The Future Proof Podcast 039
Gregory Avery-Weir 0:21
Hello, and welcome to the Future Proof Podcast. This is our podcast we do every couple months where we talk about what we're working on anything that we're planning to do that we think is cool. I'm Gregory.
Melissa Avery-Weir 0:32
And I'm Melissa. And top of the order is that we are in a discount right now; a sale.
Gregory Avery-Weir 0:38
Yeah. So Ossuary our first commercially released game is, is on sale on the Humble Store right now and will be for a while until May 23. So you should check it out. If you haven't played Ossuary already, I think it's really cool. It's a dark comedy, where you're going through an underworld that's partly inspired by Discordian religious writings. Your inventory items are all the seven deadly sins. And you're kind of trying to encourage people to discard false virtues that they've been pursuing and actually, like self actualize, and be true to themselves and throw off various shackles. All, all very Future Proof Games sorts of things. You should check it out. Search for Ossuary on the Humble Store. There'll be a link in the in the show notes. And yeah, it's half off. It's a good deal. We don't discount that deep very often. So you should check it out.
Melissa Avery-Weir 1:41
Yeah, and on Humble, it is DRM-free. Although it does come with a Steam key. So if you're like, you know, "Damn you, Steam. I don't want that version." You can have the advantage of your Steam library without DRM. So yeah, it's been a long time since we've done a Humble sale. So it's pretty cool. Yeah, doing a big spring one.
Gregory Avery-Weir 2:02
Yeah, check that out. There's... we've got a little bit of a PSA to regarding Exploit: Zero Day and Twitter.
Melissa Avery-Weir 2:12
Oh, lord. So between last podcast and now, Twitter has revised its policies and sort of put out a notice that those of us who were using the older API for things like login as Exploit: Zero Day does, that they were not just planning to decommission that, but go ahead and decommission it on pretty short notice. So we went ahead and we have updated Exploit: Zero Day to use the new version of the API, et cetera, et cetera.
Melissa Avery-Weir 2:49
But given the short notice, and given some other things, like the fact that my application—my side application, Granny Square Colors—just got turned off without any notice, early. They never told me why, by the way, even when they restored it. Given all of that, we are not going to do a lot to maintain Twitter if it breaks again, or they have some weird policy shift. The way Elon Musk is running this—and unfortunately, the way their dev team is also having to run this—is just a mess. They're doing relatively short notice changes, policy shifts, charging people 100 plus dollars a month, and going back and forth so much that there's a limit on how much energy we're going to put into it.
Melissa Avery-Weir 3:34
And we have a plan, you know, in case, it does get shut off how we can help users add other authentication methods. And in fact, if you do use Twitter to log into Exploit: Zero Day, we suggest that you go into your account and either add email/password or add Google or Facebook. (Even Facebook is more stable than Twitter right now.) So yeah, we recommend just having a little redundancy plan. If you run into trouble, drop us an email info@futureproofgames.com. And we will help you get connected with some other method.
Gregory Avery-Weir 4:07
This doesn't affect very many users. And it's only only if you use Twitter to log into exploitzeroday.com is it an issue. So if you, if you don't: you're good. If you do: add another login method.
Melissa Avery-Weir 4:21
Yep.
Gregory Avery-Weir 4:21
Just in case.
Melissa Avery-Weir 4:23
So yeah, that's it's pretty simple. It's regrettable; Twitter's had a good run. We'll see. We'll see if it keeps on truckin for a while longer.
Gregory Avery-Weir 4:30
It had an okay run. I'm not sure it ever had a good run. It did all right.
Melissa Avery-Weir 4:35
Twitter has done... Yeah. Has has provided space for many good things to happen. So speaking further of legacy work and, and long standing platforms: we've been dealing with some Majesty of Colors and Google Play stuff.
Gregory Avery-Weir 4:53
Yeah. So Google requires that if you're going to keep selling your apps on their platform for Android for phones that you have to support the latest or recent versions of the Android OS, which is fine. It's a little annoying. They don't... it's fine. But because our game, Majesty of Colors Remastered is made in Unity, it's a little more complicated.
Gregory Avery-Weir 5:25
So we have... we're working on a release to update, Majesty of Colors to support modern versions of Android should be out pretty soon. There's a chance that it'll be unavailable in the Play Store temporarily, depending on the schedule that Google has. But we've got an update in the works. However, it has been a frustrating thing. I've been doing most of the development work on it. And Melissa has had the unfortunate task of having to test it and find all the weird, weird edge cases and issues that pop up. But um, to, I've got a note in the show notes in the podcast script, not to rant too much. So I'll try and keep this trying to stay level headed. It should not be difficult to build an old project for a new system. This is a thing that is just done for most, most development environments can, can just handle this pretty pretty straightforwardly without much change. Unity, kind of fitting its pattern of being a good starting platform, but not really supporting professional development very well; ongoing professional development. Essentially, I had to upgrade our Majesty of Colors to the latest 2022 version of Unity. It was on an ancient version of the Java Virtual Machine for its for its builds. It was like... There's no way to really have Unity support a newer version of Android without just updating all of Unity. So that's unfortunate.
Gregory Avery-Weir 7:15
And layered on to that is all the other shitty things about Unity. You know, they are still doing crypto stuff, crappy NFT crypto stuff. They like put out a press release in February of this year being like, "Yup, we're still on NFT's. We're not going to use the word NFT's but that's what we're talking about." They're still doing defense contracts making military software. And they've just announced that they're doing machine learning AI. So you know, add plagiarism to the list of things that they're really interested in, rather than, you know, maintainability of projects. So we're pretty much on the Godot train right now. We're lucky enough that if we if we want to do a thing, a game that takes place in a, you know, a 3D development environment, we can use Godot, because we're not going to do anything hugely fancy. There are a lot of people out there that can't because they're doing something more ambitious. Hopefully they can move to Unreal. I don't really recommend Unity as a, as a platform. Unreal has its own problems, for sure. But it definitely seems more maintainable than Unity. But that's a frustrating thing.
Melissa Avery-Weir 8:28
Yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 8:28
Long story short, The Majesty of Colors Remastered should remain available, medium to long term, but it's annoying keeping it running because, like, we didn't have to actually change anything. We just had to update it to build in the, in the new version of Unity.
Melissa Avery-Weir 8:47
Yeah. And really, it just needed to be in the new version of the Android SDK.
Gregory Avery-Weir 8:51
Right. Yeah. Yeah, it should, it should have been much more straightforward than it was.
Melissa Avery-Weir 8:55
Right. Unfortunate.
Gregory Avery-Weir 8:57
But we've, we've unfortunately, had to deal with kind of a shitty organization. But we've also done some good lately.
Melissa Avery-Weir 9:05
Yes. So back in March, we talked about the TTRPGs for Trans Rights in Florida bundle. It feels we're just tacking the word "bundle" on there.
Gregory Avery-Weir 9:15
Such a long, it's such a long name.
Melissa Avery-Weir 9:17
It's, it's so long. That bundle kicked off in April, and ran for I think about three weeks. It was a pretty, pretty long run, but it did wonderfully. It raised over $280,000 that were going to both the Zebra Youth Charity and the Trans Inclusive Group, both in Florida, both. I mean, if you know about news in Florida at all, you know that things are very bad, right now for, for trans folk and trans youth and marginalized folks all around but particularly trans folks, so it's really very cool to see it hit that mark of $283,000, in fact, almost 84,000. And if you purchased that bundle you now own Rosette Diceless. So, dive in, ask us questions, if you have them. We have stream archives of us playing it online. We have Gregory's podcast, Tabletop Garden—
Gregory Avery-Weir 10:20
If you go to tabletop.garden and listen to The Great Molasses Flood that's done in Rosette Diceless. And to be clear, most of the credit should go to the organizers who worked very hard on this.
Melissa Avery-Weir 10:33
It took a lot of work. Especially over the holidays, and into the beginning of the year to to pull all that together. So, so yeah, try out Rosette Diceless. Let us know what you think if you have questions, or you want more examples, or suggestions or whatever, reach out. And...
Gregory Avery-Weir 10:52
And as we say, periodically, if you want us to run a game of Rosette Diceless on your stream or your podcast, we will do so happily and eagerly. So if you're like, "Rosette Diceless sounds cool. I've got a platform that maybe they would want to to promote the game on," we will we will happily run a short campaign or one-shot for you in the system.
Melissa Avery-Weir 11:17
Absolutely.
Gregory Avery-Weir 11:19
You can also reach out to us if you're just some rando wanting to do a campaign, less of a guarantee that we'll have, find the time for that. But we're always happy to give advice.
Melissa Avery-Weir 11:29
Yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 11:30
So if you want to check out more information on Ossuary which is on sale; Exploit: Zero Day which you should add a login to; Majesty of Colors which should remain available; or Rosette Diceless you can go to futureproofgames.com You can find us on Twitter for now at @playfutureproof. We are on cohost as FPG and we're on YouTube as Future Proof Games. You can ask us questions. You can just let us know what you think of our stuff on our blog on social media. You can email us at info@futureproofgames.com And yeah, thanks for listening.
Gregory Avery-Weir 12:12
Our theme music is "Juparo" by Broke for Free which is used with permission