Hey everyone, I have a quick announcement, one of the videos has won an award for the Machinima Expo 6 festival (no relation to Machinima.com)! I submitted “Stranger In Need” and “Civil Protection: The Tunnel” to it this year and they both made it as finalists, with “The Tunnel” winning one of the awards! It turns out it had some prizes, which I wasn’t even aware of. It looks like I’ll be receiving an award similar to this:


It reminds me a little bit of the marker from “Dead Space”:


The people running the festival and the other contestants were all very nice. I encourage any machinima makers to submit entries to them the next time they run the festival, which I assume will be next year. I’m hoping it will get more of a turnout next year too, since the machinima community has become very fragmented in the past couple years. It’s my hope that Gorilla Gong will help remedy that so that machinima as a medium is in a better state this time next year.

I’ve gotten asked a lot if “The Tunnel” is going to get a sequel, since I think one of its biggest shortcomings was that I left it a little too open-ended. The answer is still I don’t know. I definitely have ideas for a sequel, but the animation was so brutal for the original that it almost never happened. I’ll almost certainly won’t want to do another major video in the Source engine, but there’s nothing to say I couldn’t port the assets over to a new engine at a later date, so I’ll see. If it does happen, I’m afraid it won’t be anytime soon.

In the meantime, more videos are coming out soon, I’ll make a new post as soon as the next one is done.

More Freeman’s Mind! My apologies for a longer than usual delay on this one, you can mostly blame that on the Game Dungeon, which I actually wanted to get out in August. For the foreseeable future, FM will be getting a lot more focus in the future. Right now my goal is to get 2 more FM episodes out this month and another Game Dungeon, in that order. I don’t know if I’ll actually ACHIEVE that, but that’s what I’m aiming for. There are a couple smaller things I’m working on that may show up later on, but Freeman’s Mind is going to remain the priority for quite a while.

I’ve been awake for about 35 hours, and only had 5 hours sleep the night before that, so thinking of things to say is getting increasingly challenging. Enjoy the Halloween episode! I made it! This one was an experiment where instead of making it more review oriented, I decided to attempt a full playthrough of the game. It combines some of the style of Freeman’s Mind and RGD. It may have been a mistake, I’m not sure. It seemed to have more disadvantages compared to RGD or FM individually. It certainly took a long time to do. Anyway, this is quite an exciting game to cover regardless. I was definitely channeling some of FM when talking about Rickety Town.

Unless it becomes wildly popular, this will probably the last episode of RGD for a while. I’m pretty much just going to focus on Freeman’s Mind starting in November. I’m pretty sure I need to sleep first though.

If you’re scared of clowns you shouldn’t watch this episode at all.

This is just a quick post before the video release tomorrow. I’ve received some requests from a few people wanting copies of the maps used in “Civil Protection: The Tunnel.” I only made the one outside The Tunnel (from Shadow of A Doubt). The rest (and edits to mine) were created by Andrew “Nicadeamas” Dehnart. If you use any elements of these maps in any of your projects you must include him in the credits somewhere.

These maps are unsupported, don’t ask me for help on them, I didn’t bother organizing them. There are some random test maps in here too. They weren’t meant to be playable maps, just used for shots in the video. They were mostly created for Half-Life 2: Episode 2 (though the outdoors one was in Episode 1, otherwise the grass looked screwed). A lot of them use assets from other games / mods (Zombie Panic, Fortress Forever, Counter Strike Source, Dark Messiah, etc.). Honestly this stuff is a mess to go through, but if people really want it, they can dig through it. Here’s the link:

All maps for The Tunnel (7z archive)

Well in my quest to cut down the time on the episode, things completely backfired and this became the longest one so far. Also, it gradually started taking more of a stranger and angrier turn than I was expecting. Nietzsche said if you gaze into the abyss long enough, it will gaze back at you, so I guess on that note I’m starting to feel like I’m made out of vector graphics. It didn’t get so bad that I considered just burning the computer instead of releasing it though, so here it is!

While it is kind of intoxicating being able to release videos this fast, I have been working on it practically nonstop since the last one, so I’m afraid this rate of videos won’t be normal in the future. I do have plans to get one more episode out for Halloween though, after that, I’ll be focusing pretty much exclusively on Freeman’s Mind for a while. Videos!