Hello and welcome back to Dev Game Club, a weekly podcast in which two veteran game developers look at games from the past. to discuss their relevance and impact today. I'm Brett Duvall, and I'm joined as always by my co-host, a man who has been spending his weekend staring out over the sands. Tim Longo. Yeah, when you said that, I'll just go ahead and say, we're playing Minecraft so that we can discuss this.
what that means uh the staring out of the sands when you jumped in and you're like oh man we started in a desert expect how much of an impact that would have on my how i started off that is like starting off minecraft which already starts off pretty uh difficult in the first few days got extra difficult when it's like oh you know what you have sand Yeah. So anyway, we'll get to all of that. Yeah, we should talk about the first few moments. Well, I will talk about the very first moment.
Okay. Because you're a jerk. Yeah, so we're, you know, a little bit of a teaser. We're not going to open it up to the community yet. um we bread is running a server so we're both on it and we'll probably pay play synchronously sometimes but it probably a lot playing asynchronously um but uh i got on there just to test it out and then all of a sudden i'm taking damage from behind and i'm like what the what's going on? And I turn around and Brett is punching me.
And the first thing we do on this server is he punches me to death. I punch you to death, yeah. And then I left the server immediately so that you couldn't get it. Yeah, exactly. And I was like, so is it survival? Are we good? And I was like, yeah.
survival because they just killed me so yeah so anyway we'll talk about yeah let me talk about the the because we have two announcements one because we're doing minecraft as tim mentioned um we are going to um uh open that up not next week maybe the week after um you know because we've got the holidays coming up things are going to be a little weird but probably by the time christmas break we'll have it open
I can only take so many. I think it's like nine more maybe. So go to the discord and reach out on the Minecraft thread or something. I'm just going to take. the the people in order of when they post um please don't take a slot if you're not actually going to have time to play you know be considerate of others um you know or you can DM me in Discord. You can go to Discord and find my username to DM me from.
um that's actually probably better so you don't have to share your xbox handle with the with everyone if you don't want to so do that uh dm me and i will take them in order and i will just let people know when the when it's closed So that's item of business number one. I'll start taking those names immediately, but we won't actually allow people in.
at least a couple weeks. Second, and this is an announcement from the community, Tim has boldly asked the community to suggest the game he might play in the charity event happening at the end of January, defeating Games for Charity. So that is also a case where you go to the Discord and drop your suggestion on what Tim should be playing for that event, which is a day-long 24 hours of streaming.
at the end of January, go to the Discord and drop that in the event thread, which is just defeating games for charity. That's one of the... I just had a thought that I'm not going to share now on what is going to happen here. Okay. And I'm afraid. Oh, it'd be a lot of things. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. There's reasons why I didn't finish.
Many games. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. And just to be clear, I'm not streaming for 24 hours. No, no, no. The event is 24 hours. I'll be streaming for, yeah. It might have even been longer than 24 hours. I can't remember how long. year but it might have been super fun yeah and there was a lot of participation and yeah a lot of community members were part of it raised It raised thousands of dollars. Yeah, yeah.
The beneficiary or one of the beneficiaries was an interview. We thank again the Discord Game Club for providing off-week audio for us. which is, you know, we've been having some challenges with time this year in particular. So Bio and Calamity interviewed Phil Salvador.
Yeah. Phil actually came on the event. He came on the event last year as well. Yeah. And yeah, so they interviewed him. It's a great interview. Thanks again to Calamity and bio for doing that. And of course for Phil, for, for being their guest, it was a, it was a fun listen. And like I said, it's really helpful to have something to run in the feed on those weeks when we can't get it together.
We try to, but it's a weekly podcast. It's a grind. It's a grind. Yeah, things are pretty wacky right now in various ways, so you just have to bear with us. Yeah. All right, let's get on to Minecraft then. I will run down the list of games from 2009 just to set it a little bit in its place and time. And then Tim's going to talk a little bit about the... the sort of timeline of things happening with this game, which definitely has a strange sort of...
way it was introduced to the world, and we can talk about that as well. But from 2009, and largely these are drawn from our discussion of Arkham Asylum, were, of course, Arkham Asylum, Uncharted 2, Borderlands, which is like on its fourth installment with a side game now. That one's been going strong. Demon's Souls. Brutal Legend, League of Legends. Assassin's Creed 2, that little trilogy I quite like. Infamous Dragon Age Origins.
Left 4 Dead 2, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Bayonetta, Plants vs. Zombies, and Red Faction Guerrilla, just to name some of the titles from that year and kind of give you a sense of what was going on. It's funny when we did this. For Arkham, we didn't mention Minecraft coming out in this year. And we should have. We regret the error. It's sometimes hard to, because I think it's like 2009 is when the early access started, but 2011 is like the 1.0. That's like, yeah. And to be honest, what is it?
In Minecraft's wiki, they say Minecraft is a 2011 sandbox game, but I don't think that's the right way to talk about this game. Well, I disagree. So we consider it a 2009 game and I will explain.
later you can you can start right now i mean because it's yes okay yeah we can jump right in yeah we don't need to talk about that that was not that long ago that we did no no no no yeah um to dive into more deeply on that on that year um i did want to do a quick shout out to um artemis even though we we always we never want to quite encourage him as much as as he wants us to but he just did an event minecraft related or is it
Did it happen already? I think it did. Yeah, it did. Yeah. And I wanted to give him a little bit of credit for planting this seed in my mind, too, for suggesting Minecraft because he did it with, you know, I know community members and some of his viewers and stuff could jump in.
that event so we're doing a similar thing here so thanks artimage for giving me uh giving us the idea to play this because i do think it's an important game to play and now that we've started I'm even more excited and convinced that it's a game. We should be playing for the podcast because it's bringing back all of this, all of these weird game development memories. Yeah. So jumping in, I guess the main topic that I want to make sure we hit for the first episode.
And the reason that I just was on my soapbox for it being a 2009 game, and we were talking about this in pre-show, and Brett is right in that it's obviously not the first. game to be released in a beta form, unfinished form that you pay for, and then get updates along the way. However, it blew up so big when it came out, even in its very basic form.
And it did have so many updates over the early years before it got to 1.0. My memory is we didn't have the term early access really defined at the time. And because this was a product that both blew up and was, you know, basically indie, but also becoming, became a really huge indie game. When I'm looking at the timeline, which I'll rattle through some sort of tidbits in the timeline I'm looking at, which is there's a great minecraft-timeline.github.io. I don't know why it's there, but...
So you can do pull requests, you know. Okay, sure. Sure, yeah. It's very weird. But the timeline is very handy to see kind of like what they added where. Surprised me actually some things that I'd forgot But, you know, we didn't have the real concept of early access, which is now just so commonplace, the concept of releasing a game before it... quote unquote done or at its 1.0 phase, we just take it for granted now for the most part.
But this game was very basic. And then over the course of many years, you know, they got to eventually 1.0, which was two years later. And... Because especially you had to pay for the beta version, and it blew up, it sort of was the beginning of this sort of concept of giving developers the permission to release something unfinished.
you know it still has to be good enough for people to want to play it right so a beta version it doesn't mean you can just it can be broken or whatever it's just not it doesn't have maybe the full features that you had hoped But so really from this point on, many developers started doing this more and more. And as we know now, Steam has.
a whole category for early access right it's just a thing and it's like okay yeah i you still choose as a player whether you want to opt in to something and now we even have digital refunds if you're if you don't like it or whatever but Just in the old days, a lot of the games that we play for the podcast, that just is not a concept. You pay for a finished game. And if it's not finished when you get it, you complain about it.
albeit not great relationship between developer, publisher, and player sometimes when a game comes out buggy or unfinished or whatever. We've talked so much about Nintendo holding such a high bar for releasing a game that is extremely polished and extremely stable, etc., etc. And it really can make or break games. But with Minecraft, though, there were games like Dwarf Fortress that we mentioned in pre-show and, you know, even going back to MUDs or, you know.
Early MMOs. I would even put EverQuest a little bit in this category. Mostly finished, but there was definitely a lot that wasn't there. you know minecraft was not only just as a concept for a game a unique concept and we'll get into that as we talk about Everything from voxels to whatever, seeds.
So I'm going to get into the timeline a little bit. So early on when it launched in its data, public beta, they called it. And I think you remembered it was like 20 bucks or something, right? Or 10 bucks. Yeah. I remember them raising the price. So it like maybe started at 10 and went to 15 and to 20. Yeah. Yeah, it was largely created. That's my memory.
Yeah. Yeah. No, I think you're right. It was largely creative mode for the most part. And for all of the, a lot of our listeners probably played this game as, as younger people and they will remember all of this and I'll probably get some of this wrong, but I am. But, you know, it was largely creative. Classic mode was creative in trees or like the basics. Right. cave, some cave stuff. Multiplayer test was pretty early.
But the important thing that I want to mention in the first year, about halfway through the first year, the first survival test came out and the concept of health. at all in the game was added. which wasn't in the beginning and creepers were added specific monster enemy. And that's very critical to how the game works in my opinion. And I remember vividly the sort of where I think this game really started to become.
viral in a way is when survival came out and this concept of because i do think it was one of the games that really created that genre, which is one of my favorite genres now. And I hadn't thought about it until we started playing for the podcast that Minecraft is probably where my love of the genre starts. But the concept of nighttime in Minecraft with survival modes having started once I bought this game and didn't know it was going to even have a survival mode.
Maybe the hardcore community knew because they were keeping track, but I didn't know. I just one day had had it. And then these creepers come out and blow up and take you out. And it completely changes the tone of the game. And then what's more is before... Um, not until the end of 20 of 2009 was a crafting table.
So it's like, all you could do is build, you know, just, you know, harvest and build from what you had. You couldn't build certain things that, you know, a crafting table, like whatever tools or what have you. It's just a really, like, I just wanted to make sure that we talked about the concept that, and then some other anecdotes, I guess. Not until the early 2010 was farming and armor. Added. Redstone wasn't until Alpha 1.0, it's called, which now I'm confused.
I thought this was all alpha. Oh, they called it in-dev. So in dev was zero point. Yeah. So I do know. So this is why I was confused because the wiki is confusing because they called certain things, public betas, but I don't, I remember they didn't use that term at mode. Alpha 1.0 was redstone and that wasn't until middle of 2010. You know, eggs weren't added until beta 1.0. Random example, the nether was alpha 1.2.
So that was before beta. Beds weren't until beta 2011, beta 1.3. So it's just like... And then you have another, and then the end and Enderman was, was later. So yeah, a thing I've never seen actually. So that'll be. The End? I've never seen The End, yes, correct. Right, yeah. I've been to the Nether once and I just stepped in and I was like, oh, wow, and that was it. That was the last time I played it. Yeah, so it'll be interesting to see what we do and how far, because it's...
work. Yeah, it's pretty involved, I gather, to get there, you know, and just to build up and to be able to survive. And that's kind of what, you know, Artemisia's whole concept of how far can they get. because, you know, it does take kind of a village, so to speak. But anyway, I'm kind of like, you know, soapboxing and swagging the dead horse here. But my point is, you know, it was a very unique way to develop games.
And then that combined with it blowing up and becoming super mainstream and very broad audience. I think made it a very important... Yeah. I mean, I would totally agree. I mean, the other thing I would, I would talk about with regards to its virality and the stuff that I remember.
really hitting big at the time was you know when when things like fire propagation would happen um and you'd accidentally you know you'd have videos of people accident you know who knows if it was an you know, whether it was arson, but setting their homes ablaze and like the whole house burning and being like, I spent all this time building this thing and now it's all gone.
um kind of reaction videos uh you know we would call them today i don't know if we called them that at the time um and it just being like
you could just watch those things all day. I mean, they were endlessly entertaining because people were finding this very systemic game with propagation due to sort of... I guess you'd call that cellular autonomous or, uh, automata um you know simulation right i mean it's like the voxels and going from cell to cell and like how the how transitions happen across
cell borders for different things so like fire moves up you know across combustible cells right and water moves down for unfilled cells and things like that um that's all i that's all i mean by that um And but there are rules, you know, there's, you know, rules of like what goes through what sides of the cubes of the. So I remember those being, that was something nobody had really seen before in that form.
You know, the Far Cry 2 examples, you know, that we talked with Clinton about, you know, with like, oh, I, you know, I did this and then there was a fire. a fire and the tiger raced through it and got caught on fire and was chasing me through the et cetera, et cetera. So there, you know, these sorts of things were, were happening.
in games prior to that just emergent systems but this one had a whole new feel of like but i just built all of that how could they know how could they know to make that work right um in a way that you know other sorts of games didn't feel like like So, you know, because even if something's sort of a fun factory of crazy situations...
it still feels more authored because the player's not making any of those things in the world. And in the case of Minecraft, it was all the stuff that you built other than the initial... So when things happened, you're like, well, I did this to myself. Right. You know, and that was part of the humor in in those sorts of viral viral videos like I didn't.
happen i got chased into here by three creepers and they blew up all my stuff and you know whatever um so yeah anyway that's the that's the thing i remember and to the point about early access You know, it really, you know, it kind of put a... different spin on the sort of free to play conversation to me as well. And it's another reason why it was important. This was like the PC equivalent of like, we're going to ship something.
that allows us to have a conversation with our users, which is, you know, what the free to play, you know. developers and proponents have always said it's like well no we give you a chance you try it and if we if we interest you then we'll work with you to try to make it more the experience that you want right that's the sort of free-to-play motto kind of in the best
festive circumstances and the same thing is going on in early access like okay you're gonna pay us because you know we're we're it's kind of a different model right it's not on a phone and have a huge user base because it's on steam which is smaller than phones. We're going to have a conversation with you. And that's part of the... That's part of the experience of this, although you're going to buy in to do that. So it's a little bit different, but it kind of is like two sides of the same coin.
Yeah, and I mean, it has a good point in that with a free-to-play game, the monetization is completely different as well. And I think one of the magical things about this, and again, it wasn't the only game that did this, but I still think because of it.
viral nature and how big it blew up it became like we've we often talk about i think we've talked about on the podcast and we talked we've talked about it day-to-day lives that you know innovation is given the credit for innovation comes from the ones who succeed not necessarily the first ones that did it and Minecraft succeeded so heavily that it now is pinned with sort of like...
before we had the term early access. And the concept that I paid my money and I get these updates for free and they're very frequent and they're very significant. Like I'm looking at this, you know. Like I said, I remember when wolves were added playing the game and it was just like, what? So there are wolves? Yeah. Well, it's like now there's so many animals, you know, and then repeaters being added. And then, like I said, you know, one.
At 1.0 is when they added the end. And of course, Endermen came before that. Hunger, actually, I'm looking at is actually way later. That was middle of 2011. or so the concept of hunger, which is kind of like has become a critical part of the survival genre. But it, you know, came a year and a half, no, two and a half years, right, after the game launched.
the concept of hunger and the importance of what food is to the game. And now that's just commonplace in something like Valheim or whatever. Right. So, um, Super fascinating as far as like a development approach in history and also indie and also voxel based and also in Java. Yeah, right. So it's like all of these like...
Yeah, unorthodox, I guess. I don't know if that's a good way to use it. Yeah, no, I mean, that's definitely true. I mean, the other thing I wanted to point out is that this also had one of the wilder stories of... of where it went um certainly for any indie anything ever um when it was purchased by Microsoft for north of $2.5 billion in 2014. It's like...
that is meteoric success, you know, just incredible. Like the whole company was purchased, I guess, not just Minecraft itself, but because it's now a division of, of Microsoft. Yeah. But, you know, but that is, that is unheard of, you know, in that kind of timeframe, maybe not unheard of, but it's certainly, it's a lot. I mean, by comparison, I want to say. Bethesda slash Zenimax, you know, all the companies under that umbrella went for around 4 billion.
um like 10 years later or you know or something like that right um with many more ips and many more yeah way more ips um more companies because it's id and it's um machine games and
Shinji Mikami Tango, Gameworks. So a bunch of companies. And lots of live services and everything. And then... discord was the other thing i thought of as like a huge thing was was like 16 billion um just to like give you kind of scope and scale of things i mean this this came from a little thing you know that somebody put up in in sweden you know to to be what it what it is um today I don't know. Probably undervalued at $2.5 billion over time, honestly. Probably made out of it.
Yeah, and of course, as we know, that was Phil Spencer's brainchild. He told the story at some point, you know, and it was very much just like, because they... you know, Minecraft was being ported in. And I think there was an Xbox, I forget when the Xbox version came out. But I'm looking at some of the stats too, and I'm just pulling this from the internet, of course.
Supposedly, it's saying that it's the best-selling video game of all time at over 300 million copies, nearly 170 million monthly active users as of 2020. And so to your point about like under 100. Now 170 million and two. Right. Yep, they got us. No, I already had my copy. Active. Oh, as far as active users. Yeah, I'm back. I'm back.
But to your point about undervaluing, I forget because I was on Halo at the time. And I think some of this stuff is public. I don't remember the exact numbers. But I think the amount of time that they made their money back on that deal. not a long time, if you know what I mean, right? It's in the grand scheme of things. And so as far as like smart purchases,
As far as for the purchaser, which, you know, is from an indie development perspective, you'd want them to benefit more than they did. But it was... I think Microsoft predicted well its value to the world. And it's done lots of other things too, like it's used in classrooms.
There's a bunch of different alternate SKUs to allow it to be used in certain ways. Creative mode eventually became like a... kind of a they they focused a lot on updating survival mode for a long time and then they kind of went back around and came back around it to make sure creative mode was fully fleshed out
so it's like it's a really interesting journey and i just love that this timeline exists if you like minecraft i really encourage you to kind of time travel go back to that thing because it's really interesting to see Because it goes all the way up to today. Yeah. And on that point, that's where we should start talking about the game proper and liking Minecraft.
Because this was a rough start for me. And I remember when I started playing, I was like, oh yeah, this is why I don't play Minecraft and didn't play a lot of it. And because it is like it's just so undirected, you know, is so like like it doesn't tell you. I mean, I guess some of the load screens say things like, oh, you should probably build a shelter because it's dangerous at night, I think is basically what you want to be inside at night.
oh okay okay how do i do do oh i'm just i'm just here in the desert now like i i guess i'm just gonna have to figure that out and you know of course i had played before but i still You know, I stopped writing down how many times I died because it just became like hilarious. I mean, it was like, you know, the three stooges out there where I just like. I kept, I would die and then I'd respawn. And of course, I'm not very far from where I just died.
And so all the enemies that just killed me are going to come kill me again. So there's a whole bunch of just that of just like, well, I can't. get far enough from where i spawn to be safe spawning again and i'm not gonna sit here and just wait for night to pass while the server's running um so that would happen So in half an hour of play, I died six times and made two sandstone blocks.
That was my half hour note. Okay. I've been playing for half an hour and not much has happened. I've knocked down some cacti. I found some sticks and I made two sandstone blocks. So it can be a rough start because it doesn't direct you, but it also just doesn't tell you much about the world. I think in order to remain pure about being undirected, right, in that, like, well, if I told you.
here's how to build a block, then you'd spend a bunch of time building blocks, right? You know, if I told you... you know, now go do that, you know, go cut down a tree or whatever, then, you know, et cetera. And that was another part to tie it back.
to the virality was like all of this was stuff that users figured out or discussed on the boards and all of that i was just going to say that yeah like when the crafting table came out the the the nine square grid was like, when you start out as a player without the crafting table now you have the four squares that you can put things in and find out what it makes and we talked about this a lot with um playing classic world of warcraft when we did that series
And I think Brett brought up, that was my memory you probably brought up before this, but sort of the sanding of the edges that we've brought up time and time again because we've played old games and modern games tend to do that. And one thing that bums me out, because I'm such a big fan of the genre, the discoverability, the discovering of things in survival games is really critical to me. Like, for instance, when I play something like Ballheim.
I intentionally don't go seeking any answers online. I don't go to any wikis. Even if I have a heart, like you said, the point about dying six times in a half hour and building two blocks, to me, that is the point. That's the key to this whole thing. is that yes, you're frustrated, but also you're like,
I got to figure out what, how do I not die? To the point, to the point when I actually built a building and lasted a night, it was a huge accomplishment. Exactly. Exactly. Right. You know, and I, cause I tried several different ways. I was like, Oh, I'll just carve into the side of the hill a bit.
and start building walls around me and i forgot i didn't cover me so they just climbed down and fell into it my open yeah right open roofed hut that was built into the side of the mountain and they killed me that way i was like oh my god okay so i actually need to like build the walls up so at a certain point i was like okay well i'll do it on the open plane build the walls up. It's not a very big house. You know, it's like...
you know, people will be able to see, but when you go to the server next to him, assuming you're still spawning in the original spawn point, which I am not, I changed my spawn point. Yeah. All right. Well, I know where it is though. I know where it is. Yeah. So if you go back to it, you'll be like, Oh, this is Brett.
house it's in front of these two cactuses where we would spawn every time um and it's like three by four or something like that tops um and it's just enough tall enough that things can't get in and i would just stand in the middle of it and look up at the sky until the sun came. Yeah, exactly. It's beautiful. It's beautiful, especially when, you know, as it's one of my other topics I won't dive into deeply now, but audio design.
for this game is so important, so critical, and so good, especially. separate from just audio design itself, but composition. So I'll get into that another episode. You know, when you hear that creeper outside and you're looking up at the sky waiting for the night to end, you know, or you hear the skeleton or whatever.
so so good but yeah going back to your point about like building the game with the community building the game with um And the 3x3 grid for the crafting table when that was implemented... for those who remember one of the key interesting most interesting things which again i didn't people were were um
People were dissecting this and figuring out all the answers to all the recipes, right, when it came out. And, of course, they hadn't implemented everything, so not everything had a recipe or you could make it. But the concept of taking that grid and if you want to make a pickaxe, putting the ingredients in roughly the shape of a pickaxe in the nine by nine grid and that resulting in a pickaxe.
It's freaking amazing, you know? And then not only that, but, oh, wait, I have all of these atomic elements that I'm getting from the world, a block of sand or a flower or whatever. Can they make something? I don't know. I'm going to put it in the crafting table and see what happens.
And the reason I brought up the sanding of edges is in the old days, there wasn't a recipe list that once you found something, it would populate. Oh, you've got a new recipe. It's like, no, no, no, no. You just had to write it down or remember what it was. and it would work, and then now you'd know. Of course, everyone went to a wiki somewhere.
solved it that way yeah but now it's like so automated yes and no because i mean when i um when i was playing i i look i would go and look i was like oh i need a weapon i go it's like oh here's how to make or a pick or a I guess an axe is what I was looking for for the trees. And because I had a crafting table. And I was like, oh, how do I... make an axe. And seeing that you could build an axe that way... I was like, oh, I bet I know how to make.
And like, I could, I was off and running. Like I didn't, I could just figure it out for myself at that point. I was like, Oh, I get it. Like. this is like Picross with, with stuff, you know, in a tiny little, tiny, tiny icon. So like, if I can think of something that might be in the game. I can experiment with how I might build it. Yeah, it's brilliant. It's brilliant. And not only that, but like that structure of that within a game about blocks, the structure of the crafting is block.
You know what I mean? Like there's just, as everyone knows from listening to this dumb podcast that I love elegant solutions to things like that. And it's just so, it's so like, of course. But I don't think I would have thought of it, you know, or maybe we would have happened into it through iteration or something, but it's just so good. And then it just, once they had that structure.
And they added in a new element, like I'm seeing, you know, like Redstone is an example, right? Like was added later or an egg or something, you know, once you have that, once you add in a new thing. a whole new set of options for the player comes up, especially if you're somebody who bought in early. has the game. You're not having to pay any subscription or anything.
You're getting these updates and then you find out, oh, wolves were added in. Oh, what do I get if I kill a wolf? What do I get from the wolf? What can I do with that? You know, oh, wolf pelt. You know, so it's just like your mind. goes, you know, goes wacky about what all the different things you could do. And so... Or when they added farming, right? Or armor and things like, why do I need armor? Of course I need armor, you know, because of these.
Oh, and I also noticed too, early 2010 is when they added infinite world. I forgot early on, you know, they were basically like the, the, the tile was limit. There was a limit to how big the world was going to be.
for that seed we should talk about seeds later i guess another time and i want so putting putting a pin in two things that i want to ask you about that i don't understand at all is how seeds work and also The choice to go with voxels and how important that probably was for them, which also obviously launched a whole other set of games because it gave permission to people to make something. Low res, right? And voxels. Yeah. I mean, voxels had been tried before and other things going back to.
The early aughts, I believe. It's my recollection. Like Black Hawk Down, right? Or Delta Force. Yeah. There were some shooters that used voxels. Yeah, yeah. That's what I was thinking of particularly. But I'd have to look it up because I didn't expect to get to that topic tonight. So we'll definitely put a pin in that one. because the you know that was that was not a kind of new thing but tying it together with the
The way they did it. The cellular automata that I mentioned earlier, propagation basically, was the really big innovation, I think, that really set it apart. One thing I will say about the rough start is that I have spent a lot of time playing Dragon Quest Builders, which is... which is a Minecraft-like, but it has a lot more structure. There's a story.
You know, you have goals, you have all that kind of support, you know, around you and the recipes and all those things. Like it definitely sands down a lot of the edges. But, you know, for my sort of relaxing time, like this is not a relaxing game for me to play.
I'm constantly like... a little nervous you know and you know i've spent a lot of time now i played for probably around four hours building like a building and a wall around it um small building again probably not much bigger than the the tiny little one by the spawn point a little bit bigger but not much and then like a wall that's high enough and it's like a bridge from the top of the building so I can get to the top of the wall. I've been widening out the wall.
uh so that the spiders can't jump over it and like just you know like i'm spending all this time on just like okay i need to know when i come in here i'm gonna be okay you know yes is is and and the thing that to take this to kind of different weird place that I had never thought about. And it kind of comes around to this sort of survival game. It's probably because we mentioned it. We're talking about it together a little bit. is this is the today when I was doing this and I had built this.
building this way and then this wall this way and was like okay and then i'm gonna make another bigger wall later like i was i was feeling really connected to I don't know, to humanity in the sense that like, you know. Human beings, our basic needs, it's like, well, you can't live more than three minutes without air, more than three hours without shelter. That's under exposure conditions, obviously not.
you know, not any given day. Right. Um, but, um, uh you know three uh days without water three weeks without food right and i was like that's this you know that's what's going on in this game um you know of course air is air is taken care of you don't have to worry about that water is taking care of water. Well, no, I mean ingestion. Yeah. And then, you know, and food is kind of on a longer timeline than.
than shelter. Shelter is way more important than food initially. Like I'm not worried about food. I'm not even thinking about food. I'm thinking about like, how do I keep the wolves away to your point? And then the final point of that is like when I built this house and then built this wall around it, I was thinking, well, and then I'm going to build this other wall around that and have more. buildings and stuff like that and be able to carve more doors and things like that and get to play.
I was like, this is how cities were built. If you go to like... carcassonne in the south of the sort of you know central france i guess sort of south central france or gerona or siena i've been there as well um like You can go and look and it's like, oh, yeah. And there's where there was another wall, you know, and it's crumbled now. But like.
there used to be another wall here, you know, and, and even further out. And I'm thinking Carcassonne specifically, like there were multiple walls and I'm like, I am literally doing that or planning to do that. You know, here in this, I built my tiny little thing and it just made me feel really like. have this moment of introspection of like, oh, this really is, this is why this connects, right? Is that it's such a deeply human thing and I'm doing the things that humans did, you know, to deal.
Well, and the fact that, I mean, it's maybe on the nose, but to your point, like the fact that the genre, whether, I mean, I guess we'd have to do a lot more research in historical, you know. searching to figure out if this is true or not, but they called that particular update the survival. And I don't remember if it were the case, but there may have been games that claimed they were survival games before that. But for me, this was a launching off point. And now we have the survival genre.
And survival is what humans do. every day. It's what creatures do. Yeah. It's what creatures do. Yeah. So it's like, you're giving the, you're giving people the tools. And I was thinking a lot because I've played. i don't know man i'm probably in the 500 hour range for volheim um i know i know you're halfway to my spelunky numbers well done yeah no i'll never beat you but the um
The one thing going back to this game, because I actually played this game a lot in the past and throughout the years, I've obviously taken a long break, but I also played it with my kid as well, right? So I have that sort of those memories and we actually, I might've talked about this in the podcast, but we. recently went and found those old worlds.
she had come back from college and like, Hey, are those still around? I was like, I don't know. Let's go see. And they were there. We found them. And like the stuff we built back when she was younger and all this kind of stuff. So it was super neat.
But this game, compared to something like Valheim, there's something very magical to your point about building walls and blocks and kind of like using what you have around you. Because in this game... I mean, it's not completely true 100% maybe, but everything in the world you can hold in your hand. You know, you can break pretty much everything down by some means. You may need to find the means eventually, like mining diamonds.
And then you can pick them up and put them in your hand, you know, whatever it is. And there's this concept, and that's kind of where I wanted to talk about the choice to go with Voxel. or what have you because in valheim that's not completely true like you can definitely modify everything in the world and it's very like you can dig and all that kind of stuff but it's not
Like each piece is this atomic thing that has an entity to it. You know, it's much more, it's built in unity and it's a whole different approach. And not every survival game does this. Another one I'll mention is Enshrouded, which is cool, but has a lot more limitations on what you could do to the world. So there's pros and cons. But Minecraft, I just am reminded. how revelatory it is that it is so extreme to what it lets you do.
you know not let alone like don't forget below the ground there's a whole nother world You could just dig straight down, which don't do that. That's very dangerous. Yeah, I know. I did one of the times that I died. I was just running. across what appeared to be flat ground, and I stepped into a crevasse and fell to my head. I have no idea what's down there. I'm never going back. It's so amazing. So many, I have so many good memories and stories about finding.
I mean, there are amazing things below the ground, right? And you can dig anywhere. You can destroy any block. When I was trying to figure out where I was going to go, I was like trying to, because it, you know. It's a desert. I was trying to find, but there's a river through it, oddly. I guess it's kind of like the Nile, maybe. Yeah, I was going to say. I swam up the upriver.
And it went basically through a cave and out the other side. Oh, okay. Well, maybe this is a direction I could go. And then I died soon after I was like, well, maybe I'll go a different direction. But I started kind of spiraling away from the spawn point. and then coming back at night to preserve myself. Just to see if I could get far enough away to start to see something else, something that was not.
you know, sand. So I was looking for trees. And ultimately, well, I found a village, a couple of villages, which were way more prevalent than I expected. based on my past experience. Yeah. They've added a lot more stuff like that. Yeah. And then.
You know, I found another place where there was water that went into a cave, but that one didn't go through. So I was like, oh, I guess I'm not going this way. Like I have I had all these different sort of experiences just kind of exploring the space, which was.
was also really cool until i finally was like oh okay i'm gonna go over there of course when i went over there i was like where is this relation to the spawn point oh i don't know i guess i'll find out next time i die which of course was not Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. The, that's why I want to talk about the seeds too, because of the sense, and this will be in a future episode too, but.
The sense of exploration is a really key element for these games to me too. And because every world is so different, like you're always going to be, for me, I'm always, I'm an explorer player type primarily. And I'm always. surprised, right? When you see a new landmark or you find a village or whatever, and there's even a lot more than in the old days. like temples and, you know, and more dungeons and dungeons have gotten more elaborate, the enemy types and such.
And just to offer a little bit before we start closing, I died a lot too, just so you know. And again, it's... I really revel in early Minecraft and early survival games because it does feel so raw. It's like...
And so I have certain, I guess, because I won't give too much away about what I've been doing, but I have certain like... rhythms that i get into with a survival game where i have certain goals that i immediately give myself like i want to get to this kind of place and i want to set up shop in this So that's what I eventually did. And that's why I think it was so great and ironic that we started in the desert because it forced me to...
get out of the desert fast and find a solution, which caused me to die a lot because I had to run at night a lot and then die again. But I did eventually make a bed, so I have moved. I think it would be fun for me not to give you any idea where I went and not give the community any idea. It's a big world, but I don't know. I think we should kind of play it out a little bit. I'll go back to the spawn point and probably harass you a little bit and leave some fun.
Yeah, don't take any of my stuff, man. I won't take any of your stuff. I've played a lot less of this game than you have, so I need a little forbearance. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe I'll leave you present as well. Something to give you a little bit of a head start. A little deus ex machina for you, huh? Anyway, yeah, I mean, that's one of the cool things that we'll probably talk about much later is the multiplayer. And then communities. And then, of course, modding. But yeah, I.
I don't know. It gives me all the feels, and I love your point about connecting to the raw sort of deconstruction of what... creatures and humanity bring to it maybe that is you know that's kind of why i like these games so much you know i'm backpacker and I like that kind of stuff and not that I'm out surviving but but there's something about it I'm not yeah yeah and there's a reason yeah
I like walls, structures. Yeah, exactly. I was like, get me out of here. Give me a list, please. I would like a list. That is me. Yeah, I... So, it was... It was interesting. I mean, one of the things, and we didn't kind of talk about this, but one of the things that was hard for me starting this time was like, I really wanted to play like the 2011 version.
Yeah. And because we did that with Dwarf Fortress, we did the earliest possible version we could, which is another one in this kind of model, different kind of game.
but also deeply simulated and with mining um so it's it's uh it's got a lot of similarities and crafting a lot of similarities as well um but it's um Yeah, but that's just not a thing that's available with Minecraft, unfortunately, because it would have been really, really fun and interesting to... to give that a try play the timeline in a way yeah like we did more fortress yeah yeah we played several
several points along the way. There's got to be mods out there. Yeah, but I mean, it's hard to mod out the... quality of life stuff that people like, you know, um, You know, and I know there's a lot. Yeah, there's a lot of mods out there. Maybe there's a mod that basically rolls it back to 2011. That seems hard to believe. Also, I'm using a Realm, and I'm not sure server-wise. Oh, yeah, on the official, because the Realms are official. Yeah, official Mojang, yeah.
that. I mean, the Windows version now isn't on-job anymore, right? You can still get this. Yeah, but I mean the one we're playing I don't think is. We're not. No, we're not. So there's also that. It's kind of interesting. It would be for a game this important and big and successful. Well, similar to WoW Classic, right? Like the WoW, World of Warcraft, Classic World of Warcraft came out because of the community need for it, right? They were making their own illegal servers.
Blizzard's like, you can't do that, but why don't we do it? Oh, that's an opportunity. Yeah, exactly. So there's that side of it, which is a bummer sort of. But I feel like if there's a game that needs a sort of like... time travel ability to time travel it would be this I think people would really appreciate it to some, you know, to some degree. Cause I'd love, I guess all the information spoiled at this point, but I'd love to not be.
I was bummed, and I was looking at sort of like the most recent update, which is on this timeline too, which I guess is out now, 1.21. And they have something called auto crafting, which I think we might have in this version. I'm trying to figure out what that means exactly, because armadillos are in that in this release, too. And those are I saw armadillos. while I was playing. Yeah, whatever we have is the latest and greatest because we're running a realm and anything.
Yeah, but on the timeline, it says it's in the future, so I think the timeline's just not up to date. Oh, yeah. But, you know, just reading the word autocrafting just depresses me. It's like, come on, that's like the point. So it's the sanding the edges. Yeah, removing the useful friction. Well, we will talk a lot more about this game and build a lot more stuff. But let us turn to an email to...
Oh, this one's from France, I think. It's sent to devgameclub at gmail.com. Okay, the future of sequels from Miss Terry. Sorry. I'm not sure. Sorry. It's Miss Terry Deepu. Deepu. Is this really from France? It's not really from France. Okay. Okay. All right. So I'm not sure. Yeah, it may be a little too opaque for me to, yeah, okay. be fooled. Bonjour! Since updates were infrequent or impossible in the early years of game releases, SQL served to both improve upon concept
and to funnel existing customers. As online updates became ubiquitous, patches, DLC, and expansion started blurring the lines. as to when a release was complete. Now we are in an era where some consoles are shipping without a media slot, cloud gaming services are achievable, companies want their own games as service. The physical boxes either contain a download code. Weird.
or require a large day one patch, it seems the world wants to move in the direction of the game is whatever you download today. As we've seen with some sequels from small and large developers, making something new is sometimes a flaw. It seems a safer bet to make one game you're known for and keep iterating on that for the same financially reoccurring audience. Is this the future? Is there still a place for bespoke sequels?
Cordial cordially cordial month cordial month I took French in school too and I still Yeah. Anyway, for those who aren't following, it's Mystery Dip. Hello, Mystery Dip. Oh, okay. I did not get that at all. he's mystery he's just getting worse and worse he's trying to hide the fact that he's going for a longest streak of emails because this is three emails in a row three He's trying. It's a disguise. He's disguising his name in email form. Thank you. I'm too dense.
to get that mystery. That one fooled me. I mean, I guess you succeeded. I wouldn't have noticed. I see the actual email addresses and who it's actually from. I don't have to share that information with you. I just see his name.
in the email in the inbox um anyway as far as bespoke uh sequels go i mean i think that we're still in an era where those are possible um You know, unfortunately, I think... well there's just kind of two two things one is that the indie space is alive and well and yeah the smaller things are always going to you know have a place for this and you know that's kind of where a lot of sort of interesting things are happening in this vein.
On the larger scale, you know, I think what happens is they all have to be these huge tent poles if they're going to kind of use that model and they have to kind of bring in. you know, whatever the number is that it has to be, you know, and that as long as it's coming in with that number, they're going to keep making them. It's all market forces at that point. So your Assassin's Creed and things like that, you know, and actually all of Ubisoft's models are like bespoke.
iterations on their major franchises, right? So those are going to continue to happen that way as long as it's profitable. And if it becomes not profitable, then yeah, some other model will have to. to come to the fore i mean i that's all i can really say about it i think um but i don't know if you have other thoughts Yeah, I mean, because we've lived, both of us and our colleagues have lived through this whole transition throughout our career.
because we kind of started around the time the internet really started. you know was was getting going when it comes to online games and such and there was definitely an era a few years of time when this concept of day one patches was looked down on as you know um how could you you know it's like
Uh, and, and it kind of like it unleashed this sort of concept, I think in developers, at least on games that I worked on, it had this debate happening of like, how big is your online patch going to be? And there's actually at some points policy about it. Right.
where it's like you can't be bigger than this because you don't want players to have to you know you want them to be able to play right away or whatever and like that's all gone now yeah and the reason I bring it up is it's like there's certain This is going to maybe be too theoretical, but... Every generation there's always some boundaries that developers are going to be hitting. It could be every generation claims there's a graphic.
boundary, right? And it just kind of keeps getting up to every generation. There's memory, there's whatever. hardware chips there's whatever you know whatever that is yeah ray tracing now and then you know whatever yeah yeah and then and you know and then and then to to mystery's question it's like there's bandwidth and there's you know there's how fast how much can you download and what are players willing to deal with when it comes to download
Even for a bespoke game, yes, Ubisoft has their model, but they still have day one patches as well. But it does work out of the box if you're not connected to the internet, to your point, right? And so I just like... In a way, what I'm trying to say is it doesn't matter. Like, yes, that is true. The internet has happened. And we, any developer or what I will say is any. content creator, any creative content person who is making
is going to leverage the internet and that's going to come with things like day one patches or what have you. But I think to your point, like the weird thing that's happened is that the spaces have the, the. The space is turned into the extremes on both sides. You have the indie space, smaller games, more developer-focused and controlled games that are able to do bespoke games if they want to. And then you have, I think Ubisoft's a good example. I think a better example is now Sony.
dabbled in online and is trying to figure it out and has now come back and said, oh no, and publicly even, oh, actually, we're pretty good at the bespoke gains. We're going to keep doing those. They're huge. you know, triple digit million games, they're story based, they're single player, most of them, they might have a day one patch, but.
We like those big blockbuster, like you said. Right. The question is more about the sequels, though. And yeah, I think Sony is like, yeah, they're still going to be doing the sequels because. I think those need to be that that's how you build the tent poles, right? You know, you make your first one and it's, you hopefully get away with it cheap. And then you're like, well, if that one hits at all.
then we'll invest bigger in the next one and make a bigger bet or maybe you know maybe we won't you know maybe they'll be like well we don't really see that you know having a bigger return um yeah i mean the internet has happened the internet has enabled more of the like constantly updating sort of is counterpoint. What about a world where there's sequels?
you know we're talking about a game you know now that is like it's just been updated and updated and updated and updated you know the you know for that's all that's the whole model um you know and that's true of other games we've played as well Yeah, those tentpoles allow you to experiment. My point with Sony was going to things like Horizon, where that's a new IP, big tentpole game that they didn't know was going to be successful or not.
And then it is the result of it was a big sequel afterwards. Right. It's like that was, that was their iteration, even though the internet exists. Yeah. So I don't think those are going to go away, but I think. we will constantly adapt to what we have in front of us because it's there, you know? Yeah. Oh yeah. That, that point is definitely taken. Yeah. I mean, I still look askance at huge day one patches. I mean, part of.
Part of why that happens is because it basically, it becomes a negotiating tactic between the developer and the publisher or the publisher and the platform holder as to what... what we can let slide insert because it's very dangerous. Yeah. Oh, it's terrible. I mean, I think it's a terrible model and I, you know, we should be all ashamed that we do it. But it's often not in our hands, right? It's not a decision I'm making, you know.
It's a decision that's made kind of at a business and sales kind of level because hitting the date is the most important thing. So if you, because of marketing plans and how much spend is done on marketing now, like you have to hit those dates. then we have to squeeze as much as possible into the day one pack.
um you know and we'll push we'll push on the publisher like they don't want it not to come out or the platform holder rather they don't want it to not come out on the date either right so it's like all the incentives are there to push things into patches um patches well it's like as you're closing uh you know inside baseball that uh maybe many of you already know but like to give an example as you're closing a game like those tentpole games
You're triaging bugs, for instance, and you have your gold master slash release build that you're going trying to finalize. And you mark bugs for that build. Then there's a field for bugs for the day one patch. That is after that, right? And so you're, to Brett's point, you're pushing, you're triaging bugs for one or the other. And if something is important to be in that release, that's going to be essentially on the disk. But again, it's a code, let's face it.
then there's also like the bugs that get pushed to, okay, it's not as important, but we still want to do it, but we don't have time to do it in time for the... quote unquote old old-fashioned gold master so let's put it in the day one patch and it's marked differently you know so it is this weird new kind of like
buffer like what's a good analogy in other place in life it's like you know it's a procrastination kind of like but i think to your point on where why it has become a dangerous thing And this is where I was not succeeding in my point about limitations in any form is that. i think one of the most important things that we talk about you know i talk about a lot we talk about day to day everybody in makes games should be talking about is you know
the right amount of stuff to make the game as high quality as possible. Not trying to do too much, basically. And I think with the day one patches and even limitations on other boundaries, whether it's graphics or what have you, it's like you should constantly be cutting and focusing on the right portion of the game rather than trying. sneak more in yeah you should be taking more out and i think that's kind of the nintendo approach as we know so
These sorts of bad habits have gotten worse because of stuff like this, because people shouldn't be trying to sneak more in. They should be taking it out instead. And technology like this has given people... permission to be sneaky. Yeah. Well, you know, an analogy for me is that I set my bedroom alarm clock to be nine minutes fast. Because that means I can hit the snooze button once in the morning and I know I'm still on time for when I actually.
get up yeah that's exactly it yeah that's exactly it yeah just you know at a cost of millions and millions of dollars it's kind of a difference of scale really anyway Thanks for the email. Um, miss Terry, uh, terror E dip, uh, or however that was supposed to be pronounced. Uh, Mr. Um, that was sent of course as i said earlier to devgameclub at gmail.com we also love to get your reviews i get all of those if they're on the apple infrastructure but if you're somewhere else
Let us know or send it in. We love to read them on the show. We have a website at devgameclub.com. My co-host twitches when he can at twitch.tv slash. Tim Longo Jr. with the JR at the end. Is this ever happening? It's going to happen again. I'm sorry, folks, but it's not going to happen, I think. Yeah, it's that time of year. It's the most wonderful time of the year. where we're just...
I'm trying to hit the goal of streaming Final Fantasy VI for a whole year. So I'm actually stalling a little bit because I want to make sure that I finish 12 months later. How about a decade? How about a, you know, just stretch it out to 2030. You can also find us on our discord. There is a link in the show notes and that's where you're going to want to go. If you want to play on our server or suggest Tim's game to play on this year's defeating games for charity.
stream in January our intro and outro music was written and performed by Kirk Hamilton commissioned by friend of the cast Aaron Evers and our logo the Discord, our merch store are all by Mark Garcia. Have fun figuring out what you can do with a stick this week. And good night. So much. So much. Good night.