Danny:              00:10          Whether you have two, one or no graspers at all welcome to the Titans of Text podcast. We are your hosts, Danny "Austerity" Nissenfeld.

Eric:               00:20          and Eric Oestrich.

Danny:              00:23          and we have with us today Jane of Stillborn. Stillborn went through its final beta period and has just recently gone live. We're going to talk about how the beta went, how players received it, and what changes you can expect to see in Stillborn today. Welcome to you Jane.

Jane:               00:43          Hello. When I say it's out of beta, that's only in the sense of a, I'm probably thinking more in the way Steam distribution system works. Early access means barely functional enough to be considered presentable to the average consumer and that's what I mean when I say that. I don't mean that it's not going to undergo any significant changes either. Now we're in the future, just that it's not where I have to babysit it at every possible moment for it to work properly.

Danny:              01:13          Let's start with a bit of a recap. Since we're almost a year since the last interview, what is stillborn and what kind of game play could a new player expect to see when they log in?

Jane:               01:27          There's lots of different terms that can be applied to it, but universally it's a rather dark, surreal fantasy type of round based mud. And what round based means is that instead of running perpetually, like basically every other mud in which progress isn't regularly reset, which presents a different kind of economy progression system as opposed to what Stillborn does in what at a certain point, the section that's running and stillborn ends. And at that point, every character is wwiped. One does not save their equipment or progression other than achievements and memories, which are a form of currency that can be kept between the rounds. The object of the game is not to build up a long list of quests or possessions in your apartment, hall, whatever, and more about the complex mechanical interactions you can have with the objects in the game and with other players and the stories that result from it as opposed to having anything tangible, but it's because of its impermanent nature. You can get killed by a large amount of stuff easily. And it's not as if the game lasts long enough for when that does happen, for that to bite so hard cause you're not really losing much and that encourages players to do more fun stuff as opposed to just wasting their time and grinding when all of that's going to go away in the end.

Danny:              02:58          On the achievements and memories are, I guess this is kind of a two part question, achievements, do they actually affect characters in the game or are they just like badges sort of thing?

Jane:               03:12          They're just badges. But I do have some ideas for actions one can take to affect future rounds. For instance, like if an artifact is discovered and it makes its way out of the map through a shopkeeper somehow, then maybe it can appear by the same kind of shopkeeper in a future round, but we are still thinking of how to do such things. For the most part, achievements are just you did this.

Danny:              03:35          And what about memories? Some memories carry over. How does memories affect a character in a future round?

Jane:               03:43          Well, when you select your class to load into the game, you go through a whole load-out phase, like picking what kind of clothes you start with. If you're a peacekeeper, whether you start with a pistol or with a club or something. And better options can cost memories. So it's basically just something you can use to enhance yourself during the load-out stage and in the future I want it so that a certain amount of them can be used much more than an item. And the load I would cost to do something like forcing a certain mutator or causing something bad to happen just in case it wasn't happening on a often enough basis in the game.

Eric:               04:20          So tell us a bit about the beta itself. How long did it run and how many rounds were in it?

Jane:               04:25          Well, that started on November 29th, but there weren't really a lot of uses during that time cause it was still pretty broken. On January 7th it opened, which was my birthday. I'm 20 now. Oh God.

Jane:               04:36          But since then, stillborn has been going online and offline every three days. And the three day interval in which it's not up is to give me some kind of peace and quiet, I guess, because since the round restarts, it's not that any catastrophic code mistakes will damage the game in the long term, but because the entire game is the short term, it can disrupt that. And I don't really like making changes to it while there's players on and I know they're not going to be on for those three days. We have a small handful of people that play regularly every time there's a number of updates.

Danny:              05:19          So the, the round structure now since the seventh we're about almost two full weeks in, are the rounds ending naturally? I played a while ago in the first the first set of play and I know there was a voting system and if someone caused some kind of cataclysm that it ended the round how do the rounds end at this point?

Jane:               05:41          That is still the case, but I renamed it to doomsday, like "at doomsday", but we do want other round end conditions to be available so that it feels better when we introduce antagonists. The terrorist will be the first one. The completion of their goals will signal the end of of around and for someone to use the doomsday command. Now a certain percentage of the players that have connected have to have either died or gone offline and at least one hour and 30 minutes must have passed.

Danny:              06:09          How does the antagonists get chosen? I know in something like SS13, which Stillborn takes a lot of cues from it's basically random. You just show up and you're labeled the I forget what it is in SS13.

Jane:               06:24          Traitor.

Danny:              06:24          yeah, traitor. So how does that get chosen for stillborn?

Jane:               06:29          It works the same way, but stillborn lacks the option to opt out of it. When a pre-round starts players are getting loaded in, they get moved to this room called the meat grinder where an object of some sort that they would expect to see in the world. They're going like a skull or an officer's cap or whatever will mention needing someone for some kind of role. So players will know that there's going to be an antagonist of some sort, but they're not going to know exactly what, and not every quote unquote antagonists in the code. We call them instigators because I don't want it to be that they only disrupt the round for players. You know, it could be like an extraction team or something, but players are looped through and when a player either says yes or when it runs out a tries the round starts and if it runs out a tries, it picks someone and says, sorry, you don't get a choice because someone else could've answered yes up to that point, which would have let someone who wanted to do such a thing have that opportunity. But, you know, we can't just not have an antagonist.

Eric:               07:28          Have you seen a new surge of people since the beta has started interested in trying this out?

Jane:               07:34          Yes. As always, every time I answered someone's post, like, you know, what mud do I get for this or that? Every time I get a opportunity to reply to one of those two, which stillborn actually applies to usually that's where most of the newbies come from. But from some of the, a players that have been playing other mud such as mostly Sindome and Cybersphere they've been telling their friends and I think it's starting to get around at least a little bit probably because it's actually playable. And while there's not, like we're not at the point of even having 10 people online at once. Yet the activity we do get is substantial enough to build off of as far as feedback and knowing where to go from here is concerned. And that's probably, I'm very okay with it. Just staying there for a bit.

Danny:              08:25          So I know another thing that you've been developing around Stillborn is some discord integrations. What kind of things can one expect? If they join the Deathcult discord.

Jane:               08:41          We actually made a discord bot that can interface with the Moo directly. For example, you can type "heartsignal remember me" and it's a command channel and it'll ping you every time around starts. So that way someone who's not playing the game can know when it's active, when it's, you know, when they can join and play is the largest set of preround start classes. And you can also probe it to see how many people are online who's online. You can even read posts from the end game forum system using the bot. And I think that's a going to have a huge impact on the turnout of players in the future.

Danny:              09:23          I know so Stillborn is you know, more of a, I'm not going to say it's an RPI necessarily, but it's, it's definitely, I don't know, I guess it's an RPI, but, yeah.

Jane:               09:35          It's roleplay oriented

Danny:              09:35          Yeah, it's very roleplay oriented. Roleplay is very important in its purpose. Do you ever think you'd integrate discord with in game chat? Like an OOC channel I guess would be the best equivalent.

Jane:               09:50          That'd be cool because the kind of conversations people are having in the OOC channels and the game itself or probably something that discord users could also participate in. Plus it might keep players that just sit in the discord and don't play the game. It might make them actually want to get more involved. So that's a good idea.

Danny:              10:11          So I, I remember way back when I was playing industrial nightmare was essentially the scenario that you were running.

Jane:               10:20          I want that to come back one day.

Danny:              10:22          So what scenarios are running currently in stillborn?

Jane:               10:26          Right now it's just the one, it's called deep down and it sets in, actually have the text for it, if you want me to pull it up. I'm pretty sure you have a better reading voice than I do.

Danny:              10:38          Sure. I'll, I'll, I'll be happy to read it up. Yeah, just post it and I'll do my best.

Jane:               10:44          But that may seem weird.

Jane:               10:46          No, no. I think that would be fun.

Danny:              10:48          Vespra is another of Azasthem's codependent sectors under the soil of some dead and blackened plain as long as it does not conflict with Azasthem's wishes or orders it can do what it wants and it's treated separate from Caldern, Azasthem's mainland. Life at the bottom of ravine is hard, but there's more space down here than up there above ground.

Danny:              11:17          There's the NSR, Noctopian outposts and subsidies, multitudes of smaller offshoots of each other. Nobody cares enough about to remember the name of and every sort of prototype civilization or attempt to lack such a thing among those that live in the waste areas. The crawling chaos of tunnel below the Genova and crust is itself, no doubt dangerous, but it's easier to manage and there are much less humans in them to worry about. It's been hypothesized that nyctophobia is a trait, rarely shared among a majority of wasters.

New Speaker:        11:51          A near obligation to attempt to apply pure reason to civil situations and prosecution unfettered by emotion or prejudice with the intent to prevent the development of totalitarianism. It's a rather appealing concept to wasters and those not content with other States in which to live. Many of them are unaware of the extent to which residents have them as FM sectors. Desperate included somewhat more so than others to take their safety and privacy under the ground. Thus it is the will of the best friend laws, spirit. All crime is punished to the severest extent that impacts net productivity as little as possible. The disadvantage don't often impact this number. Best friends don't necessarily mind the wasters, but there is no place for treasonous or greedy behavior in their society. These are the sort of cynic skeptic of and disgusted with most of the available options that are exposed to the nationalist territorial pissings.

Danny:              12:54          It's pretty, I'm not going to say standard because it's, it's obviously more interesting than to call it standard, but it's definitely organized dystopia that you might see in a lot of 80s movies. Including super Mario brothers. Which I don't know if you've seen the super Mario brothers movie. Yeah, you should. Oh, everyone should see every listener should see the super Mario brothers movie.

Jane:               13:23          I feel like I should point out because it's not listed there. But there actually is a help file that explains what wasters are. Cause you know, I'm just pulling that word out on them without defining it.

Danny:              13:32          I think it's pretty clear. Someone who lives outside of society, a waster lives in the wasteland. That makes sense.

Jane:               13:40          It is a semi legal definition, which is basically a wasteland is considered a region which is officially stateless lawless and too hazardous to consider expansion to remote establishment within by recognized data entities. There's practically no political unity in any of these areas.

Danny:              13:58          So how, how did the players react to this new dystopia? I mean, industrial is also pretty dystopian, but it's a very different kind of dystopia, a lawless, kind of chaotic place. How did they react to this, to this scenario?

Jane:               14:14          They like it, most of them, well I say most, but a fraction are a bit more interested in the wasteland maps we had planned for the future and for the revamp of industrial nightmare. But the point of something with a clear social hierarchy was intended to bring the first kind of gameplay loop that involved players who had responsibilities to other players. You know, the shroomer has to deal with growing food for everybody. The peacekeeper has to keep the peace. The sanitizers deal with keeping the power on and dealing with trash, all that sort of stuff as opposed to industrial nightmare where it was every man for himself or in this case, every genital mutilating woman cult for themselves. Oh, right reactions. They've been they've been positive. I don't have any more detailed analysis into it cause we've been focusing more on how to fix the problems we've been having and adding extra systems to make it work. We still don't have money. That's what we're working on next. Then after that we're adding shopkeepers. Then we're going to do something with Phantoms so that players can keep moving around and interacting in some ways with the world after dying instead of dying just being, well now I have to go play something else.

Danny:              15:34          What are your plans for phantoms? I know if you die, then you can vote to end thing or don't. People can vote to end things, but if you die, then it furthers the end. So what would Phantom, what would you be able to do? Like, do you have a solid plan for that or is it just kind of like, Oh, we'd like people to be able to do something.

Jane:               15:52          Haunting for one that's a given, but something I made today called the magic prism is something a player can shake and it'll give some canned answer to whatever hypothetical question you might've asked it. But if there's a Phantom in the room, there'll be prompted to speak through it. And if they do fast enough, then there's effectively a, not very optimized but functional method of communication with dead spirits. And there are lots of potential uses for that because they can go through doors.

Eric:               16:26          We're there any troublemakers during the beta?

Jane:               16:30          Thankfully, no. We haven't had to ban anyone yet.

Danny:              16:34          Was there anything in particular that was surprising? A, a weird bug something that players discovered that caused some kind of strange interaction?

Jane:               16:45          The very first round on my birthday for some reason, every class, even the cancer who is basically the dictator equivalent spawned in holes in the ground instead of their workstations or their homes. We got that fixed. But the problem was that there were more players than there were spawn points. So it's been patched so that a lack of spawn points, which should hopefully never prevent players from spawning again because what it would do was put them with another player that was on the same map.

Danny:              17:18          Right. So they spawn in holes in the ground, like in the dirt holes. Like were they able to dig out?

Jane:               17:25          They were the called hovels.. There were homeless people that were expected to live if someone is not already squatting in there. Proles and shopkeepers in every other type of Vesperan that both has an ID and enough and a job considered important enough by the labor service division get an apartment. The others don't, which includes the farmers for some reason, but they have a scrap metal fortress and district two which remains undeveloped.

Eric:               17:55          Do you have any plans to bring on more building and coding staff now that the game has mostly launched?

Jane:               18:00          I haven't had anyone approached me about that sort of thing and I don't really want to make a post requesting them because I have a feeling I'll be disappointed only because there's a lot of customs esoteric crap that only I understand. And I would spend more time teaching it to others than I would making more of it. But a few builders that we've had on the team for several years are now getting around to making their own stuff. Birdie's currently working on outfitting the cancer's office, cause he doesn't even have a chair in there and the, he's been making a lot of items craftable like wooden tables and chairs and whatnot. So that should keep the crafted type of players busy.

Danny:              18:45          Well, now that it runs on its own, essentially, I'm obviously not, ah, not full launch, but it kind of minds itself. What's, what's your main focus? Is it building out the features, fixing, getting things working right or, or is it is it going to be mostly content?

Jane:               19:02          It depends on whether there's a rather pressing bug that people are complaining about that needs fixing. But right now the priority is adding extra layers of depth to the game to make the rest of it work. For example, we need the economy so that, you know, there can be four people in the first place to wipe your feet on and rich people, he you want to kill because they're richer than you. Without that sort of dynamic, natural antagonisms not really going to appear as often as we'd like. Plus, you know, a lot of drama can be created over, you know, money bullshit. Phantoms are not as necessary as the beginning of the economy system. But I feel that the introduction of more supernatural elements is key to stillborns themes. You know, alongside modern equipment such as televisions and radios. And the last episode, which we were actually getting a decent amount of new people from the URL listed at first sabbath.online. Then it was blackmagic.army, which they got rid of cause fuck, go daddy. We changed our domain hopefully last time since then, and that's where the discord server and such can be found. And that's at deathcult.today.

Danny:              20:18          So that's death cult one word. Dot today.

Jane:               20:21          Yes.

Danny:              20:22          Well, I'd like to thank you, Jane, for coming on the Titans of Text podcast for a second time.

Jane:               20:28          All right. Thanks for having me on