Think Like A Game Designer - Jonathan Grant — Critics, Experiments, Secrets, and the Business of Play (#92)

Episode Date: September 23, 2025

About JonathanJonathan Grant is a creative director at Zynga, founder of Orbital Games, and co-host of We Thought It Would Be Easy with Jordan Weisman. His career spans startups, acquisitions, and AAA environments, where he’s pitched ideas in Zynga boardrooms, built risky new projects, and collaborated with legends of the industry. Jonathan’s work is defined by his willingness to experiment, his honesty about failure, and his belief that great games hide secrets waiting to be discovered. In this episode, we dive into what it means to make the right bets, how to use criticism to grow, and why experimentation and mystery are essential tools in game designThink Like A Game Designer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Ah-ha! Justin’s Takeaways* Your Critics Are Right About You: Jonathan challenges us to let go of ego by acknowledging that criticism often contains truth. Instead of fighting it, use it as fuel to grow. Accepting this mindset helps designers take risks, embrace feedback, and move forward without fear of failure.* The Power of Experimentation: At Zynga, Jonathan saw firsthand how structured experimentation can refine ideas—sometimes running a dozen tests at once. The key lesson: experimentation validates and sharpens vision, but it should never replace it. Use data to guide improvement, not dictate creativity.* The Purpose of Gameplay is to Hide Secrets: Jonathan believes the most memorable games invite players to discover hidden layers. Secrets create mystery, turning mechanics into worlds worth revisiting. As designers, we should craft experiences that reward curiosity, giving players reasons to return again and again. Show Notes"Pain isn’t bad. Damage is bad." (00:17:57)This framing really resonated with me. Creative projects often hurt, the late nights, the tough feedback, the near-misses, but that’s not the same as damage. Damage is when you burn out, ruin relationships, or risk your financial stability. Learning to distinguish between the two is essential. Pain can be a teacher or a compass; damage is a warning sign."Your critics are right about you." (00:27:14)It’s a hard truth, but Jonathan is right. The ego wants to believe that critics don’t understand us, yet their words often hold a kernel of truth. When I apply this mindset, I can let go of defensiveness and see criticism as fuel for growth. Its a reminder to use feedback to sharpen both my work and myself."The thing that Zynga was incredible at was experimentation… sometimes a dozen experiments at once." (00:50:37)At Zynga, experiments weren’t random, instead they were structured, frequent, and scaled. As a designer, I take from this that experimentation should validate vision, not replace it. Numbers can guide us toward sharper solutions, but they can’t generate the spark that makes a game truly special."Philosophically, the purpose of gameplay is to hide secrets." (01:08:29)I love this idea. Secrets are what keep players coming back: hidden interactions, unexpected depth, and little discoveries that reward curiosity. A great tip for RPG game masters is to place a secret in every location so players always have something to unravel, with each secret offering a way to draw them back on track. In my own designs, I’ve found that the best games aren’t the ones that reveal everything up front, but the ones that invite players into a world where there’s always more to discover. That sense of mystery is what makes play feel alive. 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 Jonathan Grant. Jonathan is a creative director at Zinga and a founder of Orbital Games. He's also, along with Jordan Weissman, created the podcast, we thought it would be easy, where I was the very first guest. I recommend that. If you enjoy this podcast, you'll almost certainly enjoy that. We talk a lot about the creative process, how you handle fear, the fact that your critics are probably right about you, and what it

means to accept that. We talk about the power of experimentation and what it means to have a visionary designer and how you can kind of craft that and turn that into something that's amazing. The ideas behind gameplay and the way he thinks about it is great. He really does a great job of highlighting not only the people that he works with like Jordan Weissman, but we talk about how games like Candy Crush and the business behind massive companies like King are done. The difference between working in large companies versus the more entrepreneurial side of things. I knew I wanted to have Jonathan on the podcast as soon as I got a chance to talk with him on his podcast. I think you're going to love him and all of the stuff.

that he and Jordan are creating. So without any further ado, here is Jonathan Grant. Hello and welcome. I am here with Jonathan. Grant, Jonathan. It is great to have you on the podcast, man. Thank you for having me. I'm excited.

I'm excited to chat. Yeah. So normally I kind of start with origin stories and I think yours is interesting. So we're going to dig into it. But I'm going to start with our origin story, right? We first got to connect on your podcast, which is, We thought it would be easy with you and Jordan Weissman. And we had a great conversation.

It got to be the inaugural episode. So let's start there because we were actually chatting a little bit before we started recording about the podcast and why you're doing it. Maybe give a little bit of a pitch to the audience here because I think there'll be a lot of overlap of people who listen to my podcast who would be interested in yours. And then, you know, kind of why you're doing it and we can jump off from there. Yeah. I think the why is really about as game designers, It's funny you said you and Jordan, but really it's got to be Jordan and me because, you know, Jordan's the big draw, I think, in a big way because he has, you know, a following. He has IPs that he has built that are storied and loved and loved by me. And that's how Jordan and I first got connected. But I think for both of us, we have both realized, I think you came to this realization probably earlier. than we did that if you want to connect with your audience,

you got to go direct. You have to, in Jordan's case, connecting with his audience in the form of having a podcast the thing you go to. And in my case, understanding an audience and connecting with them for the first time as anything other than a completely anonymous game developer. I think that is the impetus that made us want to start a podcast.

And then we started thinking about what value we can provide. You know, Jordan's got an insane rollo decks of people. So that's part of what we can provide because we can talk to all kinds of creators. What we originally really focused on is like creativity and why do people do it? Because it is very, it can be very costly, both financially, personally, emotionally, yeah. And, you know, especially if it doesn't work out. there's no doubt in my mind, for example, I got my

start of my career as a programmer in games. But before that, I was a web developer. There's no doubt in my mind that if I'd have stayed in web development away from games, I'd be a lot richer. I mean, it's just true, right, when you look at the history. Because I'm an old man. So, I mean, I started in the dot-com era. If I'd have been a programmer that entire time, I would have had, I'd probably have a pretty

different lifestyle. But I think I would have had a much more boring and, you know, potentially less happy life. But anyway, yeah, you're talking to a guy that dropped out of one of the top five law schools in the country, so I hear you. That's right. You're a big law refugee, basically. That's right. That's right. So, okay. So then, so you went and, you know, you've personally, because I want dig into your story a little bit here too, right? Like, yes, Jordan Weissman, incredible, you know, legendary designer, which is funny to call him because he just hears that as old. But, you know, he's been on this podcast. He's been a mentor. Yeah, it's been a mentor to me, to you, to countless others. But you've, you know, you've had a career of your own here that is, you know, not, I think,

to be trivialized. Like, in fact, just because you're, you know, it's not the same household name, like, you've been involved in a lot of interesting projects and, and jumping from, web development into games. You mentioned, obviously, maybe we're leaving money on the table, but what, what, you know, what brought you into that space and then kind of how did you craft that career that got you to be, you know, in the room and on the, not only creating that podcast with Jordan, but, but, you know, building a lot of great games along the way. Yeah.

I mean, for me, it's fundamentally, we, we just had a guest on our pod. It's not out yet, so I'm not going to tease it to. much, but he's a very well-known person in games and father of the Xbox. And just a little promo. He was saying, he was like, fundamentally at times I can be a lazy person and so I need something really engaging if I'm going to really focus on a project. And that really resonated with me too. you know, I just, I'm not a good employee if I don't, I kind of need two things to be a good employee

slash a good lead on a project. I need to feel like it's challenging and interesting and a lot of people feel that way. But I have a little bit of a gambler's instinct. So I need to feel like there's some shot at, you know, exponential success. And I think, I think that has kind of guided me in my career because I've, you know, I've only really ever done projects that were either startups, games that were sort of risky and edgy, or, you know, weird new projects at big companies. And I think that, you know, that's definitely, when you do that, you just have a lot of strikeouts. It's just reality. You know, you're going to miss a lot. But I think it's just kind of cooked into who I am as a person.

And so I don't, you know, I don't feel a ton of like in places where I've worked for years and we've, you know, and anybody who's been in the startup game knows this. You know, you build up a bunch of equity. You work on something for years. And then the company just folds and it's all gone. I don't really regret any of it because, you know, always it's kind of like, well, there's going to be. be another challenge. There's going to be another big opportunity to come around. You will eke out some wins along the way. And, you know, there's something about just the pirate ship nature of chasing after these like kind of crazy goals that is a little bit addicting. So when you say that

this is sort of baked in for you, because this psychology, you know, a lot of people ask me about, okay, well, should I publish my own games or should I be a part of a startup or should I try to get a job it a big company and or should I try to just, you know, sell, you know, license my game and get somebody else to publish it. And, and it's, there's not like a single right answer, right. A lot of it comes down to the makeup of that person, what they want their life to be like. A lot of times you got to discover that kind of the hard way. And as I, I certainly did, you know, going to work for a game company and realizing that I did not want to work for, uh, what appeared to me to be bond villains at the time. Uh, so I had to go off on my own and find better partners to work with.

But how did that come about for you? How did you discover that either discover or cultivate that kind of attitude of accepting losses gracefully and being excited for these moonshot potentials? That's a good question. I think there's an honest answer, which I'll try to give, which is like I actually was never very good at it. never took loss as well. I get very emotionally connected to losing and take it very personally. And I think earlier in my career, that really actually did hold me back because I was looking at failure as failure, not as opportunity. And really, it's only in the last like 10 years, as I've gotten older that I've started to get the

distance from failure and the right kind of, I mean, not all failure is opportunities. Some failure is just failure. You know, you make some bad choices in your life and there's not a lot of redeeming qualities to them. But if you make the right bets in the right way, then it's impossible to feel bad about them even if they go upside down. And I think that's the most important thing. Say more about the right bets in the right way. What makes something a right bet or the right way?

Well, I think a lot of these things, you have to look at them as though they are going to we're in like borderline, depending on where you work, you're in like the venture capital industry in a way in games

because you are, you're in the similar hockey stick potential success, but many losers and few winners that kind of make up for all the losers. And, you know, or another way to say it as like a Pareto Curve, right? Like it's a Pareto Curve business, meaning that, you know, the big winners that you hear of, again, kind of repeating myself, mask a whole bunch of losers. And the chances are, when you do something that involves a lot of risk, you're probably going to be somewhere on the loser side of the curve. But if you are making that bet kind of, you know, what do they say in Friday night lights,

clear eyes, full hearts can't lose. This is kind of a saying, like if you are clear-eyed about what you're doing, if you're sincere about what you're doing, and if you find a way to hold on to that clarity and sincerity through what is typically an absolute washing machine experience of getting pummeled, then I don't think you can lose. You know, you have to have realistic expectations financially. I think that's really important. But as long as you're protecting yourself on that front and your family potentially, then I think, you know, you make the kinds of bets that inform you you, help you grow, help you understand the market more, develop skills that you don't necessarily

have. You do it with a group of people that you love or are interested in or can learn from. Like a perfect example to me was my time at Zenga. I worked at Zenga because we actually, I was at a startup. We were working on, of all things, fantasy sports in the social gaming era, so Facebook gaming. We realized. that we didn't have the scale to build the kinds of games that we wanted to build in fantasy sports where you have to actually get all your users before the start of the season. And so we pivoted to making kind of arcadey games. And this is right when King started to get big and Zinga already was big.

And Zinga started to get worried about, you know, they didn't have the kinds of games or really the kind of game developers that were making the kinds of games that King was making, Bubble Witch Saga, if you remember, all the way back then. This is kind of pre-Candy Crush era even. And we ended up getting acquired, Aquahired, really, to join Zinga. And interestingly, I think I was the person they were interested in the least out of our little studio of five people. We had like a very scrappy five-person studio. I was the creative director. And I remember interviewing with them and they were kind of looking at me little funny. And I knew Zinga reputationally,

and I knew that, like, you know, I knew that they could be very aggressive, let's put it that way. And I got in there, and it was really challenging. You know, a lot of very type A personalities, a lot of people who went to Wharton Business School, who I'd never been exposed to in my career

as a somewhat fuzzy game designer at that point, creative director. But I was like, you know, I just found that despite these people who, you know, had Sterling, in many cases, Ivy League resumes, I found that as a creative person, I could hang with them. And moreover, I found a lot that I could learn. And so it was absolutely a pummeling experience. I mean, I have never sweated pitches so much and never been like just crushed so many times in pitches as I was at Zinka. Absolutely trial by fire repeatedly. But so like it's like graduate, it was like graduate.

I considered like the equivalent for me of graduate school. I learned so much. Yeah. So let's let's linger there. for a little bit, right? First, I want to get in, and I'll give you some time because I want to, at some point, I want you to take me into the room for one of these pitches and, you know, kind of make it a little bit more visceral. Because I do. I think it's like fascinating. And I remember from my era, as Zingo was rising up and it was hiring a lot of people of a lot of game designers, a lot of people from the Magic Pro community. And, you know, it got this reputation, not just of being like cut throat, but being very, very metrics driven, right? Everything was metrics driven. If you can't show it with numbers and A, B testing, then it's not real. And so there was a really interesting class of people that came out of there, a lot of great designers that learned a lot. So I want to get your insights on it here.

But I think, you know, when we talk about like what does it mean to make a good bet, right? It just kind of went off on this little kind of tangent here where I think there's a few different aspects to it, right? As you said, and I think this is just an important emphasis. Like, most games fail. Some have asymmetric success. and in order to kind of be able to keep taking those swings, you've got to kind of have, you know, clear eyes, you know, in this process and know that that's coming

and that it's okay to be wrong, you know, four out of five times if the one time that you're right is going to get you, you know, a 10x or 100x or whatever on your money as long as you don't run out of money in that timeline. That's not, it's not for everybody. But I think the process of like, I can't lose. I just had, you know, Tim Ferriss on a recent episode, And he talked a little bit about this in terms of like how he picks projects.

It's like if you're optimizing for your ability to learn new skills and build relationships with people who are good people, then you really can't lose, right, regardless of the financial success or whatever happens to the project. Like those are the things. And I hear some of that in your answer. And it's kind of a big part about how I choose the work I do, right? Is our company models work with awesome people, make awesome things, help each other grow. And, you know, if I'm proud of the thing I'm making, if I'm building relationships,

just with people I really love to work with, and I'm learning as I go, like, oh, like, eventually things are going to take care of themselves, right? And it's like a, it's a good kind of heuristic. And that's, I just like to contrast that with the fuzzy, you know, it's a little bit of a fuzzy heuristic, but I think a valuable one, then to go into, ideally a good story from you about the, the rough and tumble world of Zinga and, you know, kind of how, be it metrics decisions or how the Wharton Business School graduates made choices compared to you as a creative director. So you got any good tales to kind of bring that one home?

I do, but I just want to touch on something you said, which is I think something took me a while to learn. And I kind of learned it a little bit with physical fitness as well, which is that pain isn't bad, damage is bad. So if you are engaged in one of those projects, that is going to be a loser, you know, and all that times you know along the way. Sometimes you think it might be a loser, and then it, like, comes out right at the end, and you're like, oh, thank God.

But, you know, a lot of times you can feel it going off course, and, you know, you're fighting the controls, and it hurts. It hurts. But pain isn't bad. You know, when I actually, before I've gotten back into running lately and trying to maintain my girlish figure as I get older. And, you know, I've just really, that's really cemented it for me. It's like, there's a lot of pain and running. Damage where I hurt my joints because I go too much, that's bad. And I think there's a lot of echoes of that in your career and how you think about projects too.

If you're, you know, ruining your financial future, that's bad. If you're, you know, suffering through some late nights that aren't endless, that are on, you know, a schedule that you know is somewhat manageable, at least, you know, in the short to medium term, that's pain, but it's okay. And also, that pain might help you next time you try to do something more challenging. So, yeah, just a thought kind of on the line of what you were saying about why you make bets. Yeah, I love that. Let's stay there for a second before we go back to the to the Zingha story because I think this is I haven't heard it in the analogy you said the sort of physical kind of sports and training analogy where it's it's you know pain not damage whereas in a lot of times in the business world there's the uh I'll describe it as

you know kind of suffering through the the period where you're in the dark forest or the trough of sorrow right where you're like you're in the thick of it and this is like where you should continue to push forward and like no you know a lot of the advantage of being the experienced designer that I am now is I know when I'm in that zone and I can remember I can recognize it and be willing to push through the discomfort but often and this is a question I think I even asked and we discussed on the on when I was on on your podcast but I don't think I got your answer as deeply as I would like so now you're stuck and got to give it to me you know how do you know the difference right how do you know when it's okay you know what these are manageable late night things or this is

is a manageable level of risk or cash out the door or whatever or, you know, injury or pain. And how do you know when I'm pushing that boundary? It's like, hey, this is the time I should quit or this is when I need to pull back. Like what gives you the, you know, be it, I don't know, whether it be intuition or metric or how do you get to, how do you know the difference? Yeah. I mean, a bunch of it is experience. I think also when you're younger, you have like,

a more of a threshold to go through pain and figure out where maybe even take a little bit of damage and go, oh, don't want to do that again. So, you know, experience is super valuable. I think like, I think you have to have. So there's a, to follow up on the athletic thing a little bit. You know, I was never a sports dude. I was a skinny little nerd. I graduated high school, and I'm about like 510, 5'9. And when I graduated high school, I weighed 125 pounds. I was just so thin and kind of small, to be honest with you. And really wasn't into physical fitness at all and slowly got into it over like 20 plus years. And as part of that, have kind of learned more about how athletes approach things. And you know, you often see, especially at a high level professional

athletes, they're trying to give everything they've got, but they're trying to preserve themselves as well. And I think you have to use good judgment about that, right? You want to give, if you want to be the best at what you're doing, you're going to have to find ways to give it your all. But you also have to recognize that you have a long arc of your career. And, you know, if you're starting to develop deeply negative personal habits, mental health, you know, substance abuse, you know, lack of sleep even, I think you have to start to look at those as the significant, you know, red flags or at least, you know, flashing yellow lights that they are. If you're starting to damage your personal relationships with people, if you're, you know,

some of that is like it's down to an individual's preference how much of the crazy artist you want to be. But as long as, you know, your life is not completely going off the rails, I don't think you're really entering into the damage category. You know, I mean, to go back, though, again to the like financial success piece, you know, I don't think it would have been impossible for me to get an engineering gig at Google in 2005, let's say. Boy, that would have been a pretty interesting financial outcome. But, you know, I, I, so did I do damage there?

I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. The future is always unknowable. but I do think like, oh, if you're gambling your last, you know, retirement savings, you're pushing to that degree, you know, then you're potentially looking at damage. And even as a company owner, not just as an employee, I still think you have to be really smart about, you know, your financial success and future. The perfect example there, it's not a creative enterprise, but would be like Groupon, right? Who remembers the era where Groupon was massively, you know, impactful and killing it and they were, they turned down many acquisition offers. And I think they were probably foolish about doing that.

And so, you know, you've just got to, you've got to grow your instincts for the difference between damage and pain. And the only way to do it is to, you know, is to venture into it. swim into the waters and push that boundaries and and learn learn the hard way which is yeah I think a lot of the theme I've gotten from you know listening to your podcast and and you know just whatever life in general is like a lot of times pain is the teacher that you need like there's no other way around it right you've got to push those those boundaries and it's one of the great things when I talk to you know aspiring designers or people who kind of like look up and you know see oh well it's you know it was easier back in your day or you've got all these advantages now is you've got a reputation

in a company. I'm like, actually, like, it's a massive advantage to just be young and have no reputation. Like, it is a massive advantage because you can do and take all of these risks and push these boundaries and push further without a lot of the consequences that come from. Like, I have a lot of responsibilities. I have to make payroll. I have to get all these other things done. And when you're, you know, that era is the perfect time to be pushing, pushing your boundaries and seeing what you're what you're capable of. And you fall on your face, the, the, the gap between their height and the ground is not high. It's not high. So it's a little. little easier to get back up again. So it's an interesting, you know, kind of paradox of starting at that

stage. If anyone's listening who said, who's like saying those things to themselves, well, this other person has these advantages and they have power and they have money and they have success and blah, blah, blah. I just want to tell you those are lies you're telling yourself. They're lies. They are lies to protect yourself. I've told myself those lies dozens of times. one of the most impactful things, two impactful little sayings. One is common and one is less common. The common one is fairly somewhat new, and it's Sam Altman's, you can just do things. That is powerful and true.

That's how I got the podcast with Jordan started. I was like, okay, Jordan, let's really do this podcast. seriously, we've talked about it a couple of times. Let's just really do it. I was on a run, actually, and I stopped, and I just was like, I was just like, am I going to do this or am I going to think about it? And so I just called him and I was like, let's really do it. He's like, okay, I'll book some people. And he booked you. So one, I would say embrace that. You can just do things and you can find incredible leverage, actually, by just being audacious and not getting too hurt or wounded if it doesn't work.

But then the other thing that is tangential to that, but is really powerful, I think, and is about killing kind of the fearful ego protecting part of yourself, is there's a saying that I actually got from Anna on the Red Scare podcast, of all things, who I don't know, but I just listen to their pod, which is the saying that your critics are right about you. I heard that and it kind of blew me away. It's like nobody wants to believe that.

Oh, my critics are wrong. They don't know me. They don't know what I've been through. But they're actually probably mostly right about you. And, you know, their critics are right about them. Everybody's critics are right about them. And if you look at it that way and if you're able to sort of extinguish part of your ego, or the fear of being wrong or criticized by acknowledging that,

I think that it can help you get past those kinds of sentiments where you develop all these excuses to not even try. Just try and fail. And then when you fail, try again. It doesn't make you less than anybody else. It doesn't reveal some secret flaw in you that nobody knew about. that you were masterfully able to pull the wool over people's eyes on. And by the way, I'm talking to myself here.

I was always one of those people and have often in my career been really afraid, afraid to fail. And it's just a terrible way to live your life. Yeah. And I just, I want to echo that and not just like, I don't think that that ever actually goes away. Like I've, you know, I've had a lot of success in my career and I still feel it. this day. Anytime I'm launching a new project, anytime I'm like, you know, something doesn't seem like it's going the way I thought it was going to go. And, you know, it's still there. It's just a question of, yeah, I guess putting that fear in the right place and just saying, look, this is a thing I'm

worth, it's worth facing that fear. And the more you do it, the bigger, the things you're willing to be afraid of next and the things that you were used to be afraid of. You know, and you could just go through this exercise, like go back 10 years. What were you afraid of? What was scaring you then? And it's ridiculous to you now. Almost 100% of the time, it's ridiculous to you now. And so that's happened. You can go back, even five years, I can tell that story. And like, once you've done that enough times and you go back in the way back machines, like, almost certainly, whatever it is you're afraid of right now, it's got to seem ridiculous to you in five to 10 years. So just try to remember that to give yourself perspective as you're jumping into the abyss or whatever it

feels like you're doing at the moment. Who do you, if you're as a fan of anything, who do you feel more a fan of, the person who's always had like linear cruising success in life, or the person who's like had some success and some downfalls and then has come back to success. At least for me, the people who have fallen are the ones who are the most interesting and often the most exciting. And so if you're that person too, like, that's okay. Oh, yeah. And I, so I had this experience. So I worked with Neil Strauss to write my new book that's we'll be coming out next year. And he, you know, the principles of the book or something I've been doing for a long time, this idea of taking the game, the lessons of game

design and creating and applying that to kind of business in life. I think it's like a useful thing. And it was when I started working with him, it was a very boring book because I didn't actually share the real stories, like the stories of when I fell flat on my face to learn these lessons where I messed up horribly again and again. And like, how. had to take deep, deep looks into myself. And I had to share that. And so that I ended up rerunning the entire book to share those stories. And it became a much better story because, look, you think about it just like,

you go to the movies, you don't want to watch, you imagine that character arc where it's like, yep, everything starts great, continues great, just gets better. And it's really good. Like, that's a terrible movie. Nobody wants to watch that. You need the fall and the redemption and you need something to make that story relatable. And so, yeah, the same is true for your own life. And so that's, you know, still not fun to be in the trough yourself while you're there,

but it does help to say, look, you actually want some of that. And if you don't have any of that, then you're not living the best story of your life you could. Well, and I think the movie example is really interesting too, right? Because I think that while you're thinking about that arc of success and failure, you also have to remember that like the days are long, but the years are short. another cliche, but I think where movies don't necessarily equip young people with the, the gear that they need to get through some of this is, you know, most of the time when you're in that long, dark tunnel that you were talking about or valley of despair or whatever it is,

you're not, you don't get out of it quickly. It's not like in a movie where, you know, the heroes get beat up a little bit by the bad guy. And then they, just learn to rally together as friends. What we need in life is a training montage for life. You know, if you can just get some like funky 80s music and get yourself getting better a little bit by little bit every day. And then boom,

you're done. 10 minutes later. Just remember that the montage might be six months. Yeah, or six years. Yeah, or six years. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, it's life is, life does have every, I think, you know, even people have managed, certainly there are some people

who are blessed, right? And I've met some of them. But even for people who have what appears to be a smooth arc of a career, there's often, you know, long nights of the soul or whatever metaphor you want to use, there's long periods where they have struggled. And, and, So when you encounter, that's what I would call, like in many cases, although not all pain, right? When you encounter that, don't be scared. Just keep going. Yeah. All right.

So speaking of pain, let's circle back and bring you back into that Zinga boardroom. Because I think this is a great and really meaningful divergence. But I do think I want to take some of the lessons out of there. and I didn't get to experience what that was like. Though I did get offered a job there, I stuck with my rogue ways, with my own company. So take me in there.

What did I miss in those pitch meetings? Yeah. Well, I mean, everything happened at Zinga through a moving window of the whole company's evolution, right? So, you know, you're talking about a company that had very, very rapid, incredible. Once they

figured out, I think they started doing like stickers or something that a bunch of these Facebook API companies were doing. And once they figured out games, and by the way, Mark Pinkus, who's the guy I usually was pitching to, is like,

if, you know, he's very fierce in the room where you pitch him. But you know, if you hang out with them at a baseball game, and I've done that, he's like a nerdy gamer too. You know, like he's,

he had this dream, uh, for a long time. He wanted to make a game that was the exact same scale as Earth. And he wanted to make it interesting and he, like I can't even describe his vision for it. But it just gives you a, you know,

the idea of making a game at that scale, um, and being really into the idea. It gives you a sense that like the guy has creative, um, I wouldn't say designer impulses, but he has like a gamer's love of, you know, new undiscovered worlds, right? But he's also an incredibly fierce and analytical, scrappy startup founder. And so those guys got traction with Farmville. And like many, you know, games or products that form a company,

that became both a massive rocket for the rest of the company and also a handcuff that held them back. And they absolutely struggled, I think, basically starting right around the time I started there, I can't remember what year it was, but I started, I think, right after Castleville came out. They struggled with that handcuff basically the entire time I was there. Because the, you know, the innovator's dilemma, right? The question of why would we spend a dollar on this? when we could, you know, spend a dollar on Farmville and get a better return. It's also something that I got to watch secondhand King struggle with on Candy Crush. For years, they couldn't ship any games because they would always compare the dollars that it would take to promote the new game to putting those dollars back into Candy Crush.

And I think interestingly, a lot of those businesses have decided that the answer, is to just stick with that core game and double and triple down on it. But that's, you know, let's get back to the Zenga thing. So that was the era that I was in at Zenga. We were pitching new games. We were pitching arcade games, bubble shooters. You know, we were kind of squeezed into match three, although we didn't necessarily want to do it.

And the way that I would get games made over there is actually I would prototype them myself in like, in Unity or in Flash, I had this engineering background so I could build, and I actually went to art school for a couple years, so I could build not terrible looking prototypes, not finished or polished by any means, but playable experiences pretty quickly. And so I did that really twice at Zenga. And I would draw from, I had some casual games experience, I would draw from that experience. build things. I knew the Zinga ethos, which was the, they sort of pitched it internally to creative people at the company as same better new.

So if you think about, you know, a pie, just classic pie chart, their ideal game would be some balance of a third the same, a third better, a third new. Or maybe to be more realistic, it was probably more like 40% same, 40% better, 20% new. And so that was kind of their creative guidance. I would operate inside that. And I was looking at it and the company was really structured this way, actually, is I was looking at it like our little studio was kind of like an independent startup. And we were trying to pitch investors on funding our product. that was a format that Mark was really comfortable with and some of the other leaders at the company were really comfortable with.

And that's actually how he liked to conduct his pitch meeting. So we had sort of a typical green light process where we would develop a concept. We'd take that for a green light for funding for a certain number of employees in a certain amount of time. And somehow in there, I think probably because I was the one who created the protocol, and like was able to speak about it somewhat intelligently. I just ended up being the face of the studio pitching this stuff, which is ironic considering behind me I had my more experienced executive producer and my much more experienced GM.

Um, but I ended up being the guy in the room who God squeezed. Um, so what was it like? There's no, you could not prepare. Well, the way that you would have approach a meeting like that with Mark specifically was there was a little bit of authentic preparation and a little bit of sneaky cheating. And the authentic preparation was mostly about just doing a lot of, you know, what people might call red teaming.

And what I mean by that is, you know, you get some people who work in the studio to sit and just ask you all the hardest questions they can think of about your ideas. why it'll work, what data do you have to validate that it'll work, what is your competitor doing, how are you going to, you know, adapt all of the moves that, or the, you know, hit all the notes that your competitor is going to hit, but then you're going to add something to it to make your experience compelling. So a lot of those, that kind of process of preparation, often the decks, the slide presentations that we would have for those meetings would be like five to eight slides in the front, a thank you slide, and then about 30 slides in the back.

So that in the moment where you got challenged with some of these kind of radical questions, oh, I have a slide for that. You can just go and talk intelligently about the question. So a lot of red team being, that was sort of the sincere preparation. You better know your competitor's products, both from a, playing, you know, deep familiarity with the gameplay and the progression. So you want to get really deep into some of these games that can take tens of hours to get through.

But also the numbers. So you want to know what do we believe their revenue is, you know, what do we believe their DAU is, all that kind of stuff. You want to have a pretty surgical knowledge of the competitor. And then the sneaky part, the sneaky part is that, to avoid meetings blowing up with random unexpected questions, you basically do a roadshow and preview with almost everyone in the meeting, not with Mark because he didn't really work that way and he's very busy. But, you know, Mark had his crew of creative advisors, some of which who are legendary

game designers in their own right. And very sincerely, um, you know, very deeply caring people who really cared about the quality of games and gameplay, which I think surprised some people when I would tell them about Zinga. But like also legendary game investors like Bing Gordon, who I got to pitch to a few times, and have enjoyed listening to on podcasts recently because he's exactly the same there as he is in person. But, you know, we would kind of roadshow some of our ideas before the actual meeting. Then you have the meeting and it's just, you know, it's like probably 60 to 120 minutes of Mark basically walking through your idea and trying to figure out what you're being dumb about. So he's just like, you know, sometimes he'd ask questions that like, I can't help but that are designed to unsettle.

You know, my favorite one is we started the pitch for a match three we were making. I think it was the pitch to go from pre-production to production. And I've got to slide up. It's like the first slide. And he's like, let me stop you right there. And Mark's really intense. And I'm like, okay. And he goes, is that your final font?

And I'm like, okay, what is the right answer to this question? Is that my final font? I'm like, well, I could say no, and I could, you know, say like, well, what do you think the final font should be? But I was like, I kind of was like, this is like a detecting weakness and creative weakness question. So I was like, yeah, it is. It is.

I open a feedback, of course, but that's our final font. He was like, okay, thanks. And we just went on the presentation. But in the moment, everybody's in the, you know, all my team, I'm there with my art director, who was like my creative partner. We've actually we interviewed on the pod, Kevin Hanna, great guy. I'm there with him. You know, my GM, my EP, everyone freezes like a mouse exposed in a field when they see the, you know, the barn owl pop up in the sky.

You know, what are you doing those moments, right? Like there's no preparation. You just have to stay calm. And, you know, if you're going to sweat a little bit, don't wipe your brow conspicuously. So that was kind of what it was like. You know, it taught me the value of preparation. It taught me not to be scared of people. I think I've never pitched anyone who was as scary to pitch as Mark because he would just, like, I mean, here's a guy.

He's like a billionaire, basically. And he will definitely tell you you're stupid if you're acting stupid. And, you know, as far as a – and by the way, I love. like Mark. Like I like him. I have a lot of respect for him. But he is, you know, he's not to be trifled with in those moments. And sometimes I think, you know, I'm sure if you got him on the pod and you asked him about his own process, I think he would probably acknowledge, in those days, he was under a lot of stress. And I think he would probably, you know, maybe reluctantly. But I would guess that he would say, yeah, sometimes that was maybe a little too harsh. That said, he's still

that guy. So after pitching him, I, you know, and throughout the rest of my career, I pitched some not, you know, some fairly big names. And every time I would get that feeling at the start of the pitch, I would just remember, I'd be like, there's no way it's going to be worse than, or, you know, more scary than pitching Mark Pinkus. And I always feel that not dissipate, right? Because, you know, you know that once you've, I don't know, once you've really kind of face down potentially deep professional humiliation, you've kind of got the, you know, grounding to be able to get through other tough meetings. Yeah, well, this goes back to that, you know, the pain versus damage, right? You got to, you know, you suffer the pain through those situations and it feels like it's

damaging. But in reality, you're just getting yourself stronger. You're right. You're building up that resistance, you're building up that muscle. So clearly that gave you some value. But I have one more story there that I think is that you might like, which is I got really good at pitching at Zenga, really good. I had a routine. And by the end of it, you know, I pitch mark, I'm going to guess and say like six or eight times. And like, you know, I won a couple of game design prizes at Zinga. I talked in front of the whole company of whatever, like, you know, three, five thousand people. I'd gotten pretty good at it.

But what I wasn't getting good at was making games. I was getting good at making pitches. And they're really different things. You know, we literally would go home from one pitch and start thinking about the next one. Because it was a very all-consuming process. And I think this is what haunts a lot of AAA and even double-A game developers. and hinders their products and movies too. And you can, I almost, I mean, I'm for certain I'm hallucinating a certain amount of this,

but sometimes when I see the products, I could imagine the pitch meeting where it went off the rails. They showed something, it wasn't up to snuff, and they got told, make it more like your competitor, or, you know, make it more like this, or, you know, my kid played the game and here their thoughts. And, you know, I started to think like, the pitch can't drive the game, and it is driving our games, and our games are poorer because of it. We need to figure out a way, and I need to figure out a way as a designer, to develop confidence in the game and use that to build the pitch. And also have enough courage in those meetings.

and I never quite got there at Zinga, have enough courage in those meetings to say, this is what the game is and it's going to be good. Well, prove it to me. I can't prove it to you. But I'm telling you, either you believe, you know, choose to believe me. I have a, you know, you better do your homework, of course,

for any of those kinds of meetings. But sooner or later, you just got to stand up and say, this is the game. It's going to be good. Either you believe me or don't believe me. because anything else, I think, starts to be, um, starts to be poisonous to the,

the experience of creating a good product. A good pitch is not a good product. Well, and this is what's so hard for me, you know, because I, you know, I didn't have the Zing experience. I didn't have, you know, my, any, like, real sophisticated corporate experience. I just, whenever I try to make a game, because I see the numbers of that type of game category,

and I feel like the market's moving in that direction, and I'm trying to make a game in that space. It's garbage. I mean, it's just not, I mean, whatever. It's not good. It's not up to the standards. Whereas if I make a game where I'm like, listen, I think, I believe in this vision.

This is something I am excited about. I think there's something here. Those are the things that have survived, and those are the things that have been successes. So it's like a very tough, that's where like I was always trying like, this sort of secret sauce of Zingha of like what the numbers and metrics were that ended up potentially leading off the rails sometimes.

I try to find that balance. How do you let metrics inform and temper what is otherwise a creative, iterative, intuitive process? I don't think I have a great answer for it, but I do think there's certain, you know, there's art and science to this and it's still a lot of it just has to come down to that designers instinct and, you know, being willing to make a new thing that hasn't been made before. So of course you don't know how it's going to do. That's the whole point of creativity. It's not just like I'm going to copy 40% of the thing that already exists and 40% with a plus 10% ROI or whatever.

You know, it just seems really hard to think that way to me. Well, I have like two maybe direction link pieces of information. I don't have the answer. Number one, the thing that Zingle was incredible at was experimentation. So they would run in their games. They would not just look at the metrics, but they would take a feature, like let's say, a layout for the store or pricing or even to a degree tuning, but not so much tuning. But progression, probably, yes.

They would take it and they wouldn't like, you know, you might hear people talk about A-B testing. They wouldn't do A-B testing. do like A through H testing. They had the volume of users to be able to do that at statistical significance. So they'd run, you know, sometimes a dozen experiments at once and they'd slowly prune off the ones that weren't. And this is, by the way, completely inspired by Amazon because whether people know it or not,

that's what Amazon does on their homepage. You're probably running hundreds of experiments, if not thousands. And in the age of AI, I'm sure that that is now really a major factor. as well. But, you know, Zingo, we were in a different era. They would like slowly prune off some of these dozens of experiments and eventually like circle into a winner that, you know, the numbers supported being the strongest answer. The problem with that is that it's a little bit of like local maxima, meaning, you know, you look at where you're standing, you look at the area around you. and as long as you choose the area around you that's slightly more uphill than when you're standing,

yeah, you'll get to a high spot, but there might be a mountain range next to you that you miss and you're standing on the top of the hill. So I think that that helped them a lot early on in the company's existence when they didn't necessarily have the same kind of competition. And then, you know, the company that sort of, it didn't. It didn't crush Zinga, but it did really, I think, suck a lot of the wind out of Zinga's sales was King. And they really did it with Candy Crush. And when you look at candy, candy really kind of was a product.

And by the way, the creator of Candy Crush, you should try to get them on your podcast. And I want to try to get him on mine too. So his name's Seb. He's one of the founders of King. You know, I knew him at a remove when I actually lived in Sweden. He literally set aside to like build a better version of bejeweled. So he was very much designing in that space that you're talking about where you've struggled. He was like, I'm just going to go make a better bejewel.

But the environment that they made it in at the time was one where they had, basically a portal where anybody could play, and they were putting up builds of games, and just testing them that way. So he built candy originally for this portal. By the way, I'm sure I'm butchering this story a little bit, and there may be somebody out there is listening who works for King, who has a better version of it.

If so. Come on the pod. But he built this basically prototype of a match three game and saw a huge traction on it. And they were like, okay, that's what we're going to build. And they kind of built it out from there. I think they also still were using some of those experimentation, successful experimentation tools, but they're using it inside a core vision, right, which is different.

But also they were doing what I think I come back to again and again in my career. I first heard about this from one of the guys who worked on Half-Life II. he was talking about how important it was in the development of Half-Life-2 that they did unguided user testing. So during many, many points in the game, they just bring someone in who was a gamer who liked Half-Life-1, put them down in a particular level they were working on, zero instruction, and the team would watch, either in the room or ideally through like a one-way mirror or something. typical like, you know, qualitative user testing. But the core inspiration behind that where you watch real people use your products unguided the way they would at home, I think is inspires that thought in me, which is always like, okay, but what is a real user actually going to do with this idea that I have? Right. I don't have the mental model, honestly, to really be able to describe how an average user is going to respond to an idea I have as a game designer.

In fact, I think I'm quite poor at it compared to many of my peers who can visualize this stuff more clearly. I just think of stuff I think would be cool. I think of how it can fit inside a complex system like a game. But then the best way to get any kind of validation on that is to see it. either, well, ideally, quantitatively and qualitatively, as fast as you can. And I think that's, that same mechanism was at play with King when they were testing Candy Crush on their little portal before they released it. And I think that's how many of these great games have actually been made.

So two different, slightly different anecdotes. I think tactics that you can engage actually together in the right tool, for the right case. You know, certainly pricing, I think, is something that benefits from a lot of experimentation

in games. I'm not saying that you have to optimize to squeeze people. I'm actually saying that, you know, maximizing pricing can lead,

one, to things being cheaper potentially, and two, preserving a company that might die otherwise. So, you know, experimentation could be super valuable

with stuff like that, but it's not super valuable for like the inspiration and direction behind a game. I think that has to come from one or a couple of people's brains and then just has to quickly get into the hands of users for validation. Yeah. No, I think that's a great distinction of how to leverage those tools together. So let's fast forward a little bit then because now you, you know, you both have the podcast with Jordan.

you're working with him at Endless Adventures. You've had founding your own companies. And so what do you take with you now today? I don't know, actually don't know how big your team is or what, you know, but what is it that you try for when you're saying, all right, here's how I'm managing these projects now is more, you know, kind of the leader or the one that's helping to make those decisions of go, no go. Like what's driving you now or how do you think about this being outside of the giant corporate environment

and now being your own corporate overlord, if you will. Yeah. Well, I mean, with endless adventures, with all the stuff we work on, it's always, you know, Jordan's like the visionary, right? So a lot of what, the other thing about Jordan you see, he's not a dictator. So, you know, he just, he's literally, I mean, it took me a long time to realize, but like he's he's a big kid. He really has ideas that he gets really excited about.

And then he's developed this sharp sense, this sharp businessman's sense of like what it takes to survive. And he brings both of those, you know, aspects out in the right moments. But he's not a dictator by any means. He's like very open to experimentation and play with his design and feedback. But he has things he's trying to do, right? He's trying to reach,

usually in his design he's trying to reach for a brass ring and he has a mechanism that will try to get him towards that brass ring. And so a lot of what I do at endless adventures is just try to help him reach that brass ring. For me though, like when I, you know, I think I don't, I'm very, we talked about this when you were on the pod. Like I really don't know what the future holds. It's very, it's a very weird time to be in games. I have a lot of opinions. Like I think, for example, that the way that major publishers have been behaving is going to be deeply poisonous to the market. And it will be poisonous in the shape of they will not have the content they want to have.

It'll be positive in the shape that a lot of flowers are going to bloom, hopefully, and the independence. scene, and I think it'll generate the kind of classic new wave of acquisitions eventually. Maybe. We might be entering an era where there's so many new flowers blooming that you can't make acquisitions quite in the same way, because, you know, there's just a lot more smaller games. But, you know, we're post-COVID. I think the damage that COVID wrought to the gaming industry is so much deeper. than we realize, both in the shape of how it sugar-juiced all of our sales and then left a gap

when people decided they wanted to go outside instead. I think it- People have a lot of nerves that way. It gave us an incredible jolt on hiring, which we're now kind of suffering through. So I think that damage is deep. And I do think deeper than we realized, and I do think we're starting to come out of that. Certainly I look at the new Battlefield, which the demo dropped last weekend, this past weekend. And I played that and I was like, oh, we're back, baby. Like, this is actually a good game in the Battlefield franchise. And it's fun in a way that has been missing for a long time.

But, you know, now we have AI confronting us. We have the continued hiring strangeness in games. What I, you know, I am looking at the future and thinking that there's probably more possibility than ever. And I'm trying to configure how I can take advantage of that and embrace it. So some of that is AI, of course. Some of that is some of these gaps in the market that I think are appearing because of how challenging funding can be for a lot of independent companies. I look at something like, you know, a game I love deeply would be the Homeworld series. And I look at Homeworld 3, which came out, I think, a couple years ago now and kind of died on

the vine, I think, due to, like, insufficient sales. They basically left that project pretty early on, it seems like. And, you know, that while very deeply sad, potentially leaves a gap in the marketplace that someone can can exploit. So, you know, I'm looking at this like it's a new era, like it's a reset in the industry, and I'm trying to think about, you know, I guess definitely as somebody who's getting older, what my place, what I want my place to be in that industry reset. And some of that's, of course, through the lens of endless adventures and Jordan and I collaborating on stuff, whether it's the podcast or building games together.

Some of it is like beyond that, right? I'm like, okay, well, like that's what we're doing right now. What's next? And some of it is also, and I won't, I can't sugarcoat this or minimize it rather, is like I have a nine-year-old and he loves games and I want to make games that he wants to play. As a dad, there's nothing more, you know, like one of something that's something that that was great about the podcast was like, I often listen to podcasts in my car,

and I have the Apple CarPlay screen. And like, you know, I was my kid sitting in the back. And when we shipped the first episode with you, I was like, oh, hey, look what this is. And I pulled it up on me, you know, there he's hearing my voice and he's like, whoa. So, you know, giving, when you have somebody in your life who you love so much like that, and they love the,

industry that you're in, which is games, of course, you want to, you know, you want to make something that will have an impact on them. Yeah. Yeah, I love that. And I mean, I do. I think that's like one of the best motivations for creation in the first place, right? This is where, you know, kind of getting back to this idea of like, am I building something, you know, for metrics and money, which, of course, we want those things, but are am I building something for the love of what I'm creating, for the joy that I can produce and the people that I choose to care about? And I just, you know, I just think there's nothing more powerful that in my experience also tends to lead much better to the success, the financial success, the metric success. Like that when you find especially obviously a loved one and you really, you know, I'm designing a game for them, right?

I'm designing the game for this person. And then, you know, yes, we'll test it. We'll make sure it appeals to a broader audience before I spend tons of resources and release it. But I just think it's such a great, you know, metric for what we're doing. And as we move into this era of complete uncertainty, right? Like, you know, let's linger on the AI point for a while because it's pretty hard to have a discussion about the future of creativity without talking about AI now. That ability to make, you know, even a game for one person. Like I'll use an example slightly outside of the industry.

If you've heard of a suno.com, it does the music. It's music, AI music creation. Yeah, I've used it. Yeah. And I got to do that to make, you know, my mom for her birthday. like a custom song for her. That's exactly the genre that she likes with all the cool things and lyrics. And it blew her mind.

She just, she loved it. And it was such a cool thing to get to do. And I've done that bunch with some other friends or whatever. And like that would have been completely impossible. I have not musically talented at all. But I was able to use this tool to create for an audience of one that was now a totally reasonable,

cool thing to do. And I don't think it's the end of the world if, you know, games end up in that space where you can say like, hey, I want to make a great game for my son, and you can with these tools on your own. I mean, you were rare in your career that you could actually, you had some programming skills,

you had some art skills, you could make prototypes on your own. But now, you know, anybody can do that or in the very near future anyway. And so I think that there's something really magical about that, even if it, you know, it does upend what it means to have a career in games, perhaps.

I think it's a pretty cool vision of the future that we can all have these kind of bespoke creative works for our particular groups. and interests, et cetera. Yeah, I think there's a lot of interesting ways you can develop it. And I do think that, and I say this with a lot of sensitivity, because I've been there myself, I say this with a lot of sensitivity to the people have lost their jobs in the game's industry.

And I know some of them personally, and I know people are still struggling. And I know people are exiting the industry. But I do think that the power of not needing a smaller team to realize a creative vision is going to unlock a lot of space in the industry for delight and joy. It's also going to unlock a lot of slop, let's be honest. But, you know, I think that these, and you're starting to see it, You've been starting to see it in Steam, of course, and I think it's going to accelerate. These games that no one could have greenlit never could have been made on a financial basis

where there's these nuggets of delight, whether there are really small nuggets of delight. And I can think of, without diminishing anyone's awesome achievement, I can think of lots of cool little indie games that offer these nuggets of delight. or these big, you know, chewy, delightful experiences, I would put, say, Hades in there as that. Hades is kind of unpitchable as a game, right? I also think like something like a game I really like, satisfactory by coffee stain. Also, somewhat unpitchable. I think my favorite game probably ever,

I would say top game ever is dwarf fortress. And the reason is that, which led me to this not really true guiding philosophy to games, but this idea that I'd like to remind myself of, which is philosophically the purpose of gameplay is to hide secrets. That's certainly the experience that I love. loved in Dwarf Fortress because there were all these secrets in the game that you could discover these like secret interactions between systems. It's also the most god-awful looking game ever made. But I still think probably one of the best. And also made by a totally outside voice, non-core

industry voice who lived in Lutheran Washington and just shipped something that he passionately believed in for donations for the longest time. So when I think about those people who've been able to discover those unexplored nuggets, those things that would never have been pitchable to a major or even minor studio, and I think about empowering them with more leverage in terms of what they can do, I think that it's inevitably going to lead, along with the disruption and destruction to some really, really great moments in gaming. And I mean, like, that's what we're doing. That's what we're all here for, man. You know, like we're all out here trying to bring those to life. And I think that is, that's the unifying principle that a lot of people in games do default to. Yes, we want financial success.

Yes, we want our companies to be able to continue and grow and thrive. Yes, we want to be able to employ people. But it all starts there at that nugget of the. delay. And hopefully I think we will be in a world where we can more easily make them. Yeah, love that. I think that's a wonderful place to wrap it up. So where I know, of course, we've already talked about the we thought it would be easy podcast where people could find you and Jordan and even me on your inaugural episode, along with other great designers and people well more accomplished than I on that you've got on there. Where else can people find you?

or what other things you want to point to as we wrap up? Yeah, I mean, I think you should, you know, check out Jordan's stuff. I think looking at endless adventures, which is his no-code tool is a great thing to do. I'm supporting the development of that. But really, I mean, I think it's probably mostly the pod. I mean, I'm on Twitter.

There's no reason to follow me on Twitter. I have nothing useful to say there. I'm on Twitter and Instagram. I think what I would ask of your, viewers, if they have time, definitely, of course, feedback on my thoughts on this episode, because the key to remaining humble is being curious about what other people think about what you say. And so I am curious about what any of your listeners think about any of my thoughts, whether

they're extremely mid and normie or whether anybody thinks there's a nugget of something in there. But also feedback on our pod. if you've listened already, if you haven't, you should absolutely go listen to Justin's episode because he's got some great. I actually, when I was, I do all the editing on the podcast. And when I was editing your episode, I was trying to look for clips to post to YouTube. And I was like, there's so many. There's so many great little, you know, things that Justin's dropping here. So check out that episode. But check out as many as the episodes as you feel. And like my great

request would be send us, if you don't like it, I want to hear that you don't like it and why. I want to hear your criticisms because, one, I am terrified, but I'm posturing as though I'm unafraid. And two, you know, that is how we'll get better. So yeah, that would be my request. Let us know what you think. All right. So everybody go check out. We thought it would be easy. I'll put a link to my episode and then go tell Jonathan what you don't like. about him specifically. Tell just whatever you got. Jordan's not going to hear about it.

It'll all be internalized. Fantastic, man. This is great. I was really glad to get to have both of the conversations that we've had. I look forward to many more. So thanks for coming on the podcast. Oh, thank you so much for having me. Thanks for watching people out there, people of the internet.

Yes, thank you, people of the internet. We'll see you soon. 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 platforms, 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 designer. 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 like a game designer.com

or wherever find books or sleep.