2024 Projects - Roadmap (Patreon)

I realized that things have been pretty quiet on my end the last few months for a variety of reasons, so I figured I should make a post detailing what I've been working on and what order things are likely to come out in.

2023 was very much a year of me being hired to work on Secret Projects for things other than Epithet and my YouTube channel. I tried and failed to balance those projects with my own work because I always prioritize other people's work going smoothly over anything I'm working on. That's because when other people are that guy and get in the way of my projects, I want to kill them! So I never want to be that guy myself! Yay!

I had one major writing project on and off from January to July, and then a second major directing project which I expected to last from August through Oct/Nov, but it actually lasted through until January 2024. Whoops. What are you going to do. I'll talk about those when I can talk about them, which will not be soon.

I was also trying to get the PoP book out, which has been unnecessarily difficult, and my last goal of 2023 was to finalize most of the remaining Kickstarter rewards. I still have three books to write, but those come after everything else is done, so getting the signed copies shipped and all the physical busywork off my plate was my #1 priority.

I was busy in December, January, and I'm out of the country for all of February, but this upcoming year I'm finally pivoting focus back to my YouTube channel and I'm going to be focusing on the following projects:

THE DOKAPON VIDEO - (ETA Late March would be nice, but April is more likely)

A video breakdown of all the mechanical issues of Dokapon Kingdom and its 2023 port, Dokapon Kingdom: Connect. Vixen, Aloha and I played this on stream a few months back and I became obsessed with the sheer badness of its design. When something is bad, I like to research into why. Was it underfunded? Was production rushed? Was there a problem with the staff? Or was the developer just genuinely incompetent? In this case I'm almost certain the answer is the latter.

This video is sort of a spiritual successor to Let's Make a Pokemon Game and Let's Make an Animal Crossing Game, but it's much longer and more mean-spirited than those were. This also serves as practice for me editing a video of this length for the first time so I have a little more experience under my belt by the time I get to the Jetters video, which, yes, I am still working on.

This video is about... 60% done. It's nearly two hours long and requires a ton of visual work and lots of footage-gathering. Also math. Lots and lots of math and graphs.

SO THIS IS BASICALLY ONE PIECE

When StiB was close to ending, I knew the only series that might be a good fit for a future installment was One Piece. The correct formula for a good StiB is a franchise I know a lot about that has some great elements but a lot of undeniable flaws. That's One Piece. However, Oz was not interested in doing OP because Oz hates the art style.

Bo's willing to do it though!

We've got about a third of the video storyboarded, but we keep getting hit by Real Life issues. Bo's got chronic bad luck this year and I don't feel comfortable giving any kind of ETA on this because while there's a small chance things will settle and work out smoothly, I think it's more likely a tornado will crash into their house.

...Which actually did happen to the illustrator of the Fire Emblem/Zelda/Star Butterfly videos!

When this is done it'll be the longest StiB.

DOGS IN LOVE 3 - (Late Spring, probably?)

Dreading working on this one, to be honest. To my recollection, I already sorted out most of the clips I'm going to use for it, which is a big chunk of work done, but doing the animation with the portraits takes forever. I spent entire days correcting the issues on the portraits I got commissioned for DiL2, to the degree I didn't even bother hiring the artist to make more for the 3rd video. Like, what's the point if I have to spend hours upon hours correcting all the coloring issues between the portraits that makes them unusable?

Originally I was going to ask Bo to help me with the only new portrait I'll need (Gacha's evolution), but Bo's busy with StiB OP, so I'll... cross that bridge when I come to it, I guess.

I like Dogs in Love a lot, I don't really enjoy making it. It isn't the kind of video editing I enjoy. I like coming up with silly, unique effects, transitions and visual gags to pepper over gameplay footage. But there's so little to work with on the Colosseum/XD footage that you just have to do an insane amount of character animation to cover for it, and doing that animation is boring. Then doing the SOUND DESIGN for that character animation straight up sucks.

But yeah, I gotta do this eventually, so what are you gonna do.

For years I've been planning to do an edit-down of our Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance / Radiant Dawn games, but honestly I kinda just want to move on to more video essay work in the future rather than this gameplay editing stuff. Those videos take a LONG time. The only easy one was the Skies video, which only took a month.

I dunno, we'll see. There's some amazing gags in those playthrough but I feel like we've moved so far past them as improvisers now?

In the meantime you can watch AndYetNoBananas's two amazing animations covering the Ashnard Fight which is pretty inarguably the highlight of the playthrough.

EPITHET BOOKS 1 + 2 - (I plan to write both of these in Spring but I don't expect to see them anywhere for over a year, given my publisher's current track record)

Look. Writing is easy. Writing is fast. I wrote all of PoP in like a month and a half, and that didn't have source material to pull from. These books do.

Not really looking forwards to the first book because I'm not changing too much and I think writing it will be a little boring, but I think it'll be fun to rework and expand Redwood Run. I'd like Howie to have a bigger role and I'd like to explore the downsides of being a Mundie in this setting a bit more thoroughly.

I'm also planning to do some in-person book signings after the book is available in stores. Probably one in LA and one in Dallas/Fort Worth so I can have Dani and Kyle be there with me. No idea when or even if those'll happen, but I'll announce them here for sure.

TOP 100 ANIME OPENINGS PROJECT

Weirdly, this is the thing that's currently brainworming in my head nonstop.

If you're a weeb and/or squeeb you may have seen videos on YouTube where people upload their "Top 50 Anime Openings" or "Best 100 Anime OPs of All Time" or "My Favorite 800 Openings". Yes that last one is real and yes we watched all of it.

It's exactly what it sounds like. People post a list of all their favorite openings in order, and then they always put Brave Shine at #1 for some reason.

But nobody's ever done it right.

See, the problem with these lists is that 99% of the time, people are really just listing what they think the Best 100 Anime OP Songs are. But this is an OPENING. These people neglect to consider all the elements. The visuals. The editing. The credits. The symbology. The themes and story that the Opening is trying to convey.

Amy and I have decided to correct this.

For the past... Jesus, maybe 8 months, we have watched 1000+ anime openings, many of them dozens of times. We obviously haven't watched 1000 anime ourselves, so to widen our net we went through every Top 100 list we could find to find candidates. We asked everyone we knew for suggestions. We dug in places nobody on earth has thought to look for decades just to find weird one-off great openings from shows lost to time.

I sat down and watched all 58 fucking Detective Conan openings with Vixen and not ONE OF THEM is good. I have SUFFERED for this project.

Our goal is to make an academic list of the best Openings of all time, ranking all their components holistically. A banger of a song is not enough. Incredible fight animation is not enough. Everything must be considered.

For instance, the first Fire Force opening song absolutely fucks and the animation is cool as hell. And then they slapped ugly, bold, white credits on top of it that break all the lines of action and ruin the whole thing because clearly nobody considered where the credits would go when they storyboarded their OP. Whoops.

"Hey dude, where should we drop our song credit?"
"How about right in the middle of the line of action on top of a character's face."
"Bro you are a genius."

And our favorite shot, from the Otherwise Really Good second Hyouka opening. Check out how they credited the animators who worked on the OP.

Looks good guys! No notes! Not covering anything important at all!

Oh, wait. It's actually covering both focal characters and completely obscuring the main visual of the girl reaching through the reflection to grab the guy, which is the emotional climax of the entire opening and the whole point of the visual storytelling.

I'm sure those OP animators are super happy you credited them by RUINING THEIR HARD WORK.

Amy and I have been having so much fun with this. WAY too much fun with this. We've spent hours debating the effectiveness of openings, how all their elements tie together, etc. etc. And to make it clear how seriously we are taking this academic endeavor and how impartial we're trying to be, the Bomberman Jetters opening does not make the list. That's right. I'm taking one for the team. For art.

It is currently sitting at like #115 though. That song is a fucking bop.

We're planning to release two videos going over our list. One will be a smaller, more digestible YouTube video on the main channel. It'll have a little introduction with some of the credentials we're looking for alongside examples. Then, the openings will be stratified in groups of twenty: 100-81, 80-61, etc. Those openings will all be in the same tier as each other, because even with all the rules Amy and I have come up with, it's basically impossible to """objectively""" compare something like the dark experimental Serial Experiments Lain opening to the well animated bop-filled-with-tits Dragon Maid S opening and decide which one is a better piece of art. It's more about the general level of goodness rather than "This one is specifically #48 and this one is specifically #47."

That being said, Amy and I do have our actual definitive list of 100 openings. And we're planning to sit down and go over what we like and dislike about every single one on call, then edit a video with the explanations together and put it up as a Patreon exclusive for the highest tier of backers. It's probably going to be like... 5 hours long. Haha! Uh oh!

Amy also wanted to see if we could do it live somehow so people could react to our choices and our orders. We'll see??? I dunno! But anyways, we've been VERY excited about this project and most of our dates in the last few months have been long, nerdy discussions about which openings are good and which ones are bad and why.

Anyways that'll go up. Eventually! We'll see. This isn't an important project, but it is a fun one and it's definitely the one I'm most into at the moment.

AREN'T THERE SOME EPITHET SONGS YOU STILL NEED TO DO?

Yeah there's a Giovanni Villain Song, a Giovanni Lullaby, and the extended version of Deadline.

I've poked Plaster and Sapphire about the latter several times. I was hoping to get that done in December but Plaster's been intermittently busy and/or incapacitated for a long time. So. That's not great!

I've got a composer lined up for the Gio Villain song and that might get in the works in March or so, we'll see. No promises though, these have been really difficult to get the ball rolling on through no fault of my own.

THAT BOMBERMAN JETTERS VIDEO JELLO WON'T SHUT UP ABOUT

My main excuse to work on the Dokapon video was so that I had a test essay I could make on a subject I didn't care about that much before a video I care a lot about. This Jetters video has been in some level of production for over a year. Believe it or not I actually had to contact local newspapers for some scans of articles from 15 years ago for it. I did RESEARCH on this bitch. And getting the footage was Not Easy.

Amy and I are planning to go on a road trip and move in together some time in late Summer. My goal is to have everything on this list done before then.

I really want this video to be good. The script makes me cry twice.

Anyways that's pretty much all The Stuff. You can expect The Stuff eventually.