S4E4 – Because of Polygonal Tits

It’s a wonderful feeling when you meet someone and you instantly click on a personal level. Perhaps you share the same hobbies and interests; perhaps you have similar political affiliations and moral values … or perhaps you just have the same affinity for speaking your mind with no regards for societal norms. This week, we

Continue reading S4E4 – Because of Polygonal Tits

It’s a wonderful feeling when you meet someone and you instantly click on a personal level. Perhaps you share the same hobbies and interests; perhaps you have similar political affiliations and moral values … or perhaps you just have the same affinity for speaking your mind with no regards for societal norms.

This week, we had the good fortune of being in the company of Randell Trulson, founder of the Giggle Horse Games company (formerly Neuron Games), a 20+ year veteran in the games- and computer industry. Randell was not only there from the beginning, earning his chops as a programmer by coding the device drivers that we all cursed to hell when we ran out of conventional memory in MS-DOS, and getting into games programming because device driver programming is a thankless task that can go fuck itself.

He also has some pretty neat glasses.

We invited Randell on the show to talk about game engines — spurred on by the fact that he is currently creating his own game engine for a forthcoming adventure game, Absolute Zero.

We say this up front, because Randell also shares our affinity for not being able to stay on topic, and the conversation almost immediately took a turn down a completely different (but nonetheless highly interesting) avenue when he was asked to “briefly” talk about his personal history and accomplishments.

Somewhere around the halfway mark, we finally get on track to actually talk about game engines, and Randell enlightens us with how he first created the Cortex engine as “a game engine that can do anything, really.” There’s some tech talk in there for the programmers among you — Fred, especially, seemed to enjoy those, as he makes a living as a programmer himself.

If you are not a programmer, then fear not: there are also some helpful (and belabored) metaphors strewn about to help the non-programmers of the audience (that would include yours truly) understand just what the fuck is going on.

We also have the distinct pleasure of being the first in the world (yes, a true BSD exclusive) to not only tell you about Randell’s new game, Absolute Zero, but also show you what it looks like.

It’s an adventure game set in space (and that’s really all we know at this point, as it is still very early in development). But every space game needs a space bar, and this is what the space bar in the game currently looks like:

This image zooms. You click on it; it gets bigger. Go on, try it.

Do go check out Randell’s company at gigglehorse.com — assuming he’s got the website up and running; at the time of the recording, he had JUST renamed his company, and all the DNS servers were still scrambled to shit. Giggle Horse is also on Facebook.

As always, the audio version is readily available (subscription links at the bottom of this post), and we have a YouTube version as well if you’re into that sort of thing.

Patreon exclusive content

We would be remiss if we didn’t mention this: We are finally getting around to putting our Patreon page to good use. If you subscribe to our Patreon, you’ll get exclusive before-the-show content ahead of the episodes.

This is stuff that you won’t hear in the official episodes, and it’s tremendous good fun. For instance, this week, you would’ve heard Randell refer to a certain game as “pretending to be asleep while your creepy uncle is in your room masturbating.”

Head over to patreon.com/backseatdesigners and chip in. We promise strive to make it worth your while.