Three Devlogs, one month
Goal: 800 <randy.gg/>
Now it’s been a hot minute since my latest Devlog. Since that time, I’ve been focusing my efforts on getting the Twitch channel running in tandem with the second channel’s stream highlights.
BUT WAIT NO LONGER I CAN. My balls are itching for some high octane, action packed, indie development logs. So here’s how we’re gonna do it…
←the following reads better if you’re blasting this playlist
BOYS AND GIRLS. Our story starts in February of 2020. I was stranded out in the desert with nothing but a green screen, a laptop, and my person. I had been putting together a script for a small video by the name of “Programming a New Physics Engine for my Game” for the last month.
When the editing phase rolled around, I was stumped. I’d never really taken that much of a liking to video editing. I love creating, I love coming up with ideas, I love executing them and watching them unfold.
But when it comes to editing, more often than not I’ll find myself falling asleep at the keyboard — and that’s certainly what happened in this situation. It took me an entire month to finish the edit on that video. By the end of it I was questioning every fibre of my existence…
“This is a shit video, I should just scrap it and start again.”
Nonetheless, I still cranked it out, and it ended up being my best performing video to date, currently sitting at nearly 1 million views. Looking back on it, it was a solid video, a solid edit. But no amount of money, views, or fame will get me to do something I don’t truly enjoy doing.
Don’t get me wrong, editing can be fun, there’s a lot of editors in this world that love their jobs. I just wasn’t one of them.
Now that’s when it hit me…
If I’m dreading editing so much, why don’t I just bloody hire someone else to do it?
A simple thought, even an obvious one — but one that is easier said, than done.
For the rest of the year, I worked very closely with my good friend Average (who just happens to be studying editing) to try and establish a rock solid workflow for outsourcing the edits.
We ended up creating a handful of videos, in the process, refining our process. But there was a big problem looming over head — each video was less successful than the last. I kept telling myself it didn’t matter, that the view-count is just a number, that I shouldn’t let such petty things dictate my action.
But eventually, I cracked.
When you spend an entire month dedicated to something (no matter how half-hearted), seeing it flop is still disheartening. Worst of all, I knew the declining view-count was my own fault; I knew I was doing something wrong, but I didn’t want to face the fact.
Eventually I just gave up. I stopped doing devlogs all together and switched to Twitch streaming. Average and I continued our work together, and we begun pumping out really frequent stream highlights. Even though the videos weren’t getting much views, 3x80k per week is better than 1x200k per month, by a long shot, and for considerably less effort as well.
To this date, I’m still really enjoying the stream highlights. It’s a good way of summing up a day's work in 10 minutes without sifting through an entire 8hrs of stream footage. I also absolutely love the near-instant feedback I get from you guys on whatever issues I’m trying to tackle in the moment.
But there was still a hole in my heart from where the devlogs used to sit.
I missed having one large magnum opus of a video, which I could point family and friends toward and be genuinely proud of. Instead of a mediocre (but still meaningful) body of work that is the stream highlights.
I had some time off over the Christmas holidays and meditated on this idea for a bit. And came to the following conclusion…
The devlogs are making a return.
Not monthly though. One month is too long a span of time for my line of work. A lot can change in a month, and I need the feedback for rapid iteration.
Weekly I feel would strike a nice balance of progress, quality, and quantity; but that timeframe is a tad bit stressful. Myself and Average would like a week off every now and then. So there it is…
3 weeks on, 1 week off. Rinse and repeat.
Now this is where you come in. Editing videos like this weekly is a full-time job. I figured that since the randy.gg fund has just been launched, dedicating our first goal toward getting Average on full-time would be an obvious first move.
So if we can hit AU$800 each month, Average will be able to whip up these high-quality devlogs full-time without breaking a bloody sweat. Then before we know it, we’ll be squirting masterpieces like this out of our ass three times every month…
If that’s something you’d like to see and you’ve got the financial freedom to facilitate it, every cent counts.
Take care,
Randy
