Aphelion Gaming

Original is here: http://forum.aphelionpowered.com/index.php?threads/aphelion-the-future-my-true-passion.1710/#post-5890


Aphelion - The Future - My True Passion

Hello Everyone!

I'm writing this post to bring everyone up to speed with the current state of Aphelion, my current situation, and what I plan to do in the future (not small things - pretty big things).

The Past Year
The past year has been pretty quiet and in all honestly I know I have hardly been around. I don't have an excuse for that other than I have been running two companies, a games company and a consultancy company which leaves me with little time to sleep, let along anything else. This has made me a little sad since Aphelion and all the people in it are very important to me and the whole concept is something I am extremely passionate about. Evidently there has been a steady decline in activity in the community due (in part) to my absence but also for a few other reasons:
We had several periods of time where updating the Minecraft server would have been a bad idea and many people didn't want to build because we would lose everything we worked towards.
@Valesse was also taken out of action due to stupid University internets and now heavy amounts of changes to stuff in the US.
Minecraft got super annoying, broke most good plugins with the API shift and all in all completely disrupted server maintenance which meant that I would have needed to invest EVEN more time to keep things ticking over.
Now - Approaching Christmas and the New Year
So where are we at now? The community is quiet most of the time with an occasional burst of people all popping on. That makes me feel like the only reason things are the way they are is due to a lack of regularity in the community, which incidentally can be fixed and I will explain how in the next section. First I want to discuss what is happening with me personally right now. I cannot give specifics due to the current nature of business but I can fill you guys in more than I do to others.

I now part own a computer games company called Omnigon Games which has a game called UemeU (you probably know this). UemeU has recently had an fantastic amount of press on Kotaku, PC Gamer and VG24/7. Not only is it turning heads in the press but it is also turning heads in the professional world and it is likely Omnigon Games is going to become something rather larger very soon (psssst... its going to be epic). I'd have to say PC Gamer's article is my favourite... :)

Last week I had an interview with quite a large gaming blog which has yet to be published and they asked my quite a bit about what made me so passionate about Minecraft when I was playing and what I thought was so special about the community. I spoke for a good 20 minutes about LPMinecraft and Aphelion and how we had all bound together and changed each other's lives significantly building friendships and supporting one another. I actually got quite emotional at the time... little bit teary - it's a good thing it was only an audio interview and there were no cameras :)

This reminded me about how special this was and how I really needed to sort things out and at least fill you all in properly about what is going on with me so that you can understand what is going on a little better... hence this post and the following statement:

"I fully intend to revive Aphelion and grow it beyond the size of LPMinecraft."


For those of you who don't know, thats a members base of approximately 30,000 users. Doing it wont be easy but this is my intention over the next year. My hope is that you are all still here (lurking) and will stand by me and help each other while I do this (and we do this.... I can't do it on my own).

The Future (and beyond)
So it's all well and good me giving you my intentions but it doesn't mean anything if I don't do anything. So heres the plan:
I try to start actually being around. I say try because I cant immediately always be around, but I can be around more often. I'm going to start by being online tomorrow and tomorrow evening for a good while and going forward I'm going to try and bundle together some regular times where you can all rely on me being there, streaming / playing / just hanging with you guys. I'm hoping people will be around to hop on the Minecraft server with me and @raxxo :) I'll be streaming the whole thing :)
I still have tonnes going on right now... things in my life are about to go through a big transition and although I can't give details... Omnigon Games is about to become a reasonably big deal... and I am going to need to move home to relocate and things are going to honestly be amazing (think cool studio, amazing resources, regular big streaming capacities, all that jazz). This does however mean that things might be more erratic than I'd like them to be in the meantime. Please bear with it, and understand that I haven't forgotten, I just need to do a few more bits before this community will have something that pretty much no other community has...... and I still can't say what it is :( but its there and I want to! PS I'm always available on Twitter - I swear @EmiBliss and @MrMonotone are the only people who really take advantage of that! @EmiBliss will tell you i normally get back to her within 10 minutes to fix the server / answer a question :).
The Christmas Period Activies - It's pretty commonplace for communities to do events around this time of year and to do fun stuff together. So I'd like to put together stuff that we can do this christmas. I am completely open to suggestions but at the moment it is likely I will try to throw up a creative minecraft server which we can all build in, and then I will host the map afterwards for everyone else to download. Another idea is that we can all go in and play UemeU together and I will teach you all how to play and we can make some cool stuff in there together. It is really up to you lot though. So let me know below and we can sort stuff out. If we do events they will likely be... on the 24TH and 25TH of December in the evening. So around christmas eve and after christmas day! Obviously I'll probably be fooling around all the way into the new year as well... (I kind of have a sort of holiday until January .... I hear people saying .. "What... Mentioum has a holiday! Thats crazy talk!"
Big plans - I want to change the games industry and the culture within it by leading by example. That might sound like a big thing to say right now... but if you knew the things I can't tell you right now, you might understand why I think this is possible. It's a big goal... and getting Aphelion moving again is the first of many steps! PS I'll probably get to tell you all the juicy details middle - end of January.
So In Conclusion

Basically - I'm back, I'm going to be around more, I need your help and support to make this Aphelion amazing and better than ever, and Omnigon Games is doing awesome! So let people know, all the people who you remember hanging out with, and doing things with, new and old friends - Hit them up and we will see if we can do something awesome all together again. Who knows... maybe we can make another absolutely epic spawn or something like we had back on Sekai ;) .... man those feels :)

Pledge your support below!