The Future Proof Podcast 046

Podcast episode

Music 00:00:00
"Juparo" by Broke for Free

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:00:21
Hello and welcome to the Future Proof Podcast. This is our periodic podcast where we chat about the stuff we've been working on and anything cool we're planning. I'm Gregory Avery Weir.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:00:32
And I'm Melissa Avery Weir, and we have been doing some fun technical stuff.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:00:38
Yeah. So last time, last episode we mentioned that we were looking into basically fixing our storefront and tax collection problem on Exploit: Zero Day. We... for various reasons in selling the season story there, we wanted to move away from a system where kind of we were calculating tax ourselves or kind of going to a third party to calculate it, but we were taking the user's information, passing it on to someone else to calculate tax. They were keeping track of a bunch of stuff. It was a complicated and expensive (in the end) system. And so we switched to doing a merchant of record system style thing where essentially someone's running a storefront for us. They get a fair cut and, and also handle all the tax stuff and all of that, so we don't have to, to worry about anything but sort of the, the lump amount and not handle the sales tax stuff.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:01:43
Yeah.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:01:45
So we switched to Paddle is the one that we, we picked out. Um, and we've done that, that programming switchover. It's not yet deployed...

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:02:00
As of recording.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:02:01
As of recording. Yeah. Actually it might be out by the time—

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:02:03
I hope so!

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:02:04
—by the time this episode. Yeah, barring, barring any problems, it should be. And it was, it was a nice process. It was slick. They have a cool, like, API for, like, a JavaScript front end thing that'll pop up a good-looking storefront thing and then backend API that you can hit various ways to like say, "Hey, let me just double check. Did the customer successfully get this payment through? Cool. Okay, great. Let's unlock the stuff for them."

So yeah, and it's, it went well and it was really, really nice to be able to rip out a bunch of old stuff. Because we were supporting our tax, our tax service and PayPal and a different payment method.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:03:00
Stripe, yeah.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:03:01
Yeah, yeah. And being able to just take all of that out and just kind of let someone else handle it. And all we basically do is say, hey, show the customer a payment screen. It's nice.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:03:11
Yeah. I don't remember what our research process was all those years ago. I know that these services existed because I know two of them that have existed that long and that I've used with like non-profits. I wish things had been such that we had not spent the last several years dealing with this sales tax situation. It is very stressful to check the PO box knowing that like states will be looking for us to, you know, have filings about sales tax of $0 or whatever.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:03:44
Yeah. And like I bet back then the API support wasn't as great. So you know, it would have been probably more complicated for us to sell—like, we don't have a download or anything for Exploit: Zero Day. You're just kind of unlocking a thing on your account.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:04:02
Yeah, and that was a limiting factor.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:04:03
Yeah, yeah. Those are the early days of microtransactions online and that sort of thing.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:04:10
Right. A lot of them were geared towards mobile and I will say—not going to call any specific company out—but the one that still uses SOAP for its API connection did back then too.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:04:24
Well, I mean that's probably why they still use it. Old technology.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:04:28
Yep. Good, nice and stable.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:04:33
We have been switching who we get our digital stuff from in various ways. You set up our replacement for Bitly, right?

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:04:45
I have. Bitly is a long time sus-ass company that does URL shortening. They're kind of the industry standard. Like, they had a very generous free offering. They allowed us to do like QR codes which we have done extensively for when we've done conferences and we give out like Exploit: Zero Day access codes that we would do QR codes and it was very fun. But they have continued to sort of shrink their free offering and they are a pretty, I don't know, privacy anti-privacy company. So I don't feel bad about kind of going, all right, well, we're squeezed out without having to pay. So I had set up a service... It's an open source platform called I hate this, I hate this name but I'm going to say it into a mic because I'm an adult: Shlink.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:05:45
It's like, it's "short link", right?

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:05:47
It's "short link". Yeah. Shhliink. So I stood that up on a box that's got backups and all that sort of nice stuff that you do when you run a service for production and it looks pretty smooth. And the API was nice. So I was like, hey, this seems like a viable alternative for us because we have not only do we have links that go in newsletters, but we also have ways for if you are playing systems or clusters in Exploit: Zero Day, you can... If you want to share either that system or your solution to the system, things like that you can do so and we give you a short link for it because who needs a long-ass URL for that sort of thing? And so we have all these kind of components that talk, were talking and integrated with Bitly and so yeah, we've done a switch. That's another thing that will be live by the time this podcast comes out. Testing has gone very smoothly on that.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:06:51
That's one that yeah, presumably like no one will be able to tell the difference.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:06:56
That's the hope.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:06:58
All the old links will continue to work, etc.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:07:01
All the old links will continue to work. Users' data won't be going anywhere. Like it's just going to be our system. We, of course, we're not selling any data. We do very minimal tracking to say like, oh, you came from... Someone got to this Exploit: Zero Day system from a shared link, but not really anything beyond that. So it'll be nice to sort of just have a solid platform there. And I say that, you know, assuming it works and has like 100% uptime and all that good stuff.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:07:36
Well, we'll deal with that if a problem shows up. Let's see other stuff. There'll... coming up probably before our next episode will be almost certainly summer sales. Steam has announced that its summer sale is at the end of June and the start of July and that is going to be both of our games that are on Steam. And we don't have any information about this, but itch.io tends to have sales around the same time as Steam sales. So chances are good that we'll be part of a, of a store wide sale there too.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:08:17
Yeah.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:08:17
And you can pay attention to our social media for information on other sales that we're in and storefronts other than those.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:08:27
Yep. And speaking of social media, we mentioned it in January... in our January episode, but we want to like just say plainly here, outside of the ramblings of the footer of a podcast, that we are not on Twitter anymore. Like, we have an account there still, but we are not posting there I think at all.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:08:48
We're just essentially keeping some crypto company from getting the account and that's about it.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:08:55
Yeah. So if you want to get news about when we're on sale, when we're doing streams—which I did my first stream back in quite a while this past weekend. 

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:09:08
It went great.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:09:10
It was a delight. I was so nervous, but I had a lot of fun.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:09:13
Oh, you should tell them what you told me about 30 seconds after you stopped playing.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:09:19
Oh my god. Okay.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:09:20
So this is, this is the new Wadjet Eye game.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:09:22
Yes, Wadjet Eye's game Old Skies. It is a time travel point and click adventure. Wadjet Eye games are outstanding. They are like, that is a studio—one person, but, you know, cast of—

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:09:38
A bunch of people work on each game.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:09:40
—that has only gotten better. Like, every game that they've released has been better than the last. And I adored their previous releases, so I was super excited to play it. And I play the first two and a half hours and it's on stream, right? So it's a little slower. I'm taking some breaks. I'm listening to all the audio and all this sort of stuff in ways that you don't necessarily do when you're playing solo. And it was very... It was in the very linear opening stretch where it's like, "Here's a puzzle. You have to solve it before you move forward." There's no branching, there's no real choice happening. So it's, I would say, relatively boring compared to what I suspect the game is going to open up to, just kind of from the trailer. Y'all, I stopped playing... You go into a bar, you're trying to find this guy. And I was like, okay, this is clearly going to be one more set of conversations. Whatever. I'll end the stream here. It's not a spoiler to say—

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:10:40
Yeah, because this game has time travel.

Melissa Avery-Weir 00:10:41
This game has time travel. The moment you initiate the one conversation you can usefully initiate in that bar, a scene pops off in which you get murdered. It would have been like the most, like, interesting, like, twisty thing to happen in the stream. And I just, like, I picked it up, what, the next night or whatever on my own and was like, son of a bitch. So that was, that was fun. But, yeah, we'll be back on schedule, you know, I've already got my next game picked. So we post our schedule up on Future Proof Games. We have a streams page there where we list our upcoming, our next stream. And then of course, the social media places, those eventually get archived over on YouTube. So, yeah, not on Twitter. Follow us elsewhere.

Gregory Avery-Weir 00:11:35
Yep. You can always find our stuff at futureproofgames.com. We own that, so we don't need to worry about switching services there. We have an account on Bluesky as futureproofgames.com on Mastodon as fpg@mastodon.gamedev.place. And then like Lissa mentioned, we've got our YouTube channel, which just search for Future Proof games and you'll get all of those archived streams. If you have any questions or comments, you can contact us on our blog or on social media. And our theme music is "Juparo" by Broke for Free, which is used with permission. Talk to you next time.

Music 00:12:16
"Juparo" by Broke for Free