The Future Proof Podcast 048

Podcast episode

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

Gregory 00:00:21
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Future Proof podcast. We're Future Proof Games. We're a two person game development studio. And we talk every, roughly every couple months about what we're working on, stuff we're thinking about, stuff we're planning. I'm Gregory.

Melissa 00:00:36
And I'm Melissa. And we want to talk a little bit about how we stream games.

Gregory 00:00:44
Yeah, like not the, not the logistics of the tech we use, but like how do we pick a thing? And you streamed just Saturday, right, Lissa?

Melissa 00:00:54
I did. Had a hard pivot in the middle of it.

Gregory 00:00:59
Yes. So do you want to tell the big story?

Melissa 00:01:05
Yeah. So I had... So I guess to back it up a little bit further, even. Every a couple of times a month, roughly, we alternate streaming an indie game that we think is in line with our values or game design principles or whatever. And so I picked Pentiment because it seemed interesting and I thought I'd heard it was doing some things that might be of interest to us.

Gregory 00:01:30
And it's by Obsidian Software. Obsidian is the game development studio. And we're like, yeah, they're a good indie studio. They made Fallout New Vegas.

Melissa 00:01:41
Yeah. And so I start streaming and Greg, bless their soul, is like, "Oh, hey, Obsidian is just Microsoft now."

Gregory 00:01:49
Yeah, yeah. So yeah, we always like, I try to like pull up the game's wiki page just so that I know this, you know, I can pull any credit information. I'm like, oh, right, they, Microsoft bought Obsidian like five years ago or something at this point. And Microsoft is on the BDS Movement list of companies to boycott.

Melissa 00:02:12
Right. And I've heard the term BDS for obviously the last mumble-something years. And at some point someone probably said what all of those letters mean. But it is the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement and they are particularly interested in groups that are, in companies that are supporting Israel against Palestine.

Gregory 00:02:34
Yeah.

Melissa 00:02:35
And Microsoft provides Azure cloud services. Their AI services have been used by the Israeli government to perpetuate the genocide.

Gregory 00:02:47
Yeah. If you haven't been keeping up with that, basically Israel is a country in the Middle East. They are an apartheid state, which means that Palestinian people, which are people that lived in the place we now call Israel in around 1920, descendants of those people are treated differently than everyone else. And by differently, I mean they are murdered, you know, families, children starved, having their homes destroyed or stolen, etc. It's really awful stuff. And part of taking part of ending this genocide is going to be similar to what happened in South Africa's apartheid, anti-apartheid movement, which is boycotting companies which support it, helping to reduce the amount of, you know, funding and support that goes into this effort. And so we don't want to support any games that are made by Microsoft or Xbox Studios, which is a lot of them. And this was one of them.

Melissa 00:03:43
Yeah, a lot.

Gregory 00:03:44
And they specifically asked don't stream them.

Melissa 00:03:47
Right. Yes. And so it just completely slipped through my filter because that's not the branding on the tin. And so we pivoted. I switched it to...

Gregory 00:04:04
We didn't actually hit start game. We were like on the main menu.

Melissa 00:04:07
Correct. I had in my testing because I had to make sure it streamed well. But that's correct. We were on the main menu describing things. And so I pivoted to a delightful game which I do recommend and as far as I am aware is not under boycott, called The Garden Path. That is a, a very chill and also sometimes very stressful little gardening game. 

Gregory 00:04:33
It seems like a game for people who thought Animal Crossing explained itself too well. That's sort of the vibe.

Melissa 00:04:37
Yyyyes.

Gregory 00:04:39
It's like very like mysterious and cryptic and you're meeting friends and gardening plants and building things... decorating.

Melissa 00:04:47
Very slow paced game. It's a very slow paced game in some ways. So anyway. But we thought it would be interesting to talk about like how do we pick streaming games? How do we filter out ones even when it's not a huge boycott against genocide. Like how do we, you know, there are lots of games we want to play. Our backlog is bigger than our forelog will ever be. So how do we not just play, you know, Doom 2016 on a Future Proof Play stream?

Gregory 00:05:17
Yeah. And I mean the really short way to put the story is it's vibes based.

Melissa 00:05:23
Yeah, yeah.

Gregory 00:05:24
But, but generally we, I think the way we generally put it is we want games that are in line with our values and that can be a complicated conversation. Not, not between us. I think that, that we very seldom disagree on whether a game is our sort of game. But like in general, talking about games that are not evil or even games that are in line with your values can often become like, "Let's find games that don't have anything bad in them." Sometimes people interpret—although I don't think the wholesome games group does this—I think some people hear "wholesome games", for example, and go, "O"h, you mean games without sex or violence or anything challenging? You know, games you can show your kids." And that's not what we are looking for.

Melissa 00:06:11
Right. Same with cozy game and wholesome games are getting, getting a bad rap at the moment from certain crew.

Gregory 00:06:19
And we love a cozy game. We love a wholesome game. But we also like games which are kind of life affirming but exploring hard shit like we'll, we'll do... We've done horror games. We've done games that have depictions of sexual assault in them in, in you know, tasteful and meaningful ways. You know, we're, we don't... Hm. I was going to say we don't make edgy games but I guess that a lot of the political things in our games can be a little, a little controversial. We're abolitionist, for example, regarding cops and prison.

Melissa 00:06:58
It depends on, this, this has to be in relation to how fascist your government is, right?

Gregory 00:07:02
Yeah. And let's be clear: The US is super fascist right now. We are also trying to stop the United States from carrying out a genocide. So things are rough out there. But I think generally we want games that, let's see, they're thoughtful, that are saying something. Sometimes the thing they're saying is "family is good" or "isn't it nice to make friends with animals". But they have some sort of center to them that is philosophical or moral. And also we want games that like we can play for an hour and a half and have it be interesting.

Melissa 00:07:41
This is true. Yeah. There are definitely some of my... I use Playnite to sort of sort my games—

Gregory 00:07:55
Playnite is amazing. 

Melissa 00:07:59 
My only wish is that it existed off of my sole desktop machine. But I have a bucket that's like "plan to play". And these are like out of all of the million games in my backlog, what's the high intent games? Some of those are just not streamable. Some of those are like we're just gonna mosey around, you know, in a space and not have anything to talk about for, for 90 minutes. So it doesn't make the cut. But I think that there is an additional complication with our selection of games which is that we don't pre- play the games. We are coming in sight unseen. So we are judging, attempting to assess, like, is this game going to like laugh at survivors of xyz, right? Like, you know, we're trying to like pick games that seem to have a good, a good heart. And then sometimes you get on stream and you get partway through a game and you might go, "ah, I don't like what this is saying" or "I don't like this politics" or something like that. And you got to decide what to do on the fly. So sometimes it still catches up.

Gregory 00:09:01
Yeah, I can, I can be prone to improper scrupulosity, like trying to make sure that I'm 100% good at everything I do. So I try not to over check and over police the sort of games I stream. But I generally will like look at the studio's bluesky profile, right? And just see like, have they been tweeting, complaining about women? I will usually Google the developer or the game and "controversy" and, and then I think checking like comments and like content warnings on the game where you can usually tell like, you know, if a game is like "this contains a whole lot of gore and nudity" and we're probably not gonna stream it not because it's bad, but because it, you know, it. It's not, it's not in line with a lot of the other stuff. And so people who come to, to our stream, like wouldn't, would expect a certain kind of game that we're doing. And so we're not gonna do like, you know, like you said, Doom 2016, even if it weren't under boycott, we probably wouldn't do it just because it's, it's not the sort of game we stream.

Melissa 00:10:15
Yeah, but we have done, you know, we have, we've played Indica for instance. There was... is it called the Missing? The one that you streamed just a couple months ago?

Gregory 00:10:29
Oh yeah, that one is about a, like, its central kind of crisis is the death of a child.

Melissa 00:10:35
Yeah. Of course, you know, there, there's an interesting sort of divide and I think movies have this too of like once something is a classic, you no longer judge it by the same standards. So we played What Remains of Edith Finch. And by we, I mean me and I remained scarred by that game. And there's a lot of pretty traumatic death in that game in ways that are unpleasant and—

Gregory 00:11:02
And I'd say child neglect going on there as well.

Melissa 00:11:08
At a minimum. And so I think we are able to explore those ideas even if I... That was one I wish I had. I wish I hadn't gone in quite so sight unseen.

Gregory 00:11:19
Yeah. But notably like that's a one where kind of the hazard there is, oh, am I gonna cry in front of chat. Not like, you know, there's nothing in Edith Finch, I think, I mean we can discuss whether it, whether it handles its topic well, but like it's not handling gratuitously in the sense of like you don't see limbs flying or anything like that in that game. There's some troubling fish stuff later on.

Melissa 00:11:44
Yeah, the fish stuff is troubling.

Gregory 00:11:46
Yeah. And, and so it's, it's an ongoing conversation for us. On like... not a, not an active one. I don't think that we're like, "Hey, do we need to revise our standards?" Although... Do we need to revise our standards? Do you think we're doing good?

Melissa 00:12:04
I think we're generally doing okay. I think we have... we currently have kind of a struggle with the amount of energy we have as people.

Gregory 00:12:15
Yes.

Melissa 00:12:16
And the amount of performance involved in streaming. And I think it is harder to take on a more challenging game on stream if you are exhausted.

Gregory 00:12:25
Yeah.

Melissa 00:12:28
Are we going to play Horses? You know what I mean?

Gregory 00:12:30
Like, probably not. That's seems pretty bleak. And then like something that I often say either to myself or to you is this game looks like it has a lot of dialogue in it and it is not voiced. Because I think both of us really like to read the dialogue and text that's important on screen aloud just because that's part of streaming. People like it and it's easier to follow if you're viewing in a small window. But like, if it's all unvoiced dialogue that can... I can't talk that long.

Melissa 00:13:02
Yeah. I have a game I would love to stream, but oh my god, there's so much text. And I just don't think I could do it.

Gregory 00:13:14
So, like, Device 6 is getting release on PC. I think that would be an amazing game to stream, but it is... a screenshot of that game looks like a page of a novel. It is not tenable. You know, we're not going to do Fallen London. It's just too not.

Melissa 00:13:32
I have streamed Fallen London.

Gregory 00:13:33
But for Future Proof Plays?

Melissa 00:13:34
Not for Future Proof Plays, no.

Gregory 00:13:37
But yeah, that's, that's sort of what we're thinking about when we think about a game we're doing. I have a kind of a.... I don't... It might have happened by the time this episode comes out. I don't know. It depends on how our schedules line up. But my next stream that I'm planning on doing is a little bit unusual. I'm planning on doing the games in Game Poems #1, which is a literary magazine, I guess, that I'm on the editorial collective for, organized by Jordan Magnuson, who's a great indie dev and academic. And so I'm going to be doing actually possibly some games that are in that category of in line with our values, but kind of hard, kind of tricky to look at sometimes or to read. So. But I'm looking forward to doing that. I'm not going to be playing my own game, but I'll be playing the rest of them during in the magazine.

Melissa 00:14:32
You can switch to me and I'll play your game. Although I was a playtester, so...

Gregory 00:14:36
Yeah, yeah. We wouldn't be able to do a first, first playthrough of it.

Melissa 00:14:39
Yeah.

Gregory 00:14:40
But yeah, beyond that, one of the reasons we wanted to chat about this is that. So if you've ever been curious about how that process works, that's how we go about it.

Melissa 00:14:45
Yeah. And if you have any ideas for games we should play... We try to keep an ear to the ground on things that are coming out and things that are in our backlogs. I'm still playing games from the itch.io 2020 bundles, 2021 bundles. But there are, I know that there are indie classics that I haven't played yet that might be good for streaming and I... It's been a long time since I did that Run of Virginia and Norfolk Suite and all of those or whatever that one was. Norwood. So if you have ideas of games we should stream, we should play, including if you are the creator of said game, reach out to us on social media or info@futureproofgames.com or either of us individually in our respective social media places. We are interested in playing games. So yeah.

Gregory 00:15:42
But beyond that, one of the reasons why we chatted about that on this episode is that we don't have a lot of news to share. We're working on a whole lot of stuff behind the scenes at Future Proof Games. So we're upgrading internal tools, switching from a very old version of Ember to a modern version of React, right, you ended up using?

Melissa 00:16:05
Oh, this was from Meteor to React.

Gregory 00:16:08
Oh, Meteor, that's right. Yes.

Melissa 00:16:10
Yeah. Which, that'll take you back.

Gregory 00:16:14
Yeah, I liked Meteor. It's just not, it feels old fashioned at this point and is a pain to work with in modern times. We're working on reinforcing some of our security. You're working hard on taxes for the year.

Melissa 00:16:31
Yeah. And then EZD—Exploit: Zero Day is getting some visual redesign of system pages and internal things like that. And then we're also doing some writing. We've got writing to do on Headless Swarm. So we're, we're churning over here on a bunch of different things. There's just nothing to say like, "Go look at this right now!"

Gregory 00:16:53
We're excited and maybe even desperate to be able to share cool, visible stuff with you. But sometime soon, hopefully. 

Melissa 00:16:55
Yeah.

Gregory 00:16:56
And if you have any questions, if you want us to hear us talk about stuff on this podcast, absolutely feel free to reach out to us. We don't get a lot of feedback, so we're kind of just riffing it here, so feel free to let us know what you think. You can find all of our news and games at futureproofgames.com. You can find us on bluesky as again futureproofgames.com or on Mastodon as fpg@mastodon.gamedev.place and our YouTube channel is called Future Proof Games. You can give us questions or comments on our blog or on social media. And our theme music is "Juparo" by Broke for Free, which is used with permission.