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Mmm, this is true...

@LoneKnight: Counter pick sounds good...

should be present tense, Podcast to Win (or just, Cast to Win)

but I kind of like platforms and pitfalls, tbh

So, uh, when am I needed for what not? This is a very busy week for me. It'll also be a good idea to get a bunch of recording and sound tests down first, including testing the ability to take a 5 minute break and then get seamlessly back into the cast.

"General Chit-chat"

I'm doing a testcast shortly just to A) get a bit of conversation flow over the set up and B) Check how nicely I can shift things around sound wise.

As it stands, I'm not sure when we'll do things next week but I'll post up as soon as I know. Brief test cast is in about 10 minutes though.

EDIT
Test cast done: Thanks A.C and Amp. So, I know it works, but I just have a crappy head set... But that can be fixed. Hopefully by the end of the day I should have a new one, and then be able to test it tonight/tomorrow

btw did you actually want me to just play/talk about touhou music, or should I answer the game questions

We ended up doing a test-cast with KayinN, Amp, and I. It was stellar~! Lofo'; if you wanna play DJ as your main role, and interject occasionally, that would be fine. This isn't really a "set in stone"-kind of deal, seems like.

Yeah whatever you like will do

Don't think you're at all left out, mate: chemistry between the other hosts doesn't mean there ain't room for the idea-starter. Any good leads on a mic'?

Yes, I bought a nice cheap but good microsoft livechat 3000. Tested and I've got no feedback at all. So, perfect!

EDIT: Thanks Alfonso and Dragonchild for the advice you two have given me on the more technical/management sides of things. Having advice from people with a clue is extremely helpful and I really appreciate people helping me through my incompetence..

EDIT 2:
Just speaking with Dragonchild, and we thought it might be best because he's quite busy (and is also lying about not having a voice for radio, but self convinced) that he drops out of the first podcast so currently looks like (including a few more guiding questions so potential speakers can have a good think about what they might say, along with some guidelines on time, but all this is fairly loose as we are in our early stages and is free to change on the fly.

Platforms and Pitfalls/Counter Pick/Character Select

Intro (hopefully no longer than 20 minutes)
-what this podcast hopes to be
--A discussion on games hoping to focus more on the design side. Although we may delve into many different gaming issues.
-cast
--what cast are playing and getting up to in relation to games

Main topic (40 minutes?)
-Why do you play games?
--what got you into games?
--What was the first game you really obsessed over, if any
-If your tastes have really changed over time, what where those changes and why do you think they happened

Possible name debate (10 minutes)

Who'll be speaking

Link6616
KayinN
Amp
LoneKnight
Alfonso Crawford

Counter Pick seems too fighing gamey, but it is a really good name.

Platforms and Pitfalls is pretty great.

How 'bout
"Collision Detection"
or
"If I Knew You Were Coming, I'da Made a Game"

I agree Platforms and Pitfalls is pretty great...

However, I also love Collision Detection...

I believe we've got 3 agrees on Platforms and Pitfalls though... and it rolls of the tongue nicely. So, for the moment, I'm going to leave Platforms and Pitfalls as the real name unless we have mass want for Collision Detection

Vote. Especially if we try to foster debate.

Collision Detection is already the name for a slightly gaming related blog (http://www.collisiondetection.net/).

I think Platforms and Pitfalls is pretty good. But might as well go "Platforms, Pitfalls and PTW" if you're going all Ps. But maybe you wanna distance it more from the Big S.

Adding PTW makes it too wordy, or more accurately to syllable-ly.

Platforms and Pitfalls I think works really well. It sounds nice and if you want to be one of those people that really reads into things it has a lot of meanings (like pitfalls as a design misstep, a commonly used gaming device, and as a reference to the classic game Pitfall).

Seconding Platforms and Pitfalls.

So, if you guys could still use a person with supposedly weird euro accent, it seems like I'm actually going to be available this whole weekend afterall. Probably. About 95% sure.

Also, it just hit me that PnP could stand for Pen and Paper (as in tabletop RPGs). Maybe a future podcast could be about PnP design? Games are games, is all I'm saying.

YAY, another accent to join my aussie one!!!... (yes, I put one after exclamation marks)

PnP design on the PnP podcast, good call. I've added that, and a bunch of other potential topics onto the opening post but for those who can't be bothered going back:

How a FPS player thinks? What makes the FPS such an enjoyable genre to many?
and given our boardgamers...
What unique advantages do board games have over videogames, and what would be the best way to get into them (feel free to suggest a better board gaming topic)
PnP game design on the PnP podcast
Comedy in games, how to best make your game 'funny' without it feeling tacky
What separates a grind from developing skill
The JRPG battle system, how to make them (more) interesting
2d level design (a super metroid podcast, must have Kayin in it)
How to create Immersion and Atmosphere and the benefits of doing so outside of for the sake of Immersion and Atmosphere
The importance of player agency, and at least the feel of it in linear games
The role of time in games, real time limited vs implied but fake one
Difficulty in games, how to make a game hard without ruining it for people (Demon's Souls vs NSMBW)

Feel free to refine the broader questions though!

So, Kayin, loneknight, amp and alfonso crawford when is a good time for you over this week?

I'm free all wednesday/thursday and provided I don't have to do this between midnight and 5 am EST (GMT+10) I'm good

I'm in GMT+1. Any time not between about 7 and 13:30 (16-22:30 EST?) is good for me.

Current local time in Clearwater, Florida, United States

Thanks to being unemployed, I have an extremely flexible schedule for the next few months (during which time I will be working to qualify for the army). Wednesdays and Sunday-mornings are tricky, due to meditation and church-services respectively, but both days are still very malleable.

By the way; you can refer to me just by my first name, if you want.

Current Local Time: Dallas, Texas, U.S.A.

At the latest, my classes end at 2pm (14:00), with a 30 minute drive, generally say that I'll be free just after 4pm (16:00) every day.

Same time as Alf here. I'm pretty safe any time after 5 except on mondays and fridays, which are totally out of the question.

Looks like 8am my time is the way to go, thats

Thursday, 28 October 2010 at 21:00:00 GMt+0
Thursday, 28 October 2010 at 4:00:00pm in amps time
Thursday, 28 October 2010 at 5:00:00pm in Kayin/Alfonso's time
Friday, 29th October 2010 at 8:00:00am in my time
Will work out loneknights later (although I assume 10pm his time)

I think this should work for everyone, but complain now if it's an issue, I do think I've got it right though.

So... 1 hour left till podcast?

That would be 2 hours.

huh, alright, if you say so.

Also... my ISP is being a bitch. I just had a 45 minute (!!!) outage. This is AFTER I called them that my connection is not stable, because it had been on-off the hour before that.

Just saying. There's a chance that, despite the fact I've been hyped for this shit for more than a week now, I may not make it. Whatever happens, I'm looking for a new ISP tomorrow.

I also had another 10 minutes while writing this... ffs.

Right, well, cast has just been recorded and after MANY tech problems, or should I say one continuous one, we got it done...

Quality is questionable, but we are learning. Amp is taking care of the tech side (thank you) and I'm not sure when we'll have it up.

So, our main next question is:

Next show's topic and time...

Given we have IWBTG's Kayin, I believe game difficulty would be a good topic. More importantly, how to make that difficulty fun, thoughts?

Game difficulty would be an awesome topic. Please do it.

Also, if its not too lame, what about the idea of a named character versus a character you "create" in games and how that effects the player. This is something I've been thinking about for a while. Tell me if that sounds too vague.

Do you believe in 'good' and 'bad' difficulty? If so, what games have you played with 'good' difficulty that you would recommend?

I just kind of realized that despite being a game design podcast, we didn't really get into what actually got us into, well, the design aspect. Only what got us into gaming. But then, having 2 episodes dedicated to "hey, what do we like?" would be kinda lame I guess?

In difficult games, how do you know when you've crossed the line from joking with or encouraging the player to taunting the player?

Official Episode #2 Question-List

This post will be updated as more questions are suggested.

1. Do you have standard for "good" and "bad" difficulty? If so; describe it, and give examples of both.
   
   
2. In a tough game you've played, when do you personally know that the designers are just fucking with you?
   
   
3. How would you make a game continually rewarding for its trouble?
   

By the way, could we open with a news-segment? Each speaker synopsizes one article of their choice, which is then discussed lightly?

Suggestion

Higher Difficulty in games tend to reward the player with certain items or skills, (think ninja gaiden). These settings get so high that it is more about figuring out the ONE AND ONLY way to handle each situation to walk away relatively unscathed for the next level.

"How to balance difficulty compared to how important/significant the unlocks are?"

Ninja Gaiden (one) just gave u a sad costume (yes no added dmg or anything, just new visuals that too only for ur char not even something like all human enemies become futuristic versions) for all your effort. Cool looking plasma sword is as "good" as the wooden sword. The ultimate weapon in the game is achieved by upgrading the wooden sword numerous times - very worth it even though grinding for it is a bother.

Street Fighter IV only unlocks other characters by playing specific characters.

Tekken (3) unlocks most stuff no matter what sequentially, only some characters have difficulty based unlocks.

Legendary mode in Halo series is not worth less than a minute of alternate footage.

Delta mode in Crysis (one) is not even a challenge compared to hardest/veteran mode in most FPS. (Try COD4 MW last level in veteran with arcade mode. It had more difficulty) That plus it doesn't unlock anything. Not that the unlock matters since the podcast is concentrating on difficulty.

So being a lazy asshole, I've only just started editing PnP Episode 1, but that now technically means I have to listen to a solid 2 hour, 10 minute block of convorsation I was involved in to find out the stuff we need to edit out.

So is the theme this time 'difficulty' or does that question list just suggest that?

I will say this, we need to get the problem of people breathing directly into their mics fixed, quickly.

EDIT: 1h15 minutes into the soundfile. Roughly an hour to go.

It's officially difficulty until it changes.

OH GOD EDITING IS DONE.

It's encoding (LAME mp3 @ 256kbs) now, all I need is somewhere to upload it.

http://www.macjams.com/
and
http://www.soundcloud.com/

are both free, I think.

E-mail it to me, and I should be able to upload it to the platforms and pitfalls blog

guess what you put before hotmail.com to get to me.

I just sent the file to link (Check your PM) for review.

Probably an easy way to distribute the file for now is to just let you guys download it from my public DropBox, but as I'm not the guy in charge of the project, that's not my call.

Do that for now amp while I work on the whole RSS feed to itunes stuff...

Platforms & Pitfalls: Episode 1

I like the accents overall!

Edit: I hate the passage and heavy rain too!

Edit2: Anybody heard of Metro 2033? I hear thats pretty scary.

Edit3: Agree with Kayinn about Super Meat Boy.

YAY, love!

But I loved heavy rain... Sadly, I must confess that most criticism it gets it totally deserves (the fact that you find out your characters thoughts are actually LIES at somepoint... given this is supposed to be your characters thoughts...)

Anyway...

I've listened to it a bit myself, and it's actually not bad. Thanks for your work amp! I'm looking forward to how good it becomes given it'll hopefully go uphill

Rowan has a pretty easy to recognize accent.
Kayinn is easily recognizable.
I can't place Alfonso and Amp. Who has was talking about the JRPG shopseller?
Loneknight is pretty easy to recognize, can't place the country by accent.

You're less likely to recognize me from accent, I'm the one with the highest audio fidelity, and no it had nothing to do with the fact that I was the host/recorder, recording was done through a third machine which was pulling audio from the internet.

And yes, I was the one talking about Recettear.

Ok, Alfonso has a southern accent (kind of). I think he just didn't talk often...

DAMNIT THAT IS PROBABLY NOT HOW YOU PRONOUNCE "RECETTEAR", WTF NOT "REKKA-TEAR
Recette is a french word for Recipe, pronounced much the same way, but instead of "cipe", it's "set", damnit