017 - Fraculation Studios

Ryan Post: 0:15

Welcome to the show with bite-sized bits and discussions. Today we have Dan with Fraculation Studios joining us, whose game Seed Defender is hopefully, I believe, coming out later this year. My name is Ryan Papapost and assisting me tonight. I've got Josh with Suggestive Gaming over there, I've got Dom up over there and we don't have Logan because he hates me. So anyways, dan, how are you buddy? Welcome to the show.

Dan: 0:45

Thanks, I'm doing great, you know, just hanging out.

Ryan Post: 0:51

Just hanging out with the mushrooms behind you.

Dan: 0:52

Yep, yep yep, hanging out. Yeah, I like this background. This is actually my room. I've cultivated these mushrooms over the past year carefully alongside my game development process.

Ryan Post: 1:05

Okay, impressive. What are those trees? Is that like cotton candy trees?

Dan: 1:10

Yeah, so those are like salvaged timber from old barn houses with cotton candy on top, so it's very, very like chic.

Dominic: 1:18

Oh, fantastic, by touch that mushroom in the background, will it eat me? Which one? The one behind you to the left.

Ryan Post: 1:27

As they say, there's like, yeah, that one will. Oh, to the left, the branches kind of look like I don't like that one. It kind of looks like mustaches on those. That's what I've obviously been looking for. Closely. I was like are those like?

Dan: 1:41

people, I guess that is I mean?

Ryan Post: 1:43

I mean Like personified.

Dan: 1:45

I was going to open they're kind of scary.

Ryan Post: 1:48

They're kind of scary. Well anyways, welcome to the show. Dan, your studio. Shout out to all the podcast listeners who have no idea what we're talking about.

Dominic: 1:57

Yeah, I was going to say.

Ryan Post: 2:00

I'll watch that on YouTube later.

Dan: 2:01

Yeah, yeah, audiovisual experience.

Ryan Post: 2:05

That's okay. You get a little bit here. That's why you got to watch it in both places. Plus, I mean, you get extra giveaway codes for the. Anyways, that's for later.

Dominic: 2:14

We'll get there.

Ryan Post: 2:15

We'll get there eventually. No, I made sure, by the way, that Gary stayed in the sump pump today. That's just a little bit of an inside thing from last week. But anyways, dan, welcome your studio Fraculation. First of all, I got to know where did Fraculation come from? What is Fraculation?

Dan: 2:34

Oh, that's a good question. Okay, so I actually haven't. I don't think I've been able to tell anyone this story yet. So when I was looking, trying to think about the name, like I chose the name after I sort of already had the game of development in the game, steve Defender is all about growing plants and having dynamically generated plants that are very self-similar, using L systems and all that, so they're like a little fractally. So I wanted to get Come up with a word that's kind of like fractal but is like maybe doing a fractal, like a fractal as an action and Fraculation signed. It Sounded kind of similar to that. It turns out it technically is a word and it's only been used once in media that I know of, in Rick and Morty at one point. So if you search the phrase, it might, you might get like a Rick and Morty clip or you might get my website. It's kind of a oh.

Ryan Post: 3:27

That's a slippery slope these days, yeah.

Dominic: 3:29

Yeah a little bit, that's true.

Dan: 3:31

Oh no, yeah, that's basically how it came about. I think the actual meaning of the word is to like, separate into like so many pieces and separate into like a billion tiny pieces, more or less, which is not really what I was going for, but I think it works.

Ryan Post: 3:51

Like a microscopic measurement, like a Pico. I know, that's a joke that no one else is going to get. I'm sorry.

Dominic: 3:58

I barely get it.

Ryan Post: 4:00

Pico Johnson? No, I get it, but I don't. That was a shoehorn like I've never seen before, I'm sorry. So just to Okay, we had a machinima many years ago and Pico Johnson was the name of a character for Josh, which basically means microscopic wiener. But anyways, I'm sorry to cut you off, dan, go ahead.

Dan: 4:21

Yeah, I have to correct myself there. I misremembered the meaning of the word and apparently it's to be scrambled beyond repair, which honestly I feel like is fitting for my game development process. Sometimes it gets cold.

Dominic: 4:34

It's like my brain. It kind of works with how your logo forms on your website as well.

Dan: 4:40

Yeah, yeah, it just kind of happens. Yeah it just happens.

Ryan Post: 4:46

So I guess I want to know a little bit about your background. For those who don't know, I just like Lyme, who's actually in chat today hanging out. I met you at Midwest Gaming Classic. You're kind of showcasing your game SEB Defender. I keep saying SEED. So easy to say that.

Dan: 5:03

Yeah, you got to get it right.

Ryan Post: 5:05

Yeah, and I'm the worst one names, so put me in my place, if I'm ever, anyways.

Dan: 5:11

I make the same mistake honestly, sometimes even in my game.

Ryan Post: 5:15

So if you see the name Anna or Anna, which one is it?

Dominic: 5:20

Oh, my God.

Dan: 5:22

Wait, okay, I can't, just you, just just, if I see the name you'll have to tell me how it's spelled?

Ryan Post: 5:27

Yeah, you got to say A-N-N-A, a-n-n-a, anna. No, no, anna.

Dan: 5:33

I think it's Anna, I'm sorry.

Ryan Post: 5:40

I was just totally like fucking up someone's name before. The problem wasn't that you fucked it up. The problem was that she told you how to pronounce it correctly, because you asked, and then you proceeded to say it both ways just throughout the entire conversation. Yeah, that's a throwback to our episode with the VEKIE. But, anyways, dan, okay, so I actually I remembered you telling me this at Midwest Gaming Classic that you actually like that's actually being generated on the website, right the Fraculation logo, or is that just in the game, that where it's being generated in real time?

Dan: 6:17

Yeah, it's, that's just a captured gift, unfortunately, but it is being so. I generated it by like designing the plant system to generate it that way, but it's not actually running on the website, but it did run somewhere when I captured it, if that makes sense.

Ryan Post: 6:32

Ran somewhere. So how crazy did it get? Do you have to like trim the bushes Eventually, or like no, that's not implemented yet, unfortunately.

Dan: 6:42

No, it was basically what it ended up being, was I would have, like that's each letters constructed by a series of like, move forward, or like split or turn commands, so like F would be move forward two times, split, turn right, move forward two times and yeah, you can get it Sure, okay, so your game, sieb Defender.

Ryan Post: 7:06

We've been talking about plants, mushrooms. This is it's a tower defense game, right that? Basically it's not like plants versus zombies. It's something completely different where you're kind of growing my understanding and please correct me if I'm wrong, it's been a while but it's a game where, like, you're kind of creating a garden, so to speak, and protecting from. I don't remember what the enemy is either, so please expound on your game.

Dan: 7:31

Yeah, the enemies are very they're sort of like almost self-inserts, they're kind of whatever you want them to be. So the core sort of idea I built the game around, or the core motivation, is I wanted to make a game about genetics. That wasn't just like a lot of the games out there about genetics are you have like two animals, you breed them together sort of manually and you get like a even like very predictable blending of their traits and then, like you move on from there, or maybe it's not even genetics at all. So from that I decided to move to like explore ways that I could sort of take genetics and encode them into a system that generated like a being of some sort, and plants came out of that. So the core of the game, aside from all like the theory, the core of the game is you have these plants, or seeds, or siebs, I should say, that have like genetic code in them that you can grow the siebs and you a plant will kind of come out of that and it'll be partly determined by the genes but also partly determined by the environment you grow it in. So it's not quite like as deterministic as you might expect. And then you take that plant sort of once it's fully grown or you've decided it's fully grown because there's no technically like completely grown state you sort of freeze it in time it becomes a and then when you freeze it it becomes a tower, as if it was sort of like plants versus zombies. So you kind of get you like grow this plant. It's affected by its genes, affected by the environment, maybe plants that are growing near it. You get it, you turn it into a tower defense tower and then it has all these attributes on it that are sort of derived from its genetics and its environment also. So it's not just like you get this plant and it has like it's this good at being a tower defense tower. It'll have like a different number of weapons and each weapon will have a different range potentially, and the fire rate will be different depending on how many leaves are on the plant because of that defects, how much glucose the plant gets, all that type of stuff Do you have like all these complex systems interacting and you get this plant and then you put it into the relatively simple sort of tower defense level and you then that the tower defense cycle is pretty like. I think it's like rogue light-ish, that phase, like you fight with this selected set of plants. You fight a few waves until you kind of die eventually, and then you get a reward based on how far you made it. And then the points okay, and then the big loop is you get these points from that right, your reward, and you use those points to unlock different genes and then those genes will become accessible when you like. Expose your seeds to radiation treatments, basically randomize your genes. And then you have to like select for the genes you upgraded into.

Ryan Post: 10:22

I was gonna ask if there was like mutations involved. So that's cool.

Dan: 10:27

Yep, yeah, and that's kind of the and all the mutations currently are exclusively intentional. Like you'll put your seeds into this like box and it will kind of just like garble them up a bit.

Ryan Post: 10:40

So you don't have I like that. Do you not have much of a choice of how your plant is genetically growing or modifying, or is it like random?

Dan: 10:51

Yeah, so that's kind of. This is actually something I'm kind of struggling a little bit with you. The choice that you have is sort of the same choice that like Gregor Mendel had when he was understanding Punnett squares. Right like you can choose which plants breed with other plants and produce, and their offspring will have like traits that are not a linear blending of their traits, but it will be like the genes will actually perform like a discrete genetic combination. So you can control it by breeding them in a using genetic like combinations in the same way you sort of can in the real world. And that's kind of like the core of that.

Ryan Post: 11:31

So it's not like a big tree of things where you could sit there and select, because I'm thinking of, like, if you've ever played the game like plague, is it called plague ink, I think when you choose. I think it's a fungus where it'll like you can kind of pick what you want, but it'll actually start like having mutations and other things that you have no control over. So I wasn't sure if it was like a tree that you choose from or if it's just completely based on how you're breeding plants.

Dan: 11:58

Yeah, and that what you described there is like almost exactly what I'm trying to avoid, because that's what I saw in a lot of other games that did like genetics. It really it was. You weren't actually really interacting with genetics and that which is the system of like multiple chromosomes breathing and like randomly mixing. You were just kind of like picking things that were called genes that you wanted as upgrades.

Ryan Post: 12:21

Oh, that is really cool, Go ahead Dan so.

Dominic: 12:24

Dan. So when it comes to like a tower defense, is it like a tower defense simulator type of thing?

Dan: 12:33

Yeah, that part of the oh.

Dominic: 12:34

I'm sorry. Did you pull inspiration from plants versus zombies at all, or were you just going into this thinking it'll be its own little thing?

Dan: 12:42

So I pulled I will admit I pulled a little bit of artistic inspiration from plants versus zombies. The most basic tower unit is like the P-shooter from plants versus zombies, but the actual level is the way you play. The tower defense game is very different because it's a classic 2D. The enemies will not walk in one direction, they'll follow a single path and the ranges of the towers are fully Because the plants are fully 3D. The ranges of each individual weapon on the plant has a unique range in three dimensions which will intersect with the two dimensional plane the enemies are traversing. So there's some strategies like you want all your weapons to be facing downwards a little bit so they will actually hit the enemies, that type of thing.

Dominic: 13:37

And so, since you're defending the plants, of course, right, do you have anything in the game that's meant for defense only, like walls, barricades, etc. Or like plant walls or something like that?

Dan: 13:50

No, I don't. I've thought about that type of thing and an early build of the game had something kind of like that, where the enemies would literally try to hack through your plants, like they literally destroy the physical structure of your plants as like a hedge to get through. But there's nothing like that in the game right now. I'm guessing what will probably happen to achieve that type of goal is a different type of weapon that might emit like a slowing projectile or like an AoE that slows things down, that'd be cool.

Ryan Post: 14:24

Yeah, just put up some thorn walls, man.

Dan: 14:27

Yeah, that's the type of thing that, yeah, if you could have a plant that was just thorns, that would be really easy to sort of implement in the systems that I've got.

Dominic: 14:34

It can be like barbed wire yeah.

Ryan Post: 14:38

Yeah, let's okay, let's just okay. Now we're out, now we're. We got the think tank going here Now we're just workshopping. Do you do you do? You got your notepad ready, dan, for all these ideas that you don't want to do?

Dan: 14:47

It's always good to have ideas. It's always good to have ideas that I can ignore and put other I prioritize other ideas over. I know what's important. I know what's important.

Ryan Post: 14:57

You can plant a vine with some thorns that'll wrap around your plants to help fortify them and like here we go. Yeah, now we're on to some anyways.

Dan: 15:04

Yeah, and then if you, if you make sure that plant has like nitrogen binding rhizomes, it can fertilize all the other plants, all kinds of good stuff.

Ryan Post: 15:11

I understood everything you just said. Rhizomes dude, I took two biology courses in college.

Dominic: 15:17

I just took a biology class. It's beans.

Dan: 15:21

It's just thorny beans Dude, can I?

Ryan Post: 15:24

can I ask do you have like a passion with plants and like, do you have like a really big green thumb? Because I feel like or at least biology, you know.

Dan: 15:31

Yeah, I think I, I think I do. Now I it kind of just sort of happened to be honest. Yeah, like so I I got a. I live in an apartment and I was able to convince my landlord to let me put a like raised bed garden in last year. My sister got me into gardening like four years ago and I would I think that had like some influence over this choice. Like I enjoyed it a lot and started making a game about it.

Ryan Post: 16:00

That's really cool to me. Like I that I am, the, I do not have a green thumb at all. So, like just, I don't understand anything about plants other than I. They die if you don't water them, so I love growing like food and stuff.

Dominic: 16:15

That's always fun to do.

Dan: 16:17

That's what I'm interested in, Yep. So yeah, I'm less interested in decorative plants.

Ryan Post: 16:23

So with your garden have you been like breeding.

Dan: 16:29

Like no, not where where?

Ryan Post: 16:31

where did the inspiration for that kind of aspect come from? Like I know you said you had seen, kind of you know, genetics implemented in games before, was that just kind of your, your jumping off point, to do it in this kind of more scientifically accurate way?

Dan: 16:48

or I think. So I'm actually not sure like specifically where the interest in genetics comes from. I've always kind of been fascinated with the idea of like simulating life in in the computer in some way and seeing what what you can possibly like get out of it Like, I think, a cool way. Back in college I made a sort of simulation of little, what do I call them, like microbes I guess, that would try to like. They would have very simple perceptrons that would try to seek out food, but they have a really very stupid brain and it would really. They would only evolve through like genetic. Genetic would be a stretch. They would sort of be like we could call it genetic optimization. I think is what we tried there. So I think I've just always been fascinated with seeing how to like simulate the way that evolution sort of happens in real life but in the computer and seeing, like what you can, interesting effects you can get out of that. Yeah that's.

Ryan Post: 17:55

That's always something that interested me as well Because, like so, coming from my end of things, like I am huge into genetic algorithms, like I love you know that that area of heuristic designing so like this to me is so similar to that, but in such a obviously different way, so like that's why the idea of mutations and stuff sound really cool, so I'm interested to see you know where you go. Oh, and Lyme in the chat actually asked if you were inspired by genetic algorithms.

Dan: 18:34

So there we go. Yes, yep, that stuff is so cool. That's basically like the way I think about it. Is the player is the genetic selection algorithm, like the genetics happened. But typically when you're using genetic algorithms, you would sort of impose a selection bias based on, like, some attribute and that that was like in some way derived from the genes, right? So in this case I'm making the player choose what plants are good and in theory, they'll like eventually get some better plants.

Ryan Post: 19:07

I, yeah, I really like that idea. That's. That is actually pretty cool. It turns the idea on its head almost where, instead of? Instead of having the algorithm drive its own, you know path of evolution, that's the player's job.

Dan: 19:23

That's really cool. Some of the interest. It's really interesting because then the player can sort of they're not only looking for plants that are like the most effective fighters. Again, some of my playtesting I've gotten a lot of people that like they noticed this plant grows kind of like a ladder. So I'm going to try to make plants that look like that because I think it's cool, so you can get all these interesting like little things that people select for when you have like a generation space that's big enough to allow for these types of things.

Ryan Post: 19:54

So can you accidentally grow black sheep plants that you don't want.

Dan: 20:01

Oh, like a plant that just sucks. Yeah, yeah Like yeah, sure, yeah, it happens like at least half the time, at least half the time, perfect, perfect. It's really common, in the way that I have it set up at least. No, that's good.

Dominic: 20:15

I'm looking on your website and the sunlight seeking behavior is really intriguing me. Yeah, so how long does that take you to create?

Dan: 20:24

Oh, I'm going to, I want to make sure I see it right. No, okay, I actually know. I remember what we were talking about. So that was like the thing that made me so excited about parts of these systems I was building is the fact that that specific behavior was sort of the emergent of the properties that I built into the L system engine as a whole. So it took me a while. To what makes that work is the ability to sort of individually attribute the amount of sunlight that hits each leaf to individual, like specific leaves, which is useful for driving growth towards sunlight and just as a side effect, I can also make things that kind of like weave and dodge to seek out sunlight. So actually, I guess, actually to answer your question, actually building the system that sort of cross associates the sunlight to individual leaves probably took me, I think, if you include, like the time I spent sort of thinking about how to solve that problem probably about a month to get through it all.

Ryan Post: 21:31

Wow, and that's not sure days either, I'm sure, I'm sure Nice long days. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dan: 21:39

Some of that was just like I'm working on something else, but I know that I have to solve this, like sunlight exposure problem and I'm thinking about, like, how is this going to work into the system?

Dominic: 21:50

Also, while looking at it, I can imagine like games using that for like very beautiful shots of like if you're like a small person going through a forest and you can see all the leaves flying around and stuff. I think that'd be really cool in a game. I think there's something like what you got here. It's kind of like mesmerizing. I can't stop watching it.

Ryan Post: 22:13

What are you just talking about? The gift with the sun going around?

Dominic: 22:17

Yeah, it's so cool looking. I don't know how to explain it.

Ryan Post: 22:20

So if you guys are listening and you want to see, kind of like, what we're talking about while you're listening, if you go to Fraculationcom you can see a lot of what we were talking about here.

Dan: 22:31

Yeah, I think the article title is implementing efficient Linda Meyer systems in Unity I think that's right.

Ryan Post: 22:38

Okay, yeah, and I will say, Dan, like your website I was glancing through it before I didn't have a chance to like dig deep into it, but I mean you've done a really good job at documenting kind of what you're doing, how you're implementing, especially the L system stuff.

Dan: 22:55

I'm glad you think so.

Ryan Post: 22:56

Yeah, I definitely recommend folks like if you're listening to what we're talking about here and you're interested in that, I think you could take a step in there and at least look at it and appreciate what's going on in Sieb Defender here I mean even if you're simple like me, and you just like pictures that move.

Dan: 23:17

Yeah, I try to keep it illustrative because I feel like that's even for me that's the best way to sort of understand what's happening.

Ryan Post: 23:23

I agree, dan. Can I ask how do you approach like designing and implementing the AI systems in the game, like? What factors do you consider when you're creating how everything works together?

Dan: 23:39

Well, when you say AI, do you mean the plant generation system?

Ryan Post: 23:43

Well, yeah, so is it.

Dan: 23:47

Yeah.

Ryan Post: 23:47

I guess that I am.

Dominic: 23:49

I guess you can kind of take that how you want to take it?

Dan: 23:51

Yeah, yeah, I'm not sure how it all works. I can talk a little bit. Yeah, I think what the process I went through to sort of reach the TEL system that I have now, like the plant generation system, it started with doing a lot of research to sort of figure out a way to reach the goal of transforming like genetic code into a plant that had relatively realistic physical qualities like ability to have sunlight exposure and water moving through the plant in a sort of like diffusion-related manner, and the core of that was figuring out how to take this like the string of code basically and turn it into a 3D plant or a 3D something. So I started with a lot of research to figure out on existing techniques first and I saw a few techniques where they would. My first thought was like trying to to voxelize it somehow, so having some sort of procedure to turn it into like a voxel grid. But eventually I found like basically the original paper for L systems and end up matching sort of what I wanted and they actually talked about a lot of the things that I'm doing. They like especially the sunlight exposure stuff. Like that's very closely related to stuff that they talked about in the sort of the first paper on L systems. So, to be honest, a lot of the stuff that happened here was more or less a result of me kind of just like pouring through the established literature on it and implementing it with what I knew in C-Sharp and Unity and Burst and all that garbage.

Ryan Post: 25:39

There's so many languages man. I think I'll see sharp garbage in my presence.

Dan: 25:45

Well, yeah, there's good things about it. I use it. I mean, it's the thing I've written, probably the most code out of all languages, so I just love lambdas.

Ryan Post: 25:54

Give me lambdas or give me death.

Dan: 25:58

Oh go ahead, Dom.

Dominic: 25:59

Oh, I'm sorry. So in the future do you think you're going to add like weather type of things, like winter time, fall?

Dan: 26:09

Yeah, I think that would be cool those types of variables. My thinking around, that is, I think I'll have like different sets of levels, like different difficulty levels, right? Like you'll start at almost like start to level. You'll start out spring, then you'll move to summer. Maybe it's a little bit tougher and you get like different enemies and different terrain and water is a bit scarcer, so you have to like breed plants that are more drought resistant. So I think there's a lot of cool things you can do with that, once I get like to the point where I'm ready to start cranking out content. I think that'll be a big part of it.

Ryan Post: 26:48

Okay, another question from chat. Was there any inspiration from other games that used mesh deformation, like Jade Cocuni? What was the inspiration for the graphics?

Dan: 26:59

Oh, what was the inspiration? I'm not sure if I I don't think I took any like intentional inspiration on the graphics. A lot of this is just sort of cobbled together. Stuff Like the else is. The plants themselves are sort of just they were initially like welded. Like cylinders is just kind of copied onto it themselves the simplest possible thing I could come up with. Okay, yeah, I think there might have been like a little bit of inspiration coming from the OG Spore games, Like I like. I really like those.

Ryan Post: 27:34

That's the game I was thinking of. Yeah, yeah.

Dan: 27:38

And they're very like procedural generation based. They're not. They don't really have genes or anything, although they kind of pretend like they do. So that's them. Yeah, Maybe I took some like thematic inspiration from that.

Ryan Post: 27:52

So basically, he stole all of the inspiration from that game.

Dan: 27:58

Oh yeah, everything Max is to me.

Ryan Post: 28:01

Yes, I'm calling Molliny. Right now, get old Pete.

Dominic: 28:06

Even like the weird creature show up.

Ryan Post: 28:09

So right.

Dan: 28:10

Yeah, and I guess I can say that, like a lot of the actual in-game graphics that aren't related to the generation of plants are sort of are more related to just what I found that I could do quickly, like a lot of stuff. A lot of the in-game like graphics and UI are just really super simple 3D meshes, because I found I could do that a lot faster than 2D graphics, that type of stuff.

Ryan Post: 28:33

Oh, okay, one of the things I wanted to ask before it leaves my brain, just because a lot of this seems like it's very procedural, maybe, to a degree, what was like the funniest glitch or most unusual behavior that you've experienced when, like, trialing this stuff out, because I'm sure there's been some pretty crazy stuff?

Dan: 28:59

Yeah, okay, oh great, let me think.

Ryan Post: 29:06

I'm coming with the hard questions there's so many things.

Dan: 29:08

So it's the part of okay, this is going to get interesting. I saw a few plants that would have the like they can be. They have variants over their structure, right. So some of them would branch so rapidly and so densely that they would have like 100, like 128 branches. But they'd be like this big, so they'd like branch, they'd like move a little bit and then branch and then move a little bit and branch and branch and branch and branch.

Dominic: 29:38

Oh my.

Dan: 29:38

And that's like horrific for performance. So a lot of like the work that I did around, especially around like the sunlight engine, is like specifically to sort of exclude all those ridiculous like preposterous outcomes. So no super powerful broccoli's running around and no, unless they have enough leaves to support all that biomass Okay.

Ryan Post: 30:01

Cool. Another thing, and Josh, please feel free to step in if I'm kind of stepping on your toes. No, go ahead. Are you and I think we talked about this during Midwest gaming classic a bit but are you kind of using this game as kind of like a stepping stone to doing other games and other things, kind of with plants and things? Because, like, if, for example, a game like Viva Pinata had some kind of like procedural, like plants, where you could, you know, mix and match, you know, to the level that you're doing with your game, would have been really good. So it's like, is that kind of the plan, the stepping stone to the next thing?

Dan: 30:45

Yeah, I think I think so I already have like at least one idea for like something I could use these plants for. But yeah, I'm really interested and like excited to make turn this into sort of like a reusable part of my games. And in fact the code is public, so I mean it's really messy, but if you want to use it you can't use it for commercial products, but you want to use for something free, do it. I think the next, the sort of next game I was thinking about, is almost like if you've played Mountain, this would be familiar to you, sort of like. I'm thinking of like a Zen, almost like Banzai, the emulator, where you'll have plants but you'll be very tightly focused on like one highly detailed plant or maybe two or three and you're supposed to, and you would sort of like trim it or provide like certain qualities to the plant and then get sort of like a score for it. Maybe the score doesn't even do anything, because I feel like trimming the plant is just like caring for it would be reward enough.

Dominic: 31:54

So that's kind of like Mentioning that like Zen type of thing. I was wondering what type of music do you have in the background for the game, if there is any, because I'm a sucker for music in games.

Dan: 32:07

It is for a free music pack. I got off of Humble Bundle. I don't even know the title. It's very placeholder right now.

Dominic: 32:16

That's all right, yeah, so what type of music does that have? Is it like whimsical happiness or is it kind of like relaxed?

Dan: 32:24

death. Yeah, I think, I think. Yeah, I'm going for like the whimsical, almost like cartoony vibe. Yeah, yeah, so it's like very lighthearted, especially because a lot of the, the animation and like generation of the plants almost feels like stop motion ish. So I've integrated that thought a little bit into how the enemies like move around. So I'm going for a little bit of a like toy like vibe there where everything feels a little bit like not really smoothly moving but like kind of like jerking between positions to sort of keep the whole environment in line with how the plant generation system sort of inherently behaves. Oh okay, it's fun.

Ryan Post: 33:11

I like that. Thank you, I think, oh, what was it? I had another one too. Oh, have you? I know you said you've used, you know, the music packs, but have you collaborated with anybody else to help get things done in this game?

Dan: 33:33

I've tried a couple, one or two times I had a UI sort of designer. Give me like a few tips once. I think that's the extent of it so far.

Ryan Post: 33:47

Really.

Dan: 33:47

Okay, yeah, I've been. I need to. That's something I need definitely need to get better at, because there's some things, like like the art and music, that I need to eventually like find someone to help with, sure.

Ryan Post: 34:01

Yeah. So if you plan on keeping the same artistic style that you have now or if you plan on changing it up a bit, you know, once things are more stable and not as resource intensive, Right, yeah, I definitely think I will, because the UI is very placeholder.

Dan: 34:18

I think I have like a sort of like pixel art UI right now and I think I want it to be a bit more closer to, like you know, the vector graphics or something like that, with sort of the style of the rest of the game. Everything is very clean, simple, like sharp edged matches. The pixel art doesn't really doesn't really fit too well.

Ryan Post: 34:40

Sure, okay, I'm going to take things aside just for a quick second, you should. You should have never mentioned that the code was open source and you know, available, because now.

Dan: 34:53

I'm looking because I've just been looking at it and first off, I'm blown away.

Ryan Post: 34:58

Second off you have written more documentation just for this one thing that I have written in my entire career.

Dan: 35:04

Dude, I don't know how you, I don't know how you keep track of anything. I would forget all this.

Ryan Post: 35:09

It's all up here in my ADHD mind. But yeah, that is in. That is insane. I can't wait to dig into this.

Dan: 35:17

Yeah, part of the reason why I did that is because, like, I think it'd be really cool to see like people using it and then contributing to it potentially, if it's clear, sure.

Ryan Post: 35:27

I'll I'll change one thing syntactically and I'll submit a poll request. They know you a contributor Hell yeah, Put my name in the credits. So I did have a question of just going on like the music and UI thing, and even a little bit further than that. So like what, what for you looks like something that's I know that you have alpha builds, like on your Discord, but like what looks like something that's ready for public Is this are you thinking early access? Are you thinking you know you're just going to get to a certain kind of milestone and release it and then just update from there? Like, what does that look like for you? Or what are you thinking?

Dan: 36:08

Yeah, I think there's sort of been this thought in my mind of the point where I am ready to start generating content, because there's a lot of like core games, loop things I still need to figure out. And I think what will happen is I'm not sure if I'll release a demo or if I'll go early access once I have like have that point and have like a little bit of content after that point. But I think it'll be either one of those Like I'll want to release something out in the world once I reach sort of a point that I consider stable and like stable enough for me to start building on top of. So it'll be either a demo or early access and then from there I'll add more and more features, like more weapons, more environments, more levels and all that, and get to general release.

Ryan Post: 36:58

The business part of it's always the hardest part to try and figure out. Because I feel like, especially with you know, like smaller games, like putting a demo out, someone might just play the game on demo and then they feel like they've gotten enough out of it and then won't feel inclined to maybe to buy, you know, unless they absolutely loved it, so like. But then you got the whole like well, a lot of people don't trust early access games. They don't want to sit there and invest in a game that you know people have been burned so many times. So I'll be following closely and interested to see what you do, yeah.

Dan: 37:36

And for me personally, like luckily, I've almost sort of decided to hopped out of needing to care too much about the business side, like I've sort of decided to move slowly on this it's not, I'm not really planning to do this full time, like.

Ryan Post: 37:51

I'm.

Dan: 37:51

I have like a different full time job to support myself with, so this is just a hobby. So that's why I'm like, if I'm a little bit wishy washy, it's because I don't really take the time to think about it, because I've decided to kind of not have to, right.

Ryan Post: 38:05

Just because now I'm, I'm, I'm extra curious. You don't have to tell me the company or anything, but what you do for work is it related to what you do on the side, or is it something completely like you would not even think that you, you do.

Dan: 38:21

I can tell you it's on my link like public LinkedIn. So, I work for this place called post-off. It's yeah, it's complete. The only thing that's makes it related is we're writing code and C sharp. Everything else is like completely different. I tried working for a game dev, a company that was like doing game dev and unity for a bit, but I found it wasn't. I thought it might be rewarding to do game development as my job because I enjoyed it so much working on my individual projects, but it ended up not for me.

Ryan Post: 38:51

It ended up not being as as rewarding, since I think what I really enjoy is working on stuff that I have like full control over you know what I'm glad I tried, yeah, yeah Is the creative aspect, kind of the, the driving force, as opposed to just, you know, implementing somebody else's ideas.

Dan: 39:10

I think so. I think that's kind of what I discovered about what makes it fun.

Ryan Post: 39:15

I mean, you could always just give your resume to Raven software and just say, hey, I'll make you awesome plants for call of duty, yeah.

Dan: 39:24

I'm just saying they just need to give me about 80% of the performance budget and I'll make it happen. I'm sure that'll work.

Ryan Post: 39:34

That's funny. It's a cool thing just because almost all of us here are Wisconsin based, not counting Dom, but you know you're Wisconsin in our hearts, so it is. It is nice to help support local companies and businesses and just real quick, just to give you a moment to breathe there, dan. Speaking of local businesses we are partnered up with and, dan, maybe you've you've heard of them or seen them at Midwest Gaming Classic, but Dark Fusion Systems. They build these really cool boutique mini ITX PCs and we're doing a giveaway for them or for not them? There's only one, there's only one. So it's a nice little system that I learned last week can run cyberpunk at full settings, you know. That's all you need to know. So we are doing a giveaway that's running through the end of August, and if you watch our shows live here, there's a code, and these codes are worth a lot more than just the general entries. So I do want to give away that code right now, just so we can get it out of the way, and the code for today's live stream is ACCCC4UOV, as in Victor, accc4uov. So, just so you guys might want to enter that, you get, I think, 30 or 40, I believe, entries into the giveaway, where most things are like one to two, and if you're interested, you can get $150 off your build by mentioning bucket bites when talking to Henry at Dark Fusion.

Dominic: 41:25

So they're very nice.

Ryan Post: 41:27

They're very nice.

Dominic: 41:28

I will mention that every time.

Ryan Post: 41:30

So check out Dark Fusion and actually Lyme is also from Wisconsin that we had on a couple of weeks ago, so it's nice to have all this Wisconsin representation here on the show and I absolutely love that.

Dominic: 41:44

So not me. I'm from the dark pits of Virginia, Virginia, California.

Ryan Post: 41:49

I didn't know that existed. So, dan, I'm curious, you make games, you work on games. You actually did a game jam that was kind of with some other people and it was actually a really fun little game and I'm actually going to put the link in the chat right now, but it'll also be in the description of the video as well. But you made a game called disconnect and can you? Can you? Can you talk about this game jam, like what was the, what was the? The topic and how did you guys come up with the idea?

Dan: 42:27

Sure, so the the topic that we got was roles reversed. That was kind of it. So we spent it must spend three, three, four hours brainstorming to to settle on a solid idea. We went back and forth a little bit. There were a lot of kind of interesting ideas out there, like thinking about how to invert the like how many? What types of roles can you reverse? Like what is a role? Do you want to also reverse the goals with the role? Like, if you are Mari, if you reverse Mario and you play as Bowser, you still want Mario to win? Or now you were like trying to still trying to kill Mario or are you trying to like help Mario, that type of stuff. One of my like favorite ideas that we had that we didn't use but I feel like it's just so out, there was like inverting the role of specific components of a game. So like the camera in a third person shooter. How would you invert the function of the camera? Almost thinking like a function is typically to show you something that's useful. So if you you could design the camera so it would avoid looking at things based on like a certain utility metric of different things, so like almost be like the most useless camera ever, but eventually, like how we actually ended up on connect for is. We were literally brainstorming in a physical location that had a connect for game and we just looked at it and we're like what if we, what if we just did that? We just reversed that one and that's sort of how the idea seated. From there we did.

Dominic: 44:08

Yeah, sorry, I'm sorry.

Dan: 44:14

And from there we just did a little bit of like paper prototyping sort of like placing tokens around, seeing like how this mechanic would feel if we tried to like try to make the board play against the players, type of thing. Which was that? Honestly, looking back on it, that phase was. It's interesting how that worked because we found that out of the three of us, we had two people playing like playing regular connect for one other person trying to shift the tokens around after they were placed to prevent either of the players from actually winning. But we found that when we were actually like, when we were intelligently placing tokens intentionally it was we never got the board to win, like there was always a win. It seemed almost impossible to make a game such that was possible like fill the board in a draw with connect for. So I was thinking, is this even, is this like actually possible to fill a connect for board without connecting for that type of thing? Okay, so from there then we tried placing the tokens randomly and we found that it actually placing tokens randomly Ended up in a draw, like a hundred percent of the time, like every time we did it. So there was like this spectrum between randomness, completely random and like as intelligent as I am and placing connect for tokens Like somewhere in there is like a good master at for got it.

Ryan Post: 45:46

Well, yeah, now we know. I'm fairly this guy connect for you take your money. By the way, this is a. I just played, I just played around and that was the, yeah, probably most brilliant thing I've ever experienced in my life. That was. That's so tricky, an amazing idea. Yeah, you, you really have to like completely reverse how you yeah, how you think about the game. Like that's it. That is such a brilliant idea and such a great implementation to. Yeah having to Thank you, thank you for that I guess it's great. I recommend everybody to go check. Just go play it. I get on each IO so you can just play it in your browser.

Dan: 46:25

Yep, it's tech, technically mobile compatible, but it's a little janky.

Dominic: 46:30

so sure I might have to try it like that. I like playing janky things.

Ryan Post: 46:34

Yeah, the controls are just like that's gonna make you know I'll figure it out.

Dan: 46:38

I won't spoil it.

Ryan Post: 46:41

I'm sorry, but so yeah, the premise of the game that you guys made is basically you're a ghost while people are playing, connect for, and your job is to not let anyone win, because you're just a big jerk.

Dan: 46:53

And I just hate the players yeah so it's actually pretty fun.

Ryan Post: 46:57

I played it for, like I don't know, 45 minutes before I, yeah, went on to start rating things. So, and for me to play something for 45 minutes is impressive because I.

Dominic: 47:07

Did you know?

Ryan Post: 47:08

I did not. I did not win. I think the most I ever got was like 29 or something like that.

Dominic: 47:13

Yeah, I got. I got 25 and I was a lot of fun like.

Dan: 47:16

I can't wait to to play there and.

Ryan Post: 47:20

So how, I guess, how many is it there's? How many turns would it be like max to win? Like well, there's sick.

Dan: 47:26

I think it's six by five, so probably 30.

Dominic: 47:28

Yeah, so I was like really close then you were so close, yeah, you almost got a post to play a game for 45 minutes, yeah, but that's rare.

Ryan Post: 47:36

But that's, but that's.

Dan: 47:37

After that last one, I said yeah, I think the tricky part about it is it's already like almost hard enough when you're thinking about connect, for, like, you have to evaluate Is this token I'm gonna place improve my position or hurt the position of someone else, right, right? But when you're shifting like an entire row all at once, you have to almost, like, make that computation Once for every single token you're shifting and it's like it's. It's really tough to keep track of all that.

Ryan Post: 48:08

Well, and you move it row by row, or like you move the row, yeah. So like having to think, you know two steps ahead, like I love this, and you can't just, and you can't just have them alternated either, because at some point they're gonna cross, they're good, well, yeah, yeah, you'll get a fight or you'll get a diagonal.

Dan: 48:26

Yeah, pretty sneaky sis, yeah. Yeah, I could hit the team on. That was. Yeah, I was incredible. We were able to get a really very, very skilled artists to like do all the art for us, sort of at the last minute. The two other developers did all of the like animation, like the hand movement and hooking up the menus and all that. All I did was sort of the back end where, yeah, designed like the AI and moving of the tokens and all that right. But it was all very, yeah, very satisfying and it was the first game jam I did with a team. Sure, it's gotten me thinking very seriously about scheduling Like more team game jams, because it was so, so satisfying compared to this like three-year game I've been working on.

Ryan Post: 49:11

Right? Well, it just, it takes your brain and it focuses it and brings you outside of what you've been doing on the daily. So, like I think that kind of stuff is super cool. What is that jam end, by the way I?

Dan: 49:24

Think it's over now. There was one week of voting and then a couple days for the game maker toolkit guy to come out with With his final ratings of the game, but that doesn't mean we have. We have a rating. Now we're in the top 250 out of Nearly seven thousand.

Ryan Post: 49:43

So I was, I get, so it back to to vote. You actually have to play ten other games before you can choose which one, and you know there were some that were not so good. Some of that were. I mean, obviously, what was the time frame that you had on that?

Dan: 50:00

It was a 48 hour jam, technically 49. They bumped up, bumped us a little bit there.

Ryan Post: 50:06

Yeah, so they had two day. You guys had two days to build this game. What was it? 48 development hours or just 48 hours, just day to day?

Dan: 50:16

Yeah, well, it was 48 Just total hours they gave us the theme 12 am On Friday or 12 pm, I think.

Ryan Post: 50:25

Okay, you had to submit by 12 pm On Sunday, yep okay, yeah, cuz when I, when I went through, I played, I Played a lot of games actually, I think it was like 30 or 40 Mm-hmm and, like I said, there were some pretty decent ones. There are some not so Decent somewhere. Yep, rough, but I mean everyone's in different phases and and learning and where they're at they were. To be honest, there were some that were pretty freakin nuts for two days. I'm like okay, well, they were, they Were prepared over achievers, well, you know. but how many people do you think kind of like prepare for Something, like they have something that they can, they know right away, like hey, I can use this base piece, whether it's the art or whatever, and they can just like flip it and Turn it into something right away.

Dan: 51:12

So yep, yeah, there's like a lot of. I bet the more you do game jams and I I mean lime job, lime blossom is shining up, chiming up here. I know he's done a lot of them like you can get faster at them by Like it's by practice, right? There's a lot of things you can learn that maybe don't I'm not sure if they would make sense or not in like a bigger game, but they can help a lot if you can like know how to streamline a lot of the like basic stuff you have to do every time.

Ryan Post: 51:40

Gotcha. Yeah, I wish it. I wish I could Write code after 4 pm, Because I would love to get involved in this kind of stuff.

Dan: 51:50

But oh yeah, yeah, I did up. I think I ended up taking off on the Friday and we those were long days, yeah, like four hours of sleep, working every other hour of the day, basically up until sure.

Ryan Post: 52:05

So when you, when you're not making games, what are you playing? You play games a.

Dan: 52:11

Little bit. Yeah, I can, let's pull up my steam history here fun I don't Okay, so good, let's see the, the biggest game I've been into lately. It's like almost embarrassing. I've been playing a lot of pink paint peglin. It's like a there's a name for what it is basically you. It's a rogue like game, except the core.

Ryan Post: 52:39

Well, I'm not rogue like, like, rogue like is fine. I don't Rogue rogue light. Actually is what I'm, I'm okay, yeah, I really like.

Dan: 52:48

is this an overloaded term at this point?

Ryan Post: 52:49

Yeah, it kind of is yeah. Yeah, this is kind of like. It almost looks like Peggle.

Dan: 52:54

Yeah, so yeah, you'll like throw a Projectile down into like a pegboard and the pegs, and the pegboard will like add damage or like give you gold or something. It's highly randomized.

Ryan Post: 53:06

Oh, it's legit Peggle yeah it's like battle, battle, peggle. I like this. Oh, with that with a little yeah, looking dude with a yeah.

Dominic: 53:16

Look up blit do whatever.

Dan: 53:18

Yeah, yeah, anyways, okay, yeah, that's right, it's not like yep, it's not you, it's the thing about it is like it's not that it's deeper than that. Engaging or like it's almost easy, one of those games you can almost turn your brain off to work on which. I feel like it's what I'm leaning towards a bit more now, as I'm Like, if I'm doing, if I feel like I can turn my brain on, I I have a bit more motivated to like try to do some game Dev or coding or something, oh yeah. So I think that's what I'm leaning towards. A really cool game I played recently was viewfinder. That one, I think, got a lot of oh, I saw that.

Ryan Post: 53:56

Yeah, yeah, that's the one with the picture. That was crazy and like you place things base. Yeah, I saw clips.

Dan: 54:01

That was a good game that game.

Ryan Post: 54:03

That was on early access for a long time before they finally just released it right.

Dan: 54:07

Oh, was it I, I think I didn't know that so I think so, because.

Ryan Post: 54:14

I remember maybe it was just early development videos of the game and like they had like a you know, a demo period.

Dan: 54:19

Yes.

Ryan Post: 54:20

I but. I remember seeing it a long time ago, but it only just came out, I thought not too long.

Dan: 54:24

Yeah, there there was a oh, like three days ago. I'm not sure if it was the same developer. I'm assuming it probably was, but there was a gift of like the specific Mechanic they have implemented in the game that circled around like game devs are, but it's at least once or twice a year, every year since three, four years ago. It was like such a like a very, very cool little like core mechanic that he had implemented.

Ryan Post: 54:56

Okay, there's another game that's kind of like this. Maybe that's what I was thinking of Josh, what we're like. You can make the what like. There's a chess piece. What the hell game is it? What is it called? Hold on I don't know you're gonna find this.

Dan: 55:14

I find this game no. No, I think I know you're talking about it. This was a couple years.

Ryan Post: 55:21

Super, super, no, super super.

Dan: 55:25

I should, oh, I should play that game. Yeah, it's called super, super liminal is what it's called Mm-hmm, yeah that one is almost like the inverse, because you use perspective to change the size and property objects, whereas that's exactly that was copy paste yeah okay, so that was the game I was thinking of was super liminal before, so that's all.

Ryan Post: 55:46

It's a very similar concept, yeah, where you're like, perception changes reality, mm-hmm. Yeah, that is such a heavy statement, by the way. Well, just take that into your daily life. Why it holds true, though? Absolutely deep, deep thoughts here on bucket bites. So I want to ask what is in your Main system Like what, what's your, what's your bill? What do you, what do you play? Oh, I'm on, what do you? I want to know.

Dan: 56:23

Okay, let me pull up system intro information. So I actually, okay, I have a 3080 that I got, I think, about a year ago in my rig. Let's see what CPU I have. It's been a while since I've even Looked at it.

Ryan Post: 56:42

Is it a pre-built, or do you like building computers or do you I?

Dan: 56:45

build, I Typically will build myself, I think okay. Yeah, I have like a couple laptops I've gotten from jobs, but everything I buy myself I will you like to put it together.

Ryan Post: 56:55

Yeah yeah, there's something just therapeutic about doing it so yeah, I feel like you get a better deal.

Dan: 57:04

Speak for yourself.

Ryan Post: 57:04

Yeah, I get the better deal. That's why I, like it fucking hate building PCs. I'm just shoving cables wherever they fit, and then I wonder why the shit stops working in life. You know what, though? That's? That's why I give Henry so much fucking credit for his systems, because in those little fucking boxes you can there's, you can't even see the fucking cables, and I don't know how they can. Anyways, I'm sorry, yeah, not to turn this whole episode into a dark fusion commercial, but like I am constantly amazed at how good of a job they do, I could never like you should see the cable management in my PC. It's a fucking nightmare yeah my two, all right, so you got 30, 80, what, what kind of? Do you remember what's the kind of CPU, or what Do never to figure out how to look this up actually.

Dan: 57:48

Oh, okay, I don't okay.

Ryan Post: 57:52

So Lyman chat says I suck at wire management and that that holds true for about 99.8% of the population.

Dan: 57:58

So yeah, oh, here.

Ryan Post: 58:01

Are you windows 11 or 10? I think I'm windows 11 now because if you just, if you just type about your PC in the in the start menu, it'll come right up.

Dan: 58:11

Oh okay, perfect. Oh yeah, okay. So I've got. I've got a AMD FX 83, 58 core, so it's like it's pretty decent. I feel like it's it was like they reasonably priced five years ago, so it's got to be outdated right now yeah and I'm on windows 10. Okay, not 11 yet.

Ryan Post: 58:35

Well, works the same on 10 and 11, apparently, and yeah, I'm sorry I learned that I must have upgraded upgraded my RAM at some point, because I Apparently have 64 gigabytes of RAM now and I don't remember doing that.

Dominic: 58:48

So hey, congratulations. Did you download more?

Ryan Post: 58:50

I I downloaded more RAM. Yes, I.

Dominic: 58:55

Would someone talk about PCs? I always like reminded myself that I need to Get an upgrade. Well, you know, you know.

Ryan Post: 59:02

First he's got a job he's working, fucking with. I'm fucking with him. Do you know what? Do you know what you can get, though? You can get that new 16 gigabyte RTX 4060 ti that they just came out with three days ago.

Dominic: 59:14

I have no idea what you just said, but sure.

Ryan Post: 59:16

Yeah, those were numbers. Get the big boy. It's a 16 gigabyte V-ray. Okay, so Nvidia released a 16 gigabyte graphics card, which is, you know, pretty fucking high. Actually, most you're gonna see are gonna be anywhere from 6 to 12, unless you're going to like a 4090. I think, which is like 24, say, I've got 24 in mind except for a 4090 with you with your 24, but but you're still. I guess it's interesting because they have such a high. And, josh, I don't know how in tune you are with Specifications these days, with these things, just because I've also kind of slipped out of it a little bit. But what? What do you think would benefit more? And Dan, feel free to chime in too, but what do you think benefits more to a gaming system? Is it speed or is it capacity? In, just in graphics, in terms of just in terms of just graphics on a GPU. Speed, for sure, speed first, I agree. But capacity there's something to be said about capacity too, because games these days are getting larger and larger and they're also Requiring more VRAM. See it, I disagree. I disagree completely, because of how good texture streaming is getting from NVMe Solid-state drives. Sure, I have a system working together, I right so I think VRAM is like Less important now, as long as you've got a solid-state drive or an NVMe solid-state drive, because there's that a Because there's that technology the ps5 uses. I forget what it's called, but there's something similar for windows now.

Dan: 1:01:00

Okay, I think it might be Intel specific, but I'm not entirely sure. Yeah, you're talking about the tech that lets it go straight from the drive to the GPU without going to the CPU.

Ryan Post: 1:01:11

Yep, so yeah. So essentially you're bypassing the, the VRAM all together, because you're just streaming directly from the solid-state drive.

Dan: 1:01:20

So it would still have the caching in the VRAM, wouldn't it? Like it has a Store it?

Ryan Post: 1:01:24

I don't know, I don't know Because I think, I think it doesn't have to store it because it can access it so quickly from the NVMe.

Dan: 1:01:33

Is that like an? Is NVMe an SSD or is that something? Yeah, yeah okay, it would. It would have to store that because if it, if it couldn't store that in the VRAM, it would have to load it from the SSD every frame.

Ryan Post: 1:01:54

No, I see what you're saying. I see what you're saying, but yeah, you're right, it just doesn't have to store as much. Because it doesn't have to, it doesn't have to pull forward if that makes sense.

Dan: 1:02:03

Yeah, yeah, it can like stop stuff in and out very right correctly, like so quickly.

Ryan Post: 1:02:07

I'm not saying it bypasses the, the VRAM all together, but it doesn't have to cash as much because it can access it so quickly. That makes sense, Okay. So let me ask this then If you had the choice between a 4060 Ti and a 3070 Ti, which I think the 3070 has only 12 gigs on the Ti er, I'm sorry, 4070, is only 12 gigs compared to a 3060 with 16 gigs would you then choose the faster GPU? I'd choose the 40 series, no matter what. Well, I meant 47. Dlss, Right, right, right. I guess what I meant to say and I misspoke was would you choose a 4060 Ti with more VRAM capacity or 4070 Ti with less capacity but faster speeds? I would, personally, I would choose the 4070.

Dominic: 1:03:04

Okay, the one with the faster clock speeds. Yeah, with less capacity, I mean at 12 gigabytes is your fine, I think anyways.

Ryan Post: 1:03:10

but I was just gonna say, because for that minuscule of a difference in VRAM, like the Tensor Core's alone are gonna make up for it, yeah, but the 4070 Ti. But then you gotta think about it as your 4070 Ti price per performance. For $300 less you can get the 4060 Ti, you know what. I'm saying, yeah, if we're talking price point wise, like yeah, 3060's probably gonna be fine.

Dominic: 1:03:40

I keep saying 3060,.

Ryan Post: 1:03:41

It's a 4060. 4060 versus 4070.

Dominic: 1:03:43

Yeah, and now you got me all fucked up. I know I'm sorry, it's my fault.

Ryan Post: 1:03:46

No, you're probably right For the $300 difference, I'd probably say the 60's. Fine, I'm not even gonna say the first two digits anymore.

Dominic: 1:03:53

Right.

Ryan Post: 1:03:57

Oh man, I'm sorry, I was just kind of curious where your thoughts were. And just because they invidia quietly, not quietly, but they're not really promoting it, they just released that 4060 Ti with the 16 gig. They always do kind of do that mid-generation refresh that they never really talk about. It just kind of happens. Well, and it's interesting because they took the old Ti, which was well, it's still available previous two speakers Is that what they call it, the TiP? No, that was a fantastic rap joke that four people are gonna get TiP. There was a rapper, Ti yeah, for a little bit he was TiP. Was he really? Yes, yes, he was. I didn't know that. It was like for one album, really yes, I did not know that. That's why that was a fantastic joke for four people like Ti. And also, I'm curious, josh, if you I'm sure you have seen this but the Spooderman PS5 that they kind of show, oh, did you not?

Dominic: 1:05:07

see it yet. Well, look at it, did we talk?

Ryan Post: 1:05:08

about this no.

Dominic: 1:05:11

Oh, it's an actual model of the PS5. It's the system. I'm not gonna say this at all. They're making a. Spooderman PS5 console you have to buy a third PS5. Oh my, you have how many.

Ryan Post: 1:05:23

Listen to this guy just all the way through this episode.

Dominic: 1:05:28

Oh, I don't like this that much, I'm fine with it. Okay, all right, I thought it was pretty neat.

Ryan Post: 1:05:32

I thought it was pretty neat One for the office and one for the living room. What about the bathroom? One for the bathroom. No, I can stream to my, to my phone with the backbone. Oh, thank God.

Dominic: 1:05:46

I know.

Ryan Post: 1:05:48

I'm never that far. And also, Dom, you put something in for some other minor gaming news, something with Mortal Combat. What's up with that, buddy Dan, are you a Mortal Combat guy? Do you like Mortal Combat?

Dan: 1:06:03

Not a big fight. No, not really A lot of my friends do, but I never got into fighting games. I suck at them.

Ryan Post: 1:06:10

You don't like just mushing, mushing buttons. You don't like that Just slamming your buttons and yeah.

Dan: 1:06:15

I did that a little bit with Super Smash Bros. I would always play Bowser and just throw people off.

Dominic: 1:06:19

Oh, Bowser's phone.

Dan: 1:06:22

That's as long as far as I've gotten.

Ryan Post: 1:06:24

Gotcha. All right, Dom, what's up?

Dominic: 1:06:27

So I want to come about one. They finally revealed their DLC.

Ryan Post: 1:06:32

The one that came out in 1994?.

Dominic: 1:06:35

No, the reboot to the reboot. Oh yeah, I broke one.

Dan: 1:06:41

It's new. Yeah, it's new.

Ryan Post: 1:06:44

When it was 92, now I feel like a fool. My joke didn't even work.

Dominic: 1:06:48

So the DLC has some heavy-headed names like Omni man, homelander, peacemaker, and some returning characters as well. So I'm into the Mortal Combat stuff and all that's really exciting. I won't dive into it deep, since no one else is into it like me, but Dive deep, brother. Okay, fine. So the returning characters one of them was from Mortal Kombat 10. He was one of the combat kids, which was Now was Mortal Kombat.

Ryan Post: 1:07:14

No, mortal Kombat 9 was the first reboot.

Dominic: 1:07:16

Mortal Kombat 9 was the first reboot. Okay, sorry, go on. Mortal Kombat 10 was the game after 9, of course, and they dived into it and that's when the time traveling shit started happening, sure. So yeah, one of the characters from Mortal Kombat 10 came back. A lot of people were surprised he wasn't in 11, because he was really fun to play, but Cassie Cage was in the game still. So his name was Takada, he was trained by Scorpion and everyone missed him. Now he's coming back in the DLC Another character that's been gone, related to Johnny Cage. Cassie Cage is Johnny Cage's daughter and she became the main character of the series, and she was trained by Scorpion. No, no, no, but the returning character is named Takada, I think. Oh, and he was trained by Scorpion.

Ryan Post: 1:08:03

So what does Cassie Cage have to do with anything?

Dominic: 1:08:06

I was referring to the list of characters.

Ryan Post: 1:08:08

He was involved with oh, there was a comma I missed. I'm sorry.

Dominic: 1:08:11

Yeah, sorry.

Ryan Post: 1:08:12

Sorry.

Dominic: 1:08:14

Just trying to follow along guys. I'm sorry. He was a part of that group, he was a part of the game-spoken commas of the new Mortal Kombat characters. He was part of that group and one of the fan favorites, including Cassie Cage, right. So he was trained by Scorpion and he was in 11. For no reason, no one mentioned it. A lot of the characters from 10 weren't in 11. So he's come back in the DLC, which is cool. Ermac, a longtime character in the Mortal Kombat series, is finally coming back. He has a weird-looking redesign, but he could be interesting and I think the other returning I don't remember the other returning character right now, but those were the ones that caught my attention the most, so all that should be. I hope it's fun, because I would love playing John Cena in a Mortal Kombat game.

Ryan Post: 1:09:02

Oh, yeah, I guess Peacemaker.

Dominic: 1:09:05

Yeah, peacemaker, that would be really funny. You said, homelander's going to be in there too. Homelander's in it with Omni man as well.

Dan: 1:09:12

I'm definitely going to play for Homelander. Dude, that's a good combo. I didn't know that. Is that new for them, or do they typically pull in comic book characters from other franchises?

Dominic: 1:09:24

Not really new for them, though. They've always grabbed things. So in Mortal Kombat 11, they had Rambo, rambo Robocop and Arnold Terminator. I wasn't interested in that stuff since I wasn't watching. You're not a boomer. No, I get it.

Ryan Post: 1:09:40

I get it, you weren't alive when. Never mind Sorry.

Dominic: 1:09:45

So far. Mortal Kombat 1 has a very strong roster. That has my attention. I'm very intrigued to see how it plays out. That was mostly it for the news.

Ryan Post: 1:09:56

Gotcha, okay, no, that's good. Thanks for the update, dude. Got to talk about what you're passionate about, yeah, and if it's about ripping people's hearts and spines out through the front of their chest, I mean, that's on you, man, that's cool bro.

Dominic: 1:10:10

I don't know what characters. I hope that would be in it for DLC, but those so far are just absolutely amazing for me. I love all that stuff that's there right now. I couldn't imagine what other characters they can pull. They can maybe, for PlayStation players, bring Kratos back if he was in Mortal Kombat 9.

Ryan Post: 1:10:31

That'd be interesting.

Dominic: 1:10:32

That would be interesting seeing Kratos with a Treyus or something as a DLC combo.

Ryan Post: 1:10:37

That would actually be kind of slick. I haven't played the new one yet, though, so I don't know if that would still be slick or not. Are?

Dominic: 1:10:42

you talking about 11?

Ryan Post: 1:10:44

No, no, no, no. I think it means Ragnarok, oh.

Dominic: 1:10:46

Ragnarok. Oh shit, yeah, my bad, I've seen this I've still not played it's interesting. I'm sorry, it's all right, all right.

Ryan Post: 1:10:55

So, hey, dan, I'm just kind of curious, just because we've talked a lot about your game and a lot about your experience. What about the man behind the development of all of this stuff? What do you like to do? What are your hobbies outside of making games?

Dan: 1:11:12

Oh man. Okay Well, it's funny because the first one on the list is Gardening, which Valarie talked about. I guess I'm a big cook, cooking guy, so I'm.

Ryan Post: 1:11:26

I thought you were going to say cocaine. I was like why?

Dan: 1:11:28

Well, I mean I might be. I haven't tried it yet, so who knows Yet oh. I got really into baking bread and like the not quite sourdough but all that type of stuff back in the pandemic or when that started. But I've always been really into sort of like cooking my meals, experimenting, trying out new stuff. Yeah, oh, that's fun.

Ryan Post: 1:11:53

Cool. Do you have a family at home or are you kind of, you're flying?

Dan: 1:11:58

solo, yeah, solo.

Ryan Post: 1:12:00

That's why you can do that. I can't do that because I got picky.

Dan: 1:12:03

Yeah, I think so. Yeah, and I've been, you know, like I've sort of made the intentional decision to sort of put off dating for a little bit, like I've only put a little bit of effort into it. But not much beyond that, because you know, I find like working on uh, working on game development stuff takes up so much of my time, Like there's so much stuff to keep myself occupied with sure that I'm pretty happy with it.

Ryan Post: 1:12:25

I respect that.

Dan: 1:12:26

Absolutely I do yeah. So it's responsible in a way. You know very much, very much. I don't want to be in a relationship when I have like all this other stuff that I want to do. That isn't that yeah.

Ryan Post: 1:12:38

Dude, yeah, dude, absolutely. It's the one thing, you know, one of those things that people easily forget about, especially when they have a family is like you got to take care of yourself and make yourself happy, like that's like you got to take care of yourself and a lot. I think a lot of people, especially once they have families, they kind of forget about that.

Dan: 1:12:55

You know. You got to know where your priorities are.

Ryan Post: 1:12:56

Yeah, and your own personal happiness is a huge part of your enjoyment of life. So, like take care of yourself, dude, have fun and move at your own pace. That's that's what's up. So absolutely. I know we've been kind of pegging you with questions, a lot of questions. Something I do like to ask our guests is do you have any questions that you want to ask us? You don't have to. It's okay if you don't, but if you do, feel free to ask away.

Dan: 1:13:29

Yeah, well, actually, josh, I think you mentioned that you're a little bit of a programmer on your on your own time. So I'm curious, like, what, what's that that been like for you? Like, what type of a tech stack do you work in? Like, do you like it, all that type of stuff?

Ryan Post: 1:13:44

So I don't get into too much of what I do in the day job, just because you never know what was on the internet.

Dan: 1:13:50

Oh, that's fair, that's fair.

Ryan Post: 1:13:52

I can't say like what the tech stack looks like. Okay, so so I'm a. I'm a C sharp guy, 110%, Yep. Um used to be VB until I convinced them like it's not 1994 anymore. We got to, we got to get into C sharp. Oh man so yeah, so we're, we're NET and it's mostly. I mostly do Windows development just because it's easy. But you know, if we have to do web development it's IIS just running.

Dan: 1:14:21

Okay yeah, pretty bog, standard stuff, nice Yep, yep, pretty cool. So so yeah, there's a lot of things in that space, a lot of people doing stuff there.

Ryan Post: 1:14:35

I love. I've gone to Microsoft stuff a couple of times over the years. I love their programs that focus on developers. I love NET. I have absolutely no complaints about it.

Dan: 1:14:52

There's a lot of cool stuff. Do you stick on the bleeding edge where you're doing all the Roslin analyzers I feel like aren't even new anymore, but they were at one point NET 7, all that type of stuff, yeah.

Ryan Post: 1:15:08

I'm in NET 7 now. Nice, but Roslin and all that the stuff I make is so minimal. I work for a company where I'm making stuff for one location. Essentially. Code bases are very small and it's not like I've got unzik code that I need to make sure is optimized. Most of that stuff is just for me. If something's taken a minute to run that I know could take 10 seconds, I'm going to spend a week getting that down.

Dan: 1:15:45

Yeah, just because you know you can make it, because I know I can do it. Yeah, you got it.

Ryan Post: 1:15:50

I remember the first time. I'm at least. At the time when I started, I was the youngest developer by, let's say, 30 years. I remember the first time I rewrote something in a recursive algorithm and they were like what the hell is this doing? You can see, this is a person. What are you talking about?

Dan: 1:16:11

They didn't teach me this in high school Exactly. I don't know that's always a good feeling. Yeah, getting stuff to work a little bit faster.

Ryan Post: 1:16:21

But yeah, that's the day job, hoping one day I can get out of there. Don't tell my boss, he listens, he listens. I see the analytics.

Dan: 1:16:32

Yeah, that's cool. Well, thanks for sharing.

Ryan Post: 1:16:35

Yeah, so cool, I think. The last thing I wanted to mention, just a couple of things. Number one we have a game called Bramble. It's our July Game of the Month.

Dominic: 1:16:47

Game of the Month.

Ryan Post: 1:16:49

Yeah, it's been kind of quiet, but we do give away a copy of that game. If you're interested in winning a copy of that or a next month's game, you can just do exclamation GOTM and chat If you're interested in that, or go to our website, wwwbucketbitesgg. You're also going to find the information on the summer giveaway for the Dark Fusion PC there as well. Something else I really wanted to make sure that I don't think we've formally announced it yet, but it was on our calendar Is this upcoming Monday we're having our first Bucket Bites Community Game Night where we will be playing Jackbox together. There will be a couple of us I'm not sure who's all going to be there, but we are going to be playing with viewers as well. So we hope to see you there. That'll be Monday at 8 pm.

Dominic: 1:17:32

Central.

Ryan Post: 1:17:33

Time Monday yeah, 24th. So if you're listening to this, I'm going to try and actually get the podcast audio version out tomorrow and then the video version out on Sunday. So that's kind of what's going on With that, and I think that's kind of it. Dan, before we go, I'm going to give you the floor to talk about whatever you want, whether it's your games, whether it's whatever you want. So your socials where to find you? Go ahead. Floor is yours to talk about anything. I've got a lot of power.

Dan: 1:18:07

Including politics.

Ryan Post: 1:18:11

Well.

Dan: 1:18:12

I think I'll just plug myself. I mean, check me out. Go to freculationcom. Linktree slash freculation, search me up on Twitter, danomite all that. Check me out and contribute to the Lindenmayr plant simulation repository on GitHub. If you're interested in this type of stuff, look at it, see if you can get it to work. If you can't get it to work, tell me, because you should be able to. And yeah, try it out.

Ryan Post: 1:18:43

That's something we didn't get into, so you're going to have to come back, I think, dan, at some point, but we didn't talk about AI at all today. And I know that you've got some viewpoints, so I think you're going to have to come back if you had fun today.

Dan: 1:18:59

I'd be open to coming back.

Ryan Post: 1:19:00

Look at that Nice Open to.

Dominic: 1:19:03

He's like if you pay me enough, no.

Dan: 1:19:08

It was. You paid me just enough this time, but we'll see you about next time. Man, dude, I'm telling you you're stretching me thin too.

Ryan Post: 1:19:15

Got moths.

Dominic: 1:19:16

We've already got all these giveaways, yeah.

Ryan Post: 1:19:19

I know. No, dan, you're awesome. Really appreciate you coming around. Thank you for everybody that's out there watching us live, listening to the podcast on Spotify or wherever else you listen, and also to those of you who watch us on YouTube, because we are all over the place just trying to get that exposure. So my name is Ryan, that's Dom in that corner and that's Josh right there. We're Bucket Bites. There we go. I am going to implore everybody to check out Dan's website and take a look at his posts, because read through some of that stuff. It is fascinating. Do it, do it, do it. This is Bucket Bites. Everybody appreciate you all. Check you next time, should I?

Dominic: 1:20:00

Bye-bye.

Ryan Post: 1:20:06

Oh man oh we left.

Dominic: 1:20:08

Oh shit, he's back.

Dan: 1:20:11

OK, ok, do that.

Ryan Post: 1:20:16

Oh, thank god, it's over. Get me out of here. Oh, nice person. Thanks for Dassard, those guys.