Production update 2024-05-25 (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

I am back from the dead. I'll be straight and direct, motivation has been an issue recently and as time went by with nothing great to report, I've had growing anxiety towards opening Patreon and making a post, leading to me just never doing it instead.

Regardless, things haven't been all bad, because despite being in a slump, I've actually managed to slowly crawl my way through the Punch Out video.

Over the last three months, I very slowly made it through most of the process: the script is basically complete, almost fully recorded, and I only have the Mike Tyson fight and the post-run stuff left to edit. One big hurdle left is that I still have to make about 25 graphs in Manim, but a lot of them will be very similar with different data, so once I make about 5 or 6 unique ones, the others will come easy.

I'll dedicate a post about the video soon. One thing I will say is that the release date is pretty much set in stone: June 13-15. For now though, I wanted to talk about an opportunity that presented itself this week.

SM64 RTABC 70 stars in 0xA

Those of you following the news might have heard that Marbler managed to finish Super Mario 64 with 70 stars in no A presses, on console, in real time! That is an insane achievement, and a testament to just how far RTABC has come since the history series has concluded.

I decided that I wanted to make a video to cover his achievement. However, the run being over 86 hours long (~9 hours of gameplay, 78 hours of waiting), I couldn't do a proper speedrun explained format, so instead I chose a quick summary approach. The video is expected to last about 20 minutes.

I put a good deal of effort into the research and script, but due to the nature of the video, the technical explanations are, for the most part, completely handwaved away. I prioritized being able to get the video out within a week after the run was achieved over making a super detailed and thorough breakdown with lots of visualizations and cool editing. So, I guess that overall, this counts as a "low effort video" for me. I hope it won't really come across that way too much.

Because of that, I'm kind of torn on whether or not I should count it as a "video" in the Patreon sense. As you all know, my Patreon is on an upload basis rather than a monthly basis, and I only count fully fledged, main channel videos as one upload. I want to be fully honest and transparent here, this summary of Marbler's run is going to have taken me about 30-40 hours to make rather than the usual 150-300.

To add to that, I'm fully aware that I have completely dropped the ball in providing the promised benefits of this Patreon in the past couple of months. With all that in mind, I think it would be fair to ask you directly if you believe a video that's one week's worth of work should count like the ones that take me 2 months. I will only count it as such if an overwhelming majority of you tell me that you want it to count. The poll is at the bottom of this post. I don't say this lightly, please do not hesitate to vote no. The last thing I want is to unfairly claim money from you guys. I'm myself leaning towards no unless everyone convinces me otherwise.

PACE Summer 2024

Finally, I wanted to say that I will be at PACE Summer in one week! Please check out the Super Mario Bros. tournaments and LTA events on Wednesday, June 5th. FlibidyDibidy's live race view is an absolute must watch, I cannot recommend it enough. I will be doing live commentary of several events on that day.

That's it for now! I promise I will make a more complete post about the Punch Out video before I leave for PACE. Thank you everyone for hanging on despite my lower activity recently, I can't overstate how grateful I am for all the support. See you next week!

Should I count the summary of Marbler's SM64 in 0xA run as an upload and charge everyone on Patreon?