Wednesday, January 6, 2021

2020 Recap and Plans for 2021

Happy New Years!  As is customary for me, every year I go back through my Youtube progress and calculate how productive my year was on Youtube, calculating my livestreams and published videos and logging how many and when.  And when looking back at 2020, I had a very unproductive year at first glance.  But 2020 was a very behind the scenes year and after examining all of the behind the scenes stuff, it was very productive.

For starters, I released a video about COPPA, which took effect in early 2020.  This unfortunately made all of my videos (except a scant few) fall under "for kids", meaning limited searching and no comments.  Thankfully, the response to that video was very productive.

However, that video was an offshoot of a huge project that my best friend and I spent a lot of valuable time and resources on.  Starting in late December 2019, we recorded 8 or 9 podcasts with the intent to edit them for clarity and release them to the public.  The project was called Don and Jerry with a goal on creating a podcast and videos on a separate channel.  With his help, we created a successful discord, edit roughly four of those podcasts together, create a discord exclusive preview and publish three video game playthroughs for our brand new Youtube Channel.  Don and I worked hard planning, recording, editing and creating for three months to get this done but unfortunately life got in the way.

A tragedy happened in February which you can read partially about on my new poem: A Girl Named Frank.  At the same time, I was diagnosed with tinnitus, which halted my ability to listen to the podcast and edit.  Around this time, I did record a couple of new videos (Mega Man X2, Lion King, GTA Liberty City Stories) but though I finished the first two, I never got my editor to work.  I chalked it up to lack of memory and put them to the side.

Fast forward a month and my tinnitus is starting to get better.  I started a Resident Evil Challenge on Mixer (as my computer stopped letting me livestream due to memory issues) and managed to beat RE0-4 as well as CVX and most of 5 before getting severely burnt out.  I also streamed most of Gears of War but I wanted something different.

I chose Super Mario Galaxy.  I started it up on my Wii U and started recording the walkthrough and to my surprise, it worked.  I managed to record all 242 stars over the course of the month and began editing them.  Unfortunately for me, my video editor still didn't want to work.

That's when it happened.  My computer's hard drive started failing.  Thankfully, I got a great new one which allows me to livestream, record and edit again.  And throughout October, November and December, I edited the 250+ videos into manageable parts, timestamped everything and created custom titles, editing them down into 70 separate videos.  This was by FAR my biggest project ever for the channel and the most time consuming, taking me nearly six months to finish.  While I am sad that I didn't get it out before September when Super Mario Galaxy was announced for rerelease, it's still done and I'm very proud of the result.  I may start SMG2 soon but I want to do a few other videos first, such as editing the numerous unedited videos on my hard drive.

I did manage to livestream quite a few more times though, streaming Story of Seasons FOMT remake and Portal but unfortunately I didn't get a lot of edited walkthroughs up (though I did manage to get a few that had been unlisted for a while).  And though I finally got my 1000 subscribers last year, I wasn't able to celebrate it much.

That's why this year, I'm cracking down.  It's gonna start with making sure the timestamps on my videos are correct and there.  You may have already noticed I've been doing this throughout today, fixing a lot of the timestamps and adding them as necessary.  This is due to Youtube's new Chapter feature, which really helps with my longform walkthroughs.  By making sure these timestamps are correct and on there, I can facilitate your viewing and make it easy to play along no matter which platform you're on.

I also plan to record a bunch of new walkthroughs starting with Phoenix Wright.  I recorded it a total of three times so far but each time video corruption reared it's head (or I wasn't a fan of the final output).  However, no more.  I got the game on Steam and I can run it smoothly, which will allow me to record it perfectly as I intend to.  I also want to finish more Zelda games as well as the remaining classic Castlevania games.  I also want to re-edit Dragon Quest 1's walkthrough to remove the random encounters and finish DQ3's walkthrough as well as a few Final Fantasies.  I really hope to follow through with this and make 2021 a much better year.