#oneaday Day 582: Getting some mojo back

No drawing today as I've been doing other creative things, as I shall talk about in a moment.

I have not felt at all like making any videos for a while, which is a little bit frustrating to me, because the first two episodes of my Space Rogue playthrough actually did surprisingly decent (for my channel) numbers, and I reckon there's just one or two episodes more of The Granstream Saga to do before that's all finished. I just haven't quite been able to summon up the energy to continue those recently, not helped by a week of feeling ill that I'm just getting over.

However, with a soft embargo date approaching for Super Woden Rally Edge, a game I wanted to cover — the video I made on this game's previous installment is the best-performing video on my channel by a long shot — I felt a bit more inspired to actually do something today. So I recorded a bunch of voiceovers: both for this, and for some other things that I've previously written articles for, but wanted to turn them into videos. All in all, I've recorded voiceovers for Super Woden Rally Edge, Old Skies, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein 2009 and Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, which should result in a nice spread of 15-20 minute videos for each. I've even edited the Super Woden Rally Edge and Old Skies ones already, but I'm going to leave the Wolfenstein ones to another time — maybe tomorrow, maybe later in the week, depending on how I'm feeling.

I continue to go back and forth on what is "best" to do for my YouTube channel. Up until now, I've built it on Let's Play-style playthroughs of games, and I think a lot of my viewers like that sort of thing, particularly as I make an effort to explain how to play the game, why it's interesting, why it's still relevant (if it's an old game, which it usually is) and what I, personally, think of it. These are fairly easy to record and edit, but they are time- and energy-consuming to produce, since they do involve me sitting and playing a game, often for quite a long time, and attempting to find meaningful things to say for the duration.

At the same time, the pre-scripted videos tend to overall do better, particularly over the long term. I think I'm probably more "proud" of those overall, too, since they involve more in the way of editing, and delivering a voiceover is a different skill overall to off-the-cuff, unprepared commentary while playing "live". However, they take a lot more time to both prepare and edit, since there is often a lot of miscellaneous footage required to capture along with the footage of the main thing I'm covering, and the editing process involves a lot more in creatively finding ways to visually represent the things I'm talking about.

Part of me wants to commit to one or the other of these approaches, because I feel it would probably be a good idea to. At the same time, I think there's value in both approaches; you can show things in "live gameplay" that you can't show in a "video essay"-style production, and vice versa.

I do, however, think that kicking off long playthroughs again might have been a mistake. The videos for The Granstream Saga have performed more poorly than anything I've done for a long time, although, as I say, the first couple of episodes of Space Rogue did surprisingly well. So I'm inching towards abandoning those, though I feel like at this point I probably should finish The Granstream Saga at the very least.

Anyway, that's something to think about another day. I have enough on my plate with these new videos for now, so watch for them coming soon to my channel!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 272: A productive day!

One of the troubles I am sure anyone with any sort of "online presence" will be familiar with is the feeling that you "should" be doing something "productive" with any free time you happen to have. Such is the case with me; I've been on holiday all week, and I've had the lingering sensation that I should make some videos for my YouTube channel, since it's something I enjoy doing, and having a bunch of free time available is, surely, the ideal time to do such a thing.

And yet. And yet. There's always a part of your brain at times like this that says "no, fuck that, you booked time off so you don't have to work, so just relax and enjoy yourself". Of course, making YouTube videos is a relaxing and enjoyable activity, but it also requires effort, so you can see the quandary.

Anyway, I made some time to get some stuff done today. I'd already scripted the intro sections for several vids yesterday, so all I had to do was set aside a few hours to record the intros and gameplay sections, and there we were.

I'd been meaning to do several of these videos for a while, but had put up a bit of a mental block towards a couple of them, because they involved games and a platform that are unfamiliar to me: specifically, two Spectrum games that had the potential to be rather challenging to cover.

And they were challenging to cover, but I found a solution. Mostly dogged determination, to be honest, though in the case of one of them, copious use of save states and rewind functions. And the result is, I hope, some videos where I demonstrate how a lot of Spectrum games can be something of a "slow burn", particularly if you didn't grow up with them, but if you are willing to put in the time and effort, there are potentially rewarding experiences that await you.

All in all, I got five videos done altogether today: three Spectrum vids and two Atari games as a palate-cleanser. Want specifics? Oh, all right then; on the Spectrum front, the two I was worried about were Ant Attack and Army Moves, the latter of which is where the majority of the save state/rewind "cheating" took place, because fuck that game's first four levels, plus Auf Wiedersehen Monty, which I knew probably wouldn't be an issue and, sure enough, wasn't. The two Atari games were Lode Runner's Rescue (which is a really interesting game I'd never heard of until very recently!) and Frogger II (which I just like).

That's pretty danged productive, so I should be pleased with myself. So I am! I'm looking forward to sharing these videos with you, as I think they're all a lot of fun. Watch out for them over the course of the next couple of weeks.

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#oneaday Day 103: A solution?

Following yesterday's ponderings, something blindingly obvious occurred to me earlier: there's quite a simple solution to what I was contemplating, and that is to actually finally start doing some streaming.

I've tried streaming a couple of times and not had a terrible time doing it, but I fell off from doing it because I didn't really set aside a specific time to do it and haven't (yet) put in the work to try and get any sort of "community" going. To be honest, it's that "work" part that kind of puts me off a bit; one of the nice things about YouTube is that I've been able to just sort of do it slowly and gradually build up an audience naturally without having to faff about promoting myself or whatnot.

Twitch is a platform that is still quite alien to me. There's a lot I don't like about it. It's noisy and filled with distracting features that don't play nice with my autistic brain. I feel certain portions of the Twitch audience have unreasonable expectations of what a streamer can be expected to do to keep them "entertained". And I've seen far, far too many people burn themselves out because they "needed" to get Partner, or Affiliate, or whatever their monetisation program is called.

But at the same time, I kind of like the idea of having a platform where I might be able to make some new friends, chatting about the stuff I love. If I do decide to kick off some streaming, I'll almost certainly keep it retro-focused — at least partly because in my study, which is the place that is really "set up" for streaming, I don't have either a gaming PC or a current-gen console — but I think there's plenty of potential to cover things there, between Evercade, the various mini systems I have (Atari 8-bit, Amiga, C64 and, later this year, Spectrum) and, of course, the gigantic Launchbox library I have on a 5TB hard drive.

It's kind of a scary prospect, though. Even more so than YouTube, Twitch is "putting yourself out there" and inviting comment from any old random who happens to stop by. I should probably comfort myself with the fact that the kind of people I wouldn't want to engage with probably wouldn't be watching retro gaming streams, anyway — but it's still somewhat nerve-wracking.

Perhaps I'll give it a go this weekend as a sort of trial run. My wife is going into town with a friend for a bit, so maybe I'll take the opportunity to try some bits and pieces out back then. If you'd like to stop by, here's my Twitch page. No promises, but I have mentally "pencilled this in" for this Saturday, and we'll see how it goes.

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2431: I Also Made This

I made another video today in an attempt to further solidify my knowledge of Hitfilm 4 Express, and indeed to refresh my subject knowledge with regard to video editing in general, as it's one of those skills that can atrophy from non-use, particularly with how non-intuitive professional-grade programs can be.

I'm still in two minds about the advent of video on the Internet and how, for young people in particular, it has taken the place of good old fashioned text Personally speaking, I'd still rather read a good article with nice screenshots than watch a video — particularly if I'm out and about on my phone and am not in a situation where listening to the audio of a video would be practical — but I'm forced to reluctantly admit that for gaming content, video does sort of make sense.

Video games are, for the most part, a dynamic, audio-visual medium in which the way things move around the screen and the noises they make are just as important as what they look like as still images. This is more true for some genres than others — shoot 'em ups such as the two games I've covered with my videos over the past couple of days are a good example. But even in more sedate games, there's value to being able to actually demonstrate what the thing looks like in motion, how its interface works and all manner of other things. And while you could take the TotalBiscuit approach and make hour-long videos about options menus — there is value there for some people — I think the real strength in video coincides with the atrocious attention span most people have these days: short, snappy summaries of what something is all about and why you should pay attention to it.

I don't yet know if I've nailed that format in my videos just yet, but I'm enjoying making them if nothing else. Plus insofar as creative projects go, they could potentially end up forming a "portfolio" of sorts should I find myself in a position where my video-making skills might potentially get me a job of some sort. That would be nice, wouldn't it? I'm trying not to think about it too much, but as I'm broke it's kind of constantly on my mind.

Still, I guess this counts as a vaguely productive use of my time, and I did at least apply for two jobs earlier today, so I can say I got something done. Unfortunately none of those somethings quite pay the bills at present, but, well, doing something is better than nothing, non?