Video Games + Board Games = Unique Fun

Hello! Can you tell us who you are and what you do?

Hi! I’m Martin Grider, the creator of Abstract Puzzle. It’s a company I made that’s based in Minnesota, and I focus on making thought-provoking games that are more targeted toward mobile platforms. I specialize in iOS apps, but I’m also quite flexible with other stuff too!

I’ve been making games for a long time, and the earliest game I can recall was a Flash game I made back in 2007. Aside from that game, I also made mobile board games like Blither and VR ones like Puzzle Prison.

What’s your favorite game to play?

Yeah, that's an impossible question to answer. I think I am a huge fan of Zelda, especially the Breath of the Wild-era Zelda. And so I might say that's my favorite, but in truth… it’s Tetris. I've played a lot of Tetris over the years, but the interesting thing is that I don't think it's really like vanilla Tetris. It's. I am very much interested in variants of all kinds of games.

Like, how can a game be tweaked and modified and still be as fun as the original or maybe even more interesting than the original? So I’m more into the variants, personally.

Go Tetris

That's a project that is perpetually in development. Since Flash died, I've been working on remakes of Go Tetris. I got into Swift, I really like it and it is now my favorite programming language and there's a game engine written in Swift called GateEngine. The latest version of GoTetris is in GateEngine, but there's a version that's a bit farther along that's in Unity, and I actually showed it at some conferences. However, I'm not working in Unity anymore.

So yeah, someday I'll re-release it and when I do, I think that's a good candidate for Steam, right? So I’m definitely planning to do a desktop version.

Are you working solely on Swift now?

Yeah, so I would say that 90% of my projects are Swift. But I am working with a friend on a game project right now that leans towards a traditional Zelda-ish type of experience, and that's in Godot. I'm a big fan of open source and Godot is great. It's like a drop-in replacement for Unity.

Working beyond iOS

I think there are a few different ways to maybe take an iOS project directly and turn that into Swift. That's actually in the back of my head, and it's the next project I plan to tackle. It's essentially transpiling or taking the Swift code and using that, changing it into probably something that's more native to Android.

I did release Thrive, which is a two-player abstract strategy game that I designed as an iOS and Android app that was meant to be a simultaneous release. That was actually the last Unity project that I really spent any effort on. Thrive had a Kickstarter for the physical board game and was my first real published board game. And that was back in 2019.

And then around 2020, I came out with the app version. Though I think I'd been working on it for a year or two before even the Kickstarter, so it was kind of a slow-burn project. I do have some stuff on the Android store, like in the Google Play Store, but because I'm not working in Unity anymore, maybe in Godot, sure, I don’t update it that much anymore. Maybe if a project was Godot native, but most of my Godot stuff has been desktop-focused rather than mobile-focused because I prefer Swift. 

There are a few different ways to do it and I just haven't hit on the right one. The path to getting Swift onto every platform feels so close and it has felt tantalizingly close since I started working in Swift. I really didn't come into Swift until I think 2019 and that was Swift 4. At that time, you could run Swift on Windows, and there were projects and stuff to do it and certainly on Android. However, it wasn't a great experience and it's still not, and that's the primary problem, so I'm waiting for somebody to make it easy.

The GateEngine is really nice, but it's just one guy maintaining this whole game engine, and game engines are huge. So I think it almost has to be a project where it's built on top of another open-source game engine and it's just like Swift bindings to something else. That feels like someday there's going to be a good one of those and that'll be the way, though I'm probably not going to be the person to do it.

I started doing more standard freelancing work around 2019. At that time, that's really when I sort of relegated game development to being a hobby again. I wasn't looking for freelance work that was games anymore, basically. And so I think, as someone who thinks of them primarily as a game dev hobbyist, it's got to be fun. Whatever engine I'm going to work in, I have to feel like it's a fun thing. Godot is fun, but really Swift is what feels fun to me, maybe just because it feels easy.

Can you tell us more about making digital board games?

So for Thrive, I think I first went free. I started freelancing in 2012 and at the time, I had been doing iOS since the beginning of iOS development. And I had a game in the App Store that was a mashup of chess and Tetris. 

My first freelance client was a board game conversion. It was for a company that did board games called Tasty Minstrel Games. And I had been working with a number of potential clients, basically pitching at them, like, “I want to do iOS versions of your board games.” And that was just the first one that said yes. And so I was able to quit my job and work on that project. So yeah, I have a history of that kind of thing. And I've done a fair amount of talking about iOS board game conversions and just board game conversions to digital in general.

I actually had a talk at GDC in 2014 that was on that topic. I had pitched them, I think, like taking UX lessons from iOS board games, essentially UX for iOS board games was my pitch. And they're like, “How about you say, like, taking UX lessons from iOS board games?” And it went from “I'm the expert on doing iOS board game conversions” to “I have to be a UX expert”. Which I am not at all.

And so that was a hard talk to give because I really felt like, “Oh, I have to learn all about UX now and be an expert on usability.” That's never been something that I claimed.

How about the board game licensing and the business side of things?

Let’s go back to the era before there were a lot of conversions. Right now, any game that becomes really popular to the point where you can find it in Target probably has a digital conversion for mobile. And back then, this line of thought didn’t apply. There were barely any board games in Target either. But they were awesome to me and I really wanted more of that kind of thing and I wanted to be working on that kind of thing.

So I reached out to publishers, like board game publishers that had games that I knew I would enjoy working on. Tasty Minstrel Games was one of those. But I think I had probably sent a dozen cold emails or something and one responded that I was able to have some back and forth with was a local company, MindWare. Tasty Minstrel is not local. They're in Colorado or something. But MindWare is a local here in Minnesota. They do board game publishing, but it's actually not a huge part of their business. But they happen to have published Qwirkle, which is a really popular game that you can find in Target. 

I had pitched them Qwirkle, I think three different times and each time with more and more stuff like, “Now I've got a design document, and here are the features we're going to have in the app and stuff, and here's a proposed budget…” And they never said yes! It was such a frustrating experience.

But Tasty Minstrel, the guy who runs that company basically said, “Yeah, this is a thing that we would like to do and we'd like to have done, but we want to do it right.” And so they hired me and this other guy, Brad Cummings, who was the iOS board game blogger on Board Game Geek and he was the project manager basically. 

And so he really knew the space very well and I think he leaned on me because I knew development pretty well. But we also brought in someone who became a longtime collaborator of mine, this guy Tyson, to do the AI. At the time Tyson had written a couple of books on poker AI, but otherwise, that was his experience. And now you look at the top-selling board games in any app store, like on Steam or on iOS and he's probably written the AI for like 50% of them. So Tyson's just really skilled and just really, really good at what he does. And he only does that one narrow slice of it. He doesn't do UI, he just does the AI for these things. 

That was a really cool project that unfortunately like didn't go well for Tasty Minstrel. First of all, the game that they wanted to make was called For the Win, which is impossible to Google. It's just not a great game for them to make. I should have pushed a little harder for them to do one of the games that was a good seller physically. This was a game that hadn't even come out physically yet. It had been on Kickstarter and done like 40k for them. So they looked at it as like, “This is a small game and we're going to test the waters with this.” But they really should have like taken their best-selling game and made that one. But sadly that's not what we did. So it wasn't very successful then, and that was my only project with Tasty Minstrel.

At the time, there wasn't really a set model for this. There wasn't the licensing that we have now. Now if you look at those board games in the app store, they are probably 90% of them licensed from the publisher. So there's a developer that said, “Hey, I want to make this game. What will it cost me and what kind of deal can we broker?” That's not what I was pitching at the time. I was pitching, “Hey, I want to work for you and make your game and we'll release it together !” or “I'll be the expert on this topic and we'll work together to make this game.”

I wanted them to pay me. I didn't have the financial security to be able to just like spend a bunch of money to license games. So now I think the market has really significantly changed. Like now those games really are getting licensed and you have to have that.

The average conversion deal between the company and the contractee

It's just like any other deal. So they can kind of say like, “Oh, we're going to do this upfront and maybe that upfront cost comes off of royalties later.” It just sort of depends on how big I think the product or IP is. So if this is a game that's sold millions of copies as a board game, they're going to expect a higher cost. I don't really know what the numbers would be, but it's going to cost some amount of money plus a revenue share down the line. And I think all those numbers are totally tweakable.

Because it's not public who knows really what those numbers are? I know that the big players in the space are doing well. However, I couldn’t give you specific numbers.

What’s your take on app monetization?

That's such a hard problem. I think the App Store from the beginning has had this “race to the bottom” kind of mentality, right? Which I think directly contributed to or became the freemium model. The freemium model is the result of the App Store's race to the bottom.

In my belief, disclaimer: I have no idea, this is not really based on anything, but what I think is that all of these monetization issues are the App Store review team's fault. 

I think if they had done a better job and still even today could do a better job of surfacing good pay to play games, right? If they had just said, like, “We're going to focus on games that are really good experiences.” and not all the freemium garbage that there is in the App Store, we wouldn't have this problem.

But I do think it's a real problem. I think it's legitimately a problem because the second you decide I'm going to turn my game free and I'm going to add either ads or some other form of microtransactions, you're changing the design of that game, right? You're changing the way that the game feels to play for the players. But that’s just my opinion. All of my game development is about design. I'm not really a monetization guy. I'm not a UX guy, I'm just a designer. I like making games and I like thinking about how games work. And for me, games that have those microtransactions work poorly. They work worse. It makes the game experience inferior to add that kind of microtransaction.

And so I make the games I want to play. I've always been upfront about that. If I'm freelancing, of course, I'll make whatever kind of game you want me to make. But now that I think of games more of as a hobby activity again, one that I spend a lot of time on frankly, I’m going to make what I feel is the best in my terms.

That means I'm just gonna make premium experiences. And the sad fact of it is that almost no one plays them because they have a cost associated. Everyone wants free stuff, even if they have to slog through crappy ads. You know, this was pointed out in the most poignant way when I released a game for the Apple Vision Pro. And I basically told myself, like, “No, this is a premium product. I'm gonna make it $5.” And I think it got five downloads. And you know, if I turned it free, like, in terms of financial success, for me, it would have zero impact. It wouldn't matter and maybe more people would play it, but it just feels different to me, you know?

On in-app purchases

I have never done that.  I do think that there is one form of in-app purchasing that’s fine. What I think of might not necessarily change the game itself, but what’s in my mind is sort of just having a demo experience that you then upgrade to the real and paid version. And so through that, I don't feel that's terrible or that's going to change the game at all.

But it sort of involves building two versions of your app, right? You have to make a compelling demo that would encourage them to buy the full version. And I'll be honest, most of my apps are not the best they are. I didn't spend the time to make them this premium experience. So I feel like it's almost like telling a lie saying like, “Oh, here's this demo that I could limit it artificially.”

Blither is a good example. It’s a game where it's a board game experience, right? So you're playing a game against an AI in the app. I could imagine, like allowing you only so many games. And then after that, there's a paywall and it says, “Oh, you got to pay more to play this game more.” And yeah, that'd be fine, but you know, it's a little bit more work development-wise and it's the development that I don't care to do. I'd rather spend that time working on more features or achievements or some other feature rather than an in-app purchase.

How did it go developing for the Vision Pro?

The funny thing is I probably put as much time into doing two talks about how to develop for the Apple Vision Pro as I did into the app itself. I mean, I think I probably put in less than 40 hours of development time over the course of like three or four weeks. And while simultaneously kind of like taking notes and writing these talks about how to develop for it.

I had looked at the APIs before that. So before I started development, I'd been keeping abreast of like, “Oh, what does it look like to develop for this thing?” Because they had announced it at the WWDC before. And so from that time on, I'd been looking at the documents and thinking about it and was pretty frankly excited to make something for it.

The experience of it was almost anticlimactic. It feels exactly like iOS development. Like you're in Xcode and you're writing the same sort of libraries and stuff that you can write for iOS. And so it felt like, “Oh, yeah, this is what I do day in and day out.” So it didn't feel like doing anything special, really.

I mean, there are obviously different APIs and stuff, and learning those is what was fun. Actually, I would say the coolest part about it is that the headset has this feature where you can put it on and see your desktop, like your Mac desktop. And so the coolest part is having the headset on working in Xcode and hitting play in Xcode and then your whole world changing around you. Because I'm launching this experience just right from Xcode hitting play. You can have the thing on and kind of forget that you're wearing the headset because it's that good. Like, it really is the highest quality headset I've ever used.

Do I use it? I almost never do. I do have it right next to my desk. It's back here. I put it on like, you know, once every couple weeks. And it's usually to check out some experience.

How much of your income comes from the games you made?

99% of my income comes from consulting. I don't actually know if web games are a completely different beast in terms of money. But for the vast majority of games, there's a huge spike at release and then it's a long tail afterward. And so that's been my experience on iOS releases as well. And basically every game that I've been involved in a release has had some kind of spike. The Apple Vision Pro game, the spike was 5 sales and then dropped to a 0. Long tail. 

I have enough games on the App Store that I don't think I have months where I'm not making any money anymore. It's less than 100 bucks but it’s something. It’ll never compare to that of freelancing or, you know, contract work. It’s downright laughable, no real contest. I should really just make them all free but I just haven't bothered. And partly it's because it's a little bit of a pride thing.

Do you have any notable projects you’re working on right now?

Yeah, as I said, I’m working on a Zelda-esque kind of project. The idea really just came from my reaching out to him and saying, “Hey, we haven't worked together in a while. Let's build something!” So this is a guy I worked with when I was freelancing and was working on the For the Win app.

I deliberately structured my freelancing, and I have maintained that to this day, where I was working on my own projects, 50% time. And so this is definitely like a point of privilege. Not everybody can afford to do this, but iOS freelancing is fairly lucrative. And so I essentially work 50% time on freelance projects and 50% time on my own games. And so I always have some game that I'm working on or a bunch of them, depending on the day when I went freelance.

The first game that I worked on that was a personal project was… when I had worked with my friend August before on some games, like Game Jam games and stuff. And so I asked him if he wanted to do the art for the game that I released myself at that time. So he's a longtime collaborator, this guy, August Brown, and his art. He mostly at that time just did art, and it was not his day job. So he was just like, “This is fun! To make art for games!” And now he's been working in games long enough where he's got a lot of experience. He's a producer at an actual real game company.

And so, yeah, I just reached out to him, I think, a few months ago, and said, “Hey, we haven't worked together in a while. Would you be interested in working on something together again?” And he said, “Yeah, that sounds awesome.” And so we sat down to talk about what project we were going to work on and spent some time planning. And now we're both trying to work on the project at least once a week. So whatever amount of time that takes, if it's just an hour or just like an afternoon, usually we both try and make just a little bit of progress every week. And then we check-in, we have a Slack channel where we just like say, “Oh yeah, I worked on this or I worked on that.”

More on his upcoming projects

I mentioned it's kind of a Zelda-ish game. Though I shouldn't say calling it Zelda-ish is wrong, it’s just probably more of a story-driven 2D Metroidvania. I don't know, I don't want to say too much. There's fishing involved. It's a nonviolent game and we're probably not going to have any money in it as well. So there'll be all sorts of missions and things that you do will be motivated by talking to other characters in the game and wandering around in a pleasant way. That's our goal.

So it's definitely really ambitious, because most of my games involve, you know, sort of infinite replayability in terms of like a game mode that's like a Tetris. And this guy, this friend of mine is super into those kinds of games as well. But I think we both decided consciously we wanted to build something else, like something a little more substantial. So there will be, I think, a story, which is something that not a lot of my games have.

So it feels really premature to talk about it because this is probably two or three years out minimum because we're both working on it just once a week.

I intend to release a new version of Action Chess, which is like the first iOS game that I made. And it's, again, like almost a Tetris mashup with chess. I've been working on that on the side too, and that should come out in the next few months probably. And I'll make it just an update to the old app, which I think has like, I don't know, probably 20,000 people downloaded it at some point in some time between when it came out in 2009 and when it left the App Store around 2016. So it's a complete rewrite, but has the same features as when I first released it.

Are you planning to approach your upcoming projects in a different way?

I will say I almost never think about marketing just in general, which is probably a big part of why I haven't seen that financial success. I haven't partnered with someone who enjoys and specializes in that kind of thing. And that would be a good partnership for me to have, but it's not one that I've ever pursued. 

I'm thinking about the game that I want to make or the game that I want to play. So regardless of different factors, that’s the primary thing. Fun. How can we make a game that we both find fun together? And because August's role is more of a producer role in his day job, I think he is thinking a little bit more about those kinds of things, about the release maybe, even though it's still laughably far away. And I'm happy to let him do all the thinking about that. That's just not something that I think about in my development workflow.

What’s your opinion on AI and its involvement in the industry?

I don't think of AI as a tool for game development at all. It's really just not in that part of my brain. But I mean I'm thinking a lot about it in terms of futurism and the future of humanity and our role in the universe and what it means to be a developer. And so I'm well aware of the trends of AI. I don't know if you know this, but Xcode has recently added some of the features that all the other IDEs are adding. So it has some AI tab completion features. They're primitive and not very good. And I would say don't compare favorably to some of the other options out there, but this is like an anecdote.

So last weekend was, or maybe it was the weekend before now, several weeks ago was Minnesota Protospiel, which is a board game prototyping convention. And we actually have two of those a year now, which is awesome. So I was at that, and I had the opportunity last year to go to Essen, Germany, which is the largest board game consumer convention in the world. 

And on that trip, I went with my publisher, my board game publisher, Adam’s Apple. And so Adam and a bunch of the other guys that had gone, we were all kind of, you know, we talk about game design all the time. And so I had at some point, mentioned this idea that I had for a game that was not at all fully formed around, and it was almost like a party game around this study called Kiki Bouba. 

So these are nonsense words that don't have any meaning in any language. But if you point to like some object and you ask whether that's Kiki or Bouba, almost everybody, universally, regardless of language, will pick one or the other. So they have a sharp and rounded meaning in people's brains. And so my idea was just that it was like, “Okay, is this a game?” And we did it a bunch of times on the trip.

Roll forward to this Protospiel a couple of weeks ago, and Adam brought it up again and was like, “Hey, when are you going to show me your prototype for that game that we played on our trip?” And I'm like, “I don't know. That was fun for like five minutes at a time. It's not the kind of game I play.” But he brought it up in a way that I was like, “Okay, I should probably do something with this.” And then during the course of our conversation, he said, “You know, I'll bet that if you wanted to generate a list of nonsense words like that, it’ll be something ChatGPT could do.” I was surprised, because, again, AI isn’t something I think about in my day to day.

I had not considered that I could use ChatGPT for that. So that night I went home from the convention and plugged into ChatGPT. Like, “Give me a list of words that don't mean anything in any language.” Sure enough, four of the words totally have English meanings. But you know, I was able to generate a list and pare it down and print it out and I brought it to the convention the next day.

We playtested it. It seemed like it was going well. So that's just an anecdote where like “Eh, I used some AI for that game.” The end cap to that story is that on Monday one of the guys who'd been playtesting with us messaged me and said, “Hey, do you know what this game that's coming out in 2025 called Boubakiki?” Exactly our game. Like when I had the idea at Essen, it was already in development. So I'm just relieved that I don't need to work on that game anymore because it's not the kind of game I would normally make.

Can you tell us about your design process?

I'll just clarify that I think design in the context of games has a different meaning from physical graphic design. So the way that the game looks versus the way that the game is played. And so generally when you talk about game design, you're talking about the way the game's played, not the way that it looks. With that out of the way, I’ll drop it all in one go: I have zero graphic design skills.

But yeah, I spend a lot of time thinking about game design and sort of the way that the games are played. I actually have this loosely held belief that there is a realm in which a game exists just as design outside of its context. So outside of the digital context that you play it in or the physical context that you play it in.

For example, there's the notion of what is chess, right? It's in its rules, but also it's outside of the physical makeup of those words that constitute its rules, right? Because you can have rules that are vastly different from one another and still you play chess, right? So whatever that abstract concept is, that's design, at least for me.

And so I think about that as almost like pure design. It is abstract design in a way. And so that's what I think about a lot. Like, are there games that exist that are sort of fundamental games that are universal? One thing people talk about when they talk about Go is that it's like, it's one of those games that are so simple and quintessential.

People have said if there are other species out there in the universe that are sentient, they may or may not play chess. They probably play some form of grid movement game, but it's probably not chess. They also probably play Go because it's so simple and so universal. And so I spend a lot of time thinking about what would be an interesting tweak to do, or what would be a different thing that would make chess interesting in an alternative way.

Where can we find you to learn more about you and your projects?

There's Abstract Puzzle, which is where I release games. And if I worked on a game and released it myself, it's going to show up there. I have a blog and then my resume site, which also has a bibliography and all the games I've worked on.