Make It Meme With Sandro Wahl

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

Hey everyone! I’m Sandro Wahl, and I founded prealpha—the team behind Make It Meme!

I worked as a software developer and an IT consultant until I founded my team. We’re an independent game studio based in Germany, where we dedicate our projects to fostering creativity, humor and connection between users on a global scale.

Make It Meme is our multiplayer game that turns meme creation into a gaming experience. It’s a game that’s best played with friends and is designed to be a fun and casual party game. Each player gets a random meme and has to think of a text for the meme within a given time. After that, the players rate each other's memes and award their Meme-Buddy. Whoever has collected the most points at the end wins!

What game are you enjoying right now?

Right now I'm playing an indie game from a small indie studio in Germany. They released a single-player, 2D RPG called Drova — Forsaken Kin. So yeah, it's like your classic old-school single-player RPG. There's a great story and a lot of dialogue to read through.

I really do enjoy playing single-player games with great lore and I actually don't like competitive multiplayer games. I just enjoy living through a good story, and this is what I played recently.

What got you into gaming?

I have to say that it all started with Minecraft. And I had an obsessive Minecraft phase, like, I poured way too many hours into it during school. We had our own servers and we managed them, coded them and made plugins for them. And I wasn't even into coding at the time. So I spent my time hanging around designing websites making banners and stuff, trying to build our small community and I think this is how it all started.

It sparked an interest in general game development, I think. But during my studies, I have to say, I barely had time to play because academics were so intense. And LinkedIn isn't too correct about my degrees as I only have one degree. I'm the college dropout founder, I would say. I had a bachelor's degree and continued with my master's until I got fed up with it and just wanted to do game development.

I don’t need another degree at this point, I just want to make a game.

How did Make It Meme come to be?

I think when I first started working on the project it was always just meant to be a party game for me and the boys. In the beginning, I never intended to publish it. It was hosted on a web server and you could only enter it with a password and it was way simpler than it is right now.

So we played Make It Meme together with a community on Discord. They’re game developers we befriended, I would say, and we played it with them as they had the password and they said, “This idea is brilliant. You have to publish it! Just remove the password and you're good to go. You can immediately release it. Just do it right now.” And they talked me into it and I did it. Though yeah, in the beginning, there weren't a lot of users.

Starting off

I released a post on a small German image board that’s similar to Reddit, but some guy made it himself and it's very niche. I was on it at the time, and I thought, “Yeah, maybe I should just make a text post and say I made a game, please try it out.” And yeah, it sparked interest and people loved it.

And it's not even a big platform, that image board, I mean. So you couldn't go viral and have millions of players. But on that platform, it somewhat went viral, I would say. And yeah, we had like over a thousand people in one evening and this was blowing my mind, like going from 30 visitors a day to a thousand people playing my game.

I was sitting on the couch and scrolling through my laptop, seeing all the lobbies that were open and active where people were actually playing the game, and that was incredible for me. Because you have to realize that there's someone actually sitting at their desktop or whatever and dedicating time to my stupid project and spending time there and maybe having fun.

So for me, that first thousand was a pretty emotional and cherished memory.

Premise of the game

Again, the game is intended to be a party game. So it was always about this social group, a group of friends, maybe a group of people that already know each other.

So they have a common basis, right? That's it. Spend maybe game night together or on Discord, whatever you come together create a lobby and all the friends join the lobby and then the game starts. 

Everyone gets a meme, a random meme, and the way our game works is that all the memes are like pre-made templates, so you just have to input the text. You don't have to create text boxes and drag them around. You just have to input text and everyone gets a meme and you have a minute and thirty seconds to create a funny caption. And this is where the social aspect comes into play, right? Because it's meant to be a place where you can make inside jokes.

This is where it's really funny. You make jokes about your friend or what just happened or whatever, it could be anything that your friends like. After the minute passes and everyone submits their meme, it goes into a voting round and each of the creations is shown one by one. One after another, while you all view the same meme at the same time, and this is intentional.

So we all see the same meme and we can laugh about it. This is the core aspect of it and you have a few seconds to upvote it or downvote it. That part’s actually inspired by Reddit, as on Reddit you see a post and it has these upvote or downvote buttons.

It's just the arrow keys, and it works the same in our game. You just upvote if you like it or downvote if you don't like it. And then it goes on, showing all the memes, and this is how you collect points. It just calculates how many players liked a meme, and how many disliked it, and it calculates a score for each of the memes, and then it accumulates them for each of the players.

And that's the game. You just make memes and vote on it. That's it.

How did you create the scoring system?

Well, the scoring system has a maximum of a thousand for both positive and negative. If we hit a thousand points, then it means everyone upvoted or downvoted it. So it's always comparable.

And actually, figuring out the scoring system was a lot more challenging than I thought. I had the idea that if someone made a meme and we voted and then the best one won, how should this even look like? I didn't have any experience with game design in general. My background is consulting for insurance and stuff, so it was not my strength at the time. And we actually worked through a bunch of prototypes that worked a bit differently from one another. 

For example, we had one where you wouldn't vote for the memes one after another, but you get a list like on Reddit, with all the memes and then you can click on them if you like it or not. And as I said, this means that no one sees the same meme at the same time. So everyone laughs about something different, which isn't the same amount of fun, right?

So yeah, figuring this out was actually a challenge for us. And we came up with a few clever ideas. To make it more interesting, we actually came up with the concept that allows you to collect points from other memes, like investing in memes that you like because we thought that maybe there would be rounds where you're not feeling as creative and the meme doesn't turn out great and you don't want to score badly, so we came up with this concept: namely the “Meme Buddy”.

And you can give that Meme Buddy to someone else’s meme once in each of the rounds. And what it does is you get half of the points that the other meme scores, whether it be positive or negative. So you can invest your Meme Buddy once each round into the other memes and then collect more points and show that you like the meme.

Who made the audio for your game?

The audio is actually a custom-made track by someone from Fiverr. He's a freelancer who makes music. I knew I wanted to have some music going on in the background, like on default. At the time we were posting a lot on TikTok, we had a dedicated TikTok account for the game by the way, and creating funny meme videos about the game, putting out whatever we felt like doing. And there was a lot of vibrant, lowkey house music that was used in a lot of memes.

And yeah, this is how we discovered this direction of meme music. And I just sent this guy a few examples, and he made a simple beat and that's actually how it came to be. And people tend to like it or dislike it. It's like modern elevator music, I would say. But the funniest thing is someone actually made a 10-hour version of it and uploaded it to YouTube.

Do you have any interesting stories regarding the game?

The craziest stories for me are always when I meet people in person who know the game but did not learn of it through me. So I meet random people and we happen to speak about it because it's basically my life.

And they say they played this all the time with their coworkers or fellow students. And this, for me personally as a game creator, feels surreal. I think the craziest story that happened to me was when I was at a small company party, and the girls from the marketing approached me and they heard that I was the creator of the game.

And they said, “Yeah, we play it all the time. We have a meme wall.” I was like, “What? A meme wall?” And they really did have one in their office, they showed me around and had like a wall full of printed-out memes that they created in the game and stuck to the wall. Why would you even print out a meme? That’s really out of the box for me.

But anyway, this happened actually twice. Like once with this company and once with a school class. They sent me an email and said, “Okay, we're always playing your game in class with our teacher.” And they sent me this image and they had this pinboard filled with hundreds of memes. And they asked if I would like to sponsor their yearbook, and I did because it was lovely for me to see.

The power of social connections

It's super interesting for me that this game is way more social than I thought. You give people a room to express their creativity, in a very social way, then it becomes a hit. It's literally meant for friend groups, so it caters to them and what they currently talk about and make fun of.

And this is actually an interesting dynamic that we discovered is that people do not play it once and forget about it, but tend to come back because they have new content to make memes about. And we actually have the same dynamic in our friends group. We don't play it every day, but maybe every month, because every time a funny story happens, we feel like, “Okay, we need to make memes about it.”

And then we just make memes for an hour about the same joke, and that's okay. Then we wait till we have more stories to make memes about.

Saving memes for specific trends or subcultures

I actually never thought about meme science, but it could be a thing. So at the moment, we don't store any of the created memes because it's very resource-intensive. And what we do is when you create a meme, you actually don't create the image itself. You just submit the text, the caption, and then we render it on your device. So everything you see is not “real”, per se. It's not a file that exists anywhere, so we are not saving the memes.

It's just on the fly. This is cheaper for us. And it's also about privacy and security as well. But in the future, we will allow people to save their memes to a private collection. So you don't have to download everything or screenshot it.

Memes are very diverse and there are countless niche memes or subcultures, I would say. The best example is probably subreddits. Like on Reddit, you have like different subreddits, it's like different forums buried in different topics, right? And people have their own jokes, their own memes, their own imagery, their own language, even!

This is so diverse and this is a direction we have to focus on in the future, like making the game better and more tailored to these subcategories. Because at the moment, the way the game works is that we provide the content and it's more like general-purpose memes, like the super popular ones that people from Germany know, but also from the U.S. and from France and other countries.

But in every country and every language some memes and formats are not popular in other countries, right? So it would be wise to offer the people content that is actually tailored to them. It would be great to have a German meme pack or maybe a German football meme pack or whatever.

And this is something that we have to develop in the future. And we're actually actively working on that.

How do you handle moderation and legal issues?

This is super critical, especially for multiplayer games and especially if you allow people to post their own content or just allow them to chat with each other, especially in a public place.

So in Make It Meme, we do have different lobbies. We have private lobbies. These are non-critical, I would say because they are usually just used by friend groups that already know each other anyway. And we have the public lobbies. And the public lobbies are more meant to be as an introduction to the game.

Maybe you just discovered the game and you want to try it out but you don't have your friends around. So you just join the public lobby and you can play a few rounds. And we do have a lot of problems with critical content on these public lobbies as we have the chat and people make memes. So that also means providing text content and you always have people that are misbehaving. And at the size we are currently at, it's basically impossible to moderate everything properly.

It's just not feasible to make a filter that's 100% accurate. You will always have situations where people find a way around certain filters or the security measures we put in place. And yeah, so this is pretty tough for us, this moderation endeavor.

What we do have at the moment is a two-layer approach. We have a real-time chat filter that filters all of the text input, like in the chat and the memes. This uses AI and whatever under the hood and it checks all the incoming messages in real-time, and it prevents people from writing n-words or hate speech and whatever. It blocks messages from misbehaving people.

And if that fails, we have the second line of defense, I would say. It's just allowing players to report each other in the game. These reports, together with a short proof, like the recent chat messages, are then sent to our internal moderation system and reviewed by a team of moderators that we have.

And we actually built that ourselves and it took like a couple of months as it was quite a big thing for us. That actually produced even more work because now we have to review over a thousand abuse reports a day, and it's just this constant battle of people misbehaving and us trying to stop them from doing so.

It's a hard challenge. And I think this is a challenge that needs to be solved on a global scale. Like every game developer should have a solution for this before building a multiplayer game. So just to give you a number we're currently filtering around 1. 8 to 2 million chat messages a day. This is an incredible number that’s a double-edged sword. On one side, it shows how big this project has become, and on the other, is something that makes us scratch our heads about how should we even begin moderating this much?! But yeah, this is super important for us as a company.

And especially because we have a younger audience. So it's usually teenagers, but also kids play it. So when you give people room to interact in public, then you have to make it safe as a platform, of course. And we're doing our best, but it's as I said, it's not always that easy.

Tell us more about the monetization system you have

In the beginning, I never planned to make money off this game because it was meant to be my hobby project, so in the beginning we didn't have ads, we didn't have a publisher, we didn't have anything. It was just a website and I was paying for it with my money to host it, but also with my time to develop it. But at some point, the server costs were just too much for me to bear on my own, so I started trying to get people to donate money.

But this actually didn't work out because I'm not that active on social media. So yeah, I started thinking about, “Okay, how should we monetize this game while making it accessible?” And of course, the only viable way at the moment is through advertisements. Frankly, I hate ads because they’re just horrible for everyone. No one likes ads, but how you can make a product free while maintaining it without affecting your life?

So yeah, I started. Implementing ads and it went pretty well actually. I remember sitting at my grandma's couch on Christmas while on my laptop and playing around with it, developing it and adding some advertisement to the game, and the next day we were making money and I was like, wow, this could be something big.

And by now, we do have a proper publisher and business partner. We're partnered with Poki. They are the biggest browser game platform at the moment. just a website where you can play a bunch of games. Back in the Flash era, we had a lot of these websites, right? You go onto these websites and play hundreds of games. Poki is like the modern version of that. So yeah, we do have a publisher and we have our own domain and it's all still financed by the advertisement.

On moderator “fees”

But coming back to the moderators, these are actually guys from our community. So we do have a big Discord community server. And people just come in and they offer to help voluntarily. So we do have a team of moderators, but they're all voluntary. We don't force them to work. So it's if they feel like it, review some stuff, and follow our rules and so. And they do enjoy it.

And the way we actually try to motivate them is by making it a challenge. This was actually super interesting because we just started out with this moderation system, and our moderators could just review this stuff and whatever but there wasn't any feedback for them. They were doing work, but not getting any feedback.

So It was getting pretty boring pretty early, right? So what we did was add leaderboards to this moderation system. So they could see, “Okay, this month I reviewed 500 reports. And what we actually do is make it a monthly challenge. So, they all do it voluntarily, but the one who does the most abuse reports gets a personal gift from me, so it could be a gift card or whatever, and sometimes we actually just donate money if they don't want a gift. So yeah, this is how we motivate our voluntary workers.

Placing ads that don’t hinder user experience

That's actually pretty interesting because we had to integrate video ads which I was pretty hesitant about at the beginning. They are super intrusive and it just interrupts the user by forcing them to watch something.

No one likes that. You at least need a skip button or something. But we had to do it because video ads obviously have the highest revenue compared to display ads. Aside from that, we had the problem that we couldn’t interrupt the game flow with a video ad because while it's a real-time multiplayer game, we cannot just show a video ad in between the rounds or something or in-between the memes, though that would’ve been ideal because an average game session is around 20 to 30 minutes. So it would be wise to place ads in between just to split it but it's basically impossible because you would have to pause the game for every player in the lobby and then play a video ad for everyone.

This is super unreliable because video ads, well, they don’t load equally on every device, and it just depends on internet speed. Maybe someone has an ad blocker and they would stare at a blank screen for half a minute. So it just doesn't make any sense to include video ads in the game itself.

This is why we opted to go with the so-called pre-roll ads. They just play before the game, before you enter your lobby. But it doesn’t always do that, as it actually takes into account the duration of certain things, like how long you’ve been on the page or so.

And the other thing that we did was integrate the ads as a sort of reward. Like, we offer you to watch an ad to get a reward back. It's like super common in mobile games where you watch an ad and then you get, I don't know, in-game currency, gems or something. But this is also tricky for our game because we don't have a currency, we don't have items that you could unlock.

It doesn't make sense to give you a spell or whatever, I don't know. So what we did was mark a bunch of avatars—these are basically the in-game skins that you can choose from—and these are meme characters and some of them are premium, as they look better and it's a more popular meme, whatever.

And these premium avatars just require you to watch an ad to unlock them. For half a minute or something. And yeah, this is how we included the video ads without making them intrusive.

What’s next for you and your team?

Actually, we’re working on something really big. What I haven't told you is that we weren't a company all the time. It was just me working on the game and this changed early this year or actually in December last year. This is when I hired my first developer.

And this was for a reason. Because well, okay, the game is already finished. And now we're actually working on version 2.0. This version of the game is meant to be released later this year, November or December maybe. And yeah, we have been actually working on this for a year now or maybe even longer if you consider the design phase. And this will replace the existing game.

So it's like a big update for the game with a big design overhaul and a lot of new features that have been requested for literally years so yeah, I always had this bigger vision for the game. I wanted it to be a platform because it's super social and it would make sense to be able to connect and maybe share stuff and even provide your own content, right?

But this requires a more sophisticated technical backend. So you need to offer accounts and stuff. It's just super complex. And I knew I wouldn't be able to make that on my own, at least not in a year or two. For me, it would take five years probably as I know myself. This is when I started looking into hiring people or working with an agency, maybe.

And yeah this has been ongoing for a year and we are this close, like literally weeks away from releasing the first test version to our beta testers on the Discord. This is right around the corner.

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

I would say if you want to put feedback, best place to be is on our Discord. We have a big ass Discord community, like we literally have like 30,000 members, which is nuts. And yeah, we are always open for feedback, especially from developers and also from people wanting to help out. You can always help, we welcome it.

We're a very small team and we're trying to stay bootstrapped. So it’s a challenge for us realizing this endeavor, this new version while staying independent. And we're always happy to have helping hands.