Oh fun q - let's see. The basic idea came from me brainstorming with a separate friend about how to make games like stranger video[1] - we got into the idea of

Oh fun q - let's see. The basic idea came from me brainstorming with a separate friend about how to make games like stranger video[1] - we got into the idea of a game you could play entirely via calling a number. I pitched "rock paper scissors on the phone" to greg (we were going back and forth with ideas; I really wanted to make something with him!). So the basic idea was there from the start - although it came from a lot of thinking about the broader idea of "games about playfully interacting with strangers"[2]. We dropped a ton of features. We originally were going to let you play from the browser, give you a rematch button, make things best of 5, and maybe have a little phone tree. The most controversial of those is probably "play from the browser" - we prototyped this and it would have made the game more accessible but we thought that needing to dial a number made the game interesting - if the game is in the browser why wouldn't we use the features of the browser? We also iterated heavily on the experience of recording yourself - e.g. tweaking our timeouts, moving from Twilio transcriptions to Whisper, etc. But I think that's all just making the UX better, not changing the core of the game. greg shout if i missed anything! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38305787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38305787 [2] i wrote a tiny bit about this here: https://eieio.games/nonsense/game-13-talk-paper-scissors/ https://eieio.games/nonsense/game-13-talk-paper-scissors/