April Fools 2020 - Early Access & Behind the Scenes! (Patreon)

HELLO!

Something a little different today, and potentially the way I may start doing thing on Patreon from now on is a slight early access for you guys before putting the video out there for all to see.

And as I'm taking the time to do this I figured I may as well write up some stuff regarding the video's production and how I've been lately, all things considered.

April Fools Day!

If there was one video that could bring me out of hiding, it was going to be something for today. Like last year, I went down the route of making a fairly normal video in terms of production quality and sticking to a game review... but did it about something ridiculous!
I actually had several ideas for this year including:

• a genuine review of Undertale in my usual style of video, which would have been simply because nobody would have expected it of me... but I only played through that for the first time about 6 months ago and never captured any footage, and wasn't in the mood to replay it just yet.
• A very quick "review" of The Matrix: Path of Neo where I simply picked the blue pill at the start of the game and let the credits roll. I felt this was too easy an option in the end.
• Or this Elmo game I bought for £1 at a games market I went to last year with the intention of eventually making a joke video about it with Puppetronious.

So obviously I went with the Elmo option as I thought it'd be fun to have a joke around with Puppetronious taking the helm and making a video about someone who kinda looks like him!

The entire video went from me playing the game for the first time, to being fully completed in about 7 days as the game is ridiculously short (wasn't joking in the video when Puppetronious said it was a waste of 25 minutes!) 

The other thing I did attempt to do was to recreate the N64 box art, but putting Puppetronious and Arlo in place of Elmo and Ernie but... I'm not that good at drawing, and I felt it'd look weird having only this video in a hand-drawn style compared to the others...

Speaking of which, you may have spotted a slightly different set-up for the thumbnail too!

This Astro Bot one is just a mock-up (for now!) but it works as a template for how I may make most thumbnails from this point on.

I liked the idea of getting rid of the side bar, giving me more room to make each thumbnail about the game itself, and perhaps put my logo making skills right there front and center before you've even clicked the video!

The space on the right will be for some sort of photo of myself... or Puppetronious! It depends on who's hosting the video, I suppose.

What comes next?

Well... First of all (you may have already guessed this) but no, this Elmo video is NOT a part of the multi-part series retrospective I plan on doing, but something extra to celebrate what I hope is an annual April Fools theme from now on!

However, I have spotted I already own another kids game by the same development team as Elmo's Number Journey (tuns out I have heard of Realtime Associates Inc afterall!) so later on in the year I kinda wanna look into that, and perhaps have Puppetronious host it as a short video again.

The plan now is to finish up the first video in this upcoming series, which is actually nearly finished as I'd been working on it for a few weeks prior to starting this Elmo video, and the whole world falling apart etc... but yeah check this out...!

This is for the next video I plan on making. It's a little messy but most camera bits are filmed, and a LOT of video is fully animated and ready to go. I just have a fairly complicated idea for the intro that'll take a few days to film and make look right... but yeah, hopefully not a 6 month gap between uploads again!

Other ideas brewing:

Some other things I don't have in active production right now but feel would make for some fun videos is firstly:

A bunch of PSVR stuff...

I'm thinking one bigger bumper video going over several games that I feel are worthy of quickly talking about, and then a couple of standalone videos for things like Astro Bot, which is a VR platformer game!

I've already been capturing a bunch of footage of these games as I play them out of habit anyway, so at least I have all of that ready to go.

The other thing is a potential video on Death Stranding as I've been playing that game quite a lot in the last few months and have somehow amassed a whopping 170GB of footage for the game. I've no idea how this potential video would turn out but I feel I have plenty to say about it as I've been taking notes and recording the footage anyway... so who knows.

Keep in mind these two things are sort of ideas in the background at the moment and aren't in any active production right now. My main focus is getting back on the horse with this series I want to talk about throughout the summer.

COVID-19 and work related stuff:

I won't go into too many details but the short version of it is that physically, I'm fine.
I don't seem to have caught any bug, and all of my family seem OK thus far.

My main concern is what'll happen if I do catch it, as my job does involve dealing with a lot of people face-to-face and is totally unavoidable in that respect.

I have my family to think about, and the company I work for is seemingly doing nothing to help staff with things like ignoring social distancing guild-lines, and not providing cleaning solutions either, so at the moment I'm keeping my distance from the place, unpaid.

The main thing I'm dealing with at the moment is the anxiety this brings, as I've no idea what response I'll get from colleagues and management when I eventually do go back.

Thankfully, the sometimes ridiculous amounts of overtime I did throughout most of the last 2 years means I have enough savings set aside to live off of, and help my family out for the time being... so we should be fine.

I'm just wondering what'll happen about my job and how I may or may not be treated when I show my face back there again.

I hope all of you are keeping well. And honestly DON'T worry about keeping up with Patreon pledges during this time if it's even the slightest inconvenience!!!

I don;t make enough videos to justify charging per month so I'm glad that in hindsight I opted into a per-video page when I did sort of go into hiding.

Thanks for the support, and keep safe everyone.

 -Pete