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Experiment more with shorter editorials, they should be easier to make and easier to release before the topics become outdated.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