Decodex: A Game From a Nokia Engineer

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

Hi. I’m Áron Csatlós, the creator of the game Decodex—a free-to-play daily cryptography puzzle game that features hand-picked quotes from famous folks around the world. I’m based in Budapest, Hungary, and I’m currently working as a Technical Lead for Nokia, though I’ve been with the company for more than a decade now.

What’s your favorite game to play right now?

I have quite a few. I play chess daily. I'm not good at it, but I play daily. I also play Rocket League on console, and nowadays it's my favorite. And I also play a lot of daily games in the Discord server I share with fellow game creators, and we play each other’s games. Aside from video games, I also do a lot of board games, with Terraforming Mars being one of the best I’ve had.

Can you tell us about your career at Nokia?

Nokia’s brought me all around the world. I’ve been to India, then all around Europe and also in the U.S. We had a West Coast trip, which was beautiful, fully packed with nature trips, and last time we visited New York and Miami.

What’s #BuildInPublic?

When I first found the #buildinpublic movement, I followed a lot of devs who put everything out to try and get some traction by publicly building something. GroundKids, the AI training plan generator I made before, was a small project, so I thought I could build it in public, share the stories of what I did. I showed what I tried, where I failed, what worked, what didn’t... So I tried it for I think about a month or so. It was fun to share these kinds of details.

However, I didn’t have many followers, so I wasn’t an influencer, but it was still fun to do. I shared these stories on X, got feedback from random people on the internet, so it was a nice experience overall.

What inspired you to create Decodex?

I was inspired by the game a friend of my friend created, and it’s called Actorle. It's a game where you guess the actor of the day, and based on your guesses, it reveals some movies that might help you pinpoint the right answer. That creator made the game four years ago, and he made quite some money off of it now, so I wanted to try it out myself.

So after that, I tried to learn the key points, why it was successful. I tried to come up with an idea using those key points on what to do to engage my users and create screen time that was enjoyable for them. So when I started it as a project, it was a very engineered game where I didn’t know what kind of game I wanted to create.

But again, I had these points that I studied beforehand. I was like, “Okay, it needs to be some text-based game because people hang onto those more. It needs to be in English because Tier 1 advertisement countries are the U.S., Canada and the U.K. It has to be engaging for about five to six minutes for a player. And I need an engagement booster, something that makes people want to share the results.” I wanted to build a community as well, so I started working on it and saw a lot of cryptogram games.

Decodex isn’t a new game, nor are those other cryptogram apps. But they weren’t new games, not at all. Everything could’ve been nicer, with better UI, more fluid overall UX, maybe playable on a phone, not just a browser. So I mixed everything that I came up with together and went forward. Now, what to generate? Then I thought I could look up the quotes that I like. Then from there on, the quotes I could use are endless, and that’s how it started. 

Gameplay influenced by marketing opportunities

I launched the initial version a while ago, and with it the Back to the Future campaign. I only had around 10 to 15 regular players from Reddit, though I did get feedback from them then I polished it a bit more. I wanted users to register, but why would they register if there’s nothing worth doing it for?

So I thought of something that would get their attention. And also, you can’t post on specific subreddits, like r/BacktotheFuture, if you posted unrelated content. So that was one of the reasons I picked Back to the Future as a campaign, aside from me loving it myself. 

Can you tell us about your current marketing strategy?

During the initial launch, I mostly posted on Reddit, mainly in gaming subreddits. Then I reached out, and the people in the B3ta newsletter liked Decodex then put it in there, shooting up the 10-15 players I had before to 2000 visitors or something in two days. After that, the average traffic also went up to 150-200 a day, and it stayed and stuck around there, so that was a very nice surprise for me. 

Did you get any surprising opportunities from building your game?

On Reddit, I ended up talking to another developer, who made the game Quizmoji, and then he told me about another guy who was also developing another game. Then another. Then another. Then he asked, “Would you like to create a Discord server and talk about game development stuff with others like us?” I was like, “Yeah, sure, why not?” And now we have around 12 people in there. Now we cross-reference one another, bounce back our players together.

Do you have any advice you’d like to share with budding game developers?

Yeah, actually I have a few. So, one of my biggest problems back before I made the game was that I planned a huge project. I started it off, and then this mental curve happened where I was,  “Oh, okay, maybe no one will use it. I'm not sure if I want to finish it,” which then goes to, ”Oh, I don't have time for this.” 

For Decodex, I cut everything out, leaving just the bare minimum of what is needed to release the game. So there was no database, no authentication, nothing. Just putting it together as fast as I could.

When I released it, I got very positive comments. That was momentum, and this helped me to go further, so I did not stop developing it. I polished it here and there. If a bug pops up, I fix it as fast as I can. My lesson, what I learned here, is that if I cut everything out and stick only with the key feature, then I can finish the project.

What are your plans for the future?

I plan to release more games in the future, at least two more before summer, like around June. It sounds a bit of a tight schedule, but one of my games just needs a bit of polish and it’s ready to go out. I have another I can release before summer as well, but that one needs a bit more work compared to the first one.

The one closest to release is actually similar to Sumplete. I thought I created a unique game while I was talking to ChatGPT, then I found out Hey, Good Game was already on it, so I had to tweak it a bit.

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

Play Decodex. It helps me a lot to create more fun games and maintain my current projects. I’m also in X, if you’re interested.