The Future Proof Podcast 045
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:00:22
Hello, and welcome to the Future Proof Podcast. This is our podcast where we chat about stuff we've been working on and anything cool we're planning. I'm Melissa.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:00:32
And I'm Gregory. And you've been kind of busy with a bunch of kind of in-depth businessy research. We're going to talk about games that we played in the past year. Don't worry. But first we're going to talk about taxes.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:00:45
Yeah, we're going to talk about taxes a little bit. So since we sell Exploit: Zero Day directly instead of through a platform like Steam or whatever, we have to handle sales tax, like collecting it and paying the states back. And heaven forbid we ever had an international sale, we'd have to deal with that or whatever. And so many years ago—over 10 years ago—
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:01:19
Ugh.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:01:20
Yeah, we signed up with a service called TaxCloud that, like, we call their API with an address and they tell us that someone so and so needs to pay like $6 and or 6 cents in taxes. And so we tack that on in the checkout process. And then—
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:01:32
We need to be able to do that before the customer pays because we need to be able to show the customer how much tax they'll be paying before they pay money.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:01:41
Exactly. So like, you know your standard flow, except we have to do it ourselves. And then what this company does is like, they have agreements with a whole bunch of states. There's like this kind of coalition of states, like has the "streamlined sales tax" thing, which sounded like a great idea a million years ago, where you know, they can do like very cheap filing for all the, for like 20 some-odd states, except for where we are, which is in North Carolina. But the costs have gone up a lot and it's been very confusing because we are still the, like, merchant of record. We are still the seller. And so even if TaxCloud is filing our stuff for us, if something doesn't go right, Minnesota mails us.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:02:30
Yeah.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:02:31
And so then, you know, it's just like chaos in managing because I'm like, why am I getting this? And I don't always get told that there was even a problem. So I'm like, why am I being asked for $100, so on and so forth. So they have recently increased their prices in a way that is ,like, shocking. It'd be less shocking if it turns out we hadn't been undercharged for years but it's by hundreds of dollars a year, which is far more than we make on Exploit: Zero Day at this point. And so I've been kind of scrambling to be like, okay, like we just, it's not a good use of our money to be doing this. So.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:03:10
And this is one of those small business things where like, even if we did it all on our own, we would have to register in basically every state, which depends on the state, right?
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:03:22
Well, turns out we are over-registered because this whole streamlined sales tax thing has registered us in a bunch of states where we don't have sales. And so things are being filed every month to Minnesota even though we've never made a sale in Minnesota and we don't have to file based on their own rules.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:03:42
And this might be like, these are made up numbers, but it might be $100 a year to be filed in Minnesota when we're not making $100 a year from sales in Minnesota.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:03:53
Right. And then multiply that times the 25 to 40 that you know, we'd have to worry about. So it's just a big mess. And so as I've been doing this research, I have learned that like, even if you're selling stuff on your own site, there are ways to do it where someone else is the "merchant of record", which is the term for it. And so it's like we're not on Steam, but we're also not handling sales stuff on our own.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:04:22
Like if you've ever like played a live service game and like when you go to buy the currency, it's like, "so and so is a certified reseller of xyz."
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:04:35
Yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:04:36
That's the merchant of record that is handling stuff so that the game company doesn't have to be the person on the tax bill.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:04:42
Yeah. And so this is just something I'm still, I'm still researching. I'm hoping to be able to sort of present some decent solutions soon. It'll be much cheaper because it's primarily at the transaction level, which is appropriate. And that won't just sort of be looming over our heads. And as someone who is bad at checking the post office box on a regular basis, I appreciate not only getting a letter when it is already overdue for me to, to have handled from Minnesota and Tennessee, who both need to chill the hell out.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:05:21
Yeah. And all of our other games like Ossuary and Majesty of Colors Remastered and Rosette Diceless, all of those are essentially sold through a merchant of record. Like, Steam is the, the marketplace is handling that stuff for us. So it's not too big of a transition.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:05:39
Exactly.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:05:40
If we end up going that direction.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:05:42
Yeah. It's just Exploit: Zero Day, which we knew it was going to be a weird one. You know, we had kind of looked at like, what is Fallen London doing? But now the space is much clearer and much bigger. There are a lot more people doing in-app sales and all this sort of stuff kind of fits under this model. So, so, yeah, it's kind of good news. Do less on our side, which I like.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:06:07
But we've certainly also been the player and purchaser of games this year. We've played a lot of stuff. I think as an indie developer, we like to talk about other indie games. Y'all have heard about, like, the big published games already. Presumably if you're listening to this podcast, you 100% have. So we thought we'd just mention some of the games that we've played that that stuck with us in 2024. Some of these came out in 2024.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:06:47
Ehhh.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:06:48
But you know, we're I think now at the stage in our lives where we're often playing games that came out several years past just because we have now gotten around to them.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:06:51
And I will say, in 2020 and 2021, who among us didn't buy one of those damn bundles off of itch.io? That is an endless source of game. I know it's like the most indie game dev dork shit to be like, "I have so many games to play!" but I literally have more than a thousand games to play.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:07:15
That all said, I think the first game on our list here that we've, I think each put over a thousand hours into is Warframe. I think we've probably mentioned it on the podcast before, but their 1999 update is out. And I mean, they're like mostly owned by Tencent, so they're only sort of indie, but they're definitely in the spirit. And then we spent a lot of time this year playing Divinity: Original Sin 2. We finally finished our probably years long campaign the two of us did.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:07:45
Yeah, I think it was two years. This would be like Saturday mornings, two hours at a time. So take a reasonable 80 hour run and divide it up and you get well over a year of playtime there. So, yeah, it's really good game. Well written, had its flaws as any such game does, but yeah, it's good.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:08:13
And then was it after we finished Original Sin 2 that we played Mythforce?
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:08:19
Yes.
Both, singing 00:08:20
Mythforce!
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:08:23
I'm not gonna sync that up in the—
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:08:25
No, no, it's fine. It'll be a little out of sync. That's okay. That's how we experienced it. But yeah, that one's a, like, a first person fantasy roguelite that's sort of styled after Saturday morning cartoons. So like, I don't know, old She-Ra or the... I guess I'd never watched the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, but like, you know, there's colorful people, each with their own specialty. One person is bow; one person is magic; one person is shield. And it's, it was cute. We didn't stick with it for like multiple runs upon runs after we knocked it out.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:09:05
Yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:09:05
After we, like, beat the final boss. But, but it, it was interesting to see. I like first person roguelites. I like how people experiment in that space and it was fun to see one that was like very, very fantasy focused and had a whole lot of personality to it.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:09:22
Yeah, it was, it was lovely. The voice acting was good. They, they captured that feel very well by having that kind of film grain type style to it. Good theme music, all of it. And it will stick in your head like you will hear "Mythforce" shouted musically quite often. But it's well done. Our next one that we are currently playing on our Saturday mornings is a game called APICO. APICO ["ap-ee-co"]? I guess I just realized I don't know what to do with that "i" in the middle there.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:09:55
A-P-I-C-O.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:09:56
Yeah. It is a beekeeping... simulator?
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:10:02
Yeah. Think like a Terraria sort of look.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:10:06
Yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:10:07
But it's all like, planting hives and making sure the right flowers are around them to support the right kind of breeding. And also fishing and decorating and—
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:10:17
Yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:10:17
—pet keeping and crafting and all the stuff you expect from that sort of, you know, top down, pixely, crafty, farmy game.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:10:25
Yeah, it's adorable. The bees have different, you know, have very simple genetic system. They have interesting little traits. Like some of them are "grumpy". So you need to like run a smoker nearby to be able to interact with their hives. They want different climates. Some of the bees are solitary, so you can't just put a hive up. You have to give them a special place with the, you know, you kind of throw in some sticks that they might like and hope one shows up.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:10:50
There's butterflies. There's incense, there's. Yeah. System upon system upon system.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:10:55
Yeah, it's adorable.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:10:56
Definitely a sort of wiki game.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:10:58
Oh ,yeah. Oh, yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:11:00
And then we continue to play Beat Saber. I've gotten back into it lately just to have something that I do that is exercise that doesn't require going out into the cold.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:11:09
I have a total of about 350 hours in Beat Saber, which is less than I thought I would have.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:11:19
That's pretty good. I mean, you can't play... I mean, you play for impressively long in one session, but a human cannot play that long.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:11:27
Yes.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:11:28
Because there's just so much movement. I'm always proud when I, like recommend a game to you and you end up playing it more than me. You're way better at Beat Saber than I am at this point.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:11:37
Not only that, I bought a headset for it. Beat Saber was a $350 game. No, I'm kidding. I also played what was the... The Room VR, which is very good. But yeah, I guess, I mean, I've been playing for over three years now, so... not bad.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:11:57
Well, I kind of feel a little... I, I was putting down the list of like, what indie games have I played and enjoyed lately? And I was like, well, I'm picking the most basic-ass indie games that everybody surely knows about. But then I remembered that XKCD comic where the geologists think that laypeople only know the formula for like three or four silicates. So you, you may not have heard of, of, of these. My first is, you know, are arguably not indie. They're a big deal now. I played Alan Wake 2, which is amazing, a expected. I love Remedy's stuff.
I, in anticipation of Satisfactory 1.0 coming out, I had a factory game itch. And I played Shapez with a "Z" at the end, which is if you, if you're from the Flash era like me, if you've played Factory Balls, which is a game by Bart Bonte, it's, it's like, that is a game where you're like, "You need to make a ball that's half red and half blue with a black spot." And so you need to like dip it in the red and then mask it and then dip it in the blue and then stamp a spot on the side. And this is that same sort of idea of like layering shapes on top of each other, but like, also it's a factory game where you're like needing to manage conveyor belts taking shapes from one machine to another. And how do you get in, basically ore, that's a certain, you know, I need to bring in diamonds, like literal geometric diamonds from some other area of the map, that sort of thing.
And then that tided me over until I played Satisfactory, which is amazing. I've, I've liked Coffee Stain since Sanctum probably? So, way, way back, you know, pre-Goat Simulator days and they just knocked it out of the park with Satisfactory. It's kind of everything I want from that sort of factory game. It feels like they really perfected like this cool funny world and all of that. And I really enjoyed it.
And then right at the end of the year, another arguably not indie. I've been playing Monument Valley 3, which is amazing. The first two... It's more of Monument Valley if you've played it. Beautiful mobile game, kind of puzzle-y, very stark graphics, kind of cute and weird and unsettling. They... I don't think the company got bought by Netflix, but they're all Netflix exclusives now, so I completely understand if folks are like, ah, a Netflix game isn't, you know. But highly recommended, nonetheless. If you have or know someone who has a Netflix login, it's great.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:14:38
I pulled down one of them onto my phone, but haven't played it yet. From the Netflix library of games.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:14:47
They're very chill, not too challenging.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:14:49
Yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:14:50
Very short sessions. They're very, very accessible and pretty and fun.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:14:54
Excellent.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:14:55
And you play too much stuff, right?
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:14:57
I play too much stuff. This has been a really tough year for me in a lot of ways, 2024. Health wise, work wise, across the board. And so yes, I played a lot. I played a lot of games that have like control knobs I can control. So I think my number one sort of genre played this year was sort of building games. I played Timberborn, Rusty's Retirement—which I still like—No Man's Sky, Dwarf Fortress, which I never played the original. So I've only played the new Steam version.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:15:35
Oh, was 2024 was your first time playing Dwarf Fortress?
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:15:39
I might have started it last year. Yeah. But I fell back in it. Satisfactory 1.0. Outstanding. And Station to Station, which is a fun.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:15:51
I think I heard about this one.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:15:53
I'm gonna guess it's indie. I actually didn't double check that it is.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:15:56
One of those games where you look at it, you're like, that's gotta be indie. There's no way someone—
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:16:01
Yeah. It's just so specific.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:16:01
There's no way this isn't a work of love.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:16:04
In the, in Station of Station you have... certain places need items from other places. So like you have a mill and it needs wheat and—
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:16:14
Okay.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:16:15
-and you are placing you can place very few stations and you are making tracks between things such that all requirements are met and your city gets all the final products it needs. So it's, it's almost more like a... It reminds me of Dorfromantik a little more than it does like a, like a train simulator. You're not building the train, you're building the routes.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:16:37
Maybe a little bit of Minimetro?
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:16:41
Ah, yeah. Yep. Wow. I haven't thought about that one in a hot minute. So I haven't played a ton of it, but I like it a lot. It's got a very, you know, cool little pixely voxely kind of feel to it that's, that's lovely. And then my other sort of major category were like strong narrative games. Like, "I Was a Teenage Exocolonist", which I streamed. I hope that that archive is up or will be up soon. Fascinating game. Multiple replays, you know, find all the options, do all the branches that you can do. And I'm almost done with 1000 x Resist which is just an absolute banger top to bottom. It's weird. It's cool.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:17:23
That's one of the year's biggest critical darlings, right?
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:17:26
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Everyone who doesn't like, who doesn't mind a game with relatively few, I'll say, "mechanics".
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:17:36
Yeah, you're not. They're not many game over screens in 1000 x Resist.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:17:42
And then I only played Baldur's Gate this year, so I was—
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:17:46
Baldur's Gate 3.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:17:47
Baldur's Gate 3. This is correct. I have played Baldur's Gate and that was, you know, when I was a child.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:17:54
But when everyone else was playing Dwarf Fortress, you had already played plenty of Baldur's Gate.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:18:00
Yes. So yeah, those are sort of the three big ones in terms of like strong narrative that I, that really stood out. Like, you know, I played some Indika, I played some other stuff, but Indika I kind of bounced off of a little bit. So yeah, lots of building games. I love it. It's so fun. It's just relaxing, you know, have something up on one screen to watch and build something on the other.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:18:27
Yeah. And then as, as you mentioned, there's a bunch of stuff that we've streamed. We, our streaming, has been for, for some, some reasons that have already been mentioned and others a little sporadic this year. But we still played a bunch of real cool stuff that you can check out on our YouTube channel.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:18:46
Yep. Yeah. And if you purchased those itch bundles back in the day, some of these may be in there. You may end up already owning some of them.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:18:58
You may recognize some names when you flip through them. You know, APICO definitely was a bundle game for me. Or no, maybe it was a free like Amazon Prime game.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:19:08
Yeah, I think it might have been because I think I had to purchase it. So. But yeah, you can find all of our stuff over futureproofgames.com including Exploit: Zero Day, which you know we're working on. We are—
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:19:23
Which if you buy now, will probably cost us money.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:19:27
No, I mean, it's fine. We're already paying.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:19:29
It is. It is fine.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:19:30
Yeah. It's a flat fee.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:19:31
It won't cost us extra money than we're already paying.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:19:34
Right. We are on Bluesky as futureproofgames.com and we are over on Mastodon... we are fpg@mastadon.gamedev.place. Absolute mouthful. We are not really posting on Twitter anymore, like for much of anything. So those two are the best places to find us these days. Pour one out for cohost, which I think should be like, completely down at this point.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:20:06
Yeah. It redirects to an archive so you can still see stuff on co host but it's not active anymore.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:20:13
Yeah. And we are on YouTube as Future Proof Games. So we've got archives there of our streams. We've got some actual plays of Rosette Diceless nd a couple things there. You can hit us up with questions or comments over on our blog or any of those other places. Our theme music is Juparo by Broke for Free, which is used with permission.