Happy Halloween! Here’s another video that took WAY more time than I intended it to! I selected this game because I thought it would go faster than a normal full length game, but things kind of spiraled out of control, as you’ll see in the video. Some of you may be disappointed I’m covering a flash game for Halloween, but I’ve been wanting to cover some (and newer ones for that matter) on the Game Dungeon, I just hadn’t gotten around to it. I promise I gave it a full treatment for this episode, with some additional surprises. I hope to have a “real” game next year with hopefully more videos leading up to Halloween.

Special thanks on this episode goes to Adam Shepard, who emailed me while I was working on the video, offering to assist with some additional music. He had a very fast turnaround time despite me being a fickle bastard about the music as I tried to figure it out in the middle of deadline pressure. You can hear his music for the “safe room” music and for the in-game ending. I didn’t mention the music in this episode since it was long enough already and it was either absent or unremarkable for this game. I’ve gotten multiple offers of music help in the past, but lately I’ve been overwhelmed by sorting out my email, so for any other composers wishing to help, Adam had the luck of covenience. In the future I’m happy for more music offers for Ross’s Game Dungeon, but it may be a while before I can sort through everything. Without spoiling much, I really mean what I say in the video when it comes to being able to relate to this game.

I also want to say thanks again to everyone who donated, especially helping with the SSD. I can only imagine how much data I’ve written to it since I bought it, I’ve been giving it an absolute workout with all the video recording and processing. This episode alone I’m sure involved a few terabytes of writing at one phase or another.

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TECHNICAL QUESTION FOR TECHNICAL PEOPLE

To any experienced video editors out there, I have a couple questions:

1. Are there any video editors that support WORKING with lossless compression, like HuffyUV or Lagarith? Having everything uncompressed really leads to massive file sizes, it makes me wonder how other people handle it. I use Adobe Premiere CS5 and while it will open those codecs, it is unstable and unreliable when using them.

2. Are there are any “tricks” with the colorspace to get Youtube to preserve more of the color when moving from RGB to YUV or whatever the hell Youtube uses? I preserve the colorspace as long as I can from recording and editing, but it gets lost in compression slightly more than I’d prefer and was trying to see if there better ways of handling it.
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This is going to be last Game Dungeon until at least December, and I’m not promising anything then. All I plan to be working on from here until the end of the year is more Freeman’s Mind. It’s going to be an endurance test however, as I’m also moving in less than a week. I don’t know if I’ll have internet right away, but I intend to get a recording room set up ASAP so I can resume work with only a couple days downtime from the move.

Finally, I was going to include a joke about Candy Corn Oreo cookies, but found out at the last minute that South Park had also, so I decided to scrap it. This isn’t the first time this has happened. I also had an idea for a Civil Protection episode involving Cthulhu and an offshore oil rig that they also beat me on.

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ADHD version: Happy Halloween! More Freeman’s Mind coming!

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Hey everyone, I was invited back to a podcast recently to talk about horror movies since I’m an avid horror fan. You can check out the discussion here:

8-bit life Halloween Podcast

This actually went online just before the latest Freeman’s Mind, so I held off a few days announcing it so it wouldn’t be buried immediately. This podcast isn’t really an interview, but is more talking about one horror movie after another, there ended up being a lot of title dropping in the thread. If you’re not into scary movies, you may not get much out of this podcast, but if you are, it’s an extra bonus.

At the end of the podcast I ask the audience if they have any recommendations for any scary movies they’ve seen, specifically the truly terrifying stuff. That offer extends here also, although odds are anything you recommend I’ve already seen. It’s questionable how much time I’ll have to watch any this year, but I’m happy to add to my “to watch” list if people have recommendations for some really scary stuff.

Youtube link

(Downloadable copy will be up later)

Here’s the final Black Mesa episode of Freeman’s Mind! This one has been about 98% done for a couple weeks, but there were some complications with some of the final aspects of it. Some things that people may find interesting: 1. The volume of the last scientist is as it sounded in-game. I was kind of amazed how quiet it was. Otto was going to increase the volume to it, but I decided it worked better with Freeman shouting that he couldn’t hear him at the original volume. 2. The slipping wasn’t planned, but I thought it was a great addition to the episode, plus I’m never in a rush to redo a gameplay sequence if I don’t have to. 3. My thoughts reflect Freeman’s regarding the teleporter in that I couldn’t imagine any scenario where Freeman is still alive after being teleported if momentum isn’t preserved.

The footage for the next episode is done, though I haven’t made progress on the voicework yet. I doubt there will be another FM episode before Halloween, but we’ll see. Expect more in November!

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Watch Part 1

Watch Part 2

Well I completely bombed the time estimate in my last post, I really don’t know why I thought I was going to get it done sooner, I think it was a combination of the scope increasing and underestimating just how much content there was. This one had so much I decided to split it into two chunks, although unlike some other episode there is a natural splitting point in this one. Working on this one reminded me the most of Strife mostly due to the scale, although Strife is hands down a great game, whereas Revenant is more complicated. I’m still working at getting the Game Dungeons cut down to only the best content, in this case it may have spiraled out of control a bit. If you enjoy seeing quirks and frustrations in the game with the videos, you’ll likely enjoy this one.

Also I may as well mention I ended up fixing the level load delay that plagued me through recording, but it happened so late in production, I didn’t mention it in the video, so you’ll get the more raw experience. Even with the “fix”, the game still fights me from using it every single time, so the video is still pretty representative of the experience.

Because this video took so long to make, I’m going to scale down my original plans for Halloween. I’m still going to have a Game Dungeon, but it won’t be a grandoise game with a huge scale, just because I don’t think I’ll have enough time. The voicework on the next Freeman’s Mind is done, but there are some complications arising in other areas. I’ll find a solution to it one way or another, more Freeman’s Mind is coming.

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Youtube link

(Downloadable copy will be up later)

Here’s the next episode of Freeman’s Mind. This one contains the most shouting there’s been in an episode in a while, but Freeman has some legitimate grievances. I originally considered skipping this area for FM since I felt like it was one of the more contrived areas, next to the giant fan room, but I saw some comments of people saying they had been looking forward to this part, so people will get the full experience instead. In any event, I’m happy with how this episode resolves the previous one. As a bit of side information, the very last part of this episode was literally played and recorded in slow motion. It was the only way I was able to preserve the motion blur AND not have the game glitch during the demo playback. Something about the one of the teleporters the demo system in Source simply did not like.

The voicework for #61 has been recorded, although it will take a little longer for the editing than this one did. In the meantime, I’m likely taking on more than I should and I plan for the next video to be another Game Dungeon. I’m aiming to have it by the end of the month, but I’m not promising anything. More videos coming one way or another!

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