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Farm RPG: The Podcast - Firestream Interview
1.6k Plays1 year ago
Hey everyone, welcome back to another great episode! Join boobun and forcepath as they interview the creator, dev, and the reason we are all here: FIRESTREAM! Listen to them absolutely grill him with the hard hitting questions YOU had about the game along with various other silliness! Thanks for listening!
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:16
Speaker
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Farm RPG podcast or Farm RPG the podcast. I am Buban. I'm here with a couple of guests. My co-host. Hey, it's me, Forest Path. How's it going, guys? And gals. And awkward intros. And we also have a special guest with us today. Hey, it's Firestream.
00:00:41
Speaker
What is fire stream? Oh my God. It's fire stream. Can you believe it? He's here. Um, so how many people did you have to bribe to get fire stream on this thing? Uh, just one. And his name is fire stream.
00:00:54
Speaker
Does the budget allow for fire stream? I think he pays the budget. So yes. But yeah, welcome. Welcome back to the podcast.
Community Spirit and Swear Jar Contest
00:01:08
Speaker
If you guys don't know what this is, it's a podcast for Farm RPG, which is a text based farming RPG on mobile and browser.
00:01:19
Speaker
It's a game. If you if you aren't playing the game, I don't I don't really know why you're here one, but you should check it out. And thanks for joining us. Thanks for everybody. Welcome back. Hey, my mom listened to this podcast and she doesn't play farm RPG. Wow. You know, maybe you should maybe you should chill.
00:01:35
Speaker
Wow, I'm shocked your mom listen. That's awesome. Hi, that's older that she needs to play. I have. We've had this conversation many times. I've recently got her to stop playing two dots and we're just really close to convincing her to actually try out a different game. But I think there's just, she's nervous. Well, you get her on there, you know, you can, you can send her some welcome cards and some other stuff to help her get started.
00:02:01
Speaker
I don't know. I mean, we do have some great new player stuff now. I had the welcome cards and giveaways and whatnot. So it's pretty wild. It's just how, um, aggressively friendly everyone is when you're starting out. It's almost overwhelming.
00:02:18
Speaker
So my husband Vinnie, he joined. I think we talked about this the last, did we talk about the last podcast? I don't know if we did. He had joined at that point and he was getting stuff in his inbox from people just in his mailbox. He was like, who is this person? Why are they sending me things? I don't know who they are.
00:02:34
Speaker
I'm like, people troll the new player list and send you, you know, welcome cards and stuff. And he did not understand it at all. He's like, I don't know why this is happening. Do they know who I am? Are they watching me? I said, no, nobody's watching you. It's fine. Um, but yeah, I had to just explain it to him. Now he goes through the new player list and sends them welcome cards. So it's cute. I know. I know. It's cute. Totally gets it now.
00:02:58
Speaker
He gets it. He's getting there. You know, and we're this close to getting him to join us on the podcast to talk about the new player experience. So, dude, that would be really interesting. I had some wonderful conversations with him recently about it. So I'm really hoping we can convince him. So if you're listening, he's not really should join us.
Firestream's Game Development Journey
00:03:15
Speaker
He's not listening. I promise. Oh, I listen. It's, you know, I'm not going to defend it, but I know he's not going to listen to defending it.
00:03:28
Speaker
Okay, let's just keep this let's roll it along Co-chief distraction officer right here. Yeah So let's let's announce the swear jar winner from last week. Oh, yeah Not last week last month. Excuse me It does feel like a week since we did this though because time in farm RPG is Time flies every month. It's like no way
00:03:55
Speaker
I cannot believe it. We're like four days into April. It just feels like, you know, I hate it. It's speeding by. Um, so the winner is water shrub, water shrub. If you are listening, which you should be, send me a DM and I will send you 110 gold. So you are our winner. You have to, you have to message me to let me know that you won though, because that's how we get you.
00:04:22
Speaker
Is that wait, is that just the opposite of fire stream almost kind of a water shrub Kind of but not really kind of but not really but still Clever close close. I know we do have right now. We have an air stream and they Fire no air stream is gone now. I believe that was a different user. They change back. What about wind
Tech Challenges and Community Feedback
00:04:44
Speaker
stream? Oh all of them there was a
00:04:50
Speaker
There was a water or something. I remember who played for quite a while. There've been, there've been many, many pretenders, but there is no fire stream other than a fire storm on there, right? Cause I was getting mistaken as fire storm.
00:05:06
Speaker
And we had so much awesome feedback, though, for the first episode. I mean, like, I wasn't really sure if people were going to like the swear jar or just the general, you know, podcast. Some people didn't like it, but that's okay. You got to cut one or two. Well. Wait, didn't like it? We had like one person that was upset about it, but that's okay.
00:05:29
Speaker
They're very upset because it was supposed to be family friendly. And why are we allowed to swear? But, you know, we're blaming it. That's okay. It's not actually swearing. We're pretending to swear.
00:05:41
Speaker
But seriously though, the feedback was just incredible. When we brought that out, I was like, Oh my gosh, what's going to happen? And just on the swear jar page and the podcast page and the YouTube page, so many really thoughtful comments. I received a couple thoughtful DMs, you know, just really appreciate everyone in the community.
00:06:05
Speaker
You know, for me, I was super nervous, a lot of anxiety, and everyone was just so kind. So thank you so much for all your feedback. We've read it all. We did. Yesterday I went through and reread everything. So thank you guys. We really, really, truly appreciate your support. And we love being a part of this community. That's why we're doing it. True that. And just to like, you know.
00:06:28
Speaker
reiterate just what good old force path here is saying. I also appreciate, I read, we read every comment unlike what you're supposed to do on the internet, which is not read comments. We did read every single comment. Um, and you know, everybody was extremely positive. Um, which is, I think just a, a 10, a testament of this community's just absolute great and like utter
00:06:51
Speaker
community-based vibes, everybody gets along, it's friendly, aggressive kindness. Yeah, even in commentary. It's amazing.
Growth and Infrastructure of Farm RPG
00:07:01
Speaker
So do you want to go over a couple of these comments we got? I mean, I'd be glad to. Most of the comments that I took were questions people wanted to chat about, but I figured maybe we could do that during tea time so that we could talk to our boy Firestream here.
00:07:16
Speaker
yeah yeah yeah let's move let's move on to the let's move on to the question and answer party and potatoes potatoes of this episode which is going to be the fire stream interview we did record some questions from some of the comments here that we got on on either the
00:07:33
Speaker
the podcast page or i think youtube we got some on there too um and that's it yeah we we pulled them all in and we are ready to go over them so um are you are you ready fire stream you ready first yeah i'm good to go let's do it okay um so first off let's start let's start with the first question on our list would you care to share any background about yourself how did you get into this
00:07:59
Speaker
So, okay, I've been doing websites for a long time, probably like 20 years, golly, I guess that's right. But way, way, way back, I had a pretty big Halo website, and it tracked stats for the Halo franchise. It was like Halo 3 and Halo Reach, Halo ODST, it was all those. It got pretty big. It wasn't as big as former PG, but it had a,
00:08:28
Speaker
a few hundred thousand people using it. That's pretty good. That sounds really big. Let's be real. Sounds massive. Yeah, it was big. It was a different experience than the farm RPG experience has been. That was Halo charts, right? Halo charts. Yeah, that's right. Did you use it? Were you aware of it back then? I don't know where we met. It was a while ago though. You and I didn't really officially meet until most of Titan Conquest, but I was aware of some of your projects.
00:08:56
Speaker
So the Halo site was pretty big. And I don't remember what prompted this, but I thought it would be fun to sort of build a Halo game inside of the Halo website. So I made this little game called Halo Sphere. And it was like a game on top of the website that people were already using to track all their actual stats. And it was kind of like an optional thing. You didn't have to do it.
00:09:22
Speaker
And it was like playing Halo in your browser like text base is kind of silly. You're just that you could like buy armor and upgrade it and you could run battles and you could go to different maps and I mean all this stuff but you got really deep and crazy and I think it only had maybe
00:09:41
Speaker
10,000 or so people play it ever. But it kept growing, and I spun it off to its own thing, and I made another game called Halosphere 2 that was a better version of that. And then that game became Galaxy Warfare, which was another browser game with space.
00:09:58
Speaker
And then I decided to try doing like a destiny theme of it all since destiny was the big thing at the time This is 10 years ago now. So I made a destiny RPG. It was actually called destiny RPG and it was a Really unique experience too because it was 100% free. There was nothing no money at all and
00:10:23
Speaker
Because I knew I would get in trouble if I had any kind of money coming through you didn't want to have
Future Updates and Game Design Philosophy
00:10:28
Speaker
the season desist come in and yeah I got one of those anyway, so I actually made it on to the destiny breaded and Blew up to like a hundred thousand players real fast I mean it was real fast and the next thing I know I got this email from Activision saying you can't do this. We're shutting you down. Yeah, and
00:10:48
Speaker
There's a little bit of a panic, right? But, um, I had connections at bungee from all the halo stuff I had done. And so I try to remember exactly what I did. I think I may have just sent the email to them and said, Hey, can you help me out with this? And they, they came to bat and they said, no, no, no, we know this guy. He's doing this game. No big deal. It's not competing with us. It's not making money. You know, just let them do his thing. So we let a destiny or PG go for a while.
00:11:13
Speaker
Um, but then I realized it was so big that it was kind of drowning me as far as like server costs and what it actually took to build and run a game, you know, like arm RPG, because it was just, it was pretty big at the time. So we, um, we took it down and we rebranded it to Titan conquest, which is the one that, uh, force path here knows and loves. And he played a lot of Titan conquest, man. And Titan conquest was actually a better game than a dusty RPG. Um,
00:11:44
Speaker
And that, you know, that ran for a while. And I've made the answer to this question really, really long. And I am sorry. No, no, you're good. Right. And conquest goes for a few years and it's doing great. And I, I had this idea of to build this thing on top of it called settlement settlements, um, settlements, settlements. Yeah. It was going to be like a timer based, you know, mining expeditions type thing where you're, you're building a base and you're getting resources and all this stuff. And.
00:12:13
Speaker
it it didn't fit right with the whole futuristic mythological battling it just never really seemed right to me so i just took the idea out and i said well let's just try making this a farming farming experience um so completely just kind of started from scratch on that concept and made a little farming game back in 2021 so we're coming up on three years now and uh
00:12:42
Speaker
threw it over the fence to some people that played Titan conquest and they liked it and then put it on Reddit and Reddit liked it and basically said, keep going. And man, that's all I've done ever since then is just keep going. And here you are. And now this is like your full time gig. It is my full time and then some gig. Yeah. It can be every day of the week and even late at night and stuff if I let it, but
00:13:10
Speaker
I try to keep a balance, but it's definitely got its moments where you can't, you just have to stay up late and make sure something's right and all that, but it's worth it. You know, it's worth it for, you know, all the other things I get to do with it. For sure. Very cool. Yeah.
00:13:25
Speaker
Along those lines, I would say the most common question I get asked on a very consistent basis when people talk about Farm RPG is they really want to understand the tech stack of Farm RPG. What's it made out of? How does it work? What's the secret sauce? Would you care to share a little bit about the tech stack for Farm RPG? Sure. Just give a brief overview. Obviously, you don't have to give up anything that you don't want to.
00:13:55
Speaker
It's not really magical. Right now, today, it's a PHP. It's got PHP on the server, a MySQL database, and it's basically a big glorified website. The front-end stuff uses what's called Framework 7, which is like a JavaScript-based library to do all the little menus and buttons and transitions and all that stuff.
00:14:18
Speaker
Uh, and then you're playing on your phone, um, basically in a browser, it's just like an app that's wrapping a browser. And then we've got, um, hooks to do some of the stuff on the phone. Um, like a huge thanks here to a 10 food. Cause he, he wrote the code that does like.
00:14:37
Speaker
uh, playing the background music or, uh, doing the notifications and the in-app purchases. So there is some, you know, some code that's running on your phone, but for the most part, you're basically playing a big, complicated website and, uh, a database really. Yeah. And the database with it, a really big database. It's grown a lot. I mean, but.
00:15:02
Speaker
We're changing some of that up and we're going to make it better this year. I'm really excited to have Code Ranger on board and kind of the whole team. And we're all working together to try to improve some of the technologies. I have no coding skills. So I'm just, I'm just the cheerleader.
00:15:22
Speaker
Well, that's not true. You're helping with all the artwork and stuff. Oh, yeah. That's not the coding stuff, though. Yeah. Well, art's just as important, sister. Yeah. All right. Yeah. You know, no, I'm not. I'm just saying, you know, I don't do any coding. So, you know, you know, that's not true. I've seen you talk about it. You know what? You know what the you know, you know what the no, the whole thing's about nobody. All right. Sure.
00:15:47
Speaker
But that's the simple version is it's just a big website. I personally never expected to have, I mean, gosh, just the other day we had over 5,000 people playing concurrently. I know that was nuts. Yeah. So this big website has had some growing pains just because there were certain things I did that I never imagined would be
00:16:09
Speaker
hit as hard as they are, you know, three years later. So we're, um, we're working really hard to make a lot of stuff better and make sure it'll scale to way beyond 5,000 people, especially before we go to steam. Cause I don't know if steam could be the kind of thing where we double in size or we could not double in size. I just don't know what to expect, but you know, there's, there's a lot of people on steam. So it seems like there'd be a lot of people that might get the game through it. So we got to be ready. Hmm.
00:16:41
Speaker
Very, very cool. Great answers. Very technical. Yeah. Very super technical. And so I think that probably ties into this next question. Kind of what are some of the weird challenges you've faced that you would have never expected to have faced making a text based farm RPG sort of game. Yeah. What are the challenges? Yeah. So the, I think the biggest challenge for me has been that you can't anticipate everything a player will do.
00:17:11
Speaker
Even though you might try, when you throw it out and you got 50,000 people doing something in your game over time, you're bound to have a dozen or less that do something in a way you've never imagined.
00:17:26
Speaker
And so suddenly your work on balance or your work on designing something is just kind of out the window because someone comes along and says, I know how to do this in this game the most efficient way possible. And you just never plan for that. Or you never imagine that someone could do it the way they did it. So that's been a challenge. I wish I had an example right here on top of my head, but I don't.
00:17:48
Speaker
I mean, I can think of like 12. Yeah. Cause you think about the balance a lot lately. Um, I've been thinking mostly just about keeping it from crashing lately. So I probably think about the time together, but that's, that's probably the simple answer
Personal Insights and Influences
00:18:06
Speaker
to that. Just you can't ever expect what people can do. Very cool.
00:18:15
Speaker
You know, you were talking a little bit about, you know, 5,000 people at once and scaling. Like, can you talk about, like, how the game started? You know, how many people were playing? What, like, the most number of people that you've had playing is? And then, like, how you kind of, like, handled that. Like, just as, like, a game, lots of people want to understand, like, how you've
00:18:41
Speaker
managed to keep the game running, you know, like, did you get new servers, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Like talk about that for a minute. Yeah. So, okay. Well, way back when a couple of years ago, we were lucky to have 500 people playing at once. I mean, that was a, that was a big day and now we're 10 times that, um, we have migrated to a number of servers in the last year.
00:19:09
Speaker
I want to say it was we got two servers that were identical, kind of a live server and a backup server. And then when we started having the massive growth in the fall last fall, for whatever reason, the game got picked up on some algorithms on Android and we started getting 2000 to 3000 installs per day. And at first I was like, okay, this is just going to be a week or two.
00:19:34
Speaker
Ended up doing that for close to four months. And that was when we started, had a lot of growing pains. You guys probably remember, you know, it was, it was, we went from last September to maybe 2000 online to this week. Um, Monday, the first, I think it was because of sleep RPG, we were at 5,400 online. That's insane. Big hit, big hit sleep RPG coming in strong.
00:19:58
Speaker
Told your man the idle game dude people love people love idle games. That was a nice little test of the waters there Yeah Scaling goes yeah, I mean Code Ranger and myself we've looked at the code a lot and started trying to optimize things that were done poorly the first time around so just a lot of optimizations making sure that we
00:20:21
Speaker
don't hit the database as hard as we were, you know, and just, uh, I personally do believe that we had a hardware issue on the, the server, um, when it was running at its worst, it was, it was like, there's no reason for this to be as bad as it's running. So let's try moving it to the other server. And I did that in early February and I was like, huh, now it's working. What the heck? So.
00:20:47
Speaker
You know, the old server must have had some hardware issues and, uh, still gonna try to keep that from happening down the road. But those are just, you know, I can't expect that. We just tried. We just couldn't expect that being the, uh, the, the issue all along probably. But the good thing about it was we did come along and fix a lot of stuff that was bad in the code.
00:21:07
Speaker
So it was fun watching. I mean, so it wasn't fun, but it was interesting watching the process, right? I mean, like I I saw the frustration of the lag and whatnot, but it was really interesting to watch you rip your baby apart, if you will, and say like, oh, this was a bad idea or oh, why did I do this? Yeah. And then you could come out the other side and you were like, oh, look at all this like improvements that I've made and
00:21:35
Speaker
That's been a lot of fun to watch like on the back end, like see you kind of build that stuff. Because I mean, we never stopped learning, right? Never stopped learning. Yeah. And I'm learning a ton. This is the biggest thing I've ever worked on. So scaling is new to me too. And I've got some help now and that's the biggest thing I could ask for, you know, just having a team behind me. And it makes the future a little brighter, you know, to know that we're working on
00:22:05
Speaker
a better version of it as far as, you know, the server load goes and, uh, we should only get better, you know, as time goes on. Yeah. But it was a, it was a really frustrating time, but January was a hard month. That was a month. That was a lot of stuff in code that I was like, what was I thinking? This is, this is so bad. Why did I do this? You were not expecting 5,000 active players at a time. Uh, never. Oh man.
00:22:32
Speaker
It's awesome. It's fun to watch. Speaking of a lot of players being on, what really brings people in are the events, some of our, you know, some of those big weekend events or like holiday events. What has been your favorite holiday event that you have put into the game so far? So let me give you two.
00:23:01
Speaker
the most well we did the october halloween event and and code ranger helped out by doing like some ghost hunting
00:23:08
Speaker
and with some ghost animations in the haunted house. And that was super fun. And I love the Halloween month with, you know, with your assistance this time and having all the characters be dressed up. Yeah, that was fun. All the quests and storylines and the goofiness of that. And I think if people come into the game during October, that's one of the best months to join the game because it's just so such a fun time, you know, around the whole world of the game.
00:23:35
Speaker
And then I happen to really enjoy the Christmas events to the December time because I just like the snow and Christmas lights and all that stuff too. So those are my two favorite and I love that we're kind of
00:23:52
Speaker
We're taking what we've done each year and we're kind of adding on top of it. We're stacking it up. Makes it a little harder to manage from year to year, but it's, it's also fun for everybody who was there, you know, in the previous years, cause you could see what we did and then, Oh, on top of it this year, we're also doing, you know, frozen fishing this time and stuff. So.
00:24:12
Speaker
We're, and again, I think having a team here, we're all able to come up with some great ideas to make the event even better every year going forward. So those are, um, those are my favorite right now.
00:24:24
Speaker
Those are two very good picks to be fair. They are. They are the best. Probably the obvious two, though. I don't know. But they're definitely really good. We probably do. We put a lot of effort into those. So yeah, those are the big ones. They're like the really big ones. The other ones are kind of like, you know, smaller, littler events. Yeah. I mean, I like the eggs too, personally. I mean, it's not my interview, but the eggs I like as well. Make it all about you, Booper. I know. I know. I know. Egg hunt is a lot of fun. It is good. It's cute.
00:24:56
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, so you actually did mention something that I was really curious about. You've been doing this for a long time. I mean, so farm RPGs up on three years. Uh, you've got three Halloween's under your belt at this point, wait, two or three, three math is hard. Three. Yeah. Um, yeah. Cause we're almost, we're almost done. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So on the fourth run of all those.
00:25:20
Speaker
I know. Oh my gosh. We need to take better notes anyways. What keeps you coming back? What keeps you excited about working on farm RPG? What are the things that you're like, all right, I'm not ready to be done with this yet.
00:25:39
Speaker
uh well there's still an absolute billion tons of ideas left that we could build the thing about this game out of all the other ones i've done is this is the least like boxed in we've ever been so you my previous games are always kind of around an existing franchise or a theme um and this time it's like
00:26:01
Speaker
We're building our own theme, our own world, our own characters, and like we can go any direction we want to go in. And there's no, there's nothing saying we can't add whatever we want, you know? So the, the roadmap on the game is a good list of things that I've always wanted to make. Uh, and then having a lot of feedback and a lot of people helping and all the, you know, discussions and ideas and planning and stuff, it, it, you know,
00:26:29
Speaker
It's the biggest creative outlet I've ever had. And there's a lot of variety to it. So it's kind of like, well, one day you can be thinking about an item hunt or how to get a bunch of things and put them together or another day we can be talking about a new economy or a new quest line or a new adventure. And so there's kind of like, there's always something to do and think about.
00:26:52
Speaker
And so that's sort of why it's keeping me, you know, engaged, just cause there's always some other thing we can add and people love. I think that's the thing. I think that's the simple answer is I love seeing people enjoy the content that we come up with and put out. And so that's the driving force behind saying, uh, we need more content to put out so that people keep loving it.
00:27:16
Speaker
It is a lot of fun. I'm right there with you on that. It's fun to see people get into the world or tear apart a mechanic and find the best way. It's challenging when you are designing it or watching it get beat in ways that you didn't expect, but it is quite fun to see people engaged in work that you've worked on.
00:27:44
Speaker
That's right. You go and you look at a quest line that you wrote or an adventure that you wrote and you can see, man, 6,000 people did this thing. It's like, wow, you need to do more of these things because this many people loved it. And maybe not that many people loved it, but that many people did it at least. So yeah, definitely.
00:28:04
Speaker
Very sure. Um, so going into that about people coming back, think, thinking about the player base, things that the players enjoy. What is some things you're excited about? What are some things you're excited about that you're, that could be coming to farm RPG in the next year? I'm real excited about mining the mining skills. It's really, you know, it's another skill in the game.
00:28:33
Speaker
And the last time we did that was with cooking. So it's kind of like adding an entire game on top of a game. When we do a big update like that, it's a, I'm excited about what it can do. Um, for everyone at every level, because it's an entirely new concept for, you know, so even if you're in game and you're kind of bored and out of stuff to do, we got a whole new game here for you to play basically.
Player Feedback and Game Developments
00:28:59
Speaker
So that's exactly play endlessly, too. Yeah. So that's endlessly ish. Yeah. Right. I mean, I think mining is going to be the kind of skill you can work on perpetually. I mean, even once you level up to 99 and get every zone, there's not really any end to the leveling in the in the mines. And the people have seen it and they've already played a lot of it. But I'm really excited for that.
00:29:28
Speaker
There's a lot of other stuff on the roadmap. That would be fun. I personally really, really want to figure out like the tavern system idea, being able to create a tavern or a restaurant or something, and then put cooking to use. Um, cooking has some quirks and some things that we'd like to improve. And so maybe, maybe cooking will get some love and attention this year and, um,
00:29:54
Speaker
make it more of a fun skill to work on. Cause right now it's definitely the most grindy skill. Yes. It's tough. It's a tough one. It is a tough one, but you know, it gets a lot of hate and I think some of the hate is justified, but at the same time I've been cooking just kind of casually for a year, probably. And I'm in the eighties now, so it's definitely doable. Just kind of do it on the side while you're doing everything else.
00:30:19
Speaker
That's how I play it too. Just like. I actually just hit 80 recently. Yeah. I think I'm close to. But props to the people who get to 99 and cooking, because it is definitely a grind and we know it's a grind. And I think it's going to get better in the future. I'd like to say this year.
00:30:38
Speaker
I don't know. This year is weird because started flying by. We know we want to get to steam this year. So we're working on that. We know we want to make the server better. So we're working on that. We know mining needs to be done. So we're working on that. So there's a lot of priorities all at once.
00:30:53
Speaker
It's still a small team and we're still trying to put out monthly content on top of all that. So it's a challenging thing to get a big, huge new skill or system added to an existing game because you have to make sure that you don't break the balance and mess up all the other things in the game that already work pretty well. And mining is one of those really early things that you can do. And so it's got to come in and sort of fit almost perfectly into the giant puzzle that is farm RPG.
00:31:23
Speaker
day one so cosily with all the other skills it's a tough one yeah but the feedback's really good on it so far so i think that's going to be the winner this year that's awesome i um i was thinking about how you were talking about how cooking and mining are coming in um but i also have i was thinking about auto crafting um and i was thinking about
00:31:50
Speaker
just like how much Farm RPG has changed. Not only have you, you're introducing new skills has changed, but just the game itself has changed. I'm just really curious, what you feel has been the most surprising or unexpected aspect of the game that's really different from your vision or conceptually from what you imagined when you started working a lot on Farm RPG. That's a good question.
00:32:22
Speaker
You know, the, the core stuff hasn't really changed a lot since even day one. Like farming is still basically the same farming that I made three years ago. Except you get to plant all and harvest all when that hurts. That's true. Yeah. I think that maybe the usability of a lot of things got better and there's still.
00:32:45
Speaker
You know, there's still need for that for more quality of life improvements and a lot less clicking still. Cause I think that's probably been the biggest takeaway of, or, or surprise to me was I didn't mean to make the game as clicky as it was. And I didn't mean for it to be, you know, a drag in certain places. So just to see it evolve and we're making guests. I know just, just trying to reduce clicking.
00:33:17
Speaker
Definitely something I want to do more and more of. And what's funny is we do that though. Like we reduced all the clicking by adding in ciders and, and adding in Arnold Palmer's and large nets. And then you have the large net launcher, you know, still having to click a ton because there's really no end to what you need to have. So even if you end up with 10,000 of an item that we can simply just say, well, we need 10,000 that item for a quest. So suddenly you're still clicking a ton to get those things.
00:33:40
Speaker
is a big.
00:33:47
Speaker
Um, man, I don't know. I'm rambling on the answer to this one. I don't know fully, you know, without getting more into making an idle game, there's just, there's just some clicking to be done. Um, always be clicking. But I think having more, more quality of life will help and I, and we're, we're getting there and it's, it is definitely a fun thing to put a quality of life fix out, you know,
00:34:17
Speaker
And I like giving stuff to townspeople that's in need of some love. And I think, oh man, probably the most requested piece of feedback that I see across all the different platforms I watch is giving stuff to townswool. Like an auto send. Yeah. And I think we can either auto or we can make it simpler just by going to an item and you know, it's either auto or it just go to the item and say, I want to give 10,000 of these to Rosalina just does it. Um,
00:34:48
Speaker
That yeah, there's some design work to do on that too. So we'll see. I mean, we're going to, we're going to keep making the game better. That's all there is to it. Um, well, let's, we're going to do the next question here, which from what I'm reading is what games most influence your design philosophy when it comes to the games you've made specifically farm RPG.
00:35:16
Speaker
Okay, so I did play a lot of Stardew Valley. I think that's probably an obvious thing when you look at it. I played some other games like Harvest Moon, but I haven't actually played that many farming games, just a handful. I like to think about some games that I really enjoyed like Stardew Valley or even just like a Final Fantasy game or even just Halo and think to myself, how do you simplify it down to sort of like, what is it doing at core?
00:35:46
Speaker
Uh, especially if you take away all the graphics. Cause that's kind of what I figured out my niche was, you know, like I'm not going to go off and be able to make a halo game. I'm just, I'm not that developer. Um, but I can make some menus and I can make numbers go up. Right. So people really enjoy that. I love it when numbers go up. Yeah. Everybody does. It's kind of like taking concepts, you know, from these games like Stardew and saying, well, let's at the core, what are we doing here?
00:36:16
Speaker
And that way, you know, you're just getting down to the basics. And so it started out as this basic. We're going to do farming and fishing and crafting and exploring, and we're going to save you a lot of time by just having the menus tell you what's happening. Of course, then it turned into a much deeper, more complicated game than I ever expected. What? No way. Yeah. And people love it for that too. And it's, it's fun then to kind of get into the world building and
00:36:43
Speaker
coming up with systems and ideas and economies and all that stuff too. So, but I'm inspired by those games. Um, big, always inspired by the, the old final fantasy games. That's my favorite game ever. Um, so, and that game was always just a, you know, great characters and lots of numbers going up. So that's true. That's probably my biggest inspiration too. Getting those quad nines got to do it.
00:37:12
Speaker
Yup. Here we go with the mod nines. It's a little early in the night. I have one more moderately serious question for you before we kind of switch gears and maybe get a little silly for a little bit. All right. But this was a late addition to the question more. But as a game developer, can you tell us what your favorite and least favorite part of the process is? Hmm.
00:37:44
Speaker
Which one do you want first, favorite or least favorite? You're the interviewee. You tell us, brother. There you go. Decision making. That's the hard one though. Favorite is just the creativity part of it, right? Like what can we do with, you know, these people and these items and the storytelling and all the systems that can come around it and stuff. And I mean, an example like Raptor Fight Club was just
00:38:13
Speaker
Sort of a joke, but it was so much fun. It's a good joke though. Yeah. To go off and make this thing and hide it in the game. Um, so that's the kind of stuff I live for. Just like, I love coming up with the ideas and implementing, um, whether or not they're implemented right to begin with or not. But, and, uh, and putting those out there. Um, the hardest part is maybe a two-fold answer sometimes.
00:38:42
Speaker
Well, the growth was hard in a way because like I said, it caused a lot of pains for the server and all the scaling. And I was probably the hardest, just sort of the tidal wave of people. Um, it is hard to take criticisms too. I mean, no one wants their baby to be called ugly. So that's sort of, and some people, you know, are nasty. So you just have to deal with, with that too. So getting thicker skin is something that I've had to work on, uh, over the last few years. That's probably.
00:39:11
Speaker
the other hard one besides the death from success in some ways too.
00:39:17
Speaker
Mm hmm. Totally fair. It's true. Now, we're going to get into the silly ones. But before we do that, I'm going to ask you if you could please make us our hidden password. If you don't mind, sir. I know we need to hide a password somewhere in here. So here it comes. The hidden password. You the password right now. You're going to tell us. Great. I'm going to write it down. The password is Vinnie.
00:39:45
Speaker
Oh my God. Vinny is the password. Oh my goodness. He has to listen now. Now he's got to listen to hear the pa- I'm not going to tell him what it is. Don't tell him. He's got to listen. He's got to listen. I love, I love everything about that. That's very good. So Vinny is the password. Capital V, I assume. I don't know. Just does case matter in the passwords? No.
00:40:08
Speaker
No, I was going to say, I don't think case matters. All right, cool. What are we giving away? What are you, what are you giving away in the password? The fire stream. Oh, you're putting this on me now too. What's the, what are we giving away? Let's see. Um, ah, golly. Saves me the time. I'm trying to figure it out. We brainstorm it live. It's all right. We brainstorm live. Last time we did popcorn. We did popcorn. So, Oh, okay. So an item like that would be good. Just something silly.
00:40:36
Speaker
Let's give away looking. He's scrolling through the item list right now. I know. He's scrolling through the item list right now. Well, you don't have all 1000 items memorized. I can't make it an egg if you want. I thought about an egg. Yeah, I thought about an egg or just an egg basket or cool. That's such a great gift. Okay. I feel I feel like egg basket sounds wonderful. Magical egg basket or just regular basket?
00:41:05
Speaker
Well, let's just do a regular. All right. All right. Regular egg basket. So you all heard it here. The password is Vinnie and you will get one egg basket. Should be interesting to see how long it takes for all the chairs to get flooded with the name Vinnie. That is true. It's going to be really funny and really weird for me, but that's OK because he doesn't look at the chair.
00:41:33
Speaker
But since we're in a silly mood, we're going to go right into the silly questions. So here's the first one is, who is your favorite mod? Or you could also say, who is your least favorite mod? I would love to hear both. It could be the same person too. Oh, I mean, least funny and least, oh my gosh. Yeah, your least favorite and your most favorite moderator in the game. So moderator not being like,
00:42:01
Speaker
Like the admins or you could pick an admin if you want. I mean, most of us started off as nice favorite. Okay. I hate picking favorites because I love all you guys. I love everybody. I feel like my favorite staff member is 10 food.
00:42:23
Speaker
I mean, that's the obvious choice. I knew that. He's everybody's favorite. Coming from a mile away. Well, just because he's always reasonable, whenever there's something that shouldn't be reasonable, he's always reasonable about it. And I'm just like, dang it, you're so reasonable. Stop being this way. It's unbelievable. The calmest person, the most non-fiery person, it's wild. Great choice.
00:42:49
Speaker
Least favorite. I don't want to pick a least favorite. I don't. You can say stressed. It's okay. You can say shred. It's okay. You can also say shred. Yeah. That's a good answer. Shred. He won't listen to this. So it doesn't matter. He'll never know. I've yelled at him. I don't have a least. Everyone who's helping is awesome. So it's true. We have a really good team. Dealing with trade mishaps or
00:43:17
Speaker
writing quests or whatever. No, you're, you're awesome. So there's, there's no least favorite here. That's very kind of you. Diplomatic answer. So, uh, less, well, less silly, but more inquisitive. Tell us about your hobbies outside of farm RPG. Like, what do you do? What do you like to do other than be on farm RPG?
00:43:42
Speaker
Um, it's funny is that this used to be my hobby. Yeah. The monetization of your hobbies. I enjoy just getting, uh, spend time with my family, just lots of going to sports, um, ball games and, uh, just spending time with them. I think that's kind of now, you know,
00:44:10
Speaker
I don't really have a lot of other hobbies that I do, you know, mess around with some games and some stuff, but, um, I need to take up some new stuff, but there hasn't been time yet. You know, I'm like grilling, but I haven't done it. Um, yeah, no, I just, I just like seeing my family. We like to do stuff together. We all get along. And so that's, that's what I like to do the best. So wholesome, so wholesome. It truly is.
00:44:36
Speaker
Yeah, it's getting bad. My kids are growing up way too fast. So time it goes by so quickly. Again, it's already April and what happened? Just years fly by. They sure do. And your family members are pretty cool.
00:44:51
Speaker
That's true. That is true. They are cool. Um, now let's do a complete non sequitur here. Um, this is a completely non sequitur silly question. I don't even remember who asked this one. I think it was, uh, Nico Nicho, um, are good, are good. One of our mods on the staff team here, um, which is why didn't they change Luke's name to better hide him from the empire?
00:45:17
Speaker
This is a star wars question. Good question. So, you know, I don't know. I used to really, really like star Wars and I still do. I don't know. It's, it's going off in all kinds of weird ways, but I think original star Wars, I think George Lucas swears he had this all planned out. I don't think he did. No, you're right. So, you know, I think, I think they were like,
00:45:44
Speaker
I think they just came along like late in the game and said, you know what, Vader's going to be their dad. And then they were like, Oh, that's a big surprise. Let's do that. I don't know. They're going to be siblings and Vader's their father. Yeah. And there's like other clues that really point to you.
00:46:00
Speaker
knowing that that was never going to be the case. Yeah, that's fair. There's quite a bit of randomness. Here's a question that randomly got put in the wrong spot in this interview.
00:46:16
Speaker
We could skip it. Uh-oh. I think we already talked about this one really a little bit anyway. You did actually technically talk about it. I'm going to ask it again because, you know, I'm a slave to, I'm a slave to the schedule. To the format. To the format. But you didn't mention taverns and I'm pretty sure taverns is your answer. But what's one cool idea you'd love to add to farm art? G of time and budget weren't an issue. Oh yeah, that was mentioned. Yeah.
00:46:40
Speaker
the tavern system. I think it could be like this whole giant game within the game where you're managing a restaurant and serving customers. And, uh, and I actually had that idea a long time ago. And of course it's not original. There's tons of games that do that, but playing, uh, Dave the diver recently, and you're trying to serve all the sushi and stuff. I was like, Oh, this is fun. So if I had the time and budget and talent helping me, I mean, that could be, it's like a great little game of its own, just like a,
00:47:11
Speaker
a day of the diver, except, um, you know, what a farm or GG style or something. I don't know. Could be a lot of fun. My mind goes crazy, uh, with ideas. Yes. It's yeah, that would be a lot of fun. I think that's the one.
00:47:27
Speaker
I love it. That's a good one. Tavern sounds great. Um, so I think this is also another like more serious, less silly question, but what is one piece of advice you would give to somebody who was, you know, contemplating making their own game or just getting into making their own game like a newbie? What would you, what would you tell them? Uh, I would definitely encourage them to do it, you know, just because you don't,
00:47:56
Speaker
There's so many games out there, right? There's, if you start looking, you'll think, well, I'll never be successful because there's already 10 million games out there. Um, it's kind of that way with music and books and stuff too. Like I think if you've got the passion for it, um, just chase your dreams, right? Like that's, that would be my answer. You know, just don't be afraid, make something, put it out there. If people like it cool, if they don't like it, well you,
00:48:24
Speaker
make something that you enjoy, or you can try to change it and make it to where people do like it. Um, like all my previous games that were of this style of farm RPG were a lot smaller and they had their niche, but yet it was still very fulfilling to even see 10 people playing, you know, this game I made. I mean, like Gaussian warfare was a small little game, you know, even though it came in the middle, but I didn't, it didn't stop me just to know that there was a few people out there that really did like it. So, um,
00:48:55
Speaker
And also the other thing I would say is, um, don't stop trying to learn the new stuff, whatever's out there. Cause I'm a little guilty of that myself. I kind of got hung up on some old concepts. Uh, and after so many years goes by, you realize, Oh man, there are a lot better ways to do certain things. So don't ever stop learning, try to, um, stay a little bit more up to date on, uh, the world and then
00:49:23
Speaker
all the tools and tech and magic and stuff that's out there. Thank you. Very cool. I should make my own game. I'm just kidding. This is kind of like you're making your own game. Here's the part of this one. I'm very grateful to be a part of this one. I am super grateful.
00:49:42
Speaker
Okay. This has really gone off the rails because we're just bouncing everywhere. I know. But a question that I found was if you could be any animal, what would it be? And I have no idea why anyone would want to know this, but evidently someone did. That someone is me. I put that in there. Was that your question? No. Listen, as a person that thinks about this a lot, I need to know always. I don't mind.
00:50:12
Speaker
It's kind of the difference in between what my favorite animal is versus what animal and I actually want to be right. Yeah. I thought about that more. So originally I would have said like a great horned out because I think owls are amazing. Just love. Owls are awesome. I go to the zoo and you see these owls or you go out and hear them. I never see them when I'm out, but I hear them. Um, but then if I had to pick what animal I would be, I think I would want to be my dog because my dog is just like spoiled rotten.
00:50:41
Speaker
He just lays around and sleeps and can do whatever he wants and doesn't have to pay taxes and doesn't have to go to work every day. And yeah, the dogs have it made. They're little rotten creatures, probably cats too. But I think dogs are a little bit better just cause they, you know,
00:51:01
Speaker
I'm here to hear first, everybody. Dogs better than cats. Here we go. You're going to start in World War III. On the game. I'm the cat guy, so. Yeah. Kind of cool too. I like cats. I do. We've had some really good cats, but I don't know, you can train dogs and they like listen and get excited about stuff. And then cats are just like, they're kind of like their own thing. They just, they don't.
00:51:31
Speaker
Like they don't care what you do or say. They're just like, well, look, you're going to, you're going to pet me now. I will allow this, but you know, dogs are different. I don't know. So that's, that's why they're better. Fair enough. Fair enough. Love that. Um, so, uh, next question. Do you have any favorite bands, movies, books, games? What's your favorite media right now that you're consuming? What do you, what do you enjoy? And you can't say below. Oh man. Don't say below. I was about to say that that's, that's all I'm doing lately.
00:52:01
Speaker
No, um, Oh gosh, I've got way too many favorite bands, books, movies, and games way too many. Um, you'll, you'll see some of them sprinkled throughout farm RPG as a passwords and little references in the item descriptions. And some of the items are named after some of my favorite things. So there's a lot of that in there, but right now.
00:52:25
Speaker
I'm re-listening to Lightbringer, which is the sixth book in the Red Rising series. And Red Rising is my, probably my favorite book series ever. I've read all the books a number of times and done the audiobooks on them and stuff. And been listening to, oh shoot, let me pull up real quick.
00:52:53
Speaker
Uh, Radiohead's new stuff under the, it's not Radiohead, it's Tom York's new stuff under the smile. It came out pretty recently. So that's, that's been kind of on loop. Um, I have been playing Bellatro a lot and even listening to music a lot. Yeah, it's just been on loop. I've literally been listening to that music.
00:53:20
Speaker
And then as far as movies go, I don't know. We watch a lot of TV shows, movies here and there. Been listening or been watching the, uh, the Shogun TV show. I heard that's really good. I heard it's really, really good. Yeah. It's pretty good. I'm, I'm enjoying it. We're only maybe halfway through it. Um, but it's, I mean, gosh, I've got way too many of the favorite things to talk about. That'd be a whole other podcast episode. That's fair.
00:53:46
Speaker
That is fair. I mean, we can always have you back to talk about that stuff again. I guarantee you the outcome of this podcast will be an outpouring of, I would like him to answer these questions. Yes, it surely will. You're definitely coming back. Okay, sure. You'll have to come back in like six months. We'll give you a little break. We'll give you a little break. All right. Sounds good. I'm down. A breather. Yeah, the final question that I have
00:54:15
Speaker
On the list is sweet or salty snacks? Um, there is a wrong answer. Well, have you ever had a snack that is both sweet and salty? That's true. They do have them and they are excellent.
00:54:30
Speaker
Yeah, those are the chocolate covered pretzel. Come on. Yeah, exactly. That's fair. Target sells these little peanut butter pretzels. They're pretzels filled with peanut butter. Those are so good. Yes. Now I've had them from Costco. They have a really big tub of them at Costco. Yes, it's probably the same thing. Yeah, for sure. I forget what those are called, but those were very popular in my previous residence. They're excellent.
00:54:54
Speaker
Yeah, I think I tend to go more toward the salty snacks, though, if I had to pick like love that chips and. Well, we really like hummus a lot, so we get hummus at the snack a lot. A little humming. I want to like umami, right? Yeah, that's like an umami sort of thing. It's kind of tangy. It's not really a hummus fans. Oh, I am. I like any kind of dip, a dip. Dips are good. Yeah. Cheese dip is always a big thing. Give me the cheese. Yeah.
00:55:25
Speaker
little queso, a little tortilla chip. Yikes. I'm getting hungry. Thanks, guys. You're welcome. Well, I think that concludes the interview. That's all the questions that we had. Interview. The interview. The more like we just like, you know. Grilled the fire stream for like half an hour. Grilled you for an hour. An hour? Oh my gosh. Yeah, almost an hour, basically. But that's okay.
00:55:45
Speaker
Um, we, you know, that's, that's how we do things here. We just like literally get the guy that made the game on a week grill him for an hour. Yeah. That is, that is the vibe of the farmer PGA podcast. I mean, we're not here to, not here to mess around. Nope. We're not here to have fun. We're not here to, you know, literally grill. Yeah.
00:56:06
Speaker
Oh, man. What do we what else do we have? We have a little we could do a tea time. We could. I mean, listen, I'm fine if we want to wrap it up because we are like, you know, getting a little long on the tooth. But if my long winded now, you know what? I know that is preferred over us just rambling about nothing. I mean, what are you guys working on? We'll do a little tea time. What are you guys working on in the game right now? What are you working on there? Force path? What are you? Oh, man. So let's see here. I believe we're working on a lot.
00:56:36
Speaker
Yeah. Well, so are you asking like, what am I working on from a development standpoint or like actually playing farm RPG? I mean, Porque no los dos, English only.
00:56:52
Speaker
That's going in the swear jar. You can put it in the swear jar. All right. We're at 110 then. There's a swear jar because we haven't. Broke the COC. Yeah, it's OK. Yeah, you could tell me a little bit about both. Why not? Sure. No spoilers. No spoilers.
00:57:13
Speaker
Okay, in game at least, I was locked on boxes and something else doing tower grinding. So I finished that and then I got like two more levels and then I had more Mega Masteries to do and I just finished those today and now I'm on black powder. So for me, it has been solely focused on whatever Mega Mastery comes up next in the tower grind.
00:57:41
Speaker
I'm there with you. Honestly, I've been having so much fun with. Even though I technically could know the list and get on Buddy Farm or spoilers or whatever, I've been just going in blind and it's almost like having more quests to do on a very minor scale and it's a lot of fun. Borgen loves boxes. Yeah, and then I ran myself out of gold buying apple pies.
00:58:12
Speaker
that you're broke. You know, shout out sufficiency farmer for goading me into buying so many Apple buys. They will claim they didn't, but they know they did. So I'm rebuilding my gold stores right now, too. So that's most of what I'm working on. What about you, Buban? You know what? A lot of the same except for the gold thing. I'm not I'm not gold poor at the moment. I'm OK.
00:58:36
Speaker
Um, but I am working on mega masteries, which I am not good at at all. I'm in the same boat where I don't look it up. The only one I did look up was chum, and I did finish that. I don't know if I said by the last, I know I finished chum, uh, and I just finished white parchment today. I know. So I get to move up because I finished that. Now I'm stuck on, uh, yarn yarn's got me. So what have you been doing for three years? Nothing. Not playing this game. That's for sure. I sit and chat. No, I, you know,
00:59:06
Speaker
chat RPG chat RPG. That's where I see the thing is this masteries is not my jam. So I never really focused on it. So as soon as I would like, you know, get all the stuff needed for the quest, I'd be like, I'm not going to do any more of that done crafting. Not my thing. Didn't do it. It's fine. Um, a lot of people love it. I was not, you know, that's not my jam. So I never did it. I just forgot about it. And now I need it to climb the tower. So, you know, we'll get there. We're getting there.
00:59:35
Speaker
Um, but that's what I'm working on. I'm still working on, you know, uh, Pam rats, the Pam rats. I, um, I think I'm like, I have two more left and I like, I have been debilitated by fishing super rares. I need so many fishing super rares and you know what? It's.
00:59:56
Speaker
It's gonna take me like a month. It's okay. I'll get there. This brings me to a comment before we hear from what Firestream is working on.
01:00:08
Speaker
Sadie commented, I really enjoy listening and how nice to see you as well. I have to get over the fact that someone who looks so benign and friendly can write such mean quests though. Sadie, I'm so sorry. I don't know where you're at in the game. It may get worse. It definitely gets worse. Definitely gets worse.
01:00:32
Speaker
I feel guilty sometimes, but most of the time do not lie. I said sometimes, but most of the time it's a lot of fun. And watching people I don't know if struggle is the right word, but watching the gnashing of teeth and then seeing people achieve is very fulfilling. So it is maybe a little bit of a mean streak for me, but I promise
01:01:01
Speaker
I'm mostly friendly, except when I write quests. Don't say that you recently filled up your inventory with any kind of item in chat. Forest Path is watching always and he will take your item from you. I used to collect popcorn. This man came from my popcorn. I specifically asked for popcorn because you continued to brag about how much popcorn you had. And I had the Corn of Interest theme and I said to myself,
01:01:29
Speaker
What can I do to make Buban mad at me is take 2000 of her popcorn. That's fine. It's fine. Take it. Take it. I don't need it. Vinny just finished what's it called corn quandary and he was just like, I'm done with corn jail. I'm like, baby, you're not done with corn. You're not done. I'm sorry to tell you this, but it's never done. It's never over. Give me more corn quandary. What a great, great quest.
01:01:56
Speaker
Oh God. Did we really ever want it to end? Let's be honest. No. What are we doing if we have nothing else to do? I have corn Stockholm syndrome. I just want to just grow corn. I'm growing corn right now. In fact, I'm going to look over here. I'm growing leeks. Are you crazy? I need that egg.
01:02:13
Speaker
Oh, spoilers if you didn't know. It's been in spoilers all day. This will come out. It'll be a little old hat. But who knows who has never been in chat before? Who is not saying this in chat or who have never been in chat.
01:02:29
Speaker
Yeah, so if you didn't know, you can get an egg, a new magical egg from leeks. So maybe grow some leeks if you haven't. Get growing. I've already done like 35 harvests with zero eggs. I'm not growing leeks. I already got one. Oh my God. Let's not talk about you anymore. Let's talk about Firestream. Are you playing the game you make, Firestream? Yeah, I'm playing. I'm working on the lemonade.
01:02:59
Speaker
Uh, our level two 42. It's been hard. It's been hard. I will admit it. Um, and I already finished star map and Pam rats and pro very quick. Actually almost faster than I did. I felt like I did, but, um, you know, my wife plays and she's already done all that stuff. She was like so fast.
01:03:28
Speaker
She's ahead of me in like everything, except I think I have her beat on cooking. Hmm. Hmm. Oh. I should look at her stats. See where she's at. She's pro gamers over there in the fire stream household. But we talked about how wholesome it is, right? His wife is just like, dude, you made this game. I'm going to crush it. And that's where we're at. Knocking it out of the park.
01:03:55
Speaker
Yeah. You know, I gotta say one more thing since we're almost done, but I got some other friends and family that play. It's just super cool to see like a bunch of them have played like a lot. I have former coworkers who are up there in the, the 200s in tower level. And I'm just like, wow, that's, that's really cool. And family too. I've got some family members outside of, you know, my, my core family here that they play and they
01:04:24
Speaker
Whenever I see them, they, we talk about it and it's, it's cool. It's really cool. Hopefully you don't tell them, you know, forest path, that could be a problem for you. I tell everybody, I know you just, they're like, why don't you fire that guy? If there's anyone you're going to name drop name, drop boo button. No, don't be jumping.
01:04:43
Speaker
No, not at all. Not at all. Do you see what I'm sitting in? I'm almost 40. Like, don't know. Come on. I'm sorry, microphone. Got me there. No, your girl's not cool. Promise. But. Oh, man.
01:05:01
Speaker
Good talk, guys. Yeah, I feel I feel like I really want to go over a couple of these comments before. Let's take a look. I mean, like I know that we're already like at an hour four, but I truly want to acknowledge the insane amount of feedback that we got. And you guys asked some really interesting questions and I just want to at least touch on it. Yeah. Even if we don't have in-depth answers and if FireStream wants to pitch in or like can answer anything, he's welcome to.
01:05:30
Speaker
, but
01:05:50
Speaker
We have we have we have a lore lore master in Tenfu. We got to get that guy on here. Yeah. Good luck with that. He might do it. He might. He's a quiet guy. He he he has made a majority of the lore for this game and has graciously allowed me to
01:06:13
Speaker
uh, pitch in, um, world building is something I really enjoy. Um, and then fire stream, uh, kind of came up with the whole original concept and then was like, Hey guys, here's the playground. Go, you know, build it up. So in the space. Yeah. I can't take credit for almost any of the story though. I mean, well, besides the first batch of, of characters. Yeah. I mean, the first batch was me. And then.
01:06:39
Speaker
You guys pretty much ran with it after that. It's a lot of fun. I mean, so, you know, corn corn quandary backstory there was we needed a way for people to be able to get Runestone 11 because a lot of people really felt frustrated by that early on.
01:06:59
Speaker
and one night I was making joke lyrics in a discord and it struck me that it would be really funny to go insane growing corn and using lyrics that had corn in them and us corn quandary was born.
01:07:18
Speaker
Jills out here, you know, making memories for people. That was a lot of fun. Corn of interest. I had been on a on a person of interest spree watching it. And I don't know. I just thought it would be funny to to parody the intro line from person of interest. You know, you were being watched, et cetera, et cetera. And I had just been thinking about we needed some
01:07:43
Speaker
enter more endgame grinds so uh you know the ideas you know strange companions that's all been planned out for a very long time and then
01:07:56
Speaker
Sometimes it's hard to write the end of a story. We can talk about that for a long time. But the end of the story is known. It's just kind of connecting the bridge and making sure that everything kind of sits in place. Yeah, Tenfu, I kind of passed that off to him a little bit. So those of you that want a peculiar gem, it's coming. I read some of it recently.
01:08:26
Speaker
Um, ideas come from everywhere. Uh, you just have to be open to, you know, thinking and when, uh, when you think you have a bad idea, it's only a bad idea when other people are like, and even then it's not always a bad idea. No, you gotta, you gotta like, you know, get a second opinion. You gotta ask a few people.
01:08:46
Speaker
One person, you know, they may not like it, but other people might. You never know. You should put around a bit to get the answer you like. Yeah. Um, I, there's a comment in here that since you're talking about your quest writing, let's just go over it.
01:09:02
Speaker
It's, wait, now I need to know why Forest Pat doesn't use Oxford commas with four exclamation points. And that's by Pookeria. She wants to, or they want to know why you don't use Oxford commas, which I'm sure Vinny would also want to know, since we're going to make him listen to this podcast, he probably is going to want to know why you don't use Oxford commas.
01:09:23
Speaker
why i don't have a good reason uh i really don't uh i feel like maybe i'm not fully against the Oxford comma i'm just lazy okay as as a former English major it might just be that i'm lazy that's that's completely valid honestly i don't i have no idea about any kind of grammar vinny corrects me constantly so don't even worry about it
01:09:49
Speaker
Here's a here's a really wonderful comment and I'm actually glad to have it while fire streams on the podcast It's a little bit longer, but it's from bookworm Who says hello? Thanks for bringing the podcast back. I like the types of questions Used before in the old podcast where we get to use to know the old players PS We'd love to bring old players on it's just we are doing it a little slower cadence So we'll get there just gets a little bit of time
01:10:18
Speaker
So thank you for that feedback. And finally, thanks to force path. I'm not bringing this up because you said thanks force path, but because I think this is something we're really passionate about. Thanks for force path to mentioning accessibility work, which has been done on the game. I'm a blind player who has benefited from that work. For example, the vault used to be an item I would have to get help on.
01:10:38
Speaker
As of last summer, I've played the vault daily and have been able to use the color notations for each number to figure out the codes. I know a few of the other blind low vision players and think we could also bring something to the podcast. Totally agreed. I know that FireStream has benefited greatly from feedback from people with accessibility challenges and we are so grateful for your feedback.
01:11:01
Speaker
Um, we have a feature on alpha that is kind of in hold right now, but it's definitely something where a lot of stuff that is designed is designed. And then we think, Hey, how do we make sure that it's accessible? So, uh, in the voice quest or another piece of that, um, at some level, just because the screen reader is one thing, but having an actual voice is very different. So, um, very cool. I don't know if you want to speak to that.
01:11:30
Speaker
The accessibility is a very important thing to us and we definitely want to make some of the rougher areas of the game better there. And so thank you to the people who are, you know, telling us, hey, this can be better or this is better or whatever, because it certainly drives us to make sure that the game is playable for anybody. So, yeah, I really appreciate the feedback on that.
01:11:53
Speaker
Yeah, well, that was really cool comment. So very much appreciate that comment. And thank you for listening, by the way, Bookworm. Yeah. What else do we have here for more comments we could go over? Let me pick one out.
01:12:12
Speaker
People want to hear a small tips section where we talk about our favorite tips and advice for players, which we can start adding to podcasts. Don't sell it. Yeah. Don't sell anything. That's some small, that's a big tip. Huge tip. Never sell anything. Again, the tip I gave earlier, don't mention how many of an item you have in chat ever because, you know, people will make you talk. That's true. They can just look it up.
01:12:39
Speaker
what else you know read the library is one of my there's a huge like resource of awesome stuff that you can you know read and we have librarians that like just really like you know they're very focused on the library and making sure it's extremely readable so if those guys they own the wiki in a way that
01:13:03
Speaker
They know it probably better than I know the game in some ways. It's wild. For sure. Any of those guys, they know so much about how the game works, and it's insane. I don't know how they do it. My brain is smooth, and I can't memorize anything. So smooth. It's so smooth. But off to them, they're awesome. But the library is a huge resource.
01:13:27
Speaker
Um, and help chat is a huge resource. So if you're really struggling with something, I'll chat. If you just go and be like, help Jeff, please help me. They will help you do some of the most helpful people. I hang out there sometimes, but I rarely talk because I feel like they just give better advice than me. I've seen tech support. I've seen Wiki support. These guys are amazing.
01:13:49
Speaker
props. Yeah, I don't even try because I can't do it as well as some of the people do. So I mean, like, I feel like I know a lot about farm RPG inside it out. And yet I know there are multiple people that know far more about this game than I, than I probably fathom sometimes.
01:14:09
Speaker
I classically say I suck at this game. Don't ask me questions. I don't know.
Community Support and Inspiration
01:14:13
Speaker
I can draw you a picture and that's all I can do. So there's, I have one player who, who I won't name for their safety, but I go to for quite a bit of like math when I feel like I'm out of my mind. Everybody knows who you're talking about. No, they don't. So you may know, but no, if you are in spoilers, you know who you're talking about.
01:14:32
Speaker
Uh, but there are, there are, I have a small group of people that I go to when I say, you know, Hey, I had this idea. What do you guys think or how analysis a sound? Um, you know, here's my math. Can you make sure that I'm like on the right page? So just internally grateful to the community. They're the best. We have a really great group of people hanging out in chat and not in chat, you know, really contributing a lot. So shout out to everybody.
01:15:00
Speaker
Yeah. Other comments, you know, like to hear a lot of advice for early to mid game players. Again, you know, definitely something. Thanks Frank Binky for the comment.
01:15:14
Speaker
Also, community appreciation, absolutely. We really appreciate the community. If you're looking to be amazed at how awesome the community is, pop into giveaways or help chat and you will be amazed.
01:15:31
Speaker
really looking to understand a core mechanic happens spoilers and those guys will definitely or gals will definitely make sure you fully understand how to do a thing the best way according to them at least so you know
01:15:49
Speaker
they're the saltiest group but they're usually you know they're on the right track with a lot of that late game sort of it's like late game help and they're kind of mean about it but that's okay I can appreciate that from them so yeah absolutely
01:16:06
Speaker
Luke Tony asked if we were talking about Dropout Game Changer. Yes, give me more Game Changer. I don't think anyone else here watches Game Changer, but you should. That's from Dropout, which is the old college humor. And they do improv comedy. And I love them very dearly. Okay. Big comedic inspiration for me.
01:16:28
Speaker
Oh, yes and like a little yes and a lot of yes and stuff going on just uh watching people Come up with jokes that I could never dream of on the spot is always a thrill So, um, I think that's really all I mean there were more Uh, and we appreciate every comment for real though. Yeah for real. We just can't get to everything every episode So, you know anything that you comment and say to us we definitely read it. Um, so continue
01:16:57
Speaker
sharing that with us. Actually, that's another thing we can bring up here is that we made an improve loop, specifically for the podcast. Why didn't we mention that at the front end? I didn't remember until just this very moment. Listen, again, brain is smooth. Things just bounce off of this bad boy. But it came to me eventually. We have an improve loop. We will link it into the podcast library page. If you have any information you want to
01:17:25
Speaker
drop in there, questions you want answered, suggestions for what we can do better, anything you want to see us improve, please just pop it in there or be happy to read it. Don't let that stop you from commenting on the library page also, but if you have, again, suggestions, questions, whatever.
Podcast Improvements and Future Plans
01:17:43
Speaker
Just pop it in there and we'll be there. Yeah. I got a new microphone because a piece of feedback I got was that I sounded terrible. I mean, par for the course. Well, I just am not using my podcaster voice. Oh, there you go. Perfect. I don't have a podcaster voice. I don't know either. I don't either, but what is it that we said? We had a face for podcasting.
01:18:11
Speaker
Oh, yes. No, you have faces for podcasting. We don't have faces for video. Yeah, I'm not here for my face is not meant for video. It's meant for podcasting and listening to it and not potentially watching it. But you could be watching this on YouTube. You could be. And if you are, I'm grateful for that. But why?
01:18:29
Speaker
Do you want to know the metrics though? We had about 1,000 people listen, audio, and we had about 1,000 people watch video. Oh my goodness. So about 2,000 people experience the podcast, which is insane to me because it's half the 5,000 that was
01:18:49
Speaker
active that one day. We had about half of that group of people. That's cool. That's pretty cool. We're some of the first podcasts. Amazing. Thank you for listening to the podcast. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much. I think before we go, I just want to mention that it is coming right up on Easter. Now, I know we've had the Easter holiday, but in Torah, we're not going to try to bounce Easter around like the US holiday bounces around.
01:19:16
Speaker
Yeah, that's too much. Yeah, keeping an egg stuff. We've got a new temple idea that is cooking. Oh, yeah. We just worked on another new feature that those of you that are in alpha, I would expect by the time you listen to this. Well, maybe not.
01:19:41
Speaker
Pretty soon you'll be able to see it. Don't make promises you can't keep. You're right. I've learned my lesson. But so we will have something hit in Alpha soon. It's nothing game breaking, but it is going to be different. Fun. You know, fun is in the eye of the beholder, but I like it. OK. So and then we've got our normal slate of events and new content and we've got fourth anniversary.
01:20:10
Speaker
Oh, yeah, yeah, that's coming up soon on the 20th. So there will probably be a mini celebration. So guys, there's more on the horizon. We got the official anniversaries in May. Oh, that's right. I always think April 20th. But that's just when you probably tested it. Yeah, somewhere in April toward the end of April was like the
01:20:35
Speaker
You can play the game if you know about it. Yeah. And then we did like an official launch in May. That's right. I know why I think April 20th is actually my wife's birthday. So I'm wrong track. Yeah, that happens. Oh, yeah. Event stuff, event things happening. I don't know when the the actual egg event event was happening. Did we discuss that?
01:21:05
Speaker
We, we didn't cause well, we just did one. Um, that's true. We're going to do something bigger before it gets to be too long. The worst part was we, we missed the February one because of issues, you know, the servers and stuff. We did do one in March. Um, so we could do something again, fairly small and then just went really big around the, uh, the anniversary.
01:21:34
Speaker
That's probably the best course of action. Yeah. All right. Well, TV, a TBD on when any of that stuff's going to happen. But, you know, we, you will see it in the updates. Yeah. You will. You will see that. And we will, we will keep, we will keep working on everything. Right. Secretively in the background. Secretively in the background. I mean, how many projects do we have going on at once? You think? Oh, I mean,
01:22:03
Speaker
Boo button here is working on a big one too. I mean, I, yeah, I did. I had worked on a very large, I know I, I'm icing my hand every night.
01:22:12
Speaker
After all that one, that was a big one. I mean, yeah, we got that project and obviously merch is coming. Oh, yeah, merch is coming at some point. I got to like actually like, you know, jump up some ideas for that. Well, you know, we just have to stop stop taking all of your time for in games. Other stuff. That's OK. I don't mind either one. You know, I'm very versatile. I'll just, you know, I would say I would say there's like five big projects that I can take on my hands. But, you know, then there's the
01:22:41
Speaker
600 different ideas that we're just deciding whether the investment or the juice is worth a squeeze, if you will. Yeah. And then a lot of ideas just pop up. Oh my gosh. We're like, we're doing things that we know we want to do. And then all of a sudden we're like, Oh, what if we do this? You know? Yeah. And, and, you know, for all of the 10 food is the most reasoned and chill person. He's also the person that distracts us the most. That's true. That's true.
01:23:10
Speaker
Yes, that's true. I agree. Going down a path, we're making a feature and then he jumps in and says, you know, it'd be really cool as if it did these 10 things, all of which are amazing, but it's also like really come on. Yeah. Awesome. But that's why you feel great because the 10 things he'll list are all like, that makes total sense. We should do all those things. Yep. True.
01:23:35
Speaker
It's always like he's the yes and of yes the group in a lot of ways, you know He'll come up with a really good idea But a lot of times someone will say hey this and he'll be like yes, and then you're like, ah crap. He's so right. Yeah So additions are like perfect. Also the his pun game is on point. Oh my gosh Dude's pun game is so on point. So it's crazy. I look up to that man in so many ways
01:24:03
Speaker
The best, the best. All right. Well, I think we've kind of gotten to the end of our of our list of comments and our things to talk about. Well, I have to hit the old dusty trail. Yeah. That was the big old inhale exhale. They'll wrap it up. I can't do it. I can't do like a Texas accent whatsoever. Very northern. I'm so I'm such a like the Yankee area.
01:24:31
Speaker
of, uh, new England here. Um, but yeah, anyway, you know, we could call, we could call it the end. Um, is there anything else you guys want to add here before we bid adieu to fire stream outro? That's what I want to add. I don't know. My ultra was just thanks for having me and I'm looking forward to all the cool stuff we're going to add this year. Hmm. Real boring. Wasn't that boring.
01:25:00
Speaker
No, this was good. Thank you. Thank you for being here fire stream and thank you for helping me with the, uh, the podcast there forest path. Um, screaming every week, kicking and screaming every week. It's true. Just dragging in here. Yeah, it's great. Well, we will, I'm sure I will talk to you guys, um, real soon and definitely plan on coming back and doing this again.
01:25:22
Speaker
Perfect. We have to have you. Thank you again. Fire shame. Much appreciated the classic goodbye here, which is where we just say bye. Bye. All right. See you. Bye. There you go. We're back.
01:25:41
Speaker
This is just an addendum because I wanted to shout out both Belligan and Noodles who have both been extremely helpful from the audio and video side. I am learning as I go and I just wanted to make sure that I gave a quick shout out to both of those individuals. So thank you so much for all of your help. We could not
01:26:07
Speaker
do some of this stuff without you guys volunteering your time and energy, so. Yes, thank you so much. You guys are the best. Again, Belligan, your infinite knowledge. I didn't have to talk to Noodles because Noodles has been helping you, but thank you, Noodles. You're the man, the goat, the man, the myth, the legend, the bowl of soup. The bowl of soupy noodles. Soupy noodles. All right. That's it. Thank you. That's all we have. Bye.