The Solo Developer Making Seven Figures From Free Browser Games

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Welcome to the Navic Gaming podcast. I'm

your host, Kaylee Moore. Most of the studios we talk about on this show have teams, funding, a publisher, or platform behind them. Today's guest has none of that. He has a laptop, a handful of contractors, and has created 17 browser-based games that millions of people play without downloading a single thing. Abe Train has spent his early career at HelloFresh, where he started as a meat buyer and worked his way up to head of business intelligence. In December of 2021, he left to build something a little bit more technical. A month later, WLED took over the internet. He built Global, a daily geography guessing game, posted it to Reddit, and watched it take off. Since then, he's built over a dozen games under Train Wreck Labs, including Metazoa, a daily biology game where players climb the tree of life. He is the only full-time employee, and over the past 3 years, his total revenue has passed seven figures. What makes his story especially timely is how Abe builds now. He barely writes code himself anymore, and every jump in AI

capability feels like hiring a new employee. He's also planning native apps, running real world events based on his games, and building a subscription business on top of free games. Today, we're going to talk about what it takes to build independent games after a viral hit, how to market and monetize browserbased games, and how close we really are to that one billion dollar gaming company led by one person. Abe, welcome to the podcast.
Hi, Kaylee. Thank you so much for having me, and thank you for the lovely intro.
I am really excited about your story. I love personally just career transition stories especially when people haven't worked in games before. I didn't get into games until my late 20s. Um so you went from procurement meet procurement to a head of business intelligence at HelloFresh Canada and then you left with no job lined up. I want to hear about that moment of how long you thought about leaving like when you really made the decision and kind of what your goals

were when you left. Yeah, absolutely. Uh HelloFresh was an incredible experience and opportunity and I'm really grateful for it. Uh even at the times when I was, you know, out in the distribution centers making sure that orders of pork chops came in on time, which is very different from what I do now, but it was a great experience. Um I had been there for I think about 3 years. It was my first job after university. And I moved through a bunch of different roles within the company, kind of just going wherever they needed me and wherever my skill set worked best. And I learned uh I learned a lot through each step of the way and towards the end of it my time there it was uh still it was kind of the towards the end of the pandemic um I was doing we were trying everyone was trying to figure out whether you're working from home or in the office and where you're doing your meetings from and all that and I was I was a little bit fatigued from all of the uh uh video calls and those kinds of meetings. So, I figured, you know what? It was time for

a bit of a fresh start. I I decided I told all my co-workers, I said, you know, new year, new Abe. I quit December 31st, 2021, and decided that the next thing that I would do would probably be something, like you said, in in a more technical realm. I'd been building more and more projects on the side. Um, both personally, things like related to like, you know, uh tracking your Spotify listens and that sort of thing. Um, and then at work too, I'd been building kind of projects to help uh manage orders and track costs. And so I was like, hey, you know, I I love building. I love making things for other people and and bringing in the creative work into the technical work and and joining that together. So uh it was time to try something new and I grateful that I did that when I did because I it's been an incredible journey since.
How much runway did you give yourself? like a couple of months where like I have enough in savings. I have this much time to figure it out.

That's a great question. I have a spreadsheet somewhere I should go and find, but I think it was about 6 months before I would probably have to leave my condo if I didn't have any revenue in that entire time.
Wow. Okay. So, it was a big it was a big leap of faith.
Yes. And I will say I was very nervous about how my parents were going to take it when I gave them this information. And they were totally on board. They were just like, you know what? Like I think they'd seen all the hard work that I put into HelloFresh and knew it was time for uh for something else. And they they had a lot of faith that I was going to get on my feet quickly. So I'm very grateful for that, too.
That's wonderful. Okay. And you said in our prep call that you didn't plan Train Wreck Labs to become a career after the success of the first game, which we're going to deeply get into. Um, you you were thinking like maybe this would actually lead to a job like maybe in a game studio. When when was it that you decided like no, actually I really like

this solo thing. It's working and this is my career path. you know, I like you said, I wasn't I wasn't expecting it to go quite the way that it did, but um when global really took off, uh it had it was just an enormous number of players in the first couple months. The timing was incredible because it was when people were getting and I I couldn't have planned this, but people were starting to get sick of Wordle and looking for the next Wordle before moving on from daily games completely. So, that's kind of where it when it exploded. Um it also helps that everyone was on um Twitter like Twitter hadn't um fractured at that point yet. So like when Wordle took off on Twitter that's kind of where like the internet was so to speak and and that's where things were sharing. So um sorry what was what exactly was the question? I distracted myself.
It was when like at what point were you thinking that oh I don't want to like parlay this into maybe a career at a game studio like actually this works. I

want to keep building my own games and being a solo entrepreneur.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh I saw the audience that it had and I had a few companies reach out to me about potentially monetizing the site
and I you know, first it was realizing that it could be something. You know, I I was starting from a place where like this is just a side project and I was eventually going to have to figure out the next thing to do. And so the first step in that was learning like oh like this could be a business. This could be real. And then I think another big turning point, I don't remember exactly when this happened, but um the gentleman who created Wordle that started the entire craze that I' I've built my career off of since sold Wordle to the New York Times. And I think that was kind of like a okay now now we mean business. You know, it's no more side projects, funding game, building in the open, uh talking to users on Twitter kind of thing. It was it was now we mean business. And that's that's when it came together for me.

Okay. And so I think you were a pretty casual gamer before, right? Like did you consider yourself like did you consider yourself a gamer? Like what type of games did you play?
I actually uh I didn't even know it was going to be games that I was going to focus on. I was I was thinking of just um web development was really where my what I was looking at. And it is, you know, you'll notice like global and none of my games are written in Unity or or God or anything like that. they're all in JavaScript and you know the variations and frameworks that you build on top of that. Um, I do consider myself h do I I don't know if I use the the term gamer for myself so much, but I've uh for years I've loved like the New York Times games, the the daily crossword and and Wordle and everything that's come up from that since. Um, actually my first experience making games I would say was probably the one or two semesters at University of Wateroo that I made the crosswords for

the school newspaper.
Um, that's so cool. I love doing that. It didn't end up being something that I stuck to long term as other like you know school related priorities took over and you know the co-op program and everything that goes on there. But um I would say that uh interestingly looking back that was kind of like a big step for me in this direction.
I think that's so funny. I never considered myself a gamer either and I am a total like Will Schwarz fan girl. Like I've seen him speak at colleges, right? that's like that level of nerd. But I still think there's a little bit of disconnect there.
I do really want to talk about Wordle because I mean it was a place in a time, right? Like world but but so WLE took off but then all these clones flooded the market in 2022 and disappeared and you built global. Let's actually and by the way I played it right before this call and I really loved it. Um, why don't you tell the audience a little bit just exactly what global is and how you

came about it and then I want to talk about why this one had a lot more a lot more staying power even though it's not technically a clone. So why don't we start with explain what global is.
Sure. So back in the Wordle craze um I wanted I you know I saw how the game works and I thought this is pretty straightforward. I'm looking for side projects. I have a bit of time. So, you know, now's the time to get into making the taking a sab similar. And originally, I wanted to do uh a a Wordle for movies. I knew I didn't want it to be just like another set of words with the exact same mechanics as Wordle. I wanted to get a bit more creative with it. But the first idea was movies. Uh, and I ran into a problem pretty quickly where I realized that there's no set of movies that any player can pick up and be expected to possibly know the answer. Because if you look at all the most famous movies of all time, you know, you're going to

get ones from like 50, 75 years ago that a lot of modern audience hasn't heard of, even if they deserve their classic staying power. So I decided I then then I I was ruminating over what would be another set of things like fiveletter words that global has which could be uh which would lend itself well to a game like this and I decided on countries. I was also very inspired by the sporal games. Um I mentioned the New York Times games earlier but I don't know if you're familiar with the website Sporl. It's just trivia website. Um, it doesn't operate now quite the same way as it used to, but when I was in high school, it was like my favorite source of of casual games. And it was there was one that was um a map of the world and you had to find the country and every wrong guess it would just say hot or cold. Uh, and so global was kind of like a more interactive visual version of that original idea.
Okay. And I mean, creating a game is one thing. I feel like now and we're going to dive into AI, but when people can

create anything, attention is attention is the hardest thing to get, right? I want to hear about how you marketed global early on. I know you mentioned you had a Reddit post. Did like did one Reddit post make it go viral? How how were you thinking about marketing global and what was the moment that it took off?
To to be honest, the answer is yes. It was one Reddit post really kind of blew it up. It was and it it was it got out of my control of like what people were talking about so quickly. Um and I remember like it started off in Reddit where just in our/ geography it was
uh people were just uh sharing people were sharing with me like bugs in the game. There were like some smaller countries missing. There was a lot of discussion of like what should be a country in the game, what's territory, all that sort of stuff. the problems that I still deal with now certainly. Um, and then it migrated at one point from Reddit to Twitter and then it really kind of just like escaped and I

was seeing people were talking about the game or even sometimes directly tagging me um that had a lot of followers and really big followers and I came out of nowhere for me. So, um, all that is to say, as intimidating as that was at the time, like I recognized that I I had a product go viral without doing any marketing really. And if man, I I've made games since, if I could recreate exactly how I made global, if I could teach people how to do that, I would do it again and again. But I really think it was uh just the timing was so incredible. And I've I've I've I've recognized how serendipitous that was. And that's why I've kind of decided to focus on, okay, you know, global got that uh huge bump. It it got the traction that it did and we're building everything around that.
Were you big in the Reddit geography community?

Were you active in it? Did you have a lot of karma points or was it just like, hey, this this could be in people interested in my game. I'm just going to post about it. [snorts]
I I didn't have I don't think I ever I've had like multiple Reddit accounts. I don't think any of them have ever really had karma. Um, you know, and and Reddit's funny because they're and I think this has probably gone back and forth over time, but they tend to be the communities themselves and the mods and the rules are are very skeptical of self-promotion. They don't like it if you go on and like are and it's very obvious that you're shilling your own product. I think a big difference was that like I was nobody, you know, I didn't have a a studio name behind me or anything and people were genuinely looking like everyone was sharing versions of Wordle whether you made it or not at the time. So I think that's kind of how it was able to be picked up. I posted it at the same time that like the exact same post in uh the webdev Reddit which I think is much bigger than the geography Reddit. Um and it got absolutely zero traction and nobody

looked at it. So, I'm glad that I I put it in more than one or I'd be speaking to you from a very different place today.
And what kind of metrics did you see after that first kind of spike? Like once it went viral, how many players were you seeing?
That's a great question. I um I didn't have a great way to track it at first because I think it was it was I never had to think about how to do that.
Um I believe I think I got to go and look at some old numbers. I believe at the peak um of the the postworldle craze when global was at its highest was it was over a million players every day.
Wow.
That were going to the game. Yeah. On this like it was a create react app app which for anyone who's been programming for like 10 years know that's like the worst way to build anything. That's like how beginners make make like their first website you know that just says hello world. it was kind of like on that infrastructure and I've made a million edits and rewrites and things like that

since. So, it's definitely looks very different from the back end now. But, um yeah, just to think that like an app that was built on that like how to get started framework got so big is pretty crazy. It also helps um it was a it's a static website so it wasn't like as pe as like a million people came to the site that it was like costing me a ton of money to host. Uh, Cloudflare has a really generous subscription for static sites and so I think I I paid pretty much nothing to host for like the first year.
Wow. And I mean global obviously still exists. People are playing it. It's still as your biggest game. Are you now doing any kind of marketing spend?
Yeah, I have explored lots of different ways to do marketing, but it's really tricky. And if if there's someone out there that has figured out how to do marketing for an ad driven website, I would love to hear about it because the problem is that if I go and try and pick

and choose, let's say a content creator or a Tik Tocker to make uh a game about my like a new game that I'm trying to promote, they make a video about a new game that I'm trying to promote, then I will see like I might see depending on, you know, how big they are and and and how much you know how big the contract is. I might see a bump but of players, but they won't necessarily be players that stick around. And if someone, you know, follows a link to one of the games to one of my daily games and they play a single round and they never come back, that's pretty much that's a tiny fraction of a cent, right? If I'm getting players, they have to be players. If I'm paying to get players, they have to be players that are coming back pretty much every day to uh or you know, making a regular habit out of it.
Um that is to not to say that I haven't had great experience with content creators before. I have. There's a couple that I've I've worked with when I'm launching new games and that's been great. Um, but my best experience with

content creators, um, and we can talk about other kinds of marketing later, but my best experience with content creators has been when I don't talk to them at all and they just like someone just discovers a game and they share it. Um, and so that's happened that's happened a couple times where I'll just see like a spike in the data and then oh my goodness some of the funnier ones um I there was a huge spike in in players of Linkxicon that's like my English language game from Thailand
and I was like oh that's so interesting and I I look it up and sure enough there's a guy on TikTok that's made a couple videos of of playing the game and the game is not this I have a few games that are translated links is not translated you can only play in English and the game mechanics are about the English language But he was playing in he was speaking to his audience in Thai and that's who his audience was. But they were playing like an English game. I think I you know I read transcripts. I did my best to understand what's going on, but it was to to learn English.

Um or at the very least to kind of show off, you know, your skills in in this foreign language. And so that's one example. I've had other ones that have just like random creators have popped off. There is a there is a high school biology teacher who plays Metazua every single day on Tik Tok and I have gotten count like countless numbers of players just from people that are watching that. It helps with the content creator side that um this has like been my biggest insight is if you are a creator and you want to you know have and maintain a big audience then you pretty much have to post every day or things like the Tik Tok algorithm will forget you right they want people that are always bo like
quantity is is very very highly regarded and if you need a lot of content what could be better than a daily game
and that has been how it's there's this symbiosis here that it's like the timing of global I couldn't have predicted but I I've just benefited from enormously.
So you had a lot of success with global

sounds like right off the bat. How when did you start creating your the next game and what was the thinking around that?
Yeah. Uh my next game is not one that you can currently play. The game has been shut down. It's not on my website anywhere but it's called Plurality. And it was kind of a family feud style game. I work on it with a friend of mine who is really into crypto and we had intended for there to be a a big crypto component to the game. Um, and so global was the beginning of 2022 and then plurality was a couple months later and we launched I think about a week or two after this crypto winter started um in uh spring of 20 winter in spring of 2022 and just any prospect of the game being having that crypto element and actually like gaining success out of that was was very clearly and quickly not uh not going to be something that was viable. So, we made the difficult decision to scrap that. Um, and then maintaining

that particular game was a bit more of a hassle than than some of the other games that I'd been working on. And over time, I a couple months to a year later, I decided to to really focus on what Trainer Labs was going to be. Um, and it was going to be specifically concerning educational games. and plurality didn't really fit the uh the mission of of what that should be, right? I want I want teachers to be looking for Train Wreck Labs games to play in the classroom and I don't know what class you're teaching that plurality would have been good for. Um I will say though that the mechanism of plurality has kind of been proven. There's this new game out there, I think it's called Krillin, which is very similar to the Family Feud style. Um, and it's like it has incredible animations and it's a lot more like fun and and pulls you in in that way. But it just I a friend shared it with me a couple weeks ago and I was like, "Wow, this looks an awful lot like someday a game that I used to know, but I I think I think theirs is a lot better and I

highly recommend it."
So, you know, now you're focusing on education games, school subjects. How do you decide what makes the cut, what doesn't? How long do you test games before you scrap them? I would love to hear a little bit about that process. Yeah. Um, for ideas for new games, um, I find it really helps that I I put uh, like creative limits is maybe the right term. So, you know, like if I'm I want to make a game and it's I I know right away I'm telling you that my next game and none of my future games are going to be Call of Duty, right? Because, you know, it's not in my wheelhouse. But I can also tell you that it's probably not going to be anything even related to um a million different subjects just because like it's probably not going to be a platformer unless I come up with a way to make like a physics a platform that teaches you physics which is something I've like thought about before. But unless anything short of that, I'm not going to be making those kinds of games because I know that I I work in this in this world. And so it makes it so much easier to start a project when I've already narrowed it

down to like the kinds of games that I'm going to make. Um, and I think it's it's I think brand consistency helps a lot too. Like if I make my my most recent games I just released are uh related to anatomy. They're called Bone Doggle and Abracadada. And where is the best place to find an audience for new anatomy games? Well, I happen to have a big audience of players of uh biology games, the Metazua. And so the Metazua players are going to go and are trying out the new one. And I'm getting a lot of amazing feedback so far. So, uh, it really helps that, you know, people expect those kinds of games from the work that I do. I love making these kinds of games. I love knowing that I I have a part to play in these classrooms all over the world and I'm able to support teachers that way. I should I'll plug now that um I do offer a subscription for playing games without ads and and uh multiplayer access to all of my games. And teachers get it for free. You just have to sign up and kind of say to the school that you work at and um and it's always given away for to to teachers. Um

uh yeah. So I in terms of like ideas, one thing I hear from a lot of other people who are are trying to make it in the daily game space. I feel like every couple of weeks someone reaches out to me on Discord and is like hey can we do a a cross collaboration you know like cross link sharing my game and yours and yours and mine and I have done this with a few other great creators like um uh gentleman Richard that made the game Nerdle which is very popular daily math game you know. So, we have a cross promotion going on which I which I'm really thrilled about. Um, but I find that a lot of games they're just trying to they will be like other versions of Wordle or they'll be a geography game that just lists a bunch of statistics about different countries and you have to figure out which country is which. And I find that if you really want to grab people, if you really want something to um to have staying power and be unique and kind of stand out from the crowd, then you have to get a little bit more creative with the visual um and gameplay

dynamic of it. It it should never just be that you're typing an answer into a box and then uh words pop up on a list. I'm always trying to do a little bit more than that.
So, I want to talk a little bit about your very passionate players. So, you mentioned Metazua, and I know that Metazua has fewer players than Global, but I know they're very passionate. How does designing for a smaller, more obsessive audience differ from designing from more of a mass market audience?
I'd say it's better. I'd say it's actually quite a bit better because uh those are the players that are going to give you feedback and they are you know if I if I were to be very pessimistic and and dow about it I would say that there you know these players are very picky you know they they have a certain vision for what they want to be they feel entitled because they're the players that like will come back the most often and thus you should be making the game for them specifically. Um, however, you know, if you really have a conversation with them and you look at

the feedback that they're giving, I find that these are players that, you know, um, they they want to provide feedback and information uh, about how to improve the game because they love the game and because they want to share it with other people that they think will love it and make the game more accessible like that. Um, I would say I I and I think this is I I must have heard this on like a Y Combinator podcast or something, but it stuck with me. you know, you want to make something that a few people love more than a lot of people like. I think that that works for a lot of different kinds of products and uh the games are no exception. I a global is helpful that you know the players that the the multitude of players the more players that like it are coming back to play every day. So that is you know they they're liking it to a certain level that that's very beneficial. But um the real passionate players that I see for Metazua and like the conversations I have with them, they know that I learn about biology from these players. Actually, a funny story. Um, right before I launched Medazua, I was having

dinner with some extended family and I told a cousin of mine who has a master's degree in in biology in in sephalopods and sea creatures um about the game I was working on. And she said, you know, it sounds like a lot of fun, but you know that uh taxonomy, the classifications of different animals can be a very contentious subject. And I was like, oh well, that's not something I'm going to worry about unless people are actually playing the game. So, I'm not even going to think about it. And then like within a couple months I'm like moderating debates over whether you know Eagles are under this sub genus or this super family and it's been crazy. So like I'm learning so much from these passionate players and you know I I think a lot of people um are learning from the games as well and that I that's just incredible.
Yeah. I I I saw some very passionate discussion on your Discord. How much of your product roadmap do you take from this user feedback versus what you've kind of planned to do on your own?
Oh yeah, I think it all starts with the

plan of what I do on my own. I don't usually like if I have an idea for a new game, I don't think I'll usually run the idea past the Discord server. I will say that um I noticed this with friends and family, too. people have people like what's familiar and so I'll pitch a new idea for a game that's like not quite like anything I've done before and I'll hear like that could be all right but maybe you should make it more like Metazua you know or or something like that and so I I find that you know the road map that I build for myself might be the most ambitious one that I get but then as soon as it is ready for as soon as like the game loop is playable I'll start getting feedback from players and typically that's not going to end changing the game completely, but I do get a lot of I'll always also I always heir on the side of more difficult when I'm launching a game.
Um, this is another this is a rule. I should write all these down because these are great rules. This is another rule of like this indie game development is that players will always request a

game gets easier, but they'll never request a game gets harder.
Interesting.
Yeah. So, if I were to follow every feature request, then the game would get easier and easier and people would lose interest because they're not being challenged anymore. But people typically don't tend to with a few exceptions. Someone did ask recently if I could remove the um molar masses on the the element cards in Elamingle. It's my chemistry game. And I was like, "Oh, that's interesting." And I might uh I might have to fiddle around with the mechanics there if people are saying that. But um for the most part, players have ideas for how they want to reduce the to make things more convenient and reduce their challenge. What they really want is to actually be challenged and that's what's going to bring them back every day.
That's such an interesting insight. Um okay, I want to talk a little bit about the monetization side of this because I think a lot of people who are going to listen to this might be building browser games themselves and wonder, you know, how do I go from making this my hobby to making this my full-time career? So, one

of the things I thought was so interesting is that you really wrestled with putting ads on global because of principle and then you decided that if you're going to, you'd rather be in control of how that works. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that thought process and how that view has held up now that it's several years in. Yeah, I'll say when I when I was first launching global um I I had this idea that I was somehow like above the ad industry and if I you know and I I wanted the game to be in some sense pure that people could just always come to it and it would always look the same and and you wouldn't have to worry about you know being being pushed to buy something like how much of the internet feels now. Um and I still you know agreed to some sense that like I I have reservations about ads. I'm careful about which ads get to actually be shown on the website. have some have some control over that. Um, but when I was running low on that runway that I mentioned earlier, I was kind of faced the decision, okay, do I keep the games as they are in their pristine pure condition, and then get a

job at a tech company, which is probably hosting ads to sell people things, or do I just host the ads myself and, you know, kind of take control of the process from beginning to end? And as soon as I framed it in those terms, it was a pretty obvious decision to make.
And you work with Nitro, and I know that Nitro's dashboard, it gives you a lot of fine grain control over placement in a game where ads can ruin the experience. Like, what do you think good ad design actually looks like? And do you get any push back on ads from your players?
Yeah. Uh, you know what's funny? When I when I first going back a few years ago, when I first started putting ads on the games, I was I thought there was going to be this massive backlash and loss of players and angry messages and all that, but it turned out that people already expect there to be ads on the internet. And so, like, the fact that there weren't was the anomaly. And then when they were added, people didn't really see I I really barely heard anything. I

think I even apologized to a player once who asked an unrelated question and they were like, "No, yeah, we we get it. like you you need to make money for the games. That's fine. So, it's like, oh, I guess I was I was sweating a lot over nothing. Um, when it comes to ad design for the games, I I think the number one rule has got to be you like you listen to your players. For every player that tells you that an ad is getting in the way of the gameplay, there's a hundred players that just stopped playing because because the same reason it didn't tell you. So, uh Oh, that's something that I learned from HelloFresh. If a package was leaking in one person's box, we counted it as though it was leaking in like five or 10 because you because you have to like, you know, account for all those shadow people that aren't telling you that there's the problem and they're just going to stop buying product.
Wow. Um, okay. and you so obviously we've talked about the ad monetization which I believe is a major portion of your revenue but you've also launched the train wreck club as a paid ad free subscription and a newsletter with

sponsorship. I'd love to hear about how you're thinking about that monetization mix how you're experimenting any any insights you're surprised by.
Yeah, I'll talk about the newsletter for a minute. I've actually shut that down as of the end of the summer. It was something I ran for over a year. uh just under two years I think and the idea was that you know it would have I'd have a way to connect to players that maybe played once or twice throughout the week but then we're going to forget about the game so they would see the the newsletter and go back to it. Um and there was I I was working through the platform Beehive which has a uh a sponsorship model so I could get people like they would help connect you to sponsors for your newsletter. Um and I I stopped doing it for a couple reasons. one, I when I did run those sponsorships, I really didn't make much money off of them. Um, that's there's a number of possible reasons for that. Uh, it could be that for everyone that was opening the newsletter, like the the sponsorships I was getting were not

really like what they personally were looking for. And other other newsletter companies are a lot better at like this is a crypto newsletter and they're sponsored by a crypto product and so people are more likely to click on it. Um, another thing is that I was trying to automate a lot of it and I wasn't really putting my heart and soul into it because you know what I wanted to be doing was talking to players and making games and so I figured I would automate the things I don't want to do. But people know that they can tell that you know things are especially when I started doing it if something was written by AI. Um, I I had AI images for most of the time that would be like the cover letter for the newsletter. And at the beginning it was like uh I think people were kind of ambivalent on it but you know over the course of time people have really really people have a lot of like uh strong feelings about AI but especially AI images people really hate those so I had I had to take those off. Um and then I I when I think Fable came out like the really powerful Claude model I asked it to do an analysis. I hooked it up to Beehive and I was like can you tell me how much this is really

driving my business? and it thought for like 15 minutes and then was like it's not driving any business I'm sorry [laughter] with the numbers to back that it's like I hired a Mackenzie consultant who told me so I didn't end up going through there the subscription on the other hand I is something I am uh putting my full heart and soul into and I think players are able to see that um it is so when when you get a subscription for the train wreck club it's what I call it it's a little corny I think but you know I'm happy with it um you can play all of the games without ads and you get access to two additional games that aren't quite they are they're multiplayer versions of daily games that I already have. So global leaks let you play global with your friends where you pick the country and they have to figure out what it is. And then Metazua or sorry the the one for Metazua is called Metavita where instead of being stuck on plants or animals you can pick from any ukareotic almost any ukareotic species and you get to pick the answer and and

like all the different kind kinds of species it could be. So it'll be like um you can make a a version that's all species of feline all all cats and then you send send it to your cat friends and they figure it out from there. So, that's something I'm always working on those games and and coming up with new features and things to put in the train club. And uh the I moved um the subscription model to Stripe a little bit earlier in the year and I I've been having a lot of success with that and I'm very happy with it.
And if someone was just getting started out building browser games, maybe they're having a little bit of success. Do you have any kind of monetization advice that you wish you would have known from the beginning?
Oh, that's tough. I think I think the number one thing is just making sure that your ads don't like players can be pretty forgiving about ads if they're out of the way. But if they feel like the ad is really getting in the way of gameplay, it's not going to be so good. Um, I would say uh try not to be one of those like app store apps that's like 99% ads with a touch of gameplay in the

middle. I don't think that you're really I like I think if you if you want to pursue this from an indie gamedev creative style then you're not doing yourself any favors in that way.
Fair. Okay. I want to shift to everyone's favorite topic right now, which is AI. And because I think it's so interesting that you really started this before chat JPT came out and like took everything over and so you were actually coding these games, but now with how far AI has progressed, you mentioned that you're barely writing code yourself anymore. I'd love to hear about what a normal build day looks like now, like what you're still doing by hand. And then also because you're using AI to code games, like what you're focusing on more with your time.
Yeah. [snorts] Um I'll I'll start by saying that the transition from coding everything by hand to AI, it was it was like um the Ernest Hemingway quote about

going bankrupt. It was like slowly and then all at once, right? Suddenly I I look up and I realize I haven't written anything. Um because at the beginning it was a lot of copying and pasting from Stack Overflow 2, which at the time that felt like cheating and then you know going a few years later that's like doing things the oldfashioned hard way. It's crazy. Um so the way that it looks now is I actually very recently I have pretty much switched out of VS Code altogether which I've just been using since the entire my entire career of writing any lines of code has been in VS Code. Now I'm and I haven't settled on this completely, but I'm experimenting with working entirely in the chatbt desktop app. Um
Oh, interesting.
Chat GBT over claude for now. I think that they I think that whichever one is like more powerful and cheaper like it it seems to like go back and forth all the time. I'm not saying that I'm I'm married to OpenAI, but um as of right now, I believe the Soul models are like token for token a little bit cheaper than the Opus models. So that's just

where I'm at.
Um, and I'm found that I interestingly I' I've been taking the focus away from and let me know if I'm is doing this from a too technical perspective, but I'm I'm taking focus away from lines of written code like hardcoded files and I'm moving it more towards looking at the browser itself, which of course I was always doing. You know, I change something in a in a file and then see how it edits the browser. But um with the chatbt app, you can have like a browser window open and then you can use their tools to like click on things in the browser and say move this up, change this to the side, this should be red instead of yellow and those kinds of things. And I'm using the terminal a little bit more too because instead of where it used to be like the one main window, I think a lot of developers will agree with this where it used to be the one main middle that or window that you worked on in the middle was the file and then maybe you had the terminal below and a chat window on the right and and

like the list of files on the left. That's what my setup used to look like. But now the one that you want in the middle is the chat window. It like got promoted to being the center of everything. But I still need the terminal. I still need the list of files. I still need the like an actual integrated browser is great. And then the thing that I need the least now interestingly is that thing that used to be in the middle which is the actual lines of code in the file. So um it's been a transition and you know every time I I think that I can give absolutely everything to the co to the AI and retire I step away and then I come back and something's gone wrong. So I, you know, it's no good to do to do that completely. And I making the most of the agents.mmd file at the root of the folder with with rules like you know you can't make any UI changes without my explicit permission. Um you're not allowed to tamper with tests like those are you know above all the most important thing and and rules like that. So that's really really important for keeping the bots in check. But then I think it's also after that it's like experimenting and pushing the limits.

You know, there's there's I'm I'm working on projects now that I didn't think there are some things that I thought that I would I would hopefully get to eventually when I had more time and, you know, maybe an employee or something like that. And now I'm like past those and I'm working on projects that I never thought I would get to because I have so much more computing power with AI and time. One of the things that I was impressed by and would love to hear more about on our prep call was that you're using a lot of the time that you were previously coding to really connect with players and it seems like kind of almost a more personal relationship. I'd love to hear about that.
Yeah. So, with every new game, the Discord server gets a little bit bigger. Um, there's two main ways that players talk to me. It's through Discord. And so every single one of my apps has an invitation to come to Discord, join the server, join the conversation, share your scores there, raise bug reports. There's all kinds of uses for it. Or just we have a bug report channel that is for, you know, problems with the games. Or if you see, if you're a betazu

player that sees a really cool insect outside, then you can also put it put a channel, which I love. Um, and you know, like today I learned uh and and and just like indie gamedev and all all those kinds of stuff to talk about. Um, so that's one way. And then you can also there's a there's not everyone is on Discord actually, surprise. Um, so there's also a contact form on the website and I I talk to players through both of those ways. Um, that's got to be for a number of reasons that I I've mentioned already in this call when it comes to like, you know, bug reports. If I if I hear from a player, I know that other players are seeing it. Uh players have great feature requests and all kinds of ideas. So, I would only be doing myself a disservice if I was not actively having these conversations and getting the feedback and and really paying attention to it with players. So, that's that's really important to me. Um I don't there global no longer has over a million daily players. I'll I'll say

I'll say that. I'll share that. Um, but there are still a lot and with each new game I get different kinds I get new players and all the players have something new to talk about. So the conversation is just always going and always lively and the more wrote and admin stuff and and like you know some of the more difficult coding challenges that I never trained for because I don't have a computer science degree. you know those the more of those things that I can I can shift off to AI or at least you know like be a supervisor to AI if not hands off completely then that's time that I can spend with players and you know that I monitor players spending that time with each other and I think it's uh I I think it's been nothing but good for the community
and you've mentioned that I know you use a lot of AI agents but you also work with some contractors as well how do you decide I'm going to work with a person or I'm going to build up an agent like what is what's that decision-m process or is it is it category specific?

Yeah, I I think it'll be it'll be category and task specific. The contractor that I work with the most is an artist that's based out in Venezuela. I've never met him in person, but uh I found him through Reddit doing uh an RFP for artists and that was that was an enormous process that took like a lot of time um to find someone to to do illustrations for me. I like I I mentioned earlier um players hate uh AI carrying art.
Um and it's it's it's I'm I'm I love I love is the wrong word, but I'm fascinated by the conversation around it because like every every year it gets harder to tell and then I feel like people push back even harder and it it's it's become very personal and intimate for people about these sorts of things. So I make I have a I make a point now of there's there's no AI generated art in games. It's the logos are all are all done with
usually by me or me and an artist together. Um and then illustrations like my profile picture and Discord and and um the the characters in Elamingo. That

was actually how I met this artist was for that project. That's all done that's all hand or digitally drawn. So um arts illustrations is is the really big part there. And then um when I had the newsletter, I worked with some other like real people writers as well. uh but then the newsletter isn't isn't around anymore. For future projects though, you know, I'm I'm very grateful that I have a budget to be able to work with uh people and pay people a good wage when when I am working with them. So, uh for if if the opportunity comes up to uh work with an artist or um another creative or or another developer, someone um a fan of links uh improve the algorithm for connecting words together. And so I we have a now we have a partnership where he's maintaining that for me and and through like a a contract. So it's
Oh, I love that. It's a community vibes.
Yeah, it really is. And um those opportunities it can this indie game dev

world can be a little bit solitary. So when I do have the opportunity to work with with a a brilliant creative, it's such a pleasure.
Okay. Okay, I want to shift gears a little bit to the future because you've had a lot of success building browser games, but I know you plan to build a native app for all Train Wreck Labs games before year end. Why move beyond web? Why get into mobile, which is a very tricky space?
That's a great question. I think that um one thing that I think about is I might play my own games more if they were an app on my phone because sometimes I'm just looking for, you know, that quick opening up there. Um I think that the games themselves, they're all on the web, but it's not the web that makes them special. It's the mechanic and the the education that you get out of it and the learning. And there's a lot of elements these games that I don't think should be platform specific. And if they're not platform specific and we have all of this compute now and all this way to share

information, I think there's no reason that you can't just like spread things out a little bit more broadly. I was um I was really inspired by this news recently that Shopify, the the biggest tech company in Canada, um recently moved off of React Native for its mobile apps. React Native lets you um write code that can compile to both Android apps and Apple apps, iPhone apps. Uh so you only have to maintain one codebase. But they said that with AI, one of the one of the coding tasks that AI is best at is if you like write a script in JavaScript and you're like translate this into Python, it's incredible at that sort of thing. So now that what they what they've said at Shopify is that maintaining uh the two completely separate code bases used to be like this this ridiculous unnecessary challenge and now it's a piece of cake with with what AI is able to do. So I figure um I don't know I I don't know which technologies I'm going to use or how I'm going to approach it. This is still I'm

going to uh start the project by the end of the year but it's still a little bit ways away. But I'm really excited to uh explore all the different ways that this can be done and and to bring uh my games to new platforms, wherever that might be. Dis I will say um one of the most common requests I get is for people to be able to play the games directly in Discord as well because Discord has a way of like you can actually play games in DMs. And
yeah,
I think like that's that's something like I I I am there's a part of me that worries like can I run ads in there? Do I do I get anything if if that's going to happen? But um I think also Yeah. But but I'm open to it, you know. I I want to I want to explore. I don't know what the future holds. But I'm going to keep uh I'm going to keep trying out different things. See what works.
Can you run ads in games on Discord?
I do not know. I don't know. But that doesn't mean that it's the only way that it's beneficial, right? Because maybe there's a limited version of the game and then you have to go to the website to play. Maybe it just it just brings

people into the train labs ecosystem. I there's so much to explore.
Yeah. Okay. And you know, you've built, like we said, a couple a dozen or so games. Are there Well, can you give me a hint of maybe what the next game will be or what you're currently exploring?
Oh, sure. So, the ones that I just made are the anatomy games I mentioned earlier. Um, and I'm still seeing how those have taken off. Uh, and and you were like they're just they're just out of beta like as of last week. So, you know, there's still corrections and things to do there.
Um, but for the next like completely new game, um, I I've I've been so happy to see that Linkxicon has had like a real resurgence in the in the earlier part of this year. Um, the way that my g my games are like very tied to the school cycle. So, um, whenever it's like summer, then you know there's a big dip and then back to school things go back. So, um, looking at the at the spring in Q1, Q2, there was a really big boost of, uh, Linkxicon players, and I kind of want to ride on that. So, I'm going to,

um, do something. I think I'm going to work with that contractor that I mentioned earlier and find, um, something that is similar enough to Linkxicon that those players will love it, but different enough that they'll have something else to do, you know? And I have a couple of ideas of where that's going to go, but it's probably going to be in that like English semantic meaning space. I've also I've there's I've tried making a music game I think like four times and it never works. So So I'm going to like that's it has to happen at some point. I got to
Why doesn't it work? What's the biggest pain point? Um it'll be like well so some of these have been like apps and all all the things related but like uh it's sometimes the game loop just doesn't close like you know the way that these have to work is it has to be possible for people to come back every day and get better you know and like learn something and they have to and share it with friends and there's all these different mechanics that need to fall into place and so even if the tech is

there and the coding is possible for the vision that I have it doesn't like maybe the vision just doesn't quite there's still things to work out. So I have some some of these are just like halfbaked ideas and some of them are just ideas that like you know this this might have worked in another kind of app but not the sort of thing I do at Train Wreck Labs and so it's on the shelf for now.
Okay. So Abe one last question for you. So like four years ago you were doing business intelligence at a meal kit company. You built a sevenf figureure business mostly by yourself. When you picture Train Wreck Labs in the next five years, what does it the company look like and what do you hope that players take away from it?
Um, I think about this a lot and there's I I I don't know exactly. One is I would love to have those those uh being able to play the games on other platforms like I mentioned before. Um I think that something I've done before is I've run a few live events. I've run Metazoo Alive a couple times, which has

just been so much fun. And I'd love to be able to run run do something more in the real world, whether that's running events or maybe something that's more connected to teachers and classrooms. And I'd love to have more resources for education than just the games themselves. Maybe connect teachers to each other. But these are like real challenges and things that I've never tackled before. If I find someone else that like shares my vision. Oh, if I find someone else that is um a really avid writer and that loves education and games, that sort of thing, I'd love to bring back the newsletter just just like but have, you know, work with like be a partner on the newsletter rather than just, you know, a manager of it. I would love to like work with other creatives in that way. And I think the last thing would be merch. I would love to do merch, too.
Oh, that would be amazing.
Yeah. Um, a thank you so much. I personally found your story so inspiring and I'm sure a lot of other Navic uh

gaming podcast listeners do as well. So, we can't wait to see what you build next game-wise, appwise, and thank you so much for sharing your journey with us.
Thank you for having me. It was it was a pleasure to chat.
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