Weekly Update: All that's left are the big ones. (Patreon)

Hey Saucy Ones,

So I'm back and I'm mostly un-jet lagged. I almost had it under control and then the time shift happened.

Finally, some news about the FNV CA Compliant Run.

So I've finished the master list of the run. I've got all the guns catalogued and determined by my own ruleset if they're allowed or not. I might work on the main rules some more though, like a recent addition I made where in order to pass the "background check" to buy a gun in an area, I must be at the very least have a "liked' reputation in that area. Here's the whole thing:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LnW_S16nGzUHp2FntJYDGWcLJGinZxHtE45t6XjNW8E/edit?gid=455203903#gid=455203903

Yes, it is color-coded. Yes, it has conditional formatting in all the fields to help keep track of why a gun is banned. and Yes, it catalogues EVERY. LAST. WEAPON.

I've asked for some outside help just to help keep things more on the level. depending on when they can get back to me and vet my list and ruleset is when we'll get started with the run. I'm gonna stream it and I'm gonna go HARD into streaming it so that we can get it done sooner rather than later. I gotta have this ready no later than December 20th to coincide with the start of the new season of the fallout show.

In the meantime there's prep for the Abiotic Factor video...

So the playthrough is done and right now I'm labelling clips since there are so many that there's no way I can remember everything for writing the video, it was a 120+ hour playthrough. I've gotten 214 for the 384 clips labelled as of writing this which puts me right at the start of Hydro Plant and other distractions before the reactor.

Ideally I'd like to get all those clips labelled, an outline of the script done, and then put this on the backburner before I start the FNV run. Maybe taking half my time to play the challenge run and the other half to write the video. I'm definitely wanting to take a lot more time on these videos than I did for previous ones but unfortunately given how much time I have there is only so much time to go around.

I'm on the fence about putting Abiotic Factor off until January or at least after FNV is put to bed but at the same time I'm very optimistic about my progress: I think that so long as the ruleset is finalized this week I could theoretically get done with the playthrough by the end of this month. That's playing every day though which could be exhausting.

On taking my time... and Indieween

On that note while I've learned a great many lessons in improving my production pipeline this year with IndieWeen, I've also learned some other hard lessons. Not a single video did well by the usual standards of my uploads and this is the only month in 13 years of doing this I've had a net loss of subscribers. Not by a lot, but enough to notice that folks did not like these videos. There were plenty of things not to like about them: a little too heavy on cooking stuff, games a little too weird, and they were generally shorter videos, but I don't wanna dwell on this too much. Instead I'm going to take it as an affirmation of what I already know: people like long, thoughtful videos.

I really still want to be the champion of all the weird little indies out there and now I've got people tagging me on every other little project not getting any love on twitter but I also gotta take care of myself and that means making videos I know will do well. I thank you all so much for you support because thanks to all of you this had been a manageable loss that can be turned into a lesson and not a catastrophic failure owing to how I put out 8 videos that didn't get the combined viewership of a single video that I could have done instead

I know a good portion of indieween's failure (from a video performance standard) had a lot of other factors: I was rushing because I was gonna be on vacation for most of October, I made too many videos period, I should have maybe focused on 4 games that totaled up to $100 and devoted more time to making those 4 videos good, and probably some other stuff. I'm not sure how I'm going to proceed with indieween next year, but It's not gonna be like this. No matter how you wanna chalk it up I screwed up bad enough to where this is the only time I've ever bled subs and had my viewership tank like this.

Why this matters

I'm going on about this is because I feel I'm in a precarious position about when to release the next video and how much time I need to take on the next one. It's hard because youtube throws all those anxiety inducing numbers at you to get you pumping out videos but ironically when I pump out videos like that it hurts my channel, and that matters a lot because even if Patreon's been my primary source of income over ad revenue for a while now, I still get my patrons through YouTube and my videos, so they still need to be good. You guys aren't gonna keep paying me if I just put out shit now, right?

I think the best course of action is to just keep going and to remind myself to NOT rush on these projects. I know the big christmas season is coming up and that's enticing for ad revenue but I gotta pace myself here to make sure I have videos that earn their viewership.

That's all for now, stay saucy.