http://www.savingpointmedia.com/forums

~John

Here are all the various things that we are talking about, in some semblance of order.

http://www.destructoid.com/allegations-sleaze-treachery-a-tale-of-two-worlds-194521.phtml

http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/31/nanocade-turns-your-netbook-into-a-lap-friendly-arcade-cabinet/

http://www.qj.net/images/stories/021111/skylanders.jpg

http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/23/minecraft-coming-to-android-too/

http://www.siliconera.com/2011/02/10/cave-story-3d-is-a-nintendo-3ds-launch-window-title/

http://www.destructoid.com/ubisoft-keep-the-faith-for-beyond-good-evil-2-194963.phtml

http://www.itproportal.com/2011/02/23/sony-apparently-developing-hack-proof-ps3/

http://www.myextralife.com/sitenews/awesome-legend-of-zelda-anniversary-painting/

Regarding Ryan and his plans for video games and whatnot, he has taken that side of the team and formed Saving Point Media. That is the name by which our official, non-parody things will go under so that we do not get in trouble with copyright. Our main goal is to release two video games right now (dubbed Projects Throwback and Memoir), and as details that I can actually share and have a conversation about are made available to me I will talk about them both here and there (the site for Saving Point will be at http://www.savingpointmedia.com). It probably will not be ready this year, but there will be things to show and talk about. I want to emphasize that neither of our projects are merely vaporware. Much has already been done in both projects (Memoir has a complete story structure and plan, while Throwback has that and many assets sitting in folders waiting for their use).

Now, as far as Gaming Parodies, I want to continue the basic plan that we were going on before the old site died a horrible painful death. As we are more focused on parody, we will be releasing our regular dubs and side projects under this banner. With the coming of HTML 5, we will be more able to release podcasts and videos on our site without too much work. People will be encouraged to upload things to our site who aren’t official members of the teams, so we can try to raise up a larger user base. Many other things can also be done under this banner, and I hope that we can get serious action towards that direction.

Also, regarding the site itself, I am very close to giving up on WordPress and switching back to what we had. The problem with being the coder and the one who makes decisions is that I only see the backend, and think about what I can tweak. You saw what the site had, all I saw were the limits. If you want to use PHPBB as our management system, just say the word. I’m ready to get that back up, with the theme that we had. That takes a bit of tweaking and relearning, but it’s not incredibly difficult.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me. I would love to get some feedback and more ideas for what this site can be.

Episode 19 was originally posted October 31, 2009.

I feel like I should keep posting these updates, although I have a distinct feeling I’m posting to satisfy my own yearnings to blog. The reason I have done little to update the site and add new features/fix some bugs is that we are planning on a rename by the end of the year. Gaming Parodies is a fine name for a group that, well, parody games. And we have plans to continue doing that. But for things like Project Memoir, StarCom, and many other things that other members are working on just don’t fit under the title of Parody.

The combination of rename and refocus means that the backend of the site will be changing from PHPBB. I have considered things like vBulletin, rather than making a purely forum engine pretend to be a blog system. But the publishing suite is, well, expensive. Along the lines of $285. And I would rather find a free version of basically the same thing (not a pirated version, since we want to follow the rules for this one). But until we begin work on the new site, I don’t want to change things here too much.

On the note of our different plans, I would also like to give you a brief timeline. Bear in mind that this is my timeline, what direction I am currently under the impression we are going.

1. Foundation. Decide on a name, our goals, and build a home for all our projects.

2. Establishing projects. Things that get us known. While Memoir is the goal, we can’t simply start there. Other things, such as a small demonstration of our developing skills, would come in here, as well as other things like StarCom, any video/audio projects (ParodyCast), and other games (Fersivan Chronicles).

3. Memoir. We’ve been working on it since I first talked about it, but at this point we would delve solely into this project. Much of the outline for this game is already finished, so all we will have to do at this point is actually build the game. This is our current goal, but that does not mean nothing will come after. We want to continue to make games.

I hope I am conveying some glimpse of what we are doing. This is not in any way the same way we announced things and never did anything with them. Some of that is my fault, as I liked to post before anything was really achieved. I’ll be honest, I just liked having a website that people visited. But at this point, we do have content. Things have been made, and slowly we will be showing it off, when it is ready. I thank those of you who still come here, and I promise the things we are working on will be worth it.

Feel free to join the site and make suggestions on the forum. Again, welcome to 5.0.0!

EDIT: Obviously I got too sidetracked by theme, and I did that first. Forum will come soon, I promise.