Why Indie Games Are GoalOasis's Secret Mentorship Engine
For over a decade, Questist has built things for small businesses — websites, systems, the unglamorous infrastructure that keeps a company running. But the work that's been quietly shaping how we think about GoalOasis lately isn't enterprise software. It's indie games.
Specifically: how a tiny, scrappy game with three or four players at a table can teach you more about building community than almost anything else.
The pitch: small games, real mentorship
Here's the premise. Indie games aren't just entertainment — they're some of the most efficient mentorship engines that exist. A well-designed multiplayer game puts people in a room (physical or virtual), gives them a shared goal, and forces them to teach each other. The veteran player explains a rule to the newcomer. The newcomer asks a question that makes the veteran rethink their own strategy. Nobody planned a "mentorship program." The game's structure created one.
That's exactly the kind of community GoalOasis wants to be: not a platform people use alone, but a space where people who love the same game teach, challenge, and root for each other. The question is which games actually produce that effect — and which ones quietly poison it.
What game design teaches us about choosing the right game
Not every multiplayer game builds community. Some actively tear it apart. Tabletop designers have spent years naming the specific ways this happens, and the vocabulary is genuinely useful if you're trying to pick or build a game meant to bring people together.
The clearest example is what designer Lewis Pulsipher called the three-player problem: in conflict-heavy games, the two players who are losing will often gang up on whoever's in the lead. This can lead to the game going on forever, the player who avoids conflict winning by default, or a losing player acting as a "kingmaker" who arbitrarily decides someone else's victory out of spite. None of that builds mentorship. It builds resentment.
The fixes designers use are worth borrowing for any community-building context, not just games. Hiding victory information so no one becomes an obvious target, lowering how directly players can attack each other, and making sure any single action only nudges the game state rather than swinging it wildly — these all reduce the "tear each other down" dynamic and replace it with something closer to parallel growth. People playing near each other instead of against each other.
That's the litmus test we'd encourage any budding game developer — or any community builder — to apply: does this structure reward people for helping each other improve, or does it reward people for sabotaging whoever's ahead?
Two tips for developers building multiplayer games
If you're early in your game dev journey and want to design something that actually fosters community rather than just competition, here's where to start:
1. Decide what your game promises before you decide what's "fair." Kingmaking and leader-bashing aren't accidents — they're emergent results of letting players directly attack each other with no friction. Before you tune those mechanics, ask what experience you're actually promising players. A game built around fierce, personal rivalry will tolerate (even want) some of that chaos. A game meant to build a long-term, friendly community probably shouldn't. Design the social contract first, then the mechanics that enforce it.
2. Give your game an anchor, not just a hook. Marketing researcher Chris Zukowski makes the distinction sharply: a "hook" is what makes your game unique; an "anchor" is what makes it feel familiar and safe enough to try. He found that players rarely cite the hook as their reason for buying — they cite the anchor: a friend's recommendation, a beloved genre, a creator they already trust. For developers hoping to build a community around their game, the anchor often is the community. People don't just join because the mechanics are clever. They join because someone they trust vouched for it first.
Why this matters for GoalOasis
The throughline here isn't really about board games. It's about what makes people stick around and teach each other. Indie developers have been quietly solving this problem for years, one playtest at a time — figuring out which structures turn strangers into teammates and which ones turn them into rivals who never come back.
That's the lesson GoalOasis is borrowing: build the kind of structure where mentorship isn't a feature you bolt on, it's a natural byproduct of people loving the same thing and wanting each other to get better at it.
Sources: Skeleton Code Machine, "Solving the Three-Player Problem"; How to Market a Game, "Know Your Game's Anchor."
