CSB392: Torchwood's Strongest Soldier

Patrick Boivin (0:40)

Good morning.

Woolie Madden (0:40)

Hi. Hi. Hi.

Patrick Boivin (0:43)

How you doing, man?

Woolie Madden (0:44)

Okay. Okay. You know, feeling an improvement, and feeling good enough to sit and hit the button.

Patrick Boivin (0:55)

Oh, that's good.

That's good. Oh, so what's up?

Woolie Madden (1:00)

Uh, no. Not much. What's been going on?

There has been a week of things. I don't know. Did you have a lot on your side?

Patrick Boivin (1:15)

Yeah.

Woolie Madden (1:15)

You had quite a few things.

Patrick Boivin (1:17)

I had like the busiest weeks of the past year.

Woolie Madden (1:22)

Okay. Well, let's just start passing the hot potato back and forth.

Patrick Boivin (1:29)

Okay.

Woolie Madden (1:30)

On my end, I spent a good bit more time with ZCOM, aka Zero Company.

Patrick Boivin (1:39)

Where people have now been hired back. Yay.

Woolie Madden (1:42)

The furlough breaking news. The furlough workers are starting to come back. That's nice.

And it's, I mean, it is extra nice, now that I especially have more context here, that like, this game is really good. Really, really good.

Patrick Boivin (2:01)

It's really good. It would have been okay if they got fired if the game was bad.

Woolie Madden (2:04)

If the game was bad. But the game is good, so it's extra, extra good. Anyway, but no, the...

Patrick Boivin (2:12)

So it's hard to make the judgment because we're not there and the game did come out well. But I feel like running the economics of your studio to the point where everyone has to leave for a couple of weeks because you ran completely out of every single dime is maybe cutting it too close.

Woolie Madden (2:31)

Yeah, that's worrying. Very worrying. Here's what I can say.

Patrick Boivin (2:34)

It reminds me of Vanillaware does that. Oh, do they furlough? Every game they put out.

No, they don't furlough, but every game Vanillaware puts out, they put out a statement going, we are out of money.

Woolie Madden (2:46)

Right.

Patrick Boivin (2:46)

The company will go under if this doesn't do well.

Woolie Madden (2:49)

If you don't port it to fucking PC, it will.

Patrick Boivin (2:51)

But they don't hit furlough.

Woolie Madden (2:52)

Yeah.

Patrick Boivin (2:53)

They have enough money for a couple of months.

Woolie Madden (2:56)

There was a point in time where I was like, Vanillaware is George Kamitami and an office manager is what it felt like. I don't think that's the case, but I know it feels that way.

Sometimes you see a company name and then you're like, are you a company or are you just one person?

Patrick Boivin (3:12)

If Vanillaware is limping over the finish line, then the Zero Company devs are like a corpse being dragged over the finish line by a horse.

It's like you did it. You did tech. The studio did make it to release.

Woolie Madden (3:29)

Yeah. Another one of those was I saw the what was the company called? Evening Star, I believe, is the company that made Stonic Mania. I was like, oh, Christian Whitehead? It's like, well, there's a game company. There's other people involved in the whole thing.

Patrick Boivin (3:49)

Of course, there's other people.

Woolie Madden (3:50)

Yes, but it's Christian Whitehead's studio. I was like, okay, cool, cool, cool, cool. They're in the news because they're going to be working on something new coming up.

In any case, though, Zero Company, Star Wars. Story and plot wise, fucking, where I stopped talking about it last time, I was around cycle 23 or so. Boy, it pops the fuck off right after.

I was giving some impressions of like, things are pretty good. And immediately after last podcast, I sat and played a bit more and shit starts going. And it goes in a major way that's really, really interesting. It does some very fun things with the world you're in, the setting you're in. It does some fun things. And you're rolling your crew. Oh, you just reconnected. I think you're...

Patrick Boivin (4:49)

Yeah, I'm messing with stuff over here. Don't worry about that.

Woolie Madden (4:53)

Yeah. And it does some fun things with your character. It does some fun things with just like overall, like how the story advances. It's cool. I really, really like what they're doing.

And, you know, no spoilers, but it is like... Gameplay is like only gotten a bit more complex. Like...

Patrick Boivin (5:15)

There we go.

Woolie Madden (5:15)

Okay. That's important. We're on the boost cam.

Patrick Boivin (5:18)

I needed to get that correct to do.

Woolie Madden (5:20)