Weekly Update: A Big Year Ahead of Us (Patreon)

Hey Saucy Ones,

I know it's hardly a week into the year but after taking the time to reflect on goals and set up some plans for this year and do all the boring under-the-hood stuff like organize receipts and tally up incomes, I can see that we've already got a big 2025 ahead of us.

Last Year's Business:

Now that things have finally calmed down between getting the Pathologic 2 video and personal life stuff, I'm getting the last of those damn patches and aprons out. The goal is to get them all sent to you before I head out for MAGFest and that's perfectly doable: I've had all the aprons painted and ready to go since November and my first work task of the day for this week is to post last night's batch of aprons and pack and do the customs forms for the next batch. Based on how many I have to send I'll be posting the last few aprons Saturday morning. The next week will be sending out patches to the people who pledged for just the patch.

I wanna take a moment to thank all of you who pledged last July and August as well as off an apology for how long this has been taking. The short of it is that not only did I have a big move last year but back in 2023 when Halloween in July took off I saw how many aprons I had to send out and was like "WOOOAAAHH!!! That's a lotta aprons! I'm gonna have to really hustle to get all these sent out"

In 2024 I had DOUBLE the amount of aprons as I had to send in 2023.

Fulfilling all the thank-you gifts has been educational if nothing else thanks to the sheer mass of logistical management it has been. Thankfully I've been able to take some good lessons from 2024 which are gonna really alleviate the issues I had with getting all these out... of yeah, and I'm not gonna need to be taking all the time to handle relocation stuff.

Upkeep Stuff:

I'm gonna try tweaking a few things this year. The first is that these weekly update posts are now gonna be public for everyone since I've noticed I've got a whole lot of non-pledge followers now and this is also a convenient way to get information out between videos without having to deal with YouTube's community post system. Hopefully it also entices the watchers to also start pledging by seeing what cool stuff I've got cooking

I'm also gonna be working on little details and such on this site to clean things up a bit. Nothing crazy, just a combination of decluttering the page, organizing posts better, and also finally putting a proper writeup in the About page. I've been meaning to do that fort like 6, 7 years now.

Big Videos for the year:

I've got three major videos I plan to do this year outside of the usual stuff, The usual stuff being Immersive Sims, Halloween in July, and Indieween.

The first is gonna be whatever you all vote on this year. I sent out messages to the Sauce L0rds to get submissions for the big vote and one person immediately got back to me but I'm waiting for others. They've got until the week of the 20th and I'll poke em again closer to that date. I'm not sure when that one's gonna come out since I don't know what its gonna be yet.

The second major one is the Fallout: New Vegas California Compliance run. While i wanted to do this one last year, I also had a lot of other stuff to do and things got away from me. Presently the plan for this one is to either release it whenever season 2 of the Fallout show drops or if it turns out that's happening next year, November the 28th to have it be a big start for the holiday season ad revenue. Man's gotta make money, y'know?

I'm hoping that season 2 of the Fallout show drops earlier because the third big video will be revisiting Cyberpunk 2077 after 5 years of patching and TLC. That's got a hard date of December 9th, the 5-year anniversary of Cyberpunk 2077's tumultuous release. The timing works out well as just like around the time Cyberpunk 2077 released it was time for my to upgrade my PC, and now that it's been 5 years my part warranties are expiring and it's time to upgrade my PC again. This'll be great to directly compare how Cyberpunk ran on contemporary hardware vs present-day hardware. This video's gonna be a combination of a modern review and a retrospective of Cyberpunk 2077's release so it'll be a bit tricky to do.

Immersive Sim Videos!

I did not do NEARLY as many Immersive Sim videos last year since things got so crazy. The silver lining to this is that I now have a shitload of ImSims ready to go for videos. It's a NYR goal of mine this year to make at least one ImSim-related video every month out of the year. Here's what's on deck

Blood West: Dead Man's Promise (this is gonna be this month's video.

PERIPETIEA. It's finally releasing next month and depending on how much time I get with it, it'll be either next month or March's ImSim video.

Fallen Aces

Gust of Wind

Arx Fatalis. I've wanted to do this one for a loooonng time.

Prey: Mooncrash. This one's gonna be July.

~~Ultima Underworld~~ eeeh I think nobody needs to do one of this for a while since Majuular knocked it out of the park. Maybe in a few years

Dishonored

Dishonored 2

Dishonored: DOTE

Imprisoned Hyperion 1 & 2

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (this is gonna be wither February or march Depending on when I get PERIPETEIA)

A revisitation of Postal 4?

VTMB2*** They say this is the year it comes out, but they've said that every year since 2019

Secret Agent Wizard Boy and the International Crime Syndicate... if that comes out this year.

And whatever else comes out this year

That's plenty to keep us going for all of 2025 and easily into 2026!

Halloween in July:

I've already got a theme figured out for this year: AYYYLIENS!!! I've got a bunch games on deck already and I've figured out that if I want to keep things reasonable on my end I can only do up to 6 of them unless I find myself way ahead of normal videos in a month. What I've got on deck now is:

Aliens: Colonial Marines played as intended (on a PS3 that cannot download patches)

Scavenger SV-4

Phoenix Point

Signal Simulator (VOTV will be discussed, but it's not on deck unless it appears on steam or another verifiable platform)

Prey: Mooncrash (that's out monthly ImSim

The Resistance: Fall of Man Trilogy

XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

If you've got any other ideas let me know in the comments here, I'm open to other stuff too, especially if they'll be shorter to get through than big'ol games like XCOM 2 or Phoenix Point.

The real game-changer this HiJ is that I have acquired the means to produce the aprons on my own! previously I had to use a local maker space but I got extremely lucky and found a full-sized heat press at a pawn shop and thanks to the massive savings I got laying away on that press I can also buy my own sublimation printer. This is HUGE! one of the hiccups of last year's Halloween in July was that I was making the big move before the videos released so I had to overproduce in order to make sure that I had enough for everyone. I initially thought I made an insane amount of extra aprons but I ended up coming within 25 aprons of my limit.

This isn't gonna be a problem now though and on top of that, your names on the aprons will be way, WAY less hokey as now that I'm just doing it out of my house and don't need to schedule appointments to press aprons so instead of painting your names on with fabric paint, I can just print your names onto the apron design and can press it right onto the apron, as for that design I'll have it just before MAGFest as I need to get a few good shots of the full moon before I mock it up. Patches will be totally new too as I plan to take advantage of having a reliable firm to make them.

I'm pressently working on that Aliens: Colonial Marines video along side the 2024 ImSim Roundup video and getting these aprons out. I'm a busy dude, but I've gotta get it done.

Dabbling in Twitch:

So one of my goals this year is to try out streaming. Not commit to it, mind you, just try it. I know it might not work out so I don't want to preemptively marry myself to it and end up screwing myself over: Youtube's always gonna come first with streams as a bonus thing. I'm shooting for a late February starting point and that's gonna be a rolling start as I'll be working on Twitch stuff whenever I have downtime, stuff like:

Making a bunch of lil thingies in my about area like all the other steamers have

Figure out a viable schedule: enough to where Twitch will allow me to make money but not so much that it eats into YouTube time.

Getting a layout, this is what I have so far :/

Yeah it's a work in progress. This layout is designed not so much for being a cool streaming thing but for practicality. The gameplay area would be fully 1920x1080 and nothing else about the layout would ever go over it. That way I can set my OBS to save a recording in 1440p, archive the footage, and then when it comes time to make/edit videos I can use stream VODs for footage by just cropping it. I don't plan on upscaling videos past 1080 because it's just gameplay footage and visuals have never been my big draw.

Presently the plan is to try and do a couple secret streams on Discord and then in February start with Patho 2 before trying the Souls-a-thon. Maybe I'll play some mooncrash too to get footage for that for later in Halloween in July. Who knows? Maybe something else will come up too.

Indieween and everything else:

I've already got a shortlist for indieween as I picked up a good number of games on the fall and winter sales. However, the point of indieween is to get better and faster at making videos so all of those are subject to change.

I think that's just about everything but you never know what else the year might bring. It's gonna be a busy year both work and personally for me so we'll see how much of this becomes a reality. No matter what I'm so happy and thankful that all of you are along for the ride with me.

Stay saucy everyone