The Future Proof Podcast 047
Music 00:00:00
"Juparo" by Broke for Free
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:00:22
Hello, and welcome to the Future Proof Podcast. We are Future Proof Games, a two person game development studio, and this show is where we chat about stuff we've been working on and anything cool we're planning. I'm Melissa.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:00:35
And I'm Gregory. And as has been the case for a while, artificial intelligence is a big thing in the industry. A lot of folks are talking right now on Bluesky and places like that about like what, what their AI policy is. And I think that folks might be curious about our situation. I think the big overarching thing is: we will not use generative AI in our games. We're not going to generate art with AI, we're not going to generate text with AI, not going to generate audio with AI. We do use a speech to text tool for audio transcription, for transcribing this very podcast, that is a neural net. It is that sort of AI. Yeah, it's called AssemblyAI, right? You have worked with it much more than I have, Lissa.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:01:30
Yeah, it is a sort of classic first pass at transcription that saves me, you know, an hour or so on transcribing the podcast. I go through and I proof the results by hand and get it all formatted the way we want it to be. It is—we used to use Otter.ai back in the day before they started becoming... just malware, I think, at the way which they hop through—
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:02:00
Allegedly.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:02:02
Uh, sure. The way they hop through corporate enterprise accounts by having you sign up to see someone else's transcription which then emails your network, et cetera.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:02:18
Yeah. And if you're not a game developer, you may have kind of a fuzzy view of the border here. But we... sometimes people talk about like "enemy AI" in games, the AI that runs NPCs and characters and so on. And that is just a different sort of thing from generative AI. We... I don't actually think we have anything that someone would call AI as behavior in one of our games we released. But we will at some point in the future and those are like... Artificial intelligence can mean a lot of things and it's been reduced to LLMs and generative AI and all that lately. But there will always be a role for like, "How does a character figure out how to get from place to place and do pathfinding?" That's technically AI. We will keep using that sort of thing.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:03:11
Yeah, that's, that's the old school stuff we learned in college, like alpha-beta pruning. The way AIs beat chess is the stuff we're doing, not machine learning, which is a different, a different beast.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:03:26
Yeah. And speaking of older work, we're gonna be doing an update that you may have heard about the reason for.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:03:36
Yes. So Unity, the game development environment that Majesty of Colors is written in, has had a security flaw for the last, what, eight years? that was recently revealed. And so there is a small patch that we're going to be applying to Majesty of Colors. I think it applies across all platforms that we release on.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:04:07
I think so.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:04:09
Windows, Linux, Android...
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:04:10
Yeah.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:04:10
And it should change nothing—
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:04:14
Yeah.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:04:15
—in terms of behavior.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:04:17
It would be wild if anyone is actually at any risk for Majesty of Colors. It would require you to be running Majesty of Colors with command line arguments on your machine. So we're not worried that anyone's actually been hurt, but it's good to, to close that loophole anyway.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:04:35
Absolutely. So we will certainly post when that release comes out, just as like a general heads up. If you notice any issues or something behaves weirdly, definitely reach out and let us know because we can crack it back open again. It is weird opening Unity!
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:04:55
It is, yeah. We have been totally off Unity for a while now. I've been messing around in Godot lately.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:05:01
Yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:05:02
And it's nice to be away from Unity, I have to say. And it's a little bit of a shame to be booting it back up, but we want to make sure that this is kept up to date.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:05:11
Absolutely. In an update you will absolutely notice...
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:05:17
Yes. Is what I've been working on. I think we may have mentioned that we were starting to work on it last time, but the redesign for the Exploit: Zero Day system page, that's the page where the actual puzzles show up, is currently in testing. So that should, I mean, maybe by the time you're hearing this, it will have gone live? Or it will, you know, when we manage to find the time to test it, we will, we will push it out shortly after that. And it looks good, I think! We kind of, as we added features over the years to the puzzle, you know, leaderboards on who did it—or not leaderboards. We added leaderboards. We removed leaderboards and just did like "see your friend solutions". And then we, you know, we've got all sorts of sharing stuff and all of that just kind of made the page messy and disorganized and a little hard to use. And I think that we've cleaned it up and given some fresh effects and I'm excited to have that go live.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:06:19
Yeah. So we may include a screenshot in the show notes...? Depends on the status of things. So feel free to check your podcatcher for that.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:06:31
And then the only other thing that we need to cover is just upcoming sales as usual.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:06:39
Yeah. So the winter season is upon us. We are recording this before Thanksgiving. So we have the Steam Winter Sale is going to be coming up December 18th and that will run through the beginning of January, I think. And there will be at least one Black Friday sale going on possibly as this is coming out.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:07:05
Yeah, I always feel a little weird about doing a Black Friday sale.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:07:10
Yeah.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:07:12
It's a storefront wide sale. I like participating in those. But also the whole concept of Black Friday feels evil to me.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:07:18
So especially combined with Cyber Monday which is now apparently just normal, just like a thing people say. So there's those two things going on. We'll certainly post about them on social media. There will probably be other sales that have not yet been revealed. Storefronts really like to keep the dates close to their chests on these and one notable storefront likes to not tell you when the sale's gonna end. Just keeping you on your toes.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:07:54
So in some cases we'll be finding out when you do about sales.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:07:58
That is... yes. That is very real.
Gregory Avery-Weir 00:08:02
But we'll make sure to keep you posted.
Melissa Avery-Weir 00:08:05
So you can find all of our stuff over at futureproofgames.com. We're over on Bluesky as futureproofgames.com and on Mastodon as fpg@mastadon.gamedev.place. We're also on YouTube as Future Proof Games. Hit us up with any questions or comments over on our blog or social media. Our theme music is "Juparo" by Broke for Free, which is used with permission.