Is waffle your last job ever? Yeah, I saw that question. I wondered if that was a typo. My last job. I've not considered if it's my last job, but I wouldn't mind. All right, we just got done interviewing James Robinson of uh Waffle Fame, and James provided so many great insights. What were some of your takeaways, Nate? We've talked to a lot of a lot of game creators and many of the most successful ones have been sort of accidental successes and James is is kind of another example of this and I find that the fact that he's basically found his last job at Waffle um is pretty incredible and such a testament to the type of person and the values that he has as a game creator and really his skill set. So really fascinated by this conversation. All right, so on to the pod. I'm Aaron Cardell and I'm here with my co-host Nate Cadlac. Today we're excited to speak with James Robinson, the chief waffle maker of Waffle Studio. James, also known as Jesse, created the hit word game Waffle, known as one of the word games that can rival even Wordle. He founded Waffle Studio behind its massive success. Aside from Waffle Studio, James has been working on software for a long time and has worked in positions at companies like Coral Tree Systems, DRIS, and Cognitus Global. Waffle is a world puzzle game that challenges players to create words by rearranging a grid of letters. The shape of the grid is a square, and it has tiles in it, which makes it look like a waffle. Players create words by switching tiles all around on the waffle, and each waffle has only one solution. Players can tackle the daily waffle, deluxe waffle, or go through the long waffle archive for more fun. James, we're thrilled you're here. James, we always like to ask, what's your favorite game to play? Yeah. Well, I got a shout out to my puzzle friends, Nerdle and Squaredle and Kuckle. I play those quite a lot. Um, into a lot of puzzles recently. Polygonal, that's a good one. I love puzzles in general. I love uh paper puzzles. I've been doing a lot recently. I've bought a lot of puzzle books since I've been doing this endeavor full-time. So, I've been doing a lot of those. I loved your chat with Jim Bumgardner cuz I've got a few of his books. Vampire Survivors. Have you played that one? No. That's a good one. That's a new That's a bit of a different game. That's not a puzzle game, but I've been getting into that quite a bit recently. That started out as a web game, which is interesting. Using Phaser and it just sort of blew up. So yeah, I find that quite fascinating. And it's quite retro as well. I like quite a lot of old retro games. I've got one of these GameBoys that can play a lot of retro games, all the sort of Sega Capcom PlayStation games. So, so yeah, I've been enjoying that lately. That's awesome. Speaking of of retro, as a fellow Commodore 64 afficionado myself, I I heard that's uh you know, maybe where your dad taught you to make games. Can you tell us more about that experience? Yeah. So, yeah, I mean that was a long time ago. I mean, I don't know if he uh taught me a lot of things at the time. I was so young, but I did pick up a lot of it. He he basically showed me how basic was the programming language at the time, how that worked and and got me into it. And we would just I would sit there as he was typing it out and he'd explain how it was going. And I remember debugging that sort of thing. He'd print it out on this old dot matrix printer and sort of go through it and yeah, he sort of encouraged me to learn programming. I I went to Visual Basic on my computer and stuff like that and I always tried to make little games with that. Yeah. So, it's quite old technology that I started with. I had one of these Scion organizers as well. It was like this little I it was a handme-down sort of thing that I got given from someone and you could program. It only had two lines of text on the display, but you could program it with basic. And so you could you could type in these two on these two lines like a whole program. And I managed to make a very small game out of that by just I had a little character that you can move up and down between the two lines and then it would have a sort of projectile coming across the screen that would try and take you out and you just had to jump between these two lines and it would speed up and you get a score at the end. But that was very popular. I mean, I handed it around in class at school and people were it I didn't see it until the end of the day and people were trying to beat their scores and everything and I thought that was a great example of a game that was very simple um but still addictive and competitive. So that's that was a good memory of of one of my early programming. we gave a little bit of your your background on just some of the different companies that you've worked at, but uh from that start in gaming, what's your experience over time been with with gaming? And can you tell us just a little bit more about your journey in general? Yeah, I I feel like a relative impostor in the games industry lately. I've been going to these games conferences, but I've never made I've never managed to finish a game aside from Waffle before. I've always wanted to make a game. I've always had it in my New Year's resolutions to finish a game. Well, this year I'll just do something that I can get out there and people can play it, but I've never managed to get past the sort of first stages of creating a game. Like, I get into the concept of it and then I don't get to the end of it and actually finish it so people can play it. It's always been in the background of my mind. It's always been something that I wanted to achieve and I've always tried to learn different game frameworks like Unity or Kokos 2D or I did a lot of Flash stuff early on but yeah again I never managed to get to that point where I actually finished a game that could be played all the way through. It was only when creating Waffle was using web technology which was something I was using day in day out. So it was a bit more familiar and I could knock something up quickly just using things that I already knew. It was very simple. So I actually managed to finish it and I could push it out there for people to play. Yes. And it's been Yeah. bit life-changing, I guess. I'm so curious about the design of Waffle. So my background is in design branding. Did you do all the design yourself? How did you think about the aesthetic quality of the game? Yeah, I mean, yeah, it was all done myself. I mean, I did have a bit of influence from Wordle, you might be able to tell with the color scheme, but I've always had an interest in design, keeping in sort of minimal design, keeping things as simple as possible, but still having a bit of charm to them, like typography and colors and just things like that. little animations, micro animations, stuff like that I've always had an interest in since I was messing around with Flash when that was popular. Yeah. So, I've always had an interest in design like that and music posters as well, things like that sort of art style. I collect a lot of playing cards. You can get a lot of playing cards that are done by graphic designers and they have different designs on each card. And I love stuff like that. that's, you know, it's a very small sort of art form, but it's still compelling and it's got like character and personality to it. So, I guess it comes from that. You know, when I when I first found your game, I think that's what drew me in because you'll see a lot of these games use a similar template and yours just has so much more personality kind of embedded in it. And I think that that's what initially drew me and as someone who likes games but is passionate about design really caught my eye. And so I appreciate that and and what you've what you've built with Waffle. Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons it's been so popular. I think is it has got a bit of personality to it. I like to say I we try quite hard to make sure it has got something a bit extra and people can tell it's created by humans. We've got people behind it that are putting in the effort to make it enjoyable, make it fun. Yeah. Trying to keep it human, I guess. But I I you know, I do this because I like seeing people enjoy it. So I I try and put things in it to make people enjoy it more and just try and encourage people to play nice little comments and jokes and encouragement. Just try and be have fun with it. And it seems to be appreciated. We get nice comments back. We get a lot of nice feedback about it. Someone said, "I like one of the comments about our donations page. We have like a buy me a coffee page, kofhei.com." And someone described that as the most wholesome page on the internet because you look at that and you see all these comments that we get just people thanking us for the game and what we're doing. And I think that's partly because they they can see it's created by people and there's a person behind it and we try and push out messages to people just to say, "Hi, how you doing? Hope you're enjoying the game this week. Got another one. We're still going." Yeah. So, it's nice. See, you you can definitely pick up on that handcrafted feel like Nate suggested and like you just described. You know, having talked to a lot of puzzle creators now, I'm just super curious like the the actual puzzles themselves, how much do you get some help from algorithms to generate those uh and and how much of those are handcreated or curated? Yeah, I think curated is is a good word for it. I obviously I created the original algorithm if you like the the generator for them, but you know there's there's certain things that go into creating a good puzzle that you need a human eye over it. You need to check them and you need to play it and you need to get a feel for it to see if it is a good puzzle. And there's certain things in it that we can put rules in the code. So over time the code has changed to be less sort of it's not very systematic. It has certain heruristics, I guess you'd say, about it that choosing words that aren't too obscure. You could have one obscure word, but you don't want them all to be obscure. It needs to It's nice when it's symmetrical, I think. It just looks nice. Um, things like that. So, and we're always reviewing the words as well because it's that's that makes or breaks it the word list that we're using because we don't want words that people don't recognize or they're not internationally known because we've got British as well as American players. So, I try and remove any words that are not cross-atlantic sort of words. I removed the word dilly the other day. That didn't seem quite good. It didn't seem to fit. So, we remove that. And it's surprising how often they come up. I mean, I what I really need to do is go through the whole word list and just decide if certain words are good or bad, but that's quite a long list and I just sort of pick them out as they come across and do it that way. But yeah, it's so yeah, we do curate the puzzles and and check that the number of moves that they involve and how difficult they are feels good. Um, but mostly, you know, as time goes on that gets more and more automated, but we still check. Another design consideration is kind of the the key game mechanics that you landed on. And I I think your method of using stars is uh really well thought out. Can you tell us a little more like did you just get that right on the first try or how how did you get there? What what was the iteration process for you? The like the origin story. Well, I mean yeah. So it didn't take very long to make. So I guess I to start from the beginning I was I was doing my washing up one evening at home and I was thinking about Wordle and how that works and how it's luck based and and I thought I wondered if there was a way to make a word game like that where you're trying to find a word that's not luck based. Um, so if you were given the letters to create the word, then that would make it different because there's only one solution that it could be based on the letters. But then the only way that works is if there's several words. So I tried to make words out of a 4x4 grid. Yeah. So after I done the washing out, I quickly sort of went to my computer and I was trying to come up with words that fit into this game that is compelling to play and solvable. And 4x4 grid of four letter words was was too difficult to create. I couldn't find enough words that fit in that sort of shape. So, I ended up going to fiveletter words because I think like a lot of people at the time, I was trying to I I had some code that I'd written to try and find the best word or start a word. So, I had a list of five letter words already. So, I tried to fit those into a grid and and it worked and we just ended up with this this shape and this sort of puzzle that you could solve just by having given some letters. You could fit them into this shape. And then it evolved over the next couple of days. But so I'm sort of working on what I'm getting to is the process that I used was testing it with my friends really. I just sort of gave it to them and saw if if they enjoyed playing it or if they would play at all if it sort of captured their interest. So, I've got a couple of friends, John and Ra, who I've got a little WhatsApp group with, and I just sort of put this word puzzle in front of them and tried to see if they would play it. And and dragging around letters was good, but then that was quite difficult. It need they needed the clues of of what letters go where, the yellow and the green. And then I thought you can just keep moving letters until they turn green. So, there needs to be a limit on the number of moves. Otherwise, they were just moving all the letters and it felt a bit too robotic. Um, so that's how I got to the point where I limited the amount of swaps you could do and I thought you could then score it based on how many that you had remaining. So yeah, like the first version I had on paper was on Thursday and then by the Tuesday I'd sort of refined that to the point that it is now really. um where you've got this number of swaps and you've got to solve this these words that are in this grid um and you get yeah number of stars the stars came later I think I think it had you ended up with a score and then I thought you should get a star for each one that you've got remaining that's a good way of doing it um yeah so quite quickly I had that up and running and and that's still pretty much how it is today so if you're like us uh you probably get just massive amounts of feedback on your games. I'm curious like what's the number one request people have right now on on your game? I guess I don't know if it's a request, but the issue that comes up with a lot of people is they want to save their stats. They want to make sure their streak is transferred to a new phone. Um that sort of thing, which I didn't plan ahead for when I first started this. I mean, it was just a throwaway game that I was wanted to put onto the internet. I didn't think people would be playing it long enough that they were precious about their score, but you know, it makes sense. So, that comes up a lot. Um, yeah, I think that's it really. I mean, people are quite happy with how it works. They want more recognition for five stars, I guess, cuz it comes to a point. If you look at how it works, you can sort of get an idea of how to get five stars every time. There's a certain sort of strategy to doing that. And so people are trying to get a streak of just five stars. They're trying to just achieve that every time. You know, it's come up a little bit more recognition of that sort of achievement, I guess, has come up a little bit. But yeah, we don't get a lot of um feedback suggestions. So I' I'd welcome them though. If anyone's got any suggestions for it, we're always trying to find new ways to improve it. We've come up with different ideas. We've got quite a lot of ideas to be honest of things we want to do, but it's just sort of finding the time to do them, which I was chatting to Richard the other day at Nerdle about this and we were sort of saying for a game that practically runs itself, I I don't seem to find enough time to do the things I want to do. And I don't know why that is, but hiring more people. So, I'm hoping that we can fulfill some of the ideas that we've got. I mean, we have got things we'd like to do with it. It's obviously only in one language at the moment, and some people have requested or even created their own versions in other languages. So, we'd like to sort of try and support that, create a few of those. But, I mean, overall, I just want to create more games, I guess, as well. I want to create similar games that have this same sort of level of compelling joy that this one does. I think I've got a lot of other ideas that we could take forward. So, we want to do that. Yeah, we've got quite a long list of of things we could do. I'm trying to think of some of the other ones we do. You have an example of of one or two that you'd like to share of other games or features games or or ideas that you want to implement. So yeah, we've got another game actually that I did recently called oneword search.com. So you can have a look at that. That's um I'm quite happy with that one. That's quite good. I think it's the same with um waffle. I think one of the things um that was in my mind in the back of my mind when I was creating Waffle is I thought someone's probably already done this. Someone's already probably created a game that's got this similar mechanic because it seems quite simple and I thought it must be done before. I mean, I've had ideas before about games and then you search for them, you find someone else's has done it in a far better way than I would have be able to achieve. But this one, I decided just to not look. I thought I just wouldn't do the Google searches. I'll just put it out there and if someone's done it before, they'll tell me. They'll say, "Oh, that's like this game that already exists." Um, but yeah, no, I was quite lucky. I think that it doesn't seem like anyone has created something that's the same as this. And I'm hoping that's the same with one word search as well. It's a new sort of mechanic. I think it seems original. I again there's probably there might be examples out there of similar sort of word searches, but so far I haven't quite found something that works the same as this. So, I'm quite happy with that. But yeah, that's that's the that's the current one that I'm trying to slowly introduce to people. I haven't uh opened it up to the full waffle audience yet, but I'm welcome. I'm I welcome people to try it and let me know what they think. Um, so far the comments have been good. Uh, I had a little feature in there where we get uh message uh people can write me a message and give us some feedback and it gets sent to our Slack channel and we can see what people think of it. And so far people are quite happy with it. People are enjoying it. So that's good. Yeah. more sort of minimal games like that that require logic and potentially word games but or just be the general theme of things that I want to create. I'm just happy to have the freedom to do it now. I mean, I've I'm doing this full-time now. Yeah, Waffle allowed me to quit my job and do this full-time, so I've got the freedom to fulfill some of these ideas that I've had in notebooks for a long time. I've always been one to write down ideas in notebooks. So, I've got a stack of notebooks on the shelf that have got varying levels of quality in game ideas, but hopefully there's a couple in there that might be fun, but we can just try them out now. We've got a good audience that we can just push things out to and see what they think, which is a very um fortunate position to be in. It's very useful. I can tell you you really en enjoy that freedom and and you're making the most of it. Can you tell us a little bit more? I've I've heard actually you're on record as uh being given a really good offer to sell and uh you decided not to. Can you tell us more about your thought process on that? Yeah, I've thought about it a lot every day since probably. But yeah, no. So yeah, sort of late 2022, I was offered I mean I had I had offers before that, but this was significant enough for me to pause and rethink the rest of my life. So I guess you'd call that a life-changing offer. And I guess I had to make a decision whether I wanted to either sell and just live on a boat or something or go to other countries, do anything. But or I could just keep the game and and make more of them because it's got such a big audience that if I didn't have that then it would be a lot more difficult to test out new game ideas and things like that. So, I'd be losing a lot if I sold it. And or did I just, you know, did I just want to go back to my day job, which wasn't a bad place to be, but I had always dreamed of making more games. So, it was following that dream of having the freedom to make more games was worth more to me, I guess, than the offer that I had. That's not to say I don't Yeah. still think about it every day where because I it's come up a few times. We've had more than one offer put on the table and I have to think about it every time. I think it's worth taking the time to consider it and be grateful to be in that position. But so far, yeah, I've kept it. I'm carrying on waffling independently and seeing where it goes. I mean, early on we were we at the point that I got the first offer, we had about 450,000 players a day. So, you know, we we were doing okay. We were doing very well. I had enough to support me doing this full-time as it was. So, and at that point, we hadn't even tried promoting the game to anyone. Um, so it felt like there was still I mean, it still does feel like there's a long way to go with what we could do with it. So that um factored into my decision. Yeah. We felt like well if we've got 400,000 450,000 players now and we haven't even tried to do a Tik Tok campaign or put some ads on Google then who knows what numbers we could get. It turns out it's a lot more difficult than that. We we've tried doing a Tik Tok campaign. We tried doing as or meta platforms um with I don't know doesn't seem to have much of an impact to be honest. Um but recently we hit a new record anyway. We hit a record of 510,000 players this week which was great and and we don't know why. It's just it's just the viral nature of it um is giving us this very slow but steady incline. We have a very flat but slightly inclined number of players each day. It hasn't it hasn't spiked. Well, it did spike a little bit early on, but mainly it's just been it rose to 450,000 and it sort of stayed there for a very long time and it slowly slowly increased gently and we were waiting patiently for it to hit half a million and it did in March. So half a million players in one day and then Yeah. So and it seems to have stuck now. So very happy. Half a million a day. Yeah. So congrats. I'm glad it is. I mean Yeah. Thanks very much. Yeah. No, it's it's Yeah, it's a weird sort of milestone. It feels like a nice round number almost half a million. But yeah, so I mean at the point at the time when I got the first offer, I wasn't sure if it was going to carry on like that. But luckily it has carried on for let's about 18 months since then. So I'm I've got more confidence now that this could carry on for a reasonable amount of time for me to enjoy it and not um regret turning down that that figure. So which leads me to ask is Waffle your last job ever? Yeah, I saw that question. I wondered if that was a typo. My last job. I've not considered if it's my last job, but I wouldn't mind if it was to be honest. I mean, I wouldn't say waffle is my last job. I mean, making games is probably going to be my last job. I'm 38 now, so I feel like I've got a little way to go before I can retire, but I'm just enjoying creating more games. So, my plan at the moment, um, after, you know, I turned down the first big acquisition offer, I thought, well, I've just got to go all in on this and quit my day job, work on this full-time, see where it can go, try and create as much as I can, create as many as many of my ideas, put them into reality as I can. And that's what I want to do. And that's what I'm doing. and it's luckily it's going well so it can support support that idea that plan is going ahead uh and it seems to be going okay so yeah hopefully it is my last job because it's pretty pretty good it's yeah something I could have only dreamed about but it's yeah it's going well so is it my last job uh Yes. Let's say yes. Yeah. I mean that's another thing I hope I hope I can do talks about it at some point because I do hope it is inspiring cuz without sounding ridiculous I would I would feel inspired by me if I was listening to me several years ago because I always wondered if you could come up with a game is it you know is it feasible to come up with a game idea and get it out there and for people to play it and you can make a living out of it and and yeah it is. It is uh it turns out it's still possible which is great. I mean it feels like that's I enjoy the fact that that's still possible in the modern age of the internet that you can still make a little website at home and put it up on the internet and it's practically free as well. You can put you can put a website onto the internet at practically no cost at all if you know what you're doing and if people enjoy it um if it's compelling enough. It didn't take me much for to find people to come and visit either. So that's a great thing for the internet in general that you can still do that still quite democratized. Yeah. So I hope it is inspiring. Yeah. I was inspired actually by Josh Wardle doing a he did an interview on another podcast about his game and how he you know chucked Wordle onto the internet without polishing it. Just it was a quick thing and he got it out there and that inspired me to finish doing Waffle. After my friends seemed to enjoy it, I sort of put it down for a little while until I had the extra motivation to finish the last part of it and put it onto the internet. You talked about maybe wanting to do uh more talks on this and previously you talked about maybe attending more games conferences lately. Um I'm I'm curious uh what what games conferences have you been going to and have you gotten an opportunity to do any talks at those? Yeah. No, I haven't done any talks yet. I think I got invited to do a talk, but I can't remember what happened about that. But no, I haven't done anything like that yet. Like I was I think I was saying before, I still feel like a bit of an impostor in the games industry to be honest. But I'm going to these conferences and I'm just trying to learn as much as possible about them. Um, and I'm learning a lot. It's It's a great industry to be a part of. It's very fun. I go to So, the only conferences I've been to are quite local in the UK. So, I've been to Pocket Gamer, which is in London. That's good. And there's another one called Develop, which is on the south coast in Brighton. Yeah. And it's great listening to the other people doing their talks and just talking about games and the mechanics of games, what compels people to play them. um what do people enjoy about games? And we're still discovering that all the time, which I find fascinating. Um games are always changing, how they're created and what they appeal to and what technologies are being used, but underlying all of it is just uh the human brain and what people enjoy. And we're still finding different ways to um create enjoyable experiences, whether it's yeah these massive games, AAA titles or farming simulators or just a little fiveletter word game. It's quite a range of things that people are trying and still discovering. Um, so yeah, so I don't know if I could do any talks just yet, but I am learning everything about um, waffle and how it's been appealing to people and I've got a lot of experiences from that that might be fun to tell people about like I am now. So, you mentioned a couple of times you feel like an impostor, but uh if if you knew the palpable excitement that Nate and I had, just that we're able to interview you today, you know, hopefully it chips away a little bit at that imposttor syndrome. But in in terms of uh you know, helping other people out, um you know, it seems like you know, at at the beginning you gave shout outs um to you know, some of your friends in the industry. Um I'm I'm curious. Can you tell us a little bit more about your collaboration with the Squirtle founder or creator? Yeah, Mike um who creates Squaredle with an E. Um I got in touch with him through I think some Discord channel thing. Um and also Kuckle as well. We've done crossovers with them. Uh that's the Canadian Wordle variant. Um and that's been Yeah, it's just been really fun to do. It's sort of a good experiment. I mean, the first So, the first one we did I did with Kuckle was it didn't go that well to be honest because we changed the colors of the letters. I used red instead of green and it was uh it was a bit um disconcerting for some people when they came to the game and it was all different. People weren't quite so sure about that. But other than that, people did enjoy it. I think uh that we we gave a bit of a twist to it and and you know it works both ways that we sort of promote each other and we spread the word about these our different puzzles that we've created and and yeah with Squaredle as well um Squaredle created a waffleshaped version of their puzzle and and it sort of matched up with the waffle of the day the same letters. Um so that was really good. it really fitted well and and yeah, I think people appreciate it. People enjoy being referred onto a new game that they can find and um yeah, so it's gone down really well doing that and I would like to do more of that and we've talked about doing it again as well. We did a crossover with Nerdle as well as well. We did uh we did a Nerdle colored version of Waffle and yeah, that went really really well. So yeah, we'd like to do more of that because it's just it's just a fun little thing to add to the the daily routine of the puzzle that people enjoy having a little surprise to find. How do those collaborations come come to be? Is it is it you reaching out? Are people reaching out to you? Are you actively seeking to to do things like that? No, I haven't yet. I think um yeah no uh I think they've come to me generally. I'm trying to think if I reached out or if they did but I think they did. But you know we just I like I love talking to new people about what they're doing. I think this has given me through waffle I've met a lot of people that I you know wouldn't have otherwise got the opportunity to chat to. Um so I always enjoy doing that. If I'm ever given the opportunity to speak to someone that I haven't met before that's got an interesting story about what they're doing or how they've got to where they are in their career, uh I always like doing that. So yeah, so just talking to people and seeing what they're doing with their games. There have been certain there was a Wordleverse Discord group. Um, and yeah, I think we just met on there and started talking about how we're getting on creating our games and it's just natural to see if we can do some sort of crossover that that benefits both of us. Um, it benefits the both of us and also other people enjoy it. So, it's it's sort of win-win win for everyone. And that's sort of how it came about, just um, yeah, just finding people to talk to about the games. And I think there's a lot of people out there since, you know, since Word or other people have just tried creating very small games at home on the I mean, they always have done, but more so there was a bit of a boom of similar sort of daily games, creating something that's compelling enough for people to play once a day. Um, and it's great. It's a great uh community to be involved in. Yeah, I think uh something that we found is just so many of these games are have found some accidental success and it leads to really interesting people like yourself who who have built these games. But going back to launching your game and getting some traction, we have we have a database of thousands of games, right? And everybody's looking to figure out like how to how to get the word out. What would you what did you do and did you do anything special in terms of just putting the game out there and letting people know about it? I don't think I did. I did. So, initially I just put it out on Reddit on certain Reddit subreddits uh sort of the web games one and there was a Wordle group. Um, and that was that was sort of it I think and it sort of gained about 800 players in the first day and that number gradually increased. But then it got featured in a PC games article that was just one of these list articles of games like Wordle. Um, and we got featured in that and that bumped us up to a certain degree. And then we got mentioned in another article by Lifehacker. They did a article about what's about this new game called waffle and cnet.com had an article saying waffle is the new wordle which was very nice very appreciated that that came across and then that just boosted our our numbers to the next plateau really. It sort of bumped us up to I think 430,000 at that point and it just stuck. Every time we had one of these articles it would just step up. Yeah. Again, that wasn't anything that we had prompted. It just spread, which is obviously a dream position to be in. We didn't pay anyone to get into those those places. Um, I guess the only other thing I did was on Twitter, as it was known back then, we I put a few sort of comments on people's Wordle scores just if they were aggravated by Wordle. You know, it was quite natural that I would recommend this new game that I'd cooked up called Waffle. But I don't I don't really think that anyone paid any attention to that. So, I can't I really can't put any of waffle success down to that. We also got bumped up in the Google search results for the word waffle. And I don't know if that really helped us. I mean, people were searching for waffle to find our game. So, the click-through rate for waffle searches is quite high. But it meant that we quickly became number one uh search result for the word waffle in UK and America and various other countries which was yeah no search engine optimization on my part. I have never been involved well I've you know I know the basics of SEO but I've never had to put much effort into that. I've never bothered. Um, my cousin asked me actually, she said, "I was wondering, yeah, if you have a call and you could just give us some advice about search engine optimization, how we can boost our Google ranking." And I just had to say, I I don't really know to be honest. I You just have to make a very popular. Yeah, exactly. Make a very popular website and the Google algorithm works and it will bump it up rankings. But I don't know if that's, you know, increased our numbers of people visiting our game. But according to our analytics, we have quite a lot of fans who are also food lovers or amateur chefs. So perhaps that is because they're searching for waffle recipes and they just so happen to come across a word game. I don't know. But I don't know. I think yeah it's just obviously the mechanic of sharing your scores with your friends I think is something that benefits all of us. So that's I think been the main driver. But yeah, the main driver has just been uh it's been popular. So it's grown naturally. Um despite us trying to boost it further, uh we just generally rely on the organic growth. Have Have you It seems like maybe it's just not necessary for you, but have you ever tried to make a run at getting waffle.com? Yes, I have reached out to them. Uh, shout out to e-hob.com who own that domain and their waffle cushions, but no, they're not interested in selling, which is fair enough. I mean, it was a good domain to have. I would love to have it. They're still obviously they'll be listening to this podcast and if they do hear this, um, we can we can always talk again about that because I would love to have waffle.com, but yeah. No, that's fine. But yeah, I have tried and I've made them what I thought would be quite decent offers, but they're they're doing they're doing stuff with it, so it's fair enough. When was waffle re released in comparison to Wordle? I first came up with it. It was January 27th, 2022. So I was I think I'd only really discovered Wordle that week or thereabouts. It was still quite a fresh game to most people, I think, at that point. Um, and that's when I was thinking about creating something. But yeah, so then I created it. It was by the Tuesday, which was 1st of February, that I sort of had it finished. And that was the day that the New York Times bought Wordle. That was the same day. So that I was looking because I was looking back at my messages with my friends, sort of conversations we're having around that time. And I was trying out this game. And then it was around the same time that that Wordle got bought and was like, "Oh, wow. This is actually worth something to create a little web game. Who'd have thought that?" So, um, I guess that was encouraging to to do something. Um, but yeah, so it's quite around that sort of time and I think a lot of people were were quite inspired to make games around that time. So, I wasn't the only one. James, can you tell us more about your thoughts on on trademarks and if you've pursued those? Yeah, I know that was a I took a deep breath. Someone who's been through that. Uh, we tried to trademark waffle. Well, we have trademarked uh Waffle in the UK and Europe. Um, I tried to trademark it in the USA, but that was complicated, so we haven't done that. Um but yeah, we were just there were a lot of copycats started coming out and it's quite scary when that happens, especially if you've just quit your job to pursue this and then you see these copycats coming out creeping up the Google rankings and in the app stores. So it is something we try and defend and try and you know reach out and just say do you not could you not do that? Um not directly rip off our game. That's all right. But um it's difficult. I mean, I don't know how much energy I should put into it. I guess that's a question I try and ask other people in this situation. How much how much should I worry about that? As long as our game is popular and it's more popular than theirs, you know, then maybe I don't need to worry about it. But it just feels personal and it's something you've created and you're seeing these copies come out there. So there are things you can do. You can try and send the right letters and you can try and reach out to them, but it's like whack-a-ole and they'll just other ones will pop up in their place. So it feels like a bit of a futile thing to do. But so I try not to give it too much thought um and consideration. just try and you know establish what Waffle is amongst people and hope that they recognize that ours is the original game of that name and keep playing it because ours has more character than the rest of them something like that. Yeah. So it has there have been moments when I've felt more compelled to do something about it, but it sort of goes up and down that feeling. So you've told us that Waffle is going to be your last job and it looks like um you know it looks like the way you monetize is is mostly through ads. Is is that right? Could you talk a little bit about how how Waffle earns income? Yeah. Yeah. No, it's through ads. I mean, early on we I try to avoid ads cuz no one likes ads. And I know it's a common thing that comes up in other episodes of the podcast, but we know no one likes ads as they are typically presented and they can be obtrusive and um the way they work is, you know, disconcerting for a lot of people. And so I did try and avoid them for a long time because I don't like them either. Um so I tried getting people to support the game just um with like one-off donations and things like that. That was that was early on. And then one of the offers that I had to acquire the game sort of not massive offer but the guy basically said to me after I turned him down he said look this is what I would do with it. put some ads on it because you can actually earn an income from it. And and that was a, you know, that was a big thing for me because that meant I could do this full-time and I don't think I would be doing this full-time now if I hadn't tried it. Um, we work with an ads partner which is makes it easier. I think like other people have said, you just in in basic terms, you just have to give up part of your website to ad space and they sort out the rest. It wasn't quite that straightforward, but uh let's say it was. Um then yeah, you can I wish it was. Um but it's not quite that simple. But but yeah, I mean I still don't like ads and I would love to have a solution which is not as ugly because like you said, I've tried to put effort into how this game looks and keep it minimal and pleasant to play and ads are not um helpful in that regard. So, I I don't really want to have ads, but I do have ads because otherwise I wouldn't be able to do this as a full-time job and establish what we're calling Waffle Studio and we're going to create more games and I Yeah, so, you know, I'm using ads to be in that position and and most people are fine with it. I haven't had the negative feedback that I was expecting. I thought people would hate it. I was dreading the idea of sticking ads on my page, but but you know, I think people prefer that than having a game that they can't play because they have to pay for it. Um, and obviously that's not the be all and you know, you can have a hybrid sort of situation with freetoplay games. They do it in lots of different ways, the position we're in at the moment. And it's it's just after this guy told me that I I realized how lucrative it can be if you've got half a million people coming to your page, you can actually um and a decent amount of money to to carry on and and do other things. So it was a bit of a no-brainer really. So, James, I I think there was a period of time where you maybe didn't have a a mobile app for Waffle and then uh you you added one and um as I understand it, you're now maybe doing some substantial updates. Can you tell us more about that journey? Yeah. So, we didn't Yeah. We didn't have a mobile app in the app store for for quite a while, I think, but there were two reasons for doing it. I guess I wanted to have something in the app store because it always felt that was where people look for games and they want to find it in there. Um, so I did a very simple version which was just using Apache Cordova to create a version of the web game that was in the app store which is great. I always I've used Apache Cordova for a few things and I think it's a really great way of doing something like that that's you know crossplatform. It's on the Web Bandits in the app store. Um, but also because we were just getting copycats in the app store. So, people were searching for our game and they were just coming across something else that wasn't what we'd created. Um, again, another cousin of mine, she she put something on Facebook saying, "My cousin has created this wonderful game. You should all try it. Here's a link to it." And it was a link to someone else's game that was a copycat that was in the App Store. So, oh no. Felt like now's the right time to put our own app in the app store because that's probably happening quite regularly. So, yeah. So, that was another reason for doing it. Um, but yeah, but now we have we've been developing a completely new app. It's we've we've got a development team called Lively. They've been creating it. Um, and it's got wonderful colorful art and characters. And it's much more of a a I'm trying to use the word that isn't controlled by trademark, but it's a game where you go on a journey and you play lots of puzzles along the way. Um, so it's quite a different game, but it's using the same puzzle that we uh and different formats and same mechanic um just as a sort of celebration of the waffle puzzle. And so we've been developing that for the last year, I think, um, with Lively and it's being published by Mini Clip. Um, and it's, yeah, it's on the app stores now in America, but we're just sort of testing it out. So, we don't have a lot of players at the moment because we've just been trying to soft launch it and and see how it goes cuz uh it is quite different. It's not It does have the daily puzzle, but it also has all of these other variations of it. Um yeah, so it's a lot of fun and it's a lot more colorful and uh yeah, we're excited to see how that goes. Um, yeah. So, it I've always felt like I don't know, obviously since the iPhone iOS app store and people were creating apps for everything, it felt like a web game wouldn't even get looked at. So, it was only until Wle came along that sort of buck that trend. It felt like and it felt like people would maybe save a game to their home screen that was a web game. Um, and so, yeah, I look at it a lot differently now. Um, I'm not fully focused on creating an app first. I would create a web game first because creating stuff for the web is a lot quicker. You know, you can create a web game, well, I can create a web game a lot quicker than I can create something in Unity or anything like that. So, and we can try it out obviously with our audience and we can tweak it a lot quicker if we want to make a change to it. We don't have to submit a new build to the app store and go through all the certificates and sorting all that out and app store optimization. We don't have to worry about all that. We just put it out onto the internet, try it out, see if people like it, uh send them a link and and see how it goes. And then if it is popular um then we can create it into an app later um and we'll know we can invest in it with without having that risk that no one's going to like it because we've already tried it out. Um so that's my current sort of uh process that I'm looking at with future games is going to be web games first. Long live web games. Absolutely. That's That's our clip right there. Yeah, Nate. Long live web games. Long live web games. How how is your strategy for launching something like this changing from from launching Waffle? Like are you you know other than using your game to to promote the new mobile app? Are you I don't know feeling like you need to do PR and reach out and do do that whole thing? Um what's Do you have a do you have a strategy in place? No, we we just don't need to. I think we can just uh we have that large audience now that we can just we can just send it to a fraction of our audience just to try it out. You know, we've got a lot of control over who gets to see it and who tries it and we can directly find out from them what they think of it. Um, so we still have supporters. We still have that um part of our game and that gives us an audience of people that are very much invested in the game and they they like waffle and they like what we're doing. So they are good people to try it out with. Yeah. It's hard to think how differently we would do it now because that's why I wanted to keep waffle, you know, because I don't then I don't have to have that challenge because it is a massive challenge and I know everyone how how much everyone says it is. So yeah, that's that's a reason to hang on to that for dear life because it's very valuable to to have people's attention. So, you you mentioned uh a couple times here Waffle Studio that you're building. Yeah. And you know, I'm curious. Is it is it lonely being a creator? Are you are you looking to build something bigger? What are your what's what's the impetus be behind building the studio? Yeah. No, I mean, I haven't been doing it on my own so far. I've got my wife does all the social media stuff and I'm working with uh my consultant Charlotte. She's doing Charlotte Cook. She's doing a lot of the reaching out to to partners and we can work with and different people and slowly introducing me to the games industry and teaching me stuff. Um, so yeah, no, I've always found people to talk to about the game and how it's going and the other game developers. Um, but no, saying that, I still would like to build a team because I wouldn't say it's lonely, but I I don't get enough time to to fulfill all the ideas that I've got. I think that's the main thing. I just I want some help to see if we can make some of that a reality and try it out. So that's the main impetus for hiring people. But I also love sharing ideas with people. And I think it would be great to have a small team of people that we can we can throw ideas around and and if we come up with something, we've we've got the skill where we can create it really quickly. So like I said, with web stuff, you can create stuff quickly and and put it out there. And I think we need to take advantage of that as much as possible and streamline that. so that if we do have an idea, we can just come up with it and it it doesn't take it only takes a few days to to put it out there and see what people think of it. Um, so that's that's a reason to have a good team that um just to make things like that happen. But I also like working in an office on a similar sort of point. Um, the office that I'm in now, this is a rented office that me and my wife come to and when we're having meetings, we can invite people here and but it's in a building of other shared offices. So, we've got a shared kitchen and you can actually talk to real human beings. Uh, which I like. And yeah, so I I'm excited about inviting more people into an office and having people around that you can actually talk to face to face. Um, that's a good reason for doing it. We we always love the uh family connections and uh just how different people have integrated their their families into game building. Um, and I I hear your wife gets a lot of credit for just some of the formation story too. Can you uh are there any specific things you want to call out there? Yeah. Well, yeah. Yeah. So, my my wife Ness, she came up with a name for waffle. Um, which is great. I mean, I don't know. I think a lot of people can relate to the problem of trying to come up with a name for your game. And you might be able to tell I'm not very good at it because our other game is called One Word Search because that's what it is. Um, but Waffle is a lot better name. So, so yeah, that night when I was coming up with this idea, I just drew it out on a bit of paper. as I like to do in my notebook. And I showed it to Ness and her first comment was, "Oh, that looks like a waffle." And yeah, that was brilliant because that's obviously a great name for it. And yeah, so that was one thing off the list to tick off because immediately we had a great name for it. Um, yeah, Nest does a lot of the social media posts and yeah, replies to people for me and um, and yeah, I think people appreciate that. I think it comes through when you're honestly, you know, replying to people and they realize you're a real person behind the game. Um, it makes a big difference and our audience appreciates it. Uh, yeah. So, yeah, we're enjoying that. um doing it like that. So, James, I've I've heard you're maybe sponsoring a or have sponsored a local hackathon in your area. Um what were Can you tell us what some of the motivations were on that? Yeah, it's something I've always wanted to do. It's my first hackathon actually and I've, you know, there's been a few people trying to encourage me to do it before and I always turned them down. So, I felt like now was a good time um because obviously I'm trying to build up this waffle studio now and so I wanted to reach out and and see if people were interested in doing that. So, the hackathon was a good chance to meet people, meet more people that are doing things, who enjoy making things. Um because that's that's really what what I'm into. I just like making things and I've always just liked making stuff like this and I'd like to find more people that are motivated by that, motivated by making something that you feel proud of and it's quick and you can um give it to an audience. So yeah, so the hackathon was partly to to do that and just um see if there was an interest in doing that and partly just to see if my skills are up to scratch with other people's because I've spent a lot of time just working as a solo developer for for people of recent years. So I felt like I needed to get out of get out of that routine and and uh integrate with um yeah more developers that were doing similar things. Uh and it was great. It's it's great fun doing something like that. It's a lot of pressure on on your skills to create something in a short frame of time, but I really love doing it and and it's great fun and you learn a lot from from doing that sort of thing. Um, so it's always worth, you know, pushing yourself to do something like that that you might not initially feel the most comfortable doing, but um, yeah, once you're doing it, it's it's good fun. It's a great learning experience for developers at any level because you know you get a lot of skill benefits from doing that sort of thing. Well, for some of the uh developers who are just starting out or game creators just starting out, would you have any advice for them uh when building their first game? It's all about keeping it simple, which I've always known. You've always wanted to create the minimum viable product is what they talk about. and and getting people using it. But I don't know, there's it's easier said than done sometimes. You want to make sure that it's still a product that people aren't going to laugh at. And so you or people are going to be like, "Is this the best you can do?" So, I don't know. You have self-conscious uh thoughts about, you know, just putting something out there in front of people, but you know, it's the best way of doing things because you get feedback very quickly. You find out if it works. You need to put it out in front of people. You need to keep it as simple as possible. You don't need to worry about all of the little extras along the side. You just need to work out what is your core compelling thing and get people to try it and see if they agree that that's a good thing to be doing. Do they enjoy it? Do they enjoy um doing that thing that you've given them to do? So, so yeah, I think that's probably the main thing is just not to think too hard about it. Um, if you can create something, yeah, just do just do it as quickly as you can, as simple as as you can with the technology that maybe you feel most comfortable in, um, that you enjoy using. Uh, that's how I I got there. Really like that last part of the advice. Uh, work with what you're comfortable with. Um I I think uh a lot of people sometimes uh over complicate things even just on the creating it side like oh I got to learn a new the hot new framework or I got to do this or that. Yeah. Well, waffle was created with jQuery. So if anyone knows what that is, that means a lot I think and it still is. Um, I don't think I will be using jQuery for everything going forward, but that is something that you can create stuff very quickly in. That's not necessarily um great for the long run, but um that doesn't matter. If you can create something quickly, that's better than not creating it at all. So, use what you can um create it quickly and then you can always um refactor it later. You can always sort that out later down the line if people actually enjoy playing it because it's worth finding that out first before you spend your time trying to yeah use the hot new thing and and architect it um to an inch of its life. So yeah, don't overengineer it. Just get it out there. So James, it's hard to ignore how AI is impacting kind of everything around us. Does it impact Waffle in any way? Not at the moment. I mean, I do try and embrace it. I guess that's the main um feeling I have about it at the moment. We do try and use it. We write a lot of jokes. I'm hesitant about saying that. We try and write a lot of jokes or nonsense in our word definitions if anyone notices. I don't know if a lot of people notice, but we that seems to be what we spend a lot of our time doing these days. and we tried to use AI to do that sort of thing and and it didn't work very well. Turns out chat GPT hasn't got a great sense of humor yet. So that's one thing that it doesn't work for. But I think like a lot of coders as well, I use um GitHub Copilot. Um so that helps a lot, you know, speeding up um writing code. And I think that's that's a good way to look at it at the moment. It's a It's a tool that can allow you to do things quicker. You still have to put the effort in to do it, but it speeds speeds things up. We haven't found a way that I think would work in the game itself. So, it's just in the background helping us create things. There are other games like Twof Goofer was um one that I've played before. I met Oh, I spoke to Colin who created that. That's quite a good game that uses AI generated images as part of its game and that's great. I mean that's a great way of using AI to create content I think. But apart from that um for Waffle in particular the content that was created wasn't quite human enough for for us. I don't think it's not got the same personality as as something that's created by hand. and people can tell uh for stuff like that. So, at the moment, it's it's there as a tool and I feel like we need to keep up with it and embrace it along the way and and don't discount it because it does help us create things faster. You haven't tried as a prompt yet. Uh please write in the style of uh James Robinson of Waffle Fame. No, not yet. Okay. No, I don't think we're quite there. I've tried to write things in the style of Charles Brand who I don't know if many people know who he is listening to this podcast but he's he's been one of the sort of spiritual voices behind waffles. So um so that sometimes helps but yeah know we're just using human uh power for most of our stuff at the moment. But it's it's an interesting thing to try. does it it can help you it can help inspire ideas I think as well is another good reason for it it's it's quite a weird brain that it has and it can uh come up with some interesting things so one thing I think a lot about is SEO and you know what what might happen with AI and and we get a ton of organic um traffic I'm sure you do too which is why I think you're building a brand and an IP that people want to come to that people know about and uh you know it's it's something I think we're trying to do as well. But uh do you have any thoughts on SEO maybe maybe changing in the future and and how that affects Waffle? I don't know. Yeah, I mean we would like to, you know, appeal to people that are looking for word games, which is something people do search for and people are still using Google a lot just to find games, which again that surprises me based on, you know, the app stores I thought were the be all and end all for people searching for games, but it turns out people are still searching through Google to find stuff that's just on the internet. Um, so there's always uh improvements that we can do to try and appeal to those people, but so far it's just one of those things that's on the to-do list of things to try and just see if we can appeal to more people that way. But there's lots of other things on that list as well. So, I don't know if it'll necessarily be something that we try soon, but but yeah, the brand thing as well, I I want it to be recognized as just people know the name of of the game that we've created and and people can search for it if they they like it and come up with us rather than someone else. That's all. Um I would like which I think is working so far. Yeah. So, if people can understand what a waffle puzzle is amongst all the other sort of puzzles that are out there, I try and collect now that I'm doing this full time, I try and just collect all the all the different types of puzzle there are out there. I've always been fascinated by logic puzzles and uh not necessarily crosswords, but like the Sudoku and uh any other sort of mobile puzzle games. So, I'm always collecting those as ideas and and just working out what makes them fun. Um, so I'd love to be considered, you know, one of those among the ranks of classic puzzles some point. It's a good aspiration. Well, James, I've uh really enjoyed this. Uh, if you want people to find you online, where where should they look? Uh yeah, we do have social channels if you come through our I think if you just go to waffle really. If you look in the menu, there's some links to our social channels that we pay attention to. Um yeah, and we if we if we release anything else, it's going to be through waffle to be honest. So for instance, oneword search.com, that's something that we promote through waffle. So, so just just uh yeah, just play your daily waffle and and you'll hear from us through uh we push stuff out there quite regularly and I hope people enjoy it. So, wafflegame.net or uh just waffle in your Google search. It'll be the top result. Yes. And uh yeah, just James, thanks so much for being with us today. That's okay. Yeah, thanks for getting in touch. It's been great to chat. Thanks, James.