00:00SPEAKER- Brad, I started using DuckDuckGo.
00:02SPEAKER- Wait, are you saying you trust ducks
00:04SPEAKERwith your search results?
00:05SPEAKER- I like, it turns out I like DuckDuckGo.
00:08SPEAKER- Go on.
00:09SPEAKER- Do you remember when Google,
00:10SPEAKERyou'd type search results in
00:11SPEAKERand then the very top of the page
00:13SPEAKERwould be the number one search result,
00:14SPEAKERlike the most best result for that on the internet?
00:17SPEAKER- Yes, well, best, right, in quotes.
00:19SPEAKER- Most popular, wildly successful.
00:22SPEAKER- Yes, for varying definitions of best, yes.
00:24SPEAKER- That's how it works now.
00:25SPEAKERThere weren't, there aren't any,
00:27SPEAKERlike it doesn't excerpt any stuff from like the top result
00:30SPEAKERand be like, yo, here's the bad version
00:32SPEAKERof the thing that we think you're trying to answer.
00:34SPEAKERIt doesn't have any ads.
00:35SPEAKERIt doesn't have like a celebrity panel on the side
00:39SPEAKERthat's like Ernest Borgnine is a Dutch American actor
00:43SPEAKERwho starred in such films as blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:46SPEAKERIt's just the search results.
00:48SPEAKER- No algorithms, just search.
00:50SPEAKER- Well, no, the algorithms drive the search results,
00:51SPEAKERbut other than that, that's it.
00:53SPEAKER- No, I know, no data extracted and shoved in your face.
00:56SPEAKERIt's just, it's just everything you want
00:58SPEAKERwith none of the stuff you don't want.
00:59SPEAKER- It's just Google without all the bullshit.
01:02SPEAKER- Yeah, like I like it.
01:04SPEAKERIt turns out it's really good
01:05SPEAKERto just get the search results and not all the,
01:08SPEAKERI thought I needed the bullshit.
01:09SPEAKERI think I was addicted to the bullshit, but now I'm clean.
01:12SPEAKER- Do you have any idea who runs that thing?
01:13SPEAKERI'm pulling it up right now.
01:15SPEAKER- I assume it's just a bunch of ducks.
01:17SPEAKER- I don't know if you want ducks running your search results.
01:19SPEAKERAre you sure about this?
01:20SPEAKER- They're doing a pretty good, look, I haven't had to go,
01:23SPEAKERokay, so I still use the Google app on my phone
01:25SPEAKER'cause I kind of like the algorithmic news
01:27SPEAKERon the homepage for that thing.
01:28SPEAKERLike it does a reasonably good job of getting me
01:31SPEAKERlike 90% of things that I'm interested in,
01:33SPEAKERthen 10% that's just utter garbage
01:35SPEAKERthat I never want to see again.
01:36SPEAKERBut yeah, it seems pretty good.
01:38SPEAKER- You know what, I actually just went to their homepage
01:39SPEAKERand right at the, well, not right at the top,
01:41SPEAKERbut if you scroll halfway down,
01:42SPEAKERhow does DuckDuckGo make money?
01:44SPEAKER- Oh.
01:45SPEAKER- What does Google know about me?
01:46SPEAKERWhy use DuckDuckGo instead of Google?
01:48SPEAKERThey seem to be pretty upfront about all this stuff.
01:50SPEAKERThere's a friendly graphic here of a little monster
01:53SPEAKERand a lady in a lab coat.
01:55SPEAKER- I like that they imply
01:56SPEAKERthat your personal identifiable information
01:58SPEAKERand advertisers who track you are a ghost
02:00SPEAKERthat would chase you while you're running away.
02:02SPEAKER- Data ghosts.
02:03SPEAKER- Data ghosts.
02:04SPEAKER- I don't want to be chased.
02:05SPEAKER- I'm afraid of data ghosts.
02:07SPEAKER- Does this integrate into browsers?
02:08SPEAKERCan you?
02:09SPEAKER- I type in at my location bar in Firefox
02:13SPEAKERand it takes me directly to DuckDuckGo.
02:16SPEAKER- I bet Chrome doesn't let you do that.
02:18SPEAKER- Oh, you can change the default.
02:19SPEAKERI'm pretty sure you can change
02:20SPEAKERthe default search engine in Chrome.
02:21SPEAKERI'm sure Google, I'm sure they're still reporting
02:23SPEAKERyour business to Google, but like--
02:24SPEAKER- You absolutely can.
02:25SPEAKERI could be using Yahoo search right now.
02:28SPEAKER- Brad, I have bad news for you.
02:30SPEAKERI don't think Yahoo exists anymore.
02:33SPEAKERI think they're gone.
02:34SPEAKER- Somebody should let the Chrome settings people know.
02:36SPEAKER- But yeah, it's like the other day
02:38SPEAKERI was setting something up on a content portal
02:41SPEAKERand one of the options for your company's social stuff
02:45SPEAKERwas Mixer.
02:46SPEAKERI was like, oh man.
02:47SPEAKER- Just, yes, pour one out.
02:49SPEAKER- Pour one out for Mixer.
02:50SPEAKER- I mean, look, I would be asking Jeeves to this day
02:52SPEAKERif I could, but you know how that went.
02:55SPEAKER- I never was a Jeeves guy.
02:57SPEAKER- I wasn't either, it was just a joke.
02:58SPEAKER- Oh, I was a Lycos and a web crawler guy.
03:00SPEAKER- Lycos, interesting.
03:02SPEAKERI was Altavista.
03:03SPEAKER- Altavista was like my third,
03:04SPEAKERthat was my, if the first two didn't work.
03:06SPEAKER- Who made Altavista?
03:07SPEAKERWas that Nick?
03:08SPEAKER- Netscape ended up owning Altavista, I believe.
03:10SPEAKER- I want to say, let me see, wasn't it, doo, doo, doo, doo.
03:14SPEAKER- Do you remember Metacrawler?
03:16SPEAKER- Vaguely?
03:17SPEAKER- You typed one thing in there and it would search
03:19SPEAKERall of the big search engines, including Jeeves.
03:21SPEAKER- I mean, Jeeves is the authority, right?
03:23SPEAKER- It popped a window with four frames
03:27SPEAKERwith the search results for each of the different
03:29SPEAKERweb search engines in the corners of the frames.
03:33SPEAKERRemember frames?
03:34SPEAKER- Look, if DuckDuckGo can get some frame display going,
03:36SPEAKERthen I might be on board.
03:38SPEAKER(upbeat music)
03:51SPEAKER(upbeat music continues)
04:07SPEAKER- I think that's a good place to stop it.
04:09SPEAKER- Yeah, I think there were maybe two or three places.
04:11SPEAKER- Couple of cuts there, yeah.
04:12SPEAKER- In there.
04:12SPEAKER- One of them was real short, I think.
04:13SPEAKER- Altavista was deck.
04:15SPEAKERRemember Digital Equipment Corporation?
04:16SPEAKER- I remember deck.
04:17SPEAKERI had to maintain a deck machine when I was at UT.
04:20SPEAKERIt was a real pain in the ass.
04:21SPEAKERThat thing ran so fucking hot 'cause it was just,
04:23SPEAKERit was these SIMD cores that were just running
04:26SPEAKERat like 1,000, a million gigahertz at that point.
04:29SPEAKERIt was so, it was like overclocked and the fan
04:31SPEAKERsounded like a fucking jet engine when you turned it on.
04:33SPEAKER- They made their own CPU, right?
04:35SPEAKERDeck alpha? - Yes, yes.
04:36SPEAKERThe alpha was a SIMD, a SIMD design
04:41SPEAKERthat was 32, maybe it was 64-bit early.
04:44SPEAKERI can't remember.
04:45SPEAKERIt was unusual in some way.
04:47SPEAKER- You could get NT 3.514 and Windows 2000 for it.
04:51SPEAKER- The days of the big iron.
04:52SPEAKER- Oh yeah, gotta have that.
04:54SPEAKERThe guy who used that machine was a psychology,
04:57SPEAKERa cognitive psychology professor who had massive,
05:00SPEAKERbut at the time, massive data sets,
05:02SPEAKERbut it was like a few million lines in a database,
05:04SPEAKERnot billions.
05:06SPEAKER- Yes, I know about the deck alpha
05:08SPEAKER'cause I've been making my way through some mid-90s era
05:11SPEAKERJohn Carmack plan files.
05:13SPEAKER- Ooh.
05:14SPEAKERHe talked about it a lot.
05:15SPEAKER- Yeah, he's in there talking about the giant server
05:17SPEAKERthey just bought.
05:18SPEAKERHe's like, this is practically in the top 500 super computers
05:21SPEAKERin the world right now,
05:22SPEAKERbut then he goes on to list the cores,
05:24SPEAKERor they weren't cores, they were discrete physical CPUs,
05:27SPEAKERbut he lists the core, the CPU's out at 166 megahertz each.
05:32SPEAKER- We should start the show.
05:33SPEAKER- Yeah, this is good material.
05:35SPEAKER- I know.
05:35SPEAKER- Where should we stick this?
05:36SPEAKERI think we already started.
05:37SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod.
05:39SPEAKERI'm Will.
05:40SPEAKER- I'm Brad.
05:41SPEAKERLet's just put this in there.
05:42SPEAKER- We'll just do two cold opens this week, that's fine.
05:44SPEAKER- I guess.
05:45SPEAKER- I wasn't talking in podcast voice.
05:48SPEAKERLook.
05:49SPEAKER- Wait, do you do a different voice for your podcast?
05:51SPEAKER- I always feel bad when we have an off-the-cuff conversation
05:53SPEAKERjust for ourselves and then we realize it's good material
05:55SPEAKERand we stick it in and it's like,
05:56SPEAKERah, they're gonna hear me, I'm just talking.
05:58SPEAKERI'm not talking, I'm just talking.
06:00SPEAKER- I mean, I like to think of that as the curse
06:01SPEAKERof the podcaster.
06:02SPEAKERAnytime I'm talking to somebody
06:04SPEAKERand I have an interesting conversation with them,
06:06SPEAKERI'm like, shit, this is podcast material.
06:08SPEAKER- Everything is content.
06:09SPEAKER- I hate that, but I also love it.
06:11SPEAKER- That's the 21st century on planet earth.
06:13SPEAKER- Everything is content.
06:15SPEAKER♪ Everything is content ♪
06:18SPEAKER- I'm sorry, we have a lot of kids' music in my house now.
06:21SPEAKER- I know streamers who have told me, I mean, God help me,
06:23SPEAKERI think we are entering this world ourselves now.
06:25SPEAKER- Brad, you're a streamer.
06:26SPEAKER- Yeah, I know, right, but like--
06:28SPEAKER- I saw you on Twitch.tv yesterday.
06:30SPEAKER- Well, we're probably not gonna go to this extent,
06:31SPEAKERbut I know streamers who have told me
06:32SPEAKERlike every single second they're playing a game
06:34SPEAKERnot on stream, they're telling themselves
06:36SPEAKERlike I should just be playing this on stream,
06:38SPEAKERlike start to finish.
06:39SPEAKERI mean, these are the types of people
06:40SPEAKERwho play every game start to finish.
06:43SPEAKERSo I don't, yeah, like I don't,
06:47SPEAKERfor me, like I mostly stream PUBG
06:49SPEAKERand then I also stream some indie games,
06:52SPEAKERbut like I don't, like I'm playing Immortals Phoenix Rising
06:55SPEAKER'cause it was on sale the other day
06:56SPEAKERand I picked it up 'cause I wanted to try it out.
06:58SPEAKER- That's a good game. - 'Cause it looked cool.
07:00SPEAKER- Yeah.
07:00SPEAKER- And it turns out it is cool,
07:01SPEAKERbut it's not the kind of thing I would ever play on stream.
07:02SPEAKERSo I absolutely don't feel guilty
07:05SPEAKERnot playing a giant open world exploration game
07:08SPEAKERthat would take me six months to finish on the stream.
07:10SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, a lot of those
07:11SPEAKERtend to be pretty rote to me.
07:13SPEAKERLike if there's not a lot of,
07:14SPEAKERwhat's the game design term?
07:15SPEAKERThe possibility space is fairly limited.
07:18SPEAKER- Yeah.
07:19SPEAKER- I feel like if there aren't a lot of decisions
07:20SPEAKERyou can make at any given time,
07:21SPEAKERif there's sort of the one thing the designer wants you to do
07:23SPEAKERand that's all you can do,
07:24SPEAKERI don't feel like those types of games
07:25SPEAKERare super interesting to stream.
07:26SPEAKER- Well, it's interesting because like,
07:28SPEAKERyou know, if I had to,
07:29SPEAKERmy channel thesis is probably,
07:32SPEAKERI like games with massive possibility space.
07:34SPEAKER- Yes, yes.
07:35SPEAKER- Like that's why I like,
07:36SPEAKERthat was the thing that was intoxicating about PUBG.
07:39SPEAKERIt's a shooter that ultimately your goal
07:42SPEAKERis to click on people's faces,
07:43SPEAKERbut the stuff between the clicking on faces is infinite.
07:45SPEAKER- Yes, if I can sit here and try to coin
07:47SPEAKERsome other highfalutin game design terminology,
07:50SPEAKERI like to think of the sort of decision point.
07:52SPEAKERLike you hit a point in the flow of the game
07:53SPEAKERwhere you have like X number of things
07:55SPEAKERyou could spoke out from there and do.
07:57SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
07:58SPEAKER- And you can pick one of those things
07:59SPEAKERand usually it's like,
08:01SPEAKERdo I wanna set this thing on fire or do I wanna freeze it?
08:04SPEAKER- Well, so it's interesting 'cause you say that,
08:06SPEAKERbut like we, when we were building,
08:08SPEAKERwhen I was building VR software,
08:10SPEAKERone of the things you think about in VR a lot,
08:11SPEAKERbecause you're taking over people's whole sensorium
08:14SPEAKERis how much cognitive load you're putting on them.
08:15SPEAKERLike how much you're making them think at any given moment.
08:18SPEAKER- I'm sorry.
08:20SPEAKER- Yes.
08:20SPEAKER- Okay, first of all, first of all,
08:21SPEAKERthe guinea pigs are active.
08:23SPEAKERSecond of all.
08:24SPEAKER- Do you hear the weaking noise?
08:26SPEAKER- Well, I think they heard the term sensorium
08:28SPEAKERand became discombobulated.
08:29SPEAKER- Oh no, oh no, it's like crinkling lettuce for 'em.
08:32SPEAKER(laughing)
08:34SPEAKER- Is that a term you used
08:35SPEAKERwhen you were doing business with people?
08:38SPEAKER- Well, so sensorium comes up, yeah.
08:41SPEAKER- When you take over everything people can see and hear.
08:43SPEAKER- I mean, yeah, I got the context.
08:44SPEAKERI, it's just, it's just such a professor,
08:48SPEAKERProfessor Will's magical sensorium.
08:50SPEAKER- Welcome to my sensorium.
08:54SPEAKERSo, but no, you have to think about that stuff
08:57SPEAKER'cause like you need to give them
08:59SPEAKERenough interesting things to do
09:02SPEAKERthat they aren't gonna wanna take off the headset
09:04SPEAKERand look at their phone.
09:05SPEAKER- Sure.
09:06SPEAKER- Like that's the thing you're competing against
09:06SPEAKERin every form of media today.
09:08SPEAKER- Right.
09:09SPEAKER- Like if you're watching TV,
09:10SPEAKERis it interesting enough I don't wanna look at my phone?
09:12SPEAKERProbably not.
09:13SPEAKERIf I'm watching a movie on the couch,
09:15SPEAKERis it interesting enough I don't wanna look at my phone?
09:16SPEAKERMy phone, it turns out, is maybe the most interesting thing
09:19SPEAKERin the whole world, Brad.
09:20SPEAKER- See, this makes me feel very grateful.
09:23SPEAKERI mean, I'm sure this makes me a fuddy-duddy
09:24SPEAKERthat I think the phone is to be avoided whenever possible.
09:28SPEAKERI like not looking at the phone.
09:29SPEAKER- For you, that is a choice that you are making.
09:35SPEAKERThat is you saying I am stronger than my basest urges.
09:39SPEAKERMost people are not stronger than their basest urges.
09:41SPEAKER- That's, you know, looking at the sum total
09:44SPEAKERof human history and experience,
09:46SPEAKERI think you're probably right.
09:47SPEAKER- You live an aesthetic life, Brad.
09:49SPEAKERYou're a digital monk, I think.
09:51SPEAKER- Yes, yes, yes, I am absolutely.
09:53SPEAKERThis apartment might as well be a monastery.
09:56SPEAKER- But the cognitive load thing is an interesting thing
09:59SPEAKERfor video games too, 'cause like if you think about it,
10:00SPEAKERa game, like the games that I like
10:03SPEAKERand the games that I enjoy playing the most
10:04SPEAKERare the ones that make me, like give me no idle time
10:08SPEAKERfor my neuroses and anxiety to take over my brain.
10:11SPEAKERSo I'm entirely focused on the task at hand.
10:14SPEAKER- Sure, and, yeah, go ahead.
10:16SPEAKER- Well, I was gonna say, when you're streaming,
10:18SPEAKERthere is a whole extra layer of not only
10:19SPEAKERwhat is engaging the participant who is actually playing,
10:22SPEAKERbut like what is gonna be engaging for people to watch.
10:24SPEAKERLike that's the real goal there is to create improvisation,
10:29SPEAKERI guess is what I'm trying to say.
10:30SPEAKERLike you want unexpected things to happen
10:32SPEAKERand like those kind of emergent narrative situations
10:34SPEAKERto come about organically as people are watching,
10:38SPEAKER'cause that's what people remember.
10:39SPEAKER- It's interesting 'cause I've been watching some GTA,
10:41SPEAKERsome friends got into GTA role-playing lately
10:44SPEAKERand it's really fun because it's like
10:48SPEAKERan eight hour a day soap opera, right?
10:50SPEAKERLike you watch it and they're just doing mad,
10:53SPEAKERamazing improv all the time
10:56SPEAKERin a highly modifiable GTA world
11:00SPEAKERthat also is still GTA as GTA at its core.
11:04SPEAKERLike there's NPCs walking around
11:06SPEAKERand they're just GTA NPCs doing GTA NPC stuff,
11:09SPEAKERbut then like you can buy houses and stuff.
11:12SPEAKERSo like the person I was watching the other day
11:15SPEAKERhad bought a house and she came home
11:17SPEAKERfrom doing some crimes during the day
11:19SPEAKERand there were a bunch of NPCs laying around,
11:22SPEAKERlike laying in our pool, having a pool party.
11:24SPEAKERAnd she was like, "These fricking little locals."
11:27SPEAKERAnd she just went back there
11:28SPEAKERand beat the living shit out of them.
11:30SPEAKER- I mean, did anybody give them permission to use her pool?
11:34SPEAKER- No, that's why she was pissed.
11:36SPEAKER- But like she-
11:36SPEAKER- It's like that I blame her.
11:38SPEAKER- Yeah, it's like an opportunity for like,
11:39SPEAKERit's like you said,
11:40SPEAKERit's finding the opportunities for improv and everything.
11:42SPEAKERThat's the thing that I love about streaming
11:45SPEAKERand watching streams and all that.
11:46SPEAKER- Are those streamers doing actual voices?
11:48SPEAKERAre they playing literal characters?
11:50SPEAKER- Oh dude, there are rules.
11:51SPEAKERYou should look into this.
11:52SPEAKERYou would, this will either stress you out
11:54SPEAKERor you would love it.
11:55SPEAKERI don't know which.
11:56SPEAKER- Probably the former.
11:57SPEAKERLike A, I've been looking at Twitch
11:58SPEAKERmore in the last two weeks than probably the last two years.
12:01SPEAKER- Yeah, that makes sense.
12:03SPEAKER- Yeah.
12:04SPEAKERB, I've looked at the GTA RP stuff
12:05SPEAKERjust enough to see that they're getting
12:07SPEAKERlike unthinkable numbers of viewers on some of the streams.
12:10SPEAKERI mean like 70, 80,000 people at a time.
12:13SPEAKER- Oh yeah.
12:14SPEAKEROh, congratulations.
12:16SPEAKERBy the way, we buried the lead here,
12:18SPEAKERbut congratulations on the launch, man.
12:19SPEAKERYou guys knocked it out of the park, I think.
12:22SPEAKER- Thank you so much.
12:23SPEAKERI am terrible at talking about myself
12:25SPEAKERand it's hard for me to take compliments and congratulations.
12:27SPEAKERSo I was avoiding it, but yes, thank you so much.
12:30SPEAKER- For people who don't know,
12:32SPEAKERI'll do it for you so you don't have to.
12:33SPEAKERBrad and our friends, Vinny and Alex launched a new,
12:37SPEAKERwhat do you call it, a podcast?
12:39SPEAKER- A new property?
12:40SPEAKER- A new property?
12:41SPEAKER- A business?
12:42SPEAKER- Yeah, I guess it's a sure.
12:43SPEAKERI mean, we have a company bank account.
12:44SPEAKERI guess it is a business now.
12:46SPEAKER- Yeah, called Nexlander.
12:48SPEAKERYou launched the Patreon, you launched on Twitch.
12:50SPEAKER- Twitch podcast.
12:52SPEAKERI think we envisioned it as a podcast first, I would say.
12:55SPEAKER- Okay.
12:56SPEAKER- We kind of make sure we get the podcast right
12:57SPEAKERand build out from there.
12:58SPEAKERBut yes, we have Twitch and YouTube channels.
13:01SPEAKER- Coming to TikTok, you got that TikTok?
13:03SPEAKER- We got the TikTok name.
13:04SPEAKERI don't know that we've used it yet.
13:05SPEAKER- Oh, shit.
13:06SPEAKER- I hear TikTok monetizes pretty generously though.
13:10SPEAKERSo maybe we should try to figure out
13:11SPEAKERhow to go viral on TikTok.
13:13SPEAKER- I think Vinny's particular brand of charming insanity
13:16SPEAKERwould do very well on TikTok.
13:18SPEAKER- We should probably look into that.
13:19SPEAKERI don't know if he edits in that aspect ratio though.
13:21SPEAKERWe'll have to.
13:22SPEAKER- He could be the garrulous uncle of TikTok
13:24SPEAKERif he played his cards right.
13:26SPEAKER- We're gonna figure that one out.
13:27SPEAKERDo people over 40?
13:30SPEAKER- They're looked upon with suspicion.
13:32SPEAKERDo they get to use TikTok?
13:33SPEAKERIs that allowed by terms of service?
13:37SPEAKER- TikTok has transitioned away from,
13:39SPEAKERlike remember how Snap used to be
13:40SPEAKERfor sharing nudes of yourself.
13:42SPEAKERYeah, now it's just like music videos and stuff, I guess.
13:45SPEAKERI don't know.
13:46SPEAKER- Sure, okay.
13:47SPEAKER- It's the same thing.
13:48SPEAKERIt's not for kids anymore.
13:48SPEAKERThe kids still do kind of side-eye the olds occasionally.
13:52SPEAKER- Well, that's always to be expected.
13:54SPEAKER- I got an okay boomer comment on one of my videos once.
13:57SPEAKERI was like, well, I'm banning that person forever.
13:59SPEAKERYou can go straight to hell.
14:00SPEAKER- I was young once, believe it or not.
14:02SPEAKERI vaguely remember that mentality.
14:07SPEAKERBut yeah, so yes, thank you so much to everybody
14:09SPEAKERwho's listening to this and has supported Nextlander.
14:13SPEAKERIf you would like to find out more,
14:15SPEAKERyou can go to nextlander.com
14:16SPEAKERor we have that name on Twitch, on Twitter,
14:19SPEAKERall over the place if you want to check that stuff out.
14:21SPEAKERBut we, yeah, I mean, I don't know what to say, honestly.
14:24SPEAKERLike it is the support-- - It's awesome.
14:26SPEAKER- The support has been so humbling and so beyond any,
14:29SPEAKERI mean, literally by the numbers,
14:30SPEAKERlike so far beyond anything we expected by several times.
14:36SPEAKER- I think I sent you a message at like nine o'clock
14:38SPEAKERin the morning after you'd been up for an hour
14:40SPEAKERand you'd hit 1,000 or 1,500 patrons.
14:43SPEAKERAnd I was like, I think you guys are gonna be okay.
14:45SPEAKER- Yeah, I guess so. - You're like,
14:46SPEAKERI don't know yet, man.
14:47SPEAKERYou're probably fine.
14:48SPEAKER- It's, I can't, I don't even,
14:50SPEAKERour heads are spinning trying to figure out
14:53SPEAKERhow to take all this in and where to go.
14:55SPEAKER- I mean, you just get done and do the work, right?
14:57SPEAKER- Right. - Like you make the show
14:58SPEAKERand like you figure out where you are in a few weeks
15:01SPEAKERand then you make more shows and then you go from there.
15:04SPEAKER- I cannot tell you how badly my brain wants to do the work
15:08SPEAKERand not the company set up stuff.
15:12SPEAKERLike that stuff is terrifying.
15:13SPEAKERLike the, oh yeah, figuring out incorporation
15:17SPEAKERand like estimated taxes and like you name it.
15:21SPEAKER- Health insurance, have you done health insurance yet?
15:23SPEAKER- Well, I think, well, yeah, that is,
15:25SPEAKERbecause of the way the COBRA stuff works,
15:27SPEAKERthat's at least- - You have some time.
15:29SPEAKER- In place for a while, if it's not the cheapest solution,
15:32SPEAKERbut at least there's that.
15:34SPEAKERWhat I mean though is like,
15:36SPEAKERso it was weird, we have, we got a Google workspace,
15:38SPEAKERwe have like proper email addresses, it's like a-
15:41SPEAKER- It's a business, it's a job.
15:42SPEAKER- It's a proper little thing,
15:43SPEAKERbut like some, a few PR folks in games found
15:47SPEAKERlike our kind of public info address
15:50SPEAKERbefore we started doing any outreach
15:51SPEAKER'cause we just haven't had time yet.
15:52SPEAKER- Yeah. - And started sending us
15:53SPEAKERjust like some press releases, just like some-
15:55SPEAKER- That's awesome.
15:56SPEAKER- Like the basic ass video game press release
15:58SPEAKERthat I have been getting in my inbox
15:59SPEAKERfor like pushing 20 years now,
16:02SPEAKERcannot tell you how comforting it was
16:03SPEAKERto see those press releases come in.
16:05SPEAKERIt was just like this,
16:06SPEAKERlike a familiar comfortable little blanket of like,
16:09SPEAKERah, just some outreach about a video game.
16:11SPEAKERLike there's no business decisions to make here,
16:13SPEAKERthere's no name to figure out
16:15SPEAKERor like logo samples to look at or like,
16:17SPEAKERit's just the actual work.
16:19SPEAKER- I would just, it's nice to just like know
16:25SPEAKERthat you're not starting from zero, right?
16:28SPEAKER- Yes, for sure.
16:30SPEAKER- I like, when we started, when Norm and I started testing,
16:32SPEAKERI remember like we started,
16:34SPEAKERit was small when we started testing
16:35SPEAKERand I remember the first time a PR person reached out
16:38SPEAKERand were like, hey, we'd love to talk to you.
16:39SPEAKERAnd it wasn't something we were gonna cover,
16:40SPEAKERbut like I will always be grateful for that person
16:43SPEAKERfor paying attention and being like,
16:45SPEAKERhey, I think that the stuff that you're doing
16:46SPEAKERis important enough that we need to engage with you
16:50SPEAKERto try to get you to cover our content, our product.
16:52SPEAKER- I am literally going to write back
16:54SPEAKERto the first PR person who reached out to us
16:55SPEAKERand just say like, thank you so much
16:57SPEAKERfor reaching out to us.
16:58SPEAKERLike this was such a comfort in a very hectic time.
17:01SPEAKER- Well, and it's like you guys launched it,
17:03SPEAKERit's a time when it's easy to get lost, right?
17:06SPEAKER- Yes, it certainly is.
17:08SPEAKER- 'Cause it's E3 week.
17:09SPEAKER- Yeah, which you know a little something about.
17:12SPEAKER- I'm on the other side, Brad.
17:13SPEAKER- I don't know how much you want to get into that.
17:15SPEAKERThank you again, just, I cannot say thank you enough
17:17SPEAKERto the people that have supported us so far.
17:20SPEAKERAll I can think of to say
17:22SPEAKERis that it feels like a huge responsibility
17:24SPEAKERand we are going to do our damnedest
17:26SPEAKERto do right by the support that you've shown us.
17:29SPEAKER- Aw, shucks, man.
17:30SPEAKER- Yeah, that's me, that's my brand.
17:32SPEAKER- I am Mr. Aw, shucks.
17:34SPEAKER- Let's talk about you.
17:36SPEAKER- Yeah, so I started at Straight Bomb Bay a month.
17:38SPEAKERI don't know what this episode, we don't know exactly.
17:39SPEAKERThis is going to be like a weird in between,
17:42SPEAKERthis is going to be a potpourri episode probably.
17:44SPEAKER- Yeah, between us getting this business off the ground
17:46SPEAKERand you guys revealing your game yesterday
17:49SPEAKERand all the stuff that went into that.
17:50SPEAKERWe had more formed ideas for this episode
17:54SPEAKERthat we started to get into.
17:55SPEAKERWe were talking about doing WWDC and Google.
17:59SPEAKERWhat's the Google?
17:59SPEAKER- Google IO.
18:00SPEAKER- IO, right, yeah, we were thinking about doing that.
18:02SPEAKER- I think we'll still touch on that,
18:04SPEAKERbut it's probably gonna be next week.
18:05SPEAKERI don't think they're, the iOS 15 stuff looked really neat.
18:08SPEAKERI didn't have a chance to dig into any of it at all.
18:10SPEAKER- Yeah, it's like doing the research
18:12SPEAKERwas kind of the problem.
18:13SPEAKERWe do have this, we have a pretty respectable list
18:15SPEAKERof show ideas in this Google doc now.
18:17SPEAKER- Yeah, we filled it out nicely
18:18SPEAKERat the patron episode last month.
18:19SPEAKER- Yeah, and we added some more since then.
18:22SPEAKER- Ooh.
18:23SPEAKER- But yes, this is kind of a,
18:25SPEAKERthis is one of those potpourri episodes, I think.
18:27SPEAKER- So I started at Stray Bombay.
18:30SPEAKERToday is actually the end of my fourth week.
18:34SPEAKERSo I started middle of May
18:35SPEAKERand basically went in on day one.
18:40SPEAKERStray Bombay is Chet Falisack and Kimberly Voll.
18:44SPEAKERSo Chet was from Valve and did Left 4 Dead
18:46SPEAKERand Left 4 Dead 2 and Portal.
18:48SPEAKERI think he wrote Portal and was the lead
18:50SPEAKERon Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2.
18:51SPEAKERAnd Kim wrote AI has a doctorate in artificial intelligence.
18:58SPEAKER- Goodness gracious.
18:59SPEAKER- She's very smart.
19:00SPEAKERIt's like, I'm like, I'm sitting,
19:02SPEAKERI listen to her talking about, oh yeah, okay.
19:04SPEAKER- Like Left 4 Dead is one thing to have on your resume,
19:07SPEAKERbut AI PhD is quite another.
19:10SPEAKER- And she was at Riot and also started the Fair Play Alliance.
19:13SPEAKERShe was one of the co-founders of the Fair Play Alliance,
19:15SPEAKERwhich is the, hey, we want to design games
19:20SPEAKERthat make people less toxic because they're mechanic.
19:23SPEAKERLike they're not mechanically encouraging people
19:25SPEAKERto be toxic.
19:26SPEAKER- That's an interesting and noble goal.
19:28SPEAKER- It's looking at how it works in,
19:30SPEAKERlike three years ago they were talking
19:33SPEAKERand realized they liked the same kind of games
19:35SPEAKERand we're like, let's go make a studio together.
19:38SPEAKERSo they went and made a studio together
19:39SPEAKERand hired a bunch of people.
19:40SPEAKERWell, a bunch of people, I say a bunch,
19:41SPEAKERlike it was 12 for a long time apparently.
19:44SPEAKERAnd we're up to 21 now, I think.
19:47SPEAKERSo it's a small studio.
19:49SPEAKERWe announced our game yesterday.
19:51SPEAKER- Well, congratulations. - Well, it's Thursday
19:52SPEAKERfor you all.
19:52SPEAKERThank you. - Congratulations.
19:53SPEAKERYou made it on through the hot game summer.
19:55SPEAKER- We were on the summer game fest with Geoff Keighley
19:57SPEAKERand live kickoff.
20:00SPEAKERThursday at 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern.
20:04SPEAKERBut we're making a game called The Anacrusis
20:06SPEAKERand it's like a retro future site, 30 quad.
20:10SPEAKERI can't believe I'm fumbling this.
20:11SPEAKERI said it 50 times this week.
20:13SPEAKER- Remember your media training, man.
20:15SPEAKER- I know, it's a cooperative four player
20:19SPEAKERfirst person shooter set in a retro future sci-fi world
20:23SPEAKERwhere aliens, where humanity expanded through the stars
20:27SPEAKERfor a long time and then all of a sudden aliens attacked
20:30SPEAKERand kind of, we didn't know what to do about that.
20:32SPEAKERWe hadn't had any kind of challenges like that as a species
20:35SPEAKERand it's in a very left for dead sense,
20:40SPEAKERit's like four unlikely heroes who are chucked
20:43SPEAKERinto this situation have to kind of figure it out.
20:46SPEAKERAnd there's a lot of kind of the characters
20:48SPEAKERtalking to each other as you play
20:49SPEAKERand moving through this world.
20:51SPEAKER- Like scenario based and kind of meant to be replayed.
20:55SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean the whole point of what Kim does
20:58SPEAKERis that the game is wildly different each time you play.
21:02SPEAKERAnd we're gonna, part of our challenge is figuring out
21:04SPEAKERhow to communicate that to the audience
21:07SPEAKERbecause you don't see that into the 20 seconds
21:11SPEAKERof a trailer of gameplay on a trailer or something like that.
21:14SPEAKERYou see that when you're making the trailer
21:16SPEAKER'cause you have to do the same thing
21:17SPEAKERover and over and over and over again to get the footage
21:19SPEAKERand you're like, oh man, this is really fun,
21:20SPEAKERreally frustrating to make a trailer it turns out.
21:22SPEAKER- That sounds like a fun challenge though,
21:24SPEAKERlike that's the type of stuff,
21:25SPEAKERthose are the types of weird little challenges
21:27SPEAKERthat I have always relished.
21:28SPEAKERLike did you ever know about that shadow complex incident
21:32SPEAKERwe had early on at Giant Bomb?
21:33SPEAKER- No, wait, was there a secret thing
21:36SPEAKERunder the office in Sausalito?
21:38SPEAKER- No, I apologize to Pete, I've told this story
21:40SPEAKERa couple of times over the years, I apologize
21:41SPEAKERto people who've already heard this, but it was early.
21:44SPEAKERI mean, shadow complex came out like a year into Giant Bomb.
21:46SPEAKER- 2008 or something, yeah.
21:48SPEAKER- '09 maybe.
21:49SPEAKER- Yeah, that's before I started.
21:51SPEAKER- Long story short, Donald Mustard came by the office
21:54SPEAKERwith the game and Ryan and I sat down
21:57SPEAKERand we did like, it might've been like the first
21:59SPEAKERquick look EX of him playing it and telling us about it
22:02SPEAKERwhile we talked to him.
22:04SPEAKERAnd what happened was, you record audio and video separately.
22:07SPEAKERThe audio all recorded just fine.
22:09SPEAKERThe video, something was wrong with the frame rate
22:11SPEAKERon the capture and it was like 10 frames a second
22:13SPEAKERor something, the footage was just unusable
22:16SPEAKERand we didn't have a build, or no, I'm sorry,
22:17SPEAKERthey did leave us with a build of the game.
22:19SPEAKERBut, you know, he was gone, he had left town
22:22SPEAKERby the time we figured out what was wrong.
22:24SPEAKERSo I sat there for like a day or two listening to him
22:30SPEAKERand us talk in my head and watching that busted footage
22:34SPEAKERover and over and screen by screen,
22:36SPEAKERbecause that game's broken up into rooms
22:37SPEAKERlike Metroid style, so there's like a nice hard cut
22:39SPEAKERbetween rooms, so it's easy to stitch a bunch
22:41SPEAKERof different captures together.
22:43SPEAKER- So you just recreated it?
22:44SPEAKER- I methodically learned every single thing he did
22:48SPEAKERin that 12 minute demo and recreated every action
22:51SPEAKERdown to the grenade throw.
22:53SPEAKERI had to make sure the grenade went right under the robot
22:55SPEAKERin the right spot and blew up at the right time.
22:57SPEAKERI had to make sure I hit, 'cause he was referencing,
22:59SPEAKERhe was like, "Oh, I nailed that headshot."
23:00SPEAKERAnd I was like having to hit the same headshot he did
23:03SPEAKERat the same moment.
23:04SPEAKER- Wow.
23:05SPEAKER- But it was super fun, it was ridiculous
23:08SPEAKERand maybe a questionable use of resources and time,
23:10SPEAKERbut it was such a bizarre challenge to take on
23:14SPEAKERand really fun to pull off.
23:16SPEAKER- Oh, that's really, yeah.
23:17SPEAKERA lot of trailer stuff for us was figuring out
23:20SPEAKERhow to get the AI to do the thing that we wanted to do.
23:23SPEAKERSo we have tools that let you set up monsters
23:26SPEAKERin certain spaces and stuff like that
23:27SPEAKERand then trigger, turn the AI on all at once
23:29SPEAKERso then they'll do something.
23:30SPEAKERBut because, I mean, we talked about this
23:34SPEAKERin some of the interviews, so it's nothing new,
23:35SPEAKERbut the pathing, we don't do like,
23:39SPEAKERwe don't have to manually create pathing
23:41SPEAKERfor the bots, for the NPCs.
23:43SPEAKERThey just, we put the geo for the world and the level
23:46SPEAKERand hit the button, run a script that does some math
23:49SPEAKERand then the bots know where to go, right?
23:51SPEAKERLike they can know which things they can climb over,
23:54SPEAKERthey know which things they have to go around,
23:56SPEAKERthey know what the fastest point between A and B
23:58SPEAKERfor any set of A and B on the map.
24:00SPEAKERAnd they know where the players are gonna start
24:01SPEAKERand where the players are gonna end
24:02SPEAKERand a bunch of other interesting stuff.
24:06SPEAKER- You guys, which engine are you on?
24:07SPEAKER- Unreal.
24:08SPEAKER- Okay.
24:09SPEAKER- So.
24:10SPEAKER- Unreal four, oh I have to be four.
24:11SPEAKER- It's all Unreal four right now.
24:11SPEAKERNobody's using Unreal five right now.
24:13SPEAKER- Yes.
24:14SPEAKER- Unreal five will be ready in six to eight months
24:16SPEAKERfor people to start, who are insane,
24:18SPEAKERto start working on stuff.
24:19SPEAKER- To start working on, right?
24:20SPEAKER- I mean, you could start working on something now.
24:22SPEAKERI would, it seems ill.
24:25SPEAKER- It seems a bit early.
24:27SPEAKER- Look, if you have a real job and you wanna make a game
24:29SPEAKERand you wanna noodle with something, start with Unreal five.
24:31SPEAKERIf you wanna ship something in the next 18 to 24 months,
24:34SPEAKERUnreal four is your baby.
24:35SPEAKER- God, that's crazy to say,
24:37SPEAKERlike when you think about where,
24:39SPEAKERI mean, before you know it,
24:40SPEAKERwe'll be a year into this generation of consoles.
24:43SPEAKERLike is UE five, are shipping UE five games
24:46SPEAKERgoing to be a kind of back half of this generation phenomenon
24:49SPEAKERlike that's kind of what it sounds like.
24:50SPEAKER- I'm sure that there's someone out there right now
24:52SPEAKERthat's making a UE five game, screaming at their radio
24:54SPEAKERand being like, hey dumbass, we're making UE five games.
24:58SPEAKERBut it's pretty raw.
25:00SPEAKER- You could see, I mean,
25:00SPEAKERyou could see like some games of smaller scope, right?
25:02SPEAKERSome like indies that are not like,
25:05SPEAKERmassive a hundred million dollar productions.
25:07SPEAKER- Yeah, and also like if you're probably,
25:10SPEAKERif you're starting now and you know you're gonna be on UE five
25:12SPEAKERand you're spending this time prototyping mechanics
25:15SPEAKERand stuff like that,
25:16SPEAKERthen you can probably change that stuff over pretty quickly.
25:18SPEAKERLike once you start, like there's a period of time
25:21SPEAKERafter which you do not wanna have to do
25:23SPEAKERany engine upgrades at all.
25:24SPEAKER- Right, and I mean like Unreal,
25:25SPEAKERI mean, I think that's this kind of core
25:26SPEAKERto their business model now, right?
25:27SPEAKERThen like Unreal kind of scales
25:29SPEAKERto all tiers of development, right?
25:30SPEAKERLike that's kind of, that's how they went up
25:32SPEAKERagainst Unity, right?
25:33SPEAKERLike Unity kind of had the indie market to a large degree.
25:37SPEAKER- Yeah, the basic deal is that
25:38SPEAKERuntil you make a fair amount of money,
25:39SPEAKERyou don't have to pay anybody anything right now.
25:41SPEAKER- Right.
25:42SPEAKER- And then once you start making,
25:43SPEAKERand you can, I mean, you can choose to just say,
25:46SPEAKERhey, we want the game.
25:47SPEAKERI think the deal with the Unreal games,
25:50SPEAKERI can't, I can't, I feel like this may,
25:52SPEAKERI don't know if this is still the case.
25:53SPEAKERThis isn't inside information.
25:54SPEAKERThis is just based on what was reported years ago
25:56SPEAKERin EGS launch.
25:57SPEAKERBut like you, if you sell your game on EGS,
25:59SPEAKERthen you don't have to pay the Unreal licensing fees
26:01SPEAKERfor any games that are sold on that platform.
26:03SPEAKER- I think that's right, yeah.
26:03SPEAKER- So like, it's, it's a real,
26:07SPEAKERand also while Unity has gone kind of more toward tools
26:11SPEAKERin the last few years, like there's a lot of,
26:13SPEAKERthere's a lot of like tooling stuff
26:15SPEAKERthat's built up around Unity now
26:17SPEAKERin like VR and AR spaces and stuff like that.
26:19SPEAKERI feel like Unreal has really leaned into games
26:23SPEAKERin a big way.
26:24SPEAKERSo I don't know.
26:25SPEAKER- Yes, yes, and TV production.
26:26SPEAKER- And the TV production stuff is really big.
26:28SPEAKERYeah, the photo real stuff in five,
26:32SPEAKERlike I'm super stoked about it.
26:33SPEAKERI can't wait to see games that are shipping with that.
26:35SPEAKERAnd, and somebody will do that sooner rather than later.
26:37SPEAKERBut like, I think most people, if you're like,
26:40SPEAKERif you don't have ends or don't have a subscription
26:42SPEAKERconnection or, you know, a brain genius on graphics,
26:45SPEAKERyou're, you're probably using UE4 right now.
26:48SPEAKER- Yeah, I am, I am utterly fascinated by the Nanite stuff,
26:51SPEAKERthe, all the virtualized geometry,
26:53SPEAKERlike the kind of the eradication of discrete levels
26:55SPEAKERof detail, like that whole thing just going away
26:58SPEAKERand everything just being like smoothly rendered
27:01SPEAKERat all distances now,
27:01SPEAKERlike to the point that I pulled up some
27:03SPEAKERof their actual documentation on the engine
27:05SPEAKERand started trying to read it.
27:06SPEAKERAnd it's, it's highly technical.
27:08SPEAKERAnd I need to find like a,
27:10SPEAKERa lay person's explainer of that stuff.
27:12SPEAKERBut I am, I am fascinated by it because like,
27:15SPEAKERif you, if you work backwards, Brian Karas,
27:17SPEAKERthe guy who is kind of the main architect of that stuff,
27:20SPEAKERlike you can find like talks and blog posts
27:24SPEAKERand stuff that he was putting up a decade ago
27:26SPEAKERabout his very sort of primordial ideas for that stuff.
27:30SPEAKERLike, it's crazy to think how long that stuff,
27:33SPEAKERlike since, to put it in like historical perspective,
27:35SPEAKERlike since the Xbox 360 was the big console,
27:38SPEAKERlike he has been working on that stuff.
27:40SPEAKERLike it's crazy how long it took
27:41SPEAKERfor that to come to fruition.
27:42SPEAKER- They've been thinking about this stuff since,
27:44SPEAKERsince programmable shaders were a novel technology, right?
27:48SPEAKER- Right.
27:50SPEAKER- It's, it's been like, that stuff is fascinating.
27:52SPEAKERI'm, I'm really interested to see environments
27:54SPEAKERthat aren't desert.
27:56SPEAKER- Sure, like environments that change,
27:58SPEAKERlike things that move potentially.
28:01SPEAKER- Trees, maybe?
28:02SPEAKER- Yes, things that are just static and round.
28:05SPEAKER- Bushes that move.
28:07SPEAKERI mean, like there are a lot of games that do a lot
28:08SPEAKERwith bushes and trees that don't do any movement at all,
28:10SPEAKERand that's fine.
28:11SPEAKER- Yeah.
28:12SPEAKER- But, but yeah, I want to see some more varied environments
28:16SPEAKERon that stuff sooner rather than later.
28:18SPEAKER- I'm certainly no game developer,
28:19SPEAKERbut my gut feeling is maybe the Nanite stuff
28:22SPEAKERis like something you would use case by case
28:25SPEAKERrather than globally.
28:26SPEAKERYou know, like, like I started playing the Ratchet and Clank
28:29SPEAKERon PS5 last night and like it, there is a ray tracing mode.
28:32SPEAKER- Yeah.
28:33SPEAKER- But, but I would guess that's applied very selectively,
28:35SPEAKERright?
28:36SPEAKERLike shiny, shiny metal and puddles probably get
28:39SPEAKERthe ray tracing and everything else is more traditional.
28:41SPEAKER- Shadows.
28:42SPEAKER- Raster, raster lighting.
28:43SPEAKER- Often people use the inverse of the rays
28:45SPEAKERto make the shadows look real and dynamic.
28:47SPEAKERAnd like if the character self shadows and stuff like that,
28:50SPEAKERthat's probably ray tracing at this point.
28:51SPEAKER- Right.
28:52SPEAKER- Um, so anyway, yeah, we lost the game.
28:55SPEAKER- It's a, you can find it at the Antichrist.
28:57SPEAKERI mean, we know it's the game.
28:58SPEAKERWe did not watch the game, Jesus.
28:59SPEAKER- I don't think you, unless you press the wrong button
29:03SPEAKERon one of those back ends you've been working with.
29:06SPEAKER- Look, I have a lot of thoughts about the back ends.
29:10SPEAKER- See, I, that's, I would do this entire episode
29:12SPEAKERabout the work you've been doing.
29:13SPEAKERLike I live for CMSs and shell scripts
29:17SPEAKERand all the backend crap you have to do to,
29:20SPEAKERto make things happen.
29:22SPEAKERLike I am, like I am, I am so interested in
29:25SPEAKERlike console dashboards and like their,
29:27SPEAKERtheir store infrastructure and just like all the nuts
29:29SPEAKERand bolts of what makes all these embedded systems work.
29:32SPEAKERTo the point that like, if we,
29:33SPEAKERif we were not still doing this public thing
29:35SPEAKERand I went behind the scenes and just found quiet work,
29:38SPEAKERI would probably look into something like that.
29:39SPEAKER- So what I will say is that there's a big opportunity
29:42SPEAKERfor someone who is a graphic design firm that specializes
29:46SPEAKERin taking existing assets and making them look good
29:51SPEAKERon the different storefronts.
29:53SPEAKERI don't know that that exists.
29:54SPEAKERIf it does, please let me know
29:56SPEAKER'cause I would like to engage them.
29:57SPEAKER- Okay, as opposed to say you resizing graphics manually.
30:01SPEAKER- It's, it's not that I can't resize graphics.
30:03SPEAKERIt's that if somebody who was good at it did it,
30:05SPEAKERit would look a lot better.
30:06SPEAKERI mean, I think what we ended up, what I ended up doing,
30:08SPEAKERokay, so first off, it's a big, this is a,
30:11SPEAKERthere's a lot of people that help with all of this stuff.
30:13SPEAKERLike there's people that are grabbing assets
30:14SPEAKERand people that are helping me figure out
30:16SPEAKERhow to build templates and all that stuff,
30:17SPEAKERwhich is, it has been amazing.
30:19SPEAKERAnd I don't, I wouldn't be able to do it otherwise.
30:22SPEAKERLike it's, one of the constants of my life as an adult
30:26SPEAKERis that I have realized that there is literally
30:29SPEAKERalways more to something than you think there is
30:31SPEAKERfrom the outside once you start actually doing the work.
30:33SPEAKER- Yes.
30:34SPEAKER- And that applies to like, you know,
30:35SPEAKERmachining and welding and--
30:38SPEAKER- Everything, literally everything.
30:39SPEAKER- Literally everything.
30:40SPEAKER- There is, unless you have done the job yourself,
30:42SPEAKERyou don't know what goes into the job.
30:43SPEAKERThat sounds very self-evident, but it's not, you know,
30:48SPEAKERit's something I didn't appreciate when I was 20
30:50SPEAKERand it had two jobs and one of them was waiting tables.
30:52SPEAKERYou know what I mean?
30:53SPEAKER- Nobody does, you know, like I've made the same mistake.
30:55SPEAKERI continue to make the same mistake.
30:56SPEAKERLike it's just a, it's a bad human tendency to
31:00SPEAKERlook at a vacuum and fill it with your, you know,
31:02SPEAKERproject your own ideas onto it.
31:04SPEAKEREspecially, especially when your own ideas are like,
31:06SPEAKERwell, I can't tell what they're doing.
31:08SPEAKERSo they must be doing nothing.
31:09SPEAKER- Well, so that's exactly it.
31:11SPEAKERAnd, and like I work on a, on a team of really,
31:15SPEAKERreally smart people and the company's flat in, in the,
31:20SPEAKERlike we're small enough that that works really well for us.
31:22SPEAKERI don't, I hope that continues.
31:23SPEAKERCause it's awesome because it means that if somebody has
31:26SPEAKERquestions about what's on the steam page,
31:27SPEAKERthen they just come over and ask me.
31:29SPEAKERAnd if like, if I want to talk about, you know,
31:32SPEAKERdifficulty in the game and how we're balancing ammo
31:34SPEAKERconsumption versus damage and stuff like that,
31:37SPEAKERthen I can pop into that meeting and, and,
31:39SPEAKERand listen and see where we're going and when,
31:41SPEAKERwhat people are thinking.
31:42SPEAKERAnd it's given me a lot of appreciation for how
31:45SPEAKERcomplicated and how thoughtful and how,
31:50SPEAKERit's the right word.
31:51SPEAKERIt's, it's not deliberate, isn't it?
31:53SPEAKERBut, but like people think about at least,
31:56SPEAKERat least where I am,
31:58SPEAKERwhen we talk about something like ammo consumption,
32:01SPEAKERpeople think about the entire spectrum of users from the
32:03SPEAKERperson who is like,
32:04SPEAKERjust like loads up the game the first time.
32:07SPEAKERAnd they're a bad shot and they just,
32:09SPEAKERthey shoot an entire magazine into the wall and maybe hit
32:12SPEAKERtwo bullets on an, on an alien, right. To like,
32:15SPEAKERsomebody like me who has a 99% headshot rate.
32:19SPEAKERAnd like, I can't be 99% brand.
32:23SPEAKERI think that's a registered trademark of CBS interactive.
32:27SPEAKERAnyway, no, it's, it's, you,
32:33SPEAKERlike the, the experience is different for everyone.
32:35SPEAKERAnd you have to account for all of these different play
32:37SPEAKERstyles and the person who like,
32:39SPEAKERyou have to account for the person who likes using a pistol
32:40SPEAKERand a shotgun, right? Like pistol for range and shotgun for
32:43SPEAKERup close. And you have to account for a mixed group of
32:46SPEAKERpeople where two people are stone cold murderers and one
32:49SPEAKERperson is like a five-year-old and one person is,
32:52SPEAKERis somewhere in between.
32:56SPEAKERAnd, and as a result,
32:57SPEAKERthe conversations you have around this stuff are,
32:59SPEAKERare deeper. And like, I,
33:01SPEAKERI knew that these conversations existed.
33:03SPEAKERI did not appreciate how complicated it gets at how quickly
33:07SPEAKERon, on every aspect of making a game like this.
33:10SPEAKERAnd like, you know, this is a game that,
33:14SPEAKERthat is ultimately about shooting aliens. I mean,
33:17SPEAKERthere's a bunch of other stuff that happens along the way,
33:19SPEAKERbut it's, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's,
33:23SPEAKERI can't imagine when you get into a game that has like
33:26SPEAKER55,000 verbs or something like that. And like, there's,
33:29SPEAKERthere's a million, like, you know,
33:33SPEAKERthere's a million side objects,
33:34SPEAKERthese side things that you can do at all,
33:35SPEAKERgive any given moment and how you direct the player.
33:37SPEAKERAnyway, it's, it's, it's been really interesting. I did,
33:41SPEAKERI did do some command line stuff yesterday.
33:42SPEAKER- Oh?
33:43SPEAKER- Apropos of our conversation, I think last week.
33:45SPEAKER- Go on.
33:46SPEAKER- I installed PowerShell.
33:47SPEAKER- Oh, the PowerShell 7?
33:49SPEAKER- PowerShell 7.
33:50SPEAKER- Did you get it from their GitHub repo?
33:52SPEAKER- I did get it from the GitHub repo.
33:54SPEAKER- The way, the way they distribute that stuff is weird
33:56SPEAKERbecause like PowerShell 5,
33:58SPEAKERI want to say 5 is what ships with Windows 10 still.
34:01SPEAKER- Yeah.
34:02SPEAKER- 5 that ships with Windows 10 and 7 that you can go get
34:05SPEAKERfrom them now, which is the current version, kind of
34:07SPEAKERco-exist on your system, I believe?
34:09SPEAKER- Yeah. You, you ended up having them both installed.
34:11SPEAKERAnd I think one,
34:12SPEAKERI don't think 7 will install automatically,
34:14SPEAKERupgrade automatically. I have to do that manually.
34:16SPEAKER- Right. Like that, that stuff's a little confusing.
34:18SPEAKERI wish that they standardized, like a lot of this,
34:20SPEAKERa lot of this open source stuff they're doing is a little
34:22SPEAKERramshackle in terms of the way they're putting it out.
34:24SPEAKERLike that goes for PowerShell 7, Windows, Windows Terminal.
34:28SPEAKER- So I installed Windows Terminal.
34:29SPEAKERThat's what I wanted to talk about.
34:30SPEAKERCause that's, that is frigging rad.
34:32SPEAKER- Windows Terminal is quite good.
34:34SPEAKERAnd what was the other one I was going? Oh, Winget,
34:35SPEAKERwhich is the package manager that is,
34:37SPEAKERI guess just went 1.0 actually.
34:39SPEAKERLike I, I think it might be in the fall feature update.
34:43SPEAKERI think they might put that in, but the point is right now,
34:47SPEAKERlike all this stuff,
34:48SPEAKERyou kind of just need to go to Microsoft's GitHub,
34:50SPEAKERwhich is still a weird thing to say,
34:51SPEAKEReven though they own GitHub and download installers,
34:54SPEAKERlike there's no sort of in-line way to just get it.
34:58SPEAKER- My guess is that this stuff will end up being like
35:01SPEAKERpower, like, like power toys where it ends up getting
35:04SPEAKERbundled and like theoretically Winget should solve all of
35:07SPEAKERthese problems.
35:08SPEAKER- Yeah. That's, that's kind of what I want, you know,
35:10SPEAKERlike the way that they just quietly included the open SSH
35:13SPEAKERclient in Windows a couple of years ago, like I wish that's,
35:15SPEAKERI wish that's what they would do with all this stuff.
35:17SPEAKERCause it's like small and inoffensive enough that they could
35:19SPEAKERjust put it in every install and you don't need to think
35:21SPEAKERabout it. You tell me.
35:22SPEAKER- I mean, that expands your threat surface though.
35:25SPEAKERSo if they have problems with that software,
35:26SPEAKERthen it's going to cause problems for everybody that has
35:28SPEAKERinstalled. So better to leave it optional, I think.
35:30SPEAKER- That's that's a fair point.
35:31SPEAKER- But like, but if you could like,
35:33SPEAKERso I had to install node cause I was installing,
35:37SPEAKERI don't know if you're familiar with the press kit,
35:39SPEAKERthe open paren, closed paren.
35:41SPEAKER- Node node.js.
35:43SPEAKER- Hmm.
35:44SPEAKER- Sorry. Yes.
35:45SPEAKERRomy, Romy Ismail's press kit.
35:46SPEAKER- Romy Ismail's press kit tool.
35:48SPEAKER- Which is basically like, I just know this from osmosis,
35:50SPEAKERbut that's basically just a common framework for developers
35:53SPEAKERto put like a kind of a standardized press pitch package
35:57SPEAKERtogether with assets and information and links and stuff.
35:59SPEAKER- Right.
36:00SPEAKER- So his default version is like a PHP script that reads
36:02SPEAKERsome XML and folder structure and then generates like press
36:06SPEAKERkit pages. So it's like, here's what, who's in the company?
36:08SPEAKERWho's the founders? Who's the, what's the history?
36:11SPEAKERWhat's the, what's the theme thesis, you know?
36:13SPEAKER- Right.
36:14SPEAKER- Where are you based? What time zones?
36:15SPEAKERWhat's your phone number? What's your mailing address?
36:18SPEAKER- How can you get in touch with us?
36:19SPEAKERIt's a very standardized,
36:20SPEAKERlike nice clean format that I've seen like over and over
36:23SPEAKERover the years from indies in particular,
36:25SPEAKERlike it's a very cool thing he did.
36:27SPEAKERI can see why that would be super useful for small teams
36:29SPEAKERthat don't have time to build something bespoke.
36:31SPEAKER- Yeah. Like I was,
36:32SPEAKERI was literally sitting in a Squarespace website the other
36:34SPEAKERday and I was like, shit, this is a complete waste of time.
36:37SPEAKERWhy don't I, I'm trying to make this look good.
36:38SPEAKERI just need information here so that when somebody asks me
36:40SPEAKERfor, you know, a video file and some pictures,
36:44SPEAKERI can send it out.
36:45SPEAKERSo I went to press kit and it runs on PHP and it's like,
36:48SPEAKERman, I don't have to set up a PHP server.
36:49SPEAKERI'm not going to fool with that.
36:50SPEAKERSo then I searched for, for flat HTML press kit,
36:54SPEAKERparentheses, parentheses generator, and it turns out
36:58SPEAKERthat there is one, somebody made one.
37:01SPEAKER- They forked press kit is what she's saying.
37:02SPEAKER- Pixel nest, which is a, another game studio made one.
37:08SPEAKERThey're the folks they make like,
37:12SPEAKERthey make a bunch of cool stuff like Shmups
37:16SPEAKERand bullet hell games, it looks like.
37:19SPEAKERBut they made a flat text generator,
37:21SPEAKERflat HTML generator that you basically install node
37:25SPEAKERon your machine.
37:26SPEAKERYou dump all the stuff that you need in a folder
37:28SPEAKERon your hard drive, run a script and it generates
37:31SPEAKERthe XML file, the HTML files and the, and the website
37:34SPEAKERand all the JavaScript you need for the, for the,
37:37SPEAKERfor the press kits page to work.
37:39SPEAKERAnd then you just upload that to your web server.
37:41SPEAKERI was like, well, shit.
37:42SPEAKERSo like where our host doesn't let us just upload files
37:44SPEAKERto the web server, what am I going to do?
37:47SPEAKERSo I was like, I'm going to use, I'm gonna use GitHub pages.
37:50SPEAKER- Okay.
37:51SPEAKER- So then I had to install git.
37:53SPEAKERAnd so I had to install node, which installed chocolatey.
37:56SPEAKERSo then I used chocolatey to install git
37:58SPEAKERand I used git to push it to GitHub.
38:00SPEAKERAnd we have a pages.
38:02SPEAKER- Actual git, like.
38:04SPEAKER- Command line ask git.
38:06SPEAKER- Straight up Linus Torvalds developed git
38:07SPEAKERis what you're talking about.
38:08SPEAKER- I did, I did a git add a, add dash capital A.
38:13SPEAKERI did a git commit dash M slash first commit.
38:16SPEAKER- Man, I've never, that sounds fun.
38:17SPEAKER- I did git push dash U dash F.
38:21SPEAKERYou know, I got all the, I got all, I had to connect.
38:23SPEAKER- That's like, I have, this is probably too deep for us,
38:26SPEAKERbut that is some good old scene drama actually.
38:29SPEAKERThe creation of git.
38:30SPEAKERHave you ever seen, that's come up like.
38:30SPEAKER- Did he get pissed off about Fitz's SVN or something?
38:33SPEAKER- I don't know if it was SVN,
38:34SPEAKERbut it was something along those lines.
38:36SPEAKERIt may well have been, but like that's,
38:38SPEAKERthat story has been told a few times on our discord.
38:40SPEAKERAnd I always love getting in on that conversation.
38:42SPEAKERBut yes, like he apparently made git in like a week or two
38:45SPEAKERout of, so out of irritation.
38:47SPEAKER- Well, that seems like a Linus Torvald thing.
38:50SPEAKER- And apparently I think he made it just for kernel source,
38:53SPEAKERjust to do source control for the Linux kernel.
38:55SPEAKERIt was not intended to be some industry wide standard,
38:57SPEAKERwhich I gather from a lot of the developers on our discord
39:00SPEAKERis like why the core git user experience is a little rough.
39:05SPEAKER- So we used git at foo because,
39:09SPEAKERbecause like the game space,
39:11SPEAKERso git is typically web developers and like people who work
39:15SPEAKERwith a lot of text files, if you use a lot of binaries,
39:17SPEAKERpeople usually recommend use Perforce,
39:19SPEAKERwhich is like basically these source managers
39:25SPEAKERdifferentiate between binary files,
39:27SPEAKERlike images and video and sound and flat files.
39:32SPEAKERSo the text files ask you, I guess, are UTF files now,
39:35SPEAKERbut text files that are readable
39:39SPEAKERby the diff command easier.
39:42SPEAKER- Plain text, yeah.
39:43SPEAKER- Plain text, thank you.
39:45SPEAKERAnd git launched LFS around the same time we launched.
39:49SPEAKERAnd when I asked people if we should do Perforce,
39:51SPEAKEReverybody's like, do you have someone that can spend a day
39:54SPEAKERor two a month keeping this running?
39:55SPEAKERAnd I was like, no, we do not have that.
39:57SPEAKERAnd they're like, use git then.
39:59SPEAKERSo we used git and the thing that happens when you use git,
40:01SPEAKERif you don't have somebody in the organization,
40:03SPEAKERthat's good at git, is you end up having a post-it note
40:06SPEAKERon the side of your monitor that has the command to use
40:09SPEAKERwhen you fuck up git.
40:10SPEAKER- Okay, what is the command?
40:12SPEAKERDo you have it?
40:13SPEAKER- It's not here anymore, it's not my problem.
40:15SPEAKERI don't have to deal with that anymore.
40:16SPEAKER- Wait, is the post-it note no longer in your line of sight?
40:19SPEAKER- I do not have the post-it note here anymore.
40:21SPEAKER- Did you throw it away?
40:22SPEAKER- Yeah, dude, of course.
40:23SPEAKER- You might need it, you might need it again.
40:25SPEAKER- I do now, I wish I hadn't thrown it away,
40:26SPEAKERbut I think it was git, it's like git stash,
40:30SPEAKERwhich saves all the work that's different
40:31SPEAKERfrom what's on the server, and then you use the thing
40:34SPEAKERto pull the new thing down and then you merge it back in.
40:36SPEAKER- Okay, can I intercede here very briefly?
40:40SPEAKER- Yes, hello.
40:41SPEAKER- I was clicking around without thinking
40:42SPEAKERin the middle of the cold open.
40:44SPEAKERApparently at some point changed my default Google,
40:48SPEAKERI mean my default Chrome search engine
40:49SPEAKERto something called Ecosia.
40:51SPEAKER- Oh.
40:52SPEAKER- E-C-O-S-I-A dot org.
40:55SPEAKER- What's Ecosia?
40:56SPEAKER- If you thought you were fancy on DuckDuckGo.
41:00SPEAKERApparently I'm--
41:01SPEAKER- Plants trees?
41:02SPEAKER- Wow, trees, they claim to have planted
41:04SPEAKERover 127 million trees through their users.
41:09SPEAKERSearch the web to plant trees, so I'm, hmm,
41:12SPEAKERmight need to read a little more about this.
41:14SPEAKER- This is what these people, you know what--
41:16SPEAKER- Wait, are they using their ad revenue
41:17SPEAKERto fund tree planting?
41:21SPEAKERThat's kind of cool.
41:22SPEAKERI never heard of these, this was just in the dropdown
41:24SPEAKERin the Chrome settings for search engines
41:25SPEAKERand I accidentally clicked on it and now I'm searching--
41:28SPEAKER- What makes Germans?
41:29SPEAKER- Now I'm searching Ecosia, Ecosia, Ecosia?
41:32SPEAKER- Oh, they're a B Corp.
41:33SPEAKER- For the Windows version of git.
41:37SPEAKER- Huh.
41:38SPEAKER- I'm sorry, I didn't, go on.
41:41SPEAKER- So, no, git is interesting.
41:44SPEAKERGit LFS is, I don't know if I like, it's challenging.
41:47SPEAKER- What is LFS?
41:48SPEAKER- It's large files, so it's for binary files
41:50SPEAKERthat are larger than 50 megabytes.
41:52SPEAKER- I see, I see.
41:53SPEAKER- Texture maps and atlasing and stuff like that.
41:56SPEAKER- I'm looking for the Windows version to see who makes it.
41:59SPEAKERIs it just forked and maintained by random,
42:03SPEAKERno, no, the Windows version in particular.
42:05SPEAKER- Of git?
42:05SPEAKER- Yes.
42:08SPEAKERNot core git, which is obviously
42:09SPEAKERlike a very fundamental Linux tool.
42:12SPEAKER- I think, huh, I got it from Chocolaty.
42:16SPEAKER- Oh no, I'm talking about who makes it.
42:18SPEAKER- I know, this is a beautiful thing about Chocolaty,
42:19SPEAKERyou don't have to know it, you just type it in
42:21SPEAKERand it's like, Chocolaty install git and boom,
42:25SPEAKERor Choco install git and done.
42:26SPEAKER- Choco install whatever, yeah.
42:27SPEAKERYeah, I'm curious to see what happens
42:29SPEAKERwhen WinGit is more widely available
42:31SPEAKERand see if it eats Choco's lunch
42:34SPEAKERor what's gonna happen there.
42:37SPEAKER- I mean, look, I think it's gonna probably
42:39SPEAKERdrink its milkshake if it's gonna do anything.
42:40SPEAKER- I guess you're right.
42:43SPEAKER- No, so I'm a little skeeze, I was a little skeezed out
42:46SPEAKER'cause you have to install Chocolaty
42:47SPEAKERto install Node for Windows.
42:49SPEAKER- Yeah.
42:50SPEAKER- 'Cause I tried to do, what I tried to do,
42:53SPEAKERfirst I installed the Linux subsystem
42:56SPEAKERand put Ubuntu on the Windows machine.
42:58SPEAKER- WSL2?
42:59SPEAKER- WSL2, that I had to update to 21H2, H1, whatever.
43:03SPEAKER- Yes.
43:04SPEAKER- Whatever the current major version of Windows is
43:05SPEAKERto get that, so I did that and did the Linux install
43:10SPEAKERand I got to the point where I was app getting Node.js,
43:14SPEAKERthe Node packages, and it ate shit
43:17SPEAKERbecause it was like, yo, something is bad here.
43:21SPEAKERThis thing you're trying to do is too new
43:22SPEAKERfor us to understand.
43:23SPEAKERWe're gonna throw a bunch of error warnings
43:25SPEAKERand then I did the thing that lets you ignore the error,
43:28SPEAKERthe version erroring problems and then it just didn't work.
43:32SPEAKERSo I gave up and just installed Node for Windows
43:36SPEAKERand did all that stuff, so it ended up working out.
43:39SPEAKERIt was really good.
43:40SPEAKERThat press kit thing is really neat
43:42SPEAKER'cause you literally open an XML file
43:44SPEAKERand type in a bunch of text and you have to make sure
43:47SPEAKERyou exit out any non-XML compatible characters
43:51SPEAKERlike ampersands.
43:52SPEAKER- Escape all your stuff.
43:53SPEAKER- Escape your characters.
43:55SPEAKER- What's the escape character?
43:56SPEAKER- I didn't, I just changed,
43:58SPEAKERlike I'm gonna tell you the truth.
43:59SPEAKERI didn't take the time to look up
44:00SPEAKERwhat the escape character was.
44:02SPEAKERI just rewrote the sentences that had escaped character
44:05SPEAKERso I didn't have to deal with it.
44:05SPEAKER- You just took out anything that needed to be escaped?
44:08SPEAKER- Yeah. - Oh boy.
44:09SPEAKER- You know how I did it?
44:11SPEAKERI went to an XML validator website.
44:13SPEAKER- Great.
44:14SPEAKER- And I copied out small chunks of the webpage
44:15SPEAKERuntil it validated and then I was like, okay,
44:17SPEAKERwell the problem's clearly here.
44:19SPEAKER- I mean, more and more over time I get the impression
44:22SPEAKERthis is how everything happens.
44:24SPEAKER- I used to feel bad about doing stuff like that,
44:27SPEAKERbut I was like, I have a few hours to do this
44:30SPEAKERand I would like to see my daughter tonight, so.
44:33SPEAKER- Right, I mean, we have a lot of very skilled developers
44:36SPEAKERon our Discord and yet I still see them all the time
44:38SPEAKERsaying things like, I don't know how I would get
44:40SPEAKERany development done without Google.
44:41SPEAKERLike I don't know what I did before Stack Exchange
44:44SPEAKERor you know what I mean?
44:46SPEAKER- I mean, some of the people I know
44:47SPEAKERwho are the best programmers I've ever known
44:49SPEAKERliterally have a portrait monitor beside their computer
44:52SPEAKERso they can keep the docs open on it all the time
44:54SPEAKERand like Google search windows.
44:56SPEAKERSo yeah, no, I think that's like,
44:59SPEAKERif we don't use the tools that we have
45:00SPEAKERto expand the capacity of our brains,
45:03SPEAKERwhy do we build those tools?
45:04SPEAKER- That's a good point.
45:06SPEAKERWhen you put it that way, it's hard to argue with.
45:08SPEAKER- Yeah, like let the machines do the remembering
45:11SPEAKERand let us do the thinking.
45:12SPEAKER- Oh man, speaking of machines,
45:16SPEAKERyou wanna wrap up here, talk about bots a little bit?
45:19SPEAKER- I love bots.
45:20SPEAKER- Well, I didn't wanna spend the whole episode
45:22SPEAKERon your game necessarily, but maybe we'll get back to this.
45:25SPEAKERI was interested in the stuff you mentioned
45:27SPEAKERabout putting up guard rails in your game
45:29SPEAKERto discourage toxic behavior and encourage good behavior.
45:32SPEAKER- Oh yeah, so let's see, Chet talked about this
45:34SPEAKERin some of the press that we did this week
45:35SPEAKERso I can talk about this stuff
45:36SPEAKERwithout making anybody upset with me.
45:41SPEAKERSo for example, if you're playing Left 4 Dead
45:45SPEAKERand they drop items in the world that are unique items
45:47SPEAKERlike power ups or like imagine,
45:50SPEAKERso like we like the idea of class-based games
45:54SPEAKERlike your Deep Rocks where you pick a class
45:56SPEAKERand then you play that role the entire time you're playing
45:59SPEAKERand then you level up that character
46:02SPEAKERand he becomes kind of your guy in that game, right?
46:05SPEAKERBut the bad thing,
46:06SPEAKERthe downside of that kind of class-based game
46:09SPEAKERis that then you end up being the person in your group,
46:11SPEAKERif you play with a regular group, you become that guy
46:14SPEAKERand you can't really try the other things.
46:15SPEAKERSo like if you wanna be the engineer in Deep Rock
46:17SPEAKERbut you're usually the driller, then sorry, too bad,
46:19SPEAKERyou're probably the driller for life, right?
46:26SPEAKERInstead of making people choose,
46:27SPEAKERlike tying classes to the characters in the game,
46:31SPEAKERLance or Nessa or Guillaume or Leo,
46:36SPEAKEReverybody starts with the same skills, right?
46:38SPEAKERAnd then as you play through the game,
46:40SPEAKERyou find upgrade stations, perk upgrade stations
46:43SPEAKERcalled matter compilers and each, the AI places the,
46:48SPEAKERthe AI knows about what you're doing, Brad,
46:50SPEAKERknows how you play and it knows whether you're playing
46:52SPEAKERwith people you usually play with or don't
46:54SPEAKERand it gives you perks to choose from,
46:57SPEAKERlike a set of two or three perks to choose from
46:59SPEAKERand you can build out a multi-class,
47:01SPEAKERlike you can build out your own class each time.
47:03SPEAKERSo you can put everything into upgrading your pulse shield,
47:07SPEAKERthe knockback thing that pushes the bad guys away from you
47:10SPEAKERand then make that like do damage and be an offensive skill
47:14SPEAKERor you can spread your points around,
47:17SPEAKERbecome kind of a generalist,
47:18SPEAKERlike make you the healer and pretty good at damage
47:21SPEAKERor you can load everything into like one of the guns
47:24SPEAKERand then you'll get, you know, you can like headshots
47:27SPEAKERwill make the bad guys explode or something like that.
47:30SPEAKERAnd the upshot is you get a wildly different play,
47:34SPEAKERit's part of making a game that's infinitely replayable,
47:36SPEAKERright, it's like the character progression
47:38SPEAKERis different each game.
47:40SPEAKERBut the reason, this is back to your question,
47:45SPEAKERthe reason we do that that way is that if we just drop
47:48SPEAKERthose things as like a consumable in the world,
47:51SPEAKERthen the person who was in the lead would end up getting,
47:54SPEAKERcollecting all of those and the people behind
47:56SPEAKERwouldn't get any.
47:57SPEAKERSo like, if you're a new player and you're slower,
47:59SPEAKERthen you're penalized for being new,
48:02SPEAKERwhereas this makes it an exciting moment for everybody.
48:04SPEAKERYou're like, hey, I found a matter compiler,
48:05SPEAKEReverybody gather around, you all go stand around the thing,
48:07SPEAKERyou pick out your upgrade and like there's an opportunity
48:09SPEAKERfor the enemies to attack at that point
48:11SPEAKERand apply some pressure and stuff like that, it's fun.
48:13SPEAKER- Okay, that sounds cool.
48:16SPEAKER- Yeah, and it's a lot of like,
48:18SPEAKERit turns out it's a lot of like little stuff like that
48:20SPEAKERwhere you're not putting the players
48:22SPEAKERin competition with each other necessarily.
48:24SPEAKERYou're just giving them, you're putting them in situations
48:28SPEAKERthat foster cooperation instead of competition.
48:30SPEAKER- Well, the reason that comment stood out to me
48:32SPEAKERearlier in the episode is that that's also a lesson
48:35SPEAKERyou have taught me with Discord,
48:37SPEAKERwith the TechPod Discord server, which is,
48:40SPEAKERI assume is a lesson you learned running your own Discord
48:42SPEAKERfor your Twitch channel before that.
48:44SPEAKER- Maybe.
48:45SPEAKER- Which is that like, you basically told me early on,
48:47SPEAKERlike you can essentially influence the culture
48:50SPEAKERof your community just by modeling the type of good behavior
48:53SPEAKERthat you would like to see, right?
48:55SPEAKER- Oh, yeah.
48:56SPEAKER- Like the thing that really stood out to me
48:57SPEAKERwas that you made an effort early on,
49:00SPEAKERthere's a little message in the Discord
49:01SPEAKERwhenever somebody joins for the first time
49:03SPEAKERthat just is like, oh, so-and-so is here
49:04SPEAKERand like you told me you made an effort
49:06SPEAKERto go and emote at every one of those you saw.
49:09SPEAKER- Every single, like for the first year,
49:11SPEAKERI did every one that I could find.
49:12SPEAKERI'm sure I missed some and I'm sorry, but yeah.
49:14SPEAKER- Right, and like now everybody does that.
49:15SPEAKERLike it's just a nice fun little warm thing
49:17SPEAKERand like now people do goofy custom ones
49:19SPEAKERthat are like goofing on people's usernames
49:21SPEAKERand all kinds of stuff like that.
49:22SPEAKER- Or like sometimes it says, I hope you brought pizza
49:24SPEAKERand then that person always gets a bunch of pizza slices.
49:26SPEAKERI love that stuff.
49:27SPEAKER- It's goofy, you know, it's such a small little thing,
49:29SPEAKERbut it's like, it kind of increases the feeling
49:33SPEAKERof sort of camaraderie, I guess.
49:36SPEAKER- Well, I mean, it's the benefit of being able
49:40SPEAKERto do this slowly over time, right?
49:42SPEAKERLike is that, you know, we started quietly and slow.
49:48SPEAKER- Yes.
49:49SPEAKER- It's gotta be, I don't wanna say scary
49:52SPEAKER'cause scary is not exactly the right word,
49:53SPEAKERbut like you kind of went from zero to 1,000 on Nextlander.
49:57SPEAKER- Yes, we have a very large discord
49:58SPEAKERand like to be clear, moderation is coming.
50:01SPEAKERLike we are trying to start thinking about how to shape that.
50:04SPEAKERLike with a server that big,
50:06SPEAKERyou obviously have got to have some
50:08SPEAKERactual guardrails in place, but even there,
50:10SPEAKERlike even there people have been super chill so far
50:12SPEAKERand like, I've tried to take that lesson
50:14SPEAKERthat you taught me there and do some of that same stuff
50:17SPEAKERand just, you know, everything doesn't have to be
50:20SPEAKERheavy-handed moderation and rules all the time,
50:22SPEAKERI guess is the point.
50:23SPEAKERLike you can, from the bottom up,
50:26SPEAKERtry to influence things in a positive direction
50:28SPEAKERand not just drop rule books on people constantly.
50:31SPEAKER- I was gonna say, this is one of the benefits of being old
50:34SPEAKERand having an older audience is like,
50:36SPEAKER- Sure.
50:37SPEAKER- Like the people who want to engage with the stuff
50:39SPEAKERthat I make now and that you make now
50:42SPEAKERare probably older and less likely to tolerate bullshit.
50:45SPEAKERAnd as a result, they're less likely to create bullshit.
50:48SPEAKERAnd like you end up in a situation where like
50:51SPEAKERon my Twitch discord, the mods are just kind of like,
50:54SPEAKERthey're conversation stewards, right?
50:56SPEAKERLike we don't ban people.
50:58SPEAKERI think we banned a couple of my daughter's
51:01SPEAKERlike school friends who found the discord
51:03SPEAKERand came in and rick rolled one of our mods.
51:06SPEAKER- It may be better not to be less sad about that.
51:08SPEAKER- Yeah, look, that was funny.
51:10SPEAKERIt's fine, that resulted in maybe the most awkward
51:13SPEAKERparent conversation I've ever had, which was like,
51:16SPEAKERhey, I'm gonna tell you a bunch of stuff all at once
51:18SPEAKERand then you can ask some questions at the end,
51:20SPEAKERbut let me just talk for a minute.
51:22SPEAKERI do this thing every night and yeah.
51:25SPEAKER- This sounds like parenting guidebook, market opportunity.
51:31SPEAKERWhen to talk to your child about discord moderation.
51:34SPEAKER- No, no, no, it's like how to introduce
51:36SPEAKERyour children's friends to the fact that your dad
51:38SPEAKERstreams video games on Twitch every night.
51:41SPEAKER- This is a problem that is unique to our generation.
51:44SPEAKER- Yeah, and it's a book for like Vinny and me
51:46SPEAKERand I guess Greg Miller now and people who,
51:52SPEAKERDrake's kid, Drake and Andrea's kid
51:54SPEAKERand people who have public streaming personas
51:57SPEAKERand also have children.
51:59SPEAKER- But also being the first generation
52:01SPEAKERthat truly grew up with technology and video games, right?
52:04SPEAKERAnd communications.
52:06SPEAKER- Yeah.
52:07SPEAKER- Our parents never had to deal with this stuff
52:09SPEAKERbecause they were not into these things,
52:10SPEAKERand the people after us won't have to deal with it either
52:12SPEAKERbecause by then it'll just be a fact of life.
52:14SPEAKEREverybody will understand it, right?
52:16SPEAKER- But there's always a new thing, I think, right?
52:18SPEAKERLike the people growing up now
52:21SPEAKERare the ones that grew up with AR or whatever.
52:23SPEAKER- Oh sure, yeah, there will be new technologies,
52:25SPEAKERbut I mean, I would argue
52:26SPEAKERthere were no technologies previously.
52:29SPEAKERElectronics communications kind of didn't exist in this form.
52:33SPEAKER- That is, I mean, it's weird though, Brad,
52:35SPEAKERbecause there is such a wide spectrum
52:38SPEAKERof technology experience
52:40SPEAKERin the parent group of my daughter's class,
52:44SPEAKERbecause A, like Jean and I are on the way old side
52:47SPEAKERfor first kid in whatever grade she's in now,
52:51SPEAKERI'm not gonna say.
52:54SPEAKERYou know what I mean?
52:55SPEAKERIt's like, so there are some people in my daughter's class
53:00SPEAKERwho are young millennials.
53:02SPEAKERThere are some people who are parents.
53:05SPEAKERThere are some people who are somewhere
53:09SPEAKERbetween young Gen X, like mid Gen X.
53:15SPEAKERSo it's a wide range.
53:16SPEAKERThere are parents who are 50
53:17SPEAKERand there are parents who are 25.
53:19SPEAKER- Wow.
53:20SPEAKER- And there's an equally wide spectrum
53:22SPEAKERof technology experience and embrasure.
53:24SPEAKER- Sure.
53:25SPEAKER- Like some of the kids didn't get an iPad
53:27SPEAKERuntil pandemic started, right?
53:29SPEAKERAnd they needed a computer
53:31SPEAKERthat they could do schoolwork with.
53:32SPEAKER- Right.
53:33SPEAKER- Some of the kids hadn't played video games
53:35SPEAKERor any of that stuff until then too.
53:36SPEAKERAnd that's kind of like, if there's one universal,
53:39SPEAKERit's that the games as social spaces
53:42SPEAKERand like a play way to interact with your friends,
53:45SPEAKEReven when you can't be with them in person,
53:47SPEAKERexploded over the last year and a half.
53:49SPEAKERAnd that I think is ultimately gonna be a really good thing.
53:52SPEAKER- Yes, very interesting time to be online.
53:55SPEAKER- Yes.
53:57SPEAKERI guess that's the place to wrap it up, huh?
53:59SPEAKER- Yeah, I guess so.
54:00SPEAKERI hope people like this episode.
54:02SPEAKERLet us know what you think about this episode.
54:03SPEAKERI always feel a little bad.
54:04SPEAKERThis is supposed to be a sort of topic driven show.
54:07SPEAKERAnd when we just come in and ramble about whatever,
54:09SPEAKERI hope people like it.
54:12SPEAKER- Yeah, so next couple of weeks,
54:13SPEAKERwe have a really interesting guest lined up
54:17SPEAKERthat I have to book a time with
54:18SPEAKERso we can actually get a recording done.
54:20SPEAKERAnd then we can also talk about,
54:23SPEAKERif you all care about what we think about WWDC
54:25SPEAKERand Google IO, let us know.
54:26SPEAKER- Yeah.
54:27SPEAKER- And we'll put together an episode for that next week.
54:29SPEAKER- I'm always mixed on that.
54:30SPEAKERSo especially if we do like an Apple only episode,
54:33SPEAKERI worry that we're gonna lose Android people
54:35SPEAKERand vice versa.
54:35SPEAKERSo that stuff's always a little hard to juggle.
54:39SPEAKER- And the challenge for me is that as somebody
54:40SPEAKERwho doesn't engage with Android on the reg anymore,
54:43SPEAKERit's hard.
54:44SPEAKERLike I'm always worried that I'm gonna not,
54:47SPEAKERlike I'm gonna not understand the important thing
54:49SPEAKERabout the Google IO announcements in a way that is important.
54:53SPEAKERLike we intentionally shy away from,
54:56SPEAKERrip from the headline stuff on this podcast.
54:58SPEAKER- Yes, yes.
54:59SPEAKER- But if it's something you all want,
55:00SPEAKERlet us know and we'll do it.
55:01SPEAKER- Yeah.
55:02SPEAKER- As always, you can send emails to techpod@content.town.
55:05SPEAKERI think Brad made a, you made a--
55:07SPEAKER- Oh, I didn't do it yet.
55:08SPEAKERI need to do it.
55:09SPEAKER- Well, it's up by now.
55:10SPEAKERThey're not hearing this until the future.
55:12SPEAKER- Yeah, I totally made.
55:13SPEAKER- Good job, man.
55:14SPEAKER- You're talking about the Q&A channel?
55:15SPEAKER- Yeah, the Q&A channel.
55:16SPEAKER- Yeah, we're gonna to kind of backstop
55:19SPEAKERour monthly email episodes.
55:21SPEAKERWe're also, I'm gonna make a Q&A channel on the Discord
55:24SPEAKERwhere people can drop questions in as well.
55:25SPEAKER- Does that mean you're gonna have to say Q&A's now
55:27SPEAKERinstead of emails?
55:28SPEAKER- Guess so.
55:29SPEAKERE-mails and we'll figure it out.
55:32SPEAKER- I've always liked turning Q's into A's.
55:34SPEAKERThat's one of my favorite things to do.
55:36SPEAKER- That's not bad.
55:37SPEAKERRun it through our patented scientific process.
55:38SPEAKER- Yes, it's a 12 step.
55:41SPEAKER- Figured that would be a slightly lower barrier to entry
55:43SPEAKERfor people who are active on the Discord
55:45SPEAKERto just throw show questions in there, so.
55:47SPEAKER- Yeah, and I think we'll make it a slow channel
55:49SPEAKERso there's not a conversation.
55:51SPEAKERIt's just like you post your one thing
55:52SPEAKERand then you go the fuck away.
55:53SPEAKER- Yes, we'll put the slow mode on there
55:55SPEAKERso people can just drop questions
55:56SPEAKERas they think of them and move on,
55:58SPEAKERbut that should be up on the Discord soon.
56:00SPEAKER- We might be able to make it
56:01SPEAKERso that they can't even see the questions
56:02SPEAKERonce they've posted them.
56:03SPEAKERSo then it's just a black hole into which questions go.
56:06SPEAKER- Interesting, can we do that?
56:08SPEAKER- We have that power, yes.
56:09SPEAKER- The Discord roles,
56:10SPEAKERand this is like a whole other episode almost,
56:12SPEAKERthe Discord roles and permissions framework
56:14SPEAKERis extremely powerful, but also a lot to learn.
56:17SPEAKER- Discord is awesome.
56:19SPEAKER- They've done some work.
56:20SPEAKERThere is a lot of stuff going on in that thing.
56:22SPEAKER- It is very thoughtful what they have done
56:23SPEAKERwith the way those channels work.
56:26SPEAKER- It is way beyond just like graphical IRC at this point.
56:28SPEAKER- Yes.
56:30SPEAKERSpeaking of Discords, it's a great time to mention
56:32SPEAKERthe fabulous TechPod Patreon,
56:34SPEAKERwhere you can get access
56:35SPEAKERto the even more fabulous TechPod Discord.
56:40SPEAKERI think we've committed internally
56:41SPEAKERto changing the tiers at the end of this month.
56:44SPEAKER- Yes, tentatively, we're getting there.
56:46SPEAKER- So if you want to get in the Discord at the $2 level,
56:49SPEAKERthen now is the time.
56:50SPEAKERYou can go to patreon.com/techpod,
56:53SPEAKERand for $2, you can join our community.
56:56SPEAKERWe have a bunch of interesting,
56:59SPEAKERlike there was a big conversation yesterday
57:02SPEAKERduring E3 stuff at the big tech announcements channel,
57:04SPEAKERlike talking about the Summer Game Fest show
57:06SPEAKERand Day of the Dev stuff that was unveiled.
57:10SPEAKERThere's always, there's literally
57:11SPEAKERalways something interesting happening,
57:13SPEAKERand there's always good stuff to learn,
57:14SPEAKERso highly recommend that if that is interesting to you.
57:18SPEAKERAnd then again, that's patreon.com/techpod.
57:22SPEAKERAnd as always on, at the end of our shows,
57:25SPEAKERwe always thank our executive producer tier patrons,
57:28SPEAKERincluding Andrew Slosky, the Bunny Fiend,
57:31SPEAKERJacob Chappell, Joel Krauska, Twinkle Twinkie,
57:34SPEAKERDavid Allen, and James Kamik.
57:35SPEAKERThank you all so much for your support,
57:37SPEAKERand everyone who supports the pod.
57:39SPEAKER- Thank you so much.
57:40SPEAKERI don't know if this needs to be said.
57:42SPEAKERAm I being paranoid here?
57:43SPEAKERBut I just want to mention
57:45SPEAKERthat I remain fully committed to this podcast.
57:48SPEAKERI love this podcast,
57:49SPEAKERand I especially love the community that we've put together.
57:52SPEAKER- Thanks, Brian.
57:53SPEAKER- I just want everybody to know I will be.
57:55SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, we're not going anywhere.
57:57SPEAKERWe, before you started Nextlander,
57:59SPEAKERwe had a conversation when I was like,
58:01SPEAKERhey, I think I'm going to take this full-time job
58:03SPEAKERworking for Chet. - Yes.
58:04SPEAKER- And you were like, do you want to stop doing the podcast?
58:06SPEAKERI was like, no, like I--
58:08SPEAKER- Well, I didn't say, do you want to stop doing it?
58:09SPEAKERI was more like, I was like trying to make sure
58:12SPEAKERyou weren't going to stop.
58:13SPEAKER- Yeah, so like the thing I said to you is,
58:17SPEAKERI intend to do this podcast until I can't talk
58:20SPEAKERor nobody listens. - Right.
58:22SPEAKER- 'Cause I enjoy spending, like the hour that we sit down
58:25SPEAKERand talk about some weird tech nonsense is my favorite,
58:28SPEAKERone of my favorite hours every week.
58:30SPEAKERIt's always good.
58:31SPEAKER- Absolutely feel the exact same way.
58:33SPEAKERLike this, I mean, this is the show
58:35SPEAKERwhere I can be the most myself, I would say,
58:37SPEAKERwhich is a great comfort to me.
58:39SPEAKERAnd also that Discord, like to a large extent,
58:42SPEAKERhelped me get through the pandemic last year.
58:44SPEAKERLike it was a real lifeline to interacting with cool people.
58:47SPEAKER- Well, yeah, and like also it's been incredibly powerful
58:51SPEAKERfor me 'cause like coming out of the end of food,
58:55SPEAKERwhen you have a business that hasn't gone well,
58:57SPEAKERyou kind of are like, well, shit, what should I do?
58:59SPEAKERShould I just go fucking start driving Uber or something?
59:02SPEAKERWhat am I going to do?
59:04SPEAKERAnd like, not that there's anything wrong with driving Uber,
59:07SPEAKERbut like, I just, I literally had no idea
59:10SPEAKERwhen we were starting this, like what my next thing was.
59:12SPEAKERI was like, if I do a podcast
59:14SPEAKERand I'm not attached to Adam and Norm
59:15SPEAKERand all the places I had been before,
59:17SPEAKERpeople are going to listen
59:18SPEAKERor people are going to want to engage with that.
59:20SPEAKERAnd it was really gratifying and fun
59:24SPEAKERand also a wonderful excuse to sit down
59:26SPEAKERand hang out with you every week, Brad.
59:27SPEAKER- Absolutely, yes, I am like you.
59:29SPEAKERI will do this thing for as long
59:31SPEAKERas people want to listen to it.
59:32SPEAKERIt's one of my favorite things that I have ever done.
59:35SPEAKER- Yeah, back the show if you want.
59:37SPEAKERIf you don't, that's fine, just tell your friends.
59:38SPEAKERThat's the best thing.
59:39SPEAKER- Just thanks for listening.
59:40SPEAKERThanks for leaving iTunes reviews.
59:42SPEAKERSpread the word.
59:43SPEAKER- Yeah, and oh, hey, so one last business.
59:45SPEAKERThis is, I'm going to kind of shill for my new job,
59:48SPEAKERbut I'm also, I just want to shill
59:49SPEAKERfor like indie game people everywhere.
59:51SPEAKERIf you like indie games,
59:52SPEAKERand I feel like a lot of people here probably do,
59:55SPEAKERlike the kindest thing you can do to an indie,
59:57SPEAKERfor an indie game that like isn't available to buy yet
1:00:00SPEAKERis to go on Steam and mash the wishlist button
1:00:04SPEAKERbecause that wishlist button
1:00:05SPEAKERis what drives discoverability across Steam
1:00:07SPEAKERfor things you can't buy yet.
1:00:09SPEAKER- Interesting.
1:00:10SPEAKERSo like if you saw games that were announced yesterday,
1:00:13SPEAKERand I'm not asking you to come do the game
1:00:15SPEAKERthat I'm working on.
1:00:16SPEAKERI'm just saying like that 2D cel shaded thing
1:00:19SPEAKERthat was right at the beginning that had the song
1:00:21SPEAKERthat looks like a Zelda exploration game.
1:00:24SPEAKER- Sable?
1:00:25SPEAKER- Sable, holy shit.
1:00:26SPEAKERLike I couldn't get to Steam fast enough
1:00:28SPEAKERto mash the button on that thing.
1:00:29SPEAKERIt looks unbelievable.
1:00:30SPEAKER- So that feeds into algorithms that pushes stuff?
1:00:32SPEAKER- That feeds into what gets,
1:00:34SPEAKERit feeds into what gets shown
1:00:36SPEAKERon like the new and upcoming on Steam.
1:00:38SPEAKER- I see.
1:00:38SPEAKER- And that stuff drives like,
1:00:41SPEAKERthat is make or break for new games,
1:00:44SPEAKERespecially new franchises and for indie studios.
1:00:46SPEAKER- I didn't know it was that crucial.
1:00:47SPEAKER- Yeah, so the more people who mash those wishlist buttons,
1:00:50SPEAKERlike literally take five minutes
1:00:52SPEAKERand go down the list of games.
1:00:54SPEAKERI think that there's even a summer game fest
1:00:56SPEAKERcurated list on Steam.
1:00:58SPEAKERAnd you can go down and see all the games
1:01:00SPEAKERthat were in there yesterday
1:01:01SPEAKERand literally hit the button on anything
1:01:03SPEAKERyou thought was cool and would like to know more about
1:01:05SPEAKER'cause that helps those people so, so much.
1:01:07SPEAKER- Yeah, that's a hot tip.
1:01:09SPEAKER- I did not understand that before.
1:01:10SPEAKER- There's a lot of things you learn
1:01:11SPEAKERwhen you go on the inside.
1:01:12SPEAKER- Dude, you have no fucking idea.
1:01:15SPEAKERYeah, it's always good to talk to you, Brad.
1:01:17SPEAKERWe'll see you next week, I guess.
1:01:18SPEAKER- You too, yeah, thank you everybody.
1:01:19SPEAKER- And thanks for listening, everybody.
1:01:20SPEAKERWe'll see you all next week too.