Back Seat Designers

The Open Crowd Source Machine has shown us some quite spectacular things thus far. We have seen the Pope from Boston busting for a piss. We have seen Gandhi swim across the Pacific. We have been to an East German antique shop with a serial masturbator. We have gazed upon punk chicks in Mexican food. SoContinue reading Open Crowd Source S1E5 – Josh Mandel

Unleash the combined magic of a vicious Taco Demon and a penchant for funeral home renovations with special guest contestants Serena Nelson and Jess Morrissette. Featuring a special guest appearance by Jess' way-too-young-for-this-shit daughter, Bea!

Please allow me to entertain you with a brief appetiser before we haul in the main course. Google, by now one of the most famous tech companies of history, is known for many things. They have revolutionised the way we use the Internet, and admirably continue to do so. They have provided free email and cloud-based storage space for the unwashed masses. An operating system largely of Google's design is powering a vast number of the computing devices that link us all together in a vast network where we can all harness the greatest achievements of the human mind, and learn, grow, and evolve, as we stumble through the darkness, together.

In short, you would never expect Google to be comprised of a bunch of sadistic fucking shitheads who take pleasure in completely ruining a promising podcast. Yet, that is exactly what happened yesterday. At least, I am reserving the freedom to think so. Evidence and more copious swearing available via backseatdesigners.com...

Last weekend, we had the pleasure of co-designing a game about the exploding bladder of the alternate 1970's Boston Pope. Today, we are upping the ante, as the Open Crowd Source Machine tasks us with designing a game in which Gandhi must put it all on red in the Entertainment Capital of the World for the benefit of his home nation.

Or, rather, that's the cards we were eventually dealt after the machine had crashed. Twice. One of them has even been played before. I'm still working out the kinks here, but at least the music worked.

Last night we had the great pleasure to welcome Francisco Gonzalez of Wadjet Eye Games back into the Back Seat Designers fold -- this time as the inaugural guest contestant on our spin-off show, Open Crowd Source.

Despite Fred's computer audibly trying to self destruct around us, we are dealt four random cards from the Open Crowd Source Machine and are tasked with designing a game about an American Pope who's absolutely busting for a piss.

Last night, we were joined by a bunch of great people in a very special Hangout where we covered most of the topics Troels and I have been discussing on season 2. Our guest list was reduced slightly because both Joe Mastroianni and Tom King had to bow out. But although that meant the guest list for this season finale was smaller than we originally anticipated, it was certainly no less impressive, with Brian Devins, Francisco Gonzalez, Serena Nelson, Jacob Janerka and Josh Mandel all being in good spirits. Many very good points were made, and enlightening - and frank - discussions were had.

I'm not gonna keep yapping about it - suffice to say, it was a great and very humbling experience and I'd very much like to thank all of our guests for taking the time to visit our freaky little show. And speaking of "freaky", I'm gonna let you make a choice that is not at all dissimilar from the opening quizzes in most of the Leisure Suit Larry games.

Oh, the irony. If we pulled off a Kickstarter, I wouldn't back it.

Anyway, last week, we did an episode about crowdfunding. By our standards, it was a fairly serious, sobering (though I wasn't actually sober) and enlightening romp. We both walked away with a new perspective on a subject we care a lot about.

I'm not gonna waste your time with my rambling, cause the episode speaks for itself.

A wild Gareth appears!

I do apologize so much for taking that obviously candid photo from a private chat and splashing it all over the internet -- but it was too good not to go there.

And appear he did, on Sunday the 7th of June, at Fred's apartment. For what was ostensibly a social occasion, a decision to record an episode was reached, and we quickly decided on a topic while Fred was still in a somewhat coherent state. (You will notice this state declines sharply as the episode progresses.)

The topic was "history in adventure games" -- as in historical events that would make good adventure games -- and this was a perfect fit as Gareth, indeed, holds a Ph.D. in History.

He does, however, also perform what Fred and I think is the absolutely side-splittingly hilarious role of Pete Toleman, CEO of Priapic Mountain, and the opportunity to conduct an "interview" with the man/myth/legend while he was in the room was just too good to pass up. So that's why the first 20 minutes of the video episode consists pretty much exclusively of Fred having a beer on camera, or having a piss off-camera.

Finally, we can put the past behind us and get back to discussing what we do best: Minute details in adventure games that turn out to be much grander and with many more facets than we could anticipate.

Case in point: The narrator in a game. On the surface, a simple discussion about the pros and cons of first person vs. third person narration.

Turns out there are many degrees of first person narration. And once we bring the discussion round to whether or not this creates a fourth-wall breaking disconnect with the player, well, that's when we each reach for our beers and try to bring some levity to the situation: Fred with his Christopher Lee impression, and me by suggesting that Frank Miller should be anally violated with a pineapple.

As you can tell, we're in for quite the sobering educational romp. But, before all of that, we also have to deal with the dreaded technical demon of fucked internet connectivity! Oh god. The rage. How it burns and boils!

This is probably the hardest post I have yet had to write. For my task is to convince you to watch/listen to the trainwreck that was the latest episode of Back Seat Designers.

Let me provide some background info, so we have the Clusterfuck Chronicles collected in one place. You'll no doubt remember that we had been titilating you with the prospect of a guest appearance by a friend of Troels, who's also an acquaintance of mine. Anders Bjørn Rørbæk Pedersen, AKA Audiolog was going to make an apperance in order to discuss adaptive sound design with us.

Having him as a guest was of special interest, since he is working on a game audio system that has the game events change based on the music and sound. That's essentially the exact opposite of what LucasArts' iMUSE system did, so we felt this was gonna be an interesting little excursion into something that could be hugely interesting to apply in an adventure game.

So we made plans and Audiolog was into it. Troels got himself spectacularly blitzed in cheapo plastic bottle beer and asked me to take the word this time around - I'm gonna get into that later - and we were both ready to pull off an episode for the ages.