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Episode 3 - Next Fest and Julia Minamata
2.5k Plays10 months ago
After we successfully avoid talking about Stardew Valley, Roses and Matt talk about a megaton of Steam Next Fest demos that they played. Then, we talk to Julia Minamata about her upcoming game, The Crimson Diamond, and 1990s software piracy rings.
Find Julia here: https://twitter.com/JuliaMinamata and wishlist The Crimson Diamond now! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1098770/The_Crimson_Diamond/
Email Us! [email protected]
Games Discussed (THERE ARE A LOT):
- Death of the Reprobate
- Islands of Insight
- Lies of P
- Botany Manor
- The M/S Cornelia II Incident
- Please Touch the Artwork 2
- Chicken Police: Into the Hive
- Indika
- Duck Detective: The Secret Salami
- Turlock Holmes
- Prim
- Queer Quest: All in a Gay’s Work
- Back to Hearth
- Exit: A Biodelic Adventure
- Mutants Ate My Carrots
- Gloomy Juncture
- An English Haunting
- Death Trick: Double Blind
- Daemon Masquerade
- The Crimson Diamond
- The Colonel's Bequest
- Denarius Avaricius Sextus
- Personal Nightmare
- Rome: Pathway to Power
- The 7th Guest
- Armed and Delirious
- Myst
- Dagger of Amon Ra
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Transcript
Introduction and Fan Base Naming
00:00:00
Speaker
Okay, Matt, we're recording. What did you want to tell the people at home? Nothing. I just wanted to welcome all the ag heads back into the podcast. Is that it? Yeah, you're an ag head. I'm an ag head. And all our fans, they're the ag heads. All right. Thanks, Matt. Yeah, thank you.
00:00:22
Speaker
You know, so it's good to have gotten, in only our third episode, to have gotten the worst cold open out of the way, so that- Yeah, I'm glad we did that. In the future, we know that they're all gonna be better than that one. Expectations can only go up. And that's something that the Agheads really know. Adventure game heads. Nope, nope. I don't like it.
00:00:50
Speaker
We call them the leisure suit crew. Done. Done. That's what you're called now. Enjoy. What's up my leisure suit crew?
Origins of Last Names
00:01:19
Speaker
Everyone, pushing up roses here, I am back with my special boy, my precious, precious little boy and co-host, Matt Aucamp. Hi, Matt. What up, eggheads? It's me, Matt Aucamp. That's a very interesting last name. What is that? Aucamp? Yeah. What heritage is that? It's sort of German.
00:01:48
Speaker
there was this project I had to do for German class in high school where it was like everyone was supposed to research the origins of your last name and then come and like let everybody know like oh I'm French so my last name is from the archaic French word for this and the yeah whatever my last name when I went to research it this was on
00:02:11
Speaker
early days
00:02:25
Speaker
It was a French name, Auchamp, and then a bunch of French people moved to Germany, and then somewhere between they're living in Germany and they're moving over to the United States, changed to Auchamp. Now, since then, I've seen conflicting evidence for that, but anybody, look at my face and think French, and you'll be like, oh yeah, that guy's French. Really?
00:02:52
Speaker
We don't have a picture of you. We haven't scanned one in. I know there's no there's no picture on the Internet. So if you just picture a Frenchman with a beret and like just maybe like a little Irish, I think you look like the curse of Monkey Island Guybrush Streetwood. That's how I view you when like who I'm talking to right now is essentially Guybrush Streetwood. Just so you know.
00:03:19
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I guess I have a little bit of a guy brush vibe. I've got this. We've got we share a hair. Well, whose vibe do I give off? You know, that's a loaded question. You know, in the. Fraggles. Yes, that big lady made a trash. I can't believe you. I can't believe this.
00:03:47
Speaker
Okay. Okay. You're like, you give off like, alvira on the weekends. Oh, yeah. But during the week I'm the trash lady of the trash. No, I'm just saying, I'm just saying during the week when she's wearing her business attire.
00:04:06
Speaker
Okay, you heard it here. I compared Matt, the guy who brushed three foot, and he compared me to a trash monster. So, Rosas, what have you been playing?
Gaming Discussions and Reviews
00:04:19
Speaker
So, well actually, this is gonna be a great segue into what we're talking about today. We have been playing a lot of demos for Next Fest, right? And that kind of inspired me to do a few other things. I'm actually quite interested now, and I haven't had the time to play it yet, but I played the demo.
00:04:35
Speaker
for Death of the Reprobate. And now the dev is going to send me keys for his other games. And I've watched a few videos on it. And I can't believe how well that works. I just can't. I can't. It's so bizarre. I've never seen a more bizarre looking game. And I think as an artist, if you guys don't know what those are, the Joe Richardson games, he uses Renaissance style
00:05:04
Speaker
not style. I'm so sorry. He actually takes images from Renaissance paintings and animates them and puts them in games. And they're, they're very funny. They're very well done. The animations are, I guess what you could call crude, but also crack me up. Also, I think they're hilarious.
00:05:24
Speaker
all his games are just so funny. I remember looking at the premise and thinking it was going to be just like, it was like an interesting art style. Like the art style was funny, but expecting just the most kind of basic, simplistic point and click game and then expecting the humor to sort of be
00:05:45
Speaker
You know, kind of Pure Isle. Instead, what I got were these like really thoughtful and interesting point and click games. Because this is his third, Death of the Reprobate is his third. He's done two other games. He's done Procession to Calvary and Four Last Things. It's called his Oh God, what's the name of the trilogy?
00:06:07
Speaker
Oh, he has a name for the trilogy now. It's called the Immortal John trilogy because that is a character in the game.
00:06:16
Speaker
I find that my humor style really aligns with these games because I mostly, for the most part, do what I would say more wholesome humor, goofy humor, like Wayne's World. But then I'll hit you with a fisting joke. It'll come out of nowhere. And that's what makes it funny. You definitely don't want fisting to come out of nowhere. You want to spend a lot of time preparing. You don't. Yeah, this is a public service announcement. Always be prepared. And what have you been into, Matt?
00:06:46
Speaker
Um, you know, I've also been playing just so many of these demos and like I said, last episode, the one that's kind of hooked me and I'm just like spending hours and hours in is this Islands of Insight demo, which just came, the full game just came out today. Uh, and I've, I've been playing it and it rules and yeah, this'll be released about a week from now. So hopefully you guys have been on Islands of Insight playing, playing with me.
00:07:15
Speaker
Wait, oh, that's the MMO. Yeah, this is the MMO. Oh, you're still into it. Oh, man, I love it so much. You want to do a Let's Play? You want to do a Let's Play on this game where you just fart around in this adventure game world? That might be fun. Other than that, I've been... And this is another obsessive game of mine, because I think between all these demos, I just wanted to play stuff that could...
00:07:40
Speaker
that I could just kind of meld into and let my brain turn off. So I've also been playing for like the fourth time I've been playing Lies of P, that Pinocchio Dark Souls like game. Oh, that sounds fun. Yeah, you it's it's like a Dark Souls game only your your
00:07:57
Speaker
You are basically Pinocchio. And you're like this handsome little robotic puppet boy just carving through hundreds and hundreds of enemies and incredibly difficult boss fights. When you beat that game, you get to start over from the beginning of the game, but you don't lose your levels or your weapons. So you're just extra powerful.
00:08:21
Speaker
nice and playing a dark souls like game with this like extra power so it's like if you feel so cool just being able to tear through a souls like without having to worry about dying every you know five minutes yeah and so yeah that's that's what i've been doing uh just to chill listen to audiobooks and just carve up some puppets
00:08:45
Speaker
I've also been playing Stardew Valley, but we're not going to talk about it this time. Because Matt says I talk about it too much. So, you know, we're not going to talk about it. We have so much to talk about with these Next Fest games. So why don't we wrap up the segment like now-ish, and then we're going to come back. Oh, right when I mentioned Stardew Valley? Yeah, sure. Yeah, let's wrap up now.
00:09:09
Speaker
We are going to come back. We're going to talk about a ton of fucking Nexfest Devos. We've played so many. And then we're going to cap off the show. We're going to talk to Julia Minamata about her game, Crimson Diamond, and then just about some other random junk. Yes. So, roses, roll that break music.
00:09:55
Speaker
Man, I love this music though. Swanky Max Amino. I mean, how can one resist? How was your break?
00:10:04
Speaker
It was great. I finished a protein shake. Or I'm sorry, are you asking the audience like you were last time? Are you just me? No, this time I'm asking you. Keep up. Thank you for caring. Yeah. And then next time I'll ask the audience and then the time after that I'll ask you. You just got to keep track of this. Please. Maybe make a little... A little document. A little document that you can check. Please stop toying with my emotions. I need to know if people want to know how I'm doing.
00:10:35
Speaker
How was your protein shake? It was good and it was chocolate banana. Cause I am getting swole. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. So I can be fast and a good jumper like you. Oh man. There's nothing that's better than that. So next fest, next fest 2024.
00:10:55
Speaker
is a, every year, Steam does this, we talked about this last episode, but just as a quick introduction, every year, Steam does this like week of demos and live streams and developer commentaries and stuff. It's just basically,
00:11:14
Speaker
they called like a celebration of what you can expect in the future. So there was a ton of adventure games in Steam Nexus this year. And we, me and Roses, we played a shit ton of them. Roses, how many did you play? Because I know mine is going to be an embarrassingly high number. You played way more than me. I played around 10, which is a lot of demos to play in like a period of time. Yeah.
00:11:43
Speaker
I played 26. How many did you? Six. 26. I played 26 of them. You played 26 demos? I played 26 demos? How are things going in your life, Matt? Do you need a friend?
00:11:59
Speaker
There were so many really good ones. And before we get into, we're gonna talk about a ton of them today. We brought up a couple last episode. And if you want to, you can go back and check episode two, where we talk about these ones. But I would just, real quickly, I wanna say, the first ones that stood out to me the most were Botany Manor, Cabernet, Islands of Insight is the MMO, which I talked about in the intro segment. It's so good, it's so good.
00:12:27
Speaker
I really love this game. Again, the story is barely there. It is somewhere on the spectrum between embarrassingly obtuse and non-existent. Like it's somewhere...
00:12:42
Speaker
on that spectrum but the puzzle it's just so fun to run around and have an infinite number of puzzles to solve I'm loving it so much and did we talk about sky of tides last time we did yeah we talked about the four the four demos that you had already played why don't we roll into talking about
00:13:03
Speaker
Summit you've played roses. Sure. Um, so one that I am Very excited about is I think I mentioned that I probably have already mentioned this a bajillion times and don't even realize it is the ms cornellia 2 incident
00:13:18
Speaker
right first of all the screen caps got me hooked immediately it looks very classic point and click very classic older king's quest would you agree like the old like king's quest one era yeah i'd say yeah it's got like codename iceman
00:13:34
Speaker
Which kind of frightened me at first because we're not into submarine simulators over here podcast necessarily. But yes, it gave me those vibes of being on an island being very secluded.
00:13:49
Speaker
The very interesting thing about this game is it just kind of pushes you right in. No story, no intro. You're just there. You're just on an island and you've got to find certain clues to unlock your memories to figure out who you are. And it's not a very long demo, but it was enough that it very, very genuinely, I'm very intrigued to keep playing this game. I really want to figure it out.
00:14:15
Speaker
I found it challenging, actually. I found, so not only are there seemingly like inventory puzzles, there's also, yeah, this mechanic, like Rose is saying, where you try to unlock your memories by highlighting certain words, and then you go just sort of- You got a little hidden objecty, right?
00:14:34
Speaker
Yeah, and then you sort of go into this brain palace where it asks you questions and you have to use, once you get enough clues, you sort of put together, like you piece together the answer using the clues.
00:14:54
Speaker
It is a little bit of a challenge, I will say that. But I will also say because it does throw you in, and you're not quite sure what you're meant to be doing, as soon as you got that gameplay down, as soon as you know, Oh, I gotta look, I gotta look for letters, I gotta look, I gotta scroll over things and see if there's clues, then it became like a little bit easier for me once I understood that that is one of the core mechanics.
00:15:17
Speaker
And if you like chunky pixel art, it's beautiful. Oh God, I love it. I have a type, Matt, when it comes to adventure games, I got a type. Chunky blocks of color. Super high contrast, murder mystery vibes. So I want to talk about a game that I played called Please Touch the Artwork 2. And now I never played Please Touch the Artwork 1. Interesting.
00:15:47
Speaker
It's kind of like a hidden object game, but with like a point and click system, right? You control a character, a cartoony kind of looking character on screen. You click around, it goes where you walk. But you encounter characters who are just the objects of paintings.
00:16:08
Speaker
And these are all it's all based on the works of Belgium's famous painter, James Ensor. You talk to people from his paintings, and then they give you some amount of an object you need to find. And then you walk back through the paintings and try and find that number of that object. And
00:16:28
Speaker
In addition, there's this other mechanic where sometimes you come across rips in the paintings and you have to repair them with this, you know, casual little game that's like, what do you call those games where it's like you're trying to draw a shape without ever retracing your steps? It's like doing a continuous line.
00:16:51
Speaker
doing a continuous line, yeah. And so it's like that. And once you solve, I think like two of those in a row, it fixes the painting and then you can progress. It's really silly and fun. And yeah, I was really impressed by it. It honestly looks very cozy. It's like I want to dive into this. Yeah.
00:17:12
Speaker
The developer's name is Thomas Waterzoy, and I'm probably mispronouncing that. So it's like the word water, the word zoo, and then the letter I. I'm gonna bring up the chicken police into the hive. Oh my god, yeah. Yeah, because I didn't know that there were other chicken police games. Am I right in saying that, that there are others? There is one other chicken police game. It was released a few years ago. Got it.
00:17:41
Speaker
I think maybe 2021 or 2020. Yes, 2020 was released by The Wild Gentlemen. Oh, wild. That's the name of the dev. The first one was called Paint It Red.
00:17:57
Speaker
I played the demo for their next game, which is called chicken police into the hive. And once again, I have a type like I know when a game is just going to grab me immediately. And it's going to be that 1920s, hard boiled noir.
00:18:13
Speaker
type of a thing. It does help. There's animals in it as an animal, a huge animal lover, but especially birds. It's like photorealistic animal heads on human bodies. What an interesting aesthetic.
00:18:33
Speaker
It's really hard to get used to at first, but you sink into it in a way, maybe not hard, but it seems it's odd. It's like supposed to be odd and it feels odd at first, but you sink into it so fast that when like some dude with a fox head shows up, you don't even think about it. You're just like, oh, this fox guy. That's the world building, you know, it sets up this world. I love that you can play it in black and white.
00:19:03
Speaker
So the first game was all black and white, and this game adds a color mode, which is awesome. It's very cool.
00:19:10
Speaker
That is cool. It's awesome that they did that. I still chose black and white because I wanted that heavy noir feel. Love the voice acting. Just sounds great. And I didn't, obviously I only played a demo, so I didn't play too many puzzles. Right now they're pretty fine. They're fine. You know, I am more interested in this world, in this crazy world of chicken police, you know? So the main, there is some inventory puzzles in the chicken police games, but the main
00:19:38
Speaker
thing is interviews. Yeah. Or like interrogations, I guess. Interrogations, right. So you can like in this demo, you talk to a bunch of people, and the conversations can go a number of ways. But the main mechanic, like I think the most interesting mechanic of the chicken police games is the interrogation.
00:19:58
Speaker
where you have specific goals and you have to coax specific information out of informants. And the game ends teasingly immediately before, like, you say you're about to start an interrogation and then it fades to black. And it's like, thanks for playing the demo. Okay, so I played a very weird game. And this game looks so much weirder
00:20:24
Speaker
in screenshots than the demo actually was. So I imagine this game gets much, much weirder. It's called Indica. Yeah. I don't doubt of that one, man. Like, I was like, no. If you look at the trailer to that, it looks unbelievably frightening. The game itself that I played was like
00:20:43
Speaker
Uh, tense and there were scary moments, but it wasn't, it wasn't, I was never scared while playing the game. It's got a very, um, it's by developer odd meter. It takes place in some kind of like.
00:20:58
Speaker
Alternate Russia, it's got a very Last of Us kind of vibe. Really heavily, realistically rendered 3D, third person. It's uncanny valley almost. I'm getting that. It's real, but not real. There's something wrong.
00:21:16
Speaker
Right, so all the sequences I played, everything was very realistic, but based on the trailers and the screenshots and stuff, it seems as if the Uncanny Valley is part of what makes it scary. And so the game, the part of the demo that I played, you're just, you are a nun who was kidnapped by some, it seems like some ex-soldier.
00:21:40
Speaker
And you're taking him to where he wants to go. And as you're passing through these like little Russian towns, something bad has happened. And we don't know what they mentioned possession. Oh, I like that. So it's like it's it's sort of steampunk, but very light on the steampunk. But so you're riding this like steampunk motorcycle kind of. And it's making this weird
00:22:07
Speaker
sort of 16-bit noise and I was thinking something else in my house somehow was playing this noise because it doesn't fit with the game and there's all these other things like when you find certain things in the game you get these like very pixelated rewards and so it has these really incongruous elements where you're playing the super realistic game and suddenly this very retro aesthetic pops up
00:22:32
Speaker
So you start to find out that this nun has a lot of guilt about something and you don't really know what it is.
00:22:38
Speaker
But when you end up by yourself at some point, you start being like interrogated and maybe tortured by this demonic voice in your head that's like mocking you. And he has this power to alter reality, but if you pray, his voice goes away and reality goes back to normal. So he might stretch out a room and then you might be able to progress further than you were. And then you pray and the room compresses again. And now you can reach, say,
00:23:07
Speaker
a platform you couldn't before. And so you climb up onto the platform. The way you're describing this is scary, though. Like, that sounds tense to me. If you have a lot of religious superstition, I think this game is going to be instantly scary to you. If you're not very faithful, I think you're going to be it's going to feel tense, like you're waiting for something to jump out of nowhere.
00:23:31
Speaker
It's very weird. I hope that I've communicated strongly enough that this game is strange and there's all sorts of elements to it that just are, I think, intentionally incongruous with each other. I've never played anything like it. The closest thing, again, is The Last of Us, but that does not encompass it. That's just sort of like the visual style and the narrative style. And then, yeah, there's this puzzle platforming element. What's your next game?
00:24:01
Speaker
My next game is because I just can't get enough of detective animals is Duck Detective The Secret Salami. This game is adorable. I cannot stress to you enough the visual style your character looks like a little cutout sprite. It is so cute.
00:24:23
Speaker
You look like a sticker. You look like a sticker. Yeah, that's true. The voice acting topped here. I was so impressed, but also it was just funny. I actually found myself definitely laughing at a few, just especially at our character, the Duck Detective, who was
00:24:41
Speaker
seemingly going through some heartache as the hard-boiled detective usually is. But also is trying to figure out these kind of, I don't want to say petty cases, but they're wholesome. They're wholesome cases. They're not- Because he's a bread addict.
00:24:57
Speaker
Yeah, he's on the loaf. And it's simple so far, right? Because all I've played is a demo. But I like the way the puzzles work. It is a mystery puzzle thing. It's about observation. It's about taking in the clues and putting things together to unravel more of the story. Yeah, do you want to describe that mechanic a little bit?
00:25:19
Speaker
So I was going to actually explain it like it kind of reminded me of contradiction. I don't think you've played that one, Matt, but basically, so like you'll have a sentence with like blanks in it, right? It'll be like, Sally was upset because blank on her blank, which sound phrasing, I know. But essentially you'll have this sentence that you need to figure out and identify correctly.
00:25:45
Speaker
So you go around your setting, you look for those clues, those words, and then you kind of put that sentence together and hopefully it'll make sense. You know, hopefully you're doing it with intention and not just like clicking words everywhere. Hopefully you've looked at everything and you're like, Oh yeah, Sally worked on Tuesday because the calendar said Tuesday. You know what I mean? So I really like it. I think it's accessible again. Once again, I feel like I'm being pleasantly surprised by these demos because the screen caps just don't
00:26:15
Speaker
I don't know. They don't do the screen caps don't do it for me. I have to play it. Absolutely. And on that same train, speaking of animal detectives and speaking of fill in the word mysteries. And I just want to take a second to say you seem into it, but I think we've had enough animal detective games like there's enough.
00:26:41
Speaker
There's, I think it's called Tails now. What was that game called? With the, like the Badger. Everyone was really upset about the way that it ended. Backbone. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they changed the name to Tails to try and avoid the backlash. It's actually really messed up in the way that they handled the Kickstarter's bad. Anyway, so yeah, there's Tails, there's
00:27:04
Speaker
Brock the Frog detective there's Brock the investigator. There's chicken police. There's there's one that's Lord Lord. Yeah. Yeah, there's a bunch that are a cat. There's nine noir lives. There's Lord wiggle bottom investigates. It's just
00:27:24
Speaker
There's so many, there's definitely other things you could do besides make a detective animal. If you are a person listening to this, developing a new detective animal game, just change the sprite to something else. We have too many. It's ridiculous. Anyway, this game's about a turtle detective.
00:27:47
Speaker
It's called Turlock. Anyway, I felt like we just went anyway, here's Wonderwall. Yeah. It's called Turlock Homes. And it's basically a word game where you get a paragraph about something that happened. Like a boy was found dead on the street in nothing but his underwear. He had an umbrella next to him, but it wasn't raining. What happened? Yeah.
00:28:14
Speaker
Oh, it sounds like a math question, doesn't it? Like a little bit. Right, and you get...
00:28:20
Speaker
a bunch of blanks and the blanks are different colors and it's like the red are the most integral parts of the story that you don't get for free. The white is like of and or the, and it goes up and then there's like yellow and then there's blue. And you can click on any of these words and try and guess them and you'll know how many letters are in the word. And sometimes as you,
00:28:49
Speaker
solve certain words, it will give you certain letters for other words. So you have a place to start from. And if you can't figure it out at all, you can do a basically a sporkle on it. You can click on the word and it'll let you do like a sporkle.
00:29:04
Speaker
So I will say this towards animal detectives and stuff like that, the way that this is being described. And I did watch some Let's Play so I could be in the know about what I'm looking at. I will say that this game, Turlock Home, seems to be more emphasized. It is like a word game type of a thing. And I will say for Duck Detective,
00:29:25
Speaker
the animals and the cuteness of them and talking to them, it does matter. It would be it's even a little more egregious, right? It's along. It's kind of aligned with other like cutesy detective games where I think Turlock Holmes is more puzzle driven or at least at least logic puzzle driven. Yeah, I would agree with that. Turlock Holmes is more just like a mascot in the game. Exactly. Exactly. All right. What's your next game?
00:29:52
Speaker
So I would like to bring up a game called Prim. And I feel that this game was made for me. The demo is not too long and it's not too involved. I love the art style. It's very illustrative, pen and ink, very gothic. You are playing Death's Daughter, which I think is amazing and fun. Something I took note of right away in that game was the music.
00:30:22
Speaker
I felt like, man, I don't even know. There's a familiarity to it. I felt like I was playing like another monkey island or another grim or something where the music just felt so nice to listen to. The character design intrigued me. The art style absolutely intrigues me. The mechanics are accessible and easy to use. There's only one thing that's maybe
00:30:44
Speaker
a little bit of a negative for me and this is personal preference you guys. I thought the voice acting was almost too emphatic. I don't know how you felt about it. I played this demo
00:30:56
Speaker
a couple of years ago. I don't know if the demo has been updated since then, but I can't remember what the voice acting felt like. For me, it went a little over the top. And that sometimes takes me out of the game. And this happens with adventure games pretty frequently. Sometimes dialogue is just, it can get a strain to listen to. Because you are spending energy listening and paying attention to this dialogue. So if it's a little bit too much, a good example is Toonstruck.
00:31:23
Speaker
very emphatic voice acting. Granted, I like that game a lot, but it can be a drain on your energy to listen to Trust McNeil play a hoppy little bunny for two hours. You know what I mean? Right. This is what I'll say about Prim. If you liked the Datalik games,
00:31:42
Speaker
I think Prim is worth checking out. It's cartoony. I think it's a little better than a lot of the data like games, but it's got a similar kind of style. It's by Application Systems Heidelberg. It's been in development for a while and I'm not sure it has a 2024 release date, but that has been pushed back before. So I don't know when we can actually expect it, but hopefully this year, I know this is like a very highly anticipated game for a lot of people.
00:32:11
Speaker
All right, what do you got? Okay, let's see. Gosh, I played so many roses. I wanna talk about, real quick, I wanna talk about, I'm gonna do a couple real fast, is that all right? That's totally fine. Games that I have maybe one or two things to say about and that's it. Totally fine. Okay, so I played Queer Quest.
00:32:33
Speaker
which was a, you know, it was a cute little point and click adventure made by Queer Mo Games and the two, those two things together should give you a, you know, hint of what you're in for. It's very, it's very much LGBTQ pageantry, right? A celebration. It's a celebration, yes, definitely. The one thing I want to mention about Queer Quest is they put music with lyrics.
00:33:03
Speaker
as the background music, and it drove me crazy because I'm trying to read dialogue, and then it's just like my brain's also processing what these lyrics are. Like, I can't read and listen to music with lyrics at the same time, unless it's a song I've heard a thousand times, which maybe, this has apparently been in development for a long time, so maybe these developers have heard this music so many times, the lyrics just disappear into the sound for them.
00:33:31
Speaker
But yeah, this is gonna be new music for anybody who's playing it. Yeah, I hear what you're saying because it is not voice acting as far as we know. So we are trying to get the information of reading the dialogue while this this voiced music also plays. So that's a little tough.
00:33:48
Speaker
Yeah, I want to mention also Mutants Ate My Carrots, which is a very sort of standard point and click. It's again kind of cute. You play a really muscly, angry rabbit who had all his special black carrots eaten.
00:34:09
Speaker
And now you're on a quest to find who took them and get them back. The interesting thing about Mutants Ate My Carrots is that in addition to inventory items, you also
00:34:20
Speaker
find physical attacks, types of punches and kicks and stuff. And some of those you can use on the environment to get through obstacles. And most of them you use on other characters. So when you come across a character that you can fight, they will have a certain number of dots above their head. And each of those dots is one more thing you have to solve. So the thing you have to solve might be just using the right punch on them.
00:34:46
Speaker
Or the thing you have to solve might be you have to distract them in order to get your first hit in. So it's kind of a hybrid, almost. Like it is an adventure game, but they do have other mechanics going on. Yeah. Unlike, say, Brock, which was like a legitimate beat them up where you hit buttons to punch and kick, this one has you just select them from your inventory bar. So it's like just making them part of your inventory, which is interesting. The other one I'll mention real quickly and then I'll throw over to you is back to Hearth.
00:35:15
Speaker
This was strange. I don't know how I feel about this game. I honestly don't know if I'm giving it a recommendation or not, but I do want to talk about it because I think it was interesting. It's by Podobo Interactive and the Morivo Collective.
00:35:34
Speaker
a 3D game using very basic 3D assets, sort of almost like a PlayStation 2 sort of feel. And you're revisiting this, it almost looks like you're coming back to a home in the American South after the Dust Bowl blows over and you have to clean up your yard. The tasks you do are really not fun, but it seems to be hinting at a much deeper and more
00:36:03
Speaker
interesting story. And what I think was really impressive about it was just how atmospheric the game was. It definitely puts you in a world. It's a little miss like there's that intrigue of your settings. There's not again, there's not really puzzles to solve. There's just really tasks to do. It'll definitely wrap you up in its ambiance. Okay, your turn.
00:36:26
Speaker
I just want to touch on this game very briefly because this was the last game I played on my demo list. It's called an English haunting. Oh, yeah. And I didn't get a chance really to go through it the way I wanted to. I ended up if this is not on the game, it's not boring. I didn't fall asleep. But I have got to say, once again, I have a type. And that's what it is. That pixel art that animation is gorgeous. What in the world? It's so beautiful.
00:36:56
Speaker
I'm having trouble thinking of a game with that gorgeous, like Backbone maybe. Yeah, that's what I can think of. I can't think of another game except for, yeah, maybe Backbone that has that beautiful of pixel art. I love the talk, everyone's talking so their mouths and necks are, quote, moving, you know, as much as you can in a pixel art. I just, I've really brought up the screenshots now.
00:37:24
Speaker
because I just think it's so beautiful. I really, ugh. Yeah, it's just like intricate pixel arts with modern lighting effects. Again, much like Backbone. I don't know why that's coming up so much in this episode. Backbone's very relevant right now. Oh, sorry. Sorry. Tails. Tails. Get it right. Geez. You know what it kind of reminded me of, just very slightly, is the Trilby series. They chose Mythos series. Yes. I could see that.
00:37:54
Speaker
Yeah, just based on the gameplay, a little bit of dialogue, a little very slightly aesthetic, as well. But like, as I was like reading, as I picked stuff up, and I was reading, it kind of gave me that vibe. It also gave me a little bit I don't know if you've played this one, Matt, but clock tower vibes, it gave me like, oh, I'm okay.
00:38:13
Speaker
I'm in a scary place and I don't like it. You know what I mean? I mean, yeah, this was one of the most impressive demos I think I played. I think up there with Botany Manor and Cabernet and I think this is one of those games that I'm going to play the moment it comes out. Yeah, I just I can't get enough of it.
00:38:33
Speaker
I imagine these are games that you guys will be hearing about from us on this podcast again later when their full games are out. That's by the developer Postmodern Adventures in English Haunting. It's just another game that's made for me. I just assume that these devs are making games for me because they like me.
00:38:53
Speaker
Very quickly, the premise of English Haunting is that you are a professor at a college that's part of their metaphysics department, and there has been some sort of controversy with your partner, and you have 72 hours to prove that ghosts exist, or they're gonna shut down the metaphysics department.
00:39:20
Speaker
And keep in mind, our character doesn't believe in ghosts. He is a skeptic. Right? I got that right, right? He's the skeptic. I didn't get that. I know maybe there's some line of dialogue that I missed. Can I misread? I'm sorry if I misread the intro. One of us is right. One of us is wrong. And the only way you can know is by playing an English one too.
00:39:49
Speaker
He's just very scientifically minded, scientific method, these are our tools and everything. He asked his students in the beginning if they believed in God and he's like, well, where's the supporting evidence? So that to me read that he's not gonna believe in ghosts, he would need evidence. What I got from that is that he was saying that
00:40:16
Speaker
denying the existence of ghosts is silly if you are a person who is of another faith, who has any sort of faith. Okay, got it. But now I can see exactly where you got that from. My man. I think he believes that there's a scientific explanation for ghosts and that's the reason for the metaphysics department. Let's talk about gloomy juncture. Yes, let's.
00:40:41
Speaker
So this is an interesting little game. It's by Subtales Studio. The dev actually reached out to us on Twitter. I had already played their game by the time they messaged us, but it is... Okay. It's first person 3D, but everything is like it's made out of cardboard. Everything's kind of blocky, and it's like the details have been drawn on in marker.
00:41:10
Speaker
which I love, just as an artist, as a drawer, as a painter. I really think it's cool. I found that part of the game very highly engaging. Yeah, the art was incredible. I was really impressed by it. I got a little stuck on some of the early puzzles. I had a little trouble figuring out the way to navigate the environment.
00:41:31
Speaker
Puzzles weren't tough, but figuring out where stuff was, like searching the environment was a little tough. The last puzzle of the demo is a sort of obnoxious type of puzzle that made me laugh out loud and I loved it, which is you have to determine where certain color blocks go by tracing a really, really complicated tangle of wires across the ceiling. And that's just such a...
00:42:00
Speaker
It's like when the boulder in a Dark Souls game comes out of nowhere and crushes your character and you're like, how was I supposed to know? It's like the sort of thing where you feel like the developer's like making fun of you. And it made me laugh out loud. And I really appreciated that.
00:42:14
Speaker
Again, this is a personal preference. This is not a reflection on the game. I am not a big fan of first-person adventure games in general. I think people know that by now. It is not my favorite thing. I don't know. It's a brain thing. I get mixed up. I get confused. I feel stupid. So that kind of threw me a little bit. But if that's something you don't mind,
00:42:38
Speaker
I mean, there's always going to be exceptions to the rules. So Firewatch was first person, too. And I love that game. So I am eager to see where this game goes. I did find it to be a little crass. And this is coming from somebody who made a fisting joke.
00:42:54
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, your first task is to clean up puke, and then there's a lot of drug references. You're in a very dingy, kind of shitty, like, kitchen. Kitchen, yeah. But that seems to be part of some really, like, CD establishment. But it gets very...
00:43:14
Speaker
What do you want to say? Psychedelic almost? Yes. Yeah, psychedelic. Sure. Yeah. It gets kind of dreamlike and surreal by the end of the demo. I think I need to see and play a little bit more of it for me to be like, I love it. You know, I don't. Right, right. The English haunting is the only one where I basically joygasm over an adventure game. So you've got big shoes to fill if you're not an English haunting. If you're not an English haunting. I will.
00:43:42
Speaker
I'm going to blaze through a couple once again. Okay. Speed run, speed run man. Speed run, speed run. Okay. Okay. So Death Trick Double Blind is by Misty Mountain Studio. And it's like a visual novel kind of deal where you are a
00:43:59
Speaker
You're a woman who is, you can read minds maybe, and you're a magician, and you're trying to solve the death of a magician at, of another female magician or disappearance of another female magician at some carnival by taking her place and seeing who that draws out. And at the same time,
00:44:24
Speaker
you're switching between that person and a detective who has been hired to investigate this woman's murder by this circus. It has a very Phoenix Wright sort of deal, because again, it's a visual novel, but you can present items and topics and characters in conversation and they'll have different effects. So you can look for contradictions the same way you can yell objection in Phoenix Wright.
00:44:54
Speaker
In each conversation, you can only do so much. You have ability points. So you have to pick and choose the things you talk about judiciously. I played a game called Demon Masquerade by Callum Page. Is that the developer?
00:45:11
Speaker
Let me look it up, keep talking and I will look it up. Okay. And it seemed to, the problem with this one, it was like a kind of a comic bookie art style. The problem with this demo is it's very short and it kind of just walks you through the tutorial. And as soon as the thing starts to get interesting,
00:45:32
Speaker
the demo cuts off so i'm interested in seeing where this game goes but basically you are this child who's a subject in some research facility and you're solving puzzles like that's the thing they give you puzzles and you put them together as like you solve them as quick as you can but then
00:45:52
Speaker
Uh, on like the third day, I think the director comes in and hands you a criminal case and says, here's another puzzle solve this, which is a really interesting idea, right? You being like some sort of gifted, some, some sort of special or superhuman or gifted child who your abilities are being used.
00:46:16
Speaker
in this completely different way to solve criminal cases. That sounds really interesting, but you don't really get to solve any of the actual cases in this demo. I also see that is anime inspired, so it has a little bit of an aesthetic to it. Yeah, it's got a little anime, definitely comic book-y for sure. Yeah. Yeah, and that is by Callum Page. It is, yeah.
00:46:39
Speaker
Oh, speed run. Okay. I played exit. I played exit a bio-delic adventure, which I would call like, okay. It is, it is a point and click adventure. It takes place in like a futuristic world. And as opposed to cyber punk, this is like yucky punk. Did we just, did we just create a new genre? Yucky punk, organo punk, like a bio punk maybe is a good word for it. It's like,
00:47:10
Speaker
You are in this alien world, or maybe it's Earth in the far future, but everything's been taken over by biological technology. So everything's squishy and organ-like, and it's sort of like 2.5D, where there's 2D backgrounds and then kind of like 3D-modeled characters. It looks really cool.
00:47:31
Speaker
It's difficult because they don't really explain to you what all these weird biotechnology things are. You just kind of have to figure it out, and some of it is intuitive, and some of it is not, and it's all really yucky. It's very strange if you like really weird shit. You like yuck punk. Yuck punk games. Matt, would you like to join my yuck punk band?
00:47:57
Speaker
That's yeah. Exit a biodelic adventure. Nice. So the last game I want to talk about is Death of the Reprobate by Joe Richardson. And I had not played these games before. So the demo is kind of what got me into it. And Matt kind of encouraged me to play because we were we were kind of talking. We were looking at like screenshots and you're like, oh, this looks hilarious. I'm like, it does not. This does not look like no real. I was like a little judgy.
00:48:27
Speaker
But I'm like, you know what, somebody worked super hard at this, and I'm gonna see what it's all about. And upon playing it, I very much appreciate the humor. It's so funny. The graphics are so interesting. I love the way characters dance.
00:48:48
Speaker
So let's let's talk about what it's I mean, you know what? I'm not even sure what it's about because it's so You play tasks for your for your ill dying father, right? Yes
00:49:03
Speaker
So your father is immortal John, who is like the holy emperor of this Renaissance land, this absurd Renaissance land, who again is made up entirely of Renaissance paintings. The backgrounds are all Renaissance paintings, the inventory is items are all pieces from Renaissance paintings, the characters are all from Renaissance paintings, and by which we mean they're collages, right? Like these are... They are cut out and put in.
00:49:29
Speaker
Yes. So, you know, every every scene you're going to see a El Greco and you're going to see a Michelangelo and whatever.
00:49:42
Speaker
It's so if you like Renaissance art, it's worth it for that. It's the games are really cool and beautiful. And there's always a segment, a section of his games where you walk in and every painting he's used is on display like a big art gallery. And you can click on them and the character will make some sort of joke about it. But you can also just look at the paintings. You know, so just it tells you who what the name of the painting is, when it was from, who it's.
00:50:12
Speaker
who the artist is, and you can just admire these Renaissance paintings. This is pretty cool. Yeah, so you are the son of Immortal John, and he is dying, and you want his kingdom, and he's making you do a series of tasks.
00:50:30
Speaker
Oh, not just tasks, though, like good deeds. You have to do like seven good deeds before he dies or something. Yeah. And it's got a verb coin. You can look, you can talk, or you can use your hand. And if you use your hand on people, you just slap them. It's always so funny to just walk up to somebody and slap them and see what their reaction is.
00:50:56
Speaker
Look, I'm not about that anymore. I'm traumatized by putting the shorts in the luau and starting a valley and people being so disappointed in me. So I'm not slapping anyone because I don't want them to hate me.
00:51:11
Speaker
mostly there's just a funny joke. And it looks so absurd because the characters in these games move so crazily. He's so good at figuring out how to twist and turn these figures so they look as stupid
00:51:29
Speaker
and hilarious as possible at all moments yeah i think the humor is like a weird cross between okay some of this is going to turn people off but imagine the good parts of all these things um like the good parts of south park combined with the good parts of
00:51:48
Speaker
Uh, Monty Python combined with maybe like the humor sensibilities of say like the state, like, um, wet hot American summer or those kinds of postmodern comedy.
00:52:02
Speaker
Yeah, so a little bit of a little bit being pushed to the edge with certain things. It's interesting though, because there's all there's also a lot of silly, like silly wholesome humor. Like I think the first thing you see upon the screen is like, see you later nerds or something. It's just very silly to put with a Renaissance background, right?
00:52:23
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot of slapstick. They're just funny. I don't know what else to say. You know humor is subjective, but I can't imagine any human being playing these games and not finding several things to laugh out loud about.
00:52:39
Speaker
For sure. You know what the most impressive thing to me was, though, is that it actually is an adventure game. So when I when I first saw these games a couple years ago, I'm like, what are they? Are they like hidden object or or even kind of lower than hidden object would be like, like the the humongous arts games where you're just clicking on stuff and getting, I just say humongous arts.
00:53:03
Speaker
You did say humongous arts, which I believe is your brain combining LucasArts and humongous entertainment? Sure is. Whatever. Okay. No, they remind me of the humongous entertainment stuff where yes, those are made for children, but they're mostly like you click on something and it gives you like a little screen, a little animation, a little thingy.
00:53:24
Speaker
So I thought that's what that was going to be. But upon playing it, there are full settings, you know, full inventory, full ass characters. This is an adventure game. And I found myself getting very attached to the world that I was in.
00:53:38
Speaker
And his games are incredibly well designed in the puzzle sense. You're not just going to be walking around picking up item, use item with other item, use combined item on guy, right? Like you are going to be thinking through a series of
00:53:57
Speaker
And it's not like I don't find his games very difficult, but the way that you play them, it's interesting. And there's always a huge variety in how you solve the puzzles, even in the short demo, you solve the puzzles in like a variety of very unique ways.
00:54:13
Speaker
Yeah, and I liked the puzzle. Some of them were a little gross, but I can overlook that for a good game, you know, for balance. I can overlook that if it's balanced. There's one thing I wanna say though. Go ahead. What did you turn the guy's head into? I did not get that far. Okay, all right, sorry. I'm talking about the milkshake that you give the kid. I don't remember this.
00:54:42
Speaker
Did we play different games? I don't think we did. The milkshake. The milkshake. The milk that you give one of the kids to make them stop crying comes out of a cow and we're back. We cut something out. We had a little bit of a, what would you call that, Matt? We had.
00:55:02
Speaker
a doubting of reality, I guess, because we both played the same demo, but we don't know if either it got updated in between when we played it or if there's an optional section or something, but Rose has played a whole different part of the game than I did. So we had to like walk through everything we did. We were like, wait, I didn't do that. We both came to the- Then we thought that we weren't playing the same game and like something happened. It's okay. We both got an ending. It's fine.
00:55:31
Speaker
Yeah. No, it's fine. We can still like, we can still suggest this game. So yes, we had a little kerfuffle, a little mental kerfuffle. And now we're back. And now we're back. This game rolls. It's just- May I say, may I say one negative thing, just one? No. Moving on. No. Okay. No, please, please do it. Okay. All right. I was gonna say some of the music drives me insane. That's just me.
00:56:01
Speaker
Okay, I love the music. Here's the thing, every screen is a different, like, classical Renaissance piece being played on traditional instruments. And every screen in all of Joe Richardson's games has a whole, like, Renaissance band. Yeah. That's just there, and you can look at them, and if you try to, if you look at them, he just, the character just sings along.
00:56:30
Speaker
There's no dialogue, so it's just like hum, dum, dum, hum, hum. It's so cute. It's so cute and funny. But I love it. I mean, I think it fits the aesthetic, which I can't imagine you disagree with, right? I do not disagree with that. It is the right choice. I don't want to hear a pan flute anymore. I don't like regular flutes. Please stop. My eardrums are being perforated. That is personal preference.
00:56:55
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I love old ass music, so I enjoy it. But I guess I could see if you don't like it, it is nonstop in every screen of the game. And every screen of the game has a different band playing a different song. So that is something you might want to think about if you cannot stand Renaissance music.
00:57:18
Speaker
I'm a woman of very poor taste, so it's not a fan. Give me some yuck punk.
Interview with Julia Minamata
00:57:27
Speaker
I would do much better with that. And with that, I think let's wrap this segment up. Roses. Yes, Matt. Do you want to go talk to Julia Minamata about adventure games? Alone? Yes, I do. Well, see you later. I'm coming. I'm coming. Hold on. Wait, wait, wait.
00:58:09
Speaker
Hey, everyone. We are back. I am here with a very special guest, Julia Minamata. Did I pronounce your name right? First of all. You did. Perfect. Perfect.
00:58:18
Speaker
Yay. You might... Oh, sorry, and Matt's here too. Hi. Hi. Okay, now that that's out of the way. I'm here. I did 1,000 pushups during the break. He's so strong. Julia, did you know that Matt is very physically strong and a good jumper? That's really impressive.
00:58:39
Speaker
Thank you, thank you. I'm also very fast, but it's okay that Rosez didn't mention that. Yeah. Well, we've got to leave something, you know, to be a surprise, you know? Yeah. And I see something in your back pocket there, so. I hope you know that when we go to the Adventure Game hotspot, I think it's called Fan Fair Now convention, I hope you know that you need to live up to all of these insane expectations. And I expect you to be very fast. Very fast. I can jump really strong.
00:59:09
Speaker
Yeah. I hope you're on board with that. Anyway, now that that's out of the way, you may recognize Julia because I did a video a while back on her demo. Yeah, for the Crimson Diamond. So long ago. It was a while ago. Julia, how long have you been working on the Crimson Diamond?
00:59:28
Speaker
Oh, this question. Yeah. Oh, so long. So long. Just lie. It's okay. Oh, okay. If I can, if I get to lie, I'll be like 2022. No, but for real, for real, it's been a very long time. And
00:59:44
Speaker
I like to say it's because, yeah, it was a hobby before. I was kind of like, oh, pixel art, I'm going to do some pixel art, da-da-da, and I did some pixel art, and then I wandered away, and then I wandered back, and I did some more. That's kind of how the development happened for the first like five years, five, six years of just doing that.
01:00:02
Speaker
But yeah, like I always pinpoint like November 2018 as the first kind of official time when I started to get serious about it because I showed it for the first time in Toronto here at an event called Wordplay at a showcase. So that was the first time I kind of showed what I had publicly and then from there I kind of focused more on it. So I kind of put 2018, like late 2018 is kind of almost an informal starting point, which is still a long time ago, but that's okay, I've been told.
01:00:30
Speaker
And I tell myself that too, so. Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's any sort of, nobody looks at pieces of art once they're done and says, yeah, but how long did it take you to do that? I ask that all the time. Well, I, okay. I ask like people who make games. I don't like go to the museum and wonder and go to art galleries and work at it.
01:00:52
Speaker
The moda Lisa's cool, but do you know it took him 10 years to paint it? It's far less cool when you know that. I'm never looking at it again. No, art takes time. You are a team of one, right? Is it just you working on the game?
01:01:10
Speaker
It is basically me, except I do have a musician working on it with me, Dan Pollakar, who is an amazing musician who actually legitimately bought himself a Roland MT-32 to compose the actual music on. That's amazing. Yeah, I did not ask him to do that. I would never ask anyone to do that. He volunteered to do that, you know, on eBay. He got his for like 150 US, I think, which is actually cheaper than they were back in the day, because they were at landishly expensive back in the day.
01:01:36
Speaker
But, uh, no, I'm so fortunate that Dan, Dan is making the music for me because he was so like already totally into like the look of the game, which we'll talk about later, maybe like it's EGA. So it looks very old school. It gets to sound old school. We're actually considering, uh, releasing an actual MIDI album of the music. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. So he's a big part of that and I'm really super grateful, but yeah, everything else is me.
01:02:02
Speaker
That's amazing. I can't even fathom, like I'm an artist myself and Matt is... A very special boy. A very special boy. Yes. He's good at jumping. He's very fast, I hear you.
01:02:20
Speaker
I mean, I think we all have in here an appreciation for the arts, music, visual arts, gaming, especially. And yeah, it takes a long time. But I want to ask you,
01:02:33
Speaker
How? When did you? Okay, when did you play the Curdles bequest? Look, it's one of my favorite games of all time. I played it when I was young, it scared the shit out of me. I finished it without Matt and I talked about this. The first time I played it, I was maybe 11.
01:02:52
Speaker
I did that run where you don't have to do anything and got the lowest score possible. I was so scared to even look around because the I hear you Matt, I hear you snickering over there. I found it very frightening as an 11 year old. So what is your experience with the Colonel's bequest?
01:03:13
Speaker
Yeah, I was super super super scared of it too. I think it's designed to be scary because you yeah you stumble in on scenes and the time passed and you're like wait no I didn't want that to happen, rewind, rewind. Yeah, I think it's kind of almost set up to be that way and my first memories of it were
01:03:28
Speaker
I think this is a fairly common story amongst us adventure game folk is my dad was part of like one of those software piracy rings at the office where they would swap games with each other. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Thank you, Matt. Thank you. Yes. So my dad was in one of those kinds of arrangements where, yeah, they would photocopy the manuals at work. Amazing. That was my exposure to Colonel's request. It was a bootleg.
01:03:55
Speaker
That's amazing. As a bootleg, did it run pretty well? It was totally fine. Absolutely fine.
01:04:05
Speaker
I don't know how we did, you know what I actually think? I think my sister might've come to think of it. I think she actually drew the little fingerprints and everything so that we'd have them to look at. Wow. That's incredible. Julia, what is the weirdest, a game from your childhood like that, that your dad and his buddies pirated, that you've never seen again? What's the weirdest one?
01:04:34
Speaker
You know, the thing is, is that everything seems, I watch a lot of like retro Twitch, Twitch streamers and everything. And I feel like just about everything that I remember from back in the day, I've seen, like there's that weird CRO boxing game that I used to play a lot. Oh, wow. And it had a kangaroo in it and stuff. So I said, nice. It's great. I can't believe Sierra, Sierra published that. That's kind of amazing. But yeah, I just put everything under the sun. I've seen other people play, but I will say I, there are so many DOS games that I never played back in the day that I'm getting to,
01:05:03
Speaker
Actually experienced now like I'm playing currently I'm playing on my my streams a in EGA text parts adventure game called denarius avaricious sextus
01:05:14
Speaker
I've never even heard of that. You've made that up. I know. Here's the thing. I thought so too, but it was recommended to me on my stream so much that, Hey, have you played this? I'm like, what are you even talking about? You know, never heard of it. It's made by like, it's so cute. Okay. It's made by one of those small team, English developers called, this one's called Thorsoft of Letchworth and it's made by four people with the same last name, like three or four people, like Mark, Mike, Mandy.
01:05:39
Speaker
And it's really different like so you can control it with with arrow keys But also you can control it with a mouse and like as you drag your mouse around you move your mouse around the screen and the guy moves along with your cursor It's like you're the cursor on the screen. Oh, that's weird. It's super weird. Yeah, it's great It's great and and also there's a boss button that you can put and you can have like a graph going up and down It's great. It's great But yeah, yeah, you know those boss, you know, you know the boss button and
01:06:07
Speaker
It looks like a spreadsheet or something. So if you're the boss, but I had, yeah, I was not following it. I was like, wait, you could just fight a boss at any point. No, this is if your boss comes by. Yeah. By your cubicle. Yeah. Yep. Yep. You press the boss button. It's a fake spreadsheet.
01:06:25
Speaker
But it's so funny now because, of course, now it's like it looks like some DOS application. You're not fooling anyone. We don't run this. Yeah. Yeah. It's been so for me, like the stuff I've remember back in the day, I've seen all over the place, but it's a joy to discover new stuff that I had never gotten to play before. And that that counts for a lot of other adventure games that I've been discovering recently. Because, yeah, I mean, LucasArts and Sierra, like we've all kind of seen those. But what I love to see is, yeah, like
01:06:54
Speaker
the four people in the UK making this weird little game that I've never seen before. That's the fun thing for me. That's what I enjoy the most right now. Yeah, honestly. You only get to know about that stuff by word of mouth. How am I even going to look that up? I don't even know where to start.
01:07:10
Speaker
Yeah, no, I think as as things have gotten more accessible with, you know, GOG, GOG.com, and even Steam, to an extent, it's just easy to play adventure games. And there have been really, you know, old games that have been newly released that I'm thrilled that I'm like, Oh, wow, I wanted to play this as a kid. I think I saw this out of babbages. And now I get to play it is thrilling.
01:07:35
Speaker
It's like, yeah, it's literally like finding hidden, like treasure, like really treasure, like literally hidden gems. And for me, what I've been kind of enjoying recently in terms of this idea of rediscovering stuff that you never got to really play is we were always a PC household and never had the consoles. I had like Game Boys and stuff like that, but never an actual like NES, SNES, Sega, anything like that. And recently, like late last year, I bought myself an Ambernic, one of those little like handhelds that you can load a bunch of ROMs on.
01:08:04
Speaker
Oh, cool. Yeah, so I finally got to play, you know, the adventure games from like NES like like deja vu. I've got nice and uninvited all these things. I cannot wait to discover this is whole world of adventure games that I just have never really had access to. And thanks to how things are now, we do have access to just about everything. I know there's a lot of Amiga games that never really made it over to PC.
01:08:30
Speaker
that I haven't played, but when you go to like one of those abandonware websites, there's just so many games that you're like, they just look like the point and clicks we all loved at the time, but you've never heard of any of them. Yeah, it's the best, it's the absolute best. I actually played recently, I do stream on Tuesdays and tonight's a Tuesday, I'll be streaming tonight. I've been streaming yellow games, I've never played before from the back of the day. And one of them was a cruise for a corpse.
01:08:58
Speaker
That was one I found on Home of the Underdogs. Yes, I listened to your first episode. Yes, there's like Home of the Underdog. I wasn't there something called Happy Puppy or I don't know what there's a bunch of like old happy puppy sounds sounds familiar. I cruise for a corpse was also one that I got in one of those old abandoned where sites back in the day.
01:09:16
Speaker
Yeah, never beat it. It's a tough game or I'm dumb No, no, no, it's it's almost impossible. I did play it. Okay good It takes a village to play these games I like to say because I'm just getting help people are like consulting like playthroughs while I'm on stream I'm like help because sometimes there's not even a walkthrough like the game I'm playing right now There is no walkthrough for this game. Like there are a few long plays you can find on YouTube. But yeah
01:09:39
Speaker
Yeah, no, it happens. Yeah. When I started doing computer games for YouTube, that was back in 2013. Oh, my God. We're all very old. When I started doing that, I would play games that I very much wanted to review, but there's no walkthrough. Yeah. And it was it was just impossible to get there. I remember I don't know if you guys are familiar with this game. I think it is out for purchase now. It's called Personal Nightmare.
01:10:06
Speaker
I oh my gosh okay yes I've played that I finished it it is it is yeah oh my gosh roses it is almost impossible it might be the hardest game that I've like finished on my channel yes please share your experience share your experience with with personal nightmare
01:10:23
Speaker
I wanted to do a review on it. I had remembered it because it was on some kind, as when I was younger, it was on some kind of collection that I had. And I re-found it later. And you know, I'm trying to find cool stuff for my channel, for my new gaming thing. And I'm like, you know, I started with Toonstruck. I thought that was kind of cool. And then I just wanted to hit some of the, before I got into Sierra and LucasArts, I wanted to hit some of those obscure things. So I went back to Personal Nightmare.
01:10:52
Speaker
And my God, look, I tried streaming it with an audience. We could not do it. We all found this same awful walkthrough that got us nowhere. And I think what happened is I got myself into an unwinnable and then I rage quit. You can rage quit adventure games, people. It's allowed. It's allowed. You're allowed to. They don't come find you.
01:11:18
Speaker
Yeah, they don't. But yeah, no, okay. Personal nightmare. There were a couple places where I nearly did give up and I had to leave it for a little bit. There was a part where you have to crash a car into a tree. And I watched Let's Plays. There was two different Let's Plays I was watching. One was not even the same. I think one was the Amiga version and one was not. And the one that was the same version I had had no commentary at all, so they weren't even explaining what they were doing.
01:11:47
Speaker
Even with the benefit of watching two different versions of someone playing it and succeeding I yeah, I almost could not finish that part and All right, Matt, you need to get on this so you know what we're talking about. Yeah, yeah play the whole thing Yeah, if you guys don't mind just waiting a minute. Yeah, I got a Not now not now It's already loaded up
01:12:10
Speaker
Wow, that's quick. I'm very fast. That's Matt's artistic talent. I've never played, I don't know if I've played any of the horror soft games.
01:12:25
Speaker
Yeah, I was just gonna say that's horror soft. The company what they did the Elvira games is Julia is personal nightmare technically part of the Elvira series. It is not. It is not but I mean, yeah, definitely made by the same people and I've never played the Elvira stuff but
01:12:44
Speaker
Yeah, so I got a clip of me, like the moment I finished personal nightmare and I will share that with you later. It is the most cathartic moment of maybe of my entire life. It was literally the last command I had to type in and I just couldn't figure out what was wrong and why it wasn't working.
01:13:02
Speaker
Yeah, and it's one of those ones where it's almost better that when you finish a game like that, where it doesn't have much fanfare when you finish it, it's just like, okay, you're done. And then that's it. I draw that build up to the command prompt there. Yeah, yeah, it's basically like that, which just makes it funnier to me.
01:13:23
Speaker
That's amazing. Have you guys heard of the game? And maybe, I think this is sort of an adventure game, but it's called Roam Pathway to Power. Are you guys familiar with that one? No. No. Okay. This is a, how do I describe this game? How do I call it action adventure? It's weird. I feel free to look up screen caps. My brother had it when I was very young and I just couldn't get enough of watching him play. It was like an early let's play before that was a thing.
01:13:51
Speaker
It was the most difficult game. Back when you actually had to say to somebody, hey, let's play. Yeah, you had to say it. Let's play this together. Yeah.
01:14:03
Speaker
So I watched him play it and then it kind of got lost in the recesses of my brain for a long time. And then it came back as a retro game person. So I played it hardest game I've ever played. So difficult. However, I have a clip saved on my stream, you can watch it where I beat like the hardest level on accidents, totally a fluke didn't mean to do it.
01:14:29
Speaker
But man, it is so satisfying when you get through those like impossible moments. I think sometimes these games were easier originally, or they weren't meant to be beaten, but I'm struck, like I'm remembering, have you guys played Seventh Guest anytime since like 1995?
01:14:58
Speaker
Yes, for a review. I have not. I played it a little bit, and yeah, I was just like, not my thing. It's a bad game. No, it's not my thing. If you want to hear me rant, seven guests. It's a bad game. 11th Hour is probably the worst, literally the worst video game I've played in my life. I thought people liked that more. Oh my god. We could talk about it sometime. All right. It will take up the rest of the episode if I start going into it here.
01:15:29
Speaker
there is a sequence where you play, I guess it's like basically Chinese checkers against the computer. Oh, you're talking about attacks, the game attacks? That's what the original game is called, that the game was doing it. Go on though. Okay, yeah, no, I don't know. It's one of those games where you have marbles and you're playing against somebody and you have to jump their marbles. And
01:15:57
Speaker
if it was based on the, like its logic process was based on the speed of your processor. So if you played it anytime after say 1995, it was so smart that it was literally unbeatable. You could only beat it if you were using another computer that would counter its moves and you got lucky.
01:16:22
Speaker
Yeah, that's true. That is true. Yeah, remember when like, like computer speeds were a thing. I had found later in life, it may be my early teens, I found quest for glory one. True story. I played quest for glory five, the first quest for glory game I played but later. Yeah, later I played quest for glory one. And my computer was too fast. Do you remember that slowdown program that was out there?
01:16:49
Speaker
No. No. Damn. Okay. So I, yeah, I don't know if I, my poor computer, I downloaded a CPU slowdown program that would slow the computer down so I could play quest for glory one. So I could get past something at the end. Isn't that nuts? Man, I feel like I don't have to worry about that anymore.
01:17:12
Speaker
No, you don't, you know, this one less, you know, you want to play on like old hardware with, with an original copy or something, but no, no, no. Thankfully they've kind of fixed all that. And in DOSBox you can cycle down and up and whatnot. Right. Yeah. DOSBox is a, it has been a lifesaver and scum VM too, which can now run everything. Yes. Scum VM just does everything now and it takes care of all that for you. Yeah. That's really great.
01:17:38
Speaker
So Matt, so I have a question just only for Matt since Julia said that Personal Nightmare was one of the hardest games she'd ever played. Me too. And Roam Pathway to Power. Matt, what is the hardest game you've ever played? Where you're just like you need to like rage quit?
01:17:54
Speaker
There's so many, there's so many of these old, like, Cruz for a corpse is one, that I was just like, I can't get it. I stopped playing. Obviously, I quit Myst a million times. Myst, actually, I have that triumphant moment that you guys are talking about with the games you played. I was on a flight to the Dominican Republic, and I had put Myst on ScumVM on my phone.
01:18:24
Speaker
And I was like, I'm going to focus on this thing. And I'm going to, without a walkthrough, try and beat Myst with the power of my own brain. And I ended up playing for the first half of this like beautiful resort vacation I was taking with my then girlfriend. I ended up spending so much time playing Myst on my phone. And then about halfway through, I got through. I beat it. I beat it with no walkthrough. I beat the whole- How is that? I don't believe you.
01:18:54
Speaker
I beat the whole game. No. Beat all of Myst with no walkthrough. And it was just, it was the most triumphant moment. And obviously no one was going to share that with me. I was like, oh my God, I beat Myst. And my girlfriend was like, OK, cool. I was like, no, you don't understand. She doesn't understand. She didn't understand the weight of that. Of being in like the early 1990s and opening Myst and being like, I don't even know how to get
01:19:23
Speaker
Across the island right now. Like I don't I don't know what any of this is for Yeah, I've been beating it and being like I have achieved something in life Your girlfriend just going like okay. Anyway, do you want to go to the buffet or? Yeah, I've never gotten off the first island I'd miss I didn't know there was more
01:19:47
Speaker
I think I got missed as a young, like a young person. I, I don't know if you guys feel this way, but I find first person adventure games frightening and mist was so lonely with like no characters that I kind of didn't like, like atmosphere pretty great. I will say, I will give that to miss, but I felt scared. I didn't, I didn't want to click on anything. I was terrified.
01:20:16
Speaker
Um, I just remembered another game that I, I did rage quit and I can't remember the name of it. Tell me if you guys know this one. Um, it is you'll, it's not an American studio. Um, it is a 3d game. It came on like 12 CD-ROM discs and you were a weird grandma.
01:20:44
Speaker
Do you guys have any idea what I'm talking about? I think I need more than that. She kept all her inventory items in her bra and she was in this surreal landscape.
01:20:58
Speaker
I think all her family got kidnapped and her house got pulled into another dimension. And- What are you talking about? What are you talking about? This absolutely exists. It doesn't even sound familiar. No. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This was from the early 90s. And I think my stepmom had it for some very strange reason. And I started playing it. And it's incredibly difficult.
01:21:27
Speaker
And I played it again as an adult and I still don't remember the name of it. I played it again as an adult and it is even like the further in you get, the more it's just like, it's that moon logic, right? It's this idea of like how on earth would I have ever imagined that those two things would have that function?
01:21:49
Speaker
Yeah, I will try I mean, hopefully somebody listening will recognize the words that you are saying will know what you're talking about because now I'm a little I'm a little curious. Okay, this is gonna be a very loose this is gonna be a very loose segue. But speaking of like surreal, I'm sorry, Matt, did you know
01:22:10
Speaker
I'm so sorry, I'm sorry to interrupt your incredibly good segue that we all were waiting for. So I started googling all the words that I just said to you guys. I found somebody on Reddit who's looking for the exact same thing and he says, it's an old 3D graphics and you play as an old woman slash grandma to a family of animal abusers or something.
01:22:32
Speaker
Then one day a rabbit, or a humanized and sized rabbit in a suit if I remember correctly, comes to steal recipe of hers and ends up scattering the family all over this crazy world.
Creating Pixel Art and Game Development
01:22:44
Speaker
Armed and Delirious is the name of the game.
01:22:53
Speaker
Even just looking at the grandma experience you've ever had She's made of like polygon like in the early days of 3d animation Everything was like weird shapes randomly stuck together. Oh My this is the weirdest What?
01:23:19
Speaker
I need to play this, to be honest with you, I need to play this. Okay, I wanna, yeah, I wanna hear some more about Julia's love of adventure games and Crimson Diamond, but maybe the three of us need to do an episode of this podcast in the future where we all play arm to toe. That's hilarious, oh my God. It's amazing, I've never seen this, I can't, yeah, wow. I'm shocked. It's unfathomable, you look at it and you just have no idea what you're seeing.
01:23:50
Speaker
Yeah, that art style is crazy. Anyway, my segue, speaking about art, it's a very loose segue. How did you learn pixel art, Julia? Because that's something I have kind of a little bit of an interest in. I don't know if you guys saw, but I did a pretty good pixelated adish one time. Yeah, pretty exciting. So it was not easy. How did you learn pixel art?
01:24:16
Speaker
How did I learn pixel art? All I did was I just pulled up some Sierra screenshots, I guess, and finding out what resolution they were working in. That kind of was a lot of it because that dictates how big the squares are and then how much detail you can get in. And I always loved the EGA art to begin with in all those Sierra games. And so that started me off, OK, well, that's the palette. That's the resolution. And then there were just so many screens, screenshots of Chrome's request and Space Quest and just a bit of anything that I just started to look at how these things were done.
01:24:46
Speaker
And it's actually, I think pixel art is a pretty good starting point of learning if anyone wants to learn how to do art or to draw or to make art for games. I think it's a really great starting point because it is fairly simplified. And you can actually look at those old screens and see exactly what was done. Well, that pixel goes there, and then it's that color. And here's how the light and shadow works in them. And from there, I was able to just start generating my own screens, really.
01:25:12
Speaker
And the thing is, and when I just started out, I was like, oh, this actually, this doesn't look too bad. You know, this, you know, well, the thing is, I feel like if you use the color palette and use the resolution already, you're going to be like, okay, this looks like a game from back then, because there was a broad range of styles of even EGA, like different studios have different styles, but different people have different styles.
01:25:32
Speaker
It already kind of gets encouraging at the very start when you do that because you're like, okay, yeah, this looks like it could have been in a real game. And then the imagination starts going. And that is kind of how I started. I started with like rooms. I wanted to make little rooms like the kitchen and the living room. And I was thinking about the clue board. So I took out my clue board.
01:25:50
Speaker
And instead of being like, well, yeah, I mean, what else do they have in a clue board? There's a conservatory. So that's why there's conservatory in my lodge, which is why it has the same- Oh, I love that. I'm so into it. I, a clue is one of my favorite things ever. So I'm very much, if I see like a conservatory or like a study or billiard room, I lose my shit. No, I get really excited. And like the reason I put a billiard room in my game at all, I was like, there's a billiard room on the clue board. And I don't know why there's a billiard room in my game.
01:26:21
Speaker
It wasn't a game. I was just like, I'm making rooms and stuff. I don't know. And then when I started making games, I'm like, oh, man, I got to do something with this billiard room. I was going to be like, why is there a billiard room? I'm like, I don't know. So I eventually came up with a reason why that is there. That's a lot of what is in the game. The reasons are kind of backwards, where I made something just for the heck of it. I'm like, OK, I need to rationalize this. People are going to have questions. Yeah. Yeah. What point did you decide you were making a game and not just
01:26:51
Speaker
a bunch of scenes and characters.
01:27:09
Speaker
Right. It was just like step by step. I'm like, okay, well here I made, you know, I made a little kitchen. The kitchen in the, in the lodge is like the second room I ever made as pixel art. That's my, my first room was like kind of a disaster. Like in terms of scale, like everything was too big for any characters and anything, you know, I looked at the scale of the characters from Sierra games. Like, yeah, the scale is completely off that, that I just made, but my second room, yeah, it was better. My second room was the kitchen. And then I made,
01:27:31
Speaker
Other rooms. I'm like, oh that's this is kind of nice But I'd like you know It's like there to be a character because I need to make this to scale I need to make the counters be the right height and the coverage be the right height So let's make a little character. So meet a little character
01:27:43
Speaker
And then I'm like, Oh, that's, that's nice, but it would be cool. How cool would it be if, you know, she could like walk around in the room and then she could walk behind the furniture just like in those games. And, and so I picked up adventure game studio, having seen Francisco Gonzalez of, you know, the Ben Jordan series and now of, uh, Lamplight City, Rosewater and Golden Lake. Yeah, he's amazing. Love it. We love, we love, we love Francisco over here. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. His, his games are great.
01:28:07
Speaker
He's one of the huge reasons why I even started making adventure games is because I saw it like less place of her crab it has had these less plays on YouTube and I was watching and I'm like, one guy made all this like this is that this is an actual game right like people you can move around and talk to people.
01:28:22
Speaker
And so I started to slowly teach myself adventure game studio, just be like, oh, I just want to, you know, okay, well, wouldn't it be nice if there was a door to this room and she could open and close it? Yeah. So I slowly, very slowly started doing all that stuff and then making more rooms and like, okay, I need a hallway. And they started to pick away at it bit by bit. And then I started asking myself questions like, well, yeah, I'm furnishing this house. So what kind of furniture is in this house? What, what is the time period that this house is going to be in? Cause then I need, I'm going to look for reference of what kind of furniture I would have. Um, and.
01:28:52
Speaker
Then I started to kind of slowly germinate like a story in my head about why is this lodge here and who lives in it. So yeah, that's another thing. What kind of rooms are you going to have? Who lives in this? How many people live here? And it slowly kind of built up to being like a little story that I started to expand upon. But yeah, it's not generally how people go about building stuff, I think. Usually people have an idea of what they're making before they start, which I did not.
01:29:17
Speaker
I think a lot of people kind of fall into it, though. I really do. I think a lot of people unintentionally start making something more grand than they intended. It sounded like you really snowballed. It did. It totally did. Like, starting out with 6 more turned into a game.
01:29:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's snowballed because I'm like, okay, well, here's this lodge and you can walk around the rooms, but what's outside the lodge? And like, okay, well, what's outside the lodge and how many screens are that going to be? Well, yeah, should there be a
Character Development and Game Nostalgia
01:29:45
Speaker
shed? Gazebos are nice. I'm making a gazebo. Gazebos are nice. Gazebos are nice. And so, yeah, it just slowly, it literally did just snowball into something that was like, oh,
01:29:55
Speaker
When I showed it in 2018, it was basically the chapter one demo of that's on steam right now. It was basically that what I showed, I mean, much in a much rougher state, but that was basically what it was. And people seemed to really like it and people, it just, people would see it and then put a smile on their face. And that was really, I, it had been kind of just in my head the whole time. I'd never really shown anybody, but to know that people are interested and excited, like totally lit a fire under me to, to expand upon it.
01:30:20
Speaker
And I just started from there. I was like, okay, well, so I got like the crimson diamond.com and I, you know, nice to do all the social media stuff and everything very, very slowly over time. And yeah, it was just to get that type of reception to something that you've just been working on is.
01:30:35
Speaker
Of course, I'm sure you feel the same when you put out a video and you get people commenting about how much they enjoyed it, or how much they remember that episode, or how they identify with it. It's huge. It's so nice to have a connection. It's getting feedback on a hobby turned passion project is amazing. I love the demo. I can't wait. I'm so excited.
01:30:56
Speaker
We need more female, first of all, more female developers, but more awesome female protagonists. Like Laura Bow, right, Matt? I don't think Matt agrees with me on this at all. The idea is the province.
01:31:13
Speaker
I don't know why- Tell us more. I know why Rose's calls me out like this. I didn't play because she knows that I have not played Dagger of Amon-Ra, where- How dare you? This comes up every episode, Julia. This is like episode one too. Yeah, this is the third episode we've recorded and everyone so far.
01:31:42
Speaker
I even think she brought it up in her trailer and I had to cut it out. So yeah, no, in Colonel's bequest,
01:31:56
Speaker
she doesn't have much of a character, right? She's just kind of an avatar for the player. Everybody else has the personalities and drive the story and you just kind of walk around and experience it. So in Dagger of Amun-Ra, as I understand it, she is a character and she has a whole personality and she has a job and a story and I haven't played that yet. So I don't dislike- And a romance.
01:32:24
Speaker
So I don't dislike Laura Bowe as a character, I just have not experienced the character of Laura Bowe yet, because she doesn't really exist in Colonel's Bequest besides her look.
01:32:37
Speaker
Yeah, I would 100% agree with you on that observation. And in fact, I just recently completed like a collaborative Let's Play of Flora Bogue 1, A Colonel's Bequest. I'm on this thing, this YouTube thing called the Level Zero NPCs, and they've been doing Let's Plays of Sierra games for like years and years, like seven or eight years, and I just recently joined them.
01:32:56
Speaker
And because, yeah, they hadn't got around to the Colonel's request. So we're hoping to do. We did Colonel's request. We're working on a dagger from on run now. And hopefully when we're finished dagger from Monora, we can segue like right into Crimson Diamond or something. Yeah. Wow. We kind of had this whole joke about Laura Bow in the first game where
01:33:14
Speaker
Yes, she's kind of like a non-person, almost. Like we kind of joke that because the way that she dies, like when the chandelier crushes her and like when she walks into the swamp and instantly dissolves, we kind of joke that she's like she's made of cake. Like she's like a cake golem.
01:33:27
Speaker
Because also, you know, the way that the axe kind of slices her. So yeah, we kind of made like she's just like a cake golem that was animated by John Bow and she kind of just wanders. That's why people don't want to talk to her or engage. She's kind of creeped out by her and she could be on the show. Is it cake?
01:33:45
Speaker
Yeah, she could be on the show as a cake, and she would be cake. She's sweating through her fondant glaze. And it's just really unsettling. And she just breathes warm oven temperature cake air in people's faces. And she has little current eyes. That's how we've kind of felt about her during that game. But definitely in the day of Amandara, she has a lot more personality.
01:34:08
Speaker
just even to do with the voice. So we do the silly little voices, of course. In Laura Bowe, there's barely any of her saying anything really out loud. It's true. That's true. But I'm wondering, I've really had to polish up my Southern accent. And it's just, woo. Yeah. It is fun. She's fun in the game. But I mean, of course, my heart's going to always be with Laura Bowe in the first game because it's that beautiful setting, the beautiful ETA graphics.
01:34:34
Speaker
Um, so even though I can understand that it's not like the most amazing game, like adventure game I've ever played, like, yeah, it's always going to be, you know, you guys talked about in the previous episode, at least episode one, about how, you know, that some games like, like, you know, the brothers roses, you're saying King's quest three.
01:34:47
Speaker
where you know that it's not like the best game, but there's just something about it that just holds a special place in your heart. Yeah, it has an impact. I think the Colonel's Bequest is very impactful just in terms of time constraints and murder mystery and just interrogation and eavesdropping. I think it really, really did cool things.
01:35:09
Speaker
I actually prefer Dagger. My fans know this. I love that game so much. Again, another game that scared the crap out of me as a kid. It's one of those games that looks very friendly and it looks nice and funny, but then it's very gory and kind of tense.
01:35:32
Speaker
who's doing all the murders in Colonel Bequest, Colonel Bequest, not the other, like we get an answer to that at the end of the game, but who's doing all the murdering of Laura throughout the game? Because it doesn't seem to fit with anybody's plans. I thought about that myself, I assume, and you guys can feel free to disagree, I assume it's Lily, her friend, Lillian.
01:35:59
Speaker
Wouldn't that ruin Lillian's entire scheme, though? It's not like she just wants... Like, why would she want Laura dead? Because Laura's snooping, and she's like, I gotta figure out some stuff. Except for if the first thing you do is take a shower. She'll kill you. She's like, I hate showerers.
01:36:21
Speaker
death to hygiene. I honestly I think then I think then we can kind of go back because the shower scene is reminiscent of psycho. So I think we can maybe assume that she is just a psychopath. Okay. And maybe that's and maybe that's the reason there is no reason she's gone a little bit unhinged due to the relationship with her grandpa and the rest of her family and maybe she's just a little unhinged.
01:36:50
Speaker
I would love to see, I would love to see what happens in any adventure game stories after the character dies. Like how would the Laura Bow thing have turned out had Laura Bow just died in the shower at first? And then everyone would have been like, well, that girl's covered in blood. Like that was a very brutal and vicious murder. We know who the murderer is.
01:37:20
Speaker
That would be interesting actually. I would love to know how those stories progress. Like how does Uncharted happen when just like 10 minutes in Nathan Drake falls to his death?
01:37:35
Speaker
That is a good call. So I think we've been recording for a while. So I think we need to wrap soon. Matt, I want to throw it to you. Do you have any questions? Matt recently played your demo. Do you have any questions for Julia? I have just like a nerdy question about the art. What program do you use?
01:37:56
Speaker
I use Photoshop, which is the most boringest answer. But I will say that if anyone wants to start doing just Pixel, there's so many apps or programs that are either cheap or free that are not only going to be just as good as Photoshop or Pixel. Pixel and Photoshop is kind of overkill. I'm used to using Photoshop.
01:38:13
Speaker
because I was a freelance illustrator for 10 years. And so I used Photoshop. I still use Photoshop every day of my life and I'm just really used to it now. And, um, that's one of the reasons why I stick with it. But you know, the, of course, there's a sprite is great and it has feet like pixel art features that Photoshop does not have. So yeah, a sprite is already a better featured pixel art program. And you can sometimes get it on sale. So it just recently won on 50% off. So I'm not sure if, um, if it's still on sale, but yeah, like sometimes you can get over, you know, 20 bucks. I think I paid 15 bucks, I think for it at some time.
01:38:42
Speaker
So I do have, and I have used it, it's really good, but yeah, there's plenty, I have something called Medibank Paint on my tablet, which is really good. Oh yeah. Which is also free. Do you have that one, Roses? Yes, I do. Yeah, that one's great. And also you can buy it like a paid version for like, I bought it once for like five bucks or something where you can actually get some layer options and you can save out as a PSD and you can open up in Photoshop if you want. So I do have that one as well, but that was just a one-time payment. So then if you use Photoshop, like do you,
01:39:10
Speaker
When you do dithering, is there like a tool for that? Or do you just literally go in and click pixels? Well, yeah, you do. But then what I have is I have a bunch of like, yeah, 320 by 200 layers, which are just a checkerboard. And I can like change out the color. So it's going to be like black checker checks and then like transparent, the other squares are transparent. And so, yeah, I just keep a bunch of those. And then I just use layer masks to
01:39:36
Speaker
to block out what I don't want to be showing and stuff. So yeah. That's amazing. Very useful when you're doing dithering is to have the ability to have layer masks is definitely a key for pixel art.
01:39:51
Speaker
You ever notice that we all use Photoshop for not its intended purposes because we're all used to Photoshop? Yeah, they know it too. They know it, yeah. I've been learning pixel art on Procreate. I don't quite, I don't, I'm not sure I recommend it for...
01:40:10
Speaker
for character design and stuff like that, but I am learning how to do backgrounds and things of that nature in Procreate. Just a fun little thing to do. I've never tried it. Yeah, I love it. I got so used to doing art, and this is by its own nature, pixel art. I got so used to doing art on Microsoft Paint that now when I buy a new computer, I have to go search for the old versions of Microsoft Paint because it's changed. It's changed so completely.
01:40:40
Speaker
And no longer is based on, you know, a grid of pixels that you color in.
01:40:46
Speaker
I know game devs who use Microsoft Paint to make their art. So it's totally, absolutely valid. Anything's valid completely. And there's no need. Don't spring for any expensive subscription or any expensive piece of software to do pixel art. It's absolutely not necessary. And that's kind of the beauty of it, is the upfront cost is very little. If you use Adventure Game Studio, that's a free software. It's open source. You can just make a game. You can sell it. You don't have to worry about licensing or anything. Yeah, it's really, really wonderful.
01:41:12
Speaker
That's awesome. I'm so inspired right now. Go ahead. I'm very inspired. Well, Juliet, thanks so much for coming on and chatting with us about adventure games. You're welcome.
01:41:25
Speaker
I'm not gonna ask when the Crimson Diamond is coming out. That would be impolite of me. That would be such an imposition on your goodwill that you showed on coming onto the show. So I'm not even gonna ask when the Crimson Diamond's coming out.
01:41:45
Speaker
It is? Don't tease me, Julia. Do not tease me. You know what? I'm pretty sure. I've said probably this year four years in a row, but I honestly think that it will come out this year. Right now, I am just about to send off Alpha version 2.0 to my testers probably sometime this week.
01:42:06
Speaker
So the game is playable from beginning to end. Oh, holy cow. That's amazing. Yes. And I did my first round of feedback. So I just got a lot. I've fixed a ton of bugs and now I just have some assets I need to update for the full game. And like the music is all done. The music is implemented. I'm like really close to being able to declare it finished. So yeah, congratulations. That's incredible. That's really great. And obviously, listeners, if you haven't heard of the Crimson Diamond, obviously go check it out.
01:42:36
Speaker
Yeah, you should be feeling inspired. Please wishlist on Steam if you want to. The demo is available on Steam
Community Engagement and Future Releases
01:42:42
Speaker
as well. It's also available on Itch.io and on a site called Fireflower Games. But yeah, the Steam, of course, is a big one for launch. The wishlisting is a huge deal for indies. And it helps us to make sure that we have a good launch with a lot of visibility on the Steam store page.
01:42:57
Speaker
Hell yeah. And also you, you, you stream. Do you want to tell everyone where they can find you? Of course. Yeah. I saw a stream every Tuesday at 8 p.m. Eastern, um, for Karim's and Katoo's days. You can find that at a underscore maple mystery on Twitch.
01:43:15
Speaker
And so what we do with those is I don't do any spoiler stuff or anything, so don't worry about getting any aspect of the game spoiled for you. I only work on upgrading the intro art, because the intro art, if you do download the demo and you watch the intro, there's some art that looks very crude, and I've just been going through and updating that over the period of the past three years since I've been streaming. So don't worry about time spoilers.
01:43:38
Speaker
When I do an art stream, I do art and then I do a Let's Play. So one of the Let's Play games I did on stream was Personal Nightmare. I did Little Manner, High Seas Homicide. I've been sticking to EGA adventure games, and that's my thing. So if you're interested in watching any EGA adventure games happen, that happens at the tail end of an art stream.
01:44:00
Speaker
But sometimes Dan is available to come on. Dan tours a lot, so we don't get him that often. He's in Sean Paul's band. He's been in Sean Paul's band for the past 13 years or something. So Dan just came back from Australia, and so I got to have him on last Tuesday, so that was nice. But a lot of the time, Dan also does a ton of other stuff. He teaches, he composes for other things and everything.
01:44:23
Speaker
So he's super busy, but when we can have Dan on, we basically recorded and composed almost every track for the Crimson Diamond live on stream. What? That's so fun! Yeah, and so we take people's feedback like, oh, should this be faster? Should this be slower? What instrumentation do you like and everything? And so that was a lot of fun. Now that the soundtrack is finished,
01:44:44
Speaker
I'm not sure what we're, like last week, like we just, we did, um, some, I did some graphic design for the MIDI album on like a three and a half inch diskette. Uh, I did, I did some, um, some design stuff for that, but, um, I still like, there's still room for some tracks if Dan, if Dan wants to compose more tracks for the actual game. But yeah, so sometimes it's a music stream and we'll do some of that, but I usually warm up with some art in the first place too. So it's, it's a really fun, it's really fun hangout time.
01:45:09
Speaker
Um, to, to just, um, it's, it's, it had been doing, yeah, for the past three years. So it's, that's great. I will stop by because, you know, I love art and I love EGA games. That's like, that's my thing. Yes. Yes. No, no, it's, it's, you know, of course, a hundred percent of my thing too. So it's definitely my happy place.
01:45:27
Speaker
to be. That's great. Oh, I can't wait. I really can't wait, Julia. I was so stoked when somebody slid me the Crimson Diamond on Twitter, I think it was. And I've been excited ever. I'm a very excitable person, if you haven't noticed. I will get excited at anything. So I am hyper excited for this game.
01:45:50
Speaker
And thank you so much for talking to us about games and your experiences. I do feel inspired. So thank you so much. Oh, good. And I want to thank you guys too. Thank you, first of all. Roses, when you did that, I was shocked to be on words when you did the...
01:46:05
Speaker
the little of the video about Crimson Diamond back like way back when I was just like that was another thing where I tell you like the reception of it has been so positive and you were a part of that I'm like oh my gosh like I well I watched you for years and it just like I can't believe you made a video for it and it was it was just a big deal to me so I want to say thank you for that
01:46:22
Speaker
Oh, you're very welcome. I plan to review the whole thing. So look forward to the whole game. Yeah. And also with this podcast you and Matt are doing, thank you so much again for supporting and celebrating adventure games and for supporting and celebrating indie adventure game developers. That's a huge deal for all of us and it's just so much appreciated.
01:46:41
Speaker
Of course. We love doing it, we love adventure games, and we love Julia Minamata, so thanks again for coming on the show. Thank you, Julia, for coming on the show. Everybody go check out The Crimson Diamond. I had so much fun talking about trailers with you, Roses, not trailers, demos. Thank you. And trailers, too, because some of them I just watched. You watched some trailers. I had so much fun talking about upcoming games. This whole episode was about upcoming games, and I'm stoked.
01:47:10
Speaker
This is I got a little excited in the third segment. I don't know if that's annoying or what's going to happen when I listen to that back. But I'm stoked. I'm not inspired. I'm excited. It's nice. It's nice to talk to somebody who inspires you. And I am so if half of these games come out this year, this is going to be an incredible year for
Conclusion and Future Topics
01:47:33
Speaker
adventure games. And I'm really glad to be doing this podcast and having a place to talk about this stuff with everybody.
01:47:40
Speaker
but more so with me, your friend pushing up roses. My friend pushing up roses. So Matt, I have a question for you and the audience. What say you and I perhaps do a let's play on one of these upcoming games that we just talked about?
01:47:58
Speaker
Yeah, I'd love it. Look, people have been begging. Okay, a couple people have been begging for a Let's Play. And I thought I would invite you to do it so that we could, I don't know, have something for the YouTubes for the channel. Yeah, that would be great. And then everybody can see what a great gamer you are.
01:48:19
Speaker
Thank you. Keep tabs on our social media and pushing up Rose's YouTube channel for that. So thank you all for listening. Remember to keep sending us emails. Ask us your adventure game quest. Ask us for adventure game advice. That might be fun. Ask us, you know, your deepest, darkest questions about adventure gaming. Send us emails at Matt and roses at gmail.com.
01:48:50
Speaker
We also want to announce we are now part of the Adventure Game Hotspot Network. We're really proud to be a part of them. There's all sorts of good stuff on the Adventure Game Hotspot Network, YouTube channels, podcasts, and the Adventure Game Hotspot website, which you can sometimes see a review of video game from me there. They are also- I'm the Matt Aucamp?
01:49:17
Speaker
The Matt Hockiff, you can see his writing. They also just launched a Kickstarter for the Adventure Game Fan Fair, which is the first ever adventure game fan convention to happen in the United States. It's going to be taking place in Tacoma, Washington, July 27th and 28th of this year. You can go to adventuregamehotspot.com and find the Kickstarter, find all the information about it there.
01:49:45
Speaker
Perfect. Anything else we wanna talk about before we dip? So about Stardew Valley. So I just wanted to. Yeah, thank you guys all for listening. Next episode, I think we'll be talking about the excavation of Hobbs Barrow. So make sure you've played and get ready for some of that. We'll probably be spoiling some things in that episode. Dude, do you remember our sign out? Podcast is art. Test is art. Art is suffer. Art is suffer.