Production update 2023-08-30

Hello everyone!

I hope everybody enjoyed the last video. I've got a lot of things to talk about so let's get into it!

Silo DLTK Explained

How did the Silo DLTK video end up? Let's take a look.

As you can see, it's doing... fine. If I'm being honest, slightly below my expectations, but not to a huge degree. I figured this would not be as big as Minecraft and Super Mario 64, so it's about on par with the later parts of the A Button Challenge. That's fine with me, honestly. To always try to one-up and go bigger, better, longer every time is a toxic mindset on the long term anyway. I was just fine with doing something slightly shorter this time about a topic I like even if it's not gonna appeal to the broadest audience possible. The average view duration being low is just a factor of its length being a bit shorter than usual; 14.5 / 31 minutes is actually a pretty solid 47% average watch time.

TAS with map view

As promised, I am releasing the TAS recreation with the map view that I made, on my second channel. It's ready to go - I just need to start the encode - but exporting it will take so long that I'll do it overnight. It should go live tomorrow on Bismuth Speedruns.

Music

The music is out! Check it out here if you haven't. I'm quite happy with how it turned out, and I was glad to be able to make 8 pieces to make up for me reusing a lot of music in the past couple videos and not putting out a lot of music then. Port of Adia seemed to be the most well-liked. Now, depending on the next video topic, there's a good chance I will get to reuse a lot of this music, but I will try to fit in at least one or two fresh ones for the next video as well.

Next video

Speaking of which! For my next video, I'd like to stay in GoldenEye 007. After the "impossible" run, I want to talk about the luckiest/unlikeliest/most improbable run (still not sure which superlative to use). That is, of course, Frigate! The focus will be on 00 Agent, but I plan on taking a minute or two to talk about Agent and Secret Agent as well.

The goal of Frigate is to free hostages, disarm a couple of bombs and plant a tracking device on a helicopter. The most interesting part is the hostages, because they need to actually escape for the objective to complete. They can choose many different exit points, and they need to choose the fastest to complete the objective in time. There's a lot of RNG regarding not just that, but the death animation of the hostage taker, pathing AI, guards and other obstacles getting in the way, them being able to warp doors if they're unloaded, etc.

Because of all of that, it's actually quite the difficult task to estimate the odds of the hostages completing in time for a fast run. I'll look into just how difficult that task is and if I'm going to be able to advance any kind of number or if it's so arcane that I'd be in the complete dark and any kind of attempt I could make at explaining it would either be impossibly vague or most likely incorrect. That's the last step I need to do to lock in Frigate 00A as the next video topic.

If it turns out not to be feasible, I have other ideas lined up. We'll see in time.

Updates in the last couple of weeks

Finally, I want to talk about how sparse my updates have been on here. I'm aware of it and I'm sorry. In the past few months, I haven't really been in the greatest of places in terms of motivation and work ethic. I'm trying to get back into it but it's an uphill battle I fight everyday. 

More specifically, procrastination got the better of me and it made me less eager to talk about progress because I was ashamed of how little progress I made compared to my expectations. I've always been crippled by procrastination - it's part of why I ended up dropping out of university - and I've never found a way that really works long term to kick the habit. I can find a new routine, a new system, a new schedule that helps for a couple of weeks to a couple of months, then it's slowly back to the same old. I hate it but that's how I am. I hope I can make it up and be better. I hope that when updates are more rare, you guys still know that I'm doing my best.

Part of it can be explained by how hectic my life has been in the past month. We had a decent amount of flooding in the basement. It's an unfinished basement below the apartments with lockers we can use to store stuff, and we stored a lot of stuff there. Thankfully, nothing of value was lost, but for a whole month, the whole place stank of humidity. We took the decision to empty the whole locker and store our stuff elsewhere. Since we have plans of moving out in about a year, we also figured we might as well start preparing for that and sort our things in large plastic storage boxes, so for now, everything is sitting in the apartment and we need to go through all of our stuff sometime soon.

In the meantime, my girlfriend spent most of the summer doing an internship on top of her full time job, so she had very little time for chores, grocery shopping, meals and so on. I picked up her slack to give her a break, but it also limited the time I had to work myself. Not gonna lie though, I very well could have managed everything anyway if I had been more diligent, so I'm not gonna use it as an excuse, but it did contribute to my overall energy level for work being lower.

That's it for now! I will update again once I have the outline for the next video drawn up. I'm dealing with a bunch of stuff right now though. The whole apartment is a mess, oh and by the way, as of one hour ago, we also have water leaking from our bathroom ceiling so that's fun. My car needs repairs, and it's also my girlfriend's birthday next week, so I'm organizing a surprise party and something else on her birthday. So I'll go a bit light on work for about a week until I figure everything out and until I'm ready to dive into Frigate 00 Agent!