Continuing from yesterday’s post and onto my YouTube series itself. I have also fallen behind on that and there are a multitude of reasons for it. Technical issues, some boredom, depression, Real Life. I need to get back to 1 episode a week at least, and honestly I thought the 2 episodes a week was a nice number. I certainly cannot do the daily episodes I was doing last year about this time. That happened because I was unemployed for a time and was putting that extra time into gaming and creating videos which was great but not attainable while gainfully employed. I feel like I can reasonably do 2 episodes a week with a job, but I want to make sure I get at least 1, which this past month I have failed at.
For the actual content. I need to re-emphasize Minecraft. I felt like at least off screen I was getting there before my all out life crash. I was reinvesting a lot of time back into Minecraft, and while episodes were only coming out 1 a month, that reinvestment in the game slowly starts to pay dividends into actual episodes. I was actually turning a point where I thought I would be getting weekly episodes back up and running. But then the crash… blech. Over the last couple of days I started playing again after a near month hiatus on even opening the game. And I will be honest a lot of my time has been spent figuring out wtf I was doing lol. For Minecraft I want to alternate episode types… 1) Base Update, 2) Castle Update, 3) Exploration, 4) Other. So that every month has 4 episodes that are kind of different…. The other episode could be anything from the first 3 or something else like figuring out a new mechanic or taking a look at one specific mod. I am a person that thrives when I don’t stick to one thing, I like doing a lot of different things at the same time. It’s part of my ADD. And I feel like I kept getting stuck into one certain area where I would do 3 or 4 episodes in a row of the same thing and I think that affected my excitement for it and lets face it, it makes for better viewing to have something different to look at every week.
The other content…. I guess I need to talk about Craft The World. I really like the game and often when I record find myself sucked into it. But there really isn’t diversity in the game. I am now in my third play through and second play through for Let’s Play, and really 3rd play is not different from 1st. The differences between Ice World and Desert World are largely cosmetic. Different animals serve the same purpose, a couple different but fairly useless base items, a couple interesting twists (I did like the tornadoes in the desert world) and a slightly increasing difficulty (less trees in each world seems to be a thing). I think the last several episodes have sort of shown this lack of newness to the game that I have been feeling and I think that came to a head when my low-tech XP farm failed. At that point I just sat there and thought, well there’s really not much left I can try in this game. I like the game, I really do and this is nothing against the game, but I need a break from it and I think what I am doing currently is probably not good for YouTube viewing anyway. I may decide to do a few more episodes, just to give the season closure, and also because one new thing that I really did want to do on camera is go look inside those fancy shmancy pyramids and see what wonders they behold (hopes are not high).
Going forward for the second series outside of Minecraft… Well at this point you might have noticed. I have decided to take on Stardew Valley. I don’t know if the game translates well to let’s play or not and I feel like it is a trendy choice for YouTube. But I will say that I tried the game and very much enjoy what I have seen with it. I got totally sucked into it and actually want to play more so that is a great sign.
I have had another train of thought to do mini-series of me trying out various indie games. My thought was to do 6 to 9 episodes each (since I do recordings in 3 episode stints) and then move onto a new game. I kind like this idea. This goes back to my previously mentioned “I like to do many things at the same time” concept. I don’t feel as trapped this way. I do know that I will be playing No Man’s Sky on Day 1. I am so very excited for that game. At this time I am looking into other indie games that I can play for this short series. And I am purposely not rushing into anything on YouTube, I feel like I’ve already been failing for a month, I’d just assume fail a couple more weeks and come back right than rush things and come back badly.
Last with the YouTube stuff, I have purchased a video capture card. This is different than a graphics card. The capture card unloads the duties of recording your game onto the card so that I can get higher FPS videos on YouTube. When I started recording MInecraft a couple months ago I was noticing that I was rarely getting over 40FPS anymore and that really bothered me. Without recording I can easily get more than 70FPS, but 60 is the sweet spot. If a card can help me get there, all the better. It’d also let me stream easier, and record modern consoles too which could open up new games. So far I think it has helped, and I am also hoping that it will diminish the amount of issues that I have had in the past 6 months for recording as a lot of those issues would be bypassed by the card.