Unforgotten Realms Returns April 30th

Long time right? Now that it's finally over and all thats left is mailing the DVDs (which trust me isn't as instantnous as people think). Let me know tell you the story about how much I hate the acronym DVD.

First off, if your DVD has not shipped. Don't panic. It simply means I'm mailing it sometime this month based on when you order it. If you are a furious person who is super angry at me, send me a threatening email and I'm sure that will speed up the process (Just kidding it really, really won't). At this stage I am literally just driving to the post officer a couple times a week mailing these things. Mind you when your talking about hundreds of DVDs that have to be packed, labeled, mailed one by one. It DOES take some time so please, just wait before sending me an angry email.

But how about a story time. A story of a DVD that was suppose to be released back late November is just now shipping in April.

It all started when I left the Escapist. People ask me why I left the Escapist or like to claim I was somehow fired or terminated or something silly. Trust me thats not the case. I don't want to rag on the Escapist because they are really good guys but they were simply not able to support the show anymore and I didn't have any options that were "Keep making Episodes" I had, build a DVD and keep working on the show or quit Unforgotten all together and pursue another career. So the emails, the PMs, the troll threads that I somehow just abandoned the show kinda sting guys because the sacrifices I have made and I have forced my wife to make should really not be taken lightly. Did you know Unforgotten Realms could have been on TV here in Canada? I chose back mid last year however to stay with the Escapist because I believe the Internet is a much better platform. People crying scam, scam, and the time I have had to waste dealing with people who think I'm stealing forty bucks from them really kicks me when I'm down here.

But enough about the DVD. Unforgotten Realms, the comic, the podcast. Will all be coming back up starting on the 26th. I might even have a preview for a new show I have been working on, but I don't like making promises. However, I will promise you that Unforgotten Realms shall continue on the 30th. So high five for that! These weeks moving up to it will give me some more time to get another episode or two ahead and some site/forum maintenance that I have been seriously putting off. Although I can tell already that I am going to be sick of driving to the post office by the end of the month, thats for sure.

Very Slow Month with no change in sight!

I am on the BRINK of finishing up this DVD and moving on with everything else with the site. This puppy is just eating up my time. Right now the entire site is at a standstill as I try to get these puppies ready to ship.

The good news is while I may have had lots of delays with the DVD, other projects have been brewing quiet nicey. I have a dozen podcasts recorded with Roamin and Gaary, the game as some may have seen a couple weeks back has some cool prospects to it and hopefully I can get some more UQ Dev nights in here in the future. I have a brand new fancy show in the works I plan on filming at the end of this month (Hopefully). Yup, although the site is slow now, hopefully will be kicking up soon enough here.

Man I feel like the last dozen updates on the site have just been "HEY IM WORKING ON THE DVD" but really thats pretty much all I can say at the moment. I'm on the final stretch and then i'll be back to getting season three done which by the way has an excellent ending. Lots of hate for Season Three as a whole from some of the LESSER FANS but man when those last couple episodes come out and everything clicks together both was all that build up worth it. Next season I'm going to relax on the storytelling in favor of just slapstick humor for a bit but I will say that Unforgotten Realms without a story just seriously doesn't make any sense. Roleplaying without.. Roleplaying? Geeze.

Oh? When am I planning to have this DVD out the door? End of the month. I'm in the final preparations here and while I have the DVDs now and they are ready to ship there is a SMALL PRESENT I'm waiting on I want give all my pre-orderies. I can say that as long as something doesn't go terribly wrong, the DVDs will start shipping before March. I will keep preorders going until the first day I ship and will put up a big one week warning as well. Once I start shipping however, The DVDs will go "Out of Stock' for awhile until every preorder is shipped and I have time to get setup for proper shipping.

If everything goes according to plan, you might not see "episodes" right away but you will see the build up and small trailers to episodes starting the first week of March with episodes coming out weekly again mid/end of March. I know I said February but alas DVD production deemed it no so.

Stay tuned and check back soon for the continuation of Unforgotten Realms!

PS: I know the episodes are borked. 1 through 14 work with the exception of 7 that for whatever reason doesn't have an intro! I'll be fixing all FOURTY SOMETHING episodes over the month.

Back from the Break. Getting down to Business!

I'm back and busy working on Unforgotten Realms here! Next week will have the comics, podcast and UQ Dev show up and we are getting ever closer to the episodes starting back up again!

This DVD is turning out to be a nightmare on eating my time by the way. We are still in pre-order mode and will be until the first shipment is out, but some people are killing me with the emails. I sent out a big email right before Christmas about the delays and such, but I must have gotten 200 or so emails asking where there DVD is. If you didn't know, I'm waiting for a shipment of DVDs from the guys I ordered them to print them all off. I was suppose to get them at the start of December and now it's looking I'll get them sometime this month. You will know when I start sending out DVD, so don't worry!

The Escapist is just creating more and more work for me as well. It took a couple days to go through and copy/past/embed code from page to page for the 46 episodes using their player and then earlier this month it just stopped working. Great. I don't even have my own episodes on my site. I'm going through and uploading season one over the course of this week and I'm working on getting Season Two up as well.

I don't like giving exact dates because they setup for disappointment but from where I stand right now, we might be seeing Season three continue in February as long as there are no more delays. So sit back and relax while I finish up this DVD so we can move forward. Don't worry too much about future DVD, they won't take nearly as much time as the first one had me learning how to do a lot of stuff.

Happy Holidays

I tried super hard to get that DVD out for Christmas, but in the end it all came down to waiting for a shipment of DVDs to get here that just didn't. My expected arrival date went from late last month, to early this month, to middle of this month to the start of the New Year.

Sorry guys and gals trying to give this as a Christmas present but it was just out of my hands.

On another "Oh man thats lame" note, some of may notice that the episodes aren't working on the site. For whatever reason, the embeded players just simply don't work off Escapist anymore and this wasn't something I could fix before heading to my parents for the Holidays. When I get back, I'll be uploading all of Season One and some of Two, but alot of the material is still exclusivly owned by Escapist so I might not be able to get all the episodes on this site if the player they provide doesn't work.

Now for some good news, we are over 40% complete for Season 3 funding! This means when I get back and the DVDs get shipped here hopefully early into the New Year, I'll be set to start releasing episodes. Season Three SHOULD continue January 1st or around that date but don't hold your tongue just yet!

I'll be leaving pre-orders for the DVD until I know exactly when I'm able to ship and give anyone sitting on the fence about them a 48 hour warning before taking it down so don't worry about that vanishing as I some doing. I will around checking the forums and my email so if you have any questions, concerns, cancellations for my immense failure, please be sure to contact me.

Happy Holidays guys.

I will be a happy man when the DVD is done.

Another busy week here with tons of things going wrong! The comic was delayed, the podcast was released early and all the cases and DVDs got mailed to my moms house!

Yes everything seems to be against me this week. I was away from my computer Thrusday/Friday for some personal stuff and had my FTP program set to upload the cartoon at around noon on Thrusday. That somehow didn't work properly and I think it might have just been user error but it is sort of a bummer. Something else that totally did not work out this week was the Podcast for next week. I was putting a rough private version of the podcast onto Youtube to send to some people and although I know 100% I set that thing to "Private" it somehow managed to upload as "Public". Very, very annoying as I had to then deal with a bunch of angry fans upset I took it off youtube because they are clueless of this site and if it isn't on youtube they don't care. Sadface.

Besides all of THAT though, things are shaping up nicely. I will give fair warning here about the DVD though. I absoutely am refusing to cut stuff off of it so it will most likely get delayed in shipping by a week or two. This is only because the pre orders have been insane so far and I'm totally going to get backed up here. If you are planning on giving this DVD to someone for Christmas, throw me an email at rob @ wittywizard.com and I can see what I can do to make sure you are on the first batch mailed out here. Hopefully everyone will get it by Christmas but for you guys overseas I really can't promise much as I have no idea what kind of time it's going to really take.

Alright then. This Monday is another live show, we got Two more comics coming up on Tuesday and Thrusday and the new podcast (The one without Johnny, stop emailing me because this isn't something I can change) will be out Wenesday. I will tell you guys right now that if you are looking for the same kind of show as Legendary Heroes, you might be disappointed, but with that said, if you are open minded and like to laugh then this new podcast will surely end up on your Wenesday night links.

UR Comics

Sorry the first one is coming out a bit late in the evening! I was a bit busy today and didn't have the time until tonight to get everything setup properly for the web comic. Future installments should be going up before I even wake up, thanks to some nifty new software. So, hopefully you guys are ready for the next chapter of Unforgotten Realms in Interactive comic form!

I meant to get this blog post up last night but I have just been completely out of it the past couple days. My real life is kicking the crap out of all the work I'm suppose to be doing, but I'll get it all together here over the weekend. While the comics were a sure-fire-100%-I-know-it's-absolutely-going-to-happen thing, there have been some changes with the Podcast and Live Stream shows. Some of you might be excited for this news and some of you might be disappointed, but I think a couple months from now everyone will like the changes being made.

Next Monday kicks off the new Live Stream show I'm doing on Mondays. Originally my idea was to simply play games with the fans, and host it live. Sometimes maybe play solo games, sometimes play some multi player for people to join in. While that idea sounds cool on paper,I currently don't have the resources to do it how I would like too. I can't stream my xbox or any consoles, and would be limited to just computer games. So I been thinking about it all week and I'm going to change the live show to something I would love to be able to do every Monday Night.

Work on Unforgotten Quest.

Game design is my true passion, and while I like making cartoons and such, it isn't a hobby anymore and some of the fun has been squeezed out. Mind you, writing cartoons is always entertaining, but recording the audio, mixing the audio, animating scenes, rendering scenes ... well, all of that can get pretty boring quickly sometimes. So I'm gonna do 'hit two birds with one stone' here and make it so Monday Night is a night where I live stream working on Unforgotten Quest. For some of you, it won't be all that interesting, but for others you'll get to see progress that's being made on the new game I have just started- and even be able to throw in your input. (Mind you I might listen to your input, but don't think this is a collaborated game. I don't write scripts that way and I sure as heck don't intend to design games that way!) Hopefully it will be a neat little fill for Mondays because it will give me that excuse every week to work on something I really want to see the light of day in the upcoming year.

The podcast, which also has some bad news/good news with it, is getting a complete make over. It will not be the Legendary Heroes Podcast, and will not feature Johnny. It was my fault to post and say Johnny would be back before everything was confirmed and podcasts were being made. Johnny and I want two different things out of the podcast and in the end neither of us could really come to an agreement on it, but don't worry because while one podcast might die off once and for all, here a new one and hopefully just as entertaining, if not more entertaining is about to be born. Most of the fans do not know that Roamin and Gaary are based off two people, those two people being Roamin and Gaary. These guys have been my Internet buddies for over five years, in fact it might even be closer to ten now. If you ever found the way Roamin and Gaary argue about the simplest of things to be hilarious then this new "currently unnamed" podcast will likely be the greatest thing you will ever watch in your life. More news on this one next week after we do the first recording of it.

All in all, some good news and some bad news. On the cartoon front, we are close to Cotswell, which means I don't need to go pick up a part time job and can finish up Unforgotten Realms Season Three after the New Years. Don't fret too much if that sounds like a long time as I have a couple other small cartoons planned for the holidays.

Hallowbolean Issues

So I wake up Saturday Morning (Halloween), to find my computer won't turn on. This bothers me because my fiancée's computer just recently had the same problem last week. So I started to wonder if it was something malicious the two of us might have gotten but then I did found out my PChad had been running at nearly 90 degrees all night and that's when I realized the heating for my office is right next to my PC.

Whoops.

I cooled it off and it looks like I didn't break anything, but now I'm going to have to reorganize some stuff around the office here to make sure this doesn't happen again. Either way it delayed the Hallowbolean Episode most of the day, which really sucks since I wanted to get it up nice and early for everyone to be able to see, but didn't end up getting on the site till 9pm EST. Oh well, it doesn't have much of a Halloween theme to it anyway. So I'm sure most of you will enjoy it anyway.

The DVD is set to be released in the next 25 days which worries me, as things are taking much longer then I thought. This week I'll be working on get the Master Copy for the first DVD in the bundle that contains all the episodes and commentary. Some of the episodes have had their scenes redone. For example, Timmy the Evil is in a lair a bit more Evil then just a room with nothing in it but shadows. Hopefully I'll have it done by the end of the week because I need the time to get started on the bonus features. I really don't want to delay the release of the DVD but at the same time I don't want to give you guys a product that doesn't totally kick ass. The Halloween episode will end up being on the DVD but I do still plan on adding some other exclusive Roamin and Gaary cartoons in the same fashion. I'll wait till we get closer to the final date to see if any delays need to happen but I'll try my hardest to get copies sent out before Christmas (You overseas folks might not get it till the New Year but I'm trying hard to not let that happen).

Another thing you guys might notice about the Roamin and Gaary Halloween episode is "THE QUALITY"! Back on the Escapist the episodes really paid using that video player, but now using Blip.tv, you guys will really get to see the episodes in all their golden glory. Season One, Two, and Three of Unforgotten Realms will get updated once their respective DVDs come out. And due to contract obligations I still have with the Escapist, I can't yet, but I plan on releasing all my content in this video quality. Some of you might be saying to yourself "But Rob Exclamation Mark, Why buy the DVD if you are going to give us high quality web cartoons?". Well Steve or whatever you are calling yourself these days, I suspect a lot of people who buy the DVD don't buy it for just high quality versions of the episodes which is why I try to offer tons and tons of bonus content that will give you a lot of reasons to want to buy future DVDs. Also, a lot of fans simply bought the DVD for more episodes to be released because they love the show so much so hopefully putting out Quality web cartoons doesn't kill me in the long run!

Speaking of all you cool guys and gals but mostly guys who pre-ordered the DVD. You people are awesome. I'm not at liberty to say how many I have sold so far, but I can say that starting in the New Year Season three will most defiantly be continuing and if things keep up you can expect a Season Four! I haven't started advertising it on places like Newgrounds and Youtube and other channels I have some fans, but when it's released we might see another surge of 10% or 15% which would just be fantastic.

Last but not least. It's November! Lots of cool content is coming to the site this month and lots of it is still in the works. The First ever Unforgotten Realms web comic comes out this Tuesday and then again Thursday and the following week I'll be started a Live Show on Mondays. The idea for the live show was originally going to be just me playing video games with the fans but I'm starting to really consider some other ideas. I might make the live show simply a couple hours of me working on the Unforgotten Realms game due to the fact this gets two things accomplished, one it gives me spare time to work on something I never have time for and two it gives you guys a glimpse of something to see in the future! We'll see what happens, as I'm still deciding what next week will bring us, but hopefully it ends up being something totally badass!