What growth teams can learn from game designers | Joel Burgess & Dan Vader (Grindstone)

I don't think we nailed every aspect of our first time user experience, but I think we tried to stay light on telling you what to do through text boxes. I have two kids, they skip 100% of text boxes in games. It's incredibly heartbreaking to me since I write those most of the time. There's jokes in them. They've never. They don't see the jokes, they just skip. So we know that like throwing up a text box that tells you how to do something is a band aid solution in the end really.

Hi everyone, I'm Kristin Berman and this is the Irrational Mind. As behavioral scientists, our job is basically to get people to do hard things. Things like saving money, eating better, calling your doctor, or avoiding the scroll. As you likely know, this is tough. Yes, I want to optimize my savings account interest rate, but today I want to go to brunch with friends and play some video games. So who better to learn about motivation than a game designer? And today we get into the heads of Joel Burgess and Dan Vader. These guys are all stars in the game design industry. They've designed and developed numerous games. But for our purposes, we are going to zero in on Grindstone, one of the most satisfying puzzle games in recent memory. Dan was the lead writer and designer and Joel was a studio director at Capi Games. I went into the conversation thinking we would talk about the classic gamification mechanics like points and gems and strengths. But instead we talked about the benefits of not awarding those types of kudos and points, and in their case, hearts and making the game harder, not easier. This, they said, has helped unlock users motivation. In our society, it seems like we have two versions of motivation. One paradigm emphasizes tangible rewards, money, allure, action, affirmation. These are the motivators. And these motivators are often mirrored in gaming through points and gems and streaks. We literally call this gamification. The other motivation paradigm. Moore says, big challenges motivate me. I want to climb a mountain. This feels heavy and hard, but it feels worth it in the end. We typically see these models of motivation as very different, but Jill and Dan introduced me to a more nuanced perspective on motivation, suggesting a more authentic interpretation of gamification, one that blends the thrill of conquest with the satisfaction of overcoming formidable challenges. Here the pursuit is not driven by the allure of rewards, but by the intrinsic value of the challenge itself, with rewards serving merely as a nudge to persist rather than the primary motivator. To be clear, Joel and Dan would never suggest removing hearts and daily Challenges and leaderboards. These are critical, but they may be less critical than the underlying feeling of accomplishment Someone gets. In doing a hard thing, we hit it all. In our conversation, we touch on leaderboards and their point of view. On onboarding, they share an example of one feature that didn't work and one that did. We touch on the beauty of coordination. Hello. 7:30 Eastern. And why silly hats really matter. There's so much to unpack with these guys. So settle back in your favorite gaming chair and enjoy. And on a more personal note, my day job is CEO of Irrational Labs. Irrational Labs is a SWAT team of behavioral scientists. We help companies design and build products that customers use, love and pay for. This podcast is an exploration of behavior change across different domains. If you like it, you may also like working with us. Give me a shout@hello rationallabs.com and mention the podcast. And also throw us a bone. I mean, review on Apple or Spotify podcasts. Thank you in advance. It really does help guys. Thanks for. Thanks for joining. Very excited. I did not. This is my confession before we start. Just so you know where I'm coming from. I watched a lot of videos of people playing games, but I did not go as deep as I should have in this homework. But I now understand how to watch video people playing video games. So love, I feel, I feel like I understand my husband a little bit more. So thank you for that therapy in general. So you guys are expert game developers and you make things interesting and entertaining for a large group of folks and I think you understand some of the mechanisms that immerse people. You and so today we're going to focus not generically on all games you've done, but actually zero in on Grindstone, one game that, that you've, you've collaborated together on. And so maybe the, the first kind of scene setting for folks is just walk us through what's the conceptual genesis of Grindstone and the initial idea behind it.

So the basic game is it's, it's a color matching puzzle game, but we are sort of giving it the aesthetic of a animated action game. So what you're doing is you're playing a character. His name is George. He's this kind of hulking barbarian in this brutal, icy, unforgiving world. And the levels are a seven by seven grid and you're essentially your, your sole mechanic, your sole interaction as the player is to plot a path from George, your character through light colored monsters that we call creeps and try to get the longest chain, as we call it, that you can and you can be very contemplative and cerebral about it. You can take your time.

There is no timer, there is no time pressure.

And then you plot that path and then you hit go. And you unleash George on this like murderous rampage through all the creeps, slashing and just like throwing gore on the screen. And then the higher the chain you can create, you can unleash these things called grindstones, which is the primary resource in the game. It's a shiny crystal, which is like something that's a classic gaming trope. And then when you do that, it's allows you. It's a, it's a rainbow crystal that allows you to both collect it as your prime resource in the world, but it allows you to switch colors to make even longer murderous chains through the level. And so that's the sort of basic interaction is just plotting these color matching chains of destruction through the level and you're playing this barbarian. But our sort of like little twist on it was that we didn't want to make a game that was like, you know, sort of machismo, testosterone driven, typical barbarian game that's about some epic mythical quest. We wanted to boil it down to something that was like infinitely relatable even to ourselves while we were making the game, which was just this is your job. George is perhaps not passionate about killing creeps every day. He's doing it to support his family. He wakes up every morning, it's snowy outside every day, just like it is right now. He punches the clock and he goes to work. And we felt like that was a really fun little twist on this world and a way to bring players in to a fantastical world. And then of course, the simple mechanic, the, the, the sheer act of chaining, there's not a lot of rules that govern it. It's very intuitive to the player. And that's the thing that kind of drives them to the next level and.

To the next level.

That's the basic rules. On top of that we, we do what we've done sort of really successfully in, in all of our puzzle offerings, which is we take those puzzle mechanics and we put it inside this actual world, this lush place with its own history and lore, which is not typical at all for this genre. And we cast the player as a character with motivations, with familial connections, which is also not typical. Like usually in a color matching puzzle game, there is no character. The main character is the tip of your finger or whatever. And then on top of that formula, we just are constantly reinventing the game as it goes. We're throwing more and more ideas at that central mechanic to reinvigorate it, to keep the player wondering what's next. I want to see what's next. And that was sort of the grindstone formula that we lit on.

Love it. I love the, the, the. I think you said the chain of destruction. So the goal is to get longer and longer chains of just murderous chains of destruction. And, and so you mentioned basically that, you know, you're adding things to keep people engaged. What, after they've gotten the basics, which seem to be, you know, you're creating chains need to be longer. You are. George, what are the types of things that are added to keep them going, to keep them wanting to play again?

Yeah, I mean, at the, at its most basic, the actual just meat and potatoes level progression takes you on this journey. Most puzzle games and, and we adhere to the sort of the trope of like the. The. The level content is spread across a vast spine that moves vertically up. Next level, next level, next level. The difference is that at every threshold we're introducing a whole new aspect of the world, a whole new biome, a whole new place with its own enemies and its own sort of little implied environmental story there. So just playing the levels, you're going to go on this pretty long, epic journey that takes you a lot of different places. You're going to see a lot of different things. With that, of course, we want to drip new rewards, new pieces of gear, new twists to the mechanics so that even an Expert by Level 20 has to sort of like be put on their back heels and, and become an expert again at level 30 and then at level 50 and level A hundred. And then on top of that, we were lucky enough to sort of start dipping our toes into this idea of live service, of supporting a game ongoing. We started adding more and more content and, and Joel was certainly a part of that, of that process that we were sort of learning as we went. Maybe Joel can talk about some of that stuff.

Yeah, yeah. Cause I came on in November of 2019, which was like two months after the game shipped. Three months, I think. Dan. Right. September 19, 2019. And it was interesting, right, because like Cappy had built this really compelling, surprisingly big puzzle game. And it launched with Apple Arcade and we saw like, it was obvious, I guess, that the game was worth continuing to invest in. Right. The game was great. Audience was responding to it. It was launched over and over again as one of the best games in that service. Ended up being kind of like A dark horse, you know, among like a really strong catalog of game. So the question then became like, not just how do we incentivize like your most committed players, right? But how do we incentivize like players to. To return to game, stick with the game, how do we like, make the experience better and better for. For new players? And this, like, if you follow, like, I'm getting a guest, like Kristin from like other guests who have on the podcast, right? That like, you know, the concept of SaaS or software as a service, which is like so dominant among like Bay Area software companies, right? Like, that's like a familiar concept that has bled into games as well. So like when Dan says live service, that's basically SaaS or gas, right? Like a lot of G A S games as a service concepts will come up. This stuff is like completely foreign to Cappy. Despite being like a really, you know, a really storied studio with like a strong legacy, it was just not a place that Cappy had ever really spent any time, like updating a game after it had been launched to an audience. And so that was kind of like, for me, coming on when I did to the team, sort of puzzle number one to sort out is like, how do we continue to extend the game? And like, initially we had what I would call like pretty conventional ideas about like, hey, we'll add new areas with new levels and we'll kind of like repeat the format, continue doing, you know, all the like, solid game design stuff. Dan is talking about adding new enemies or new challenges and new puzzles so we can continue kind of recombining elements and introducing new elements. And I think what was interesting was like, over time kind of cracking the code of like, what were the best kinds of updates to give players to keep them engaged in this more like ongoing live game. Because, I mean, Dan, like, you know, I've been away from Cappy for a little bit now, but you know, Grindstone is still getting updates right now, correct? Like four years on.

Yeah, it is, exactly. We just celebrated its four year anniversary, which is kind of mind blowing to us to celebrate an anniversary of a game that we're actually still kind of working on. It's a, it's a milestone for the company and something we're really, really proud of.

And what were some of those updates, by the way? Congrats. Congrats on the milestone. What were some of the updates that you tried out? Let's go with the ones that didn't work or you didn't think worked. I know you May not have the full data set on this, but ones that you tried and didn't actually work. And then we'll go with the ones that actually kind of hit and. And be.

Which do you want to take, Joel? Because the funny thing about the ones that didn't work, I can think of one that I don't. I wouldn't say it didn't work, but it maybe wasn't as successful as others. Those things still live in the game. It's like we ripped these things out.

Because they didn't work.

Um, they're still there to find and discover from players. So I'm gonna. I'm thinking of what we call the boss blitz. So again, unlike most color matching puzzle games, our game has a lot of hardcore video game bosses you have to defeat using that puzzling mechanic. They're full of a lot of character and charm. They're pretty zany. They offer this really kind of action packed twist to the mechanic and you encounter them all throughout the game. So we decided to just offer a mode for sort of the more I would, for lack of a better word, hardcore players in the game to try to beat all of those bosses sandwiched together in one run and then have a leaderboard for how quick did you do it? You know, what's the quickest? What's the quickest, fewest amount of turns and time that you could defeat all of these bosses? I would say if was less successful one because that's a pretty steep challenge. But I think my intuition is, is. And it's something we still fight with in the game is I think it's less successful because we present it diegetically.

Right.

So most games that have modes would. Would show you those modes in a menu. You know, you pull up the game and say which mode do you want to play? You know, next to. Next to options and credits. Do you want to play two player? Do you want to play this? We're, you know, we're really all about world building and character at the studio. Maybe in this case to a bit of a fault. We love to ground these mechanics inside the world and, and present them in the voice of the gang. So that mode Boss Blitz is not available in a menu. You have to find it in the second Biome of the Mountain. It's got a little character that introduces it and I think because of that some people probably just missed it. And that's something we're sort of like trying to think about differently because we work hard on this content and we want players to obviously see it and if they're not seeing might not be cut, you know, the lack of engagement might not be down to they don't like it, they might not know it even exists.

Totally. If you could redo that one and have a better opt in, how would you, how would you redo it?

Yeah, I mean I would go a little more capital V video games and have a sort of landing menu at the beginning of the game. That said, which experience do you want? Do you want to play the game proper, continue your progress? Do you want to play the daily grind modes, which I think is a success story that Joel can mention next, or do you want to play this boss blitz, you know, and just foreground that decision right away, um, and let players choose from there?

We, we call this forced choice where we make people choose a thing and, and it turns out that you, if you get their attention most of the times they'll choose something versus not, not choose, um, and yeast do the same thing. So yeah. Joel, tell us about daily grinds.

I, I'm gonna talk to you about boss splits first.

Oh, great. Fair.

There, there might be like a little like here's the fake leaf. I, I did the original prototype of boss splits, so maybe, maybe I'm rushing defend my baby here. Dan's actually right about everything. So like when I first prototype boss blitz, part of the incentive there was like, like to Dan's point, like, hey, we have all these great boss fights in the game and it would be pretty. And I'm not a programmer, I'm not like the most technical person on that team at all. Right. So like for me, I was like, hey, it would actually be really easy to prototype this and like sort of repurposing content into this mode. And there's this thing, there's this like this known thing in games which is like vanishingly few players reach the end of any game. Right. Like, particularly like when I worked at like one larger, really data driven company in particular, like, you know, we knew that like, you know, the redemption rates on certain types of content and the completion rates in certain types of content, I mean you're talking about like fractions of a single digit percentage, you know, of, of your audience are going to actually reach this type of content. So we did know categorically in some ways that boss blitz was like a bad choice in terms of like a lot of players are not going to see this content. And my rationale at the time with it was like, it shouldn't be too hard for us to make. This is the like flash Forward narrator voice. It was actually hard to make. Right, but it's like we can do this as a fan service for most hardcore fans to sort of, you know, give them something, show an offering to them while also kind of like being proportional, right? About like the investment into it. And of course like the investment into it was like quite a lot more because to Dan's point, we really like doing things diegetically, immersing him in the world. And there's a lot of like fit and trim and polish that came with that, which furthering to Dan's point, probably just served to further and further bury this thing that we should have been spotlighting and making part of like an onboarding process or just like the menu flows for the game. So definitely lessons learned there that I, you know, I have full faith and believe that Dan and the teeny cappy are able to learn from Imply in future projects. Now to take the flip side of the coin that was offered here, probably the big success story are the daily grind modes. And this was a thing that we had introduced in Dan, I want to say July of 2020, so six, ten months after launching. And this was a time where like we had seen that the retention of the game, right, the number of players continuing to play the game after day, like 3, 7, 15, 30 were exceptional, right. This was one of the only pieces of data that we actually gathered in contrast a lot of other like mobile game developers. So we saw the retention of the game was good and we were like interested in how we could serve players better. Like, was adding more content at the end a good idea? You know, again, like, we know players don't tend to reach the end of games. Can we, you know, can we offer players something different, a good diversion and maybe something that fit into people's lifestyles a bit better. So the idea of, you know, a daily leaderboard, which is by no means a revolutionary concept. So 24 hour wipe the slate, new set of levels, new leaderboard, play these levels. And then we just were able to then populate this in five levels, right? Dan? The initial data grind mode was a five level run. You would do four. And one of the things that I think we got right about this too was those four levels were completely agnostic to your general progression of the game, which, which means it might grab a level 201 even if you've only progressed to level 10 of the game and it didn't care. So like a. It took a lot of the, just programmatic logic. Like we didn't have to Build complex barriers of like, different players. Like anyone in the Grindstone community logs in if they've unlocked this mode, which, like you unlock four levels into the game, you can access it and you'll see content that you. You wouldn't be able to see normally unless you've invested many hours. So it made that experience richer. It served to kind of advertise stuff that like, oh, cool, I wonder when I actually get this weapon or when I see that kind of encounter. And then it gave players that leaderboard, which, you know, Kristen, because I've listened to the show, I know you've had conversations with people about this kind of stuff before and the power of all that. It was also like our first comeback mechanic, I want to say, right? So a comeback mechanic is kind of anything that sits on a cooker. So for people really familiar with mobile games, Farmville, right, going back like 15 years to like Farmville was like a good early mass adopted example of like, you plant some crops. Those crops take three real time days to grow and you come back three days later and log into your Facebook account and you harvest your corn. And then like, that's a little bit of the game. There are really aggressive and cynical versions of comeback mechanics that we see in a lot of other games. And we wanted to like, put a light touch on it. And yeah, we found that it worked really well. We got like a nice marketing boost from Apple around the same time, which is not inconsequential in terms of helping, but we saw our retention rates and just general like appreciation of the game, like shot really up and it's just like it. Also, because it was like a different experience, it wasn't just adding more content, it was adding this sort of like sidecar onto the experience of the game. We believe that's part of what it was. It's like you now could sort of set the flavor. Like, is your Grindstone experience progressing that story and existing in that world, or is your grindington experience that like your commute on the bus is like long enough for you to play the score level stream and you come back to it the next day?

And so I want to summarize just for. For folks to make sure. So basically there's kind of two modes. This normal progression through. You're on level 19 trying to get to 20, you're doing murderous destruction and want to continue your murderous destruction. Then there is this daily grind by which you play all. You have four kind of random levels that you're assigned. You're competing with all the players. Who have chosen to do this daily grind and you have to play all four levels within one day to get qualified to get on the leaderboard. By which at the end of the day you'd come back and say, did I, am I a good, am I a good player? Did I hit the top of the leaderboard? Is that, is that about right or correct me.

Yeah, that's pretty much it. Yep.

Nice. So did you see people coming back then they played and then did they immediately check their score and did come back later to see how they fared or like how did they get the feedback loop of, of they did, they.

Did well today as a non current representative, Cappy, I don't think we knew like, I think we had an idea, we had some anecdote, right of like for example, one of the members of the team is like probably one of our most hardcore engaged consumers as well. Like just play. Like has the mode he loves, plays it and like knows the other players by screen name, right? And it's like, oh, I wonder how you know, like whatever, you know, Matty Patty 420 got that score or he must have like I saw him refresh it multiple times a day. I think technically on other platforms, not actually on mobile. I think we do gather data that can tell us like how often somebody come back and refreshing score but we actually didn't know. We relied a lot on like user reviews and anecdata to kind of give us an idea of what was working and then we would do. Trying to remember Dan, like I think what we, what we did is we did some light analysis of just the number of scores submitted. So like one, you know, each user would count for one even if they came back 10 times. And then we used that to give ourselves an idea of like how the mode was performing. And we actually introduced multiple Daily Grind modes. So the, the 7:30pm reset is across all modes, all except for Boss Rush which is permanent. But then we, we introduced other modes that had like a specifically. For example, there's one like called Quick Grind which is kind of what it says on the tin. It was designed because like the original the four level mode would take. You could spend an hour clearing the mode depending on the levels, depending on how fastidious you were about how you played. So we wanted to introduce one that people could play in like a really quick turnaround. Then we could kind of like see which one seemed to get higher engagement. But much deeper than that, we didn't really gather or analyze the data well.

So here's One conundrum that leaderboards face in kind of the non gaming world, which is they're more static and that means that you know, if you're really good you'll get on the leaderboard but most people aren't really good. So the heads of the leaderboard and so you kind of have this problem where leaderboards motivate the people who could get on the leaderboard and maybe you know, 10% below people could get on the leaderboard but if I'm bad, I just don't care about the leaderboard. Has gaming solved that? Like trying to motivate people to care about the leaderboard when they're average?

I mean gaming as a whole, I'm not sure. We tried to solve this to a certain extent by giving you a reward simply for placing anywhere on the leaderboard. So we gave you a precious resource in the game, gold and you know, for logging a score. It doesn't matter if it's dead last or somewhere in the middle or at the top, you get this resource. And that was just a sort of friendly way to treat the leaderboard for players. In terms of games in general. I have that exact same feeling about, about the games that I play in the leaderboards. I don't, I don't care to engage. There's something about, I still like I was just playing Grindstone before we started this, the one of the daily grind modes and there is just because, because the, the nature of the, the modes, they're throwing a lot of different variables at you every 24 hours that at least for me and I'm, I don't place high like the, the community is far, far better than me. But because, I mean I made these levels, I, you know there's always a chance if the right combatorial like variety hits that day that maybe I can get into the top 20 maybe. And so like that keeps me coming back just personally because it's not like being the best at a first person shooter where really that person is always going to float, float mat top because they've got that muscle memory and skill that you know, I, I just can't compete with.

That's, that's really nice. So there's some level of variety and some level of just hope that people can hold onto because the variety throws things at you that say, you know, it could work for me today.

Yes.

So when, when we first introduced the mode like it has a 7:30pm reset which is like somewhat arbitrarily chosen but it had to be one reset for all time.

Zones.

So each chose one. There was sort of no idealizing it, we felt. And what we saw happen was like some people would like play early and they get the screenshot of them at the, like in the top, you know. And then of course like if you're playing at like 6pm Right, you're in a more competitive field. And we like partially patched the whole of that. Right. Like we added, I think we actually, I think this was a. Not an addition. I think this was always in there but like a countdown timer to the reset. And we added like push notifications. If you'd registered a partial run or a score, we'd prompt you like, hey, do you want to finish your run? Stuff like that. But it's, it's one of the things like it kind of felt like it didn't matter to people very much. Like we could have added a whole lot of bells and whistles to it to make it more robust. And it, it kind of felt, I don't know, my, my instinct on it was it was sort of pretty quickly diminishing returns on that. And so like the reward or the fleet ruplin item for your first play. Like this stuff worked pretty well I think. Dan, did it have friends isolated or it's just the global leaderboard, right? We never got around to doing a friends.

It's just the global leaderboard. But I mean I think like a lot of these decisions for the post launch live service content, like a lot of these features we made in a weird way because we ourselves didn't want to stop playing the game. Right. And I think that's why these, these things felt more friendly, maybe a little more engaging than a, than a mechanic that is designed as a gotcha or as a time sink. You know, I've played the game all the way through, all the levels for testing purposes and just for fun many times. And when I hit the end, I like the game so much just as a player of games that I want the game is telling me I'm done and I don't want to be done. So a lot of decisions we made for post level con, for post release content like the weekly challenges is another example is just the. For people that have done the whole thing, there's still game there to play. So for instance, the weekly challenges was a, was a feature we added, I don't know, a year, two years in where, you know, on Thursday, Thursday evening, if you got the push notifications enabled, you got a little ping and it says the challenge is live and it is a. It is a challenge that is live for everyone just that week. And the reward for doing it. Some of them are, are bite sized challenges that you could do in an hour. Some will take you the whole, the whole week to just chip away at the reward. Is a silly hat. There really is no. Like, it's just cosmetic. And I think some people played it for the hat. I think myself included. I played because I didn't want to stop playing the game. And this gave me excuse every Thursday to check back into the world of Grindstone. It's not very heavy handed, but it's a, it's a reason to return to this world. And I think we wanted it as developers and players that really had a fondness for the game and, and I think it coincided with the need there for people especially. I mean we have, we haven't talked about this. All of this stuff, this whole live service experience, this all happened during COVID during a lockdown when the studio went fully remote. We released very shortly after the. What the world happens. You know, Covid happens. We wonder, we're wondering what, what do we do? Turns out a lot of people when they're at home want to play video games. Uh, we're not the only game that experienced this. And so a lot of, A lot of our design decisions were sort of like, we want to keep playing the game. What would we want to do in this game?

Um, switching topics a little bit because we basically it's, it feels like you guys have or did have opportunities to crack the nut to get the people who are engaged more engaged or have more ability to play the game. Any insights on the, you know, first session that people are playing and how to get them to want to do a second session with you? Like either to teach them about the gameplay or to motivate them to come back again.

So onboarding and tutorialization is like a real contested bit of ground when it comes to game dev. As with everything classically, right, like, you know, all games right in like, like the history of time. Like there's been an ongoing debate about like, do you teach players? Do you tutorialize players? Like lots of text? Do you do it diegetically? Do you do it artificially? You know, you take examples like the original Mario that you would've played in arcade. Like, there's no text, you just, you can only run one direction, you can only jump, you can only do this one thing. How do you. So there's a, there's a whole bunch there about like, how do you tutorialize a game in the first place. And then when you're dealing with like mobile where you have maybe shorter sessions, more prone to distraction, where you're dealing with subscription or free to play, I think has the same thing where it's like the barrier to try the game and to judge and dismiss the game is a lot lower than a game where like I just dropped $70 or whatever on a game and you're, you, you have an incentive to like, you know, sorry, I don't know how you feel about swearing on a show. Eat shit for an hour, right? Playing a bad tutorial to, to get to the game, right? Like so it's funny. This is one of those places where like I, I think I characterized it to you in a previous conversation, Christian. Like PC console developers tend to be a little bit more like artsy fartsy and mobile game developers tend to skew a little bit more like data pragmatism. And they love acronyms and so. And Dan I think doesn't want to say this acronym out loud on a camera, so I will. Like we had to become familiar with like terms like fatui, right? Like first time user experience, you know, and then again like thinking about things like retention, right? Like how many players are dropping the game within how many days. We weren't particularly aggressive about these things. You know, we sort of like reluctantly embraced push notifications which I think we found a tasteful way of using push notifications that, that worked okay for us. But yeah, I think a large part, it just came down to trying to do the best job of game design. Like make, make the hook to drive you to finish a level really strong in and of itself, which I think is one of places where Grindstone excels. Like the hook to, to play a level and move on is, is really strong and just like inherently satisfying and then just trying to, you know, know, show the player a new interesting barrier to overcome just kind of just, just on the horizon. So you're never thinking about thing you're going to do, you know, in, in 10 hours or in one week. You're thinking about the thing you might do if you could just like play one more round.

Love that. Would you make a game? So imagine you had kind of a, a little spectrum and you say we're here right now. We could either make it a little bit harder or a little bit easier for, for new folks. Where do you go? And obviously you don't want a lot harder, a lot easier, but like where would you tend to, to have the new experience go?

Yeah, I Mean, this is always the struggle and we fight against this in every game we make. And I don't think that we've ever totally nailed it, but I mean, Grindsville is actually a really good example of. When we started working on it in earnest, it was very easy. You know, a level was wide open. Every chain that you plotted was a big juicy 20 chain. And back then it was spitting coins every kill. If you killed one guy, coins flow like you did a good job. And we couldn't figure out, you know, why. Why weren't players new players, new players within the studio that had never played the game, you know, why weren't they pushing to make those bigger chains, those big, juicy, satisfying chain? Why were they just going, well, let's kill these three. I get coins. First step was rip out the coins. Don't give them coins for every, don't pat them on the head for every. Every little thing they do, no matter how significant or significant. The second thing was to, and this is sort of counterintuitive for I think a fatui a first time user experience, but is to not make it so wide open to kind of introduce what I call a good friction, just a little bit of tension there to, to push against so that when you finally do achieve that big chain you did, you figured out how to do it and it felt good, good, and you want to do it again. So I thought, you know, the early, the early game we were working on where it was wide open, it actually didn't tell you how to play the game in, in, in a weird way, it was too easy, so you didn't know what was the right decision, you know, so adding a little bit of friction, forcing the player to earn that bigger chain themselves, I think was an incentive to both. I want to keep going, I want to do, I want to have that feeling again. But it taught through play. I don't think we nailed every aspect of our first time user experience, but I think we tried to stay light on telling you what to do through text boxes. I have two kids, they skip 100% of text boxes in games. It's incredibly heartbreaking to me since I write those most of the time there's jokes in them. They've never. They don't see the jokes, they just skip. So we know that like throwing up a text box that tells you how to do something is a band aid solution. In the end, really the best way to do it is through play and through visual cues that are, that are easily signified. And so we tried to strike a Balance between the two. Like, here's how to do this again. We present it diegetically with a little funny dude telling you how to do something with a joke on the end. But for the most part, again, the mechanic is so simple. We set up the levels to sort of guide the player through visually and through that central chaining interaction. And we did our best to make that feel juicy and satisfying to carry them through. And then at level 20, we really, you know, turn it up a notch. We turn on the heat on the boiler and it starts to get a lot more challenging, perhaps too challenging by level 20.

But I digress.

Let's also discuss these, these hearts. So what is the heart? What are the hearts? What are the heart meter? Talk to me about how this operationally works.

Joel, do you want to take this one or.

Well, I mean, I think describing it as it is in the game is pretty straightforward. The player has three hearts and every turn you're making a decision about kind of where you'll end up. And you can get caught in a situation where you could take multiple hits, but typically you'll take one hit. One hit, one heart flies off. And it's pretty classic video games and straightforward and simple. I think most players of Grindstone would, you know, you see it, you intuitive really quickly and you wouldn't think that there's any other way the game could be, but it actually was a different way for a long time. But that predates my tenure at Cappy. So I'll flip it back to you, Dan, to talk about what it was.

Yeah, I mean it was, it was more of a meter with a bunch of hit points, 20 hit points, 50 hit points. And again, that's when you play the game, that's a very generous amount of life you're giving to the player player. And what it produced was very little tension. You know, you could not base. You could basically play a lot of levels in a row without thinking about that resource, which is a resource. And it's an again, another example of a sort of counterintuitive decision to add friction, to add tension, to add difficulty that I think enriches the game. It, I, I don't think it is as off putting as it sounds. It gives the game a good tension that when you achieve something, when you leave the, when you leave a dangerous situation with that one precious heart intact, you feel like a good player as opposed to playing for 15 levels in a row and then realizing, oh, I'm a little low on hearts, I should go do something about that. So and it's, it's. The reason why I think it's so anomalous is just because of the genre that we're sort of playing in, which is typically very casual for at least the early game. It tries to sand off the edges and really push the dopamine hit of just doing well and giving you shiny things. But because we're sort of blurring the lines between a color matching game and an action game, a sort of turn based action game, you know, it makes sense to have more danger, it makes sense to have more tension. And you know, the result is I think we got casual color matching players who were suddenly tricked into playing a more intense action game. And we got action game players that were sort of tricked into playing a.

More casual puzzle game.

I know this anecdotally from my friend group that, you know, very politely played my game just to be a nice friend and were texting me at 2 in the morning, cursing me for level 121, you know, something that killed them. And it really engaged a kind of player that didn't play that game typically. And I think it did that really successfully.

Yeah, I, I think it also like, for what it's worth, just to add to it, Dan, it increases the comprehensibility of board state and like in, in game design, like board state, like it, it is what it sounds like, right? It's your ability to like hold the reality of the simulation in your head. So like, would chess be a better game if the queen could take three hits, right? And like if you had to have some way of tracking how many hits and if a pawn has one and a bishop has five and a, and a rook has three and like those don't make chess a better game because the board state becomes more complex and it becomes less comprehensible. And so I think like there are games like some of the big RPGs that I worked on were like squishy things with 100 hit points. And this thing takes poison damage which adds seven. Like that makes sense if you're playing Dungeons of Dragons or a big pcrpg. But, but for a game like Grindstone, where board state and holding that in your head is a big part of it, it puts the player in the Reich. It's a dollar store version of self determination theory. Right. But like where the player like can understand what's going on well enough to feel like success or failure is her fault and not the fault of like the mechanism of the game, like clapping around.

Thank you for listening. If you like the show. Go to rationallabs.com to say hello to us or or post a review on Apple or Spotify. Big thank you to the show's two Jax Jack Buer, our writer, and Jack Steger, our genius editor. Until next time.