We had a chance to chat with with Ryan Clark, co-founder and CEO of Grubby Games and therefore of The Amazing Brain Train.

For those unfamiliar with the game, it’s a collection of fifteen brain-teaser minigames in the vein of Brain Age. Unlike most minigame collections however, The Amazing Brain Train is remarkably coherent, and all the games contribute to a single goal: fuelling the Brain train.

It gives the minigames a sense of purpose they might otherwise lack. As your train chugs around, you’ll meet various animals who need errands run–usually train-related errands. So whether you’re counting monkeys as they scurry among bushes, hopping on lily pads to do arithmetic, or dragging ropes to separate cats from dogs, your brainpower is piped into the train and helps make the world a better place. It’s cutesy and simple, but there is more structure than has ever really been given to a brain training game before, and the game’s presentation is remarkably polished. Add to that the fact that the game dynamically adjusts the difficulty of its scalable minigames, and you have a solid game collection.

Pixelsocks: I guess the first question that pops to mind is, “Where’d you come up with the idea?”

Ryan: Well, I guess it sounds like a good name, “Brain Train,” just because it’s a good pun. But we knew right from the start that we wanted to have something more than just simple minigames, we wanted to have a quest mode. So the way that we drove the quest mode was through the train. So you play minigames, and the better you do, the farther your train will move along this map in the quest mode. We thought that would be a good metaphor for driving a story forward.

It’s not just like the other brain games, like Brain Age and Big Brain Academy, [which are] kind of a collection of games just because they’re brain games, that’s why they’re there. For this we wanted to tie it together with story and also add long-term goals. We have trophies that you can unlock for performing various feats. It’s not just about playing the game and trying to get the highest score. There are trophies you can get that will require you to play those minigames in a different way. So there’s replayability, so you have to try to achieve something other than score. So you have to go back and play it differently rather than the usual way.

Pixelsocks: So are trophies and score available to a community that can see them?

Ryan: The score is. You can play against other people on the internet via online high scores, so you can compete that way, but trophies are just personal. What you’ve unlocked for yourself.

Pixelsocks: But they give you something interesting to do, something to shoot for.

Ryan: Right, yeah, it’s not just high score. It would take a long time to actually unlock all of the trophies. So if somebody is hardcore then they will go ahead and try and do that, but it adds a lot of replayability.

Pixelsocks: Actually, you mentioned Brain Training and Big Brain Academy. Is this game being developed with the intent to fill the same sort of space that they do in the market?

Ryan: I suppose. I really like those games. I like brain games. I also am a big fan of minigames in general, like WarioWare. That’s what I wanted to do. I thought it’d be fun for us to make a collection of minigames in our style. I guess we are trying to compete with those games. We think that we’ve improved on the genre in a number of ways, so, you know, there’s been success in the brain game genre, and if we can improve on it, then hopefully we’ll have success as well.

Pixelsocks: One of the things that really stands out about the game you’ve made is the fact that it’s is very bright and colorful, and it’s got a very distinct visual style. Most minigame collections end up getting released on portables, and so they’re a little bit pared down. Somebody that was looking at a bright colorful game might assume it’s intended for children, but having actually gone through and played the demo, those puzzles get pretty tricky as you go along. Who did you have in mind that you wanted to be playing the game?

Ryan: Well, for all of our games we try to target all audiences. As you saw, they do get pretty difficult, but it has a dynamic difficulty system in it, so if you take a long time to answer the question, it’s going to adjust the future questions it gives you, based on that. So if a kid plays it, it will be much easier. The math questions a kid’s gonna get are going to be 1+2, and things like that, so it is playable by pretty much anybody.

Pixelsocks: Does the game ever let on that it’s doing that, or is it secret?

Ryan: Yeah, we try to hide it as much as possible. Nobody likes to think that they’re getting the easy questions. But we made it so the score is affected. If you are playing well and you are getting the harder questions, you get more points for that.

So a kid can play it—they’re not going to get a great score, but they’ll still be able to answer questions and have fun, and play a game that their parents or grownups are playing. They’ll be excited about that, you know, that they can play that game, too.

Pixelsocks: That flexibility seems like it’d appeal to a much broader audience. In addition to making it much more accessible, if you’re not acquainted with minigames or puzzle games, the whole “you get a minute to work on this thing that you’ve never done before” might seem a little intimidating.

Ryan: We’ve had a lot of people come by the booth who say “I’m terrible at games,” or, “I’m terrible at brain games,” and things like that, and we say “Just try it,” and they do, and they realize, “Oh, I got seven of them right in a minute,” and they’re happy with that, and they don’t realize that the game’s making it a bit easier for them.

Pixelsocks: That’s a tricky thing about the puzzle genre. When you win, that’s great, but when you lose . . . you feel dumb.

Ryan: Another thing we added to make sure people felt rewarded was, after you play each minigame, there’s a brain hitting a high striker, that’s what they call that thing where you hit the hammer with the little weight, and it goes up and dings a bell.

Pixelsocks: I had no idea that’s what they were called.

Ryan: Yeah, neither did we until we decided we wanted to have one in our game, and then we Googled it and found out, oh, it’s called a high striker. What we did was, if you get very few correct, you hit the high striker, and maybe it’ll go up part way, and that’s if you get one or two correct. And if you do decently, you’re going to hit it and give a tiny ring. If you do well, you’re going to hit it, and make a pretty loud ring. Eventually you can dent it, you can knock the bell off, or you can knock the bell way into the water. So people don’t know that these things are hidden there. They think “Oh, the object of a high striker is to hit the bell.” So a kid who had hit the bell would be like “I hit the bell! Finally!” But they don’t realize that there’s four levels of awesomeness beyond that. So if you’re a really hardcore player, you’re going to be excited because you know, you’ll progress through all these stages of different ways of whacking the bell. And eventually you’ll get a great score and knock it into the ocean way behind you.

Pixelsocks: So, how did you pick the fifteen different minigames in The Amazing Brain Train?

Ryan: We actually prototyped I think over thirty minigames, and rejected a large number of them, either because it just didn’t work, or because we couldn’t make the dynamic difficulty thing work with them, or we just didn’t think that they were as fun, so we narrowed them down to these fifteen. We also wanted to have categories, like the memory category, the spatial, the planning, things like that. So, sometimes we’d need one more planning [game], so we’d prototype different games that were planning based. But we also played all of the brain games that exist, and we made sure that none of them were too similar.

Pixelsocks: Something I noticed playing the demo is that, on a lot of the puzzles, you get to the step before the last one, and as soon as you release the mouse, it’s finished. Does that show up in a lot of games, and what is the purpose behind it?

Ryan: Yes, it shows up in definitely three, maybe four games. [The game] auto-completes [the puzzle] for you as soon as it’s obvious that you’ve figured it out, just so you can get more answers in.

Part of the problem that we had was that some of the minigames let you answer them immediately, and get another question whereas a few of them will take you three or four seconds. So that means you cannot successfully answer as many. So we had to make it so a correct answer is worth different amounts in different games, because of the fact that it’s going to take a certain amount of time.

We balanced that out in beta testing, so that all the games, for an average person, have an average score, but there are some people, I don’t know if you’ve played Cosmic Cubes, the one where the cubes are rotating, and you’re trying to make a 2D projection of it. People who are good at that can get scores in the hundreds of thousands because they can answer immediately, whereas an average person might get 25 [thousand]. We tried our best to balance it out, but with the nature of the different minigames it was not possible.

Pixelsocks: It looks like I have just one last question for you. If there was one design element or design decision in your game that really makes it the Amazing Brain Train or makes it fun, what would it be?

Ryan: I have to think about that for a second. I think, what I like about it best is the trophies. No other brain game has that element that makes you want to go back and play the game differently, and over a long term. I mean, once I got my Brain Age down to 20, or I got my Ace score in Big Brain Academy, I didn’t really have much else to do. I could go back and get an even higher number, but there it’s not that exciting. But with this, there are particular games that are my favorite minigames to play, and they all have some trophy, some difficult thing to try and accomplish. So, there’s more reason to go back and try it out. So, I think that’s probably the most distinctive things we’ve added to the genre.

Pixelsocks: Just to be clear, could you give me a concrete example of how a trophy might change a puzzle?

Ryan: Okay, well, in Pond Sum, the one where the frog is jumping around [on numbered lily pads], you’re generally just trying to add up to a certain number as quickly as you can. One of the trophies is to try to make the longest answer you can; where you jump and you hit eight lilipads. So you’re avoiding the tens and fifteens, and you’re trying to find the ones and twos. Or there’s another one, in Birthday Cake Shuffle, where’s you’re trying to get Professor Fizzwizzle to his birthday cake. You can play that without touching Professor Fizzwizzle. You can move the animals, it autocompletes as soon as there’s a path available, the computer will move him to his cake.

Pixelsocks: By the way, Fizzwizzle is great name.

Ryan: Thanks. It’s memorable.

Pixelsocks: Thank you very much for your time and trouble.

Ryan: No problem.