Been a fun and interesting day here in Frogpants Land. My old pal, and former bigshot at Blizzard, Riot and Ensemble Studios, Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street, did a livestream to kick off his new MMO studio, Fantastic Pixel Castle. (Yes, that was all a mouthful for sure.)
While that last chunk of text sinks in, here’s the fun part for me. Starting on the 14th of this month, and once a month moving forward, Greg and the team at FPC will join me on a podcast, we’re calling ‘Word on The Street’. It will almost always feature me and Greg in the host chairs, but in addition, you’ll get to hear from the various artists, designers, programmers, and others in the studio.
Why? Because, as Greg has often talked about, he wants this studio to be a very player interactive entity. Or, in better words, they want to be unusually transparent and open about the process of building their game. (Currently codenamed ‘Ghost’.)
That means, TONS of player feedback throughout the process. And not just after the game is playable. They want it right now, as they are exploring systems, backend, gameplay plans, etc.
If you’ve been around gaming much, you know this is very unusual for a studio to open its doors like this. With most others, you’re trickle-fed bits and boops over a few years or so, but nothing really substantial, and certainly nothing that feels like the player had a direct and real role in any of it. FPC seems dead set on changing that paradigm.
I have tons more to say about it, but mostly I am just excited to get it going, and stoked to have you guys listening come November 14th. It will be live as well, 12pm MT on both Twitch and YouTube. The vods will also be posted in various places, both at Frogpants and FPC, so if you can’t make it live, we’ll make sure you’re covered.
The audio podcast will go up right after live streams on all the platforms you can listen to podcasts on. Free of course.
In the meantime, catch up on the AMA stream they did today, and head to the podcast page to get all subbed up and ready! Very much looking forward to this. Hope to see you there!
Scott
Will this pop in the Frogpants Podcast Mega-Feed? Looking forward to it!
Haha nice one Scott!