A mobile game can have sound mechanics and still stall

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 12:37

   in life um and uh then started uh i got very frustrated with the amount of time i had to spend convincing people about the things i wanted to build um and uh and the budgets you know like map swipe was on it was on a the whole budget for the entire thing was fifty thousand dollars uh and that was including uh four people salaries those six months this is the challenge with non-profits yeah and so and by the way this is what i love about doctors i border it's like i still donate there to this day because they actually care about this stuff but at the same time you're trying to do engineering work there you meet the best people it's hard like you just end up doing everything yourself which is useful but it's uh it's difficult and i applaud the people currently doing it i know there's a few really good ones uh then for uh after uh i so i

2. 13:20

   decided essentially if i want to do a type of work long term i need to start a company this is like a vehicle for it and then um so started first mobile game studio because we were good at building games and mobile gaming at the time was like a very good market to be in um we feel that uh getting product market fit in our game we pivoted over to metal which uh became what was the game it was it was um it was a brawler so you basically uh played two versus two map was shrinking um kind of like brawl stars uh currently uh and um what do you think you got wrong the amount of variance actually so for instance people we would land people on a very similar set of maps but then like battle royale for example um the looting aspect and the strategizing around how much the environment is changing as you play actually makes it fun the same thing for example um in brawl

3. 14:12

   stars or sorry in clash royale when you know how you have a deck but you're dealt your deck in different variations which introduces the type of like gameplay variants that you need in order to react to things in real time so even though you might be really good at the tactical like moves you still have to really think deeply about your sequencing and because the game introduces a lot of um random and it creates this urge to keep playing because you're like someday i'm going to get the perfect alignment yeah i think it's i think it just said it doesn't get still that way And I think the thing that we didn't get right is we got the gameplay mechanics correct, but the gameplay loop and variation within the sessions, I think, was too low.

4. 14:54

   And then the other thing that we couldn't do was we didn't have the money to skill player liquidity to the point where the players themselves would provide that variation. And so we pivoted over to Metal, which became the largest video game recorder in the world. People use it to clip themselves playing tens of thousands of different video games. People upload roughly a billion videos a year. And it's now one of the largest platforms in video games.

5. 15:21

   And so we're fast forwarding to the present day.