Channel Update #20 (Nov) – Neir misses and thumbnails (Patreon)

Hi,

Two days before the end of the month rather than one day this time, which means we’re heading in the right direction. If you haven’t seen yet, there is a new video out. It took me a little longer to release than expected due to needing to wait for sponsor approval, but it’s been finished almost a week now and after this update goes live I will be starting on the next one (still final fantasy 14, with gothic still planned as the next next).

If anyone remembers from last update, the previous video I was working on didn’t work out but I still haven’t officially scrapped it… yet. Realistically I can’t see myself finishing it at this point, but I did toy with the idea of coming back to it and just rushing it out to release on a second channel or something. The problem with that is that it’s just hard to justify spending time on a second channel video when I could be working on a real video. I don’t like feeling like this problem video has ‘defeated me’ however, so I might give it one last (obviously doomed) attempt before I finally put it to rest.

The video I did make was on Nier Automata. My thought process behind why this game was because after my other failure I needed a project which wasn’t too long and I decided I wanted to make a video where I could be positive as, despite me being a reasonably negative person, I don’t want to the channel to get too ‘unbalanced’ in that regard and I thought a positive video might be more enjoyable for me. So I, as the intro to the video basically said, just sat down and thought of the last big budget popular game that I really liked and felt was exciting, and came to Automata.

One thing I wanted to do when making an Automata video was to put all the focus on the game itself. Over time I’ve seen that when people talk about the game (or make youtube videos on it) there’s so much focus on three things:

1. Yoko Taro being interesting

2. The broader Nier/Drakengard universe and other automata media spin offs

3. The real life philosophers Automata references.

And there’s nothing wrong with talking about these things, but to me the most important thing was always the game itself and I believe the game is more than capable of standing alone. So I decided to try to make a case for why it’s a great game while avoiding those more external factors as much as possible.

The biggest problem I had with the video was deciding how much detail to go into when recapping the story. It’s a narrative focused game, and a rather complicated one at that, and also enough time has passed since release to ensure that some people who played the game might be a little shaky on certain plot details. So recapping made sense even if it’s something I tend to avoid more than other people who might make videos similar to mine. But then I found myself torn between wanting to keep the video (relatively) short, and wanting to effectively recap the plot while including other talking points. In the end I think the balance might have ended up a little off, with the video maybe benefiting from being slightly longer and having more analysis to make it less recap heavy, but overall I’m happy with the quality of the video. Video length in general is something I think about a lot, although usually I’m left feeling a video should have been slightly shorter.

Another thing I feel is worth mentioning is that I am in the process of updating old video thumbnails. And when I say ‘in the process’, I mean I have been messing around a bit in premiere to try to improve some of the weaker thumbnails while also trying to achieve a more cohesive, consistent visual style. The reasoning for that later point is in case it helps video performance. The logic being that if a person enjoys my videos then the sooner they click a video the better (for the algorithm), and making it easier it for someone to recognize one of my thumbnails as mine might make a person who is always going to click, click sooner. Hopefully that makes sense, I feel my explanation is not as clear as it could be, but oh well. A second benefit to this is it makes creating future thumbnails easier for me as I will always be following a similar style.

Anyway if you want to see where I’m at with this mini project, here is a link to some example redesigns for you to mercilessly judge (or just give feedback on), if you wish to (zoom out to 50% for best effect) - https://imgur.com/a/M20R3QT

I also thought this was worth mentioning so people don’t get confused if they see a video of mine and it looks different (a couple titles might change too). I mostly tried to keep the same background images as before to limit how much they change, but for some that’s not possible.

And I think that’s it from me… for now. The next update will probably be a “review of NeverKnowsBest in 2021”, like I did last year, and then (if not sufficiently covered in that review update), the following update will probably be another “6 month plan” to give a greater insight into future projects.