This month I'd like to reassert my claims from the previous blog entry: making terrible content is very stressful! It's just the sheer volume of it. I find I'm thinking pretty much daily about what kind of source material (or 'games' if you will) would allow me to riff entertainingly, since every couple of weeks I need a new series to keep the momentum going.
Generally I think stuff that has lots of characters in it, is unrealistic, glitchy, and is easy to play (or cheat) is the best way to go. That said, my favourite thing I've made so far in TIC is the sequence in Murderous Mike's Day Off where he runs from the police in a stolen deposits van while talking to his wife on the phone (featuring the famous police-siren-based trance club 'Scene of the Crime'), which didn't really meet those criteria!
But all this ranting aside, I do like making the videos. Although it is exhausting and sometimes frustrating to film them (especially if things aren't going well) the laughs and fun had in the videos are all genuine. Plus it's a heck of a lot more relaxed to edit than NLPs, which usually leave me in the 'I'd rather be doing anything else' state of mind. It's like I'm working full time at the NLP factory, and after a (not particularly) long day of that I come home and chill by making my LP videos - feels like I'm a starting-out youtuber again!
In the end, there are worse ways to get money. More efficient ways too, I've heard. 'Jobs'? Might have to google that.
Something tells me that image is meant to be a PNG... Anyway...
In other news I reached the end of the second act of Nariko's Treasure this month! Horray! It marks the point in the series where I no longer have a strong plan for what should happen. Most events from the start until the end of Act 2 were planned out even before I started playing. But now we're at the point in the game where what happens is less up to the player than before so nothing is certain. I have certain events I'd like to happen, if they can be fit into what actually ends up presenting itself through the gameplay. Luckily it's nothing that requires any more crazy luck as ranted about in a previous blog post.
There's an interesting point to consider around this point in the series actually. A meta point. Were I a truly ambitious youtuber, I should STOP making the series entirely. Why? Because from a commercial standpoint, and an analytics standpoint, the series performs very poorly. Really I SHOULD act to maximise my views, and hence money, growth, free promotion and general good upward positive number magic. I should just release a couple of TIC videos per day, since they are efficient to make. Consider the following high quality diagram:
The blue numbers are the hours of 'work' needed to make each kind of video ('work' being defined primarily as editing & writing). From a pure YouTube success standpoint I want to focus on whatever minimises the blue numbers while maximising the views on the right.
AVAST ME HEARTIES BETTER PLAY SOME MORE SID MEIER'S PIRATES THEN YYYYAAARRRR!! Then playing Total War and making NLPs is a close second, which makes sense since I am, by no wish of my own, a 'Total War YouTuber'.
Now I'm not saying all this for any particular reason. I've known that I've been doing it 'wrong' for years now. I'm just doing it my way because it's fun to make good videos, and it contributes more to the genre, the audience, or whatever I'm talking about. Basically I'm trying to succeed the hard way, because I find it makes the process more worthwhile, and hopefully engages the audience a little more and helps build trust and support from them. Bowing to the commercial approach isn't my style, MMMAANNNN. [Bolshevism intensifies]
I still don't understand why people like Fields of Mars, but thank the matrix that they do since it's doing better than any other NLP. Should probably go actually record footage for that made-up-as-I-go-along excuse of a narrative. Good day sir!