Authenticity Over Convention: Lessons from 16 Years of Solo Game Development

Transcript

Shane Hastie: Good day, folks. This is Shane Hastie for the InfoQ Engineering Culture Podcast. Today, I’m sitting down with Joe Cassavaugh of Puzzles by Joe. Joe, welcome. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us.

Joe Cassavaugh: Thanks so much for having me here. This is going to be a pleasure. I already know.

Shane Hastie: I’m happy for your confidence and I’m looking forward to an interesting conversation. But my normal starting point with these is who’s Joe?

Introductions [01:26]

Joe Cassavaugh: Well, Joe is the Joe of Puzzles by Joe, first of all. Man, I’m 68 years old. I’ve been doing the Clutter Series since I was 52. I started out as a little programmer two years out of college. I started on key punch way back. I was a math guy. I went to a good engineering school. I thought I was going to be a teacher. That didn’t happen. And the rest is just a very curvy path of how I ended up here. And I’d switched over to at least games adjacent in about 1991, ’93, I think. And then, real game when I did a game called Mahjong Quest between 2005 and 2009, and that was part of the casual market boom.

And if people aren’t aware of what the casual market boom is, that’s a PC download casual market. This is where they figured out women over 40 with some disposable income would actually buy games if they were the right kind of games. And the right kind of games were not RPGs or first person shooters. They were more like solitaire, three-ball match, that type of stuff. Anyways, IT guy for years, and then finally made the switch into doing it myself. So, that’s who I am I think on one level.

Shane Hastie: We might dig deeper into who you are on other levels as we go through the conversation, but that’s how we go.

Joe Cassavaugh: Sure.

Shane Hastie: So, solopreneur, game developer for 16 years and it’s successful. That’s almost a unicorn.

Achieving sustainability as a solopreneur [03:06]

Joe Cassavaugh: Definitely a unicorn. I think of myself as a purple unicorn almost at times. But I’ve only started thinking of the solopreneur label about five or six years ago. Before that, I was really just trying to get out the next game and surviving. I started thinking in terms of sustainability way back in Clutter III really. But I didn’t really achieve it until about five years ago. So, in a nutshell why I think I’m successful enough, and I’m going to give you this just two second one, it took me 10 years to make my first million net to me. It took me only 5 years to make my second million.

And that’s the interesting part of my story from both a tech, building sustainability, and starting thinking of myself in terms of business more than… I mean I did a talk after Clutter III 13 years ago called Business Before Pleasure. So, I always had this on my mind of trying to be sustainable, but I got more serious along the way and notched it up whenever I realized, yes, this is going to be around long term. And there were several things. One of the interesting pivot points is actually about six years ago, I went to Unity finally. And that changed because up until doing that, I worked in an environment for 10 years, but I knew I was going to leave that environment.

So, it’s like having a house you’re going to move out of. You’re not going to fix up everything. And as soon as I went to Unity, I knew that was going to be my forever environment, really. So, I could justify anything I could think of that I’m going to use three or four years down the road, I could justify doing right now. Don’t put it off, let’s do it and let’s do it right enough, good enough, et cetera, so that I could get faster and ask me about commodity at some point down the road.

Shane Hastie: So, thinking of the audience, the people we’re talking to today, they’re technologists. They are looking at what are their career options. Obviously, right now the industry is in disruption, it has been over the decades multiple times. You and I both are of a similar vintage. And yes, I also did program on punch cards, and we’ve seen these cycles. I think there are unique aspects to the current cycle, but they’re still cycles. If I think of the technologist who’s wondering about what are his options, her options, how do they choose, what advice would you give them about going down that solopreneur path?

Career options for technologists in disruption [06:00]

Joe Cassavaugh: Well, I worked for iWin for five years during the boom. I made three games called Mahjong Quest, Mahjong Quest 1, 2, and 3 and they made them way too much money and I was getting paid well, but not the money they made. And even though timing has a lot to do with how a game is successful or not, I felt like I didn’t get what I should have gotten for doing those games. And at some point, I decided that I didn’t really want to be what I called a hired gun anymore. I didn’t want to work for that. But before that really happened, I pitched over and over again different games to iWin who I was working for, who I was actually an employee. And they constantly got turned down, what I call deaf by committee.

And they finally half greenlit this game. They greenlit it enough that I was working. I spent a good seven, eight months on it. And it was about halfway done when two other games they did bombed. The market had gotten tight. Like any market by the way, a market usually has a gold rush and then it has a glut and then it’s slow decline. And that’s what happened to the PC casual download market. When they pulled my game, I was traveling to New Hampshire with my future wife and she turned to me and said, “Can you do the game yourself?” And really up until that point, it had never occurred to me. It really didn’t. I was happy working for other people to a degree, because I always felt like I could get that next job.

I’d moved enough in my career and I got along with most people. Plus, I was pretty good as a software engineer, not great. I think I was a great debugger and I think I did things other people didn’t do, but I didn’t leave the best code behind me. And even though I wasn’t a prima donna, getting along with other people was not my strength. But when she said that to me and all of a sudden, wow, this person will support me doing it by myself, I immediately went, no, but something close, close enough. And that’s when I seriously started considering going out on my own.

Building sustainable income through experimentation [08:20]

And immediately, I liked the idea and I knew the market well enough that I knew I could get a hundred thousand eyeballs, that all I had to do was create a game that was good enough to a target demographic. It wasn’t a game for me and that if I did this, if I got enough eyeballs, I could survive. And that’s what led to me. And from that point on, all I’m doing is experiments and learning things. And that’s my life viewpoint is you have all this common sense knowledge, or what the bosses believe or what the market believes or everything, but it’s not all true. There’s a lot of cognitive bias going on. So, anyways, I decided prove I could do it and I did just well enough to keep going.

And for the first couple of games, that’s all I cared about, was replacing my need to work for somebody else. But then things started shifting and shifting and I got more and more. I give talks to game dev people and one of my favorite things I ever did, which I now think of as a little bit arrogant, but I did it for a purpose. I have a slide that says the best game I ever played was the game of how to make money creating games. And the score is in dollars and then it lists a bunch of things that isn’t, which was the point because I’m talking to these kids right out of college game dev.

Advice for aspiring solopreneurs [09:50]

And I say to them, “Look, it’s not about following your passions. It’s not about using the best tech. It’s not about award-winning designs. It’s not about any of that stuff. It’s about a business. Can you make a business out of it?” And so that’s what I pushed in my mindset. And I’m not sure if that answered the question you asked me, but I think what I’m saying is I did what I needed to do to get to sustainability. And then I also knew I had to ask myself, what do I need to replace from the day job if I’m going to do this, so I don’t want to do the day job anymore? I had two kids going through high school. So, I knew what I could do financially if I could. I had some success and I had a war chest put aside from two games prior, so I had a little cushion to experiment with.

So, I had all those things. And then the demographic I was going for was way older than me. They were women between 50 and 70. And I often say, I know, you know, everybody thinks that developers think they know their audience. They don’t know their audience because developers are usually younger, tech savvier, they think differently than the demographics they actually get as players. And so the one advantage I have was I was quickly approaching my demographic and actually I had a wife that was dead center in my demographic and a future mother-in-law that was a little older than my demographic and that was in the house. And I watched them play games and I started realizing the difference between when I played my game and when I watched them play my game and how I had to constantly evolve the game or do onboarding or do things that just made it easier for these people, which I also think of as a non-gamer demographic.

It’s not like they played tons of games. These are casual games. They’re not spending 60 hours and a hundred hours. They’re buying a game for 10 bucks or less. They’re playing it for 10 hours or less and moving on. And they have 20 games in their library or something. And that’s very different than the traditional sense of gaming, where people live inside the game to a degree or close. So, anyways, that’s again, I don’t know if I really helped you here.

Shane Hastie: Actually, you are, because what you’re talking about is understanding your customer and understanding the environment you’re operating in. And as technologists, one of the things we often forget is the people we are building this thing for are not us.

The people we build products for are not the same as us [12:32]

Joe Cassavaugh: Yes, one of the things I think people think I’m exaggerating, if I said the right phrase, but I’ll believe it because that’s what the talk is designed to do. When I do the game dev talks, I say at one point, I had to unlearn almost everything I knew. And it’s a little bit of an exaggeration, but not much. I knew a lot of tech for a certain size of game where I had a couple of other programmers and there’s levels of what you build depending on what you think needs to be built. You don’t need if you’re the only programmer, you don’t need quite the structure that you need if you got three programmers. You know what I’m saying? And then it’s even worse when you’re doing it by yourself.

Because then when I look back at just my programming aspect, a lot of things I did, I wasn’t doing because of programming elegance or object-oriented programming or design patterns or any of that stuff. What I did was what got me to my next milestone. And at some point, I actually realized that, wait a minute, when I start doing the coding, my objective every day shouldn’t be, “Okay, what can I accomplish today or during this two-week period, et cetera, to get to this milestone?” What I’d really be asking myself is, “Where am I going to get stuck? Where’s the unknown?” And I literally, once I realized that and I started doing that approach, that totally changed everything, because what happens is when you do that, you automatically jump to the hardest problem first.

And if it turns out, you can’t really do it or you hit a wall, boom, you’re done with the project and you lost not much. I call it risk mitigation and some people hear that and go, “No, I’ve been taught this other stuff”. I say, “Yes, but you’ve also been taught Agile. When did we learn Agile? Not that long ago. When did we learn object-oriented programming, not that long ago”. There’s all these techniques. I worked at multiple types of places in my life and I can tell you, whatever you’re being taught at school is being applied, it’s hit or miss around the industry how its being applied. Different companies, different size of companies do different things. And if you’re by yourself, you don’t need half of it.

I have a favorite story about some of this stuff. I went to GDC 2018 and I did a session. And right before my session, there was a guy from Naughty Dog, the guy that did Last of Us II, and he did a session on debugging and how to debug better, and he said so many things that I do. And it was fascinating that, first of all, he was so adamant about just certain good bug practices and stuff, and we had the same viewpoint. And then at some point, I realized the reason I learned all this was because what happens when you’re by yourself, if you can’t debug, your screwed.

You’re just screwed. Because there’s nobody else to help you find the problem. You got the internet. And when the internet isn’t working for you, you’re going, “Okay, well am I going to work on this for 20 hours or am I going to do something else?” Or can I ask my wife who knows nothing and just hope that the light bulb goes off. And occasionally the light bulb went off. Because when you’re explaining to a total, not dummy, dummy’s not the right word, somebody that’s technically challenged, as you’re trying to explain to them, you often gain insight as to why you’re failing at something or what you’re missing. So, that’s huge. But it’s all by yourself. And so you learn how to do certain things because you have to, and I got really good at debugging.

And I say 90% of software development is debugging, by the way, if you’re a developer. Yes, you’re doing the coding, but everybody thinks coding is the important part. And I’m like, “Eh”.

Shane Hastie: Well, it’s 10% of the work as you point out.

Joe Cassavaugh: Yes. And even if it’s more, it’s not the thing you should be worried about as much. I worry more when you hit a wall and you don’t know how to get past the wall. That’s what I worry about. So, ask me about commodity at some point, because that’s one of my big things, which is also related to sustainability.

Shane Hastie: What do you mean by commodity?

Joe Cassavaugh: So, I don’t care what you do in coding. There are things you do over and over again in coding. Let me give you a concrete example. I have a save file and in that save file, I want to save each of my levels and what high scores you’ve gotten, where you’ve achieved certain things and stuff. And I don’t know if you’re aware, but what I do in the Clutter games, which nobody’s seen anything quite like it because it’s my favorite invention after Clutter itself, is a concept I call replay. And what replay is, is I have a high score list for every single puzzle I’ve ever created. It’s not how fast you finish it. It’s not how many points you’ve gotten. It’s essentially how close you are to perfect.

And if you are perfect, you are 100% the way I define perfect and everybody can do that. So, I wanted to save that information. And every time I do a new game, I’m adding a new feature or I’m changing something. And so my data that I need to keep in a save file per level, every time I want to add it, I have to write all this extra code all over the place that’s boring and it’s work, but I have to do it right. And one day I wrote a system, well there was a system that turned out you could automate how you did that by reflection. Reflection is this computer technology that allows you to write code that looks at the code you’ve written.

It’s complicated and there’s not that many cases you should use it actually. But in this case, it was perfect. Because I could write code that looked at what I had written once, and every time I wanted to add something new, I didn’t have to add all this other boilerplate code. It would do that for me automatically. And so I got that once. And that was actually before I moved to Unity. When I moved it over to Unity, I rewrote it to do it even better. Because I realized there’s tricks you can do in C# that you can do even better. And now after doing that, every time there’s something new, I can literally just add one line of code per level that has this new feature and done, saved.

And that allows me to move much faster. I’m not sure everybody calls it commodity, but in my mind, I think of certain software as commodity software, things you do over and over again. Like localization, I finally invested in the time to build localization well enough and right enough that I can move to a new game and add a new language for 200 bucks and two days of work. And most of that is just because I have to send the data back and forth and clean it up because translation services are imperfect. But it shouldn’t cost you that much if you’re doing it right and you can build your system so it’s really good. So, I have this commodity. And what I find is that one of the things I’m asked, which also is… By the way, I want to throw this in. I have a talk called Anti-agile Solopreneur that really does get a few people bent out of shape.

From MVP to Best Viable Product [20:09]

And one of the arguments I make in that one is that everybody wants you to focus on getting out the MVP. My problem is what the M stands for in MVP, which is minimum. That’s not the MVP I’m shooting for. I’m shooting for the best viable product. Because part of what’s going on here with what we’re talking about with commodity is you build this stuff and you use it a thousand times down the road. And when you do that, it’s worth the investment to do it. So, I always do that. So, I shoot for BVP. So, I knew one guy who was an engineer, VP of engineering. And before I told him my joke, he called it best viable product. Anyways, I don’t know.

Shane Hastie: So, you mentioned at some point that you wanted to chat about some of your failures.

Learning from failure [21:00]

Joe Cassavaugh: Oh no, I said you could ask me about my one huge failure, which I’ve mentioned in every interview I’ve done. Like I got interviewed for a book and they got to this and this is the part they wanted to talk about, which was my worst idea, what happened and stuff. And so let me give you a quick version of this. So, early on Clutter did well as a casual PC game. And so there was a market that I sold to. The way the revenue stream works there is you sold to portals. The portal takes 65, 70% and you get 30 or 35 or something. And that’s the way it works with the platform holders and stuff. And you just make a game that sells, X amount of sales is enough so that you survive. And that’s all I was worried about for the first five games or so.

And then at some point, I realized… And then I also realized I owned my IP. And at some point, I got approached by Big Fish to publish on their platform. And when they said they could put my game on mobile, I also learned that if you have a digital product, and you want it to make money for 10 years or longer, there’s two ways to do it. You do a subscription or you do new platforms. And since I was going to new platforms, I was set for a very long time. And I started realizing this is going to be a thing. And the other thing I realized is I could live anywhere I wanted. I didn’t need to stay in California anymore.

Occasionally, I get somebody new and I will say, “My wife does pottery, gorgeous pottery. But if you have a passion for something and you can choose between digital and a real world something, go digital. Digital is so much better in the long run. It just is”. It’s the gift that keeps on giving if you own your own IP, and even I know I’m not huge, it’s just good. I’m not Candy Crush, I am not Tetris, I don’t care. It’s enough for me and I have no boss, which is one of the big motivations for me putting the effort into going solo.

I have a little thing in my talk where I say, you have to be able to look in the mirror and ask yourself these really tough questions if you’re going to go it alone and be a solopreneur. And the most important question of that is there’s two at the end. What are you going to risk by doing it? But more importantly, what do you risk by not doing it.

Shane Hastie: From the point of thinking of somebody who’s considering this is a possibility for me, what’s the biggest gotcha to avoid, the mistake you avoided that somebody thinking about going down this path should be very wary of or aware of?

The biggest mistake: confusing luck with skill [22:46]

Joe Cassavaugh: The biggest mistake everybody makes from CEO’s down whatever. Do not mistake luck for skill. Okay. There has to be some luck. Man plans, God laughs. The market’s brutal. At one point, my fifth game really kicked butt. Not sure why, it’s sad. In hindsight, it was an anomaly with maybe only one distributor that was enough that I noticed it with everything else, but it was really an anomaly there and it led me to my worst decision. I ran into two young people that were type As right out of college and I decided that for Clutter six, I would let them do the story in art. And we did a more conventional Clutter. And I had already done some stuff where I chit-chat with the players and stuff.

And what happened was that was my best looking game, producer and marketing types loved it, but it performed poorly. It cost me about 12 grand when all the other games cost me nothing, or almost nothing. And my customers complained that there wasn’t enough Joeness and they thought I sold them out by having these other two people do stuff. Even though I was involved at everything and okayed everything and input, and I just didn’t do the hard work of actually writing the thing or doing the art, I let them do it. And I only did that because I had enough buffer, right? I was feeling like, “Oh, pretty good. I’m off to the races. I’m going to be making 300K a year soon, is what looked like the projections”.

And I took longer to do the game because it just taught me a lesson and it led me here, because we were already doing the game after with those two people. When I got the results in and I just immediately cut it out, said, “Nope, we’re done. We’re done doing a sequel of that sort of”. And I did this game called Clutter Infinity Joe’s Ultimate Quest where I up the Joeness. I told the story, this is wild. I was 62 at the time. I told a little story within the game as the reward. Every time you play a puzzle in the main quest, which is in every game anywhere from 50 to a hundred levels, you get a picture, a quote, and some chit-chat.

The first couple games was more of a real story, then it became one about game dev and me chatting about myself. In this one, it was a story about for every year of my life, how did I end up being the guy that ended up being the guy that ended up creating Clutter? I started with this story about my bad left eye. I have three jock brothers. I grew up in a jock family. And when I say jocks, we were all jocks sort of. But I was also the brainy math guy, and the reason I was the brainy math guy is I have a bad left eye. And because of that, I didn’t enjoy playing catch with my father as much. And he did the books for the local Legion at night and he was an accountant during the day.

I watched him doing the books because I wanted to spend time with him that wasn’t catching a ball. And I learned long division before I was in first grade and I say if it wasn’t for the bad left eye, I’d be more like my brothers and probably would not have gone to an engineering school and no Clutter. And then I said, “And I fell in love with long division. What’s long division?” It’s a bunch of little rules that if you do them right little steps, you get the right answer. It was my first algorithm. And even though I didn’t really do computers till after college, I was already in love with algorithms in general and so forth. That game, by the way, kicked butt.

Didn’t do as well as five, but it did much better than six. And now the gloves were off of, “Oh, I think I can do anything I want as long as I’m true to myself and keep going”. And at that point, I knew I wasn’t going to ever do a game with another person. I wasn’t going to go down that route again.

Shane Hastie: But lean into the Joness.

The Joness factor and player connection [27:03]

Joe Cassavaugh: Yes, I can’t even describe how weird that’s gotten. It’s part of what keeps it fun for me. How do I make it less of a grind for me and how can I have it fun and how can I push it, so that each game’s slightly different while still being true to what they want? This game, Clutter 19 is actually called “Clutter 19 Survey says what?” And it’s because I promised them in the last game that this game was going to be for them. So, I gave them a survey and this game was supposed to be called this Game’s for You, and it got changed because of the survey results. But I get to talk this whole meta thing about what the survey taught me and it’s all just fun, but it’s one of the reasons some people hate the game.

They can’t believe my picture’s in the game occasionally. They can’t believe I chit-chat with the player. They think that’s a big ego thing. They thought the first game, which talked about Clutter a lot and gave Clutter tips how to declutter your life. Some of the negative reviews said it was a self-help book masquerading as a game. So, it’s been a hysterical ride. I hate the fact that story has to be in all games, that people have this story bias, that stories all important in the game dev world narrative. And I’m like, “Somebody somewhere should study my games for the narratives I’ve been able to pull off that if people looked at them closely would go, you’re nuts”.

They’d be amazed that all I do is chit-chat with my players and that counts as the story, and they seem to enjoy it from the feedback I get.

Shane Hastie: I’ve certainly enjoyed our chit-chat today, so I can understand…

Joe Cassavaugh: I don’t know how helpful I’ve been.

Shane Hastie: So, Joe, lots of interesting stuff there. If people want to continue the conversation, where do they find you?

Joe Cassavaugh: Well, I do have a website you can search.

Shane Hastie: Joe, thanks very much for taking the time to talk to us today.

Joe Cassavaugh: Thank you, Shane. Total pleasure.

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