Production update 2025-04-04

Hello everyone!

Sorry it's been so long since the last update. I mentioned on my Discord that the production of Part 3 of the DK64 101% WR History series was a bit troubled.

I initially gave the OK for a release date of March 25th, and I had a decent amount of leeway in my schedule to make that happen.

For a variety of reasons, most of which are my own fault, I ended up about two weeks behind schedule. To make matters worse, my parents were visiting - great, but bad for productivity - and I panicked when I realized I needed to average 5-6 minutes of edited video per day to make the release date happen. In the end, I managed to do it, but I had to sacrifice posting updates because I put all my energy into making progress on the video.

Wrapping up the series

So, the DK64 101% WR History is wrapped up! Here are some thoughts on it.

It was a ton of fun to work on, it being my favourite speedrun category. It ended up longer than anticipated - I expected only two 50-ish minute parts, not 3 parts and a 2:50 total runtime. As I kept working on it though, the interesting storylines kept popping up, and so I talked about a lot more than just record-setting runs for 2019-2024. In my opinion, the overall pacing of the story is better if not every single run that is talked about is a record. It quickly turns into a shopping list rather than a story. So, I'm very happy with the result, even though it was so much longer than expected.

As far as the release goes, well, part 3 has not been doing very good.

Normally, by this time, an average video would be near double those views. At the same time, I'm not super sad about it, because I do plan on releasing the whole series as a supercut, and I think that will give it a fresh breath of air.

I intend to release the near 3-hour video in the second half of June, basically just before I go back home. Other than stitching the parts together and making tiny little adjustments, the major change could be that I will include any WR done before June 15-20th or so.

Speaking of releasing supercuts, I will also release all the piano songs I made for DK64 as one 40-minute compilation video on my music channel! Expect that about a week from now.

Next video

So, what's the next video? Well, as I have now finished the rough outline of the script, I'm ready to reveal details about it!

The topic will be Pokémon Red any% in 1:18 by pokeguy. This actually isn't the world record, it's a 2nd place run (the WR holder left the community and is nowhere to be found). The exact time of the run doesn't really matter all that much though. In fact, the version of the game doesn't really matter much either, and he has the record on Yellow. The speedrun itself isn't anything crazy in terms of execution; I am mostly using it as an excuse to explain how you can warp to the ending of Pokémon RBY in one minute using save corruption.

As you may have guessed, this will be a hexadecimal and an 8-bit assembly kind of video, but it really isn't that complicated. I think the technical details will be relatively simple to understand, and the whole thing should be wrapped up in less than 20 minutes.

Speaking of which, the whole thing will be wrapped up in less than a month! If everything goes smoothly, it will be done right around the end of the month, but I expect to release the video sometime in May, as it will line up better with my sponsor (which I wanna talk about because it's very exciting!). Here's the current plan:

So, what am I doing slacking for a week and a half? Well, there's a long Easter break in Spain and I'll be out of town for that period. This is probably my last excursion out of Barcelona until I come back home in June.

So that's it for the next video! It'll be a short and sweet one for sure, which is a nice break from the three consecutive hour long ones that I just put out, even though I did find narrative editing to be less intense than explicative editing.

Why is the next sponsor so exciting?

I promise I'm not being paid to say this, I really am thrilled about this. So why am I so excited about the next sponsor? Because it's my friend! One of my friends from college, who was next door in my college dorm the first year I was there in 2009-10, is an extremely talented and hardworking 3D artist who climbed the ranks at Beenox working on Skylanders Swap Force, Trap Team and Super Chargers, as well as Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, before leaving to start up his own indie game dev studio with former colleagues, many of whom I know and befriended as well.

I have seen a bit of the game they have been developing for the past few years, and I am genuinely really excited for it. It'll be a monster tamer with action third person shooting combat where you control the monsters themselves. The title is Voidling Bound. Not much has been said and shown about the game yet, and my sponsored segment is gonna be one of the few marketing opportunities they will have with the release of the game. I know how much they poured their blood, sweat and tears in the project, it looks great, and I think the game is gonna be right up my alley.

Here's the game's website and bluesky where they have little sneak peeks.

Next next projects

Other than that, I have plans to cover the Super Mario 64 120 TAS when it comes out, but that is still up in the air. That will be a behemoth project and I fully expect that TAS to be literally the biggest TAS ever when it comes out. Both in terms of number of hours put into it and in terms of global reach, I think there will be an argument for it being number one. If everything goes well, I'll go into research and script writing mode in early May, and will build up a backlog of explanations for the start of the TAS while the end of it is being worked out in the next months.

I also plan on taking a short break in late June - July as I'll be moving back to Canada, and figuring out my next habitation when I'll be back home. I'll be staying with my parents the moment I go back so it won't be an immediate pressure kind of situation, but finding that next housing situation will probably take up some of my time upon my return to Canada.

That's it! I hope everyone is excited for what's coming. I know I am!