Zach Gage

@helvetica · stfj

@eriktorenberg One thing I love about cards is that they're a tremendously accessible and elegantly designed object that everyone has lying around. When you make games with traditional playing cards you're really acting more like an editor than a writer — the content is all there, you just have to organize it well. That kind of process is really fun for me, it sets up a lot of interesting restrictions, and, is in and of itself sort of a game. I have to explore a system that exists and learn things about it so I can bend it to my will and make something neat. I've also spent a lot of time with dice lately, especially for Tharsis (a collaboration with Choice Provisions), and they're interesting in a very similar way. Uh, and also paper-prototyping with cards is sooooooo fast and easy :)

Russ Frushtick

@russfrushtick

@helvetica Hey Zach! It's your first time going free-to-play for one of your mobile games. Has it been successful so far? Any regrets? Any thoughts about shifting up how you monetize based on the first few days?

@helvetica · stfj

@russfrushtick So far it's been unexpectedly great. It's a little too early to know how things will go in the long run or how Sage's monetization strategy (yuck) — which is basically the shareware model of the 80s + ads — stacks up against other strategies, but things have been going surprisingly well. It feels like I have a very high conversion rate right now, actually the launch has felt like a premium launch numbers-wise, but with the bonus of a ton of ad-revenue and extra players added on. It's great. All the feel-good just buy this once vibes of a real game, but a much wider audience of players getting to experience it. It definitely took a lot of consideration to figure out how to pitch the game just right to players, and I can't say I enjoyed doing that, but in the end I'm glad I did it and it makes me hopefully for my future launches

Melissa Joy Kong

@melissajoykong · Content, Product Hunt

Hi @helvetica! What do you think about the iOS eocsystem right now? How tough is it for indies to stand out?

@helvetica · stfj

@melissajoykong I have always been really bullish on iOS, and I still feel like it's a great ecosystem despite how scary it has become in the last few years. The truth is every distribution portal is clogged up with loads of software and it's tough to get noticed anywhere, the difference with iOS is that of all the premium channels, it's been clogged up the longest, and I think they handle it the best. There will always be deserving games that don't get attention, but at least I can say that on iOS there is very frequently some crazy odd game that makes its way up the charts. Lifeline did pretty recently, A Dark Room did further back than that. Pancake has been up there. I feel like on other channels there's a lot less weird stuff at the top.

Alper Çuğun

@alper · Principal at Hubbub. Makes Cuppings an…

Hi Zach! I'm enjoying Sage Solitaire but occasionally I find it too engrossing and hard to put down once I start. What are your thoughts about addictive qualities in games (especially yours)?

@helvetica · stfj

@alper Great question! This is definitely a bit of a grey area. A lot of the luck-mechanics in Sage were designed after a trip to Atlantic City and an afternoon playing Three Card Poker changed my mind on luck. I used to feel like raw luck games were cheap and un-interesting, and thats why games like SpellTower and Bit Pilot use luck very sparingly, and give the player tons of control. I was really blown away by how compelling Three Card Poker was though, and I wanted to find a way to use some of that in my own games. Sage is a lot more balanced in terms of how much control the player has and how much luck fits in. In that way it fits in very well with solitaire games historically. I think personally the line comes when you're using the luck aspect of the game to hide a players skill impact with the intent of drawing money out of them (the way, say, candy crush uses luck). Sage doesn't do any of that stuff, but it definitely can be addictive. I think it's important though to be able to say for yourself when you've had enough and need to take a break. Honestly theres not much game designers can do to build systems that are both fun to play addictively AND ask players to stop. Nintendo tries it's damnedest, but we just click through those screens

Corley

@corleyh · COO @ Product Hunt

Hey there @helvetica - thanks for joining us. First your Twitter handle is fab! Now that you've released Sage Solitaire - what's next for you?

@helvetica · stfj

@corleyh Thanks! Well.. At the moment, more Sage Solitaire haha. I'm working on a new mode, and I have at least one more I want to get in there after that. Also Achievements, Localization support, and Android support. It kind of never ends with new releases. After that I have a bunch of stuff on the roadmap. SpellTower will be receiving a long overdue update soon along with localization support. Tharsis (collaboration with Choice Provisions) is releasing soon. And for iOS I have a Billiards game, a new Word game, and a number-based puzzle in the works, all designed and just waiting to be polished and released! Art-wise I've been hard at work building my Glaciers series (http://bit.ly/1E9PJsf) some of which are actually going up in a gallery in Portland right now, and hopefully more of which will go up in a gallery in nyc later, along with a possible kickstarter. So hopefully a lot from me soon.

Jacqueline von Tesmar

@jacqvon · Community, Product Hunt ✌️😻

Hey Zach, Great to have you here! How long did you work on Sage Solitaire before you put it out there?

@helvetica · stfj

@jacqvon in some ways I've been working on Sage for years, and in other ways about 3 months.

Lejla Bajgoric

@lejlahunts · Intern, Product Hunt

Hey there! Would love to hear about what some of the struggles of bringing Sage Solitaire to life were.

@helvetica · stfj

@lejlahunts I think the biggest hurdle was making the tutorial work. It seems really simple in practice, but of course that was kind of the goal. Sage Solitaire actually has quite a few rules that you need to know to be able to play it correctly, but nobody wants to sit through boring instructional screens. It took a few attempts until I figured out how to break the tutorial down into "just what you need to know to play" which it tells you right off the bat, and "what you need to know to play well", which it lets players learn at their own pace (through the little info buttons you tap on the right hand side).

Dan Provost

@danprovost · Designer, Studio Neat

@helvetica Hi Zach! What is the design process like for a game like Sage Solitaire? Where do you start, and how do you iterate? Love the game by the way, I'm addicted.

@helvetica · stfj

@danprovost Thanks Dan! Actually with Sage the process was very simple. I had the idea in the shower and I got out of the shower and put clothes on and dealt it out with cards and went "hey, wow this is weirdly interesting". Then I tried it out on a bunch of people to confirm that it was weirdly interesting. Next I programmed a really quick prototype in an afternoon so that I could play multiple games faster and play it on the go in my downtime, and try it out with even more people. Once it was pretty much confirmed that it was neat and wasnt broken, I sat down and started to put the work in to turn it into a full fledged polished game, basically doing design, naming it, coming up with the aesthetic, making the tutorial work, thinking about how to sell it, and then bug testing and beta testing the whole shebang

Teresa Hammerl

@colazionearoma · Socialmediapreneur

Hi Zach, how did you become a game designer?

@helvetica · stfj

@colazionearoma in my heart it just happened, but career-wise sort of by accident actually. When I was younger I used to love videogames but my mom wouldn't let me buy any so I had to make my own. I grew up wanting to program and make videogames, but I didn't really know what that meant. I went to school for Art and became an artist and only came back to games when one of my artworks was selling really well on iOS so I bought my then-girlfriend a iOS device and she downloaded Tetris and it was just so awful with touch-controls I had to make a version of it that was good, that game was Unify. Around the time I made Unify I also made an artwork/game called Lose/Lose. Some of my teachers at Parsons: The New School encouraged me to go to Indiecade, and so on a whim I bought a flight and left 2 days later. At Indiecade I met a ton of amazing bloggers and game designers and discovered the indie scene, and I've been hooked on making games ever since