Perfect Planning! | Life and Channel Update #14 | December 2022

How do you cope when your computer that has all your videos saved on it sh*ts the bed? Well that’s a question I’ve had to answer in the last couple of weeks. Thankfully, perfect planning came to the rescue!

For those who don’t know, I’m in the middle of a major house move. I know, I know, I said that in my last post, but as it turns out these things take a veeery long time to get done. Because of the move, I decided that if my desk is out of action for a week or so, I’d record ahead a little just to build up a backlog. Well one thing lead to another and before I knew it I was 6 weeks ahead for the majority of my content! This means 6 weeks of Transport Fever 2 videos recorded, edited and uploaded. Oh and that’s for 2 slots a week too!

Next on the list was some OpenTTD content. The big return of the M4J Network went really well, at least in my opinion, so I wanted to keep that train rolling by filling out the rest of the year with regular visits to the likes of Gardcity etc. This is where my PC decided to go on strike and just not boot at all, leaving me with a bit of an issue. Thankfully, the rig is back up and operational. I have no idea what was broken, or even how I fixed it, but the main thing is things work now. Fortunately, the perfect planning to bulk record has meant you all have had your twice weekly content, and I bet you wouldn’t even know something had happened without me telling you here, so the planning actually worked!

So I have now recorded 7 episodes of OpenTTD, to go out between the 7th December and the 18th January every Wednesday. Most of the time it’ll still be Transport Fever 2 either side of it each week, but I may still throw some surprises in too. Now these OpenTTD videos are not the M4J Network, or even the New M4J Network for that matter. I have had a lot of requests recently to make a tutorial series on OpenTTD showing how I play the game and how I ended up building a network like the M4J Network. So for the next 7 weeks I will show you exactly how I lay my tracks, signal my railways, build my stations and depots and even schedule my trains. If that doesn’t sound exciting enough, this is just the beginning of the tutorials! I also have plans for road building tutorials, airport and dockyard tutorials, how to add NewGRFs and change settings tutorials and of course a keyboard shortcut to finally teach everyone the secret of the Ctrl key.

Of course the New M4J Network will continue. I have episodes planned out and ready to record, and once the bulk of the house move is out of the way I’ll have more time to actually get into it. The same goes for my planned Cities: Skylines series. Those eagle-eyed people who have seen my Discord channel for C:S change name recently already know what’s happening, but for those who aren’t in the know the city of Blue Vale will soon be arriving on your screens with the new updates coming to the game. There’s a lot of cool new content coming to the channel in the near future, and I can’t wait to bring it to you all from the comfort of the new M4J Studio (the office in my house)!

There may be some other little tweaks, changes and surprises coming in the near future too. I want to update this website as well as all my graphics for 2023, so these changes may start rolling out sooner rather than later. I do want to get back into streaming too, so there may be some impromptu streams over the Christmas period. Otherwise I’m very happy with where M4J is at right now, and I want to say a huge thanks to everyone who’s watched, liked, shared and commented over the last few weeks since videos returned. It’s gone way better than I expected!

That’s all from me for now. Thanks all for reading, hopefully these update posts are getting shorter and easier to read. This may be the last post of the year so for now I’ll say I hope you all have a very happy holiday season, and here’s to a successful and prosperous 2023.

Thanks all once again, and until next time I will see you soon!