Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 48: In Which We Talk Community With Kitfox Games’ Alexandra Orlando

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

Alexandra Orlando is Kitfox Games' community manager, and she visits with us about fostering community in Dwarf Fortress. Alexandra's YouTube ChannelSupport Dwarf Fortress Roundtable on PatreonSupport Dwarf Fortress at Bay12Games.com Musical Attribution – Thanks so much to Kevin MacLeod for making his awesome music available to content creators! Skye Cuillin by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4371-skye-cuillinLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Folk Round by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3770-folk-roundLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Let Thorf Fortress Roundtable know your favorite use of the overflow population of cats in your fortresses. Please send an email to, Eurist, at D-F-Roundable.com. That's UR-I-ST at D-F Roundtable.com. Now, enjoy the show. Welcome to Dwarfortress Roundtable. on table, bringing you Dwarven Archery Talk since 2019. The date is March 28th, 2021. I'm Jonathan.

I'm Roland. Hello, I'm Tony. We have with us today, Alexandra Orlando. She is the community manager for Kit Fox Games. Welcome, Alexandra. Hello. Here we are to talk today about a game that Kit Fox has acquired some interest in. Yeah, so maybe I can.

explain a little bit about Kit Fox. I don't know how much y'all talk about it on the show. We talk about it quite a bit whenever we have a picture drop that is going to be from the Dwarfortes steam release. But yeah, we don't know much beyond that. Tanya Shorts the, does she own it? Yeah, she's the CEO and she co-founded the studio as well. So yeah, she's like definitely the owner.

Well, I immediately have very positive feelings about Kit Fox because they've picked up on such a great game. So obviously, very bright people working there with excellent ideas. So I'd love to hear more about it. Yeah, and I think maybe it's worth even just explaining, like, what I do and kind of like how it works as far as the relationship between Kit Fox and maybe even just, like, Tarn and the development team behind War Fortress. Yeah, that'd be great.

That would be fantastic. So Kit Fox makes games, but they also publish games. games. So there's some games that are in-house titles. So Boyfriend Dungeon is one of our bigger ones that's kind of more famous. But then we also have games like Door Fortress, which we're working on publishing. So we do a little bit of both. We have, I think, six games, 10 IPs that we're working on. So my job is kind of to take care of all those individual communities, promote the games that we have coming up as well as supporting any community endeavors and just like the maintenance of everything involving the community. So our kickstaters, we have two of our games that were

kickstarted. So managing that as well as all the individual door fortress stuff that goes on. So we are directly working with Tarn who sends us all the information and we're kind of the ones that package it to you and present it to you in a timely manner making sure it's all the places it needs to be right away. And that's just not my job, but the job of several people and many other volunteers who dedicate their time. So I'm still learning about all the ins and outs. But I think there's a lot of confusion about what KipFox is or like when KipFox uploads a YouTube video, let's say, it's not always going to be a Dore Fortress update. Sometimes it's going to be other things, but we still are home to the big door fortress updates in video form.

So you said that Kit Fox has six IPs and so is that six titles that they are writing in-house or is that a combination of the things are doing in-house and their properties that they're publishing? It's a combination of both of those. Some are more active than others. So for example, we just released Lucifer within us and that game is finished and promoted. So it's one of our recent games, but we're not really focused on promoting it as much as, say, paparazzi, which is not made by us, but is going to be coming out soon. Right. Which is the game where you take pictures of dogs, and it's so wholesome and sweet.

And I'm really glad that we have a variety of games that appeal to different people. Like Door Fortress is a great example of a very old school traditional game with a very traditional audience. But we also have family-friendly titles and things that are going on the Switch. And just announced Boyfriend Dungeon is going to Xbox, too. So it's really cool to have this wide range of community members. Cool. So is that, did you say paparazzi as in P-U-P? Yeah, P-U-P-E-R-A-Z-I.

Oh, the better version of the name. Yeah, good. Well, there goes your week, Jonathan. now I'm a cat guy you know that that's right you need to have catarazzi

that'll be the sequel for Kit Fox oh also uh dwarf fortress on switch when

oh my that's not up to us you know that right like people will ask us about release dates but you know we can only do so much

the VR 3D version of Door Fortress we wait around just as much as you all do for updates. We're just kind of like, when are they coming?

We have to do, I have to do my job with them. When we first started the podcast, it was, that was about the time the Steam release was announced. And at that point, I think it had been almost three years since there was a release, a game update. So the Door Fortress community is very well aware of the ephemeral nature of the release schedules. And schedule is a very loose term here.

that's kind of the interesting about being a publisher for indie games is that sometimes you're working with a team of one in some cases and with the tumultuous time that it is if something is affecting that person's life then the game is is not being made and so that just kind of it it really is tumultuous and we try as publishers to keep people motivated especially because we have access to the community and I can go in and be like, hey, like people are actually really talking about this and are getting really excited about this. And sometimes that's the kind of thing that the developers need to be reminded of too is that they're kind of looking at the screen and the code or numbers. And they're not really thinking about the humans that are

anticipately waiting the game to come out and are super excited and supportive. And that's kind of the cool thing about my job, too. So, yeah. But Dwarf Fortress may be in a, if not unique, a rare spot such that there is quite a large community of players and fans of the game itself that are fully aware of the history of the game and how it has had its release cycles through the last, what, 10, 15, 16 years or whatever. I think that whenever you do release, there's going to be a really large number of people

who were just in the pocket. going to buy it just because they want to support Tarn and the work that he does. Is that unusual? I think that there's people have a very personal connection to developers. I mean, you would call that like auturistic where you have like this one vision, visionary creator of a game and their sort of their personal stamp is seen throughout. And you can definitely say that about Door Fortress and Tarn because of just even the language and his updates being very personal.

and coming from his voice, it's definitely more of a face than another game, like something coming out of Sony Studios, for example, right? Like, what's the, who's the face of that? You don't know. But it doesn't always have to be small games. If you think of Kojima, he's got a kind of a cult of personality surrounding his games, too. And he's not, he's not like an indie dev by any means.

You know, I wonder about that. I mean, you know, it's had a long, lead up. And I think people have kind of broken into three categories with it, I imagine, which is people who are actively playing it and following it. People who've kind of dip their toe in and out kind of through the years. And it's like, I'll play it for a while, then I'll wait to a new release, and then I'll dive back in. And then there's whole other group of people who are just sort of waiting on the periphery. And, you know, maybe they've played remworld or maybe they've played, I don't know, any other game that's sort of similar to it. And they're just,

just kind of waiting. So I feel like there's quite a lot of, you know, there could be, I think it could be quite a rush there. So I think that's pretty cool. You guys have, I think you guys have some exciting times ahead of you. Obviously, probably hard to plan for that given the development schedule. But yeah. There's definitely things that I'm thinking of personally, especially as I'm going into this role. And one of my goals long term is to work on getting the community ready for the release. And I think one group that you kind of touched upon is kind of the people sitting on the fence. But I think there's also specific people sitting on the fence waiting for the game to make sense to them. And I think that we need to work on like converting

those people over and teaching people about how to play. And obviously when things look a little bit better and the sprites are implemented, that's when I think we're really going to start to see a lot of people that really want to play the game because they love it in concept. I know I'm one of those people that just loves the idea of the game to just for all its potential, but, you know, sitting down to learn the thing is kind of a huge task that I have never really been able to do. And now is the time I need to start doing that. Obviously, I want to learn how the game works. I want to be able to teach people how to play the game as well. If you'd like, go ahead and talk a little bit about your YouTube content and what you do on

YouTube. That was your main gig before signing up with Kit Fox, right? Yeah, I dedicated basically a good chunk of my time to full-time content creation and doing kind of all the things. And so my YouTube channel was a mixture of, or is, I should say, a mixture of long form video essay style stuff that I took from my time in school. And then short form content that's more along the lines of rants. And then I have my fashion reviews, which are kind of like my silly video format where when I don't want to make a serious video, I'll look at an outfit in a video game and dissect it and say why it's good or bad. So it's kind of a range of things

and different experiments of things of me learning how to make videos and write scripts and see what worked in YouTube and what didn't. And yeah, so it's a big hodgepodge of stuff. So in your role, as community manager for Kit Fox, are you going to be going to conferences, assuming conferences

ever start back up? Conferences and game meetups and things like that? So what's your role going to be when life is back to some semblance of normal? Yeah, it's going to be really exciting when things get back to normal because I will be going to hopefully get to go to some cons and promote the games that are coming up. Unfortunately, probably not boyfriend dungeon because that might come out before things open up. I don't know for sure. But we're also pretty locked down here in Canada still. So I don't anticipate that things will be back to normal for a little bit. Although I did see that Comic-Con is going to be having something at Thanksgiving. So who knows? But I don't think we're going to be doing anything if anyone doesn't feel safe.

But when things do open up, I'm probably going to be. moving to Montreal, which will be very exciting. So I'm going to be actually working at the office, which will be really cool because then I get to meet everybody in person. And then, yeah, we're going to be promoting everything at shows as many as that we probably can argue for. And I know that with Kit Fox, they're pretty flexible with allowing people to do professional development or going to extra conferences if they feel like if Kit Fox can show a game there or what have you, there's a lot of potential, especially considering Dore Fortress, reaches so many different audiences alone.

Back in about 2010, I think it was, there was a meetup in Los Angeles for Dwarf Fortress itself. I wish that there would be another Dwar Fortress meetup at some point somehow because when was that? I would love to do that. You know, it was back in 2010. If you listened to Door Fortress Talk, the podcast that Tarn, Rain Sinkering, Capintastic did back years ago, they met up at a Marie Callender's in Los Angeles, like I think about maybe 30 or 40 people showed up. Let me see. Men of taste apparently. I don't know what that is. Marie calendars. I have no idea. I'm just, I thought it was like cheesecake factory. I have no idea. Yeah, well, yeah, well, I think it is. To me, it's like frozen pot pies in the freezer.

section at the big box store. Yeah, I thought that was like Stoufers, Lean Cuisine pop-ups or something. I don't know. Exactly. Yeah. I really enjoy meetups and conferences and things like that. It's one of the biggest things that's taking a hit during the Let's do it. Next game developer conference that happens in San Francisco. Let's do it.

What would you think would be an ideal? Like, what would you like to see out of a meetup? Oh, boy. Pot pies. Frozen pot pies. Is that a Door Fortress joke? Or is there you just referring to a room? We have to actually get Marie Callender to show up, I think. Yeah, yeah.

Is Marie Calendar even a real person? Or is this like, you know, is this a made-up thing? No, I think it's like Betty Crocker. Made up things like... Yeah, no, it's a corporate brand. What? There was some other one that was like that, where it sounds like some sort of great historic expedition,

and then it just invented it, and it's complete... Oops! Sorry about that, Jonathan. Anyway, way off track here. I feel like I'm trying to avoid answering Alexander's question about What would I like to see? Okay. Why?

Why do you want to avoid that question? No, no. Do you have a secret plan that I don't know about? I think it's a good question. No, no, no. The thing is, I'm not sure exactly what it is that I'd like to see, except I would like to see people get together in a small conference room or in a small auditorium or a large conference room and have someone give a presentation about Door Fortress

and have people sit around and talk about it for. two hours. So like a whole panel. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like a panel and maybe maybe like the good feeling of these are fellow nerds. So one goes up, talks about Door Fortress, maybe even about

the in-game stuff. Like, oh, this is how I made my archers do what they're supposed to do, for example. And everybody is like clapping. Ah, yes, amazing. Thanks. And I'd love to hear your your fashion review of Door Fortress fashion, I'd love to hear you review some of the items of clothing that are made by the various little...

Soon, yeah, we can do that because soon we do will have sprites. So I think you've got a whole... And, you know, you'd have to read it and be a little... You know, you'd have to imagine a little bit about what it would look like, but some of the descriptions are pretty good. Yeah, I can see this being a whole... Definitely, you could argue a Door Fortress panel,

especially if it's like when we have a better idea. of when the game's coming out and just having the hype and having some of the content creators come out too, because that's another aspect that I haven't had a chance to dive into yet, but there's people that are already doing Door Fortress stuff now that I'm sure will be like at these events as well. Yeah, I had a local conference here that was called OzCon, not from Australia, Oz, meaning Ozarks.

I was going to be a booth that was going to have a 42-inch flat-screen TV playing Dwarfortress and talking to people about Dwarfortress. Me and my father actually laser-cut a Dwarfortress sign for the event and then COVID hit, so it was canceled. Oh, no. That was pretty crap, wasn't it? Yeah, that was great. But now you have the sign ready for next time.

I do, I do. And whenever I have that opportunity to do it again, I actually would feel more confident doing it now because we've had this podcast going for quite a bit longer. But yes, that's the kind of thing that I'd like to do and to see but to see more regionally because where I live, there's probably not enough Door Fortress players right now

to have more than a two or three person get together occasionally. But I would like to see, maybe for the state of Missouri. Most of the Door Fortress community in your area is on this podcast right now. Well, no, there's a couple other players. There was another local guy who turned me on the game, so. No, no, no, my family doesn't have a clue. I think people's families are out. People's families see this, and they're like, no, I don't think so.

For example, what I would like to do is I did actually make myself a, what's that called, a pullover, a dwarf fortress roundtable thing, a hoodie that I can wear. I'd like to see that. you got to take a picture of that man oh yeah i didn't send it right because it arrived shortly after corbett and now i'm sitting on a hoodie and i can't use it because my original idea was maybe going to the gamescom and wearing that and like being there for the dwarf fortress community even though i wouldn't have a stand because that is extremely expensive but uh i would have been there and I would have been very obvious with my shirt, so soon.

Yeah, the shirt won't go bad, you know. It's just sitting there ready to go. You're just extra prepared. Extra prepared, yeah. That's good. Even though I'm getting fatter due to, like, sitting around and not doing anything. That's everybody right now, though. That's like, the world is just progressively getting slightly fatter.

It's all relative. So as far as, like, community involvement, and KitFox stuff, and I only know a couple of KitFox games, but what's the, like, how much do you guys get involved with the various communities of the games, or do you just sort of let that kind of do its own thing or how does it work or does it work? Because I know there's not, like, I know Moonhunters, and I guess there's probably not too much, you know, there's not too much you can do with that, because, you know, it is what it is, right? But, but like for some of these modding games or, you know, things with huge community involvement,

Like, what do you guys do for them or do you? Yeah, like KitFox is in probably the most unique place out of any publisher because we have a mixture of so many different kinds of communities. So the strategy really is different for every game. And that's a challenge because sometimes there is crossover. Like people who like boyfriend dungeon also really like paparazzi because they're lighthearted and they've got animals in them.

The boyfriend dungeon does have a cat, so we have both sides of the spectrum. I do have a dog too, but I just have a lot of cats. Yeah, I mean, like, you have to, you ultimately one or the other. You can't pick both. So we have both sides. You're right.

But then we have a game like six ages, which is a historical, choose your own story visual novel that's like very probably more niche and is not developed by us but we still like to share it so usually what I like to do or what I have tried to do is on throwback Thursday we'll shout out some of our older games because we do have that history now that we're trying to build

and Moonhunters is especially special to the team as well so I don't want to forget about it And it does have co-op. So it can be played with other people, which is really great right now. So it really depends. And Door Fortress is definitely the most unique because it is the most fragmented, I would say. There's different groups across different platforms and whatnot. So I think the challenge with Door Fortress especially is to wrangle those communities together maybe

and try and make a more centralized place where people can go for information. And I think ultimately that helps with communication because then everybody gets the same thing at the same time and there isn't like several different places to have to put a newsletter or an update. And it's just more efficient that way. So, you know, and I know not every community is the same.

And you're not going to make everybody in the Door Fortress community, like, hold hands and, you know, be together on the same platform. But we can try and get more of the veteran players, too, that can help with getting more newer players and helping them be more leaders in the community. Yeah, there seems to be a pretty good vibe throughout the Door Fortress community. But, yeah, there seems to be two main focuses for the Dual Fortress community. community right now is a place for them to get together. One is the Bay 12 Games forums, where is where Tarn makes his explanations and does his Q&A sessions. And then there's the Dwarfortress subreddit.

Where else do the Tour of Fortress community congregate? Tony, Roland? I know that there is a server and like a Discord server, I mean, I am in that, but it is not as as like discussion focused as the other ones. It's more of, yeah, look at this. I made a screenshot of my game because something funny happened. It's hard to get conversation going in Discord, though, but in such a huge server like that.

I think it's like a fire hose of text. Steam, I bet you. The Steam community page, I would imagine, will be pretty active. because if it's going to allow mods to be published, which I suspect it is, I would imagine that a lot of people would be putting things in that, and that might kind of drive some community involvement. Yeah, I don't know what will work for Dwar Fortress to try to put an umbrella over the whole community. It is pretty varied.

The folks that are on Reddit aren't always seeming to be the same people who are doing the detailed Q&As on on Bay 12 it seems to be a lot more technical the Bay 12 side so I think that's it has kind of got another question in my mind Alexandra what do you think about like how does Kit Fox what what's the thought process around the fact that door fortress is kind of going to have a split release path you're going to have the you know the the the steam itch based you know pay and get the cool graphics and stuff. But has there been any thought behind how to kind of manage that potential fracture, that potential confusion that could develop out of that? It's not a discussion I've had yet,

but what's going to happen in the next few weeks is probably I'm going to have more direct meetings with Tarn. And one of my goals is to evaluate the different platforms, which we use for our games like YouTube, Twitch, Discord, everything, and kind of giving a report and some suggestions about what we can do moving forward specifically with the Dorf Fortress community. So a lot of that I think will be more me and Tanya directly working with Tarn as opposed to the whole Kit Fox team. That being said, when we are finished with Boyfriend Dungeon and And when we get closer to Door Fortress launching, we are probably going to be having those in-depth conversations. I personally don't know what the launch of the Steam will look like in variation to the version that exists now.

So it's definitely something that's going to be in the back of my mind for sure. Because like you explained, it's going to be, once again, like two separate communities, those who are jumping on with the Steam version, those who are. maybe going to transition and those that are going to stick with the old school. I really like the way Kit Fox, the fact that even is able to exist in today's, you know, big company game development, Hollywood style environment of games. Because, I don't know, games seem to have lost a lot of soul that they had back in earlier days. just me sounding old but no I agree with you there

completely agree and I'm not old I'll provide a counterpoint to that I'm not sure I think there was a period where things really dipped and got dark and got kind of you know dare I say it EA can we use EA as an adjective but you know what I mean it's like somebody comes out

with something innovative they buy it and kill it and that that I feel like was really common but now I think you have some of these like indie games that are really coming back with augusto like and you look at platforms like the switch which you know isn't powerful enough to play you know call of duty or or you know grand theft auto or whatever but it can sure play the heck out of a lot of indies and it's portable i kind of wonder if if that whole indie scene isn't just kind of back with a boom now it's just sort of what it feels like maybe there's a lot of work that has been done in regards to indies that I'm familiar with I had a colleague that did research at the indie megabooth that was the legacy of the indie mega booth at packs and what goes into kind of making that happen and you're kind of seeing like

two things that are really exciting you're seeing like indies being successful but unfortunately you're also hitting that wall where you have the indies that are really successful and have a lot of money behind them and that are able to secure those spots to kind of be famous later and then those that can't make that mark and so no one hears about them and then no one plays them. So the kind of problem is that you're having to market yourself very strategically. without necessarily having to rely on a lot of money to secure a seat at, say, an indie megabooth or be primarily shown at a big conference or whatever, which is why I think the community is so important in getting those games off the ground.

So like Door Fortress obviously is, again, a unique example, but something like Boyfriend Dungeon was really successful because we have this very niche community of really thirsty people who want more visual novels and can kickstart. a game to make it happen, which is also a large part of our success is just having the early support of the backers who will stick with us through thick and thin and through COVID and whatever else to get the project done. And so we can continue to have people not crunch and not stress themselves out and be healthy and make a better game because of it. So Kit Fox is really unique in that sense as well.

It just occurred to me that maybe the games industry has mirrored the music industry in a lot of ways and that for a long time there was so much that was just out there purely commercial and mass created, especially in the early 2000s. And now there's a lot more indie music out there that's being able to be distributed over like the internet. And there's lots and lots of great, great music.

But for every great indie group that makes it do to YouTube and the Internet and things like that, there's probably 10 local bands that are really, really good that they're just not ever going to be heard from because they don't have the platform or the ability to get their art out there. So I wonder how many poor indie developers have a great game that we're never going to hear about because there's just a flood out there right now. I guess that's a downside of the indie boom. And this was a problem I ran into on YouTube as well. And I know several people who do long-form content on video games on YouTube.

Aaron Signal, Chris Franklin, is one of them. And he has a series called Blips where he talks about indie games that are coming out. And his problem is that any times he talks about an indie game on one of his videos, he sees a huge dip in viewership because that they're just not the thing that people click on for YouTube content and gaming YouTube content. So it's actively discouraging YouTubers and influencers from talking about indie games because it means they see a hit in their ad revenue. it's not affordable for them to talk about or write about indie games. So it's an interesting cycle. Yeah.

Yeah. Not sure how healthy the cycle is. No. That sucks. Yeah. Yeah. It does. Yeah, but I think there's a lot of critiques you could make over the YouTube revenue model, you know, the thing that makes you have to talk for five minutes before you get to the point.

Because your videos have to be above a certain length and the monetization and all of that kind of. Oh, it's miserable. And that's why I stopped, right? I mean, like, I, my channel was never able to get, like, verified to get monetized. So, like, I was not making any money on YouTube. And that's not even because I was making not safe for work content that got flagged and taken down. And I had to argue was educational and totally under the umbrella of YouTube.

And they don't care about that. So it's almost like it's ripe for another platform out there somewhere. Like YouTube could use some competition. I would love to see that I don't know that the Door Fortress Wiki itself is a community but I almost feel like it is but it's not a two-way street really

there's no way to have conversation really on the Door Fortress Wiki But the Wiki is kind of an essential tool for learning and playing the game like you can't really teach someone how to play Door Fortress without it I don't think it's No no no I can't play without it

Whenever I play Door Fortress there is always a web page of the dual fortress wiki up beside it so that I can look up to see what the properties of this obscure stone type is and what exactly do I have to do to get potash so yeah absolutely absolutely and it's and it's well done it's it's it's well organized oh yeah definitely Okay, so does anybody else have anything that they would like to chat about? Do you have any questions for us, Alexandra? Do I have any questions for you?

Well, what? This is not my interview, guys. Come on. Well, but, no, I mean, like, what, do you have any insights as to what kind of things that you'd like to see from me? or like community initiatives, like things that I could potentially make happen. That's what I would like to hear about. Yeah, so much of it is predicated on being able to meet in person. You know, the online conference gig, I think that we've found, if nothing else from this, that it's hard and that we don't have it figured out yet,

even after a year of being forced into doing online conferences totally. And a lot of big organizations putting a lot of money into the idea of online conferences, it still just isn't close to what it's like to be there in person. Yeah, I think we learned it doesn't work. Yeah, if someone could figure that out, that would be great. Someone would make a lot of money. I'd like to see some more regional meetups of Dual Fortress. It's a lot like there's programming group meetups.

In a lot of ways, maybe it's just because of the way I look at the world. To me, the Dwarfortress community and the Dwarfortress player pool is a lot like programmers. and the game is complicated enough that you really benefit from talking to others and learning things from other people who have done it before. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. Yeah. That would be useful.

Amplify. Yeah. Find the, you know, encourage people to set up meetups and then help amplify the message. I think that would be an excellent use of a platform like KitFox. And Tony, you said. probably half jokingly that we'd have a pan that we could get a panel in GDC. But something like that. I would like for the three of us to get together at some point.

Yeah, I'm local. So it's really easy for me. And I know a lot of places where we could go. And I don't imagine that this is going to be something where we book, you know, a ballroom for 100 people. I think one of the nice local bars would be more than happy to accommodate us. So I think there's, you know, a lot of possibility in that.

But San Francisco is pretty easy. So. Yeah, there's definitely like, it's very, I don't want to say easy, but doable to organize something where there's a convention already happening. So you can do something where you're meeting off site because people are traveling into town anyways. So there's the biggest chance you're going to get more people or, and, or a panel at that convention, probably not GDC.

But, like, definitely, like, PACs, you could get it, like, I wouldn't see a problem with getting into something like PACs. And a road like celebration probably as well. Yeah, and I mean, for GDC, I'm not thinking official. I don't care about being on the agenda at GEC. Like, I don't think that really matters. And I think there's gatekeeping there because I think GDC costs money to get into. Oh, yeah, very expensive.

Yeah. what I'm saying. So there's no need for gatekeeping, particularly when you're talking about a free game, at least for now. I don't think that's going to work out. But there will be a lot of people I would imagine in town who already are interested in it. And it would be great to pull those people together in a free non-paid event. Although I just did see GDC is still going to be virtual this year. So that is not going to happen in 2021. Yeah. We probably have a year or two to work on that and to raise the money through Patreon to fly

Roland from Berlin to San Francisco. It's a long plate. Dibs on Tony's couch, by the way. Oh, yeah, man, you're welcome. There's plenty of, it's July. You could even sleep on the outdoor couch. It'd be great. Outdoor couch.

What? You know, it's California, man. It's like it doesn't rain for 10 months of the year, so you're fine. But no, I do think that would be a great idea to get together that way. It would be really nice to do something like that just to just see people.

And I think it's even I think doing some sort of stream would be cool just to see more like people's faces on screen. Like if we can get, uh, some more people just like interviewed or showcased, uh, like specifically major like streamers or people that are making cool things artists. Like, that's the kind of stuff that I think could be amplified really easily. In what context? You mean as in that our podcast could do or for the Dwar Fortress community in general? Oh, I mean, either.

Like, I mean, that's something I've been, you could totally think about doing that as well. But more, I think, like, on my end, like, what we can amplify. But definitely, yeah, you should be amplifying artists and streamers and stuff too. And I think you're already doing that. So that's great. You know it. because like the original thought here was that we we got like just the normal player in here and we wanted to talk to them about the experiences and that kind of drifted off into us

trying to get our hands on the like biggest people in the scene which kind of worked great honestly but the plan I think at least for me still stands that I still want the player in here to give them a platform because that you know that's kind of lacking yeah i like that um i would listen to that podcast so alexandra could you plug your youtube channel and and everything that you do online and how can people find you yeah uh if you want to find me i'm on twitter at alex g orlando uh my youtube is just alexandra orlando uh my youtube is just alexandra orlando So that's pretty cool I took that from the Olympic gymnast

Right from under her feet Thank you very much I'm not an Olympic gymnast I know she's from Toronto as well So there was Cut and close there When I My first day at Kit Fox

At lunchtime Everybody was like So we're just going to like Clear this up right now You're not an Olympic gymnast right Oh you should have gone with it You should totally have gone with that Yeah

Make some money. Oh, they would have learned pretty quickly that I am not. But they thought I was maybe leaving it off my resume because it wasn't relevant. To be fair. I'll repeat that again. Twitter is at Alex G. Orlando. And then my YouTube is just Alexander Orlando. And then, yeah, say hi.

I'm still learning everybody. And I'd like to meet more people, obviously, that are part of the community and get more ideas and things like that. and I'm coming in with a very open mind and a willingness to learn. So, yeah, I'm very excited for that. Great, great. Well, thanks so much for coming on, and we will have you on again, you know, whenever you want to come on, but we'll certainly reach out to you whenever the seam release comes out 15 years from now. And thank you for having me on.

It makes me feel welcomed to be on this podcast, and it was nice chatting with you. Thank you so much. Until next time. This is Dwarfortress Roundtable, and we'll catch you in a couple weeks. See you later. Bye-bye. Bye. This has been the Dwarfortress Roundtable podcast.

You can find all our past episodes at DFRoundtable.com. Stop by and leave a message or suggestion in the comments section for this episode. While you're there, you can subscribe to Dwar Fortress Roundtable, or find us in the podcast service of your choice. You can find video content on our YouTube. channel and you can send us an email at urist at df roundtable.com. That's UR-I-S-T at D-F roundtable.com. Please consider donating to the creators of Dwarfortress at Bay 12games.com. If you'd like to help support this podcast, you can find us at patreon.com slash dF roundtable. Music for this episode is from filmmusic.io. Sky Cullen and Folk Round are both by Kevin

McLeod. You can find more from Kevin McLeod at incompetect.io.