Transcript
Speaker: Hey, Charlie, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: My name is Charlie.
Speaker: I'm a game developer.
Speaker: I have worked in games now for, I think, coming on 11 years.
Speaker: I started a small company called Camouflage that made a game called Republic.
Speaker: And it was an episodic stealth action game, kind of in the vein of like Metal Gear Solid.
Speaker: But it was very story-driven, story-based.
Speaker: There's no violence.
Speaker: You're just trying to help this girl escape this dystopian society.
Speaker: So it was a cool game.
Speaker: It was different.
Speaker: It was my first game studio.
Speaker: And I worked there for a year and a half before I went to Wizards of the Coast, which is a bigger company in this area.
Speaker: And I was there for six years, and I helped them build a game called Magic the Gathering Arena.
Speaker: which is still out.
Speaker: You can still play that.
Speaker: And yeah, that was kind of like my magnum opus.
Speaker: I did a lot of stuff there that I was super proud of.
Speaker: I started out as just like a senior dev to start, and then I became a dev lead.
Speaker: And by the end of it, I had a bunch of people reporting to me.
Speaker: After I was done working on that game, I went to work on their platform team, and I got to see more of kind of the back end side of things.
Speaker: And I helped them build out game services for their other games and their publishing platform.
Speaker: So yeah, that's kind of the gist of how I got into games and the main thrust of what I did while I was there at Wizards.
Speaker: After that, I went to a startup where I built a social media app called EW, which you can still play.
Speaker: It's still out there.
Speaker: Oh, nice.
Speaker: Yeah, and it's kind of a game-focused social media platform.
Speaker: But all the games that you built, they were focused on recording videos with your friends and sharing them on TikTok and platforms like that.
Speaker: So it was pretty cool, pretty innovative stuff.
Speaker: But I stopped working there in May.
Speaker: Took about four months off, and I just started another game studio.
Speaker: I'm back working on games full-time, working on another card game.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So you're working on, when you say card game, are you talking about like, like,
Speaker: Slay the Spire or something?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Slay the Spire is like a deck building game.
Speaker: You know, you're fighting your way through level by level and you're building your deck as you go.
Speaker: There's a whole genre of games that are just really strategy focused like that and involve deck building.
Speaker: And this one is it's an auto battler game as well as a deck building game.
Speaker: So kind of combining both of those elements.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Is that is that going to be mobile focused or?
Speaker: Yeah, I think we're targeting mobile for sure.
Speaker: And then we have aspirations to make it instantly playable via web.
Speaker: That's definitely a goal.
Speaker: Yeah, that's pretty wild.
Speaker: So yeah, okay.
Speaker: So I think Wizards of the Coast, how long did you say you were there?
Speaker: I was there for six years.
Speaker: Six years, wow.
Speaker: I'm fairly familiar with Dungeons and Dragons and that sort of thing.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: I don't know that I've played that.
Speaker: What was the game called?
Speaker: Magic the Gathering Arena.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Is that kind of like a card style game?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: If you're familiar with Magic the Gathering, it's kind of like chess and poker combined.
Speaker: It's like chess, but you get to pick your pieces.
Speaker: It's the way that a lot of people describe it.
Speaker: Oh, that's pretty cool.
Speaker: Chess and poker.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: That's a good combination.
Speaker: Two great games.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I love strategy games and I love working on games that are deeper.
Speaker: They're meaningful games.
Speaker: They're not just about extracting revenue.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think that's kind of important, especially in the wake of the Unity kerfuffle.
Speaker: Lots of people are reasonably upset by the way Unity acts about their developers.
Speaker: Have you been kind of following that whole thing?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I helped organize the Seattle Unity User Group, which has about 3,200 people in it.
Speaker: Oh, no shit.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We're getting lots of emails still, I think, even this week.
Speaker: Oof.
Speaker: People are upset.
Speaker: And yeah, one of the reasons I was part of the decision to use Unity for Arena was
Speaker: And one of the reasons we did it was because their revenue model was so generous and future proof.
Speaker: So it seems like they're, they've been trying to renege on that, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um, I mean, I think they've kind of walked the vast majority of it back, but I think it's still kind of aimed at the customers that have more money to spend.
Speaker: So it's, it's almost like, uh,
Speaker: milk the cow kind of a scenario or whale, I guess.
Speaker: If you're familiar with mobile.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: It's pretty rough.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They have a lot of revenue focused on ads and they run, I think, the most mobile ads now at this point.
Speaker: They're the biggest ad network on mobile.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: Even if that policy went into effect and nothing changed, they could still enforce it by cutting ad revenue from those games, right, based on the number of installs.
Speaker: So there's a lot about it in the way that it was structured that seemed just very sneaky and deceptive and
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The outrage is very reasonable.
Speaker: The outrage is real.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Crazy.
Speaker: So you use Unity with that.
Speaker: Did you use Unity for any of your other games?
Speaker: I've used Unity for every game up until this one that we're working on now.
Speaker: And we decided not to use Unity before all this stuff went down.
Speaker: The install fees.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: I'm missing it for sure.
Speaker: I think unity is definitely like the most developer friendly and beginner friendly engine out there.
Speaker: But there are definitely alternatives to that come close.
Speaker: Makes sense.
Speaker: What do you what are you using now?
Speaker: It's called default.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah, it's an open source engine.
Speaker: It's kind of like Godot in that way.
Speaker: But to fold the main thing that I think was attractive to our CTO who decided to use it was that it's performance focused.
Speaker: First and foremost, they focused on performance.
Speaker: So it's kind of like a programmer's engine in a good way.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: But yeah, when I'm banging my head against the wall right now trying to get, you know, the GUI, the work the way that I want it to, it's, it's, it's missing a bunch of things that I think I would say are designer and artist friendly that you find in like unity and other other game engines that are a little bit more mature.
Speaker: Sure, sure.
Speaker: I mean, I know they've used it in
Speaker: some of the games at King, I think.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The guys who work on it worked at King and part of the engine team there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: One of them still on the I think he leads the board of the default foundation.
Speaker: So I've actually been doing some digging into default recently.
Speaker: I've started learning it a bit.
Speaker: It was kind of funny because I actually, so I've got this kind of older Mac.
Speaker: I think it still has like Big Sur on it.
Speaker: That's kind of like the Macs it'll tick.
Speaker: And I ran the example projects and I discovered that they wouldn't build.
Speaker: I would get errors.
Speaker: Oh yeah.
Speaker: Cause yeah.
Speaker: So a couple of them don't even, they use extensions that don't work on Mac and you have to go download the Mac versions or the versions that support the Mac.
Speaker: Oh, interesting.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I haven't run into that yet, but even like the, uh, um, the, uh, what is it?
Speaker: So they've got the, they've got example projects and then they have like, uh, templates, right?
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: So if you start with like a mobile template, you know, it kind of sets up some things for you.
Speaker: So those were doing the same thing.
Speaker: They were giving me the same exact error.
Speaker: And it seemed to be related to basically their support for Mac OS is for 12, for whatever 12 is.
Speaker: I can't remember.
Speaker: what came after Big Sur.
Speaker: But anyway, so I went on the default Discord.
Speaker: And I said, hey, you know, none of this stuff is building.
Speaker: You know, I'm getting these errors.
Speaker: And one of the guys said, oh, let me take a look at that.
Speaker: So over the last two days, they literally, they fixed it.
Speaker: Oh, that's awesome.
Speaker: And they put it in their current alpha.
Speaker: So I have to use the alpha for now, but once that gets pushed out, it'll work for everybody.
Speaker: But to me, just having a group of devs that'll just go jump on something and figure it out and fix it,
Speaker: That really kind of sells the engine to me.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They really care and they support it so well.
Speaker: And this is their full-time job.
Speaker: I was joking with Alexis, who's working with me on... She's in the Discord as Swaggy Dragon.
Speaker: She's very, very active in the default Discord.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: And one of the things we were talking about was we're getting better support from Defold on issues than we ever got from Unity.
Speaker: And we had like an enterprise support level contract at Unity.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like $25,000 a year.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: To Unity.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's nuts.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We're thinking about partnering with the Defold Foundation and throwing some money their way to kind of co-develop some things that we need.
Speaker: That would be cool.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Already like they're shipping features for us and that's huge.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: That's that's pretty wild.
Speaker: So your experience with them has been pretty much the same as mine, I guess.
Speaker: Yeah, I was just as surprised at how how awesome they are for sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, so they deserve success.
Speaker: I'm pretty happy with their engine so far.
Speaker: It's just things that are missing.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Like rich text, you know, you have to use their GUI system and use an extension.
Speaker: Oh, gotcha.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that's one example.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: That's just stuff they need to work on.
Speaker: I mean, every engine does.
Speaker: You know, I've watched Twitter a lot and everybody's been kind of on and on about Godot and especially the people coming over from
Speaker: from unity, you know, Oh, it's missing this.
Speaker: Oh, it doesn't do, you know, stuff that way.
Speaker: Or, you know, there's just a lot of that kind of, um, uh, Oh, it's, it's, it's just not ready for 3d or, you know, it's missing this and that and the other thing.
Speaker: And I mean, they're making something for free.
Speaker: It's not like, you know, they're taking your money to develop it.
Speaker: And if they, I mean, the fact that even,
Speaker: One, I think his name is One, has done a whole bunch of stuff recently with C Sharp to make it more palatable to Unity devs.
Speaker: You know, kind of going out of its way to fix render stuff and, you know, things like that.
Speaker: It says a lot about kind of the open source engine community as a whole that they're willing to
Speaker: to help people out regardless of, you know, I mean, yes, they're, they're making a paycheck, but it's, it's more because, you know, they're a nonprofit, you know, they're not just not getting paid by, you know, companies to do, to do this.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The math is very different.
Speaker: If you're a nonprofit game engine foundation and team, then if you're a giant corporation that,
Speaker: You know, mostly, most of Unity's revenue is ads, I think.
Speaker: So, they stopped really being a game engine company a long time ago.
Speaker: They de-emphasized the gaming part.
Speaker: But Godot is a game engine.
Speaker: You know, and they're honest about that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Default is a game engine.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: Yeah, Unity is just at a different stage as a company, and they've been there since, you know, Riccitello took over.
Speaker: Yeah, they went public.
Speaker: I think that's been a long time coming, yeah.
Speaker: That kind of played a lot into it.
Speaker: Shareholders changed the conversation quite a bit.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, anytime a company goes public, you're pretty much looking at, you know, having to deal less about customers and more about shareholders.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Top-down decisions get worse, for sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I've kind of been watching Unreal a bit since all this started.
Speaker: They've done a couple things, made a couple changes.
Speaker: I don't know if they just used the Unity crap as cover.
Speaker: They definitely capitalized on it, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Speaker: They, you know, they laid off some people and they did make some changes to their pricing, but it wasn't for, it wasn't for developers.
Speaker: Like it wasn't for Indy or even big companies really.
Speaker: It was, I think it was more aimed at like the automotive stuff because they don't get, you know, automotive industries using their engine and not paying them a dime.
Speaker: So they've got, um,
Speaker: I guess they've done some sort of per seat licensing for that kind of thing.
Speaker: Also, the film, I don't know if it affected the film industry or not, but of course everybody's like, oh, now Unreal's changing their pricing, but it's not as bad as it looks, or I guess.
Speaker: But I don't know if you'd followed any of that or not, but...
Speaker: Yeah, I know Unreal at this point is they've become successful.
Speaker: They were used quite a bit in Mandalorian, and they really bragged about that quite a bit.
Speaker: And they're still leading the charge, I would say, as far as a AAA game engine goes.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: A better package than Unity offers.
Speaker: But and then I think Unity's probably, they've made a beachhead in the market with like the automotive folks and the cinematic and traditional storytelling, non-interactive media.
Speaker: But Unreal is still, there's just more people in the workforce who know how to use Unreal.
Speaker: Yeah, makes sense.
Speaker: Have you have you played much with C C++ at all?
Speaker: A little bit.
Speaker: One of the reasons we didn't use Unreal is because I wasn't super familiar with, you know, Unreal's flavor of C++.
Speaker: And at the time, this is Unreal 4 had just launched.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: Yeah, there were some issues there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Talk about documentation not working when you download the tutorial project.
Speaker: That was three months of my life at Wizards.
Speaker: Oh, man.
Speaker: Sounds terrible.
Speaker: How's the documentation on default been?
Speaker: It's been pretty good.
Speaker: There's been a couple of things that, you know, talking about developer support, I found and complained about and they fixed.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: But
Speaker: For the most part, it's straightforward.
Speaker: There's just a couple of gotchas with default and mainly Lua if you haven't used Lua before.
Speaker: I haven't.
Speaker: Is my camera working?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: It seems like it might be frozen.
Speaker: I don't know if it's on your end or my end.
Speaker: Not a huge deal.
Speaker: Worst case, I'll just make it an audio.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Not a big deal.
Speaker: I'll tweak with it.
Speaker: Well, all right.
Speaker: Oh, there it goes.
Speaker: Just kick back in.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: Restart the virtual camera.
Speaker: When I worked at the social media startup, I ended up taking over creator tools in general.
Speaker: So I learned quite a bit about how streamers do what they do.
Speaker: And so I got pretty good at OBS.
Speaker: We built a bunch of tools that integrate with OBS.
Speaker: Oh.
Speaker: And yeah, we built the tools so that streamers could use our app and play our games with their...
Speaker: with chat basically, you know, from their phone and it would just wirelessly stream.
Speaker: So, Oh, that's wow.
Speaker: I actually went, I went very, very deep into this.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: I know all about OBS and I don't know shit about OBS.
Speaker: I haven't even, I haven't even touched it at this point yet.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But I've, I've kind of thought about,
Speaker: I don't know if I want to get into streaming or not.
Speaker: Um, no, I don't know that I have the type of content for that kind of thing.
Speaker: Um, I mean, I suppose I could stream podcast episodes.
Speaker: Um, the, the guys that got me into podcasting are PHP devs and they run a company out of California.
Speaker: Um, and they, they stream their episodes.
Speaker: Um, they, you know, they've built up a kind of a large audience at this point.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: And but I don't you know, I obviously my audience is much smaller.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's some people who find success and just, you know, inviting people into the recording experience.
Speaker: But, you know, I think most people who stream, they see it as like it's that is the entertainment.
Speaker: And then the recording that comes after is just just marketing, you know, just due diligence.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I kind of got into listening to podcasts mainly because where I work is, I mean, it's, it's, it's manufacturing.
Speaker: So, you know, throw a earbud in, gets me through the night.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But you know, my, obviously my, my goal is to build SAS projects and maybe some games.
Speaker: I've talked to, talked to Jeff a little bit about,
Speaker: game dev.
Speaker: We've kind of kicked it around.
Speaker: I've got a ton of ideas and I've dabbled with game dev on and off since probably
Speaker: 2007 or eight, maybe, maybe before that.
Speaker: I've been, but, um, that was, that was before I really got into programming.
Speaker: So I kind of, kind of went at it backwards.
Speaker: So, you know, it was a bunch of friends of ours.
Speaker: Um, my wife and I, and our, a couple, a couple of friends thought, you know, we were playing,
Speaker: how maybe it was World of Warcraft, maybe it was Dark Age of Camelot, you know, one of the MMOs.
Speaker: Did you play any of those?
Speaker: You played MMOs?
Speaker: I came to Dayok really late, back when they revived the servers for like one last go.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I played for a little bit.
Speaker: I love the RVR stuff, or whatever it was called.
Speaker: Yeah, RVR, yeah.
Speaker: But, yeah, I leveled a Paladin a little bit.
Speaker: I was underleveled, so I would die right away, you know.
Speaker: Sure, sure.
Speaker: Yeah, I was a competitive WoW PvP-er.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: Arena.
Speaker: Yeah, Arena was fun.
Speaker: I played that for a bit.
Speaker: I can't say I was good at it.
Speaker: I just wanted the gear.
Speaker: It's kind of a pain in the butt, a recording video, for sure.
Speaker: All right, there we go.
Speaker: So World of Warcraft.
Speaker: You're a big PvPer.
Speaker: I played some.
Speaker: I didn't get... I don't know.
Speaker: I really just, like I said, I just played the PvP for the gear just because it looked good.
Speaker: I mean, World of Warcraft is like a virtual dress-up.
Speaker: That's pretty much... I mean, they added transmog, and then it was a whole sub-game, for sure.
Speaker: Yeah, that made it fun.
Speaker: I played it... I think I started...
Speaker: um during burning crusade I think yeah that's when I started as well um and that was actually the draw for me was um the blood elves because I thought most of at the time I thought most of the other races were just hideous and they were the art style I hated it initially yeah um but then you know I had a friend that that was playing a blood elf um paladin and he was just running around questing and stuff and I'm like
Speaker: that looks like so much fun.
Speaker: So, you know, I got sucked in.
Speaker: My wife and I both played.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: We played Dark Age of Camelot for probably five years on and off.
Speaker: Mostly on.
Speaker: That's cool.
Speaker: And they had a PvE server called Gaharis.
Speaker: And we played on that.
Speaker: We actually, we wound up moving from
Speaker: one server to that server.
Speaker: And we played on that for the vast majority of our time, mainly because we just weren't really that into the whole PvP aspect at that time.
Speaker: We did more of that in WoW, especially when you got out into the... Is it Outlands?
Speaker: Yeah, the Outlands.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: hellfire peninsula.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It was a lot of fun.
Speaker: And, um, and we wound up, uh, doing some of that just in the, uh, just in the quest, like, you know, you, you have to flag or it flags you when you go into this, uh, this one quest.
Speaker: And, um, yeah, it was, it was fun.
Speaker: Um, she actually kind of got into it.
Speaker: Um, some, some dude landed on me and killed me and then she killed him.
Speaker: And then,
Speaker: There you go.
Speaker: Wife to save the day.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: My wife does not like games at all.
Speaker: So no, I wish she did.
Speaker: Oh man.
Speaker: I'm so I'm surprised.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's, it's great.
Speaker: She's like level 4,000 on candy crush.
Speaker: So she plays games.
Speaker: So she games, but yeah, she doesn't identify as a gamer.
Speaker: That's that seems, I don't know.
Speaker: Do you, do you think that's, you know, I hear a lot of,
Speaker: people bitching about, um, about the disparity between men and women, you know, gamers.
Speaker: And there's obviously more male gamers than female gamers.
Speaker: Do you think that's partially because we're more immature?
Speaker: Oh, a hundred percent.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think, I think you have the maturity level, you know, comparing a man and a woman, um, men are definitely mature, but I think games are built for men more so than like,
Speaker: There's a lot more cozier games that are more about aesthetic and presentation.
Speaker: But I think it's the same reason that men prefer action movies more than women.
Speaker: Action game focused and they're a lot more like that.
Speaker: But you've got games like Animal Crossing.
Speaker: You've got World of Warcraft itself added pets.
Speaker: I would say.
Speaker: to make the game more appealing to more casual players and especially women.
Speaker: It makes sense.
Speaker: The pet battle stuff, the pet collection mechanic.
Speaker: Oh, I didn't know they did pet battles.
Speaker: Is that kind of a newer thing?
Speaker: Yeah, they added it in, I think, Mists of Pandaria.
Speaker: Oh, OK.
Speaker: Maybe before that?
Speaker: We did play M.I.S.S.
Speaker: a bit.
Speaker: My wife was a hunter, of course.
Speaker: Collect all the pets.
Speaker: That actually makes a lot of sense to me.
Speaker: I fought really hard to add pets to the arena, and we did.
Speaker: They're very popular with women.
Speaker: They're not as popular with men.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: Huh.
Speaker: That's pretty cool.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm a sucker for pets.
Speaker: They're one of my pet features that I love working on.
Speaker: So you into fighting games at all?
Speaker: I'm not, mostly because I'm not very good at them.
Speaker: That's completely fair.
Speaker: Played in New Mortal Kombat?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: I'm also, I'm really squeamish, actually.
Speaker: Oh, alright.
Speaker: I have a physiological reaction to, like, gore that just ever since I was a little kid, I just haven't been able to deal with it.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: Yeah, so Mortal Kombat is not my jam.
Speaker: But I do love brawl games, and Smash Bros.
Speaker: is awesome.
Speaker: Smash Bros.
Speaker: is awesome.
Speaker: I play that with my seven-year-old.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: He kicks my ass.
Speaker: I mean, he's just so good at this stuff.
Speaker: I don't know how kids get so dang...
Speaker: good at games like i mean i played games as a kid you know mario and but i don't think i ever reached the level of skill at that age that he has like he's just yeah he's just phenomenal i will say the brains what was that
Speaker: I was going to say, I think that their brains are just better at, you know, forming the connections and they develop the muscle memory quicker and their reflexes are faster.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I do kick his ass at Mario Kart though.
Speaker: That's good.
Speaker: You got to keep him in his place.
Speaker: At least one game.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And any of my attempts at video game dev, you know, he wants to test.
Speaker: Let me test it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, I'll test it for you.
Speaker: That's the best part, in my opinion.
Speaker: Yeah, that's true.
Speaker: Get your kid to play your games.
Speaker: And then you work on stuff that they don't think is cool.
Speaker: And then you regret everything.
Speaker: You regret your life.
Speaker: You're like, well, if he doesn't like it, it's probably no good.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: My kids definitely don't realize how cool some of the stuff I worked on has been.
Speaker: I think they're older, but they've always been like, that's lame.
Speaker: That's dad's work, you know.
Speaker: How many kids you got?
Speaker: I've got two.
Speaker: They're nine and seven.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Kids are great at just about every age, I think.
Speaker: You know, when they're babies, you just watch the baby show, as we called it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: All the kid shows.
Speaker: Kid shows are better, too.
Speaker: They are.
Speaker: Yeah, Daniel Tiger.
Speaker: We taught our kids all the basic skills.
Speaker: We basically didn't have to do anything.
Speaker: No Ryan?
Speaker: No, Ryan's World.
Speaker: I hate that show.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: My son watches it.
Speaker: He's honestly learned a lot of stuff from it.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: But yeah, it's just, it's annoying.
Speaker: I just, at this point, I feel like it's just advertisement for toys.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Now that they've got their own, you know, kind of.
Speaker: They're on target shelves.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's amazing how many YouTubers are on target shelves.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's crazy.
Speaker: He's like, oh yeah, we've got, you know, there's a, there's a Ryan toy.
Speaker: I'm like, oh yeah, we're not buying that shit.
Speaker: Roblox, I mean, my kids are into Roblox now.
Speaker: That's almost worse.
Speaker: Kind of better in some ways.
Speaker: Roblox, they sell literal real life loot boxes in Target.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: That's crazy.
Speaker: It's like three bucks and then you basically get a digital loot box, a chance to get something.
Speaker: Have you bought any of those?
Speaker: We have.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: They love them.
Speaker: And they're like three bucks.
Speaker: I guess it's an easy three bucks spend.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I shouldn't complain about loot boxes.
Speaker: Because card games are notorious for booster.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But with card games, it feels more like...
Speaker: So I used to collect baseball cards and football cards when I was a kid.
Speaker: So it feels like that.
Speaker: Like, okay, you bought some cards and you're probably going to get doubles and triples sometimes.
Speaker: It just happens with cards.
Speaker: And you're just collecting cards and trying to find the ones you don't have.
Speaker: Like, that feels less...
Speaker: I don't know what the word is.
Speaker: Exploitive.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It feels less.
Speaker: It's less about the gamble and more about collection.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That was just the physical way that they had to distribute the cards.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And but, you know, the other kinds of loot boxes like so one thing my wife and I got into, we were playing this game called Lords Mobile.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I wish I'd never touched that game.
Speaker: I finally got out of it.
Speaker: But that's what it feels like.
Speaker: It feels like you had an addiction and you finally broke free of the addiction.
Speaker: And then you're just like, thank God I'm never going back to that shit.
Speaker: They're designed to literally milk
Speaker: people out of money and especially the, the people with money, you know, cause we have a, yeah, we had a friend who dumped, he was probably dumping a thousand dollars every couple of weeks into this game.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, he made a lot of money, but, but then he's locked in.
Speaker: Like he's got an account that he spent like 20, 30 grand on.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: He can't quit.
Speaker: He can't stop playing because he's locked in at that point.
Speaker: And I think a lot of people that get into those kinds of games, that's where they get.
Speaker: They get to the point where they're like, they lock you in and then you can't quit.
Speaker: You can't break out.
Speaker: You have to either try to sell your account and make some of it back, which isn't easy to do.
Speaker: I mean, there are places that you can sell accounts to and people that sell accounts, but you're never going to make back what you put in.
Speaker: Yeah, it's definitely a bad investment to spend $10,000 on a game.
Speaker: Yeah, very, very, very bad investment.
Speaker: Yeah, the reality is it's like a 30% difference in revenue if you have an endless cap on spend.
Speaker: um for i think for most games uh brawl stars is a pretty popular game they took out loot boxes and i think it affected their revenue by by 20 percent revenue their new normal revenue is 20 percent lower than it was when they had loot boxes in the game wow um
Speaker: Yeah, it's crazy.
Speaker: But that's because they're designed to create an infinite channel for spend to get infinite reward.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And yeah, there's a question.
Speaker: One of the things I liked about Magic was that you could basically spend $300 and you could have all the cards from the set or everything you needed, at least.
Speaker: And then it was very easy to go infinite if you were good.
Speaker: So you can't spend $10,000 on magic, the gathering arena.
Speaker: You just can't, it's not possible and there's no benefit to doing it.
Speaker: The benefit runs out after about like a hundred bucks.
Speaker: Um, that's really just a time saver, but, um,
Speaker: But yeah, those, uh, the crappy mobile monetization games, you know, they rely, you know, first on ads and then for the people who do convert, just upselling, upselling, getting, getting a deeper, uh, solidifying the lock-in effect.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like you're talking about.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But yeah, I think games should, should, they should edify users at least as well as they monetize users.
Speaker: I like to say.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And yeah, the vast majority of them don't, um,
Speaker: Also, it seems to me like that sort of monetization is very... Like in the US, we kind of go, you know, when we see or hear about that stuff.
Speaker: But like in China, that's the norm.
Speaker: Which, again... And I kind of... Most of the...
Speaker: those kind of monetization practices have come from that direction.
Speaker: So when I first started noticing it was with the Asian MMOs that were coming out that were trying to imitate World of Warcraft.
Speaker: There was a couple I can't think of the name of right now.
Speaker: But, you know, it looked...
Speaker: graphically very similar to World of Warcraft.
Speaker: And it was free to play with, you know, in game kind of purchases and that kind of thing.
Speaker: And it's just started.
Speaker: It's really snowballed from there, I think.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it's Nexus games or whatever.
Speaker: There's lineage lineage to.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: In Black Desert online.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They all rely on these mechanics.
Speaker: Yeah, they do.
Speaker: I played Guild Wars 2, which also relies on store purchases.
Speaker: I mean, they have two kind of things.
Speaker: So you buy the box game, and then they have stuff you can buy in-game.
Speaker: But that's probably the least invasive thing
Speaker: game that I've seen in that kind of genre where the stuff you buy in the store is mostly like.
Speaker: None of it's going to make you better, you know, like you can buy.
Speaker: Pickaxes that don't break or storage space quality life things.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Storage space, you know, I think those are OK.
Speaker: Right, yeah, I kind of feel like those are okay too.
Speaker: And actually when we started playing that, they gave us, my wife and I played that during beta.
Speaker: And then we bought the base box or whatever.
Speaker: And when it first came out, they gave you a certain amount of their in-game cash or whatever.
Speaker: So the only thing we bought with it was storage because we knew that storage was always going to be the
Speaker: In most of these games, they load you up with all these kinds of like currencies and garbage.
Speaker: You know, you don't know what to do with it, so you don't throw it away.
Speaker: You know, you can't.
Speaker: It's true.
Speaker: So we we wound up just kind of basically just buying loads of storage.
Speaker: I think the money that we spent in that game has mostly been like bank space and stuff like that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I remember when Gilware's made a big deal out of dumping the subscription model.
Speaker: We don't need the subscription model.
Speaker: So they were one of the first, you had to pay to play, but it was free to play.
Speaker: But yeah, then they had to implement the cosmetics and the quality of life upsells to make ends meet.
Speaker: And I know for a fact that it wasn't a successful business model for them because a lot of the people who worked on Gilware's 2 were laid off pretty soon after it came out.
Speaker: yeah yeah and yeah that was just the story for every game that wasn't wow right right even elder scrolls online i lived in maryland while i was in development oh yeah and i was i was hoping to work there and i had a friend who did and they all got laid off the second it was launched yeah oh no shit zen max just didn't care yeah yeah um where we're at in maryland were you
Speaker: I was in like Damascus, Mount Airy area.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Which is closer to Frederick than it is anywhere else.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I lived in Glen Burnie.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I was born and raised there.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We lived in Silver Spring for a while too.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Did you ever get to like Gettysburg or?
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: My grandfather's a big history buff too.
Speaker: So whenever he would visit, we'd go do everything.
Speaker: I think I went to Gettysburg like four times for field trips.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The Holocaust museum.
Speaker: I went twice.
Speaker: Oh, nice.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: My dad was always big on taking us to either Gettysburg or the air and space museum in DC.
Speaker: Oh, I love the air and space museum.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The air and space museum is my all time favorite place.
Speaker: I'm still like such a huge science fiction fan.
Speaker: Like that's just, um, you know, I've,
Speaker: I've read all the expanse novels and I don't know if you've read or listened to any of those or I watched the show, the show.
Speaker: It's a good show too.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The show's good.
Speaker: I know there's a novel.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It was, it's actually based on books.
Speaker: Um, I do the audio.
Speaker: Um, but the, the cool thing about it is so on the show, one of the writers of the books was actually a writer on the show.
Speaker: So, um,
Speaker: That's nice.
Speaker: You know, when they're changing stuff, you know, because they always do in shows, and they kind of have to because they have to.
Speaker: Either it's time frame issues, you have to speed stuff up, or, you know, they have to make it flow better for a show.
Speaker: It was easier for me to accept because I'm a big stickler, maybe a stickler or fan, I don't know, of trying to stick to the source material.
Speaker: when it comes to shows and things.
Speaker: And it... So I can't watch Wheel of Time on Amazon.
Speaker: I can't watch it.
Speaker: Because they just... They deviated so far.
Speaker: Like, it wasn't even an issue of... You know, time or flow of narrative or anything.
Speaker: They literally just chopped up all the... They tried to re... Kind of make their own thing out of... Out of what was already there.
Speaker: You know, they had...
Speaker: 11 or 12 or 13 or 14 books to go off of that they, you know, and they just decided to try to make their own shit and run with it.
Speaker: Amazon.
Speaker: Was that Amazon?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Originals.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Fortunately, I think the expanse started off with, was it FFX?
Speaker: Mm.
Speaker: Um, so when Amazon, um,
Speaker: Picked it up after it got dropped after the third season.
Speaker: They basically... Amazon didn't have to do anything.
Speaker: They already had everybody they needed.
Speaker: The writers, the actors and everything.
Speaker: The sets.
Speaker: So they didn't have to build anything new.
Speaker: Yeah, that's good.
Speaker: So they were just... Basically, the showrunners just picked up where they left off.
Speaker: But a lot of the stuff Amazon's put out that's original just...
Speaker: Yeah, some good things.
Speaker: But yeah, a lot of compared to Netflix's portfolio of original content and I think Apple TV's done a really good job too.
Speaker: I've been... Amazon's been the McDonald's in the equation.
Speaker: Just shipping a bunch of stuff and it's good enough for who it's for.
Speaker: You're not going to like it if you're not who it's for.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Sometimes, though, it makes me wonder who the hell is it for.
Speaker: Yeah, especially things like Wheel of Time when they deviate from the source material.
Speaker: Yeah, because you've got this huge fan base of people that are fans of the books.
Speaker: Same thing that happened with...
Speaker: The Lord of the Rings series.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like that's pretty much.
Speaker: I think it canceled.
Speaker: I think they canceled it after the second season.
Speaker: It's definitely not doing very well.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it wasn't that good.
Speaker: Like it was just kind of boring and weirdly paced.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It was it was it was strange.
Speaker: I tried to watch it.
Speaker: I've defended that series a little bit because I liked it at first and then I watched the rest of it and I saw how bad it and boring it got.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I tried to, I tried to give it a shot.
Speaker: You know, I had a friend at work that was like, Oh, this show is great.
Speaker: I'm like, okay, I'll, I'll try it.
Speaker: You know, I, I got through a couple episodes.
Speaker: Um, and yeah, I was like, sorry, man.
Speaker: I just, I just can't do it.
Speaker: I just can't do it.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Do you mainly watch science fiction and fantasy or what kind of?
Speaker: Yeah, I'm also a sci-fi guy.
Speaker: This is why I like space sim games.
Speaker: I play all the space sim games that are out there.
Speaker: Starfield.
Speaker: Starfield, I've been playing.
Speaker: You know, I loved it because I'm a space sim guy, but I hate it for all the reasons that everyone hates it.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: There's lots of crappy Bethesda game things about it.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: feel even less advanced than like fallout for example yeah it's uh it's kitschy we'll see what they do with it and i'm excited for the modding potential yeah yeah i got into games by modding games oh did you okay i love games that you know make that an option so but um yeah skyrim was pretty hard to mod they came out with the toolkits
Speaker: I wouldn't want to work on those games.
Speaker: It doesn't seem like their tool set is anywhere close, like a conventional game engineer is flexible.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: People do lots of stuff with it.
Speaker: It's pretty amazing.
Speaker: So, you know, I've definitely played Skyrim and downloaded mods, you know, because you can and you have to.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, quality of life.
Speaker: I always feel like Bethesda.
Speaker: They start a game and then they put it out for the community to finish.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: That's always a good way to put it.
Speaker: It's always a feeling.
Speaker: I think with Skyrim, they probably did the most of it.
Speaker: And then they've released that game how many times?
Speaker: At least 10 times.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I bought it at least five.
Speaker: I bought it for Switch when it came out and I immediately regretted it.
Speaker: And then I put like eight hours into it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They iterate a lot.
Speaker: During those times, I think.
Speaker: You know, instead of doing it during the actual game development, they wait until they are going to relaunch it.
Speaker: And then they either like pull community stuff, you know, and use it.
Speaker: Or they'll do stuff to it that the community already basically fixed sometimes.
Speaker: I think that...
Speaker: I was just gonna say, I think that last version they put out included a bunch of mods or something, but it also made it hard to install mods.
Speaker: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So everybody was like, well, if you want to install mods, get the previous version to that.
Speaker: So that's the one I bought.
Speaker: Bethesda got, they got all that flack for trying to do paid mods.
Speaker: Do you remember that?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think they're going to probably do that with Starfield.
Speaker: And Fallout 76 is that way.
Speaker: Most of the mods, quote unquote, that you can play, they're through the Bethesda store.
Speaker: It's really hard to mod Fallout 76.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: In a traditional sense.
Speaker: Well, isn't 76 more of an online game?
Speaker: That's what, yeah, they'd say.
Speaker: Yeah, it is.
Speaker: I mean, you can play with people for sure.
Speaker: It does.
Speaker: That is the main, I think, appeal of 76 or even Fallout 4.
Speaker: I think it's a worse single player game than Fallout 4.
Speaker: But Starfield doesn't have that distinction.
Speaker: So we'll see.
Speaker: We'll see what they do there.
Speaker: Man.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm going to give it a good solid year before I buy it.
Speaker: Make sure it's got some mods.
Speaker: Make sure it's got some stuff fixed.
Speaker: Maybe they've added more content by then.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: It's the same reason I didn't buy Cyberpunk 2077 when it first came out.
Speaker: I haven't bought it yet, but I think I'm going to.
Speaker: That's probably it.
Speaker: nearer to my buy list now.
Speaker: I heard Phantom Liberty is really good.
Speaker: Yeah, I got most of the way through the story in Cyberpunk, but I had to wait for a patch when I bought it because it didn't run.
Speaker: Oh, shit.
Speaker: Yeah, it is wise to wait for sure.
Speaker: I think companies were pressured to launch games early.
Speaker: Yeah, that's probably never going to change.
Speaker: Probably not.
Speaker: I mean, hopefully CD Projekt Red has learned their lesson.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Because they were kind of like the game dev darlings of the industry for a while with gamers.
Speaker: They burned up all the goodwill that Witcher 3 brought.
Speaker: Yeah, hopefully they've redeemed themselves.
Speaker: It's possible for game studios to redeem themselves.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: I mean, look at, what was it?
Speaker: No Man's Sky.
Speaker: Yes, thank you.
Speaker: Yeah, another great space game.
Speaker: I was legitimately angry about that game.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I didn't play it until, um, many years after.
Speaker: So, but I saw all the backlash and, and, um, patted myself on the back for not buying it when it, you know, when it launched.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um, and actually the, the last time I wanted a game so bad that I bought it or I tried to buy it on launch.
Speaker: I tried.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: was Metro 2033 or no.
Speaker: Metro Exodus, the last one.
Speaker: Have you played any of those?
Speaker: Yeah, they're all pretty good, I think.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, they're good games.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't like scary games.
Speaker: Usually those games are awesome.
Speaker: Yeah, it's weird.
Speaker: I'm the same exact way.
Speaker: Like.
Speaker: I. Growing up, I wasn't allowed to watch horror or anything like that, so.
Speaker: All that stuff legitimately scares me.
Speaker: And I won't watch anything gory or anything like that, generally speaking.
Speaker: But you put space in front of me, and I'm probably going to try to play it.
Speaker: Or post-apocalyptic.
Speaker: Metro 2033 was one of those.
Speaker: The first couple were super scary.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Actually, they all were.
Speaker: It wasn't even Dead Space level where the first one was scary, and the second one was less, and the third one was even more or less.
Speaker: I think all of the Metro games have been pretty scary.
Speaker: But when the third one was going to come out, they were doing the whole pre-order thing, and I was going to pre-order it on Steam.
Speaker: But that was when the Epic Games Store had just started.
Speaker: And Tim Sweeney started buying up like exclusive.
Speaker: And that fucker bought exclusive to Metro Exodus.
Speaker: Oh, that's right.
Speaker: And they took it off the store.
Speaker: They took it off Steam, dude.
Speaker: Right as I was about to get it.
Speaker: Like literally, I think I missed it by like an hour.
Speaker: Yeah, I forgot about that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They honored the ones that pre-sold on there, but... So I was just like, fuck you, Epic Games.
Speaker: Never mind a game on there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Fuck you, Game Devs.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm not buying your game.
Speaker: I'm going to wait.
Speaker: You know what?
Speaker: And then I'm going to buy it half off.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: That was the last game that I, that I ever thought about buying like on launch day.
Speaker: And I would have, um, from all accounts, it was great on launch day.
Speaker: You know, it was, um, yeah, they actually finished the game, which is a good idea.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They finished the game.
Speaker: It was, you know, it had great reviews.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: But I wasn't about at the time to buy anything from the Epic Games Store.
Speaker: I have since bought things on the Epic Games Store, but not for many, many, many years.
Speaker: And typically, I just log in weekly and get my free games.
Speaker: Mm hmm.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: That's that's what it's for.
Speaker: Basically, is getting the free games every week.
Speaker: I have a yeah, I like that.
Speaker: I have a game library that I didn't have to pay for.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And Tim Sweeney likes that, too.
Speaker: I think he does.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't know what the deal is.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He like he likes me logging in to play games that I didn't buy.
Speaker: He does.
Speaker: I during this time when all this stuff that we're talking about was going down, I was working on a launcher
Speaker: like basically improving our launchers so that we could launch Arena on the Mac.
Speaker: And my project basically got canceled because we launched on the Epic Games Store instead.
Speaker: What?
Speaker: I also hate the Epic Games Store.
Speaker: Oh, no.
Speaker: We got canceled for other reasons, like COVID was going on and things were uncertain.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Why would we do this?
Speaker: We could just launch on the Epic Store.
Speaker: Oh, my God.
Speaker: They gave us a bunch of money, too.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: Tim Sweeney bought out the rights.
Speaker: I was pretty sure.
Speaker: I mean, he was doing that with everybody he was getting exclusives from.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Him and Tencent.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Tencent, you know, has a stake in Epic.
Speaker: Yeah, like 28% or more?
Speaker: Yeah, it's something.
Speaker: And then they have a 40-something percent stake in Riot, I think.
Speaker: Oh, really?
Speaker: Or maybe Riot's the one that they have the majority stake of.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, Tencent is throwing lots of money and has been for the last 15 years into the games industry.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Second to Microsoft.
Speaker: Jeez, that's pretty shitty.
Speaker: Yeah, and they're the biggest game company in the world.
Speaker: Oh, fuck.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Oh, man.
Speaker: Well, I got to say, I'd probably play more indie games than I do AAA at this point.
Speaker: That's good.
Speaker: I'm all about the indie games.
Speaker: Yeah, indie games are better.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Did you see Ghost Song?
Speaker: Oh, dude.
Speaker: What's Ghost Song?
Speaker: You are going to like Ghost Song.
Speaker: If you like any kind of Metroidvania.
Speaker: I don't know if you played Hollow Knight or any of those.
Speaker: Oh, I have seen this.
Speaker: I did try it.
Speaker: It was on Game Pass.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a good game.
Speaker: I should play it more.
Speaker: Yeah, you know, he started that game.
Speaker: He finished it on Unity.
Speaker: But he started it on Stencil.
Speaker: Are you familiar with Stencil?
Speaker: Isn't that like the open source?
Speaker: It's not even a game engine?
Speaker: No, it's a game engine.
Speaker: It's S-T-E-N-C-Y-L, I believe.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: But so their programming language is kind of like Scratch.
Speaker: Yeah, that's right, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So he started it on there, and they actually still have in their forums like this huge forum post of him like posting updates and all that shit.
Speaker: And the art looked fairly different, I think.
Speaker: But I was following it on Stencil.
Speaker: Stencil.
Speaker: for a long time, because like I said, I was dabbling in different game engines, and I've kind of done that on and off over the years.
Speaker: You know, I just keep coming back to it.
Speaker: I just haven't made my own game yet, which I think I'm going to.
Speaker: I finally, I think I have like a pretty good, I don't know, pretty good idea.
Speaker: I mean, you know how ideas are.
Speaker: Like, they're a dime a dozen, but
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They always sound good.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Heck all kinds of ideas, but there, there are ways to, I mean, there are better ideas like can weigh the value of ideas and the feasibility and potential impact and reach.
Speaker: And sure.
Speaker: And like, for me, a lot of it has to do with like, how, I don't know, how much does it grab me?
Speaker: Because I can come up with an idea and then I usually just let it percolate a bit and see if it stays or see if it goes with ideas.
Speaker: Because usually if it's not as great as you thought, it's probably not the best of ideas.
Speaker: You'll forget about it if it's not a winner for sure.
Speaker: And then there are those ideas that you just have to be.
Speaker: and you have to see how they feel and play.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think like those ideas are usually concept games, I think like, like, you know, maybe you've got an idea for puzzles or, or some sort of physics based game, you know, things like that, where you just got to like build it and see how kind of, like you said, how it plays versus something that's maybe story driven or,
Speaker: Or something like that where you kind of have to just let it sit and stir a bit and see if it goes away or if it hangs on.
Speaker: But yeah, Stencil's pretty wild.
Speaker: Have you played with any other... I guess I can't really call them no-code because they have code.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: Have you played with any like?
Speaker: Yeah, I haven't.
Speaker: I think there's a bunch of, there's a couple apps.
Speaker: Like there was an app for the PS4.
Speaker: I'm forgetting what it was called, but it was basically a fully fledged, not just a game engine, but you could also make music in it and you could compose your own music in it, which is what I started using it for.
Speaker: But then people made their own games as well.
Speaker: Oh, that's cool.
Speaker: Let's see if I can look it up real quick.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Drop me a link.
Speaker: Man, what is it called?
Speaker: Oh, it's just called Dreams.
Speaker: Oh, it's just called Dreams.
Speaker: And I'm pretty disappointed that this game didn't take off, but there's these sort of
Speaker: There are these games that are game platforms like Roblox is an example of a game that is a game platform.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um, and I think every, everybody dreams of making that, you know, fortnight's trying to become that now that's their next step.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: That actually, that makes sense.
Speaker: It's the ultimate business model.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's why Bethesda wants to monetize mods, you know?
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: But yeah, I'll send you the link to Dreams.
Speaker: I'd say Fortnite, like they probably have a better chance of that becoming something.
Speaker: Yeah, they're- Similar than anything else at this point.
Speaker: They're well on the way.
Speaker: I think they've, they're just eating market share and they're the landing place for kids once they graduate from Roblox, they land on Fortnite and they age into it is probably the way they talk about it in the boardroom meetings.
Speaker: um you said this is still a thing dreams dreams is dreams was a very big thing on the ps4 ps4 only and i don't know if you can play it on the ps5 i don't have a ps5 anymore but uh interesting yeah these types of things that are i ran into something else that was similar to this
Speaker: I think we're going to see more games coming from, you know, they're going to be made in Roblox or made in something like this or made in Fortnite.
Speaker: They're going to be sort of mods or, you know, user generated games.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then they'll have their own life cycles there.
Speaker: And then they'll either take that and make a standalone game and it'll become an IP on its own.
Speaker: There's a whole, if you look at the horror genre, a lot of horror games are starting on Roblox.
Speaker: Um, yes.
Speaker: Um, doors.
Speaker: This is great.
Speaker: One of my son loves doors.
Speaker: My son plays a crap out of doors.
Speaker: Oh, he did.
Speaker: I think he's, I think he's moved on from there, but, um, he played all I heard, dude, my son will literally like sit and give me a tutorial on doors and I'm not even playing it, but you know, he's just telling me about it.
Speaker: And I've died indoors so many times.
Speaker: I just like, uh, I watch him play it, you know, but I haven't really, I haven't really played it, but, um,
Speaker: But yeah, Roblox is definitely... Yeah, I agree.
Speaker: You can see a lot of kind of horror-y style games on there.
Speaker: That and Obstacle Courses.
Speaker: Yeah, the Obbies.
Speaker: Obbies, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But that's so those are games that people are making games and and those are for the most part no code.
Speaker: There are lots of game engines that I think the obvious are but the the horror games I don't those like you pretty much got a script in is it Lua?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Roblox uses a version of Lua.
Speaker: And it's it's pretty different.
Speaker: I'm not finding a lot of cross knowledge.
Speaker: It doesn't feel like I'm using Lua when I'm using Lua in Roblox compared to my current project, which is just raw Lua.
Speaker: And then the default API is pretty different from all the APIs that Roblox Studio has and Roblox has.
Speaker: So it feels like I'm learning a different language, even though some of the syntax is shared.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: But yeah, as far as other game engines that I would recommend people check out,
Speaker: let's say play canvas is number one for me.
Speaker: Oh yeah.
Speaker: It's web based.
Speaker: I have seen it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It feels like unity to use.
Speaker: Um, it uses JavaScript, which is accessible.
Speaker: And, um, I I've made a couple, I've made a couple like a compelling games and in play canvas.
Speaker: Oh, um,
Speaker: And they have like an asset store and a pretty good developer community.
Speaker: It's been around for a long time.
Speaker: So most things that you Google are going to have answers, which isn't true of the newer engines.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That's fair.
Speaker: Actually, it does look pretty cool.
Speaker: It's been a long time since I looked at it.
Speaker: So this is the other thing we're going to see is so Play Games is bought by Snap, the guys who make Snapchat.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: OK.
Speaker: It drives play canvas, drive some of the more interactive like camera games or messenger games.
Speaker: And then we were using play canvas a lot at my last company at you to make our mobile games.
Speaker: Oh, OK.
Speaker: And we were actually we were running those and embedding those inside of our Unity game, our Unity project.
Speaker: How weird.
Speaker: Our social media app was actually built in Unity.
Speaker: Oh, all right.
Speaker: So it made it easier for us to do like screen recording.
Speaker: And yeah.
Speaker: Initially, they had plans to make the games in Unity, but they pivoted away from that and made them web based instead.
Speaker: And then we just embedded the web games.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: Huh.
Speaker: Did you guys get hit by the unity fees?
Speaker: They're too small still, but they would potentially.
Speaker: I think Unity capped it at the latest LTS version isn't affected.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, yeah, now.
Speaker: I'm pretty sure they're having the talk of, is this our last version of Unity or not?
Speaker: Right, right, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, that's... Like, the one good thing that's come out of all this is that other game engines are getting more focused, getting more popular.
Speaker: People are actually...
Speaker: starting to branch out mainly because, you know, they don't know what the future holds for unity and can't really trust that it's going to, you know, going to be there when they, when they need it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's almost irresponsible to not evaluate other engines.
Speaker: If you're starting a game now, like, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'd say the only reason to stay in unity is if you really love it and you don't care about paying 20 cents and install it.
Speaker: yeah yeah um one of the one of the cool things i thought about um default was that it looks like for the most part you get free access to the console ports um i mean they require you to like uh like have accounts you know set up and all that stuff like you're ready to port whatever but um but that's not something that most of the free engines have managed to pull off yeah um
Speaker: Even Godot is, you know, they've, I think one of their founders has started a company, W4 or something.
Speaker: And they're, you know, they, so they like, they have ports, but I guess, I guess they're going to charge for it or something like that.
Speaker: Maybe, you know, I'm not sure how they're going to work that, but, but I thought defaults approach was,
Speaker: kind of really good.
Speaker: I mean, the fact that they just have private builds.
Speaker: I mean, I assume you've looked into all that stuff.
Speaker: Yeah, I haven't
Speaker: We don't have plans yet to ship on console, but it has been reassuring that they have full console support.
Speaker: And it's good that they do.
Speaker: I mean, mobile builds work right out of the box and web builds work right out of the box better than Unity's web builds do.
Speaker: Oh, that's wild.
Speaker: Unity's very far behind on the web race.
Speaker: And web is a target.
Speaker: The Unity WebGL player is just a piece of junk and
Speaker: It can't do half the things that the other players can do.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I actually, I have a Unity WebGL project right now that I was working on.
Speaker: Yeah, it seems like it takes a while to load.
Speaker: But if you go to vibary.gg, that's my sort of vertical slice proof of concept of how far can we push Unity's web player in the browser.
Speaker: I've been playing with it.
Speaker: Yeah?
Speaker: Have you seen it?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's pretty wild.
Speaker: It's an ambitious, like, it's a pretty intensive project.
Speaker: But a bunch of things don't work that work fine in other builds because Unity doesn't support what I need.
Speaker: So what's your plan for that?
Speaker: Are you still building on that?
Speaker: Maybe someday.
Speaker: Probably not while I'm full-time at a game company.
Speaker: Sure, sure.
Speaker: I kind of, I kind of want to launch it as its own game platform and, um, but I don't know if the core premise makes sense, but if I did launch it as its own game platform, it would be a platform that is focused on games that are educational and meant to be played throughout your day.
Speaker: Oh yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Um, so, and the whole idea is you would use, you would use vibary to, um, keep track of your work and kind of make,
Speaker: putting focus time in on your work fun throughout the day.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then there are these games that are built in that are kind of incremental and progression based games that integrate with the focus time.
Speaker: So you get rewarded for putting in focus time and get rewarded in the games.
Speaker: Oh, that's cool.
Speaker: So like one example is I have an asteroids clone basically.
Speaker: So you get a drone every time you focus, you get a life every time you focus.
Speaker: And when you run out of ships, then you go back and go back to work.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: The idea, I want to test and I want to prove out that concept and see how much, you know, carry power it has.
Speaker: Because I think it can be fun, especially for kids.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Or maybe high schoolers might be the bottom of the... Right.
Speaker: the target audience that I'm appealing to, but that was always missing for me.
Speaker: I never found school self-motivating.
Speaker: School was never fun on its own.
Speaker: No, it wasn't for me either.
Speaker: I was homeschooled for the first, I'd say up to about fifth or sixth grade.
Speaker: And then parents split up.
Speaker: I was 15.
Speaker: They threw me in high school, my first ever experience with school.
Speaker: That is rough.
Speaker: Dude.
Speaker: Stupid rough.
Speaker: My son, he's in a virtual academy.
Speaker: So one thing I noticed, and you were talking about focusing for a while, taking breaks, they do that.
Speaker: So they have like a live class for maybe an hour.
Speaker: And even during the live class, they'll take like what they call a brain break, you know, where they just stop, get up five minutes, run around, you know, grab a snack, whatever, come back.
Speaker: And they do this, you know, kind of throughout the day.
Speaker: And school doesn't last all day.
Speaker: You know, they have, I mean, he's in,
Speaker: first first grade so uh you know obviously time times will change probably but um but he's usually done with school by like 12 one o'clock he starts at like nine you know um and uh uh i mean he's doing fantastic um yeah it's a it's a neat system um
Speaker: where they, you know, they actually do take breaks.
Speaker: We didn't have that in school.
Speaker: Like your break was basically when class was over and you were walking to your next class.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think there's a lot more thought and research and applied learnings from, you know, since, since we were going through school and yeah, I think teachers have a better grasp on,
Speaker: The fact that kids have short attention spans and it's exacerbated by just the digital world that we live in and kids can self-select what they want when they're not at school.
Speaker: So, you know, schools have to meet kids where they, where their interests are.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I mean, realistically, and I'm going to super generalize here, obviously, but yeah,
Speaker: you need for like three things.
Speaker: You need math, you need the ability to read and the ability to write.
Speaker: Like those are the three main things that, that you need.
Speaker: You know, outside of that, everything is kind of, you're going to do it through your daily life, whether it's, I mean, yeah, it's, you know, it's, it's good to know about history, but do you need it to function?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's good to know about other science and stuff, but do you need it to function?
Speaker: No, not really.
Speaker: It's helpful, but it's not an absolute requirement to make it through life.
Speaker: Unless you're going to be a scientist or unless you're going to do something that requires those things.
Speaker: There's a lot of stuff that they kind of force us to do in school that
Speaker: It's not helping me today.
Speaker: You know, I know more about, uh, about science from like, you know, books and shows that actually focus on those things because that's where my interest is.
Speaker: Then I ever learned from, you know, high school.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think I learned more about space and, uh, I guess physics from Kerbal space program.
Speaker: Oh, is that good?
Speaker: Oh, it's so good.
Speaker: Play with your kids.
Speaker: I think I have it on.
Speaker: It will get them excited about... Epic.
Speaker: Don't play Kerbal Space Program 2.
Speaker: Not yet.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: It's another game that released too early, but... Oh, okay.
Speaker: Steam has kind of made that a whole thing.
Speaker: Yeah, the whole Early Access thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm a fan of Early Access.
Speaker: Don't get me wrong.
Speaker: I am too.
Speaker: I definitely bought some games on Early Access.
Speaker: but I've also been burned by some of them.
Speaker: And also, so a couple of indie games that were really good.
Speaker: Uh, one is called an, a N N E that's on steam.
Speaker: You haven't, if you like pixel art games, I would check it out.
Speaker: Um, that's, uh, really good.
Speaker: Um, but you know, they were a little indie dev studio.
Speaker: There's like five people working on it.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: And I followed it for a long time, and then I finally bought it on early access.
Speaker: And then they... COVID hit, I think.
Speaker: And then they had to shut down.
Speaker: And then they went dark for a year or two.
Speaker: And then I guess the original dev has started releasing updates again.
Speaker: So he's back.
Speaker: He's back at it, which is nice.
Speaker: The game was...
Speaker: I'll say mostly finished, but it had some, it had some issues and some places where people were getting stuck and couldn't get past.
Speaker: Um, but he's come back and started, started releasing updates on it again.
Speaker: Um, it's cool.
Speaker: RPG maker.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's, it's a good engine.
Speaker: Is that what that is?
Speaker: Is that what they use?
Speaker: RPG maker.
Speaker: Oh, interesting.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I didn't realize it's another no code engine.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You can, you can do code.
Speaker: I'm familiar with it.
Speaker: I just didn't know they made a freaking side scroller and RPG.
Speaker: It's kind of a, it's an odd choice.
Speaker: Cause there's plenty of other, like game maker would have been probably a better choice for that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: For a side scroller.
Speaker: Game maker is pretty good.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Game makers.
Speaker: Well, they got bought by opera, the browser.
Speaker: Oh, interesting.
Speaker: And so they've got a site called, oh, wait, what is it called?
Speaker: Is it Opera GX?
Speaker: Or no, that's the browser name.
Speaker: That browser, they've been paying the YouTubers real hard to promote it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, my son installed it, and he's using the browser outside of his restrictions.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Not doing anything bad yet.
Speaker: He's just a little bit too young for it to be super problematic, but we're about there.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, sure.
Speaker: He's nine, right?
Speaker: Yeah, he's nine.
Speaker: Trying to find.
Speaker: They've got a... Oh, it's gx.games.
Speaker: They've got a site.
Speaker: And it's very much kind of like... Call it like Roblox, where you just go and play a bunch of games, you know?
Speaker: Yeah, just a game platform.
Speaker: Yeah, so they've got some that you can buy.
Speaker: You know, some games you can buy on there.
Speaker: And some are free.
Speaker: I played a really fun kind of a space shooter-y game.
Speaker: It was just well done, you know?
Speaker: It just...
Speaker: decent pixel art graphics and just very clean.
Speaker: Kind of like your standard unlimited... What do they call it?
Speaker: You know, like those runner games?
Speaker: Yeah, the infinite runners.
Speaker: Yeah, it was like an infinite shooter.
Speaker: Didn't really have an ending.
Speaker: It was just kind of like... It got progressively harder and you gather power-ups and stuff like that.
Speaker: But basically, you just...
Speaker: put your thumb on your device or your, or your mouth.
Speaker: And that was kind of, um, it was pretty cool.
Speaker: So there's, there's, you know, there's a lot of stuff on, on there to play.
Speaker: Um, so I thought that was, I thought that was neat that they were doing that.
Speaker: Um, uh, if you,
Speaker: If you use GameMaker for free, you can upload your games to this for free.
Speaker: That's kind of like their way to do it, I guess, for people that are paying a subscription.
Speaker: I bought GameMaker... I think I bought it on a Humble Bundle once.
Speaker: And... They originally had it like GameMaker 1, GameMaker 2...
Speaker: And now they've, instead of doing that, they're literally just updating the GameMaker.
Speaker: They took off the two and it's just GameMaker.
Speaker: And so they're just like, you know, iterating on the same engine, which is nice.
Speaker: So they honored my desktop export license.
Speaker: I guess they did that with everybody.
Speaker: Anybody that bought one didn't have to buy an export license.
Speaker: for whatever platforms they had exports for um but but yeah game makers um definitely a pretty solid option um i'm kind of looking forward to digging into lua i haven't really played with lua much what's your what's your kind of thoughts on on using that in the game management i think uh
Speaker: I mean, it's pretty straightforward.
Speaker: Um, the default itself, you know, it uses addressables.
Speaker: Uh, so you have to get very good at knowing how to, um, address the objects that you're trying to interact with.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that, that can get complicated if you're doing a lot of spawning, um, and doing things from different scripts.
Speaker: So the architecture, um,
Speaker: Everything has to be spawned at runtime.
Speaker: There's a lot less, you create a scene in a WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get away.
Speaker: And then attach things and hit play.
Speaker: It's a lot more, you have to have a factory that spawns objects and you need to keep track of those objects in your code.
Speaker: And then you need to know how to address them correctly.
Speaker: There's a lot less, you know, dragging a reference into a script and serializing the reference in like a field.
Speaker: You're not doing that at all in default, really, outside of certain assets.
Speaker: But besides that, I mean, Lua is not type safe.
Speaker: And then it's tricky to get the ID set up to do auto-completion.
Speaker: So that's one thing.
Speaker: Is there any kind of like, I noticed that like it felt like some of the autocomplete didn't work.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So the editor inside of default itself, it tries, but it can't do everything.
Speaker: And then if you use like Visual Studio Code, you can get plugins that will help.
Speaker: Oh, is that what you do?
Speaker: Yeah, that's what we did, but I didn't set any of it up, so I don't actually know how it works.
Speaker: Shit.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: You need to find out and make a tutorial, damn it.
Speaker: Yeah, I think there is a really good tutorial about it.
Speaker: There is a, and there's an extension.
Speaker: It's called like Visual Studio Code Default IDE.
Speaker: It's on GitHub.
Speaker: We didn't end up using it, but if I was starting, that's probably where I'd start.
Speaker: It's with that one.
Speaker: It comes with debugging and things like debugging are one of the biggest reasons to switch out of using the built-in debugger.
Speaker: Makes sense.
Speaker: There isn't a built-in debugger.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The co-completion was, was definitely.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: One of the things I noticed, I was like, ah, this is weird, but yeah.
Speaker: But besides that, Lua is like, yes, there's a, there's the book about Lua written by the Lua guys from Brazil in 1993.
Speaker: And I've got that book.
Speaker: It's a great book.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: This is the fourth edition.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: And I'm reading it as much as I can.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a pretty dry book.
Speaker: Yeah, it is.
Speaker: It's I mean, it's kind of a reference, isn't it?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's not really like a. It's more readable than some some reference books that I had to read, but that's fair.
Speaker: They do tell a story in the reasoning and the thinking behind all their decisions.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The gist of Lua is you're dealing a lot with tables and you have to in default, you have to address assets.
Speaker: Oh, OK.
Speaker: But it's fully featured otherwise.
Speaker: I think most engineers who are used to working and they've worked in lots of different programming languages, I think they're going to enjoy Lua.
Speaker: OK.
Speaker: Does it seem like... So I saw a comment on the Discord.
Speaker: One of the devs was talking about how programs are structured.
Speaker: Let me see if I can find it real quick.
Speaker: I think it was after my whole they fixed my shit thing.
Speaker: Okay, let's see.
Speaker: Oh yeah, he said...
Speaker: He said, we advocate for a data-oriented approach when creating your games and thinking in a non-oop fashion.
Speaker: It's tempting to use many scripts, each holding their own small nuggets of data, but I would really recommend to try and centralize a lot of the data into a single place or a few Lua modules.
Speaker: And so I asked if it's more of like a functional approach to programming.
Speaker: would you say that it's more of a functional programming or?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, you can certainly be object oriented in your architecture yourself.
Speaker: But yeah, Lua itself is it's, it's probably better written as functionally as possible.
Speaker: And as modularly as possible.
Speaker: Whereas because Lua itself is
Speaker: like all of the different APIs are divided into kind of functional verticals and, um, yeah, you can, you can split up a big script.
Speaker: If you have a big script that is handling a lot of things and, you know, you feel like you could easily separate the concerns, you can do that.
Speaker: Um, but that's, that's just good to do in general.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: But you're not forced to use an object-oriented paradigm if you don't want to.
Speaker: Oh, that's cool.
Speaker: OK.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You have the GameObjects API, you have the GUI API, and then everything else is up to you.
Speaker: That's also true of Unity.
Speaker: You don't have to drive all of your logic inside of GameObjects in Unity.
Speaker: And in fact, we tried very hard on all of our Unity projects to not
Speaker: have things existing in scene space, just to have C-sharp scripts running.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: But I think it's, I tend to stay on the front-end side of things.
Speaker: I'm good at making buttons sound and fluid.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I tend to not care or have strong opinions about architecture.
Speaker: So I don't think anyone should really listen to what I say about architecture.
Speaker: That's fair.
Speaker: I mean,
Speaker: I guess you're working with a company anyway, so they have their own ideas of what they want architecturally.
Speaker: Yeah, it's one person.
Speaker: I'm the other engineer right now.
Speaker: Oh, there's two of you.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's cool, though.
Speaker: And her architecture is very good, but it revolves around the rules engine, basically, and how we're handling rules updates, which is one of the harder parts of the card game.
Speaker: And we both worked on Arena together.
Speaker: Oh, OK.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: That's cool.
Speaker: So we're getting ahead of some of the things that took us months to fix in Arena.
Speaker: Is this going to be a similar kind of thing?
Speaker: Hopefully it's going to be a similar size game in impact.
Speaker: It's the goal, but with a smaller team.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I guess it depends on how you might be able to get maybe some things done faster than you.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Most of us have worked on at least one game like this before.
Speaker: A bunch of the designers worked on a game called Eternal.
Speaker: Did you ever play Storybook Brawl?
Speaker: It was in Steam for a while.
Speaker: Oh, that rings a bell.
Speaker: I don't know if I've... Let me look it up real quick.
Speaker: I don't know if I've played it.
Speaker: Storybook?
Speaker: Yeah, look it up.
Speaker: Storybook Brawl.
Speaker: Sounds like fun.
Speaker: Our game is basically Starbuck Brawl in space.
Speaker: Oh, in space?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm sold.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, that website didn't go.
Speaker: What happened?
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: The Starbuck Brawl itself is gone.
Speaker: Oh, fail.
Speaker: I guess it's still on Steam.
Speaker: They were bought by FTX.
Speaker: That FTX.
Speaker: Wait.
Speaker: The crypto exchange that exploded.
Speaker: Oh, yes.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I know who that is.
Speaker: They were bought by FTX because the founder was a big fan.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then failure.
Speaker: And then when FTX imploded.
Speaker: you know, the game business wasn't very high on the, on the list of things to keep.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it, this was, this was an early access to, Oh shit.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So yeah, the reviews now are pretty negative because the game got bought and shut down by crypto people.
Speaker: But it was a beloved game before then.
Speaker: And, um, I don't know why these people, Oh, the current, this guy says, I worked on the game.
Speaker: The first game I've worked on, in fact, said, see it go.
Speaker: Hmm.
Speaker: Much love to the rest of the team and all the people involved.
Speaker: I mean, recommended it, but it looks like the... It's weird, though.
Speaker: The recommended thumbs-up ones are all like, well, it was fun while it lasted.
Speaker: Why are you thumbing it up?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The game is dead.
Speaker: Was it a free-to-play?
Speaker: Yeah, it was free-to-play.
Speaker: But still, like...
Speaker: that's the other thing about these free-to-play games is like you know they get you to buy stuff in game and then what happens if they shut down well then you've lost all your yeah you've basically spent money on nothing it's true especially card game people like to collect things yeah yeah is your game going to be um mostly online or is it going to be um like offline at all
Speaker: It's probably going to require being online and in an online account.
Speaker: But we are trying to build it so that we could have offline experiences and you could play like on the plane, for example.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: I was thinking more like if, you know, if God forbid something went under.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right now the rules engine can run locally.
Speaker: Oh, that's cool.
Speaker: We'll see how long that lasts.
Speaker: But one of the big things that we had to do on Arena, I worked on the tutorial, and it was a big pain for us to transition from having everything be server-based to being able to run at least a basic local tutorial.
Speaker: So we had to do a lot of finagling and a lot of re-implementing the rules engine client side.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That was not fun.
Speaker: So I'm glad that we're things like that.
Speaker: We've handled well from the start.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, you know, storybook brawl is gone.
Speaker: But there are other games like this one that are coming out that are draw lots of inspiration and are combining new elements and new innovations.
Speaker: And, you know, they're in space, so it's better.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Everything's better in space, dude.
Speaker: Everything's better in space.
Speaker: um and then yeah a lot of the team that was working on storybook brawl is working on this one too um and some other big names who card game players are going to know and be very excited to hear yeah are working on this um so i'm i'm pretty sure that our launch is going to be noisy and fun good and all the right ways yeah you guys gonna pimp default
Speaker: What's that?
Speaker: Are you going to pimp Defold?
Speaker: Yeah, already.
Speaker: I feel like I'm already pimping Defold.
Speaker: You are.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But I like them.
Speaker: They've earned it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I agree.
Speaker: I mean, the fact that they just went out of their way to fix something that I, as a complete newbie, who just downloaded the engine and tried it out.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I've seen it over the years and probably installed it a few times over the years.
Speaker: but just never really made an effort to get anywhere with it.
Speaker: I'm going to give it a go.
Speaker: I like the fact that it has all the console exports and stuff.
Speaker: Putting something on the Switch is probably the most console I'll go, more than likely, but that it's available is pretty awesome.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: Cool, man.
Speaker: I'm going to get off here and let you go.
Speaker: I've held you up for over an hour and a half, I think.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: That's pretty good.
Speaker: Thanks for the good conversation.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Thanks for coming on.
Speaker: I definitely wouldn't mind poking at you with some default questions later.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Please hit me up anytime.
Speaker: Sweet.
Speaker: I could use it.
Speaker: I could use the test of my knowledge.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Great.
Speaker: I'm figuring it all out too.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: I'm also working on a talk about a talk about coming from unity to default.
Speaker: Oh, cool.
Speaker: I might make a YouTube video about it actually.
Speaker: You should do it.
Speaker: You should.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'll watch.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Sweet.
Speaker: Looking forward to it.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Thanks, man.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Catch you later.
Speaker: See you, buddy.
Speaker: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Citizen Coder Podcast.
Speaker: You can find links to anything we covered in the show notes.
Speaker: If you'd like to sponsor the show, you can reach out to me at info at citizencodercast.com or hit me up on Twitter.
Speaker: Thanks, and as always, I'll see you next time.
