132 - Drill Newell, Life Serial, Sleepover
Play;Write is a podcast about creating and sharing new ways to play. We workshop seedlings of ideas for video games in hopes of coming up with something timeless. It's not just about us, though! Join in the conversation! Pitch your own game ideas to be read and explored on air on our website at www.playwritecast.com, tweet us @playwritecast, or email us at playwritecast@gmail.com.
In this episode of the podcast, Ryan Hamann (@InsrtCoins) and Ryan Quintal (@ryanquintal) do some digging, introduce species into different habitats, and use boundless imagination. The community pitch was submitted by Andreas Lennartsson.
Our theme song is "Hello World." by PROTODOME from the album BLUENOISE.
Episode 132 Transcript
(Edited to remove filler words)
H: Hello everyone, and welcome to Play;Write, a podcast about creating and sharing new ways to play. My name is Ryan Hamann. You can call me H.
Q: And I'm Ryan Quintal. You can call me Q.
H: You may remember from last week's episode that's in the middle of my pitch in which I was pitching a game about kind of a linguistic Explorer who goes around and tries to interpret whatever obstensively nonsense languages and plugging in recognized words into a kind of create and decode the entire hierarchy of a language. That I thought, you know, I have Heaven's Vault installed and gosh, doesn't this sound so familiar? I should probably play that and make sure that's not the exact same thing that I did just pitch. And in the time since the last recording I have played it and it is the exact same thing that it just, well, you know, that, and this is of course the, the gift and the curse of recording beforehand, but we, we pitched another game last week, which was games smashing together.
Q: I think it was Matt, was it a Matt who wrote in with us? Sure enough almost like clockwork, Nintendo literally two days later came out with the Indie Showcase where they showcase a developer making a game where you run a game store and can smash two games together or at least different elements of different games. So lo and behold you know, I, I guess it's a compliment, right? I mean, the ideas must be kind of sound to someone else that's right now they just have to make money, right?
H: Or, or we could just be subconsciously stealing stuff. That's not our intention. Although today I am very excited to talk about my idea of a rapping puppy who is trained by a crotchety old onion to to fight. But we'll, we'll get to that.
Q: That sounds amazing.
New Speaker: Uh so anyways, if you like to last week's Play;Write, then we encourage you to check out both Heaven's Vault, which is available on Steam and likely other storefronts. It's a, it's an interesting game from the creators of 80 Days. And so, you know, it's got at least the writing going for it, and Super Mash, which will be available next March on Nintendo Switch or available right now is the time to exclusive on the Epic game store on PC. So there you go. That's us coming clean I suppose.
Q: Although with our luck, honestly you say Epic timed exclusive, it won't be time to exclusive anymore by the time someone gets around to hearing this episode. So, you know, I mean, it is what it is, as they say.
New Speaker: Just stack the lies on top of each other. Keep them coming, baby.
Q: That's right. We're a show about deceit.
H: Let's let's get right to the game pitch and see if we can't outdo ourselves this time.
Q: Am I going first this week?
H: Yes. You're going to be pitching first. So what do you have for us?
Q: Okay, so this one is maybe deceptively simple, but I want to pitch to you some combination between a Mario auto scroller type of level and something like a Terraria or Steamworld Dig. So the screen is moving from left or right or right to left, I guess depending on how you think of it, you're moving from left to right across different levels, but as opposed to giant platforming challenges, what you're really doing is a series of digging and climbing and defeating enemies along the way. All right, we'll go ahead and start the clock then.
H: He mentioned steam world dig is one of the reference points here. And one of the things that I am most interested in that game is that you're kind of creating your own platform challenges as you're tunneling downwards, which is the direction you want to go. If you're digging for more and more valuable materials, which will be farther and farther away from the surface, you're going downwards. The a, the easiest way to do that is to go straight down in most cases but you're also creating you're platforming route back to the surface in, in doing so because you do have to resurface every once in a while. And so you kind of have to jump up the blocks that you left behind that you didn't tunnel through. Previously, so in a situation where you're just going into one direction, how do we make that as interesting as the kind of risk reward a lineup that you get with 'em with the steam world? Dig?
Q: So one of the things I think that we could do to keep this interesting, number one is, I don't know about you, but I play Steamworld in a... When I'm initially digging down, it's a little slower and it's a little bit more plotting. But if I am constantly being asked to push forward not only will digging sort of horizontally have to be kind of take it into account, but the idea of having enemies and stuff and like the way steam world will have certain enemies, they kind of break out of tiles. I think you can, you can try and optimize routes by avoiding enemies, but you also have the choice of like taking combat head on. So it's almost like a combating combat challenge rather just as much as potentially a platforming challenge.
H: Maybe your ability to drill through the ground stay ahead of the ever encroaching boundaries of the screen is kind of a limited resource that you can recharge by defeating enemies or something like that, but maybe enemies slow you down or maybe there's some sort of a health counter. One of my one of the games I was really interested in on the three D S because I'm back in the day I in my first job at Nintendo, part of my research role, we made heavy use of Miiverse monitoring on both the, WiiU and the 3DS because it was kind of a wealth of, of data that people were offering up. And so, you know, what better way to learn about our audience than to go into the place where they have self-selected to, to post their own thoughts and opinions about the games that have been released.
H: And there was a game that caught my eye called Fairune2, because of the screenshots that were posted. There were some really clever puzzles and solutions and stuff in there. And so I always had this in the back of my mind, like very into is a undiscovered masterpiece that nobody knows about and it's one of those like hipster games and like 10 years. You can kind of like look cool by bringing it up at a party or something like that.
Q: [Laughs] Okay. So when am I, let me write it down here. F E R,
H: That's a, yeah, if anyone's interested, that is F-a-i-r-u-n-e-2 without a space, but you can find it in the Fairune collection on Nintendo switch. If you don't want to go back to the three D aspect. That's anyways, the the whole reason I bring this up is because it had an interesting mechanic where it's kind of a top down Zelda-like game. There are enemies on this overworld that are hopping around and you fight them by basically just jumping into them. There's no attack, there's no Dodge, there's no blocking or anything. It's just kind of like you bash into them and they do their amount of power against your health. You do your amount of power against their health. And to just kind of an automatic process of you know, it's very kind of like D&D in a way, but without the dice it's very predictable. But I just thought like, you know, it's such like a honest, straightforward way to present a combat system. I, I was just like that just bumping up against something, watching an explode and watching your health count down and knowing like, okay, with this amount of health left, I can't take out that enemy, but I could get through that one. And it's kind of an interesting balance struck.
Q: Yeah, that's, that's interesting to hear because I do think that like this, because it's trying to set a tone and a pace, there's going to be more on this game in terms of the demand for, for engaging directly with combat. It's going to have to be a little bit more Mario-esq in its enemy placement. But I like the idea and sometimes you get this with certain sections of Mario levels where there's almost like a giant dense block of or dense section of the sort of semi, I don't want to call them translucent, but the typical Mario block. So when you hit them you can pass through them for a short amount of time as they're flipping. It could be interesting to use if you have a drill or something on a steam world, a limited fuel resource or something where you're, you're forced to kind of live or play at the level that you've dug yourself, kind of digging your own grave in a sense for some period of time. So if you go down and you run out of fuel, you're forced to engage in combat and to sort of refill that fuel.
H: There's a, there's a couple of games that I feel we'd be a little be a kind of sloppy to not mention at least. There is an, I always get these mixed up. There's DigDug which is all about digging, but there's no scrolling screen. It's just about spout digging, fighting enemies underground in a very kind of side-on arcade format kind of freely going in a grid based directions and exploding enemies along the way. And then there is Mr. Driller, which I think actually fits this pretty closely. It is a vertically scrolling game instead of horizontally one. And it's kind of like a following block puzzle in a way where there is a, there was kind of clumps of earth that you're digging into that are that take up different squares of that can, they can form rectangles that can form bigger squares to conform small squares. And as you dig through them, I believe gravity affects the ones that are no longer supported above you and they can come down and crush you. And so you're trying to kind of like dig as far down as you can while still keeping yourself from from, you know, falling victim to falling blocks in that case.
Q: So in this scenario, we do the potentially the auto scroll, but you're moving top to bottom. And so the pressure, it's almost like a falling chase scene, if you will. I'm thinking it has to be slower than something like Downwell, but I do like the idea of digging through certain sections and maybe hitting checkpoints where you free fall and you're kind of landing in a new, a new part of the screen, a new part of the, the mine that you're dicking down. So like a down well punctuated with a little bit less chaotic sections or you're kind of frantically digging in and encountering enemies.
H: Another reference point that is hot off the presses is a actually just released today at the time of recording, which is quite a few weeks before this ends up going out. And so, you know, we're going to be behind the times at that point. But you know, just back here in 2019 just today released the Shovel Knight King of cards expansion, which is final shovel night expansion for the treasure trove collection. Anyways, the King of cards or a King night has a really interesting control method where his attack has kind of like a shoulder bash. And then as soon as you bash up against a wall, he does this kind of like spin in the air. And at that point you can drop on enemies and hurt them and attack them. But you can also do this kind of like derail through blocks, which is kind of fun, but you have to bash against the wall to get that derail started. You can't just go from a jump to the drill. And so you always have to kind of balance, like I need something to bounce off of to get to where I need to be. I don't want to destroy the thing that I'm bouncing off of. I can only bounce off of some surfaces. So, you know, I'm, I'm, I just played a little bit today just to capture some audio, but it was it was interesting to kind of wrap my head around that different control scheme.
Q: So that's at, well, first of all, I'm glad you reminded me of that came out today because now I have an order of three pack of Amiibo that I need to cancel. That's definitely going to two houses ago. I ordered it so, Oh Jesus. But yeah, I, I think that's cool. So now you're into a situation where you're moving through, you're having moments where you're sort of punctuating it with this combat section and now you can unlock like every time you get into one of those new sections potentially you do the Downwell thing where if you can make it off the screen, like to the left or to the right. Occasionally there is that Spelunk-esq shop or secret area where you get little power ups and stuff and that kind of gives you a new lease on life. And the next section of the digging,
H: I hate to do this, but we're out of time. I feel like I spent the entire time talking about indie games and arcade classics. I don't know how much health that really was.
Q: That's all right. That's all right. I love it.
H: Yeah, yeah. I guess whatever we have, let's give it a name.
Q: Well, if we want to make it a Steemworld game, are you ready? Is, is it too much to combine Downwell and Steamworld and call it Steamworld Down?
H: That's a bit cheeky. I was also thinking of if, if you're drilling a well, then that could be a new, well, and maybe your character could be named Newell or something like that.
Q: Drill Newell!
H: Drill Newell. [Laughs].
Q: It's just so stupid. It could work.
H: It could just be Gabe Newell, this just happens to be his name,
Q: Drill Newell. He'll drill your wallet for all the cash it has.
H: I like that. Drill Newell. That's, that's a, that's a cute character name. That's fun.
Q: Please write in with the next entry in the Drill Newell saga. It's been a while since I, I've, I've talked about Wiggling Joe, so I feel like we need a new saga on the show.
H: That's right. You gotta get those recurring characters back on the... Back on the show again.
Q: Right.
H: All right. My turn today. So I'm going to be pitching a game where you're managing invasive species as kind of like a puzzle game. Introduce species to a different habitat across the galaxy essentially to manage life, but don't let it go out of control. You know, you might run a run certain things into extinction. You might want to alter the I want to say the food pyramid, the food chain in certain ways. I am nervously eyeing the Epic game store and Journey to the Savage planet, but I think I've watched the trailer and I think we're clear on this one. So let's call this a a, an original idea and operate off of that assumption until we are corrected. So I'm going to go and start the clock.
Q: Talk to me a little bit about how this thing feels mechanically because I mean, I feel like you, there's some setup here, but I'm not quite sure how it plays.
H: To perhaps invalidate my, my last joking point there. There was a game that I played when I was really young called I believe it's SIM Life. I was at that age where like all of these SIM games that were coming out and there were like a ton back in the day, they were like the like farming simulator and railroad simulator, like of the day in how prolific this SIM series was before they decided that like, Oh, actually The Sims is going to make all the money in the world so we don't have to do this anymore.
Q: Right. We don't have to keep shooting in the dark.
H: Yeah, yeah. There was like SIM and, and SIM earth and SIM. The one that I was thinking of was SIM life where it basically, I was a very stupid child and so all that I really knew or cared how to do was to draw funny little animals and plant them on different continents and watch them like grow and change and stuff. And it's just like, Oh, you know, it's kind of a Proto-Spore spore, but with just like hand-drawn, a little character sprites and stuff that you could like edit within the little editor there. So I I feel like it was probably doing similar things of watching species kind of feast on each other, become more prevalent in this space and you having to kind of like place other species to manage those kind of old lady who swallowed a fly style. But I'm, I'm interested in exploring that further and seeing if there's other cool ways we can take this.
Q: Well, I love the idea, you know, we've talked about so many times in this in this show, like the idea of using DNA or an environment to shape life on a planet. So I wonder if there's like, I wonder if there's like a Viva Pinata slant to this where you can do some terraforming and either like create or attract different types of life forms in order to sort of cross populate and create new species.
H: Yeah, I mean, I think that's something that spore played with in a way. But I think that one was a little bit more hands on where you can choose the aspects of species that you consumed or mated with or whatever to enhance your own species. Yeah. But I think it would be kind of a different and fun experience to be removed from it and a God kind of way, you know, where you're just kind of like subtly guiding the evolutions of things, but you're not making those specific choices. You're just kind of like putting things together and seeing what happens. You know?
Q: There's something about this that would, could almost be nostalgic in a way. And what I mean by that is I know that there's, I don't know how many years of a gap there is between you and I, but [Pantimimes and older person] when I was young I had a Tamagotchi pet and one of the things that mobile games have played with certainly because it's kind of on you all the time, and maybe this works as a mobile game, is the idea of every once in a while you have to tend to your flock, right? Or you have to tend to your creature. So maybe if this is that sort of SIM life you know, interface or whatever, you have kind of a map and you see certain areas of the map need a rain or they need, they need whether they need some sort of a interaction, you can, that's your gentle hand. You kind of slowly guide the climate and the ecology in order to support and you see, you know, species migrate and you, you know, you find some are developing a pack of predators. So obviously they need food. So maybe you create storms and get another pack of prey to migrate into where the predators are and that sort of stuff. No. Microtransactions that is,
H: Yeah. So I like that you're, you're more kind of managing the environment and watching species kind of naturally evolve out of that. I think that's a, that's a cool idea. I guess also if you could just like pick up and move like individual members of a species and you can kind of choose at that point. Like, if one species is getting out of hand, you can move a predator over there to kind of thin the herd a little bit.
H: You can move a pair of predators so that they can start, you know, reproducing as well as they just kind of replace the the awful species you're trying to control at that point. So, you know, it could be interesting too. And then of course all of the I, I just want the solid tie back to all this stories you hear about invasive species in nature where something is introduced either intentionally or unintentionally into a habitat in which it wasn't a in which it didn't evolve and the entire habitat basically goes kind of tits up because it doesn't know how to deal with it.
Q: Yeah. That, that would be kind of interesting to see. So at first maybe your S generally guiding things like the, the weather and maybe you have that sort of black and white ask hand that can kind of pick up creatures and put them in different locations depending on the scale you're dealing with. But yeah, when you drop in a species, you're, you're almost like, it's the equivalent of, you know, turning on the Whirlpool in a fish tank or something. Not that, you know, where you're just like, I just want to see what happens. So it's kind of servicing both the, the player who's interested in like just having the fish tank and the player who's interested in like poking the universe.
H: Yeah. So let's talk about the timescale here because of course, things evolving over time is a, a hugely lengthy process. So you know, how guess how, how quickly do we want things to happen? How quickly do we want species to change versus the kind of day to day of things being eaten and replaced.
Q: Maybe you'd have to be able, you'd have to be able to potentially have the Sims like three playback speeds so you can kind of slow down into the micro view and maybe some players would play entirely in the nice, slow, like I, you know, you see the Sims players who are just way more interested in just kind of living the day to day of it. And then the people who are just like mega timescale, get that job, get that money so I can design this house. So maybe it's also like guiding certain types of species in a Spore, like way ends up adding them to your catalog and you can kind of take them and place them in different spots. Maybe you find out like where they initially evolved from, they actually thrive in a different part of the world at stead.
H: Are there environments that they're most accustomed to or is it just the abundance of their needed prey around whether it's animals or plants?
Q: I think it could be the prey potentially. But one of the things that's interesting right, is it could just be animal X survive and climate Y. So you take one that's maybe more tropical, you drop it into the winter and let's say in this, you know, this is, it's a chill game. So most animals can survive most climates. So you drop a few into a wintery climate from a tropical climate and now you're in a scenario where you can watch them like grow thick fur and like get like tusks. So that they're good at fishing and the ice and like breaking up, but you know, that sort of thing. So like that is how you're getting new species and kind of evolving them based on what they have access to eat and what, what their environment is.
H: All right. So all of this we've talked about different types of animals. How would this change if we're managing birds and fish?
Q: Oh, that's a good question. I mean, what do birds eat? I guess? I guess birds eat fish that the one to one or do birds eat more than fish? They must just eat plants too. Yeah? Some, of them?
H: I mean like I owls eat mice and stuff like that.
Q: I'm thinking that it would be kind of interesting too. Maybe you don't, if you can't control the weather you take away some level of control. Instead you have to kind of label parts of the world yourself based on the behavior of the species that you see. So during certain times a year, you notice all the birds are flocking to a certain part of the map. So from that you can sort of garner that that is the more tropical climate or something like that. Now you're labeling it yourself and you're kind of, you've carved out the map and you're managing where things go rather than there being explicit affordances of like, Oh, here's snow. Like better use that. It's a little bit more blank slate.
H: Interesting. So we're at our 10 minutes. Let's let's close it down and come up with a name for this one.
Q: Huh. SIM Life is pretty good, but it is,
H: I was thinking we could do since everything. Since you know, life is very kind of linear and serialized. We can call this Life Serial, but spelled with an S,
Q: Uh life cereal is pretty good. I mean, it's as good as, what is his name? Drill Newman.
H: I wonder if if that's a regional thing that people outside of the country are going to to understand,
Q: Well, there's always the game of life.
H: That's true.
Q: But no, I think Life Serial is good. And what I like about it is if you're, if you're up till 2 or 3:00 AM you'll actually find that Life Serial's spokesperson is Drill Newman, which is perfect.
H: That's right. Mikey likes it. And so does Drill Newell. All right. Let's go to our community. We are we, we don't always take these pictures in order and I feel kind of bad looking at the date on this one cause it is about half a year old.
Q: Oh no!
H: Sorry. We don't need, we don't mean to ignore. But you know, well we eventually do get around to things. So this one comes from Andreas Lennartsson who says, Hey guys, this is my second pitch for the show. The first was Harry Potter plus LA Noir kind of game called Mischief Managed. I work as a teacher and I was thinking if you could make a game that uses a child's imagination as a kind of mechanic, imagine a Persona-ish game, but the supernatural or magic element come from the come in the form of things that the children's play. If you pretend to run a restaurant that becomes a level. If you play hide and seek, that becomes a level. If you start a food war during lunch, that becomes a level. What do you think? Start the clock. Like that was a nice little sign off the email there.
Q: I know that was easy. Thank you.
H: This is a, this is fun. This makes me think of a few things. Costume Quest by Double Fine in which children are going around trick or treating and then they're in a J RPG type setup as they enter random encounter battles, whatever they whatever costume they were wearing turns into like a giant, terrifying version of what they, that what they were wearing. So like somebody in the robot costume could turn into like a giant mech and somebody, there's always kind of comical costumes and they're somebody who goes, it's like an ear of corn could turn into like a huge corncob monster. It's quite fun. And there was a game recently published by Oh gosh, why can't I remember... Clay Entertainment, that's the one this year called Hot Lava in which it's basically a, "the floor lava" game that we've all played as we're hopping on furniture and trying to stay off the floors. We're getting from one part of the room to the other. But they actually do imagine all of the ground as like actual rendered lava. And that's just a kind of fun little, you know, a perversion of the environment in a way that seems true to the imagination of children.
Q: One of the weirdly we're talking about a game that I've played Hot Lava, my buddies son who's this little, a four year old, five year old kid, he insisted that I play love because I was "good" at video games. And it required a lot of positioning. I, I think that's fun. And I mean too, if we kind of dig a little bit into the, what Andreas was saying here with like Persona half the game being a little bit more of a silly thing. You're a silly Lifeson but for a kid, so you know, in Persona we're still going to class. I think that could still be here. But the classes, you know, kindergarten, so you have access to all of these tools and like scissors and crayons and paint and you know, your, your packed lunch that your mom made and your backpack and like all of these things and like, you know, PlayPlace and all these things that a kid does. And so maybe like Fire Emblem-y, maybe this is also a persona thing. You're choosing like one to three activities a day that you can do from a whole spate of activities and depending on your choices in the cocktail of choices that that dictates the, yeah, the, the more Costume Quest-like dungeon that happens at night.
H: Mhmm, so what what genre are we envisioning this being? And let's find something surprising.
Q: Shared. World. Shooter. [Laughs]
H: Okay. This is interesting actually, if, if it's all based on the individual imagination, if everybody is seeing things a little bit differently, the same space, maybe the same enemies, maybe it doesn't even affect anything. You know, this reminds me of another game and this is just me being an old man sitting on the porch telling war stories this entire episode. But I hope it's useful and interesting in a way. But in the the Kane and Lynch games which is I don't remember which team made them, is that in Squaresoft joint? I don't remember.
Q: I think that may have been who made Hitman?
H: Oh yeah. IO interactive. That is the same team. Good job. Kevin Lynch one of the characters is known to be like a kind of hallucinatory psychotic or something like that. And he would see certain characters as enemies that were really friends or something like that. He would see things differently than the partner did in this kind of, you know, not split-screen but online co-op game. And so, you know, you'd just be kind of going along. And all of a sudden you'd see your friends start shooting at like police officers and you'd be like, dude, what are you doing? Stop it. And that would just be his reality. You know?
Q: That's interesting. And, and I think the, the world of the shared or the mechanics of the shared world shooter. The Destiny's of the world, if you will, would actually be really fun/comical if you applied them to say a kindergarten classroom, right? You make everything everyone the scale of a small kid and you know, everybody's, it's almost like the social space inside of Destiny where people are running around and, and they're interacting with things and trade is happening. And so you could have like some period of time pre-dungeon or pre, you know, sort of combat where everybody's going and playing with different things. And then depending on all the tools that the group accessed, that could affect like essentially the load out of the characters when they go into the one of the kids' imaginations and that it rotates for each kid.
H: Well, what is the desired party size then how many people are we wanting to either NPCs or human players can buddy up?
Q: That's a good question. I feel like for me when I was little, it always felt like three was a really like centralized group of friends. Like there was always like me are really good friend and like the friend that they're vouching for essentially [Laughs] may, so maybe there's something to three. That works. I also liked the idea that like being captured or stopped by the teacher is the thing that ends the sort of pre combat around. So like the more that all three friends can kind of disperse and keep the teacher running between them the, the more off you are to get you know, get some more bonuses or something before the combat begins.
H: I do like that, especially if if all of these different Dungeons you can be delving into are essentially different imaginary constructs and which gives each of them not only like a different aesthetic, like a Dead Cells type thing where all of these different areas kind of behave a little bit differently but also a different visual language in a way. And so you kind of have to figure out, you know, what are, there are kind of equivalent enemies and each one there are equivalent items and the stuff that they all look different cause they're all being generated by somebody else's imagination. So you have to, there a certain kind of centralized game language you learn playing the entire game and then you kind of have to relearn the language which with each new level that you join cause everything just looks and behaves a little bit differently.
Q: That's interesting. So now you have mechanics. You could even add in a layer where before, you know, at the end of the school day or whatever, once the teacher rounds up all the kids, you go over one of the kids' houses. And so the house can be a little space where you can add all of your your school projects and your dream achievements and stuff. So it becomes a little like view into visiting somebody else's house and seeing like, Oh, you, you got this thing that's so cool. And creating sort of social moments around that.
H: Are there things that you could do kind of like Inception where there's one person who's kind of like hosting the dream in a way. Are there things that you can do to that character to influence the world as a whole? Like how you like an Inception when you dunk somebody in water then like the whole house would flood, you know,
Q: You know, a game that kids will play. I shouldn't say that. I have no idea what kids do now. But I came that I would play sometimes as a kid is when, when we were in a group, we would have a secret password, right? Or a secret phrase. And it was usually, it's just something so that when somebody else said, and we said, and it's secretly means farts or whatever. So everybody would get a good chuckle. But what if there was a way to each, each kid that each person essentially gets to pick a little like preprogrammed almost imagine, you know, like a fill in the variable set of sequences. And it's like if, if a member of your team does that, they're going to wake up from the dream and so you find yourself, but it's not like you don't have a choice of making it really obscure. So instead you find yourself programming things in like you either have to communicate to people that they shouldn't be doing it and then it's kind of like a fun group handicap or, or you don't say anything and then people suddenly are like sucked out of your, your dream combat. And then you have to be like, Oh no, you didn't jump twice. And then like spin around and shoot.
H: That's a, that's all the time that we have there. Let's close it down and come up with a name. Feel like, we have used imagination before, right? Like to describe a nation of imaginary things.
Q: We have Imagine-national Monster Fighter that's right.
H: That's right, Imaginational.
H: Imaginational. Imagine Nation... Is not, no, not found.
H: Okay. Well we do have Imaginational, but we can potentially use the same joke twice.
Q: Yeah. What else? What would you call a bunch of kids like running around in a classroom. It's a, it's not like a throng.
H: Hooligans.
Q: Hooligans. I wonder if there's like a play on Destiny or like guardians, guardians. Oh, hooligans is guardians. That's kind of interesting.
H: Hooligans is guardians? Is that like...?
Q: The way that Destiny players are called guardians? These are hooligans and hooligans are in the hoo hooligan nation?
H: I mean it's, it's an interesting series of syllables and sounds.
Q: What if you just called it, I'm sure. I don't think we've done anything like this. What if you just called it Sleepover?
H: Sleepover... I like that. I think that has a nice ring to it.
Q: And then you make, you know, your life. Don't make it the horror movie cover. Make it like, you know, three kids in pajamas with a pillow fight happening or something in the background.
H: Okay. All right. Sleepover. And that will be that will be our community pitch for the day coming from Andreas Lennartsson. Thank you very much for being so patient with that one. I see we've got another one from you that we can read out very soon as well. So if you would like to get in touch with us and submit your own game idea, I have a potentially ignored for half a year then you can do so by going to Playwritecast.com/pitch. You can email us or you can tweet us @playwritecast.
Q: Special thank you to prodome for the use of our theme song. Hello world off the album Blue Noise and we're into 2020 so go kick off the year by becoming a contributor to the Cane and Rinse Patreon. And what a great way of saying 2020 I got that raise. I was looking for, I think I've a buck or two that I can give it to my favorite podcast community this year. So something to think about. And honestly him going through this list and we have a lot more six month old. That is true. So we'll come in, you know, keep it eventually. Yeah, I think it's a good sign, right that we, you know, we asked people to write in and we were able to get so many different things and now we're down to, what do we get? We do one, two, three, four, five. We get about seven or eight left. So if you do start writing it, yeah. If you do start writing in the chances of your thing being read in 2020 are, I would say pretty good, pretty good,
H: Pretty, pretty, pretty good.
Q: Pretty good.
H: Allright. Q why don't you take us out of the show with a miniature pitch today?
Q: Okay. So my miniature pitch is a AR sort of mobile experience where you actually take a set of little figures that are weapons sword shields, all that sort of stuff, and you can hang them up and display them on your wall, but also as you're playing a mobile game, you can tap them like NFC tags and get those items in your game.
H: All right. That is going to be difficult to retail, but challenges later.
Q: Yeah, we'll talk to Ubisoft about it. I'm sure that they'll take a chance on a game store. It's a life thing these days, wont they?
H: Worked pretty well for them, I'm sure.
Q: It was. Do you know what true story Starlink was? $10 with the entire Starfox. [Laughs] I felt so bad. I was like, it's worth the price of the, Arwing alone.
H: I know. Yeah, exactly. All right. Well we'll catch you next week.
Q: Bye.