Blip.tv link

Youtube link

Here is another one of the side projects I’ve been up to, a new series! “Ross’s Game Dungeon” is a sort of game review show where I talk about things I think are worth mentioning on various games. While this first episode is more on the tame side, in the future I plan to differentiate this from other reviews in that I’m not going to treat this like a normal review where I analyze every detail of the gameplay or give it a rating, etc. For example, if I’m reviewing a train game, I may decide that it reminds me of an incident where a janitor stole a train and talk about that for a while instead before getting back to the game. So think of this show as part game review, part lecture, part whatever I want to talk about that’s remotely relevant. While I probably will focus more on obscure PC games, I don’t plan to limit myself to any particular kind (though for the near future I’ll only be reviewing low-resolution games as I don’t trust my computer to record much else), although if I do cover a mainstream one, my plan will be to focus on things you DON’T hear in every other review out there. Ultimately, my main criteria for me choosing a game is I need to have strong opinions about it one way or another.

This came about primarily because after joining That Guy With The Glasses, I was told by another creator that the vast majority of their content are reviews. Since I’ve played a lot of unheard of games that I can comment on, I thought this show would be worth trying. I like the idea of this show as it lets me make something constructive out of this otherwise worthless knowledge. For everyone who is groaning because I’m hopping on the game review / commentary bandwagon, I promise to keep doing other videos too.

For this first episode, I’ve covered Tyrian, a frigging masterpiece of a game that puts many others to shame. I had so much to say about this game the episode ran a little long. I think this first episode may have come out a little bit drier than I wanted, but I definitely hope to improve in the future. I expect a certain portion of people to hate this simply because it’s not Freeman’s Mind, but I think it has potential. Expect better writing and worse editing in future episodes.

Also to everyone waiting on more Freeman’s Mind, that will continue too, my plan is once I’m up to speed is to have these in between FM episodes as I think I can potentially produce them faster. All in all, this is another experiment, but so was Freeman’s Mind.

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ADHD version: Ross made a game review show! Warning: It contains lots of talking.

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I’ve mentioned before that besides the videos, I’ve been involved with many projects on the side, well I’m ready to announce the biggest one yet, Gorilla Gong!

WHAT IS GORILLA GONG?
Gorilla Gong is a website devoted to featuring actual machinima (videos created using game engines). It showcases some of the best (or at least good) machinima videos we can find, all of which are approved by dedicated reviewers (which I’m one of) to ensure a certain standard of quality. It is designed to help promote individual directors, especially small ones, and provide quality videos for viewers. The site is now officially in “open beta.” It’s not final yet, but it’s functional enough that we’re happy to announce it publicly and hope to see it grow.

CAN’T PEOPLE JUST GO TO MACHINIMA.COM OR THEIR YOUTUBE CHANNEL FOR MACHINIMA VIDEOS?
Well they can TRY. I’ve joked before that Machinima.com is to machinima videos what MTV is now to music videos. If you don’t know the reference, the joke is that despite having “machinima” being part of the company’s name, Machinima.com ironically doesn’t actually feature much machinima at all now, it’s a small minority of their content, much in the same way MTV doesn’t actually show many music videos anymore. Nowadays, in order for a machinima video to appear on Machinima.com’s channel, the director needs a contract with them (which from my experience, can be very controlling), and they need a certain level of popularity to even be considered for one. IT WASN’T ALWAYS LIKE THIS. It used to be that ANYONE who made a good machinima video could submit it to Machinima’s website, and it would get featured. No contract was required, and the person’s popularity didn’t matter. We are trying to bring that original concept back with Gorilla Gong.

AREN’T THERE OTHER MACHINIMA SITES OUT THERE THAT ALREADY DO THIS?
So far, we have not encountered any site that is doing quite what we’re trying to do. Ever since Machinima.com removed all videos from their website and deleted their forums in 2010, the machinima community has become extremely fragmented. Some sites are specialized on specific games, others haven’t been updated in a long time. There are many machinima makers still out there, but it’s harder than ever for them to find an audience. We want to try and unite machinima makers to not only help promote individual directors / groups, but also become a place that people always know that they can submit machinima videos and have them be seen.

I LIKE WATCHING MACHINIMA VIDEOS, WHY SHOULD I GO TO THIS SITE?
-We have new videos EVERY DAY (we’re currently aiming for about 3 a day)
-Reviewers have personally checked every video that goes up AND written a description on it that says what they like about it, making it easier to find content you like.
-All videos are tagged by category, making it easier to find videos you like be genre or game.
-We guarantee the MAJORITY of our featured content will be machinima videos.
-We make it easier to find good machinima videos you may never have heard of otherwise.

I MAKE MACHINIMA VIDEOS, WHY SHOULD I SUBMIT ONE TO YOUR SITE?
-We can get more views for your videos
-We are free
-We don’t try to restrict you in any way via a contract
-We prioritize videos with a low viewcount (~250k or less), giving you a chance to promote your lesser-seen videos.
-If your video is good and a reviewer likes it, we WILL feature it.
-We have many social media options, making it easier for viewers to link back to your video via Facebook, etc.
-We have director profile pages, making it easier to gain some presence within the machinima community.
-Besides featuring videos, we are trying to develop a machinima community to make it easier to find help you need (voice actors, animators, etc.)

DO YOU FEATURE ONLY MACHINIMA VIDEOS?
We will sometimes feature other kinds of videos: traditional 3D animation, other animation, amateur reviews, let’s plays, etc., however these are all held to a much higher standard than machinimas. Also at any given time, it’s our goal to have the MAJORITY of all featured videos be machinima.

JUST HOW GOOD DO THE VIDEOS HAVE TO BE TO GET FEATURED?
For machinima, a reviewer has to find something in the video he or she likes about it. This could be the direction, writing, voice acting, animation quality, etc. This means the videos can range from “something good about it” to “amazing.” At no point will a reviewer ever feature a video he or she considers bad. For non-machinima videos however, the standards are much higher and the quality of the content must be OUTSTANDING.

WHAT’S THE CATCH, DO YOU TAKE TAKE SOME OF DIRECTOR PROFITS OR CHARGE A FEE?
Hell no. We will NEVER take ANY money from directors. On the contrary, we will be featuring all videos via EMBEDDING. This means that any views of the videos will always count for the director’s channel. If a director gets paid for views, having their video on our channel will only make them MORE money. As for a catch, we will have ads on the edges of the site in order to keep it running. We guarantee though, that they will be non-intrusive and not in-your-face. The other “catch” is by and large, we will NOT promote videos that already have LOTS of views at the time of posting. We are trying to only promote videos that have ~250,000 views or less. The reason for this is to give smaller machinima makers an equal chance against big videos and fight the tendency to ONLY promote big content, which is how so many websites / channels already operate. Popular doesn’t always mean good. We want good.

DO THE VIDEOS HAVE TO BE FROM YOUTUBE?
No, we can accept videos from almost any streaming source that supports video embedding. This includes Youtube, Vimeo, Blip.tv, Metacafe, and some others.

I AM INTERESTED IN THIS SITE, HOW CAN I HELP?
-Spread the word! This will not become a large community site overnight, it needs time to grow and let people see that we’re going to stick around. The more word of mouth we get, the better.
-If you have a Facebook account, liking the site on facebook will help us out.
-Sign up at the site and suggest a video you think we should feature in the forums! Remember, it should have less than 250k views.
-If you think I personally will like the video, email me with a link. Warning: I personally am unlikely to feature videos with the Machinima.com watermark as I don’t think they should be promoted for abandoning the creators and fanbase that originally made them successful. We’re trying to promote the directors, not a company.
-If you have graphic design skills and are interested in making an infographic out of the information listed here we can distribute, go ahead and email me.
-Simply watch videos on the site, and leave feedback!

THE SITE DESIGN LOOKS AMATEURISH, ARE YOU GUYS FOR REAL?
Yes. Again, this is a beta stage, the layout and functionality of the site won’t be finalized for some time to come and we’ll absolutely listen to community feedback. There was much more focus on the functionality of the site when it was designed. Also, a wise man once said: “She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts.”

IS THE LOGO PERMANENT?
No. It’s a placeholder until we get something better. In the future we also hope to vary it depending on different themes.

ARE YOU LOOKING FOR MORE REVIEWERS?
Yes and no. While we do hope to have more reviewers in the future, we want to make sure anyone we add is trustworthy, has some background with machinima videos, and has certain taste standards (as much as we hate to admit it, there is a lot of BAD machinima out there). Approval process for anyone new will likely be slow.

ARE YOU, (ROSS SCOTT) IN CHARGE OF THIS SITE YOURSELF?
No. However I’m friends with the person is does, I’m one of the reviewers on the site, and have some influence on its development.

WHY IS THIS CALLED GORILLA GONG?
It’s just that awesome a name.

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On a personal note, I’m very hopeful for this site and want it to do well in the long term. It’s a long way from being finalized, but I think with new machinima videos every day plus community involvement, it has a lot of potential. I’ll emphasize again, the more machinima videos (under 250k views) that can be suggested, the better. In the future, we hope to have directors actively submitting videos to us for review, but for now, we still have to go out and find all the content ourselves. We’re trying to pick up the pieces of the machinima community that’s been scattered to the winds, so to speak.

Also, as always, more videos (from me) are coming! In the meantime, check out Gorilla Gong!

 

ADHD version: Want to see more actual machinima videos? Go to Gorilla Gong!

Also like it on facebook to help us out!

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I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been working on many different things since I’ve left Machinima.com, well here’s one of my failed attempts. Several weeks back, one of the viewers informed me of a voice acting audition for the game “Unepic.” I contacted the developers and they sent me a giant script of all the lines, and was told I could apply for as many as I wanted. I applied for several different roles, but unfortunately didn’t make the cut. I found out however, that I was a finalist for the lead role, and was the #2 pick (although maybe they tell everyone that). Anyway, for those that are curious, I’m posting all the takes I submitted to them:

Audition for “Unepic” 3.8MB ZIP (contains MP3s)

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CONTEST:

As a consolation prize for participating in the audition, I was also given a key for a free copy of the game. I’m currently way behind on games I want to play, plus I’ve already had this spoiled a bit by seeing the script, so I thought I would give it away instead. If you want to try and win a free copy of the game, go ahead and post a screenshot from any game you want in the forum thread (link below). They should be real screenshots from a real game, not a faked one made in Photoshop. I’ll give this contest a week or two, whoever posts the screenshot I like the best will win a copy of the game. Alternately, you can email me with the subject “SCREENSHOT” and send me a link to your screenshot instead. To keep people from going insane, I’ll put a limit of 3 screenshots per person.

More news coming soon!

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Blip.tv link

Youtube link

Download 848x480 MKV

Alternate Title: Of Bees and Bullets

Here’s the next episode of Freeman’s Mind. I think people will like this one, there’s usually a correlation of how much people like the episode v. having a high bodycount, and this one might be the highest one yet.
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HD QUALITY BY THE NUMBERS:

I get the question from time to time as to why I don’t film Freeman’s Mind in HD resolution. The short answer is it takes up too much time and space. Due to how the Source engine is set up, adding motion blur adds an incredible amount of space processing time, and this episode was a reminder of that. Most of the episode is all in the same level load, which means I can’t really break it up without glitches occurring. To give you an idea of the filesizes I was looking at, here are some statistics on this episode:

-Time for recording 10 minutes 37 seconds of footage to hard drive at 180fps: 1 hour 6 minutes
-Time to process 114,714 individual files into a more usable state: 50 minutes
-Time to do motion blur processing: 1 hour 47 minutes

Total processing time: 3 hours 43 minutes

-Filesize before motion blur processing: 130.2GB
-Filesize after motion blur processing 21.7GB

Minimum amount of space required to process episode: 260.4GB

Now I could just get rid of motion blur processing, but I love the effect and thinks it make some things look more real, even for Half-Life. Unfortunately this means using the Source engine to export the footage (my computer can’t reliably record this real-time) means processing time and filesizes will get a lot larger if I increase the resolution:

720p = multiply every number above by 2.26
1080p = multiple every number above by 5.09

So until it starts raining hard drives or SSDs, I’ll be sticking with 480p for Freeman’s Mind for now.
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LIGHT / DARK

You’ve probably noticed that the footage can be a bit dark sometimes in the episodes, that’s because that’s how how the Source engine exports it and I’m reluctant to change too much because making a dark scene bright can make a bright seen look washed out. This time however, it’s some of the worst I’ve ever seen it. Here’s a comparison below:

Before:

After:

Turning up the brightness in-game has no effect on how bright the footage is when it exports. I think I was able to do a decent job tweaking it this time, but my method wasn’t reliable and I’m hardly an expert. If someone with editing experience wants to look at the original footage sometime and make suggestions as to what sorts of universal tweaks I can do in Adobe Premiere to correct this (as opposed to changing it scene by scene), go ahead and let me know.

That’s it for now, don’t forget about the Dota 2 voice pack!

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After my stumbling launch from last week, I finally have a trailer to go with the announcer pack I’ve submitted to Valve for DOTA 2. Check it out here!

For everyone who voted for this without seeing the trailer, thanks. For everyone else, GO VOTE FOR IT ON STEAM RIGHT NOW. Here’s the link below:

VOTE RIGHT NOW OMG

(Downloadable copy up after this gets 10k votes on Steam)

Don’t just vote yourself, try to get friends, relatives, pets, to vote for this pack. I want to see Jacksonian democracy in action here. I’m tempted to hold the next Freeman’s Mind episode hostage until this gets at least 10k votes on Steam (I won’t though).

For everyone who wants more information than just the preview trailer, here are some highlights:
-Normal lines for every standard situation in the game
-MANY alternate lines for most events in the game (attacking, destroying, denying enemy towers / barracks, etc.)
-Database configured so that you won’t be spammed with the same alternate lines every game, it’s spaced out a lot so it will likely take many games to hear them all.

What this pack does NOT have (yet):
-Lines for specific items bought
-Lines for specific heroes selected
-Even more alternate lines

I would have added many more lines, but Valve put the cap for submission at 600 lines, so that’s what I sent. If I can actually get this in the Steam store, I’ll support it as long as people are interested. I’m also willing to change or add things based on player feedback, so it can keep growing even after it’s released. You know what separates me from other announcers out there? I’M DESPERATE.

 

ADHD version: CLICK ON THE LINK AND VOTE FOR THIS ON STEAM!

 

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