Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The Game Designers Workbook with Bobby Lockhart
0 Plays2 seconds ago
On this episode of Hanselminutes, Scott talks with Bobby Lockhart, game designer and coauthor of The Game Designer’s Workbook. They explore the craft of game design, from turning ideas into playable experiences to balancing creativity with structure, and discuss how the principles in the workbook can help both aspiring and seasoned designers build better, more engaging games.
https://www.gamedesignersworkbook.com/
This episode is sponsored by Tuple and Postman
Check out https://tuple.app/hanselminutes for the best remote pair programming app on macOS and Windows
Check out https://postman.com/hanselminutes for powerful API development and testing
https://www.gamedesignersworkbook.com/
This episode is sponsored by Tuple and Postman
Check out https://tuple.app/hanselminutes for the best remote pair programming app on macOS and Windows
Check out https://postman.com/hanselminutes for powerful API development and testing
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey friends, it's Scott. I'm going to take a moment in the middle of the show here and thank our new sponsor, Tuple.
Benefits of Pair Programming
00:00:05
Speaker
and I'm chatting with Johnny Marler. You know, Johnny, pair programming is kind of a niche thing, right? Like I know a lot of devs that don't pair much at all. Do you really think it's worth pair programming?
00:00:17
Speaker
Yeah, I think even if you're the best programmer in the world, there's always something you can learn from other people. And, you know, I think there's nothing like pairing that enables you to exchange like really technical expertise.
00:00:31
Speaker
um You know, for example, I'm really systems oriented. I have exhaustive error handling. I wrote my own X11 library because the error handling wasn't good enough. And my coworker, Mikey, he's he's completely different. He's he's really an expert on Mac OS. He's a big Objective-C fan.
00:00:48
Speaker
um But because we've paired so much, we've slowly been able to build up um expertise in each other's domains and styles. And he's taken some stuff from me and vice versa. um It's been really good to have that regular pairing and exchange of ideas and information.
00:01:05
Speaker
So I think it's really hard to get that. And it's also hard to stay on the same page when you're not pairing with somebody. its Instead of you know trying to send comments to each other in a GitHub pull request and maybe arguing over something, being able to slow down and take that time and work on something real with somebody, there's just nothing that replaces it.
00:01:24
Speaker
Very cool. I think more people should try pairing. I did a lot of pairing in person and the nearest thing you can do from pairing in person is using something like tuple. You can check it out at tuple.app. It's the best remote pair programming app on both Mac OS and windows.
Introduction to Bobby Lockhart and His Book
00:01:41
Speaker
Hi, I'm Scott Hanselman. This is another episode of Hansel minutes today. I'm chatting with Bobby Lockhart. He's got a brand new book out called the game designers workbook. You can check it out at game designers workbook.com. How are you, sir?
00:01:53
Speaker
Hi, I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. Man, I love looking at people's LinkedIn's and people's websites, and it's always and kind of impressive when someone starts with an award-winning game designer, filmmaking, computer science, games. You're a creative, aren't you?
00:02:10
Speaker
I am, yeah. And I've been sort of bouncing back and forth between left and right brain for a long time. Like, I went to an engineering high school and discovered there that I wanted to... work in film.
00:02:22
Speaker
So I went to NYU film school and discovered there that I wanted to do computer stuff. So yeah, it's, it's been a ping pong. And then I wish somebody had, had seen this pattern and been like, you should work in video games, man. It's both. If only they told you earlier.
00:02:41
Speaker
Exactly. I'd had no idea until much later. And now you lead important little games. You do freelance game design, but there's education running through everything that you do.
00:02:52
Speaker
You're not just making games. You're making educational games.
Inspiration and Mission in Educational Games
00:02:55
Speaker
You're making fun games. You're making games that like change the way your brain works. Were you always thinking about like pedagogy and like how brains develop?
00:03:04
Speaker
Because there are people who just make fun games, but you're, you seem from my perspective, be putting more thought into it than the average ah Joe or Jane, a game designer. I'm so glad that that's coming across. Yeah. And the reason I got into games is I read this book called The Diamond Age by Neil Stevenson.
00:03:23
Speaker
Have you read the the Diamond Age? Yeah, I read most of Neil Stevenson stuff. Diamond Age is a long book. It's I really wish that there was some stuff there was that there was an edited version that was more kid friendly because there's some weird adult stuff in there.
00:03:39
Speaker
But there's also a depiction of kind of an ideal educational game, this book called The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. And I was so inspired by reading this science fiction story. was like, who is working on this?
00:03:55
Speaker
And at first I thought, OK, this is going to be a really fancy powered something that you know surveils the user, determines what to teach, creates an optical an optimal pedagogical strategy, translates that into a narrative, embeds it with puzzles and whatever. like But since then have sort of realized that that's even if we could do that, that's maybe not the best approach.
00:04:25
Speaker
i yeah My sort of life mission these days is to contribute towards an ecosystem of learning games so broad that someone could potentially self-select their way through an entire education in whatever they want to learn purely through games That's not possible. And in some cases for sort some types of subjects, probably not advisable, but it would be so amazing if it was possible.
00:04:57
Speaker
Do games have to teach? Like, am I learning and every single time I play a game, no matter what the game is?
Integrating Education into Game Mechanics
00:05:03
Speaker
Yes. All games teach. but Usually they just teach you how to play the game. um Sometimes they teach you how to spend money.
00:05:10
Speaker
on the game. Yeah. And app purchases suck. So yeah, the sort of fundamental theory of educational games design is find yeah what is fun, interesting about the subject that you want to teach and make that the core game mechanic.
00:05:32
Speaker
um If you make anything else the core game mechanic, then it will feel like what we call in the biz chocolate covered broccoli. Get the kids to eat their broccoli, but yeah and they're going to go, what is this? And spit it out anyway.
00:05:46
Speaker
Exactly. is like so I don't know if you remember math blasters.
00:05:54
Speaker
I know it's very beloved because it's so foundational so early. Everyone's got the generational foundational game. Like my kids love how there was a game called stack the states that was effectively Tetris, except it was states of the United States or country stack. This it was stack. The countries was another one.
00:06:12
Speaker
So it's imagine Tetris. There's a line at the top, which is the don't go above this line. And then we're just going to drop countries. it's like, how did you clear countries? So you have to rotate them and get like Brazil a certain way and it drops to the bottom and it floats down and there's like really cool physics.
00:06:29
Speaker
So like the two dimensional map shape of Brazil drops down and then you got to fit fit Luxembourg into like Brazil's armpit. i see I see it as many states and countries as you want and then declare that this is, you know, and and you learn the states.
00:06:44
Speaker
This is not a game I grew up on. But man, my kids know with the shape of every country on the planet because of this stupid game and they are obsessed with it. And that's so I just went, yeah, for math blaster. They would do the same for the stack of the states.
00:06:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny. There's there's sort of like a ah sensitive developmental period where memorization is just really attractive. And if you catch a kid in that period, you can get them to learn a list of almost anything. For a lot of people, it's Pokemon.
00:07:15
Speaker
But if you could get it to be, you know, the periodic table or something, it would be. Or or or the or the ah the the multiplication tables. you I'm still a little iffy on the sevens and sixes, and i don't know what happened there. i've never actually learned them. I learned like a few touch points and then I just like, you know, add multiples of whatever in my head.
00:07:40
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. yeah But yeah, I brought up math belt blasters because it's a it's like classic chocolate covered broccoli. you're You're piloting this spaceship around and it's super fun. And then it kind of pauses and gives you a math quiz.
00:07:57
Speaker
and then And so you learn that math is sort of the thing that's in the way of fun instead of being the thing that is fun. um That is a really way good way to put it. Math was in the way of fun. That is
Code Combat's Approach to Teaching Coding
00:08:10
Speaker
exactly right. That's exactly right.
00:08:11
Speaker
but That actually makes me remember Code Combat. Did you work on Code yeah for a time? I did work on Code Combat, yeah. And subsequent Code Combat products like Ozaria, Code Combat Worlds for Roblox.
00:08:26
Speaker
Um, yeah. Code combat was peak like for, for, for my kids. And even now I i call that backwards. Like, it's like everything that's great about Zelda plus coding. It's just like my two favorite things and having my kids just play the heck out of code combat at when they were like nine and 12. That is so delightful to hear. oh yeah.
00:08:50
Speaker
Yeah. That's a super authentic one. Like to the point where you're even typing. um like A lot of coding games, I've worked on a bunch of coding games, learned to learn to code games, you could call them.
00:09:03
Speaker
Most of them have some kind of abstraction to make it feel easier to to get over the hump of syntax. But... and on code combat and code combat worlds and all of those, we just took it head on.
00:09:18
Speaker
You're typing, you're typing in a text field and you know, whether it runs it's, you can have syntax errors, you can have logic errors. It's why was it that code combat popped so much? Was it just because it was good looking? was it because it was familiar? Like what was it that made it like work?
Success Factors of Code Combat
00:09:38
Speaker
Good question. Yeah, i think a lot... i mean, I'm the type of person who attributes a lot of things to luck.
00:09:48
Speaker
Some of it is right place, right time. um you know <unk> It was on the web, but so right when schools were getting Chromebooks, and it happened to get in front of the Y Combinator folks at the right time.
00:10:05
Speaker
yeah but it also... has really approachable challenges. I think it it demonstrates why some of these coding concepts are useful in a context that that doesn't require a lot of explanation. Like if you need to get a password from somebody and remember it, you know you need a variable and then you bring it over to something or tell it to someone so that they can say it to the seat, to the magical door to open.
00:10:39
Speaker
Uh, it just makes these concepts feel more tangible. Um, although that's, that's kind of another key part of all educational games design is, um,
00:10:52
Speaker
Seymour Papert once said, like, French isn't difficult for for kids in France. Why is it difficult for kids in the US? Because their whole context, all of their like, social capital, all of their ability to get things done is based on their ability to speak French.
00:11:14
Speaker
If you want to teach kids math, you create a context like France is for French. You create math land for math and and kids will learn it.
00:11:27
Speaker
And so all educational games, well, not all, but a lot of really well-designed educational games try to create a context where it's critical that you know you know seventh grade Spanish or whatever whatever this the subject is.
00:11:44
Speaker
There was a time when I was at a conference called XOXO in Portland. It's called, it's kind of like South by Southwest, except Portland style, which makes sense because Portland and Austin are two sides of the same coin. So, you know, South by Southwest is this big tech education festival thing. And XOXO was,
00:12:02
Speaker
a big one. And I bumped into a guy and we were talking about education and I was like, you know, you should get this game called Robot Turtles, which was a game like logo that was a board game for teaching kids.
00:12:14
Speaker
And the guy I was talking to was Dan Shapiro, the guy who invented Robot Turtles. So in in sitting and geeking out about game design and teaching kids how to code, I ended up trying to sell Robot Turtles to the guy who invented it i didn't I didn't put two and two together. How long did he let you talk about it? He let me go for like four minutes before he was like, oh yeah, that was me.
00:12:38
Speaker
you know That was me and Elon Lee and we did that together. Wow. That's great market research and when you can let someone talk to you about what they like about the thing that you made. yeah. I was just going off and, oh, yeah, you should teach your kids.
00:12:52
Speaker
Yeah. i like Because I learned how to like move turtles around with a game called Logo. Logo, yeah Right? That's like Seymour Pepper. I mean, the guy I just quoted created Logo.
00:13:03
Speaker
See, there you go. It's all full circle. and you know And Dan and Elon Lee made this this board game, Robot Turtles, which is totally appropriate for like five and six-year-olds.
00:13:16
Speaker
and And they learn coding without knowing that they're learning coding. And like the the coding on ramp from robot turtles into code combat was like my go to.
00:13:27
Speaker
I would start the kids out, you know, before I, you know because I don't want screen time for a five year old. So like four five, six robot turtles, seven, eight, nine, 12. That's that's code combat time.
00:13:39
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great the pathway. Yeah, it's worked out so far. Hey, friends, this is Scott. I want to take a moment to thank our new sponsor, Postman Flows.
00:13:51
Speaker
I was chatting with Roderick from Postman. You know, Roderick, what is one thing that you thought would be simple, but it turned out to be surprisingly hard? And what did you learn from it? My biggest learning has been that AI can only compensate what for what you don't know only so much.
00:14:06
Speaker
So if you really don't know what you're doing, you really can't wield AI in very powerful ways. particularly when you're composing APIs together or you're building a you can get to good outcomes from scratch. But if you're iterating, you really have to start understanding what's actually happening under the covers. And you have to peel the layers of abstraction, at least where we are today. That may change in the future.
00:14:27
Speaker
And I found that visual languages, visual construction helps me quite a bit in that. regard So if you're an expert, you're now world class. But if you're a newbie, then you're still a newbie, just with more dangerous capabilities.
00:14:41
Speaker
And that's where it's an exciting world for us. We have to make sure that we're building and empowering people with the right tools, with the right guardrails so that they can create good things, but not do harm, but particularly when you connect them to APIs that can um send payments or do transactions on your behalf.
00:14:58
Speaker
One of the great tools for visualizing how easy it is to do this kind of work is Postman Flows. It lets you orchestrate APIs, logic, and data visually. You can check them out at postman.com slash HanselMinutes.
00:15:10
Speaker
So you've been doing educational games, inventing toys for years. The book right now is called The Game Designer's Workbook. And it's worth calling out that it is not The Game Designer's Book.
00:15:22
Speaker
It's the game designer's workbook. You have, there's a lot of like, not blank pages, but there's a lot of, you know, homework inside the book where you're expecting people to, to work through problems rather than just lecturing at them.
00:15:35
Speaker
You almost made the game that the book a game. Because yeah have to participate. That is exactly the feeling I was going for, is to make the exercises themselves really playful.
00:15:49
Speaker
um and Let you turn certain game design concept around in your hands the way you would a Rubik's Cube. ah And it try to understand all of its facets by actually working with it rather than by by reading about it.
00:16:07
Speaker
I also, the more the more time I spend as a game designer, the less dogmatic I am about how game design should be done and how it works.
00:16:19
Speaker
And so part of it was I don't have a lot of prescriptive advice to give, but I do think that I can help people find their own voice and what they value about game design.
00:16:34
Speaker
And that can only be done as a process, not as lecture. um
00:16:42
Speaker
It felt very Socratic method. Like you're asking questions. It's filled with questions where you're asking them like, Who are you?
00:16:54
Speaker
Who is the game designer in you? There's a lot of sections on reflective, you know, like let's just pause for a second and let's look back on this. i yeah I expected it to be dogmatic.
00:17:06
Speaker
Hmm. Yeah, so I mean, the the reflection chapters, a lot of that comes from, again, the background ah as a learning games designer,
The Role of Reflection in Learning
00:17:15
Speaker
because the research tells us that ah after ah a lecture or any kind of a lesson, including playing with an educational game, that knowledge gets better solidified if there is dedicated reflection time afterwards. Yeah.
00:17:33
Speaker
So if the learner it does some introspection after they experience any kind of learning experience, then ah it's just better for them long term. They have time to sort of build the right neural pathways to keep that going.
00:17:53
Speaker
so So some of it is that just pragmatic stuff, but also, yeah, it's it's there's questions and sort of lore and and self-image. As you become a game designer, you want to be like, where who where do I fit in this?
00:18:07
Speaker
I do a lot of mentoring, actually, of early career game designers who who are trying to get into the industry, which is nigh impossible at the moment, unfortunately.
00:18:19
Speaker
But a lot of the discussion we have is just talking about what kind of game designer are you going to try to be? um And part of that is like market realities, like who who who's getting hired.
00:18:32
Speaker
And part of it is, what do you enjoy making, which is very different from what you enjoy playing often? And what what kind of brain do you have? Do you have a puzzle making brain? Do you have a story making brain? You know, like all of these types of skills are useful for for game design.
00:18:52
Speaker
Yeah. I had two episodes ago, three episodes ago, I had Noel Berry who made Celeste on. I've had the gentleman who made Axiom Verge on Thomas Happ.
00:19:04
Speaker
And I wonder when someone, and and um and by the way, I also went to see the Stardew Valley orchestra They're like, they're touring playing Stardew Valley music. So I saw the, the designer, I forgot his name, the something monkey who made Stardew Valley. Yeah.
00:19:22
Speaker
Yeah. He has a nom de guerre. So I wonder sometimes if you hit a home run, And you like come up with a Celeste or a, or a, or a Stardew Valley or you know, an, an axiom verge. And then it's like, okay, you made this it's, it's amazing. You nailed it. You had a home run on the first try.
00:19:43
Speaker
do you get stuck? And now you're that person, a concerned ape is his name, not monkey Eric Barone. Like, do you get stuck? Like when you made code combat, did you ever feel like, okay, I've worked on code combat with the other folks at the company. Now this is what I have to do for the rest of my life.
00:20:00
Speaker
ah No, in fact, I was I luckily have some friends at a place called Field Day Lab, and they hired me to work on some games that do very, very different things, like a game that teaches journalism and a VR game where you are.
00:20:16
Speaker
in first person as a Delhi penguin, which is like a three foot penguin who lives in the Antarctic and, and a game about algae blooms.
00:20:28
Speaker
And that that's just really useful to me, even though those, those are more like public media games. Those are all free. Mm-hmm. and And so not as as lucrative. like the The market really demands like STEM games, so but these folks are are making stuff that that needs to be made and and is also sort of award-winning in its own right.
00:20:52
Speaker
And it's such a great palate cleanser in between the teaching coding in various ways. Yeah. In the book, you and this is my perspective as a non game designer, you blur the lines between game and video game. I would even go so far. You didn't call it the video game designers workbook.
00:21:12
Speaker
yeah You don't seem to make a differentiation between a maze on a piece of paper or D&D or a video game. are they or is video Is the video part of video game not important to you? There's just game?
00:21:25
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, one of my biggest pet peeves is when people include game design in STEM. In Steam, yes, naturally.
00:21:38
Speaker
But in STEM, no. Game design is humanity. explain the difference between the two. So STEM is science, technology, engineering, and math. e STEAM adds art in the middle there.
00:21:50
Speaker
And often what that people object to STEAM because it sounds like it encompasses almost all of human endeavor, right? Science, technology, engineering, art, and and mathematics.
00:22:04
Speaker
But in practice, what that means is really the other letters in service of art often.
00:22:12
Speaker
So, you know, like people making crazy LED shows that correspond to dance or whatever, like people writing algorithms for visualizers and and demo scene and stuff like that.
00:22:26
Speaker
That's all steam. But but to call game design engineering is is just to put it in engineering is is ah travesty because Game design is is much older than computers.
00:22:44
Speaker
It's like 3000 years old is the oldest game that we know the rules of. Senate, the the Egyptian game.
00:22:57
Speaker
ah So people have been doing this a really, really long time. And it just belongs to a different lineage. And you can do it with all kinds of things. You can do it with tabletop minis. You can do it entirely in your head. One of my favorite books is Top 10 Games You Can Play By Yourself in Your Head.
00:23:18
Speaker
Play in your head by yourself. Yeah. So you're saying, forgive me, I want to poke on this little bit. You're saying game design is an art or it's, it is, fine it is.
00:23:30
Speaker
It's, it's not, it's not science or engineering. It's not. sign know Yeah. I, it makes use of science. It makes use of math. It makes use of engineering sometimes depending on what type of game you're making.
00:23:44
Speaker
But, but it's a humanity. It's, it's something designed for other human minds. That's so interesting. Because there's like, gka I know this is not a direct ah parallel, but there's game theory, which is literally a science. there's people with PhDs in game theory.
00:23:58
Speaker
So game theory, unfortunately, has nothing to do with ludology, which is the the study of games. New word for me, ludology. Yeah. Yeah.
00:24:10
Speaker
Game theory is like economics almost. It's like, yeah, have yeah, yeah. If you do this, I should do that. So that's gaming. Ludology is gaming theory. The study of games, the playing, the cultures, the everything around making games and gaming.
00:24:27
Speaker
Interesting. Yeah. It's it more of a sociological study. Okay. Yeah. This is interesting. So you break down every kind of game. You go back into history. There's Sokoban puzzles, which are pushing, you know, warehouse boxes around. We've all played stuff like that before you go through the basics of like tic-tac-toe and connect for, and you know, but by the end, you've given them almost a full, like a thousand years of games. They've made a dozen games within it.
00:24:58
Speaker
What do you want people at the end of the book to be enabled to, to be able to do? I think part of it is to be able to join in conversation with other game designers and have the vocabulary and the the experience to to talk about the problems of making certain types of games on an an informed level.
00:25:24
Speaker
And part of it is just confidence that they can make something of their own um going forward that's of a greater scale.
Creativity through Design Constraints
00:25:34
Speaker
i mean, and i very few of these exercises ask you to make a whole game.
00:25:40
Speaker
It's often just bits and pieces. the the The important part of the game. like you're You're asking us to think about the loop, the game loop, the meat, the thing that makes the game interesting, the maze.
00:25:53
Speaker
you know like you you give You're not necessarily in this book, from my perspective, having people come up with entirely new rules. your You're showcasing a dozen different styles of rules and then saying, play within this sandbox.
00:26:06
Speaker
Exactly. And so... Unlike, you know, starting an indie game project by yourself, um the constraints are are given to you. Of course, starting an indie game project, it's, it sounds like it's limitless, but of course you have the limits of your resources and your imagination. But and have you ever read rebel without a crew?
00:26:36
Speaker
Don't think so. It's Robert Rodriguez's book about making mariachi. Oh, he made El Mariachi for $8,000. Exactly. And when he was pushing around the camera, he was actually pushing his buddy in a wheelchair.
00:26:50
Speaker
And that was their dolly. Yeah. So all of that type of stories is outlined essentially in a journal that's in this book, um Rebel Without a Crew. And he talks about how all of the narrative choices they made for that movie were corresponding to the constraints that they had. Like, oh, they have this really neat, ornate looking letter opener.
00:27:15
Speaker
Let's make that like a knife that the villain has. And oh, we have this like clawfoot tub. Okay, that's going to look great in this scene whatever. We have a guitar and a guitar case. like it's So he wrote the story around what he had rather than trying to get what he needed to make some like blue sky story.
00:27:35
Speaker
And I feel like that's that's how people ought to approach game design as well sometimes. You know you are you are good at writing stories. make Make a visual novel. Well, isn't creativity where – creativity is where boredom and constraints meet.
00:27:52
Speaker
Yeah. meat And maybe you have uh, maybe you have the wheel or the tire from a bicycle and you have a stick. Okay. Now we're going to roll that thing around. Exactly. It reminds me of the scene in, um, the princess bride when Wesley is paralyzed and he's, they're trying to storm the castle and he's like, well, I mean, there's no way we can do this. You know?
00:28:13
Speaker
I mean, if we had a wheelbarrow and the guy's like, Oh, we have a wheelbarrow. was why didn't you tell me we had a wheelbarrow that changes everything, you know? Yeah, exactly. um Yeah, there's a game designer named Carol Mertz who's just released a collection of things called play with your junk.
00:28:29
Speaker
It's like, here, here are some games that you can play with just junk that you own already. ah Yeah, I love things like that, it's, we're playing within these tight, tight constraints.
00:28:42
Speaker
hmm. But yeah, the in the book, we give you certain constraints and the the book itself is a constraint. It has to be stuff that you can do with a pencil and just the book and your own mind.
00:28:55
Speaker
yeah So there's a lot of workarounds we had to do just for that. Like randomness, for example, how do you get randomness built into this? And what we did was put rows and rows of dice in the margins, um randomly generated.
00:29:10
Speaker
And we say, think before you look at the dice, think of a number between one and 10, cross off that many dice, and then just start going from there. And then you'll have like a random series.
00:29:20
Speaker
And it'll be different.
00:29:24
Speaker
If you keep going, ah you come back to that chapter and and keep going, or somebody else thinks of a different number, they'll have a different random sequence. So So at the beginning of the conversation, you said that all games teach the players something. Like all games have to be
Educational Value in Recent Games
00:29:41
Speaker
educational games. And you have a blog post called All AAA Games Should Also Be Educational Games. So this theory, ah you said Ralph Koster's book, A Theory of Fun, calls out that fun is the feeling that I learned something. I've been rewarded because something has been learned.
00:29:56
Speaker
As we get towards the end of the show here, I thought it'd be interesting if we compared maybe the last two or three games each of us played that made our brains swell in that like, oh my God, I learned something and and what and why we learned about it. So as an example, I'll go first.
00:30:14
Speaker
ah The new Indiana Jones game, triple A game me yeah goes back and forth. It's game loop is basically climbing. So you're running around climbing stuff, Tomb Raider style.
00:30:25
Speaker
fighting dudes, punchin punching folks, or incredibly calm, chill, walking around on shelves, reading stuff. Like literally the game starts with a big fight against a big dude.
00:30:38
Speaker
And then you have to clean up the museum by picking up the objects that were destroyed in the fight and putting them back on the shelf correctly in the museum. So I found myself much like Assassin's Creed wandering around, like just reading plaques in a museum.
00:30:55
Speaker
And I thought that was such an interesting juxtaposition. And I felt that that was a very educational game. Oh, that's lovely. Well, I can, I can shout out my friend's puzzle. he has a daily puzzle called rattle that I rattle r a d d l dot quest, I believe.
00:31:14
Speaker
And it's a, it's a word puzzle game where you're trying to match words with clues. It's like, if you had the clues from a crossword, but they were the clues were missing words and you had to figure out which, yeah.
00:31:31
Speaker
at And they'll proceed from the following word. It's kind of hard to explain, but it's like a series words. looking at it right now. So today's is from tomato shade.
00:31:43
Speaker
And I'm supposed to get from the word tomato to the word shade. And it looks like I'm supposed to get there in eight or nine tries. tries Mm hmm. Exactly. What am I supposed to type? Am I supposed to type a word? Yeah. So the next word starts with it puts in the word tomato into one of the clues.
00:32:05
Speaker
There's blanks in the clues. Imagine putting the word tomato in. It actually does it for you. Okay. So all of them say tomato, but you have to figure out which one makes sense with the word tomato in there and then answer that question with a word that has the specified length.
00:32:25
Speaker
Okay. So there's a bunch of clues that are out of order and the next word has six letters and I need to figure out what that is. Yeah, so I've been playing this. I actually haven't played today's, but I've been playing this religiously for a while.
00:32:39
Speaker
And it's really fascinating, especially when sometimes you get stuck and you have to solve in reverse. And it really is. i just love the feeling of doing something in reverse, rewiring your brain to do the same thing, but opposite.
00:32:56
Speaker
So like when you get the power pellet in Pac-Man and now instead of running away, now you're chasing or like like in some pinball games where you have like like black hole where you have a lower black back glass where the paddles are now hitting the ball up towards you instead of up away from you.
00:33:19
Speaker
Just, I love that pattern. um And this, ah this little puzzle web puzzle game allows me to satisfy that sometimes. Very cool.
00:33:29
Speaker
That is at RADDLE.quest. Definitely different than the Wordle, quite challenging. And it's going to, you're going to spend some time feeling your brain change and rewire itself as you, as you learn this.
00:33:44
Speaker
For sure. Very cool. Well, thanks so much, Bobby Lockhart, for hanging out with me today. Oh, it was such a pleasure. Thanks, Scott. You can learn more about what Bobby's doing at BobbyLox, BobbyLox.com, and you can pick up the Game designers's workbook game Designer's Workbook that he wrote along with Eric Lang.
00:34:04
Speaker
This has been another episode of Handsome Minutes, and we'll see you again next week.