The Future Proof Podcast 038
Gregory Avery-Weir 0:21
Hello, and welcome to the Future Proof Podcast. This is our bimonthly podcast where we chat about stuff we've been working on in anything cool we're planning. I'm Melissa.
Gregory Avery-Weir 0:32
And I'm Gregory. And we have been archiving some of our old streams. And it's kind of made us look back on some of the Future Proof Plays performances we've done.
Melissa Avery-Weir 0:43
Absolutely, we got a little bit behind on some of them. But we have been playing some really cool games.
Gregory Avery-Weir 0:50
We stream those on Twitch and then the archives end up on YouTube.
Melissa Avery-Weir 0:54
Correct. And you know, you can find our schedule for streaming at futureproofgames.com/streams. Link is right up there in the top nav bar. And so you can join us! We alternate and we do it every two weeks. But Greg, you played a game that had you just completely geeking out the whole time.
Gregory Avery-Weir 1:17
Yeah. So, so I played a while a little while back again called "Self Checkout Unlimited" on stream. And it's a, was a cool weird like... So it's like mall nostalgia vaporwavy, quote unquote liminal space themed, but then also the—what was it was a Yungian, philosophical development of the person was explored thematically through it. So it's like this, this abandoned mall that you're exploring or, or closed mall that you're exploring. And, but it turns out, you're maybe like, it's some philosophical metaphor for the development of the human being. It's very strange. It was very cool. It was fun, like, looking at the architectural details of malls that they put in. And then also the just, it's got some gorgeous, like, vaporwave cover inspired visuals that you get when you go into various like side, dreamy side missions... Not missions. Side areas. Parts of the story you're exploring, yeah, yeah, that was cool. And then your most recent game was just adorable.
Melissa Avery-Weir 2:35
Just absolutely adorable. I played the first Frog Detective game. And the half, maybe half, maybe a third of the second one. It was an early morning stream, relatively speaking, a little off schedule. So I was very sleepy, but I hadn't played those games before which is weird. I like, you know, games of that genre. It is... What impressed me is how tightly designed they are. Like it is, it is designed such that they have chosen what they want to be difficult and not—what they don't want to be difficult.
Gregory Avery-Weir 3:11
Yeah, like a lot of like, first person mystery, puzzle adventure, like... inventory management games. They can like stump you.
Melissa Avery-Weir 3:20
Yep.
Gregory Avery-Weir 3:21
Fog Detective is not the series for people who want to like, be stuck on a puzzle.
Melissa Avery-Weir 3:26
Right. And also, there's no like friction around controls. There was no, you know, sometimes you play these games and it's, you know, by choice or otherwise, it's difficult to pick things up. Or it's you're trying to put things on top of other things and figure out how they combine and it's a weird UI and all this sort of stuff. And this was just very clean. It's very clean in a way that felt deliberate. And it's like—
Gregory Avery-Weir 3:52
Classic walking simulator controls.
Melissa Avery-Weir 3:55
Exactly, no, no weirdness, they said, "This is the thing we want to do, and we want to make sure everything else is out of the way."
Gregory Avery-Weir 4:02
The weirdest thing it does is it has a magnifying glass button that lets you look at anything through a magnifying glass. It is not useful to solve any puzzles, but it does let you see things slightly enlarged.
Melissa Avery-Weir 4:13
Yes, it did not seem, it did not seem like it was going to prove useful. There's a what, you know, sort of a meta mystery happening there. There's some there's a little tidbit that carries over from game to game that is unresolved as of yet and I won't, I won't spoil it. But you know, you might see something around some corners that you can't quite catch. So I am definitely intending to finish it. The third game I think came out late last year. It's kind of western themed, like country western.
Gregory Avery-Weir 4:42
It has a Razor scooter in it, I think.
Melissa Avery-Weir 4:45
Excellent.
Gregory Avery-Weir 4:45
If I remember right.
Melissa Avery-Weir 4:46
Only 13 years too late. So yeah, both, both of these two games are archived and up on YouTube now. I'm working my way through the rest of the archives getting them, getting them processed, then scheduling them out so that they don't all just dump in the same day. So, yeah, you should come join us we do you know, we stream two to three hours at a time. And it's a lot of good fun.
Gregory Avery-Weir 5:13
So depending on when this podcast reaches you, it we may just be finishing up the GMs Day sale over at DriveThruRPG, where they celebrate the the holiday of GMs Day for people who run role playing games. And in that sale, our game, Rosette Diceless was on sale along with its supplement. And we haven't talked in detail about Rosette Diceless for a bit on the podcast. So I figured I'd just, in case you aren't familiar with the game, I can talk a little bit about it. And then if you aren't interested, you can skip forward a little bit.
Gregory Avery-Weir 5:51
So it's a, it's a tabletop role playing game. We put it out several years ago, and it, it's designed to provide consensus-based, story-focused, improvisational roleplay. And so what that means a lot of things, one of the things that it means is that all of the conflict in the game where you would normally have like roll for initiative for combat and like a Dungeons and Dragons-type game, we use the same rules for every sort of conflict. So you go into kind of a turn based mode and resolve conflicts, whether it's an argument about like, trying to bargain for some expensive item to be affordable, or if you're trying to kill a big monster, or if you're trying to steer a spaceship away from the sun. All of those are sort of handled with this very much like story-based, like narrative tension-based system where you're, you're able to use all sorts of skills.
Gregory Avery-Weir 6:50
So it's not, it's not one of those games where you have to be like, "Well, I want to play this character, but I have to figure out how to make them be able to kill things." It's designed for you even to be able to bring, you know your librarian character into a fistfight if necessary. And you can do like, hit someone with a book or distract someone with by pushing something over and still contribute, feel like you're contributing just as much as a person who's like, "Yeah, I'm designed for this conflict specifically."
Gregory Avery-Weir 7:19
And, and the part of the consensus-based nature of it is that we designed it so that you can shift GMs really easily. So you can have one person run story one week, another person runs through another week. And you can even especially if you've got large numbers of players, you can go without a GM at all, and just depend entirely on inter-player conflict. And people can kind of administer their own conflict in a small group, that's not part of the larger group. It's good for for, it's very flexible for you know, if you're doing a live action role playing game, or if you're doing a large table that tends to split off, it'll work well for that. Although our home game currently is three players. So it also works very well with with a small number. And you can check out if you go to tabletop.garden, you can check out my podcast where I've run "The Great Molasses Flood" is a little mini campaign that we did with Rosette Diceless. And you can see how it plays. And don't worry, if you missed the GMs Day sale, because it's going to be on sale elsewhere.
Melissa Avery-Weir 8:26
It is definitely going to be on sale elsewhere. We are currently in a charity bundle on Itch. And I'm going to say all of this title of this bundle and I'm hopefully going to get all the words out in the correct order. It is the TTRPGs for Trans Rights in Florida bundle. I do not know a smoother way to say that.
Gregory Avery-Weir 8:49
Yeah, there's a lot of there have been a lot of charity bundles over the past few years. So you got to distinguish them somehow.
Melissa Avery-Weir 8:56
Exactly.
Gregory Avery-Weir 8:56
And you've may have heard us mention this a little while back, and it just has been slow getting together due to, due to some some behind the scenes factors.
Melissa Avery-Weir 9:06
Yep. So yeah, we probably would have talked about it late fall, and then holidays hit and all sorts of logistical situations there. So both Rosette and its Companion which I don't think we talked specifically about the Companion but the companion we released... I feel like it's been... almost two years ago. It's a supplemental text based on our experience running games for a few years. It's based on questions we've been asked. It's been based on the sorts of things we found as we developed a single character over several years. And so it is where we kind of say "Okay, so here are some alternate rules of play. Here are some some essays, lessons learned, etc." So both of those are in the trans rights bundle, which is what I will just call it for the duration of this podcast.
Gregory Avery-Weir 9:56
And the supplemental material also just has your standard "Here's a bunch of new options for your characters." So if you just want some new superlative traits, some new resources, things like that those are in there, too.
Melissa Avery-Weir 10:08
Yep. So the bundle is going to run through April 7. So we are recording on the 13th. So that's, you know, multiple weeks, there are over 500 items in the bundle. So if you are interested in anything from a single player, single page, 1000 people roleplaying games, whatever, there's a good chance there's good stuff in there to, to sift through. And all proceeds are being split between two pretty good charities, Zebra Youth and the Trans Inclusive Group. And this whole thing, you know, started getting organized with some of the political moves happening, particularly in Florida, not that all of us in southern region states haven't been struggling.
Gregory Avery-Weir 10:54
Yeah, being a trans person in Charlotte is a little rough.
Melissa Avery-Weir 10:57
It's a little rough. So it's, it's cool to be able to support this. Florida is in dire need of a lot of help right now with regards to this sort of stuff. The bundle is, it costs a minimum of $5. If you pay at least 10 bucks, you get a PDF of a 5E supplement called Monsters of Murka: Chromatic Gamut. It's 100% like, queer-led, queer-designed supplement that looks weird and cool, sort of an alternate—and this is me just having read the summary; I haven't played it—but it's sort of an alternate world, New York City and maybe other major metropolitan areas in which queer people have a notable presence in government? And the world, the whole world seems queered in a way that I think looks interesting. So that is automatically included in the bundle if you pay at least 10 bucks. So we're excited to be in that. It's been, you know, we don't... we were in a lot of bundles year after year, it felt like. Where, you know, it's a little, it can be a little overwhelming to say like, "Oh, hey, here's another one."
Gregory Avery-Weir 12:14
This might be our last one for a while. So if you're probably if you're looking for one that has our stuff in it. Yeah, we'll see, but.
Melissa Avery-Weir 12:22
I would like it to be the last one because the reason we have these bundles are for war, and massive bigotry and political oppression. So please.
Gregory Avery-Weir 12:33
Yes let's hope for no cause to have to raise much money in the next year. Fingers crossed.
Melissa Avery-Weir 12:40
Yep.
Gregory Avery-Weir 12:41
So our tabletop role playing games are going to be in that bundle. But if you want our video games, they're shortly going to be on sale in the Steam sale. The spring Steam sale is going to be starting March 16. I feel like this is the first one we're able to just say what the date will be they've tried to keep it secret before they publicly announced this one. So our games, The Majesty of Colors Remastered and Ossuary are going to be on sale on Steam for, from the 16th through the 23rd. Tt's a bunch of other—you know about, if you know about Steam, you know about the Steam sale: good discounts.
Gregory Avery-Weir 13:20
But if you are like I don't know about Steam, and I don't know about not giving us as much money as possible? If you love our stuff enough to give us the maximum amount: Friday March 17 hopefully will be after this episode comes out. And that is itch.io creators' day, which is a day where it's the storefront itch.io—which is super cool—does not take their cut. So, so on on these—I think it's one Friday a month—they they have a day where it's like hey, just have... All the, all the money you pay will go to, to creators. So check out our stuff there futureproofgames.itch.io.
Melissa Avery-Weir 14:05
Yeah, it's extremely cool. And on Itch like you can see other stuff other of our games that are not paid. Like they're just free gamse.
Gregory Avery-Weir 14:13
Yeah, we've got a bunch of free stuff. So my old Flash games repackaged, etc, etc.
Melissa Avery-Weir 14:18
Itch is, Itch is a great platform., and so we're happy to be there. So in addition to seeing all of our games on itch, you can find all of our stuff over at futureproofgames.com We are over on cohost as FPG we're on Twitter still as PlayFutureProof. We're on YouTube as Future Proof Games, which is where our archives are; we have stream archives from Rosette Diceless plays. So you can hit us up with questions or comments over on this post on the blog or anywhere on social media. Our theme music is "Juparo" by Broke for Free, which is used with permission.