Playdate Podcast

Christa Mrgan:

it’s another day on the job for fire prevention expert Forrest Byrnes. That’s you. You might have to cut down a tree or rescue a child from a well, or even dig one out of a hole in the ground. Fortunately, you have your trusty shovel. But you’d better hurry because a wall of fire is pursuing you across the forest, in Forrest Byrnes: Up in Smoke.

Welcome to the Playdate Podcast, bringing you stories from game designers, developers, and the team behind Playdate, the little yellow game console with a crank. I’m Christa Mrgan. Today, I’m talking with developer Nels Anderson and artist Christina Antoinette Neofotistou about their homage to licensed platformers, Forrest Byrnes: Up in Smoke.

Heads up that there are light spoilers for two games in this episode. We’ll talk about the inworld character Forrest Byrnes from Firewatch as well as an Easter egg in that game. And there are some spoilers for Forrest Byrnes: Up in Smoke, in terms of gameplay and some of the posters you piece together as game achievements.

Okay, let’s meet the team.

Nels Anderson: My name is Nels Anderson and I was the programmer, designer-- one of two main people on the Forrest Byrnes Playdate game.

Christina-Antoinette Neofotistou: I’m Christina-Antoinette Neofotistou. I know nobody can pronounce it, but I’m from Grace and I did the art and co-designed the game.

Nels Anderson: So the game is very much meant to evoke a like late eighties, early nineties era of like licensed platformers that were maybe produced more through speed than quality.

So the game itself is, you are playing the eponymous Forrest Byrnes, everyone’s favorite distressing " don’t start fires, kids!" mascot. And he’s just platforming through some cool 2D platformer levels where a huge wall of fire chases behind him.

Christa Mrgan: Right. And, of course everyone knows Forrest Byrnes, but just in case you don’t: Forrest Byrnes is a fictional forest service fire prevention mascot kind of modeled on Smokey the Bear, that ursine finger pointer of the US Forest Service. Forrest burns appears in the game Firewatch as a wooden cutout at the entrance to Shoshone National Forest and on a poster at another point in the game. But what’s the Firewatch connection here?

Nels Anderson: So I’ve been making games professionally for like, oh God, 13 years now. I was the lead designer of a side scrolling stealth game called Mark the Ninja, which came out back in 2012. And when I finished that, myself and some other industry peers that I had known started a company called Campo Santo, and we ended up making this little game called Firewatch which is how I ended up coming to know Panic.

Christa Mrgan: Yep. I think I’ve mentioned before on the show that Panic published Firewatch by Campo Santo. Okay.

Nels Anderson: When I first encountered Playdate, it was because we put a Playdate into Firewatch. There’s a bit late in the actual game Firewatch, I won’t get too into the details, but you find some discarded things in the woods and one of those is a small yellow handheld video game console with a broken screen.

And that was I don’t remember exactly. It was sometime probably like, halfway, two thirds of the way through development of Firewatch. So I guess like probably late 2014. Cabel Cabel probably just mentioned like, Hey, we think we’re gonna make a video game handheld. And all of us were like I’m sorry, you’re gonna do what?

But yeah, that as just like a, an homage, joke, Easter Egg, Quip, whatever. We put that into Firewatch. So that was my first encounter with it.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, that’s such a cool Easter egg. So how did this inworld character from Firewatch Forrest Byrnes end up with his own playdate game. And also who came up with that incredible pun of a name?

Nels Anderson: I’m pretty sure that particular verbal crime was committed by Olly Moss. He was the art director on Firewatch. And also a, a prolific lover of terrible puns and portmanteaus. I can’t 100% remember if he was patient, zero. But I think he was.

And After Firewatch wrapped up everyone at Campo Santo was trying to figure out like what they wanted to do next. Panic was like, we’re making this weird handheld video game console. Do we wanna make a weird Forrest Byrnes game for that? I’m like maybe we do wanna make a weird Forrest Byrnes game for that. And so that was like a pretty easy like, yeah, for sure , we’ll do this.

Why not? Here we go!

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, I think "why not?" And "here we go!" Are big parts of the playdate ethos in general.

Nels Anderson: Now the genesis of the game itself was actually while we were doing some very early research for Firewatch, we found I don’t know, like a rom form.

I don’t remember exactly a rom form or something that someone when he was younger he’d found like his uncle who’d recently passed away, he found like a bunch of his old computer stuff and his uncle had been like creating this " don’t start fires" game.

I don’t know if he worked. I don’t remember exactly. This was so long ago. I don’t exactly remember. I don’t remember if the uncle like worked for the Department of Agriculture or he was like trying to pitch it to the Department of Agriculture. Cuz this is a weird thing. another thing that we learned researching fire Watch is that like the US government being with the US government is.

National parks are very distinct from national forests, right? You think like Yellowstone versus Bridger, Teton National Forest, or it’s all the same thing? It is completely not. The parks are run by the Department of the Interior, but the forests and other like similar lands are run by the Department of Agriculture.

And those two, they’re not ministries. I’m not an American anymore, I just guest departments, whatever are completely separate, right? And so again, I don’t know if this. Dude’s uncle like worked for the DOA or he was just trying to pitch a game to them or something. But I think it was in that era of where like a lot of Japanese games that were already like a little bit janky, were getting like re-skinned and licensed for North American consumption.

Like most people are probably familiar with, like the whole Super Mario Brothers Two/ Doki Doki Panic thing, right? Where Nintendo, I don’t know how accurate or apocryphal the story is, but Nintendo had created like a sequel to Super Mario. But it was too hard for like North American audiences or whatever, so they very quickly.

I don’t know how this was decided, had to come up with a sequel. They didn’t have time to make a whole other game, so they just found this existing game called Doki Doki Panic, which is about like this Arab family or whatever, just having a weird adventure. And they’re like, oh, but what if we just make it Mario, Luigi, Toad, and Peach instead?

Which is why that game is like bonkers. It doesn’t make any sense. All the antagonists are weird. But the, the one of these that is my personal favorite by leagues is, I don’t remember if you have any familiarity with the Yo! Noid, Nintendo Entertainment System game featuring Domino’s Pizzas. I don’t know, like Pizza Gremlin? I can’t remember if the No. Like loved pizza or if he hated pizza but I think it was just like a dude in a suit.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah. So the Noid’s whole deal was trying to stop people from getting their hot, fresh pizza delivered on time. But Domino’s delivery drivers would always throw at him. That’s what happened in the commercials, anyway, I actually don’t remember this game at all. But it seems like the Noid is actually the protagonist in it? But yeah, the Noid wore a red suit with a big N on the chest and he had like skinny rabbit ears. And fun fact: the Noid character in those eighties commercials were designed and animated here in Portland, Oregon by Will Vinton Productions. And when I first moved to Portland, I worked at a different animation studio that was founded by some of the folks who used to work there and who helped make those commercials. Anyway, back to the Yo! Noid, NES game:

Nels Anderson: there was also like a green Noid that was more bad. It’s distressing. But anyway, there was a Yo! Noid Nintendo NES game that I remember playing as a kid, but that was just a 100% re-skin of some Japanese Famicom game called Kamen no Ninja Hanamaru, which is just like, you’re a goofy little ninja or whatever.

So this had happened all the time. Anyway. Some kid had found, his uncle had gotten the rights to this Japanese game called Teru Teru Miko, which is like, again, just another one of these bog standard platformers and had kind of like mostly re-skinned it as like this, you’re running away from fires game.

So in the back of my head, I remembered that game when we’re trying to come up okay, what’s our, what’s our Forrest Byrnes game gonna be? And this weird rom, it had never gone anywhere. It was just like some thing some dude’s uncle had put together. And the dude on this ROMs form or whatever it was, had just like uploaded the whole game, the whole source code, everything.

He’s just like, here, have at it, whatever. This thing I found in a garage and I got it working. So when it came time to make the game, we just a hundred percent used that as a starting point and went from.

I mean, In the original Japanese game you’re basically playing like a shrine maiden running away from a bunch of yokai or whatever.

And so like occasionally some stuff that was very clearly meant for that would make it self known, you have to be like, okay what, what exactly is going on under the, under the surface of this lake? So that was always very exciting. I don’t think any of that ended up in the final game. It’s probably fine.

Christa Mrgan: I love this. And the design of the game is really cute and clever. The pixel art has this sharp kind of Sunday comics, cartoon look, and all of the levels are procedurally generated, so the game is endlessly new. Christina-Antoinette Neofotistou: Nels and I made level chunks and we made them in a way that, you know they all fit together. They always flow from one to the other. And then I just skinneded them, like I got them into Tile, the tile editor and I um, skimmed them up to look pretty.

Nels Anderson: This is one of the perks of the constraints of the Playdate. And this is the thing that has been really interesting developing a game for this form factor where, you have a screen that’s 400 pixels by 240 pixels and that’s it. So the game itself is composed of like, there’s basically like a big bag of pre authored level chunks that have a small amount of variance with the actual things inside of them, but they’re primary.

fixed and they all just have a common like start point and end point platform wise. So we always know that like the ground for where two joint points on a chunk are gonna come together are gonna be at like this tile height. You know this, this amount of pixels from the bottom of the screen. So we’re like, okay, we know all the levels can socket together just fine.

So whenever we are coming up with like, okay, what’s the next run gonna be like, we just shake this bag, reach in, pull out like one, like 1, 2, 3 or four chunks, socket it all together and it just works. It’s I think how the original Diablo did their levels. Anyway, , the fact that the play date has like such a specific set of constraints made that actually quite easy. Where on a a higher fidelity, platform or whatever the expectation would be like, oh, you can kind of you can see the seams a lot.

But since the thing is meant to be evocative of this G B A or Game Boy era games were like, those games were not that robust anyway. In this case, it like, I think it fits together pretty well and feels rather organic.

Christina-Antoinette Neofotistou: Because we’re doing a uh, game in the universe of Firewatch, I had a good look through Yogi Bear cartoon strips, like newspaper strips. And they were like obviously just, you know, ink on, on paper. It was just black and white and that informed a lot of the style.

Christa Mrgan: So Yogi Bear is another anthropomorphic bear character who’s been featured in lots of iterations of comics and TV cartoon series since the late fifties. And, since he lived in a fictional national park, he was also used as a spokesbear for various forest- related PSA’s. And yeah, it totally feels like Forrest Byrnes: Up in Smoke comes from that world of 1950s, black and white halftone printed comic strips, translated to a 400 by 240 pixel screen.

And it definitely seemed like Christina Antoinette was already well-versed in one bit pixel art before working on this game.

Nels Anderson: Christina is an absolute wizard when it comes to pixel art. It’s outrageous how, again given the constraints of the Playdate where it’s, you know, just. Two colors, there are, it’s 240 by 400 and every one of those pixels is either black or white.

And that’s it. And even given those constraints, like the level of detail and feel that Christina was able to conjure is jet remains impressive .

Christina-Antoinette Neofotistou: I’ve been doing pixel art since before it was called “Pixel Art,” like in uh, 19 90 86. When I had my first com-- my dad’s first computer. It was a Commodore one, twenty eight and twenty eight. And there was a command called SPR def-- Sprite definition, where you got to define sprites. So you got to, use the cursor keys, which were really uni intuitively placed, like up, down, left, right? They were all on a straight line for some reason.

None of that cross thing that we have now. And like you, you could. Walk around the screen with the cursor and the play pixels. It was magical. The place from starting a game and finishing a game those days that distance seemed infinitesimally small.

so small, it was it looked so easy to do, so yeah I started doing pixel art then because I want to make my own games. I was a kid and the more computers grow in resolution the more we started calling it digital art. And at one point it was, Photoshop and Corel Painter.

The resolutions became such that it was basically like painting with oils and acrylics. It became illustration. And I, I was illustrating for newspapers and magazines and children’s books and all. . And then I rediscovered pixel alert with the start of the indie gaming boom when people started requiring pixel alert for their games again.

And I was like, Hey I, I know how to do that. I have to brush it up, but you know. I’ve been doing uh, one -bit art for like as long as I’ve been doing pixel art because on the spectrum, the, ZX Spectrum, it was basically one big pixel art with, splotches of color here and there.

It wasn’t really, drawing in color, but to be honest We honed in on, on the style. I’ve been doing one-bit pixel art for the Arduboy before I ever did Playdate. One of the games the Arduboy ships with is my art.

Christa Mrgan: The Arduboy is a credit card sized handheld gaming console, that’s based on Arduino hardware.

Christina-Antoinette Neofotistou: We had to, think about how to use the limitations of the screen, but the Playdate screen is huge!

Christa Mrgan: Uh, I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone say that.

Christina-Antoinette Neofotistou: For pixel art, it’s very big. And also really clear and crisp. You get to do a lot of cool stuff, like use dithering, which is, making gray. I don’t use checkerboard dithering, which is 50% dithering, which is, like a checkerboard one pixel black, one pixel empty.

But I do use, you know, other patterns dithering which can also produce grays, like 75% gray or a 60%. Also parallel lines like one pixel apart. And also outlines for the characters. So it, you get some nuance, you get some gray values in there.

I’m not bragging! but I usually work like on 64 by 64 or 96 by 96 pixels. Those are studies. Those are, I know those are really small.

Those are look like tiny stamps. But doing all the studies makes me feel like the Playdate, it feels huge to me. And basically because I knew I would have enough separation of Sprite from background because of all the grays in the background. I was able to, just make the animations on a pink background and, forget about the background altogether.

So wasn’t struggling with black and white. I was using black and white as I wished, and the background was, I was sure it was gonna be fine. It was pink.

Christa Mrgan: Nice. I also really loved the poster designs and just the concept that they’re what mark your progress through the game. One of the items you can pick up in a level is a puzzle piece, which gets converted to a piece of a forest burns PSA poster after the level’s completed. There are a bunch of posters to collect and they’re all pretty funny and kind of ominous and they just look awesome.

Christina-Antoinette Neofotistou: We wanted to do some, dark comedy like the Forrest who 's on a mountain of children.

Nels Anderson: It’s very much based on, general fire safety posters, primarily ones that feature Smokey the Bear. And when you really think about it, Right, Smokey. It’s like it’s this huge bear that’s wearing jeans but no shirt, but also a hat.

And he’s just like, “don’t you dare set a forest fire.” And it’s actually like pretty alarming. Especially if you look at some of those old posters, they’re like genuinely quite sinister. It’s just this jacked bear with a shovel being like, “I know what you do.” So they were very much meant to be a riff on that.

Christina-Antoinette Neofotistou: Each of those posters was informed by style of sixties, seventies for forties, even ,comic strips and PSAs and stuff. The you can snuff it out, like the one with the match was Olly Moss’ from the Firewatch game and I got to animate it and, designed a bit, a little bit.

Nels Anderson: Olly had mocked up like one Forrest Byrnes poster as part of various idea generation for Firewatch and I think it was, yeah, it was the one with the match. And so when we’re thinking about for this game, we’re gonna have these procedural, kinda like run based levels, but how can there be some kind of like progress, like a sense of something you’re working toward and we’re like, oh, what if we riff on a bunch more of those posters?

I concepted some of the ideas and worked with Christina (castpixel) who did all the pixel art for the game, and we just iterated on those a bunch. It was definitely her idea that like mountain. Children. One was definitely that one was all her.

Christa Mrgan: That one is my favorite.

Nels Anderson: Yeah, it was just a process of iterating across those ideas and like hitting that, like “there’s some not quite right here,” vibe that actually a lot of things that were actually generated by the Department of the Interior also have as a vibe.

Christa Mrgan: That’s awesome. I love it. Um, though, the game is mostly D pad and button focused, as you’re running, jumping, and hitting things with your shovel, I really like how it makes use of Playdate’s crank.

Nels Anderson: The game was meant to be a little bit crank- light because you’re being chased by this wall of fire the whole time. Rapidly moving from like the D pad and the jumpy swing shovel time buttons to the crank is actually like a little bit taxing in a way that we didn’t want to be deploying all the time.

So reserved it for, one, just like the clear synergy between action of I’m cranking a little device crank as like I’m reeling up a bucket felt very appropriate, but the idea was to have that almost be like a moment of like surprise and like, oh god.

Right. Okay. Okay. And so if it was meant, yeah, it’s meant to be kind like a little bit of a one-off and not a thing that was thoroughly embedded.

Christa Mrgan: You can also use the crank to scroll through your gallery of posters and the music is really good. It totally has that eighties, nineties NES vibe, I think.

Nels Anderson: So the music was it was done by Jared Emerson Johnson from Bay Area Sound. All the music in Firewatch was composed by Chris Remo, but all the sound design was done by them.

And Jared is also like a composer as well. B, both of like actual music. Like, I think he’s like in like a weird folk band. I think he plays a banjo or something. The Rivertown Skifflers, I think.

Christa Mrgan: Yes, the Rivertown Skifflers! Jared sings and plays ukulele, fiddle and kazoos with them according to his website.

Nels Anderson: But apparently also like that dude knows how to make a square wave sing , because when I was talking to him about it ages ago, I’m like, we’re trying to evoke something that has like the vibe of this soundtrack from the NES Ducktails games or what, or whatever.

All those tracks, especially the moon one, are absolutely the slap by the way. And we wanted something that kind of evokes that feel. So Jared did it and he just dropped an absolute banger to the point I forgot how long the composition is, cuz usually a run through a level is Relatively quick.

It’s only a couple of minutes. But I think the track he gave is three and a half minutes long. So like in a longer combination levels like the higher the difficulty, the more like of those level chunks there are. And so there’s an accidental weird bonus where when you’re on the highest difficulty, you’ll probably hear most, if not the entirety of the actual soundtrack.

And there’s a, there’s like a twist right in the last quarter of the track that’s oh, this is good. There’s a good like third verse vibe. It. Yeah, Jared. Jared crushed it. It’s delightful. It feels like it definitely came from a, you know, an Nintendo game that never existed.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, totally. And the sound design is fun, too.

Nels Anderson: Uh, some pals of mine up, up here in Vancouver A Shell In the Pit audio Gord McGladdery and his crew. it was, For reference, when I was looking to talk to Gord and everybody else, I was like, trying to come up with an asset list of like, people basically need sales for this and this.

Cuz you know, I’m used to working in modern games where like everything, everything has a sound, including like if you’re walking on this one surface that’s supposed to be made of brick, you have a brick foot sound effect. But then if you walk over on dirt, there’s like a crunchy dirt sound effect. And if you actually go back and try to listen to most, Nintendo Game Boy games of that era, the sound design is incredibly minimal.

Like it’s a, if an enemy is like trying to do a thing to you or you have hit a very particular, Interaction mechanic in the game. Otherwise it’s just the music. So coming up with that, trying to strike that balance was interesting where we don’t want it to be like, so. just like a diversity of a soundscape where it doesn’t feel like something from that era, but being strictly that minimal would almost make it sound like a little bit empty and hollow.

So it was interesting trying to find that line between what is the appropriate fidelity for a game that’s meant to feel like it from that era, but it still doesn’t seem incongruous to modern sensibilities.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah. And the team created this entire game asynchronously, with Nels and Gord being in Canada, Jared, living in the U S and Christina Antoinette, living in Greece. And, Nels and Christina Antoinette actually hadn’t worked together or even known each other before this project.

Nels Anderson: Panic, when they were, in those early Playdate planning stages of thinking about “who do we want to make games for this thing.” I don’t know exactly. I imagine probably Cabel just came across it on Twitter, but he was aware of Christina’s work and so when it came time to being like, okay, who do we want to do some Playdate stuff, there was just a matchmaking on Cabel’s part. So then from there it was just like, pretty consistent back and forth of like, I took that weird old firefighting game based on that other older Japanese game. use that as a foundation. Once there was like a, a skeleton using janky old bad artwork, then it was like, okay, there’s enough representative stuff here so we can start, figuring out what we want to do for the level, like the tile map that is used to get stamp out all the different levels. that vibe was very much driven by Christina and then it was kinda like, okay we need like a hazard prop that basically does something like this.

And then was just lots of just. Going back and forth over over Slack channels being like, okay, basically this. She’d upload, assets to Dropbox. I implement them, be like, okay, this one’s working. Can we adjust this one to have it, the hit box needs to be a little bit smaller, whatever.

Right now it’s not quite synced with the art. Just that kind of pretty rapid this, that iteration.

Christina-Antoinette Neofotistou: A synchronous communication is, magical… magic of our age. We communicated through Slack. I don’t think I’ve ever voice chatted with Nels either. I mean, it It’s weird, isn’t it?

I’ve seen him, I’ve seen his face. He’s seen my face. That’s about it. We’ve been collaborating for, is it three years now?

Nels Anderson: Yeah. This was a thing that, you know, I did on like evenings and weekends over quite a few years now. In concert with my normal studio job. So it was very much not like I’m sitting here at my desk waiting for assets to show up.

I was kinda like, I basically need this. And then, a day later or whatever, boo, some stuff shows up in Dropbox and it was fine. I mean, there were obviously spike moments where we were trying to hit some major milestone ever and be like, oh God, okay. But in general it was the, a asynchronicity was totally fine for what we needed to do.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, it’s amazing that working remotely from different time zones can actually go pretty smoothly. But as one of the games on the earlier side of Playdate’s development, Forrest Byrnes was being developed as the SDK was still being fleshed out.

Nels Anderson: When I started I’m pretty sure there wasn’t even an exposed c a api.

Christa Mrgan: Oh, yeah. Early on. You could only write play date games in Lua.

Nels Anderson: So the game is done entirely in Lua working via the Playdate SDK.

I hadn’t done any Lua stuff for like ages, so it was always, it was hilarious coming back to that and having a difference between that and like normal C based languages that I do on my day job and be like all these arrays are one index, not zero index.

But the actual tools themselves, just seeing the refinement over the years has been genuinely impressive, especially when it’s like mostly just Dan and Dave. it’s outrageous.

Christa Mrgan: It really is. Pennock engineers, Dan messing and Dave Hayden are pretty amazing.

Nels Anderson: And also like knowing folks at Panic from working on Firewatch. And you know, I’ve been down there a few times during the Playdate development process, so I could just send Dan a DM and be like, Hey, I don’t think this thing is doing what it’s supposed to." And he’d be like, “oh yeah, look at that. You’re right. I’ll fix that. No problem.” the kind of personal service one does not get when working with an API from like Microsoft or whatever. So that part was actually pretty wonderful. And because, I don’t know. Oh, probably this was partially accident and partially designed, but the development has been going on for such a long period of time with like slowly accreting more users rather than just like, it’s kept entire, entirely internal and secret and everybody working on it of knows how it works.

And then we just throw the gates open into the public. And then boo, we encountered whatever we encounter. The fact that like slowly, more and more people were brought in, allowed different d. Expectations for people that people had in terms of feature support or like issues or whatever, to be identified kind of slowly and seeing that continue to evolve as well has been really pleasant.

Christa Mrgan: Nice. So what kind of experience does Nell’s hope that people have with Forrest Byrnes: up in smoke?

Nels Anderson: I hope it’s, a little bit of joyful amusement, getting to spend a little bit more time with this grotesque fire prevention mascot that became, I think, more beloved than we were expecting out of Firewatch. And I think this like just expands the characterization around Forrest Byrnes just a little bit more, and I think there’s that and it, even if it also hearkens back to, because this was very much for me, hearkening back to playing NES platformers that were all licensed and like a little bit dodgy, like the Chippendales Rescue Rangers game or something like that.

Or like I remember also on the N E S I had the Bucky O’Hare game and it was so hard. I don’t think I ever beat it. Forrest Byrnes is not that hard. Cause that game was too hard. It was garbage hard but meant to like, live in that consciousness space. I think that would that’s what I hope people are able to pull away from it.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, I love that conceit that it’s a licensed platformer. And I just think it’s incredibly cool that in Firewatch you can find a Playdate as as you’re out exploring, and it has a broken screen, doesn’t turn on, but maybe in world, this Forrest Byrnes game is just sitting on that Playdate’s disc, unplayable. And now you can play that game featuring Firewatch’s in world fire prevention mascot on your own real life Playdate. Hopefully without a cracked screen.

So would Nels and Christina Antoinette make another game for Playdate?

Nels Anderson: Whooo! I, maybe. I think so. Like I have so much to do, making another game full-time with a team of people. Right? And that’s already a tremendous amount of work and I’m like, I don’t need to make two games at the same time. But now I’m like, I really know how to make a Playdate game. Maybe. I leave it firmly at, I don’t know, but it would be cool.

Christina-Antoinette Neofotistou: In a heartbeat. Like now if they asked me. please ask me! It was very fun because it’s a strong enough processor and all that, so yeah, it’s uh, the specs and the limitations are, you know, just right. So I really enjoyed working on it.

Christa Mrgan: And I really enjoyed playing it. I hope you do, too. You can learn more about Nels Anderson and Christina Antoinette Neofotistou. As well as Gord McGladdery and Jared Emerson Johnson via the links in the show notes.

Thanks so much for listening and stay tuned for more episodes coming soon to the playdate podcast feed.

Christina-Antoinette Neofotistou: Thank you so much, bye-bye.

Christa Mrgan: The Playdate Podcast was written, produced, and edited by me, Christa Mrgan. Cabel Sasser and Simon Panrucker composed the theme song, additional music was composed by Jared Emerson Johnson with sound effects by Gord McGladdery from Forrest Byrnes: Up in Smoke.

Music from DuckTales was composed by Hiroshige Tonomura.

Huge thanks to Tim Coulter and Ashur Cabrera for wrangling the podcast feed and working on the website, James Moore for making me an awesome .PDA file extraction app. And Neven Mrgan, who created the podcast artwork and site design.

And thanks as always to everyone at panic. Playdate is shipping now and available for pre-order at play.date.

Nels Anderson: Okay, yes, I will not start a forest fire! Please, you weird pants- wearing bear. Leave me alone!