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We are with Admiral Potato and Mary, who are part of the DC-801 Black Mage Badge, which we already did a video on this channel before, but I wanted to take time to sit down and hear about not only what they're continuing to build, but also some of the process that wasn't really shown in the original video.

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So first, thank you so much for joining me.

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Again, Admiral Potato, what were you responsible for, just for anyone who's watching, for this badge?

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Oh, sure.

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Well, I was responsible, I guess I was software project lead on the badge game, and I guess I also kind of herded a lot of other cats.

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I feel like I was kind of the one who was pushing a lot of other people to put effort in.

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It was a multi-year project just to get the initial batch of these out into the world, and it took a lot of making sure that a lot of people were doing their particular part, and coordinating things, but I was also designing the game engine to be a little bit different than some of the previous DC-801 badges.

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And I would imagine, though, like, that's not an easy task.

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I mean, it's a double layer, there's multiple layers to the board, there's lots of complexities.

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This wasn't an afternoon project, this was multiple years in the making.

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How big was the team which worked on it?

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Well, so Hamster, he actually has made all...

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He's done the electrical engineering for all of the DC-801 badges that I am aware of.

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There's probably like four or five of them, and I should probably be more well-versed on which ones those are.

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So Hamster does the electrical engineering.

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We have Bash Ninja and Pips, who are kind of just like there to kind of guide the whole organization.

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They mostly handle finance and promotion these days.

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We have me, who was just kind of... I was the one who started asking questions regarding whatever the next badge was going to be.

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It's almost kind of one of those situations where I was asking questions and everybody else was burned out.

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And so they're like, well, what ideas have you got?

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And I said, let me play around with some stuff.

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Okay.

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And so by playing around with a couple of different ideas...

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I think it was actually Bash who suggested, well, what if we pick a character that's like the Black Mage?

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And I was like, that's sweet, what can we do with it?

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Nobody else had any ideas, I said, oh shit, I got it, guys.

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The Black Mage, rather than having like fire, lightning, and electric spells like in the Final Fantasy series, they can actually have the magical ability to open a hex editor and edit the state of live memory in the game that you're playing.

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Everybody was sold.

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I was like, okay, I guess I have to make it happen.

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I have to imagine what you pitched, which was, hey, let's make a game, which is in and of itself remarkably hard.

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And then you said, hold on, we're also going to put quests in it, which are unique to the game.

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And then we're going to put items in it, which are unique to the game.

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And then we're going to put graphics and images, which are all like...

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So many people think the art on all of these badges is just magically done.

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Yeah, there we go.

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And we're going to come to the art.

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But then the other piece of this is, then you go, oh yeah, by the way, we're going to make all of this editable by the user in a way that won't completely hose the game while you're playing it.

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That is true.

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That's actually...

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Oh, me?

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So, okay.

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That's actually a really important part.

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Some of the previous versions of DC-801 games, like all of the logic, all of the puzzles, all of the entities, all of the text and the dialogue that you would interact with any of them, that was all written into the seat of the engine.

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So in order to be able to make a change to the game, to be able to engage with it from a creator's perspective, you would actually need to have the entire build tool chain set up and running on your box, and you'd need to test it directly on the hardware.

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One of the things that was... that was hard for me to get into.

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It took like six months to actually get enough information from each of the team members to be able to figure out just to be able to... how to compile from the source code that we had and actually get that running on the previous year's batch.

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So a lot of the first six months of my involvement in the project not only was like brainstorming and coming up with plans for what the next game was going to be, but it was also like figuring out the compile tool chain.

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I said, this is bullshit.

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I don't want anybody to ever have to put this much effort into just like turning it on and building it again.

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So what we actually did is we actually built a virtual machine that had all the tooling built in.

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Like literally you turn it on, there's like three scripts on the desktop.

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Pull the latest from source control, make a build of the game, and open it up and play it.

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So we first off started by making it easier and more approachable for other people to get the build tooling because we just gave them a whole VM that was ready to go.

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But on top of that, we knew how much it would be a barrier to people to be able to create content if they had to learn C and C++ to be able to engage with the code base.

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I said, guys, I know what to do with this.

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The plan that actually worked out really well was to take it so that...

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make it so that the... how do I put this?

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The engine...

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is data-driven.

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You have a scenario.dat file.

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And you can copy that onto the badge with an SD card.

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And depending on which scenario.dat you put in there, you could be playing a completely different game.

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Oh, wow.

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Like a completely different scenario.

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All the engine stuff is there, like the hex editor.

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Since most of the physical interface of this is actually about being optimized for teaching someone how to get in and edit raw memory by literally changing individual bits in selected bytes in the hex editor, that's the kind of gameplay that you're going to have.

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But you can tell a completely different story.

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You can have completely different maps.

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You can have different dialogue, different characters, different everything.

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You can all control this one file.

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So, our C source code reads the scenario data.

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And that's the game that you play.

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The thing is, that scenario data, we specifically designed tooling to allow anyone who just knows how to open a text editor, write a little bit of JSON, they can drag it into our browser-based game data compiler, and then it spits out a game data.

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Literally all you need is a text editor, a web browser, the tiled map editor, you can find it at mapeditor.org.

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And that's all you need to be able to generate a new game data and create custom content for your badge.

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That's really cool.

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And what's so cool about that is the barrier to entry for most people to reprogram a badge is you need to either A, fundamentally understand how the badge works from a hardware perspective, because you do hardware hacking on it, or you go, I need to understand this exact chipset and know how to code exactly for this chipset and do it in a way which isn't going to break the original badge functionality.

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With yours, and I hear it's a JSON object, and I can just feed it to something which is now going to compile a file, which I just load onto an SD card, drag and drop onto it, load it in, and it just loads it, and I can make my own maps for this.

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Yes, that's actually one of the things that we'd love to be able to let people know.

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You can make your own playable scenario in here.

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You can write your own story, and all you've got to know is JSON.

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That's really cool.

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The thing I was so impressed with your badge, in some ways, you make a badge to make money, to fund your hacker space, which is really cool.

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I love the fact that that's what you're using your badge for.

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Or other people, they make a badge because they want to make money with this, but they always hold something back.

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And with yours, it would be like the gameplay, because the gameplay is incredible, and the fact that you're editing hacks, you're doing it in the program, and you made a web browser version.

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That was legitimately the thing that made me go, you know what, I need to do a video on this, because they put the whole game in a web browser, that you can just go to GitHub, play it, and it's great.

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You can save games.

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And now you're telling me, not only have all that functionality, you don't even have to buy the badge in order to continue to customize it and make new content.

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Though, if you buy the badge, one, it's a lot more fun.

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You can bring in an airplane and things like that with you.

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On the other side of things, there's some element there, which I actually think is easier to edit the hacks, because you wouldn't be hitting the physical buttons.

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But also, the artwork is so cool on it.

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So I'm going to dive over, I'm going to go over to Mary, because you designed a lot of the artwork for this badge.

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Yeah.

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Say something specifically about actually how the web tool works into your workflow for creating the content.

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Workflow.

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It's just fast to rapidly prototype to get something functional to look at.

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Wait, you said something which just made me want to ask you a question.

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Yeah.

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Does the JSON I write, like I want to make a new map, can I impact the art in the badge?

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How it behaves, like how animations work, what things are called, what kinds of...

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I mean, yeah, you control everything in this thing.

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Like this menu right here, that's a map.

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Really?

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This is a map.

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The animations are entities, the options are just a dialogue.

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That's just controlled with JSON.

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Anything graphically weird going on, that's just normal in-game scripting features.

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That's really cool.

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So let's start, I want to spin back to the art of the badge.

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What parts of the art did you design?

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I did most of the sprite work.

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I think Corfid did that 3D model.

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Admiral did the rest of the 3D graphics.

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I did most of the sprite animations.

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Some of the environment art or the entity portraits in the dialogue, I did all of that.

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I also scripted pretty much everything, I guess, of the scenario.

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She wrote the entire story.

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She wrote the entire scenario.

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Most of it.

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She wrote all of the puzzles in our engine's scripting language.

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I'm not really a career programmer.

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I come from traditional art.

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But because the tooling was so easy to use, I just built the whole thing.

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I didn't need to learn C.

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It's so cool that you were able to just jump into the art.

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As you said, I've never done this before.

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That's one of the things I love about so many of the badges and things like this.

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I feel like that's a fundamental skill as hackers.

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It's like, I have no idea, but I'll figure it out.

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And usually, I'll figure it out in a very clever way, whether it's, like, we're going to modify JSON or things like that.

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But to be in charge of the entire story, because that's another thing a lot of badges don't have, is, like, one, a story, two, and quests, and then three, obviously, the artwork as well.

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Yeah, I do have some game development in my background.

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I got most of a degree in video games, I guess you could say.

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So I'm familiar with, like, how to scale back an MVP, how to handle playtesting, just prioritizing development, how to make a tutorial that doesn't feel like a tutorial, that kind of thing.

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That was one thing which massively impressed me with the badge.

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So when you're going through the badge, you wake up, you follow the two, I guess, ghosts type of thing.

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Ghouls, I don't know what they are.

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But they bring you back to a room, which then you have to RTFM.

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You have to read the effing manual.

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But you pick an item, which was just so clever, but you go into this room, and then it felt fun learning how to play a game.

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It's really boring to go, oh, and if you open up a hex editor, you then can do this.

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And if you open up the hex editor and change these bits, it could have been so boring.

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But there is a whole, like, you find these books, you open up these books, it gives a reason and a story, and then there's even, like, and these other two bits, we don't know what they really do, but you probably don't want to touch them.

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And obviously the first thing you do is totally touch them.

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With that one, can you tell me some of the process that went to creating the art?

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When you wanted to make these decisions, there's so much that goes into it.

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When did you start, how long did the story take you to write?

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I'm not sure.

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To be honest, I did a ton of graphics without even knowing what kind of game it would be, which is why there's a lot of monsters.

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Because we thought it would be, like, more of a normal RPG.

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And I just wanted an excuse to draw things that didn't need a walk cycle.

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And that's why so many of them, like, float or just glide around.

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We were just kind of spitballing.

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And then eventually, like, oh, we need village elders, and then I started drawing people, or...

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Yeah, I don't know.

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Oh, that's so cool.

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So with that, what else am I missing on this badge that we really need to be aware of?

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Oh, man, there's so many secret conversations.

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I really tried to anticipate people sequence-breaking this.

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And I would just love more people to try to, like, do weird stuff out of order, or, like, try to just talk to NPCs over and over again, because what they say does change quite a lot.

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Okay.

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Yeah, there's tons of stuff.

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I'm sure no one's found yet.

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That's incredible.

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All right, what else do you have for us as some final thoughts?

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Well, I guess one of the last things I'd like to say about it is keep your eyes on this project for another couple of years, because our first revision of the hardware is, like, that's it.

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That's what we're doing.

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We're going to continue releasing software on this for another couple of years.

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We've got two more chapters planned past the one that we're working on now.

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So chapter one is what people already have in their hands right now.

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We are working on chapter two.

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We'll have it done eventually.

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But then we also plan on releasing chapters two and three.

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More features of the badge hardware will get unlocked, and you'll engage with them to solve puzzles for the upcoming chapters.

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Wait , hold on.

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So there's features on the badge that you're not currently using.

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What are some of those?

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Well, currently the gameplay doesn't use the SD card slot at all, but we actually have plans for an entire castle worth of puzzles for fucking around with the file system.

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Really?

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Yeah.

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Any other ones?

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Any other sensors or things like that?

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Let's see.

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The chapter two that we're coming up with right now, you get to plug a USB-C cable in here, and you actually get to engage with the serial console.

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So it'll be kind of a text-based adventure.

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We're going to play around and see what's actually fun to engage with there.

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And then there's some other stuff that...

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Oh, wait, hold on.

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Do you have the new artboard?

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No.

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Not yet, not yet.

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Redacted's been super busy actually creating the challenge for the DEFCON badge itself, but he's actually the one who made the new artboard that we're releasing this year, whenever he can get it manufactured.

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Yeah, that is a cool one.

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I released it.

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That came out, I think, afterwards.

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I think I got a picture of it.

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But the artboard was really, really cool.

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Well, hey, thank you so much.

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Thanks for diving into the badge and so many of the other features of it.

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Like, really cool badge.

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Go check it out.

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I'll leave links in the description of where you can find this badge and hear more about the DC-801 project.

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As always, thanks for watching.

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And hack on!