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Well sorry about the website being down for those who came here earlier. I still don’t know what happened, which is bad, because it means it might happen again. I believe it’s related to the company hosting the site. I haven’t heard back from the person in charge of that yet, hopefully the site will hold before another screwup. In the meantime, here’s what I wrote before that happened:

This episode is another 100% backtracking one, though if I remember correctly, this area is one of the biggest backtracking sessions in the whole game. It’s also on the short side, but only because I like to pick good jumping off spots. A lot will happen in the one after this and I’ll make that one as long as it needs to be. This episode is also a little bit coarser than most of the others, but my reasoning was Freeman is dealing with a lot of combat and having his goals frustrated, so his agitation level increases accordingly. On that note however, if you like this episode I think there’s a good chance you’ll like the mystery series I still plan to make, but haven’t finished the pilot episode to. There’s also some glaring bugs in this episode which I didn’t have time to attempt to fix. Many of the decals are missing, particularly the blood ones by the security guard you saw earlier. This is a shortcoming of demo recording in the game and it seems to happen randomly. If I had more time I could rerecord until it didn’t happen, but alas, you get this instead.

Speaking of time, this is going to be the last FM episode for quite a while, probably at least another month, but probably not more than 2. Hopefully the surge this month gave you some to tide you over. The short answer as to why is because I’ll be resuming work on Civil Protection since NOTHING has gotten done on it since I started on the trailer. The long answer I’ll explain in another post a day or two from now.

Youtube Download 672x384 WMV (55MB) Well sorry about the website being down for those who came here earlier. I still don’t know what happened, which is bad, because it means it might happen again. I believe it’s related to the company hosting the site. I haven’t heard back from the person in charge of that yet, hopefully the site will hold before another screwup. In the meantime, here’s what I wrote before that happened: This episode is another 100% backtracking one, though if I remember correctly, this area is one of the biggest backtracking sessions in the whole game. It’s also on the short side, but only because I like to pick good jumping off spots. A lot will happen in the one after this and I’ll make that one as long as it needs to be. This episode is also a little bit coarser than most of the others, but my reasoning was Freeman is dealing with a lot of combat and having his goals frustrated, so his agitation level increases accordingly. On that note however, if you like this episode I think there’s a good chance you’ll like the mystery series I still plan to make, but haven’t finished the pilot episode to. There’s also some glaring bugs in this episode which I didn’t have time to attempt to fix. Many of the decals are missing, particularly the blood ones by the security guard you saw earlier. This is a shortcoming of demo recording in the game and it seems to happen randomly. If I had more time I could rerecord until it didn’t happen, but alas, you get this instead. Speaking of time, this is going to be the last FM episode for quite a while, probably at least another month, but probably not more than 2. Hopefully the surge this month gave you some to tide you over. The short answer as to why is because I’ll be resuming work on Civil Protection since NOTHING has gotten done on it since I started on the trailer. The long answer I’ll explain in another post a day or two from now.

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Here’s the next episode. Sorry about the delay on this one, I have very limited control over how things get released on Machinima’s channel. This episode is pretty typical of the series. I think my voice acting could have been better, but there ended up being a lot of time pressure on this one. I’m also running into a new bug that I’m basically just ignoring. When there’s a level transition, the demo recording function for Half Life Source completely ignores all ragdolls that weren’t spawned with the level. So if there are any bodies left there previously, they’re gone later on. I doubt there’s any solution to this, so oh well. I should be done with another episode for Thursday. I believe it will go up then, but I’m hesitant to promise since it’s beyond my control after a point. It will be a shorter one, but the length is dictated mostly by the best areas to have a jumping off point in the game so it doesn’t feel too abrupt.

Also I am far behind on email and plan to respond to most of them, but I may adopt a new policy of not responding to questions that you can find with 5-10 minutes of research as I’ve been getting a lot of these lately. I can appreciate if you have a specific question about something I did in the Source engine with a Civil Protection episode because I sometimes employ a lot of tricks there, or information that is very difficult to find; but dozens of emails asking me things like how to enable cheat codes in Half-Life I just can’t see myself responding to, sorry guys. Nothing I do in Freeman’s Mind is terribly exotic, it’s just some config file editing. I’m not editing maps, running mods, or changing any code. It’s just cheat codes and hotkeys. I should be your LAST resort for finding information, not the first. I’m not trying to be unfriendly, but I think everyone, myself especially, would prefer I just make more videos rather than play tech support to the world.

EDIT:

Well guys, I had Episode 23 finished and submitted first thing this morning, but it’s not up yet, so oh well. It’s anyone’s guess when it will go online.

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Surprise, here’s yet another episode. This one’s more action-oriented and plays like some of the earlier ones, so I think fans of the series will like this one more. I wasted pretty much an entire night trying to solve the WMV encoding problem that plagued the last episode, but was finally able to crack it, so hopefully this means no more video/audio anomalies in the future.

This wasn’t made during the gap between the last one. I started working on this one on Saturday and it wasn’t finished until yesterday. Believe it or not, I can’t do much more than about 3 minutes a day on an episode, and that’s under good circumstances and not counting additional sound editing. That may sound ludicrous, but it actually does take me that long, I’ve tried to do it faster before. It’s not because I’m lazy, I just don’t know how to move faster and still have the show come out as well. While it’s loads faster than Civil Protection, it’s basically a process of going through a clip, thinking of a line, recording said line many times as I’m not the greatest voice actor (this can range from 2 - 20+ takes, depending on the line and how important it is), editing through all said takes and arranging it in the episode. If I was a better voice actor and good at improvisation I could probably be done with the game by now. In this reality however, the next episode will probably be out sometime late Monday.

In other news, I still want to catch up on subtitles, website improvements, extras, emails, and many other things, but for the moment I’m just focusing on getting the videos out.

EDIT:

I’m probably going to have to add this to the FAQ. Several of you were asking why the episode was up on Youtube before it was up on here. The answer is I never know when the video is going to be up on Youtube. I have to check it, same as you. It’s someone else’s job to upload it and they’re usually pretty busy to be able to answer my inquests all the time. In this case I was taking a nap when it went up since I’ve been working night hours so it’s quiet enough for me to me record (my old spot got converted to someone else’s office). Since I’m in a different room this is also why there’s more of an echo in recent episodes.

EDIT 2:

Well I finished episode 22, but I don’t have control over when it gets released. The original schedule was Monday, but things got pretty close to the wire on this one. I guess it’s Tuesday now?

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Here’s another new episode. This one has a new introduction for the titles I made. I originally made this to go with the Machinima.com opening logo to try and better integrate it into the show, but after being told that should be fine, it was shot down (that caused a delay with the last episode actually), so I decided to redo it and integrate it into the regular titles. Even though it’s a few seconds long I’m a little hesitant to add something like this since I know many Youtube viewers have extremely short attention spans and this on top of the Machinima.com logo and the titles might be a little more than they want to wait through, but I decided to include it anyway. If people like it, I’ll probably leave it in for a few episodes then change it to something new to maybe reflect Freeman’s progress in the game.

This episode is another wandering episode, there’s no enemy conflict in this one. I’m guessing for that reason people won’t like it quite as much, but I’m still trying to keep it interesting. The episode after this will have more action and that will be out pretty soon.

Making these in a rapid-fire fashion is cutting into my time more than I’d like (I’m working weekends, but not more than about 8 hours a day), but it’s sort of interesting to see how fast I can do them since I’ve never made multiple episodes of Freeman’s Mind where that’s ALL I was working on before. I think they might come out a little better if they were done more slowly, but not substantially so. Regardless, this is an experiment. I’ll be going back to work on Civil Protection by the end of the month.

EDIT:

Even though the Youtube version will be forever screwed up, I finally fixed the downloadable copy so the intro plays correctly and the sound is in sync.