Production update 2022-03-05 (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

Sorry for being a bit silent on here. I've been giving some updates over on Discord, but I should have made a proper update on here a bit earlier.

Secret project

Alright, so what did I work on in February? Well, things have been moving along, and I think I am ready to reveal what it is. It hasn't been made public yet, so I will not announce it formally until some point in the future, probably within the next two months. So, let's keep it between us!

In January, I was approached by a German IT consulting firm that hosts a tech conference every year in Munich. They have been watching my YouTube videos and they want me to give a 50-minute talk about speedrunning at their convention this year, in mid-July. The convention is not open to the public - it's mostly in-house and invitation based, but it will be recorded and they've already told me I will have full liberty to post my presentation to my YouTube channel afterwards (which I will do!).

I decided to build my talk around the science of speedrunning. There will be a definite focus on tool-assisted speedruns, how they are made and what they can achieve. I will give some very summarized explanations of a few TASes I've covered on my channel, like the Moat Door Skip in SM64 and the Credits Warp in SMB3, but also some new stuff like the Brain Age TAS and ACE/Total Control demonstrations. I will explain how the scientific method can be applied to glitch hunting to great effect, and I will conclude with a short reflection on how reverse engineering video games can be a gateway to conventional scientific endeavours.

I decided to write it out as an essay first, and use it as a canvas to build my slides. From there, I will loosely follow that essay as a guideline during the presentation. The essay is almost completely written now, to the point where I felt ready to save it for later. Once the date draws a bit nearer, I will make the slides and start practicing the presentation itself. I didn't want to make it too far in advance so it would be more fresh in my mind by the time the day comes. I've never done public speaking before, other than the usual oral presentations in high school. This is a huge deal to me, both because of the scale of the presentation, and because of the recognition this means.

As an aside, I will also be taking a two-week vacation in Germany, so I will be inactive in the back half of July.

Super Mario 64 ABC History Part 5

Next up! I decided to set my sights on finishing the ABC History series right away. I will make Parts 5 and 6 next. I can confirm that Part 6 will get us to the present day. There is still a possibility that Part 6 might end up longer than expected, because I would like to cover not just the improvements, but also some failed ideas and the current state of some stars. It's entirely possible that the second half ends up being significant enough to be a standalone, especially given that Part 6 does have some pretty chunky stuff to break down. If the improvements part of Part 6 is at least 30 minutes long by itself, chances are I'll split it.

I did the research, planning and outline of the script last week, and this week, I've been hard at work writing the thing. In fact, the script is nearly done already, and I'm just about to begin recording the first page. I also made a tentative production schedule that is subject to change:

The current projected length is roughly 40 minutes or so, but I'll have a better idea once the script is done. It should definitely be closer to Part 3 than to Parts 2 and 4 in terms of length.

Current progress therefore looks like this

• Script: 72%
• Recording: 0%
• Editing: 0%

I've been counting my hours worked as a rough measure (not down to the minute!) to get an idea of how long a video actually takes me to make. Up until now, I've always been estimating those figures very broadly, but this will give me a more accurate estimate. Also, you can see the current projected release is March 20th. Honestly, I would not be surprised if I had to push this up to the following Saturday to give myself more breathing room. I'll just say, don't get your hopes up too high for a March 20th release, but definitely expect a release in March.

Music

There's another music update! My brother is also a pianist, better than me in fact. He has some really good (and expensive) music software with very realistic piano sound banks. We ran some tests on music I've made, and there's no doubt it sounds better than what I've been using so far. So, I will convert most, if not all, of my library to much higher quality piano sounds! I will start using this upgraded music in Part 5, and I also plan on eventually reuploading a bunch of my music channel with the updated sounds.

Production stream

Finally, with the 200 patrons goal recently met (and "unmet" immediately after!), I will start doing production streams as a Tier 2 and 3 reward. The first of these will be on Saturday, March 12th. Time undetermined for now, but probably starting in the early afternoon EST. I might stream the voice recording, otherwise, it will be editing at whatever point I am by then. I will try to squeeze in another stream before the video release.

That's it for now! Thank you everyone for your continued support. I hope the wait for an update was worth it.