The Future Proof Podcast 033
Gregory Avery-Weir 0:21
Hello, and welcome to the Future Proof Podcast. This is our monthly podcast where we talk about what we've been doing, anything cool we're intending. I'm Gregory Avery-Weir.
Melissa Avery-Weir 0:31
And I'm Melissa Avery-Weir. And Gregory did a fun bug, bug fix related to something we talked about in our last episode.
Gregory Avery-Weir 0:42
Yeah, so we, we mentioned that there was an issue with our first release—our first commercial release Ossuary, which we hadn't updated in years. But we had a report from a person that it was going really sluggishly when moving diagonally. And I don't remember if if last time we had fully diagnosed it yet, but—
Melissa Avery-Weir 1:06
We had not.
Gregory Avery-Weir 1:07
Okay.
Melissa Avery-Weir 1:08
We talked about bit rot, and all sorts of interesting things. But we—
Gregory Avery-Weir 1:12
It turns out, it was a bug that seemed to have been in there the whole time. I'm not sure why it didn't, why we didn't notice it, why we didn't get more reports about it. But long story short, every time you took a step it was saving your game. And when you were moving diagonally, I think that was happening twice as much. So removing that entirely and having it save in a different way hopefully fixed that a whole lot. And so we got that update out. And we've already had people be like, "Holy crap, I can play this game now when I couldn't before." Which is, which is cool. It was, it's, it's nice to fix a bug and have people say, "Oh, thank you so much for fixing this bug!"
Melissa Avery-Weir 1:56
Yeah, yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 1:57
But in the process, since years, since we've done releases on top of the normal like, "Wait, how does, how do we build Ossuary again?" I'm pulling out Flash Develop, which is a program that I haven't used in a while.
Melissa Avery-Weir 2:12
And it's in SVN instead of Git, right?
Gregory Avery-Weir 2:15
Yeah, yeah. So it's in a different source control system. Yeah.
Melissa Avery-Weir 2:18
Right. We haven't, we haven't used SVN for anything in a since Ossuary, I think. When, as soon as we started—
Gregory Avery-Weir 2:26
Yeah.
Melissa Avery-Weir 2:27
As soon as we started Exploit: Zero Day, we switched very quickly. So yeah, it was a while.
Gregory Avery-Weir 2:33
But yes, as a result of that Steam achievements were broken for a week or so. A little less than a week. And it was just a matter of us being able to find the time to go in there, build it correctly, and, and test it and get it out. That's, that's fixed now so Ossuary runs better than probably it ever has. And you can still get cheevos.
Melissa Avery-Weir 2:57
Yes.
Gregory Avery-Weir 2:57
So that's nice. Speaking of achievements...
Melissa Avery-Weir 3:01
Oh, yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 3:01
We... How's that for a segue? We have, we participated in the bundle.
Melissa Avery-Weir 3:08
Yes. So in response to the war, the... I don't know if there's a name for it, but the Russian-Ukrainian... the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Necrosoft set up a bundle on Itch, in the similar vein as the Bundle for Racial Equality and the Bundle for, for Palestine, where a whole bunch of us creators could sort of pitch and our games and participate there. And in I think it was, it might have only been a week, maybe slightly longer. They raised $6.4 million. There were 998 items in the bundle four of which are ours.
Gregory Avery-Weir 3:52
Yeah, yeah. So there were a bunch of mostly games. Most of the games were video games, but a bunch of tabletop stuff. And then like, some asset packs of, of tiles for, to make your own games and some comic books and stuff like that.
Melissa Avery-Weir 4:09
Yeah, so 736 creators pitched in that, that 6.4 million went to the International Medical Corps, and Voices for Children. And International Medical Corps is sort of a broadly known long-standing organization, but Voices of Children's actually a Ukrainian organization that helps children cope and recover from things like this. So it felt really good to participate. And, and yeah, so if you purchased the bundle for Ukraine, then you own all of our games that are on itch.io, so that's—
Gregory Avery-Weir 4:46
Yeah, all the commercial ones.
Melissa Avery-Weir 4:48
All the commercial, that's right.
Gregory Avery-Weir 4:49
The for-pay ones.
Melissa Avery-Weir 4:50
Yes, they they definitely request—I think reasonably so—that people don't put their free stuff in the bundle. Because that's just kind of a weird bloaty thing to do. Yeah, so you own Ossuary, Majesty of Colors, and both Rosette Diceless books. So that's cool. We hope you enjoy if you have them, and that you feel good about contributing to a good cause. So as a little bit of housekeeping, we recently made a little update to an open source project that we develop.
Gregory Avery-Weir 5:22
Yeah, so we've been quietly releasing Django presskit() for years now, I think. presskit()... So when you're promoting yourself as a, as a video game company, it's really handy to have a page that someone can go to, there's just like: here's all the information about the company, the company. Like specifically, journalists are interested in this. Like, pictures of the team. And what's the history of this thing? What other games have they made? What's the information about the games? Where can I find all the trailers?
Gregory Avery-Weir 5:53
All of that stuff is just really handy for media people to have or anyone who wants to write about your work. And there's a great PHP application called dopresskit, which is created by Rami Ismail, who's a colleague of ours, and we liked it. But our sites all run on Django, a framework that's different from PHP. So we made a an app inspired by Rami's presskit() in Django for people who run Django sites. And it's, it provides a little bit of a, they are more accessible like editors, you can even go into the the admin of your Django site and actually use forms to control it, as opposed to the PHP solution, which involves editing data files. It's convenient to use, and it's just the thing that we periodically have to make sure is working on modern versions of the framework and that that any security issues with any packages we use have been have been cleared up and that sort of thing. So we, we put out a new release that has updated dependencies, and there'll be a link to it in the show notes or you can just look for django-presskit on pypi, if you, if you know the Python ecosystem.
Melissa Avery-Weir 7:11
Yeah, so if you already use it, make sure you pull the update. If you don't currently use it and are interested, definitely look it up. Feel free to ask us any questions if you have trouble getting it set up or configuring it. We are available to help.
Gregory Avery-Weir 7:25
So if you're interested in that or any of the rest of our stuff, you can find it all at futureproofgames.com our Twitter handle is @playfutureproof and we're on YouTube if you search for Future Proof Games. You can ask us any questions you have or give us comments on our work on our blog or anywhere on social media you can find us. Our theme music is "Juparo" by Broke for Free which is used with permission.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai