From PsyHelp
This is a transcription of Crazed's recording of Ben's first audio broadcast. The ~'s indicate where I couldn't really hear clearly.
see also: Broadcasting.
First Words
...but it, you know, I didn't- she didn't know that potted pines were coming, so, it _was_ dropping some items it wasn't supposed to, but lots of that stuff was valid, lots of that stuff was game, like the uh China and everything else. It wasn't as terribly a big booboo as Vicious Ruff thought it was. But that's okay, she's looking out for people, because, you know, I didn't say anything. I was sleeping at the time too! So, whatever. ~something about how we got over it~.
Christmas Feline
Christmas Feline says "And now it's time for discussions with tomato..tomato potente," ..and it..I don't know what she's saying. This is nonsense."
Psfarrow
Okay, Psfarrow – that's my grandma – she says, "Do I just have Windows Media Player up, and tune into the radio, and then go to the website? I would like to hear two songs if available. Cavatina, theme from 'The Deer Hunter'"? What is that? Is that a – that could be something old or something really new. I wouldn't know either way. "And Dolly Parton" – so that's old – "Hard Candy Christmas from her movie." ..Um, no, I'm not going to do that. "was just re-listening to your Ben's Beat version 3.5 very nice. -Psfarrow and Thena the cat." Oh, that's nice :) Um, Ben's Beat was a song I made long time ago, I've tried messing with music. Maybe I'll play that next time. I don’t ..Dolly Parton.. I don't know if anyone wants to listen to that. If anyone has any ideas for songs they wanna play, then, yeah, go ahead and send that, because that'd be cool. Even if, you know, I don't like them. I'll play some stuff.
Espeon
Um, "I'm sure everyone is wanting to know or some people might not" – Oh, and this is Espeon, I guess that's how you say that – "when do you think you'll have Psypets 2 completed?" I have.. that's like asking when I'll have Psypets 1 "completed," because I'll _never_ have Psypets 1 completed. I've been working on it, you know, for a year, and then, okay I stopped for 6 months but it's not done. I guess, you know, okay, fine, the intention was probably 'when will Psypets 2 be ready for people to play' and that's a hard, well, that's an easier question. It's harder, because, hmm, let me think about this ...I'm going to be working on it in little pieces. Like when I first started making Psypets 1, the very first thing that I had were um pets doing their hourly activities. Like, you couldn't even log in. You could log in, but you couldn't make your own accounts, everything was -I was messing with the database directly, and that's obviously not playable yet, but it kind of builds up in tiny pieces. First I have the pets doing their things, then maybe I add, um, petting and, you know, deciding well, they usually pet pets, because that's what you do with pets, and making little messages and items, and then you can uh, I don't know then I add forums or an in-game mailing system – actually, forums came lots later in Psypets 1. Eventually I'll get to a stage where you can play Psypets 2. And whenever that happens, I will uh, you know, tell you guys, but it won't be nearly as complete as Psypets 1 is now. Moving ..moving between regions will probably be one of the first things, because it's really important just from the basic coding point of view. And I should probably explain how regions are going to work. Psypets 2 is going to be very focused on traveling. Like you'll have the basic town. There'll be lots of different areas to explore in the Hollow Earth, which if you've read about is out of its mind, so I could just go wiggity-whack and have fun with that. But, that's going to be one of the, like, things. You don't _have_ to travel, but it's definitely going to be one of the things to do because the universe will be potentially infinite. You can just keep exploring new regions, they'll be generated randomly. Like, some people were getting confused. I was IMing um, ..I can't remember her name. I was IMing someone, and she was thinking, "you know it's not going to be flash, and yet new areas are going to be added, how will that be done?" And, like, I can see where that confusion can come from, but also think about your house inventory. It's not flash, but items can come and go, and regions are going to kind of work in the same way. You'll have a map like the town map, but more useful, and it'll show you what region you're in, and you'll basically go north, east, south, or west. And, if that area doesn't exist yet, then when you say 'will you take me to the east?' it'll randomly generate a new area to the east, and randomly connect it up. The world is going to fold and bend in strange ways, it's going to be bizarre and messed up, but uh, that's going to be the kinda the basis of it. Because, unlike Psypets 1 where the house was the first thing I coded, everywhere can be your house in Psypets 2. If you want to set up a box in the middle of some plains, the box is now your house! And if you, wanna, I dunno, initially I was thinking you might be able to ride on pets and stuff like that, you could have pets living on pets. I'm not so sure that's going to work out, but there will still be a much more ..there's going to be a more fuzzy definition of what "house" is, and so the regions are definitely one of the more important parts. Of course lots of people will be able to have houses in the same region, and so I kind of imagine people setting up cities and stuff. And the first region will be, you know, the Psypets town, that's where you'll start. It'll be very interesting because people will be able to build houses. Construction is something else that pets will do. You know, instead of hunting or doing whatever else.
Vicious Ruff
Alright, anyway, moving onto the next thing. Vicious Ruff...is acting like a newbie, even though she's not, and asks me to send her a pizza. "Help I'm new to the interweb." That's nice of her to use my word, which I actually stole from my friend Jesse, who doesn't play the game. "I have no idea what I'm doing." Okay, I'm well not going to send pizza.
Vitriol
Vitriol: "Say that Vitriol is awesome and he" – no, I'm not going to say that. Vitriol says the same thing twice.
Crush
Crush says "Ben wicked idea" – this is from Crush, sorry I might have said that too quietly – "radio psy, my new favorite radio station, sadly I'll be in bed for this, so just make sure this goes out anyways -Crush, resident" ...Well, there you go, it went out.
I try
Um, wow, see, this is only taking ten minutes, and I'm already done! You guys need to send me more stuff. Let me, actually, this doesn't collect mail automatically. Here we go. I try says "Why isn't Vicious Ruff an admin yet question question question question abuse of question marks." I have thought about, in all honesty, about making Vicious Ruff an admin. As an admin she wouldn't be able to do much more than she can currently do. One of the like – I guess the real defining thing that I can do that other people can't do is the uh favors. But one of the things about the favors is that I'm not comfortable about just letting someone else do – even if it is a cool person like Vicious Ruff – is receive and record the donations. Like even if I did that, she would still have to be able to see on some level how much money people have been sending around, and that just seems like much more private information to me. I don't just don't want to, you know, throw that around. I'm sure Vicious Ruff can be trusted, but it's a weird thing. Other than that, I'm trying to think of what an admin can do. I mean, lots of the work that I really do, there isn't a way for someone to do without having direct access to my database, which gives anyone else way too much power. Like I don't have a front end, a webpage version for people to do this stuff with. Like, adding new sections to the forums, for example. I have to get my hands dirty, as it were, with the database, and go crazy in that way. So, I could make her an admin, but in the game she really wouldn't be able to do anything else, because unless I give her complete access to my domain, which includes more than just Psypets, it's telkoth.net and everything else, she wouldn't really be able to do anything. So, I guess you could say that's a limitation of Psypets 1. Which is the cause for Vicious Ruff not yet being an admin. Which is something to look into, on my part, for Psypets 2. Making the administrative tools.. See, and that's hard to decide if I should do that first, because if I focus on that first, then I won't be focusing on the game play. So seems like the game is more the thing to make first, but it's nice to put them side by side in some respects. Well, we'll see how it goes. Maybe Vicious Ruff will one day be an admin. A co-admin. I'm not going to promise anything of the nature.
Shelley_Bianca
Shelley_Bianca says "Why is there only one page of events in the park? Is that because there's a limit, or more than a page of events happening?" Is that true? Is there only one page? Like, I might not have it split up, I know that's true. Um, click click click, log in..I might not have it "page-inated," or "paginated," or however you say that. Uh, the Park.. I know it's embarrassing on my part, but I don't know where any of the links are on the left because I don't play *laughs* Yeah, okay, there's only one page because I don't split it up into pages which would be nice for me to do, because god, look how long it takes to load. Recently I've been doing a lot of work on Psypets and in Psypets 2 because I haven't had anything to do so I felt like I've been in this Psypets coding mood. So sure, maybe I'll make it paginated – the park – some time later today. We will see.
The Lucky Panda
the Lucky Panda: "Ben, it's a Psypets podcast, not a quote 'radio thing' end quote. Just thought I'd let you know about some podcast vocab." As I understand it, "podcasts" come in a form of RSS feeds, and uh, it is not that kind of thing. I guess this is more of just streaming radio. I wasn't going to worry about the technical jargon. Oh, and that was Lucky Panda, who is apparently Allison, or so they signed.
Program .EXE
Moving on, Program .EXE "What was up with the potted pines and they were giving out the donation items?" That was a booboo on my part. On the inside of the database, all the items know whether –they have this "rare marker," and rare doesn't really mean that the item is hard to get – although that's usually the case – it just means that other items like the Easter egg item shouldn't give them out randomly or for the fun of it. And uh I'd not caught that on some of them. Like I went back and got like almost all the trophies were rare ones, although I apparently missed the Medal of Steel, um, and then some plushies - those were donation items - um, because I wasn't thinking plushies in my head as being, you know, rare, unique items, because there aren't a lot of those. So I just had to go back and mark them as rare and the script automatically took care of it. In fact in the future, when potted pines drop items, they'll automatically account for any new items that happen to be in Psypets 1 if I add them. So, that's kind of cool. We can look forward to that next year again if Psypets 1 is around at that time. So that's why they were giving out donation items. And I did delete the donation items that were created, but I didn't correct like the Medal of Steel; that wasn't a donation item. It was _supposed_ to be unique and no one else shoulda got it, but it was my bad, so you guys can keep your uh Medals of Steel. In fact, I updated the Encyclopedia entry, I don't know if anyone reads that anymore, because we have the Wiki now, but it says something about how it was accidentally given out by the pine trees, and something something, I don't remember what I wrote.
use_me_holly
use_me_holly says "what is your favorite part of Psypets 2 that you'll be implementing, or one of them?" Ooh, that's a –I guess more of the –I think the Hollow Earth thing is my favorite part, because I like that – I always wanted multiple houses, and I always thought wouldn't it be cool for multiple cities, and you had different shipping costs between cities based on distance and maybe it could actually take time. Which actually, I haven't thought about whether I'm really going to do that. But I think that's really my favorite part of Psypets 2 is that there's going to be many locations and the exploration aspect. Exploration is always my favorite part of games. Like, even 3-D shooters and crazy stuff like that. It's really cool to be able to run around in those levels and explore the nooks and crannies that people have made. Only in this case, the computer is going to be making the nooks and crannies, like I said, because regions will be generated on the fly as people find them. So I think that's going to be one of my favorite parts. Oh! Another cool part. I don't think I've talked about this to anyone. But I'll tell you now. Crafts that the pets make – like paintings – I'm not going to make it fixed on how big the painting is. There's going to be kind of like an item tree, like it'll be craft, painting, I don't know, complex, or plant, flower, edelweiss, or something, I dunno, I haven't thought about edelweiss specifically, but you know. So there will be these – an item will have a kind of type as the item type, just like we have decoration/bed, or I guess that's furniture, furniture/bed, whatever. I'm going to have that kind of thing, but that won't really define all of the item's attributes like it does now. Like right now, a bed is always the same size, a painting is always the same size, a painting always gives the same amount of esteem for every painting. An item name will also be "flower painting" or "scenery painting." In Psypets 2 that's not going to be the case. A pet like a crafting pet will look around the house and say I have a bunch of blue and red dyes and I have tons of parchment, I'm going to take it all, I'm going to go crazy, because, you know, it has really high crafting skill or whatever. I'm going to take all these paintings and parchments together, and make an uber-big painting, of like blue dye or whatever it finds. And depending on how many successes it rolls in the background – terminology from a role-playing system that lots of us – behind-the-scenes stuff. Anyway, depending on how well it creates the painting, it will use more resources, and make a bigger craft-painting-scenery, or whatever. I guess scenery wouldn't really be a subtype, but you know, craft-painting. And it'll have a different size, depending on how much parchment or paper or – I don't know if I was thinking papyrus being in there. Anyway, and then more esteem, based on how much ink went into it, so things like that. Same with sculptures, like a pet will do a wood sculpture, because there's wood. There's not much of it in Psypets 1, there's, you know, logs. But in Psypets 2, wood will be a much more common resource, for building houses, among other things. But pets will be able to sculpt things out of them. So it'll be like okay I made a wood sculpting, err sculpture – oh and just like I was saying, names aren't fixed. It could be like a wood sculpture of pick-a-random-item-in-the-game, or a random pet, like it could make a wooden sculpture of 5-function calculator. It might happen. So, "congratulations, your pet has a sculpture of a 5-function calculator." But it'll still be craft-sculpture-wood, but the esteem and everything else will totally depend on how the well pet does. So I think that'll be pretty cool, that'll be very different.
Crazed
Let's see if I got any new mail, I have to check manually. I told it to check every minute. Here's Crazed. I think he's IMing me now, I'm not checking the IMs. This is my friend Matt. I think I've talked about him in ..weird places, on my Wiki I think. Anyway, he's an awesome programmer guy. He uses Macs, but whatever. "Hi Ben, long time listener, first time caller. Could you talk about Elementalist and where you plan to take that? Thanks, love the show." Elementalist. Elementalist was kind of my guinea pig for programming. I'm not really planning on developing it a lot more. Like there's still some of those items that I still wanna do. Like eye of the storm, I think is the one that Crazed was IMing me about earlier, that he has one, but he can't use it, because I haven't implemented it. I would probably like to finish lots of those. Elementalist was mostly me trying to figure out how I was going to program Psypets 2. They're completely different games, I mean, don't think that Psypets 2 is going to be like Elementalist, because that would be crazier than I could imagine. But lots of the programming behind it – it's hard to talk about without throwing around weird programming words like classes and object-oriented design and random stuff like that – but I got a good feel for how I'm going to work that kind of stuff in Psypets 2. Lots of the code that I've used in Elementalist I've used in telkoth.net in a system I'm making for my friend Steven, who you may know as Axe-Wielding Hobo or Candy Hotstuff. He's moving to England, so I'm making an online role-playing game for him. Anyway, I used lots of the code in that, and lots of the same code in Psypets 2. And I just keep improving it every time, and it changes a little, but I'm really glad that I worked on Elementalist in that respect, because it really defined – It was very helpful, because Psypets 1, like I said, is a terrible mess, which is why I'm making Psypets 2. It's really hard to implement, say, multiple houses, because every single page is programmed completely differently, and there's different levels of abstraction which might not make sense except in my mind, and it's just really hard to do anything without – like I'd have to relearn how to do it for every single page, and it's a pain in the ass, I can't do it. I think I almost had multiple houses done for a while, but then we added like the auction house – I did, whatever, I added the auction house – and some other things, and then all of a sudden I realized – The house changed, the house too changed for some reason, I don't remember why – Anyway, so then I realized I had to reprogram; all the work I had done on multiple houses was gone, it didn't apply anymore, and that wouldn't have been true even with those changes if there was a better code base, and that's what Psypets 2 is going to have. It should hopefully be a lot easier to add new content of all crazy kinds. And items, since there will be so many varieties.
use_me_holly
use_me_holly again “Sorry I should have sent this with the other message ~here’s another question?~. How long do you think you’ll keep Psypets up? If you ever get tired of it will you let someone else take over?” Psypets original or Psypets 2? Psypets original, it’s hard to say. Honestly, if people want to keep playing with it, and especially if they want to keep donating, why should I take it down? The biggest problem with keeping both Psypets original and Psypets 2 up at the same time is that my server will explode because Psypets 1 is already enough work for the server. Psypets 2 is going to be that much more. And now I’ve got telkoth.net which has got all – I mean they’re all on the same physical computer, and they’re serving to hundreds of players a day. I mean if you look at the statistics, I don’t know how many hits that comes out to, I used to record that somewhere but I stopped paying attention. That’s the biggest problem with keeping Psypets up. I’ll definitely keep them both running, even if they’re terribly slow, until it seems like lots of people have said “Ben was right all along, Psypets 2 is so cool!” and they stop playing Psypets original. That is my secret wish and desire; that people will just stop playing Psypets 1 because Psypets 2 will effectively replace it. And if that really does happen as cleanly as I would like it – and I’m sure it ~won’t?~ be that perfect -- then, yeah, we’ll go “No more Psypets 1.” But if people keep playing it, I don’t know, maybe people will play both all the time, for whatever weird reason, then I guess I’ll have both up. I can’t really buy . . . I _could_ buy another server, have them both be on another server, but . . they’re expensive :P The other problem with keeping both up for a while is that I’m happy to transfer things over from Pyspets 1 to Psypets 2 for people, because I know that people are really attached to their pets and even sometimes item comments – which is beyond me – and other things like that. I don’t want – after I’ve done that initial transfer – to keep transferring things over. And I’ll certainly not – if people say “please will you transfer my thing back to Psypets 1” I’m going to say no. No, I’m not going to do that. For one thing, it’s going to be a lot of work doing the transfer, because it’s not going to happen cleanly. The pets are going to have different skills like constructing buildings in Psypets 2, that won’t apply in Psypets 1. So mean how do you ..what do I do with that skill? Do I just throw that away, and now your pet lost a lot of its leveling up? When I take you in from Psypets 1 to Psypets 2, what do I do with your pet that has no skill in construction but maybe it should have had? Because of level-up questions. I mean the solution for going from Psypets 1 – really to go either way – is to reduce the pets to level 1 but give you the experience points to re-level them up. Which is what I’m going to do. . . I’m getting off-topic, I’m going to look at the next e-mail.
Program .EXE
From Program .EXE, again, "What about wall space and floor space, shouldn't they be accounted for?"
I thought of wall space because I thought it would be really cool if you could have shelves and add shelves that would take up wall space to add floor space. That seems so detailed - although it makes no sense for pictures to take up floor space which is also, you know, bizarre. The other - ~ well no, no that still doesn't help~ - wall space, I ~could~ think about wall space -~Did I not~- shouldn't that be accounted for? Was I saying something that made it sound like I said it would be? I don't know. Floor space will definitely be there - Oh, 'cause right, 'cause houses, you won't really have a house, right, when you're out wandering around, in regions, if you don't have a place to put your stuff, it's gonna be what you carry with you, if you don't carry it with you then it goes away, but if you drop something in something that you own, like a container, like you could drop a box I guess, anywhere, and put stuff in it, it's like.. that's a good question. Ok, see these are things to think about. In all honesty this isn't all clear cut in my mind how it's all going to work. I have started programming stuff, though. Let's see what the next emails say.
It's already been twenty minutes, that's pretty good.
gooey
gooey is mailing more: "What sort of Psypet are you IRL, in real life? Do you craft, adventure, theive? Theives won't be in Psypets 2. I hate to break it to you, but, ~that's not the question~. Do I craft, invent? Programming is a strange combination of crafts and invention. I would probably say that programming is crafts. I don't adventure as much as I would like. Although, on my wiki, I think I still have that Girls in Tank Tops in the Wilderness. That was an adventure. That was fun. That was good stuff.
wotme
"Hi Ben, love your voice," says wotme, yeah, I guess that's how you say that, "How long will you keep Psypets 1 up and running after 2 takes over and is there any chance of keeping them both?"
Well, I talked about that already.
Espeon
Espeon says - same people over and over again, that's cool, that's cool - "What do you plan by no one elses opinion you would give to everyone" - wait, what? - "by no one elses opinion you would give to everyone that was a Psypet ~an icon~" This sentence is confusing. "What do you plan"... It opens a parentheses but it never closes it. I think he's asking if I'm going to give people a badge or a special item or something. And I said Espeon right, that's cool. He told me so in the mail.
Anyway, what will I give people? An icon? I thought a badge would be really cool because items you could lose or get destroyed. I'll probably give people both, because an item would be cool. I don't know what item would be - The little beta tester like holographic projector that was that binary code. I don't like it as much as when I first made it, so, I'll try to come up with an item that's less dumb. But... ~an icon like your an admin~, That's definitely cool, I think I'll definitely - it'll have to be a badge of some kind, and ~we'll do something~ although that'll be hard, but whatever. We'll figure it out. But that's ~what I'll do~. It'll be a badge ~???~ It might not be a super cool awesome item, probably some high esteem thing that you'll replace with bunches of paintings, but you know, it'll be unique.
Fuzz27
Fuzz27: "I heard we aren't going to have a money unit in Psy 2. How exactly will we sign up for let's say a park event?"
I forgot to talk about this initially, but I'm glad someone brought it up because this is confusing so many people and I wanna make sure that people understand this. 7:25, I'll try not to take forever. I'll keep talking as long as people email, I guess.
Money in Psypets 2: The thing to understand about real life is that money is completely imagined, like the value of money. and that will be less true in psypets 2, 'cause it'll still be based on physical objects. People aren't just gonna be like making paper and using it as money. I guess they could make paper out of wood and use it as money, but, money units will be defined however people want them to be. In the initial town of psypets I will probably have -the scientific community of Psypets- I will probably have moneys, coins or something that you have. It's gonna be an item, it's gonna show up in your inventory. You won't have like money on the top bar because there isn't a universal money. But you'll have an item and basically money is - The U.S. Dollars, it's nothing more than an agreement by everyone to use as a means to exchange goods. And it's gonna work exactly the same. I mean, I could go out right now and open my own grocery store and start asking people to pay me in wood. But it wouldn't work because no one has agreed, I mean, who's gonna bring wood to a grocery store? No one does that. That's retarded! The same thing is gonna happen in Psypets 2. Initially, people will be a little confused out in the wilderness about, you know, how are we gonna trade stuff. Again, in the scientific community of Psypets, I don't know what I'm gonna call the town, Psypets doesn't seem like a good name, well, whatever, you'll be using Psypets moneys because that's what the scientists will have for you. They're still gonna give you food. I'm gonna - People are still confused. I'm increasingly feeling like I have to give people something familiar otherwise they'll flip out.
You will start with psypets moneys, but there are not gonna be a lot of them, especially when you leave for the hollow earth. Once you're in the hollow earth you're gonna find all sorts of crazy stuff. You might find gemulines. Maybe people will look at gemulines and think that this is a good thing. You'll be able to talk in the forums. By some means, and maybe I really need to facilitate this somehow, other than just letting people communicate about it in the forums, but by some means people need to come to an agreement that in this new city they've found that gemulines are what everyone is going to start bartering in, so that when you put up a price, like, I'll let you put up a price in your player run market, just like now you say "I want, you know 30 moneys". Now you'll be able to say, I want 20, whatever you want, you could say redsberries, that might not work so well, you could say wood, that also might not work so well. But if everyone has said gemulines then you say fine, I want 20 gemulines, and everyone is like fine gemulines is a good measurement of wealth. It's - you know, we can mine them, it takes work to get, they're not too common that they're meaningless, but they're still available and useful. And that would change based on region because maybe you're in another region that's out by the ocean where there are no mines or mountains and so you can't easily get gemulines and maybe there's some sort of, I don't know, bizarre flower. It's gonna depend on what people want. And for park events, since that was the specific thing Fuzz27 is asking about here. Again, you'd say, you know, how much do I want to charge people to join my park event? And parks are going to be ~?~ to go back to that real quick, but you’ll say “I want 2 gemulines per entry,” and people have to give you 2 gemulines. One thing that’s going to help with money, because, you might say well how will I get gemulines? Because you might be making lots of paintings or something, and maybe there’s so many paintings, how are you going to get gemulines when no one wants all those paintings? On one hand, that’s a problem in real life, cause if I sat here and made paintings all day, I don’t think everyone would buy them. Especially if there were only, you know, 200 people in the world. Which is going to be the case early on anyway. But there’s going to be alchemy, which is going to be kind of like the Pawn Shop, where you trade in one thing for another. It’s just going to work like cooking, but not based so much on what makes sense taste-wise, but mass – some people must have seen Fullmetal Alchemist – the same amount of matter. You’ll turn a painting of size 3 into something else of size 3. And depending on – remember how I said I had those classes of items -- like you would have plant-flower-edelweiss again and then now let’s say you have plant-tree. They share a common base which is plant, but then you go up a second level, and one is a flower and one is a tree. So basically, the farther you have to travel like that -- the more different the item is -- the more will be lost in these alchemical transformations. But anyway, in this case, if you have a pet that produces a lot of paintings, paintings are a very different class from gemulines. Gemulines are a natural resource, and paintings are a craft. So there will be a lot of loss there, but at the same time you’ll be able to get gemulines if that’s what the current/established economy in the distant city you’ve set up in the hollow earth is using. And if it’s something else, fine. You can turn it into something else. I think it’s gonna work out. Definitely people are going to start off using Psypets coins, but there aren’t going to be enough of them. And maybe I’m wrong. Maybe everyone will just go Psypets coins all the time. Or, money is coins. Maybe that’s what they’ll do. Something else I was trying to explain … I was having difficulty … let me see if she’s online, I’m so bad at remembering names, and I’m sorry that I don’t remember her name… Anyway, I was talking to her, she lives in California, somewhere, um, MCharmed21 or something like that? Anyway, she was confused about – I was trying to explain a concept I learned about in my anthropology class about a castaway society. When you have a bunch of people who are used to, you know, U.S. cities, maybe you have skyscrapers, suburbs, everything else, and then all of a sudden you put them – castaway, on a remote island in the middle of the ocean. What are they gonna do? People are worrying like “Oh no, you’re putting us back to the Stone Age with the cavemen. But you guys aren’t cavemen, you’re “civilized” people -- quote marks … you can’t see me doing that with my fingers, but I’m doing it – “civilized” people put into this Stone Age remote world. But you have all these ideas already of things like money. And people will always try to recreate the society that they’re used to, when put to this castaway situation. It was something we talked about, it was really fun in anthropology. But I mean, yes, you have this Psypets town and then you’ll go into this crazy place where there’s no standard of money, and there’s all these crazy resources and monsters and things, but you’re going to create it into whatever you want, and that’s going to be something similar to what you’re familiar with. I think it’s going to work out fine. People are worrying too much.
Here’s wotme again, “will you give a reward to the older players of Psypets 1 who’ve stuck with you, and what would you like to give them.” The older players, like the ones that already have the Beta Testers Medal? Or, not medal, trophy? whatever? They can keep it, I guess, maybe I’ll replace it with something cooler. I already said I didn’t like it.
wotme
wotme also says “How do you think Psypets has changed in the last year? And are you proud of the community you’ve ended up creating? And by the way you’re doing a great job.” Um, oh god it’s changed so much in the last year. I mean when I first showed this to my sister, there was nothing but the house and storage I think? Maybe the mail? And then when I showed it to her again, even months later, there was so much new stuff. The forums, and the City Hall, and … the Giving Tree was really late, but you know, it’s changed so much, it’s ridiculous. It’s not the same game. That’s something else that drives me crazy. People are going “Oh no, Psypets 2 is going to be so different, *makes strange high picthed noises*” But Psypets 1 is so different from a year ago. It was a slower transition, that’s true, but that’s why I’m giving this transition period between 1 and 2. People worry needlessly.
Program .EXE
Program. EXE: “With the new money system, what happens if it’s, say, fish, you’d have unlimited food” What people decide doesn’t affect game mechanics. If people decide that fish is the money for the area, that doesn’t mean you get fish every day for free. You still have to go and get the fish yourself. You won’t be given this allowance that you’re used to, not in the hollow earth. If you want to stick in Psypets town, the scientific community will support you with daily rations -- they’ll give you random fruit that gives you 24 hours of food -- every day. If you want to go into the hollow earth, you’re on your own. They can’t give stuff to you. Oh and by the way, in the Psypets community I’m thinking you won’t be able to build new houses, cause there’s no room. You’re in a little scientific community on a tiny island. Anyway, you won’t get an allowance, so you won’t get fish for free, you still have to go out and get it. And fish doesn’t make a very good money, because again it can be eaten, I don’t think people would pay it.
gooey
Gooey again. “What kind of questions are we supposed to be asking? Are you going to be making any new merchandise?” Hey! I almost forgot about …um, Cafepress. And no, the questions you guys are asking are fine, I go out on tangents, it works out fantastic. And am I going to be making any new merchandise. That’s a good question. I probably should, people will buy it, right? That’s cool. That reminds me though. I had heard from Tomi that the shirts washed and they messed up, like the print got all deteriorated and bad just in one wash. That sounded really bad to me. I hadn’t noticed people talking about that in the forums, but to be completely honest, I don’t look in the forums, maybe not as much as I should. If that’s been happening a lot … that’s really bad. I mean, I know that Cafepress isn’t the greatest for various reasons, but they’re popular enough that it doesn’t seem like it should be common. I don’t know. I can make new merchandise, if it’s not becoming terrible. Ooh, couple more mails already.
Ah, my grandma’s still listening, fun.
booksmart
booksmart says “Are you planning on doing anything else with Cafepress, because I’m so on for undies” Yay, see I’m glad someone is. I’ll do undies, because it doesn’t cost me anything to give you the options, it’s an option. I have a kitty with me now, if anyone cares. It’s Chelsea. She’s been sitting on my lap recently, which is nice of her, she hasn’t done that in a while.
Psfarrow
Psfarrow, my grandma, “Enjoying the broadcast, looking forward to the new Psypets. New challenges are always interesting. If paintings pets create can be different by dyes they use, could they be further enchanced with embellishments for more value, adding gems etc?” That’s a cool idea. “also it seems like food bartering might become more important.” Food bartering might become more important. I really think that – I mean, think of being pioneers in a new area. One of the things that you definitely have to do is hunt for food or at least be able to plant a – hey, should I have gardens in Psypets 2? I bet people would like gardens. But, you’ll definitely be more successful if you have a pet that hunts or gathers. Hunting and gathering, by the way, are going to be different things. Hunting will be hunting animals to get flesh and meat, for stronger pets. Gathering will be for your wussier pets to get things, including fish, cause fish you just throw out a net. I’m not saying fish isn’t meat, it drives me crazy when people say fish isn’t meat. But um, berries and all that stuff. So hunting and gathering will be different. There will be two classes. So it should help out for starving artists. They can go out and gather food, because that’s not physically taxing.
Any new mail? No one else has said anything. Well, I’m about – I can’t think of anything else to say, I mean if I could’ve thought of stuff to say, I wouldn’t have told you to e-mail me. So, I guess I’m about done. I’ll check one more for mail. It is 7:36, half an hour seems decent to me. I can’t imagine going on for, you know, an hour. Well cool! See, that was kind of fun. So, we’ll see what you guys thought about it after-the-fact, and, you know, tell people about it for next week, when more people are home, and we’ll see what happens. If people continue to be interested, then I will continue to do this on a weekly basis at 7 o’clock. Um, I do need to find a way to make the broadcasting station revert. You know, so you can continue to do broadcasts on the in-game tv. I’m gonna go and force, you know, hack that to work the way that you guys want it to, cause there’s no point in you guys sending me mail now. But every Monday it’ll automatically turn into something else.
Program .EXE
“What about game consoles and computers? P.s. your voice is cool” Program. EXE. Um, computers. That’s true. You would have to build powerplants. Hehe, that would be very bizarre. I guess that’s a possibility. That sounds like something for the future.
Alright, well, I’m all done. I am going–
Last Words
--Breeding – yes, no. See, I keep getting new e-mails. Yes. Breeding will definitely – Oh! Okay, fine, you guys found something else I need to talk about. Breeding was um, um. Sorry, the kitty’s distracting me. Breeding is going to not be I think -- people can --
- broadcast cuts off, but Ben doesn’t realize for another 10 minutes or so
- Ben continues to talk about breeding, the meaning of life, etc, to Chelsea the cat