The Future Proof Podcast 019
Melissa Avery-Weir 0:21
Hello, and welcome to the Future Proof Podcast. This is our monthly podcast where we chat about stuff we're working on and anything cool we're planning. I'm Melissa Avery-Weir.
Gregory Avery-Weir 0:30
And I'm Gregory Avery-Weir and we've got a fun project that's almost ready to launch.
Melissa Avery-Weir 0:37
Yes. By the time you hear this will be just a couple of days away from the first issue of our Future Proof Newsletter, or Future Proof Games newsletter?
Gregory Avery-Weir 0:47
Yeah, the we're still workshopping the exact name.
Melissa Avery-Weir 0:50
Yeah. So this is going to be a monthly newsletter. It's basically replacing the Exploit: Zero Day newsletter. It's going to cover a broader range of topics. Anything we're working on, basically, instead of just Exploit: Zero Day. There'll be a cat picture, certainly in this first one. One of the things that's going to be particularly fun is that there's going to be a, I guess, a bespoke article in it. Something that won't end up on the blog per se, but will be specific to the newsletter. This month I'm writing about the intersection and interaction between the game Satisfactory and colonialism and capitalism. So--It's a fun game. I've put a lot of hours into it. Too many hours. So I'm excited to write that. Tt's difficult not tried too much.
Gregory Avery-Weir 1:37
I mean, the the body of the newsletter will just be "Hey, what are we up to?" The same sort of news you get from from this but in text form.
Melissa Avery-Weir 1:45
With links.
Gregory Avery-Weir 1:46
Yeah. Easy to easy to follow, easy to digest.
Melissa Avery-Weir 1:49
Yeah. Although we don't have cat pictures in this.
Gregory Avery-Weir 1:52
No, we don't. We could describe your cats but that might be a little weird.
Melissa Avery-Weir 1:58
So speaking of current work efforts. We are working on an update to Majesty of Colors.
Gregory Avery-Weir 2:05
Yeah, The Majesty the Colors was released a little over two years ago. And we've been hard at work on our anniversary release. I think we've talked about it a couple times on podcasts. We're real close now! We're hoping to... maybe end of the month?
Melissa Avery-Weir 2:20
Yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 2:20
That would be... that. As long as nothing goes wrong, we should be able to pull that off. And some good features in it. There have been a few things that we've--that are sort of usability/quality of life fixes.
Gregory Avery-Weir 2:35
A few things that we've kind of had to like delve into the animation system of Unity, and we've kind of come out being like, how did this ever work? Like it... was this? Like, whenever you're doing, doing programming and stuff like that, there are always those times where you're like: I know this was working, but it must have like just been the result of tweaks and stuff, and stuff where we're like, "okay, it works, don't touch it."
Melissa Avery-Weir 2:58
Right.
Gregory Avery-Weir 2:58
And part of, some of what we've been doing has involved like pulling stuff out being like: okay, no, let's, let's make sure this is this is working, because we designed it well and not just because we hit a lucky sweet spot on it. But we're feeling good about the new features. Both, like, a few little additions to how you play but mostly stuff like we you can make text stay on screen longer if that's something that, that you need to get a full experience out of the game or just prefer.
Melissa Avery-Weir 3:26
Or you can skip text.
Gregory Avery-Weir 3:28
Yeah. So if you're, you know, on your 20th time through, you could say no, I don't need to hear that. I don't even need to read that again. So yeah.
Melissa Avery-Weir 3:36
It's been it's been fun. Unity's animation system is not my best friend.
Gregory Avery-Weir 3:42
Yeah, it's--I think it's generally pretty good, especially in more recent versions.
Melissa Avery-Weir 3:47
It's probably just fine. It's my lack of skill.
Gregory Avery-Weir 3:48
Yeah, it's just, it's uh, yeah, it's, it's a, it's a very unique paradigm of like making things happen on a computer.
Melissa Avery-Weir 3:55
Yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 3:56
That like, until you've spent a lot of time in that paradigm it's really tricky to get going.
Melissa Avery-Weir 4:01
And yeah, so it's one of those things where I'll go in and I'll be like, "okay, like I see, you know, got my state machine here. But oh, yeah, there's the bottom panel of stuff. And how does that even intersect with the--?"
Gregory Avery-Weir 4:07
There's the timeline. There's a state machine and different animation states and all that.
Melissa Avery-Weir 4:14
Yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 4:14
It's a whole thing.
Melissa Avery-Weir 4:14
So it's been fun and frustrating. I spent probably way more time than needed to get some of those things done. But it's good to do. And getting to redesign some of that to be a little cleaner. Like, it's, it's tempting to be like, "Hey, we're only going to do, you know, let's say three more notable updates for Majesty of Colors. We don't need to get this part of the game."
Melissa Avery-Weir 4:39
Except that what if the next time we go in there, then we're like, "Oh, well, now it's in minus one times. We surely don't need to update it now." But it still takes two more hours than it should or whatever. So it's good to get some of that stuff cleaned up.
Gregory Avery-Weir 4:50
Yeah, keeping our workspace clean.
Melissa Avery-Weir 4:52
Yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 4:53
So one another thing that you've been been becoming an expert on... is our taxes and accounting.
Melissa Avery-Weir 5:00
Yes. So I know last year or episode that fell in March featured me geeking about taxes. I will shorten that geekery this year it was much simpler. Except that... so in October or November, I discovered that I had been doing accounting wrong... as... as one does. So I reworked everything for 2019 relatively, relatively late in the year.
Gregory Avery-Weir 5:30
This isn't like changing the numbers, right? It's just like? This is like correcting where things are written down in the account?
Melissa Avery-Weir 5:36
Yeah, this is sort of understanding better how cash basis accounting works, not anything sketch. So I'm getting much better at this. I'm also getting better at like keeping up on it. So even if I maybe don't do accounting for a whole month or something like that, like I can get caught up pretty quickly, which meant that I was able to close the books out by mid January and kind of be like, haha! Taxes were pretty simple, as always. I mean, it's like anything where you wish they were more complicated.
Gregory Avery-Weir 6:06
Yeah, if we, if we were making more money--
Melissa Avery-Weir 6:08
Right.
Gregory Avery-Weir 6:09
Then they'd be more complicated.
Melissa Avery-Weir 6:10
But that's okay. So I'm glad it's done. Very smooth. Only a couple questions back and forth with the accountant, trying to figure out how I should classify things or whatever. That's like a nice closing button on closing up 2019 and we had our business meeting since the last podcast I think so that all just kind of zips up 2019.
Gregory Avery-Weir 6:33
And we've reviewed all the stuff for the final in the fourth quarter of 2019. And we're ready to almost ready to do the first quarter of 2020.
Melissa Avery-Weir 6:43
Exciting! So our final bit of fun things we've been working on speaking of anniversaries and closing up years. This is a very wrapping up sort of series of events for us but we are also working on some additional material for Rosette Diceless.
Gregory Avery-Weir 7:01
Yeah, so we released a relatively small roleplaying book that was, with some, some base rules and things like that that's been out for a while. And we've been doing some often on some, like supplemental material, some articles and stuff on our, on our website that have like, here's some of our thoughts about the game and like a little bit of extra rules that you can use in your game if you want.
Gregory Avery-Weir 7:25
And so, so as part of sort of the next step in the lifecycle of that of that game, we're both wrapping up a lot of that stuff into an easy to reference book/PDF, or whatever. And then also like adding a few things so that like, if you want to get like a fully formatted product, you're actually getting something new that's not just taken from the website.
Gregory Avery-Weir 7:47
And we'd for a while, just sort of been like we know we'll have some stuff we want to put in that's new. We're not quite sure what it'll be.
Melissa Avery-Weir 7:55
Yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 7:56
But recently, that stuff has been solidifying and part in thanks to new players that have joined our home game where we are we play it ourselves every couple of weeks. And so like things like, we're going to have a trait for characters that... what are we calling it? Disembodied?
Melissa Avery-Weir 8:16
Disembodied. Yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 8:17
And it's, it's like, what, what do you do if you want to play in AI or a ghost or like, you know, the, you know, some, some, some person or entity that doesn't really have this physical form or maybe their physical form isn't important. They're like they do psychic projection or something. And I love that Rosette Diceless can kind of support that relatively simply.
Melissa Avery-Weir 8:39
Yeah, it seems like we can we're gonna add one, I think, superlative?
Gregory Avery-Weir 8:45
I think it's just a positive trait.
Melissa Avery-Weir 8:46
Okay.
Gregory Avery-Weir 8:46
I don't think it's even as big as like, "you can do magic."
Melissa Avery-Weir 8:49
Right.
Melissa Avery-Weir 8:50
And even though our home game is is science fiction, the stuff we're coming up with certainly fits in on sci fi. So like disembodied--like you mentioned ghosts, which could be whatever.
Gregory Avery-Weir 8:50
It's just like, yeah, you don't you don't have a body but people can threaten some some infrastructure or some circumstance that kind of excludes you from an area that for an AI of a spaceship that might be like destroying the cameras for a ghost that might be like putting salt in the doorway or something like that. And yeah, just some little things like that they're like, here's kind of these cool you can cool things you can do with characters that are very well supported by the very story focused the loose rules of Rosette Diceless.
Gregory Avery-Weir 9:07
But yeah, for for the rules. It's--Yeah, there's and, and we like adding rules in that are like: this works the same way regardless of what sort of setting you're in. And so we've got some sci fi-specific stuff that's like, "owns a spaceship" is a trait that's in there where it's like that, that should probably be just in there for sci fi folks. But yeah, we're looking forward to, to compiling all that together, and getting a tiny booklet.
Melissa Avery-Weir 10:03
Yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 10:03
That'll be extra stuff for folks who want more Diceless.
Melissa Avery-Weir 10:07
That's targeted for... should be approximately end of July is that's when Rosette came out. And so hopefully we'll have some time between--Well, we will have time between The Majesty of Colors Second Anniversary and that Rosette anniversary. So got a couple of other things we might do in that interim.
Gregory Avery-Weir 10:25
We want to work on, keep working on Exploit: Zero Day. Keep working on--
Melissa Avery-Weir 10:31
Cultivating Insurgency.
Gregory Avery-Weir 10:32
Yes, our fun jam game and then maybe get a little bit of a new project in there.
Melissa Avery-Weir 10:38
We'll see. Maybe some doodles.
Gregory Avery-Weir 10:40
Yeah, we might we might probably won't have anything to show off. But yeah, we'll see.
Melissa Avery-Weir 10:45
That's exciting.
Gregory Avery-Weir 10:46
Yeah.
Melissa Avery-Weir 10:47
You can find all of our stuff over at futureproofgames.com or over on twitter at PlayFutureProof. You can hit us up with questions or comments over on our blog or social media. You should definitely join our newsletter! Go to FutureProofGames.com there's links everywhere.
Gregory Avery-Weir 11:05
Yeah.
Melissa Avery-Weir 11:05
I put links everywhere!
Gregory Avery-Weir 11:06
Or in the show notes. There'll be links.
Melissa Avery-Weir 11:08
Yes. Our theme music is "Juparo" by Broke for Free which is used with permission.