This week we’re joined by dNo’s very own wizard, Mark Edwards. Mark is the Lead Technical Artist, the man who takes the gorgeous figures, dice and tiles created by our artists and makes them into a digital reality. In this episode, he talks to Olivia about the challenges he faces and some of the tools he’s created to overcome them. Of course, there’s the regular round of “Yes or Nope”, a little bit of dice #ASMR and “This Week’s Nope.”
Thanks for listening to dNoPE! To learn more about who we are and what we're doing, join our Discord and follow our social media by using the links below. Have questions, comments, or ideas? Shoot us an email!
Join our Discord: http://discord.gg/dNoDice
Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok (@dNoDice)
Email us at: social@magicave.io
This week we’re joined by dNo’s very own wizard, Mark Edwards. Mark is the Lead Technical Artist, the man who takes the gorgeous figures, dice and tiles created by our artists and makes them into a digital reality. In this episode, he talks to Olivia about the challenges he faces and some of the tools he’s created to overcome them. Of course, there’s the regular round of “Yes or Nope”, a little bit of dice #ASMR and “This Week’s Nope.”
Thanks for listening to dNoPE! To learn more about who we are and what we're doing, join our Discord and follow our social media by using the links below. Have questions, comments, or ideas? Shoot us an email!
Join our Discord: http://discord.gg/dNoDice
Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok (@dNoDice)
Email us at: social@magicave.io
Olivia Serio:
Hi and welcome to dNoPE: the podcast expansion for the dNo universe. I’m your host, Olivia Serio:. And today I’m joined by Mark Edwards:. Mark and I work together over at dNo, where he is the lead technical artist. He brings together the art created by our designers and the game produced by our developers and adds some of his own magic along the way.
There’s a reason why we call him a wizard. In this episode, we’re talking a little bit about character design and its process. How it works, the challenges and the solutions that we found, or rather that Mark’s found. If you enjoy this behind the scenes look at our process, I encourage you to join our discord, where we regularly post these updates and take input from the community.
I’m thrilled to be working with such talented people and I’m excited to share their process with you. So let’s get going.
Thank you so much for joining me today, Mark. I’m happy to have you, and all your expertise. So today we’re talking about character design, and like everything that goes into that.
Mark Edwards:
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I thought we’d have a quick chat about some of the challenges, and some of the thought processes that we’ve got into around the character design. Yeah, and also we’re like a small team trying to do sort of like big things with the small team. Yes, you have to be quite creative with a lot of the way you actually approach stuff.
Olivia Serio:
Yeah, if you’ve been involved with dNo from like really, like you were before me. So like you were really early on in the process. You’re our.
Mark Edwards:
I was one of the first in. Yes.
Olivia Serio:
You’re our lead technical artist. Is that your title?
Mark Edwards:
That’s me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Lead technical artist, which is one of the main reasons I took it, with with this company, is because it’s a start up and, you know, I like doing a lot of different things. So like, if you’re like, big companies are great. I’ve worked for big companies in the past, but you tend to end up being sort of like quite specialized or you end up managing or yeah, it, you end up getting like pigeonholed a bit and there’s nothing wrong with that. Because you need to do that with a, with a big team. And I quite like the sort of smaller team environment that you have to get stuck in to do everything. Yeah, you never quite yeah, it brings a.
Olivia Serio:
Bouncing around to all the different projects?
Mark Edwards:
Yeah exactly. It keeps me interested and yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s good fun. I really enjoy it. Um, and you get a lot more freedom with a smaller team. I mean, you don’t have to go through, like, months of approval process to go and try something.
Olivia Serio:
So how does a technical artist differ from, like, a traditional or 3D artist?
Mark Edwards:
Um, so I think it’s, it’s a very broad term and again, it varies depending on what type of company and environment.
Olivia Serio:
Well, for your, for your role specifically.
[Laughter]
Mark Edwards:
Yeah. So my role specifically. So I see myself as I guess the sort of the bridge between the, the coders and the artists, um, but not just like doing a hand-off. It means I’m hands-on. So I have to be good enough art to, to, to have a, you know, a good eye and produce quality stuff, and good enough coding to produce quality coding don’t have to be expert at either. Just needs to be able to translate. So I’m. I’m. Yeah.
Olivia Serio:
I’ve, I’ve seen your code. You see you seem kind of like an expert at coding. You seem very good at coding. You’ve written so many programs just like. You, what was that? There was that application that, like is notoriously one of the most difficult applications or languages or whatever you learn. And you were you picked it up in a week and found a bug or something?
Mark Edwards:
Well, yeah, well, I’ve been around a while and I’m pre-internet, so, like it. Yeah, I’ve, I’ve been around for a while. So yeah, I mean, I’m not an expert, expert in every language, but in the over my years I’ve coded in a lot of different languages. And the more you do it, the more you see the similarities in it that let you adapt really quickly to to the different languages. At the moment, my favorites are Python, C-sharp and C++.
Olivia Serio:
For all of our listeners, on our team, we refer to Mark as the Wizard because you want something done and you’re not sure whether or not it’s even possible. Mark, will first, first of all say, I don’t know, we can do that and then he’ll be like, Never mind, I figured it out. We solved it.
Mark Edwards:
Yeah, that won’t happen every time.
Olivia Serio:
I’ll figure it out. You can fix it. But it’s happened enough times, were you’re like, Yeah, yeah. Oh, that looks dif. Oh, maybe I can figure it out. And you’re like, Never mind. I streamlined the process. Problem solved. We got it.
Mark Edwards:
It’s like the photography thing. The more pictures you take, the luckier you get out. I’ve just been around a while and just like, do you get to see some design, I guess design patterns over and over. Um, yeah.
Olivia Serio:
Yeah. I mean, that was, we were having that conversation in our arts-com Discord with Cris, who’s one of our other artists, who’s been doing a lot of focus on the characters and things. What was it you said to her? You were like, you told her not to worry, don’t worry about, don’t worry about it. I’ll figure it out with triangles, or something.
Mark Edwards:
Yeah, yeah. So I have been regretting that ever since. That was with the character thing. So, yeah so I mean, that’s, that’s a good example where. Yeah, so we’re a small team, but we’ve got big ideas and some of the harder stuff to do is in the game world is all the flappy animations and massively overlapping clothing, mixtures of hard surface and soft surface modelling, Yeah, and getting it all rigged and all the rest of it, in the bigger groups you’ll have like a team design for each of those stages of the unwrapping, and all the rest of it. Plus we want to be fitting all that to different sized characters, and making it run real time in the game engine at the same time whilst having high-quality renders. So yeah, I was just like, Yeah, it’s fine. You just go crazy as many verts as you like and I’ll figure the rest out.
So yeah, so I basically from that day on got loads of skirts, capes, belts, drapey stuff. Yeah, with about 30 million vertices. So. So I only have myself to blame for that.
Olivia Serio:
So for people like me who have very little understanding of what goes into kind of the animation and game process and modelling side of things, what does an increased, like what are vertices? What does that mean And why is having so many of them difficult?
Mark Edwards:
Yes, it’s just is the amount of information you have to move. So the vertices are literally just a three dimensional coordinate, in space, and that’s it. It’s just essentially just that. Yeah, it’s just maths. But yeah, so like if you’ve got a lot of those Yeah. I say I’ve got like a million of those then every time. If you, if you’re going to move an arm or something then you’ve got to recalculate the position for like every single one of those. And it’s not just that, you’ve then got to recalculate, yeah, which way the light’s bouncing from in between each one and, and so on and so forth.
Olivia Serio:
So does an increase, in like vertices and, like, points and things, you have to do that, that’s an increase in processes is, which means like it’s more memory in the game and it’s like is more difficult for the game to process.
Mark Edwards:
That’s more memory and it’s yeah, more and more computation. Um, it’s, it just basically slows everything down once you get like lots on screen, Um, so there’s that, there’s a, there’s a level to be had to be optimized for that. So that’s generally referred to as like retopology, were you take that really big. Yeah. Detailed model and take it down, yeah,to a, to a smaller version of it and then you can cheat. So you hear it sort of referred to as baking, a sort of high poly to low poly, were really it is a low poly shooting rays out to the high poly. But yeah, so you capture that, that detail. So then from your lower poly one you’re really looking at how far away the sort of nearest high poly vertex is, and then you can essentially turn that into a texture which is referred to as a normal map. And all a normal map is, is again a capture like a vertex location so that X, Y, Z is just RGB.
Olivia Serio:
So basically you’re like taking the thing that’s really high quality. And then there’s the part that the game can actually process and you’re finding the difference between them? And like you’re, do you like take the. Does poly just like, is poly just like polygons, is that just more math?
Mark Edwards:
Yeah, it’s all maths.
Olivia Serio:
It’s just all math. That’s why I’m so bad at understanding it.
Mark Edwards:
Yeah. The less math you do, the quicker it goes. So it’s just always getting, it’s always getting that balance between the, it’s getting a balance between, yeah. the visual quality and what it looks like. Some of the, the game engines now, things that sort of Unreal and stuff are starting to be able hand, to process, you know, vast amounts of of of polygons, but still when you’re animating. Yeah, good luck trying to white paint a 30 million vertex character. It’s just, it’s not going to be happening. So there’s, there’s it’s like there’s different challenges if you’re animating.
Olivia Serio:
So what’s weight painting?
Mark Edwards:
So the weight painting, so when you so if you imagine when you create a character and then inside of it, you really create like a fake, set of bone network.
Olivia Serio:
Yeah. I’ve seen your school skeletons.
Mark Edwards:
Yeah. Yeah. So it’s no different, really, to the bones in a human right? So like, yeah, so where each of your joints are, you’re just putting in like the major, the major bones inside of the skeleton because that you obviously want to replicate human motion, if you don’t go go crazy. You can do, you can’t pull the tiny little bones in and go crazy if you want but most people don’t. You have like a fairly standard, you know, upper arm, lower arm, thumb, you know thumb, you know bendy bit on the thumb. This is a fairly standard design, and then the weight painting is, really, again on each vertex, so each vertex as well as being a point in space, is also has information associated with it as well.
So the weight painting is, all it’s doing, is just saying in its simplest form. Yeah, so I’ve got my upper arm, my lower arm. They both have an influence on the vertex in 3D space, so as they move, like the influence changes and moves the vertex as the influence changes. Not a lot more complicated than that. That’s again why you end up re topologizing because you’ve got, you know the less vertex points you have, the less of those calculations your having to do each frame.
Olivia Serio:
That makes sense, I think. Yeah, I think I got I think I got all of that.
So kind of going back to character creation process early on, and when we were first talking about characters and modelling with Cris, and things like that. I know one of the things that we talked about was things like diversity. So we had not just two different body types, but we also have like a gender neutral character and we wanted to have kind of scaling body sizes.
So what kind of challenges does that present for you in terms of all of this? Like bone creating, re topologizing?
Mark Edwards:
Yeah, Yeah. I mean, there’s artistic challenges because, yeah, we want to try and get this right, okay? I, we want to be inclusive as a company. We want to make sure we’ve got, you know, good representation of diversity with like body shape, and they and, I think one of the interesting that I found that as we have gone through this is that, yeah, yes, the game is sort of stylized, but it’s like trying to make it stylized, you know, without being a caricature of a, of a type.
Yeah. So we’re trying really hard to, yeah, although, although all the characters are stylized, to actually try not to try and caricature too much or at all. Um, yeah. And time will tell how successful we are at that. I think. I think with all these things. Yeah. The good news is like we’re going into this with the absolute best intentions to be inclusive as we can. Will we get it 100% right? Probably not at all. Are we trying, yes. Yeah. Can we update it, again, as we go along? Yes, of course we can. So yeah.
Olivia Serio:
Yeah. I mean, yeah. What does being inclusive at the start of the process, like, what advantages does that give us as opposed to kind of.
Mark Edwards:
Hey, it just means we can get a nice we can get everything sitting in the environment from day one. So we haven’t just male, female, then think. Oh actually we’ve had some feedback with a drop in like a sort of a neutral gender as well. Now it’s like we’ve, we’ve like built it like that. So everything’s all fits together from day one.
Same with us. Sort of the body, body sizes. Yeah. Just trying to give people a range of things. One, they’re obviously they’re fun to play. Yeah. And to representative, I mean. Yeah I know. But with all being in mind there is a fantasy stylized game as well.
Olivia Serio:
Have there been any, have there been any like redesign aspects that we’ve encountered just by having those options from the get go?
Mark Edwards:
No surprisingly, it essentially adds extra work, that’s all. And the actual blending and morphing between the characters is working really good, really well as it should do. We’re all humans, right so there’s not that much.
Olivia Serio:
Yeah we’re all.
Mark Edwards:
Variants we’re doing, and so guess what, it actually works. Yeah. So it’s it’s actually going really well, like the skin tone. So we’re always going to have fantasy skin tones as well. But we’ve, we’ve like used that. I can’t really which one but we’ve used the Google sort of set of colors that they’re using for a.
Olivia Serio:
Couple different things.
Mark Edwards:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. For, for, for like this sort of base set of colors and again they look great. I mean it really, really good. So but I don’t think we quite the point where we can show those. Yep. I was like yeah, I’m really pleased with that. And I think also keep in mind that, yeah, if this is the start of our journey with this game, so to start with, yeah, we’re not going to be morphing between infinite control between all the body styles. We’re going to have like a set of, I think 12 to start with, to pick from, but that’s still 12 body styles across 3 genders, you know, and then you’ve got to fit all the armor to that and make everything work that, that’s work enough.
Olivia Serio:
And we have 3 different classes, right? Is that right?
Mark Edwards:
Yeah. To start with. And we’ve got five, well there’s more, there’s a lot. So what. So what we’re trying to do for the, for the first game that we’re doing is from the art team, we’re focused on getting like the classic sort of like mage, fighter and then sort of more like the rogue type.
So we’ve got all the other variations as well. But that was the way we thought was that those gave us like three quite distinct styles of play and I think almost the other ones are going to be more hybrids of that. So let’s get those working first. You know, get them feeling good, and then we can gradually add in the other styles as we go.
But because because we’re a small team and one of the reasons I enjoy and really wanted to work here is like, yeah, we’re having to do a lot of automation to do that. So for the rigging, yeah, I can’t fully automated the till I’ve finished my AI stuff, I think, but like the yeah, the, the yeah I’ve started to write a bunch of tools that actually help with the rigging process. So yeah, we can very quickly get things rigged which would take, yeah, other teams longer. We did, I know we’re not going to talk the dice, but the dice is another really good example. Yeah, where I’ve created, done a lot of color science behind the scenes on that.
Olivia Serio:
Yeah, I’m very excited. We’re definitely going to do, once you get your head space back into dice, as opposed to character rigging, we are definitely going to do a whole episode on all the cool stuff you’ve done with the dice, because it’s so like you’re the reason they look real. Like you and Seb together.
Mark Edwards:
Yeah, it’s super exciting.
Olivia Serio:
Ah, yeah, yeah. Literal magic. Literal magic.
Mark Edwards:
Yeah. I’ve got some new ideas on that as well. I’m. I’m thinking about whether I can actually use Unity to drive the creation process actually, as well. Which means then I could sort of like basically give you an executable and you can just.
Olivia Serio:
That that’d be so…
Mark Edwards:
Go crazy in there.
Olivia Serio:
So helpful for me.
Mark Edwards:
Then just render out loads of dice. But like, I’ve written a custom render farm as well to do all the high quality rendering. So that’s all working in the cloud, that we can pass that on off to. And it’s nice, because we own all this of intellectual property on that, I wrote it basically. So that’s kind of cool.
Olivia Serio:
So that’s like, what would you think? What would you say in regards to character creation? Let’s like the coolest thing that you’ve like come up with or like written or figured out in this process.
Mark Edwards:
Merging all the bones in real time in the game engine. I think it’s a bit geeky. It’s like.
Olivia Serio:
Well.
That sounds really cool.
Mark Edwards:
Yeah. So, so one of the challenges you got is that this has been solved a million times over in a million different ways. But like, yeah, we want to be able to swap clothing on the characters. Yeah. As we go through, and again we’ve got a small team, so we can’t be sitting there animating every little bit of everything.
So that’s what I’ve come up with, is this is a solution, and there are some other commercial ones, but it wasn’t really fitting what we wanted to write it from scratch. So we can have like just the base rig. Um, and then essentially that drives all the other bones, um, for the clothing. So there, they’re all essentially baked separately, but they can be 100% flexible.
And then it just takes the bones that knows about, reparents the ones it doesn’t and it just works. And then I can show you some of the creation on that if, it’s up to you.
Olivia Serio:
Yeah, yeah. Let’s see. Let’s see a little, little bit of that creation. For those listening to the audio version, what Mark is about to show me will be available on our YouTube channel.
Mark Edwards:
If you listen to our audio, it looks amazing.
Olivia Serio:
Yeah, it looks incredible. Absolutely flawless.
Mark Edwards:
Let me just bring this up. Um, so this is Blender. Um, we’re using Blender as a central point where I put everything in, so I’m really agnostic on what 3D applications our artists want to use because like Cris used to use like Z Brush and Maya, other people like to do other things. Other people like to use Blender, but I bring it all into blender to essentially normalize everything, get everything rigged.
Do the same with the dice. Yeah, Yes. And then it moves out of that into into the game engine from then in a standard way. Um so yeah so everything everything we recreate ourselves comes through Blender. As we’re going forward. I’m writing more and more tools directly in the game engine because like, I don’t want us to have to keep doing a round trip back into Blender, back out into the Game Engine Yeah, it puts me because we’re small team that puts me sort of as a blocker in that process.
So as, as we are growing as a team, we’re creating more tools to do that. And you can see here, the mess of a blender screen, that I’ve got here. But everything the right here is like custom tools, basically this all written written to help with the process. Yeah, including putting stuff in for mixamo and stuff like that. Which is just which is like. Yeah, just handy, just for quickly checking like if animations work and stuff but it all automatically reparents it. So I’m thinking about trying to get some of this into a more coherent form and Open Sourcing at some stage, but that be a bit later on in the process, because I think a lot of useful tools here.
I think a lot of people would, yeah, would like to use in the community and yeah, I’ve got loads from the community in the past so I feel like we should give something back.
Olivia Serio:
Yeah, pass it along.
Mark Edwards:
Yeah, he’s just time more than anything. But this is kind of cool, right? So this is a standard rigify rig. But, but what’s not standard, is all the rest. So this is the base model. Now, because we’re swapping clothes and all the rest of it, everything basically has to be separate. So all that is set up in a Blender like this.
But what’s kind of cool. Yeah. Is so that this rig here, for example, is turned off, so I can just turn this on. Yeah. So this is like this sort of where we can actually do our own animations if we want. So it’s a full of like basically standard IK, FK type rig set up. And there’s lots of other things in here that we’re not actually using.
So like, trying to remember I put the controls here. Yeah, there’s stuff like this. So we’ve got like this sort of slightly more advanced stuff, if you want to do, is you can see here our actually pivots is up and back
Olivia Serio:
Lke in the future. But right now we don’t.
Mark Edwards:
Yeah, yeah,
Olivia Serio:
We’re not using it a game or anything.
Mark Edwards:
But this all goes in the game engine and works as well. But the bit, I think probably interesting people, I guess with this, is that one of the issues people have is that when they take this stuff out to Unity and actually remap with Mixamo and things like that as well, like the bone structures, not great for Unity.
So with the tools I’ve written here, If I turn that rig off for a sec. What it does is it extracts all these out of the rig, from Rigify. You’ll see a couple of actually sockets in it as well, and reparents everything in a kind of way that’s going to work with the humanoid rig in Unity, and, or and then basically it’s not that much more complicated than basically copying the transforms from the Rigify rig. And then it just follows along.
There’s a little bit more to it than that. With some of the sort of, like how some of the parenting and stuff works, but that’s pretty much no more complicated than that. But this is all auto auto generated. Yeah. And so when you.
Olivia Serio:
And you wrote all that?
Mark Edwards:
Yeah. All the stuff that ,Yeah, yeah. This is all Python. So the.
Olivia Serio:
This is why we call Mark a Wizard for for anybody.
Mark Edwards:
Not, it’s not that that clever. It’s just a case of like getting on with it
Olivia Serio:
[Whispers] It is, it is that clever.
Mark Edwards:
Yeah. So like it but what’s kind of cool with that, is it means that you can then basically break everything down. So like you can say here, the heads got its own rig and because this head’s a bit funny, because you’ve got this sort of soft blending of like soft and hard into here.
It just only has the bones associated with it, that are required to get the matching deformations to the body. So this goes into the game engine like that. And then at runtime, it basically takes all these bones and merges them. Actually I’ll show you, I’ve got one here. Yes, I’ve written this as well. So this basically takes those elements here. So this is the body, these are the bits you’ve just seen, the plate, the feet, the head and the base.
Yeah, just I’ve just got this on an empty game object, to start the game. Okay. Yeah. And it pulls it all together in-game, and then it basically creates everything. So this is got like also got some dynamic stuff on it as well. So like, I don’t know, I mean just check any old animation on it now. Yeah. And it just works.
You can see we’ve got some nice low level simulations going on here as well. This is’t actually cloth simmed. This is just faking it with bones, but it looks kind of cool.
Olivia Serio:
It looks very cool. That is it’s so cool to see. A lot of times we see those when you’re looking at game, games and stuff, it’s like, okay, here’s the storyboarding, here’s the concept designs and stuff. And then here is, maybe, the beta, but here’s the finished product. But this process of creating and how you’re doing things is one of my favorite things to watch, as someone who has who’s never really been a Game Dev.
Never. I, okay, technically I did create a game in my Intro To Computer Science Class at university, but all it did was a cat. It was a side scroller where the cat picked up pastries. There was no way to lose the game and there was very little inter. There was an Easter egg where if you clicked on the owl, it flew, but I don’t think that really counts as making a game. So it’s very cool.
Mark Edwards:
A game of cats and pastries is winning before it even started. I mean.
Olivia Serio:
I mean, fair enough. Fair enough. Maybe. Maybe we can develop it into, like, a dNo game at some point.
Mark Edwards:
Yeah. Yeah. That can be the next thing.
Olivia Serio:
But it’s really cool to watch the process. Like everybody on our team is so talented, and there’s no way, I know, there’s no way we could do anything close to what we’re doing without you on our team. So, it’s always very fun.
Mark Edwards:
Nice of you to say, I’m sure, I’m sure we’d manage, but it’s, it’s like.
Olivia Serio:
No, no, you are.
Mark Edwards:
Nobody’s indispensable.
Olivia Serio:
You are. You are indispensable, Mark. You are absolutely. You’re a wizard. A very talented wizard.
Okay. There are two more portions of this podcast that we have before we wrap up. And they are I have yes or no questions for you.
Mark Edwards:
Okay. This sounds ominous.
Olivia Serio:
Which are very RPG focused.
Mark Edwards:
I guess I should just just quickly, I guess one other thing as well. Sorry to talk over you.
Olivia Serio:
Yeah, go ahead.
Mark Edwards:
The other thing is, like mean, if anybody, I guess if anybody is listening to this, is interested in in more detail, I’m happy, we just really skimmed over a whole bunch of stuff a very, very high level. I mean if if anybody if there is anybody interest.
Olivia Serio:
Feel free to join our, yeah join our Discord. We have even more behind the scenes stuff and you have the ability to talk to the people on our team. They are accessible. They are all on our Discord. So yeah, and I know Mark. Mark likes to talk about the cool stuff he’s doing
Mark Edwards:
We could do, I’m happy to cover more detail and I’m terrible when I get going.
Olivia Serio:
So before we wrap up, there are two more things we have to do. Yes or nope questions, which are a little too RPG focused, but I think you can handle it.
Mark Edwards:
Okay.
Olivia Serio:
And I have a game where I roll two different dice and you have to tell me which one you think is which.
Mark Edwards:
Okay.
Olivia Serio:
So.
Mark Edwards:
I wish that, I shall try. I was thinking more that I’d have to guess whether those were the material composition was.
Olivia Serio:
No, so I only have I only have one set of dice with me. So like, sh, beggars and choosers. Um, let’s actually let’s start with that. Let’s start with that. Let’s see. Let’s do a d6 and a d12. Okay?
Mark Edwards:
Okay.
Mark Edwards:
Now so I’ve got a 50/50 chance.
Olivia Serio:
Yeah. So I’m going to make sure that you can’t see what I’m rolling. Help me if you can here. Okay. So this is the first one here that.
[dice rolling noises]
Mark Edwards:
Well, it just said like a thump. I’m guessing that’s a d6.
Olivia Serio:
Wait here. Hold on. I’ll move the microphone so you can hear the rolling.
Mark Edwards:
But that sounded like I got it wrong, and you’re trying to help me out.
Olivia Serio:
So this is the first one.
[dice rolling noises]
And this is the second one.
[dice rolling noises]
Mark Edwards:
That sounds like two
Olivia Serio:
Well, it fell off the table.
Mark Edwards:
You’re just messing with me now.
Olivia Serio:
This is the second one.
[dice rolling noises]
So this is the first one.
[dice rolling noises]
This is the second one.
[dice rolling noises]
Mark Edwards:
That, that is tough. I’m, yeah, I’m going the second one that the d6.
Olivia Serio:
Second one is the D6. You got it right.
[laughter]
Mark Edwards:
There you go. There was slightly less roll on the second one, it, it felt like with the sound. Yeah.
Olivia Serio:
But they all, they are both chunky which is why it’s a little hard. So yes or nope questions. This is the last, this is the last portion before our nope of the week. So you don’t have to expand on these. You just have to answer yes or nope.
Mark Edwards:
I shall try my best not to expand on anything.
Olivia Serio:
Yeah. Can dice be cursed?
Mark Edwards:
Yes.
Olivia Serio:
Can dice be uncursed.
Mark Edwards:
With enough tweaks I guess, and a reforging?
Olivia Serio:
Yes or nope? Come on Mark. Yes or nope? Yes.
Mark Edwards:
Yes. It’s technically possible.
Olivia Serio:
Snacking at the table. Yes or nope?
Mark Edwards:
Oh, yes, totally. Yeah.
Olivia Serio:
When playing a game ,session zero. Like the like so session zero is like when you kind of discuss your characters, build your characters before you go on any adventures. It’s like not your first session, it’s session zero.
Mark Edwards:
Oh, sorry. I was thinking, I was thinking more like, I was sorry, I wasn’t thinking. I was thinking about the lots or video game type thing. I was. That’s why I lost the context. And oh no, definitely discussion.
Olivia Serio:
Yes, yes, yes, definitely, yes. Can you have too many dice?
Mark Edwards:
Never. It’s a bit like horses and motorbikes. Oh yeah. The perfect number is one more than you already have.
Olivia Serio:
Would you ever be an Adventurer?
Mark Edwards:
I totally would, yes.
Olivia Serio:
Yes, yes.
Mark Edwards:
Well, perhaps more of a Crafter. I don’t know, perhaps a Crafter would be better. Not that I. I like the idea of adventuring, but crafting is kind of cool as well.
Olivia Serio:
Have you ever played a TTRPG or DnD or?
Mark Edwards:
Yeah, back in the day. When it was first came out, because that’s how old I am. So yeah, I used to play, I used to play at school a bit. And yeah, so I had the original, I guess the original dice where you had to like rub the wax into the to the numbers. I assume you still do that.
Yeah, so
Olivia Serio:
No.
[laughter]
Mark Edwards:
That was, that was when I was at, and that was the best bit and I’m sure that they weren’t even balanced at that point. I do remember at school though.
Olivia Serio:
So you’re saying the best, the best bit of dice of the DnD was the like creating the dice. Hmm.
Mark Edwards:
Rubbing the wax in the numbers. Yeah. Yeah.
Olivia Serio:
That’s what you’re doing right now. You’re rubbing the wax in the numbers.
Mark Edwards:
And also, actually yeah, the other thing that has just come back to me from when we used to play at school. Which was, I remember being in Secondary School. I remember being insanely impressed at the time, the guy that used to be the DM was like, an insanely good artist. And literally would just sit there sketching real time as we, as we went through stuff. Like, it would be like, he’d be like what’s it look like?
[rapid sketching noises]
Like that, and it’s like. I always remember that just blew my mind.
I wonder what he’s doing now. I should perhaps try and find it. Yeah, that, that was, that was one of my big. We used to play the erm, those are the cars as well. I can’t remember what it was called.
Olivia Serio:
You got me.
Mark Edwards:
GV, GV or something like that? Oh I’m showing my age, I don’t know, I’ll have to look it up. That could just be nonsense. Yeah, we just have to play that the turn-based stuff of that as well, which was kind of fun. And then computers came about, and I’m afraid at that point, it was all about computers.
Olivia Serio:
Well, it being all about computers is why we have you here today, so.
Mark Edwards:
Oh it did help, I did help back in the day, re-write some of the Colossal Cave stuff, with the original port in to, on to the internet. I think I did help do the interface.
Olivia Serio:
Yeah, well, that’s cool.
Mark Edwards:
Yeah, but that was like, that was like a long time ago. I wonder if, yeah.
Olivia Serio:
I have two more questions.
Mark Edwards:
Yeah, sorry.
Olivia Serio:
So two more questions for you. Would you let other people use your dice? I hope the answer to this is yes, because you helped make all of our dice.
Mark Edwards:
Yes. Yes, definitely, yes. It’s all good.
Olivia Serio:
Also, I hope the answer to this question is also yes, because otherwise, ooh we’ve got a problem. Would you use digital dice, digital characters and digital tile sets?
Mark Edwards:
Of course I would. I would love, I love it, especially if Seb’s painted them for me, and made them look pretty.
Olivia Serio:
My gosh. So Seb’s art is so beautiful. Yeah. Oh, good. We have to come up with this week’s. Nope. So I feel like this week. This week’s Nope is too many vertices.
Mark Edwards:
Yeah. Or having to render out more dice when I’m thinking about modeling characters.
Olivia Serio:
Yeah.
Mark Edwards:
Yeah. It gets a bit hard work.
Olivia Serio:
Thank you so much for joining me today Mark.
Mark Edwards:
Sorry. Yeah, I’ve just rambling now.
Olivia Serio:
That’s why we love you. But I’m so glad, I’m so glad you joined me today, and it was so cool to hear the technical side of stuff that we’re working on and see some of it in real time. And we’ll have you back to talk more about all the cool stuff you’re doing with the dice too.
Mark Edwards:
Cool. Yeah, definitely.
Olivia Serio:
I know where you work
Mark Edwards:
Exactly.
Yeah. And so if anybody’s interested in diving a bit deeper into any of the technical stuff, I don’t mind doing a follow up podcast.
Olivia Serio:
Yeah.. You’re great at it. You’re a natural. Thank you so much, Mark.
Mark Edwards:
Hey, no problem.
Olivia Serio:
And I’ll see you. I’ll see you around. I’ll see you in the office.
Mark Edwards:
Yeah, definitely. Cool, speak to you soon.
Olivia Serio:
Thank you so much for listening to dNoPE: the podcast expansion for the dNo universe. If you want to learn more about who we are and what we’re doing, go follow our social media at at dNoDice. That’s D-N-O-D-I-C-E on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok for the latest updates and to join in on the community we’re building.
You can also join our discord by going to discord.gg/dNoDice or following the link in our episode description. Thanks again for listening and we hope to see you around soon.