Think Like A Game Designer - Casey Yano — Designing with Detail in Slay the Spire, Mastering the Gaming Grind, Marketing dos and donts, and Building a High Trust Company Culture (#58)

Episode Date: January 16, 2024

Casey Yano is a true innovator in the gaming world, known for his unique blend of creativity and technical skill. As a co-founder of MegaCrit Games and one of the brains behind the hit game "Slay the Spire," Casey's approach to game design is about embracing the grind and paying attention to the little things that make the biggest differences. In this episode, we discuss his early days with game testing and the massive success of "Slay the Spire." It’s a fantastic conversation with someone who's not just shaping games but also shaping the way we think about game design. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. In today's episode, I speak with Casey Yano. Casey is probably best known as the co-founder of Megacrit Studios and co-creator of the mega hit, Slay the Spire, which I have played many hundreds of hours of, we really dive deep into the entire process of not only creating Slay the Spire, but the detail levels of how to think about UI, UX, and the importance of the new user experience, why designing from a QA first perspective is more powerful than the more

classic designer and design document approach. We talk about the Apple principle and having your games look good and what allows you to move from a alpha version to an early access to a live launch. We talk about the importance of having your game be streamable and the systems that help make your game more likely to spread organically. We talk about marketing and launching a game as an indie developer and we talk about the disastrous launch of Slay the Spire and how they turned around and what systems worked and what didn't. We go into a lot of very granular detail about the process for making games, what build reviews look like, how iteration works, how you think about metrics, how every piece of the puzzle works from designing and co-creating and collaborating. and the getting things out to launch. It's really awesome. I mean,

you know, if you have any interest of making digital games at all, you will find a ton of value in here. There's a lot of great principles. We even talk about what it's like to apply those design principles to a company and the details of how they work for communicating

via Discord and documentation and hours. It's a really fascinating deep dive into a lot of granular, useful things from people who have been through it. And it's really been a great joy to get to hear how my games helped to inspire. Casey and Anthony when they were creating Slay the Spire, and I talk about how Slay the Spire has inspired me

and the creation of our campaign and algorithmically generated game mode for SoulForge Fusion that's going to be coming out soon. So it's a really great conversation between designers who are continuing to have a conversation in public via the work that we do from designs and really breaking it out. This is exactly the kinds of conversations I love to have the most. I learned a ton.

I was frantically scribbling notes throughout the entire thing. So grab a pen and paper, get ready, and enjoy my conversation with Casey Yano. Hello and welcome. I am here with Casey Yano. Casey, thanks so much for joining me. I'm super excited to dig deep into your background. This is, I think we're going to have a lot of exciting things to talk about. Yeah, thanks for having me.

I'm actually a huge fan as well. This is kind of a meeting a celebrity moment for me, actually. Yeah, this is super fun. It's one of the things that I love to do is like the kinds of conversations that, you know, I mean, we just met here, but I think the kinds of conversations,

we already kind of had a little bit of a precursor of it before we started recording are the things I just love to do. And it would typically only happen at like GDC or like conventions where I would just, you know, we'd get to hang out and have a conversation and nobody else gets to listen to it. And so getting to have these conversations where people who are like would have, where maybe you and I were 20 years ago or would love to have listened to conversations like this.

That's sort of the purpose of the podcast. So, and the reference to 20 years ago, I think is a good, a good starting point because I'd love to talk about, you know, before, you know, before Megacrit games, before a lot of the huge successes. And I'll have given people some precursor to this before they, they listen to this part of the podcast on all the things you've done. But how did you get started? What was kind of the origin story for you bringing, getting into this industry? I want to be. I don't know. And that's actually maybe too complex of a question. We'll start a little bit later. But as a, I just had a job during college as a game tester. My brother got a job as a game tester. And, you know, I was like, it would be nice to have some pocket change.

So, you know, can you, can you get me like into like this play testing thing? And my brother was like, sure. And they immediately gave me the job. It was because I'm bilingual. I speak English and Japanese. And so I got a localization test kind of job at, a contracting company for Microsoft. So that's kind of like,

I wouldn't say that it was the very first foray into video games. Like I was always just like, kind of like your typical like nerd just like playing games, playing board games, played magic, Pokemon cards, etc, etc.

But that was kind of like my first hand experience with the industry. So I don't know. Yeah. I thought it's good enough in terms of like the start. Well, it's super helpful too, because I always like to look at like where the universal principles are. And one of them there is you have the skills that you happen to have and you happen to be good at that you can leverage those to get to the industries that you maybe want to get into.

In this case, whether you knew you wanted to get into it or not, right? So this idea that you were bilingual, a lot of people wouldn't think of that as an entry point into video games, but it was an opportunity. And so I found for a lot of people that success of like, I'm particularly good at whatever, you know, writing or math or, you know, talking to people or whatever. Like, each one of those skills can be incredibly cross-promotional. I know you have some, you know, illustrative skills or really enjoy sort of drawing and sketching. And, you know, there's a lot of overlap, I think, there. And then the other piece of it that maybe will come out as more of the story goes on is this idea that, you know,

you just have to start doing the things, right? And you don't really know what you're going to love until you actually start doing it. And so getting into the industry. Very true. Very true. It's very different. Like, it's one thing to say, I love playing games. Like, cool.

Everybody loves playing games. Yeah. A million million other people. Right, exactly. But it's not the same as like making games or doing games. or working on different aspects, it's like the day to day of that may not be something that you love. And there's no way to know in my experience

other than just trying it and taking the time. And I may have a tangent for you after this because I'm in Tokyo right now as we're having this conversation. And I'm enjoying loving it here. And I've learned a few key Japanese words that helped me out here. So maybe you'll be able to teach me some other useful ones for while I'm adventuring. But, okay. So you got this job and this was cute.

You were doing translations and what kind of, how did you go from there until, okay, actually, you know, I actually really like this. I actually want to make games. I see, I see, I see. Let's see. So I was, this was around college and I was pursuing a degree for architecture. So I wanted to be an artist, but I didn't get like the scholarships for it. My parents kind of disapprove that.

So I was like, hmm, what else could I do? That's like creative and like would make me money potentially. And I was like, I really wanted to do industrial design. That was like my first choice. But I was like, who would hire anybody in industrial design? Just from like, I was like pretending to be like somebody hiring somebody. And I was like, why would some like random college student have good ideas? But then I was like, how about architecture?

And I was like, oh, they need a lot of grunts. So they just be working with like CAD and like. drawing stuff all day and it's just a lot of like tedium work and actually really like tedious work. I just like doing things that are just like concrete tasks knowing that it takes like a hundred hours to do something. Like I'm a big fan of just chipping away at something. So what was the question? No, no, I want to actually, I want to linger there. I'm actually glad you paused because I was going to interrupt you anyway.

Because I that again, this is like I'm looking for these universal principles and these things. Like that instinct to be able to sort of take a task that maybe is daunting, maybe is boring, but that just takes like that you can just kind of chip away at it. You know, in some sense, we learn this as gamers, you know, playing RPGs and, you know, playing these games where you're grinding. And I did kind of learn to love the grind. And that it's like a superpower in a lot of ways, right? People will just shy away from those things.

And I'll let you go a couple different directions. This is either, you know, where do you think that came from for you or how do you think people can cultivate that or what is it you know how do you do you look for that when you're hiring people like where does that love of the grind like show up and how can people how can people find it in themselves or another's interesting yeah that's a good point i would definitely say it's probably a personal thing um i just really like rote tasks um it might just be because i have a really hard time focusing in general i very likely have uh something similar to ADHD I got it like an evaluation,

but it wasn't like a very, very, very in-depth one. It was just like, maybe you should like get this like much more checked out. And I didn't go any further, but I was like, whatever.

So, but I guess doing things that I'm familiar with frequently and all the time is just kind of like, something that I just do, I guess. I always wake up. I always just make coffee the exact same way. I do things in a very specific order.

And it's just like, and if I don't get a certain amount of work done every single day, just something just feels wrong to the point that to me, that's like, that's like my happy place is like just doing the same things. And then I actually consider, don't tell my wife, but actually consider going on vacation to be like the real work.

Try to like, try to like be more human, try to like partake in the human experience. I'm like, okay, I have to do this. Like this is like my job is to like go out and like see different things. experience new things so I don't just become like a strange hermit that has no information of the universe besides just what's on the internet which I think would be a very bad thing to do but we won't

go into that so yeah no yeah it's fascinating I think that the um finding that that balance of routine and habit and formula of like you know I'm doing the thing and I'm comfortable in this space versus pushing outside of your comfort zone right whether whatever you you know you happen to be you know, maybe your comfort zone outside your comfort zones of vacation, maybe for somebody else, it is digging into a CAD file or digging into, you know, working through learning a new programming language or whatever it is, right? But there's this balance that you have to strike. And it's a, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, because a lot of people don't push past that boundary. Like, eh, you know what,

I'm good at this. I can do this. I'm going to avoid, you know, whatever it is, it's uncomfortable. I think that's going to be unique to everybody's personality. So, yeah, I think that's really fascinating. Okay, so let's jump back into the story here. So, you know, I know you did, you ended up doing quality assurance at Amazon for quite a while as you're working on games. Or how does this, how does this work? And I'll give another angle too, so we can go narrative style and I'll give you another hook if you want, which is, as I think there might be some people listening that hear this, okay, I do the same thing every day. I make my coffee the same way every day. I live in this box.

But you're very creative and you're able to create these really, innovative things, a lot of people see that as a dichotomy. So either you can talk about why this can be supportive to your creative process or just kind of continue the narrative of how you get there. I see. How I get there, that's very interesting. I think for my assumption is that all designers tend to just play a lot of games. And then some of those things just don't feel right.

It's just like I've been playing a lot of rogue lights back in the day. I was like obsessed with rogue lights. So we had to break down kind of like the two design rules of Slay the Spire. We would say that Anthony is kind of like the card game person. So, so for reference,

Megacrit is owned by two people. Myself and Anthony. Anthony's like the the board game card game guy. Like he's like super into magic. He used to run a community site for NetRunner. And I'm like, I just do a lot of

video game stuff. I actually don't play much card games, except when I was like very, very young. To this day, I don't actually play that many card games. A running joke in the company is that I hate card games, but I don't hate them. I just like saying it because it makes Anthony upset. And then, uh, okay, I feel like I want to do a part two with Anthony and get his perspective on this one. We're done. It's totally fine. It's going to be, it's going to be a very different interview. We have a very good cop, bad cop relationship sometimes. Wait, which one are you? Depends on the subject.

If it comes to a, if it comes to UI, I'm always the, probably the bad cop. A bit of a control freak when it comes to, like how I want buttons to be, like how the size, like what happens when you hover over them,

how they change when you click on them, just like how they appear on screen, like the slight delay before they appear, all that kind of stuff, like how, how obvious it is, see them on the screen versus how like unimportant it might look like those are all very very important things um so i'm so i spend a lot of my time thinking about like how to present information

that the player has versus um i think it more in like a traditional card game you kind of have like a smooth pacing just because you have to draw the cards but like if you imagine so aspire it's like your turn and the card just appear without any information no animation is just there and it would feel weird. It would feel like those don't feel like cards anymore. It would just feel like buttons that just be like a website. And I think I really want to make sure that flow state and even the sound that accompanies it like and when it goes away, they all like kind of like fly out and then they like coalesce into the deck. And then when they appear like that kind of relationship to me is like super, super important. So. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you've got you've got three

major topics I want to dig into. Let's let's start with the last one here. This is this is UIUX specifically because this is something that is easily overlooked, but is so critical, right? And so you've described this, okay, we're using the conceit that these are cards, and that's going to give you a lot of background and assumptions as a player, right? I expect certain things to happen. So you're building this UIUX to both reinforce that conceit that these are cards, right?

They're not really cards. We're playing like their cards. And so, and then we're all. also using that. And then that gives you a lot of leeway of, okay, people understand how that happens, right? And as you mentioned, I think before we started this call, before we started recording, this idea that there's a, there's a conversation going on between game designers and between games over time. And so you're taking the principle of a deck building game and you're using that conversation chunk, that unit that already exists and now building into this, okay, we're going to

take the rogulight, we're going to take this, you know, this deck building system and we're going to bring them together. What about U and UX? How do you, is it just instinct that brings you to these things? Like, what do you, are there principles that you use when you're saying, okay, how do I, when I'm the bad cop here and I'm really looking for something very specific, what makes you so sure that you're, that you're right or that what are the things that you're looking for that tell you, yes, this is, this is, this is on the right track. Hmm, that is a very hard question to answer, but I agree. If you could answer it, if you could answer it easily, then I would be surprised. I mean, I wrestle with this. I wrestle with this stuff all the time. So, so, so I see, I

I understand the struggle. I'm encouraging the struggle. I would say that there were two key points in my life where I was like, ah, like UI and UX matter. And so I said I was doing localization testing when I used to work at Bolt, which was a contracting company for Microsoft. But what happened when I was working there was when there was no work for me as a localization tester, they would just put me on different types of testing. And one of that was certification testing.

And when you're doing certification testing, they always have these rules. And I was always like, what are the point of these rules? Like video games are creative. You can just express yourself however you want. So why is Microsoft pushing for this stuff? But one of the tests that we did was the text had to be legible on this really crappy TV that they just had in the lab.

And it was like a 14. inch CRT and then the lowest minimum rendering this was for Xbox 360 era was like 720I and so if your text wasn't legible in 720I then it was like

then you just failed a test and there were of course some companies that they had enough pull that they could just ignore it like EA but I was just kind of thinking more and more about why these rules exist why these certification tests existed

and then over time I just became more and more just like sensitive to like why it would pass here. But I would look at a website and be like, this text is really small. Like if these kinds of tests existed, then they wouldn't, then it wouldn't pass. Like this is not like, I was like, this is not right. I'm not, I don't want to be a gatekeeper. But I was just, you know, I was just like there are people out there who just won't be able to read this. On top of this, when I got a job at Amazon, there was, it's actually, one of my professors, which is very strange to have to work with your professor.

So I used to work in higher education at Amazon, but just happened to land in the same place at the same time. But he actually had, like, couldn't see vision very well. So I noticed this immediately when I walked by his desk once, his screen looked completely different. It was like, like, all the text was humongous. It was like high contrast mode. And he would very frequently when asking questions about like, I was like, oh, what do you think about this current thing and this QA? Like, I think this is too big or whatever. Or we were looking at someone else's screen.

We would find, we'd find this person just like hard squinting at the screen the whole time. And it's just really, and I was like, oh, like, would this person be able to play my video games? And so it just got me thinking a lot about accessibility to the point that I was helping out on the accessibility team at Amazon.

on. And so we just kind of figured out, like, what makes games more playable or less playable to people? What makes, what makes text easier to read? How do we know which buttons to click? How do we know it's hovered? So it wasn't something that I just had, like, innately. But now that I've been exposed to it, like, I just can't unsee it.

Like, I just know that Peter, this person named with Peter, Peter would not be able to read certain text in a certain video game. And I would be like, like, that's not right. Like, it's just one person just literally just 100% cannot play your game ever. Like, that's what I see sometimes. Yeah. So I apply that principle to just like everything, I guess. So, yeah, I'd love to get some more because there's this pure accessibility point, which I totally hear, right?

If it's not, you know, readable, if people can't, you know, there's people are colorblind and you can't, they can't see the different colors of your thing, right? That's, that's, you class certain people out of your game entirely. And then there's, there's, there's deeper levels to it too, right? where it's like, okay, someone could play this, but they wouldn't enjoy it, or they wouldn't naturally be pulled towards, so pulled towards the thing that you want them to do, right? So the way I look at it,

the, you know, UI, good UIUX should be, you know, it should be obvious what the player can do. It should be generally easy to figure out what they want to do, and they should enjoy interacting with the system, right? Those are kinds of the principles that I use when I'm working on this sort of thing.

are there principles like that for you or or alternatively more specific examples that come to mind where it's like okay this is something that was not intuitive or not effective and then this shifted it and you know this kind of you know again i'll try to pull the principles out as well as we go i see i see i don't i don't think of things too much in principles we just we generally just have lots of like long ranting conversations when something feels off if that makes sense yeah yeah walk me through maybe walk me through one of those conversations or something that comes to mind where you're like, okay, this is a, this is a debate we had and this is where we ended up and this is why it was right or wrong or something.

You know, it's just something where you could tell a story instead of going for a principal. Yeah. There's a button that we spent like several days on in Slidenspire, and I don't think it's perfect to this day. And it's the end turn button. It represents like six different states. And it's like disabled sometimes. it has a different colored highlight.

The text color is different. The text size is different based on a localization, so that's a problem. And it just has to pop out from the background. So if we were going through a checklist, you know, it would be like contrast, legibility, you know, giving state data information, stuff like that. But I would say I'm just kind of like obsessed with things feeling good

and feeling just like pleasant to use. Like if you worked in like woodworking, and if you have like a bad chisel, like you know it's a bad chisel. You like use it just a little bit and you're like, this is like blunt, the handle is like slippery. It's like the metal is like loose from the handle.

And I just hate it when those cracks are visible when you're making UX. It's like the button just appears instead of like flying in. Like the lurp is like linear versus like exponential or quadratic or it bounces in. And there's just a way to make things feel a little bit more weighty or a little bit smoother. And when those don't align, I'm like, when those don't align properly in a video game,

I'm like hyper-sensitive to that. So we don't have a principle, but if it's wrong, we would be like, oh, that's just, that's just very wrong. That's great. And then just because some people may not be familiar with the term LERP, so maybe just explain that briefly. And then also, yeah, go ahead and start there and I'll ask my next question. Sorry. LERP is just a shorthand term for linear interpolation.

So it's just a way to animate something from point A to point B. It can be the size of something. Point A to point B. It can be a position like you're moving object from point A to point B. But if it's like lurped, it would be like, like, you know, like slow. It can be like an outlerb. It can be like slow, fast, slow.

It can do a bounce back, which is like, boi-go-go-go-y-oing like that. So those kind of like fun things, you don't need to animate them. You can just use math to just make things look nice, even with a static image. And because I'm not an animator, we use Lurps like crazy

like it is just it will make your game feel very professional very quickly I think yeah and so and so now what I've heard then is that you've

thanks for the explanation and I love that you know you did you know we're doing a video here most people don't even get this audio but your sound effects were perfect so I think people no I think everybody's gonna get it

your sound effects were great so the um the next piece is are you you've you've talked about how you've trained your kind of instincts for it and it's obvious when it's wrong you gave a great like visceral example of like a you know kind of wood chiseling and like what it just doesn't feel right um do you may mostly just make that an internal assessment do you do external testing or user testing or anything you know how do you get feedback from others and how does that inform your process whoa feedback that's a it's a very loaded question it is it is fortunate for for us I think for video game developers, it's very fortunate that we can just iterate very quickly. I think we've talked about it in a few different formats, but we had an internal play testing server for more than a year when we were working on Slate Aspire. But we also still do build reviews every single week.

Now that our company is quite a bit larger, I think we have Anthony and I, and then we have six full-time employees. So it's about eight people. We do builder views once a week. And so whenever we feel that something is wrong, we also sometimes have a little mini discussion of why we think it feels wrong. It's like, oh, maybe this button isn't big enough. Or like, maybe this animation is a little off. I guess that's kind of the process.

We playtest a lot. I'm not sure how much you're supposed to. But, you know, a builder review that's about an hour, hour and a half long. once a week and then internal playtest, we just, it's just ongoing, it's never ending. It's a Discord server. And then we push out new builds each week. Our current project was

in internal play testing for about eight or so months. We're currently porting the game to a different engine. But once that's complete, we'll be back on, we'll be back on the iteration and play testing train, I guess. Yeah, I read about that,

but I think I'll, I'll save that that issue for later. What does a build review look like for you? I see. We kind of do a roulette to make a random person play the game. And then, you know, they play the game. And then you can get into the game. And we're just kind of having a discussion.

And we record the whole thing from start to finish. And we're just jotting out notes pretty much the whole time. Sometimes we just make tickets. Actually, I don't think we'd make tickets. it's there. But we just note things that would become tickets. And then at the end, after it's one and done, it's usually my job to have to go through all the feedback, clean up the feedback, and then make tickets out of them. And I used to do QA. So it comes very naturally to use, like, clean keywords, what the expectation was, yada, yada, yada. And then because I'm like in like the big

like design and UI rule, I can also just be like, this is probably the fix that we're we're looking for if it's design-based. Otherwise, they're just bugs. Okay. And then, and so I'm going to dig in here because honestly, I think this, your QA experience and the detail level here is actually kind of a superpower. And I, I think it's a, a lot of people will learn from it. So, so there's a, it's a 90 minute-ish process.

Somebody's going to play through a game or, and then they, is it, and there's a discussion going out at the same time. Is it the random person, the roulette person you select is someone from in the company? Some external play tester, are they familiar with the game already? This is a change. The builder view is always somebody within the company. So there's a difference between someone external, which is the always play test. And then the builder view, which is like, so I think we're trying to get out of builder views versus the internal playtest server is that, you know, it's like, we're just trying to get everything exactly how we want it.

but we still have feedback for our own game. And it's just never ending. It's kind of crazy because I feel like we're just making exactly what we want to. But then in action, just because it happens to be a procedurally generated game, we just have so much things to say all the time. And then the task list is just insane. It's just super long all the time. It's between 20 and 100 things every single week.

And we're not trying to make the number. number of tasks zero. It's just the game of prioritization. It's because it's just impossible. Right. Right. So you're taking these. And then so in this this 90 minute window,

it's great insight. I just want to underscore right. You're never going to be done. There's no such thing is done. There's just, you know, next priority thing. And then at some point you have to push it out there.

But what it when you're one person's testing and you're having discussion. So it's everybody in the same kind of virtual room having a conversation while the one person is playing and they can hear it and you're just they're talking aloud and you're all just talking them as you go through the game that's right correct yeah and then you've mentioned you know turning things into tickets which some people will know some people won't but that's basically you take that compress the notes turn them into kind of tasks and in a in a some task manager thing like a jira or something like that that says okay here's the things we're going to do and then you

prioritize them and are you in charge of prioritization somebody else in charge of prioritization how do you decide what the most important thing is good question our current method is we do sprint planning. I know. I know we're we are indie, but we still do sprint planning every two weeks. And that's when we kind of collectively. Generally, we have a, we have two different sprints, one for art related tasks and one for programming related tasks. And so, but during that time, we put all the tasks in the backlog. And then that's when we kind like collectively prioritize what's important. Generally, it's Anthony and I doing a prioritization. and then we no longer use what's called sizes,

which is like how large or how difficult it is to fix something. We just don't care. We mostly just think about what just needs to be done. And we don't really think about like, oh, like we have to get this much done in a week. We don't really care about that kind of stuff. We just trust that everybody is doing it best, I guess. Yeah, yeah.

So this is great. And then I'm just going to clarify some terms for people that aren't assuming with, right? So a sprint is this kind of agile development methodology that is, you know, you generally try to like break up about two weeks of work that you're going to try to scope out at a given time because it's really hard to predict beyond that. And so you kind of have some more concrete things, right? And then I this idea of trying to predict sizes is another thing that's, you know, in the weeds, but I found also to be a huge job.

Right. Originally, I tried to do the exact same thing. It's like, okay, this is a big task. This is a, you know, five point stories, a three point story. And it was always bullshit. It was never actually the real thing. Who knows what's going to happen? Right.

And so it really ties into the importance. And this is going to shift to one of the other topics I wanted to talk about, which is collaboration. One, starting with how you and Anthony started working together, what it's like to collaborate, you know, in this kind of 50-50 sort of environment. And then two, how do you, when you bring other people on, you said you've got six full time now in addition to the two of you, you know, your system. And I believe this is the right system. but it requires a lot of trust, right? People are going to work on their own. You're not sort of checking up on them in the same sort of way.

There's not like a, you know, you have to check in X story points worth of stuff every week. And so what was it that made you, made your working relationship with Anthony work and how did you guys get connected? And then kind of how did you decide when you started hiring people and managing people? So a lot there,

so you can pick any piece you want to go in and all steer. We'll start from the beginning just because I don't want to say that the current project is going well or not, because we just haven't shipped yet. So I think people would rather know about something that has already worked. At least that's what I would be interested in. But Anthony and I went to college together. We just happened to end up in the same college.

And we just had very similar taste in terms of like video games, our thoughts on video games. And we wanted to make a video game. That's a strange thing. And so Anthony was pursuing computer science. and I was pursuing architecture. And I was doing a game testing job. And I was like, I can draw stuff. And I like games.

So I'll do the art. So back in the day, you know, Anthony did the programming. And I did the art stuff. And design was kind of like, we're just, you know, we're just, this is what games are like, right? And that's kind of how you learn, I think, as a game designer eventually is that if you don't design something, you're not going to get something very good. So, but fast forward, many, many, many, many, many, many years later, when we were working on Slay the Spire,

our working relationship is quite different now. Anthony was much more interested in design when we kind of like reconvened, I suppose, because the first game we made was like 15 years ago or so. And then we started working on Slay the Spire about seven or eight years ago. So that's like a seven or eight years ago. gap. That's a huge chunk of time. And we were very different people. I worked at, you know, Amazon for four or five years. Anthony also worked at like another large company for a few years. We were both in QA, which is very interesting. So we're very QA forward. And we just wanted to

make games. And I guess the collaboration style to go back to that a little bit. And also I'd love to tag in, you know, if you're collaborating, your QA forward, you know, define QA forward a little bit more, too, as you're talking about how you're collaborating. That seems like an important piece of the puzzle. That's a good point. I would say if you are a QA forward company, the main difference from what I see or what I saw at a big tech company, which is very software developer focused.

It's kind of like the developers make the thing. And the QAs just have to find the little problems that are there. But what I saw was, as a QA, all I saw were big, problems and bad prioritization and people were saying this is good enough or like maybe the QAs were not good at writing what they truly felt about a problem because if it's too long, they'll just stop reading it and they just start working on just getting check marks. But QA is kind of like saying like, you finished a task and you did it in a way that is like perfect for the person who's going to use it.

It's not about making the thing that you designed. it's about making the thing that people expect from the design and that's a very big difference and so when we say QA forward I mean like we always think about the game from the most perfect form and we just try to get there instead of trying to just make stuff

we're not trying to just be like the screen opens you can see the cards you can select the cards it's more like what do people expect when a screen opens what do people expect when they play cards? How do they feel the game is balanced? How much content there is.

And we just, everything is just backwards. We work from the end goal instead of from a design document. I think design documents, if you can follow a design document start to finish, that would be crazy. It must be the greatest planner of all time. That's how I feel. Like that's incredible. We are nothing like that. Our design document is like bones.

is very sparse. Very few cards. None of the cards survived. Not even close. None of the initial numbers are correct. If we follow that to a T and release the game, it would have been finished much, much sooner. But it would have been just another game

that had some cool ideas. And there are a ton of little games with cool ideas. Don't get me wrong. But I think some of them need to spend a little bit more time in the QA churn. Yeah. Okay, great. I love this. And then I wanted to circle back to one other thing that you had said. And it was kind of a little throwaway comment, but I wanted to make sure to dig into it, which is that, you play a lot of games and you see what is broken in games. And that is what informs your designs. And I want to talk a little bit about how you maybe give some more specific to that. Because I actually think this is a really important point. that I didn't want it to get buried, but I was too excited about other things at the time. So let's talk a little bit about that.

I see. I think the word broken was a little harsh. I'm not going to lie. But there's just like sometimes you just get a feeling when you are playing a game. And I get pretty addicted to games, even if I don't like them. And whenever I realize that my addiction is taking over and why I'm unhappy, I kind of think about why I'm unhappy and what I would have done differently. and that happens quite often

and some people are pretty I think people are good at sensing when something is not fun or worth their time when they play a video game but generally maybe not spending enough time thinking about what would be a good solution to that what is a good example

I would be playing like a rogue light game so I was really obsessed with rogue lights lights the T1 don't don't don't bring me up on rogue-like conversations. I don't play much rogue-likes. That's not... Maybe, maybe...

I have talked about this in another podcast, but I want to just to clarify the difference between rogue-light and rogue-like for people that are wanting to understand that. Yeah. So, I was into rogue lights. I played like a ton of them when I was just like playing games around that time that Anthony and I

kind of like started working together again. And one of the things that I felt, was like broken was that it would be like an action rogue light that's like a very common and popular one at the time like rogue legacy um spolunky uh there was really strangely named one like vagante or something um but played a lot and a problem was we i would just accidentally beat the game like on like the first or second try and i was like uh like what's like what am i looking forward to now And then, of course, I think the binding of Isaac, of course, is like the biggest action rogue light. And what was a big deal to me was that it would just keep unlocking more content. It was like, oh, you be the boss? Like, next time there might be another boss.

But there was like a design thing where I was like, I wasn't sure if there was new content or not. And each run takes a pretty long amount of, it just takes a significant amount of time to play a run sometimes. So I felt that there should be a way to communicate that. And why not just keep incrementing? That's what I thought. Oh, like, how far am I into the game? Like, I can't tell my friends. They'd just be spoilers.

So what if I just give them a number? And that was like what I thought Anthony was thinking too, which is pretty funny. Because when we released, like, on our roadmap, it was like, we're bringing in an endless mode. And for some reason, Anthony and I never had a conversation, but I assumed that's what Anthony was thinking of. But what Anthony was thinking of was taking one run and going, like, looping or whatever. Which was funny because at that stage when we started working on it, I knew that your deck was kind of complete around like the end of Act 2 in the game.

And I was like, this is not going to be fun. And then Anthony was like, but that's what we promised. And I was like, hmm, we can play. put it in, but I wanted to be like a footnote. So we do have an endless mode, but it's in the, it's like one modifier in our custom game mode. And what I thought we were going to do was something similar to what's

now called the extension system, which is where you have higher and higher difficulties. And so I was very happy to be like, well, this is what I wanted. So I got it. And then I just made it. And I was like, endless mode. Here you go, Anthony. And he was like, this is not endless mode.

So, and I was like, oh, that's fine. This is what I wanted. That's a great. But that was my, like, kind of, like, idea of, like, fixing something that was a little nebulous. Because I wasn't very, like, narratively confident at the time. And I just made too many strange characters to, like, add on more content. I was like, you're already beating pretty scary things. I don't know what I don't know what I would change.

So I would, uh, I was like, why don't. just make the numbers higher. Because I just want games to be harder and harder, personally. Right. The initial version of ascension mode was incrementally making certain things harder forever. So,

it would have been Ascension like infinity. It would just go forever and wherever. But then Anthony made a point that whenever you change things, you shouldn't change things too small. Otherwise, it doesn't feel very impactful because he's

very sensitive about kind of like step increments like when games incrementally improve things too small like 1% improved attack speed just feels like nothing and it just doesn't feel meaningful and I was like you have a point

and so we combine forces to make what is our current ascension system I guess yeah yeah no it's it's a very powerful thing and it ties into this this challenge of difficulty levels overall right you want something where if the challenge is too low, you're over it. I beat it. I don't need this

anymore. And if the challenge is too high, a lot of people, you're going to lose them. They're just like, I don't even know what's happening here. I can't. I can do it. So ascension levels felt like a very clean way to say, okay, look, I'm going to give you a challenge, but it's everybody can eventually overcome this or, you know, vast majority of the audience can anyway. And then I'm going to allow you to opt in to these higher and higher level challenges and keep giving you these options to keep it interesting and engaging. Yep. And I also named it after my favorite card game.

By the way. By the way. Hey, I like it. I'll take the pandering any day. It actually is my favorite card game. It was actually, I've only played Ford card games my entire life. Like seriously.

And Ascension and two of its expansions. I don't know how much there is now. I got too busy making video games. But like just played it. I don't, are you like to swear? Yeah. You can swear on this podcast. Okay.

I'm gonna, just only one swear word of the entire podcast. I play the shit out of it, okay? And like the exhaust deck archetype, I was just like, the purple cards in its engine, like, that's like really fun. It like goes, once you get like one good from like, it's like, oh, it's like almost perfect deck and you like just strip one more card out of your deck and it just goes from like pretty good to like insane. It's like a very good feeling.

And I wanted to capture the same feeling. So thank you. Well, and I want to say thank you. And that's part of the fun of this conversation really specifically because it was, you know, I'd read an online articles and other interviews you've done that we, you know, and Ascension had influenced you and Anthony in making Slay the Spire. And then Slay the Spire became one of those games that I also became obsessed with.

I mean, literally, I don't know how many, you know, definitely 100 plus hours. I stopped counting. I unlocked everything and played it all through on my PC. And then a couple of years had passed. I'd kind of put it aside. And then I downloaded it again on my iPad while I was traveling and did it all again. And I just loved it. And so thank you.

And it also now moved me to make the next piece of this conversation in a design back and course. So one, to tip my hand a bit, we have SoulForge Fusion is the game I did with Richard Garfield. most recently. And we did, it's algorithmically generated decks of cards.

So they are individually, you basically can shuffle any two different decks together to play the game. And so that's a physical team. Maybe you do need to talk to Anthony. Yeah. You're like, he wasn't really into it for a while.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and so now we have a digital version of that game that we just finished doing a Kickstarter for and we're going to be putting into closed beta soon. And that one allows you to not only just take the decks and play them in a classic PVP format, but there's actually a algorithmically generated PVE campaign that is in part inspired by Slay the Spire.

And so I have both, you know, again, gratitude and excitement. And also I want to learn from the things that you've learned about creating these algorithmically generated experiences. Because what I, you know, what I'm trying to do is take the, you know, not just the fact that you can bring a deck of your choice to the experience. The decks are limitless in that you'll never have. no two decks are the same. So you're always going to have new decks to play,

but that you're able to evolve over time and go through these algorithmally generated experiences. So I am curious what you, well, I'm curious about a lot of things, but in general, like, what did you learn about when it came to building? It's much harder to build a kind of algorithmically generated encounter than something that you can custom create in many ways.

In some ways, it's easier, right? You don't have as much responsibility for crafting each piece of the puzzle. But what did you learn as you went through that process? what was the most unexpected thing? What are the things that, you know, if you can think of that you maybe would have done differently in terms of how you build that structure and build that arc? That is a good question.

There is so much to unpack there, as you probably already assumed. Gosh, we need to start at like some kind of starting point. I guess we would think about which algorithmic thing we want to specifically talk about. But I would say in general, we want things to naturally fall into place. One of the things is like,

how many times do we need to add a card into your deck or a deck builder game until you feel that you have a good deck? It may be a little bit longer, so you have a little bit of a victory lap or can polish it up just a little bit more before the final boss for at least Sly the Spire. So that's kind of how we determine the length of the entire game

And we wanted kind of like Ups and downs in terms of like difficulty spikes So we wanted to do bosses Because I think we read a blog From Derek Yu about Spalunky And his intention about like each area Being like harder or easier And then I was like this is good

But what if there were bosses? because everybody loves bosses. At least I think everybody loves bosses. These kind of like nice thresholds of like how well you've been doing these skill checks. So I guess we work backwards from those goals like we talked about earlier here, working backwards. Sure.

What else? Well, so let's talk about you, so you know, I'll just, I'll just prompt with some specific things. So there's the, there's this idea of some encounters are easier than others and there's shifting rewards for it. Then you also have a certain kinds of, you know, how to just decide, you know, what the different kinds of encounters that you would offer and the different pacings, right?

So there's, there's obviously shops and currencies earned. There's monsters to beat. There's question marks and weird things happening. There's, you know, what, what made you decide, like, the kind of right number of different things or pacings or what did you try that maybe didn't work? Stuff like that. Initially, initially we had a, what's called a, I think we, had like a three branch system where we didn't really have like a strong map structure.

It was just, when you get to a room, after you beat it, you could go left or right. I think maybe in the center as well. There were like three doors. And you would kind of know what's behind the door because there'd be like an icon, which is now that I think about it, that's kind of what Hades does, doesn't it? But we ended up going with a map system because I don't quite remember. But I imagine it was because we wanted to do a little bit more planning ahead to make sure that you can do things that are correct for your deck. I think we were both into a game.

Well, at least I was really into FTL at the time. And so I would say that if you ask me what inspired the map the most, it would probably be faster than light. We looked at a few other games. We actually designed quite a bit of different rooms before we kind of paired it down to fewer. we just needed the icons to be distinguishable. And I feel like there are cutoffs. If you have too much icons, it gets a little messy and a little unpredictable. So just whatever, I guess what feels right in terms of variety.

I iterate on what feels right is generally the right answer. I know that people want more than that. But it's great to hear like, here's where we started. Here's where the inspiration points. And then as we work through it, it's, okay, we're looking to make sure that it sounds like, again, you've already emphasized this, but the UIUX is super important, right? It's not just like, what's the coolest thing I can do? It's what's going to be understandable and accessible to the actual end user, right? And that's where you pair down.

And so let me know if this is the case for you, because I'll want to shift into the process of launching that game eventually. But what I find is we, you know, we have a lot of, it's an interesting case for what we're doing with Soulforce Fusion because we have some very, I have reinvested players already, right? We have players all over the world that play the tabletop game that we're giving as some of our early access to the digital game. And their feedback is amazing, but their feedback is very much from this expert player perspective, right? They know the game super well. They want these kinds of various things. Somebody's played it a bunch.

And this can actually happen internally as a problem too, right? Like you internally have tested the game for months or years or whatever, and then your feedback and your instincts maybe get off from what. the new player is and what the new player needs. How do you correct for that or is it just this is part of just your instinct? You're always thinking about the new player. It's something I've tried to stay very, very focused on and make sure my team is. Yeah, that's quite a difficult one. Our current strategy is we have a lot of metrics and we did have a lot of metrics for

a slightest buyer as well. One of the main metrics that we have is that we can filter our metrics based on how many hours somebody's already played. We actually know who is or isn't a novice and how much and we can take a look at like how often they win or how well they're doing and we try to adjust for

that is what we're going to be doing and we do bring on new players all the time for our current project but for Slay it was actually quite a problem. We didn't have we just didn't have a big pool of people to invite over time. Both

Anthony and I are not very social. not going to lie. And so we kind of just ran out of people to keep adding to the playtest server. And so right before we released, we gave out a bunch of keys to streamers and content creators to be like, maybe we can do something with marketing like this, right? And they all just died a lot in the game. The game was extremely difficult. I would say if we have to compare it to set aspire today, it probably would be like Ascension 10. We were about to release the game at Ascension 10 from the very start.

And we didn't realize it because they just played the game so much. We're like, oh, our win chance is like 90%. So clearly, like, it's actually a pretty easy game and maybe it's fine. And it was not fine at all. Like, nobody was winning whatsoever. So, so we're like, we can't have it. We panicked the game. How long was this before your release?

Like two weeks? Oh my goodness. We just panic, nerfed everything. And then we got the metrics down, the win rate down from like, the win rate used to be like 4% before release. And then it went up to like 30%. And we're like, okay, maybe like somebody will be the game. This is good.

And so this is now, we're talking about having a, you gave the the codes to some streamers and people like and so A you know how did you select those people and what you think kept them engaged because I know other people have tried this

and you know streamers don't they've got plenty of things to stream where are they listening to you and B how many kind of of these users did you feel like you needed to be able to make the metrics meaningful for you? That's a good question. We set the keys out to like 200 people using a service

called Key Mailer. And I guess there weren't many card game people or streamers at the time. But we just kind of like shotgun sent them out to people who had played similar genres. Rogue lights Hurston

because that was the only card game. Anybody was playing at the time. So pretty much people who played those two games got a strange email in their inbox if they were part of like the Key Mailer influencer program. And our cutoff was just like, if you have a thousand followers, you just get the key.

And we just kind of just like went through their list and just like bulk selected people who have the most followers and just sent the keys off. Granted, I think we could have sent much more keys out. I think we were stingy. Like only like 500 people will play the game. I think these people maybe buy the game anyway, which is completely false, by the way. I should probably, I think if you are marketing your game, you should send your keys out to like probably, at least 2000. That's how I feel today.

But that's how we did it. We didn't send like special emails or anything to anybody. I think we reached out personally to a few people that we were following on like for Stone Twitch streamers or something like that because they just weren't on Keymailer. But otherwise, that's kind of how we did it. And I would say that it didn't work. It didn't work. It didn't work very well.

So I wouldn't copy what we did. We had a disastrous launch. Oh, okay. I want to get into the launch and I want to get into marketing, but I don't, I don't want to lose the thread of, you talked about metrics and the one that was very meaningful was, you know, win rate. And so there was, I had, I had one hanging question around how many people do you need for metrics to matter, right?

What makes meaningful metrics you? And then I'd love to dig into what other metrics that were super. that you were like really focused on. I see. How many people for metrics to matter? That's a good question. I would say you have to get lucky a little bit. Because some people play a lot and some folks who just play the game once or twice

and never touch it again. So I would say that you probably want at least like five to ten active players. And then your metrics will start to matter. But so I think that's the cutoff. It's not that high. No, it's not that high. I mean, it's great to hear. You know, when I think about metrics, and this is a, I'm going to, I'll be, I'll be honest.

Like, I don't, you know, it's a little, it's still intimidating to me, even having worked with metrics and larger player bases to make sure that like, it were getting the right data, that we're interpreting it the right sort of way, that we're actually not, you know, getting let off. Like, so, you know, you mentioned, you know, being it, or we talked about both the splitting your, your alpha players, your super invested players from your new players. And then, and also I found that there's a trap of like, you can find a lot of metrics and just kind of pick and choose between them and then they're not

really get anywhere. You can explain them in a lot of different ways, right? You change a bunch of things all at once. So were there other metrics that you were primarily focused on or what, you know, beyond win rate? And then were you doing anything else beyond just like, okay, we're going to look at these. We're going to use our instincts to make a decision or were you doing like A, B testing? Like, you know, just kind of digging into how metrics informed your design, I think is very fascinating. That's a good question. We definitely did not. do A-B testing, which maybe we should have, but it's, we just didn't have enough play testers, I think, to do A-B testing. Other metrics that were very important was card pick rate.

We'd be like, are people always just going for the same archetype? Is that because we designed the game in such a way that encourages, you know, just doing the same thing? Are there enough cards? So we have to kind of like read between the lines, I would say. And that was a very important thing. It's almost always reading between the lines. We pretty much never read the metrics at face value. So if you have never taken a statistics course and you just use metrics, then you are probably

going to interpret it very, very incorrectly. You might look at the numbers and see what you want to see. That's a very big trap. I think it really helped that Anthony and I would look at the metrics together and we would argue about things. we would be like, this data is just Jake. Like, this is just Jake data. Damn it, Jake.

Way too much. Like, half the data is Jake. So. I love it. I love it. Okay. And so for people that haven't taken a statistics course, is it, is your advice that they should take a statistics course? Is there, are there maybe some, are there maybe a few principals?

Like, obviously being aware, we've talked a lot about, they're being aware of your alpha users. I don't want anyone to, like, go back to school. Like, that would be, like, a lot of work. Yeah. That's fair. It would just really try to figure out what the basic fallacies are when it comes to, you know, analyzing metrics. And then it should be a little bit more than looking at three Wikipedia articles. It should be there should be some videos to look at. I'm not sure how education works in 2023. But I get the feeling it's better than when I went to school. Yeah, there's a ton. There's a ton of resources. I love. to just sort of give little nuggets here, right? I think we've beaten to death the idea that, you know, alpha users and your most invested players are going to consue your data.

Is there anything else that's like common fallacy or thing that you've learned or one, you know, one or two little nuggets that come to mind of like, hey, when you're looking at your data, we're reading between the lines, don't take things at face value. Is there anything else? You're like, oh, this is a trap. This is a common trap. Or this is something I argued with Anthony a ton about anything along those lines.

I would always. have an open question before looking at data. So instead of being like, is this new card that we added being chosen, right? Then it's like, but it's also a new card and all of our playtash are they've been playing a while and they want to test out the new card. Like it doesn't imply that it's better or worse. If it's hard to learn, you know, maybe if it's hard to fit into an archetype, maybe that means it doesn't really mean that the card is picked more or less. The win rate of the card is just those numbers,

they don't line up because of all these strange social factors and not just because it's inherently good or bad. And it's just sometimes it's just impossible. Yeah. You just can't get the data. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, there's a lot of things that are really interesting as your player base evolves, right?

You mentioned for Ascension, right? You loved the purple cards. You loved banishing things from your deck. New players hate banishing from their deck. They hate it. They think, why would I get rid of cards? I want to get cards, right? And so I actually had to make it around the balance of the game to actually make some of that,

the banishing cards worse over time because it just meant the best players would just go so far above and beyond the new player. And so I had to make the new players just wanted to kill monsters. They just wanted to kill monsters. And so they would get some runes cards and some power cards and they would just bash things away, right? And they would get clobbered. And so I actually had to shift the balance of my game to make it so that the new players' natural instincts were not off.

But I also wanted to make sure to have those nuggets for the players who love the banishing strategy or love the mechanic, you know, putting all the all the contracts together. You want to, you want to have. So when I think about it, I think like, okay, there are certain kind of player profiles, you know, the sort of classic psychographic profiles or just like in general, like, okay, this is the kind of thing I love to do. Make sure there's something there for me, but that that doesn't exclude the players who are just kind of learning and, and there. There's this curve of like, this card's going to be really good for you when you're starting, and you're going to realize it's worse later. And this card's going to be this nugget for you to discover later, which you're going to think is terrible, but really is a gem when you figure it out.

I think that process of discovery is really important. I agree. I agree. And I think because we're, at least for our game, we're very fortunate in that you can accidentally get those cards sometimes. And so you kind of deal with what you got. And so if you do that, you might accidentally get. extensively learned things. Whereas in different formats of card games, that might not be the case.

And I don't know. That's the beauty of deck building for me. But I'm a pest of rogue lights. So you already know I like random stuff. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, there's a lot of value to that, to that randomness and forcing people to work with the situation that presents itself.

I mean, this is, you know, again, going back to this idea of conversation about what's broken in games, right? I became obsessed with Dominion. I played it a ton. But the fact that it was a fixed set of cards over time, I got diminishing returns of it. Because once I would see the layout of the cards that are available,

the main difference in the ascension, Dominion, you have whatever the 16 sets of cards that are available. They're static, and you just play the game from that. In Ascension, the cards in the center row are constantly changing. And so you just have to deal with what's available. You only have these six cards, so pick one or, you know. And so that was a way for me to, say, look, there's a lot more replayability in a game like Ascension for me than there was for

Dominion over time. So this was this conversation. Not that Dominion was broken. I loved it. But there was something I wanted to say that moved the conversation forward. And so, you know, and in many ways, again, like Sly the Spire, I'm approaching it in the same way. I love Slaid the Spire. I played hundreds of hours of Slaid the spire. But then once I've unlocked everything and I've built, you know, I've kind of played in the space that's there, I stopped playing. And then, you know, I loved the game enough. I came back years later, but I kind of, that was, I felt like I'd explore the space. And so I'm now trying to give this next piece of the conversation with Soul Fortrusion. It's like, okay, there's literally never, you can never finish. Right.

There's every deck experience is going to be new and brought in and new cards are showing up all the time. You know, so it's an interesting thing. Creates its own set of problems and own set of challenges and, you know, but it's a, it's a great way to kind of, again, build on what's come before and offer something that that hopefully will appeal to those audiences and bring in the different genres. Okay. Well, anyway, this is this, this part's really fascinating to me. I think I want to talk about, let's shift to marketing because the disastrous launch. Oh, no, my weakness. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, this is great because I want to share this stuff. Like, it's, it's not like, there's this illusion that people like, they got it all figured out.

You're a huge success. And it was a success out of the gates and everybody's just dancing in a pile of money. And it's just not that way. That is not. Yeah. That is not. Yeah. It's we have not figured out anything. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to, I want to, you know, and I appreciate the, the honesty and the vulnerability because I want to share those, those stories of like, okay, what went wrong? What, what did you, you know, what are the things that, you know, what was that process like? And again, you, I mean, I think you've, you guys have really moved the entire industry and genre forward and conversation forward in a way that's really powerful, but it's a rocky road to do that. And so, so talk me through this disastrous launch and

what your strategies were for marketing that didn't work. And then kind of, why you think it kind of, why it kind of did in spite of those failures or or lessons learned there. That's a good, that's a good point. So we are main marketing strategy. And to be honest, I think it's still better than a lot of other games that we probably have never seen, not whether or not because of marketing is a different question. But I would say that we, so Anthony was running the Netrunner site. So there was like a little thread like, oh, like, you know, the owner of this website is like making

this game and that was like a pretty cool thing. And so a lot of folks who were fans of that were like, oh, maybe we'll give it a try. And that's actually how we got a few internal playtesters. And then I think we got some wish lists. I don't remember the numbers anymore. I don't imagine the numbers were too high. But that was like our main community, I guess, that may have been interested in the game. On top of that, we tried some physical marketing, as in we went

to shows, local events, to show off the game. We submitted it to one or two different awards, or like awards, but like contests, I guess might be the right word. To see if we would, like, win anything. Like, what do, like, what do professional

judges think about our game? And they all hated it because, I don't know, card games are not very trendy, I guess, at the time. I think, I don't think we won a single thing. Like, we didn't win top three on anything. Nothing like strategy. Some of these, some of these competitions were like six people, like six entrants,

and we got like not even top three. So I guess if a professional says your game is good or not, then I don't know. Nobody really knows. And I don't know what I'm talking about. Nobody really knows what's going to be successful. But I do know that today we have an established audience. So we kind of have a free pass for marketing in the future, which is kind of like unfair.

And so to be, that also means that like my advice is completely worthless now. Like my assumptions of what is what does or doesn't work is just flawed because I can be like, oh, our next game was successful because we made all these changes. But that's not true. That's not going to be true. It's just Slid Spire was so big that like we're going to get an initial bump for our next game no matter what. So I don't want to be like I figured it. out now. It's just, I just don't have to figure it out. It's just, I just did a very privileged position now.

Yeah, yeah, but you, you earn that position, right? And, and, and also, I mean, let me just underscore the thing. Nobody knows what they're doing. It's not just you. I don't know what I'm doing. Nobody knows what they're doing. Everybody's figuring out as they go along. And the situation's changed. Like, no game release is going to be the same as a previous game release. That what marketing channels worked five years ago or 10 years ago and not necessarily the marketing channels are going to work, you know, five years from now, when the AI will just pick all of our games for us or whatever. But, but, but, you know, the idea that I do think that that sharing the stories and giving people some paths that did work and paths that didn't work does help to inform other people's

best guesses in terms of what's going to work next, right? So, so you went and you went from, I'm submitting to these contests. I'm not winning anything. We're getting clobbered. We're sending out keys to influencers and people and most of them are not paying any attention to us. So one, what this is just a good like what's going on in your head at this point right are you losing faith or are you how what's not yeah what's going on there yeah that's fair the keys thing was actually the best thing um by by quite a bit um the keys thing uh i think what we i think we were very ambitious in who we targeted and i do know that we ended up sending more keys once we realized nobody was streaming the game because you can just see on twitch you can just look up your own game

Is anybody streaming my game? And if the answer is zero and you want to make a living out of making video games, then maybe you should send out more keys because otherwise your game will be forgotten forever, and that's very sad. And so we just sent out more and more keys, like every week, hundreds of keys, I think. I think we ended up with like sending out 1,500, 2,000 keys eventually. It would have been nice if we did it all in one go. but eventually when we started hitting smaller streamers

they were nice enough I guess to play our games and then once you get into a game and you play a lot that's that quality of a game being very interesting for somebody is kind of like infectious I think and then

streaming community is quite a tight-knit community which people may not know about because a lot of the popular ones don't really interface with each other. But like strategy game streamers know other strategy game streamers. And they would be like, hey, like, I only have like 100 followers or whatever. But like my buddy who's like a bigger streamer, maybe, you know, maybe he or she or et cetera, will be excited to play it as well. Like, because I had a great time.

So I'll just suggest it. And that's kind of the chain that happened. It just took a very long time. It took like a month and a half, I believe. Well, the month and a half is not that long. So what you say is of the things that you tried, I mean, it feels real. I'm sure it felt very long as you're like sitting there watching very few months.

Yeah. Yeah, no. And that's sharing the struggles of this stuff, right? Like it's that ability to keep your motivation when you're getting negative feedback or even worse than negative feedback is no feedback, right? Oh my gosh. The silence is so painful. It's so painful.

And so, you know, that I just, again, people that, That's just part of the process. You can't get around it. And then this spreading word of mouth, it's an interesting challenge slash opportunity, right? Obviously, any marketing that strategy is not going to work if your game is not good enough, right? You've got to have something great that people actually care about, want to play, want to talk about.

Yours is interesting because it was a, it's a single player experience. How do you think about that versus, is, you know, kind of the competitive aspects. I don't know, I don't remember if you launched with like the leaderboards and the fixed runs and everything. Like, what do you think is the key or are there keys that like make a game more recommendable or more streamable than others? Or were there any, did you put any thought into that as you were designing?

Yes. We have thought about what we called streamability. And that was, that was mostly in part because of the binding of Isaac. when we were watching the game they started showing all the items that you had on your screen and so and we also when we were watching those streams

it would constantly ask like the people in the chat or other roadlights they'd be like what's on your screen like what's happening and then the streamer would get annoyed and not interact with them but what we felt as like people watching it was that if you have all the information

on the screen all the time then it's like it's really engaging to backseat. You're like playing the game without playing the game. And we really try to capture that feeling pretty hard. We may have captured it a little too hard because most Slydispire streams are like, do not backseat, like do not do that. But now that that culture is more established, I think it's fine. So I guess that's that.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's great, right? That ability to like, if I were in your seat, what would I do? and being able to kind of learn and play along.

It's like, you know, it's nice. I mean, it's just the fun I have when I watch Jeopardy or whatever, too, right? It's just like, you know, it's true. Jeopardy, my goodness. Why are there more Jeopardy games? Hold on. That's just a game jam game. We can just crank that out in a few weeks.

Perfect. Okay, great. And then, and so, and so then just to close the marketing loop a little bit. So, so it was just. from there, and it was literally just this, like, positive spiral. It was, you know, I heard that the contests and physical demoing didn't get much out of it. The emailing and contacting streamers eventually that kind of spread organically. And then that's what you saw your growth.

Was there anything else or any puzzle pieces that were you viewed as part of the, part of the equation or that really was kind of the formula? I mean, showing off the game in person wasn't good for marketing, but it did give us confidence when our game was kind of in like a ready state, if that makes sense. And then we tried some other marketing. So I can tell you for sure what will not work, which is having a account for your company in social media with less than 300 followers and just having like a countdown or like showing off trailers that have like maybe like 500 views.

That's not going to, that's not going to translate to sales. It's very, it's very small. You need to do need to do a lot more. Um, so, but, yeah, what did end up working, we just didn't do too much more outside of that. We did keep updating the game just because we were, well, we were updating the game every single week for like a year and a half to our internal playtesters anyway. So we were like, I guess if it doesn't work out, we'll just make the early access period shorter and just call it for this game. So we were just updating and people were very receptive to our updates. because we worked at a pretty fast and transparent way.

We would update weekly, and we just, we'd just be hyper-specific about everything that we changed. And it just looked like the game was, like, an active development because it was, but in a way that was kind of not very known at the time of doing early access right. Because we,

at least Anthony and I were not very happy with a lot of early-access games at the time. There was a lot of, like, promises and no updates, or updates were very vague or only high level. So we try to take a very opposite approach of that and just being hyper-transparent. Yeah, that's great. Okay, I'm glad I asked this question then, because I think that's super important and kind of overlooked, right?

The process of designing in the open, of being responsive to the audience, of showing that you're continually working and developing and moving forward, and then this kind of early access branding, almost, this status of like, the game is not, you know, let's dig into what does it mean to say that it's okay for early access, right? You said you got confidence from conventions and being able to show it to people. How do you stage like, when am I confident enough to put it at a convention?

When am I confident enough to put it in early access? And when am I confident enough to say, not early access anymore, real access, go. I see. Yes, that's a good point. there are a few things that I think a game has to reach a certain quality threshold, but it's a very fuzzy one, and it's really hard to define. There is like performance stability. There is like your fatui, your first-time user experience that has to be really nailed down.

You don't want to, you don't want someone to play the game and not have a way to teach them. And so if you're going to have the game playable for a lot of people, if you don't have that experience, like 100% nailed, then they're never going to pick up the game again. And that's because like the first time, it's so important. The first 15 minutes of playing any game is so important. So that has to be like very, very, very good.

The game needs to look visually polished. There's like we kind of, at least I call it like the Apple principle where like we try to hide all the garbage behind like transitions. and like pretty stuff. It's like, oh, this one's a little ugly. Like, oh, maybe you would just have a way to like not look at this longer or just like even put like nice looking under construction things. Just don't show anything that looks amateurish.

Like don't even, don't even bother. It's like very, very bad to do that, my opinion. So once you have all that out of the way. Is there some specific example of that of you applying the Apple principle? And this is something that people could relate to because I think this is really valuable. But like, what's the difference between showing something that it's under construction but pretty, or versus showing something that's amateur.

I see, I see. I put a few stick figures for placeholder art in my current alpha. Does that count? It's an alpha, so it's fine. It's an alpha, so it's fine. But early access, a little, a little scarier. What's a good example?

When the setting screen is not done, you should not release. You should just not do it. It's like, I think it's illegal. if there was a law that said your setting screen must you know must at least be able to adjust the master volume and the graphic settings even something as simple as like v sync like if you don't allow those and just release

and you just says and you say like settings coming soon or it's just like a box with sliders that don't do anything it's just a really bad really bad vibe yeah title screen it doesn't move is like pretty tough like a static image and like buttons that have like no transitions except the text color changes and it's like oh the title screen is not the meat of the game so we don't need to work on it it doesn't say under construction and so players are just assume that this is the quality level

you would see throughout the rest of the game and that's like a really bad first impression yeah and impressions are just so important so yeah great yeah so this idea of making sure that you're giving a good impression there's a right level of polish um and then the that you're showing constant improvement and development throughout the process if you're out in the open is in a sense. It's like, you know, we don't think of it as marketing, but it really is, right? It's sending a message out to people that this is a, this is a game that expects a high level of polish. And it's a game is alive and will continue to get better. And so people have more willingness to stay with you and believe that you're going to give them a quality total experience in the end.

I think that matters a lot. So I'm going to, well, so there's, I want to now talk about, Let's go past Slay the Spire. Let's go to the new process, right? You mentioned it's like a new, you know, not only are you, we talked about at the beginning. I don't necessarily want to get in too much into the weeds of like, you know, the unity stuff because I want this conversation just to be a little bit more timeless. But I'm happy to understand your, you know, reap both what it's like to develop games now and how you think about game jams now and testing now that you've got a little bit of an audience. And if you want to talk about this process of rebuilding your engine or how that's flowing and any details about your new project that you want to.

talk about. I think they'll want to give some space for that. I see. I don't really care about talking about the new engine thing personally. I understand that the aim is to keep kind of like having most of these podcast discussions be like good game design discussions that are applicable or at least are like a nice snapshot of the era. I think that's very important. So I won't talk about unity, which may not exist in the future. You know, whatever. It's just a relic of it. I'm just kidding.

Who knows? But yeah, I don't know. We're just a much larger team now. It just used to be Anthony, myself. Anthony's wife helps out and a few contractors. But we have full-time employees, which is crazy. I had to go through. You know, we're designing how to make a good business.

Like, that's a whole thing. we can go pretty deep into the weeds, but whether it works or not is also a really difficult thing. It's okay, because I think it's great, I think it's great to get the process because, you know, you talked about, well, okay, now I'm in this place where we're successful. And so I can't necessarily give you advice about what it's like if you were starting.

But now in this other sense, you are, you're starting, right? What is it like to? And I think, you phrase this in exactly the way I think about it. Right. I think about the same thing with my company. I design the company. the way I design a game, right? I want there to be a great user experience.

I have to understand what the end goals are. I want to have ways to align people and make things function. How does information move from one player, one employee to another? I'm like, how do you collaborate? So I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. Whether it's working or not, we don't know. But I'd love to hear how you think about it and what you're trying. I see.

We tried a lot of different things. As we talked about, we no longer, we were like a very, a very high trust company. We don't really have, we don't really track hours. We just kind of, we just have communication hours. And even those are not like 100% mandatory. It's like if you need to like, if you want to work on the weekend, you can just let me know that you want to work on the weekend.

We have just like the normal business stuff. You know, we have days off, et cetera. We have very, very few meetings. We just have the sinks. And then we have one-on-ones. And then on Mondays. we do something called community manager sync, which is where we recently hired a community manager.

So we have like a pseudo standup where we talk about what we did and then maybe talk about what's happening in terms of like the meta of like the company in terms of like what we want to do for like seasonal events and things of that nature. So we're very meeting light in that sense. And what other things can we talk about here? We do everything on Discord. So that's pretty strange. were the exact same.

Oh, not strange for us. The style that I enforce or encourage, I don't know if enforce is the right word, that I encourage is hyperverbosity. And that does not work for a lot of people because some people need like extreme focus time. But I used to work at Amazon where people were running around

and screaming each other all the time. And so to me, I've never had super focus time. I just never like I'm always doing two things at once. Like I'm reading feedback right now while I'm talking to you. And that's and to me that's fine. And I don't say that that's fine for everybody on our team. Like they need to do stuff without being bothered sometimes. So and if they ignore me for a bit, I don't mind.

That's why we have our non-communication hours as well. Yeah. Fascinating. Yeah. I do believe in, uh, it's really interesting that. That wasn't the case at Amazon, but yeah, I believe in, I believe in deep work protected hours, and I believe in the importance of significant, you know, communication and specifically documented communication, right? So I'm in, I mentioned I was in, I'm in Tokyo right now.

I have some team that's in Europe. I have some team that's in, you know, West Coast, U.S., some East Coast. And so there's a, you know, the synchronous hours are precious and not easy to get everybody on the same page at the same time. So getting better at being able to write in Discord or in a shared Google Doc with comments and things to get people, to have that feedback, you know, or, you know, whatever, making sure the tickets are managed. Well, I found something we've gotten just had to get better and better at over time. And so that the communication styles can, you know, sometimes it makes sense to have a live chat, live chat, and you can resolve it quickly that way.

Sometimes it's better if somebody actually has to write their thoughts out in a full, you know, format. My understanding is that was a common thing for Amazon that would be, you know, any meetings, you'd have to have a, you know, pretty written out idea of what you'd want. Is that your experience as well? That might be false. Ah, that's just the narrative. I like it.

On a high level, like, when, like, a product manager has to pitch to, like, a director, I assume that happened. But, like, developers, they didn't really, they didn't really do that. Yeah. From what I see. It was an internal wiki. But it was the Wild West. Like, some teams did it and some teams didn't.

I document all. a lot. We have several hundred pages of documentation for a current project. I have documentation for games that don't exist. I just can't stop writing documents. I don't know what it is. I'm just always writing. I used to blog quite extensively. I used to blog for the university that I was going to, excuse me. I blogged a lot when we were working on Let Aspire. I actually didn't blog about this. I actually blogged a lot about my side projects while working on site is better. And then

I guess it's probably because we had Slack and I would just rant all the time about design things to Anthony and we would just get into it. You know, it was like, ah, like what do you think about this? And I'm like, you're stupid. But we're, you know, we're close enough that we can like make fun of each other.

And we have a very good relationship in terms of design, I think. For content design we have a what I call the author editor relationship which is where we think of ideas and then anthony thinks of ideas it's like oh why don't we think of 10 abilities or whatever and he'll think of 10 all think of 10 and then we just critique the shit of each other's ideas and then maybe one thing survives you know how it is so yeah well that's that's that's that's great so this is this is another thing that I've found is really important is this this idea of healthy conflict, right? The,

the ability to give criticism, to receive criticism, and to have your mind changed in ways that don't threaten your ego or don't, you know, try to be, you're not trying to be right. You're trying to get to the, you know, you're trying to learn and get to the right solution. Yeah. And, and so that what, is it just something that you just had naturally from the beginning or you had, you guys were such good friends that you, you had enough social cushion. You could just scream at each other and it was fine? Like, what got you to that place? That's a good point.

I don't know. Anthony and I used to discuss philosophy before we started working on games. So we were kind of used to just like critiquing each other all the time. And we still do to this day. We have like a friend server on Discord where we just play games and talk about game design and complain about game design. And that's separate from our company one because it's so chaotic. I don't even want them, I don't even want to expose them to that, you know?

I love it. All right. I'm really intrigued then. I want to get connected to Anthony and do a part two with him and get his perspective on all these things because it sounds like it will be a very interesting other take on this founding and this partnership. Oh, yeah. We're quite different. Yes. Yeah.

What would you say? Some agreements. Yeah. So what would you say his kind of superpowers are, his biggest strengths are? Hmm. I think Anthony's superpower. is to intuitively understand what strategy game players want to see. And he's always on top of like the meta of like card games.

If that makes sense, I think that makes sense. Always playing like the newest card games, obsessed with them, strategy games. Yes. And so just, you know, any, he also tends to read a lot more than I do. I can only read after I had my coffee. I think I actually just, I didn't actually realize that I could read. That's a weird thing to say,

but I actually just could not read because I would just lose focus all the time. Now I drink coffee constantly, so I'm like a normal person. But because of that, I like started reading when I was like 25. But Anthony, he was always just reading stuff,

blogs about opinions, card game stuff, analyses posts. And that's just, I think that's this happy place. It's just always like, knowing what people think about things, what kind of cards they want to see,

why they like certain things. We also just review and read Steam reviews all the time. We look at a new game and be like, what do people actually think about this? And then we would like read it and like try to be, probably be worried of like confirmation bias. But we would play it and be like, I think like there's just not enough meat

after you play the game once or twice. And then we just read like every single Steam review. And then maybe that's the case. But I think he reads a little. a little bit more than I do. I tend to just play a lot of brain dead games all the time.

So we're different in that way. Yeah. And so when I asked the same question to him, what will he say your superpowers are? It's probably U.X related. I think everybody is pretty sensitive

to a lot of my UX decisions and I think people tend to bring up that I have a good sense for UI and UX quite often. So I guess that's what stands out. No, it's a great, it's a great power. It makes it's, it's such a challenging thing. And I'm glad we dug into it quite a bit earlier in the conversation because it's like,

it's so challenging and nuanced and overlooked. And many a great game has become, has never, you know, has died because of bad UIUX. And it informs everything all the way through, right? That from the design and certain principles and systems that you need to cut or remove because you can't build a good UIUX for them or they're, they're too cumbersome. and through to marketing where you can have something that anybody can backseat, you know, drive and see all the information on a screen and that allows, it makes it more streamable.

You know, so, so there's, there's, it informs every piece of the puzzle in ways that I think people don't tend to appreciate. So I really, I appreciate you,

diving, diving deep into it for us. Yeah. I would say, there's a lot of good physical board game designers. Um, and generally the biggest weakness is taking that like traditional physical format to digital is UI and

UX. It generally tends to be like a copy of the physical form into digital form. And the assumption is that I really just want to sell the physical game in digital form and it's going to work out exactly the same. And that is a very naive thing that I've

noticed in some games. So I hope. Sometimes I wish people would reach out and allow me to help them. But also, that's a weird ask. So, but also unsolicited feedback is not welcome. So it's a tough thing. I always want to help people.

Yeah. Well, I will be happy to accept your help if you want to offer me on my terrible UIUX because we have our alpha ready to go. And it has got a lot of issues I already know about. So, okay, so other people that we're running out of time here. So I want to give people an opportunity. Where can they find you, your stuff, your writing, your new, game, cool thing they want to join in on?

What should I direct people to? Whatever marketing, I can help drive your way. We only, all of our news goes through our mega crit Twitter channel right now. So if that disappears in a few years, that's too bad. I don't really want to be found, but I do exist at kaciano.com. That's just where I blog stuff.

You know, I'm on Twitter too, and I link to it whenever I do. But I actually post mundane things on purpose. So I don't really recommend following yet at all. I just exist to make that platform a little more boring because I think all the news is negative. And I'd rather see boring things about people that are respect than whatever is out there all the time. Well, I think that this conversation was anything but boring for me.

I'm sure a lot of the audience will love it. I have an enormous amount of respect for you and what you guys have done. So I will just say thank you here. And I look forward to not just part two with Anthony, but learning more about the new stuff you're working on because it's really helped. You've given me many, many, many hours of fun. So I thank you for all of it.

Yeah. And thank you for Ascension, really. Like, just help me design so much content. No joke. Now that I know you work on Soul Forge, I've got to give it a try. Excellent. Excellent. All right, then.

We'll be playing some games. Okay. Thank you so much for, listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platform, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listen to reviews and shares make a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews, along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry, and compressed it all into a book

with the same title as this podcast, Think Like a Game Design. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at think look atgamedesigner.com or wherever find books or something.