaire two, which we did make eventually nine years later But yeah, I don't know. I have different thoughts in hindsight But a lot of it was like, Part of my thing is like I've been trapped in solitaire because u When you have a game that does okay and you begin to build a fan base, you have a choice to keep serving that fanbase and using your tech. or pivot to something completely new and take a big risk And when you've got a family and mortgage and bills and everything else doing that pivot to something completely new is a risk that you may not be able to take. And it also might cost too much. And if you don't have the funding, it could take too long. There's a whole load of stuff there meant that we didn't want to do that. So it was better to keep sticking with what we knew and our fan base So I mean, I think a lot of Indies are in that position. So that's why we made Shadahhand ancient enemy Regency solitaire two And then Shadow Hand Solitaire, which is a game where we thought You know what? the early game had a lot of RPG trappings like u leveling up and sort of inventory and the enemies had all these complex stats you had to figure out how to beat them. And we removed a whole load of that made it load simpler rememove the turn based combat, which you said you have to clear the cars to win the level The idea was to put that out on the old casual portals again because I thought the original game was too complex. So this is again looking at the market. Lve on a game too complex Put it out on the casual sights and see if it can make some money. Turns out it didn't. did really quite poorly on there And I think it's because we should have called it reggency solitaire zero or something. People knew it was part of our franchise because it was technically a prequ Um But we were very lucky in that one guy did play it and like it and that was Nick Lives from Night Signa Entertainment who then emailed us about Forbidden Solitaire. So we can talk about that in a minute. So in the end, it's had a happy ending, but u But Shadowhand Solitaire was supposed to come out in twenty eighteen And it just was something I kept working on in between projects and a little bit here and then. And finally I said, I just want I just want to finish that. I don't want to let it die. I want to put it out the door And it was actually my most relaxed launch because I wasn't too concerned with how well it did and You know, there wasn't a lot riding on it and we didn't expect a lot, to be honest. And that's quite actually quite a relief compared to some other launches. 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And I remember when you were like poking around in the various, you know, sort of indie forums and stuff that you and I are a part of around the time in twenty eighteen Um when you were sort of gathering up this data. talkalk to me about how it came about. Well, first of all, let's tell for those of O listeners who may have used it a bunch of times, you know, in whatever method or whatever site or predictor that they've used or their own calculations, they may not be even aware that You are the burke at the burke at ratio refers to. So why don't we tell our listeners what it is first? and then let's go into the story of how it all came about and how that the thread of curiosity that you started pulling out Sure, it's pretty simple, which is everybody collects wishlists now on steam, right and then they sort of try to figure out if I've got this many wishlists, how many units might I sell in week one. So that was what It is basically like if you have a thousand wishlists Will I sell five hundred units in week one or one hundred or whatever? And I came up with a number, which was the sort of industry median U number four how many sales you might make So' that's the ratio basically of pre launch whkist to weak one unit sales. That's what the birket ratio is And do you recall, I don't have it in front of me right now. Do you recall what the original ratio was? I do Yeah it was it was zero point five and And I'm responsible for a lot of problems in the industry. Be a wish list now on every trailer that's ever come out after this, right? Yeah, because at the time, people didn't really pay any attention to wish list, I guess. I don't know feature really in steam. Yeah. At least as far as I know, you know, but At the time, I suddenly thought, hmm, this is thing called wishlist. I wonder if those actually convert to sales and at what kind of rate they convert to sales. And so I started to ask people Hey, you know your game, how many wishlist did you have before launch and how many sales did you make in week one? And I collected load of that data and then put it into a you know, a spreadsheet and then came up with the first ratio, which was zero point five But I was very careful. Here's the thing I was careful in the article to note that you can get Ten times less than that or ten times higher than that That's just the median, that's just the middle, right? Yeah The problem is is then people forget that that whole range exists and then they make their predictions based on the zero point five. and if you If you make less than that, you're naturally very disappointed and I've seen people crushed with the sort of saying I've got tens of thousands of wishlists, but my game sold very poorly, you know, why is that? And I don't have an answer for them. you know that was the middle number. And now Simon Carless, who Game Discover co And He did a survey fairly recently and I believe the ratio is zero point one for games with twenty five thousand or more wishlists and Um ten dollars or more It's gone down from zero point five to zero point one. And what that means is The market has changed One. Like wishlists aren't as important as they used to be. like everybody's asking for wishlists. so everybody their value are roads naturally. They value of roads over time. Before they used to be a true measure of interest in your game And now They're not no longer true measure. They're just sort of people collect them or maybe users use them in a different way. But meanwhile, people have got more games. So you know, and there's more choice. That's a groups wishlist. So that's another factor And then, you know, a whole load of people started using that formula everywhere on these calculators and various analytics sites popped up and doing all this kind of stuff. Actually what happened was people used to start telling me about the birkit ratio to me myself And but not they didn't know it was called the Birket rato because it wasn't then, It was just something I came up with and everybody was talking about it And they'd be like mans explaining it to me, and I go, Yeahah, know I wrote the article on this thing. So I decided to reclaim it because My box lighter has a thing called the box lighter ratio, which is if you look at the number of sales on steam, you can multiply by sorry, not sales reviews. If you look at the reviews on steam, You can multiply by Approximately thirty, which is what I use to get a guess at the number of unit sales. And there are many factors as to why it may not be thirty. could be fifteen, it could be one hundred. This is the same thing, right? And I was jealous of his boox light a ratio named after him, and I said, Ry, I' reclaiming mine as the Berkey ratio and I've been trying to use that in a few places. so People don't land stiging for sure. It comes up in Google, you know, now it's like get your SEO on it, I think, for sure Well, yeah, I just I'm so glad we got a chance to dive into that because I've had people talk to me about it too and I'm like, yeah, yeah, I know the dude that come up with I was there when it was happening. It was a really and I remember It's hard to explain because it sounds so obvious now, but it hard to explain to people who weren't around making independent games or even big AA games, I assume at the time, right? is there's no there's There was complete opacity into steam and like you can't, you know, you obviously can't have any hooks into you know, conversions to actual sales, you're not going any data on that. And so we were all kind of clutching at straores for any kind of metric about how our games are going to do. and you kind of like it's like that that scing the montage at this in the Fellllowship of the Ring where Gandalf goes off and then comes back and he's like, is it secret? Is it safe? It's like you kind of came back out of this research phase of, you know, asking us all for a kind of daughter and you were with this like with this figure that seemed to stand up and I remember it just like I Like you say, I have no doubt people just took it and ran with it to an almost scary degree because it was the only thing that we had at that. Right. This is a thing, it's the only thing people had. These days you've also got followers, which some people think is more accurate perhaps. So on your steam page, you can get followers, which is a much smaller number but might be a true intention But you know, there's still a big range And you know, our first game which I track this on because so going back actually, regency, solitaire, when we put that on steam We just launched it. We didn't even collect wishlists. There were no demos back then and we launched it, there's our game off you go withith Shadowham, we did have that have it out page on Steam for a year. But we weren't actively begging for wishlists or anything like that. That just wasn't really thing Yeah. Yeah, it wasn't really a thing. That was twenty seventeen. But it had about three thousand at launch, but it got a birkit ratio of one. We made about three thousand sales in week one. which isn't many sales, but the point is the wish toay Oh, and one thing I should say to people A lot of people assume this ratio is how many of the wish lists convert to sales and they use this phrase conversion rate and that's not correct. What it actually is is You a certain percentage of your wishlists convert, maybe only ten percent, five percent And then you make organic sales on top of that just by being on the store and people seeing it and you're doing your marketing and those add up to the rest of the sales. So still it's a ratio of wishess to sales. It's not a conversion. wish list cells. Some of them convert but not all. it's very important So Shadow handand, you know, we had like ten percent of the wish disc converted and then we got loads of organic sales because the store discoverability was so much better. We got a front page feature and all this kind of stuff Ancient Eemy only had zero point five in twenty twenty A most recent game had zero point two Three And that's good they today. It's good for now. Yeah So it's going down. Okay, well look, but another perfect segue, your recent game. and you hinted at it before with Nick and Night Signals. So why don't we start off with how this kind of seememingly unlikely, but perhaps more likely than we would expect pairing came together Beuse it's a collaboration this game for folks who don't know forbidden solitarary between. Forbidd sol Definitely a collaboration, Night signignal enttertainment That's Nick and David in Utah and the various people they team up with, actors, musicians and so on and us over here, which is myself doing programming and design and Helen helping with the sort of the design, the marketing, doing tons and tons of marketing. And my son in terms of family as well, we also worked with our twenty two year old son who came on board for the second half of the project a contract programmer and designer and level designer comombat balancer, all that kind of cool stuff But night signignaled all the amazing visuals, the audio, the writing, they hire the actors, they do this sort of stuff, right? So But what happened was I put Shadowhand solid teire out twenty twenty four December, I think, No November Nick played it and he liked it. A lot of people are surprised when they play our games that Even if the theming isn't to their likings insulting. It's kind of like a back compliment, right? I was really addicted to this and played it for hours and I was' like, yes, because It's a good game. good at one any time and you know, I've tried to figure this out and I've got the Game feeling there and stuff So he played it and thought this is really good and he messaged me and said, Do you want to make a game with me? Here's a pitch And actually, he only found this out after we launched. His original pitch was Okay, go back a sec. He made a game called Home Safety Hotline name David Home saafety Hotline, which was a horror game Um, you know, answering calls and it getting slightly more creepy and creepy as you Awer calls on this home safety hotline And it did really well for them and was very popular with streamers and so on And his original pitch was going to be homeome safety hotline Solitaire And he thought, can I he thought, is it a bit weird going to this guy who's made all these games and saying I want you to make my IP into a Game, right And I said to him actually, if you had come to me and said that, I might have said yes anyway because I knew it was a good game and it would sound like a kind of cool opportunity actually in. So He didn't. He pondered it a bit more percolated and came to us with forbidden solitaire, one page pitch which was like Okay, you know this it's nineteen ninety five CD ROom that was banned at the time. You found it in a thrift store, you play it on your PC and some weird stuff happens, right? You know, horror stuff I looked at it and I sent the email to Helen and we were like, this sounds like really cool But we decided to sleep on it just to make sure. And then the next day we were like, this is still cool and We said we said to Nick, yeah, I think we do want to make this. And we were going to make Regency solitaire three. And we'd been to like Scotland on a trip and taken all these pictures of castles and valleys and gone to museums and done all this research and we were ready to start that game. And we cancellled it. to make this game instead U because he got us just at the right time, you know, between projects. We hadn't sought funding for that one or whatever. so it's amazing how much of these things is timing, right? Timing. Yeah. He messag us just at the right time. and said, you want to do this thing. We knew from Chris Zakkowski's sort of blog, you know, how to Market a game that horror is a hot genre. You can see it everywhere. We thought it was funny because Nxt games, they're not like, okay, if it was really gory horror, psychological horror Maybe wouldn't I made it because I'm not super into that, but I'm into sort of amusing camp horror and that's what this is. Even our romance stories, they're all a bit camp on purpose. they've got a certain sort of you know, jokiness about them, which sometimes goes over the head of people actually, but u You know, we really liked it and thought it would be fun to work on. And it also meant for me, I guess, Making a game about a wizard in a dungeon is just like, yeah, okay, I'm totally into this. Like I played D and D back in the day and I've played lot games like that and it just lent itself really well to Pool. special effects and jokes in the game and all this kind of stuff. So it's all to do with Nick coming to us with this idea at the right time. You know, a lot of people have talked in the past about luck about, you know, did you get lucky making a hit game? What was how much luck was involved? And some people see a certain level of success and think it was all luck And you know what? it was lucky that Nick came to us with this proposal at the right time But it was only because He follow we would followed each other on social media. He'd seen my GDC talk He'd seen all the games I'd made over the years, followed my advice about the industry and stuff like this played my game and liked it and messaged just because of that. He wouldn't have done that without that entire history And And then also my experience was to go, yeah, this is a better idea than Regency Solitaire three, we should do this. I my sort of calculus was it cannot sell worse than a new regency solitaire game I just knew it couldn't sell worse. and I was like, yeah, at bare minimum it's going to sell like the same, but it's bound to do better U And then what we did very quickly was we drew up contracts And we made a sort of smoke and mirrors trailer where Nick got some live action people holding up placards, saying game developers burn in hell and stuff like this And we put in some of his art into the game and captured bits of footage and he made fake footage in in dobbe Premi and we put out this trailer in february twenty twenty five and it went viral And people loved it. It's a funny, excellent trailer that he did a really great job on. I remember. fantastic. And a lot of people shared it all over the place. and I think partly some of my friends at least were like, what the heck? You're doing a what solitaire? Like it's joke in itself. Isn't it like a horror solitaire game? so And just the way it looked and the theming, it was one of those concepts which just U people's imaginations. and so that testing early is something I would advise people to do. and we Even then I had actually got plans to make spooky bonus too later in the year and I cancellled that and I said, let's just really go all in on this I worked very hard and the team worked very hard on that for fifteen months and then we released it. So even even that was A short dev cycle compared to some games, fifteen months That' P partly because sounding. ye. Yeah Yeah. Well, partly because we brought the ancient enemy engine to it, which we built on top of, but We did okay, here's the joke about all this. We said initially let's make a six month project. So And then when the triler went well, we said maybe eight or nine months and it still took fifteen. And that's my fault. I'm the producer. And we shipped it the month we ran out of money, which happens to me far too often. likeike literally could not afford to pay the salaries, then the game came out. Whatow And then I mean, okay, well, Look, we will talk a little bit more about how it landed, you know and the success of it and everything and what happened after launch. But I'm keen to dive into a little bit of development here because it is, first of all, obviously the collaboration is unique, but You know, I was in nineteen ninety five I was nine And I distinctly remember this pastiche and this kind of experience of being at the thrift store and getting a CD ROom or going to a friend's place and you know, going through the CD ROoms that they have or at uncles's or whatever And they all kind of have this kind of I missed was a big one for me. I was too young to really understand what was going on. Obviously, I played Doom and stuff as well. But it kind of has a bit of that missed feeling to it. that's like it's otherworldly, it's surreal. it feels mysterious And I just adored the pastache and like might and but not only the pastach feels incredibly well executed as a game that's kind of a sum of its parts So all of that to kind of set set us up to start talking about What were the sort of things that you laid out from the start in your collaboration in regards to like carving out areas that you were going to develop, they were going to do. How did you enter this? What was Ostensibly a new friendship, let alone you know, a new business arrangement and development relationship. Um So I mean, one of my biggest fears is actually being working with other people Because I've had mixed experiences over the years. I'm a perfectionist as well. And you know, I didn't want to be down by the people. I also didn't want to let other people down as well. you know, I've got a lot of anxieties, you know, and I wasn't sure about how it would work out. but after an initial call with Nick, he was just such a sol sort of funny, interesting guy. and we thought that we could get on with him. We thought we would try it and see how it went anyway. One thing that was very clear from the beginning was He came up with a concept and He was going to do the art and the videoing and stuff and David at the audio and then the actors and so on. So they were going to do that aspect and I was going to leave them to that. We trusted them They made home safety hotline. It'sld way better than any of our other games. I'm not going to stick my a in and say, hey no. Change the graphic style, change the story. I'm going the experts in room on this matter. the experts. It's like and actually there's a certain kind of relief in saying, yeah, you hand. I'm not going even worry about that Now it wasn't like no collaboration. There were definitely parts where he would say, I've got this idea, this idea, what do you think and we would shoot stuff back and forth, especially when it related to the game design we would have to, You know, like discuss particular art that fitted the mechanic we wanted to do, right? And then he said, okay, you get on with the game design and programming. I trust you to do a good job of that And one of the things I said to him was mayay perhaps this is foreshadowing. but at the beginning, I said to him, It might I said Yeah, trust me to get on with it. It might take longer than we planned So nine months But just know that I will finish it and it will be good. I've shipped sixteen games before and I'll do a good job of it, right? And he trusted us on that front So yeah, that was the separation of tasks. And it worked really well. We just didn't tread on each other's toes, but we would give each other feedback about those areas to sort of take it or leave it feedback. And there was one point where We added a stealth mechanic to the game, which I know sounds ridiculous. and I think it was a joke made on social media that I'm going to put stealth in this solitaire game because it has works so well has to be a stealth secret And I thought about how to do that and I thought, we could do it like this And because a project was overrunning and whatever Nick was like, yeah, maybe that's a stretch goal, Maybe we shouldn't do that. Should we just, you know, do this or whatever? And I was like, lookook, give us a chance And we spent a couple of days on it and came back to him with it working and he tried it and was like crazy bastards did it. you know because it did really work and he needed to just let us cook as my son would say, right. So that division of tasks worked very well. between the all of us and with Helen and Nick doing marketing because Nick would prepare all these awesome materials and Helen would do the thing and emails and everything and put all this stuff out ings, streamer emails and all this sort of stuff. There's a lot of stuff usiast of stuff Um You know, between us, we had like a full studio, if that makes sense. And it was very appealing for us because we didn't have to spend any money on external contractors because they were producing the art and the audio And we had just enough money in the bank to just code the thing and make Wow. Very cool So when you approach a new solitaire game, whether it's forbidden solitaire or regency or whatever you know, the next iteration of these. What's the first thing that you kind of do mechanically because you know, I imagine I mean, solitaire is a game, obviously it's been around for however long. and now you're taking it with each one, as you can imagine. Well actually I'm making an assumption here that people expect kind of more or a switch up of features or a little bit of a you know something new. Is that the case? Are you kind of what's your process for approaching each one of these new games? Well I'm going to do a mini segue, which is To talk about the fact that when people hear the word solitaire, they have something in mind, but solitaire is there are multiple rule sets So if you think about windows solitaire That is not what the Solitarianar game plays like And in fact, our type of solitaire is like tri peaks or golf solitaire and it lends itself to fast kind of almost arcade like gameplay. You're playing quite quickly fire off power up, you can do interesting things with a board, much more so than Window solitaire, I would say. Um So that's one So but that core solitaire gameplay has gone between each of our games what we've done in Shad ahand to ancient Eemy to Forbidden solitaariies changed how the combat works and iterated on that And then we've also added spepecial tableau cards that have different effects. puzzle levels as well. So and they're the things I change. But Going back to you nude What do our fans want? Our fans want more of the same but better. This is a phrase I use a lot and Indie should have it in mind with calls If you change up everything for a sequel, it will people won't like it and you won't bring as many people with you you need to give them more of the same but better. And we did that with Regency Solitaire too and people said, great, you know, with' more of the same but better And so We did know that some of our fans would expect some new stuff in this game and they got a lot of new stuff But we also felt that our fans weren't the main audience. We weren't trying to pander to our few thousand fans who buy our games each time, which is great and I love them and I appreciate them. We wanted to also appeal to Nick and David's fans who bought Home Safety Hotline, which was ten times more fans than anyone of our clents. And we wanted to appeal to brand new people So We weren't necessarily appealing to just just one small segment of the audience And we wanted the solitaire good and I think it is good, but not get in the way of the story and the storytelling, which was people were coming to the game for from Nicks and David's base, right And so Yeah, that's why in the game we've kind of got several streams. You've got the solitaire going along which is the one more level. I must play one more level gamepling and a lot of people have confessed to staying up all night playing this game and being surprised at how addictive it was Meanwhile, you've got the in game dungeon story where you want to see what's next. What weird stuff have they come up within this dungeon? And then you've got the metaory layered on top And I think those three, if you like those three, some people only like the gameplay or the story we've had you know, but if you like all three of them, it really kind of blends together very nicely. It also sters you along through the game. likeike as you said, if you've got the one more One more game thing on the mechanical side and then you've got the story of the dungeon and the wizard and exploring this and then the meta. I remember I can easily conjure out memories of pushing for each one of those like, oh, just play a couple more games. There was one actually where I said to my partner, I'm like yeah, I just finish this game. And then I was like sitting here as I was like onto my fourth game after that, like trying to fly under the radar, like clicking through being like, oh, she's gonna to get our catch onto me soon. But yeah, it was at different points there were parts pulling me through, you know, like there and they kind of handed handed my attention off to each other at beautiful point in time as well Yeah, and we kept pacing, so we were introducing new things throughout the game, so new jokers, new gems, new card mechanics. And the mechanics made sense for where you were in the dungeon, like the poison in the sort of like organic area, the maggots and stuff in the blooded dungeon and stuff like this. and the enemy attacks were all kind of varied and interesting and we just What we actually did was pared it down. so it's a five hour experience, I guess, someome people do it quicker. Some people have doing speed runs of it now in an hour and a half, which is really fast. It's great when you've got people doing I think you've made it when people try to do speed runs of your game. Yeah But you know, we tried to pair it down because our previous games had over a hundred levels. And I'm not saying they were filler because they're good games, but this one, we wanted to just make it a short experience where we're constantly constantly introducing new things and you get to the end and you're left wanting more The steam achievements show that sixty percent of people have beat the game so far, which is a really high rate ref Yeah, that's extraordinary Yeah so the average. Yeah, I think it's I think it's a lot. And so we're quite confident that U You know, if we were to make DOC or a sequel like some of those people would come along and play that right? So you've already updated you we've got a new game plus wr in as well, right? Yeah. That was a stretch goal. againgain we had So a couple of things that helped me ship this game, apart from hard work from everybody was We kept a list of stretch goals. So when we came up with a cool idea, we would put it on that list but knowing that we probably wouldn't do it And New Game Plus was one of those ideas But it was so in the forefront of my mind that as soon as we shipped in that sort of Manic, I've just shipped my body's running on adrenaline mode I still need to do something We worked on N Game Plus for a week or two and my son did a lot of that as well. And then we pushed that out the door U a just a week after launch and then did another update a week after that. And we got another update coming out this weekend U So yeah, that was a stretch goals. And the other thing I did is I keep I'm a perfectionist and I spot many issues with the game ninety nine percent of people won't spot. pixelout here or a tiny sound issue here or just tiny things And if they're in the core part of the gameplay, you see over and over, I will fix them. but if they're in other ancillary part, so I'm less likely to do that. I want to U I put them on a list called a pololish list and that list grew to five hundred items that I did not do launch And it still was ninety seven percent now, ninety six percent positive done very well, those five hundred items did not matter, I don't think. I don't think they would have doubled the sales and it would have taken me six more months to finish So interesting. That was a discipline I had to do. Is that something that you knew on this project or is it was this project kind of that you've seen sort of prove true over previous projects? orr was it this one? You know, every project I keep a list of polished items, Well, in ever since Shadowhand With Shadowhand was the one that I let myself polish everything I thought if this is the best game it possibly can be you know, it was sell better. I was trying part of me knew it might not be true, but I wanted to see if it was true. So that was an experiment, but it took too long very polished did not have the success it needed. So after that I kept these polish lists. and kept everything You know, for future games, there are ideas you can put in well, either updates or future games, right? And because our games are linear story based, they're not the service based ongoing model. in that, you could maybe apply some of these things But a lot of the issue is You can't predict what players actually want when it comes out necessarily. You can sometimes, but You need to listen to what they want when it comes out and what they ask for is probably not on your polish list. It's probably some quality of life thing or some other feature. Sometimes it's unrealistic stuff you're not going to provide, right? you know You can't second guess on all these tiny little things. And Nick was very good at this. He kept saying now, we don't need to do that. That's fine. Just to move on. And I needed somebody like that Yeah, we often talk about the design and the creative you know, um conflicts or collaboration or partnerships, but Often I find the things that make for the best production relationship, so to speak or development relationships are those kind of well, like for want of a better word, like synergies or, you know, like Santanico kind of moments where You both look at something and say, you know what, that's not important, or you understand that pursuing something might be important. It's really like this person is into the same things that I'm into or we've had the same game design ideas and love the same game design ideas. It often comes down to those moments where you know what to fight for, what to push for, whatnot Yeah, and I could see it when I work with my son who thinks a lot like me and programs like me very good ough I did learn stuff from him and he probably learned stuff from me And I could see him wanting to spend too long on certain details. And that's how my brain works. And I was like, no going to do that Here's a big list because I was the producer so and the programmer and it is desesign it so And the Biz dev, you know, it was a whole bunch of things, right? And I had to sort of manage all these other people and keep so I keep lists and spreadsheets. I'm that kind of person, you know. And I would review them regularly and say, no, we've got higher priorities. Let's do this And in fact, you know, we ship this game onn that, on this idea of focus We ship this game in English only, not localised. and of course valve themselves and many people will say you should ship your game localized, you should do Chinese and all this kind of stuff, right And if we'd gone with a publisher and we early on, we got multiple publishers come to us. You know they're like there's this joke in London, You never can get a bus and then three show up at once. Well, publishers are like that, you know, when you need a publisher, you can't get one. I know people who've pitched a two hundred publishers or whatever. We had eight come to us. We weren't even trying, and they were big publishers Devolver, for example who did inscription which we ended up bundling with at launch And u Pay stack didid u published a blatro So you know, for example, so we talk to them all But we knew that they would want localization and porting and Okay, so I know localization can make money, but I'm going to go back to the indie thing now I find it really boring and u I knew that it would either make the project take longer or take focus away from something else on the project.. E'specialally if the team is tight and small as yours, right? Yeah And I'd have just had to golf and do that or put calum on that. And it would have kind of been boring. and the game would have been less good when it came out, or it would have gone into the point where we had no money If we'd work with a publisher, they might have funded that, but there was a risk in taking longer for it to come out that When we first talked about it, people were still talking about Balaterro constantly Or is it Balatreu? I never know how to say this U People were talking about it and comparing our game to that, even though it's really nothing like it, you've played you know what I mean? It's nothing like it really. It's just a card game. U you know, in in a general sense, right? with some jokers. Okaykay U And so but we didn't want, we didn't mind these comparisons of inscription and balro But we didn't want that to go stale, you know what I mean? Wh the hype was there. We wanted to get the game out sooner. And even okay, even this factored in perhaps this is paranoid, but like I view the world at the moment as a kind of very unstable, strange place where there's a lot of stuff going on. And I did not know if at any point something would just you know, ruin the potential to sell games. This is very selfish, but you know, like Ruin the potential to sell games and Totally. I mean like our kind of sister industry, the tabletop game industry has been completely devastated by recent geopolitical things. Right. Right. So it's totally and I think you know, what film has had a couple of shots across the bow as well in regards to tariffs and things. So I've also been, you know, where' we've been in the process of signing deals and making games It's something I'm constantly thinking about at the moment is like how does this Global You know, geopolitical instability like contribute to the volatility of our industry or our like you say, just to put it simply, our ability to make a living selling video And also Like most of our audience is North American. and we were like, okay and Valve is North American. We were with Americans too as well. Right? Yeah. So there's all this sort of stuff going on. and we thought, what if the dollar just totally plunges due to some strange actions? perhaps its leader, who knows? It could happen because we're on the pound over here, there's this exchange rom And so if it goes the wrong way, we could suddenly lose out pretty badly. That's just a sort of minimal thing. things could have gotten even worse. So We wanted to get the game out sooner without belaboring on that point and not spending time on localizationational or ports, which are difficult from Blitz Max, We would have had to rewrite the whole thing in unity or Gutto or something And so there was a real focus on just getting the best game we could make We also did the design pillars thing at the beginning. We said one of the key design pillars. I think there's some great GDC talks about that forget who now And we said it' to because I'm the kind of that at the beginning, I put all my ideas into a massive design document that is just really an idea dump and I play other games and I build this big document up And I think probably Nick was worried by that because the document was massive. Like we're talking fifty, sixty, seventy pages And there were so many ideas I said, don't worry I'm not going to do these. These are just I need to get them out And then we had like eighty joker ideas and we refined it to twenty three So we threw away a huge amount of the design compared things against the design pillars to see if they matched and then ended up with this paired down design. which still was different from our previous games and delivered the experience we wanted Really cool. so great just gaining insights into this into this process, especially because of the collaboration and, you know, the story, you know, your your story career up until this point. I mean, do you know what number game this is for you, commercial game? Yeahes, seventeenth. seventeenth. All right. So now the big question, right? As you mentioned, the game crossed into overwhelmingly positive within a couple days of launch. It's obviously had bunch of success in regards to the sales and everything like that What does it feel like finally to have something land like this? Like you said, you've had some kind of hits before, but you know they were potentially other people's successes How does it feel to now be on the other side of your kind of your JDC talk andre not you're no longer a no hit wonder Yeah, I'm the overnight success twenty years in the making, right? ye. on that guy now. It's complicated is the best way. I think someone said to me, how do you feel about this and I said, I don't really know how I feel. I am getting more comfortable with it because Basically My whole life, I've had sort of financial sort of insecurity really and then running my own business and never really quite had a hit game. And so this game has changed that It hasn't changed it in a I'm going to run out and buy a Ferrari or EV or sort of or a mansion or whatever pe of thing right But it's definitely given us longer term stability, especially if we follow up with DOC sequels or something else in this work. Exactly. We're going to strike and I know you did that for many years and that absolutely makes sense to do with a solid, you know, IP So we're going to do that Yeah, I guess I've shipped so many games before Actually, this one had the most riding on it because it had so many more wishlists. It had seventy odd thousand wish lists and the most we ever had before was seventy thousand seven thousand. So it' ten times as many as anything else. Everybody was saying, o, this is a day one purchase and so on. and the demo had been out and people loved the demo and big streamers were playing it. So it was clear that It was going to do better than anything before. We just didn't know how good. We didn't know if it was going to be Mga money. or just okay, right There was a lot of pressure So building up to launch, you know, I did some self imposed crunch. I didn't make the other team members crunch, you know, had to When you're in the middle, you have to kind of put the work in U in the dip, as you say. Yeah o, no, I mean, I guess in the middle, if you're the producer and you' you're the All right, you're the Nexus. yeah. you're the neexus. R Yeah. you gota kind of like Bring all the pieces together and that can take a while So there was a lot of pressure riding on it and I wanted to know how well you know, was going to do because it could set us up for many years and change my life, not necessarily, you know, instantly a big bag of money, but like the long term and that's pretty interesting to me after twenty years A And so it came out and the first day it did better than my medium estimate. So I was like, this is good. But what happens on steam And I've seen this with many games is they start here and then they go B very quickly down And this started to dive on day two and I thought, oh my God, it's just going to disappear. we launched on a game sorry, let's backtack We launched on a day where We were on popular upcoming on Steam's front page for six hours, only six hours, even though we had seventy thousand wishlists. That's how that reveals the state of things right now Right. And they've changed it.ve got they've got rid of popular up coming because I guess they felt it was no longer serving p purpose. There were five games that came out on the same day as us that had more wishlists than us based on this chart and We already pushed it back a whole week to avoid clashing with vampire crawlers, which was there was vampire survivors, but Vampire Crawlers is a card game, dungeon crawling game, very similar ish So You know, we came out a busy time where there was was a lot going on and so Back in the day, if we'd shipped this ten years ago, I think we would have Mg But I just think there's so many games and the visibility is such when it started to go down, I was like, o my Godd, it's going to disappear and we're going to going to be even our medium level, but then it sort of leveveled out Bom that high Lvel. I said like a plane over the sea, you know And be like, okay and the tail has been thick even though after the first two weeks on discount, it's still a good baseline and people are still talking about it and playing it and I think the reviews help. And so it's got this sort of external desteem, virality and word of mouth. and on steam the algorithm must be. showing it around a certain extent and we've already signed up to do a daily deal at some point and stuff like this. So yeah, but I had a real wobble. I thought, yeay, then I went, oh my god. And then I was like, actually this is okay. Yeah right the parachute has deployed. Yeah Yeah And and it's been odd getting and I was in that manic I need to be doing stuff phase after shipping, not really able to enjoy it. and I speent a lot of time weeding our lawn Pulling out weeds on the lawn and it was just something I could do and control that was kind of in front of me and the lawn looks great now U but I'm gradually getting used to this idea of that, okay, This game is selling, we're going to be okay. We can enjoy the next phase. I'm never going to try to work as hard as it. that again, I want to just kind of Cer and enjoy and get my son directed on stuff that he's doing for the project U yeah Because you know, I'm, you know, I wave, right Yeah, I want to describe that wave and enjoy the next period of game and work with these other devs again because we had a chat and we said we want to work with you again and they're like, we want to work with you. So this is good. So it's a good sign Awesome Wow. so You know, the next inevitable question is I imagine you're planning your u oververnight success twenty years in the making kind of GDC talk down right for down down the line. Do you have And I think we've been talking a little bit about this, so it's okay if you don't really have anything off the top of your head. But now that you're this far through, obviously earlier we spoke about what were the things in those first ten years You know, you spoke a little bit about luck. What would you attribute to this success other than you know, I don't need to be dismisses of it, but like other than those nineteen years before this or twenty years before this What do you think were the actual elements in that that contributed to this? to this success I think there were multiple elements and You know Back in the day people used to say You know, an ide day is worthless without execution, right? It's all about the execution and Yeah, that's true These days, I think standing out is really, really important There's so many games you've got to stand. And I think Nick's idea stood out and his visual style U know straight away to us that we knew it was a good idea. and then when we tested it early, it stood out and went viral and people talked about it, right So I think that's something and it's like you need to find Okay, this is all about if you want to make a commercial game and have a sustainable business Hobbyists can do what they want, arrt games, do what you want But you need something that's going to stand out and most games don't It's the reality of it. you know, and you can look at a lot of games and go, it doesn't stand out. It might serve a decent sized niche. It might be more of the same in that niche and be okay This game stood out, we tested it. I think that was key. Then we had the very lucky that they had an existing audience of fans for their previous games that would come to it. We had an existing audience of fans that would come to it. And again, if you're New Indie, you don't have those Audienceces already, you know, you've got to build them up over time. So There was all of that Then there was like industry contacts, you know, like I've made enough friends over the years that when I talked about the game, people were sharing the game and U you know, we had press that knew who we were who'd reviewed our previous games and you're going to review this one and the same streams that were' going to play this game because they played home safety Hotline. So All of that stuff isn't really luck. that's just kind of having been around Talking to the people you know, knowing people Networking, you know, making friends that whole kind of thing. And then there was like, you know Is it a good game? and I think it is a good game You know, that's the old classic just make a good game. Yeah, it is a good game And people love it, you know, they leave good reviews and they talk about it and they tell other people to play it And then there was marketing. We did all the standard marketing stuff, a lot of it But this game was ten times easier to market than anything we've done before. We did the same actions we took for previous games. and it just had a much bigger result. We got in events we never got in before, like D of the deevs and different kind of you know, online showcase events that we never got in before I mean, so some of these things are maybe replicable for other devs, like coming up with an idea, testing it U doing standard marketing with a fan base and contacts you may or may not have And I think those were factors for us So that's my kind of analysis of the whole thing, but we could see it from the beginning So it wasn't like a surprise. That's the other thing. It wasn't a surprise the launch and the money. So I wasn't like I've seen this video going around of a guy called Cakes crying when he looked at his sales figures and was like, o my god I kind of had some estimates on numbers guysy. I figured out when it came up with the with the ratio Yeah. and I figured out okay. It's going to be in this range, we're probably going to be like this And I was pretty close, I've got to say So yeah So I don't know how much of that's applicable to other people, but we could see it and feel it and it happened. And that's good. That is satisfying because most of the time In the past, I've had hope and then had my hopes dashed on the rocks of Iie. Dev but this time they weren't dashed. And that's pretty interesting Yeah have vindicating as well all that time that you've put in. And you know you speak about the idea, but it's very clearly, as you've noted It's the coming together of the idea and the execution you know, for both organizations coming together to make this game. Look, something that you just mentioned then is, you know, friends and networks and a clear consistent theme throughout your career is this kind of generosity or the notion of giving back to the community that you're in, you've obviously set up Lindy. When you're in a place that wasn't even your hometown, It was obviously you moved there, but you know, you move to a new place, set up an Indie community there, then you you obviously your talk has been incredibly helpful to a large number of people, in fact, your current collaborators U And like this is just a couple of examples of this. You've obviously got theirit ratio and everything Why is this and you know We all know generosity is good, but what like What is this hallmark of yours of like this generosity? and why do you think it's important? Do you feel it's had a measurable impact as well on things It's definitely had a measurable impact. I mean, a lot of the opportunities along the way have been because people heard of me, they talked to me, friends offered me advice or you know, told me to team up with or to get money from or whatever. so That whole thing has definitely worked. I mean, you can't neglect that I say that. I mean, I do know some indndies who have worked in darked rooms and never gone out to anything who've had hit games. So it is it possible to do that? It's not a critical element of the recipe. ye. Yeah,'s not you don't need it, but like it helps I think. But some people do this talks circuit and whatever so much and they're not actually they're not backing up. What I felt I was always doing was backing up with games and people were buying those games and I was shipping and actually talking about real experience. And I've always liked blogging, you know, and now we've got a patron and stuff like this guuess Ultimately I like numbers and I'm interested in the business as well as the design of games and I like to talk about it with people. So you know, that's fine. I just do that You know, it's still a lot of effort to go to events and to do these things, but I'm just inspired to talk about it, but I also knew that it pays off as well in the long term. It's like going to GDC by. A lot of people are like, Is it worth going? And it's like maybe not once, no If you've never been before and you don't know anybody. but like if you go several years in a row, you know the lay of the land, you get to meet more people. You meet your friends and they introduce you to new people there So it has that effect, this repeated effect or whatever conferences in your area, right So you've just got to build upon things by Being out there,, which is what what I've done and has worked for me. You know, I mean it's a balancing act. You could spend too long doing that and not enough time making games, right? So yeah, certainly All right, this is my final wild card question and then we' get on with your lovely day over there. Something that I have loved about following you and you know throughout your career, Jake and on various social media channels is that You're a man of multiple interests, you're obviously deeply engaged in video games and the industry and stuff. and I've enjoyed your commentary and your games and everything over the years, but I mean your social media And with like trips into the countryside, you're famous. whereere's my computer gone series? But recently I discovered your YouTube is just with dozens and dozens of videos of like You're laughing already, You know what I'm about to say? Vvertical scrolling schmPs, right? retetro schmPs.. Talk to me about this like this project that you've been on of like playing these these schm ups over on your YouTube channel, which I don't know how I missed this. I only stumbled upon it the other day. Okay, well, I mean, you know, I've coded games a long time and I'm into retro compomuters, right? And I actually bought a Commodoore sixty four several years ago off eBay. I used to have one as a kid and I sold it to buy an Aicer but I bought one several years ago. and was playing a game on it Fractulus, rescue from Fractulus, and it blew up And then I had to watch loads of these videos of people with soldering lines repairing Commodore six actually I thought you mean figuratively. It literally blew up. o, right? Well, yeah, yeah, And I had to figure out and analyze what was wrong with it and get all the tools and then actually replace like a Ram chip and put a socket in and door this pare my commonty for. So I'm into retro compomuters, let's say And I love vertically scrolling shootem ups ever since back in the day of the arcade machines, right? And I just wanted to play I made a weird mission, which was like, I'm going to play every single one on the Commino sixty four analyze if they're any good or not. And to be honest, most of them are bad They you know, they've got many things wrong with them But there are a few that stand out as great the best ones were probably ones made in the twenty twenties because people still make games for Comminal sixty four now. And some of those are actually the best ones because they've got modern design sensibilities, right and not as rock rock you know, difficult rock ar difficulty, you know So yeah, I just made it my mission to be all the not beat them, just play the vertically scrolling shoot them ups. And guess what I'm still thinking I might play all the horizontally scrolling ones And there's more of those. I don't know, we'll see, I'm a man of leisure now. Maybe I can do this series next A just escape ilocity into just playing Commodore sixty four games for a Well, hey, Jake, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. It's been such a pleasure to chat with you again. It's been too long and congrats on all your success. I don't think I said it enough I had an absolute blast with Forbidden Solitaire loved it thoroughly. I just blasted through it in two sitttings. It was wonderful. So thanks to you and the crew at Night Signal. justust an absolute treat Look, thanks for asking me all these things It's been really fun to talk about it. I'm sure we could have talked for it even longer, but it's good to capture it somew wayere