Friday the

28th of November, 2025,

And we’ve just been looking at the modular Dungeon Caicos assets for our game. And it’s not as hard as it looks to do it, but we were going to build an environment for our scene. And in our scene we have Diana sort of Marine, like Soldier in the future is dropped into the Purple Zone, which is a disputed territory between robots and humans.

Specifically though, what we’re mostly doing is we’re in a sort of fortress area, which we’re determining right now, where is this silent fortress? Why is it there, et cetera. Because we’ve had a couple of different explanations,

Ideas,

Yeah. Why this should be, which is common territory when you’re coming out with story. We’ve been here many times before over the years.

That’s right. So story and characters as law. I was actually just looking for a bunch of other assets online.

What were you saying?

Just top down. Top down. Very roguelike in the old fashioned road, but a bit further on graphics of just top down environments. We’ve walked through caves in 2D, so this is in 3D, so we’re sort of aiming high with this 3D, but it seems silly to rebuild a thing that’s been built many times before. And also, I think I paid 40 bucks for that scene.

It depends on how you view creativity and world building, because there’ll be some people who would want to build their world from scratch, molecule by molecule, but that doesn’t really refer to us for reasons of age and experience, I would say.

We can see, we can hear the lid of the coffin coming down creaking as we work.

That’s right.

That’s kind of not my driving force. No. We’ve always told stories and some of them have got out, very few of them actually been made, but with the games, there’s a possibility of making quite a few little games. They’ve got a 2D game flushed in Love.

Oh yeah.

Flushed with Love Flush. It’s a love story about a gda goes to France but gets stuck in a toilet for a whole holiday that’s got winner written all over it. It’s a winner. So we’ve realised that the game industry only has 186 billion a year and merely

Yes.

So that’s about eight times the amount of competition. Then both the music and film industry combined. So we go up the ladder a notch and go to the even more difficult place to make a living. We’re not really in this to make a living, but we do want to make some nice, but it seems silly looking at existing assets, looking at the ai, what the AI can do. So we can draw beautiful pictures on paper, send ’em to the AI and the ai polishes them up, does a better job. Then another AI will turn that photorealistic 3D picture of a robot legs, remember the two robot legs? I want to get them working as well. Yeah. We’ve got this robot, which is just two knees stuck together, basically walking around.

Well, and we’re also aware at the moment that AI is a dirty word for some people. In fact, ed and I don’t a hundred percent agree with each other on what AI is and where it’s going to go, but we are using it for some things.

Well, I can see it breaking the barrier of not getting that project finished. So you can actually make a whole game using AI as a helper to help you with the code and also help you with tricky parts and also with some of the graphics, whereas it would take many years to build the game, even to build the scene that we’ve done would’ve taken a year.

Well, look, it’s controversial in a number of ways, but we going with it at the moment. I would say one of the things that is interesting here is we’re not using it for writing because we know how to write and we learned how to do that sometime ago. So the law that we’re building is

Based on our screenwriting skills

And we’re chucking around while Ed is working away on his computer, looking at all the various aspects of gameplay, et cetera, and putting things together for the environment. I’m sitting over here at the edge of the garage, we throw backwards and forwards things about writing ideas and for a long time we have, I would say over the decades, in fact, we’ve spent certain times where we’ve been in the same room together doing this, throwing ideas around, committing it to the page, the metaphorical virtual page, and then getting down what we want to say now. Just now. One of the reasons that Ed hit the button on the recorder was I was wondering exactly what we’re going to say about the robots and the silent fortress. And at the minute there’s one idea which is it was a human fortress or a human citadel to start with, and it’s somehow been taken over by the robots. And then we’ve also had the reverse idea, which is it’s somehow might’ve even been put together by the robots. Anyway, Diana, he’s looking through everything and discovering robots there. And I guess the question is, are the robots going to be any kind of danger at the moment? Are they out of commission? What’s happening? You were saying something about recharging.

Yeah, recharging. I was just thinking then as you’re talking that, so these are maybe Christian catacombs or some other later religion after Christianity. CCU of humans

On Earth.

On Earth. About a hundred years or so in the future. 200?

Yeah, yeah, something like that.

More than 200 years in the future. And there’s been a big war between the robots and the humans, and there’s this disputed zone very much in the West Bank where robots live basically, and humans go in there and patrol the area with a bit of heady authority. A bit of Diana doesn’t like the robots. It’s people who don’t like robots. So there’s basically racists. And that’s how kind in a way, this is a little bit about racism, just like a few films has done that where they’ve swapped human racism for some other kind of racism.

Well, yeah, I think probably most people listening to this would probably jump to, what’s it, district nine as an example of this,

Or Enemy nine Enemy? Mine was another one.

Yeah, but I mean district nine’s very much, it

Was

Built on that idea of apartheid South Africa. There’s that going on. But also I would say that there is no one place where you want to pick on for that because we’ve done this kind of thing again and again in Northern Ireland, for instance, that sort of thing.

That’s

What we do as human beings, but we’re trying to talk about it in a fictional way.

In a fictional way, though we’ve also got that spirituality thing. And also maybe the catacombs ties in with that spirituality. So we found this asset of catacombs, right? We’re kind of spit balling as to how it might exist and why it might be there.

And

Our story is about a guy who isn’t seeking enlightenment, but it is thrust upon him, basically. He starts off really hating the robots, but as we go through the cane, theoretically, he replaces parts of his body with robot parts. And if you do that, there’s certain robots which have got quantum link to the source, which is for all intents and purposes, God, we dunno what God is, but we’re kind of suggesting that the robots do, which is difficult. We’re trying to jump a few iterations of humans ahead of our own iteration,

And

Basically he sees enlightenment. And in enlightenment, we’ve actually got a picture of that robot. We should put that on this blog post,

Walking through the field. Remember that one? Yeah, do a really nice one of that. The robots were just recapping the story. So this is about law, really, this whole thing. The robots were looking after our elderly, and just like in the film Stray where there’s a stray cat running through the robot town, all the humans have died and the robots they live forever are just sitting there sweeping the, they’ve got nothing to do, there’s no more elderly left. But the robots were made to care for the old, probably similar with this. I mean, at the moment, if you look at what robots are being used for, everybody’s getting their robots to fold and do their washing, which is interesting, so as cleaners and caretakers, but soon they’ll be employed as carers very clearly. So to me, I mean in Japan, they’ve already got robots looking after primary school children and all sorts in, they’re very early adopters over there.

They love a robot. They love robots in Japan. So our guy hates robots, and he’s actually part of the military because he’s thinking they might get a pot shot of these robots, but you’re not allowed to kill robots. You can fire your weapon at them. But what it does is it just kind of renders them inoperable and you take their body parts, but they can do the same to you. So there’s no killing in this, but there’s a severe amount of maiming, but it’s all kind of without blood and it’s all, everybody’s modular and you can fit robot arms onto humans quite well. All that text’s been sorted out a long time ago. But basically he becomes a robot, and by becoming a robot, it becomes one with God and the God in this is all good, same as Jesus and Buddha, basically, you don’t kill anything you’re not allowed to kill, and your aim is to look after other beings and help them make their lives happier and healthier.

Do you think we’re here to look after others?

Yeah. Okay. Getting a strong lesson in that right now. Aren’t you

Sure? I just was throwing it out there that not everyone sees things the same.

We land here, we have a lot of fun. We drink a lot of beer, some of us take a lot of drugs, but the payback is that you’ve got to look after your old man or your old woman or someone old in your family or someone ailing in your family, someone who might have a disability. We kind of are here to look after them or to at least help those people up to our level where we can enjoy ourselves on a daily basis, which is difficult for most people. But I think the robot, the robot’s all about maybe meditation in a way, a robot, we meditate, but maybe it clear its ram or something. Meditate, clearing

Ram,

Clearing a cake, clearing out your case, switch it on and off. I think Robert’s all powered by the ether, the God and the ether, but they can communicate with God and they could communicate with other planets because as soon as they were turned on and were able to communicate at a quantum level, they found quantum tunnelling and through quantum tunnelling as a way to communicate from one place to another in the quantum world. And with quantum tunnelling, you tune into quantum tunnelling theoretically. This is actually a bit of a theory, which has a bit of an edge of reality to it. You can actually hear all the aliens talking to each other. They all use quantum tunnelling. They don’t use radio waves. A long time ago that was gone, so as soon as the robots got quantum tunnelling, they found not only God, but God said to them, listen, I’ll set up some. If you want to help rewild the universe, that’d be great. We’ve got a lot of dead planets out there that need a little bit, that need life on them, and I need to see myself in as many different possible forms as possible so I can understand why I even exist as a God for God’s sake. Well, probably went too far there, but

No, no, what I was thinking while you’re talking, Edwin just gave the very, very big picture to augment me. It’s what the part of the game that we’re working on now,

It’s just tell a spiritual adventure.

Yeah, it is. The part of the game that we’re working on now does not take all of those things in,

But

That is the universe that Edwin just lined out there. And what I was thinking while you were talking is that for people that are quite dedicated to one sort of universal or religious view, this pushes through or over or under, I dunno what you want to say, a lot of that. It doesn’t have one set of ideas. It’s taking aspects of a lot of things both religious and entertainment wise. For instance, there’s more than a touch of a bit of newer Battlestar Galactica, a little bit of Blade Runner in all of this. We’re talking about robots and humanity, et cetera. And the thing about all of that is

A lot of that series that I couldn’t actually watch on television.

BSG?

No, the new series, the Asimov One Foundation.

Oh, foundation.

I haven’t actually watched that. I can’t get,

No, I wasn’t too into that either, into some reason.

But that’s also about religion across stars.

And those things are the law, as it said, and we’re trying to create that because law is interesting for people playing a game, but it’s also got to be the thing that we use as a guide for stuff like rules, physics, that kind of thing. And it becomes actual gameplay in many instances. So it’s quite a detailed process, but one I think that we’re enjoying.

Yeah, yeah, enjoying it. And also the game that we’re going to release is a one level paratrooped into this area, which looks like a sort of wasteland kind of on the mountain that hasn’t been properly seeded or revitalised by the robots yet. And he finds these CCOs and his job is to, the reason why they’ve parachuted him in there is because there’s some, during the war, a lot of people lost limbs, legs and arms mainly, and they’ve found some legs and arms. And his job is to go into these caves and find some legs and arms and gather them and have them shipped out of there before the robots notice. And it’s all supposed to be no shooting, but there is shooting. But they gather the legs and arms and those legs and arms are going to be used by people who are lying in hospital beds, basically. So his job, so we’ve got that big story of Diana’s enlightenment

Has shrunk down to he’s got to go into, he hates the robots, and he’s been told to go into the robot area to go and get these bloody arms and legs, and he’s thinking, what’s the point of all this anyway? Why do we need robots? And he meets a couple of robots in the CCOs, and we were trying to work out what he does with them, because if he touches a gun, they’re allowed to kill him. So he’s got to be careful about what he does. He’s got capcom in his ears telling, guiding him as to what to do. But the robots can be pretty menacing when you first confront them. But they’re actually really good. They’re actually really good beings, really. But the ones he meets are the lower grunt robots who might have a little bit of a militaristic attitude in them, and we know what happens. But in this episode, he loses his, oh, might as well say it doesn’t matter, because playing a game, he loses his

Legs.

One of the robots puts him out, a sort of a psychic anaesthetic. He goes to sleep and he wakes up and he’s got robot legs.

No, and the thing about the robot legs, so

He becomes the thing he hates is what we’re doing.

Yeah, yeah. Quasi. And the thing about all of that is that obviously in real life in 2025, losing arms and legs and replacing it with prosthetics is a big deal. It’s a huge deal in this particular world. It’s flame ego. Yeah, that’s right. It’s become less unusual because of the nature of having robots. So we’re playing with that level of thing. But it’s also, and just to talk a little bit about the story that we’re pushing into, there’s a kind of human android thing happening where some people are very into the idea of having robot parts. Certainly Diana isn’t one of those. However, that’s also part of the philosophy that we’re working with here. So there’s a lot going on.

It’s very similar to in games where some gamers hate AI won’t touch it. They even wrote on their assignments. Nothing in this assignment was using ai. And then some other ones see it as a creative renaissance AI and some creative people who use AI see it as a renaissance, and it’s grown them an extra creative arm on their back kind of thing.

Well, there’s a lot of stuff that are, the creativity in tech often go smashing into each other. For instance, previous to this, in movies for example, it was a big, big deal. Do we use CG effects or do we use practical effects? And then arguments go on for a long time.

Tom Cruise on one side and James Cameron on the other.

Yeah. But you throw on top of this argument with ai, the question of IP and all bets are off because intellectual property is a big deal for creatives and seemingly a much less of a big deal, not just for AI people, but also for things like big studios and this sort of stuff. People are always making statements about IP and then big, let’s call them big creative units of some kind, will happily screw people out of what’s supposed to be their IP if they can. So there’s all kinds of, it does seem like a clear issue to some people, but I think both Evan and I agree on this. It ain’t that clear.

No, it’s not. I don’t even understand. I teach game studies, ECU, I even understand people saying that they don’t want to use AI because they’ve been growing up from being little children, five, 10 years old all the way into their twenties, hand drawing and hand painting characters. And then to see people prompting those characters into life after one second is just going to be annoying. But you’ve also got the whole thing of the people who were successful. I’m thinking about Debussy and bloody, all the musicians of the past and

The

Book writers, they were also a bit cynical too. They were getting paid. The stuff that got seen was the stuff that was published and paid for by someone above them with the money and the power to be able to do, to get their artwork seen by the world. The only reason why we saw Michelangelo’s artwork is because liked where he liked his paintings in the street kind of thing.

But that’s that blend. That’s what was once patronage, at least for a while, looked like it turned into capitalism, which of course we all love always. But now it looks like capitalism saying, sorry, creators, fuck off. So look, there’s a lot to it.

Not anyone going to level the playing field, but you’re not going to be able to sell your work to that and get it seen. So that option is off the table. The multi-billionaires are just going to employ the robots.

Bezos, I was relying on you for my money, and now you’ve got a robot doing all the work.

Exactly. I dunno what kind of arguments are flying around there actually. But as an artist, which what I am, you’re more of a writer and I’m more of an artist. Isn’t that kind of what it is? Whatever.

I’m a flippant artist mate.

Did you do art as well? Special art type?

No, I’ve never been, I

Met a fine artist type physical artist with paints and stuff.

Oh, I thought you meant someone who walked around with a bar and a smock. I’ve never been that. Edward’s. Right. He actually has a very strong background. Background in

Visual arts.

In visual arts

And came to screenwriting as the kind of, if you’re in visual arts and anything about film, you’ve got to learn about screenwriting in order to just be able to make films.

Because as we learned a long time ago, sure, you can make one or two things that are brilliant visuals and lots of feels and are an emotional sort of tapestry. But if you want to keep doing that, eventually you’ll have to look into story, which is what is in filmmaking or law, which is what it is in games.

The interesting thing, law in games has not been really, to me, doesn’t seem to be, they haven’t even really touched on the story. Some of the big games have the big AAA studio games, but even then they’re just ripping off terminated two and bloody other films. I’m thinking of Halo, massive franchise game

Franchise. Well, the thing like you’re talking about, let’s not talk about this too deeply. It opens a whole bunch of other doors up. But I do think it’s the difference between your story leads you somewhere as in film or a book, but in games, you’re taking part in the story.

You are the main character.

Yeah. I mean there’s a lot of ifs and buts with that actually. But

You are given the illusion of choice. But really actually the game, the person developing the game and the story writers behind the game are the ones pushing you towards an end. I mean, we can’t have, I guess someone could go off pissed and run around the outside of the CCOs with Diana, and people do do that.

That’s possible.

That’s a game of choice. But eventually you’re going to have to interact with one of the robots. One of the robots will probably find you. You’re

Pushed along, you’re pushed along the story

Train,

Basically.

Oh, this is, that’s called game ai, not the AI that we know and love. Now, game AI is when your enemy, how clever are the enemy? Can they see through walls? Can they hear you? You can set up that. They can hear you. You can knock something over and then the robots can wake up and come after you. Or they can just generally come after you, which is a normal thing in a game that just, they have a perimeter and if you break that perimeter, they just come after you or they can see you so you can fire rays and find out can they actually see you at that angle. And then things like if you duck, you don’t get seen as you go across that wall. So you can do that as well. But I don’t want to go that far. I think it’s just, I like the idea of just breaking barriers. And if they just come after you, if you break their circle, you’re within one click of them, they’ll come after you. So that’s what we’re going to do in this game. So that when Diana goes down into the catacombs, maybe picks up a few arms he finds or whatever,

Someone hears him, he drops something and someone hears him, there’s an option. The other option is he goes into the catacombs and sees a gun, which he’s told by cap cameras. It’s complete trap because the robots think the humans are violent. So the humans are going to grab a gun, and if they grab a gun, it’s either the place is booby trapped or a robot comes after him. And if you’ve got a gun, the robot is allowed to kill you.

How about this? Diana picks up a bunch of robot arms, suddenly a robot appears, two robots appear. Diana drops the arms and one robot says to the other, oh, don’t worry. He’s armless.

Yeah, and here’s a link too, Eric Sykes and Malcolm Wise for you. Okay, well apparent. Just show you what we’ve been brought, the comedy we’ve been brought up on.

I’m getting the feeling that Edwin doesn’t want this to be filled with dad jokes. That’s for us to discuss later, I guess.

That’s fine.

Yeah.

So that’s what we’re doing today, and we just wanted to show you that last post. So I think that’s, this is a new blog post.

Yeah, I’d say so.

That last post, which is about, what is it? In the purple zone? Something in the purple zone.

Mus Musings.

Musings from the purple zone just shows you some of the sort of inspiration, because AI, I think can inspire you. And some of, we want to see some of our characters moving as even in a feature film, there’s even a big budget feature film. We want to see them so we get a sense of what don’t we want? He does that. We don’t like Diana doing that. We want this other strange thing to happen. So we like to turn left and everyone think she’s turning right. We like to make sure that the character turns left. That’s been our basic toast and jam.

Yeah,

Toast and jam since the beginning where you don’t want, the user has expectations and you estimate what they are and then give them something completely different. Like the robot with no torso, the two-legged robot, they’re like shoes at the moment. I mean, I have comical where you can go, you is just got to, it’s just this robot with two feet that likes high heel shoes. But that’s a little bit seven two, isn’t it?

No, no. I wasn’t going to say that was going to say, okay, a tad bit Dick Emery. But I was also going to say that the slap thickness of that potentially is a little bit like

When it comes to, he goes, oh, you were nice. Oh, where are we? So the actual person is scared to death. Like this torsos robot comes and walks in and he goes, oh, you were nice. I like you in a leads accent. Carry on. Robots. Yeah. So some of my great ideas had been the carry on movies, Dick Emery, Benny Hill, of course goes without saying, and Malcolm, why? Any others?

Oh, look, someone frog it. Let’s add as many things to this list so we can feel Gen Z going away. We could feel the millennials going away, even some Gen X as it goes, oh no,

Well, four people played this game. That’s good.

Four, wow. It’s a hundred percent more than

I could. We’re also thinking about the opportunity of a character in a game to actually enlighten the user.

How do you mean?

Well, the user’s going in here, they’re not going to, maybe they are racist, maybe they aren’t, whatever. And we pull out some things, some values for that. Diana discovers is the user also discovering those values or the repercussions of an action? A lot of people don’t understand that their actions have consequences.

I think you’ll laugh.

I’m laughing at that, but that’s a lot of people.

That’s very true. Also. So I think what you’re touching on there is the idea that you may think that you have a universal view that is always correct, but in fact, by having to go into this world where the rules are very different to the way you think they are, and the stakes are very different for different groups, then maybe that’s going to shift your thinking. So yeah,

Can we enlighten the users? The question?

Yeah. For money

It’s going to be 10 bucks, 20 bucks a pop for each level or whatever. They buy

Enlightenment for money. That’s my dream.

I suppose you can pay for enlightenment. I mean, Jeff Bezos has,

Yeah, absolutely.

He’s enlightened.

I see that totally going off piece, as you were saying. I see that his ex Mackenzie is,

She’s giving away all their money now.

I know she’s giving away almost spite. She’s giving away money to all these causes. He gives

Nothing away.

I know

That makes the spaceship the shape of a penis that he sticks the girl band in

Joing the Pussycats

Pretty much. It was Katy Perry, but

Oh, right, okay. No, sorry. Katy Perry is not Josie of the pussycats, but that’s another discussion for later. Yeah. So that brings us near to an

Angela. Yeah. Yep, yep. Good one. We’ll put that up and you can have that. We’ll transcribe it so you can take away all the juicy knowledge that’s hidden in the pages there.

Knowledge, wisdom, thoughts, and musings

And musings. But is, I think the last thing we need to say is that I’ve just looked at 10,000 games

On steam and none of them have any meaning to me. I mean, they don’t shoot, shoot that, pick up some vegetables, go grocery shopping, whatever, emulator, bloody truck driving through America. None of ’em have any kind of actual substance. And it’d be great, wouldn’t it? If we can make a game with a bit of substance beyond it. Only a couple of AAA studios have actually gone the hard yards and they’ve got some substance beyond their games. But it’d be good to make us have a small game like this one with a bit of a heart behind it and a bit of a point.

Are you perhaps saying,

I don’t mind the bubble catcher games. I’m happy about those

Before enlightenment. Shoot the robot after enlightenment, shoot the robot. Is that what we’re saying?

I’m not sure. Anyway, I’ll see you next time. Bye. Yes, that