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Full Dan Transcript:

Dan Interview Hello, I'm Dan Montgomery. I'm from Seattle, Washington, born and raised been making games since I was super young but only was able to get into it a little more professionally kind of in my 30s. Yeah, yeah. So, I came out pretty early in life like pretty much sophomore in high school, And yeah, so, you know, back when it was a little bit trickier, but not super tricky to come out at that time. And. You know, kind of stayed in the geek space to feel safe, because I've always felt like as a gamer as just a geek in general other geeks, whether they're queer or not tend to hold space for people like us, or just in general, it seems like, especially when you go to conventions.

So like one of the first things, I noticed when I came out was that, you know, the band geeks, the theatre geeks cause I was in kind of all these extracurricular activities. They seem to embrace me more than everybody else in school. And that's not what brought me into gaming, but that helps. Maintain that sense of love for, you know, this industry, but that makes sense.

There must be theatre over there, glee club or something. Yeah.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

Oh, interesting. Yeah. When I came out it was pretty sparse as well because this was in the late nineties. And I was sort of seeking people, you know, not, not actively I was trying to, you know, be out, but not still, I don't know, put myself out there too much. But I did notice there was a couple out guys in the colour guard.

And I was already participating in colour at that time, which is attached to the band group that I was in. And that was nice. We even had a, we even had a gay sub that would come in and teach the colour guard. And so, I felt represented in the scene pretty early in, in that sense. And then this will last, well, even as a young kid, I was making paper games, sort of these children adventure style flip games, where you basically draw levels onto sheets of paper. You know, based on the numbers on the paper, you can go to different parts of the book. You know, that was, yeah. And so, it was more of a visual representation of the choose your own adventure.

Like I like those kinds of books, but I'm, I'm a very visual person. And so, I'm driven by sort of like visual mediums like that, but just like traditional art mediums. So, I was creating those types of games, just me and my brother growing up. And then we were just inundated with computers because of my dad's profession in electrical engineering.

So, I was able to I just started tinkering away with creating them on the screen. And back when I was in junior high, we had we had max. And so, for the first time, and it was this, there was this program called HyperCard, but it was basically like a precursor to what like web pages would have been like without the internet.

And so, you would basically just link pages together. So that's exactly, it translated to that medium. So just going from the paper to HyperGuard. That's what led me to become a web developer is, you know, just sort of that sense of page-to-page logic. But all throughout school, like, to go back to your question I was using, I was using games and making games as sort of my way of setting myself apart other than just being gay.

Because. I need, you know, a lot, a lot of careers. We have creative outlets, and we have creative mediums that we like to pursue. You know, in any sense of we're just, you know, looking amazing or, you know, being in spaces where we get to show our unique personality and games was always my way of. Going off in a way, because I just felt like it was such a unique skill to combine technical prowess and artistic prowess into like one thing and other people took notice of that, you know, growing up, it was primarily just the older adults that took notice, like the teachers and things like that, that would put me in either, you know, a TA situation in class or just, you know, I don't know.

Realized that I had this skill and heading me in the right direction. So, I knew what to do post high school. But I would always be pretty influential, you know, just gamer in general. I had one, I was one of the first people in my school to have a Game Boy. And so, yeah, like the original Game Boy. And so, I would bring it around and people would like rent it from me, actually between classes.

And so, and so they were able to get their own eventually. And then. So just things like that, I was always kind of known as a gamer and that kind of kept me cool, if you will, outside of my other, you know, just affinities that I had that were a little more personal. Like the big one, the heavy, big grey plastic one, yeah, with the black and white screen.

Oh yeah,

I had silver. Yeah, yeah.

That's awesome.

Yeah, that's awesome.

It's okay. It's one of those things where it's, it's, it's, it'll come back to you and then you'll scream it. So, it's safety, right? I'll tell you right when you lose this by the way.

Yeah, it was definitely a unifier for, for me.

Yeah. And it's come to, Oh, yeah, the casual game phase, well, as it's come to now with like the Venn diagram of friends that I have, you know, whether that's gay friends or whatever there still is quite a bit of a separation of circles that I, that I have, so. I have much more people in my circle that are geeks and nerds and gamers and that kind of thing than, than just gay.

Although the overlap is, although the overlap is pretty good. In terms of the gay people that I, like, we, for instance, like last night went to, like, a weekly board game session with some queer friends of mine. It's just wonderful because we always to camp up even more than, than when I play with other friends.

So Nice. Yeah, like we were we playing a murder mystery dinner and like murder mystery game and we spun it into like the gayest, we should recorded it. It was so fucking hilarious. It was just so twisted and weird, and we were saying at the end, cause we had to dress up for it as well. We're like, this would not have felt the same if we were just straight people acting these out, cause we're adding so much extra came to this.

But yeah, yeah, just like adding our perspective to it is so, it's so fun. Cause we don't, we don't get to do that, you know? Like we, yeah, we see. We see and games, you know, just like movies or any other medium of entertainment, and we want to see ourselves represented just flat out. And when we, when we kind of are in these situations where we role play, whether that's, you know, Jackson and Dragons or you know, an online game, you know, like once we have you just get the sense of like, you get to fill it with own. Personality and creativity and, and all, I don't know, that's why when, when I started getting to the role playing side of interest games that taught me something about the, the sort of the specialness and uniqueness of those aces, like the ability to create your own character. Sort of embed your own personality into it and tell your own story, kind of gives people the permission to go further, you know, with the play. And so, I've always, I've always just loved, loved games like that. And that's why, you know, to this day. That's the type of game I like to make games. I'm familiar. I'm familiar with it. Yeah. I'm going to be friends with that play or have you're on destiny. Yeah. And that's still, that's a, that's a challenge too, because by asking the player to Make their own backstory or make their own character in such a deep way, you know, just like in D& D or DL, you're sort of inferring that that player needs to somehow fill in that gap with their own minds and their own their own story that they want for themselves with some, you know, With some other exceptions given, you know, what that character may be doing in the game, what story they may be involved in, but you're asking the player to do more. But I think that's, me included, what people want to do. Especially queers, because we don't get to see ourselves represented, and so why not act out the representation that we feel like on the other side of things, you know, it's like, if you want to be a deviant pop or whatever, you want to be, you know, a barbarian Lord, you want to be, you know, a hero, if you want to be a villain you can be those things in certain games, but in other aspects, you get to be someone that's a little more nuanced. You know regarding, regarding your, regarding your level of quirks and kinks. So, yeah, and I, I'm not pointing this term, I'm just butchering it, but there's a sense of, I'm going to use Mass Effect as a, as an example where, you know, you have gay characters, you have bi characters, but a lot of the characters that you see in these games are what we call main character sexual. So, so they're just into you, if you do X, Y, and Z missions to them or, you know, whatever. You could be any, you could look at anything, you could have any backstory and they're still into you. And, and because, you know, they just programmed it such that it doesn't matter what, what gender you represent. For instance, and that's nice, but I feel like characters like Cortez, even though I didn't really like this story too much are more impactful because they're gay and they will always be gay. And there's no difference in, you know, what you choose. They will be into a male driven character and their story won't change depending on your choices. They're not going to flip to you just because, you know, you did. You know, a, you know, or a particular interesting moment for them. No, they are, they are into dudes and that's what Todd’s going to be. I find those stories obviously a little more challenging to write, but there are those, you know, me as a gay person, which is much more impactful and resonating. Then just like a Caden character where, yeah, there's going to be into you if you happen to do X, Y, Z, no matter what you present as. And to me that like, because I know that, you know, it's like, doesn't mean as much to me to know that if it was a female character, they doing the exact same thing. So, It's, it's challenging, but I feel like main character sexual, in my opinion, is less, is less of a powerful creative choice in games because it's, it's easy, right? And I feel like that's fine as long as they identify as bisexual, you see what I'm saying. So, at no point, like for instance, with Caden, if, if, if you were a female and you were romancing him, He wouldn't say anything about his past, being bisexual, having that as an identity, that just doesn't exist. They won't, they won't put that out there as their main preference, even though secretly, program wise, that's kind of what they are. And that's what I'm saying is kind of missing is at least with the identifying characters, they mentioned like Cortez, like the ex-husband and things like that to kind of give the player regardless of who you're playing as a sense of, no, this is my identity. This is who I am. And it makes that character a little more real. I don't know if that's the right term to use. I might have written that somewhere. I probably did. Oh yeah, that's a perfect example. Perfect example. Yeah, that's an interesting example because not only that, but if you romance too many people The punch, you know, I'm not swallowing anything. They kind of, they kind of confront you as a group. And it is kind of, but that's, I mean, it's a little bit of a draggle, but there's also not a lot of representations of like poly situations. And that's true in a lot of Romance games in general, like which is fine. You know, there's nothing wrong with characters presenting as monogamous or whatever, and they certainly do. There just needs to be a little bit more examples and Baldur's Gate has a little bit better example of how to do that well. Where characters, all types have just different preferences for monogamy versus, you And, you know, they will assert that one way or the other, depending on the situation. Everyone's a little by, yeah. How simple. Yeah. Oh, great question. I think as a. Most of the, you know, the, the trial and tribulations I face are, are just the same, I would say as, as a, as an LGBT career person like for instance pre gay gang, I, I've been in, or pre gay gang era you know, I worked for a startup, I worked for, you know, a large tech company. You know, in Seattle is it's a pretty nice place to work in a, a diverse set of people and environments and, and hierarchy. There wasn't a lot of pushback for me showing my own personal interests or creativity, or, you know, my, my background, I was pretty open pretty early as a, as an individual. And as I started to get into, you know, GL and things like that. You know, I don't say I hid it from the community, you know, like obviously like my social medias and everything were quite public but I didn't really use it as a, as an angle, I would say as much as I would, much as I would say, I would like to you know, in the, sort of like the presenting that in the future is something that I would like to do more. But it does, it does. You know, sometimes when you're working on these projects and people see you as, you know, a certain identity or whatever, you know, they may use that against you, but thankfully I just felt outside of just you know, the general angst of running a thing like this the community has been pretty embracing not necessarily my queerness, but, you know because that doesn't seem to happen very often but just in terms of, you know, me as a developer, me as a creative person having those moments where, you know, I can be vulnerable with them and share a little bit more about my, you know, my journey. My interest in personal life although it hasn't happened that often, it seems like when it has happened you know, people have been warm in a response to it. So, that's been nice, but I would say, you know, to frame it in a sense of what has been most difficult that's tricky because. You know, I've always sort of had this sense that you know, I, I don't necessarily have had many direct issues other than just interpersonal people. You know what I mean? And those were like, on a one on one with certain colleagues I've worked with who, you know, have just said really irritating things to me for no reason. Just about, you know, what do you think lifestyle is all about, or, or making assumptions based off that. But you know, in terms of the gaming sphere I've been lucky and maybe it's just because I'm tall and like imposing, they don't confront me too much but or maybe they, they all set it in the shadows. But yeah, I, I sort of led with my creativity a lot more than my games when it comes to my professional life. And maybe that's an endurance. Maybe that's been a, maybe that's just been like a defence mechanism. But I've always tried to just say like, I'll let the work speak for itself. And if people want to project what they think the work entails outside of, you know, an explicit sense of fairness, that's really on that. So the doorbell's going to ring in a second. Yeah. And with that said, yeah, with that said, you know I've taken a little bit too long to sort of put my own gayness into my work, you know, not, not to say that it's required for all creators to do that or somehow embed pieces of their gay history or their gay personality into their work, but. I haven't done that as much as I would like to, and that's, that's one thing that me and my current writer have made, made to challenge ourselves is to tell more stories that are a little bit more personal to us and unique to us as queer people. Because as we know, as I said earlier, You know, I just don't think there's enough of it, and why not take that opportunity, you know, to do that, you know, before we get too far in, it's much more difficult to do that. Yeah, I think there's a distinction between, you know, Seattle represented in creative work and yeah, Seattle as a city has its own sense of like representation for people that live here. I'm not saying there's a huge difference, but it's often when I see Seattle in fiction, you know, whether it's games or whatever, it's kind of, it's kind of hilarious. A lot of that is a brand. So, but, you know, this is a very clear city, very creative group of people in the city that I just I call this my home base because I do travel a bit, but you know, it's, it's hard to find early for me, a city that I would think I'd love more at the time of my life, maybe somewhere in Colorado. I was goanna say, it's, I mean, it's definitely a cold, but like, we don't get super extremes, like other cities do. So, you know, if, if, if anyone describes our city as anything, they just can't describe it as the worst of that thing. I can, you know, point to a different state that has the worst thing of that category, whether it be rain, snow, wind, any kind of weather, so, cold, hot, remind me what town it is again? That's what I was trying to remember. Those are social, yeah, the core concepts was around my love for sci fi and RPGs and strategy games. So originally it was a creative amalgamation of those things. And the first thing was created at a time when a friend of mine was playing a lot of games on Facebook and she was I took notice and was asking her about them and one of those games was Mafia Wars and she was saying how much she enjoyed it and how much she just couldn't get off of it. She's playing games like Farmville and those kinds of things, those casual games that you play in the browser. And I just remember like, yeah, watching her play them and thinking like, huh, well, this concept that I have in my head for. You know, sort of a planetary, you know, sci fi based building kind of co op game could fit in this paradigm. So I remember I was flying home like that weekend and I was just jotting some things down on the plane. And I just started to like, put together like a plant screen and things like that, just to kind of see if it's something that I could technically do. And by the time I got home, I had a little bit of a, of a little pre demo concept of Some of the planetary screens and things like that. And I thought, okay, I could make this work as a casual sci fi, a, you know, RPG experience, you know, for Facebook. And I started to build it up from there. And I used some of the, you know, ideas that I had that were inspired by other games that I used to play games like Star Control 2 and Master of Orion and things like that. Yeah, definitely I would say an augmentation is the best because You know, one of the challenges of these games is they just don't feel like exactly any other game. And even I was at a convention recently and, you know, we're trying to explain what it is or what they are. And so, you know, for the first game, I would say it needs more strategy. And for apotheosis, it leans more into adventure. And so, you know, if we had to distil down to, you know, a few words, RPG adventure, RPG strategy, but they all fit this sort of RPG element because I like the fact that you pick your character, you pick, you know, elements of your talents and traits and you're, you know, you pick a character name and you sort of go out into the. Into the galaxy and of your own sense of identity based off of that. That was all, that is all very key, you know, to any of these. Yeah, I like that. I like that. Yeah, we've been, we've been, we've been writing well over, I think 13 years now. I, I've lost count, but it's over a decade of the servers running. So It's a long time for a game to go in front, in front of you. Yeah. That's, that's definitely one of the challenges of how it's presented in the second one, apotheosis, because the first one, you have everything all in front of you all the time. And so you don't really lose your place. You get a sense of, you know, things aren't buried under multiple menus. And there's less complexity than the second one. So that's been a challenge is just, you know, trying to explain the mechanics in such a way it just feels natural to people to use. And that's, that's why we're. Really getting the, you know, core concepts sort of in front of the player right away. But because it's an exploration game, the second one primarily, at least in the early stages of gameplay it's, it's, it's tricky to, you know, players just want to be told what to do essentially. They want to. Be sort of propelled into their first seven decisions. And that's, you know, it's tricky when you have an open sandbox situation, because depending on where you are, you might, you know, you might have something different entirely that you would ask the player to sort of try for the first time. So that's something we're still playing with is, you know, how, how best to get players to do this exploration kind of and propel themselves on their own. They have that sense of wild open adventure you know, feeling lost, but, you know, still kind of having their, their mechanics in front of them to use. Was what we were kind of going, was what we were kind of going for versus the first game, you know, we kind of tell you to start doing missions right away and start doing battling right away and we sort of get you going on these basic concepts very early. Whereas in a second game, you may not want to do those things because there's so many other things you can do. And the combat component is completely optional for, for many people. So Yeah, it's a bit more challenging to get people to that sense of understanding. But you know, because it's an amalgamation of my favourite things and my favourite styles of gameplay you know, we're, we're going to keep going at it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But that's Yeah. And that's what we're trying to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of things like that where you know, we're going to be hiding more elements that, you know, we consider mid game or late game. You know, cause just giving everybody all the options for us to bat you know, that's. Not always the best idea but, you know, that's essentially how we put it forth in the beta, which was just like, okay, here's literally all the mechanics at your disposal. You don't have to wait to use them, you know, we just engage them by skills and things like that, but that, you know, that, that, that has gotten us in trouble because a lot of people can get overwhelmed. Yeah, we've been adding more of those recently. Just based off of where we think the most important details to give players for some of these early mechanics and, you know, it's some of the things you make self explanatory, but it's nice. To at least reiterate to people what our intentions were for them, so that there isn't any confusion. And even though there's buttons that have action words on them, now we explain what those actually do for the first time, so that, you know, people click on them, they just don't have a sense of like, okay, I'm going to just click around and then feel like I know what I'm doing. So and there's a way to skip it if players feel like they, they have, have. Got it, got it down and figured it out. And then they can kind of just keep exploring from there. But essentially, I mean, there are, there are elements of the game that you can't really explain because it's, it's, it's inherent in the nature of the exploration, some of the secrets, for instance, are out there. I want to tell you where to go because. By going to those places on your own, you get the sense of wonder and awe from figuring it out for yourself. And so even in our discord, we have a pretty, I mean, it just organically became a place where you can share a lot of information, but at a certain point people like to have spoiler warnings for certain things, which is nice. Yes. Yeah. So in the, in the first game, we, every, it was very simple system. Like when you did research, which is basically generated research, you just get this bulk of research points and you can spend those on any category. And what was okay in the second game, we wanted to represent the type of interest you have in the game. So if you're doing biological specimen research, we wanted you to include your, your, we call it your study, or your studies. And in that, in those specific categories, and that would unlock things in the game that were related to like genetics and biology and things like that. So that's one of those tweaks that we made, obviously adds a little complexity, but you know, once you kind of understand it, it just kind of makes sense. Oh yeah, totally. So there's some interesting, interesting stories that we've kind of weaved into the current universe here. So I have some amazing neighbours that I, some gamers that I've known for years. And we, we've done some just amazing trips together and things like that. And I wanted to incorporate sort of their personality into the game as well. So we created these things called Acrobats and they're basically sex bots, but we don't explicitly say that they're sex bots. We say that they perform acrobatic boons for you. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Yeah, and you can find them in like certain bars and certain clubs and things like that. And by interacting with them, you gain boons, which are basically like and they all have interesting names like Bottoms Up and Swallow and things like that. And each one will, each one will give you a Order Ship Assistive Bonus, a temporary bonus. So the swallow is, but it can be interpreted multiple ways too. So the swallow is basically, you know, it's supposed to represent a sense of like, you know, swallowing juices, if you will but you, you trigger it by drinking with the acrobat, you trigger it by basically like taking big shots with them. And so in one, one aspect of the game, we were like, we need to sort of explain that so currently in the game, we do this little trick where all the, all the acrobats are very masculine and male facing. So we wanted the, whether it was straight or gay, we wanted the players to sort of realize and interact with them regardless of their sexuality, you know, to sort of like challenge them to say, Hey, You know, you're going to have, you're going to have an opportunity with a female representing one, but just not yet. You're going to have to kind of go through this, this, you know, this acrobatic act with, you know, a male facing bot, even though they're just bots. And we have dialogue in the game to sort of represent like, Hey, well, do you have another female facing bot? And it's like, yeah, well, they're coming, you know? But we have yeah, we have those kind of sprinkled all around the system. And yeah, so they, they have a couple of them are sort of named after friends of mine as well. A little, the kinkier friends of mine. So we have a Chatbot and an Alexbot and like, for instance, the Alexbot, a An amazing bottom friend of mine. We have some dialogue with them. Yeah, they're always full, but you know, we're taking care of that. Yeah, and they're fully aware and totally in, in, you know, in, not, I wouldn't say awe, but they're just, they're, they're fully okay with how they're represented in that way in the game. So cause they're all, you know, it's nice that I get to also be in a circle of friends that are very, You know, sex positive, kink positive you know, consent forward. And so they taught me a ton about, you know, how to interact in this world with other people and in those spaces. And I, I had to do something to, to honour that. And so that, that's why, you know, I put that little kink into there. It's just like, Okay. Thank you for showing me, you know, how to be a better lover and a better person. Well, yeah, I, I, I think, I don't know who said this. It's like, write what you know when you're doing Christian and why not pull from the people in your life that mean a lot to you because I think players may not realize, but most of the second game, most of the stories that they read has a lot of inspiration from real life stories in my, in my life and in Anthony's life. So whether like whether it's captain peach or, you know, one of these other characters, all of them were based off of real situations with real people. Not that it happened in, you know, a sci fi sense with spaceships, but, you know, the elements and the feelings behind it and sort of like the grand narrative was, you know, created by some real crisis or some real issue or, you know, some real interesting story that came up in our lives. You know, the, the, the bots included, you're right, right. Yeah. And that's, that's a trick, you know, is how do you, how do you make something marketable, but yet so personally relevant to, to me and to the, you know, I would say the players you know, just people who experienced the narrative and stories and, you know, all the other details that we put in, because I think it doesn't matter. I think people do notice When people sometimes comment on the discord some of the writing, some of the dialogue, things that, you know, it's about and that is meaningful because that means that the effort that we've spent and the time that we've invested to make something sort of pop out of, of the chaos. Has really been you know, respected or just well, the first game was very much sort of a hobby project that when I first originated, I was You know, I, I was, I wouldn't say an early web dev, but in terms of, you know, my, my full range of skills, I was pretty early in my development career. You know, I still working full time job, you know, on the side. So it was very much, I will do this in my own free time and sort of build it up as it went. And you know, it did essentially go viral in the early state, kind of update so it, it was able to sort of ride that high and allow me to just focus all my free time on it that I had, which was not a ton, but, you know, sacrificing social life stuff for a bit of it. And a lot of feedback came from the players and we had a, we had a pretty active forum back then and, you know, people like your roommate and, and other folks that were in that early stage of, you know, the development were very adamant and very they, you know, they wanted to see certain changes and they wanted to continue to get updates and we wanted to continue to do that It was, you know a bit of getting into a cadence of, you know, what, what frequency of updates we could do, which back then was a lot more. But as the years went on you know, through like personal turmoil and deaths in my family and things like that, divorce, you know, all the, all the interesting things that happen and as you get older I wasn't able to devote as much time on it as, as I would have liked and, you know, sort of let it maintain itself over, over the years. And as I got into, you know, the post decade, I guess, time frame of the game I wanted to continue to create something that, that was a little more modern and kind of roll forward all these ideas that I've been collecting from players myself. And just like how the storylines evolved in the first game into something a little bit more concrete and a little bit more I guess you could say, MMO esque. So that's why I started to, to Put down some ideas to create the second game of Apotheosis. And as we got closer to I would say like six months in maybe a little bit more we rolled it out for the alpha because we wanted to just get an early sense of what people thought. And so we, we invited, we, we created this item in the first game that essentially if you had played for Over 10 years, which is, you know, it's quite a long time. You were invited and you were invited into the alpha. And that was. It was a controversial item because it costs, you know, a lot of in game item, you know, resources to, to get that, but essentially it allowed people to gain some advantages by like exploring what the galaxy felt like very, very, very early. And we had yeah, a small group of alpha players that were amazingly valuable in the development of the game. came out months ago. And it, it has been growing and building. At a rapid pace this is now my full time job, whereas before I would always be doing this sort of alongside a full time job you know, and that was nice because I didn't have to worry about, you know, if, you know, the game isn't making a lot of money or isn't able to like pay its monthly costs that month, like it wasn't a huge deal, it would kind of all work out over the course of the year. But now that the first game and this one are running simultaneously and the second game is sort of an active development, it definitely puts a lot more pressure, you know, to get a lot of these feedback rounds and the actual, you know monetization sort of kicking in so that, you know, the second game can't sustain itself into, you know, the post it on phase. But yeah, all throughout this. Yeah, and I'll talk about this process. We've, we've learned, well, I have, I just have to put this on myself. I learned the value of feedback much more viscerally. You know, as a creative, sometimes when we hear criticism about our work, regardless of where it comes from, whether it's a friend or even just a person that You don't know that that's just sharing the feedback. It can be challenging to sort of hear it and pull it back out of, out of a place of love and respect. You know, because everyone frames their, their words in a different way and how they put out what they think they need to change. And it took me a long time to sort of come to this place where I can take feedback of all forms, even, you know, harsh criticism in a very personally attacking kind of way. And, and, and distil it into the essence of what the person's trying to say, because every, every comment is valuable. So in the second game, we decided to do an in game reporting system that's a little different instead of sort of treating it just like, you know, you're reporting an issue we have a sort of a two segment type of system where if it's, if it's a bug that's only going to affect everybody, we can make that bug public so that everybody can kind of see what we're working on and that when we fix that issue, if it was the first person to have mentioned that issue, they get a reward. And we're working on a couple of different forms. It can come from, you know, just our standard imprint system, which is what we call our achievements. Or it can be represented in actual in game items, depending on the severity and you know, how pervasive the problem is and so That that's nice because it's allowing us to sort of reward people directly not just from the beta But you know when this when the beta wraps up hopefully late summer early fall but we can Use it for just general issues that people have so You just trying to make it a little bit more rewarding for people to do so, because we do get a lot of people who do report issues and we want to, we want their time and effort for doing so to be rewarded. During the alpha it was a lot easier to do that because, you know, we had about 20 to 30 people in the alpha and so And within that group, there was a, I would say like a dozen or less that were super active, and we, we wanted to reward them individually. It's harder to do that when, you know, we're in a different phase where we have a lot more people to, you know, help us. You know, to interact with. And so rather than sort of reaching out to them one on one, you know, having the same system, it's been helpful for that. I feel like it's the latter going out of your way at this stage of the development process is a little harder to do just because the nature of the bugs that are found now are very situational and based on the locations that you're in or things like that. Rather than Larger mechanical problems, even though those are still found. A lot of those have been sort of. So usually it's, it's around a certain NPC or a location that's kind of weird, it has some inconsistencies but those are still viable too, but players are usually finding those as they're exploring, as they're sort of, You know, chatting with a certain character and seeing something is a little out of place and, and they can, they can report it at the location that are in, which is nice because we can actually see, you know, very accurately where and when, and exactly what issue they have rather than they don't have to find and type all that in and just sort of collect all that for them depending where they're at. Yeah, but like things like that, if we, you know, if, if they're reported you know, we, we want to reward the player who reported it. So I highly encourage all that you know, like we, we can do this ourselves, you know, I definitely, you know, You know, it used to be a game, I used to be a software tester, you know, before I got into development, that was sort of how I got into the industry and so I understand the value of a good bug it's gold. And so it just seems like a lot of people have figured out how to log good bugs. I don't know how they learned that or it's just the nature of the type of game they play and they're used to it or what systems they've been interacting with in the past, but we have some really. Great books that have come in a well worded and, you know, some decent background information and things like that. So, yeah, we're, we're super grateful for the players that do that. Yeah. Well, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that that doesn't exist in our universes as well. I, you know, I, I made a comment in a discord that, You know, if, if something seems exploitable, you know, there's a certain type of player or a certain personality where they may not report it because that is seen to them as a ultra advantage to, you know, essentially that's what the word comes from to exploit and so, but we, we want to offer incentives, like larger bounties, essentially we call them fixed bounties. For finding things like that, it's not enough to say that it's going to counter, you know, the, the reward of holding that information closed, but we do have players that have done that and, and have that sort of mentality of, you know, even though it could be good for the game you know, they will hold. Things like that close to their chest. And that's why we spend an inordinate amount of time trying to quash that level of type of issue early you know, sort of issues that even remain the first thing things are harder to fix regarding, you know, things that happen multiple times in a day or anything like that. Because, because if there's an exploit in the game, even There's only a matter of time until it is found, you know, it can stay hidden only for so long. And then at that time that it's found it's really dependent on the type of player that has discovered it Whether they will, Related information or not. And so we just, you know, we wanted a sense of open transparency because, you know, we do, we were very clear in our terms of service that you know, if you do find these issues and you don't report it and you continue to use them, you know, you know, that's the kind of thing that can result in a ban. And we don't like to do that because that's not wrong for anybody. It's not for us. It's not fun for the players. It just creates a sense of like, bad air, you know, around both sides of the fence. And so, it's just, it's much nicer for us to go through it through the reporting system because, you know, not only can we reward the person for doing that, but then, you know, we can actually make it fair for everybody in general. And in the meantime, you know, especially people who are, who are not actively that sort of hacker mentality, you know, they have a sense of the mechanics, they figure that out well, but they're not doing things a little bit beyond the norm. And so. You know, we, we certainly want to know those issues like this because, you know, catching every possible permutation is difficult but we don't necessarily, we, you know, we don't necessarily just want to leave it to the players. So, you know, we're. Constantly trying to monitor and, and sort of see if things look all right. And then investigating weird problems that might occur you know, in the periphery of those things. And I would say fortunately the way that, you know, things have been built and sort of re engineered in the second game, you know, crossing our fingers here, but there's a lot less. Of that going on. And I think that will be inherent in sort of this, how it was built, but it's also going to be something hopefully that will come out when, you know, more competitive gaming you know, more PVP and more base titles and things like that become you know, a little more common. So, I mean, I'm biased because I consider myself a little bit of a fetishist but I feel like more is better. I think that there are definitely some good examples of games that have Representations of fetishisms and, and just alternative, if that's even the right word to use types of play in these games. But I do think that there's definitely not only a place for those, even in multiple genres, cause they, you tend to find them in games with a lot of story, like RPGs and things like that. Which it just makes sense because as we were discussing earlier just more identities get to be represented in in games like that But I also feel like even in the other types of genres that we tend to take for granted is having some more of a westernized take, you know on identities, you know, where it's like first person shooters or something. I do think there's places in all of those spaces for those types of things to be shown and respected and even like honoured because that's just, it's just another flavour of the type of people that we are. And so why not? You know, we have games that literally have heads being blown off and spines being pulled out of people's torsos. So, You can't, you can't tell me that within those spaces and those ratings and those types of interests that players have that, you know, there can't be a sensual and sexual and fetishy element that, that can't coexist or even sit alongside those things. Not, and not even to say that they have to be in violent types of mediums, but just in terms of, Games that would just fit those types of demographics, you know, I think a lot more makers need to challenge themselves on what players think that they want or what they think players want because, you know, Baldur's Gate was a perfect example of this when they took some risks. You know, on, on showing certain scenes and elements of that, you know, would be considered pretty different, you know, to the audience there, but they were embraced wholeheartedly. In fact, you know, what that kind of indicated to me was that it's almost like it's been a dearth of that type of content and we are, we've been waiting for more creators to sort of imbue that into these spaces. And there's, there just isn't enough of it. Right, exactly. Yeah, but they're more than willing to show, you know, all sorts of violent acts explicitly in real time throughout the entire narrative. And so. Yeah, it shows a sense of like lack of some guts, I guess, to, to show the things that we want to see and, you know, whether somebody doesn't want to see them or not, you know, it's really up to them being able to skip a cutscene really, but not necessarily I would say a lack of interest. I think there's a lot of interest, it's just. You know, for, for creators, you know, they need to be challenged more to include those things in there, in their narrations and in their play, you know, where, whether it's an option you can do, you know, as a mechanic and things like that. So that's why, like, we've been trying to play with that a little bit more, it's just. How can we, how can we show a level of expression of status that player can participate in, you know, obviously optionally, but not having the option or not having the ability to show that it exists in the world's context? Doesn't make sense anymore, at least not, not since, you know, not since we've had the level of graphics that will make it less silly, we're, we're past that point now. We can show everything with as much, you know, detail and as much honour as like a movie. And so, we can't lean on that old thing. It's like, well, we don't want to show that because it's just going to look too kooky. Like, well, you know, I used to play this I used to play super games growing up and that was my huge interest of play to adventure. And it was a series called Leader suit Larry. I don't know if you're familiar with that series, but they, you know, like they took a risk in going into this space and they censored a lot of stuff and, you know, they definitely didn't show that, but, you know, and they're freezing everything else. Able to at least push the envelope a little bit. And I feel like there just needs to be more games that are pushing. And I, I didn't say the word that you can push insinuates that like we're going beyond the pale here, but it's just like, this is just stuff that we have been asking for. And there just isn't enough of it in the, in the spaces of themselves. Like I like certain games, regardless of whether they have violence in them. I think I made that clear earlier. I'm not necessarily a first-person shooter. So, more games that have options that can do not just romancing play. I think that is just as relevant as something that a player might dive into for, you know, a violent impulse of like scratching at it too. You know, not to say that we need to go, like, full porn sense, because those exist. But they should be stitched into, you know, a mechanic or, you know, a certain element of, you know, something that you would pick, you know, as like your style of character or something like that. You're so creative. Yeah. People wanted more realism. Like we want body hair and we want, you know, well thank God you can actually like kick your dick now. In some games. In some games. I think that's fascinating. Yeah. Yeah, I know in Baldur's you can as well. Yeah, but it's like, beings have dicks, and they have vulvas, and it's like I don't understand. It's like this, maybe it's a Western thing, but our, our, our life fear of nudity, not even on the sexual side, but just sort of like our fear of new characters in general, just wild that it's just become finally we're kind of like turning the other side of that, I think it's because also when people think of video games, they think it's such a juvenile. We no longer think that, but it's a multibillion-dollar industry, but I think for a while people thought video games were just a juvenile thing that, you know, you grow out of. And so, we know that's not true anymore. And so, we want to see things that are mature. We want to see things that are adults and inspire and titillate and things like that. So, I think it's, we need to get over this sense of like. Oh, you know, it's, it's crazy that there'd be someone naked on the, on the screen. It's like, no, we're, we're still there even in the movie, but when we're creating virtual characters, there's no reason why we need to care anymore. Yeah. And we're not even into the stage yet where we'll see. Right. Right. And we haven't even gotten to the point, I mean, we think we're in this sort of turning point, right? Which we kind of are, but we still are a way off. We haven't really seen a lot of explicit fetish scenes. We haven't seen heart dicks, you know, we haven't seen holes. We haven't seen like the level of detail that we would say. It brings it into that next level of play, you know, and even if, even if games want to make those things optional, because you know, there are games that, you know, they have a reduced amount of blood or reduce, you know, the. The amount of, the amount of explicit core, which is totally great. I think they could have something similar for, you know, the sex side as well. You know, having, you know, that, that reference that you made when it just kind of like fades to black why not that be the default and. If someone's like, okay, yeah, that's a little bit more than I want on my TV right now when I'm, you know, playing through the rest of the RPG elements or just say, okay, well, maybe, you know, they'll canoodle into fuck or something like that. But. We want the option. We don't want to just have it be decided for us. We, we want the option when it's like, when you have a person like you or me, yeah, we're going to turn up all the way up to 11, you know, we're going to, we want to see every, every little press, you know, so it's like, let's, let's go. Yeah. Why not? It's not a big deal. It is a big deal. No. They have a specific interaction for it. That's cool. Just on Steam or like, like, do you have a different opinion about different platform or something? Okay. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I'm a, I'm a senior guy myself, so I was just curious. That's cool. Cool. Well, that could, that could be fun. No, and if there are, we, we kind of know about them Ish. So, at a certain scale. Right. Yeah, I think when you see examples, when you see examples like that, and you know, the bigger industry doesn't like to take those risks, obviously because they have to stay in a sort of like Disney mentality, but I feel like that's why in these. Are because they not only can take those risks, but they also generally need to, you know, just set themselves apart you know, to, to, to make themselves a little bit more unique and special in that way. So, it's, I think it is another reason to encourage more of that in the space. Not that it only can exist there, but I feel like in the AAA space, it still feels very deliberate and careful. Right. And it's probably a combination because when you have something that is new IP, it's much more likely that you'll be able to do something like that. But when you have established IP that's licensed, oh, no, no, no, they won't let you do that. You know, you can't, you can't go into a territory with an unknown character in the lore, even though they could be sexual and sort of like turn more of those edges on it's just, you know, we don't see that in movies, so we generally wouldn't see that in games that are, you know, based off like the Marvel universe or Star Wars or Star Trek or any of that they're just very, very careful about their, their, you know, There's spaces like that. And so, it offers some creativity, but I just feel like you're much less likely to see it in a Southwest IT. Yeah. I feel like once, once, once it enters sort of the main canon, you know, of that, of that creative world then I feel like the games would definitely be okay with that, but they just sort of have to fall pretty close to I guess what the rest of, what the rest of the property to do. Yeah, right. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's one reason I like animated, like adult animation, like those, because they, they can go so many different places that like action struggles with, you know, just in terms of the ability to do so. So, the fact that they're doing it, it's kind of fun. And then they did a crossover episode, which was awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I have, I would say maybe like first couple of seasons I'm caught up to and I'm familiar with some of these, like, really interesting things there was like, go ahead. But yeah, I've seen some pretty crazy scenes in that show. Right. The one where the little guy crawls into the, into the dude. Yeah. Yeah. That was pretty rad. Oh, you mean in terms of just like the play space and what it represented in that scene. Well, they can also, you know, the fact that they went through the urethra versus just like can call in, but also was very, that was different because basically they were sounding and that, that is less familiar to people and probably made people ask more questions, you know, about like people, they do that and it's like, absolutely you know. Well, I mean, it's definitely not sounding unless it's sort of like a solid project, right? I don't know. Sure. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Tragic ending. But yeah. The whole, the whole series is so it’s not like that was. Yeah. I was just crazy. It's crazy inside because it's pervasive in a lot of people's lives. Mm hmm. I might want to do the banging and go back to the shooting and stuff. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. In that order. Are you hopeful for, oh, go ahead. I mean, I mean, based on our discussion, I would say, yeah, let's, let's tell these stories that are less representative. You know, there are many ways to get into this industry, whether it's if you're more on the creative side or more of the artistic side, I got in through combining both my technical interests, you know, in software testing and then kind of becoming more of a developer in that space. And then just sort of mirroring my, my own RPG and sci fi interest into it. But I would say find, find the angle that's going to put you into the industry and then just like pump your creativity into that and try to assert your own stories. If you have the ability to. You know, let's, let's push for more representation and let's push for more fetishization and find those angles in which you can do something with your voice will be used or heard whether it's, you know, in a, in a larger gaming organization or if you're fortunate enough to be in the space on your own or in a small team. Because, you know, as we've been discussing, there's, there's so much room for more, and I feel like there's so much interest. It's not like people are explicitly asking for it, it's just they are in sort of a roundabout way, because when it does, And so, you know, I'm super encouraging people who want to go into gaming. I know it's a, it's a challenging space. It seems like right now it's because of, you know, the way that the job market has been sort of pivoting people around a bit, but I would say don't give up. You know, I feel like sometimes even smaller is better. Hard out space. You know, for your, for your own creativity or whatever form it may take and let it be seen. Even if you have a finished project, for instance, just keep making, keep making stuff because You'll get to that place in your creative pursuit, which you'll be able to pull from all of that stuff that you had been making or creating in a third finish or a half finish form. So yeah, just keep, just keep on it. Absolutely. There's a lot of less barriers for us to tell those stories to, so, you know, we should challenge ourselves to do so because, you know, we don't have studio heads trying to cut it out on the editing room floor. We don't have, you know, big publishers telling us, you know, we can't go through if X, Y and Z are included. So, we should, we should take those risks. And I think it will be rewarding for them. Yeah, there is. First, the first, the first, you can also go to galagaslegion2 slash promo, and you can enter it in there as well. You need a shortcut. Yeah, and then you can enter the code there. And it will show up in your inventory in minutes or less than that second. Yeah. We wanted it to be something that, yeah, we wanted it to be something that was a little bit more unique, like there's not really a specific item like it offers a little bit more reward of its use than other items of its type. So yeah, it's, it's, we wanted something that people are going to hold on to for a little bit longer, so. Let's see, well, I, I think I cut you off earlier, but what do you think is next? Like, are you optimistic for what are you seeing in the industry going, I mean, obviously in the space but do you foresee? More of this or more of the same in terms of the level of kink that we're going to see maybe in the next few years on the horizon. Yeah. Yeah. And it should have been earlier with next generation. There was that episode with Riker and that which is the species that kind of was genitals. And the, the actress that they had, there was a comment that I read later that they wanted to cast it as a man, even though it was represented as, you know, a genderless person. But they had too much pushback. And so that would have been, I guess, technically the first gay kiss, if they had cast it as a male character, or as a male actor. But they, they, they didn't take, might take the risk. And so, they instead just make them very androgynous instead. And that was unfortunate. So, we had to wait for DS9. I agree. Yeah. One hour later, it's crazy. Wow. Impressive. No, I don't know the answer to that. Actually, I, I played.
it through once and then I put it down. But you aced the Skyrim test, that's for sure. Yes. Let's hope, like you said, now, thanks for thanks for having me on and thanks for kind of broaching these discussions. I think this is one of those areas that's, you know, even in, even in the spaces that we work in, you know, it's more, more time spent talking about it together. So, yeah, I appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you. All right. Take care.