image-right The Nerd Herd Network is just a group of friends trying to make stuff. It started when we wanted to make a YouTube Channel, and slowly evolved into more. Some of these members have portfolios on this site under the ‘About’ tab. Many do not. We still have the YouTube channel which is mostly dedicated to Vlog Content. It is a running documentation of our adventures. At the time of writing, we are in a pandemic and therefore we aren’t going out and having adventures.

Humble Beginnings

The original name for this group was “Craftless Network” which comes from the fact that we wanted to make Minecraft machinimas. We used this alias until 2016 when it changed to “Nerd Herd Network” because we were a group of nerds. This is about when the vlog started. Though we look back fondly on this time, we did not know what we were doing. This is also when Frank started making games, and used the YouTube channel as a way to promote them. I would also like to shout out Average Mac TV. He also makes YouTube videos and sometimes streams on Twitch. He helped us by making content simultaneously.

Game Development

As mentioned previously. We have dabbled in Game Development. Poke My Balls was an app dreamt up by Jake and developed by Frank. It is a simple game where balls fall from the screen and you have to “poke” all of one specified color, and none of the rest. Later down the line we wanted to play Counter-Strike in real life, and rather than making actual C4, Frank developed the CSGO Prop which is a Raspberry Pi-powered box we can use to act as the bomb. The prop can also act as points from other game modes: Secure Area (Rainbow 6) and King of the Hill (Halo). The next game being worked on is the hot-dog flinging physics-based puzzle game Launch My Dog. it should be out in Summer 2021 “Depending on school.”

Short Films

A good portion of the Nerd Herd took a video production class together in High School. We had already shot “short films” together (Like The French Vlog, a film where a food reviewer is kidnapped by a French Political Party), but this was where they started getting better. The three most notable short films were:

  • The Battle For Jumango: Where a group of friends get sucked into a board game, and get a quest from John Lennon to slay a dragon.
  • The Tale of Two Tubbies: Where two guys can’t find dates for the dance, so they decide to merge their bodies into the perfect person.
  • How to Catch a Predator: A secret lab creates a dinosaur, and it escapes. It is up to one man to catch it. Another Notable video is The Mexico Vlog, a documentary-style video of Frank and Jake’s trip to Mexico. It is also where we started getting to glitchy-style down.