The Mandrel Consortium

Uggh, so I was really slack this year. The first two chapters of the book have been completed as levels, so that's something. A lot more work to go and hopefully, I'll have more focus next year.

Okay this year has been a bit of a write off. The server migration took a lot longer than I thought and I just haven't been able to find any spare time to work on the project. This weekend, going to try and find some time.

It's late. I should be in bed, I have work tomorrow, but I've been so jazzed as I managed to smash away at the game, pretty much fixing up and finishing the trans-area level with the help of a new NPC, who guides you in the right direction.


More excepts from the novel were then added to a new cutscene scene. I took the dialogue from the book, voiced both characters (Mandrel and Skelton) heavily voice effecting them using GarageBand.

I also plan to take some video footage with my iPhone of some real world structures / scenes and then take those into FCP X and see what I can spit out as cutscene movies for the game.

Jazzed.

Okay doesn't look like I'm going to get much spare time today ... I will take a peek at the novel manuscript to familiarise myself with the universe and it's characters again. It's been a year since I did anything with the game and probably two before I looked at the novel.

Nothing to report as tonight is Games Night, with friends coming around to play some tabletop / board games. We kicked the night off with some Traders of Osaka, then Dixit, Cinque Terre and ended up the night with a couple of games of Tsuro.

Thankfully, it's Friday night ... tomorrow is the weekend.

Recently I got a renewal notice from GoDaddy for my hosting service ... the price had jumped up 73% with no additional service -- in fact, these jerks lost 1/3 of my database in a MySQL migration recently.

So, I'm in the process of moving all my sites, DBs, etc across to a new VPS service called DigitalOcean. Being a VPS, there's more work I have to do, but should give me greater flexibility at the same cost as what GoDaddy was last year.

Hence, no new work on the game ... tomorrow maybe.

Update 5/11: More sites being migrated ... all my time is devoted to this task at the moment. :(

It's that time again, November when I work on my novel / RPG video game - The Mandrel Consortium. First things first, where is the game at ? I remember I was getting bogged down with a few silly errors / situations in the Trans-area.

So, to ensure I don't get bogged down on that, I'll be making it so the Trans-area level can be completed a little easier and then I'll come back to those other issues later.

So, here's a little teaser video I made of the current gameplay.