Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 712: Edmund McMillen

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

Edmund McMillen, the man responsible for some of the coolest, weirdest video games you've ever played, joins the DTFH! You already know Edmund's games! The Binding of Isaac, Super Meat Boy, and his upcoming release... Mewgenics! That one comes out next February, and is available for pre-order right now! Pre-Order Mewgenics wherever you like to get your video games!! This episode is brought to you by: This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/duncan and get on your way to being your best self. Visit trueclassic.com/DUNCAN to save. Shop now and elevate your wardrobe today. Check Out Squarespace.com for a free trial, and when you’re ready to launch, Squarespace.com/DUNCAN to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

Hello to you, my friends. You might be wondering, why don't I see his face right now? The answer is, I'm in San Francisco and not at the studio, and I forgot to record the intro to today's very special guest, which is a travesty of justice, because today's guest is responsible for some of the coolest, weirdest video games I've ever played in my life. The Binding of Isaac, Super Meat Boy, and now coming out around February. He's got a new game, Mugenics. And holy shit, after this conversation, I'm just deeply impatient. I really want to play this game, and I'm not going to spoil it for you. I'm going to let him explain what this game is about, but it's definitely going to be. maybe the biggest video game hit of all time.

I guarantee it. It gets the trussle, Ching, Jing, guarantee of excellence. Now, everybody, please welcome to the DTFH, Edmund McMillan. Edmund, welcome back to the DTFH.

How are you? I'm busy. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. I'm, I'm, uh, overwhelmed. Yeah. And, and I'm assuming that overwhelmed feeling is coming because in, what is it, February, you're releasing your next game, Mugenics.

Yeah. I mean, I don't, I would say it's kids mostly. How many you got now? How many you got two? I've got two. I got three. Another on the way. And, oh, yeah.

Oh, wow. Oh, yeah. Jeez. Things that must have been going smooth for you then because there's no way I would ever have another one. Oh, my God, man. You know, I have an Irish wife and she likes having babies and she cooks up some cuties. And, you know, it just being a parent, you know, don't you, don't you, at least for me, I get the sense of like, there's just like, we're in some kind of cosmic watch. there's big gears that I can't see and you're just some infinitesimally tiny part of that watch

and sometimes you get swarmed with offspring and what are you going to do? You know? I mean, yes, I can understand that. That's actually something that I've brought up to people who don't have kids because people would always say like, you don't know,

you don't understand how much it changes things and that's usually all they like say. But they can't put into words that like, it opens up these doors that you didn't know existed and they're terrifying. Yes. Yeah. Like it's like, oh, this is the reality that we're living in. Yeah.

Well, you just can see everything. You know, if you sort of like look at America from the perspective of like this like relatively brand new casino, when you have kids, you're putting all your chips on the table that you're fully in. and so for me that what a lot of weird things change for me one of them being it's harder for me to watch movies where kids get hurt you know oh yeah oh yeah yes yes that is a horrifically horrible yes and and i get mad you know when it when it happens and like we just watched 28 years later or 26 years later the zombie movie oh god it's so good man and but This is the second time this has happened.

My wife is very pregnant. The first kid when she was pregnant. Just, like, let's watch a horror movie. Pick some random horror movie out. Starts off with a murderer going into a NICU and just stabbing a bunch of kids. Yeah, you know a movie not to see? What?

Dear Zachary. Will not. Thank you for warning me. I don't recommend anyone ever see it. And it is a good documentary. but it is way too much like it is way too much and as a father i don't even like thinking about it what's it about it's about a crazy woman and uh it's it's like a dad's note to the their son oh god already i'm already my insides are twisting up i just so it's so harsh it is absolutely and i

didn't know what I was getting myself into until I, until I did. And then it was like, oh, great. Yeah. So my friend told me it actually, you know, even with fathers, that your DNA changes when you have kids. Like it's an actual biological change happens to you. And yeah, I don't think anybody, you can't really understand it until you, or you're in the midst of it. And yeah, for sure. And then there's also like this camera back moment where it's like you suddenly see, like the echoes the every all your past selves into your genealogy you know yeah like every ancestor back as far as you can see and all of the echoes that have come through you into these kids that you couldn't see until your third person or whatever you know like oh yeah I mean really

that's like kind of what me genics is about like it's really it started out is like I you know you know we have a bunch of cats because we didn't have kids when I originally designed it. We had a shitload of cats and that was kind of the replacement for kids at that point in time. And it was kind of interesting because we were getting these cats that were weird that were like from breeders and stuff like hairless cats. And then these things called bambinos, which were like dwarf, dwarf cats and then bambino hybrid cats. Hang on. Let me just pull up. I want to hear what you're referencing because I, though I'm not a cat.

Expert. Look up Sphinx, a Bambino. Okay. They are like hairless cats with half-sized dwarf. Holy shit. Yeah. Dude, those are cool as fuck, man. Oh my God.

The thing is, though, is they have a lot of problems. A lot of problems come with these cats in general. Like a lot of hairless cats don't usually live past like eight to ten because they have heart problems. Yeah. And we had a, we had a two hairless cats at that point. And when we ordered the Bambino, it, it did, had hard problems and it died, like, before we even got it. That's, it was kind of like this weird, weirdly, horribly tragic, but weird, like, morally ambiguous. Not really ambiguous when you look at it in the way I described it, but at the time, it just seemed like that, you know?

like we're doing like we're like totally fine with this. Like this is crazy. We're totally fine with it because it's a cat, you know? Like it's just an animal or whatever else. You know, man, this is like, I used to have a joke about it on stage. When you consider that like cats and wolves used to be a real problem for humans, like tigers, in some parts of the world, they still are. You know, every once in a while you'll see a video pop up in India. A tiger will get into a village and just fuck people up.

It'll rampage. But that used to be normal. Like your kids might get eaten by a wolf or a tiger. And over time, we mutated these beings down into these bizarre forms. Like what used to be this, the last thing you wanted to hear, when you were camping was the sound of wolves howling or you know the the the sound of a feline growling in the in the in the woods and we took over time we took them and we have shrunk them down remove their hair made them silly made them caricatures of their

former like terrifying selves and yet what's cool about cats is they still have not the dogs don't but cats still maintain this gracefulness this nobility this this aloofness that is just incredible to be around and that's why there's cat people because it's just amazing to witness that in a bambino you know that sadly i never got to witness it i'm so i'm sorry about your bambino i truly am it happens it wasn't it wasn't the only defective animal we've gotten the years it was only what it wasn't the only defective animal that we've received what other defective animals did you get we we were like okay our our sphinx is all passed and uh we're like okay we're gonna we were catless um and we had never been cat we hadn't been catless since god

since guppy which was like ages ago you know before guppy and uh guppy was a real cat he was our cat um or me and my wife's first cat and uh we ordered a a persian like a persian cat with like a short-haired persian so it's like more dense persian cat which has like the little pug nose and it looked really funny and we finally got it was imported from russia and uh when we when you get an animal you got a ticket to the vet and get it basically checked and approved make sure it's all good to go and the vet's like i don't like this nose we're like what do you what do you mean And they're like, well, you didn't breathe this. And I'm more like, no.

And they're like, okay, well, because if you did, you know, it's kind of illegal to have a nose up this high. You can't be doing that. I'm like, I don't know. There's a certain, you can't have the nose all the way between the eyes. It's very similar to pugs. Right. Because there's the same sort of stuff.

Yeah. Like the higher up you go, the more breathing problems they have, which is why they're so docile as well, because they just can't really jump and run around like a normal cat because you know and this is all stuff you learn from from taking him to the vet and them saying this cat needs a nose job she got a nose job but um to open up her airways more but uh yeah that was um one of many interesting cat breeding stories and situations that we've been in over the years that uh i'm always kind of taken it back and being like oh this is um this is weird this is weird in a uh uh uh

a wonderful way, but also a horrific way. Yeah, like a lovecraftian way, isn't it? Yeah. It's a little lovecraftian, right? Like, you're an elder god. This being has no idea, you know, theoretically, why its nose is in a weird place. But the reason it's nose is in a weird place is because over the years,

these advanced intelligences have been breeding it specifically to make it look a certain way. And, you know, man, as above so below. Anytime I let my mind wander into the various animals that look the way they do because of intentional breeding programs. And then I hear someone spouting off about the Anunnaki coming to Earth and genetically engineering us. It just doesn't seem that strange. Yeah, it's like we're predisposed predisposed to want to do that. That's right. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, like as they said, you know, Book of Genesis. God made man in his image. And also, Book of Genesis, I don't know if the last time you read it,

what's really weird about the book of Genesis is God refers to God's self as a plurality. You know, it's not me. It's they will become like us, implying some cosmic progenitive species that was totally genetically, biologically engineering a life form that at least in the book of Genesis failed some cosmic test and was abandoned that's the with that you know some envoy I guess hanging out wandering around scolding them from time to time so very strange very strange man and you know what I what I really loved about the Binding of Isaac among many things one of my favorite video games ever made I put it up there with Eldon Ring I put it up there with like it's one of the top best games it's a high owner I also

really like I'll drink oh I bet you do because you are you got some darkness in you Edmund and and and the the uh but that's what I I the binding of Isaac it's got so many bit satanic biblical references in it it it's it I it feel it always felt satanic to me that game not that you're satanic or intentionally made a satanic game and I'm not saying satanic in the pejorative either but it you know it it had an occult sense that gives you the same feeling of like when you listen to led zeppelin backwards or something like that for sure what's the quote what's the manson quote um yes you're gonna do something make it witchy yes this is oh god if like i was not a pussy that i would that would be on the list of tattoos i would want on my

body it's true though i mean it's it's it's This episode of the DTFH has been brought to you by the genies of paradise over at Squarespace. SquareSpace is my longest sponsor, and let me tell you, it is a Swiss Army knife if you want to do anything online. Want to build a website? No problem. You want the help of a super advanced AI to help you build that website? No problem. Want to buy a domain name? Easy. Want to connect your website to that domain name? Easy. Want to send emails out to your subscribers, clients that don't look like they're about to have their identity stolen? Easy. The proof is in the pudding, friends. You can go to dunk and trussle.com and prepare your eyeballs. to weep as you stare at the beauty that is Dunkettressel.com, which was made using Squarespace. It's an ever-evolving suite of tools to extantiate your identity onto the World Wide Web. And yes, I love saying extantiate, and no, I'm not sure if I know what it means. Why don't you give Squarespace a test run?

Go to Squarespace.com forward slash Duncan. Try it out. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code Duncan to get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. Again, it's Squarespace.com ford slash Duncan. Use offer code Duncan to get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. Thank you, Squarespace. that's what draws me in so when I'm making something I'm making I'm

whenever I'm creating anything I'm creating it to to appease my past self you know what would I have really been like oh my God as a kid right or whatever else if I saw it something that has danger and something that crosses the line or at least dances around the line. And, yeah, I think that was kind of important. I mean, it was, I don't think there's any other way I could have a full conversation, at least with myself, about what I was writing if I wasn't going to go both sides. Right.

And for me, it was like being the total black sheep of both sides of my family. And it's hard to not identify with the darkness, you know, the, um, The evils in the Bible, which all feed towards, like, this, this well of black creativity, which always seems to be embodied by an evil, you know, Loki God type, you know, causing chaos and mischief. And so it had to be part of it. The duality had to be there. Has your fascination with channeling that kind of energy shifted? since you had kids, do you, do you ever feel a little more nervous about invoking that sort of thing

now that you got kids? I mean, I don't feel like I'm invoking anything that I, that I believe is, I mean, I believe all that stuff is metaphorical, not literal. So I don't feel like I'm pulling from something. I just, I view that side of things as, I don't know. I've always, I've always viewed it as that, like, the, it's the chaos. It's, it's, it's the, it's the, the, the, the antithesis of, of control. It's letting loose and flying by the seat of your pants and just being impulsive and self-destructive. And it's, it's being able to go there, get what you need and come back. that I think they'll always I'll always use

in my creative process in a lot of ways it's well because it's without that in the creative process how is it even a creative process without whatever that alien visitor from whatever you want to call it the subconscious

the liminal realms without that I don't know how you make anything at all and and so And this is, you know, I think with Christianity versus, like, other, like, mythologies that it doesn't, it shows up as pure, just it's bad bat. Whereas, like, you get like coyote, the, you know, the Native American version of Loki. And it's an, it's an, you need it. It's, it, it, it, it pushes the story forward in, in some way. And what I love about the trickster

in those stories is that the trickster wasn't ever trying, doesn't, doesn't have an intent. You know, there isn't a reason behind what it's, it's, it's chaos. It's chaos. It's like, I, I think it's, it's really embodied really well in like the monkey god. Um, the whole like, Hahnemann. Yeah, like, if you let me loose. Like, I'm having a lot of fun, and I'm very strong, but don't let me completely loose. Or the, what's the Shiva one, too, where, like, I have such power that once I start going, I will lose sight of everything and just destroy. Like, it's, maybe that's a form of Shiva where, you know, it just goes nuts or Collie, too.

It's that one, yeah, I can't remember who it is. It's the one that's dancing on the body of her. Oh, yeah, that's Collie. Okay, yeah. That's Collie. At the end of the age of, that's Collie. doing the dance of destruction. Now, with Collie, what I love about Collie, you know what? Somebody gave me this, check this out. This is like, oh, you were talking about this, Josh. That's my

producer. What's the name of this, the Virgin Mary with the skullhead? That's the death. It's deaf in Spanish. What is it called, Josh? Santa Muerta. Yeah. Now, this, this seems to be the sort of, I guess, Catholic collie. and um so the virgin maria i've got i've got her all i've got a giant statue of her in my bathroom i love wearing this thing i'm to whoever thank you so much for this gift by the way the um collie what i love about her is that fearsome that any image you see of her is fearsome if you and especially you don't know the story now the story is the garland of heads that collie is wearing those are demon heads and the um it's supposed to

represent maternal you know you know because you live with a mom and when they flip into like mother bear mode that's that's collie energy it's the energy of a mother protecting her children and you don't want to fuck with that like you don't want to what do they say you see a bear with its cubs get the fuck out of there that's collie it's just going to eat you it doesn't care who you are it doesn't care that you're vegan it doesn't care that you came there to protect the bear's it's going to rip your head off just because that's what mothers do when they're protecting their young. I like that. I like that version of it. But you, you were saying earlier that you see it metaphorically. I don't quite see it metaphorically. I think it's like a, it's like, it's

an energy in the, in the, in the connection or something. I'm not saying it's some, I go back and forth on this. I'm not saying, it's the devil. You've been. someone in the devil through your games. Please keep doing that, by the way. Don't stop. But the, never stop. But, but I, you know, anytime I've been on a psychedelic or something and I start sensing that energy, I realize, oh, it's, it's something that lives in between people.

It's a connection. And within that connection, a personality emerges. The personality generally is not something you'd want to invite to a party. For sure. I'm maybe I just don't I don't think about that side of things is inherently evil and I think about it being chaotic and you know if something evil is chaotic then it's really bad but um Judas no Judas no Jesus no Judas no Jesus gets no credit it's just the yin and the yang of the whole situation I just I just feel like there has to be the the darkness

has to be there in order for the light to exist like it's just part of it So, I mean, I just, I never even, I don't even get pause when it comes to, like, my kids seeing this stuff. I've got weird imagery all over the house. You know what I mean? Like, and I don't believe I'm inviting anything in that I don't want to deal with. You know, you know, my feeling on that, man, is like, I just think ghosts are annoying. Like, I don't. This, I have, I don't believe in ghosts.

So I'll say that. I don't believe in ghosts. But. ever since moving into this house and this is the weirdest thing ever because whenever I tell when I bring it to my wife she gets really scared and whatever else

but I very often like maybe once or twice a month I'll be sleeping and if I roll onto my back I feel somebody touch my foot in a way that my grandmother used to touch my feet in the morning when I would wake up and I would feel somebody sit down

at the end of the bed facing away and then touch my foot not scary like i can't explain like i feel somebody sit at the end of my bed when i know that nobody else is there and touch my foot and it's not scary like nothing about it is frightening in any way shape or form i don't feel the need to even look and see even though i'm feeling this and i always thought that was interesting because i really don't i mean because i guess maybe i'm just thinking about it in the traditional sense of a ghost but I don't believe in that, but Edmund, can I recommend something? Unsolicited advice.

You need to look and see who's touching your foot because what if it's a clown? It doesn't feel whatever, whatever, whatever, uh, sixth sense is sensing whatever this thing is, has already identified it as something that is totally fine. What if it's a window clown? What if it's those clowns? I'm not too scared of clowns that have been creeping into people's windows and touching their feet. You don't want a window clowns scooping around your house. they're goopy they're you don't want a window clown grandmother ghost i'll take but i don't want

i don't want any clown touching my foot in the morning i mean and i'm not trying to be sex negative or anything or anything against clowns i just in the morning i don't want a clown fondling my foot or sitting on my bed you should look could be grandmother could be a window clown it's very dark it's i can't see pitch black okay i'll try to remember but what if i what if what i see i don't like and then it changes. Now I'm, now I'm really haunted. Well, you can't keep your head in the sand, man. It's a clown's a clown. I mean, I guess you could go Schrodinger's clown, but it's a fucking clown in the box. You put a clown in a box. There's a clown down there. I'd rather not know. All right. Well, I'm not going to pressure you on it, man. You know, I got some, like,

I hope you don't mind. I do have some video game questions. I love video games, and I will never stop playing video games and they it's one of my great joys in life and so if you will forgive me may ask a few nerdy video game questions to you yeah ask me those nerdy video games i hope i can answer them because i feel like a big poser sometimes well that's because you're an artist and humans are fundamentally empty and so once you stumble out of that you can only feel like a poser but the the so i'm really curious what your thoughts are on vibe coding um having what i don't code ah okay i am i am i'm designer i am well technically i'm doing some scripting right now but

i design and i'm the i'm the artist like i'm i'm the guy like if you ever see my my games i'm doing everything but programming do you ever get into programming at all like you ever try i'm my brain is the opposite like i just don't i need what usually when i'm fine when i'm working with somebody like Tyler on me genics or whatever it's we're similar people but absolute opposite brains like he's very he's the very structured analytical math type brain and I'm the full chaos creative mode brain okay it works really really well like if you find somebody that you can work in tandem with like that it's really cool um I vibe design um my my whole process is something probably similar to stand up where like I'm getting pieces and I'm piecing them together that seem right and I flow from

topic to topic. And then over time, I fill in those gaps slowly. But I leave the gaps because the gaps are the most important part of the creative process for me. Because if I from the beginning write the script with all the details, then I'm done. And I have no need to finish it because it's already finished in my head. So that's like number one for me. I noticed that really early because it's like, oh, I've got all these ideas and I write them all down. Once I feel like they're locked into place, I'm like, I'm less inclined to like follow through. Yeah. But then also for, and I don't know if other people even work this way, but for video games for me, I need the game to show me what it wants. So I throw a bunch of things out and I let it naturally find

to the where they come together and and then I fill in those gaps and then I find little more more little gaps that I fill in as I go and it becomes an exciting experience for me creatively because I'm always improvising it's like it's really hard to improvise in this environment like this highly structured yeah obsessively of structured um art form but I need that and that's how I work so I don't over design. I keep things open in every way possible, and I let the gaps fill in. So it's fun, exciting,

and the game can find itself and complement itself with things that work as we're going instead of, you know, it's one of the things that, like, large companies can't do that at all. No. Because they have, they have so many cogs in the machine that need to be turning correctly. So they need to place the whole machine out there

right from the beginning. So they can't pivot. They can't be like, oh, right. This game's now, because for me, like me, Jen, it's like starting it out it was about cats and then it became about having kids and then it became about passing down traits and a legacy and all this other stuff and then it became about playing god and like all these things didn't exist at once right it was this process into where we're at and i'll tell you what it's about now or i would like to maybe off camera because it will spoil

everything. Oh, don't. For my own selfish interests, please don't spoil it for me. Because I'm very excited. I've been watching your lot of your streams of you playing it. And it is so badass. So yeah, I know please no spoilers. No offense, anyone listening. I would rather not have a story. It goes places. And again, like, I say this with the binding of Isaac. Like, I don't think everybody is going to get it in the way that I get it. And that doesn't, that never matters to me. It's like, if you just see it as being weird, that's totally fine. too. But in order for me to work on something and be passionate about it, it has to have a piece of myself in it. It has to be honest. It has to be about something that I'm trying to figure

out myself. And I'm really proud of it. I mean, I think it's really interesting in ways that are very difficult for me to explain why they're interesting, which is interesting. Well, a few thoughts on what you just said, when I got to make the Midnight Gospel with Pendleton, what he did you guys improvised this right like that's how you you just yes we we you know it was such a he's so he's so he's so he's so good at doing what you're doing um which is like with with animation i guess the equivalent to what what you're talking about in like a big game company is what i think they call it the grid and so that means that in a character design there's a grid and the artists have to stick that character onto the grid so there's continuity whereas pendleton one of the

things he did was like don't worry too much about the grid and so all these artists didn't have to do this like technical recreation of the characters but could just sort of like make it sort of wobbly and that created a real psychedelic look in the show because you know depending on what artists were animating what it would suddenly look sort of different and And then that creates a kind of, I guess, I don't know. I feel like what you're talking about is weirdly similar to what some of the UFO people talk about, this idea of like, what do they call it? Energy that comes from the vacuum, that potentially the vacuum of space could produce infinite energy. And that in those spaces that you leave, something else emerges from it that you didn't expect.

And if you can be nimble enough to incorporate that into whatever you're making, then you start collaborating with the void or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And stuff, things surprise you, whether it's you're working on just by yourself or with someone. I don't mean to get technical here. I do want to get philosophical, but I have to ask, what does it look like? I'm trying to imagine what this looks like between you and tie. Like, what's the back and forth here? like when do you see the game and how do you say okay now does like here's the next step like

what would a typical back and forth be in the creation of a level well like the levels itself are kind of whatever but in the creation of the game like it's this is the longest dev cycle that i've ever done it's like almost six and a half years since we actually decided what it was we were going to make and a lot of it is like unspoken and I don't know if it's that I'm bad at communicating or if I just feel like like I still sometimes when I'm working with people I don't like to overshare my thoughts because they seem too intimate in some way like the I don't want to show people the the clay before it's been molded because I feel like I'm exposing myself but so they'll just be like I'll just throw a few things out here and say you know this is

what I feel like the game's about, and these are the different structures that we need, these systems. Like, this game is just a mess of systems. And we just agree, we have a lot of similar interests when it comes to video games, and we both just agree on all these things, check them off, and then we just start going. Like, it, me and Tyler kind of been working in tandem, but it's, it's weird. It's kind of unspoken of what we're, I just start working on, like, I see what needs to be done. I'm like, okay, I'm going to, move over and start working on NPC Dialogue today.

He's like, okay, I'm going to start working on translation stuff. We both have a sense of what needs to be done by this point and we just kind of go. But creatively, that's where the, I mean, this is all technical stuff. It's just like, you know, you put this piece in and

then I'll build off of this piece and then you put this piece in and build off of this. But creatively, it's a different story for me because without any of the other creative people working on this like background artists um and musicians and whatever else um i collaborate with these people in ways that they don't realize so like if i have matthias and john write a song i'll say like all right this song needs to be about a king who has been stealing

pieces of his people and creating himself but he thinks thinks of himself as a self-made man, but he's made out of all these people. Fucking cool. So I'm telling the story, and then I'm like, you tell me that story back, but you tell it to me, like, however you would interpret what I just said.

Then they tell it back to me, and then I pick up on these interesting bits and pieces they've added, and then incorporate that into the game. Like, I change... Wow. So there's a lot of that. There's like, you're not from the... Were you originally from the Bay Area at all?

No. No, I'm going up there. Actually, this weekend. I love it when I get to go up there, but no. Let me know if you're coming through Santa Cruz. But there was a Bay Area late night independent show called Fishmasters. It was this really, really funny show that acted like they were like public access, but they weren't. They were on like right after Saturday Night Live on like one of the stations here.

Cool. And so it was like, anyway, they were my heroes. It was like this ultimate independent. nonsense but really cool took itself seriously without taking itself seriously and I contacted the guy to do a meow for the game

and he actually came out he was just my he's my hero his name's Carl Carl Edge and I was like you ever want to do that stuff again because everything he did was just improvised comedy usually with people on the street or just camera and just riffing

and he's like yeah I'm like would you ever want to like reprise one of your roles as like a character on the radio and eugenics and he's like I guess and it's like I'm like try something and he just riffs this amazingly just perfect like like it was just plucked out of the show from way from the 90s like 97 or whatever and he gives me this his name is Jimmy the Hammer Valentine, and he's just man on the street talking about nonsense. Usually it's just a bit where he, like, there's one where he's just coughing. And it's agonizingly horrible because you can hear that he's like legitimately like dying.

Yeah. And he's trying to like give you a news, a new story about a collapse of a cave that caved in on these kids. That's amazing. You know, something like that. Well, that's like, that's the bit, right? And I was just like, oh my God. I'm like, can you do like 12 more? of these and we'll just put them in as commercials like this is going to work and then for whatever reason

he started to talk about something called pinky winkies it was this ongoing theme it's like pinky winkies is giving food poisoning yada yada yada and i'm like oh fuck like we need to incorporate binky winkies into the game so we started pulling that stuff in and then he would reference this guy called dj bill and he didn't exist so i'm like well can you be dj bill it's just there's just a lot of that of like trying to be as open as possible about all this stuff and just let This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by Better Help. Who hasn't ended up drama dumping all over some stranger? I know I have.

It's the entire story of Forrest Gump, if you think about it. And if somebody's accepting chocolates is payment for therapy, my guess is they're not a licensed therapist. But you can find a licensed therapist online with BetterHelp. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Find the one with BetterHelp. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at BetterHelp.com slash

Duncan. That's BetterH-E-L-P dot com slash Duncan. Thank you, BetterHelp. I'm pulling into all these different things and they all mean something to me personally, and that's good enough for me. So I just Put them all together and we get this really fun riffing, long-winded riffing that I really, really, really like. And it's one of the things that's this whole development cycle, like I said, like six and a half years, dude, it's been easy. Like it's been a breeze. Like it's, it isn't what's stressing me out. There's a lot of work. And I like working.

So that's fine. It's never been stressful. And all the people that I've been working with and the project have been fantastic. they're all independent artists. They're all self-motivated. Like they're not, they're not doing this really for the money as much as it's, they're all on board of making something cool.

And, and you know, this is sort of like the story that keeps repeating itself right now in the video game universe seems to be that these AAA game companies are spending all this money to make these beautiful looking games that are performing half as well as independent games. And I personally, I don't want anybody who's trying to make art to suffer, but there is something thrilling in that to me,

that these small teams of people with far less capital are making beautiful works of art that could only be possible in the context of being independently made. And I want that to be representative of some incoming renaissance or something. And that's where I get idealistic or naive. But I like to fantasize that because tech is getting, you know, everyone hates AI right now and I understand why everyone thinks is the demon or like dumbing down everybody. and I understand why.

But I love to fantasize that like this creative revolution is going to happen where more and more people are doing what you're doing and producing incredible things. And I know you're not using AI, but not everyone has access to coders. Not everybody has access to someone who can do that, you know? It is weird to, you know, and I know people don't like anyone talking positively about AI in any way, shape, or form. But I will say this, for the independence, it's, you know,

AI would be helping you a lot. Like, large companies have a bunch of AI. They're actual intelligence. They have a bunch of people. Yeah. They're doing all this work. And you could,

you could automate out a lot of the basic people in, you know, I feel like I shouldn't even be saying this because I know like people will just jump down my throat about this. And I, I, AI is unavoidable. Yeah.

avoidable we're already locked in and we're already heading down that path and there's going to be no doubt horrific things that happen because of it and most of those things I don't think are on anyone's radar like a whole replacing a person's job that's like the least oh my god least of your worries like oh my get ready for people to start worshiping these they are anyway get ready I'll send you some subredits friend they already are it's gonna already are it's gonna it's gonna it is it is introducing an alien life form to our society and what like this is the closest we're going to become in our lifetime to an alien landing on earth and seeing how everybody else reacts to it that's right um and people don't even realize that it's really already kind of happening but

like i said that the but but you know AI is really good at recognizing patterns really quick and it's good at automating stuff that is just mindlessly or impossible for one human being to ever do. And so for independent programmers especially, I do think that there are tools that are essentially just faster versions of stuff people are already using to automate out things. Like you could write scripts that do what AI is doing, except the AI can just, you just tell it to do the thing. Edmund, I'd like to present to you one of these. possible avenues that people aren't thinking about when it comes to the chaos that is going to explode around this planet because of AI and it's specific to you and anyone who's made great art so let you know let's take the binding visor right now and this is my thinking when

it comes to video games in general is that it it's an alternate reality It's a portal. It's like in this sort of, once we merge our subjective consciousness with any kind of media that pulls you in as the character, you have now entered into an alternate reality. Now, it might be a 2D alternate reality. It's not VR, obviously, but it's still a portal to a node of the multiverse. It's a little window into an alternate reality. That alternate reality, I'm not saying it's a literal universe, but I'm saying you, for, all intent and purposes, our God, you channeled a reality, a universe. That, God only knows

how many hours people have spent inside that, just that universe. I mean, you've made a lot of great games. Right. So, so I would, I don't know. I mean, I'm sure we could look it up on Steam, how many hours people have played the binding of Isaac. But my guess is hundreds of human lifetimes, hundreds of human lifetimes have been spent within that realm. Now, what AI is going to do, whether you want it to or not, is it's going to, it's going to make it so that reality becomes fully immersive at some point. And it's going to do it in a second. You can take any game you want, whatever it is. And it is going to, it can unfold that into any, into an actual immersive universe, a kind of Rocco's Baselisk where you, a superintelligence could just drop you into that game.

You could live there. In other words, what I'm saying is any video game is a seed. Right now, you know, Balder's Gate, no more patches, what the fuck? I wish they would never stop patching it. I love that game. Larry, and I get it though. But that's just the seed. That's a seed of a universe that as long as there's any kind of demand to be closer and closer to that universe.

And cosplay is an example of that. People want to live in that space. They want to be in that space. as long as that market pressure is there and there's some AI that could just do that on its own in a few years probably you are and I guess this is the whole core of the podcast I came here to tell you I mean you're God you're creating worlds that you think it's just going to stop there it's not it's you know what I mean if there is interest human lifetimes have been spent already living in that two-dimensional realm.

Have you ever thought about this? You've created a core. I have thought about it because there's, you know who Chris Chan is, yes. Yeah, sure. Okay. So Chris, I mean, is a friend of mine. And Chris believes that everything that they create

basically splinters off. Once it's created in their mind and drawn on paper, into its own universe and everything anybody has ever created also is in their own universe um chris also believes you can combine the universes but um just that little bit of logic the idea of like once once the human mind creates this thing it splits off into its own universe yes um is is um is cool i mean it makes it does make creativity turn into magic uh which is neat Yeah. Yeah.

But I mean, it's beyond my understanding. So it's just words to me. Well, you're a wizard. I mean, you know, like I've been around wizards. I know what they're like. Pendleton's a wizard too. I'm sorry if you somehow see this Pendleton, but that's my feeling. And it's cool.

I mean, it is magic. And, you know, magic, all these words are just, they are just words. You know, but truly, what is the difference? I mean, really, what is the difference between? going into some, like, using some, I don't know, vellum or like some special quill and inscribing runes in just the right way onto a piece of paper to summon entities, to create illusions, to create fantastic distractions. What really is the difference between that and coding other than we know how coding works? We know like the, why it's happening, the ones

and the zeros and such, but ultimately, if you're like, you're essentially like telling some sorcerer, your vision, you're opening up, like you said, spaces within which, whatever you want to call it, chaos, the universe, whatever you want to, can then move through. And then you're extantiating that reality into a universe that you know is going to absorb hundreds of thousands of hours of human life energy blissfully spent you're a wizard yeah whenever you say the numbers it always makes me feel a little bit guilty i feel like i've done something wrong yeah sometimes i look at like the bullshit I put on YouTube, and it shows how many hours people have watched it. And I feel a twinge of like, my God, what if people spent that much time trying to create a peaceful

society? We'd be in a utopia. It's weird because, I mean, my interest in infinitely replayable things is less in people playing. Like, I never thought people would keep playing the binding of Isaac. I didn't design it for that. I wanted just everybody's experience to be different than the next person's experience. It was never like, I wasn't trying to make something that you could initially just play forever and ever or would play forever and ever. I just wanted to make something that was so unique that every run would be different. So every person's experience would be different. That's what I'm the most interested in, a dynamic world, like world building, creating a world and making it feel like it's special to the person who's playing it. I feel a little bit

bad and weird about the idea of people and I've wrestled with it for a while until like I started to get emails of people saying like somebody in my family passed away and I want to thank you because it made the time pass faster yes and like that it's a weird thing to think of but that's yeah that's like it that's good I'm down with that like I'm down with that kind of escape isn't guess oh let me let me try to soothe you wizard let me just try because the last thing you need to be doing is feeling guilt here's the thing not to get all like anarchist on you or anything like this capitalist systems create a method of quantification for how to spend one's life energy that is 100% based on producing something that has some kind of value

within that system. And so the irony in technology is that the dream of tech was that it was going to automate, thus giving humans the ability to spend their time having fun. It didn't have that effect. The work week is longer. People are working more hours. People are, it actually only seems to have made things more difficult or at least more people's life energy is fully absorbed into generally participating in some kind of like corporate superstructure that makes money for CEOs and not much money for the people are getting paid minimum wage. And so what emerges in that paradigm is you're wasting your time playing games, man. You need to be out there fucking slaving, grinding.

Dude, I wake up at 4 a.m. I hit my balls with a fucking hammer. I jump in ice cold, fucking water. I start doing fucking push-ups, and then I hit my Excel spreadsheets and start making sales calls. And then I snort Adderall

when I get too fucking sleepy. And that's what I do, because that's why I have all this money. But truly, it's like, what's, a lot of people don't have access. many of us live in cities, urban areas, and we don't have the luxury of taking a nice fucking Appalachian Trail hike. We don't get to go into nature or spulunking or into caves

or, you know, anywhere fucking cool. And so video games create this environmentally, incredibly sound way for people to take many vacations that we need. Because if we're not supposed to play video games and we're not supposed to have any kind of recreational activity that doesn't fit into the capitalist fucking paradigm then this is hell then we live in hell then our entire life should only be spent for a reason and that reason needs to be the bottom line making money self-improvement and that's sad as fuck so no sir don't feel you should feel happy about those those hours those hours because those are you know what those were those are hours not spent in some dreary fucking cubicle with shitty fucking lighting those are hours not spent hopefully not spent in a long

commute those you know what I mean those are hours spent yeah in joy and fun and I I trust me because I love video guys I don't make them but I've really spun through the guilt stuff with it And I've, my final assessment is I'm getting to participate in art. I'm getting to experience this new form of art. And it's like live, it's a shared dream. I'm playing silk song right now. I love to think I'm sharing this dream with all these other people. And so no, please, Edmund, I'm sorry.

I went on too long with that, but please never. We just don't want you to stop. Well, I don't know, I don't know if I'd ever stop from that amount of it. I mean, I'll stop when it's not fun anymore. Right. But that's not making it not fun. It's just... Tell me about Mugenics, though.

Like, I've seen some clips of it. I don't want to ruin it. I don't want any spoilers. I'm thrilled because the type of game it is means that, like, I'm not going to need a PlayStation controller for it, which I love. I love to... You can if you want. We're adding game set pad support, but no, you don't... You can use mouse or even a touchscreen, so...

But what's the... So what is the, like... What's the pitch? What's the, what's the pitch? I'm terrible at the pitch. Like it's, uh,

it is cat D&D. And I don't think I'm supposed to say D&D. It's a cat RPG. You can't say D&D anymore. What's happened to our world? I don't know. I don't know if I can like market a game saying.

Oh, no, it's an RPG. It's a, it's a cat RPG. That's right. It's not D and D. I don't know, like, it's, um, it pulls from so many different genres into one, but really it's, um, you ever played Magic the Gathering? Yeah, fuck yeah. Okay, so Magic is my favorite game.

Okay. I'm more inspired by board games currently than video games. I pull a lot, and I think there's a lot of designers. You'll see, you're going to notice that a lot. Like, Bellatro's another one that's like, very much not inspired by video games as much as actual physical games. But I love magic. And Richard Garfield's philosophy when making magic was to come up with a bunch of systems that all work into one in this rule set, right? And then if the logic was if you made enough cards that were unique and enough ways to win, you could allow people some creativity over their deck.

Yeah. And they could play it how they want to play it. And they came up with a bunch of names that like Spike and whatever else. The different types of players that I play, I play magic because I want to win. I'm competitive. I play magic because I want to be controlling. I play magic because I just want to make memes, you know? Yeah.

I play it for the chaos, like all these different personality types that play the game. And he allowed for enough of those mechanics to be in the game to allow them for you to do that as you wished. And that is the foundation of Mugenics, where. it is a game i mean at its core it's it's a um it's a simulation that where where you've got these cats they share dna they breed they do whatever all the stuff's there birth defects um you know inbreeding they the cats hate or love each other they can bond you know they have a horniness value and a libido value and a gay value and all these things yeah collide um then you take these cats out on adventures you class them like you would in any RPG and um you go further away

from home so you can get food to survive to continue rolling the dice and breeding in this house that you slowly upgrade over time so cool you make friends with the people around town who give you things in return for cats so they become a resource in the game okay okay so let's say I've got like two different cats that have some set of traits I've got cat eggs I've got cat eggs it's got traits that I like for whatever build I have and then I have cat B also has traits that I like and the goal one of the goals would be to figure out a way to get those cats to mate yeah to produce offspring and so what are the methods in the game to to get cats to hump well number one you want this is an ability that you will gain you'll learn you'll you'll you'll learn from one of the characters in the game you get gay dar so that's that's a big one is the cat gay and how gay is it maybe it's just by or a certain pass a certain threshold that's gay the gay cat will still mate with a straight cat if the gay cat is horny enough okay yep um that checks out the

the factors that's how it kind of works that um how how do you affect that um put number one put them in a room together alone. So there's no distractions, nothing else. Make sure that the cats have not bonded with another cat because once a cat has sex with another cat, there's a chance that they are bonded. And they can just be permanently bonded for life. Okay. And that makes it really hard, again, unless someone's very charismatic and the other cat is very... You can't unbond them. There's not some way to... No, and it happens sometimes because then the bonded cat will die. And then it'll be really hard to breed, you know, that's just life. This game is awesome.

Please release it. I can't wait. I can't wait till February, man. This is like, oh my, oh my God. Like, how do you code that? It's not that crazy. Like, there's just a few variables in play, but. This episode of the DTFH has been supported by True Classic T's.

Dang it, I'm in a hotel room in San Francisco, which is why you can't see my beautiful face. But if you could see me, I'm wearing a true classic tea, and I love them. It's my favorite t-shirts, and I am a t-shirt snob. in fact maybe the way i feel about t-shirts maybe it means i'm a little on the neurodivergent part of consciousness because if i'm wearing the wrong kind of t-shirt it bums me out i don't like it feels like i wrap sandpaper all over my body who knows maybe i just have sensitive moves regardless true classic t's is the perfect t-shirt and if you're a t-shirt man or lady as I am, you know what it means. You know what it means when you realize that you're

going to be wearing your favorite t-shirt today. That's how you will feel every time you put on a true classic tea. So forget overpriced designer brands. Skip the cheap throwaway stuff. True classic is built for comfort, built to last, and built to give back. I had a conversation with the leader of True Classic T's. And after I told him what had happened to my hometown of Asheville, he immediately donated an insane amount of money to them. These people are the real thing, man. You can find them at Amazon, Target, Costco, Sam's Club.

But if you want to do me a good one, why don't you get it at Trueclic.com. forward slash duncan that's trueclassic.com ford slash duncan to try them out for yourself thank you true classic you you want to put furniture in the room that is comfortable you know you don't want to put like, like, a wooden, wouldn't, wouldn't, a piece of wooden furniture with, right, shit sticking out of it or whatever, right, comfortable furniture, whatever else. We're currently working on, on the, the, the, the, the, the gay factor of this, because we want you to be able to, like I said, like the Richard, this is the Richard Garfield

design for gay cats. Um, wanted there to be the logic. There's a lot of like, oh, this is logical, right? And then we go with it. The logic of, the logic of, Well, what if you have a cat? What if you have a whole house full of gay cats? Yeah. What then? You can't get anything from that. Right.

And, uh, uh, but we're adding a gay party house. So whenever a two gay cats mate, uh, it raises the chance of a stray cat that is gay, um, appearing on your doorstep that shares the same, uh, values as the cats that had sex. So if, if a cat, a gay cat that is a fighter that is retired and has a fighter ability, has sex with another cat that also is a fighter or whatever, the chance of a gay cat appearing with a fighter ability because he's like, hey, I like fighters will appear. Yeah, this is the game.

Like it tracks like. Like it tracks like. Yeah. But yeah, it's fun to be in a situation where I get people yelling woke. and then problematic at me from both sides. Oh, my God. That is so fucking funny. You are going to get, oh, my, you can't win.

You can't win because, like, yeah, on one side, you're like, oh, my God, Edmund, look at him, sold out gay cats. It's like, dude, have you ever been around a fucking cat? Like, there's a lot of gay cats. I mean, Goppy was a gay cat. like their cats can be gay i'm sorry if you you know there's just no way to that you're going to be able to make a game about cats where some of the cats aren't gay and that is so crazy that other people are going to be like dude you can't like what you're insinuating here about like gayness is

not okay like yeah so i think you know what i think what what happens there is it's like matter and anti matter i think because the two sides are going to collide and extinguish the controversy it's like it's balance yeah i'm not i'm not i'm not worried about it like it's it is what it is it's it's pretty interesting though because i get to throw i get to throw a lot of hooks out there and and see just to kind of gauge the waters you know what i mean and one of the recent was the game has a lot the game has a lot of disorders in it and disorders are an important part of why i made this game you know what do you what when you've got a a a kid born with a disorder and the disorder is the disorder you pass down to them in real life you've got to work with

what you've got that's right i mean there are positives to almost all of them and in meugenics that is the reality as well so i wanted to pull from that and we were tiptoeing around a lot of things and then we just dove right into autism yeah it was like the design that i had for autism was such a good design like it was it's uh you know plus intelligence minus charisma the abilities that the cat is born with they're very good at very efficient at but everything else is very hard for them yeah um perfect design i really loved it but it was like are people going to get mad about this like is this something like this is kind of left field like what do we do here but this is i have to do this like it just feels like i have to do this and i put it out there and everyone's just

like fuck yeah yeah man like i've i have autism and this is perfectly you know encapsulating who i am and yeah and then it was just like you gotta add this and this disorder that i have and also there's yeah we had already we had already done them all um but uh it was uh it was very fun to design it felt correct i really like the theme of hardship with silver lining where you have to pivot and work with what you've got um because i don't know it's very satisfying and it feels more true to life you know every child deserves to splash to laugh to share adventures with friends to feel like they belong but for some that joy comes with a price tag that's beyond their reach help the ymCA bring its transformative programs to those who can't afford them because connections

cannonballs and confidence should never be out of reach donate today to your local YMCA I'm sorry I hate it I'm sorry I'm going to just say you're a genius man and we're so lucky you're making these things because like everything you just described it's just

I'm going to get so lost in this game you get to name your own cats right you get to name them no we we cut that we cut that feature when we realized that the randomized names gave character to the to each cat it was really it was really interesting we'd get these situations where people would put a personality to a name and it was just naturally happening all the time right and then

in in our personal experience with games where you know keep in mind that you're going to be breeding thousands of cats you're not going to want to name them all right that if you do after the first five or six you're going to start calling them guppy two guppy three guppy four you know what Okay, let me stop you there. Call to the Lamb. You could name your followers. And at first... How many could you do?

No. If first you're like, I want to name these after all my friends. And then you're like, I don't have an out of friends. And then you just feel sad. Yeah, yeah. People want the feature and they've talked to us about it too, but I'm sticking to my guns because I've seen it's really common, like in our testing server and stuff,

that people will be like, oh, check out Gibby, like this cat. I love this cat. And it's just like there's a personality that goes to the name that you just associate with the cat. And then there's just coincidences that happen along the way that the cat happens to be fat or whatever else. You know, that just it works out really well. No, no, no.

I get it, man. No, I totally get it. I honestly, like when I was looking at your feed showing the game, I was thinking like, I want to name my cats. And now that you're describing it that way, I'm remembering Colt of the Lamb when I, like, you just, I'm not going to spend, I don't want to spend too much time naming things. It just ends up eating into your, into the, into the gameplay itself.

I get that. What about, um, any multiplayer, any trading of cats, any, any, like if I have a cat, can I trade it to someone online? Um, no, not, not at launch for sure. I mean, we've, we've discussed the possibility as if this game does really well and has a huge fan base, we can do DLC in the future and maybe hold on I lost you your audio cut out for some reason do your headphones

die I can hear myself okay there that's better just the last sentence do you mind repeating that I'm sorry sure you can still hear me right yep okay you're sorry your your your volume went up for me since you came back so I lowered my volume and I couldn't hear myself but

okay what was I saying trading cats trading cats oh online functionality is something we've discussed it's not going to be there at launch. Absolutely not. And we could possibly explore in a DLC, but it wasn't there from the beginning.

It wasn't part of the plan. And it will turn into a Pokemon situation. I don't know if you got into that. But like, basically, another key piece of the puzzle for this game is that eventually, in the first act of the game, we dance around mutations. You might see birth defects,

which are negative mutations. They're just bad. Yeah. But you may run into a vat of acid or toxic waste or whatever that if you successfully ingest and could process it could mutate the cat in some way. And then the mutation is now in the DNA. And when you breed cats, you can then breed into this mutation. And the mutations can be pretty swingy, like really big buffs of strength or abilities

like webbed feet like walking on water and that sort of stuff too and in the end so like my current my current gameplay save my main one has about 200 hours currently and I'm at the end of the game um and my cats look monstrous so the end the end game you have this process like this long process of mutating your cats and we've got the whole like we you can actually like go in and look at the family tree and see like whole generations and everything. It's easy to see inbreeding when you see the square. But the man, but

the end game is to have these really freaky things that don't even resemble cats anymore. And if we had trading, that's all it would be. Like, it would just be like, oh, you want, do you want to have my, my nine horned beast cat that, you know,

that doesn't have a body or, you know, whatever, like. Ha ha, dude, this is so cool. Well, look, man. um i want to i want to help like do you can people do pre-orders like i'm sure you guys when you're doing like what can we do to help i mean just like i guess wish list on steam okay search meugenics okay which is a play on eugenics which certain websites will say that is a problematic name yeah and to that i say yeah that's the fucking point that's the point yeah

i don't think there's a reason if anybody keeps if anybody's called that if anybody gets up tight about this game you're out of your fucking mind this is we're so lucky and i i'm pre-ordering it as soon as i get off this call with you and i just cannot wait emman thank you for your time thank you for making this game six years dude it's almost over you're at the finish line congratulations it's exciting i'm really looking forward to seeing people play it that's me too that's my number one i can't wait all right well thank you emman you are the best all the links you need to Muginix, Mr. Mugelan's Twitter, and to connect with this genius, wizard will be down below. Thank you so much.

That was Edmund McMillan, everybody. You can go on Steam and put Muginix on your wish list. That'd be a really nice thing to do, seeing us how this sweet wizard just spent an hour with my appy ass. If you want commercial-free episodes of the DTFH, go to YouTube.com forward slash Duncan, I don't know, Google my podcast on YouTube, I should know the name of it, but I don't know what it is. DTFH on YouTube, I don't know. I don't know. I want to be covered in moss. I want to be covered in moss, like some kind of dryad, perched above a beautiful babbling brook with butterflies landing on my outstretched arms. I don't want to know my YouTube URL. Hope you guys are doing great. Hang in there.

things are going to be fine. I love you and I'll see you next week.