Rob Alvarez Bucholska
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Yaakov Sash Creates a Game From Stacking Pixels | Episode 352

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After an early childhood attempt at coding Pac-Man when it came out, and failing, CEO Yaakov Sash of Novospir now unveils a groundbreaking new genre of massively multiplayer social puzzle games. With extensive experience in digital asset technology from his tenure at Credit Suisse, Sash is now set on transforming the gaming industry. Novospir’s debut game, Stack the Pixels, exemplifies his vision of integrating secure, fair, and engaging gameplay with unique digital and non-digital currencies. Yaakov shares insights into the daily challenges of leading a global team, the importance of playtesting, and how player feedback shapes the development of innovative gaming experiences. Sash emphasizes the value of persistence and adaptation in creating fun and competitive games that bring families together.

Yaakov Sash is the CEO of Novospir, an innovative gaming ecosystem that introduces a groundbreaking new genre of massively multiplayer social puzzle games. With extensive experience in digital asset technology from his tenure at Credit Suisse, where he led Digital Assets Markets, Yaakov is now focused on transforming the gaming industry. Novospir’s debut game, Stack the Pixels, exemplifies his vision of integrating secure, fair, and engaging gameplay with unique digital and non-digital game currency.

 

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Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Rob:
Hey, engagers. Welcome to another episode of the Professor Game podcast, and we are today joined by Yaakov. Is that a decent way to pronounce your name?

Yaakov Sash:
That is great.

Rob:
So, Yaakov Sash is with us today. But, Yaakov, we need to know, are you prepared to engage?

Yaakov Sash:
I am so ready.

Rob:
Let’s do this.

Yaakov Sash:
Let’s go.

Rob:
We have Yaakov Sash, the CEO of Novospir, an innovative gaming ecosystem that introduces a groundbreaking new genre of massively multiplayer social puzzle games. He has extensive experience in digital asset technology from his tenure at Credit Suisse, where he led digital assets markets, and he is now focused on transforming the gaming industry. Nonetheless, nothing less than that. Novospir’s debut games stack the pixels exemplifies his vision of integrating secure, fair, and engaging gameplay with unique digital and non digital game currency. So, Yaakov, is there anything that we’re missing from that intro? Is there anything we should know before we get on to the next questions?

Yaakov Sash:
No. Thank you for the intro. No, that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re trying to change gaming. People say that gaming has gotten stale. It’s boring. There isn’t anything new lately, and we are going to. We definitely want to shake up the industry.

Rob:
That’s amazing. Amazing. And talking about shaking up the industry, we need to know, first off, first things first, what does a day with you look like? A week with you, a month with you. What does being in your shoes nowadays look and feel like? Give us a quick intro into what that is.

Yaakov Sash:
Sure. So I do have a global team, so a team of people all over the world are working on this vision together with me. And so a lot of these people are from other countries, and so the time zones are obviously not necessarily in the favor of the US. I’m based in New York, but I have developers that are in South Africa, Pakistan, India, just to name a few. And we are truly not only this game going to be a collaborative game that’s going to be global, but our team is global as well. And so I have to get up pretty early in the morning to get in touch with my team. And this is a startup, so obviously everything is very scrappy, and we’re doing a lot with very little. So there’s a constant challenge to see what could we do better or how can we do more. But the team is fully committed to sharing this vision. We’re doing very, very cool stuff, which we’ll get into. So it’s a little bit boring in a sense. It’s like, because on the game side, it’s like code and writing code and testing and repeat and then doing playtesting. But if you love this stuff, which everyone, the team does, this is great. This is what we love to do, and we’ll do this all day long. And sometimes you get in the zone and you forget to eat, you forget to drink, and just fully focused on getting this beautiful vision done, then, of course, there’s always where you can build the most perfect game in the world. And if no one knows about it, it won’t go anywhere. So a lot of what we’re doing is around the branding, marketing. That also takes a lot of time as well. But this has always been a part of the process. From day one, we didn’t expect, oh, we’re going to come up with a perfect game and then magically everyone’s going to find it and start playing with it. So that’s how we have a great brand stacked to pixels, very, very colorful, vibrant characters, and it’s a fun family game. The way I think of it is that it’s a board game replacement, because these days families are bigger. Most board games have limited number of players that can play a game because you take out, let’s say Cells of Catan is a very popular game, but you can’t play it more than five or six or even with expansion packs, maybe eight players. I don’t remember the exact number, but if you have ten people in your family, then people have to double up and it just becomes a very, very. It’s not fun then. A lot of games are complex to learn. There’s too many rules. But a game, a puzzle type game, like a candy crush, those games are very easy to learn and very easy for little kids and older people and everyone in between to play together. It’s a fun game and it’s also competitive. People want to have a game that they can play and be on top. It’s just the nature of we are. And there’s no one more competitive than I can say about my own family. But I suspect it’s all families. Somehow you get families together and our childhood is still, we’re still in that, you know, our most aggressive days we spend with our own siblings. And there’s so much sibling rivalry. And this is a fun way to get families together where everyone can have a fun fear challenge and play together.

Rob:
Sounds great. We’ve been discussing many of the benefits and the cool stuff that you guys are doing and the results that you’re getting. Getting there is not a bed of roses, as I’m sure you know, and the engagers probably know as well. So we want to get into one of those times where things just, you know, whether with stack the pixels or any other previous experience that you certainly have, where things did not go your way in some way, shape or form, you were doing something related to games, gaming, gamification, and you were trying something, and it just didn’t work out. We want to be there. We want to feel that little large pain that you felt, right, that your favorite fail, and, of course, what lessons you got from that, like what you would not repeat, what you would do differently.

Yaakov Sash:
So, interesting. I saw my earliest failure because that’s where that I think really resonates. So I was ten years old, and this is before, like, consoles and all that stuff. So we. My dad had bought the Ti 99 four, a computer, which is a really old computer, and you had to buy games on cartridges for it. And my first value is that my siblings, brothers, I wanted Pac man, they wanted Donkey Kong, and they got their way, and I was very upset. So I said, and my dad couldn’t afford another game. So my first lesson there was, you don’t always get what you want, which is a good lesson, especially for kids these days. My second lesson was that, oh, I can do something about it. Maybe I can’t buy it, it’s too expensive, but maybe I can write my own game. And for some reason, I don’t know, I was ten years old. This is before the Internet, before everything that we have today is so easy. Go online. You can get tons of tutorials. Then you wanted to program. You really had to go buy a book in the bookstore or figure out yourself or get a magazine. These have computer magazines, which I, of course, subscribe to. And then you have to figure out yourself. So I literally taught myself how to code, and that was a great outcome. That was my first failure. First outcome. Then in terms of the game, I remember struggling. I couldn’t get Pac man not to eat the walls. It was very good at eating the dots, but it also used to eat up the walls, and that was an easy problem to solve. So I did solve that pretty quickly. But then the next problem was much more difficult, and I was still struggling with that problem even till today. And that helped me formulate stack to pixels. So sometimes it can be a long time between when you have a problem before you get a solution. And that problem was how to make the game fun, because. And, you know, it’s not a small problem. It’s not a small problem, and we still struggle with the tate, because the issue was that the monsters that I made were too smart. As a child, I was very proud of myself that I figured out the algorithm, like, how the monsters can figure out where Pac man is and just. It’s simple math, but for a ten year old, it was pretty. I was very smart on myself. But then when people would play the game, they’ll complain that it’s not fun because the monsters were fighting them too quickly and they were getting out. And so then I had to put down. I used random and other things like that, but I was never happy with that solution because it felt like a cop out. Like, I’m just making the monster stupid. Like, I’m not, you know, I’m not making it more fun. In a way. I just down the game. And this led into stack to pixels, because what I was thinking about is that some of these classic games are fun. And I love playing games like Candy Crush and other games, 2048 and all these very simple strategy type games on your phone. But then you feel like there is a social component that’s missing, and that was missing from Pac man as well. And that is the best opponent is actually another person, because then you can match to their level, right? You can. Beginners can play against beginners. Advance. Can play against advance. There’s a challenge there that you can play. But I realized that no one had any real strategy games that can play with more than one person. So you have chess, right? So chess became very popular. And now I think you even have a four player version of chess. You don’t really have games like you have Minecraft and you have games like that. But those are not really games where you can play against five opponents and then win them, right? There’s no score. There’s really not a challenge in terms of scoring, in terms of who’s better and who’s worse. So that led me to a stack to pixels. I said my vision playing like a candy crush type game, but instead of having separate wards for every person, which you have now, so you can be on level 1000 and your friend could be on level ten. And yes, there’s a serve of a competition there, but you’re on different. It’s parallel play. It’s really not. You’re almost playing separate games of chess against different opponents. You’re not playing against each other. It’s not head to head. I said, wouldn’t it be fun if we can have a massive game board where you can have ten people, five people, ten people, even 100 people. And then I thought as a programmer, you’re always trying to think, what can you design something to be more scalable? You can make a system that can work for ten people or 100 people. Can I design a game that I can have a million people playing it? I said, wow. I said, if I designed this game properly, then it’s just the size of the game board, have a smaller game board, a million people have a bigger game board, much, much larger, and a billion people have even larger. So there really is no constraint from the game itself, which is really cool.

Rob:
Nice, nice. Very interesting. And I’m guessing that it only has to do with the technical and restrictions that that might have of technical concurrent people doing stuff at the same time.

Yaakov Sash:
Yeah, yeah. The technical part is challenging, but what’s cool is that this is something that we had to build our own game server because there’s no one out there today that is doing this. So it’s not like we can go and buy an off the rack game server that we can then use. Because the game servers that they have today all basically have the concept of playing in a room together with other people. So you go into a room and then they match you up and then you can play. Or if you’re playing games like Fortnite or other games like that, it’s almost like you’re being put on a different server. Like there’s different servers, so you’re not playing with millions of people together. You’re really on a separate game server.

Rob:
There’s really very every single person on the same server groups. Fortnite has, I think it’s 100 people at most.

Yaakov Sash:
Exactly. And then you have here there is no limit. So it really changes the whole calculus. And what I think really cool here is that I look at this as the pong of this new genre of games, and I think that I want to partner with other game publishers to bring their brands and their games into this new framework, which I think is a social framework, which is, I think that’s what’s been missing a lot from gaming is that social connection.

Rob:
Cool. That’s very nice. Very interesting. So Yaakov, we’ve been discussing these difficulties that you had. It seems like you have a lot of things that you’ve been working on. And of course, as we’ve been discussing before the call here, there’s a bunch of people trying to see what lessons we can learn from game designers like you and your team. Right, to apply it to different places. Like some people might be designing a total formal game itself where it might be an educational game, it might be a marketing game, it might be gamification, might be many things. Right. We would like to know, how do you do it, essentially? What’s the process? Do you have some steps? How does that look like in the case of your company and your experience?

Yaakov Sash:
So I think it’s very key to do playtesting and to get user feedback, but we have to be very careful because when you’re doing something new, so the story goes, I don’t know how true this is, but when I believe the first car was being invented, like the automobile was being invented, and customers were asked, what do you want? They said, we want a faster horse. Right.

Rob:
Yeah. The quote by Henry Ford. Right.

Yaakov Sash:
Right. They didn’t even conceive of what is an automobile. They just want their horses to be faster. They wanted. So, you know, when you’re coming to, when you’re asking players, what do you want? They have to be very careful. Right. You have to show them something, but anything you’re going to show them is not going to be the full vision, because again, a social game that has millions of players, obviously you have to build it before that exists and you don’t know if that’s going to resonate. So I look at it in a few ways. One is if I’m building a platform in the sense, like, it’s not this specific game. It took candy crush, I think almost like ten. This is how their story goes. I think it was almost like ten different variants before they landed on Candy Crushed, a while before you hit the exact components of what makes the game balanced and fun, and that’s perfectly fine. And that’s what we’ll do as well. We’re going to have early adopters that we’re going to work with them. We’ll find out what’s fun, what’s less fun, what’s more fun, and we’ll definitely enhance the game and make it as fun as possible. But it’s a platform, so even if this particular version doesn’t work, there’s an infinite number of games that can be built in this style. So it really opens up what the possibilities are. Then the other aspect is that when you do playtesting, which we have, you listen to the feedback very importantly. And one of the feedback that I got, which I didn’t even realize that people would be so enamored with, was the act of playing next to their friend. So it’s funny they were coming. We did this actually in New York City, Washington Square park. We had an event and people were coming with their friends, with their families. It was a beautiful spring day and they were together with their friends in real life. But somehow playing the game in this virtual world was so cool to them. And I was like, wow, I didn’t even realize how people will be so into that aspect. And then based on our feedback, we actually focused on improving that part of the game. To make that even better. We didn’t have profile pictures and we added profile pictures. So now you literally can see your friend’s picture in the game, like playing next to you side by side. And that’s very, very important. Like, to listen to that feedback.

Rob:
Always. Playtesting is something that we’ve found out that most people realize is super important. But of course, it’s not just about doing the playtesting. You have to listen to what’s going on and all those interpretations. As you were saying, it’s not just, oh, what do you want? Which I think is something that is crucial. It’s how do you feel about what we’re showing you? More than what you want.

Yaakov Sash:
Right. And somehow even. Exactly. And even that you have to. People will say something and then they would do something very differently. So I had people coming over doing playtesting and like, oh, I don’t play these puzzle games. For me, I don’t. This is too. It’s like they’re playing hardcore shooting violin type games. And to them, a family friendly puzzle game to them wasn’t. Doesn’t look like fun, but when they started playing it, they actually got addicted. They were like, oh, this is very addicting. Which is what you want to hear. You want to hear that. It’s like they’re enjoying it. The addiction is coming from a good place in the sense that they’re finding it enjoyable to play and it’s challenging and that’s what you want.

Rob:
That’s fantastic. That’s fantastic. Thank you very much for that little anecdote. I think it always helps to really dig a little bit into the details so that people understand what we’re talking about. And Yaakov, again, with all this experience that you’ve had, is there, you’ve talked about playtesting. Maybe that’s it. But is there a best practice, something that you say when somebody’s gonna use, get inspired from games or create a game, what is a thing that they can do that makes their project at least a little bit better? Let’s say that way.

Yaakov Sash:
So I think that it’s coming back to balance. I think that as a game designer, right. You wanna do that and give some freedom to explore as well, to see where people take the game on their own. One of the things we saw in stack the Pixels was that players were also on their own building towers. And basically, it’s not even something you get rewarded for, but people were just finding it. So, I mean directly, like, if you make a very high tower, it’s nice, it’s cool. You’re not getting extra points for that, but players were finding it challenging for themselves, and that’s good. You don’t want to have a game that’s so constrained where there’s no freedom, I think. And then you can see where players are going and maybe that is something we should make it, we should gamify it, or just opposite. Maybe the challenge is at advanced levels, is to resist certain instincts and you actually get more points by not doing certain things that the beginner players do. Because ultimately you still want to have a game that’s a strategy game. Obviously, we don’t want that. Everyone can play. Chess is obviously fun, but not everyone can play at the grandmaster level. And even though it doesn’t scale, you still want to have a game that you can have the whole family play together and the whole community play together, which is where the massively multiplayer aspects come into play.

Rob:
Awesome. Awesome. And moving on to things like recommendations, you’ve heard already many of the questions, and you feel a little bit about the podcast. Is there a person that you would like to hear answering these questions? Maybe somebody you look up to? Somebody you would like to get inspired by? I don’t know. Do you have a recommendation for a featured guest on professor game?

Yaakov Sash:
So I actually think that it’s interesting. One of my first games that I played is actually the Lucasfilms used to have a game studio. I don’t know if they still have it now. And they made a lot of great games then.

Rob:
I think they do, yeah.

Yaakov Sash:
Humor and it was great. I think it’ll be so interesting to bring on some of those people from back in the day, that Monkey island and whatnot, right? Monkey island was one of them, but they also had one that I play was a maniac. Mansion was one of my favorite. So they really had a lot of really fun games and really fun memories playing that with my brother as well. So, yes, definitely a good. These are, I think, some of the classic games, which are so interesting how they weren’t violent. They weren’t. They were just really good stories and they had. It’s kind of interesting how I don’t really see a lot of that going on today, so I think that would be interesting.

Rob:
Absolutely. Absolutely. And keeping up with the recommendations is there. We’re talking about books at the start, right? You taught yourself to code using books and going to magazines. Is there a book that you recommend, and which book would that be? And of course, why?

Yaakov Sash:
So I’m going to go with two books. So one is a nonfiction book and one is a fiction book, but they’re actually connected. So the nonfiction book is reality plus virtual worlds and the problem of philosophy by David Chalmers. He’s a philosopher known for the theory of consciousness. I actually disagree with him on that. I’m not a philosopher, but I do have very strong opinions on many different fields. But I disagree with him on that. But I think this book was amazing. He wrote a great book. And what this book goes through is it tackles the problem straight on. Like, are we living in a simulation? Which is so interesting when we think about gamification. Is it possible that our whole world, we’re actually living in a simulation? Like we may be living in a game? So I thought that would be fun for your audience to think about. And he really goes through this at a very, very deep level. But it’s a very readable book. It’s not a dense book, and I highly recommend it. And he talks about how even if we are in a simulation, it doesn’t matter. This is still our world, and we still have morals. We still have to do things. It doesn’t change any calculus in the sense, oh, it’s just a game and big deal. No, we still have relationships, we still have people, right? We still have families. And even if it’s all fake, even if it’s a game, it’s real to us. If it’s real to us in our mind, and it’s real. And I think that’s interesting when we think about games and gamification, like, how real is it? How much is that? Does it feel real to the players versus, does it feel like a game?

Rob:
Exactly.

Yaakov Sash:
So that’s one book and then another book is mother of learning by nobody 103. That’s his pen name. I think his real name is Domagai Kamaich. So definitely now this is a self published book, and the book is about, it goes in the genre of with a. It’s basically like a Groundhog Day type book where, or that was a movie where the day is repeating. So in this book, it’s a month. So at the start of the month, he basically starts over, and then the end of the month, something happens, and then he basically resets and he starts the month over again. What was really interesting about this book is that the book actually feels almost like a game as well, because you are like, what do you do in a game? Right? The game is to, you have to do certain things and achieve certain things, and then at some point you get out and you start again. And this book is exactly like that. But what’s so great about it is that step by step, the main character really has to figure out how to survive in this universe and to figure out why the world is resetting and to basically save the world. But it’s a great work of fiction, and I highly recommend it.

Rob:
Nice. And Yaakov, we have a difficult question now. Besides, of course, at least at the moment, you’re stacked to pixels, which is probably your current favorite game. What would you say is your favorite game of all times recently? Whatever you want to go for. I know it’s a tough one, so.

Yaakov Sash:
I have to go old school to that. I would have to go to a game. So a video game, I would say something like a Tetris. I think the games withstand the test of time. It’s like, you can play Tetris today. We played it 2030 years ago, and it’s still a great game, right? It’s just like, it’s simple. Any kid can pick it up and any older adult can pick it up. It’s a great game. I think the classic games really resonate with me because it’s almost like games is becoming a new language, right? So it’s a common language. And the better games, like games, even if you want to go to board games like Checkers and chess, and like, the classic games are great because, and they’re great for gamification because everyone knows it. So you don’t have to learn a new skill, you don’t have to teach new rules. Games are going in many different directions. Some games now you buy, especially board games and massive multiplayer games. They’re so complex that for some people, it’s just too much to get into that. And then they lose out. They lose out on the benefits. Games have a lot to offer in terms of relaxation, de stressing. So it’s important that we have games, and it’s important that we have games that everyone can play, and they’re easy to play for everyone.

Rob:
Awesome. Thank you very much for that. And definitely Tetris stands the test of time. Nobody can say no to that. Yaakov, we’re arriving to the end of the interview, but of course, let us know where we can find out more about you, about stack the pixels and the platform that you guys are developing. Basically, if you have any call to actions or anything similar, this is the time.

Yaakov Sash:
Absolutely. So go to our website, stackthepixels.com. you’re literally stacking pixels in the game, so that should be easy name to remember. On the site there’s a form, the game was not launched yet, but you can sign up for early access. So I urge that you do. We want to build a community to help us play games as well. And if you’re a game publisher and you want to reach out to me and to see if we can work together, we want to definitely work with other game publishers. We feel there’s a lot of vision here and there’s a lot of every game publisher has their unique strengths and games that they’ve built, and we want to make them social. So if you have a puzzle game or card games, anything like that, that’s single player and you never conceive, how could we make a social game out of it? On Stacktopixels.com, there’s a contact form right on the bottom. You can contact me through that and you also can go old school@supportoctopixels.com. or supportovosphere.com dot. Plenty of ways to contact me. And we love to speak to game publishers, to players. All good, great stuff.

Rob:
Thank you very much for that. Yaakov, thank you for all your experience developing this new genre of gaming and all the work that you’re doing. However, Yaakov, however, engages, as you know, at least for now, and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over. Engagers. It is fantastic to have you around and you know that this podcast really makes sense because of you. So how about we connect on LinkedIn so you can let me know what you think about the podcast. Who would you like to have as a guest? If you have any questions, what we can even help you with, you can find us as Professor Game on LinkedIn. We’re always sharing content on the podcast game game inspired solutions. And remember, go ahead and find us as Professor Game on LinkedIn. And before you click continue, please go ahead and subscribe or follow. This is absolutely for free using your favorite podcast app and listen to the next episode of professor game. See you there.

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