Think Like A Game Designer - Touko Tahkokallio — Curiosity, Physics, and the Power of Mental Playtesting (#94)

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

Touko Tahkokallio is one of the rare designers who has mastered both tabletop and digital worlds. Starting out as a theoretical physicist, Touko shifted careers to follow his passion for play. First by designing acclaimed board games like Eclipse, then shaping some of the biggest mobile hits of all time at Supercell, including Hay Day, Boom Beach, and Brawl Stars. In 2022, he co-founded a mobile game studio Stellar Core which he is the chief creative officer.In this episode, we explore the hidden value of juggling multiple projects, how to prototype without rules or components, and why a playful mindset is essential, especially when the work gets tough. 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 Toko Tokakiyo. He is a self-proclaimed finished game designer with an unpronounceable last name, but it's well worth getting past the pronunciation because he has a lot of great insights. He's a professional video game developer who worked over 10 years at Supercell. He was the original game designer for mobile games such as Hayday and Boom Beach and also the first game lead on Brawl Stars. In 2022, he co-founded a mobile game

studio of Stellar Core, which he is the chief creative officer for. Prior to that, he was a theoretical physicist and we dive into that a little bit. And he has also a great board game designer, probably best known for Eclipse and is a 2012 Golden Geek board game of the year winner. In this episode, we talk about a lot of really interesting topics and starting a game company, the value of too many projects running at the same time, how to successfully prototype without using any rules or components, and the power of a playful mindset when doing hard work. There's a lot of great insights in here, and I know that you're going to love it,

so I'll keep this intro short. And without any further ado, here is Tuoko Tokakio. Hello and welcome. I am here with Taoko Takokalio. I hope I got that name right. I'm very excited to have you here. Yeah, thanks, thanks. Great to be here.

Yeah, no, it's been great getting an opportunity to talk with more designers that are not from the U.S. and not base where I am usually based because I'm in Europe for this timeline. And I'm really excited to get to talk to you because you have such an incredibly diverse background through all different aspects of the industry. We've never had a chance to talk before.

So I guess maybe just to introduce yourself a little bit to our audience, maybe kind of give some highlights, and then let's dig into kind of how you got into gaming and design in general. Yeah, sure. Yeah, so my name is Toko. I live in Finland in Europe.

So my background in gaming particularly has been like board games initially and then digital games later. But I didn't start like my life as a designer per se. I actually pursued first like this another track like totally different thing about physics, theoretical physics. And I spent like part of my early life as a researcher. But then somehow like board games just got got. into my head so so so much that I started working more and more on those and that led me to also to work on mobile games so yeah I work on board games like maybe 10 15 designs original designs and then some expansions uh the maybe the most successful one was eclipse like the 4x space empire

builder game and then but on the digital side I joined supercell 2011 it's kind of mobile gaming company. I work on there over 10 years on different games. I was in Hayday as a designer, kind of early team, the main designer there. And then in Boom Beach, I was also the main designer. And then I worked briefly on a few different kind of more like as prototypes games, but ended up in Brawl Stars. Like we started that with a small team and I was game lead and game designer initially there. I didn't work there. that long, but yeah, that's kind of like those are mobile games

and then lots of lots of other stuff on the mobile side there while I was at Supercell, but those would be the biggest games, I guess. All right, well, so I know, I got to dig in a little bit into the insides' workings of Supercell in a previous episode,

although you got in this earlier, but I got to be honest, I'm really fascinated about this particle physics and theoretical physics background, what one kind of, what were you doing? What was life like as a theoretical physicist? And then I'm curious how that kind of translated over into games. Yeah. So it is very different, I guess. I don't know, like I was always very, very curious about. And I'm still, I'm very curious about everything. And I really want to understand how the world works.

and it's still super important part of my life and a hobby. So I was just passionate about that. And I think I've been just always following my passion. Like something gets to my head and then I just almost like compulsively tried to do it and learn it. So physics was the first thing got me really excited. And then while I was doing the research, I found like the Euro games. I think 2000, yeah, pretty much I found Katan first. in Puerto Rico.

And after I played those games, I just started thinking about game design all the time and board game design. So it kind of opened the world for me. Yeah. So this is one of the things. It's kind of a theory I've been developing here. There's a lot of people that are listening that want to, you know, want to know how to sort of turn their passion into a career and follow, you know,

and for most people listening, it's game design. But for a lot of people, it's a variety of other things. And I think that there's this common thread between, there's a sort of progression from curiosity. of something like I'm interested in this thing to like a complete obsession like this thing where you have to like focus in and you just spend you know many of your waking hours like digging deep into a subject and it sounds like that's what happened with you here both to get you know to theoretical physics because obviously requires a lot of focus and attention and then just sort of you followed your

your curiosity and attention the other way is there is there some you know kind of treat that you've had your whole life is there some practice that you do when you think oh hey this is something I might be interested in this is what it's like to now become focused and obsessed on it to get to the highest levels because that's not common. A lot of people are interested in how the world works. A lot of people are interested in games, but you've kind of risen up to this professional

level in both very diverse fields. I'm interested to tease out. Is there some practice or habit or traits that you can that you possess that brought you in those places? Yeah, it's introspecting is super hard to be honest. I don't know.

I do, yeah, I just, maybe it is some kind of trade that I, I mean, I get excited about something. It's, it just becomes fun to do and fun to spend time on it. So it doesn't feel like it is somehow very necessarily something I aim towards. Or of course, like it's a combination of work, work and fun, I guess. But I think it's a fun and curiosity is really driving. And when you can find that spot, which kind of really excites you, I think you get so many things for free. Right, right. Yeah, the big difference of like when you're, you know, when you're really passionate about something, it's not that it's not that there's no work, but it's a lot of the things that other would seem like work don't feel like work. And so there's a huge portion

of your time that you just enjoy spending that way. It makes it a lot easier to get the necessary reps to reach a world-class level. Yeah, and maybe I would add there, I think as long as you can keep these things as a hobby, so they don't become like too important for you. So your whole life depends on it that you can succeed in this one thing. I think it gives you some room to breathe and really, you know, don't feel like you're pressed against the wall or something like that. So I think like

as long as you can keep them. I really try to still nowadays, I also keep all my work as like just a kind of fun thing and hobby. And as long as that works, I feel like I'm always in a good spot and like there's a lot of room from creativity and fun. Interesting. So I like

that frame. So this idea of like don't, you know, don't take yourself too seriously. take your work too seriously. I can understand people can probably relate to that when it's like, hey, I'm just designing games on the side and I've got a job or whatever. But when instead becomes your career, it seems a little harder to do. How do you keep that mentality, that kind of fresh, fun mentality when it really is your job or really is, you know, I mean, you know, you're working on games at Supercell where it's,

you know, billions of dollars on the line overall. How do you keep that same mindset? Hmm. I don't know. it's all right not an easy question yeah not an easy question but i think like one thing which helps i don't know if this is a real solution or anything but like if you have multiple things in your life that you are passionate about then i think it puts a little bit less pressure on one thing and it kind of it gives you some freedom so i always like my problem is actually that i have way too many

things i'm interested about and kind of spread my spread my attention maybe sometimes a bit too thing. But, like, I think it has a benefit, which is that it, like, no single thing becomes like this solely, like, this is the only thing, which, and my life is kind of depending on this one thing. I think that opens a lot of this freedom to do not stress about too much. Of course, there's always stress, but, like, maybe that helps a bit. Yeah, no, I think, and I don't think the goal is, like, zero stress or don't care at all, right? I think that the goal is, you know, not is to have that right level of tension between this like fun playful exploratory creative mindset right and then the you know kind of focus you know some some amount of stress is actually good in my opinion right

you need some amount of this like tension that means you're pushing at your edge you're trying stuff that's hard that you're not sure if it's going to work um that creates this positive tension if you frame it in the right sort of way at least that's how i kind of feel about it so i think there's there's something there of like finding that right edge and having a diverse set of interests that keep you moving forward. I'll just, you know, speak to my own experience. Whenever we have, like, one project that this project is the one that has to succeed or we're doomed, I'm less creative, it's less fun, as opposed to like, hey, I'm going

to pour everything I can into this project, but there's also another five or six projects that we're working on at the same time or that I can jump to, which makes it both more fun, more creative and less stressful if one thing doesn't go the way I would, I would hope. Is it kind of get at what you're talking about? Yeah, totally, totally. And I feel when I think about kind of aspiring game designers or whatnot, like, I feel like there's two extremes where where you can get stuck. One is that you always kind of start working on a new thing and never finish anything and you never kind of push yourself

to the making the whatever you're doing like complete game or whatnot. And then the other extreme is the is the fact that you you start one project and then you endlessly work on that one project and never give it up and never open a new new chapter. So but I think the balance is the hard thing is to find the right balance that you are kind of you have enough projects going on at the same time. You're willing to kill many of those, but then the ones that you feel like you want to push to the end, like you really put time and effort to make the final polish and like really balance it and whatnot, like push it to the very last line. And yeah, I think that's kind of balanced. Try to find a right spot. And I think people are in different parts

of like different points in the spectrum and everyone have their own challenges. But yeah, yeah, I think that's right. I think it's something this requires just a little bit of introspection, right? Are you the kind of person, if you know, you've been doing this for a while, you know, a couple of years and you've never finished your project, well, okay, probably you need to shift your gears a little bit and be more focused on one thing. Or if you have spent a couple years and you've only worked on one project, okay, hey, probably you need a little bit more diversification and try some other things. Like kind of finding, finding, I think you're right that different people can kind of have a tendency to err too far in one way or the other. And you need a little self-correction at that point, but you can't know where you are at the spectrum until you just. just try doing stuff for a while and start to see how it goes. Yeah, exactly.

And I think I would push people to more beyond the spectrum where you try a lot of things because you can learn so fast when you try plenty of things and you fail with them. And I think the problem is that when you get stuck with one project, it takes eternity, like then you kind of stop learning and developing yourself. So I think people should be trying out more things and failing more often. Yeah, well, I think that's the key thing you said there, which is that you have to try and fail, which means you have to get your things in front of people, right?

So there's plenty of people who will try a bunch of projects, and that means they have scribbles on their own notebooks or they have their own ideas for stuff, but they don't actually take it to the point where they can really test it and feel the failure, right? So I think that, to me, it's like, yes, you should have a lot of projects that get you to that stage and go through the iteration loop a couple times

and then you move to next things. so that you, because I don't think you learn unless you actually get real feedback from real people that are not just yourself in my experience. I don't know if you feel differently. Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. It actually ties into something I was really interested in, jumping around a little bit, but I saw some article you did or like an interview question that you did talking about

how you use kind of mental prototype testing as a very extensive. you'll actually avoid, when you're making a new game, you'll avoid writing down rules or creating any prototypes or anything and you'll actually play through the game multiple times in your head. This was from a while ago. I don't know if this is still your practice, but I'm a fan of mental play testing, but it sounds like you're pretty extreme in that space.

I love to hear your process there. Yeah, totally. Yeah, like prototyping in your head, I think like that is a metaphor I've been now using. I think it is, yeah, it's as you can try to, And I think that's like a skill. Like if you think what is a game design skill, I think that's at least very important part of it.

Because like if you just randomly try out different things, there's a chance that something succeeds. But like if you can keep it in your head and really try to think about how it will play out, see all the possible outcomes and problems and what could be fun, what could be challenging. Like it helps you tremendously.

You can kill many ideas, kill many mechanics or whatnot, already there. And that is a skill you can learn. I think more you do it in your head, the better you become at it. And then, of course, yeah, what else about? Yeah, then I think it's a kind of exploring all those opportunities helps and gives you like the great spot where you can start the real play testing and get the feedback and feedback to your mental model. And only after you enter the stage where you feel comfortable, I think that's a good moment to start writing the rules. That type of thing works for me, but I think people are also very different

on this. So I'm not saying it's the only way. It's just something I've been using and I really enjoy doing it that way. Yeah, I mean, the whole point of this podcast is to bring out the way different people do things and see where there's commonalities and see where there's differences. And so I find it interesting. I'm a huge fan of mental prototyping. Basically, my philosophy is your prototyping should be as simple and quick and stupid as humanly possible. Because you just want to get to the point where you can test a thing. And the simplest way to do that is just run it through in your head. You don't have to create any components.

You don't have to do anything other than go through it in your head. I think it's really useful for people to ask some key questions when they're doing this. Like, okay, where, you know, how am I getting the information that I need? How is the things represented? What are the tough choices I'm making? How am I interacting with other people? like there's a lot of things that people gloss over when they're just thinking of a game in high concept and running through what I would view as a sort of proper mental prototype forces you to like answer those questions okay what is it that I've not seen you know that I wasn't thinking about that now all of a sudden I don't have that information if I'm you know coming to this game straight or this new thing the problem comes up or this incentive feels wrong you know you kind of make yourself feel it and I agree with you I think it's just something that comes with practice and the more you go through the exercise. the better you're going to get at it.

Yeah, and I think one thing that you can also try to do is that when you're doing the mental modeling or mental prototyping, I think you can try to find out what are the weak spots in the game, like what are the question marks? And then you can kind of try to prototype those as fast as possible and get like feedback. So some things might be, I know like worker placement works this way

and you know you can use this mechanical, whatever you are kind of doing, but maybe there are some parts of the game that you feel less comfortable with and you are not sure how it will play out. So it can help you also direct your kind of attention to these potential challenges in the game. Yeah, yeah, I like to call those my riskiest assumptions, right? The things that I'm like, okay, this is what I'm hinging the game on, hinging the concept on.

Yeah. And how do I test those as quickly and cheaply as possible to figure out, like, okay, this is fun, this is doable, where am I at? And I, to be honest, I take the same approach to business. I'm, you know, jumping, we'll jump. We'll talk about your entrepreneurship journey later, but I find I go through the exact same process regardless of what aspect I'm working on.

Yep, yeah, makes sense. So, okay, so you've, we go from theoretical physicist to love, you know, getting hooked on Euro games, and then how did your process transition to professional design? Yeah, so I was already, working on the games while I was doing the research, like on as a side hobby, but it became a kind of obsession, I guess. Then I decided that I want to kind of pursue that a bit more. I was a postdoc at University of Victoria in Canada, but we decided to come back to Finland and with my family.

And I started working more seriously on board games. And I also did some, you know, teaching on the side for some time. but it was kind of I think it's also a good maybe a tip for life or I don't know my at least philosophy is that it's

it's good to have this not bet on one thing but you know how are different opportunities maybe that you can like a how to say like if something doesn't work out there's a fallback plan let's put it in this right

so for example for me when I stopped being a researcher and wanted to pursue the board game stuff more seriously, like my secondary plan was that, okay, then I could, if this doesn't work out, I can be a teacher primarily and then just work on board games as a kind of side thing. So I kind of pursue both of those at the same time a little bit, but then the board games started working better, and like we, around that time, I was working on Eclipse, and it looked quite promising and like if things were great, and I spent a lot of time on the board game

side, but that kind of, then by accident almost, like my friends asked me to try and Supercell and I joined that pretty much at the same time. But, you know, it wasn't like I have only one thing and I would decide that this is the one thing I wanted to do it, but it's like my life didn't depend on that point. Yeah, this ties into your earlier note about not making everything depend on your, you know, passion hobby, right? Like that it's like, if this fails, I can't eat next week, right? Is a very different kind of place. And there's a, a lot of research that backs this up, that right, when you're in a playful mood, when you're in a less stressed mood, you're more creative, you're more open. And so if you're, you know,

your next meal or your rent depends on something, it's going to be harder to stay in that open, playful mindset. So that's certainly helpful. And I think I just, to underscore this too, right, like a lot of people like view, you know, taking a career in game design or entrepreneurship and starting a company or like, you know, I quit law school to become a game designer. I quit my job as a game designer, start a company. Those things are quote unquote risky, but like you, I always had fallback plans, right? I could have gone back to law school. I could have got another job.

I had other tools available. So it wasn't like, you know, it was important for me to have these things succeed, but it wasn't like I couldn't eat next week, you know, if I didn't. And so I think that's just a really important point. But I'm really curious about the, so you were

playing in, you were playing in these board game communities, you were designing games, and, And then based on the chops you showed designing these tabletop games, that's what got you the invitation to join SuperSill. Is that about right? Well, I think it helped. I don't think mainly I would say, like,

I happened to do some people at Supercell who I think they trusted me, and they knew I was making board games, and maybe they liked them. But it wasn't, you know, it wasn't so that kind of I applied to a lot of places. this helped me, but it definitely did help me. I think maybe I wouldn't have gotten the job, but we have to say it. I think it was a combination of being in the right place at the right time and having some track record and people who trusted me from, like they knew me, some people

knew me from some time ago. So, yeah, combination. Yeah, I think you just, I think you just, you just succinctly said the formula for success, which is, you know, have a group of people that you've. added value to that you have relationships that are real that people trust you have some skills that you've developed and demonstrated and be in the right place at the right time those three things together boom recipe for success the so I'm I guess then I'll be curious to talk about you know I'm gonna be honest

I haven't played eclipse I've heard incredible things it won a bunch of awards I know the scale of game that it is and I'm really interested to one learn about that design process and why you think it was so successful and then kind of use that as a transition because that is a huge 4X massive game and then to go from that to working on mobile games

in the most classic short form game almost there is to see what that crossover was like so you could tackle that in any order you like but I'm really curious to dig into both sides yeah eclipse story is I think it started like 2008 or 2008 maybe

so I was yeah I always loved to play like civilization Master of Orion these kind of strategy games on PC and then I was always a bit frustrated like the what type of civilization games

were on on like a tabletop like board games and there's plenty of great games but it's a really difficult and impossible genre in many ways But like I think that's the that's the dream, like how to make this perfect sieve game. And that's always been one of my kind of real games to make a civilization game. And I actually started the inspiration game after playing through the ages.

And somehow felt like, oh, I really want to have experience where there is a map and this, you know, maybe there's a better way to do the production than in through the ages. So it kind of started from the point of view that I wanted to. to make us a historical civilization game. And I wanted to kind of improve, I guess. Like I had a new idea how to make the production track to work better than into the ages. And then it was just a combination of multiple things.

I first tried to push for the SIV game, like historical game. But I've hit some, it's difficult to make a historical civilization game because there's a lot of like a theme that needs to be right and it didn't feel like right to just lap the theme on it. And so, and the other thing which I've always been, like I said, like really excited is the sci-fi and especially Master of Orion's computer games. So it kind of very naturally transitioned from this historical SIF game to this space civilization game.

And I think things just, yeah, I spend a lot of time on it first, first on my own. And then I talk with a bunch of people about it. And then I met Sampo, Sikia, who helped, who worked with me on it on the game. after that and he did a lot of the art and but he also helped me with the whole development like we just launched our ideas together and yeah made it made it

better as in many ways and yeah any question yeah well so so so that you hit on the key thing which I want to dig into and you can break down like I also huge fan of Master Ryan huge fan of the entire civilization series

I've you know we've had talked about that a fair amount on the podcast already, but I think the challenge of taking those games, which are by their nature, massive, and they take dozens of hours to play through, they require enormous amounts of kind of processing and things that are going on, and turning it into a board game experience that captures the essence, but doesn't overwhelm with complexity and massive just overhead, right? Why am I playing this board game and not just playing Master Morayan or Alfa Zadari or whatever other game. So what, how did you tackle that problem specifically? You mentioned the through the ages

resource system, maybe for people that aren't familiar, you can break that down or just like a little bit of how you tackled it mechanically that was, and how you solved that problem. So, yeah, the board games, like, I always hate fiddly games, and I guess you can make the case that Eclipse is actually, like, there's a lot of pieces and components, but I think it's so, like, I'm a big believer in holistic game design and whatever it means. on free-to-play, it means maybe a bit different thing, but on board game side, I think it starts from the components and, you know, art and iconography

and then the actual gameplay itself and the theme. So I think, like, everything needs to fit together. And I really hate when there's a lot of, like, set-up time, and it's kind of, there's a, you need to reorder the decks and, like, blah, blah, blah. So, yeah, I always want to try to make the games as somehow simple and elegant as possible, starting from all the bookkeeping and whatever, production, the stuff you need to do. So it was one of the core innovations that, or not in, yeah, the core ideas for the game to have the production to be as smooth and easy to do so that you don't spend too much

time in this thing that doesn't really help you. There's not, there's not like an interesting decision involved, like it's just a bookkeeping work. And I think it worked quite well. I think this big part of the game games may be success that the core gameplay is it works pretty smoothly from that point of view and you don't need to spend time on it but I think like other part of the so that yeah definitely keeping the scope as small as possible but still keep the epicness I think sieve games just need a lot of different things to make it feel like it's an epic game but somehow trying to compress that to as little time as possible I think that was super important personally.

And because those are that type of games I like to play. I don't usually have time to play eight-hour games or 10-hour games. I really want to play it in one game night. And that was the goal for the game. And I think that was where I saw some opportunities also because a lot of great epic games existed, but they were just like, you know, super long and super complicated and super difficult to set up.

So it was a big design goal for me to try to compress that somehow. yeah that is key and it's one of the things is just as come you know the older I get the less time I have for long games even though I'll play a lot of games I just I can't I can't commit a six to ten hour session

to something anymore so okay and and so then I'm interested that in how you go from you know taking this game and so what a typical game of eclipse How long does it take to play?

It depends. We play the two-player game in 45 minutes. I think that's kind of where you can, but that's pretty, and I think four-player game in one hour, 45 minutes. That's maybe my record personally. But like if you have a group that doesn't know how to play it and you have six players, it can take quite a long time. I don't know.

Maybe for some groups like five, six hours. But I think it's like two, three, three-hour game maybe. I'll never just do tricky. Okay. All right. So you're going from, you know, a still, compressed version of a 4x style game, but

you know, many our experience to designing for mobile games and you know, you're your supercell from very early on and they've become the dominant force in the space. So what was that process like

or how did the design principles cross over or not as you're designing from, you know, many hour tabletop game to you know, multiple minutes, maybe too long mobile game. Yeah, well, maybe one word about what I like about board game designs and just before jumping into that topic. I think, like, I always like want to explore a different type of game mechanics, audiences, themes.

That's kind of somehow, maybe it's true on my curiosity and, like, the willingness to learn new stuff and challenge myself from that point of view. So I've done like kids games. I'm done a puzzle game. I've done a trivia game. I've done, yeah, very like Euro games, more heavier games. So I'm going to like want to explore the full design spectrum. So it was, I felt like it was a new challenge to jump on the mobile space because free to play was kind of new.

I guess it has existed for some time, but like it wasn't that well or that much applied yet on fighter scale. And yeah, it's a new device, new platform, new input, methods, touchscreens was quite new at that time. A lot of things to be explored and tried. And it was like a really, really great place to jump on in point of view. Like, there was so many new things. And there wasn't that much of like, there were a lot of new things to be explored on the whole, all kind of platform side, I would say.

So just the fact that it was a new, a new medium, a new arena for designing games was a big draw for you. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I'm a big fan of, of, seeing, you know, how does technology overlap with design, right? As new things come on to play, and that can be, you know, new, you know, printing capacities and components available for physical games as well as, of course, you know, the more traditional new technologies like touch screens or virtual reality. Like, I've designed for both those spaces and, you know,

just hugely different concerns around what you should make and what types of tools you have and what types of barriers you have. So I think that is, it is fascinating, you know, when we, we had digital algorithm printing technology has helped us create software fusion it's like things he couldn't have done you know even six years ago um so it's uh it's always fun to play in that space so so what were the then maybe kind of dive into that process of exploration and and learnings for uh what what makes great mobile games and how do you approach designing them yeah um i think there's there's bunch of things like there of course the fact that the game is played on a small screen and you're are in the whole touchscreen interface is very different.

I think that is very exciting and interesting problem, right? Then there's, I think the business model is definitely a different one. So you are free-to-play is very different from, like, give some opportunities, but also some challenges for sure. And I think what is tied to that is this kind of endless gameplay, which I feel like as a game designer, it is the biggest difference to regular, let's say, board games where you have a session

you play and the game ends. Of course, you have legacy games nowadays, which a little bit changed this and maybe are a bit closer to free-to-play endless games. But that is a big paradigm shift and needs like there. You need to take that into account when designing never-ending free-to-play

games, basically. So they're more like a hobbies, I guess. But it's also super exciting and challenging environment to work. But I I like challenges, so it's fun. Yeah, yeah. Well, so this stuff really does fascinate me because I think it's,

you know, this, it sort of plays in the space of not just sort of where does the technology provide, but also what does the, what does the business model provide in terms of how design should be approached, right? As when I'm buying a board game, I'm going to pay a certain amount of money,

I'm going to get the experience, I want a good experience out of it, and then I can put it away at my shelf and I can bring it out again, and that's fine, right? If I'm playing a free-to-play mobile game, then I'm, you know, the friction to approach it is near, near zero, but then the question is, what is it that's going to make this, you know, make me want to keep coming back? What's it going to make, you know, how, how is it going to pay for itself? They're very expensive to create up front. And what does, you know, there's

a sort of burden of continuous ongoing content. Not totally unlike something I have a lot more familiarity with, which is, you know, the trading card game space, right? Where here I'm spending some amount of money up front to play the game, but there's this, again, this expectation. of continuous content, a continuous evolution and needs to be designed and thought of. The way I approach those kinds of games is completely different than how I approach a traditional board game or expandable board game.

So how do you think about that in terms of what does the model look like, the business model approach to it, affect the design of those games? Yeah. I think games are done always in this medium where there's a people using the platform, forms and I think there's been like this big movement from from players that they

are not willing to necessarily to pay there's so much competition there's so much like so much different opportunities you can spend time on so like there's a it's kind of natural evolution and I think it's coming from the players wanting to not pay which drives the whole industry to towards like having free to play and I think it adds a lot of like good benefits but the challenges are related to When people come to the game, they come with the expectation that they haven't invested anything in front, right? So like they don't have, they have zero money investment, which is very different than when you buy a board game or when you go to the game store and buy some AAA game, right? You have this different mindset when you enter the game.

So I think what it affects is that players, it is harder to keep them excited and you need to be more careful in the beginning, like how you teach the game, how simple it is for them to learn. the early game needs to be super fun and engaging already from the very beginning. And I think that's like one, I would say maybe like a limitation but challenge definitely. And then of course, like the fact that how do you build a game or system that's

always into exciting and there's new content or I try to like there's like two different approaches making like this endless games right. Like one is to just have a content release. Maybe it's like a candy crash or whatever. You have always new levels. You update it and

there's a new content coming every day and then there's the other way to think about it which is that the designers built the systems that always generate random content or whatever, not necessarily random content but some perhaps procedure generated content or whatnot and it's a multiplayer game where players are creating the game content for themselves

by playing against each other so that is kind of like a system design and I think like good and great games they need a little bit of both like there needs to be the right systems in place that make sure that the game just keeps on giving new content even if you don't need to do any kind of content updates or add new expansions or whatnot, but it's kind of naturally keeping the game fresh and then also handcrafting some interesting new cool stuff and features and keeping

on developing the game. So there's like one big difference to board games or like these boxed games in general is that there's like two phases, I would say, very roughly speaking, with digital develop and then and like ever never ending games which is the kind of early production phase and starting from prototyping to to release the game and and then there's kind of the live operation phase of the game where it might be even like a different team working on it and uh it needs a different expertise to keep the game fresh build new stuff on top of it but like building the foundation and then running the game i think those are very different type of development cycles. Wow, there was a lot of gold in there, a lot of things to unpack. Right. So the first thing

I just want to underscore, which I thought was really, is fascinating. In fact, because the game is free to play and the barrier entry is so low, your player investment is also low. And so the tolerance that they have for complexity of rules or for not getting like instant kind of fun is way lower. So you have to be extra conscious to that. It's like an interesting drawback of free-to-play. And then, you know, kind of just talking there, the building, you know, of course, core systems that are fun, building systems that auto-generate new content in some form. So there's a consistent stream of content that you don't have to manually generate and being prepared to generate, you know, manual interesting content as you go. Those are both like really

interesting design considerations to have up front. And so, yeah, for me, the live operation stuff is the thing I'm most interested to dig into because, you know, and an early production insofar as how much you're thinking about how much the game can support better live operations. And, you know, I'll tip my hand here, right? We're building a digital version of Soul Forge Fusion right as we speak. And it's a really fascinating problem or challenge because we're taking the physical game that we know and we support and people can scan their decks in play and creating a version that people can access and want them to stay engaged with that has its old different set of barriers.

So running live operations for a digital game is something that I'd love to dig deeper into and see how that overlays into when you're thinking about this early production design. I think like when you are building the game, the foundations, like those sets some restrictions and opportunities for the live operation, definitely. And I think when you are doing that early development, you need to take that into a consideration. definitely. Are there any principles that apply there that you say, okay, you know, you've been doing this for whatever 12 years, 10 years, some extended period of time, that you're like, now you know some tricks to the trade that say, all right, well, listen, your game should need to do X, Y, or Z, or here's a few useful things that can give you more legs when it comes to the live operations. I think like then you need to go a bit deeper to really give, I think, like super solid answers because different game, genres are so different and they need a bit different approach, I would say, that's kind of

in general, but like maybe oversimplifying. I think whatever is the core of the game, whatever is the thing that players are most engaged with, like that, yeah, that is kind of the heart and core of the game. And you need to somehow build the live operation around that, but also to keep in mind that whatever you are producing is something that you can actually produce or whatever you offer to the player is something that you can offer with a decent pace and decent budget, right? Like, if, let's say, a game is a hero collector where you're playing with some hero,

which has like a really cool 3D character with a lot of different cosmetic options and like super cool animations and voiceovers and whatnot. It's super expensive and slow to build those things and then balance everything. So if your content pipeline is all about like handing out new heroes every, I don't know, two weeks or something. Like, it is actually like a real challenge to have that type of pipeline working.

So I think you need to be kind of taking that into a consideration. Like, what is the, what is something that I can sustainably produce in the long term? There's enough design space. There's enough, like, actual team size. Like, those things start to matter. So that is one one thing, at least, which you need to take into account and think about, like, what is the right foundation for the game? what is the main content the players are consuming and engage with.

Yeah, that makes sense. And then once you know what that main content is, and then depending upon the scale of what you're building, like how expensive is it to make more of that content as you go, which will dictate kind of what your live operations overhead is and what skill you need to be at in order to achieve success, right? If it's, I'm putting out a new, you know, three-paragraph text story and I choose your adventure every week.

That's one thing compared to and making fully. animated new characters that you're encouraged to buy and they have all their own special powers and balance and then you know it's a whole different thing so that makes a lot of sense maybe to add on that like one more thing like I think in especially in digital games and free to play games like you it's good to think in these two two aspects like you have the core gameplay and then you have the meta gameplay and the core gameplay is something it's something very atomic like you do that maybe it takes 30 seconds maybe it takes five minutes maybe it's a 20-minute session, like, and then there's the metagame around it, which is more about like

unlocking the content, progression, all of that stuff. So that gives you some, like, tools how to map and how to, how to balance things. And I think it's easier to work on those games, whereas there's like a very simple core gameplay loop, and then you have like a meta-systems around it. And then balancing that, I think, can be done, yeah, using, I don't know, formulas and and all kind of different, yeah, balancing tools, I guess. Yeah, well, so, okay, so I really want to know more about that part because so I get it, you know, the core, make a great core gameplay experience.

That is true for, it doesn't matter what genre of game you're trying to build. That's critical. And, you know, in the board game world, people don't expect any kind of meta-progression. I mean, you know, there's just a legacy games. Yeah, X's legacy games. And that's, you know, the sort of odd case, he's just like, hey, that was a great game. Cool. I'll play it again later because I really enjoy that game.

But in free-to-play games and in mobile games, I might even go so far to say, it doesn't matter how great your core gameplay experience is. Without any meta-regression, you're going to lose a lot of people, like massive numbers of people, because the expectation is that you want this meta-progression, that there's something like I'm earning or getting by playing,

which is kind of bizarre to some extent to me, but it seems to be just the norm and the expectation. Now, how do you feel about that? Yeah, I think, it is true although I must say I think there are some core game plays

that work surprisingly well without any metagame like Go or chess and they have a long tradition of having zero metagame and people still playing of course like

yeah actually nowadays just has a little bit of metagame it's not about progression but it's only about skill progression and different practice systems around it

and stuff like that but I think super interesting that has evolved to that type of direction like chess.com and stuff like that. I think what is good with, how I like to approach the meta side is that it is a great tool also to pace the learning experience for players.

So as we discussed very early on, you can't put that much complexity into a game, especially on free-to-play game because, like, yeah, people have zero interest in learning new things. Like, they might like to play it when they know the rules and that they know how to, master it and they're learning to master it. That's fun, of course, but learning new stuff is difficult. So like, meta games can be a kind of this progression tools to unlock new interesting content and gameplay

the right pace for the right players. So it is a good tool in that respect, opening up the complexity and new features for the player. Yeah. So you mentioned, I want to dig deeper into how you think about building these things. You mentioned that you can use formulas to balance. it, what, how do you approach that? You know, like how, whatever, you can use an example from a game you're working on, or you can think, you know, speak directly to me and how would I, how should I think about, you know, a game that I'm bringing to digital that, you know, doesn't have a meta-progression by default, just as by, you know, you have algorithms can generate decks, you play them,

now we're building something that evolves that way. How do you approach those kinds of problems? For sure, they are also very game dependence, but, um, maybe I can talk from it's hard to give any specific advice for you in this project for example but

in my past you can use your own expansion yeah your own projects of course that's that's very easy so my background is in math and physics right so I think I've been able to leverage

some type of thinking in well I think in board games to some extent but especially on digital games because whenever we're never players are, I think the challenge is that players are playing a game for years, maybe even like a 10 years, right? And there's no way you can really play it yourself fully and explore

everything and different players are playing with different pacings and, you know, some are super engaged, some are playing every now and then. And somehow the game should be great experience for everyone. And it actually becomes even more complicated because some players are wanting to use money and move faster in the game, perhaps. And like, there's a lot of different paths players can take. And it's impossible to just balance them out by playing yourself. So I think in hard, I feel like I'm a system designer. So like I want to create systems that I know I can somehow control, not fully, of course,

but like there are these, yeah, there are systems in planes which I have some intuitive feeling like how they will scale. usually I use formulas like with few parameters and whether it's about like how much you get coins like let's say in heyday it's a farming game where you when you are growing crops and making bread and it's like an agricola I guess right and then you are you're kind of fulfilling these orders and getting money

and then there's some XP and you play it for years and you kind of go through the whole loop of filling these orders and getting resources and so like thinking about like money production how much new things should cost how how things are tied together like basically it is a it is few formulas some some logic how things are work and once you have those few building blocks right then you can uh you have like intuitive feeling how the system will work and there's few parameters maybe it's a you know how much coins you each atom of the economy will produce and you can tweak that number maybe there's a different exponential curve for certain things they scale it's controlled by one

parameter when you change the exponent you know like the whole journey for the player will change in certain way and now you have like some tools to understand and manage and tweak the progression and then you can you know it's a combination of having those fundamental systems in place with like few controlled parameters then you have some Excel spreadsheets that you use to map things out maybe you even run a simulator like we did that in a few of our project where we basically just run an AI playing the game or then some i don't know python script or something it can be different things to to just map like different player journeys and see how much let's say in hey they expect example like if they play the game

for some years like or a few months like what's their coin balance right and then you can use that to tweak the curve and uh or maybe you can even do that calculation and excel and use that to tweak take the curse to yourself so and then there's a player like you playing the game or the players playing the game then finally getting real data from the players you can use all of those as an input to again go back and tweak those few parameters in your spreadsheets and i think it's kind of this iterative process but it's all starts from having this good fundamentals on the system side that you can control and understand yeah so there's a lot a lot there so i think that that you know kind of being able to map out these progression

and I'm making sure I heard it quite worse. So I'll know the formulas of, okay, I can adjust. Let's assume somebody's playing for an hour a day. For six months, I can see how much they would have earned going through these normal systems and make some assumptions around different ways

that could be spending their currencies and see what happens. And I could tweak that and say, okay, well, what about this player profile that's going to spend $100 and see how they would progress and how much they compare? and you could be able to contrast and get a feel for like what does it feel like to be a free-to-play player

what does it feel like to be a paid player and how does that extend out over months, years, whatever. Is that kind of the gist of it? Yes, I think, like, perhaps there's a bit deeper level which is coming from the fact, like, what is the foundation, like what are the system designed, like principles? Usually, like, you try to, at least I try to come up with as simple and as like

as simple core principles as possible which I can intuitively understand so I don't necessarily even need it's kind of like a little bit tied to the prototyping in your head the idea so you want to create this model that you understand and that's actually something I've found

it's a bit hard to try to I like collaborating with other designers and people and stuff like that but I think these parts like this if you really want to build a system that you understand I think if you start handing out pieces of that to different

designers in your team, for example. It becomes really difficult for you anymore to deeply understand how the game and the systems behind it will work. So, yeah, having this intuitive understanding of the things is possible only if you clear, make like good enough principles on the very fundamental level. Like, for example, like maybe each dollar is mapped to a time equivalent and that time equivalent and the systems there are in place are such that you don't need to think about every player progression individually. You have this fundamental principles with map each to each other, and that will help you to understand whatever players will do in this system.

It's going to be okay because of these fundamental decisions made in the game that will always make sure that the players can't kind of destroy the experience because of these principles. Interesting. Okay, so that's a good deal. Do you have other examples that come to mind of that? These kinds of general principles, one could apply to a meta-progression that are understandable and can help make otherwise complex things simple? I think it is just like every design principle,

keeping it as simple as possible, but yet having enough complexity or depth to really mention. This is like the Einstein quote. Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler or something like that. Yeah, yeah. I think that is the trick with everything, right? Yeah, but like this is your theoretical physics coming in here.

This is a, this is the principles you've learned from there. Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah. But there's like tendency to fix things and improve things by creating exceptions. And we know as a game, game designers, all of us, that it's a bad, you should try to avoid it. But I think that is somehow easy to do when, uh, easy to land on this trap that you just overcomplicate your, I don't know, economy with all kind of different handcrafted rules and you know just use very good principles and formulas and that will help a lot with few parameters and i think that's that's kind of the main

key how i at this strategy approach and then maybe the other thing is to try to use this uh somehow like this procedurally generated systems inside your thing whatever it is you can create like a lot of these uh variations and different experiences by combining in a clever way uh you know bits and pieces and having a great systems in place which make sure that players will get fresh experiences. You need very few building blocks, very few rules in that. Yeah, yeah. Having systems that can create content endlessly does feel super valuable. And, again, I'm speaking from working on an algorithmically generated game

where there's a literal infinite number of deck permutators that you could have. So it's a wonderful tool to have available. And we're trying to build the same thing at the heart of what we're doing to have different kinds of content that can come in the game as well. So that definitely resonates. Are there heuristics that also can, in the spirit of simplification, that can also work in this favor? Like, you know, you said, you know, hey, a dollar matched to a time equivalent.

Is there like a standard range, hey, every dollar is worth an hour of time or a day of time? Or does it, you know, because I've seen, I've seen different metrics there. Or is there a certain amount of time you want to be, like, stopping people from playing? I see a lot of these games where they try to get you to come back every eight hours. I don't know if those are just like, you know, kind of cargo-culted tropes that people have or if there's real principles behind them that you think to apply. Yeah, I don't think there's any like rulebook that you should use this and these and these values with this and this time.

But of course, you build some intuition. but I think every game is actually different and perhaps some people just fall back too easily to replicate other games of the decision which I feel sometimes they are bit arbitrary in the beginning but then someone does something and then just people copy it so it kind of becomes something

that you just see over and over. Yeah, that's the biggest thing I try to avoid here especially when I move, you know, the temptation I've built up enough of my design instincts and tabletop games and card games and things like I can help but when I move to a new arena like again an area I don't have as much experience in like building these progression mechanics the tendency and I'm sure this is true for people listening for this hey oh what have other people

done let me just copy that which is a totally reasonable place to start but it can often lead to this kind of group think trap that you're actually missing the core principles underneath it like what's really important here so that's the kind of stuff I always like to draw out so when you you know make decisions they're they're based on first principles not on just you know copying what's out there yeah totally um okay so speaking of first principles. I want to make sure to now get into this new company you've had for

I think less than a year you've been public, if I recall correctly. So talk to me about the transition, what made you leave Supercell and start this company. Tell me about what it's about and what you're up to.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. So the new studio we are running is called Stellar Core. We are doing mobile games in Helsinki. We are actually part of this Brazilian company called Wildlife and I think it's a really exciting and interesting setup where the studios have like a full creative freedom and they can do their own decisions like they want to explore whatever games they want and make to make the calls but then there's also like the support organization which helps helps us in many ways in kind of publishing and yeah it is

super complicated nowadays to make successful mobile games I would say it needs so many different things to come together, like starting from great marketing, but there's also like support, legal, whatever. But then actually, like, a lot of the core thing is making the game itself. So I think it is difficult to build a studio which is small and it's kind of very development focused and then yet able to support all of the stuff that's needed around it. So I think this is like a great model where we can be like a creative studio focusing on a on a games and we have only developers in our team like 15 people at the moment we're working on two new games and then but yet we can tap into this bigger structure that will help us to distribute

games yeah and so was the process like you wanted to you knew you wanted to do something on your own and you approach them for funding to start building it or you had something you were you broke off and you were building and then you connected with them like I'm always curious how these deals come together. Yeah, yeah, it is like I spent over 10 years at Supercell and I really enjoyed it. I think it's a great company and I was happy there, of course, like, you know, when you do one thing for a long time, some things, maybe there's things that you want to explore new things and try, learn new things, try new things and it's a big company, right? Like Supercell is really big. The bar to make new games is super high. It's there's a, it creates some pressure, right?

I think in a good way, but also sometimes, of course, if you have that environment, it's sometimes hard to explore new things. And so I kind of test a little bit of that where I wanted to try something a bit smaller scale. Perhaps not from the success point of view, of course, it's great to be, try to be as successful as possible, but somehow it is easy to do in a smaller team. Well, yeah, your definition of success is different, right? With Supercell, it has to be make hundreds of millions of dollars, a year or it's a failure, but as a small team, you know, a few million dollars a year,

$10 million a year, that's not a bad place to be. Yep. Yep. That is true. But of course, our ambition is very high here, and we've, but I think it's just like a very natural transition to try something else, start something new. So, yeah, let's see how this works. But so far it's been awesome and really enjoyed it.

And I think we have cool games in the pipeline. So, yeah, so I understand the motivation. Again, I'm just, if you don't mind talking about it, I'm just curious about the process, right? So you, you know, how did you get, you've got what sounds like it makes a lot of sense is a great situation where you've got another overarching company that's sort of serving as a publisher and helping fund and manage all the back office stuff and marketing and everything, but, and it's kind of helping you be a primary creative. And of course, you have a great reputation and tons of experience. You know, so was it, what is, what was the process of getting that deal and building the information? infrastructure for your company like. Yeah, so they, well, they approached me about this.

I hadn't heard about the whole model, but then they explained it to me and it sounded really exciting. First, I was very reluctant to leave because supercellar, as I said, it's an awesome place and I really enjoyed my time there. But at the same time, I started thinking about it and made the decision at some point to jump on this opportunity. But yeah, they approached me and then they told me about it and I felt it was the right way to build things and felt felt like the right decision. Yeah, that's exciting. Yeah. What a great jump. So then for what has been the most surprising thing about this transition from jumping and starting a new studio, obviously there's going to be a bunch of new challenges that come in. What's been the most surprising thing so far? I don't know if what would be the most surprise. I think like maybe the surprise is that things have gone so so smoothly or like in a sense that there's there's always these unknowns unknowns, right? And I'm I'd like to think I'm this paranoid optimist, so which means that I'm always paranoid about everything, but I'm also like optimistically want to want to make the best, best decisions and like whatever, not once you map out all the risks, like then you just commit to the.

most optimistic outcome, I guess, in a sense. But like, so I, of course, had a lot of fears and stresses about how things would go wrong. Like, it's hard to build a team. It's, it's, maybe the cooperation doesn't work, like, you know, there's tons of things. But maybe the biggest surprise is that everything has been very smooth. From that point, if we got a great team super fast and, yeah, I don't think it sounds a bit boring, well, I don't think there hasn't been that much big surprises. That's fine.

So what can you tell us about, I don't know, I assume. and you haven't talked about your projects yet. So if either if you can talk about the projects you're working on or what the philosophy is behind them or, yeah, go ahead. I can talk about the philosophy of our studio, which is that I still want to believe that there is like some kind of, so the market in mobile at the moment is very tough, I would say, like it is very tough to find the distribution

and get like people excited about new games. So that is the kind of reality, but I'm a big believer that when you do something new and cool, which really excite people, that is the, you can kind of unlock a lot of players and eyeballs and so forth. So we, our studio is not really like a genre specific or like we do only these type of games. We want to explore different type of opportunities and try something a bit new. Of course, it's always a combination of taking something that works, but then. also finding something unique, cool, which hasn't been maybe untapped. So we are really trying to explore new mechanics and ideas. Of course, at the same time, understanding like what are the opportunities and constraints in the market.

So trying to find the sweet spot between innovation and best practices, I guess. Yeah, well, that certainly does feel like a good recipe. And so, like I said, I think I've only seen public information about your company for the last, eight months or so. How long have you been working and how long do you think it will take until you have something that you can actually reveal to the public? Yeah. So we are working on two games at the parallel and so we are like testing. So I want to really test things as fast as possible to get some reads on them and do smaller testing rounds with first like limited player testing. Like there's a great testing platform like player

playtest cloud and things like that where you can actually just, you know, send the bills to players and get their feedback, see the videos and there's all the services as well. But then going in some smaller countries to test a few of the games and this is something we want to do early and and but yeah, I can promise any dates. So we've done some testing for both of the games already and yeah, but I don't know when they will go. So we will launch them, actually. So, yeah, I just want to get into the specifics here

because I think this is actually really interesting and useful stuff, right? So you have a big scale game like this. You can't, you know, just release it and talk about it openly. So I've heard about the concept of, you know, you do test launches to countries, but you specifically being able to do these sort of individual test platforms. I'm familiar with like usertesting.com. You said player test cloud. Is that one you prefer?

Play this cloud. That's something we've been used. Play test cloud. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, can you talk a little bit to people who may not be familiar with what that is like. Yeah, I think there's like, if now we're talking about context free-to-play mobile games, for example, like there's, of course, like different phases for testing.

I would say, like there's the prototyping phase where you just test in your team. Then maybe there's like a company studio play testing phase where you play with the whole studio. But you can also overlap and sometimes do it even earlier, like to test with certain people, around the globe who have signed to these services like Playtest Cloud. So they have like a bunch of people in the ready there and then you just send your builds and then they will record a video play through where they play to build and give some rating and feedback. That can be really useful. Of course it's it's not like real audience right. They are kind of paid to do that so it might also give you some wrong

impressions but I think it's very valuable to get that type of feedback where you see players playing it and like you oh no they didn't understand this or they're really confused about not finding this button or whatnot like or they don't really understand anything about or all in this game so you get like this surprising feedback when it's kind of like a blind testing with board games right like it provides you a different type of information that you can't get by just giving the game to your friends and who are sitting next to you and you explain it to them oh yeah i have i have there is nothing more useful and more painful than these kinds of blind play play tests. So, you know, just to give people a picture of it, because I've done this with a few

more products where you, you know, you have, with these tests, they'll have somebody will play your game. They're just given whatever instructions you choose to give them. There's a video camera on them. You can kind of see sometimes there's heat maps of like what they're doing, where they're clicking. And then, and you can just watch them just completely fail to understand these super obvious things that you know for sure they should have gotten. But in reality means your game's too complicated. You didn't make it clearly enough because you just have all these preconceived assumptions in your own head that are not obvious to other people. So you get to learn that through these blind play tests.

Yes, yes. Yeah, and maybe I have to add on that, like maybe after you've done some of these type of testing, then there's like these different type of like soft launches or alpha launches. There's a different naming convention. For example, we use like alpha launch and beta launch. Some use soft launch. And then there's a global launch. I think it is some, of course, it's a bit arbitrary how you define them.

there's closed alphas, open alphas, but the basic idea is that you actually submit to some kind of app store or google play and then people in fact for example on android in specific country can find the game and maybe you do like a small marketing push in that country uh you get uh some hundreds of or thousands of players installing the game you get some real user data mostly like we typically follow the retention number which means that if like 100 players joined today, then we measure how many of those players come tomorrow, and that's called like a D1 retention or like day one retention, basically. But you can do like the same thing for different metrics, but you get some like a real, real user data which helps you maybe to make some

decisions. Yeah, yeah. There's no substitute for actual user data. And so being able to have these test markets, I know, is super valuable. So in your setup with the broader company, are you responsible for those pieces, or is that something that Wildlife Studios, the broader publisher does those tests or some combination thereof? It's a combination.

They help us, but we have a one data scientist in our team as well. So we do some, like, yeah, but they are providing a lot of the back-end structure and, like, help with that pipeline, right? But, like, we do have our own data scientist. But of course, I think like nowadays the game team needs to understand that type of thinking a little bit. It is part of the puzzle to understand and read the data.

I don't think it's the most important thing, but it is an important one for sure. What advice would you have for people for whom that idea is pretty foreign to them now, right? They understand playtesting, they understand core design loops. But this idea of being able to kind of do these tests and read the data, you know, they don't have the, you have more than a decade of experience doing this. Where should people start if this is something they're interested in learning more about or approaching? Yeah, I guess there's a lot of books and, I don't know, blogs writing about it. You can find a lot of stuff.

I think the retention is the most important metric. I think it's kind of more like you can think it as an extra tool that you can do on digital space, which you can't really do on a board game, physical side. And it can be really powerful because it can help you to understand, hey, we shouldn't base, time on this project, we should rather work on something else. But I would just go online and find stuff. There's plenty of things. When you say, and I've heard this before, we've had other guests say the same thing, retention is the most important metric. What does a sense of if people know if their retention is good, bad, or, you know, worth pursuing? That depends

so much on genre and platform and audience. So it's hard to give any real benchmark numbers, right? So I think certain type of games, just if it's a very simple, casual game, you can have a retention that is maybe like 50, 60%. So if you have 100 people, and that's like, let's say, US, iOS, something like that. That's a good retention. 56% for what, how long? Day one. So if you have 100 users coming today, like, it would mean that 50 to 60 of those will open

the app next day or open the game next day. And how does that scale as you move to more, less casual games, more, you know, more engaged games? Yeah, again, like for some countries, for example, like Android users, let's say they have a

lower tier devices. Like, there's a bunch of factors which makes it impossible to say one number, but like I don't know. I don't know if I even there to say, but like, I think it's some games, genres like strategy games maybe they can have like 30 40 that still some games can be successful with those metrics but of course then you might need like a really good long-term

retention and good monetization to really get users yeah and I appreciate the difficulty of picking numbers here that there's yeah it's all underweave so you know I just I like to push to make things concrete because I think for a lot of people this stuff is just so out there so just like kind of getting some some sense is helpful but Yeah. Great. Well, you've done a lot to really illustrate a lot of great principles from a wide range of subjects here. So I very much appreciate it. I know we're getting a little close on time. So I want to both give you an opportunity to say kind of where people want to follow your stuff or see your new projects or anything like that. Let us know there. Or if there's any other things you wanted to make sure we covered or talked about before signing off for today. Yeah, unfortunately, I have like very little presence on internet. I've been thinking maybe I should do something about it. But like, yeah, I don't have any.

Like, of course, you can follow Stellar core and see when our new games come out. And hopefully I'm also working on some board game stuff. So hopefully at least eclipse expansions. But I've also come back to the SIV game idea a few times. And this summer I spent some time on the historical SIV game. But let's see. So those are more like a hobby projects from that side. But yeah, nothing on top of that.

Maybe I should start a channel or something, but I haven't done it. Well, that's okay. It's not for everybody. And it also is another, it's nice, but it's also a huge distraction of time. I know everybody's like, oh, well, you should do a TikTok or do whatever. I'm another thing. I'm like, I don't know, man. We'll see.

We'll see. But I really enjoy these kinds of conversations. So this is a great piece of content. I'm glad to let people get to know you better and I get to learn a lot more. So I've really enjoyed it, and I appreciate your time. So thanks for coming on. Thank you. That's great.

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

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 something. Thank you.