Help Make Freeman's Mind HD!

Well here’s a video people may not have been expecting. It’s part a send-me-money video, part behind-the-scenes of Freeman’s Mind. I tried to make it entertaining. If you’ve ever been curious about some of what’s involved in making an episode, you might enjoy watching this. The short version is this explains some of the obstacles to making the series HD and why more money will overcome them:

 

DONATE HERE!

Now the bad news is the next FM episode is NOT ready yet, however it is partially done. I’ll re-record it in HD and get it out ASAP if this fundraiser goes well. In all honesty, I probably would have been done with the episode by now if I never made this video, but the “why isn’t the resolution higher?” comments finally got to me, so by delaying the next episode and making this instead, it could be increasing the video quality on all future episodes.

On a personal note, ever since Machinima.com prevented me from releasing videos for months at the same time my pay dropped over 80%, this past year or so has been like a marathon for me trying to get my income stable again. I’m still crawling my way back towards sustainability and have been involved with a LOT of different projects to earn more income. I’m doing everything I possibly can to try and stabilize things and hope to do so sometime this year, but any extra money you donate will be GREATLY appreciated. A big part of the reason I haven’t bought this part myself is I’ve never been able to justify it; all donation money over the past year has gone directly to food and rent. By making this video, it FORCES me to buy the part and increase the resolution to the show. Anyway, because a lot of my time is divided up these days, I can say that for now, more money likely WILL increase the release rate of both Freeman’s Mind and RGD since it will free up time I would be spending working on other things.

As an extra “thank you”, I’ve also updated all the downloadable copies for Freeman’s Mind, and I’m going to try my best to reply to all the emails I’ve received over the past months, something I’ve been neglecting a lot (again). If you haven’t gotten a reply from me, it’s very likely you will over the next week. And if you don’t donate, I’m still glad to have you all as fans and will keep making more videos no matter what.

I throw out a lot of information in this video, so I can only imagine the comments I’ll get from people telling me I’m wrong about everything, but here are some questions / comments I’m anticipating:

Q: Why aren’t you using Kickstarter or Indiegogo?
A: Those fundraisers typically require many prize levels that would take a lot of time to fulfill. It’s not that I don’t want to give people prizes, but I’d rather not spend weeks mailing things when I could be making more videos instead.

Q: Are there any prizes?
A: Maybe! I will send an email of thanks to everyone who donates. Also I’m willing to give any prizes that don’t require me to act like a business and take tons of time to deliver. I am willing to record a line for anyone who’s donated 0 or more, just email me about it. Also, I was considering releasing all the isolated voice files for all the Freeman’s Mind episodes if people are interested in that. If you have ideas about something else you’d like to see, let me know.

Q: You don’t need a SSD! You need a capture card or use Shadowplay then play back the demos in slow motion!
A: For adding in motion blur, that wouldn’t actually help save me any time, plus it would still be susceptible to potential dropped frames if there was some sort of hard drive stutter.

Q: You don’t need a SSD! Your CPU is too slow!
A: While a faster CPU would speed up the motion blur processing some, none of the cores ever get maxed during recording, there’s plenty of overhead. The hard drive speed is the bottleneck.

Q: Will you be updating all the old episodes to HD?
A: Unfortunately, no. I no longer have the old demos and project files necessary to do so. I never would have gotten rid of them if I expected FM to be as popular as it became.

Q: What about the Game Dungeon?
A: Due to voting results, I plan to focus mostly on FM for the near future, but I have a LOT of RGD episodes planned. This part will remove all barriers for recording in RGD also, so I’ll be able to cover potentially any game after this, not just older ones (though I still plan to keep doing those too).

Q: Do you eat only beans?
A: No, but beans + onions have a good cost-to-flavor / nutrition ratio.

- - -

ADHD version: Send money to Ross if you want to see Freeman’s Mind in HD! Or send money because you can, Ross can use it! New FM coming this month, maybe in HD!
Freeman's Mind Post page

FREEMAN'S MIND: EPISODE 54

Download 848x480 MKV

Here’s another episode that got delayed more than I wanted, but I’m still making them. This is coming out on Valentine’s Day, but it’s just a coincidence, I didn’t plan it like that. This episode isn’t especially related to Valentine’s Day unless you find ninjas and shotguns romantic. I think this episode came out pretty well, it actually took longer due to bugs with HL: Source’s demo recording, but I was able to eventually work around them.

On another note, I wanted to try and introduce some democracy to what I work on next and see how it goes. I’ve start on episode 55, but after that, I haven’t decided what video I should do next, so you can vote on it below:

[poll id=”10”]

In reality, it’s more of a competition between Freeman’s Mind and Ross’s Game Dungeon, but I just wanted to see how big the divide is. While I haven’t given up on it, I can’t realistically do another animated video at this time since that will delay everything else too much and I need to keep my income going. This goes double since it’s now a CONFIRMED conspiracy that Youtube isn’t counting all views and I guess is just pocketing the money instead. I’ve suspected something like this ever since I saw some statistically improbable things happen in December, but that link above has actual proof in it. I’m sure Google’s stance on this is that it’s just a bug they need to fix. An enormous, and insanely profitable bug. So, while I plan to go with the majority rule, if Youtube siphons off enough views from FM so they’re both equal, I may just do more RGD instead, since I can produce it faster and it’s a little more fun for me to make.

More videos coming!
Freeman's Mind Post page

FREEMAN'S MIND: EPISODE 53

This episode got delayed more than I intended, but if you’ve been watching the series a while, it’s nothing compared to some of the other ones. This episode is also one of the shorter ones in a while, although really, this is ideally where I wanted to aim, but the past few episodes have just been one thing after another, there was less of a good jumping off spot. I know plenty of people would just as soon have me make the next episode 30 minutes long, but it’s definitely easier for me to break it up some more. Part of the reason this episode got delayed is because I’ve been spending a little more time learning possible software for the long-term movie project I still want to do. That’s not anywhere close to being done, but I would go crazy if I wasn’t doing SOMETHING on it, I mostly put that completely on hold for 2013. Finally, the documentary Freeman refers to in this episode is totally real, though I forgot the name of it.
Freeman's Mind Post page

Gorilla Gong Promo Server Nuke!

Well I have mixed messages today. The first is Das Bo Schitt has helped us make a great promo for Gorilla Gong. We were hoping for a quick shout out, but he went above and beyond and created an all out machinima promo, and a quality one at that. Check it out here!

The bad news is the promo worked a little too well as Das Bo Schitt is so popular it’s choking the GG server a bit, and this site also. If you have trouble loading things (here or Gorilla Gong), just hit refresh and it may load properly. Sorry about the screw up, but hey, more videos!
General News Post page

ROSS'S GAME DUNGEON: ZANY GOLF

I was hoping to have more time in between this episode and the last one, but there was some time sensitive information in this one. I thought it would be a fun idea to make a birthday episode, but “fun” ended up turning into spending all day Wednesday and Thursday on this, along with doing an all nighter continuing from last night to work, making this the busiest birthday I’ve ever had. Regardless, I’m pretty happy with how this one came out. It’s actually sort of a dual review; the first half of the video I’m reviewing Zany Golf, the second half I’m reviewing Electronic Arts. Feel free to guess which one I give a better rating.

This game easily has the most haunting music out of all the games I’ve covered so far, I still can’t get the “fans” stage music out of my head. Watch this one if you dare.
Ross's Game Dungeon Post page
Contact

The best way to contact me is via email. I only sometimes see Youtube and forum comments and I only use Twitter for quick announcements.

I'm happy for email from people and will try to answer questions, however I can often get overwhelmed by the volume of email I have and I often neglect it in favor of spending more time making videos. I DO read all email sent to me, but replies can often take a while. Please don't get offended by slow replies, even if it can sometimes take months. It's the only way I can have enough time to keep making more videos. If it's something time-sensitive, it may help to put that in the title. Alternately, if it's been a LONG time and you're waiting on a reply, it's okay to send me another message to remind me.

I probably won't reply to emails that are only reports of news or requests for Ross's Game Dungeon due to limited time. There is about 0.1% chance your email will be considered spam by Gmail and I'll miss it. As flawed as the process is for me, email is still the best way to ensure I'll see what you have to say. Also, be sure to check the FAQ!

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