Aftermath of the First Day

To put it simply, I'm blown away.

The times between Thursday and today reminded me of a few years ago when I was playing a D&D game with a few friends. The rogue was trying to make a disguise out of a cactus, and the DM got so fed up with begging  that he made it possible but only with a check of natural 20. Of course, he rolled it. The DM then explained the downsides of the cactus disguise for about the next 10 minutes. The fact it could be full of spiders, was obviously prickly, and would soon begin to rot. The rogue, after hearing this and negotiating for the cactus disguise for the past fifteen minutes, suddenly declared that he was going to throw the new disguise on the ground and run over it with his supply wagon. The DM looked up, completely in shock with a bit of offense, temporarily at a loss for words at how much time had been wasted. What he said next is a moment I'll never forget.

"You completely obliterate it."

That sums up how I felt looking at the page. You completely obliterated it. I'm incredibly thankful that so many of you decided to back me on this, and I have an overwhelming explosion of nice messages and offers from translators and audio engineers I'm going to need to start pouring through. This went far, far beyond my expectations. I can't thank you enough.

With that being said, here's what's going on next.

My intention when I made the page was to possibly work up to the higher goals over the next few months before the move. I definitely wasn't expecting to explode past the first two in a single day, with the third within striking distance at the time of writing. So here's what's happening for the videos.

First of all is the really good news. I'm going to be able to start working on the videos more each week a lot earlier than expected, likely within 2-3 weeks after the upcoming video on NecroVisioN and NecroVisioN Lost Company (two videos in one!). I'm not sure how long Empire Earth and its expansion will take to do a video on, but I'm thinking the usual 2 week cycle should fit since it's a game I'm intimately familiar with. Games I'm completely fresh to typically take me longer since I go into games with the intention of having a good time and not a "critic brain" or something. It's hard to explain. This means that either before or after the Empire Earth video will be the first mod video. I'm leaning towards the Dawn of War Soulstorm Ultimate Apocalypse mod since I've met the creator of it, and he's a really nice guy, though people have been mailing me suggestions and offers the past two days I still need to look through plus I need to ask him about his schedule. If it does end up being before, there will likely be a different mod video after the Empire Earth one as well, as I'm finally cracking into Elite Dangerous properly. My reason for putting it off so long was due to hearing from players to "wait for the patch", which I've come to realize that the patch is more of a concept since Elite has some core issues in its current state, but it still has a lot of merits.

In more good news is that I've received a lot of offers from translators and caption authors. A few of which have offered to work for free in their native language, and from time to time I've had some generous folks making captions in their own time without being asked. The EYE Divine Cybermancy, Dead Space, Dark Messiah and STALKER videos are now completely translated into Russian, and a few other videos are available in Spanish and French captions. This should be helpful for people who still have issues with English, though I'm not sure I'll need to hire any German translators since most of them already speak English better than me and my fellow Americans.

In uh, "moderate news" I'm not going to start physically putting together the workspace yet. The way I see it, anything I buy that's new will need to be repacked up for the move relatively soon so getting a new desk, non-disintegrating/squeaky chair, and other "real office" stuff can hold off a bit longer. For now I'm gonna be saving up, and also looking around to find what would be best to have in whatever floor plan I end up going with so that when I'm in the process of moving in I can get the predesignated stuff ordered and get it up and running as quickly as possible after resettling. This will make doing real job stuff somewhat easier, but YouTube will by far benefit from the new setup the most. I've actually had to redo some takes due to my chair or keyboard tray making an awful squeaking sound so that alone will speed up production time a small bit and give me less headaches.

Finally, the credits also ended up being a lot more popular than expected. I'm thinking of ways to make them something other than "lightspeed scroll" or "black_screen_vegas_titles.veg" and I've seen some good ideas. The one I'm leaning towards right now is one several people have suggested, which would be blatantly copying the format of Siege Sensei Raycevick. I stopped midpost to bother him on Discord about it, and he's given me permission to lease his credit format on the condition I don't start calling the videos "Game: X Years Later" like everyone else started doing after he made it cool so it's a good deal if I continue with it. This would make the credits around a minute long, which is slow enough to have people's names not whisk by at unreadable speed, and could also serve as a way to have "mini-updates" at the end of videos so I could do away with biyearly update videos entirely except in special circumstances. Plus it would be an extra perk to those of you already backing me here, since I could take maybe 3-6 questions before a game review video. Sometimes there'd be less questions with some mini-announcements, but to not have to make dedicated update videos would be ideal for me. If you have any other ideas of ways to make the credits extra watchable let me know!

The first mod video will be a bit of an experiment, and I've had some people say they definitely don't want me to make a second channel for mod maker interviews. I haven't decided on titles or how exactly those will go about, and I really wish YouTube could let you opt into notifications for certain playlists because it would make this easier. I don't want to spam people with "mod spotlight" followed by "modder interview" two days later, so I might end up setting the interviews to not give sub notifications or something similar if they end up on the same channel. It's still something I'm uncertain on and would be open to ideas. I've got a "main engineer" lined up, along with some other talent to help make those something I can pay people to make nice while I work on other stuff, though I'll still be on the hunt for artists and backup engineers.

This is the first public post, since I'm sure there are people curious of what's actually going to happen in the future who aren't patrons, but most of the posts after these will be the more frequent (and hopefully smaller!) weekly updates. I'm going to be going through the community tab soon, and figuring out exactly how the site layout works since I'm not familiar with it, but I'm ecstatic with how things have gone so far. I couldn't ask for a better viewer base.

  
Thank you again for backing me up in this!