This article was originally published on the Echo Chunk website and is being shared here for the benefit of candidates that may want to learn more about Sami, Echo Chunk, and their origin story.
This is the story of convergence of my multiple journeys over the years exploring the untapped potential of AI and the boundaries of strategy game design.
Like a lot of folks who were working remotely during the pandemic lockdown, there came a time where my wife and I were eager to see the outside world and explore nature again. By the time the vaccine rolled out, we couldn’t wait to get out. Armed with our laptops as tech veterans, we decided to nomad around the world. We got our COVID shots, let go of our tiny apartment in San Francisco, sold whatever few things we owned, and hit the road.
We drove and hiked around the great outdoors while working remotely from small towns and villages. By the end of the year, with enough saved up, we decided to ditch the day jobs and set off on a full-time creative exploration journey. It’s crazy how much faster the creative juices flow when you switch out your work environment and (unironically) touch some grass.
My goal was pretty simple: carve out the space and time needed to go all in on building mode and make the things I’d always marked as “one day dreams” a reality. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to make strategy games. The running joke among my friends is that I sold everything to hit the road, but still needed storage space for all my board games, game books, old school consoles, and niche gaming concoctions.
I started playing chess at 3 years old on a wooden board and have been obsessed with strategy games ever since. I would play Heroes of Might & Magic (HoMM) on the old family Pentium PC, waking up at 4am to steal time on the coveted PC chair before my older siblings could call dibs, hot-seating them in PvP every day after school, and sneaking out of bed to create custom HoMM maps at night.
I’ve always loved the craft that goes into strategy games: turn-based strategy (TBS) above all, but God knows I’ve sunk countless hours into RTS, RPGs, TRPGs, RTTs, 4X, TDs, MOBAs (before any of us called them that), and puzzle games of every genre. I still play HoMM avidly to this day. Heroes 3 with the HotA community mod is my all-time favorite for single player or PvP, though I think Heroes 4 and 6 have some hidden gems in them despite their many hotly-debated shortcomings.
So during my building-mode and digital nomad journey, with a laptop hitched on random Airbnb mattresses, I got back into making games—lots of puzzle games, in particular. I started musing with the idea of a chess-inspired puzzle game. I wanted to redesign the rules and mechanics inherent to chess, making it laughably easy to learn and approachable to anyone, regardless of any prior exposure, yet still insanely hard to master and with a ton of strategic depth.
My contrarian opinion on this is that chess is a fantastic medium, but over time the chess meta has devolved into unintentionally incentivizing memorization of famous openings and “mate in X” maneuvers over first-principle thinking, mostly because of the sheer size of its competitive scene and centuries of optimization. I felt there was a missed opportunity there and wanted to create something true to the core spirit of chess that I first fell in love with as an uninitiated kid, without all the newcomer gatekeeping.
So as soon as we got back to California and got reunited with the little nostalgic belongings we still owned, I reached for my childhood wooden board, bought a few extra chess piece sets on eBay, and started exploring new mechanics and game balancing designs. And so it was, one prototype at a time, playtested on a piece of wood and shared through WhatsApp screenshots and pen-and-paper scribbles, that our company’s first proper game was born.
Bit by bit, something surprising started happening frequently. Anyone who tried the new version of the game was now getting hooked. People would keep coming back trying to beat levels they couldn’t solve. They’d ask me to manually reset the physical board to specific checkpoints in a puzzle so they could try again.
Chess masters and newbies alike would describe feeling a rush of excitement every time they’d reach the Aha! moment of a maze. Then people wanted to play “the game” at home and show it to their friends. I’d send them photos of my scribbled level designs so they could reproduce them on their own with each of their old-school wooden boards. One day I just figured this was getting comically unsustainable. So I decided to properly build it into an online game, and I called it Echo Chess. And then it grew like wildfire.
It took many iterations to get here, and let’s just say, not every early version was a crowd favorite. In the earliest days, all a “crowd” meant was those very few among my friends and family who were still patient enough to humor me through my long rants about the state of modern puzzle games and strategy games. I would tell anyone who’d listen how things are becoming so broken with the current industry dynamics, how AAAs, stuck in the Innovator’s Dilemma, are running out of strategy game sequels and twenty-year-old remasters to recycle, while Gen Z kids still obsess over plain old chess.
By that time, it was becoming pretty obvious to me that while the fresh supply of strategy games was struggling, the latent demand remained as high as ever and wildly underserved. More importantly, I became very convinced that there’s a real opportunity today, thanks to the recent advancements in AI, for a huge wave of fresh ideas and game design innovations to revolutionize a field that hasn’t really been reimagined since Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson quantified our collective imagination by bringing polyhedral dice rolls to storytelling.
It turned out, as I came to appreciate later on, that my intense dissatisfaction with the stagnation of the field was actually the best driver, in hindsight, to the next breakthrough phase of Echo Chess and its novel approach to game design.
In parallel and throughout my TBS creative explorations, I had been rekindling my academic fascination with AI, and by that point I was already dedicating the biggest portion of my time to dig deeper again into the fundamentals of modern ML and Deep Learning. I had already bought a bunch of ML textbooks and was working through them cover-to-cover during the late hours of the night. I knew I had to focus on one main area and go really deep, as opposed to half-baked learning explorations applied in varying directions that diverge.
I started becoming fascinated with all the ways that AI and automation could really shorten the learning cycle between every subsequent version and take the game design process truly to the next level. I knew game design itself was ripe for disruption thanks to the latest breakthroughs in AI, but I couldn’t find any tool or product to serve me as a game maker in my quest to create the best puzzle and strategy games. So I decided to build it myself and scratch my own itch.
Thus was born Echo Chunk’s first AI engine, and with it a whole new plethora of ways to generate content, levels, maps, mods, and mazes. And more importantly, it meant I could finally shorten the learning cycle and iterate faster on the game itself.
If you think about it, there’s somewhat of a poetic beauty in the fact that who we are today, as a modern game company leveraging state-of-the-art innovation in AI and game design, started on a physical piece of wood used for the oldest game in history, in the hands of a guy who was looking to trade excess screen time for some nature.
And now that you’ve read our story, our echo lives on with you. As a parting thought, I ask you: have you solved Echo Chess today?
