Discord Game Club Ep. 14

Hello, Brett here from the Dev Game Club podcast. I hope you're all enjoying the holiday season from the just completed Hanukkah to tomorrow's Christmas to Kwanzaa, which I think is Friday, or honestly, just a break if none of these apply to you. In addition to that, I just want to remind you of the 2026 Defeating Games for Charity event run by our Fan Run Discord, which returns on January 23rd through 25th and is in every way bigger than last year's. The lineup and schedule is available.

There are 24 streamers over 50 hours. Charity benefits the Video Game History Foundation. We're off until the new year, so this week we are happy to again be able to dip into the Discord Game Club backlog of interviews with an interview between Biostats and Calamity Nolan and Robot Spacer, who is one of the streamers in that event, with King's Quest and Shadow... and who does some hobby game dev besides. If that's not your bag, then we'll see you in a couple of weeks. Take care.

Welcome to DGC Just Rhetoric, a podcast where Nolan and myself interview content creators and developers. Today, we are excited to have Mike Piontek, better known as Robot Spacer. a Twitch streamer specializing in giving viewers an immersive experience of playing retro games, including covering the boxes, manuals, and alternate versions. I'm your host, Ryan, or Biostats on the Discord, and I will let these app developers...

introduce themselves right now. Hello, I'm Nolan or Calamity Nolan. Hi, I'm Mike Piantek or Robot Spacer. All right, so first thing we always ask our guests is tell us about your handle. My handle. Oh, boy. So in the earlier days of the Internet, I first started out using like usernames that were a reference to. you know some like anime or something and uh every every new service i went to like

somebody would have taken the name I was used to using. So I was like, all right, I got to come up with something unique that's not a reference. And I was in a band at the time. And I had recently written a song called The Lonely Spacer about a... astronaut that is uh very lonely and i was like lonely spacer that's kind of a fun username uh but then i thought about it for a bit and i was like well I don't want people to see that and think that I'm describing myself as lonely.

so i tried to think of uh what's something else that could go with spacer uh spacer is just kind of a fun word so i thought maybe i'd try to work with that and eventually i thought of robot spacer and uh that seemed good enough for me so That's been it ever since. And the reason it's all lowercase? Just personal preference, I guess. I love that people always tend to...

latch on to something in like high school and then that's their yeah that's their handle forever what was your initial motivation to start streaming oh gosh i would say Big part of the inspiration for that, my wife and I first started watching GDQ, Games Done Quick. That was kind of our first introduction to Twitch. And then at some point we started watching Nina Marie, Nina Freeman, a game developer who also streams on Twitch and really enjoyed watching her channel. And she...

Always has a lot of insightful commentary, just like her perspective on games as a developer. After a while, we started watching... okay retro zone uh streamer and uh game developer that's um Also did a lot of like Lego builds and stuff like that. I think it was the Lego specifically that got me thinking, you know, maybe maybe it would be fun to to get a Lego set and stream that as a way to.

justify the purchase a little bit. It's content. Yeah. Before that, we had both experimented a little bit with streaming. And my wife kind of got into it a little bit before I did. But I started out... doing doing lego streams and then uh kind of pretty quickly thought that you know it might be fun to uh share some some games i grew up with and and things like that I grew up with a Mac and those versions of the games don't get shared a lot.

um on twitch so i thought that would be kind of a fun angle to take yeah basically just kind of snowballed from there well you also like to bring in books sometimes and and give historical context to these games so i think it's really cool to see it's not just showcasing the game itself, but you are...

you know, giving people an education. Yeah, I definitely, like, I have a lot of knowledge just from growing up with these games. I have a lot of, you know, magazines and books that I've kept over the years. Unfortunately, a lot of my old games went through some water damage a while back.

Certainly an experience a lot of people have had, I think. It's hard to keep things in good condition for that many years. But yeah, it's a nice opportunity to, you know, get out that stuff and share it with people who, you know, maybe haven't.

seen it before. I also just kind of really enjoy sharing what to me was like the the typical experience of of playing a game back then which is you know you definitely want to read through the manual like with old games you know you don't have tutorials built into the game so you really need to go through the manual. You'll often get backstory in there as well. That gives you some important context that...

is usually kind of repeated in the game, but often kind of shortened. And then map making is another big thing that I feel like a lot of people skip over. playing these games now that you were very much expected to do and is, I think, an enjoyable part of the experience. Certainly not everyone agrees.

But it definitely helps a lot to get through those games without having to resort to a guide or whatever. So hopefully I give people... a good look at um you know how how these games might have been played back then and hopefully it gives a new appreciation for them sure and i think that it's a great match for twitch also because a lot of these games

kind of were meant to be played multiplayer a bunch of people together yeah and yeah so you have that sense of community too with with the chat absolutely when you're streaming um

So I think had Nolan and I put it to each other, you have this sort of professorial approach, at least at the start of the game. Yeah. How do you... Decide on what you want to cover and what you want to focus on and what you're going to add and then what you're going to talk about later. So usually when I am getting ready to stream a new game, I. You know, I.

If I have a copy of the game, I'll dig that up and take a look through it a little bit. If there's anything in particular that comes to mind about that game, I'll make a note of it. I usually try to make an outline of... points i want to make you know i always try to mention basic stuff like when it came out and the you know main developer and stuff like that um and then generally i i do a little research online

kind of start out with like the wikipedia page or mobi games um you know sometimes mobi games has some interesting little trivia bits on there same with wikipedia So, yeah, I just kind of put together a little outline of interesting bits that I think are worth sharing. And I try not to plan too much.

and just kind of go off that outline and uh just kind of uh wing it from there aside from like the the beginning um There's not a lot of planning to, you know, when I mention things often, you know, somebody will just ask a question in chat and it'll, you know, remind me of something that is interesting to share.

uh do you have any long-term plans for the channel long-term plans um someplace you want to take it or or is this you're just going to do this for for as long as you can uh Yeah, I mean, that's kind of been my feeling on it. I definitely don't have any big plans. Certainly put a little bit of effort in to, you know, try to grow the channel. I also... keep my archive on YouTube updated. But I don't have any goal of making it a full-time job or anything like that. I think it's...

It's a lot more enjoyable for me as a hobby than something. that i make money off of um i do definitely see some appeal in like there are some game devs like julia minimata who works on games primarily, also streams some of her work as well as games she's playing. That is certainly appealing to me at this point. Game dev is also very much just a hobby for me. And you were making a game on Twitch. Is that correct? Yes.

tool that came out back in 1986 which was uh also the same the same year my dad first brought home a mac i think we didn't get it until like a year or two later though but um This tool was called WorldBuilder, and it was created by William C. Appleton, and he built it to create his own game, which was released in 84, the same year that Mac came out. He built it just to make it possible to make his own game on this brand new system that didn't have a lot of development tools available.

And then eventually he got in contact with Silicon Beach Software, who published the game. And then a couple of years later, the tool world builder. And I had played with this a bit as a kid. And found it really interesting. It definitely started a lifelong interest in making little games, or at least attempting to.

uh i thought that would be a fun thing to share with people um because you know again like along with you know mac versions of games like uh a lot of people don't talk about uh you know mac specific tools even if they were you know ultimately pretty important and influential. So I thought, we'll take a few streams and make a tiny little game project. And it just kind of took off and...

Trying to think of how many hours we spent on it. Many, many hours and many streams. I think I did like 70 streams total. It was a lot of fun. And I also have found that streaming is a great way to encourage me to keep at something that is like a hobby that I... you know, enjoy doing but don't need to do. So yeah, it's been done for a while, but I haven't quite released it yet because I decided to paint a cover for it as well. And that's been on pause for a bit.

so you're an artist now too yeah i have uh i was uh at a very early age uh very interested in art so that was kind of how i you know started out um and then computers kind of came into it later like i said my my dad brought that mac home when i was 10 and uh i drew a little kangaroo and mac paint and i was pretty hooked at that point um

And then things like WorldBuilder and HyperCard came along and got me interested in simple programming type of stuff. But yeah, for a long time, I was really only interested in art. Eventually around high school, I got into graphic design specifically and figured that was what I would focus on. I went to...

Center for Creative Studies in Detroit and studied graphic design there for four years. But then I didn't quite graduate because some friends and I got hired to... work on a game demo for a children's uh educational software and uh that was just kind of one of a few factors that Oh, boy, there's kind of a whole thing I could get into here where I did not get enough.

Time with computers in college. I did not get enough education that felt like it would prepare me for what I would actually be doing after college. It was more focusing on basic design skills and a little bit of an outdated program. I did get a lot out of it, but after... a few years, I started to feel like, well, this isn't giving me enough. So it was very easy to kind of drop out and focus on, you know, actual work I was doing that I was learning a lot more from.

But then I eventually got into web design and that kind of led into app design eventually. So I just kind of... stumbled into becoming primarily a programmer, but I'll always see myself as more of an artist. And I definitely enjoy combining the two whenever possible.

What would you consider a success for your stream or your art or your games? That's a great question. Let's see. I guess I'll start with streaming. I guess I feel like... successes there for me are just like little things you know anytime someone says they enjoy my stream anytime someone you know comes back regularly to watch you know especially if

you know, someone felt inspired by it in some way or, you know, encourage them to, you know, check out some game they might not have otherwise. That's all I'm really there for. That's the most I could ask for.

you know like i said i'm not looking to to make a career out of streaming or anything and uh i'm just i'm just there to like you know share the stuff i enjoy and uh it's great to chat with people and um Also, for me, just having people come in and share their own experiences, that is very rewarding. just the the whole community aspect i guess is uh is definitely why i do streaming um as far as my games honestly uh

At this point, my biggest success would be releasing a game. I did technically release a couple of games I made as a kid. But... I have never really released something that felt intentional and something I was really finished with. Yeah, hopefully I'll manage to get this World Builder game out eventually. And I've also already started working on a Playdate port of it.

Which has been a fun project. And I guess I really just feel like managing to get it out. And hopefully some people will say that they enjoyed it. And that's good enough for me.

Tell us about your childhood games. For a long time, I thought they were gone forever. i made a couple of games in hypercard which is another much better known authoring tool that was released for the mac many years ago in 87 Apple released HyperCard, which was created by Bill Atkinson. And the number one game that was made in HyperCard that is by far the best known is Myst.

It, interestingly, does not look much like a typical HyperCard game because HyperCard did not support color by itself. So they had to do a lot of things to add that in. But it was still a pretty capable and very approachable tool to make a variety of things in it. It also had a lot of influence on the World Wide Web in various ways. Since it was so easy to work with, it was another tool that I had fun playing around with and made a couple games. So one of them was called Pump It Up.

which was inspired by Reebok pumps, which are these shoes that... It had a little like basketball on the tongue that you would press and they would inflate to, I guess, give you a snug fit. And they were very popular for a while. And I guess I just thought it would be a funny idea to make a game where you are wearing these shoes and go... Bundy jumping off a bridge. I guess probably that was a popular thing at the time as well. And so you had to inflate your shoes just the right amount.

or you would either slip out of the shoes, or if you inflated them too much, then the bungee cord would break. But if you got it just right, you'd have a successful jump. And that was pretty much it. That was the whole game. There was also just like some very simple calculations that... There was a wind number you were given and you had to take that into account. And that was kind of the only variable that affected what was the correct amount to inflate your shoes.

But it was something I was able to put together in HyperCard. And it did a lot of little animations and stuff for it. And that was... Probably the first game I ever really finished. I remember my dad was very proud of it and took a copy of it to work on floppy disks and shared it with some people. And then the other one, so there was this early Mac game series called Dark Castle.

which started out Mac only, but it was eventually imported to a lot of different platforms. So it's reasonably well-known. It was originally black and white, like the original Mac, and just had really beautiful... um monochrome art that i uh appreciated very much and for some reason in junior high french class I don't remember exactly how the phrase beaver pelt man came up in French class.

But it turned into a game. And for that one, I borrowed a lot of art from Dark Castle. It was also kind of like... a little bit meant to be a sequel to Beyond Dark Castle for some reason. And in this game, you started out going shopping to buy various traps. And then you would sit on the left side of the screen while these... beavers came at you and tried to basically kill you in some way. There was also this complicated setup where some greater enemy was sending these beavers to attack you.

I guess they had taken over the castle and you had to get past all the beavers to get to the castle to defeat the main enemy. And that game was... very ambitious like most of my game projects have been over the years and it was never really finished um But getting back to a thing I hinted at earlier, I thought these games were gone forever. I had some discs that were labeled suggesting they had the games on it.

I had no way to read them. I still have the Mac I grew up with, but it has been dead for several years. A while back, I got a new mouse for it and booted it up and played a little Dark Castle. And then the next time I booted it up, it just beeped. And I'm definitely not an electronics guy, so I had no idea how to approach repairing it. So I've just kind of let that sit for a long time.

But when I started working on this world builder game, I kind of got inspired to look into buying a new, slightly newer Mac plus.

So it was just a couple years later than the model I had. But of course, with a working disk drive and able to boot and all of that important stuff. So I got that and... i really didn't expect to be able to get anything off those discs i figured surely they've been like damaged or accidentally erased or something uh but i was able to rescue both games off those floppy disks

And then the Beaver Pelt Man game, I spent some time at one point kind of polishing that up and doing my best to like... uh finish my um original plan for it and make it fully playable all the way through which was certainly not possible before so i uh Shared those on robotspacer.software, and you can play them in your browser there. They're certainly not good games, but I think they're amusing, if nothing else.

They are pretty amusing. I'll co-assign that. And really cool, right, that you get to play an emulated Mac game in 2025. 35 years later uh yeah so you so these are available on your website which i want to say your website is great and it seems like you thank you continually update it yeah i actually have um i have too many websites i kind of have a problem so i've got robotspacer.tv which is focused on my streaming

I have robotspacer.software, which is where I posted those games and will eventually post TransferPoint, the WorldBuilder game. Those are just a couple of the many websites I have. Well, it seems like you put a lot of effort into them. It made it very easy for us to look up information for the interview here. Great. Thank you for that. You're welcome. Continue to go through some of these and just talk about them a little bit? Sure.

So Chicago Avenue Moon. Oh, so this was a friend of mine, Josh Dumas. We've known each other for many, many years. Let's see. I first met him in, I guess, junior high. So he also grew up with Macs, and his dad was a Mac developer. So we bonded a lot over adventure games and specifically Mac games a lot back then. And just kind of had a lot of common interests in general. In later years, he has focused a lot on music, and we have collaborated on a lot of projects together.

really big music project we worked on together was a website called tenseforms, tenseforms.com, which I still keep running, even though it has not been active for many years. But this was kind of like a collective of musicians and artists and just a way to share. everybody's work online and also a way to kind of experiment with some new things. So I was basically the web

site guy and the tech guy for that project. And then later after I got into app design, Josh approached me with this idea for a music app. And it sounded like a fun project to experiment with some new things that I had never done before. So the idea was that you would... give this app your location and it would use that location to basically create music out of different

pieces of music that were already recorded. Gosh, it's been so long since I thought about this that I don't remember exactly how all the aspects of it work. But, you know, ultimately the idea was that you would go for a walk and start this app up and your movements. in different directions, as well as the phase of the moon, would all influence the different components of this piece and the way that they were assembled together.

So it would always be a little bit unique each time you listen to it. And yeah, that was a fun project that I had a lot of fun doing.

note file note file is a note taking app uh pretty simple um honestly just started out as something i wanted for myself um believe at the time i created it um apple's notes app did not exist yet um or if it did it it didn't quite do what i wanted it to do um But ultimately, I just wanted a quick way to jot down things on my computer more than anything else.

So I just wanted something, you know, extremely simple and distraction-free. Also, I often find myself doing little calculations from time to time. So I wanted to put in a feature that you could write down five times 10 and select it and calculate it. Obviously, I'm generally doing more advanced math than that.

Yeah, that was just like many of my projects is like a specific need I had that I wanted to solve and figured, you know, I might as well share it with folks and see if anyone else finds it useful. Deliveries. So Deliveries is my main app that has been my primary business since, let's see, I just looked this up yesterday. I believe 2008 was when, actually, no, that's when it was first released in the App Store.

But before that, it was a Mac specific dashboard widgets. I don't actually know what the year is on that one, but dashboards. was just this little way of making a web-based widget for a Mac. And that was, as a website guy at the time, that was very easy for me to learn. And then when the App Store was introduced, it was clear that Apple had created a bunch of apps that were modeled after some of their own dashboard widgets.

So that kind of inspired me to think, you know, maybe I can turn my package tracking app into a, I should have started out with that. It is a package tracking app for various services. But yeah, it just kind of inspired me to try to learn app development and see if I could make this into an app and get it up on the App Store.

It took a few months after the App Store had launched, but I managed to get it in working form and available in the App Store. And it just kind of took off and has been my primary business ever since.

I had in my notes here, I have JuneCloud started in 2008. Yes, yes. Yeah, I started the company along with wanting to get that in the App Store. It just seemed like... better to to have a company to release it than uh just me personally i know this is an only question what's it like to make new games for old hardware oh boy it's honestly like it's a big challenge

But I find it very enjoyable to embrace these very specific limitations of the time. And it also helps a lot how fast... and emulated older computer runs on modern hardware. So it just makes it very easy to focus on what you have to work with. I definitely have, I have always, always found that like having some limitations in like any given project, even like an art project is kind of freeing in a way because it's.

It gives you a way to focus on what you can do in working within the limitations you have is just interesting to me. and uh certainly with uh creating something for you know software that came out in 86 um like going back to world builder um The programming language in there is incredibly limited. Your variable names are a letter and a number. And you get like A1 through Z9, I think. And that's it. So I had to.

keep track of. I started out keeping track in a notebook, but eventually created a detailed note on my computer of what all these variables I was using for actually meant. There are also a lot of complications. So WorldBuilder gives you these four windows. Let's see. There's sounds. objects which can be something you could pick up and carry around or something that is um you know immovable uh could also include um just

you know, objects that you program in the functionality, or you can have things like weapons that have some built-in functions. There's characters. which includes both your player character and enemies. And then you have a map view where you place different rooms. I completely forgot the point I was getting to that needed that background. Oh, right. The objects section, you have to name each object. Each one has to have a unique name.

and then those names are also the way you refer to those objects in code so if you ever want to rename something you also have to update all your code and there's no find There's certainly no find and replace across all of your code. So it's just a big challenge. You have to do your best to plan in advance.

do need to rename something at some point you really have to go through like line by line um so yeah there were a lot of uh interesting limitations to struggle with and you know not not all enjoyable to deal with but um it was neat to kind of see what we could do within um like i said there's a map so like the idea is that every space you go into is some sort of room or a you know specific outdoor space but um

i thought well we could create a room that's basically a close-up so you uh you know you're holding an object and you look at it and you get taken to this close-up Which of course adds in some complications because there's all these built-in features like you can drop items you're holding anywhere. But obviously you don't want to drop something in a close-up.

because that would both look weird and be a little confusing. But it was a fun challenge to kind of deal with that and figure out how to make it work. And eventually I did manage to do it.

you know any any built-in functionality you can kind of intercept of course and uh you know prevent it or make it do something a little bit different um so it's just kind of fun to see what we could do and also like having this as like a hobby project with, you know, no stress to worry about having a, you know, a polished game in the end. is certainly a big factor in how enjoyable it was. Like you said, there's 70 episodes of you going through this on stream.

If people want to learn more, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I did my best to do as much as I could on stream. Occasionally I would do some like little... tinkering and cleaning things up off stream that just uh didn't seem very interesting but uh i would say 95 of the work i did on stream you have any uh

plans to do more on-stream development? That's a good question. When I started out doing that, I wanted to eventually do a hypercard game on stream in a similar way. But then it took so long to finish that one that I figured, well, maybe we'll wait a little while before we get into that. I would still like to do that eventually.

I've done a couple of HyperCard streams. Like I said, I spent some time fixing up BeaverPeltMan on stream. And I did one stream where we just kind of made a simple like... RPG battle screen just to kind of share what you can do in HyperCard. But it would be fun to create a finished game at some point. We'll see.

maybe you could do a special stream for defeating games for charity or something maybe for an example uh which yeah thank you for streaming this last year and defeating games for charity of course that was a lot of fun It was really cool to see all of the knowledge you bring to your streams and the games. So we're hoping to get you back for next year as well. Absolutely. In fact... If a certain game has a new 3D version that comes out, you might have to play it.

Post pod, Ryan jumping in. We neglected to mention the game we're talking about is Mystery House, which Robot Spacer played in last year's event. Yeah, do they have a release date? I don't know. I don't think so. I feel like they did an announcement and it seemed like it was pretty early in development.

Tell us about streaming with your wife. What's it like living with a streamer? It's been fun. Mostly we just kind of stream on our own. She streams very different stuff from what I do. She started out as more of a variety streamer.

But she's really enjoyed Genshin Impact, which is, of course, is a gacha game where kind of the main... money-making component is you know buying wishes to try to get different characters and stuff like that but it's an interesting game and they really put a lot of work into I mean, all of it, but the thing she really appreciates is the lore in the story, which is surprisingly well thought out. And it's kind of fascinating to see.

a game that is like unfolding over multiple years that has um seemingly been pretty well planned out in advance So that kind of turned into her primary thing is just keeping up with all the new content in that game is kind of... All she needs to fill her one or two streams a week. But, you know, she... is interested in a lot of other games and a lot of the same types of games that I enjoy as well. Recently, we've been talking about playing some games that...

She played as a kid but never finished, as many people did when they played an adventure game as a kid. So a while back, the first one of those we tackled was King's Quest IV. Which is especially fun because I had never played it either. But for different reasons. At the time that came out, the Mac was kind of struggling a bit. And Sierra was also like moving to a more advanced game engine.

So I think, you know, porting those games took a bit more work. And I guess they just didn't see the commercial value in bringing a lot of... those games to the mac at the time so there was never a king's quest 4 for mac and uh i was never able to play it many years after it came out we eventually got a windows pc at home but

I had never gotten around to actually playing through it. So we figured it was a fun opportunity to finally play through that game, both for our first time together. And it was a lot of fun. We approach adventure games very differently. So that's an interesting challenge to, like, I very much want to work through things on my own without getting hints.

um she um doesn't really care about that like she just wants to you know keep progressing i think um she's good at solving puzzles but if she gets stuck on you know there are some punishing uh puzzles and games back then so you know it's it's pretty natural to get stuck now now and again and get frustrated by it But the nice thing is that we generally work together pretty well and have different ideas about how to approach things.

So I feel like it worked out pretty well in the end, and we were able to... I guess I can't remember if we ever got any hints. I think mostly like we both had kind of absorbed a lot of knowledge of that game over the years that we were able to get through everything without... any additional hints but it was a lot of fun and certainly something we'll be doing again in the future we've talked about playing gold rush and the scoop which are

Again, both games that she had played a little bit of and I have never played at all. We've also done some... Some other games in the past, Phantasmagoria and its sequel and stuff like that. But always an enjoyable experience. I think the main reason we don't do it more often is just...

scheduling, trying to find a time that we can both dedicate a few weeks to a new game. And your wife's handle is Unsecret Crush, right? If people want to... go watch yes that's correct but yeah i think that that is very admirable that you're trying to play king's quest with no hints those are those games in particular i think

yeah there's some there's some strange puzzles in those ones i mean speaking of um ones you played as a kid and never beat i'm pretty sure that's riven for me which you're currently playing through

Yeah, I had played through Mist and Riven when I was a kid and got very, very into those. That was another series that really made me want to... make games myself or at least experiment with it um actually uh speaking of my friend josh we worked together on a a game um that was very much inspired by mist and ribbon for years honestly i also like at one point um uh i met a a friend uh in college frank snowgold that uh also kind of uh collaborated on that idea for a little while but uh

It was definitely more of a thing that we enjoyed kind of working through ideas for, but no one had the time to dedicate to make it a... a finished thing um but it was uh it was fun and a learning experience so i think it was valuable regardless ruben was a favorite of mine too my brothers and i played through it

And I had to get one hint for that one that I remember going to Barnes & Noble and looking up a guide there, which I did not. There's one puzzle that just never would have figured it out. I don't remember if I ever got any hints for Mist and Riven in particular. I think probably I talked to Josh about... those games enough that we were able to work through things together when necessary. I remember when Miss came out, a buddy and I were playing through it during the summer.

And I remember the only reason I solved the, I guess it's the clock tower puzzle. The one where you actually, when you hold it down, it spins it further. Right. Like it like just keeps going, which is not something that you would see unless you accidentally did that. But his brother accidentally did that once.

so that opened it for him and then he told me about it so that was the only reason i was able to complete this that's funny and they just added a new age to mist i gotta go play that yeah wild that was fun to experience for the first time It's very cool to see all these games kind of still coming back. And, you know, they're so beloved. Yeah. You know, that you don't need... I feel like there's...

I was going to say you don't need all the modernity in games. Just with well-designed puzzles is all you need. Yeah. I feel like there's also kind of a... I don't want to say resurgence because people have continued to make adventure games ever since people started declaring they were dead. That hasn't ever stopped, but I feel like it was kind of a... um like a lot of new adventure games um coming out all at once from indie developers right now and it's been great to see

A lot of really well-made games with often fresh ideas. It's been a lot of fun. Oh, anything you've been playing recently you recommend?

Going back to Julia Minamata, of course, she released the Crimson Diamond. I guess that was last year. I enjoyed that a lot. Disclaimer, I was also a beta tester on it. I enjoyed it. I was not a beta tester. I would have enjoyed it just as much. I really love that game. I actually, it's inspired a lot by the Colonel's Bequest, an old Sierra game. which I had not played until I think about two years ago.

And that was immediately one of my favorite Sierra games ever. And I think she did a great job of creating something inspired by that that feels very much its own thing. and brings a lot of interesting new ideas to the basic gameplay of it. Just really enjoyed that. So that's the main one that comes to mind. There's a bunch of others that came out just recently that I have not had the time to get to, like Rosewater, Old Skies. Old Skies is good.

Looking forward to it. There's a lot like both of those. I would love to play, but like I would also love to stream them. So I'm doing my best to hold off on them until I have time to do that. Do you play games differently on stream than you do off? So I very much try to. Share like what for me is a natural experience of playing games, but.

It's tricky because for me, you know, sometimes the natural experience is to just stop playing if I get stuck and take a break for... hours until i happen to have an idea you know maybe even days and you know i could do that

But it would probably result in a lot of very short streams and an erratic schedule. So it's tricky to... create a natural experience in a you know in a more consistent stream schedule uh so you know occasionally that results in me you know asking for a little bit of a nudge from from you know someone in chat that's played the game before um i generally try to avoid that because i think for me a very

sometimes frustrating but ultimately very satisfying part of playing adventure games is you know that that time where you get stuck and are struggling to progress but you finally figure it out like you have that idea that uh you think of that that finally works and uh i just i'd love to share that i love to you know have that experience myself um so you know i i do my best to to kind of um

Create the conditions for that and occasionally fudge it. Certainly, if I am asking for a hint, I try to get as subtle of a hint as possible to get me thinking in the right direction. And there's always a lot of folks that are very good at giving me the nudge I need. So it generally works out well, even if it's not, you know, a completely natural experience. I think it gets close enough.

I think when you were playing Myst and we were going through the maze where you're in the cart. Yeah. I feel like you asked like yes, no questions, which I think really helped avoid spoilers. Right. Yeah, I'll usually try to, you know, ask very specific questions if I have them, just to make sure that I don't get more info than I want. Common across your streams is...

this adventure narrative puzzle is like um i don't know if it's your wheelhouse because those are the games you played growing up and that's what you're doing on stream or that's just what you like best but that's um It seems that almost all the games I've seen you stream fit in those categories. Yeah, definitely. You know, that's a lot of the games I grew up with. And I certainly play... greater variety of games off stream um like i think the

The biggest category that I play off stream that I don't really stream very often is more like action adventure type stuff. Like the Uncharted games or Tomb Raider. or Star Wars Outlaws was a recent one that I had fun playing. And I guess I feel like those kinds of games get plenty of attention already.

And, you know, I just I have fun, you know, just playing those for myself. And I feel like that's that's fine. And I'd rather I'd rather focus on stuff that is a little bit less seen, at least these days. And also, it's been a good excuse to kind of check out a lot of games that I missed back in the day. I guess I feel like it helps to have a kind of focus of my channel. So people...

will have some idea what they're getting and a reason to come back. I try to go a little bit back and forth between fairly well-known stuff and more niche things. So hopefully having a kind of adventure game. focus gets people to stop by to see what this niche thing they've never heard of is. Just knowing that they enjoy the other stuff that I stream.

Game that everybody should try? A game that everyone should try? I'm completely blanking. There's so many. I feel like every game I would recommend... comes with a lot of caveats so it's hard to think of ones that i would recommend for anyone i guess uh i guess i'll say uh the colonel's bequest

is definitely one I would recommend for anybody that's interested in older adventure games, especially if you're looking for something that's a little bit different. It's a very... interestingly designed murder mystery game it is a text parser game so that is a bit of a hurdle if you've never played a text parser game i guess i would say uh start with the crimson diamond because that teaches you how to play them nice

What's a game in your backlog that you just haven't gotten around to yet? Just anything. I'm looking at my shelf here. Most of the games on my shelf I've played. I have a copy of Myst on my desk, which has reminded me, I've never played any of the Myst games beyond Riven.

So there's quite a few of those. There's Mystery Exile 4. I can't remember. I think that one has a subtitle. And then I don't really... yeah yeah it's it's for so there's two kind of they tried to do a like online thing also and it it didn't work like a an mm right right game but my understanding is you can still play that though like i think um like there's been a a fan group that kind of kept it going and playable over the years that's cool and then yeah

But yeah, a streamer friend... That's the other one. Okay. A streamer friend, Silverstreak, is even more into the Myst series than I was and has played everything. Definitely once I get past Riven, I'll be relying on him to kind of guide me a little bit. Well, I will say they are of varying quality. So good luck. But the newer... Have you played... Abduction or what's the other one that came out last year? Transference something. What was it?

It's on the tip of my tongue. No. Fur. Fur. Firmament. Firmament. Yes. Yes. That's it. Yeah. I haven't played those either. And I will definitely, like, my thought is at this point, I'll just kind of go through the cyan catalog in order. So I'm excited to check those out eventually as well. Pretty good. There's a puzzle. in abduction that they didn't mean to be a puzzle they just have a rotary phone oh no and kids these days don't know how to use a rotary phone oh wow that's funny yeah

We had rotary phones for a very long time at home, so I won't have any problems with that. Getting clotheslined by the cord because your mom was like across the room running around, right? That's what happens.

Here's something we ask all of our interviewees and always get interesting answers. So what support mechanisms do you have in life? So after thinking about it for too long. I finally started seeing a therapist. Let's see, I guess it's been about a year and a half ago. I guess for me, it was a big struggle to kind of take the steps to get started on that.

i've been really glad i did and i if anything wish i'd done it much sooner you know i try not to worry about that too much and just just be glad i started when i did and it's uh it's been really helpful to just You know, have someone to chat with about mental health stuff and look after my own well-being and improve things that can be challenging. I think it's helpful to destigmatize it. Yeah.

Absolutely. Frontman for a band. Yeah. Tell us about your time playing and singing. So I guess I can see the guitar cases in the back. yes um i guess i'll kind of start at the beginning like so uh i was always very into music um i guess let's see when did that start Definitely really started being a big thing in high school. I went to a high school that had a radio station, which was a really cool experience. And it was also a pretty big high school.

So, you know, there was a wide variety of like interests and met a lot of other people that were, you know, into the same music as I was and stuff like that. I mean, I guess you generally categorize it as alternative, like pixies. They might be giants.

are kind of like the two big ones that pop into my head that i feel like kind of summarize the the kind of stuff i was uh into back then and uh still am and then let's see so my brother who's a couple years older than me had some friends that were also interested in learning how to play music And I think it kind of started with them. Unfortunately, we had three of us that kind of wanted to start a band, but we were all guitar players.

No one could sing. No one could play another instrument. But that didn't stop us from trying. And eventually my brother decided that he was going to learn to play bass. I think initially we kind of took turns playing bass, but he decided he was going to dedicate himself to that. Our friend Greg was... the best guitar player of the bunch so he kind of became the lead guitar player and um i could just kind of do basic rhythm guitar and that was about it

But I was really into, I guess, just the lyrical component of music. And I always enjoyed learning the lyrics to songs and kind of thinking about their meaning and stuff like that. So I feel like that was a big part of why I decided that I was going to learn how to sing and play the guitar, even though I didn't even know how to sing very well without playing a guitar at the same time. So kind of coincidentally, I ended up going to this.

I'm trying to think of how to describe it. It was just kind of like a summer camp for artsy kids at Eastern Michigan University. This was during high school. At the end of this camp... like everyone is expected to kind of have a big project that they would share at the end So I decided, okay, I'm going to spend some time at this camp learning how to sing and play guitar at the same time. And at the end, I will do a performance. And I... decided to play American music by Violent Femmes.

And just did my best to practice it. like if you've never tried to sing and play guitar at the same time even if you're like okay at playing guitar it's it's a real challenge to like keep track of those two things at the same time But I eventually managed what I think was a respectable performance. And that just kind of led into being the front man for our band, which we eventually named Liquid Plumber.

And then we started out with one drummer that was also in a ska band at the time. And he was great. We had a lot of fun, but the ska band took off and ours didn't. So eventually he decided he needed to focus on his ska band, which was totally great.

And that left us without a drummer for a bit, but we eventually found another guy, Jeff Poyer, who was just... amazing at the drums like he was like by far the best musician out of all of us um so that was uh a very lucky find and uh so we played together for I think we started around 95 and broke up around 99. Mostly because kind of everybody went off in different directions, left the state to go to college and stuff like that.

But it was a lot of fun. We played a bunch of shows. We recorded two albums and released them on pressed CDs and everything. Also, I made an enhanced CD-ROM for our second CD.

uh which was a fun project um probably maybe people aren't even familiar what that is these days so i guess i'll just say briefly an enhanced cd uh was a music cd you could put in your computer and then it would launch um what's kind of been replaced by websites now uh just a little interactive thing often you'd have like lyrics and little animations and videos and stuff like that

So it was a nice way to kind of pull together all my interests. But yeah, we had a lot of fun. We played some great shows. We somehow convinced Wally Pleasant, a local but well-known in Michigan musician, to let us open for him at the Majestic in Detroit. That was kind of our first big show. We played at the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor a couple of times on a Wednesday, of course, but still pretty exciting to play there and have a decent crowd. I think we also did some open mic nights there.

But yeah, I had a great experience doing that. And I also feel like it helped me a lot in just kind of getting used to performing. which has also been really helpful streaming on Twitch. That was literally my follow-up question, but now I'm going to tip it. So... you said you recorded a bunch of cds did you guys do home recording or what were you doing at that point let's see um our first album We all shared, the three of us that started out playing guitar, we all had the same guitar teacher.

And he had a pretty solid musical background and also some experience recording. So he helped us record our first album, if I recall correctly. Later, for our second album, we had met a friend whose dad owned a professional recording studio, Pac-3. So we were able to get in there on occasion when no one else was using it. And, you know, it was a very nice setup with like a separate recording booth and, you know.

acoustic padding and everything. So that was an interesting experience for our second album.

is there anything else you want to tell us about got anything to plug gosh not a whole lot comes to mind i guess i'll say um As we talked about, I've been working on this game, Transfer Point, that I'm going to do my best to get out the door this year as soon as I finish that cover painting. Also, got a lot of streams coming up I'm excited about. There's always a million different games that I'm excited to play. Working through Riven right now, which I haven't played in like 27 years.

And that's been a great time. Also finishing up The Case of the Golden Idol. I suppose by the time this is available, I'll have moved on from that one. But I always try to find a lot of... Interesting adventure and detective games to share on stream. And hopefully if you come by my stream, you'll find something new or just have a nice time. Where can they find you on Twitch? On Twitch, I'm at twitch.tv slash robotspacer.

There's, of course, as we discussed earlier, my website, robotspacer.tv, where you can also find my schedule and links on my archive streams if you want to check out something I played in the past. And your wife? My wife, you can find at twitch.tv slash unsecretcrush. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much for having me. It was great. Nolan, plug your stuff, buddy. You can see more of me at...

Twitch.tv slash calamitynolan, and you can play my games at upatnight.games. Thanks for listening to this episode of Discord Game Club, Just Rhetoric. We want to thank Brett and Tim for making the Dev Game Club podcast and for giving us a slot in their release feed. We also want to thank Mark and Artimage for starting the Discord Game Club podcast. Go listen to those episodes if you haven't already.

If you'd like to hear more interviews like these, let us know. You can find us in the Dev Game Club Discord, where Calamity Nolan and Biostats. Goodbye!