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Weekly blog 9/17/23

Hey all, sorry about the lack of blog the past couple weeks. Hard to remember exactly why it's taken so long for me to write again. Then again, the past couple weeks have been pretty eventful with wrapping up two major albatrosses of a project that I've been working for at least all of last month, if not longer. First of all the Pikmin 4 review is finally complete, and technically my project for the Golden Sun modding game jam completed a few weeks back. Though the sloppiness from the short timeframe I worked on it shows. I've been taking some time to clean it up, sharing my progress through Discord, now and then. Let's dive right into the details.

Reflecting on the Pikmin 4 Review

The Pikmin 4 review is finally out. You can watch it below. This has been an eye opener for me to see it finally released which I'll get into now...



After months of scripting, voice over and editing... ... it's out like any other video. I did a premier with the hopes of adding on hype and to better take in the moment of finally getting this baby out... and it did okay. I guess it technically performed above average compared to other uploads. But between the time that went into it and how popular Pikmin is at the moment, I confess I had unrealistic expectations for this video. Maybe its for the best, because if it did so well that it ended up being the only thing people wanted out of me, that would have been its own problem, as I don't think I'd have enough passion in the series to keep that momentum going. But it's still kind of a hard pill to swallow.


Sacrificing all that time that could have gone into projects I'm more comfortable with, just to have it barely do better than my average LP episode in terms of views is a bit discouraging. I haven't given up on the concept of editorial videos completely. It's just I'm going to need a very different approach if I ever do something like this again. The few take-aways I've gotten from all this include...

  1. Stay as far away from topical things as possible. Yeah, sure it'd be good for the algorithm, but by the time I finish the video people have already moved on to the next big thing. Not as big of a problem here as it was with the Direct Reflections, but I have a feeling people weren't really interested in a non-spoiler review of Pikmin 4 by the time I finished it.

  2. Experiment more with shorter editorials, they should be easier to make and easier to release before the topics become outdated.

  3. Put special care into the topics I decide to invest time and energy into. I thought Pikmin 4 was good enough for this with the passion I had in the game, but I kind of lost interest in doing a lot of Pikmin stuff by the time I finished the review, which makes me wonder how much it was passion and how much just hype in the moment. Game still good, and I was really passionate while writing the script, but I find myself questioning if it was good enough to spend several months just to prepare a video talking about it for only 30 minutes.

  4. Put more plan into what footage I'm using during the scripting phase. I think a big problem with the creative process of the Pikmin 4 review is that it took so long to edit. And that editing took so long because I didn't have everything I needed already recorded. I thought between the clips I captured during my personal playthrough and the fail speedrun attempt, I'd be cover but even then I had to boot up the game a couple times to record a thing here and there. Even then, even in the final product I didn't have everything I needed. Like I wanted to have clips of various game hub worlds for that portion of the script and I could of have more specific clips for all the portions I was just running around. But at that point I was just done, and wanted to focus on releasing it. If I can focus future editorials around games, I've already had full playthroughs for, so I could just reuse that footage, that would be amazing. Otherwise, I think I'll need to come up with a better plan for recording somehow. I have other ideas of ways I can make editing easier on myself while experimenting with other ideas. I kind of wish people actually enjoyed writing more than videos so I could just write these scripts instead. But I got some ideas that'll make it easier to share my more in-depth ideas. I just need to figure out what I want to do and try it out.

  5. Keep expectations in check. Now I know that I'm not going to instantly start hitting 1K views on a video like the "big" boys just because I took my time on it, I think that alone will reflect how I do similar things going forward. Who knows, it only did just come out yesterday, but I got a feeling it's never going to reach the unrealistic expectations I have for it. I can't rely on a single good video to change things.

That said, I don't think I'm going to do anything this big for a long time. I'm feeling in a bit of a rut with Youtube at the moment, and I think investing all that time into this one video might be part of it.


Other Video and Stream news

So like I said in the Pikmin 4 section. I think I've hit a bit of a rut with Youtube. I put a lot of time into it, so it's a bit discouraging to not see that effort pay off. That and it's inevitably cut into time that I would use to record and edit my main uploads, which has me in a bit of a panic for next month. It's my birthday month so I wanted to do something extra fun and personal, but I never was able to put aside the time to figure out what I wanted to do, let alone do it. In fact, I'm tempted to just take off the entire month instead. I'll let you all know what I decide to do next weekend, but I got the feeling things are going to be out of wack with the video/streaming routine for a while.


Speaking of which, I'm definitely not streaming next Saturday. It's going to be too busy of a weekend, outside of the internet to even consider it. Definitely gave myself plenty of ideas to do once I got the stream/will sit in front of a mic to stream though. So I think there will be at least a few more streams between the rest of this month and next month.


Game Projects

I kind of brunt out all my typing reflect on my Pikmin 4 video, so I'm going to keep this brief.


Been working quite a bit on my Golden Sun game jam project, despite the Game Jam being over. Found a few soft locks when I shared it on Discord so I want to keep it contain to the Discord until I'm certain I've at least fixed everything with all the patches I made. I think I fixed everything, but I need a bit more time to test things before sharing. Sharing publicly is a whole process with making the itcho and Github pages for each project, but maybe I'll share another update my progress on Discord once I finish testing everything. Otherwise, feel pretty confident I'll have something to share publicly by the end of the month. I'd say next weekend but with how busy next Saturday alone is going to be, it feels foolish to promise anything that soon.


In the meantime, if you missed it, I've released a Quality of Life patch for Golden Sun 1 earlier on in the month, where I take features from Dawn of Djinn like the fast travel, prologue skip, or sellable Psynergy items, and apply it to the original game. So if that was your biggest draw to Dawn of Djinn and just want to play Golden Sun with it, I'd recommend checking it out.

Golden Sun QOL by JackitK (itch.io)


Etc

Had a little time to just try things out this week, kind of wish I spent a little more time just relaxing TBH, but oh well.


Tried F-Zero 99 a couple times, been having fun with that despite never really considering myself an F-Zero fan. In fact I've been tempted to talk about it in video form, but I'm already trying to steer myself away from editorials. If I haven't already talked so long I'd just do that now. Maybe some day I'll do a stream or a quick one-off video to give me a platform to chat about what I've been enjoying about it.


Also tried some Pikmin mods. Is what I would say if I didn't realize I messed up patching one of them so I just ended up playing the first day of the original game twice. xD The one mod that did work was interesting. Though I forgot how bad I was with the original Gamecube controls so I kind of doubt I'll get very far before I end up suffering. Day 1 in the mod was already a bit of suffering as I struggled to throw Pikmin onto a single Pikmin. I was going to just jump right into a blind playthrough of Pikmin 1 & 2 mods for a fun stream idea someday, but oh boy, am I glad I played a little on my own first so I realized how terrible of an idea that was. xD At least not right now, I'd definately need to get used to Gamecube controls first. I haven't played it that way since I first rented Pikmin from Blockbusters, so I forgot just how much better motion controls, gyro, controls, heck even the Pikmin 4 auto-lock features, improved things.


 
 
 

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