Transcript
Joe Cassavaugh: I left this up as my opening slide. These are three of my worst reviews for my very first game that went out in February of 2011. The one I like the best is, 'Looks Like a Student Project.' 'Worst game I ever played,' is pretty good too, but, 'Just Awful.' Really, they didn't say anything more than this. I think the 'Looks Like a Student Project' complained a little bit, but the other two reviews really, you can put text, they just did the title, the Just Awful is very good. Why am I here if this is this Just Awful game? It started out looking like this. Now it looks like this, which just on basic observation, you can tell it looks a little better. More importantly, though, I'm just about to release my 19th game in the Clutter franchise. Most importantly, there is this slide. Including the year it took me to make the first game, it took me 10 years to have 7 or 8 of the games get to the point where I netted a million from it.
All the numbers that I'm going to use, I'm not going to use that many, are all net to me. More impressively, I think, is the last 5 years I've netted my second million. I've made over $200,000 per year from this game. That little bonsai tree in the bottom right-hand corner, we're still growing. This whole thing I refer to the franchise effect, and I'll explain that in a little bit.
Who Am I?
I am Joe Cassavaugh. I am the only Joe of Puzzles By Joe. This is what a Clutter game looks like. This mechanic already existed as a small part of some games called hidden object games. I'll explain what a hidden object game is later. You basically look around, find two objects that are exactly the same, except for rotation and size, like the two coffee cups. There's the two coffee cups. What else is there? The sunglasses, and the New Year's Eve, the green hat in the upper right and lower left. Even if an object is buried, you can click on it and away it goes. Some people find this game incredibly stupid. Luckily, there's a bunch more that find it very addicting. In the Casual PC download market, puzzle games needed a story. Over time, it evolved to after they solve any puzzle, they get a picture, they get a quote, and they get me chit-chatting about it. We're going to talk about that a little bit later, too.
I do my talks the same way. This is a quote from Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken, "I took the one less traveled by and that has made all the difference." Most people misinterpret that. Look it up online, that's all I'm going to say about that. This is here because this is the question I want in your brain the entire talk, could the solopreneur path be right for me? When I really want to stress something, I like to say it twice. Could the solopreneur path be right for me? Who am I? I think I'm a lot like a lot of people in here. I was a math guy my entire life. I started programming right out of college. I was a software engineer when that became vogue, distinguished from a programmer. I grew all the way to the point where I became an entrepreneur and a solopreneur.
I'm going to explain the difference between those two titles later in the talk. Early in my career, I was accused of always wanting to be the smartest guy in the room. I'm really happy to not be the smartest guy in the room on many levels. There are so many heavyweights here, and I'm just loving it. I'm also not the best software engineer. I was a really good debugger, solved some really hard problems. The systems level stuff, was never really good at. I didn't write code that was the friendliest for people coming behind me. I think you have to do that to be a good software engineer. I didn't write mean code, but I didn't write the best. Great things are done by a series of small things brought together. That's this talk. Less is more, the author died, by Giuseppe Kazinski. There's a theory, and there's different interpretations of the theory called the death of the author. Basically, it means the less I say, the more you'll bring your own interpretation to it. I like that. That's how I work.
A Tale of Two Talks
You came in here expecting a solopreneur's journey, from engineer to puzzle master and storyteller. The title I always had in mind, but is very dry, was just building a sustainable business as a solopreneur. This talk is a mixture of those, so don't be surprised. The key word there, sustainable. That was my goal from day one, of, even when I was just trying to get to the next game, I wanted to build a sustainable business. I like to share my mantras. I'm going to share a few during the talk, and just quickly. "Everything you do is in preparation for a future path that you can't predict." I think this is almost universally true. Yes, you could be a little 7-year-old kid who knew he wanted to be a lawyer or a doctor and went to med school and law school, and they became what they thought they would.
Most people, that's not true. I think if you really grok this, you appreciate the twists and turns in your own life more. You don't view them with as much trepidation, if you really grok this. "Perfect is the, the enemy of good enough," here. This sign was good enough, which is why I picked it. I like the fact that 'the' showed up twice. I like the short version of this, which is, good enough is good enough. The perfect part, if you're a perfectionist, you don't want to be a solopreneur. You need to figure out how to ship. I don't think you can be a perfectionist and be a true solopreneur. You might be able to be a starting artist if you're a perfectionist, but you're not going to be a successful entrepreneur or solopreneur.
The Turning Point
This is actually one of the snippets in my game, and these things are called snippets if I haven't used the word snippets yet. "Just surviving is a noble fight," one of my favorite lines from a Billy Joel song. The reason I have it here is I'm going to now tell the stories about my first few games. Really, that's all I cared about was surviving, getting to the next game. This is the only long story I'm going to tell you, and I'm going to try to trim it down. These are six words that changed my life. I worked for a company in the Casual download space called iWin. I made three games called Mahjong Quest, and they literally made in the millions for the company because it was during the boom of this Casual space that has now shrunk a lot, mostly due to mobile phones and stuff.
I pushed my own ideas after doing these three Mahjong Quest games for them. They greenlit one, and I was about halfway through when two other games that they produced or created bombed when they got released, and they decided they weren't going to do any internal development anymore. They pulled the plug on my game. I was traveling to New Hampshire at the time, and my future wife turned to me in the car and said these six words, can you make the game yourself? I immediately answered, not quite, but close enough. As much as I had done games on my own before and failed miserably, my brain really immediately wrapped around the fact that I could do a game in this space that would get seen. I knew I'd get the $100,000 eyeball. What is that game going to become? My future wife and I talked about it a little bit, and we started talking about matching objects.
She lives on HGTV. We talked about cleaning up laundry in just a living room, and as you match the two socks, they go away, and then you get this beautiful picture. That's not what the game became either, but that was the genesis. I think in a weekend, I wrote the prototype, and I knew I had something worth pursuing. This is also from one of my games, and this is a true story. Sometime between I was 3 and 4, I've been told my whole life that my first complete sentence was, "By self, mommy." This was not, "I did this by myself, mommy, give me praise." This was, "Leave me alone. I want to do it by myself." I think it's funny now that I look back on this and realize I was not meant to work with other people, I think. I spent too much time doing that.
The First Clutter - An Experiment Worth Doing
This is what a true hidden object game looks like. Gorgeous art, there's words at the bottom. It's very similar to I Spy, if you've ever seen I Spy as a kid, or books. Basically, you look at the words, and you find the objects. I hate this because it's not replayable. These games were super popular, people treated them like movies. They'd buy them. They'd have 15 of these scenes, a little story to go with them. They'd play them for two to four hours, and when they're done, they're done, they moved on to the next one. I wanted to do a replayable version of that. We'll stop there for now. The first Clutter I decided was definitely an experiment worth doing, and could I make the game myself? I immediately went to iWin and said, "I'll cut you a deal. I want to be able to use the tools that I've made Mahjong Quest with, and I want to use the same tools to do my own game." All they cared about was they made me sign something that was the right of first refusal, so that for the next two years, if I made a game, they could decide to publish it.
They gave me all my intellectual property back. I agreed to stay on two months extra to help another game out, and then I was on my way. Will it be worth it? I thought I knew the market well enough that it would either bomb and make less than $10,000, or it would make $100,000 or more. That was my, I felt, break even for a year of my time at the time. This is 2009, and that was good enough money for me at the time. This was the game, same thing, you can look at those two pink mice, the two pink cakes, the two light blue tiles. This is actually the second puzzle in the very first game. It proved me wrong. I thought less than $10,000 more than $100,000, it came right in the middle, and after 15 months, it was only going to make about $50,000. That meant if I didn't do another game ever, that game might have made $55,000 to $60,000. This is a long-tail thing. Long-tail is a great word. There's a great book on it. You should look that up.
Adventures in Sequel-Land
Even though I came close to not doing that second game, I decided I could do it in half the time. I'd already written the engine. If I can do $50,000 for six months, that's close to that $100,000 for the year. It's exact, in fact, if you're a math guy. How do you do that? That is my second game to the right, and I reused as much as possible. You can see the interface is almost exactly the same. I skinned the Clutter itself. I did add variations. It is not the same gameplay as the first game, and it tells a different story, but I did not reinvent the wheel wherever I didn't need to. I did get that game out. It took me about six dev months. It took me longer in time. I was working for somebody else and hedging my bets a little bit, but I was able to do $50,000.
$50,000 in a dev year is bad, but $50,000 for six dev months is good. Then this game surprised me. It made $50,000 itself, and it bumped $20,000 to the first game. That first game that I don't think would have made more than $60,000 over the life has all of a sudden made $70,000. That's great because that is $140,000 for a dev year. Really, this was only the beginning.
Clutter 3, my future wife had a lot of input. She wanted pretty pictures. She talked me out of ugly objects. I had these really nice dental teeth that clacked, and really some ugly stuff that she talked me out of, and it was good. I'm glad she did. I felt she slowed down the process. For 3, I had a few things I wanted to accomplish. Number one, I realized the game was a commodity, and that's what the coffee beans represent. Nobody cares how shiny that coffee can is. They just want the next cup of coffee or the next can of coffee. Getting it out quickly is really what matters most. I like to do experiments to prove the market wrong, what they believe. I want to know for myself, and the problem is there's a lot of confirmation bias. Something that's always been done that way, they keep doing it.
I want to shake that up. That makes it interesting for me. A little red riding hood. I wanted to do a very unconventional story. The coffee beans in the grinder, I don't want the game to become a grind to me. I want to stay happy while I'm doing it. This is Clutter 3. It has a little bit of a science fiction-y thing, but it talks about game dev. I replaced the gorgeous pictures with collages that let me talk about game dev. The one in the lower left there, those two dice, are basically me talking about random and replayability. It's not just the pictures, I do talk about it. At the end of this game, I did my one little small thing that I'm so happy I did. I asked my players, I said, "If you want me to make a better game, you find me," it's pretty easy nowadays, "and you give me feedback, and I'll make you a better game." They responded well to that. This game did better than 1 and 2 combined, and I was really off to the races.
For Clutter 4, I wanted to put it out quick, and I called it Minigame Madness Tour, and found out my customers do not like me to go away from the basic Clutter idea. I enjoyed the minigames because they were different enough, and I enjoyed creating minigames, but my customers said no way. For 5, it was called Welcome to Clutterville, it's the upper right there. I told the story of why am I creating Clutter 5, and will there be a Clutter 6? I really wanted to fake them out into believing that there wasn't going to be a Clutter 6. I had almost like a Tetris-like Clutter, where things came down a tube, and you had to match to get rid of it. I implied that that was about the last thing I could think of doing to Clutter. I don't want to keep doing the same game, so no 6.
It ended the game with telling them, of course, there'll be a 6. 5 was off the chart. I thought 3 did well, but 5 really did well. For 6, I ended up contracting with two young ladies right out of college that were very type A, and they did the story in art. It's the only Clutter game that looks pretty. The publishers and marketing types loved it. My players said, "You sold out, Joe. We want more Joe. Jonas, not enough of Jonas." Really, I approved of this at every level. I'm a fictional character in this game. It was hysterical. I did a 180 and said, I'm really going to turn up the meta. This is how meta, Clutter, infinity, Joe's ultimate quest was. I told the story in snippets for every year of my life of how I ended up being the guy who ended up being the guy who ended up creating the Clutter games.
It was all talking about me. In the early reviews, people couldn't believe I put my face in the game. Many things that the people that don't like the game accused me of, and they just got worse. This also did well. Not quite as good as 5, but much better than 4 and 6. I do want to show you this one slide before we go on. This is for you to really understand how the game makes a chunk, but there's a bump. The blue is what the game made. The red is what all the prior games made together in that same six months. What you can see is after Clutter 2, the bumps all are similar. The games perform differently, but you can see 5 and 7 and 3 all performed a little better. The bumps are about the same. What it means is as long as I keep putting out another game, even if the game doesn't do quite as well, that bump is still going to happen. That's the franchise effect. That franchise effect going this way is what keeps me ahead of the ever-shrinking market curve going that way.
Adopting Unity
We are now right here in my story. We're not quite right there. That's where the change occurred. As 7 went out, I finally did this. This is my slide to show you my Unity decision. I had a framework for iWin. Most of you probably know the difference between a framework and libraries. Libraries are things you use. Framework, you sit in. Frameworks are constraining, but they let you go faster. I cut my teeth on that with iWin for bigger projects. I was very happy with what the framework did. That Volkswagen bus, very reliable, but it couldn't even do simple things. Like I couldn't have a dialogue on top of another dialogue. I couldn't have a dialogue without rotating the things in the dialogue for it. I'm an old dog, I don't like new tricks. I had hung out. I ran my own game dev meetup for many years.
I heard the other indie devs talk about Unity. I saw it. I saw what it could do. They kept complaining about things and some unreliability and stuff. When that calmed down, I got more serious about trying to go to Unity. I hired some people to do little projects to get me started. Then luckily, I met a kid, a young man named Tony, just senior in college, who did some pair programming with me. He did some stuff for me, and then we did pair programming. When that happened, he was my co-pilot driving me around Unity. At that point, I took the leap of faith. Unity is that Porsche. I'm easily four times faster than my old environment. Easily. Probably four to six. That diamond in the middle, I had finally made it to what I call my forever environment. There were things I didn't clean up in that iWin framework, that Volkswagen, because I knew I was going to leave it.
I'm 68, Unity till I die. It means that if I think of something to fix, I want to do it now, because then I get to use it longer. I really did put off many things in the Volkswagen world. This is what Unity looks like. It's a very sophisticated dashboard, is what I can tell you. It just blew my brains out in a good way. I jumped to VS Code at the same time, which did code completion. I did not think I was getting burnt out until I went to this and how much this re-energized me. Then I realized, I was really getting burnt out there. This is what I used to do. Command line. This is a Bash shell, but it was a Korn shell at the time, and vi and command line compile. I hated the Microsoft IDE. Again, I am that old dog. I really am.
The Curator of Clutter
Before I go on, what I've accomplished, I think, is impressive on some level. However, it's like a magic trick. Everybody sees a magic trick and goes, "Wow, awesome." Then you find out how the magic trick is done and you go, "eh." That's what I feel. I feel like, over time, I've accomplished something pretty good, but it's not like I did anything that special to get there. People over the years have said, is Clutter a great idea? It became its own genre. How good was that idea, or was it just my hard work? It was neither. What I did was I noticed a little piece in the game that was interesting enough for me that I thought I could make repeatable, replayable, that I wanted to experiment with. I wanted that thing I wanted to nurture. The difference between an entrepreneur and a solopreneur, in that middle, I became the curator of Clutter.
I realized there were people, in a sense, depending on me to make the next Clutter game, because if I don't make it, nobody is going to. It's that ownership of the product and that nurturing of that bonsai tree as a metaphor of what separates the solopreneur from just an entrepreneur. Even though I worked with some people for a little while here and there, other than provide some text files, looking up some quotes, I haven't used anybody else for six or seven years now, I think. The thing about this, this is something you can do. It doesn't even have to be a game or an app. Maybe you write songs. Maybe you do stand-up comedy. If you watch Shark Tank, week after week, you see people that found some little piece that they saw other people were ignoring, and then they nurtured that into whatever their business became. That's how you become a solopreneur. You don't have to quit your day job to do it, but you guys can look around and do this if you want to travel this path. Again, I like to repeat it when it's important, yes, you can do this.
Tech Stack
A little tech stuff, because I felt like I should give you guys some tech stuff. I love this quote just because I always think of the little Clutter engine that could. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. That's pretty much how I felt Unity was compared to my old system. My old system, I occasionally had to go into the framework and fix something, add a bitmap copy or something. I never have to do that in Unity. The base thing just always works. Unity is a double-edged sword, because I'm four to six times faster, but there's about three times more that I can do with it and I want to do with it. I didn't immediately become super-fast with it. The question is, how do I put out 10 games in 5 years with about 1,800 puzzles per game? I believe I'm the only one doing this.
The answer to that is refactor, refactor, refactor. My own habits, anything that's grindy at all that over time will wear me down, I have to figure out how to get rid of. Anything I can do that's more content-based I want to do, but I have to get better at everything. The first thing I did, these are four scenes from my game that are really four different games, but they all derive from a base class called minigame. That minigame talks to that top strip, which is just my menu bar. Everything in that menu bar, all my little minigames get for free. There's a Clutter game in the left, it's called Gap War. In the right, that's Sliders. Below, that's Mahjong. They don't have to worry about how you get to the next game. How do you turn on the timer? How do you pop up to the menu?
All of it, I just write this little piece and it magically works. That's because I built a framework inside of Unity, even though Unity is component-based, blew my mind, after coming from C++ world with everything with inheritance. The guys that I had help me with Unity at least answer questions, it totally blew their mind that I was trying to do inheritance inside of Unity and had base classes and sub class, all that.
You look for any little improvement. This is just my INI files, my config files. It's almost the old school Windows INI, it was all very flat. It was just a key-value pair. This becomes a nightmare as you get more and more puzzles that have variables in them. One day I got an idea, took me a half an hour to implement. I immediately just wanted to smack myself in the head and say, why didn't you think of this two years earlier? It was simple. It was a semicolon. Now I can put multiple key-value pairs on a line. This is the easiest thing in seriously 30 minutes. It just made my life so much better. I then added this. I have lands that are 100 puzzles. Those 100 puzzles are really just 10 levels crossed with 10 different object sets to create the 100. It's not really 100, it's more like 10.
Those 10 come from the main quest. Because the quest has 10 related puzzles, and I basically take them to a degree and then just play with them a little bit to create each one of the lands. In each game, I do a new variation that deserves its own row or column in the main quest. I have 100 pictures in each game. At the start of the next game, I make these tiles from them to be used as an object set in the next game. When I did this originally, I manually did this. I did it a couple times and it was a pain. I now have these and these. I now have nine of them. This would take me about three days of really grindy work. I didn't want to do it, but I said, time to learn Batch in PaintShop Pro. You're going, why use PaintShop Pro?
Because it's the first thing I ever learned. That's what I use. Content is king. You get faster by moving more and more things to content. I write less code, but I look for new ways to include new content. This is your basic photorealistic set. This is an object set that's made up of other object sets. It's all food base. There's empty plates. There's pizza. There's cookies. There's seeds actually. There's blue plate specials. It feels different when you play this. It doesn't feel like just the mishmash, because again, they're all round. In this one, they're almost all the same size. These are donuts. I had enough different donuts that they're an object set. I love these. These are almost the perfect object set because some are very close to each other while some are obviously pop out at you. Even though I don't show it here, these all rotate, which is what Unity let me do really easily. These are all spinning. The two of them spin in one direction and one spin in the other one, but the same rules. You find two donuts that match, you click on them, they pop off.
Whenever I get an idea that I think in my head, Jim wouldn't like that, or one of my old producers or whatever, I go, that's going in the game. This is almost too much fun. This is probably the most fun I had, at least for a very short period of time. It's one of those things, the idea came, the execution, so silly, but I loved it. I don't think many of my players have really commented on this one. I'm not sure they liked it. Here's some dice. These are animal heads. This is the first non-photorealistic object set I did. It was for the game that had no text. I knew there would be a love-hate relationship with these guys, with my audience. Some want the challenge, super challenge, but some just want to relax. In fact, half of my players don't use a timer. They just don't.
There's a lot of variation. There's black and white puzzles that if people don't like that, they can turn on the color. I give them a little control over the way a puzzle operates. Those ones that rotate, they have the ability to pick seven different speeds. I don't let them stop it because that kills the puzzle, but they can go very slow or very fast. I let them play it the way they want to. I have so many object sets. This is an object set that's made up of icons of other object sets. When I went to the no text version, I created a bunch of icons to tell them what kind of games they were playing. Content, so that 1800 puzzles per game isn't quite real. Probably 900 is totally free and content driven, maybe a little more. These things are called sliders. They come in horizontal, vertical, both at once.
There's select and swap versions that aren't sliders, but they're called select and swaps that play with any picture. There is square jigsaws. In Clutter, I can cut up a picture and make them into tiles and they play that. Those puzzles stay the same in each game. Sometimes I change them a little bit, but mostly they stay the same. What makes them different is the 100 picture puzzles they get that are now different. That 1800 per game is again, more like 900 or 1000. Then I give them 200 of these box quotes. This works with any paragraph. It can be a quote from a person. It can be from a book. It can be lyrics from songs. It's a nice little puzzle. I give them 200 each game. There are some people that buy my game just for these. They don't even play Clutter, but they somehow love these, and they've stopped playing Clutter and they just want these each time.
I don't change my main menu anymore. That's 17, that's 18, 17, 18. I change it as little as possible. I'd rather put the time in giving them new and interesting puzzles. It's important in my distribution chain, they often get to play it from 30 minutes to an hour before they make the buy decision. I want them to know the game is so huge that if they're on the fence, they buy it. This is the very first thing they see when they bring up a Clutter game. They do one click anywhere here, but they can read this if they want. They do one click, then it jumps them into the first puzzle. This is to show them just how big everything is. Then that's been successful. The main menu I used to do different. This just got created about five games ago and I haven't touched it. The content changes, the code doesn't.
Persistence Pays
Steve Martin said, be so good they can't ignore you. I like, be good enough and stick around long enough so they can't ignore you. Really, there's a corollary. The corollary is, stick around long enough and good things happen. That's what's happened to me. After game 6 or 7, they weren't calling it its own genre yet. A few games later, they were. I'm on the front page of many of my distributors in my own category called Clutter. Some of them do bundles. About six years ago, I think I asked if I could do a collected edition, which means I can charge twice as much for my game with this one distributor. They said, no, you're not special enough. Two years later, they came back and said, would you like to be a collected edition? I'm going to finish with my best story here. Seven months ago, there's a guy who worked for one of my distributors and he left that to go work for a web distributor that they make swipe games.
They're the business model, sort of like Wordle, but they're not Wordle. They have their own site, but they also farm it out to the Boston Herald, I think, the USA TODAY. They came to me and said, can you write us a mini Clutter? It only took two or three weeks of my time. Most of the code was fitting in with theirs, just doing a couple little things. The rest was just content picking. I created this mini Clutter that only plays 49 games. It's only a seven-by-seven little grid, only has 15 pictures, but it still feels like Clutter. I still chitchat. It immediately has become 15% of my business. It's different. It's ad supported. In the Casual market, I get the big chunk and then the long tail happens and off it goes. Even though I'm keeping the older games alive, that's what happens. Over here, it's ad supported. I get the same chunk. It's not as big as my big chunks, but it's a pretty good chunk. It happens month after month after month. Again, it immediately became 15% of my business. They came to me. I'm just thrilled about that.
What Are You Risking by Not Doing It?
I do do a lot of talks for game devs right out of college or still in college. One of the things I tell them, if they're thinking about being a solopreneur, they have to look at themselves in the mirror and ask themselves the tough questions. These slides will go up at some point. You can read all the tough questions. The ones that matter are, what are you risking by doing it? What are you risking by not doing it? Especially, what are you risking by not doing it? The tech world right now is crazy. Layoffs right and left. I'm 68. I'm glad I wasn't 55 looking for a job. I don't know how I'd get a job at 55, 58, 60. This is the only thing that has insulated me. It's truly sustainable. Knock on wood, but if the plane goes down on my way home, my games will bring in $300,000 to $400,000 for the next two or three years in this little trickle before it totally peters out.
I didn't do Clutter 1 thinking I'd be here, but that's what's happened. I'm really grateful. One last one that I used to do with kids. I used to be arrogant enough that I had this slide that said, the best game I ever played is called the game of making original IP. The score is in sales dollars. The reason I did this is that all that thing that's blacked out was to tell them, it's not in how beautiful you think it is or how much your friends like it or whatever. I wanted them focused on making money. My last point I want to make here, and I know it sounds like a humble brag and I hate that, but it's part of why trying to be a solopreneur is worth it. I don't keep score anymore. That bonsai tree, I've taken care of it. It takes care of me now.
Good enough is good enough. I am not Tetris. I am not Candy Crush, but I do ok. I feel like I won the lottery on one level, but it's a small lottery. It's enough to keep me going. I don't have money issues. I don't have a boss over my shoulder. I don't plan on retiring. I am that code monkey. Some people think that's a derogatory term. I've loved it my entire career. I love it when I'm writing code. This is something you can do. Everything you do is in preparation for a future path that you can't predict. Good enough is good enough. Do it by yourself. Dumbest decision I ever made was quit my job and make the first Clutter game. Smartest decision. Let's keep going and make the second one. This is the question now, could the solopreneur path be right for you? This is the last mantra, "Working for myself, I still have good and bad days, but the worst day that I've ever had working for myself is still slightly better than the best day that I've ever had working for someone else."
Questions and Answers
Participant 1: When it came to being a solopreneur and stuff like that, were there other aspects of the business field that you needed to get familiar with, such as accounting, and contracting, and things like that? What was that jump like?
Joe Cassavaugh: Contracting, not really. I did it mostly myself. I am quite good at Excel now. I keep every dime in a spreadsheet. I track. I love it. You do whatever you need to do at the time. One distributor stopped paying me and somebody else sent me a cease and desist that I could copy to send to them to get them to pay me or take them off the site. You learn whatever you need to do. Programming's harder. That part's the easier part. The toughest part actually is a little bit, once you realize it's your effort that matters, if I work 10% harder, I make 10% more. If I slack off 10%, I make less. Balancing that to still take a vacation or anything is the tough one, because it's truly that commodity coffee can, however I put out, within a certain degree of quality, it's going to keep going.
Participant 2: I was wondering, there are so many games nowadays. How did you initially get a player base and get noticed?
Joe Cassavaugh: I call it the 100,000 eyeballs. I only do about 1% of my business on Steam, that sells first-person games and shooters and RPGs. That wasn't my audience. I was already in the space where I created the Mahjong Quest games that I knew I'd get 100,000 eyeballs. To get a game on Big Fish at the time, all you had to do was, it had to be so long. It couldn't be uglier than my players thought it was. It couldn't be really ugly. It couldn't have violence. There are many things. It had to run full screen and windowed, and a couple other criterias. It had to be, again, at least six hours long. I knew I could meet that criteria, so at least it would get seen. Then if I just got a conversion rate, I'd make enough to keep going. I knew them and iWin would take it. GameHouse, which now loves me, rejected it originally. I knew the distributors were there and would take the game, basically.
Participant 3: When you decided to take the plunge and go all in on this, for your first game, how scary was that and did you have a plan B?
Joe Cassavaugh: Yes, the plan B was always just to go back to work. I had tried a couple other times. They're too long of stories, but I failed miserably. I made one game, made no money, made nine games trying to get people to my website, when I didn't work for somebody else because I had some funny money. Those, I couldn't get people to my website. I came this close to going to work at IT, when a friend of mine who worked at iWin said, you'd be perfect to do the Mahjong Quest games. Those little Windows games I wrote got me that job. I failed miserably trying to get people to my own website. This one, I knew I had the distributors. My wife's name is Ana. She does gorgeous pottery. If pottery was digital, we would be billionaires because it's Ana's clay house. I'm going to say that.
Her turning to me and saying, can you do this yourself? The fact that I had no fight at all in that area. I had no, please let me do this. This was total support. Then, again, when that game came in in the middle, I was a little disappointed, but really, I knew that I could do the second one. Then I got lucky. I did not know about the sequel effect, which became the franchise effect. The rest was just, I could work harder. What happens is I think I can do it in six months. Then all of a sudden, I want to put one more thing in the game and so forth. I'm now to the point though, every game, what happens is, I have a list of things and some I even implement, but then when I start doing the puzzles, they're giving me a little too much, I put it off to the next game.
The next game always starts with a few things that I've already done that I haven't really put in the game. Once I committed to, I'm doing this, it's mostly finding, what's going to be the next fun in the story. I could do a whole talk on the weirdness of the stories. The meta, me chatting to them is just the beginning. It's very strange how the stories evolved. Because part of me goes, the stories don't matter. I'm a puzzle guy. I love the puzzles and so forth. I have fun with the stories in a way that at least some of my customers like.
Participant 4: I'd like to ask you one then, and it's a question about responding to feedback. The feedback that you put up at the start of your talk was pretty brutal about, "This is awful. It looks like a student project." Like, we're all experts at taking feedback, but how do you know when the feedback is a gift and when it's not? How do you make a decision on whether to act on it?
Joe Cassavaugh: The gift thing doesn't matter, but that's a great question, because I love the story. Early on, I decided two things. I tell the game dev people, if you make a game where all your friends and everybody goes, "That's pretty good. Yes, that's kind of good. That's good," and nobody hates it, you've made a sucky game. I wanted the horseshoe. I was so happy with the horseshoe. I learned quickly on, I came up with this reasoning, if you try to please the haters, all you're going to do is water down your idea, or game, or whatever. What you want to do, and if I have a golden or genius, this is that. Listen to the people who love your games that are still complaining about something, and then remove that something. That's what I've done for the 18 or 19 games. I've done this. I want to share one.
This last game was supposed to be called, This One's for You. I made a splash screen. Then I told them to do the survey for me. They did the survey and just about every topic, they came right down the middle. I made another one. I got an idea for player's choice awards, I was going to call it. Then I showed them that splash screen and the other one, and they voted. It came in right down the middle. They all had different reasons for why they liked one or the other. Now the game's called Clutter 19, survey says what? I'm talking the whole time about the stupid survey and how they can't agree on anything.
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