Shawn_Clabough:
Hello and welcome to another episode of Adventures in.NET. I'm Sean Clabough, your host. And with me today, we've got the full slate of hosts. We've got Adam.
Adam_Furmanek:
Hello everyone.
Shawn_Clabough:
Hey Adam. We got Christian.
Christian_Wenz:
Hi everyone.
Shawn_Clabough:
And we got the pro, Mark Miller.
Mark_Miller:
I made it back,
Shawn_Clabough:
Yeah. Hehehe.
Mark_Miller:
man! I thought I hacked into your system and then you realized I was here, so maybe I'm just invited.
Shawn_Clabough:
Yeah.
Mark_Miller:
Just one more show, Sean!
Shawn_Clabough:
No, no, one more. Yeah, until
Mark_Miller:
Before
Shawn_Clabough:
next week
Mark_Miller:
you
Shawn_Clabough:
and
Mark_Miller:
fire
Shawn_Clabough:
then it'll be
Mark_Miller:
me!
Shawn_Clabough:
one more. Yeah, we'll just go one
Mark_Miller:
Just
Shawn_Clabough:
more
Mark_Miller:
one more show.
Shawn_Clabough:
week by week. Good. All right. Let's introduce Bo Button. Welcome, Bo.
Beau_Button:
I shouldn't be here, gentlemen.
Shawn_Clabough:
Yeah. So, Bo, let's start us off by giving us a short introduction of yourself and how you got into development and how you got into.NET.
Beau_Button:
Yeah, I started off probably around the age of eight tinkering with hardware, old 486, 586, kind of predating the Pentium. My first legit workstation that was built from scratch brand new was a Pentium, so that's kind of dating or aging myself. But spent about three years just playing with hardware, learning operating systems, and then overnight I kind of picked up quick basic. I had an old IBM PS2 that shipped with QB and I was like, oh, this is interesting. I can actually build software and spent a lot of time with Quick Basic and then eventually, probably halfway through high school, I picked up web development with Visual Basic, Script, VBS, and ASP. Yeah, and then I got a job as an e-commerce and content management system developer at 16, which was quite honestly, that was the most pivotal point in my career. That's what got me into the industry and got me really hooked because not only could I do what I enjoyed, but I was taking home. for that time and for that age a sizable paycheck. And then when ASP plus came out, which was kind of the precursor to.NET and Windows DNA and all these other things, I was like, ooh, you know what? I've always wanted to learn C or C++ because quite frankly, I wasn't the most popular kid on the internet saying that I was a VBS programmer. uh... would be be like there's a stigma with the d uh... and i remember that was like this for the marines c sharp or bb dot net and i'm thinking i'm gonna grow up i'm gonna become a man today and uh... i took the c shop route and and target dot net and quite frankly i have a look back ever since
Shawn_Clabough:
It took me a little bit longer to become a man than, because
Beau_Button:
Sorry,
Shawn_Clabough:
I did stick with,
Beau_Button:
I didn't mean
Shawn_Clabough:
I
Beau_Button:
to
Shawn_Clabough:
took
Beau_Button:
talk
Shawn_Clabough:
a PB.
Beau_Button:
bad about VB developers because I still love WinForms with VB and Visual Basic 6. That was the most productive environment I've ever been in.
Shawn_Clabough:
Yeah, I don't think many people would argue with you there, but yeah, I tried vb.net for a little while because I was a VB6 developer and I actually taught VB6 at the local college here. So I tried to
Beau_Button:
Very
Shawn_Clabough:
stay with
Beau_Button:
cool.
Shawn_Clabough:
it for a little while, but then C Sharp just kind of pulled me in.
Beau_Button:
Yes,
Christian_Wenz:
I know
Beau_Button:
no
Christian_Wenz:
a
Beau_Button:
it
Christian_Wenz:
person
Beau_Button:
has-
Christian_Wenz:
that is still using VB, including vb.net, and tries to avoid C sharp and F sharp and whatever like the plague. But now he's a blue batch, so he maybe is
Beau_Button:
Very nice,
Christian_Wenz:
slowly
Beau_Button:
look
Christian_Wenz:
forced
Beau_Button:
I've...
Christian_Wenz:
to change sides.
Beau_Button:
Yeah.
Shawn_Clabough:
So what kind of things are you working on now?
Beau_Button:
So yeah, I spent most of my career in enterprise space as a.NET developer. It's like Java, J2WE, and then you've got.NET. So building pretty much anything you can think of. Spent time doing EduTech, oil and gas, FinTech. Did a lot of custom software for just small boutique operations. People who thought they needed custom software when in reality we should have never built them custom software. And then about six years ago I kind of pivoted from running my own ISV to to starting a software development slash video game development company with a good friend of mine from high school called Servers Interactive. About a year and a half ago we rebranded that company as Atlas Reality and today we're building mobile games, specifically location based mobile games that are in the play to earn genre.
Christian_Wenz:
Could you elaborate a bit on play to earn? I mean, I know pay to win, I
Beau_Button:
Yeah,
Christian_Wenz:
know free
Beau_Button:
yeah.
Christian_Wenz:
to play.
Beau_Button:
I hate acronyms. I
Christian_Wenz:
Ehh-
Beau_Button:
live in a world of acronyms. In my mind, a lot of people personally take offense to play to earn. So what we've kind of been pivoting towards is play and earn. So instead of you're playing the game, it's job. You go to work, it's play to earn. It's play and earn. You have the option. It's an optionality there. But ultimately, that term is used more frequently with Web 3 or blockchain-based games where there's some incentive. you receive a token of some sort, some type of cryptocurrency for achieving something in the game. In our world, we're off chain, so there's no tie-in with Web3 blockchain or cryptocurrency, so we actually allow the players to earn, we facilitate earning cash. Now, how we do that is interesting. We are a virtual real estate platform. We often get grouped with these metaverse projects like Decentraland, Sandbox, Upland, et cetera. But long story short, you buy virtual real estate and once you buy it from Atlas Reality, we become your tenant. And as your tenant, we pay you rent per second. And that is a virtual currency that once it's accrued up to $5, you can cash it out into Venmo, PayPal, check-in account, gift cards, whatever you want.
Christian_Wenz:
And so what is then your source of income? When someone
Beau_Button:
Yeah.
Christian_Wenz:
buys your land, so to speak, or are you ad-based or?
Beau_Button:
Yeah, I'll give you a bit of info about how the sausage is made. So we have three primary revenue streams. The first and most obvious, I think, in most mobile video games is in-app purchases. So you don't buy the land using an in-app purchase. You buy our virtual currency, which is called Atlas bucks. So you buy Atlas bucks, and then those Atlas bucks can be consumed to buy a plot of land, which is roughly 30 by 30 square feet. Then we have ads, incentivized video rewards. So you can watch an ad in exchange for two Atlas bucks. Another opportunity for players to kind of accelerate the rent is they can watch an ad to boost their rent. So again, and because we are a game, we can't necessarily talk about this as if it was an investment. There's, you know, on the internet, people use terms like return on investment, this is not an investment, it's not FDIC insured, but the behind the scenes, here is we basically take a percentage of our revenue and we manage our own treasury. That treasury is diversified. We're growing that money at a rate that right now is beating most markets. It's not, we have it in like, we don't have our own hedge fund like we just manage our money using exchange-traded funds. and we're able to grow it at a rate that allows us to backstop the virtual rent that we're actually giving these players. And then the third way that we make money is we're, as of right now, we're the only location-based game in this genre that has nationwide deals with about 15 merchants, brick and mortar merchants, Burger King, Jamba Juice, Auntie Anne's, Pretzels, Popeye's Fried Chicken. Our business development team has gone out. We have contracts with these brands where we offer in-game missions that incentivize in mortar and spend money. And because of our contract and relationships with Visa and MasterCard, we actually sit on top of their loyalty program rails. When you swipe your card, no QR code, no receipt scan, it's completely transparent. We're tied into the Visa and MasterCard network. We reward you with virtual currency and we get a commission on that sale because that mission drove you to the brick and mortar. So Niantic tried doing something very similar, but they kind of stopped at like the last 30 feet and said, look, we've got 500 people at McDonald's, but they couldn't. that last, you know, can you confirm that they spent money? We're able to do that and we actually have a patent on that in this space.
Christian_Wenz:
Yeah, because Niantic was the first thing that came to my mind, but yeah, they have I think they have
Beau_Button:
Yeah,
Christian_Wenz:
Starbucks
Beau_Button:
I mean...
Christian_Wenz:
as one of their partners, right, but then you have Starbucks themed content at one place, right, but that's
Beau_Button:
Yeah.
Christian_Wenz:
it.
Beau_Button:
The difficulty with their model was that conversion. So when you're speaking to a brand, if you can't show them or illustrate, like, what is the conversion? How effective is this campaign? It's a difficult sale, especially for a startup like ours. Like, Niantic and Google, they're a big company. I'm sure they can pull strings and people will take a risk. For us, we needed to be able to prove that we were actually effectuating foot traffic. And by having the Visa and MasterCard integrations at the end of each month, we could say, here's how many people saw the offer. aka mission. Here's how many people spent money and here's how many Atlas bucks we gave in exchange.
Christian_Wenz:
So would I need to register my credit card with you so that
Beau_Button:
You
Christian_Wenz:
we
Beau_Button:
do.
Christian_Wenz:
can make that connection?
Beau_Button:
That's correct, yes. So
Christian_Wenz:
OK.
Beau_Button:
both Visa and MasterCard, they basically tokenize these credit cards. We
Christian_Wenz:
Mm-hmm.
Beau_Button:
don't accept
Christian_Wenz:
OK.
Beau_Button:
the expiration date, we don't accept the CVV2. All we need is a 16-digit card
Christian_Wenz:
Mm-hmm.
Beau_Button:
number. We then reach out to both of them. They're engineered very differently. Despite solving the same problem, the engineers were very clearly on different, you know, sides of the globe or whatever. But they tokenize it, we get that token. And then in essence, we get a webhook. There's a webhook whenever you use that card
Christian_Wenz:
Mm.
Beau_Button:
at a participating merchant that says, this card was used at this merchant and this is how much money was spent and that's how we're able to trigger push notifications and rewards and all of that.
Mark_Miller:
Boom.
Christian_Wenz:
I've seen something kind of similar, I think in the UK once with a coffee chain that was then also tied to a rewards program that was
Beau_Button:
So.
Christian_Wenz:
not the coffee chains reward program but a different one.
Beau_Button:
Yeah, so.
Christian_Wenz:
It always amazed me how and whether that's possible at all. But yeah, the way you describe it I think
Beau_Button:
It's definitely possible
Christian_Wenz:
makes sense.
Beau_Button:
and we acquired this technology from a company that was basically doing what you just said. It was a third party. They had built out this platform for restaurants to fill seats in their off-peak hours. Because they were actually doing cash back, like they were giving people refunds, it was hard for them to sustain it. For us, it's virtual currency so we can do whatever. Sorry, Mark. I spoke over you. I know you had something to say.
Mark_Miller:
No, I'm curious, how does the patent protect you? You said you have a patent in here and I'm trying to figure out where it hooks in to Visa and MasterCard's service
Beau_Button:
Yep.
Mark_Miller:
that they're giving you.
Beau_Button:
So in the patent, we don't mention Visa and MasterCard. It's the process patent as it relates to a video game offering missions with brick and mortar incentives. It's there's several layers of the patent. Now, have we actually had to use to defend the patent? No. I'm personally, and my partner Sami will probably kill me for saying this, I am not a fan of patents, but from our investors' perspective, it was something that we needed to protect. We've held the patent for about three years. Our first game, Atlas Empires, which is not a play-to-earn game, leveraged this same technology as well, so that's when we actually took it upon ourselves to get it patented. But
Mark_Miller:
H-
Beau_Button:
if you wanted to know precisely how it protects us, I'd have to pull in one of our attorneys because they're the ones that can read through the patent application because I can tell you right now, in the patent application we had to define what a computer network was, what a computer was, and I'm like, this is nuts. My brain's not wired for this type of language.
Mark_Miller:
How long did it take you to get the patent? Was it initially rejected or did it go straight through?
Beau_Button:
I wouldn't say it went straight through. There was definitely some back and forth, and this is why patent attorneys drive really nice cars. It was expensive, I think all in all, we probably, you know, 18 months from
Mark_Miller:
Yeah.
Beau_Button:
the time where we
Christian_Wenz:
Well, yeah.
Beau_Button:
approached the patent attorney, and then honestly the hardest part is the diagramming, and just like they want so many obscure, like it's not a fun process.
Mark_Miller:
Yep, I know. Okay, I'm with you. 100%.
Adam_Furmanek:
So now when you have patent and you really did all your like, you know, you have all the know how, do you know other companies in like your industry or close proximity that are trying to reinvent the wheel or are doing something similar to like work around your patent?
Beau_Button:
We haven't seen it. Quite honestly, the tech part of this is not the most difficult part. The patent for us was an offensive move. The real difficult part is getting the brands. uh... as a startup getting in front of a brand you know we had in in the first game we had very few users we just watched the game we acquired this company was a stock you know it was like we we wrote a giant check there was no money to write a giant check was basically an all-stock offer for company that was doing so well but uh... getting the brands on board uh... was very difficult and what we had to do is leverage some previous relationships we'd establish in other ventures for people who were in the quick service, you know the food industry, bring them on as advisors and we built out kind of this advisor based business development team. They're going to conferences, meeting with brands, so I'm sure there's somebody thinking about doing something like this but quite frankly you can go sign up for the Visa API or the MasterCard SDK or API and probably build something very similar.
Shawn_Clabough:
So what kind of things do you do in the game? Is it kind of like a Farmville type thing or is it different than
Beau_Button:
I
Shawn_Clabough:
that?
Beau_Button:
wish,
Shawn_Clabough:
Heh
Beau_Button:
I wish.
Shawn_Clabough:
heh.
Christian_Wenz:
Thanks for
Beau_Button:
So
Christian_Wenz:
watching!
Beau_Button:
yeah, look, we started off building games. The first game, Atlas Empires, was an amalgamation of Clash of Clans and Pokemon Go. So you've got your basic, I'm walking around the neighborhood, I'm finding things on the map. Okay, I've got them in my inventory, and then you've got your Clash of Clans. I'm using those things that I found on the map to build my, we called it... Great Hall. So you're building your base, you've got your Great Hall, you level it up, and then you can attack other ones. For Atlas Earth, it is quite frankly just a real estate land grab game today. We're probably a week away from launching our mini game platform that's built on top of Atlas Earth. So in addition to coming in and buying land, the most basic game loop is you can own the most land in a city and become its mayor. You can own the most land in a state, become the governor, and then likewise for the country. So there is a lot of competition. People are dropping a lot of money just to be on the leaderboard and to say, I'm the governor of California or Texas, et cetera. Some of them are using them. username for political statements, et cetera, you know, free speech, let it be. But there really isn't much else right now in Atlus Earth that you can do, and that's why we've been focusing on our minigame platform to drive people to come back for reasons other than I want to increase my rent per second to watch ads. And there are a lot of people on the internet that would say that Atlus Earth is not a game. They're probably not entirely wrong yet, but we'll see. We're building up minigames. So that's what you can do. You can buy land and in a week, hopefully you can play some mini games.
Christian_Wenz:
Fantastic. If I buy a milkshake and try to solve a task to get extra rewards, what kind of task would that be except for
Beau_Button:
It's.
Christian_Wenz:
purchasing something over five bucks?
Beau_Button:
Yeah, there's no task. So
Christian_Wenz:
Yeah.
Beau_Button:
basically,
Christian_Wenz:
Okay.
Beau_Button:
once you've enrolled your card, we show a list of merchants within a 30 mile radius of where you are physically in the world, on the map. And let's say Burger King, you... go through you've got your car rolled user credit card we literally we have a conversion rate that we negotiate with the merchants we have a commission negotiate you swipe your card to get a push notification that says congratulations you spent twenty five dollars at Burger King you were awarded fifty atlas bucks you don't need to do anything other than go spend money there and at the value for the the merchants pretty clear because at the end of the month we show them here's the number of people here's the the dollar amount and then of course here's the the invoice the total that you need to pay us for facilitate that transaction
Christian_Wenz:
in which regions can the game be played?
Beau_Button:
Right now, it's just in the United States. The next country that we're gonna be launching in is gonna be Canada, and then we're gonna target Australia and New Zealand.
Adam_Furmanek:
And why is that? Is there a technical limitation on your end or just some business decision?
Beau_Button:
It's more legal, so our business model doesn't work everywhere. We get paid for ads, the CPMs, in countries like India, our business model may not work because we count on the ad revenue to basically fund our treasury likewise with the in-app purchases, etc. So the ads, the CPMs in those countries are extremely low. so it just wouldn't be attractive to players. The reason we've chosen those three countries, the Australian, New Zealand, and Canada is the consumer spending habits from a gaming perspective are very similar. And those countries, based on our attorney's advice, are very friendly. Some countries are, like right now technically, the United States is of those four the most stringent. Australia and New Zealand, they're just like, screw it. Not that they don't care. I'm sure there's some rule somewhere, but they're a lot more relaxed than the United States.
Adam_Furmanek:
And for the end users, I presume, but just want to make it clear, are there any taxation issues with playing this game?
Beau_Button:
there are, yes. We are obligated to send you a 1099 miscellaneous if indeed you exceed the threshold set by the IRS. Thankfully, it would be very difficult in a calendar year for a free to play player to get to $600 unless they were doing something malicious. We've just started to crack down. We're a location based company. You've got GPS spoofing. You've got emulators. You've got all of these techniques to basically circumnavigate like the core. you know, kind of spirit of the game. We've seen this with Pokemon Go, et cetera, but yes, there are tax implications.
Shawn_Clabough:
So you
Adam_Furmanek:
So
Shawn_Clabough:
mentioned.
Adam_Furmanek:
I imagine when you expand to other countries, those tax implications will be even more sophisticated. So
Beau_Button:
It depends,
Adam_Furmanek:
we
Beau_Button:
yeah.
Christian_Wenz:
Hehehehe
Adam_Furmanek:
are now based in Europe, so we should get ready for that.
Beau_Button:
Yeah, what we've done, and we've tried to do this across the board, is partner with companies that have solved those problems. I don't, we want to build games. So we just recently launched our integration with a company called Tremendous, Tremendous.com. So we were previously paying people out via PayPal, directly to PayPal, and that was a nightmare. Additionally, if you had a foreign PayPal account, there were fees, and it was a nightmare. So Tremendous has built out this basic rewards platform where you can send somebody a link with a $5 reward, and they can choose how they receive that money, and it is internationally or localized. So if you're in a specific country that's not the United States, don't show them the ACH option, because in Europe, I'm sure you guys have something that's equivalent, the automated clearinghouse, et cetera. But we're also trying to find partners to help us with the taxation side of things to maintain compliance. So we'll have a trigger that says, okay, if this player is in this country and they exceed this amount of money, we'll give you the data and at the end of the year, you can help us do the reconciliation. But we haven't even entertained or looked at Europe yet.
Shawn_Clabough:
So you mentioned the metaverse. I kind of find that kind of an overused term. What's your thoughts on that?
Beau_Button:
I hate that term. I really do. I don't... I'm a logical person, and there's nothing about how that term came about that resonates with me. When people want me to define it, I just say, it's the Internet. It's the evolution of the Internet. I am a big AR VR enthusiast and I do believe that the future there is an element of our day-to-day interactions with the internet that may very well be in three dimensions potentially with an AR pair of glasses. I hope to God somebody comes out with a reasonable pair of AR glasses that I can wear that are comfortable because being in VR is just nauseating. It's great. Look, don't get me wrong. But yeah, it's just the evolution of the internet. I was never like a web one, web two. I'm like, what the hell is this? I think it was about accessibility. We had responsiveness. I think my business partner, Sami, kind of described the Web 1, Web 2, Web 3 most succinctly. Web 1 was access to info. Web 2 was access to, in essence, people or social interactions. And Web 3 is access to your data and potentially being able to monetize it. So equity, having some equity in these large conglomerates, meta, et cetera, earn some money. That's about as clean of a definition I can come up with, but it's still confusing. I don't think anybody has come up with a definition. I'm like, oh, that makes a lot of sense. It's like, it's just the internet, guys.
Adam_Furmanek:
So I heard a very nice explanation of what metaverse is really about and wanted to hear your opinion on that. It's basically that in the real world, the span of attention we get for ads is like very short. You need to be very strict, very direct, very precise. But when you go to metaverse, you can actually build an ad that goes on and on for days when you have good placement. How do you see that and how do you think that could work in like the games industry?
Beau_Button:
My honest, personal opinion is that is disgusting. I hate ads despite being in this business. And generating a significant portion of our revenue from ads. Sami, my partner and I are committed to trying to figure out other opportunities to monetize this, but the fact of the matter is, is ads are where it's at right now. I actually, I like that explanation because it's an experience. And I do think for some consumers, if you're imagining yourself shopping, you can use the Amazon Whole Foods mobile app, you're looking at a list, down a virtual aisle and be completely immersed in a virtual grocery store and have little mini games, so be it. I'm not the guy that's going to be doing that. I'm the guy that just likes to yell things out to the home assistant and say, hey, you know, ship me something and it shows up two days later. But that makes a lot of sense. But that's probably coming from like, that's the ad and marketing side of the internet. And I'm not a big fan of that. Obviously, we wouldn't be here without it. We have to market the game, we have to acquire users, etc. I don't have a solution. I'm just saying there's something really just slimy about it all.
Adam_Furmanek:
Cool, sounds good. And when it comes to metaverse, and you mentioned web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, do you think that this whole metaverse is just virtual reality with like smart Googles, let's call it then, but should we expect some completely new devices coming on that will really catch attention and be high flow?
Beau_Button:
I don't think that the future of the Internet is going to require custom hardware. I do believe what's going to win this race is, A, open web-based standards. So I'm a big fan of OpenXR. I'm a Web3. When it comes to, not Web3, forgive me, open standards. I just don't see it. Maybe it is in 10, 15 years. In regards to new devices, I would gladly volunteer for an implant and that's not even a joke. I wear glasses. I am, look, I've seen what they're doing. I forget the company that Elon Musk is involved in. There's a whole lot of
Mark_Miller:
Neuralink.
Beau_Button:
yes, yes.
Christian_Wenz:
Yep
Beau_Button:
And like I'm reading the pros and cons and I'm like, wait a minute, does this say I have gigabit ethernet embedded in my brain but I might die? I'm like. Let's go with excuse me. I just dropped an expletive. Sorry about that
Mark_Miller:
But I'm
Adam_Furmanek:
Daddy.
Mark_Miller:
with you. I'm with you on that, Beau.
Beau_Button:
I'm ready, I'm absolutely ready.
Mark_Miller:
I'm
Beau_Button:
I have the, go ahead, sorry.
Mark_Miller:
just going to say the downside is I think the holes, you know, about the size of an American quarter, as I recall. It's not, you know, at first I was like, yeah, I think it was something like 25 millimeters or something like that in diameter. And at first I was like, well, that's not that big. And then I was like, oh, wait, isn't that like two and a half centimeters or something, at which point it's like, oh, shoot, it's big. And the problem with the big hole If you're a guy like me that falls a lot, you know, biking and doing high speed crazy stuff, it weakens your skull. Right? So I'm going to I'm going to need some like a cork or something, you know, to pop in there to give
Beau_Button:
Yeah,
Mark_Miller:
me the stability I need.
Beau_Button:
yeah, I'm ready. And that's not a joke. It's like I'm willing. As long as there's a way for me to subconsciously speak to this thing and get results, like if you think about where we are with, you know, Jenner Taveya and Chad GPT, I'm like, it's a superhuman power. If you're not effective without it, don't expect to be very effective with it. But if you're effective without it, it really is going to accelerate what you can do. It's going to quadruple if not more.
Mark_Miller:
Yeah, no, I'm 100% with you on it. I've actually been like, I, when the first professor who was, the first implant that happened, you know, for somebody who was, I think, paraplegic, it was a professor at Duke University. And this was like about 20 something years ago, I think, almost, that the first implant went in. And it was like a much bigger chip. with far fewer sensors and the what they had to do is they had to put the chip in really slowly so that it wouldn't tear the essentially the the the flesh of the brain right so they they're putting it in incredibly like over a period of hours they're pushing it down right
Beau_Button:
Interesting.
Mark_Miller:
small movements anyway i reached out to that guy said hey i'm ready i'll take it i'll do it and no response back i
Beau_Button:
Yeah, probably so.
Mark_Miller:
But I'm there. I'm like, you give me that thing, and what am I going to do? I'm going to start writing software for me so that I can interpret what I'm doing. I'm going to be using my brain to write software, not my hands. And I'll be writing that software and connecting, you know, and hooking it up to AI to having it more and more intelligently understanding what I'm thinking and wanting to do.
Beau_Button:
Yeah, a personalized model that is you in essence. So my personality, the way that I attack engineering problems, I mean, it's unique to me. And I'd say it's probably a key contributor to my success in this industry. I'd love a model where I can have like auto GPT running somewhere, but like it's doing things as if it was me. So I'm just getting more done. It's like the cheap version of a real clone.
Mark_Miller:
I like it. Let's do it. Let's patent this thing. Get
Beau_Button:
yes
Mark_Miller:
your lawyers in the call.
Beau_Button:
no please i don't want to diagram that out that that sounds like torture
Christian_Wenz:
So what... yeah sorry Sean you go first. All good.
Shawn_Clabough:
So what was development of this game like? Is it all.NET? Is it Unity?
Beau_Button:
Yeah, so to say that it's all.NET is probably not entirely, it's all C Sharp. The way that Unity works, it's kind of 60% engineering, just prowess, like beautiful, it's incredible, and then it's like 40% black magic. The way that Unity works is just mesmerizing. There's a lot of mono going on. We use something called IL2CPP, but we write our game in C Sharp. It gets compiled or... technically on for android it gets compiled directly to a native apk for for xcode for ios it generates and actual Xcode project. Quite honestly, I hate mobile development, even though I've been doing it for so long. The tooling, the ecosystems, the two different, this reminds me of the browser wars. You've got your Microsoft, you had Netscape, it's like Apple and Google, and then every time that, if I choose to use a cross-platform tool, whether it be Xamarin or back in the day, it was PhoneGap, you're always playing catch-up, there's new APIs, there's just like, it's a nightmare. Nothing's easy and nothing always, nothing ever just always works, just randomly. Some random things will break. Yeah, I mean, our back end is written in.NET. We target.NET Core. We deploy everything into Azure. We're a containerized cloud-first company. We did decide for this game, we dove headfirst into Kubernetes for our orchestration. But yeah, I mean. i can't say it was painful but like that's just me saying look it's always painful it wasn't any more difficult than anything else we already built the game was location-based i had about ten years of experience in geospatial technology so it was a pretty natural fit but just mobile development in general
Adam_Furmanek:
If you were to compare like today's mobile development with what was there like three years ago, five years ago, ten years ago, what do you think really made the difference over these years?
Beau_Button:
I'll be blunt. I don't think we've made much progress at all.
Christian_Wenz:
I agree.
Beau_Button:
It's still a nightmare. If you're using... Xcode and using CocoaPods like the dependency have like I remember back in the day when I was doing win forms There was like a period of time where I thought I was gonna be an MFC C++ developer And I was learning all these different things. I was just like dependencies. I can't shake it No one's really solved that problem, especially when you're dealing with cross-platform. So in unity just like Xamarin I've got in essence, you know DLL Imports or you know an abstraction layer on top of native API's and they're always breaking but I don't think we've gone very far I mean it has I'd be foolish to say it hasn't improved to some degree, but I would have expected us to be much further along, to be quite honest.
Christian_Wenz:
I agree, I agree. And I mean, even if you use hybrid solutions, I mean, PhoneGap or Cordova, they were wildly popular for a while. Now I think Cordova is still popular, but not wildly popular. I think, I just remember Microsoft had an integration into Visual Studio for that, right? So that
Beau_Button:
I remember.
Christian_Wenz:
you could set up a project in Visual Studio and that took care of all the, I wouldn't say all of the heavy lifting, but. of the annoying parts, right? So you had like this F5 experience. The project was set up and then was just building without you needing to install yet another dependency or configure it or install an Android emulator because that also came along. Yeah, but eventually they abandoned their project. And I mean, they were a bit successful with several forms. Maui is still a mixed bag. I'm
Beau_Button:
Well,
Christian_Wenz:
still
Beau_Button:
that's.
Christian_Wenz:
thinking about how did Mikuel de Casa call it on Twitter like two months ago? Hopium around the platform
Shawn_Clabough:
You
Christian_Wenz:
which...
Beau_Button:
Mystic Hope, yeah look, I'm a big fan of Miguel, I love how direct and blunt he is. I've been following him back through his Linux days, but Miley's cool, but it's Happy Path right now.
Christian_Wenz:
Yeah, yeah.
Beau_Button:
And very rarely am I building things that are Happy Path. I love the concept though, like that's what resonated with me when I saw Xamarin forms. I was like, okay, I've got my business logic in a class library, my iOS project, my Android project, my Apple Watch project, I can share things. This sounds great. And then you hit some third party SDK that you have to use, whether it be for a QR scanner or some API, you're like, all right, well, what do I do now? I can't do anything. Yeah, it's, and Unity is different. The way Unity works is very different. But they're doing a good job quite frankly as a game develop not me personally i'm not in unity on a daily basis and enough just to rotate cubes and things like that uh... my my background so i can say back into infrastructure but uh... it's it's it's a completely different paradigm building games and and i didn't know that getting into this i was a site will let's build a game with you know let's let's drag some things onto a canvas like i was used to doing in nineteen ninety nine when i was doing wind forms uh... that it doesn't work like that at all
Christian_Wenz:
Yeah, I think. And I
Adam_Furmanek:
I
Christian_Wenz:
mean...
Adam_Furmanek:
imagine our listeners may have similar ideas or imagination how it works. If you could summarize your tech stack, what do you do? What do you use in your day-to-day job? Tech stack toolkit or the things that you have?
Beau_Button:
yeah i mean unfortunately as as one of the co-founders i'm not really in to i got my new ctn president i i'm the one that is that do you use these days the public school education coming up so i want to does the due diligence on tech tech related to kind of endeavors like for instance fine payment processors you know here's a plug for strike and but The tech that I use, I'm still a Visual Studio person. Half of our team uses Visual Studio code. We've got one engineer who is a MacBook fanatic. He's got this machine that's got more horsepower than all of my computers I've ever owned combined. But it's relatively light, quite frankly, between Git VS Code Visual Studio, Docker, of course, when you're running locally, and then basic Kubernetes commands to get things deployed. There really aren't. We don't have any specialized tools for the back end side of things. And kind of similar on the front end, you've got Unity, the editor, and then Visual Studio. Our lead engineer does use Visual Studio code for Unity, which I think is interesting. But... We don't really use many tools, quite frankly. It's C Sharp, Unity, the game, the editor, AKA the tool that we use as game developers, and then the engine whenever you deploy something. And then I think the only new tool recently that we've started using is called Lens. It's from a company called Mirantis. It's a Kubernetes IDE. I am not a fan of YAML. I just, it doesn't, like, I've learned too many markup languages in my day, and I'm just like, not another one. So having an IDE for Kubernetes, as someone who's not in Kubernetes and can't remember the cube control command. It's like, oh, it's nice to just see where things are in a cluster. But yeah, that's probably the only new tool that we've had to adopt or adapt, adopt rather, in the last two or three years.
Shawn_Clabough:
Doesn't
Adam_Furmanek:
So
Shawn_Clabough:
YAML
Adam_Furmanek:
generally.
Shawn_Clabough:
start for yet another markup language?
Beau_Button:
Say that again?
Shawn_Clabough:
Doesn't YAML start, stand
Beau_Button:
i
Shawn_Clabough:
for
Beau_Button:
i
Shawn_Clabough:
yet
Beau_Button:
i
Shawn_Clabough:
another
Beau_Button:
i'm pretty sure it does
Shawn_Clabough:
markup?
Beau_Button:
with my god i've always cd and i don't like spaces i'm the guy that uses tabs and i'm incompatible with you uh... i like my things to look a certain way and you know what to do with the different way and i just did i can't
Mark_Miller:
Bo, did you ever have any problems with regards to verifying the position of people as they're moving around? And did you find ways, innovative ways, to solve that problem? Or did it always just work out as expected?
Beau_Button:
In both mobile operating systems, they provide pretty robust location-based APIs. Obviously, for navigation, it's essential. There are nuances between different Android versions, different device manufacturers. You've got your different GPS radios. It's a little less nuanced on Apple's side because they have tight control of their hardware, et cetera. We have had issues with accuracy, but it's not unique to us, the game, or Unity, or anything like that. It's if you're in downtown Los Angeles between three or four big buildings, it's just GPS as a whole. You'll see the same kind of issues in Google Maps or Waze or something like that. But yeah. had to do anything outside of learning more about those nuances on the Android side. Like I said, when you request location on Android, you can request it at a specific precision. uh... in for a game we didn't think we needed to you know high precision which is going to increase the number of times it polls for location like there's implications battery consumption etc but we didn't spend a whole lot of time but that that is something that uses report you know you open the game you see avatar in the map and all of a sudden he just shoots across the map because like the GPS finally caught hold of three satellites it's like oh that's not where you are but we haven't had to do anything i think unusual
Mark_Miller:
So that means that also means then that you're only using GPS signals to locate people.
Beau_Button:
Right
Mark_Miller:
Is
Beau_Button:
now,
Mark_Miller:
that true?
Beau_Button:
yes, that is
Mark_Miller:
Okay.
Beau_Button:
true. Now, we did engage, there's a company, forgive me, if they're listening, I forgot their name, but they have a technology that's being used by first responders for Z-axis. So GPS is basically just your X, Y. NAB point, forgive me, there they are. we we have integrated that but again it's something that we're contemplating because we are as of the last two weeks we implemented something that text and this is provided by a company called shield shield dot com they've got a really brilliant sdk for fraud and abuse but uh... yeah that's right now it's just x y and we're using the baked-in gps radio and the the mobile device but we do have plans to allow people to to to let's say build a high rise and incentivize people for being high in the z so elevation
Mark_Miller:
Okay, interesting.
Christian_Wenz:
And maybe
Shawn_Clabough:
talking about.
Christian_Wenz:
spoofing is not that much of an exploit probably in your type of game, right? Whereas in some of
Beau_Button:
It's,
Christian_Wenz:
the other
Beau_Button:
yeah,
Christian_Wenz:
games reward
Beau_Button:
there's...
Christian_Wenz:
you for walking, for longer distances and stuff like that.
Beau_Button:
Yeah, if we were doing like a step counter or something like that where there was an actual reward for moving about, it would be more of an issue. It's still a real issue, but it's more so about perception from the community, the people who are playing fairly. uh... there's no financial reward for spoofing your location but if you want to be the mayor of california and you're sitting in new orleans and you're spoofing it's unfair to the guy who's grinding out in los angeles to become the mayor of california it's the mayor of los angeles to the governor of california uh... we want to crack down on it for that very reason because it's very clear we've got a feed in the game of every piece of land that's being sold and you can see the same person well you used to be able to see the same person go to six different states in twenty five minutes there's just no way sends them in the community on reddit and discord and facebook and tiktok everywhere. It's just like oh I'm playing fairly and here's this guy flying around the country using a spoofer. So that was the motivation you know behind blocking those.
Shawn_Clabough:
Talking about battery usage in these games reminded me of Pokemon Go with my son, because he used to go down to the local store and buy a bunch of $5 battery packs for people, and they'd go to the park where all these people were playing a game and sell them for $10.
Beau_Button:
that's smart look that's
Christian_Wenz:
Very
Beau_Button:
smart
Christian_Wenz:
smart.
Beau_Button:
because
Christian_Wenz:
Very smart.
Beau_Button:
uh... we we have it we haven't solved that problem in our game it's one of those things that we're aware of but i mean we're pulling location i think my intake has gotten a lot better uh... i wish right white paper list that would be unity which is help us out but yeah right now we get a handful of complaints on a daily basis about people saying that if they play our game uh... consistently throughout the day their phone last is last half as long but will fix it one day
Christian_Wenz:
I've got one more question with regards to the metaverse, because I think that's how we started this conversation. And you were rather hesitant with regards to the term,
Beau_Button:
Yeah.
Christian_Wenz:
which I absolutely liked, to be honest. Now, do you have an explanation why the metaverse didn't take off yet? Let me just say yet, because we never know what's happening. So we've been. We might be dubious as well, but I mean, I think it's a fact, right? There was this nice article which I read a few weeks ago, and then I saw you treated it as well with the journalist that was alone on St. Patrick's Day in that Irish pub in the Metaverse, right? Which just was a telling story, right? So why do you think, what do you think is lacking? I mean, we probably all have our theories, right? But since you are in that area, what would you say? What is lacking in the metaverse? Or will it never take off? Or what do you think?
Beau_Button:
Yeah, I mean, I can't say it's never going to take off, but I will not, I just can't find it in my fabric to say that that is like the sole future. Like we're gonna be in these dystopian 3D environments, you know, chatting with people. I think for me, honestly, the pandemic, having been removed from an office, removed from my, you know, water cooler chat, like there's nothing about being in a virtual world right now that I want. Like,
Mark_Miller:
Thanks for watching!
Beau_Button:
You can't replace my whiteboard. I'm a whiteboard fanatic. I love whiteboards. I love being around a table, just getting things done. I think it's, we desire to be close to real people. And I just, we're not gonna change that anytime soon. I do believe the shortcomings though, really, they're not technical. I think Metta has its own problems, Horizons, where I mean, it's kind of clunky. There's all of them, even ours is kind of clunky, but there's just really not a whole lot to do. And I think, Adam, what you mentioned about the advertisers, there are more companies trying to figure out how to build these interactive experiences to sell stuff than anything. And once you're onto it, you're like, why do I want to be here? I think we're ultimately going to come down, what it's going to come down to is there's some companies, a handful of them that are building these tools that allow average computer users, similar to like Roblox Studio, to build these fully immersive 3D experiences that you can share with friends by just sharing a URL. And that's like what I think the future is going to be as it relates to what people are calling the metaverse today. Not one giant, completely connected world. It's going to be a bunch of smaller microverses if you choose to join people and play games in 3D, you can. But I'm also optimistic that it won't require VR or AR. It's going to be something that allows you to play if you just have a mobile phone, et cetera. I don't know what the hell that looks like. But that's where I think it is. But I don't think... I don't think it's a future. I think Meta just, they had a lot of money and it was like, that's the next best thing. They obviously had a cryptocurrency as well that's gone. I think Horizon, you know, they have Quest, et cetera. So I don't have a succinct answer, but I don't think it's going away. I just don't think it's gonna consume 100% of what we're seeing in regards to how we engage with the internet.
Christian_Wenz:
Yeah, and the user experience flaws, which you hinted at, I think. They
Beau_Button:
Anything
Christian_Wenz:
are a big,
Beau_Button:
that's metaverse
Christian_Wenz:
big barrier of entry, right?
Beau_Button:
and blockchain, like our entire, for the last six years, we've focused on top of funnel, getting users into the game and to find sticky users. and everything that Web3 brings to the table just complicates that. You
Christian_Wenz:
Yes.
Beau_Button:
know, and even if it was off-chain like ours, there's still obstacles. You know, if it's 3D, like, just learning how to navigate. Like, I am not a gamer, oddly enough. I am not, even though I'm a PC, I've been writing, you know,.NET software forever, people think that I'm a PC gamer instead of a console because I'm on a PC. I do not have the coordination to use the keyboard to navigate in a 3D environment. I'm a mouse jockey. So some of these experiences are like use ASDF and I'm like, oh man, this is like flashbacks to when I was at a LAN party in 99 and somebody was trying to teach me how to play Counter Strike or Rainbow Six or something. I'm like, I'm just not built for that. But yeah, there definitely are some hurdles for the user experience side of things that we need to work through.
Adam_Furmanek:
And talking about hardware here, do you think that if we have more and more smart devices literally everywhere around us, is this going to improve the state of Metaverse? Do you see any fancy smart way of using those and composing the world together? Or do you really think mobile, like our mobile phone, is really all we need for the Metaverse?
Beau_Button:
like to think that all we need is our mobile phone. There was an article written, it was speculation about how Apple's AR headset would work. So instead of being an independent device, it was merely a display that would leverage the compute that was in your pocket. I loved that conceptually. In regards to smart devices, you know, Sadly, I think the only people who are gonna benefit from additional smart devices are gonna be the brands, the big box retailers using beacons and trying to figure out where you are in the store to potentially have a XR experience that dovetails with you buying Oreos or milk or something like that, but as a consumer, and despite me being in tech and being a fan of IoT, I hate the fact that my refrigerator has an IP address. Like, I'm over it. I'm like, why are we doing this? If you look like, the router at my house in Austin and look at the DHCP client list. I'm just like, it's two people that live in this house and there's about 112 devices that have IP addresses and I'm just like, this is ridiculous. This is absolutely insane. But I don't have any visions of what additional devices. I'm sure somebody's working on something out there that's going to blow my mind. I am a gadget geek. I will probably buy one to figure out how it works. But as of right now, I hadn't put much thought into that honestly.
Adam_Furmanek:
Yeah, one thought I had some time back is like with all those voice assistants and the generally smart AI with chat GPT like being in a top place now, if we had more of these devices than probably just interaction of the world would be changed like significantly, right? For instance, why do I need to keep my own voice assistant of whatever kind, whether it's like Siri, Google or whatnot? Why do I need to carry it on with me instead of just walking to the room where there is like generic, standardized voice assistant that in some way figures out who I am and knows what to tell me when I ask, hey, how do I get back home? Right. So this is what I see. I just don't see it yet in Metaverse, but I think that could be one of the directions.
Beau_Button:
that direction than this virtual direction. I'm a home automation buff, and I'm a voice assistant fanatic. I've got a few in the house here. I've collected experiments. I have to remember what room I'm in, so I have to talk to Amazon or Google or Apple. But I agree. I think, I'm not sure about the omnipresence, like generic, I don't know how that would work, but as I mentioned, and I think Mark agreed, the implant that I want in my fantasy, is something that allows me to use my inner monologues. I don't wanna move my mouth. And there's companies that are built out these microphones that basically they listen to your skeletal vibrations, intramuscular vibrations, where you can just literally, like when you're talking under your breath about somebody, just like, hey, I wanna do, if I had that. voice assistant with probably something like Alexa integrated with chat GPT so I can just passively ask myself and have it go out. I can get a lot more done. I spend a lot of time searching things. That's really what I want. But I would rather that type of experience in my house, in a store than in a virtual world. That's just me.
Mark_Miller:
Yeah, it's great. I love it. Yeah, I'm
Beau_Button:
I'm
Mark_Miller:
actually
Beau_Button:
optimistic.
Mark_Miller:
I'm actually building a chat GPT coding assistant that I'm kind of in the middle of doing right now. And I'm actually it's really interesting. Although I will say, though, that I was in an argument with chat GPT on the live stream about whether something was supported in C sharp or not. And came back three times saying, no, I'm pretty sure you're wrong. And chat GPT kept telling me I was wrong. And. I and everybody watching the stream still all agree. We all are on the same page. The chat GPT was wrong. And this idea of hallucinations, right? Or when it writes reports for you, it puts in citations that are completely fictitious. That might
Beau_Button:
I've
Mark_Miller:
pick
Beau_Button:
seen
Mark_Miller:
up,
Beau_Button:
it.
Mark_Miller:
yeah. And so there is a strong hallucination kind of component to parts of the information that are coming back. And I think that part of the trick here is if you want to at least rely on it, right, for you are going to make decisions based on that information, right? Part of the trick is I think getting a stronger sense of the truthfulness or the accuracy of what's coming back. It's not enough to just have it look like it fits. It's got to have citations. It's got to have the right links. It's got to have the... It's got to be able to have a... Like Wikipedia, you've got links that back up claims. If I come back and confront it, it's got to come back and defend, I think. And right now it doesn't do that. Other than simply saying, oh, I'm sorry, I hear that you think I'm wrong, but I'm really right. And everybody's freaking out at this point because it's not right at what it's claiming.
Beau_Button:
Yeah, my usage has been more so, I have writer's block. I can talk about anything and it comes out just effortlessly. You put me in front of Microsoft Word and someone says, hey, write a description of this feature, write a description of this technical decision. I'm done. I mean, I could do it on a whiteboard, but I can't. So I've been using chat GPT and I've been learning there's this new kind of field of employee employment opportunities. They're calling them prompt engineers. Learning
Mark_Miller:
right.
Beau_Button:
how to ask GPT in a very specific way to minimize the noise and potentially I guess the hallucinations, et cetera. I'm not an expert, but I've gotten much better at getting what I want for job descriptions. unfortunately I had to use it for a termination letter and I was just like let me just see how this is gonna pan
Mark_Miller:
Wow.
Beau_Button:
out. There was a very specific situation where someone had done something and I just wanted to say it in a way that wasn't offensive and politically correct. I just wanted to be very kind and I was like, can you help me? And sure enough it did. I'm just like, Jesus, like
Mark_Miller:
Nice.
Beau_Button:
this is
Shawn_Clabough:
Yeah
Beau_Button:
insane. But
Mark_Miller:
Yeah.
Beau_Button:
I haven't actually used it for software yet. I'm hesitant. One of our game developers has played with it. There's a plugin for Unity where you can describe a level. So imagine you're building a first person shooter and you want something that looks like let's say the French Quarter of New Orleans but you don't want to go buy 300 independent models and texture them and do all that yourself. You can actually ask ChatGPT, just in written text, hey, can you design this model or this level for me and miraculously the 3D models. Now it's pulling these models from free online kind of asset stores. but that itself is very powerful in my opinion for prototyping. I don't think you're going to ship a game with these assets but that's the only, that's the extent of my technical use of it.
Shawn_Clabough:
I'm with you on that writer's block thing, because I remember in high school and college, I'd write a paper, and it would come back to me, and it'd always say, more here, more here. It's like, well, if I knew you wanted more there, I would have put more there, but I thought I answered the question.
Beau_Button:
yet to happen ever been it's never been much from suit i mean throughout high school it was painful i think they think i remember my english teacher telling me that i could no longer write my reports on when this for all to see only got the only everything
Mark_Miller:
Ha! Ha
Beau_Button:
i did
Mark_Miller:
ha!
Beau_Button:
every single one of my reports was on this man because you know i love his story i do a lot about lennox i can talk about his history is education has seen key but uh... that was it that's all i can write about was that guy and then even college i carried on
Shawn_Clabough:
Okay, I think we're sitting pretty good on time. So we'll wrap things up and move on to picks. So let's start picks this week. Adam, do you wanna give us your pick?
Adam_Furmanek:
Yeah, I can. My pick for this week is vocal remover. And since we spoke a lot about AI and other stuff, this page lets you, and I believe it uses AI because everything uses AI nowadays, it uses AI behind the scenes to remove vocal from the song you give to it. So now if you ever wanted to find a song you know just the melody, get rid of the vocal and singing, that's the way to go.
Christian_Wenz:
for karaoke bars as well.
Adam_Furmanek:
Exactly
Christian_Wenz:
Probably they would
Adam_Furmanek:
right.
Christian_Wenz:
need to license the audio track.
Shawn_Clabough:
I was always curious about how some of these YouTube musicians get the tracks that like they're a drummer and they get the song without the drums in it that they play the drums or or without the guitar part. I don't know where they get all those independent tracks without those things. But so if you're a singer, you can now use this vocal remover.
Beau_Button:
It makes me miss the midi, like the period of my life in high school where I was downloading Axl Foley midis. There was no vocals, it was just basic midi. Yeah, so I'll have to give that a try because I am an introvert. I love, especially growing up in New Orleans, there are a lot of hip hop, like rap songs, I'm like, I love this beat, but my God, does he have to keep saying this? I'll have to give it a try.
Shawn_Clabough:
Okay, all right, Christian, what's your pick?
Christian_Wenz:
Yeah, when we did the panelist episode two weeks ago, you took my first pick, right? So I picked rewatching the old Indiana Jones movies. And so I thought for today, since we're also talking about games, I, earlier this week, started playing Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis again. The game came out in 1992. I played it under DOS over 30 years ago. was probably the first game I completed. I was always too stupid to beat Maniac Mansion, because, well, I was always trapped in the basement and didn't find the panel that let me out of that basement. And I mean, the game itself, I think, is pretty legendary. It's a point-and-click adventure, right? So younger people probably don't know what it is, but believe me, it's great fun. It was really a good, good game. I think got a lot of awards. I still have the digitized 5 and 1 quarter inch disks when I bought the game back then. But I was thrilled to see that it's now also on Steam and probably on other platforms as well for a very low normal fee. Great fun playing. I think I'm halfway through and probably I'll beat it over the weekend.
Shawn_Clabough:
Cool. Mark, what's your pick?
Mark_Miller:
Well, you know, I was talking earlier about the programming assistant that I'm building. One of the components of that is being able to talk to it and say, hey, I need this or I'm looking for this particular piece. And to make that work, I tried initially to, well, I wanted to see how good the built-in speech recognition in Windows was. And it turns out it really wasn't any different from how it was about 10 or 12 years ago. It was just not great. It was, in fact, I tried it and I was disappointed. I was like, okay, I guess there's just no way to implement what I want to implement using the built-in technology. And my machine is like a beast of a machine. It should have all the horsepower it needs to solve the problem. So then I was like, all right, well, let's go try out Microsoft Azure. Let's go to Azure and look at the speech recognition services. You know, I'm... you know, worried about time, performance, how long is it going to take and how accurate is it? Tried it out, surprisingly accurate, remarkably accurate and incredibly fast. It's faster than it is to run on my machine locally in terms of getting the response time back and it's almost always accurate and all the tests I've done, I think it got one word wrong out of all the tests I've done since Friday or something like that. So that's my pick. It's the speech to text component of Microsoft Azure's cognitive services, their speech services. Really, really well done. And no training. Oh, and the other component of this, the reason why my local machine wasn't doing so well is because I've got a microphone that's not right up next to my mouth, right? I want to be able to be in the room and just casually say something, and I wanted to get it. And I was so impressed with the Azure speech services.
Shawn_Clabough:
Yeah, it
Adam_Furmanek:
I
Shawn_Clabough:
reminds
Adam_Furmanek:
remember...
Shawn_Clabough:
me of a.
Adam_Furmanek:
Yeah, go ahead, Sean.
Shawn_Clabough:
Yeah, yeah, reminds me of dragon naturally back in the day and it looks like they still actually have a product, but yeah, Azure, you know, be much more readily available for most of us using net.
Mark_Miller:
No, it's amazing. Anytime in the past, or even when I'm on the phone sometimes with companies and I'm having to deal with the voice interfaces, at some point, the emotional state goes up. The tension goes up. Sometimes I change the way I'm talking so that it'll understand the words I'm trying to say. But so far with the Azure Speech Services, it's exactly what I want. It's like I'm just offhand saying, hey, I need you to go take a look at this for me. And There it is, it gets the text.
Shawn_Clabough:
It probably has to be fairly good because it's probably the same thing as Cortana.
Mark_Miller:
Yeah,
Shawn_Clabough:
Yep.
Mark_Miller:
I'll say yeah, sure.
Shawn_Clabough:
Hehehehe
Mark_Miller:
I'm just saying, I'm saying it's nailing it. It's nailing every word I say, and it's doing it incredibly fast. It's like, it's as if it was running on my machine. It's the expectation I would have for the local, the local speech service uses, yeah. Yeah.
Shawn_Clabough:
Awesome. Okay, my pick this week is another Netflix show because it just came out this week. It looks like Christian probably knows what I might pick here. It's season two of Sweet Tooth. So I don't know if you guys watched the first season of Sweet Tooth, but it was very popular and very, I thought it was very entertaining, very good. So, you know, it's about a boy who is half human and half deer and he's
Mark_Miller:
Alright.
Shawn_Clabough:
surviving in a post-apocalyptic world with other hybrids and things like that. So if you've watched season one, there's now season two, but if you haven't watched season one, I do strongly recommend watching season one. And then catching season two even though I haven't seen season two yet. I'll start watching it this weekend. If it's anywhere like season one it'll be good.
Christian_Wenz:
So how many episodes are season one? It's like eight or 10, because that's manageable
Shawn_Clabough:
Uh, yeah, you
Christian_Wenz:
for
Shawn_Clabough:
see,
Christian_Wenz:
me
Shawn_Clabough:
you
Christian_Wenz:
if it's
Shawn_Clabough:
see
Christian_Wenz:
like
Shawn_Clabough:
there.
Christian_Wenz:
this traditional 26 episodes, which I have to catch
Shawn_Clabough:
Yeah.
Christian_Wenz:
up with.
Shawn_Clabough:
It's a, I think it was eight. Yeah. Eight.
Christian_Wenz:
OK, that's Google.
Beau_Button:
I can do
Christian_Wenz:
Great,
Beau_Button:
eight,
Christian_Wenz:
thank
Beau_Button:
yeah,
Christian_Wenz:
you.
Beau_Button:
I can do
Shawn_Clabough:
Yeah.
Beau_Button:
eight. When you said
Shawn_Clabough:
Yep.
Beau_Button:
Sweet Tooth, I'm thinking, is this a baking show? But when you described it, I'm like, I was like, I would have never, never come up with that.
Shawn_Clabough:
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, at least check out the little previews that they have, find your distressing, watch the first episode, and then you'll probably be hooked to watch the rest of it. Cool.
Beau_Button:
sounds like it.
Shawn_Clabough:
All right, Bone, do you have a pick for us?
Beau_Button:
I do. So... As CTO of Atlas Reality, I do a lot of research trying to figure out which technologies, not so much like programming languages, more so third party SDKs, APIs, etc. services that we're going to leverage to build things. Our game design team comes up with an idea and I'm like, ooh, how are we going to solve that? I don't like homebrew and a whole lot of stuff. It's debt. We have to own it and manage it. So I'm going to recommend something called Croquet, C-R-O-Q-U-E-T. The website is croquet.io. It is a very interesting, they call it a state synchronization, but if you're building multiplayer, multi-user experiences and you're tired of the old way of doing it... This company has really solved this problem in a very unique way. They've got a client-side virtual machine that runs in the browser that guarantees bit-identical state synchronization, including physics, across multiple clients, up to, I think, the max per what they call room, or actually there's another name for what they call it. It escapes me right now, 100 people. But as a developer, you just build a single user experience and the rest is handled for you. If you go to croquet.io and play around with some of their examples. it's pretty impressive and we're evaluating that technology to build out our microverses where players can interact with each other. Yeah, that's probably the only thing that stands out in my mind over the last six months. It's kind of sad really. It's too late in the game to recommend Stripe or Twilio. These are the giants that I use and when someone asks me for a recommendation on payments and I'm like, there's only one. There's no other company other than Stripe to be honest with you. But yeah, croquet.io, it's again, it's something that I feel like could be leveraged, not just for games, they've got a multi-user collaborative like Word Editor or Notepad and it's impressive.
Shawn_Clabough:
Okay, you said croquet and I was starting to think the lawn game.
Beau_Button:
it is i believe if i'm not mistaken forgive me it's spelled the same but i remember my grandma had a croquet set and after thanksgiving and christmas dinner we go to the backyard nobody knows what place it was more like uh... happy gilmore meets
Shawn_Clabough:
Yeah.
Beau_Button:
uh... croquet try to figure out who can hit the queue across the backyard is as far as possible
Christian_Wenz:
So it turns out there's the World Croquet Federation, which is called WCF, which kind of
Beau_Button:
nice here but
Christian_Wenz:
rounds
Beau_Button:
we need another
Christian_Wenz:
up the topical
Beau_Button:
uh... conflict
Christian_Wenz:
focus of our podcast.
Beau_Button:
yes yes yes dot net oh my goodness
Shawn_Clabough:
Alright,
Christian_Wenz:
All right.
Shawn_Clabough:
Bo, so if our listeners have questions and they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way to do that?
Beau_Button:
linkedin yet and there's only two bo buttons and aware of the other ones my fifteen-year-old son and if he's on linkedin i'm doing something right but he's not
Shawn_Clabough:
Hehehe
Beau_Button:
yet uh... it's b a u b u t t o n uh... i'm pretty vocal uh... talking a lot about building teams uh... project management what dislike about web three i spent about the last nine months just bashing with three trying to figure out what people like saw it so i've kind of changed gears or you can just go to atlasreality.com or atlasearth.com
Shawn_Clabough:
All right, awesome. If our listeners want to get in touch with the show, they can reach out to us. They can get me on Twitter. I am at.NET Superhero. So tweet to me. I love to hear from you. So thanks everyone. Great episode.
Beau_Button:
Excellent.
Shawn_Clabough:
And
Beau_Button:
Thank
Shawn_Clabough:
I
Beau_Button:
you
Shawn_Clabough:
will,
Beau_Button:
gentlemen. You
Shawn_Clabough:
yep.
Beau_Button:
have a good day.
Shawn_Clabough:
Yep, we'll catch everybody else on the
Mark_Miller:
Nice
Shawn_Clabough:
next
Mark_Miller:
to meet
Shawn_Clabough:
episode
Mark_Miller:
you, Beau.
Beau_Button:
Likewise,
Adam_Furmanek:
Thank
Beau_Button:
you'll
Adam_Furmanek:
you.
Beau_Button:
take
Shawn_Clabough:
of,
Beau_Button:
care.
Christian_Wenz:
Thank you, Bo, and
Shawn_Clabough:
of,
Christian_Wenz:
until next time.
Beau_Button:
Yes sir.
Shawn_Clabough:
yep.
Beau_Button:
Y'all have a good one. Bye bye.
Shawn_Clabough:
We'll catch you on the next episode of Adventures in.NET.