Production update 2020-07-15

Hello, long time no see!

So many things happened since my last update. Thanks for your patience while I stayed silent. I got in a loop of wanting to update but feeling like there wasn't enough substance, and feeling increasingly pressured to do something. Time started flying and a month later, here we are. I'm gonna structure this update in three parts: the past, the present, and the future.

The past

Long story short, I got caught up with real-life stuff. My girlfriend is on her last summer vacation of the foreseeable future and we've taken this time to do many many things, from important stuff like getting vaccinated, helping friends move, helping both our mothers, to the good stuff like going on mini-vacations, spending time outdoors, spending time together and seeing all of our friends we haven't seen in a year and a half. We should be nearing the end of it. There's still about a dozen things to do around the apartment and we have a few more activities on our list, but I'm gonna be spending more time working now. We have a vacation planned around the end of July for about a week where we'll go out and visit my extended family up north, and a couple more days of planned stuff together, but the next couple of weeks at least should be mostly dedicated to work.

About the last video: the launch was actually shockingly bad compared to previous videos, I really thought YouTube was just giving me the middle finger. 

(Comparison with Super Mario Bros. 3 Credits Warp for the first 12 days)

That is until nearly two full weeks after release (when most of my videos start dying down), when it finally caught a breath of fresh air and slowly went from one of my worst releases to date to being the best outside of the Big Three™ (SMB1 4:56, SMB1 4:55, SM64 1 Key TAS). Here is a comparison with the Zelda 1 video:

As you can see, in just a day or two, it will surpass that video to become the best of my recent releases after 30-something days, even though around that 11-12 day mark, it was not looking pretty. That is great news. I was hoping the video would do a little better because hey, it's Super Mario Bros. any%, but overall I'm very satisfied.

As a side note, the Donkey Kong 64 TAS video is currently at #4 all-time in my videos, and is about to reach 1,000,000 views sometime in the next 3 to 5 weeks!

The present

As you know, work has resumed on SM64 ABC. Between all the distractions and responsibilities, I am having a lot of trouble completing one of the most complex explanations the whole series is going to have, the one about cloning (the family of glitches that allows goomba staircases, HOLP manipulation and other craziness). It's the first time a single concept has taken over two pages to explain, and I'm not even done. It was a huge undertaking, but I think I did a good job with it.

One challenging element is that pannenkoek2012 is such a good communicator and he has analogies and examples that are so efficient that I'm finding it difficult to make the explanation my own without borrowing from his exact words. But after rereading and revising a few times, I think I'm getting there. 

I'm still unsure how long Part 2 is going to be. Right now, the script is 3 pages long, almost all of which is spent on explaining cloning. I know most of the other early improvements were rather simple, so I'm hoping for a total length of about 20 to 25 minutes, 7 to 8 pages long. I also don't know when it's coming out, but it will be in August.

Other than that, I'm still working on Kosmic's Romhack Wednesday videos weekly.

The future

Originally, my plans for the future were to get parts 2 and 3 out together, then break it up with another project, but I am going back on that. I'm thinking of trying to finish up the entire series in one go, and to get it all out (with the supercut combining every part into one big feature-length documentary) before the end of 2021. That is the current plan.

We're also almost at 75% of the goal of 200 patrons for live streamed editing sessions! I'm looking forward to that, at the very least because it's gonna give me a framework to get a good work session with no distractions. It should help improve the consistency of my work ethic.

Finally, there is exciting news to come, but I currently am not quite comfortable enough that it will indeed happen to announce it just yet. I'm hoping that it's gonna fall in place this week, so I'm looking forward to spill the beans next week!

That's it for now!