Video progress report.

This week’s blog will be slightly different from most. I have not uploaded a proper, full-length video to YouTube in almost two weeks. This is because of the shift in styles of content and uploads that I’ve been undertaking. I used to finish a stream and download a thirty-minute segment that had some interesting events. Then I would process that down into a five- to ten-minute video. While this was a great way to have a constant churn of content and daily uploads, it is not what YouTube wants to promote anymore. YouTube focuses on the front page and "For You" portions of the site rather than subscriptions. Daily uploads are heavily penalized unless they are covering topical stories such as news and drama. Regardless of the quality of content, if you upload daily, you get buried. This format of content worked extremely well for me in December 2022. When Dwarf Fortress was released, I was uploading three to five videos per day. While that sounds like a lot, on release day I uploaded 21 videos in a single day. These videos were pulling 20k-30k views each. It was insane to me at the time, but it did not last. If that happened now, I’d be punished for uploading at that speed. Those videos would not be surfaced as much. However, if I uploaded shorts linking to the videos, they’d perform closer to the way they did in 2022. Obviously, three to five videos daily is not sustainable for one person unless it’s a specific event or situation where that becomes viable. For example, a game you’ve been making content on or a topic you cover getting a major mainstream set of eyeballs all at once.

At the time of writing, I have not uploaded a video (aside from shorts) to YouTube in eleven days. It will likely take a bit longer to finish the current project. However, I hope to give you some updates on the current project I’m working on.

As today goes on, I'll take screenshots of what I’m working on and explain what they are to give you an idea of my workflow and what creating an ambitious video looks like. I’d also like to shout out my feedback team on Discord. They have pointed out things in the edit so far that have confused me beyond reason, things I would never have thought about as negatives that should be fixed.

These file previews might give you a little bit of an idea of the vibe of the video. I spent two hours yesterday editing images in GIMP and cutting things together frame by frame. For the video itself, I am spending a minimum of thirty minutes of editing time to get one minute of video. It’s been as much as two hours for a minute of video. I started working on the project properly on Friday; now it’s Monday, and my total approximate work time is seventeen hours, with an expectation of at least twenty-four hours. This project requires cutting approximately fifty hours of footage down to under two hours. Voice-over, music, SFX, image editing, cutting, trimming, and screaming at my screen when my software crashes... again.

The software I am using for editing is Kdenlive. It was easy to pick up after using Adobe software for a decade, but it’s far from perfect. There are aspects of it that I like a lot more than Adobe. However, it does break in ways that baffle me. Two of the hours I spent yesterday were trying to recover a file that vanished after it crashed. The crash was caused by trying to edit an audio merge, using a simple transition to create a clean cut between two separate recordings. I ended up deleting both files and removing them from the software completely, then re-adding them and cutting them. This was fine and an easy fix, but it also decided that some of the footage I had edited in was no longer there. I had to go back and sift through ten hours of footage to find the spots I wanted and re-edit a whole segment. Now, again, this would be fine enough and not a hard fix. However, the crash also shifted all the audio around and deleted a chunk of the audio track. Simply put, I had to re-edit a whole portion of the video.

Aside from these time-wasters and minor issues with the software itself, the video is coming along well. The seventeen hours I’ve spent have gotten me through a full five-minute intro as well as cutting one of the five VODs into roughly 19 minutes of video. I am not lying; there is part of me that wants to take the week off-stream and just grind out this video. However, that does not seem wise. I’m undecided on this thought; it highly depends on how this video performs. It’s taken roughly fifty hours of stream footage, seventeen hours of editing, and it’s about 20-30% done. If this video pulls a hundred thousand views, it will be worth the time and effort. Once the video is done, I need to make and upload at least a dozen shorts out of it to promote it. That’ll take another chunk of work.

If this video does perform well, there is a possible reality of me uploading shorts more or less daily while streaming four days a week for a chunk of time, then taking a week off-stream and editing a full-length video. Keeping up with news and the future of the fortress is easy enough, as they take 1-5 hours to make. Right now, I am looking at a project that could take an additional twenty to thirty hours to complete. That is the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen, and it makes me want to cry. If I upload this and no one sees it, how do I prove it was worth it? How do I convince myself to take on another project like this? In the past, when I would take on projects like this, roughly halfway through the editing process, I’d start to feel like no one would see it. Then, instead of uploading a quality video from end to end, I’d half-ass the second half. Then I’d upload the video and not feel bad about it because no one saw it anyway. Now, I feel like I have a good idea of how to make a video perform, partially due to obsessive research on how YouTube works. But there is always the possibility of a flop. I’m not sure if my confidence can take that right now, but at the very least, even if nobody sees the video, I need to be happy with it. I need to be satisfied with what I’ve created so that I can look back and be proud of it and think of it as something that I made and enjoyed the process of making. A chunk of creativity that will live on some server somewhere for a good long time. Hopefully, that will be enough for my stupid brain.

If you are a paying subscriber at any tier. This post has a preview of the intro of the video. Not trying to make it sound like a sales pitch I just want folks to know that even though the uploads of videos are slow. I am in fact working on changing that.

As I wrote above, this video is consuming all of my free time. I didn’t really get a weekend. The only time I spent not editing was dinner at my parents' house on Saturday for my sister’s birthday and two hours at the pub on Sunday night. Shout-outs to Tash at the bar for quitting his day job at Amazon and getting his realtor’s license. This is the downside of the current schedule, but I came up with it, so I have to deal with it until I figure out how to move forward from here.

The stream schedule is likely to be Tuesday through Thursday again this week, skipping Friday. It highly depends on how much editing I get done today. I also have to edit some shorts, so that’ll take time as well. I’ve run out of my once five-day backlog. YouTube uploads will be those said shorts. Streams will probably include at least one stream of that new fort I started last week. I want to play some more Norland because those updates look great for balance. If there is a beta patch for Adventure Mode, I’ll stream that and do another one-shot like the elf playthrough I did.

I also have some smaller videos planned for after this huge project. Nothing I should really talk about yet, though.

Stats! YouTube is down from last week at 79,345 views in the last 7 days. Subscribers are up by 33% though sitting at 166. The Twitch stream average viewership is up by 3 from last week sitting at 173. If I had streamed on Friday it would have likely been in the mid 160s based on historical averages.

History and Development of Jupiter Hell is a video that I put together in 2021. My YouTube channel had 4k subscribers at the time. I spent weeks on this video; I don’t even know the hour count. To this day, it’s made me $9.56 CAD in revenue. I still go back and watch the whole thing now and then. It’s probably my favorite interview I’ve done.

Four years ago, I uploaded a video titled The Bronze Hero of Hearts. This was back when I did “lore-ish” videos about events in my forts. It’s messed up to think about now, but this was when I would stream 60+ hours a week with an audience of 40-70 viewers on Twitch. That number of hours was necessary to make a living. I did that from 2017 when I cut the hours at my night job down to 8 from 34. These videos were made in the fringes of the free time I had. I eventually stopped producing them because I felt I was telling the same story over and over. My head was way too clogged with exhaustion to have new ideas. This one stands out because it’s the only one that did well enough at the time that I gained traffic from it on my stream, and again, when the Steam release happened, it got an additional boost.

So, my third and last recommendation is from Folding Ideas, aka Dan Olson. I got to meet him at PAX West last year, and it was one of two times I’ve almost had a panic attack meeting someone. I’m a huge fan of his work and writing, and I envy the productions he is able to make. This video, in particular, is fascinating to watch. It’s about James Rolfe, the Angry Video Game Nerd, his workflow, and deconstructing it. Eventually, it talks about finding peace with who and what you are in a creative space, regardless of whether you have achieved your initial goals. It’s about feeling any kind of confidence and success in your own work, then looking at it and dissecting it to improve. It’s a deconstruction of the personality of an internet creator that is both in good faith and fascinating. I could not recommend this video more.