The Future Proof Podcast 023
Melissa Avery-Weir 0:21
Hello, and welcome to the Future Proof Podcast. This is our monthly podcast where we chat about stuff we've been working on and anything cool we're planning. I'm Melissa Avery-Weir.
Gregory Avery-Weir 0:32
And I'm Gregory Avery-Weir and it is a spooooooky season at the moment.
Melissa Avery-Weir 0:41
It is. And with spooky season come a variety of game discounts on different storefronts. So we can say that there is an itch.io sale coming up. It will be broadcast all over its site, of course. And we'll have a post on our blog once it starts. But we will have all of our games: Ossuary. Rosette Diceless, The Majesty of Colors... I'm surely forgetting something.
Gregory Avery-Weir 1:15
I mean, Exploit: Zero Day won't have an itch sale, but.
Melissa Avery-Weir 1:17
This is true. Yes.
Gregory Avery-Weir 1:18
It's still one of our games.
Melissa Avery-Weir 1:20
It is still one of our games. So all of our games that are on itch will be on sale. And I think it is reasonable for folks to assume that other places will also run sales for the spooky season.
Gregory Avery-Weir 1:35
Yep.
Melissa Avery-Weir 1:35
I can neither confirm nor deny. But...
Gregory Avery-Weir 1:38
Due to contractual obligations.
Melissa Avery-Weir 1:40
Exactly. So that's kind of exciting. I kind of like the season. It's a little more interesting to me than the Christmas season for, for discounts just because you can kind of play up the horror aspect of you know, Ossuary, both, both Ossuary and Majesty of Colors are very--
Gregory Avery-Weir 1:58
They've got monstrous elements to them.
Melissa Avery-Weir 2:00
Very well suited to the season. So yeah, keep an ear peeled for that. And then, in other news, we took a bit of a break recently.
Gregory Avery-Weir 2:10
Yeah, you may have noticed, we haven't had a podcast in a bit. And we've been a little quiet. And back in, in mid September, I think that you, Melissa, were the first--were the person who kind of raised this, which was that, like, we've been working on Future Proof Games, like full time for yeeeaaars.
Melissa Avery-Weir 2:32
Right.
Gregory Avery-Weir 2:33
And like we've had, we've had day jobs and other stuff we've been doing, certainly, but like, we don't tend to take time off because you know, "small businesses is a thing where you're always on call" and all that. And then I think you were like, "Hey, we're, you know, I'm talking with folks who are who are working in Europe, and some of them take entire months off."
Melissa Avery-Weir 2:55
Right. The whole "European summer month thing" that goes on.
Gregory Avery-Weir 3:00
Yeah. And it was like, are we, are we practicing the values that we say that we espouse with regard to like, what healthy labor looks like? And we were like, "Oh, no, we're not at all."
Gregory Avery-Weir 3:12
And we were we were noticing that like, this wasn't a healthy way for us to be doing our work. Like, I don't know that we're exploiting ourselves like, I don't know that you can make like a labor relations conversation there. But we were certainly like feeling burned out and, and coming to, like, dread going to work on FPG, which is not something we want to do.
Melissa Avery-Weir 3:34
Exactly.
Gregory Avery-Weir 3:35
So. So yeah, we took all of August--I guess mid-August would have been when you would have mentioned it because September was the the month we took off.
Melissa Avery-Weir 3:43
Correct. And that is because I think folks at the company I work for... I think they took August off. And so in the US, we don't, you know, and so there's sort of some, some gentle grumbling and stuff about projects on hold. Because, you know, the parent company folks are gone. And I'm like, let them live. So yeah, that's sort of where the idea came from.
Melissa Avery-Weir 4:10
And I remember back in 2012, 2013, when we were really kind of incorporating and figuring out like, how to get Ossuary out the door and stuff like that, and what Future Proof Games was going to be, part of it was: we are not going to do the American small business thing of grinding ourselves down to a pulp. And I think we haven't done that in a way that's--
Gregory Avery-Weir 4:34
Yeah, we've avoided a lot of other things. We haven't gone into enormous debt in order to start our business for example.
Melissa Avery-Weir 4:40
Right. And we aren't... we are kind to each other. Like, there's certainly an environment we could have where we chastised each other for perceived productivity stuff, and we don't do that. So--but this was a this felt like a much needed break to sort of regroup and work on side projects and stuff. Stuff like that.
Gregory Avery-Weir 5:00
So yeah, we're back now.
Melissa Avery-Weir 5:03
Yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 5:03
You may have seen us streaming and on social media, we're gonna be getting back to development on server maintenance and working on Rosette Diceless's supplement that is coming out, hopefully, real soon. And that's it. But there's one thing that is not going to be continuing.
Melissa Avery-Weir 5:29
This is true. So we're kind of pulling together the, the state of our sort of community stuff. And there'll be a nice little article about this in this month's Future Proof Newsletter. But we are, we are going to go ahead and shut down the EZD newsletter. We started talking about that early this year, we sent out a couple of notices to people on that mailing list.
Melissa Avery-Weir 5:55
We are not transferring subscriptions from the EZD newsletter to the Future Proof Newsletter. That is sort of ethically sketchy, we think. People signed up for the Zero Day newsletter not for news about all of our stuff. So if you are on the EZD newsletter, you need to sign up for the Future Proof newsletter. There'll be a link in the show notes and there is a banner on futureproofgames.com that is adorably put together by Gregory that links directly to the subscription.
Melissa Avery-Weir 6:26
And it's, it's a newsletter, like it's a newsletter with all the stuff we're doing. So I usually write a short essay about something in this case, it's going to be sort of community management and the ways in which, you know, we're reflecting back on sort of the one year anniversary of our survey and, and how we think that's been going this year. And then you know, latest streams, latest posts, updates on games, all that sort of stuff. So it's, it's good things. And there's always a picture of one of my two cats who are very photogenic, I think. I mean, I guess I'm biased.
Gregory Avery-Weir 6:59
I think they're very photogenic, too.
Melissa Avery-Weir 7:01
Yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 7:01
And and yeah, the the normal Exploit: Zero Day news that was in the other newsletter will, will show up in this one when it's when it is happening. And there will be one final message out to the to the Exploit: Zero Day newsletter. That will be like "Hey, case you missed it. Here's where you sign up."
Melissa Avery-Weir 7:20
Yep.
Gregory Avery-Weir 7:20
But if you don't notice that, heads up.
Melissa Avery-Weir 7:22
So yeah, you can find all of our stuff, our news, our latest happenings all of the games we have created over at futureproofgames.com. We're over on Twitter at PlayFutureProof, and on YouTube as Future Proof Games. Hit us up with questions or comments over on the blog or social media. Our theme music is "Juparo" by Broke for Free which is used with permission.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai