0 A.D. With Stan Dolcini

Developer Interviews

This episode is part of a series of interviews with developers. Check out this page for more of them

Featured Image

Players

Squidge

Jay

Stan

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Content Warning

At 52:11, Squidge says the following:

Squidge:

a butt tonne

I’m not sure whether that’s an imperial or a metric butt tonne, though

Please listen responsibly

Show Notes

A great poet once said:

Don’t call it a comeback

I’ve been here for years

Rockin’ my peers and puttin’ suckas in fear

and it’s never more true than right now, because

taking a deep breath

WE’RE BACK, BABY!

Oh heck yes, the Waffling Taylors have returned. I mean, we hadn’t gone anywhere. We’d still been tweeting, Facebooking

is Facebook a verb? To Facebook…

Live Streaming, YouTubing

styling and profiling

and even blogging

Squidge wanted me to put a rude joke in here, but I decided against it

We even have a new intro song, too. It’s called Among The Stars and is from the Cosmos Music Pack by Muz Station Productions. What do you think to it?

Stan

Anyway, we’re back. And this time we brought a friend: Stan Dolcini of the 0 A.D. team. We’ve talked about 0 A.D. a whole bunch on the podcast. I’m a big fan, and when I showed it off to Squidge… well, he goes into that in the podcast.

During my intro to both Stan and 0 A.D., I mention an episode that Chief was in charge of

he turned up and told us that we were doing an episode on RTS and RTT games

that episode is called “The Quantum What of What”, and was a real hoot-and-a-holler to make.

But before we could get on to the task at hand - i.e. talking about 0 A.D. - we had some business to take care of, such as our recent games

Squidge’s Recent Games

• Borderlands 3
• Diablo III

You may remember that Squidge had recently started re-playing this when we interviewed Mike Hermann about RetroMania Wrestling a few weeks back. Well, no to shatter the illusion, but this episode was recorded a few days after we recorded that one.

Stan’s Recent Games

Stan had set up a Raspberry Pi with a bunch of emulators

which is something we’ve talked about before

a few days before the interview. He’d been playing:

• Worms
• Super Mario Kart
• 0 A.D.

Jay’s Recent Games

• Final Fantasy IX

When we recorded this

remember, it was a few days after recording the Mike Hermann interview

I’d finally gotten past the part that I was stuck on - due to my own stupidity.

Squidge:

Just imagine a really small dog trying to attack a giraffe

he’s not wrong

I also felt it important to talk about my one-in, one-out rules

which I wrote about a few weeks back

when talking about the games that I’d bought, ready to pick up. Here’s a short reminder of the rules:

in case you don’t want to click through

• I can only buy one game per month
• I cannot buy any more games until I have finished the most recently purchased game
  • Even if I finish the game before the end of the month
• The only games which don’t count are sports games, or those without a logical end point

With that in mind, I’d bought a few games ready to pick up once my self-imposed month break was over.

What Would You Recommend?

Squidge recommended that I start with Undertale

Squidge:

Unless you want to end up as zombie food

tells us a cautionary tale about Aaron from Underale

and some of the other parts of Undertale

take notes for your next play-through, folks

Whereas Stan had mentioned that perhaps there was something announced in that day’s Nintendo Dispatch

we really do record these in advance, and you’re about to learn how far in advance

The above embedded YouTube video is for the Nintendo Dispatch which was released on the day that we recorded.

O A.D

Here’s the spiel that I tried to read out, by way of an intro to RTS games:

Jay:

Real Time Strategy games are all about building up a civilisation or army of some kind, and capturing as much land and resources as possible. Some of the big names in this genre are games like Command & Conquer, Dune, Age of Empires, Populous, and Warcraft 3

And here’s my attempt at intro-ing 0 A.D.:

Jay:

0 A.D. is all about picking a civilisation and making it grow through established stages of societal evolution: from the stone age onwards. By evolving your civilisation you gain access to advancing technologies, but it also makes you a target for other civilisations.

And considering that it’s a completely free game, too.

Stan:

It works on very old laptops, from 6 to 16 year old laptops… some players have gotten it working on PlayStation 2 and Switch

Squidge’s Reactions

In order to prepare for this episode, I’d asked Squidge to take some time to play 0 A.D. He’s not a huge fan of RTS games, in fact there are very few of them that he actually likes. He had told me, before we started the interview, that he had some thoughts and reactions and that he wanted some time to talk Stan through them. And I thought that it would be a great idea to actually log his reactions here. So here we go:

Squidge:

Clouds?! That’s awesome

Squidge:

I love the music!

In fact, the soundtrack is available for you to stream, purchase, download

and anything else that you want to do with digital audio

on BandCamp. But for your convenience, I’ll put an embedded player here:

Squidge:

Seriously, I love the music!

Squidge:

Battle Elephants! Sweet!

which is one of my favourite things that I’ve ever heard him say

Squidge:

One of the things I really did like … is that when you choose a unit, you can give them different formations to stand in and to attack in as well.

Stan then told us about “A Tale of Warriors”

which is included in the soundtrack

Stan:

…there was somebody at the Los Angeles Opera that did a voice over for one of the songs [in] the game

Here’s an embedded player for that song:

He also tells us that the popular Total War mod “Europa Barbarorum” - essentially - rips off their video trailers

it is open source, but even so. That’s a bad guy move

which is against the open source license of the game

did I mention that it’s free and open source yet?

Squidge:

I think that one of it’s strengths is that you can micromanage, but that you don’t have to

External Links of Interest

• Support us on Ko-Fi
• Our Facebook page
• Us on Twitter
• Stan Dolcini on Twitter
• Wildfire Games
• 0 A.D.
  • 0 A.D. on Twitter
  • 0 A.D. on Facebook
  • 0 A.D. on Instagram
  • 0 A.D. on Reddit
  • 0 A.D. on YouTube
  • 0 A.D. on Mastodon
• 0 A.D.: Graphics Pipeline - How open-source game graphics works
• Spring Engine
• The 0 A.D. Soundtrack on Bandcamp
• Europa Barbarorum
• Inkscape
• itch.io

Music

Links to the music used in the podcast can be found below. Definitely check them out, because they're amazing tracks by awesome musicians.

• Intro music is Among The Stars, from the Cosmos Music Pack by Muz Station Productions
• Spoiler Break music is Spectrum (Subdiffusion Mix) by Foniqz (BandCamp)
• Pallet Cleanser music is Breath Deep Breath Clear (Wu Chi) by Siobhan Dakay
• Outro Music is I N e e d Y o u 私の側て by G.H (removed from BandCamp)